Jason Reza Jorjani (230:02)
Well, there you go. So in Steppenwolf, Hess's novel Steppenwolf, which is one of my favorite novels, there's this character grappling with nihilism, Harry Haller, who wants to kill himself. And he meets this very enigmatic woman, Hermine, who introduces him into this occult underworld of people who are now, this was written in the 1920s or so, and they're the first people using psychedelic drugs. And they're also clearly involved in theater and in staging theatrical performances and stuff. And basically these countercultural people involved with this enigmatic woman ultimately invite Harry Haller to enter this magic theater that they, let's say, have access to. And he goes through this place and it's like, basically he stepped into the Twilight Zone. And, like, space and time are not normal inside this magic theater. And he's confronted with a bunch of different performances that are meant to symbolically convey different things and get him to reflect on certain aspects of his subconscious in other rooms. He has to engage in long conversations, in some cases conversations with, like, past historical figures. Anyway, long story short, he goes through this labyrinthine magic theater, and in the end he finds out that, like, all the great creative geniuses of history are there, like, from, like, Mozart and Beethoven to Newton and so on and so forth. And they oh. And the last person he has to have a conversation with is like, an older version of himself. And so he has to confront himself in the future too, as part of this process. And point being, in the end, he's let in on the secret that the magic theater isn't this isolated space, like a venue in our world, it's a metaphor for the world that we're living in. And that that's the nature of human existence. I take this idea of the magic theater in my writings and I put it next to this idea of the theater, theater of cruelty that was developed by the surrealist Antonin Artaud, who became a total lunatic. Dysfunctionally so. But he made a lot of interesting art in the process. And he came up with this idea that we should develop a new form of theater that breaks down the distinction between the spectators and the audience. I mean, between the performers and the spectators, between the dramatists and the audience. That this classic distinction between the performance on a stage and the people watching it, that formed in classical Greece with Aeschylus, that this should be deconstructed. All right, real briefly, a note on Greek theater. In my first book, Prometheus and Atlas, I get into this in great depth and detail that the reason Greek sculpture becomes like photorealistic or becomes perspectivally accurate at the same time as there are the first large scale dramatic performances with poets like Aeschylus, is that it was the first moment in history, of recorded history, that people were able to take the position of spectator theaters at a theater sitting in different places on different nights, Meaning that first of all they were perceiving geometric perspective for the first time. So, like, one night you're in some shitty seat in the back up here in this corner of the amphitheater. Another night you're in the middle, close to the action. Another night you're off to this side. And one thing you notice as you watch the same play or different plays from different perspectives is you actually notice perspective for the first time geometrically. And there's a good case to be made if you look at like, for example, Julian Jaynes study the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. The origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. He looks at like Homeric literature from archaic Greece and, you know, the ancient Mesopotamian texts, and he's like, look, these people's minds just did not work the way ours did. Their cognitive. If their cognitive structure wasn't different than their cognitive capacities were radically not at the level that ours are. And one of the things that I believe they lacked was perspective. They actually could not see perspective the way we do. And it's why archaic Greek art looks like a bad hybrid of like Egyptian art and Mesopotamian art. Then you get these theater performances and all of a Sudden you get these magnificent Greek sculptures. But the other form of perspective that I think the plays cultivated in them was psychological perspective. Where for the first time people got like an outside view of dramas in human lives and they started to see themselves as characters. They started to realize that, oh, what's going on in this drama is like, oh, that's like me in this situation in my life. And it starts to cultivate and deepen a sense of psychological perspective in people. And isn't it interesting how the first figure in Greek drama ever to take the stage is Prometheus? The Prometheus trilogy of Aeschylus was the first series of dramas ever performed. So now to go back to Arto. So the point was this. The classical drama did transform human consciousness in a way that was conducive for the rise of our rational faculties and our self reflexive ability. However, Arto now wants to take it to the next level where now that we've developed reason and perspective and so on, so forth, and objectivity, he wants to deconstruct it in a way that allows us to, again, as it was the main aim of the surrealists, develop a more conscious relationship with our subconscious or make the subconscious conscious. And so he designed a form of theatrical performance where the audience was repeatedly violated by the performers by certain types of extreme harsh lighting by performers, like intruding on the personal space of the audience by suddenly subjecting people to fear and anxiety in the course of a performance. Loud noises, taboo breaking scenes that force a person who's a spectator to confront his subconscious reaction and whatever beliefs are being violated by this like taboo breaking spectacle. And he calls this the theater of cruelty. Well, I take the magic theater from Hermann Hess's Steppenwolf and synthesize it with Artaud's theater of cruelty and developed this idea of a magic theater of cruelty. And by the way, the thing that made that click for me is this line in one of Jim Morrison's songs where he talks about us in some insane and ancient theater. I don't know if you remember. You remember that it's some line from one of his songs about how we're like in some insane and ancient theater.
