photo by jgm | play: O Fim do Fim — Amândio Anastácio e João Garcia Miguel | Actor: Paulo Quedas
Man alone and World Theatre Day!
The creator of the theater, the first of all men who created the theater was alone and had many beings inside him. But he didn't know how to bring them out and one day he reached out his hand and a drop of rain fell into his palm. He mixed the drop with the earth. And the water and the earth became mud. The creator of the theatre knew the birds and the other four-legged animals. And he had seen himself in a pool of reflected water. He showed his teeth. He frowned. He growled like dogs. And he laughed. At first he was amazed, but then he started laughing. He still didn't know what it was like to laugh or cry. He did those things, but he didn't understand why or give them a name. Sometimes he felt good and sometimes he felt bad. Then the creator of the theater, the first one no one knows his name from, shaped a doll like him out of the mud. And I told him from the inside in that language that it was all his: let me see how you'll use those legs and arms to walk and run. The mud turned into a man and he started to walk on his feet, stumbled on his legs, stood up quickly and leaned with his hands on the rocks and trees. He did all this without realising that anyone was looking at him. Well, that's magnificent! Said the man alone. You can walk and jump and fall: you do things exactly like me. The first theater creator liked to see the little man and liked to see the difference between this and the birds and the four-legged animals. Then the man said to himself: I think you need more companions. You need him and you need another voice inside him. Then he took the little man made of mud and quickly turned him clockwise. He turned it so hard that the little man got dizzy, and, as always when you get dizzy or feel dizzy, the little man saw many images around him. He tried to grab them but they escaped his eyes. Soon there were others coming and more. He began to see the whole world turning continuous green, then the blue sky mixed with many colors and then he had to close his eyes and everything went dark. The little man saw all kinds of men and women, children, half man and half beast. Of all colors and sizes. Some danced, some talked, some climbed stairs, others threw their heads into the water. And when he stopped and became like himself again, when he stopped seeing the world around him, there were all those women and men and children he had imagined. There was a crowd of people around him who were laughing and clapping. In the middle was the man alone with many tears in his eyes. A river shone down his cheeks to his mouth first and then to the ground. The man alone laughed and cried so much that he stood on an island surrounded by salt water. And we know that men love the air and the earth, have their heads raised to the sky and their feet well planted on the ground. The men live inside houses where they turn on the light at night and have sat around in a big room to talk ever since. The light they bring into the house is an imitation of the light that is up there in the sky, that golden star that throws holes in our eyes and all this because there is rarely light that comes from the ground. There are fires from time to time, but they are weak imitations of the great star hanging in the sky. And men do all this after all, because the drop of water that became mud when mixed with the earth - from which the first little man was made - fell from the sky from which the light comes. And he mingled with the earth where the shadows are hidden when the light warms the ground where it strikes. And so it was that man alone discovered how to get the first man out of himself. Since then, man alone has invented small and large men, just like him and very different ones. Sometimes they put them in the light, sometimes they hide them in the shadows. But he learns to be alone and to like the stories that little men tell him in the living room. In the living room well with you and the world. In the house where the light is an imitation of the sky and the wood of the floor is an imitation of the earth.
NOTE: This text was inspired by a legend of the origin of the Apache jicarillas tribe of New Mexico told by Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God - Primitive Mythologies
João Garcia Miguel
27 March 2020
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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