Culture, Evolution And Perpetual War:
Post Modern Critique
1: Laocoon: The Perils of Knowing
Striving to rise, Laocoon is pulled down. Attempting to break free, he is confined. Pythons coil round his arms and thighs ever more tightly. Around him, the city of Troy erupts into flaming ruins. Its people shall soon be slaughtered, or marched into ignominious captivity.
2: The Beginning of the End: This Mortal Coil
Together they swam, slithered, trotted or stumbled forward through the eons, undergoing periodic costume changes scripted by chance, death and change: filter feeders, bloodsuckers, or toothy sets of murderous jaws. Now amphibian, now reptile, and most recently as mammal…replicating the digestive tube format in myriad variations… until they arrived at last, somewhere very near the threshold of this modern world.
3: Masters of Illusion: Ascending-Descending
Each generation, a new cast of characters queues at the banks of the river Lethe. Under the spell of forgetfulness, they wade out into the purling reddish current…preparing to commence another rudderless drift into war…
4: ErdaRing: Sleep Tight, Wotan
In a moment of climactic irony, Donner hammers away the storm clouds. A Rainbow Bridge miraculously opens up, inviting the gods to cross from this dwarf and giant cursed world to the safety of newly built Valhall . The mournful cries of the Rhinemaidens reach a crescendo as the procession begins. Suddenly the earth splits open, and Wotan gapes in horror as Erda, rising from the depths, deliver a dreadful prophecy from the heart of a bluish flame…
5: Panopticon: Welcome To Your Portable Prison
Carried atop the powerful shoulders of a bodily muscular tyrant, each captive Brain is carried forward on a personal Exodus out of Egypt. Their pathway is laid upon a bed of Read-Only, terrible Commandments…Remembering the fate of Uzzah we must ask: do we dare to approach this Ark and touch it?
6: Crazy Old Freud: Tear Off The Masks!
Bumper to bumper, shimmering heat waves rising off windshields and hoods, they were going nowhere. Nowhere, that is, but back to a single footpath in a mountain defile uniting Cithaeron and Thebes; Nowhere, but back to the place where three roads meet; Nowhere, but back to the repetition compulsions that mitigated prolonged infantile dependence; Nowhere but back to the strange evolutionary adaptations that had made culture possible, and that simultaneously pinned their collective, Oedipal heels…
7: How Humans First Stumbled Upon The Gods
The idea of a god who looks, acts and thinks like humans was a spectacular innovation. It was so risky! So logically preposterous! So easily exposed by the critical faculty as a ridiculous fabrication…
8: Akhenaten vs. Henry VIII: Hellions or Saints?
Much like the Northwest Indians who believed the ground they trod was the composite of the spirits of ancestors long gone, we also tread upon the ancients. The corridors of the Pentagon, the doorway into the oval office, the coiling spires of the Kremlin, the Hypostyle hall at Karnak–these are a few of the stony flowers that spring from the fecund, ancient earth, reminding us that the secret of all renewal is return…
9: Post Modern Oedipus: Sophoclean Farce?
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is not a biography, is not tied to reality in any way. It is not about Justice, not about Merit, not about Laius’ misbehavior, not about Apollo, not about rashness or egotism, not even about the consequences of over-reaching…It is a dumb show whose masked, puppet-like actors go through the motions of a bizarre legend that leads us to a single, overwhelming question: Should a man dare to take control of his own life?
10: Epigenesis of Totemism:
Engine of American Culture
From his seat within a womb-like sanctuary, Abraham Lincoln gazes out over an enormous Reflecting Pool–a national birth canal–to contemplate the distant, Moby-like immensity of Washington’s obelisk. Dozens of times larger than its Pharaonic progenitors, it towers erect from its artificial mons in primal, phallic triumph over the marketplaces of the world…
11: Ecce Homo! Nightmare Of Eden
The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leap frog on his thighs. They were black, and iridescent green without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned…
12: Why History Must Always Repeat
Not even Robespierre, clad for the Feast of Reason in his new coat of Robin’s egg blue, could make humanity over. Not overnight–no matter how sharp he kept the guillotine.
13: Erotic Religious Seduction
Bernini’s St Teresa swoons languidly upon a coral-like bed of dreams that floats above the altar of the Sta. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Head tilted back invitingly, throat beginning to emerge from a ravishing swirl of polished drapery, Teresa seems about to fall into a perpetual unconsciousness while, poised above her, Cupid thrusts a golden arrow again and yet again deep into her heart…
14: Hamlet: Facing The Abyss!
The doors unlock and swing wide. Women swarm into the department store, their purses acting as cudgels, their high heels spiking into enemy ankles and calves. Watch as these fierce Maenads struggle in anguish to lay hold of a scarce pair of nylons. Two, like famished robins struggling for a worm, tug and tug at one precious stocking which sadly stretches to three times its length and then expires. Still more women surge in through the open doors, a tidal wave of human desire…
15: Death of a Salesman: A Plague of Dreams
A fragile, hastily improvised raft bobs like a sodden cork beneath heavily, threatening clouds. Some of its semi-naked passengers are resigned, others near to expiring, and still others are intent on keeping watch, perhaps believing in the imminence (or immanence) of rescue. They have gathered at what they believe to be the front of the raft, near a makeshift mast. But they have no rudder to steer by. Great blasts of wind impel them in the opposite direction from that which they imagine their rescue might come. A dead man, his legs dowsing the surface of the shark filled sea, leads them on their way…
16: Schizo-Philosophy: The Sirens Beckon
At countless junctures upon its journey, the Idealist tradition skates perilously close to the edge of the wood–the edge that all along we have insisted we must come to see. The ice is thin; the darkness of the shadowy trunks looms ever closer. But the deft skater salutes, then turns and glides out into the sunlight once again…
17: Counter Reformation: Plato’s Attack On Reality
Crassus, I suppose, is the supreme example of the ambition to acquire. Already the richest man in Rome, he clamored after more honors, finally securing the command of an expedition against Parthia. His choice turns out to be a spectacular disaster. His son Publius is captured and beheaded in the first engagement. Plutarch shows us the great man on the eve of the final, futile battle…unable to rouse his soldiers who had marched into Parthia with such bright confidence…
18: Tragdy: Triumph of the Trojan Horse!
Our psychic history has been the story of two contradictory metaphysical positions. Each struggles for dominance within the bony prison of the skull: Idealism, with its faith in eternal life, and Materialism, which accepts chance, death and change as the law…
Tragedy begins as religious affirmation, but finally replaces the image of Heaven with a handful of dust…
19: Dionysus: Stampeding the Gods!
Dionysus comes from the depths of the psychic past to teach how and where the gods began. But who broke the locks to the door of the repressed unconscious? Who then aroused this monster from his slumbers and led him up and out into the sunlit, Apollonian world that the reason had arranged into coercive celestial hierarchies?…Dionysus threatens to kill off the gods–unless they can kill him first.
20: Prometheus, Satan & Jesus:
Even today, some two thousand years after their leader was proven so dreadfully wrong, one still hears of fanatical bands who sell all their property, resign their jobs, and retreat to some common home and barricade the doors–all in the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return. That he never came as predicted must have been an agonizing disappointment for the believer, who was forced to repeatedly reinterpret scripture so as to justify the delay of the second coming.
21: Kansas Forever: Finding Your Way Back Home
Inexplicably, the second-hand, un-witnessed Resurrection occurs off stage. What was the mythologist up to? Why not have Christ rise before gaping millions? Why not have the stone that blocked the crypt blasted to smithereens, or even better, suspended aloft by magical force fields as in a painting by surrealist Magritte?