The puppet theatre

Contrary to what people usually think, as they torment themselves, a holiday doesn't need cares, but rather freedom from them. And this freedom first and foremost is achieved through a strict isolation from the workday world. By now all peoples have forgotten about the commandment concerning the sabbath and the impenetrable divisions between sabbath and the other six days have been removed. On the other hand, only the frame, the border, and the immaculate edge can reveal the distinctive space of artistic creativity. This space is idle in the evaluation of external space, which is, however, saturated with joy and important meaning and which every working day pulsates with the springs of life.Out of humaneness we do not stone people for breaking the sacred precinct of the sabbath, but out of vapidness we have preferred to replace the stone wall with an uncommitting string rope. On the other hand, we have ceased to see the sun, life has  grown dim and dried up and the world has become poisoned with boredom.

So we all turned up here in this fenced off space and discovered an isolating frame. It ist rue that man needs very little to experience thrilling joy. A few dozen trees and a sturdy high fence, together with a ditch and places to cross it, proved an adequate isolation from all kinds of terrors, the weariness of life, and the countless cares of existence in these difficult times.

The Revolution, the ruin of the year 1922, the poverty and unreliability of life in all its aspects-all this remained on the other side of the fence. And when the sky suddenly cleared and the washed sun, descending into evening, lit up the birch trees, the brightly coloured crowd, and a few beautiful scraps fold fabric that the Efimovs had tenderly brought to the puppet theatre from the trunks of grand-mothers, a living fairytale lit up in the consciousness like a sunbeam. The puppet booth, the puppets and the children surrounding the theatre, everything together was fashioned into a single art form, one that was more than an art form, because apart from the pre-existing intention of the performers there sounded the prophetic voices of the soul, and the mysterious forces of nature crept in. Words, which in other circumstances would probably have gone unnoticed, when spoken in this setting by the puppets acquired an unexpected weight, and the popular sayings really did sound like the condensed wisdom of life. Dolls made of rags, pieces of wood and papier mache came to life as clear as can be and acted independently. They no longer followed the movements of the hand that directed them, but on the contrary they themselves directed the hand, they had their own desires and tastes, and it became perfectly obvious that in a certain setting special forces were acting through them. This performance started out as a game, but later on it grew into the very core of life and verged on either magic or mystery.

Of course, the puppeteers, who bear a crusading responsibility and are carried away by the whirlwind of the action, have no time to think about what is happening, and it would be a hindrance to split themselves in two, in order to compare their puppet consciousness with their usual one. But as the present book shows, even they recognise the puppets as 'wanting' or 'not wanting' this or that, as 'approving' or 'disapproving' the setting in which they have turned up. As for the spectators, or more precisely the co-participants in this puppet ritual, for them its even more patently evident that the puppet theatre is something incomparably greater than the Eflmovs plus the puppets, that in this ritual some third element takes part, and this third is the thing for which theatre itself exists.

Cut off from everyday existence by a fence, together with their choir made up of spectators, the puppeteers raise higher still the potential of mysterious forces acting within them, through a second isolation, their own puppet booth. And finally, in clothing their hand with the persona of the puppet and permitting the reason of their hand to take on an independent face, they liberate it [the reason of the hand] from its subservience to intellectual reason, which conversely becomes a subservient organ of manual [reason]. Thrice removed from the external world by three successive degrees of isolation, the hand becomes a body, a transmitter and organ for the influence of forces other than those that are known in our everyday consciousness. In the puppet theatre there appear the principal devices of imitative magic, which always begins with play, with imitating, with teasing, to make way later for the other forces that have thus been attracted, which accept the challenge and fill the receptacle that has been offered them.

No one, of course, is taken in by the illusion. The puppet theatre has the great virtue of not being illusionistic. But while they are not 'like the real thing' and make no claim to appear so, the puppets do in fact bring to life a new reality Itenters into the space it has liberated and fllls the holiday frame of life.

The choir of spectators is united by the puppet and the choir itself nurtures it, via the puppeteer, with its own profound emotions, which have no place in the everyday world. Most profound and cherished for us is our childhood, which lives in us, but is tightly screened off from us.We have forgotten about it, about this primordial proximity tovall existence, when we still nestled close to the life of nature. We have forgotten it, but it continues to live in us and it declares itself unexpectedly at certain times.

So, American psychology has elucidated well enough that the psychological process of religious conversion is nothing less than a return to childhood, the surfacing of the most profound strata of the personality that have formed during the very early years. 'If you don't convert yourself (ie., do not overturn your personality) and do not become as children (i.e.,not just children in general, but precisely as the children you once were), then you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.'5 Indeed the Kingdomo of Heaven is 'peace and joy through the action of the Holy Spirit'.6 So, the spiritual harmony, which is suddenly revealed in religious conversion, lives in those same layers of the personality that the puppet awakens in us. The puppet theatre is the hearth that is nourished by the childhood submerged within us and which in turn awakens within us the slumbering palace of the childhood fairytale.

Once united in this 'paradise', now we are divided from one another, because this 'paradise' has become hidden from the eye. But through the puppet theatre we see once more this lost Eden, even if only dimly, and so we embark upon an intercourse with one another in what, like a secret, we cherish most, what each of us guards within ourselves - and guards not just from others, but from ourselves too. Shining in the rays of the setting sun, the theatre opens like a window onto an eternally living childhood.

Pavel Florensky
Beyond Vision Essays on the Perception of Art