Another Arch in the Proscenium

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 20 March 2014.

In some ways, one of the dichotomies emerging at this point is not beauty vs. ugliness, but rather beauty vs. nothingness. This nothingness has no life or existence of its own, but is able to act in "viral" ways, a phenomenon we see all too often on the web. I suppose this is somewhat pathetic for actors who get coaxed into becoming another rib in the proscenium, but it is also tragic for the remaining protagonists, who are progressively trivialized, humiliated, diminished, etc. as their utterances are in inundated by frames.

I guess that may be a good definition of tragedy in general.

And that's a totally different way of looking at it. Is this just a modern version of just the old dialogue between the protagonist and chorus? We know from history that the chorus is the more primordial reality. So, these frames, these arches, these ribs in the the proscenium, these viral elements that have no content of their own are, in a sense, the more constitutive reality (in a way, that makes sense: we were created ex nihilo).  It's again reminiscent of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music in that the protagonist sinks back into the pre-Thespian chorus, the dithyrambic frenzy.  That is the moment at which the actor becomes just another arch in the proscenium (modern theater having largely done away with the chorus).

I think one of the redemptive questions posed by the project is whether we can in some way win some kind of freedom from these viral frames-within-frames, maybe to avoid being turned into just another echo radiating out from an increasingly depopulated stage, just another member of the chorus, just another arch in the proscenium. But that's what the protagonist tries and fails to do--we already know that. And probably rightly so. But there's seems to be choice at that moment of his downfall, one that leads to salvation, the other to damnation:

1. "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal 2:20)
2. C.S. Lewis's idea of Hell being "nearly nothing"

So, if we all become these wraith-like viruses drifting through cyberspace, having no lives of our own, echoing the often trivial utterances of the remaining "heroes" on stage, then yes, we have descended into a kind of hell. But if that stage is vacated of everything such that our lives serve as a stage for the one true God, such that our lives echo and amplify his life-giving Word, then we have actually snatched an unlikely victory from the jaws of ignominious defeat.

So, yeah, the soundtrack with clips of animals doing cute things sounds good.