The Hero And The Traitor- Act 2 scene 1

Act 2
Scene 1

Once again, a dark stage. Borges walks on stage, plants himself in the center, and begins.

BORGES- Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia, saw in dreams a tower felled by order of the senate; on the eve of Kilpatrick’s death, false and anonymous rumours of the burning of the circular tower of Kilgavarn spread throughout the country- an event that might be taken as an omen, since Kilpatrick had been born in Kilgavarn. These (and other) parallels between the story of Julius Caesar and the story of an Irish conspirator induce Ryan to imagine some secret shape of time, a pattern of repeating lines. His thoughts turn to the decimal history conceived by Condorcet, the morphologies proposed Hegel, Spengler, and Vico, mankind as posited by Hesiod, degenerating from gold to iron. He thinks of the transmigration of souls, a doctrine that lends horror to Celtic literature and that Caesar himself attributed to the Druids of Britain; he toys with the idea that before Fergus Kilpatrick was Fergus Kilpatrick, he was Julius Caesar. He is saved from these labyrinths by a curious discovery, a discovery which, however will plunge him deep into other, yet more tangled and heterogeneous mazes…