The author William S. Burroughs used to say that nothing happens in reality unless a writer writes it first. I take his meaning in a metaphorical sense, but he was speaking more or less literally. So was the poet Wallace Stevens in a signature poem, "The Idea of Order in Key West":

And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

The composer William Osborne believes in the literal meaning as well. "We write (or sing) our world into being," he says, noting that it's the theme of "Cybeline" his music theater collaboration with Abbie Conant, presented six weeks ago at the Walt Disney Hall music complex in Los Angeles.

Why bring this up now? Because the horrific news from Iraq about American and British soldiers torturing prisoners — as reported Sunday by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by The Mirror in London — was prefigured in the 1982 play "Catastrophe," which Samuel Beckett wrote in honor of Vaclav Havel about the interrogation of a dissident. There's a remarkable equivalence between the torture photos from Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and scenes in the play. The equivalence (abuse and humiliation) does not have pictorial exactness. But the meaning is scarcely different.

In one of the play's scenes "a theatre director and his assistant arrange a protagonist, who stands on a black block submitting to their direction. 'D', the director, wears a fur coat and matching toque (a kind of hat) and smokes a fat cigar." Think of the horseplay of the smiling U.S. soldiers as they posed their abused prisoners for photos. These two photos from a production of "Catastrophe" — here and here — are less graphic than the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" revealed in Major General Antonio M. Taguba's Army report, which Hersh obtained, but the intended goal of abject human degradation is the same.

"Cybeline" took the issue a step further. Osborne's program notes explain that "under the social engineering of the military," exemplified "with special clarity" by the "history of 20th century Germany," a human being can become "a consciously programmed construct, or cyborg. As such, humans are not served by the media but are part of its apparatus, cyberbia." It reaches the where "society itself becomes a programmable cyborg." He writes:

This is the fascistic reduction of human society, the mass programming of a culture, to simplistic ideals generally formulating social identity based on slogans and the unifying forces of hatred. Strength through joy, Blut und Boden, and Lebensraum were common slogans during the Third Reich, but ultimately, media sound bites such as Weapons of Mass Destruction, Liberation, Support Our Troops, and War On Terrorism could have a similarly reductive and imperialistic effect.

page 1 | 2