HUMPTY DUMPTY’S BACKSTORY

Linus Pauling set this play in motion. “The carbon atom is tetravalent and has no business being that way.” That was the truth that got Linus to sit still on his high wall until he understood what was going on inside and outside the carbon atom whose hybridized orbitals form the bridge to all life on this planet. In this play Humpty Dumpty is this carbon atom personified and slightly misbehaved. (He’s arrested on page 3.) What more do we know about Humpty? Humpty’s heart and mind were forged in the interior of a dying star. How about that? Whether the dying star exploded or not is an open question but it seems that Humpty’s celestial birth stems from a dying star and it’s corona. And so, in these few words we can begin to understand Humpty’s predicament, his adjustment to the look on people’s faces as they worry about his future, not knowing where he came from or where he was headed. And so this hybridized carbon atom, formed in the corona of a dying star, manages to subjugate all biological creation to form something in the image and likeness of God, something alive with immortality. This we did not know. Humpty appears slightly unstill on his wall in this play with his two interiorized friends abstracted from the antecedents of Greek mythology: Pandora and Prometheus. Pandora holds the imprint of life in the DNA chains in her unopend (& opened) gift from Zeus. Prometheus personifies the voice of reason, the electrical fire in the mind, our own corona if you will, that forms our halo in the order of things that shapes and reshapes what we know and don’t know about everything. This play is all about what we don’t know about Humpty Dumpty, tetravalent and hallowed and slightly unsteady.