The distinction between history and myth is blurred. History, just as truth, depends on myth to come to life. The productive tension between the two underpins the Platonic account too: It is only by resorting to the myth of the cave that Socrates (as rendered down by Plato) is able to bespeak the truth in the first place.
... (As for culture) it is only insofar as we play games and tell stories that reality comes to be, and is allowed to change. Without the awkwardness and inadequacy of language and dialogue (In terms of intention or even representation) life becomes mechanical, perfectly dead. And it is exactly the excessiveness that these failures inhabit that reminds us that we are dealing with art and not philosophy. Socrates claims that he wants to expel the artist from his city because art is too far removed from truth. Behind that claim, however, hides a fear of that which cannot be reined into neat categories, that which always exceeds its own boundaries, that which in fact threatens boundaries as such.
... that every act of appropriation is bound to fail; that the human condition is a perpetual playful becoming that would be extinguished and annihilated if the metaphysical dream of eternal and self-same being was realized.– Söderbäk
In terms of intention or even representation not every metaphor as a symbol has a meaning that endures, so what's the point of sticking to the truth? But this does not mean it has no history or future anywhere but as a curiosity or trinket on a shelf, worn on the outside (if excavated) not unlike a hood ornament wrapped around your neck, loose-fitting so it doesn't strangle. It is often said that in the old days people wore their subconscious on the outside and buried Mr. Greymatter so their day-time dreaming or play wouldn't be interrupted by all his calculations. When subsumed, so goes the thinking, it's accelerated to quantum speeds like leaps and jumps that we would label intuition, flash, a sixth sense or telepathy. It's maybe all or none of these, how would we know if it's running under cover, subliminally? Sometimes all you can do is go with your gut, and that's not to say "follow orders", it's just a temporary presumption of something you can trust. Distrust is only proved when it's been broken. Like I said before, along with others now and then, we haven't got it wrong, we've just been folded wrong-side out and told that every other way is sin (or something even worse, an embarrassment).
Sometimes archetypes, just like bad habits, appear to be shouting orders, and we notice 'arche-' loses its connection to "olden" like the -ology that digs up bones and arrows from the dirt and instead turns its spade toward the assholes that anarchists are against. You dig? Like, the words we use (a word is a psychological attachment to a boundary around an utterance just to claim some property, not as if it's a child or lover – or for some, maybe it is) once upon a time referred to something very different. In fact (which is just a statement of induction, it's a cover for "I could be wrong, but...") you could say that this concerns most anything. Culture isn't something superimposed on or emergent from nature. It's a pattern recognised and sometimes pathological from everybody's point of view, even when the pattern's still mimicked. Every pattern just endures by telling stories, dramatised and performed like it's a ritual, the motions become automated with increasing practice, forever overdoing rehearsal and forgetting all about the show.
The good news is every script can be re-written, another lesson I'd call "fact" of histories that anyone remembers, and increasingly today comparing news headlines with those last week and how the meaning of a word has changed in just one year when shouted by the same directors, we shouldn't write it off, erased as mere hypocrisy when we can apply to it grafiti, throw tomatoes or read from another script, and prepare to self-defend literarily by plowing on ahead, insisting that beating's only what we do with eggs but on occasion we turn the beaters to a bowl of leaders or directors of our little theatres.
Ignore the chief but if he doesn't go away (he has that option) you may have to resort to thirty seven arrows. Artaud would make the play, a thing considered by some "deception", just to show the option of running just before the arrows fly. If we do it in the theatre, it needn't have to be considered true and reality changes in the telling and the doing – Kristeva's "confinement within the stases", like our arrows now are locked up in museums.
Monsters were created just to stay aware, not necessarily paranoid and running scared. They only came to life when we stopped believing they were there. So even Merlin's law of basic ignorance, which seems so enticing can be broken. If you ignore them they might just conjure up something really frightening (well, so can we!). Unless it's done with some perfection, which is to say electro-shock or surrounding doses of paranoia-inducing substance, theatre for the cruel would quite resemble a poetic curse. It may not be enough, it may need some help with props where all the players' masks are made of mirrors reflecting only the monsters that are the audience. Well that's also been tried before; it doesn't work when monsters cast no reflection.
Of course, Artaud would dispense with the audience altogether (everybody's IT and also in it) as just another set of indeterminacy, a variable, not something to control. In Artaudian theatre, players and spectators are in-distinguished, or such is the intended appearance.
In a word, we believe that there are living forces in what is called poetry and that the image of a crime presented in the requisite theatrical conditions is something infinitely more terrible for the spirit than that same crime when actually committed.
We want to make out of the theater a believable reality which gives the heart and the senses that kind of concrete bite which all true sensation requires. In the same way that our dreams have an effect upon us and reality has an effect upon our dreams, so we believe that the images of thought can be identified with a dream which will be efficacious to the degree that it can be projected with the necessary violence. And the public will believe in the theater's dreams on condition that it take them for true dreams and not for a servile copy of reality; on condition that they allow the public to liberate within itself the magical liberties of dreams which it can only recognize when they are imprinted with terror and cruelty.
Hence this appeal to cruelty and terror, though on a vast scale, whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities.– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre & Cruelty
Pandora was right to open up the box because in it was our resistance that the bosses labeled "every thing that's evil". That's always just a point of view, especially when you're running frightened that you'll lose control. Pandora never meant a sacrificial state, it meant 'all-giving' or 'all gifted' otherwise her name would be "Panthusia" or "Pantheon", like the oligarchs or bureaucrats that keep you in your place. The Greek words for "sacrifice" are either thusia, the noun which means nothing beyond "victimized" or "a victim", and the verb form thuo, meant "to slay, kill or slaughter" – Theo is of course a receptive god in the bible, the only consumer at the table, and we're supposed to be his cooks. Once upon a time the killing was what was done just before a feast because most folks still preferred it cooked if food could run away before you eat it. In the olden days a feast was just a gathering from which no one left still hungry.
Why would wearing telescopic glasses or time-travel be considered just a cover or disguise if it helps to make things clear like "watch out where you're headed"? And why should we trust anything presented so clearly and distinctly, that is to say so logical or banal that it puts us to sleep? Better to just move on to something else if you don't feel the need to exercise or have already had your brain-cells wiggled – it's just a game and you're not required to play in it. But don't forget about the beasts who may have wrote it. If you don't like it, plagiarize with nasty cuts or broken glass and wheat-paste it upon their peepers, they're just announcements of a new show soon to be playing near you! If you don't understand, that "jeepers!" sounds like "gibberish" or "Greek", then think of it as just another entertainment. After all, what else is there when the monsters take a fall and go to pieces?
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