ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the paradoxical novelty of the apparitional as the vocation of the everyday: ‘both invisible, hidden’ and quite ‘ordinarily visible’, in pushing the relation between the sacred and the secret of the future-to-come. Bottom’s mystery and the hidden wisdom whereof he speaks threads together the aporia of the embodied and the non-embodied, the visible and the non-visible – does the sanctity of theatrical performance and its communion lie in an analogous hidden visibleness? Bottom’s initiation into the world of the spirit foregoes the conventional criteria for ‘knowing’; it is unrepeatable, absolutely singular. For all that it is ‘out of body’ Bottom’s name is itself a type of ‘open secret’ – a reminder that the experience of the spiritual secretes the ‘promise of a blocked or denied sensuality’. Inevitably then, in performance, there is also always a sharing of the secret without sharing it.
