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..