Dramatic parables: ritual, anti-ritual, the “festival complex” : Justify the meanness...
: Practise...
: Without emotion...
: Practise...
: Without human ties...
: Practise...
: Without – no – Lest there be self-doubting...
: Practise... As Was the Beginning, As Is, Now, As Ever Shall
Be, World Without.
(–)
An entire monograph could be written on the nature of the spiritual and
psychic intersubjectivity which binds the mendicants to the Old Man
and aligns them to his frenzied “evangelization” against “As” and its
“priesthood,” “gospellers” and “enforcement agencies.” The repeated
refrain of “Practice” which is their “response” to the “call” constituted
by the Old Man’s litany of cynical abuses of power, would seem to in-
dicate that they are absolutely controlled by the Old Man. But then we
have seen them turn on their mentor in earlier moments of the play,
even going as far as opportunistically betraying him to his arch-enemy,
the Specialist. And the Old Man in turn not only generally condescends
to the mendicants in ways that reinforce the inferiorized psychology that
goes with their underdog status within a viciously hierarchical war and
state machine, he in fact sees them as physically expendable in the cause
of tearing away the masks from “As” and its orthodoxies of belief and
practice. This is why, as this scene of ironic evangelization builds up to
a crescendo, the Old Man, with help from other mendicants, attempts
to cut the Cripple open on the Specialist’s operating table in order to
discover, as he puts it, “just what makes a heretic tick.” That the other
mendicants are willing to go along with the Old Man in this grotesque
inversion of a sacrificial ritual obviously has something to do with the hys-
teria and collective self-hypnosis that often accompany religious fervor
and ecstasy. But the Old Man’s explanation is also apposite: “Because we
are together in As.” This is, finally, the bleakest insight of this profoundly
pessimistic play: everyone is in the circle of As, there is ultimately no sep-
aration, as in Aristophanes’The Clouds, of “Right Logic” from “Wrong
Logic”; all, perpetrators and victims, “specialists” and “madmen,” can
become the voluntary or unwitting victim of the ubiquitous scapegoating
phenomenon when “As” is on the loose in a culture, a society, a historical
epoch. The fact that it is indeed the Old Man himself and not the Cripple
who is slain on Dr. Bero’s operating table – an ersatz ritual altar – gives