Scene 1
Gaea I have spoken to your brothers and sisters. None of them will help me.
Cronos Help you how?
Gaea In curbing the power of Uranus.
Cronos My what?
Gaea Uranus
Cronos You mean my father.
Gaea Yes.
Cronos Curbing his power, what?
Gaea He has to be stopped and you must help me.
Cronos (hesitates) Stopped doing what? You want me to do something against my own flesh and blood?
Gaea You are his son, but you are mine too. And you have other brothers and sisters to whom he has been a cruel oppressor.
Cronos Why should I care about them? I don’t know them or anything about them apart from the little you’ve told me. For me he only does what fathers do. I have known no other. Who was his own father?
Gaea No one was. He was unbegotten.
Cronos What does that mean?
Gaea He was not the product of um… sexual union. He is the first male, the first being with a working penis, and now it needs to be removed.
Cronos What does?
Gaea Daddy’s winkie.
Cronos What about it?
Gaea It must be amputated, cleanly snipped off.
Cronos No. (long silence)
Gaea What are you thinking?
Cronos I can’t take it in. This is not funny. You shock me. Why did you say that?
Gaea I mean it. I have never been more serious. It has to be done.
Cronos I’m dumbfounded. Why are you speaking like this?
Gaea There must an end to this endless production of children. Not only is it wearing me out but there has to be room in the cosmos for you to exercise your own organ.
Cronos But he’s you husband, you share his bed every night.
Gaea Feelings change. I used to love him but have come to hate him.
Cronos That doesn’t make sense.
Gaea You are young and inexperienced. It’s very common with wives, almost normal.
Cronos (after a silence) If he had no father how did he come into being?
Gaea I am the whole earth. I generated Uranus as a covering for myself. Without the earth the sky could not exist.
Cronos Would he confirm that?
Gaea Go and see him. Talk to him. Hear his side of the story.
Cronos I’ll do that right away. (leaves)
Gaea (shouts after him) Don’t mention our project!
Cronos (shouts back) Of course not. Don’t worry!”
Scene 2
Uranus is seated alone in a room. Cronos enters.
Cronos Mother has been telling me about the history of our family.
Uranus What did she tell you?
Cronos That she was the second being in the cosmos taking form immediately after Chaos.
Uranus That is the story she always spins. It’s what is known as an old wives tale. She’s an old wife. You should not believe her.
Cronos Are you telling me she is lying?
Uranus Remember first that she is female. Females see everything differently. How could she know what happened before her birth? Even if her story were true there would have been no one to tell her except Chaos and who has ever got any sense out of him? Did both come out of nothingness? Out of nothing is made. She was born out of Chaos.
Cronos She tells me I have some brothers and sisters you have mistreated.
Uranus. Those were children of Chaos, monsters, burgess shale freaks. Hundred armed beings with mouths where their bums should have been and the other way round. Much abortive experimentation has be destroyed if we are to have order, which is the opposite of Chaos.
Cronos Are there not many possible forms of order?
Uranus I know just one way out of Chaos.
Cronos And how many ways back?
Uranus As many as you can imagine.
Cronos I shall discover for myself.
Uranus That is not necessary. I can tell you everything about what you are and where you come from. You are my son and heir.
Cronos But I am more than that.
Uranus You are my favourite son. I want you to learn so you always remember about all I have achieved for you. In the beginning was only Chaos. You must stick with me. Split from me and that is what will return.
Cronos Times have changed. Now there are new forces of oppression that need to be resisted.
Uranus Don’t listen to your mother. Hear about the past, what you are and what you must not revert to.
Cronos I am listening.
Uranus Hear of your grandparents and your great grandparents. There is nothing earlier. Go back only three generations and there is only Chaos.
Cronos Mother tells me you have no father.
Uranus There again that is only her story. It may not be true. There are other narratives. I have heard tell that my own father was Aether, the stratosphere, son of Night, who was the child of Chaos.
Cronos Why would mother lie?
Uranus Women do. Still she probably believes what she told you.
Cronos Can you not hand over some power to me? I have dreams for a new creation, a golden age. I shall rule as a king over a race of new beings.
Uranus You may create what you like but my law shall reign forever.
Cronos What about my law?
Uranus What can you know that is unknown to me?
Cronos Inspired by this magical plant I envision a new Heaven and a new earth.
Uranus What’s that?
Cronos Hashish.
Uranus What is it?
Cronos A drug.
Uranus Taking drugs is wrong.
Cronos How can that be?
Uranus Because I say so. All authority, all morality comes from me. I am your father as well as the whole of heavens. You cannot defy what I declare to be wrong. Altering your consciousness is contrary to my universal law. I never did it myself. That is my commandment. Disobedience condemns you to Tartarus.
Cronos What is Tartarus?
Uranus Some say he is the third born after Chaos and Gaea, which makes him your uncle. Others that he is her son by Aether, the stratosphere. He is the dark abyss, as far below Hades as Hades is below earth.
Cronos So it is a place?
Uranus It is where we confine the enemies of the gods. It is where I send your monster siblings.
Cronos A place of torment.
Uranus (shrugs) One day you too will need it to confine your own enemies.
Cronos Truth is not made by you.
Uranus How can you think that? There is no other source. You come from your father and your mother, nothing more.
Cronos All may be from my parents, but that includes recessive genes. Hidden forces and principles from my grandfather Chaos.
Uranus Or from Aether, the stratosphere.
Cronos Even in him there may have been genes that were still recessive. In Chaos were the seeds of all things.
Uranus I am Varuna, the celestial ocean. I am omniscient, catching liars in my snares..
Cronos Yes father,
Uranus Away from me everything is error.
Cronos What if I reject your freedom, your revolutionary enterprise, what you have made me. Many things have gone into my making. (begins to walk away)
Uranus Hear me out.
Cronos I have heard enough.
Uranus You shall return.
Cronos Fuck you!
Scene 3
Cronos I have spoken to him. He was patronising me. He angered me. Now like you I hate him enough.
Gaea Here is my plan, Here is a sickle. She hands it to him.
Cronos What am I do with this?
Gaea Tonight as every night he will come to mate with me. As he is about to insert his pintle into my snippa. I want you to cut it off.
Cronos Your snippa?
Gaea Don’t be silly. His pintle of course.
Cronos Do I just charge into your bedroom?
Gaea You must hide under the bed.
Cronos It’s a horrible thing you want me to do.
Gaea It’s necessary
Cronos I’ll do it.
Scene 4
All is darkness. Uranus emits a terrible scream. That goes on for a long time.
After castration the prophecies.
Gradual lightening. Cronos standing before Uranus holding a bloody sickle.
Uranus This was fore ordained.
Cronos Who could have ordained that? Who was there?
Uranus As soon as time came into being it had this quality that it may be seen into.
Cronos Did you foresee it then?
Uranus No. I didn’t look.
Cronos Tell me then. Yet I am your heir, you told me? Am I still?
Uranus Yes you are. As you have overthrown me your children will do the same to you, and even more specifically, what you do to your children to prevent that happening your children will do to their own.
Cronos Who told you?
Uranus It is implicit in all you already desire.
Cronos How so?
Uranus I’ll explain to you.
Cronos I’m listening.
Uranus First some questions.
Cronos Ok.
Uranus What do you desire?
Cronos You know that. I want freedom and independence.
Uranus Yes but what do you want to do with it? What will you do now?
Cronos I shall create a Paradise.
Uranus How? Where?
Cronos I shall live as a king in a land called Italy.
Uranus And how much freedom will you allow to your subjects?
Cronos I have recently discovered that most have no use for freedom. I shall make a happy time of complete virtue. All will be free and all will be rational. They will not be selfish, they will be led by the light of reason.
Uranus Your eldest son, Zeus, will be troubled by old prophecies. That son, who will overthrow you, will have ninety two known children of his own, only 41 of whom will be divine. But there is another who will not be known until the last days. That makes 93, a most sacred number.
Cronos A good number?
Uranus That depends. It is the sum of love and will. The last born though, the last product of love and will, the ninety third child of Zeus…
Cronos Is evil?
Uranus There is another old prophecy going back to the days of darkest Night. I could say beware. But is there any point in warning you? It will happen anyway.
Cronos My will is free. I am not bound by prophecies. They may inform me of a risk and I can take measures to avoid it.
Uranus Your own children will rebel against you and look back to your mother and myself as the best generation, the brave ones.
Cronos In their stupidity and ignorance. That I can believe.
Uranus It will be a natural reaction. They know we fought a war so they could be free.
Cronos Born merely of ignorance. They will hear lies about the past, our past. And for their grandchildren it will be my generation which is the best.
Interlude
Philosopher Saturn overthrew Uranus, Zeus overthrew Saturn. Will Zeus’s children in turn overthrow Zeus? No, because Zeus is too careful. My loyalties used to be to Saturn, I suppose because my sympathies were always with the enemies of God. Any generation, once they were overthrown, would become the enemies of God, surely? Logically they should be entitled to my sympathies once they had been overthrown.
Having ascertained that most people have no use for freedom, we trace how the anarchist individualist became a fascist. Fascism is a movement of intellectuals. The initial problem was one of life affirmation, how to overcome pessimism and celebrate life. Fascism involves not caring for your own children, like Saturn who devoured his progeny. As well as a god Saturn was also the king in the golden age. There is profound truth embodied in his story. The golden age was a fascist paradise, a time of complete virtue. No one was free; no one desired freedom except of course the king. He is obliged to devour his own children, that is to say whoever desires to be free as he is. He is kind to the masses who crave authority, but he must be cruel to those who are really closest and most similar to himself. This is a violation of nature.
Set that right and other evils emerge. Time moves on, and eventually all seriousness departs from the world, levelled and equalised by the fanatical drive to make everything fair.
Scene 5
Enter the spirits of the surreal and the absurd, two satyrs with huge phalli. Surreal has a Dali moustache.
Absurd I am the Absurd
Surreal You are a turd
I am the Surreal.
Absurd No big deal.
They laugh.
Surreal Fast forward to the final page
Now upon this cosmic stage
See upon the world let loose
The last born daughter of Zeus.
Absurd Her too, like Athena
Her sister, he ate.
Both of them failing to pass.
Surreal That one emerged from his pate
This one came out of his arse.
Absurd Under the spreading chestnut tree
There stands a silly ewe
Like a dog it looks at me
But yet it is as I now see
A holy bugabboo.
Surreal We wish no hurt
To the goddess of dirt
Who calls on all to serve her.
Absurd Viewers I present to you
The witch Anti-Minerva!
Enter a grotesque female figure with a sheep’s head armed with grenades and assault rifles.
Surreal Place her on Olympus height
A horror bag, a hag, a fright!
Antiminerva A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Absurd and Surreal jump up and down laughing.
Absurd
Never to be adored
Much to be abhorred
Last born daughter of daughter
Of daughter
Of Heaven and Earth.
If you call it birth
A fearsome sight
A curse, a blight
A deadly gall
To anything at all
Possessing any worth!.
Antiminerva Death to traitor sister mine!
Born without a mother
Patroness of arts
To her I give my farts.
And the same to other
Siblings, Muses nine
Each Zeus’s daughter
Them I must slaughter
Together with their mummy
The goddess Memory.
Absurd That’s Memosyne!
Antiminerva My own adopted dam
With whom I am saddled
The nymph Democracy
Though old and raddled
Is every bit as good as she!
Absurd
Down with Mnemosyne!
Antiminerva
My thought precisely!
As for the birth of me
Zeus lay with the nymph Democracy
Latest child of fate
Then from her hole
A house fly stole
And that he promptly ate.
Surreal And then he had a shit
And you came out of it!
Antiminerva The Tao is with me
I have a destiny.
Absurd
Antiminerva wills to see
Before the end of time
Dressed up as morality
The victory of crime.
Antiminerva
I hover as a vulture
Over the corpse of culture.
Absurd Bestow on us your wisdom and wit!
Instruct us make us laugh!
And for an epitaph
Lay on us your shit!
Antiminerva When God made man she was only joking.
Absurd and surreal howl and roll on their backs with laughter.
Absurd ‘Twixt male and female looms a chasm.
Antiminerva Female needs no boy to treasure her
No man to pleasure her.
Absurd She can do it herself. Hail Orgasm!
Antiminerva By my own twat
I second that!
Absurd Hail dirt!
Antiminerva Rebel, subvert!
Abolish patriarchy!
Establish matriarchy!
Absurd Hail Chaos! Hail anarchy!
Antiminerva You two babies, read, mark learn
And inwardly digest
Not Mister Chaos but his daughter
Night, my cousin, will return
To nourish from her breast.
Absurd Hail Night! Hail dirt!
Antiminerva Revert to the rule of the
Earliest mum
My mitochondrial DNA
Soon to come
First born of Chaos
Primaeval Night
To reign from end of day!
Absurd And Death her child
So much reviled
Will art and beauty slay.
Antiminerva
I hover as a vulture
Over the corpse of culture.
Absurd Books are dead!
Antiminerva That’s enough!
Retract what you said.
I write stuff
I write tales of equality.
Absurd Equality is death
Death is the leveller!
Antiminerva And I am the reveller!
Absurd Hail Death!
Antiminerva Hail it indeed!
Absurd Long live what?
Antiminerva Death to wicked Tories
Who with their dismal stories
Selfishness and greed
Inexorably lead
To weaken the sorority
Of bugaboobookind.
So kill, kill, kill for love of me
And closure of the mind!
Absurd Vivat Nox!
Surreal Come Night we must
Get off our rocks
And slake our lust.
Antiminerva On you a pox!
You two with cocks!
Remain frustrate
Just masturbate!
Surreal Place her on Olympus top
In the meantime let us strop!
Surreal and Absurd dance around the stage masturbating.
A loud bang. Then all goes dark.
THE END