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Café Satan
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
 Apr 26, 04 - 7:23 PM |
The World of Café Satan
I have been much amused, and occasionally dismayed by some of the reactions that I've heard to the Café Satan concept. Some could be ascribed to simple thickheadedness - people who couldn't get that the Café was a put-on, and that no real devil worship would be occuring. But some of it, while misguided, showed signs of a little more thought, albeit not much education. The concern was over the subtext of the backstory, and a belief that I was insulting God and the Judeo-Christian religious legacy. Far from it. The world of Café Satan is not a world that I believe that we live in. The backstory, I would put in the realm of speculative fiction, fantasy to be specific. As what I'm describing doesn't look like the world view of any religion that I know of, I suspect that almost everybody will agree with me on this one. If somebody, for reasons obscure to me, decides that he wishes to build some kind of Neopagan religion around this story line, I suppose that he's free to do so, but he will be doing so without my blessing. Everybody clear on this one? Then let's proceed. The "Demiurge" is a concept from Gnosticism, an early Christian heresy, which postulated an extreme kind of dualism in its answer to the question of evil. That question is a familiar one : "If God is all good and all powerful, then why does he allow so much evil to exist in the world? Why does he not snap his fingers, and set all to rights?". This question has been answered in many different ways, the answers doing a lot to define the religions that adopted them. The answer the Gnostics posed was that there was a world of matter and a world of spirit, with a number of intermediate worlds in between. The god of the material world was supposed to be the God of the Old Testament, the true and merciful God dwelling in the world of spirit, unable to influence events in the corrupt material world. The Demiurge, the god of this world, was far less compassionate and far more corrupt. Each of the worlds in between would have a ruling deity of its own. The closer a world was to the material one, the more corrupt it and its ruler would be. The closer it was to the spiritual world, the purer it would be. The solution to the problem posed by the question of evil was to escape the world of matter, and rise to the world of spirit. In this view, the story of the Garden of Eden is transformed, the snake becoming a savior by saving Adam and Eve from the immortality they would have otherwise enjoyed, leaving them trapped in the material world forever. I had not settled on aa backstory yet, at the time I stopped thinking of this as a Burning Man camp idea, and started thinking in terms of a theme party, but I had a few ideas. One of them went as follows: Let's start by assuming the existence of a world that looks something like that Gnostic world view. We wouldn't go so far as to say that the earth was irredemiably corrupt, but its ruler certainly was, and his creation would be reflecting his own bad character. Not completely evil, but harsh, his search for justice untempered by mercy or even any a very clear vision of what the purpose of justice is, understanding the details but never seeing the big picture. Think of him as being a version of your high school principle, with power on a cosmic scale. The d**ned, in this scenario, are not flawless or blameless. Some of them are truly abominable (eg. Caligula), others were guilty of little more than indiscretions and were just unlucky enough to catch the Demiurge in a bad mood. Some experienced torments, and others largely ignored, mainly as a matter of whim, though when punishment did come, it was usually in the form of poetic justice a la Dante. (Eg. the man who acted as a glutton in the midst of famine spending a millenium in a rain of excrement, with nothing to eat but that which rained down upon him. Excrement being all that he made in life, it is all that he is rewarded with in death - a slight modification of one of the punishments from the Inferno). The purpose of the portion of the afterlife spent in his realm was supposed to be to help reform the lost souls until they were ready to move on to the next level of existence. The Demiurge, however, willfully lost all sight of that, and in casting away his sense of purpose, put himself on the road to ennui and ultimate madness. The centuries dragged into millenia dragged into tens of millenia, and with nothing but novelty to keep him occupied, eventually discovered that nothing seemed novel at all. He settled on a punishment for all of the d**ned - to wander the world, able to see all but influence none of it, unheard by those they tried to cry out to, unfelt by those they would touch, knowing of all of life but unable to share in even a moment of it. This he applied indiscriminately to all the lost souls in his grasp, because he no longer cared enough to bother to do anything more imaginative ... |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 7:55 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
... than to condemn all to an eternity of wandering the same grey and empty limbo, viewing the world only as images seen through a mist that they could not pass through. They could not even sense the presence of the others trapped beyond the veil. Eventually he relented, and granted the d**mned a week's reprieve, but only to silence the endless cries that he couldn not help but hear. No compassion guided his choice, only a desire to be left alone. The Demiurge had gone quite insane. The rulers of some of the other worlds had taken notice of this. As befitted their nature, their response was a mixture of that which was virtuous, and that which was self-serving. An insane god was one who could not plan the defense of his own realm in a clear-eyed fashion, allowing his neighbors the chance to move in and expand their own realms at his expense. This, they could rationalize with some degree of justice by saying that they were merely enforcing the law the Demiurge had forgotten, giving the lost souls a way out of this H*ll that the god of their world had made for them. At the time the proposed story cycle opens, those rulers of the other worlds, including the orishas worshipped by the Youruba speaking peoples, have made their presence felt more strongly in the world. These are the gods of the villagers our lost souls encounter. They (the d**ned) will not be escaping for a while - the incursion has only begun, two religious and cultural worlds coming into collision. Markedly absent will be the one-time gods of Europe. The West maintained its devotion to the Demiurge, misperceived as being a just and compassionate god, to the bitter end and was lead dangerously astray. Though the d**mned do not know it, their own civilization has been dead and gone for tens of thousands of years. They think that they hear no news from home because they are too far removed from the trade lanes, but the reality is that there are no trade lanes any more. |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 8:11 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
The world, in this scenario, is a depleted, devastated place, most of its civilizations gone, its landmass underwater or radioactive, its resources depleted or otherwise unavailable. The civilizations that remained were the ones nobody felt threatened enough to drop the hydrogen bomb on during a series of world wars. Perhaps they might have rebuilt, but there wasn't enough of a world left for the rebuilding to succeed. Civilization has stagnated, the cultures that remain being maintained out of a sense of nostalgia for a now semi-legendary time when men could fly through the airand the future held more possibilities than the ones that one could see people already living out. Legends being what they are, the descendents of the survivors aren't aware of the hunger that their ancestors endured living in the Third World, and probably wouldn't think much about it even if they did. Life might be easier, but it is still hard, with no real hope of improvement, ever. The difference between Hell and Purgatory is that Purgatory has an exit. |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 8:45 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
One begins to see why, in these stories, the villagers would put up with the less than ideal behavior and attitudes of these spirits who come to them. Living in a world with no pleasant suprises left, and longing for a time of legend, they're meeting those who were actually there, and if trouble should come with these strangers, what's a good legend without a little of that? Those visited come back with a great reward for their trouble - stories to tell to a world that is forgetting how to make them. The stage is now set for the story cycle, to some extent. What kind of stories would the participants/d**mned souls tell if this premise were pursued? The stories of their own lives, told from their perspective as it has changed over the years. (Memories are often lost and the perception of time is distorted in Limbo. The spirits think that it is the year 2057, when in fact it's more like 82057). The villagers listen, find a spark of creativity in them that they had forgotten was there, and invent stories of their own - or tell stories about the strange events starting to unfold, events that the visitors have trouble believing really occured. Though few know it, change is starting to come. Oh yeah, Satan ... what would a story about a hellish universe dominated by an insane supernatural bureaucrat be without his irresponsible opposition, his foil, in literary terms? The "Satan" of this story cycle is not a warm and cuddly guy, but he's not evil incarnate, either. If anything, he's probably closest to the Satan of LaVey's "Satanic Bible", with a nasty mischevious streak tossed in. A unpredictable spirit of rebellion, whose greatest pleasure seemes to be driving the Demiurge more insane than he already is. The d**ned have occasionally met him, and are awaiting him at the Café. Like Godot, he will never come - we know better than to let him show up. Nobody could play that role. But, the characters can share anecdotes of a being who will be a strange mixture of good and evil, a chaotic opposition to what has become the soulless predictability of the Demiurge and much of the world he rules. Think, maybe a little like Wesley Snipe's character in "Demolition Man" - totally amoral and a little sadistic, but in a strangely likable way. A paradox that makes us wonder what's wrong with us. A character who does what that nasty inner child of ours wishes that we could do, sometimes. |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 9:08 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
This, then, was one possibility to pursue - "The Canterbury Tales" gone mean?  A mixture of story telling and performance in the dome, had this been a Burning Man camp.This wasn't THE premise, it was one possible version of the premise. The combination of the Café and the Lushes' Kitchen was not completely arbitrary. People going to Burning Man or other burns, most of the time, are looking for something less low key than storytelling. For that reason, I would put storytelling in the one location at a burn in which it would feel natural - in a chill space, where people go to relax and do something low key, when they've had enough fire spinning and moving toilet riding for the time being. Doing so gives people something that is often lacking when they're in a chill space, especially at night, and looking for a little human contact in a comfortable setting. It gives those present a common activity to share and a place where a discussion with a stranger can begin. One of the great weakness of burning has often been just that, I think - an opportunity to give a more human touch to the spectacle. It's not that people at a burn don't want to, I think. I've gotten the feeling that the vast majority of the people I met at Black Rock were very much open to that, but it is a rare person who is so outgoing that he can easily make real conversation in a totally unstructured environment with somebody he has just met. Do things like this, and I think that you'll find that fewer people will say that the found the experience an empty one. |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 9:33 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
Is this premise a good one to go with? Some will consider this scenario to be a downer. For others, it will resonate as satire. Let's face it, the 21st century, if a lot more cheerful than our fictional 821st century, is already looking more than a little bit dystopian. Find the death and disappearance of Western Civilization to be a little depressing as a story topic? How would you like to be from one of the many people from the traditional cultures that globalization is helping to shove to one side, finding yourself facing a world that might be as inescapably alien as that confronting our lost Westerners? Don't like the grinding and inescapable poverty? Go take a look at the lives of the long term unemployed. There's a reason why, if you want to put it in pop culture terms, a lot of us prefer Babylon 5 to Star Trek. In a bad era, anything resembling Utopia in a story is just going to ring false. These nasty, horrible fictional scenarios allow both the writer and the reader to exaggerate their fears to epic proportions, and experience a little catharsis in the process. Ever notice how many of the best loved plays are tragedies? Even so, I was unsure that the Playa was the place for this. Environment dictates aesthetics. There's something about being in the middle of a snowbound Midwestern forest or a grey Northern city that makes us like things that are a little heavier. The Playa seems to encourage a lighter, more surreal touch. The scenario above is more fitting for a Midwestern burn, I think, one meeting during the cold weather which we have in such abundance. |
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Joe Dunphy, your benevolent dictator for life
Apr 26th, 2004 - 10:06 PM |
Re: The World of Café Satan
What to do? Remember, at a burn out west, we'd be doing this in a chill space, playing to an exhausted audience with a limited attention span, eager to get back out once they've rested. If you travel to some of the other forums, you'll come across comments that audience retention has been a problem. As is so often the case, finding a solution to the problem is a simple matter of acknowledging its reality - that people don't want to sit through long stories. If you don't fight this reality, the solution to the problem becomes blindingly obvious - stick to short stories. The short story, as a literary form, has obvious limitations. One can't really create an elaborate world in it. So what does one do? For the Playa version, we lose a little of the metaphysics and all of the future history. We'll have the village that is distant from the trade routes been just what it seems - an island village that is seldom visited. Create an obscure fictional island in the Carribean instead of a post-Western post-apocalyptic world. Postulate an honest but overly strict God and a Devil that is more immature than evil. What you have is a simplification of the scenario above that reads like a parody of it - the tragedy is scaled down until it becomes comedy. Perhaps this might be the way for camp members, if there ever should be a camp, to approach this - write a story using the more complex and nastier story for reading here in Chicago, and then parody one's own work for reading on the Playa or other, sunnier location? Not so much a direct parody, referring to a story unfamiliar to the people out West, but writing a lighterhearted story suggested by the grimmer first version? Anybody who has ever done a harold (as in Del Close' technique) will probably know what I'm referring to. For those who haven't, the harold is an improv technique which starts with the performers tossing out a word, free associating, pulling the words together to make a scene, and then free associating off of the scenes already played to create more scenes, pulling all together at the end. Do this in print instead of on stage, in a sense. Have I completely confused everybody yet, maybe even myself included, or is nobody reading this? This is where I leave off with this particular discussion until I see a response. I've been at this for a few hours, and dinner and laundry await. I must confess that, at this point, my ideas become a little vague, even to me, but as this project hasn't even begun, yet, I'd argue that a little vagueness can be a good thing. Your suggestions are welcome, but please let's keep this on an intelligent, adult level. We're not going to do slapstick. What I want to see is something that requires some thought from those speaking and those listening, not something dumbed down to the level of the lowest common denominator. One can get that in a bar or on the WB. |
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