CHORUS:
The majority of of men are neither superior nor inferior to women; the majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. Humanity is mediocre. Humanity has never been anything but the terrain of culture, source of the geniuses and heroes of both sexes.
IUONOTIS:
(addressing no one in particular:) When my pregnant mother bore me in her womb, they said she asked the gods what she would bear. A boy, said Phoebus, a girl, said Mars, neither said Juno. And when I was born, I was a Hermaphrodite.
CHORUS:
It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch [it is] only because [they] are composed at once of feminine and masculine elements…that is, a complete being.
JESTER:
Any exclusively virile individual is just a brute animal; any exclusively feminine individual…
CHORUS:
([INTERRUPTING} loudly:) SILENCE the FOOL! (after an insufferable silence:) HEED the words of the FOOL! It is the same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity…just as it is with individuals. [All “isms”] are a political error…[sins!] errors [in thought that…] true instinct will recognize and abhor!
IUONOTIS:
(CONTINUING) Asked How I was to meet my end, Juno replied: by arms; Mars: on the cross; Phoebus: by water. (all turn in silence towards IUONOTI ; after a long silence IUONOTI addresses them:) All were right.
CHORUS:
Like [the physician’s] Caduceus, [behold] a rebus that unites the opposites: “the he and the she and the is of it”
IUONOTIS:
(forlornly:) A tree over shadowed the the waters, I climbed it; the sword I had with me slipped, and I with it. My foot caught in the branches, my head hung in the stream; and I—male, female, and neither—suffered by water, weapon, and cross.
CHORUS:
Nature subdues nature; Perfect harmony is a dead end. Out of the hostility of the elements there arises [UNITY], indissoluble and incorruptible.
CHORUS AND FOOL:
(after removing IUONOTI ’s Crown and robe they all slowly shuffle off stage holding it aloft eulogizing:) Carried away by neither water, nor by arms, nor cross, but by all. Neither in heaven nor in earth, nor in water… This tomb has no body in it, this body has no tomb around it—this body and the tomb are the same…From the Womb of Kings, the Might of Queens:
All praise amoral phenomena!
IUONOTIS:
(naked in the fading moonlight:) Infixus sum in limo profound et non est substantia.
(“I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing”.)
exeunt.
the pinched: Valentine De Saint-Point, Daniel Higgs (p.b.u.h.), Camille Paglia, Jacques Derrida, Carl Jung, James Joyce