MODERN THEATER
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tained us for twenty-five hundred years? It should be said initially that,
from a theatrical perspective, the man with the pig's head has a tradi–
tion of his own, comedy, which was born from the phallic songs that
accompanied the same ritual of Dionysus. As the Thracian religion
moved southward, into civilization, and as the ritual began to change
from communion to catharsis, the spirit of comedy, unmalleable as
laughter, was in a sense squeezed from the dance into an arena of its
own, the satyr play, in which the unrepentant, unrehabilitated animal
instincts were free to perform. The satyrs - like that entire Greek
menagerie of sileni and fawns, sphinxes and rninotaurs, tritons and mer–
maids, sirens and centaurs - represent not so much men in the guise
of goats as goats pretending to be men, their
phalloi
extended before
them like rods of divination, tapping hidden resources of energy, ready
in
a moment to drop the disguise and seize the paradise of their in–
stincts. As Nietzsche pointed out, the satyrs are "nature beings who
dwell behind all civilization." He failed to add that from their place
at the rear of civilization they are in a perfect position to sabotage it,
just as from their place at the end of a tragic trilogy they were in a
perfect position to burlesque what had come before. Comedy seeks
all
the things - union and generation of energy - usually ascribed to
tragedy. Thus it is comedy that was performed at a time of withering,
in
winter, at the Lenaea, when men most feel the need to reassure
themselves of their - and nature's - fertility and most desire to infuse
their chilled lives with passion. Tragedy was performed in the spring,
at the Dionysia, at a time of swelling, bursting, thrusting powers, a
time badly in need of dissipation and discharge. The history of drama
is in part the story of how, once cast away and behind the tragic festi–
val,
the chorus of satyrs has managed to smuggle itself back to the
center of the stage. In some ways their reentrance may be symbolized
by the event in Union Square, which in turn may well be a response to
the fact that on that November day we marked the very winter of our
lives.
It must also be said that the proposition that the tradition of
catharsis, of desacralization, has sustained us is no more likely than that
it has brought us
to
our present state. What is revolutionary about the
young is that they have discovered a radical goodness in the very in–
stincts that civilization has viewed with distrust. The ethic of love, which
so permeates their lives, is an expression of faith in the purity of what
we have always called impure; it is also a means of living out that
faith, of bringing about the inner unity of the individual and of man–
kind,
since love is, after all, a means of combining, joining, conglomer–
ating, of making one where there were two, of reducing the various and
