Apparitions & Passion Plays: the Joke
One might describe an apparition as a perceptual joke, perhaps a cruel one. Certainly it was a predatory joke when imperial Rome, after crushing three Jewish wars for independence in the desert-making process called “Pax Romana” stole the identity of the Promised Land by re-naming Judea (properly, Yehuda), “Palestina” after the sea peoples of the Mediterranean who, plundering the Nile delta and nearby coasts were called by Egyptians and Israelites “Peleshet” or Pilishtim, “trespassers” and “invaders.” The deformation of language and history in the imperial term “Palestina,” this early bit of virtual reality took on a demonic life of its own, eventually bequeathing a father dearth to the West and haunting it with a demonic ghost its cult exalted. The uprooted or vilified and discarded or degraded father becomes a nagging void, a phantom the mind cannot banish and that appears with increasing insistency over time; the more its original nature is denied, the more horrible the images grow. A large part of the demonic Gorgon within the West’s cultural confusion is the deformed and repressed Judaism and Judah within it, and with it, the degradation of the father. But the West, at least its leaders, cannot face the truth that would topple them from their godlike thrones or, rather, free them to live as humans rather than as highly wrought artifacts “of hammered gold and gold enameling…” To topple them would rid the West of its Satan obsession and all the terrors that stem from it.
That’s a bitter joke enforced by an oligarchy of nasty jokers clinging to their myth of a Jokerman, an illusion asserted as a savior, the man who, like Charlie on the MTA never returned as Maeterlinck confessed in his play, “the Blind” (1891) and as Beckett joked with lewd bitterness in Godot (1955). The passion is a bad joke for those blamed and for those inventing and inheriting the fiction of blame, compressing history and shifting the Empire into the role of hapless enforcer of the father people’s supposed cruelty. Since “Bar Abbas” means ‘son of father” then the crowd… but this is just one of a host of basic confusions in the ruling myth that result in attempts to fix its lies via art: to impose its fictions as dogma. Centuries of images show the cult of mercy and art centered on a myth of human sacrifice and blood drinking…the Dionysian paradigm. Where else to put such matter than a Grail cup, to sublimate and make it pretty, purifying; what else does that phantom goblet of blood evince than a Gorgon’s head, the raw cultural matter that the fleeing Perseus forever turns into “monuments” [1]?
As noted, it’s a bad and bitter joke increasingly reflected in the horrors of modern culture.
“Is he not coming yet” ask the personae in the asylum that bad ideas, dishonest ideas have made of the West. (Lawrence felt like “a second comer” when he saw the snake at his trough, at “the horrid black hole” but that gaming was a semi-jest). The blind of Maeterlinck are shadows that cannot see, surrounding themselves with echoes of the virtual reality of which their culture was built.
First Blind Man:
I was asleep too.
THIRD BLIND MAN
I was asleep too.
FIRST BLIND MAN
Is he not coming yet?
SECOND BLIND MAN
I hear nothing coming.
THIRD BLIND MAN
It must be about time to go back to the asylum.
FIRST BLIND MAN
We want to know where we are!
SECOND BLIND MAN
It has grown cold since he left.
FIRST BLIND MAN
We want to know where we are!
THE OLDEST BLIND MAN
Does any one know where we are?
THE OLDEST BLIND WOMAN
We were walking a very long time; we must be very far from the asylum.
This is the asylum of art made “not for love” but for “the love of Beauty, the love of the Idea, the love of Mystery…and Bayreuth…a state of harmonious ecstasy.” In the sleep of reason, in the dominion of imperial conceit; in images of unnatural desire and power at last there are only echoes in a dark wood after a very long walk. They killed the King of loving kindness and compassion and replaced his ineffable majesty with an avatar fiction, a composite being, hybrid like the culture; “the character of Christ, a union of man and woman, strength and sweetness” reflected in myriad effeminate Greek heroes and menacing female goddesses and demons. This is a Joke, a fantastic and lethal one and earns the cult of the West the title of Jokerism. Like the Joker, it leaves its acolytes in a dark wood [2], freezing to death after their brief escape, if they have escaped from the asylum of their fictions.
When Beckett re-visits this paradigm of despair and confusion with brisk, insouciant modern repartee the banter has a socialist and perverse erotic aspect as if fulfilling the enthusiasms of Peladan and Huysmans. Sucking on carrot ends, fumbling with their zippers, considering hanging themselves for erections that will seed mandrakes that “scream” when plucked, Vladimir and Estragon make Western hope as a joke, its expectations of the avatar maddening and sour. They don’t know where they are either and audiences laugh or are chastened at the vision of the end time’s teeming mall. The head of Orpheus sings but the harmonious song has become a joke. The way was ready for the routine cynicism of postmodernism and belief in nothing, the end game of a cult of identity by images.
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book V, 217-40
2. Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 1-3 passim
Sterility and the Image
“I have heard the mermaids singing each to each;
I do not think that they will sing to me…” [1]
We have established that the West is defined and cursed by its inauthenticity, by its hybrid and self-negating identity. Further, and consequent upon this fact, the West allays its anxiety and emptiness by glorifying imagination and image-making, by aesthetics that show the self it would be. It is inevitable, however, that representation of its inner malaise and manifold confusions will increasingly show it images of disembodiment, of hybrid genders and species, of monsters.
[excerpt from a book, "the Head of Orpheus." Please support this vital work of cultural analysis]