R

THE CRIME OF PROMETHEUS 35

ture makes for his general optimism in the face of the myth’s
fruition, yet the unspeakable past is abysmally known by
each prisoner as he divines, discomfortingly, that the spoils
of a crime somewhere underlie his pleasant paths and his good
things of life. So, in order to bring to pass the vision of this,
his last act, the Modern Spirit who directs our scene must
see to it that the common language is cleansed from any ves-
tiges of essence and that men will be purified of all traces of
sacramental mythos from which they, with occasional insight,
might suffer and by which their faith in him might b2 se-
duced, in order that they may be kept ignorantly pure in
their role of producing, with their common body, the vision
of Prometheus eternally bound.

For this purpose of moral and mental purgation the au-
tobiographical confession has been institutionalized on our
linguistic scene. Each individual in his social abandonment in
the mass yet needs suffer mounting anxisty at being sep-
arated from it. He undertakes his confession as an act of
faith and fusion. The mass, constituted as the audisnce, de-
mands- his complete submission. It views him with personal
detachment yet with keen interest. With its Argus eye it
pursues him like a pathologist. It requires that he use the
idiom of naturalistic mimicry so that the symptoms of his
alienation may be feelingly understood and his words, by
attaching to the proliferating novelty of his sensations, may
produce a gently laxative effect, leaving him without a tale
of his own to tell, leaving him a clown of himself, leaving him
a pure man of the mass.

Through its disinterested passion for 1ts actor, then,
the audience enjoys knowledge of his evils without contam-
ination, since, 1n its status of a confessional, it runs off mean-
ings of words into channels of waste and clarifies the guilty
scene. This ever-willing audience is an irresistible invitation
to the performer to make a showing of himself as incarnate
liberator and word of truth, and thus are our actors encour-
raged to apply themselves to the mortifying “*good works’’