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.