Magic Theater

Not for Everybody. Madmen Only.

(Digital; based on a dream I had after Safeword)

It always takes me a few days to recover from the massive sensory input that is Safeword — the erotic art show put on by the Otherworldly Arts Collective every year.

There are so many people and the space is warm and moist with their closeness. It's loud with their shouts and cheers and conversations. The lights are soft in one place, sharp in another. This year there were multiple rooms connected by a long, pink-lit hall: two rooms for performances, the gallery itself, and the entirety of Norseman distillery, where art hung on one glowing wall, but people could also sit at tables and in booths and chat, drink, and eat. I did plenty of chatting and forgot to drink water or eat.

As I walked down the pink hallway, everything taking on a slippery blur because I wasn't wearing my glasses, I thought about the party at end of Steppenwolf, where Harry finally dances and goes to find Hermine in hell. Hell, in this case, is just another room at the party... which is actually probably the most apt description of hell there is.

Steppenwolf, published in 1927, was eventually banned in Germany because Hesse vocally hated war, nationalism of any flavor, and the Nazis. The book, and Hesse, was considered grotesque and immoral. It was then banned by the Americans, who don't hold a great record for their reading acuity, because they thought it was about Nietzsche's Ubermensch and therefore written in support of the Nazis. When Steppenwolf finally hit American audiences, they misunderstood its point to such a violent degree that Hesse wrote a new introduction for them specifically. It said, and absolutely not in these words:

"Listen up, you illiterate assholes; Harry Haller, the lonely wolf of the steppes, is only redeemed by ceasing to be a judgy, isolated elitist who clings to norms and myths of self! He is a warning, not a goal!"

And the American people, who would go on to idolize Patrick Bateman, Walter White, Rorschach, and at least a dozen other shitty, evil, and downright Puritanical at their core characters, said: don't tell us what your book means!

As an occasionally terrible and perpetually rigid human being, I think I have some insight on this. It is an absolute bitch to even admit you're making your life small through neurotic strangling, let alone LET FUCKING GO and actually live. Making it all the way to the point of entering the Magic Theater? Well, that's reserved for the suicidally brave. Which is why the sign says: For Madmen Only. If you're not willing to kill the self you've cultivated so very carefully, you can fuck right off.

I think Hesse would see Safeword as a perfect little glimpse into his theater. Art devoted to sex, people dancing, music so loud it reverberates in your sternum, mad costumes, and drag. The man who wrote of the lovely Hermine, only to recognize she had always been Herman, would definitely love drag.

I've grown to love Safeword (almost as much as I love Steppenwolf, which is saying quite a lot). It's fun in an absolutely necessary way. Like the Magic Theater, it's not for everybody. But the madmen it is for, are of the very best caliber. It might be expecting too much for an art show, but I like to think that the wildness of it echoes out into the world, eroding myths about the quiet, normal, middle road and perhaps giving people a peripheral glimpse, like a haunting, of the life they could have if they would just let go.