Abridged 0 – 37: Torquemada

 

sanda hoyn snake

Pavel Buchler, Sandra Hoyn, Brenda Bullock, Laura O’Connor, Dylan Brennan, Benjamin Hiller, Afric McGinchey, Jana Romanova, Kate Dempsey, Angela Carr, Lizz Murphy, Ray Givans, Gerald Dawe, Maeve O’Sullivan, Gráinne Tobin, Roisin Kelly, Niall McCabe, Rachel Long, Denise Blake, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Shlomit Migay, Deirdre McKenna, Clare McCotter, Laura Mullan, Aoife Mannix, Maurice Devitt, Joseph Allen.

Abridged 0 – 37: Torquemada focuses on the confessional and faith; the lies we tell and the secrets we keep, the hypocrisy of love and hate and the pointedness and pointlessness of the penance we ascribe ourselves and others, the faith that keeps us going and makes others suffer. Torquemada is the first in a trilogy very loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

To have faith – social, political or religious – is to trust in the imposition of an ordering force on society. Faith stimulates, motivates us through a sense of significance and justified suffering. An essential energy is derived from the tension of the central binary of any faith: between good and bad, between darkness and lightness.  This central binary forces order on the dappled chaos of existence. This categorization allows us to negotiate the shadows and complexities of life. When moderate faith modulates to the extreme it becomes a destructive force founded on a loss of the ability to see beyond this basic binary, a total dependence on the division between light and dark. In order to believe in a sublime goodness, its counterpart, the darkness, must be acknowledged to exist. The good must be distinguished from the evil, and if the good are to be rewarded, the guilty must be punished. The intensity of the light must be matched by the intensity of the darkness. Chiaroscuro. Pride in something of great brightness necessitates an essential conflict with all that is dark, and in the context of subjective social moralities, the tension between light and dark can become a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Those who depend on the light fear the dark, and strike out against it with the fires of execution.

A free copy of the PDF can be found below: