Phaedra
Opening scene
Hippolytus wanders about the altar of
Artemis.
Hippolytus
Artemis plays
a perpetual game with herself. Dionysios
is engaging her in his pulling her from herself, in his seducing and encouraging
her to elude herself, to confound herself, to dance through herself. Dionysios compells her to the dance. She finds she can only scoff at the nebula
she perpertually made of herself, to dare this nebula to overwhelm herself. A dance was a dare. She would dance against
herself.
I wonder,
was it by the arts of Dionysious that Artemis compelled my convictions toward
her own worship. Dionysious who renders
the distinction beteween god and mortal into irrevocable confusion. I believe I’ve come to confuse myself for a
god, as I now fail to percieve their identifying traits. This much I can identify: Gods and Goddesses
are exposed to my vision as dancing beings, as beings defined by the condtions
of their physicality. Has Artemis
deigned to make me into the dancing soul of Greece? I believe she wonders if she can base herself
upon the complex architecture of dance, upon the architecture of perpetual
elusiveness. Can she build her psyche of
the nature and methods of dance, can one’s psyche be built upon its
principles. Artemis is a master of all
connoted sin, of all aftereffects of shadows, all connoting
shades.
Artemis is
the dancing goddess of Dionysian revelry, her dance is a revelry of
self-conscious sin. She is the
consummate mimic. She is the gamely,
silly-mannered physical analogue of all that is insubstantial in her, impalpable
to cognizance. By physical dance she
penetrates her path through all her nebulous being.
Artemis has
physicalized me into something disembodied from my family. She has made me believe myself as a body of
godhood. She has made me persuaded of my
physical acquaintanceship with gods. She
has made me feel my own physical godhood.
Somehow it is a mortal’s dealing with a god that is brought to one level
with her, gods and mortals as common acquaintances. Gods and Goddesses are become physical to me,
robust, boisturous.
Aphrodite,
what of Aphrodite? Aphrodite’s own
artful deceptions create therefore a fulfilled nakedness behind themselves. She embodies things by clothing them in
bodies, each body being her own body, by weaving deciets about themselves. Sh e clothes formless truths in lies, thus
giving them body. Aphrodite likes to
discuss anything and everything that is unrelated to the moral purpose of the
conversation. She obstinately maintains
her talk at a set standard of irrelevancy..
Servant
Hippolytus-
whereas Artemis delieghts in the hunter’s eye within the whirlwind of
introspection of her wilderness of soul, Aphrodite is tender to the touch. She wounds easily. And your penetrative wit may match her
sensibilities in a kind of atonal assymetry which may case a aclashing of her
inward wills- her soul lost to your wit in a cacophony of ne’r do well
introspection, unwilllingly coerced within her will.
Hippolytus
I do not
well understand you.
Servant
My meaning is
that- Aphrodite may not take kindly to your penetrating insights into her
character, unlike Artemis, the goddess of nighttime souls of inward
seekings. Aphrodite is not an
introspective sort.
Hippolytus
Then she
should be. I spared but a few words upon
her. She is too light and willlowy for
my liking.
Servant
I would
simply not take such a flippant view of Aphrodite. She is easily wounded, an may retaliate with
a reflex’s dawn of awakening sun.
Hippolytus
If she is a
being of mere reflex, a being who wakens to the light of action by cantankerous
inward will, she is not on my sighting.
I think not of her.
Servant
Oh, there is
a law which speaks of relations between gods and men which says, Abhor pride in
the face of divinity. Ignore Aphrodite’s
will at your peril.
Hippolytus
My peril be
then in the canker philosophical whimsy makes in a divinity’s soul. Let’s off to meal.
.
Scene 2
Oeanea
Oh, the world
is a gaping cancer wound- my world, Phaedra, she is my world, and she is lost to
delierium. She refuses food, and yet
remains plump, but her face is a wasting like an autumn leaf flaking away to
harmonies of dusk. What harmony yet in
her regality as she lilts to a soul’s genocidal whim. Is it a whim this despair she throws herself
into as into a Scylla and Charabda. She
throws herself about the ceremonial hall with a formality of pomp, what
forbearance yet in her shattered state.
Yert can we lift her ashen face from ghost’s narrow cove, from the shadow
cast of within ghost’s caves. What can
we do?
Servant
I haven’t
heard yet of this the Queen’s despair until but a half-hour ago, how she seems
to hover above her sick-bed like a spent phantom, how she moors herself within
tempests of deathly fervour. In the din
of ecstacy is her mind caught within the deafening roar of doom-bells chanting
their sonourous echo of colours gross.
Phaedra walks in.
Phaedra
My tears are
ornaments to my shame. They glisten like
crystal optics to amplify the image of my hear’s deepest marrows of darkness, of
my heart’s cavernous inwards my tears glisten like jewels in a dwarve’s mine, to
display my shame within the mire-encrusted caverns of my heart with the crying
heavy lids of jewels glowing, like eyes in a cave, the cave my conscience, my
conscience full of eyes like teardrops, my shame awash with blinding sight, the
sight of my confessions, my confessions to my closet, my mirror, my pillow, all
my willowy voice bending to the marshes of its gurgling rhapsody of woe, my
drowning voice, drowning as it confesssess to the props of my
solitude.
Oeanea
Oh, heavens,
what is this self mourning like one would be lost in the rocky cliff faces of a
waterfall of grief. You collapse before
me. What confessions are to blindly
sheet-lightning in their heartstricken to the doom bell chime, what confession
strikes the hour of a clock whch knows the strings of your heart like its own
wirrs and cogs. Is there any
confession you can bestow upon me for my forgiving eye to settle with compassionate heart-lightening
sorrow and commiseration for all-too familier sin. Your sin-sorrrow meets my own familiar
bedfellows of my familiars, my emanations of sin which enact in imagination all
that has cast down upon itself a a compassionate eye of night, the moon, the
pale light of pale knowledge. The moon
nods and winks at our sins cast under a nightime spell. What of your sins, the marrow’s weed of your
confessions, it is but a night’s toy, your malefaction.
Phaedra
Not such as
this. Oh, that a hunter’s chariot should
uproot my sins from my heart under the
bliss of night- Oh, what did you say, Oeanea, your praise o f nightimes
sin-casting ardour, you plunge my soul into a demon’s ecstacy, into the realm of
the very demon of night itself. My
words follow yours into the depths of Tartarus.
Oeanea
What have I
said? Did I inflame you mind to thoughts
of Artemis’s revelries? I apologise, my
thoughts are arrows too much hewn to the curve of Artemis’s thigh, at which she
presses the bow when she bends it taut against her body. The nightime silver glistens against her
skin, the skin of the naked huntress, like a coffin’s gleam, the moon sharpening
its winking gaze upon her silken skin..
Phaedra
Oh, do you
torment me with visions of wildernesses, reticient in soul’s manner, of
twilights shifting their pace through curtains of night? This is the realm of Hippolytus, despiser of
daylight’s cheery glean of cheery message, Hippolytus of sad midnight casts, of
meloncholy philosophy, of lackadaisical whimsy of
observation..
Oenea
Hippolytus,
and what is he?
Phaedra
He is- the
very weeping gash of my heart, the very motive of my mining with doeful eye into
my heart’s burrowing corners, the very slant of my heart’s gaze into itself is
his bow and arrow’s bent.
Oeanea
Hippolytus,
what are you saying? Hippolytus, he is-
your confession?
Phaedra
He is the very
ocean of my remorse, my passionate, weening remorse- my love’s
remorse.
Oeanea
Oh, what do
you say! Hippolytus, no! Oh, wickedness! To seek on ever foreign soil for oh most
familiar love. Hippolyus is a
wilderness’s dream, a lover and bestower of enchantments. He serves the naked huntress’s willl to keep
in heavy-lidded privacy our dreamtime revels.
But this love for a doer of holy deeds is as a sullen, sinister whisper
into your domestic closet. He is
encloacked within the cursed veneer of family.
He is a familiar visiter of your domestic haunts. Oh, my very words are contaminated with her
shadowy aftereffects of connotations.
What infection has bred in our house?
Phaedra
What
infection is done. You have closed your
doors upon me. I will say no
more.
Scene 3
Aphrodite enters
Aphrodite
I
feel the world sucking my heart inside
itself. I am becoming a reckless,
chaotic force of the world; all of my superfluous diversity of elements are in
worldly terms an anarchy of phenomena. I
become the world’s war with itself, become its desperate grasp for the ghost of
its own impulses. When my heart became
the world, the world became the fuel of my passions. The world is become the architecture of my
passions; thus I molded the world to serve the natural inclinations and ambition
of them I can only perceive the world as
something otherworldly. To serve my own
natural personage, I made it serve otherworldly themes and purposes. I wrench
the world as I wrench my heart. To me
the world is a kind of surface essence.
I feel
Phaedra in a a sense become the the otherworldly being I can only see the world
itself as. I feel somehow all of my own
wrenching activity embroiling in Phaedra.
Phaedra is my own situation, my own precise positioning of myself, in the
world. Phaedra is the self-destructive
contradiction of my own being. Phaedra
devotes herself to an otherworldly virtue.
Later scene, not sure which number
Hippolytus
Oh, what has
made a hellish maw of the moon, made
wilderness hideous, made the creatures of the night into minions of hateful
imagary! What has she told me? Something which invades Artemis’s sanctuary,
invades Artemis herself, like a wolf made rabid, betraying its inner marrow of
paternal kindliness. What weening sense
of Aphrodite’s taste is this? A taste
for lewd fashioning of human nature. I
feel the night howl with lewd betrsayal, the reetchy kiss of family persecutes
the dewy bliss of clearsighted night!
Oeanea
Oh,
Hippolytus, I didn’t mean to evoke the tempests of your ardour. I merely thought to bring all sins or
thoughts of sins within the purifying sanctity of Artemis’s temple. She would forgive.
Hippolytus
When she
herself most tender to the night must walk now in trepidation of a blood-soaked
moon born from the taint which I bring to the ethereal mists of night’s
cast. I – I am the blame. I am at guilt for crying shame upon the
wilderness. I who have not yet wrenched
myself free from the pernicious loyalties of family.
Oeanea
Oh, be
discreet yet. It is only between
us.
Hippolytus
The day must
expunge the night’s guilt.
Oeanea
I plead with
you, by the kissing death of oceans- dear man, be quiet!
Hippolytus
Do not touch
my raiment with your scandal scent of death!
You shall not touch my royal person!
Oeanea
By the ship’s anchors of gods, have
pity! Don’t pass on what I told you in
direst secrecy. It would destroy
me.
Hippolytus
Destroy
you? Words spoken in direst
secrecy? Your words were as innocent as
the footsteps of doves, you told me!
Oenea
What I told
you was not for all ears, not for public inquest.
Hippolytus
Words of
honesty, as you avouched your words, should not be caught in nets of
silence. Let all hear.
Oeanea
Do not
weather the ancient margins of oaths by reneging on the one you swore
me,
Hippolytus
My lips
swore. The oath does not anchor my
now-horrored heart. All oaths are
dismissed. Oh, this plague upon
Artemis’s sanctity contaminates all oaths and throws them into the
oceans.
Oeanea
What would
be your will? The destruction of a
friend by Theseus’s marriage.
Hippolytus
Friend? God forbid I should brook such
friendships.
Oeanea
Yet
forgive!
Hippolytus
Forgivenesses
are rendered moot. All horror’s moon has
sunken into the epochs of times ancient spent, for all ancient sins have been
rendered afresh as daisy’s grown from rot.
Begone.
Later scene
Phaedra
Oh, what have
you done, Oeanea? Your- oh God,
Hippolytus will bring a
Roman temple of day crashing down upon my private
shame, my private confessions now the prey of a hunter’s chariot. Hippolytus knows! Oh Gods!
How could you blow to the winds of Artemis’s wilderness, the wilderness
encased within Hipppolytus’s lonely heart, my horrible deranged conscience of
tempest’s love. Hippolytus now believes
all of Artemis’s realm tainted by my love’s twisting courses of nature’s
perverse fancy.”
Oeanea
Oh, forgive
me! I believed Artemis’;s heart would
within his flow, and whiten and sanctify all sin encroaching . I hoped his sense of the scales of familial
injustice would so gain mercy astride his horse’s gallop, not that injustice’s
scales would be capsized by an avalanche of shadow passion within Hippolytus’s
royal persona of shadow’s scales merit.
Oh, my words are all in chaos.
His passions is black, his royal person is a shadow who bears scales of
injustice by his passions of night.
Phaedra
You horrific
womb of treachory, see what you have brought down upon my house! May Zeus who brought me up from the blasts of
time blast you to death with fire and grind you to dust! Did I not attempt to ward of the dangers of
public ignomony to pre-empt your indiscreet vales of speech toward Artemis’s
purity fo r forgiveness of all sins, did I not forbid you to speak a word of it
into Artemis’s wilderness of shadows, a single word of what now pulls me by
chariots naked as death through the mire.
You spoke and your reason robs any hope of an honourable death. Now- some new plan. Hippolytus, casught in the tempests of his
outrage, will carry your treacherous words to his father and indict me. He will fill the landscape of the kingdom
with tales of the derangement of family.
Curse you! Curse all such friends
in office who offer their beneficience toward the ruining of their mistresses
virgin soil of discreet regality.
Oeanea
My lady, I
have done you wrong; you may well blame me.
The wound pricksm, and overcomes you jeudgement. Yet, if you’dlll listen to me, I can speak
for myself. I nursed youl I am your friend; I treid to find a a remedy for your
troulbe; and I was unllucky. With better luck, I would habe been called a wise
woman, after all, wisdome is only
haaaappening to guess right.
Later scene
Phaedra
My own
perverse transgressions are to be made an open display only to the secrecy of
Theseus’s private heart. I will be my
last claim on Theseus, on my husband. He
will be the final trasncripter of all my fear-woven perversity, all of which
will become his private conscience, his guarded tomb within himself. Theseus will become the true tomb of my
heart, of my whole soul itself. It will
be by the fibres and delicately pernicious weaving of his conscience that my
salvation will be articulated into law.
His conscience, by its will and by its law to protect the privacy of what
it contains, will become the authority of my salvation. Theseus will become my guardian of my
honour.
Hippolytus’s
righteousness casually inverts all postures of this world, all names and
desigation of status ware propped by him on a a stage to esubjected to an
exposure o their supposed stagey nature, to be transformed to artifice, to be
paled into awkward stage props, into things with no posture of their own. I feel myself already turning to
artifice. I feel it in my
sensations. It is by the dictates of
Hippolytus’s present social instincts, by the inevitable intentions of his
righteousness.
(pause)
The
destruction of my identity in this world is the only basis for any future action
on my part. The public shame implies
only suicide as its honourable requisite- the expungement of the will of the offending organ, the decay of
the root of social corruption, but the sin itself yet kept undisclosed to public
propriety . The sin feels within myself
undivided from his own nature, such is the invasion of his persecutions.
(pause)
The exposure
of the peculier sin to public propriety will however be his indiscretion, his
transgression against social decorum. I
resolve to affirm it so. He will be
known as indiscreet where I am modest and chaste in manner; the transgressions
will be appropriately divided to their actors.
(She sits down to write) All of
the poisonous fantasies of my heart will conglomerate into my last testament
written finally upon tablets to Theseus, all of my confession, all of the dark
abysmic nature of my reality, of my horror rendered invisible to all by my
practiced decorum. (She reads out loud as she writes) “Ah, Theseus. What horrors laden within my heart can brook
this tragedy. My heart has become an
encrustation of horrors. I cannot feel
where or whence the invasion ends and I begin.
The invasion is an abyss within me, has hollowed out my feeling, rendered
me within myself a corrugated mass. Did
you detect a soul within me as I busied about the house It was but the effective imposture of soul
much practiced by me. Oh, Theseus,
he! The he. He heightens all to a purity of a thing’s
essence. He has an eye for the essence
of all things. He brought me to my
essence. He made me pure to my essence,
made the outward consciousness the inward cravings, seekings and burrowings, all
within myself that burrowed deep within depths I’d just as well have let bury
themselves to my vision, all these depths of instinct he brought all my senses
and sensibilities to an attuned comprehension of. He made me comprehensive of myself. He brought me to the horrors of
self-comprehension. He’d invaded me, had
brought me to the impulse of devouring myself.
Later scene
Hippolytus
Father, I
heard you outcry and came at once. What
troule has caused your distress I do not know; bu t I wish you would telll mel…
OO! What odo I see? It is you rwife , Father= deeead! Dead?
How is it possible? I had only
just left her’ a short time ago she
was alive/! What has happenned to her? How did she die? Father, I am asking you to tello me! Will you njot speak? This is no time to be silent!! I kkkknnow that to o insist out o f season on
eing told everythingis called idle curioustity;’ but I am a friend=- something more than a
friend. Surely , Father , you shoujd not
hid trouble from me!!
Theseus
Ohe, the
futiloe folly of men! Why do they teach
arts innumerable, contrive and search outut every other thing, when on
knowloeldge they cannot win,one quarry they ahave not caught, the skill to teach
wisdeom to the brutish.
Hippolytus
He would
certainloy be a clever instructor who coulod drive sense into a fool. But., Fatjher,. This is not the time for
philosophical discourse. Sorrow, I fear,
is making you talk wilodly.
Theseus
Oh, there
should be somewhere a touchstone of human hearts, which men could trust to tell
them the truth about their efriends, who is loyal and who treacherouls;.! Every manj should have twop voices, the one
truthful, the other natureal, aos that his lying voice might brefuted by the
true and we shouod not be duped.
Theseus
Hippolytus,
the embodied will of Artemis, was predisposed to make of Phaedra’s name a toy,
to make her one of the creatures of the wilderness, within which he himself
hovers as a reckless, disembodied virture.
He is the virtue of the wilderness, the purifying virtue. He is the wilderness which disentangles and
unweaves all enmassed and enmeshed convolutions of human foibles into
crystalline virtue. He is the relentless
discoordination which translates anything to virtue.
He would
make of Phaedra’s name a wilderness.
Phaedra losing all postures by which to hold herself up. Her suicide was perpetrated in the name of
continual decorum, a decorum which is alien to Hippolytus. It is the one transgression Hippolytus has to
his name: his moral disrespect for decorum.
His will to make of Phaedra a funny, perverted toy is in itself a clear
outlining, the clear articulation, of his own sin, of his will to
perversity. He is revealed as one who
plays with toys, as one who teased Phaedra into a toyish figure. The outward manner of his morality stands
contrasted and clashed against the outward manner of hers.
The predatory
heart is the home promised to the anylitical faculties, the heart which hseeks
to bite and chew and tear pieces out of the world. The ravishing, devouring intellect which
seeks to claw and raze the whole expanse of the world, the devouring intellect
which requires as its mate a heart that seeks to ravish the world, Artemis’s
heart, a heart to bleed the world, to tear bleeding gashes into it. A heart that seeks to conquer the world, to
subject it to a massacre, to feed all of its own impulses into the world. Hipppolytus has acquired all of Zeus’s
reckless wiles.
She has
made herself the coffin of my heart, an earthern testament of my soul. Her conscience had become the enclosed coffin
of all the bursting, waayward sexual straining and exertions of a relentless
god, of the god’s heart that gorund mrotal s through itself. My son had implanted a wilderness within my
wife’s conscience, all the overcrowded sins within her heart.
Later scene
Aphrodite
In anylizing
my complicated relationship with Phaedra,
I feel myself immobilized in a disconcerting manner. In pursuing death, Phaedra feels all her
virtuous passions coinciding with themselves in perfect harmony. She will be overmasked with death. Death will be the mask of virtue. It will make her impermeable, chaste,
unscrutinizable. Her death would make
her a permanent fiction.
Phaedra
Hippolytus
heightened me to my essence.
Is Artemis,
the dream essence, the most consummate, meticulous articulater of tragic
drama? I s dramatic tragedy the ritual o
fher priestesses, the ritual the oice of which was in greaes proximaty to her
beating heart. The meticulous ritualo of
tragedy is the ritual of her own heart, is its sensation of
itself.
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