Confessions of Another Mask
(17 short plays about Subcomandante Marcos, After Mishima)
Over the last two months, Chiapas has been on my mind, as I have been working on an extensive essay on a social practice project in San Cristóbal which I will be publishing soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share this appropriated/repurposed text performance I assembled in 2011 about Subcomandante Marcos, using Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Marcos is a complex figure, one at the center of the Zapatista uprising that took place 30 years ago, in January of 1994. While Marcos was supposed to be a placeholder identity, covered with a ski mask, soon the identity of the man behind it was revealed (Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM). In an interview in 2009, Marcos said: “The fundamental mistake Marcos made—and I must forgive him for it, because he is me, and if I can’t forgive myself then who will—was not taking good enough care to foresee this cult of personality and stardom that so many times, more often than not has prevented us from seeing the reality behind it.”
Mishima committed suicide after staging a failed coup d'état against Japan's Self-Defense Forces in Ichigaya, Tokyo, in an attempt to provoke a movement to reestablish the former imperial political structure. Back in 2011, when I took on the job of creating a performance work to reflect on the legacy of the Zapatista revolution, it didn’t seem appropriate for me to try to invent or imitate the voice of Marcos, nor to quote his actual words, so well-known and original as they are. The very familiarity of his voice is what obstructs our ability to see him clearly, hiding his true identity from us better than any mask could do. It seemed to me that a more appropriate approach would be to imbue him with the voice of another revolutionary, regardless of their political leanings. The act of usurping a text is like the irruption of revolution itself, suddenly seizing its grip on reality without the slightest forewarning.
The text was first performed in 2011, with a video featuring an actual EZLN soldier (who was willing to perform the part). The project was produced in collaboration with Bernardo Bernal and Hector Bourges.
CAST
A masked man who calls himself Subcomandante Marcos
SCENE
La Realidad, Chiapas, 2011
1
And yet I was unable to take any great pleasure in this freedom that was granted to me. Like an invalid taking his first steps during convalescence, I felt a feeling of stiffness, as though I were acting under the compulsion of some imaginary obligation.
At about this time I vaguely began to understand the inner workings of the reality that what most people regarded as affectation on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely everything people regarded to be my true self that was a masquerade.
It was this unwilling masquerade that made me say: “Let’s play war.”
2
As we went along the passageway we did not receive even so much as a reproachful glance. We were ignored. Our very existence was obliterated by the fact that we had not shared in their misery; for them, we were nothing more than shadows.
In spite of this scene, something caught fire within me. I was emboldened and strengthened by the parade of misery passing before my eyes. I was experiencing the same excitement that a revolution inspires. In the fire these helpless souls had witnessed the total destruction of every evidence that they existed as human beings.
The situation they had faced and fought against in that place—a life for a life—was likely the most universal and elemental condition mankind has ever encountered.
My breast was filled with a desire to scream out. Perhaps, had I been a bit fuller of the strength of self-awareness, had I been blessed with greater measure of wisdom, I might have gone on to conduct an assessment of these requirements and thereby come to understand the true sense of what it means to be a human being.
4
They were loud and boastful as they related to each other the dangers they had endured. In the true sense of the word, this was a mob in rebellion: it was a mob that harbored a radiant discontent, an overflowing and triumphant dissatisfaction full of the force of spirit.
5
And yet, my self-analysis skills were built in a way that defied definition, like a loop made by putting a single twist in a strip of paper and pasting the ends together. And even though in my later years my self-examinations travelled the margins of the loop more and more slowly, when I was twenty they merely wheeled through the orbit of my emotions, and, lashed onward by the excitement attending the disastrous stages of outright war, their dizzying speed was enough to knock me completely off my balance.
6
Everyone says that life is a stage. But most people do not seem to become obsessed with the idea, at any rate not as early as I did. By the end of childhood I was already firmly convinced that this was so and that my role to play my part on stage without once ever revealing my true self. Since my conviction was coupled with an extremely naïve lack of experience, I was certain that all men embarked on life in just this way, even though there was a lingering suspicion somewhere in my mind I might be mistaken. I optimistically believed that once the performance was finished the curtain would fall and the audience would never see the actor without his makeup on. My assumption that I would die young also played a part in this belief. Over the course of time, however, this optimism or, better put, this daydream would experience cruel disappointment.
7
A part of my sense of superiority became conceit, an intoxicating sense that I was a step ahead of the rest of mankind. Later, when this inebriated part of me sobered up more swiftly than the rest, I committed the rash mistake of judging everything with the sober part of my consciousness, not taking into consideration the fact that part of me was still drunk. In this way, the inebriating concept of “I am above everyone else” was supplanted by the diffidence of “No, I am a human being, too, like everybody else.” Because of the miscalculation, this in turn was amplified into: “And I am also a human being like them in every respect.” The part of me that had not yet sobered up made this amplification possible and bolstered it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that “Everyone is like me.” This line of thinking that I have termed the touchstone of my waywardness played a powerful part in reaching this conclusion…
8
But, it may well be asked, can a person be so completely untrue to his own nature? Even for a single moment? If the answer is no, then perhaps there is no way of explaining the mysterious mental processes by which we desire things we actually do not want at all, or is there? If it is granted that I was the exact opposite of the ethical man who suppresses his immoral desires, does this mean my heart cherished the most immoral of desires? In any event, weren't my desires exceedingly petty? Or am I fooling myself completely? Was I actually acting as a slave of habit in every last detail? The time was coming when I could no longer shirk the necessity of finding answers to these questions.
9
I even shuddered with a strange delight at the thought of my own death. I felt as though the whole world belonged to me. And little wonder, for we are never in such complete possession of a journey, down to its smallest nook and cranny, as when we are busy preparing for it. Afterward there is only the journey itself, which is merely the process by which we lose all possession over it. This is what makes the journey so utterly fruitless.
10
I had long insisted upon interpreting the things that fate impelled me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. At the heart of what I called my intelligence there was a tinge of phoniness, a sham pretender who has been set upon the throne by some freak chance. This doltish usurper could not possibly foresee the revenge that would inevitably befall him for his stupid despotism. I passed the next year with vague and optimistic feelings. There were my law studies, performed perfunctorily, and my automatic comings and goings between university and home… I paid no attention to anything, and nothing paid attention to me. I had acquired a worldly smile like a young priest. I had the sense of being neither dead nor alive. It seemed that my former desire for a natural and spontaneous kamikaze death had been completely eradicated and forgotten.
11
War had instilled a strangely sentimental maturity among us. It arose from our way of thinking of life as something that might end abruptly; we never considered the possibility of there being anything beyond those few remaining years. Life struck us as a strangely fleeting thing. It was as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a dense concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface. Since the moment for the curtain to fall was not too far away, it might be expected that I would have acted out the masquerade I had devised for myself with all the more diligence. Yet, all the while telling myself I would begin tomorrow—tomorrow for certain—my journey toward life kept getting postponed day after day, and years of war went by without the slightest sign of my departure.
12
And yet, some instinct within me demanded that I seek solitude, that I remain set apart from everything else. This compulsion manifested itself as a strange and mysterious malaise.
“In the classic annals of martyrdom it is said that, shortly following his enthronement, Diocletian dreamt of limitless power as unobstructed as the soaring of a bird, when a young captain from the Praetorian Guard was arrested and charged with the crime of serving a forbidden god… He was charmingly arrogant… There was nobody who knew where he came from, nor where he was born… to them, it seemed that this Endymion was a nomad, leading his flock, that he was the chosen person who would lead them to a pasture greener than any other… This was Sebastian, a young captain from the Praetorian Guard… His was not a fate to be pitied; in no way was it a pitiable fate. Rather, it was proud and tragic, a fate that might even be called shining… he, too, must have foreseen, even if only dimly, that martyrdom itself lay in wait for him along the way, that this brand that fate had placed upon him was the very token that set him apart from all other men on earth.”
14
Was this not a unique period of happiness for me? Though I still felt a sense of uneasiness, it was only faint; still fostering hope, I set my sight forward toward the bluer skies of tomorrow. Fanciful dreams of the journey to come, visions of its adventure, and the mental picture of the person I would one day come to be in the world. I took childish delight in the war, and despite the presence of death and destruction all around me, there was no abatement to the daydream in which I believed myself to be beyond the reach of harm by any bullet.
15
And in the gaps between all the mental effort I made toward this artificiality, sometimes I became overwhelmed with a paralyzing emptiness, and, trying to escape from it, I shamelessy subverted it into another sort of daydream. Then suddenly I would become quick with life, finding myself again, and I would bound onward toward wild images...
16
What I wanted was to die among strangers, without anguish, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who sought to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was a natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted to die like a fox not yet versed in her slyness, walking carelessly along a mountain path right into a hunter's shot out of her own stupidity… If this were the case, wasn’t the army the ideal place to seek my purpose?
17
Then suddenly another voice spoke out within me, telling me that I had never once truly wanted to die. At these words my sense of shame welled up and broke the dam behind which I had been confined. It was a painful admission to make, but at that moment I knew I had been lying to myself when I said it was for death's sake that I joined the army. At that moment I realized that I had been secretly hoping that the army would at last provide me with an opportunity to gratify those strange sensual desires inside me. And I knew that, far from desiring death, the only thing that had allowed to consider army life was the firm conviction—arising out of a belief in the primitive art of magic, shared by all men—that I could never die by my lonesone…
Oh, how unpleasant these thoughts were for me!
I much preferred to think of myself as a person who had been forsaken by everything, even death.