The Phrenological Journal & Haunted Typebox Blog

Dr. Faustus, it would seem, is in he’ll. Lead there by Mephistopholes after entreating Helen, Christ, and the elements (in that order). He fulfills his part of the contract, rending his soul to Lucifer. But what did Faustus get?

Surprisingly, the play is short on magical reads. Yes, he travels around the world, turns invisible, torments the pope, raises spirits, and puts horns upon a man’s head. But that’s just what he ‘does.’ What he wants is knowledge. Within moments of signing himself over he starts asking Mephistopholes for books. The first is about necromancy, but the other two are cosmolgical and biological. Faust wants to know. While a workable example of the first volume is beyond our grasp, the latter are rather commonplace today. We have access to Faust’s knowledge on our phones. Which is not to say that an iPhone would have kept him out of he’ll.

Our want to know is not diminished. I read Marlowe’s Faustus because I’m creating a paper theatre narrative that requires a play within a play. My main character, Alexander, sees a paper theatre performance of Dr. Faustus. This inspires him to his own pursuit of knowledge discovery and containment.

Our want to know is it’s own damnation, because it’s never enough. After all, there’s always more to know. But it’s not just that. I think we’re hardwired to acquire information. And the pursuit can be an avoidance. Once we capture it, we don’t know what to do.

Would be about a man who dreams the world is flat.

“Isn’t his world already flat?” you ask.

“A man can still dream,” I say.

And I suppose that this time it’s my fault. After all, I chose to read it. It was I who put again the drama in motion, had them woken up, summoned as it was, to Elsinore. “I come to bury Caeser, not to praise him” it was said in another play. But I think it comes to me to eulogize Rosencrantz and gentle Guildernstern. The news comes to my ears, even though I did not order it. To close the book is to turn the earth over on their coffins, but while the bodies are still warm, let us remember the men who could not themselves remember.

They would not be the first nor the last men to forget themselves. Just the other morning, while in the shower I convinced myself I could not recall my own past. The reasoning I took was this: so barely could I connect the person that I was seven years ago to the person I an now (then)–not because I was so changed–but perhaps because I was not, that I seemed birthed from that moment. I would have all but forgotten myself, had I not remembered.

But Rosencrantz and Guildernstern never had that luxury, even when confronted with their tragederian dopplegangers. And yet even as they failed to recollect their collective past, they were always somehow cognizant of their shared and inevitable future, their absurd and tragic fate.

My friends, I recognize myself in them. I too, far too often, am waiting for another to direct my fate, feeling as if I were conjured to act the part in another’s story, that my fate is already part of the plot.

But this is about them, not me. They gave us entertainment, came to us to divine our maladies at their expense. They were summoned for us, for our melancholy. That they should die, that’s just part of the play.

How beautiful

Oh, dreadful censorship of Erasmus, the great humanist (or so I’m told). And yet, how beautiful! How the lines which redact his text also obliterate his image, leave him blind in one eye. Yet, is not the entire Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in which this is housed) a kind of blindness? Is this not calling our attention to the very violence done by censorship? As if the censor is demonstrating that very line of Erasmus: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!

The Hopeful Candidates!

The challenges of a paper cast! What does one look for ? A certain look, of course. A strength of countenance, sure. A single slip of paper is the drama’s driving force, so the casting of the lead is of particular importance. The paper actor holds one look, one stance, even one costume. Must he appear strong, vulnerable, angry, and serene, all in one look? Or do we look for a certain blankness? Who can be our Alexander, restless and conflicted youth? Recalcitrant, yes! But also: burdened with responsibility and expectation. A dreamer, for certain! But also: haunted by what he’s seen.