The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words...creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words...Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery...The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.
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The innermost meaning of sacrifice is the annihilation of the finite just because it is finite. In order to demonstrate that this is the only purpose, the most noble and beautiful must be chosen; above all, man, the fulfillment of the earth. Human sacrifices are the most natural sacrifices. Man, however, is more than the fulfillment of the earth; he is reasonable, and reason is free and nothing but an eternal self-determination toward the infinite. Thus man can sacrifice only himself, and that is what he does in the omnipresent sanctissimum of which the masses are not aware. All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods. The meaning of divine creation is primarily revealed in the enthusiasm of annihilation. Only in the throes of death is the spark of eternal life ignited.
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The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
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I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty -- I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.
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