I was inspired by the Gita, but only saw the connection to Godot after watching the play in London (the West End production with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen). Two decades later, the full arc makes sense in light of the Layer Cake Model.
Mystic Cab began as a play Kert Peterson and I co-wrote and performed at the 2004 Frontera Fest. Its original title gives the game away: "Guru or Disciple? YES!" Grover, an Indian cab driver, and Dick, an investment banker, keep meeting in Grover's car over the course of a year. As Grover says, "There are no coincidences!"
Three dialogues
Each of the three works is built on a dialogue between two people.
Krishna and Arjuna: the all-knowing one on your side
In the Gita, the dialogue is between Krishna and Arjuna, on the eve of the devastating war of Kurukshetra. Arjuna, the hero, has a moment of crisis and self-doubt; Krishna, his charioteer and an avatar of Vishnu, counsels him. Here you have the all-knowing one on your side: a guide who stands outside the plane of the game itself, who understands how every seemingly invincible boon can be countervailed, and who hands the hero the model he needs. In Layer Cake terms, this is the mythic layer at full strength.
Vladimir and Estragon: Godot never arrives
In Godot, the dialogue is Vladimir and Estragon - Didi and Gogo - waiting for someone who never arrives. This is modern man realizing the ultimate model-knower was a fiction, and despairing. Nietzsche's 'God is dead' becomes the predicament: the old source of meaning has fallen away, but they are still waiting for it to arrive. They cannot see that together, they in fact are "God-ot." They look externally for something that can only be found within, and the tragedy is that they never see it. The play has no third act to resolve the tension.
Grover and Dick: Guru or Disciple? YES!
Mystic Cab suggests the answer, and the third act. The cab replaces the chariot, but there is no guru and no disciple. Grover and Dick become Arjuna and Krishna to each other at different points in the story, in lockstep around their particular dualities, eventually resolving them with each other's help. The characters show us how to take perspectives from two models' points of view. With two people, the dance partner is the person in front of you. With one person, a new model is introduced to challenge and dialogue with your existing model. In either setting, the dance is between models, opening the possibility of integration into a third. Where Godot leaves its pair waiting, Grover and Dick realize it is entirely up to them to steward meaning, and the story resolves with an all-confirming "YES!"
The arc through the Layer Cake
The Layer Cake is what completes the arc for me. Humanity's models were laid down in layers: evolutionary, tribal, mythic, systematic, methodic. The mythic layer is the mechanism by which models change in a fundamental way: the hero's journey, the boon, the return with the elixir. Those mythic models got codified in the Systematic Layer. Godot is what it feels like when that promise is withdrawn and nothing replaces it. The Methodic Layer's response is to formalize the journey itself. In the Human Fugue, the Mythic Layer is formalized in each of the Houses providing an ever-changing set of models. But it left the House of Meaning vacant. This is Godot's predicament. But past is prologue and the Meaning House needs its method. My proposal is the JOurneY Method. No god in the chariot, no waiting for Godot: two people, holding the mirror for each other, walking the journey deliberately. Beneath it, a dialogue between 2 models and a resolution into a third, which can be conducted within ourselves. All the layers coexist in our current moment; nothing is left behind.
Mystic Cab dramatized that move twenty years ago. The Gita gave the inspiration, London gave the Godot connection, and the Layer Cake gives the arc its frame.
Watch the film and read the original commentary.
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