Cosmic Theatre: The Little Chariot of Flames and Voices

Cosmic Theatre: The Little Chariot ofFlames and Voices BETTINA KNAPP • SPACE TRAVEL HAS ALTERED MAN'S FRAME OF REFERENCE. The launching of satellites has made possible measurements of solar rays and of radiation; the photographing of cloud formations and mineral deposits have modified philosophical and scientific concepts. Such expansion into outer realms has been accompanied by concomitant journeys into man's inner world - his unconscious - uncovering in this arcane region another dimension replete with infinite riches. The probings accomplished in both exterior and interior worlds have resulted in two main attitudes. The first is pessimistic. Man feels his isolation and his helplessness in the limitless universe. He is flooded by various sensations which lead to a kind of vertigo. He feels uprooted, as if set adrift in some spaceless and timeless area. He loses his bearings, his identity, his raison d'etre and looks upon his existence as absurd. The religious and philosophical concepts which he had accepted have now scattered, like dead leaves blown in the wind, in a ceaselessly altering world devoid of a center and focal point. Pascal expressed these feelings in a precise manner: "The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me..." The second attitude is optimistic. Because of man's expanded universe and the increased knowledge at his disposal, he not only gains faith in his own capacities and accomplishments, but fills his lungs and mind with renewed energy. His desire, like that of an Einstein, to search still further in the fabulous mysteries buried within the universe, burns insatiable within him. To be terrorized or energized by the notion of infinity is only part of the picture today. Whatever the attitude, man, if he is to survive and remain whole, must establish new relationships and adapt to altering circumstances with respect to the unknown cosmic forces surrounding him. The conventional and circumscribed world of the past, with its pat answers, its set 225 226 BETTINA KNAPP notions of economic, philosophical and religious security, its belief in the sacrosanct principle of cause and effect, has all but vanished. It is the trauma of adaptation or transfomlation which causes both individuals and nations such enormous difficulties. Organized religions have suffered an enormous decline in adherents resulting from growing attitudes of mass dejection and hopelessness. Particularly in the Occidental world, rejection of institutions that foster credos relating to God's goodness as adumbrated in the Scriptures, is widespread. Many in today's world can readily accept man's extraordinary capacity for scientific, philosophical, and artistic advancement, but cannot understand nor cope with his tremendous capacity for Evil-making in a God-created universe. Others have learned through rigorous self-probing, discipline, understanding and the very real experience of excruciating anguish, to know renewed faith in God. Such a person· is Liliane Atlan, poet, critic and dramatist. Her journey inward, her discovery of the divine principle was given literary expression in her plays: Monsieur Fugue (1967), The Messiahs (1968), The Little Chariot of Flames and Voices (1971). Her goal was to discover her identity and to solve the paradox and the turmoil of the finite being living in an infinite realm. The God she perceived at the end of her path was not some foreign entity removed from the work-a-day world, some ossified abstract concept, but a very real spark - a flame - alive within her and buried within her deepest fiber. This force or catalyzing agent enabled her to pursue her creative work, to experience the beatitude oflove (as both wife and mother), and to understand the meaning of relatedness not only in terms of herself, her family, her people, but with respect to humanity in general. Born in Montpellier in 1932, Liliane Adan and her sister, because they were Jews, were kept hidden in their home during most ofWorld War II. We had to entertain ourselves. My sister would dress up, would disguise herself. She was the audience. I was the stage: the actors, the author.... Everything lived within me: I screamed, gesticulated, died. I would speak out my lamentations, my dirges, my psalms. After the war nothing seemed possible. There was not way out for us. Man and his gods had died in the...