Essays by Wallace Shawn. (2/2)
Title: Essays.
Author: Wallace Shawn.
Genre: Non-fiction, essays, philosophy, ethics, politics, theatre.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004, 2008, and 2010 (this edition 2010).
Summary: A collection of 16 essays divided into two parts. Up to Our Necks With War (2004) are excerpts from a diary in which the author discusses his feelings on the war in Iraq, the irrationality of calling United States a democracy, and the hypocrisy of being entirely against war and killing in context of human history. In Israel Attacks Gaza (2008), the author explains why so many Jews find the extermination of Palestinians historically justifiable, and how irrational it is for other countries to pander to that belief. In Why I Call Myself a Socialist (2010), the author compares the roles actors play to the roles we all play on a daily basis, and the randomness and unfairness in the illusion of class equality, and how the division of labour and how we view it in our society is inherently immoral. PART TWO: DREAM-WORLD: In Myself and How I Got Into the Theater (1996), the author expounds on the influences that made him become a playwright, from his privileged and liberal upbringing, to his father being a book critic and the innate discomfort Shawn felt that any form of art could be criticized as "bad," a critique nonexistent in the world of theater. Reading Plays (1997) is about the unique experience of reading a play, as opposes to seeing it performed. In Aesthetic Preferences (2008), the author wonders about different tastes and preferences, and philosophizes on the importance of dreams. Interview With Mark Strand (1998) is an interview with the American poet about his poetry and his outlook on the medium, as well as the importance of poetry in the world overall and the ultimate meaning of it. In Writing About Sex (2008), the author talks about why writing about sex is most interesting and most taboo. (Only PART 2 in this post, refer to PART 1 for the rest of the quotes).
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ It's tragic when civilians die in war. But is it really less tragic when soldiers die? Why do people tally the deaths of Iraqi and Afghan civilians-but leave Iraqi and Afghan soldiers out of the accounting? Did the soldiers in those miserable armies deserve to die? Because they were soldiers? These were just young men-some were conscripted against their will, others decided to risk their lives and enlist (maybe because they were desperate, because they were ignorant, because they loved their country.) Please don't tell me they deserved to be massacred and not even counted.
Who does "deserve to die"? Whose death should not be mourned? Some say: the guilty deserve to die and should not be mourned.
♥ Of course there are particular instances in which even hardened killers find it too absurd to claim that that their chosen victims are guilty of crimes and deserve their deaths. This is particularly the case when the victims are children. In those cases-the Chechen rebels' killing of child hostages, Bill Clinton's imposition of child-killing sanctions on Iraq-the claim is simply that the absolute necessity of achieving the goal (the liberation from Russian oppression, the hostile leverage that Clinton wanted to apply to Saddam Hussein's regime) turns the killing of the innocent into an appropriate tactic.
A lot of hypocrisy comes into play in discussions about killing.
I believed in the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, although it was led by people who took it upon themselves to kill in order to achieve their purpose. I rejoiced at the end of apartheid, although it wouldn't have ended if it hadn't been for the actions of the African National Congress, which took it upon itself to kill in order to end apartheid. When you live in a place where oppression is murdering your countrymen, where people are cold and have no shelter, where people are hungry, where people are starving, where people's lives are being crushed by the status quo, you may feel a desperate need to take immediate action, and the human imagination is only rarely capable of devising and embracing a Gandhian approach to the necessary confrontation with the ruling powers. So at times a simple choice appears to exist between the human death daily caused by the existing system and the use of death-creating force to effect change. And to denounce all of those whose battle for change has not excluded violent methods may be to condemn most people on earth to inevitable suffocation. There may always indeed be a third, nonviolent path, but it's usually the hardest path to see. Yes, if I'm involved, I must struggle to find it, but I can't bring myself to condemn Nelson Mandela and everyone else whose principled struggle for justice fell short of the nonviolent ideal.
♥ To call the attitude behind Bush's concept of "the war on terror" hypocritical is simply to say: Yes, it is hard to believe that any human beings could be so inhuman as to crash planes into the World Trade Center, but it also happens to be hard to believe that any human beings could massacre the defenseless Zulus, entire families, as the British did in the days of the empire, or rape and murder innocent islanders, as the Japanese did in World War II, or systematically, relentlessly drop explosives and napalm from gleaming airplanes onto peasant villages, year after year, as the Americans did in the Vietnam War.
♥ Bin Laden is admired by many Muslims. Some clearly admire him because of his least reasonable beliefs. But many admire him because they feel there's something terribly wrong with the circumstances in which they live, and bin Laden's anger symbolizes for them a desire for a better life. And that desire is not at all unreasonable.
♥ The end of the Cold War was a moment of anxiety for the American nationalism addict. Pornography privileges were suddenly withdrawn. The apparently implacable Soviet leaders, sitting perennially in a row in their uncomfortable-looking uniforms and suits, disappeared from the television screens, along with the trudging, raggedy armies of "Marxist guerrillas" in various countries around the world, and so, just as ex-alcoholics (like President Bush) are nonplussed or worse by the sudden disappearance of their necessary substance, nationalism addicts in the 1990s experiences serious depression if not desperation. But in 2001, the emergence of "the terrorists" finally brought relief. In fact, "the terrorists" were an improvement, as the Russians had never actually attacked the United States, nor had their statements expressed visceral loathing against us.
♥ The eighteenth-century figures who devised the theory of modern democracy, not to mention the ancient Greeks, had something else in mind. The American theorists thought that citizens would live and vote based on rational consideration of their own interests. A political speech might, in the imagination of these practical philosophers, convince its listeners through a persuasive marshalling of evidence and inferences. But to put a drug into someone's drink, knock them out, and carry them home is not a form of seduction, and to paralyze a listener's brain with fantasy-whether injected by a needle through the skull or poured into the ears through the spoken word-is not a form of rational argument, nor any basis for what those theorists would have called "democracy."
Residents of mental institutions are not usually brought by their keepers to the voting booth on Election Day. They fall too far short of the image of the citizen/voter that inspired the authors of the Federalist Papers. And yet people whose brains are pickled in fantasy-people whose knowledge of the real world outside their own neighborhood (or even within it) may be close to nonexistent-are allowed to vote.
The American citizen's vote is a powerful weapon. The election of Ronald Reagan, the election of Bill Clinton, was, for various individuals across the planet, an inescapable portent foretelling their death. But the great majority of the voting American citizens cast their ballots without an awareness of those individuals and the terrifying destiny hidden inside their act of voting.
If one imagines a system in which Smith and Jones are running for office, but voters must cast their ballots only for "Candidate A" or "Candidate B" without being allowed to know which candidate is Smith and which is Jones, you could say, assuming the votes are honestly counted, that the voters do determine the outcome of the election, but as citizens they have no power. When they vote, they're participating in a ritual, like kowtowing before an emperor.
If American voters don't know the meaning of their own votes and float into the voting booth drugged with fantasies, their act of voting is only a ritual. But apparently this doesn't bother the voters, and it doesn't bother the press or the politicians either.
~~Up to Our Necks in War.
♥ Recent history shows that the Jews, as a people, have found few friends who are honest and true. During World War II, when Hitler's anti-Semitism was murdering Jews by the million, the world's nations expressed their own anti-Semitism by refusing to house and welcome the tortured people, preferring instead to let them be terminated if need be. After the war, the world felt it owed the Jews something-but then showed its lack of true regard for the tormented group by "giving" them a piece of land already populated (and surrounded) by another people-an act of European imperialism carried out exactly at the moment when non-European peoples all over the world were finally concluding that European imperialism was completely unacceptable and had to be resisted. And now we have the spectacle of American politicians encouraging and financing Israeli policies which will ultimately lead to more disaster and destruction for Jews.
It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation, or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation. There is no evidence that that could possibly happen, and there are mountains of evidence to the contrary.
♥ To some of these individuals, a Palestinian boy throwing stones at an Israeli soldier, even if the boy's house has been destroyed by the Israeli army, even if his family has been killed by them, is simply one figure in an eternal mob of anti-Semites, a mob made up principally of people to whom the Jews have done no harm at all, as they did no harm to Hitler. The conclusion drawn by many who hold this view of the world is that in the face of such massive and eternal opposition, Jews are morally justified in taking any measures they can think of to protect themselves. They are involved in one long eternal war, and a few hundred Palestinians killed today must be measured against many millions of Jews who were killed in the past. The agony the Israelis might inflict on a Palestinian family today must be seen in the perspective of Jewish families in agony all over the world in the past.
It is irrational for the Israeli leaders to imagine that the Palestinians will understand this particular point of view-will understand why Jews might find it appropriate, let us say, to retaliate for the death of one Jew by killing a hundred Palestinians. If a Palestinian killed a hundred Jews to retaliate for the killing of one Palestinian-for that matter, if a Thai killed a hundred Cambodians to retaliate for the killing of one Thai-the Israeli leaders of course would agree that that would be unjust, that would be racist, as if one Palestinian or one Thai were worth a hundred Israelis or a hundred Cambodians. But if a Jew kills a hundred Palestinians to retaliate for the killing of one Jew, to many Israelis this does not seem unjust, because it's part of an eternal struggle in which the Jews have lost and lost and lost-they've already lost more people than there are Palestinians. Well, it's not surprising that certain Jews would feel this way, but no Palestinian will ever share that feeling or be willing to accept it. What the Palestinians see is an implacable and heartless enemy, one that considers itself unbound by any rules or principles-an enemy that can't be reasoned with but can only be feared, hated, and if possible killed.
♥ During the period of time in which these younger people have been alive, the Jews have not been, for the most part, persecuted victims. They've seemed like unusually self-righteous victimizers. In other words, Israeli policy is day by day stoking a rage against Israel that can only lead to a grim future for all Israelis and possibly for all Jews everywhere.
Consequently, it's patronizing and disgraceful and no favor to the Jews for American politicians-for narrow, short-term political advantage, for narrow, short-term global/strategic reasons, or even because of a sense of guilt over past Jewish suffering-to pander to the irrationality of the most irrational Jews.
~~Israel Attacks Gaza.
♥ The actor's role in the community is quite unlike anyone else's. Businessmen, for example, don't take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.
Contrary to popular misconception, the actor is not necessarily a specialist in imitating or portraying what he knows about other people. On the contrary, the actor may simply be a person who's more willing than others to reveal some truths about himself.
♥ We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there's a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he's playing himself in his daily life, he's playing a part, he's performing, just as he's performing when he plays a part on stage. He knows that when he's on stage performing, he's in a sense deceiving his friends in the audience less than he does in daily life, not more, because on stage he's disclosing the parts of himself that in daily life he struggles to hide. He knows, in fact, that the role of himself is actually a rather small part, and that when he plays that part he must make an enormous effort to conceal the whole universe of possibilities that exists inside him.
♥ The actor on stage is living in reality. He knows that there is indeed a king inside him. But he also knows very well that Fate has made him an actor and not actually a king. The audience member looking at the actor on stage steps out of reality and lives in illusion until the curtain comes down.
Our capacity to fantasize about other people and to believe our own fantasies makes it possible for us to enjoy this valuable art form, theatre. But unfortunately it's a capacity which has brought incalculable harm and suffering to human beings.
It's well known what grief and even danger can result when we make use of this capacity in our romantic lives and eagerly ascribe to a potential partner benevolent characteristics which are based on our hopes and not on truth.
And one can hardly begin to describe that anguish caused by our habit of using our fantasizing capacity in the opposite direction, that is, using it to ascribe negative characteristics to people who for one reason or another we'd like to think less of. Sometimes we do this in regard to large groups of people, none of whom we've met. But we can even apply our remarkable capacity in relation to individuals or groups whom we know rather well, sometimes simply to make ourselves feel better about things that we happen to have done to them or are planning to do. You couldn't exactly say, for example, that Thomas Jefferson had no familiarity with dark-skinned people. His problem was that he couldn't figure out how to live the life he in fact was living unless he owned these people as slaves. And as it would have been unbearable for him to see himself as so heartless, unjust, and cruel as to keep in bondage people who were just like himself, he ignored the evidence that was in front of his eyes and clung to the fantasy that people from Africa were not his equals.
♥ After a while one does grasp the pattern. Africans, Jews, Mexicans, same-sex lovers, women. Hmm, after a certain period of time somebody says, Well, actually, they're not that different from anybody else, they have the same capacities, I don't like all of them, some of them are geniuses, etc. etc. The revelations are always in the same direction. We learn about one group or another the thing that actors quickly learn in relation to themselves when they become actors: people are more than they seem to be. We're all rather good at seeing through last year's fantasies and moving on-and rather proud of it too.
♥ So there's our situation: it's delightfully easy to see through illusions held by people far away or by members of one's own group a century ago or a decade ago or a year ago. But this doesn't seem to help us to see through the illusions which at any given moment happen to be shared by the people who surround us, our friends, our family, the people we trust.
♥ I've sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War Two, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a "selection," choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these "elections" are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents. As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto then and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label "factory worker" and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she'll crawl out of the pit, and she'll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she'll stand at her workstation for sixteen hours a day, she'll sleep in the factory's dormitory, she won't be allowed to speak to her fellow workers, she'll have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, she'll be subjected to the sexual whims of her boss, and she'll be breathing fumes day and night that will make her ill and lead to her death at an early age. And when she has died, one will be able to say about her that she worked, like a nurse, not to benefit herself, but to benefit others. Except that a nurse works to benefit the sick, while the factory worker will have worked to benefit the owners of her factory. She will have devoted her hours, her consideration, her energy and strength to increasing their wealth. She will have lived and died for that. And it's not that anyone sadly concluded when she was born that she lacked the talent to become, let's say, a violinist, a conductor, or perhaps another Beethoven. The reason she was sent to the factory and not to the concert hall was not that she lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so she was one of the ones who was assigned to be one.
♥ Even those of us who were selected out from the general group have our role and our costume. I happen to play a semi-prosperous fortunate bohemian, not doing too badly, nor too magnificently. And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume, I pass, for example, the burly cop on the beat, I pass the weedy professor in his rumpled jacket, distractedly ruminating as he shambles along, I see couples in elegant suits briskly rushing to their meetings, I see the art student and the law student, and in the background, sometimes looming up as they come a bit closer, those not particularly selected out-the drug-store cashier in her oddly matched pink shirt and green slacks, the wacky street hustler with his crazy dialect and his crazy gestures, the wise-cracking truck drivers with their round bellies and leering grins, the grim-faced domestic worker who's slipped out from her employer's house and now races into a shop to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think nothing, I have no reaction to what I'm seeing, because I believe it all. I simply believe it. I believe the costumes, I believe the characters. And then for one instant, as the woman runs into the shop, I suddenly see what's happening, the way a drowning man might have one last vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and I feel like screaming out, "Stop! Stop! This isn't real! It's all a fantasy! It's all a play! The people in these costumes are not what you think! The accents are fake, the expressions are fake-Don't you see? It's all-" One instant-and then it's gone. My mind goes blank for a moment, and then I'm back to where I was. The domestic worker runs out of the shop and hurries back toward her job, and once again I see her only as the character she plays. I see a person who works as a servant. And surely that person could never have lived, for example, the life I've lived, or been like me-she's not intelligent enough. She had to be a servant. She was born that way. The hustler surely had to be a hustler, it's all he could do, the cashier could never have worn beautiful clothes, she could never have been someone who sought out what was beautiful, she could only ever have worn that pink shirt and those green slacks.
So, just as Thomas Jefferson lived in illusion, because he couldn't face the truth about the slaves that he owned, I too put to use every second of my life, like my beating heart, this capacity to fantasize which we've all been granted as our dubious birthright. My belief in the performance unfolding before me allows me not to remember those dreadful moments when all of those babies were permanently maimed, and I was spared. The world hurled the infant who became the domestic worker to the bottom of a pit and crippled her for life, and I saw it happen, but I can't remember it now. And so now it seems quite wonderful to me that the world today treats the domestic worker and me with scrupulous equality. It seems wonderfully right. If I steal a car, I go to jail, and if she steals a car, she goes to jail. If I drive on the highway, I pay a toll, and if she drives on the highway, she pays a toll. We compete on an equal basis for the things we want. If I apply for a job, I take the test, and if she applies for the job, she takes the test. And I go through my life thinking it's all quite fair.
If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it's not bearable. It's not beatable to watch while the talents and the abilities of infants and children are crushed and destroyed. These happen to be things that I just can't think about. And most of the time, the factory workers and domestic workers and cashiers and truck drivers can't think about them either. Their performances as these characters are consistent and convincing, because they actually believe about themselves just what I believe about them, that what they are now is all that they could ever have been, they could never have been anything other than what they are. Of course that's what we all have to believe, so that we can bear our lives and live in peace together. But it's the peace of death.
Actors understand the infinite vastness hiding inside each human being, the characters not played, the characteristics not revealed. Schoolteachers can see every day that, given the chance, the sullen pupil in the back row can sing, dance, juggle, do mathematics, paint, and think. If the play we're watching is an illusion, if the baby who now wears the costume of the hustler in fact had the capacity to become a biologist or a doctor, a circus performer or a poet or a scholar of Ancient Greek, then the division of labor, as now practiced, is inherently immoral, and we must somehow learn a different way to share out all the work that needs to be done. The costumes are wrong. They have to be discarded. We have to start out naked again and go from there.
~~Why I Call Myself a Socialist.
♥ Like everyone else who comes from that particular tribe, the children of the privileged, I was brought up to believe in the central belief of the tribe: that there's a certain (large) quantity of the world's fruits that is the appropriate portion of the children of the privileged. But I came from a family that was a "liberal" family, so, rather confusingly, I was encouraged to feel that for every dollar I took from the world, I really ought (for some reason) to "give back" a penny, at least a penny's worth of something. The unspoken and (in case of my parents, certainly) un-thought belief of the liberal privileged group was that one was supposed to be ready to rob and murder in order to secure one's appropriate portion, but as one rode off from the conquest one was always to remember to toss back to the victims a small offering, a small scrap torn off from what one had just taken.
Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained to me that we were not rich, only "middle class," and so, oddly, I would need to "work for my living" rather than just receiving it automatically-in other words, the little package that was the life I'd inevitably possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn't be delivered to the house, I'd have to go into a taxi and go get it.
Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I've stayed lazy.
♥ Well, I guess you can see that a young man can't go too long without writing about his father. In any case, I will tell you about mine that he happened to be, of all things, an editor, a kind and beloved mentor to writers, and at the same time a highly respected judge of literature; and whenever my father was discussed, and it was really very often, it was always said that he had "high standards." (I mean, other people said it; God knows he never would have, because it would have seemed to him horribly pompous, and because he would have found the metaphor ridiculous and incoherent-one pictures with difficulty someone measuring something somehow with some odd device while standing on a ladder.) Unfortunately, in contrast to my father, I never really comprehended the whole concept of measuring in the first place. If I listened to a piece of music, saw a film, or read a book-well, I seemed to go through it all from moment to moment, somehow. I was enlightened or confused, indifferent or thrilled, and certain things were offered to me that I needed, or didn't, and then it was over, and I couldn't really remember the piece of work as a whole, much less pass judgment on it. In a way I didn't see the piece of work at all-I just lived inside it for a while or something. So when people said that the music or the book or the film was "good" or "bad," I usually felt that I just didn't know what they were talking about.
♥ People did not go to concert halls to hear something called "singing." The fact that human beings have the need to hear different sorts of singing, that the appetite for opera cannot be satisfied at a concert of folk music, was recognized in the musical world by the invention of categories. Different sorts of singing even took place in different buildings, with different critics in attendance. But in theatre, obviously, and most particularly in my country, there were no generally accepted categories of plays, there were only "plays." People still had different sorts of appetites for plays, but they didn't know how to find what they wanted. There was a high frustration level and no way to remedy it, as if restaurants had been forbidden by law from announcing the type of food they served, and spaghetti-seekers had no choice but to try every restaurant in town until they hit on one with an Italian chef. And so there was a kind of critical chaos or critical vacuum. Individual audience members and individual critics each expressed and asserted their individual drives and feelings, their incoherent longings, as they made their way from play to play, and what resulted was like a bizarre sort of imitation of criticism, in which any criteria at all could be applied to any play at all-a "dream play" in the tradition of Strindberg could be angrily denounced because it lacked the qualities of a Broadway musical, or Thornton Wilder could be excoriated because he didn't write like Eugene O'Neil-and so no sort of consensus could ever be reached on anything, each "opinion" was canceled out by another, and no opinion could be taken seriously.
And that all felt rather agreeable to me, because it meant that no one in theatre would be held to account; if a person wrote a play, as opposed to a poem, for example, there was not going to be any way to prove, or even plausibly to argue, that what he wrote was not good, that what he wrote was in fact a "mistake." It was a field in which one might be left alone, and I leapt into it.
♥ The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre just didn't arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone so far as to see a play or two-well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. Having been exposed extensively to the rival storytelling mediums of television and film, most of my fellow-countrymen found it frankly rather peculiar to pay extra money to attend an event in which the faces of the actors could barely be seen, and where you had to strain to hear what on earth they were saying (despite the fact that they never stopped shouting, even when standing right next to each other). Theatre obviously was embarrassing. It was embarrassing from the first moment, because the actors were trying so hard to fool you, but you never were fooled. You never believed what they seemed to be begging you to believe. Despite the heavy frock coats and the funny hats under which you imagined them sweating, despite the recorded sounds of horses' hooves, sleighbells, and the cracking of the whip, when the actors walked off the stage, you never believed they were going to Kharkhov.
So the theatre-goers in the United States-the loyal followers of theatres, the ones who, despite everything, loved the theatre-the theatre-goers were an odd little circle, a funny old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well-worn copies of Kawabata and George Herbert. And of course, not anyone who was poor or desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle class. (People frequently insist, and I suppose I believe it, that in their own times the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles were part of the life of rich and poor alike, but times have changed, and we have to say that theatre today is very definitely not for everyone. Music is for everyone. Everyone, from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor, listens to music. But theatre is only for the middle class.)
♥ Well, I didn't expect to be understood, and I quickly realized that I;d bever be able to "make my living" as a eriter of plays (assuming as I did, without ever thinking about it, that my "living" obviously had to include at least the minuimum of bourgeois amenities-telephones, heating, "good food," etc.).
Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn't be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn't live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine's ballets? Frederick Wiseman's documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico's frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day's newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
♥ Well then, what was the outcome? Was the game lost or won? Were the plays worthwhile and valuable, or weren't they? Regrettably, I may never know. Freedom and self-confidence enabled me to write ambitious plays. I amused myself, and then I died, I suppose, with the results of the experiment still undetermined.
~~Myself and How I Got Into the Theatre.
♥ It is strange, then, to isolate the dialogue of a play in a book, and it's strange to read it-to sit somewhere alone and read it silently to yourself. Reading a recipe is not the same as eating a cake. Reading about love-making is not the same as making love.
And yet, on the other hand, one has to say that a written play can have a special magic of its own. Reading a recipe may only remind you of the cake that you wish you could have in front of you, but reading a play can be a rather complete experience. The written play has its own music, its own very pristine existence-words, thoughts, and spirit abstracted from the physical, abstracted from the bodies of actors and their travails through space. There are wonderful things that can happen in the mind of a reader that cannot happen to anyone watching actors in a play. Indeed, the actors are often aspiring, as they act, to approach, in physical reality, the experience they had originally when they themselves read the play-but, as the reading experience is in an entirely different realm, they can never quite manage to hit that target (just as writers may often, with an equal degree of un-success-for the very same reason-attempt to capture in words a powerful mood or a feeling that overwhelmed them in life.)
~~Reading Plays.
♥ Every day I wake up wondering what has happened to those early plays of mine in the intervening years. They haven't caught on, apparently, even after all this time. And the years I spent writing them-what were those years? Were they like the years that recovered alcoholics describe-"lost years" spent wandering in a desperate haze from one night's incomprehensible encounter with someone or other to the next night's horrible barroom brawl?
♥ Almost instantly, a man spoke up from the center of the auditorium. "Yes, I have a question," he said in a loud voice. "What was the point of that?" Now, let's note that his question could have meant two different things. He might have been wondering what the point was for us in making the film. Or he might have been asking what point there could possibly have been for him in watching it. But in a way, I feel that my whole life seems to revolve around the fact that I'm crawling through the streets every day unable to answer either version of that question about anything I do.
♥ I do like plays, though. There's something so chaotic about them. And I like to write the text that appears in a play, that is part of a play. For me, a play is a wonderful pile-uo of bodies, lights, sets, gestures, clothes, nudity, music, dance, and running through it all and driving it all is a stream of words, sentences. Words and sentences are (to me) aesthetic materials, and a purpose that I think one would have to call aesthetic can certainly be the governing element in writing a play. One plays with sentences the way a child plays with matches-because they're unpredictable. In fact, sentences make up a sort of jungle in which I seem to be living. And somehow an artistic object comes into being, that is, an object that exists for the purpose of being contemplated.
And the contemplation of an artistic object can induce a sort of daytime dream, one might say. And perhaps it's somewhat odd for a play to have that intention, at least in comparison to a painting, for example. Agnes Martin's paintings put the viewer into a trance, while Bertolt Brecht's plays were specifically designed to wake people up. But a play might possibly try to do both.
♥ And then, perhaps inevitably, centuries ago, analysts of art brought the concepts of "good" and "bad" into the conversation, and most of us, as irritable diners, frequently use this vocabulary in discussing our artistic meals, although it often merely adds to the prevailing confusion, because a parsnip is not really a "bad" carrot, it's a different vegetable.
♥ Dreams can help, although they don't make their points in a direct way, and sometimes no one can say for sure exactly what their points really are. Dreams can even agitate for change, or for a better world, sometimes simply by offering people a glimpse of something agreeable that might be pursued-or crystallizing into a vivid nightmare something awful that ought to be avoided. Dreams are actually involved in a serious battle. Despite a certain lightness in their presentation, they're not joking.
~~Aesthetic Preferences.
♥ Wallace Shawn: ..I don;t' think I really get the concept of "themes." So I'm not going to ask you questions like, What is your view of nothingness? because I don't get that, exactly.
Mark Strand: I don't get it either. And I'm not sure I could articulate a view of nothingness, since nothingness doesn't allow a description of itself. Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
♥ MS: You don't read poetry for the kind of truth that passes for truth in the workaday world. You don't read a poem to find out how to get on Twenty-fourth Street. You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, "I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were... thieves. And aren't we all thieves?" You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. But there is another type of poetry, in which the poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world. Wallace Stevens was the twentieth-century master of this. There's no other poetry that sounds like a Wallace Stevens poem. But then, there's nothing that sounds like a Frost poem, either. Or a Hardy poem. These people have created worlds of their own. Their language is so forceful and identifiable that you read them not to verify the meaning or truthfulness of your own experience of the world, but simply because you want to saturate yourself with their particular voices.
♥ MS: ..I mean, I like that, I like it in other people's poems when it happens. I like to be mystified. Because it's really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours, finally becomes the possession of the reader. I mean, in the act of figuring it out, of pursuing meaning, the reader is absorbing the poem, even though there's an absence in the poem. But he just has to live with that. And eventually it becomes essential that it exists in the poem, so that something beyond his understanding, or beyond his experience, or something that doesn't quite match up with his experience, becomes more and more his. He comes into possession of a mystery, you know-which is something that we don't allow ourselves in our lives.
WS: We don't?
MS: I mean, we live with mystery, but we don't like the feeling. I think we should get used to it. We feel we have to know what things mean, to be on top of this and that. I don't think it's human, you know, to be that competent at life. That attitude is far from poetry.
♥ MS: I mean, I think the reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn't try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for. It doesn't ask you to imagine a place in detail; it suggests, it suggests, it suggests again. I mean, as I write it. William Carlos Williams had other ideas.
♥ WS: When you say that when you write, language takes over, and then you follow it, you're implying that the experience of writing is one in which, at least to some extent, you're in a passive role, "Something is coming to you from somewhere, and you're receiving it. But where is it coming from? Is it just the unconscious?
MS: Poems aren't dreams. They just aren't. It's something else. People who write down their dreams and think they're poems are wrong. They're neither dreams nor poems.
♥ MS: I think a poet writes a poem not feeling that he must be understood on the first or second reading. He writes a poem hoping that the poem will be read more than once or twice, and its meaning will be revealed over the course of time, or its meaning will reveal itself over the course of time.
♥ MS: ..But, you know, I think if you try too hard to be immediately comprehensible to your audience, if you give too much to the moment, you're also giving too much to the status quo. The poet's obligation isn't to his audience, primarily, but to the language that he hopes he's perpetuating. And when you think of how long it takes us to understand each other, for example-and how much leeway we give other areas of knowledge in our lives-why can't we be a little more patient with poetry? The language of a poem is meant to be meditated on. You clear a psychic space for poetry. It's a space in which words loom large.
♥ MS: ..I mean, we can love a poem and not understand it, I think. There's no reason why we can't live with a poem that doesn't deliver meaning right away-or perhaps ever. You know, somebody should have asked the teacher, "What's the relationship between the meaning of a poem and the experience of a poem?"
♥ WS: But all the same, doesn't it sometimes bother you that millions of people don't revere you? I mean, don't you sometimes feel that you ought to be honored for your accomplishments everywhere you go? After all, you deserve it.
MS: Well, some people like my poetry a great deal. It's better than nobody liking it.
WS: But what about the millions of other people?
MS: There are a few people I know whose feeling about my poetry is the most important thing to me. It's as simple as that. I don't know many of the people who read my poems. I don't even know, when they read my poems, whether they like my poems. There's no way for me to know, so I can't worry about it.
♥ WS: But don't you find it sort of awful that our society doesn't even respect poetry enough to allow poets to support themselves through their writing?
♥ WS: If I may speak of you personally, it seems that, for better or worse, writing poetry is an essential part of your identity, your sense of yourself-am I right about that?
MS: ..I refuse to write if I feel the poems I'm writing are bad. My identity is not that important, finally. Not dishonoring what I consider a noble craft is more important. I would rather not write than write badly and dishonor poetry-even if it meant I wasn't properly myself. I mean, this sounds high and noble, but in fact, it's not. I love poetry. I love myself, but I think I love poetry as much as I love myself.
WS: You don't seem to share the attitude that some people have of, "Hey, I enjoy my hedonistic life of reading and writing, and I don't have the faintest idea whether what I do benefits society or not, and I couldn't care less."
MS: No. That's not my thing at all. I'm certain that what I do, and what other poets do, is important.
~~Interview with Mark Strand.
♥ For whatever reason, and I don't remember how it happened, I am now what people cal "sixty-four years old," and I have to admit that I started writing about sex almost as soon as I realized that it was possible to do so-and I still do it, even though I was in a way the wrong age then, and in a different way I guess I'm the wrong age now. Various people who have liked me or cared about me-people who have believed in my promise as a writer-have hinted to me at different times in my life that an excessive preoccupation with the subject of sex has harmed or even ruined my writing. They've implied that it was sad, almost pitiful, that an adolescent obsession-or maybe it was in fact a psychological compulsion-should have been allowed to marginalize what they optimistically had hoped might have been a serious body of work.
♥ Why is sex so interesting to write about? To some, that might seem like a rather dumb question. Obviously when someone interested in geology is alone in a room, he or she tends to think a lot about rocks. And I imagine that when many geologists were children, they put pictures having to do with rocks on their bedroom walls. And I would have to guess that geologists find it fun to sit at a desk and write about rocks. So, yes, I find it enjoyable. But apart from that, I still find myself wondering, "Why is it interesting to write about sex?"
One reason is that sex is shocking, yes, it's still shocking, after all these years-isn't that incredible? At least it's shocking to me. And I suppose I think it's shocking because, even after all these years, most bourgeois people, including me, still walk around with an image of themselves in their heads that doesn't include-well-that. I'm vaguely aware that whole going about my daily round of behavior, I'm making use of various mammalian processes, such as breathing, digesting, and getting from place to place by hobbling about on those odd legs we have. But the fact is that when I form a picture of myself, I see myself doing the sorts of things that humans do and only humans do-things like hauling a taxi, going to a restaurant, voting for a candidate in an election, or placing receipts in various piles and adding them up. But if I'm unexpectedly reminded that my soul and body are capable of being totally swept up in a pursuit and an activity that pigs, flies, wolves, lions, and tigers also engage in, my normal picture of myself is violently disrupted. In other words, consciously, I'm aware that I'm a product of evolution, and I'm part of nature. But my unconscious mind is still partially wandering somewhere in the early nineteenth century and doesn't' know these things yet.
♥ Sex is of course an extraordinary meeting-place of reality and dream, and it's also-what is not perhaps exactly the same thing-an extraordinary meeting-place of the meaningful and the meaningless. The big toe, for example, is one part of the human body, human flesh shaped and constructed in a particular way. The penis is another part of the body, located not too far away from the big toe and built out of fundamentally the same materials. The act of sex, the particular shapes of the penis and the vagina, are the way they are because natural selection has made them that way. There may be an adaptive value to each particular choice that evolution made, but from our point of view as human beings living our lives, the evolutionary explanations are unknown, and the various details present themselves to us as completely arbitrary. It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines containing pictures of breasts, but not magazines with pictures of knees or forearms. It can only be seen as funny that demagogues give speeches denouncing men who insert their penises into other men's anuses-and then go home to insert their own penises into their wives' vaginas! (One might have thought it obvious that either both of these acts are completely outrageous, or neither of them is.) And yet the interplay and permutations of the apparently meaningless, the desire to penetrate anus or vagina, the glimpse of the naked breast, the hope of sexual intercourse or the failure of it, lead to joy, grief, happiness, or desperation for the human creature.
Perhaps it is the power of sex that has taught us to love the meaningless and thereby turn it into the meaningful. Amazingly, the love of what is arbitrary (which one could alternatively describe as the love of reality) is something we human beings are capable of feeling (and perhaps even what we call the love of the beautiful is simply a particular way of exercising this remarkable ability). So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.
Yes, some people go through life astounded every day by the beauty of forests and animals; some are astounded more frequently by the beauty of art; and others by the beauty of other human beings. But science could one day discover that the ability to be astounded by the beauty of other human beings came first, and to me it seems implausible to imagine that these different types of astonishment or appreciation are psychologically unrelated.
♥ Sex seems capable of creating anarchy, and those who are committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to themselves that it doesn't even exist. My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people. Many of its readers might enjoy it much much more if it did, but those same readers still might not buy it if those images were in it, because if it contained such images it couldn't be the New York Times, it couldn't present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world-a world not ideal, but still good enough-which it's the function of the New York Times to present every day. Nudity somehow seems to imply that anything could happen, but the New York Times is committed to telling its readers that many things will not happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to think, and while problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers. The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know.
But perhaps it would be a good thing if people saw themselves as a part of nature connected to the environment in which they live. Sex can be a very humbling, equalizing force. It's often been noted that naked people do not wear medals, and weapons are forbidden inside the pleasure garden. When the sexuality of the terrifying people we call "our leaders" is for some reason revealed, they lose some of their power-sometimes all of it-because we're reminded (and strangely, we need reminding) that they are merely creatures like the ordinary worm or beetle that creeps along at the edge of the pond. Sex really is a nation of its own. Those whose allegiance is given to sex at a certain moment withdraw their loyalty temporarily from other powers. It's a symbol of the possibility that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in which we march.
~~Writing About Sex.