I woke up this morning, and for some reason, my brain was drafting letters to you and your ensemble, preparing the letter I would send after seeing your show. Too bad it was all in my head because I thought I was making my best point ever about why the performing arts is the highest art form. It ends with this idea that I will send now, knowing the other thoughts are lost to the ether of my pillowcase:

Meditation is the only way for the soul to know itself as an individual ray of the cosmic source of God. The yogi, a soul of any religion who achieves that union, knows of their attainment when the meditation, object of meditation, and meditator become one. They reunite their soul with the soul’s source, their Cosmic Beloved.

Similarly, only the performing arts allows the same transcendence, for only as the performing artist can the art, the object of the art, and the artist become one.

They reunite their art form when the triune of palette, painter, and canvas coalesce as the same. In theatre, your body is the palette, you are the actor, and your character is the canvas. Every other art form is what religion calls secular: separate from the whole and unable to transcend its individuality. As the writer, I cannot become these words having written them, and I am most certainly not the page or HTML from which these words are read.

Add to this the emergent properties of the ensemble, and you have yourself not only an enlightened actor but an entire pit, crew, production, and house uniting in those climactic moments to create the perfect play. The end is unattainable except in that culminating instant, never to be seen again except in a new way at the next showing.

Finally, the smoking gun to my argument is that this heavenly process of the arts happens not just on occasion or upon the artist’s sudden afflatus, but on cue, like a timeless clock, eight shows a week for fifty-two and more weeks. No other artist is even as pro.

So that, Burke, and to Burke’s actor friends, is why the performing arts, especially theatre, is the highest art form. No other expression makes as close an analogy to the true Self’s story back to the infinite, what in Sanskrit is called Lila, or Divine Play.

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