🇬🇧 THE FOUR ACTS

“ELON ON MARS” unfolds as a voyage in four acts. Rather than telling a conventional story, each act explores a different stage of a journey through memory, imagination, consciousness and transformation.

ACT I

A cargo ship sails across the seas of the world. During its voyage, the great achievements of past centuries come aboard and remind us — despite our often faulty and ungrateful memory — of the exploits of the great pioneers who shaped History. What have we done with our inheritance? For the crew, a symbol of humanity as a whole, the time has come to prove worthy of it, to rise to its height, and to make way for the Poet, the Son, the only one capable of bringing an end to the disunion of peoples.

A Fundamental Sound, Founding and Creative, rises above the waves: a supreme power sustains all things. It is the Creative Breath, and it is upon this wave of breath that the world is carried toward its glorious destination despite all the obstacles encountered along the way. It triumphs over every obstacle. An Immortal Flame, an immortal Breath. The Son. The Poet.

But then a storm rises in the cosmos: chaos and disorder spread, while the bones of skeletons accumulate into gigantic cliffs. The end of the world appears on the horizon as inevitable. Earthly consciousness is now ready to be judged. A final reprieve is nevertheless granted to humanity. The magic of the Devil gallops into an enchanted forest where cherub-wolves howl and great birds of the night fly on giant wings. Carried by the power of this enchantment and by the sound of guitars, humankind, as if in a state of fascination, arrives before a closed gate. Upon the threshold of the temple, a hierophant reveals that only desire will grant access to immortality and knowledge. From that moment begins the descent into the infernal realms, the world mounted upon the occult force of the Prince of Demons. The triple gallop of destiny is now on its way toward the kingdom of Satan.

ACT II

A moment suspended in eternity. Here there is neither an infernal ride, nor the crossing of oceans, nor an interplanetary voyage through meteorite fields, cosmic radiations and monsters of space. Yet the power of darkness continues to grow. It feeds upon the prayers and supplications of believers. It revels in the worship offered to a god whose place it usurps, profaning His sacred Name. It turns faith in God into a force of death. Blood rains down from every side.

Shocks and disturbances ripple through the cosmos around the spacecraft, caught in the midst of a mystical trance. A first seed of the mutation is already aboard “the Mutant”. Hidden. Incognito. Gestating within Billy's belly. Consciousness is a belly, an athanor, a place of transmutation because oven. The belly is an oven. Darkness — this belly — transforms everything passing through it into Omen. The Devil. The Oven. Passage through darkness, oven, flames and ashes... before the return, before the dawn of a new way of being, of loving, of breathing in the open air.A monster, therefore. Dormant, curled up in the deepest recesses of the human soul. A fetus imprisoned within a block of granite? In this placeless realm where everything appears static and motionless, a movement exists, in potential. An unmoving movement. An eye opens within the stone. A vibration. A very powerful vibration, yet reversed. Extremely powerful.

Orpheus leads us into the very heart of Hell. With his golden foot he treads the incandescent ground of suffering and sorrow. Everything oozes pain and affliction. That is Hell: this solitude, this sadness, this isolation. A gigantic weight rests upon Satan's shoulders: human life, its evolution, its organization, its functioning, its fragility. Songs of adoration rise from the depths of the night. Invocations and prayers, unbearable to the demons who gnash their teeth, lament, suffer and groan beneath the sound of so many requiems. Prayer is hateful to them. Yet their all-powerful master is its accursed author. He bears many names. Under every one of those names he is worshipped. He calls himself "God". A terrible rumbling. The presence of the Lord of Darkness manifests itself. Everything begins to tremble around him. An implacable machine of death drives him forward. He roars. In truth, he weeps. The suffering of the monster. The terrible vibration of Hell. The infinite suffering of Satan. At his service stands a most peculiar character: the Devil and his demons. Disappointed, defeated, seeing himself overcome, the Devil—who always has more than one trick up his sleeve—sacrifices a first-class Chinese chicken. In the kitchen, far from every witness, a powerful mystery unfolds in full satanic legality: the terrified bird struggles like a little devil, for it is in fact nothing more than an apprentice demon belonging to the seventh hierarchy of minor demons disguised as a Chinese chicken. The ritual completed, the Devil decides to go to Mars. He takes Mick Jagger with him. After all, the Devil owes him that much for the services rendered to his cause and for the labor of The Rolling Stones during their mission on Earth. Tongue sticking out. Having thick lips and big balls: the Devil’s identity card. Now everybody knows the truth.

ACT III

“The Mutant” enters a dangerous region of space. It envelops the interplanetary spacecraft like a powerful narcotic. The passengers sink into a state of waking dream or semi-conscious sleep, where the cosmic environment generates interferences between the psycho-sensory impulses of each individual, as though the barriers separating one person from another were dissolving in favour of a shared collective energy accelerating the process of mutation already underway. The journey to Mars is, in reality, not a matter of distance or technological achievement, but a metamorphosis of consciousness, comparable to the development of an embryo within a nourishing fire. Where can such a fire be found, if not within oneself? Then, quite unexpectedly, emerging from this state of semi-consciousness, a revelation takes place. Billy's troubled past unfolds before the astonished eyes of the passengers, together with the soundtrack of the underworld explored by the two boys, Billy and Callum. This is no illusion. It is lived experience. Raw. Concrete. Nothing unreal. This is not fiction. These are not memories. Everything unfolds in real time, as though the crossing of space were generating a reality imposed upon the passengers aboard The Mutant. All of them — the Poet first and foremost, from the depths of his prison cell — experience it as though this horrifying, dark and gory reality were unfolding within themselves, identifying with it. From that moment onward, Billy becomes both the centre of the voyage and the very place where mutation occurs. Between Billy and the spacecraft there is no longer any difference. They are one. Billy's story, his murderous odyssey alongside Callum—a kind of Bonnie and Clyde between two young men—begins to spread throughout the world. Everyone on Earth follows his journey with fascination. To whom will he give birth? Who will become the first human being born on Mars? The moment Billy realizes that he carries a child within him—without knowing either why or how, as he himself explains at the very beginning of the opera—he decides to give the child a name: Elon. Because he will be born on Mars. Elon on Mars. The child is the stowaway within the inner fire. Billy becomes the adventurer of consciousness, the pioneer of a new humanity, the explorer of the unknown, an astronaut navigating the abysses of the human soul. Carried upon light and photons at a triple gallop, Billy gradually enters cosmic consciousness. The interplanetary spacecraft does not vanish into another dimension. Quite the contrary. Multiple dimensions enter it, settle within it, becoming a new crew, a new vessel, a new cargo. A new way of being comes aboard...transforming this spacecraft into a New Earth. A celebration. Celebration of the Number 28. Yash's birthday — on the twenty-eighth — aboard the Cosmic Man: which, indeed, is what he is. A Cosmic Man. The true astronaut of all time is he: at once spacecraft and passenger, captain and crew, individual and collective: a cosmic temple. A Chariot of Fire.

ACT IV

Having reached this point, you will not understand my words — and for good reason! I am a Mutant. I am the Mutant; not a saving messiah; not an avatar. I went ahead, I travelled, and I arrived, not on Mars, but upon myself: another Earth, another consciousness, renewed, entirely new. I am a Mutant: that is to say, every existing thing in the world gathered into a single person, a single being... collective. The mutation has taken place. We know it immediately, because a piano gently unfolds the simple notes of the mutation. Twice. This always signifies confirmation whenever the same thing is repeated twice in succession. Repeat, repeat, repeat again: that is mutation. With every repetition an almost imperceptible change occurs, a new version of the rhythmic cycle or of the melody. Everyone expected a birth on Mars! The first human being on Mars. But nothing. No more messages. No more signs of life. No trace of the spacecraft. Gone. There is no one left to observe, to bear witness, to tell the story. Elon was never born on Mars, simply because nothing describable remains.The piano was the final message, where the first message becomes one with the last. The piano heard at the very beginning is the final breath, the last vestige of an ancient world, of an Earth that has mutated, withdrawn from the line of time; from temporality itself; an Earth that has escaped duration; that has broken free from the sensory, the descriptive, the narrative, from self-contemplation. No more cinema! To consent to this offering is to escape slavery, to escape the tyranny of imposed images. There is no longer any "personal" story. The person has mutated, and so has the body that once enclosed it. Everything has become revelation after revelation, unveiling after unveiling, in an endless process of laying oneself bare; removing every garment, everything that conceals, everything that veils; everything is seen, everything is known, nothing remains hidden; no more clothing; no more make-up, no more tattoos; no more disguises nor smiles painted upon glossy paper. The shame of nakedness has disappeared. Gender no longer exists. Neither man nor woman. Only naked beauty, splendid, dazzling, replacing former sexuality. Spirit has become concrete. The concrete has become the splendour of spirit. Intelligence has become an act of love, an endless beatitude, forever renewed, from which naked beauty is born, standing upon her shell. To contemplate her. To embody her. To radiate her.This is what brings the Person into being: ageless, forever young, and yet immemorial. Here we are! The multidimensional nature of consciousness now inhabits space-time. The observer, the explorer, the seeker that the human being once was has given way to a direct and immediate knowledge of all things. Beings and things are no longer separated from one another by distance, by weights and measures, by name or by race. Everything has become communion. Everything has become exchange. Every exchange gives birth to felicity, both inwardly and outwardly. As though the person were tasting the very substance of his own atoms; while the atom itself, in ecstasy, delights in being tasted through its own essence. The exterior has now become abstract rather than concrete. The interior—the spiritual nucleus—has become concrete rather than abstract.The exterior is pure energy. The interior is form and beauty. Each reveals itself through the other. They commune. They interact within Being itself. The new Person is both half-abstract and half-concrete. No longer belonging to itself as before, but belonging to a greater Whole that embraces and discovers it through successive emanations of energy unfolding throughout History, exactly like a fan slowly opening. Mutation. The one-directional line of time reveals itself as a multiplicity and multiplication of connections, forever new, forever renewed, continually growing and expanding into an immense network. The continuous exchanges between the abstract and the concrete create the events unfolding through time and space that we call human history. Civilizations blossom. Then disappear. The multidimensional Person endlessly builds and dismantles itself in perpetual renewal... and the Whole communes with the Whole through each of its countless, almost infinite connections. Mutation. For such a being, the appearance of the cosmos and of its own planet is entirely different. It is no longer egocentric, but multidirectional and multicentric. The centre is everywhere and nowhere, situated and non-situated. Everything has become creative delight, no longer merely the pleasure of the senses. Sexual union survives only as a distant memory of fleeting orgasms, sources of mortality, accident, illness and failure. Infinitely more powerful, delight has become a permanent state of consciousness established within every cell of the human body, which itself has mutated. The new world is Jazz. A cosmic chabadabada. Repetitive. Minimalist. Enough to celebrate the Number Twenty-Eight in apotheosis, and to present Yash to the whole world: the Mutant. Born from lightning and thunder. He had told me to pass through India in order to bring him into the world. Ecstasy fills my cells. The bells are ringing.

"The Son of the Bells"... That is what Jean Cocteau called me at my birth.