7. What are the polarities in your family? If your town was the location of a Western, how would a stranger riding into town find it polarized? How does polarity operate at the national level?
8. Have you ever experienced a reversal of polarity in your own life or in someone around you? Describe this and how it made you feel.
9. How do polarities work in a half-hour TV show? Watch an episode of a show and identify the polarities and moments of reversal.
10. Look at two of your favorite teams or athletes competing for a championship. What are their contrasting qualities, their strengths and weaknesses? How does the winner exploit these polarities?
Several times in this book we have used the word catharsis, referring to a concept found in the works of Aristotle, one of his terms that has survived to become part of the general theory of drama and narrative. It is a critical concept, the point of drama according to Aristotle, and its roots go back to the beginnings of language, art, and ritual.
We have little chance of ever knowing for sure what Aristotle meant by catharsis. His work has come down to us in shreds. Less than half of what he wrote survives and most of that comes from rotted, jumbled manuscripts found under a building. Scholars disagree vigorously about what Aristotle meant by catharsis and there is even a theory that the word was inserted into the Poetics by an over-eager copyist at a place where the text was garbled, because Aristotle had promised in an earlier book that he would eventually get around to defining catharsis.
Whatever it meant to Aristotle, the word has come to mean something to us: a sudden release of emotions that can be brought about by good entertainment, great art, or probing for psychological insight. Its roots are deep in our spirits and in the history of our species. If we look back a little into the origins of drama, we might find that catharsis has always been a desired effect and in fact is the mainspring of the dramatic experience.
To find the origins of drama, narrative, art, religion, and philosophy we have to cast our minds back to the time when human beings were in their earliest stages of development. Through a few miracles of preservation, we have windows into the soul of those times, through the marvelous cave paintings and sculptures that have survived from as early as forty thousand years ago. We know from these breathtaking, life-like rendering of animals and hunters that the people of those times made pilgrimages deep into the belly of the earth, and must have performed some rituals in which they played the parts of the animals they hunted or the forces of nature that they perceived around them. Through these rituals, the beginnings of storytelling and drama, they must have tried to master or appease these powers. Joseph Campbell recognized one figure from the cave paintings with his antlered costume as a shaman, a go-between, embodying the spirit of the animals his people depended on for life.
A physical catharsis or emotional reaction is hard to avoid when going into a deep cave, even today. If you go as they went, long ago, with only fitful candles to light your way down the narrow tunnels, you can't help but feel the weight of the earth and imagine the forces and beings that might be lurking there in the endless darkness just outside the glow of your flame. There is still a sense of wonder when coming out into a big cavern deep in the earth, especially when its walls are painted with huge animals that seem to leap across the ceiling in the flickering candle light. It would be a perfect stage to initiate young people into the mysteries of the tribe, its deepest beliefs, the essence of its compact with nature.
I can testify to the still-impressive power of a candle in a dark place to animate things. It is the cheapest but most effective of special effects. I was visiting Hamlet's castle at Elsinore, or Helsing or as the Danes call it, on a tip of Denmark, facing Sweden across a short expanse of water. In the frigid crypts of the castle is kept a brooding statue of Denmark's version of King Arthur or El Cid, shown as a rugged Viking sitting on his throne with a drawn sword across his knees. He is Holger Danske, Ogier the Dane, one of Charlemagne's paladins and Denmark's legendary protector in time of need. Troops of Danish schoolchildren and tourists are marched past the statue to stand shivering before it, marveling at the illusion of life, for at the feet of the statue is a candle, or rather these days an electric imitation of a candle, a small flickering light. In the otherwise darkened crypt, so like a cave, the erratic light casts a nervous glow over the statue's features, and shadows dance and shift on the chamber walls. In an eerie way that makes the hair stand up on your arms and the back of your neck, the stone image seems to your eyes and your Stone Age nervous system to be distinctly alive. You could swear the Viking chieftain is asleep but breathing, about to wake up and surge off his pedestal at any moment. It makes a convincing theatrical illusion that the country's eternal fighting spirit is slumbering but ready to return to action when needed. No doubt the ancient people felt the same awe as flickering torches and oil lamps made the giant horses and bison gallop across the cave walls.
A feature of some commercial cave tours in the modern world is to turn off the electric lights at some point so the visitors can get a sense of the pure blackness of the lightless cave. Perhaps our ancestors used a similar dramatic technique in their cave rituals, putting out the oil lamps and torches so the young initiates could experience the deep dark. For some it would be terrifying, for others, soul-expanding, and some might be visited with visions that made them feel connected to the animals or the powers that made the world. Perhaps the paintings are memorials of those visions, amended and painted over by successive generations of initiates.
Emerging from a cave is another hazardous passage, climaxed with the feeling of relief upon emerging into sunlight and open space once again. For some there is a feeling of transformation, of having died in some sense down there, or having come very close to death and other eternal forces, and now coming to new life on the surface.
Ancient people undoubtedly had other places that served a similar function of enhancing dramatic experiences and evoking a religious feeling, such as intimate groves of trees, natural amphitheatres, isolated mountain tops like Mt. Olympus, sacred wells and fountains, or arrangements of monumental stones. Trees could be planted in rows or in circles to create spaces that enhanced a group feeling of awe and connection with greater forces. In those spaces rituals were performed that tried to link the world of people to the world of the gods. People played the parts of gods, heroes, and monsters to enact the drama of creation and the stories of the ancestors. The first plays may have been the texts of these rituals, recited at first by a chorus but with actors gradually taking the parts of individual characters.
As humans made the transition from nomadic hunting to the settled life of farmers in societies like those of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, drama found different theatres of expression and dramatic forms, with a new emphasis on time and the vast calendar of the stars.
On the fertile, muddy plains on the banks of great rivers, people built civilizations that needed dramatic rituals to bring order, unity, and a shared sense of purpose to a large population. By communal effort they fashioned river mud into bricks and built huge temple mounds that were like artificial mountains, connecting their society to the heavens and providing a stairway to the world of the gods.
These temple pyramids or ziggurats also served as spectacular backdrops for highly theatrical presentations designed to evoke a healthy religious feeling in a whole population.
These religious spectacles were staged with exquisite precision to a calendar set by a giant celestial clock, the movement of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky. Lives were short but people accumulated thousands of years of observations that could be passed down by various forms of notation. They paid particularly close attention to the exact turning points of the year, the spring and fall equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices, the four points marking the change of season. The great festivals of the year were held at these times, with a greater festival marking the beginning of the New Year.