BARSISA Awakening to the Mark of Humanity

 

BARSISA

Awakening to the Mark of Humanity

A Philosophical Tragedy in Three Acts

—

For every soul that mistook its mirror for its face.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BARSISA

An aging ascetic, revered for forty years of devotion. He is not a hypocrite. His tragedy is worse: he is sincere.

THE WOMAN

The sister entrusted to his care. Not merely a victim but a philosophical counterpoint. She represents life, embodiment, finitude, and the courage to exist without armor.

THE STRANGER

A figure who arrives without knocking and departs without being dismissed. By turns charming, merciless, and inexplicably sorrowful. Perhaps Satan. Perhaps the shadow Barsisa has never once turned to face. Perhaps the voice of Being itself, which does not care whether we are ready to hear it.

THE BROTHERS

Warriors. They embody the social contract — its protections and its brutalities. They do not change throughout the play because they do not need to.

THE JUDGE

The law made flesh. Brief, implacable, honest.

THE CHORUS OF SHADOWS

Voices woven from memory, guilt, desire, and conscience. They do not narrate events. They name what Barsisa cannot.

THE NARRATOR

Neither fully inside the story nor safely outside it. At times a storyteller. At times a philosopher. At times a prosecutor. At times a witness who wishes he were somewhere else.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

She wears a long black dress. Her face is pale and still. She appears before the play begins. She is never acknowledged by any character. She never speaks. She is always present. The audience will wonder, for a long time, who she is.

THE BOY

A small child. Silent. He holds the Woman in Black's hand and does not let go. He never ages. He never speaks.

THE GIRL

A child slightly younger than the Boy. Silent. She often carries a small white flower. She never ages. She never speaks.

A NOTE ON THE SILENT FIGURES

The Woman in Black, the Boy, and the Girl are present in every scene of the play. Not prominently. Sometimes standing near a wall. Sometimes seated at the edge of the light. Sometimes crossing slowly through the background, like memory crosses the mind during a conversation about something else entirely. No character ever notices them. They move only during the stage directions marked with a dagger (†). The audience will draw their own conclusions. The playwright has drawn his.

PROLOGUE

The stage is dark. The audience settles. A single bell sounds — not a warning bell, a funeral bell, struck once and left to fade completely. Then, slowly, a dim light rises at the edge of the stage: not enough to see clearly, just enough to feel watched.

The Woman in Black is already there. She was there before the house lights went down. The Boy holds her hand. The Girl stands close, the white flower in her fingers. No one in the play will ever acknowledge them.

The Narrator enters. He is unhurried. He has told this story before and found no comfort in it.

NARRATOR

There are stories that belong to history.

There are stories that belong to religion.

And there are stories that belong to the human condition —

which is to say, stories from which no one

has yet managed to escape.

This is one of them.

He walks slowly across the stage. He does not look at the audience directly. He speaks as though remembering.

NARRATOR

Long ago, there lived a man named Barsisa.

Some called him a saint.

Others called him a friend of God.

For forty years he prayed.

For forty years he fasted.

For forty years he built his virtue, stone by stone,

the way a man builds a wall —

and lived, with great satisfaction, inside it.

Pause. The Narrator turns slightly, as though something has just occurred to him.

NARRATOR

Then three brothers left for war.

They entrusted their sister to his care.

And the Stranger smiled.

A faint shadow shifts at the edge of the light. Nothing more.

NARRATOR

The temptation did not arrive as evil.

Evil rarely does.

It arrived as kindness —

a small step, and then another,

a door opened,

a conversation begun,

a silence that grew warm,

desire waking in the dark

like an ember no one remembered leaving.

Pause.

NARRATOR

A woman died.

A child died.

A saint died.

And something else died, too —

something that had no name

and was therefore the most difficult to mourn.

He turns, at last, to face the audience.

NARRATOR

You already know the ending.

The only question is whether Barsisa does.

Blackout.

ACT I

The House of Certainty

THEME: THE KANTIAN FORTRESS — MORAL LAW AND THE FEAR OF BEING

SETTING

A barren room. Stone walls. Worn books. A prayer mat frayed at the corners from use. The light is grey and even — the light of a place where nothing changes, which is also the light of a place where nothing lives. Barsisa has spent forty years making this room impregnable. He has succeeded.

Scene 1 — The Brothers Depart

The Brothers enter. They are armed, purposeful, and not entirely comfortable in the presence of a man they have been taught to revere. The Woman stands slightly behind them. She looks at the room. At the prayer mat. At Barsisa. She is not afraid. She is curious.

FIRST BROTHER

We entrust our sister to no man.

We entrust her to a servant of God.

Barsisa lowers his head. There is genuine humility in the gesture, and genuine unease.

BARSISA

There are no servants of God worthy of the name.

Only those who have not yet been tested sufficiently.

SECOND BROTHER

You are too modest.

BARSISA

I am not modest. I am accurate.

A silence. The Brothers exchange a glance. They are not equipped for this kind of conversation.

FIRST BROTHER

She will keep to her own room.

You will leave food at the door.

There is no reason your paths should cross.

BARSISA

None at all.

The Brothers leave. The Woman remains. The door closes. In the silence that follows, both she and Barsisa become very interested in opposite walls.

† The Woman in Black takes one slow step toward the center of the stage. The Boy follows. Nothing else changes. The audience notices. Barsisa does not.

Scene 2 — The First Visitation

That night. The room is lit by a single lamp. Barsisa prays with the focused intensity of a man who has been praying the same prayer for so long that it has become a form of silence. The Stranger enters — or perhaps he was always there, and the light has simply shifted to include him. He is not frightening. He is almost elegant. There is something in his manner that suggests he has seen this particular room before, many times, under many names.

THE STRANGER

Why do you hide from the world?

BARSISA

I do not hide. I withdraw.

There is a difference.

THE STRANGER

Is there? Tell me.

BARSISA

I seek God.

THE STRANGER

Or do you seek certainty?

BARSISA

They are the same thing.

The Stranger laughs. Not unkindly.

THE STRANGER

No. They are as different as a country and a map of a country.

God is infinite. Certainty is merely comfortable.

You have spent forty years becoming

very, very comfortable.

BARSISA

And you call that failure?

THE STRANGER

I call it a kind of sleep.

A sleep with excellent posture.

Pause. The Stranger moves through the room, examining things lightly, as though browsing a market he has no intention of buying from.

THE STRANGER

Tell me something. If your virtue has never been threatened,

have you ever actually possessed it?

Or have you simply possessed the absence of temptation,

which is a very different inheritance?

BARSISA

Virtue is obedience to the moral law.

The law does not require suffering to be valid.

THE STRANGER

The law.

He seems genuinely amused.

A man kneels before the law the way a servant kneels before a lord —

not from love, but from the knowledge that disobedience has a price.

Is that what you have spent forty years practicing?

Prudence dressed in the clothes of holiness?

Silence. The question fills the room. Barsisa does not answer, which is itself a kind of answer.

The Stranger moves toward the door, then pauses.

THE STRANGER

I will ask you only this, and then I will go:

Have you ever loved anything

that could love you back?

He leaves. Or perhaps the light simply stops including him. Barsisa remains. He does not resume praying.

Scene 3 — The First Boundary

Some days later. The Woman has become ill. Barsisa sets a bowl of food carefully outside her door, places it on the floor, and retreats quickly, as though the floor itself might be dangerous.

The Stranger reappears.

THE STRANGER

Why do you leave it so far from her reach?

She is ill. She can barely walk.

BARSISA

Appearances matter.

THE STRANGER

Ah. So your concern is not for her hunger.

It is for your reputation.

BARSISA

Preventing the appearance of sin is itself a virtue.

THE STRANGER

Is it? Or is it a virtue's portrait,

hung where others can admire it?

The woman is hungry. She is unwell.

You are outside her door with food in your hands.

What does the law of goodness require in this moment —

not the law of appearances, but the law of goodness?

A long pause. Barsisa picks up the bowl. He carries it three steps closer. He sets it down. He steps back. His hands are shaking slightly.

BARSISA

There. That is close enough.

THE STRANGER

(quietly)

Yes. That is how it begins.

Always with something close enough.

He is gone. The first boundary has fallen. It was only three steps. It was everything.

† The Woman in Black moves three steps closer to the center of the stage.

Slow blackout.

ACT II

The Fall into the Self

THEME: HEIDEGGERIAN AUTHENTICITY AND THE VERTIGO OF FREEDOM — KIERKEGAARD'S DESPAIR

SETTING

The same room. But something has changed. There is a second cup on the table. A small plant on the windowsill. The light is warmer. These details accumulate quietly, like snow.

Scene 1 — The Room That Grew Warm

Months have passed. Barsisa and the Woman sit on opposite sides of the room — still, technically, the required distance apart. But the distance is no longer charged with avoidance. It has become comfortable. She is speaking. He is listening. He cannot remember the last time he truly listened to another human being.

THE WOMAN

I have been thinking about your God.

BARSISA

That is a large subject for the morning.

THE WOMAN

Is it morning? I hadn't noticed.

She laughs. He almost smiles.

THE WOMAN

What I mean is — you speak of God as though He lives in the rules.

In the distances. In the correctness of everything.

As though the further you keep yourself from life,

the closer you come to Him.

BARSISA

That is not an unfair description of forty years.

THE WOMAN

But doesn't it seem strange to you?

To seek the maker of the world

by refusing the world?

Silence. Barsisa looks at her. He has not looked at someone — truly looked — in a very long time. He finds he does not know what to do with his hands.

BARSISA

Why do you not fear me?

THE WOMAN

Should I?

BARSISA

Everyone does. I have spent forty years

making myself into something people revere.

Reverence and fear are nearly the same thing.

THE WOMAN

Then perhaps they have been meeting a portrait.

I seem to have met the painter.

A long pause.

BARSISA

I do not understand what happens to me when you are near.

THE WOMAN

I know. That is why I am not afraid of you.

Whatever is happening — it is the first honest thing

you have felt in a very long time.

The honest things are never the ones that frighten us.

It is the honest things we frighten away.

† The Boy moves quietly closer to Barsisa. The Girl sets the white flower near the prayer mat. Barsisa walks past both without looking down.

Scene 2 — The Stranger Returns

Evening. The Stranger appears in the corner of the room like a thought that has grown too large to stay interior.

THE STRANGER

You spent forty years escaping existence.

She has returned it to you.

Are you grateful?

BARSISA

Desire is corruption.

I know what I am feeling and I know its name.

THE STRANGER

You know the name you were given for it.

That is not the same as knowing the thing.

Desire is not corruption. Desire is revelation.

You are finite. You are embodied. You are mortal.

You were thrown into a life you did not choose

and handed a rule book written for angels.

And for forty years you have been performing,

with great discipline and great loneliness,

the role of a creature you are not.

BARSISA

And you think feeling is the answer.

THE STRANGER

I think it is the question.

The one you have been refusing to ask.

Not: what does the law require?

But: who is it that is living?

Silence. The Stranger watches him with something that might, in a certain light, be pity.

THE STRANGER

Every human being is thrown into existence without consent.

Without a map. Without the chance to review the terms.

The only question that has ever mattered

is not whether you obey the rules of the house —

but whether you are ever truly home.

He disappears.

Scene 3 — What Happens in the Dark

This scene is not erotic. It is existential. The stage direction that precedes it is not a description of sin. It is a description of a man, for the first time in his adult life, fully present in his own body, in his own life, aware that he exists — and simultaneously, therefore, aware that he can lose everything. The Chorus of Shadows speaks in the silence after.

CHORUS OF SHADOWS

Every choice creates a self.

Every refusal creates a different one.

There is no innocence after freedom.

There is only the self that chose,

and the weight it must now carry,

which is the same as the weight of being real.

† The Woman in Black now stands directly behind the Woman. Like a shadow cast by a future neither of them can yet see. The audience sees both faces. The characters do not.

Scene 4 — The Dizziness of Freedom

The pregnancy. This is the moment the play ceases to be about desire and becomes about consequence — which is to say, about genuine moral life. Barsisa stands in the room alone. He is not praying. He is looking at the wall as though the wall owes him an answer.

BARSISA

God forgive me.

The Stranger is there.

THE STRANGER

Why ask God?

You are not confused about what you did.

You are confused about what to do next.

Those are entirely different prayers.

BARSISA

I have ruined everything.

THE STRANGER

You have not ruined everything. You have complicated everything.

Ruin is a conclusion. You are at a beginning.

The question is: what kind of beginning?

BARSISA

They will return. The brothers. The world.

Everything I have built —

THE STRANGER

Ah. There it is.

Not: a woman's life.

Not: a child coming into the world.

Everything I have built.

Pause.

THE STRANGER

Kierkegaard called it the dizziness of freedom —

the vertigo that comes when a human being realizes

that they are not the outcome of their circumstances

but the author of them.

You did not fall into this, Barsisa.

You walked. Step by step.

With your eyes open.

BARSISA

I made a mistake.

THE STRANGER

No.

You made a choice.

Several, in fact.

The mistake you are making is the one you are planning now.

The Stranger is gone. Barsisa stands alone with the only freedom that has ever mattered: the freedom to choose who he will become. He makes his choice. It is the wrong one. It always has been.

Scene 5 — The Last Conversation

The Woman stands in the room. She knows. She has known for some time. She is neither hysterical nor passive. She is simply, devastatingly, present — the way certain people are present in the moments that define everything after.

THE WOMAN

Say it plainly. I would rather hear it plainly.

BARSISA

When they return—

THE WOMAN

I know when they return.

BARSISA

I cannot — there is no explanation they would accept.

There is no story that would—

THE WOMAN

There is a true one.

BARSISA

The true one would destroy me.

A long silence.

THE WOMAN

Do not kill me to preserve an illusion.

BARSISA

Everything will be destroyed.

THE WOMAN

Everything was already destroyed

the first time you chose the appearance of goodness

over goodness itself.

I was there. I watched it happen.

It was very quiet, and very quick,

and you did not notice it at all.

Barsisa moves. He cannot look at her. He is doing this precisely because he cannot look at her, which is a form of cowardice that masquerades as mercy.

THE WOMAN

(quietly, without accusation)

You never loved God, did you.

You loved being the man who loved God.

And you cannot give that man up.

Even now.

Even here.

Even for this.

Darkness. No violence is shown. Only the sound of earth being moved — soft, steady, final.

† The stage freezes. Barsisa holds what he holds. The Woman in Black steps forward and covers the Boy's eyes with her hand. The Girl releases the flower. It falls. It is very white. It falls for a long time.

Blackout.

ACT III

The Abyss

THEME: THE LONG WALK FROM SELF-DECEPTION TO TRUTH — NIETZSCHE AND KIERKEGAARD'S DESPAIR

SETTING

A prison cell. Stone walls again — the same stone, the same grey light. But where the first room was built by choice, this one is not. Barsisa sits in the particular stillness of a man who has stopped arguing with what he has done, and has not yet found anything to put in its place.

† The Woman in Black stands inside the cell. Only a few feet from Barsisa. She has never been this close. The Boy and Girl sit quietly at her side.

Scene 1 — The Return of the Brothers

The Brothers stand at the cell door. They do not enter. Their grief has not yet found its form; in the meantime it inhabits them as fury.

FIRST BROTHER

We worshipped you.

BARSISA

That was your first mistake.

A silence. This was not the answer they expected. They expected weeping, or denial, or elaborate self-justification. They do not know what to do with simple acknowledgment. No one ever does.

SECOND BROTHER

You were supposed to be—

BARSISA

I know what I was supposed to be.

I spent forty years being it.

That was my mistake.

The Brothers leave. The Judge appears briefly in the doorway.

THE JUDGE

The sentence is death. It will be carried out at dawn.

You may use the hours between now and then

however you judge appropriate.

The Judge leaves. Barsisa looks at the hours he has been given as though they are a gift he no longer knows how to receive.

Scene 2 — The Last Visit

The Stranger comes. He does not use the door. He is simply present, as he has always been — a possibility that was always in the room, waiting to be acknowledged.

THE STRANGER

Do you know why you fell?

BARSISA

Because I sinned.

THE STRANGER

Everyone sins.

That is not an explanation. That is a category.

BARSISA

Because I was weak.

THE STRANGER

Everyone is weak. Try again.

Pause.

BARSISA

Because I did not know myself.

THE STRANGER

Closer. But that is still only the wound's location.

Not its cause.

He sits — or seems to sit — on the air beside Barsisa. The gesture is oddly companionable, as though they are old friends who have come, at last, to the honest part of the conversation.

THE STRANGER

You fell because you worshipped an image of yourself

instead of whatever truth lay beneath it.

You were not devoted to God, Barsisa.

You were devoted to the reputation of your devotion.

You did not love holiness.

You loved being known as holy.

And when that edifice was threatened,

you destroyed a life to protect a portrait.

Silence.

BARSISA

And you — what are you?

In all of this. What have you been?

THE STRANGER

(after a long pause)

I am the part of you that has always known.

I am every moment you turned away from the mirror

because you preferred the portrait on the wall.

I am not your tempter.

I am your witness.

I have been your witness

for a very long time.

Barsisa closes his eyes.

BARSISA

What do you want from me?

THE STRANGER

Nothing. I never wanted anything.

That is the part you have misunderstood from the beginning.

I never wanted your soul.

I wanted your attention.

A long silence.

BARSISA

She said it first. The woman.

She said the same thing.

Before she — she said it.

THE STRANGER

I know. She was wiser than both of us.

He is still. The most terrible word he has ever spoken has just been confirmed.

Scene 3 — The Execution Ground

The Narrator enters. He stands at the edge of the stage. Behind him, the sounds of a gathering crowd — not hostile, exactly; more fascinated, the way people are fascinated by the destruction of what they have believed in.

NARRATOR

There comes a moment in every human life

when a person is entirely alone.

Not because others have abandoned them.

But because the excuses have.

Rain. The scaffold. Barsisa is brought forward. The Stranger stands beside him, invisible to everyone else — or perhaps simply unnoticed, which amounts to the same thing.

THE STRANGER

One gesture. One acknowledgment.

And I will give you something.

BARSISA

Give me what? My life?

THE STRANGER

Relief from what you feel.

Isn't that what you have always wanted?

To feel nothing?

To be the man in the portrait,

who never suffers because he never lives?

BARSISA

I have feared this moment all my life.

THE STRANGER

I know. Kneel.

A very long silence. The rain continues. The crowd waits. Barsisa slowly, slowly kneels. The Stranger watches him with an expression that is not triumph. It is something far more complicated than triumph.

The crowd does not understand what they are seeing. Neither, perhaps, does Barsisa, not yet. Only the audience understands that this is not capitulation. This is a man going to the very bottom of himself.

THE STRANGER

(very quietly, almost gently)

You still do not understand.

I never wanted you to kneel to me.

I wanted you to kneel to the truth.

They are not the same direction.

Barsisa lifts his eyes. Not toward the Stranger. Upward. Or inward. The distinction, at this depth, no longer matters. There are no prayers. No formulas. No doctrine. Only a man, at the very end of all his performances, standing at last in his own skin.

BARSISA

Then all of it — all of it —

was me.

The Stranger neither confirms nor denies this. He smiles — and the smile is neither cruel nor kind. It is the smile of something that has been waiting a very long time for a question it cannot answer, and is glad, at last, to have been asked.

FINAL CHORUS

The abyss does not open beneath us.

It opens within us.

We gaze into it and call it fate,

call it the devil's work, call it God's will,

call it anything except the one true name:

the long, quiet refusal to see clearly.

The longest journey a human being ever makes

is the distance

between what they perform

and what they are.

The execution bell sounds. Once.

Darkness.

Silence.

FINAL SCENE

What Stood Beside Him All Along

The bell's echo fades. In the darkness: a change. Something that has not happened once in the entire play is about to happen.

Very slowly, the Woman in Black walks toward Barsisa. The Boy and the Girl walk beside her. Their pace is unhurried. There is no judgment in it. There is no warmth either. There is only the impossible, unbearable fact of them: that they are here, that they have always been here, that they were here from the first moment of the play and will be here after the last.

For the first time in the play, Barsisa sees them.

BARSISA

(barely a whisper)

Who are you?

The Woman in Black does not answer. She extends her hand toward him. He reaches toward it. He cannot quite close the distance. The gap between them is not large. It is everything.

NARRATOR

Some say they were the dead.

Some say they were memory.

Some say they were judgment.

Some say they were mercy.

Pause.

NARRATOR

And some say they had been beside him

every moment of his life —

patient as stone,

faithful as consequence —

waiting only for him to turn his head.

The Woman in Black takes the children's hands. They walk, slowly, into the darkness. They do not look back.

NARRATOR

The devil did not destroy Barsisa.

Neither did desire.

Neither did fear, nor weakness, nor the sins

common to every human life.

Pause.

NARRATOR

A more ancient force destroyed him.

The refusal to see.

The forty years of carefully constructed

deliberate, devout

refusal to see.

The last light goes out.

The stage is dark. The stage is empty. Somewhere in the dark, a flower lies on the floor, very white.

End.

A NOTE ON THE PLAY

The story of Barsisa is ancient. It appears in Islamic tradition as a moral parable: a devout hermit undone by temptation, who commits murder to conceal his sin and is finally abandoned by the very devil who encouraged him. It is told, usually, as a warning against complacency — against the assumption that a life of devotion has made one immune.

This play accepts that warning and pushes further into it.

What interests this tragedy is not the sin but the structure beneath the sin — the particular architecture of self-deception that made the sin possible. Barsisa does not fall because he is weak. He falls because he has confused the performance of virtue with virtue itself, and has so thoroughly maintained that confusion for forty years that when genuine experience arrives — embodied, mortal, inconveniently real — he has no vocabulary for it except threat.

The philosophical dialogue draws on Kant's moral formalism, Heidegger's analysis of authenticity and thrownness, Kierkegaard's concept of the dizziness of freedom, and Nietzsche's critique of the ascetic ideal. These are not decorations. They are the actual substance of Barsisa's crisis, which is the crisis of any human being who has mistaken the map for the territory, the portrait for the face.

The Woman in Black, the Boy, and the Girl are never explained. The playwright considers this the only honest choice. Some presences in a life are too large for explanation. They can only be seen, or not seen. Barsisa does not see them until the moment he cannot avoid seeing them, which is the definition of how it usually works.

The Stranger is left deliberately unresolved. He may be Satan. He may be the shadow self — the Jungian dark twin that the devout man has spent forty years refusing to integrate. He may be Being itself, which does not care whether we are comfortable. The play does not choose. The audience must.

The Woman is the play's most important philosopher. She is not a victim who happens to speak truth. She is the truth-teller, and the character whose clarity most threatens Barsisa, and for whom the play mourns most profoundly. Her final words to him — spoken before he kills her, which is to say, spoken at the moment when speech can no longer protect anyone — are the play's true thesis:

Everything was already destroyed the first time you chose the appearance of goodness over goodness itself.

She identified the wound before it was fatal. She told him where to look. He looked away.

That is what the play is about.