Configuring Principle

Part One Inside the Theatre of More

I

You enter the place called theatre or playhouse to see the play; you find your place there; then the play takes place. You yourself also come here to play, at least in your own mind, knowing that the play also takes place inside you. What’s out there is also in here. Secretly, you are the theatre, the playhouse, the place of the play, where your own life may seem to be staged right before your eyes; and here, under cover of private hiddenness, it gives up its secrets—if you have eyes to see. Your seeing eyes see both ways at once, the outer stage and the mirror stage within, the in/out threshold, the (double) ocular axis upon which your inner play plays out—the thea (Gk.), the view and the viewing that you, theates (Gk.), viewer, behold in the place of viewing: the theatre. It’s all you—well, it’s also all the world.

And it’s all me, and all not. We double, we straddle the threshold, confuse identities, we arc in the viewing between viewer and viewed, we spectators co-configure—we make theatre side-by-side, each with our own play running privately inside. What renders this spectacle so spectacularly possible? Somewhere in here there is a root principle difficult to define and resistant to names, and yet it has language. Is it knowable?—and, if it is, in what sense is it known? And can we tell each other about it?

The hinge here is language: the principle that has language and can speak itself also is language. That’s the starting point in this inquiry into principle; the realization that a principle shows itself in the language by which it is thought. It has what might be called a poetics.

Theatre, to begin at the declared beginning of the Theatre of More, is a word that carries a complex set of relationships, as indicated in its viewer/viewing/viewed etymology. A formulation like Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Teatro della Memoria (1530) inherits a complex of traditions that plays out the possibilities of viewing. This confluence of traditions includes the external site and architecture of the physical theatre; the ancient mnemonic systems (ars memorativa as mnemotechnics) that combine primarily rhetorical systems with architectural images and nomenclature; the variously developed abstracted ancient rhetorical uses of mnemonics (Cicero, Quintilian); and the Hermetic tradition (Lull, Ficino) and magical and cabalistic practices able to incorporate mnemonic systematics in an esoteric agenda. The idea of theatre in this broad history involves a range of meanings from the most external viewing to the deepest internal visionary experience. The word itself comprises, as it were, a kind of continuum running between the “outer” and “inner” meanings, and as such it is a threshold (limen) and site of liminality between extremes; here a Camillo can play out his drama of mind-theatre, its staged levels of “intellect” and “intention,” ranging from the practical to the divine, with magical aspirations always ready to lift the next curtain.

Memory/Memoria too is such a logoic threshold (if I may introduce a neutralizing term for “language”). I view memory, like theatre, as what I call a limen, a liminal (non-)point of processual distinction within a continuum: on one hand, memory as rhetorical recall or as recollection (information retrieval) of facts, ideas, and rational formulations; and, on the other hand, memory as a site of restoration of powers, a return to fundamentals of one’s intrinsic nature, an initiation that is both a discovery and an uncovering. “Theatre of Memory” in the latter sense would be a site of what gets called magical, initiatic, and transformative experience, as indeed we may understand Camillo to have intended: you go in as you and you come out as other.

And in that sense there may be many subtle inheritors of such a “theatrical” tradition, perhaps including, say, Alfred Jarry’s ’Pataphysics, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Jerzy Grotowski’s “Objective Drama” and “Art as Vehicle,” along with those connected to the latter (Peter Brook, Richard Schechner), and...