Political (?) Mother

With a title like “Political Mother”, it was difficult to avoid speculating before the show (What do they mean  by “political”?).  Whatever expectations I formed before the performance, however, could not have prepared me for the truly unique and stunning display we witnessed.       A thin layer of smoke hung over the theatre in beguiling calm , when we entered the darkened room and headed to our seats.  The performance began as sweet, tranquil notes from Verdi’s Requiem rose from the misty darkness and the spotlight shone on a lone dancer, clutching at a Samurai sword.   The dancer proceeded to reenact, in vivid, and almost disturbing detail, the seppuku ritual to which members of Japan’s warrior class would once resort rather than bear the dishonor of defeat. It was a transfixing moment.   But as darkness fell upon the prostrated figure of the Samurai and the music persisted in its  sublime, ethereal tones, my eyelids began to feels heavy.   I let my eyes close and took the music in with placid contemplation.  I was almost drifting off, when an explosion of heavy metal music jolted me to attention.   I was not going to get any sleep.

After that initial start, the performance managed to captivate me without resorting to blunt shock value.   It is difficult to describe exactly what transpired over the next hour or so, and anyone interested really has see it for himself.    Suffice to say it involved a lot of wild twitching and gesticulation on the part of dancers – and just a little bit of folkdance.   As I was watching the performance, I could not help but connect it to our recent readings in Nietzsche: the contrasts between light and dark, sweet melody and savage riff , obliteration of the individual  and  singular defiance seemed, at times, to be drawn directly  as illustration for Nietzsche’s discussion of the Apollonian and Dionysian.    There was a schizophrenic aspect to the whole performance, with two tendencies – entities, to speak more clearly of what they were- seizing the will and engaging in perpetual, internecine conflict.   There was also something of the Pagan festival , and it felt, at times, as though one had stumbled unto some ancient and terrible cult that has, in some impossible manner, always been an attendant of human affairs..

One striking motif was a terrible figure, obscured by darkness, who stood atop the platform and seemed to direct with strange, superhuman powers the wild scenes of despair and submission below.   He seemed to transfix the audience, as well, casting a terrible spell over the whole theatre.   Who this figure was – a dictator, a devil, a sadistic God-never is answered in the performance.   But, perhaps influenced by the title, I inevitably connected it to the “political”.  Politics has its rational discourses, but it also a darker aspect.   There is always something primal in the way that people relate to their leaders and the law.    Beneath the veneer of smiling faces, polished rhetoric, and noble ideals is the exercise of a power that originates in the more wild and remote regions of man’s psyche.   After all, we inaugurated the political struggle on earth, not as autonomous rational beings, but as animals of the irrational group , barely removed from our primate infancy and still clutching desperately for  the ground of conscious being.  To offer a glimpse into this frightening dimension of the political  is not to make a criticism of any one political system or style of governance, but to lay bare the  essential forces underlying our  political relations, their bizarre shapes and latent malignancy.

An interesting formulation of this came in the funniest moment of the performance:  “Where there is pressure there is….folkdance,” a projection revealed.  If there was a schizophrenic quality to the entire performance, then this instance intensified it by presenting a specimen of the schizophrenic’s “disorganized” thought.   But schizophrenics were the prophets of old, and the message that appeared in bright relief, absurd and humorous as it was, seemed to have a touch of prophetic inspiration in it.    Just as systems of power have a “shadow” existence that directs them in essential, but obscure ways, so those movements that arise in genuine opposition to authority must have their own secret and inscrutable motivations.   The notion of “folkdance” conquering overlord who stood invincibly atop his platform  seems ridiculous to us  ,and perhaps that says something about our political moment.   The “Occupy Wall street” movement has produced it own marketable brand of rhetoric, and has succeeded in finding some sympathy among the begrudged ranks of the struggling and unemployed.   But, despite its smug sense of historical significance, it lacks any true substance,  any essential power,  whether spiritual or animal.   Strip away the organizers and their banners and what remains is the most superficial vein of resentment, out whose impoverished soil no real action can germinate.  There is no confrontation in what the Occupy protestors do, regardless of how shrilly they may shout at office fronts  and television cameras  , because all genuine political confrontation must occur first in the pre-rational depths of the soul  before it can spill into the streets and call itself a movement.

The revolutions of the 1960s – to give an example that is vivid, if highly colored and  distorted, in the American memory – were accompanied by  titanic shift in the pre-rational psychological and social landscape of a generation.    The figure of the hippie cannot seem anything but a strange caricature to us now, but what seems most like caricature today  -engaging in folkdance, for example-   was actually the essential  part of the movement  , not its intellectual or moral content, which was largely derivative.    This is not the element of a political movement that can pursue its objective in a rational, purposeful, and effective manner, but it is the life-blood, the animating principle, without which the rational faculty cannot operate in any meaningful and vigorous way as a political agent.    Political Mother was political.  It was also interesting, and that is a great accomplishment in of itself.