3 swords Hades Dragon - More thoughts on drama

I had a lunchtime meditative talk with Hades about stuff today. Yesterday, my oracles and what-not seemed to be pointing me toward notions of balance and passion, and one thing I know in my bones I have a passion for is divinity. My attraction to divination may just come from the notion of personal divinity, which is that awareness of how my will and divine will intersect and become one. To get to that place, I need to go through a vetting process about my desires as they enter into my awareness, and some of the things I see that I seem to want eventually reveal themselves to be ephemera. Some of the things that I seem to think I don't want have become indispensable, for example kale of all things. Kale and brussels sprouts are two foods that I have come to cherish for the simple reason they make me happy. I have no idea why this should be, but I'm looking forward to having kale with mixed vegetables, pork, rice cakes, butternut squash and an apple for dinner tonight, along with a couple of other small items.

My meditation with Greece's ancient death god today seemed to turn on the notions of drama and how it has been a passion of mine in the past. I used to get caught up in whether or not tragedy was a possible expression for the contemporary American. Now I see it as a rather pointless notion. The tragic hero's definition was way too constricted in order to fit Aristotelian notions of reinforcing the then status-quo wherein proper governance was a bastion of a military and intellectual defense of patriarchal self-aggrandizement which articulated a rather reactionary and paternalistic viewpoint that didn't bother to disguise a hostility toward some notion of "primitive" (read egalitarian and/or matriarchal) peoples. (I acknowledge that I can't really prove this notion on its face, though I believe that Shlain, Gimbutas and others have articulated similar notions about how the alphabetic cultures had warred against cultures of image and imagination.)

Aristotle still continues to have a death-grip on the notion of what constitutes a proper narrative, however, one which is very similar to the male ejaculation process. Hamlet's Money Shot is the moment at the end of th play when Hamlet kills Claudius. Oedipus' Money Shot is of course his realization that he is the contagion afflicting Thebes and he puts his own eyes out. Frank Galvin's Money Shot in David Mamet's screenplay The Verdict is when he calls Nurse Costello to the stand and redeems his sorry-ass ambulance-chasing career. And I suppose we'll be seeing a long-delayed Money Shot when The Sopranos ends this final season.

It isn't a surprise that some women are good money-shot creators, like J.K. Rowling for example--though I will say that the climaxes of the Harry Potter novels are a bit peremptory, kind of like a handjob. I love the Harry Potter series, but that is a characteristic weakness common to all the books, with the possible exception of Book 3. But the thing I love about the HP books is the world she creates, so I don't mind that JK has to hit the buttons to create that rush for He-Who-Must-Be-Served, that Voldemort-lizard brain inside us all. Still, isn't it interesting that the climaxes are the very places where there's not much heart? Oh, there's plenty in the aftermaths thereof, especially in Books 4 and 5. I can't read Book 4's ending without crying, and when Sirius dies in 5, I feel a great loss.

Anyway, these are kind of interesting digressions about the nature of the western/patriarchal/addictive/civilized notion of narrative THRUST and CLIMAX, with scant attention paid to afterglow. I'm wondering about how I as a playwright can play to reconnect the sexual, the sacred, and the theatrical and how all that can work to subvert the thuggish paradigm inflicting its' wounded rages upon the greater populace. Some of our ancient myths probably tell of ways to tell stories that are not as "climactic" but desirable and pleasurable to tell and hear. But to get to that place, it might be that some sort of "abstinence" from "narraporn" might need to be effected. Could it be that Aristotle and his band of soul-thieves over the centuries (and in whose school of cuntishness I too have been trained, but to my benefit, whose dog in my hand don't hunt at any rate), have created an addiction that is just as pernicious as toxic belief or Jack Daniels or Jelly Donuts or Juris Doctorates? Jingo Drama, perhaps? After all, the earliest playwright in the annals of Greek record whose work is still extant, Aeschylus, was a brillliant (gangster) statesman/general.

Sidebar, along those lines, Woody Allen alluded to something very interesting in his brilliant piece Bullets Over Broadway, when he had Chazz Palminteri's gangster character be the real playwright in the works, and not hapless John Cusack. Dianne Wiest's famous "Don't speak, don't. Speak, don't, etc." speech is the ultimate in the censorship of the heart and soul ain't it? But in a cunture like ours, it's cunture-artists we get. Kunt-kunt-kunt, eh? Dracula Falwell would be motht pleathed.