peek and boo discuss writing

Somewhere in this land. A country inn. Faint smell of smoked pig fat. Off stage sounds of other drinkers. Two enter carrying tankards and sit on small milking stools.

Peek: I thought he wouldn't buy us a drink.

Boo: No, the scrivener is alright, he'll buy you a drink quick enough so you will move on and he can get back to his writing.

Peek: What does he write?

Boo: I have no idea and I don't care, writing is no good to man nor beast.

Peek: What do you mean?

Boo: His words don't feed the belly or quench the thirst.

Peek: But they might help you cajole the widow's daughter.

Boo: She does what she wants, when she wants with whom she wants. That's what I like and what she likes. No words ever made her do something she didn't want to do.

Peek: But surely you must think writing is of some benefit?

Boo: It might be a mildly amusing diversion at best, at worst it misleads and distracts people from living.

Peek: But it helps us communicate with people far away?

Boo: Yes, and is that a good thing? They bring as much bad as good when they come to our hamlet. I'm fine in my corner and I don't need to be writing to anyone else.

Peek: Your a strange fellow Boo, do you know that? I might ask the scrivener to write a story about you.

Boo: Don't you even think about it! I am who I am and I am not some fool on a piece of paper!

Peek: Ahhh! I think I touched a raw nerve there, are you afraid of been captured?

Boo: No, I cannot be captured. The writing is ink on paper and I am me, the two are different.

Peek: Now I get it, like that French bloke said, 'meaning is trapped inside language'. Who you really are would be trapped inside the words used to describe you.

Boo: Not even inside the words, it would be more outside and beyond those words.

Peek: And what about the 'good book' surely that has made its mark on the world

Boo: A book many say they live by but few have read. A book written over the span of a thousand years in three different languages that has been translated and mistranslated, used and abused. People have left their mark on it, that's for sure. If the man himself came back he would say "it wasn't like that at all, that is not what it was all about".

Peek: But it has left its mark on the world.

Boo: No, your slow today Peek! People leave their mark on the world not books and not talk, talk goes unheard and books crumble to dust.

Peek: Just like us. You really get going when you have a drink inside you.

Boo: The belly is the centre of man, let no fool tell you otherwise.

Peek: Will we go and get another, perhaps the scrivener will do right by us again.

Boo: Let's go.

Peek: Yes, let's go.

Off stage sounds of other drinkers. Two exit carrying tankards.

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