Question. What connects Modernism with big game hunting?
Answer. Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. What connects blowing your brains out, with bull fighting?
Answer, Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. What connects a bowl of soup with a dead shark?
Answer. Marcel Proust or. Ernest Hemmingway!
Question. Why do people think there is always a rational answer to a rational question?Answer. Ernest Hemmingway!!!
People will always deny the importance and even the existence of a feeling level in drama. My own sister-in-law stated a common view that you cannot mix funny and serious. She is a very intelligent person with a college degree, and understands the concept of the ‘tragi-comic’; it’s just that she wants her comedy straight. Likewise her tragedy. Her view is the conventional one. This though is brilliantly contradicted by the Simpsons, where comedy and ‘serious’ emotional moments are freely mixed, and has huge audiences with no one complaining. To re-state then my argument, people in general, deny the need for a feeling level in drama or entertainment in general. Either they jus flatly deny it, or they say that all that is required is efficiency, professionalism, and that it simply follows the recognised formula. On t.v. this would be something like ‘My Family’.In theatre it is something that is cleverly staged, the actors being brilliant at impersonating stereotypes or accents,, and that it must have some kind of relevance to some current issue, or be from a current text like a successful novel. This is the norm now in our ‘fringe’ theatre. The fact that plays we all love and admire like ‘Waiting For Godot’, The Chairs’, ‘Uncle Vanya,’ do not follow these rules or this formula, is just ignored. I think people are aware of it, they simply choose to ignore it in the interests of the all consuming need for ‘success’, and getting that much needed arts council grant. Look though at things from T.V. we love, like ‘Hancock’, ‘Dr Who’, ‘Python’, it’s the same story. These things do not follow the formula and they all have a distinct feeling level. But still, managements will always say, in order to get an audience you must do something formulaic. One-dimensional. Accessible. Entertaining in the slick clever sense of that. Because that’s the only thing people will pay for! But when theatre comes down to purely commercial considerations I think it means, as an audience, we have wandered from the path somewhat. Wandered into that sterile wilderness of the right-thinking 'entertainment' and P,C. theatre, if you can call it that. We skate over our sterile surface and the feeling depths are conveniently ignored. Is there anyone out there who really thinks that 2008 will produce a new 'Look back in anger' or on T.V. another 'Singing Detective'? (Of course you protest, but isn't it our choice about the kind of thing we want from theatre? Well yes. No one is demanding people accept anything at all. It is simply about our awareness of things. If we take a health analogy, you could say well, it's more comfortable to just sit around all day, which is true, no one is arguing about that, but would this lack of exercise really be good for your health??? ) So. Our theatre is bankrupt because we are bankrupt. Always selling out for a shot at Hollywood or a part at the R.S.C. in yet another re-hash of that great theatre deity SHAKESPEARE! Who was, and I mean this, the greatest writer what ever lived, and yet. Why is Shakespeare so popular with us luvvies? Answer. Because his work has a very definite FEELING LEVEL. It isn't just some rhetorical Elizabethan formula. What I am really saying is that at this moment in time, the power of social conditioning is very strong indeed. The pendulum has swung back from the open permissive 60's into the present moment's rigidity and conformity. At this moment, people are virtual sheep! No pun intended. And I am not saying we can change this. We can't. Seeking to actively change it is foolish. All we can do is become aware and then try to find others with a similar awareness. So that we could do something a tad more authentic, and then we could sleep easy, which is really all that counts, ain't it? But let's make another argument. For there are 'X' number good arguments why it is so imperative to understand this. DEPRESSION. THE 'd' WORD. Bad. Very sadly a friend of my partner committed suicide last week. This was a tragic waste of a young man who was creative and talented. The cause was depression. And what really is depression? It's what the word says. Depressed. Pressed down. Closed off. Not opened up. We deny or depress something and that give us a feeling of deadness, hopelessness, rigidity, and the consequent inability to embrace your feelings. It's really just the inability to open up to something, which is not 'material'. To go with something irrational. Spiritual. The result of our rigid commercial brainwashing, which says things can only be one way, so if you are depressed, you stay depressed. There is no hope! Sad. As Joseph Heller said: "I get the willies when I see closed doors." We should meditate deeply on that one. But what will be the stumbling block here is the simplicity of what I have just said. People do love to complicate things.
Never the less. It really is that simple. Remember. The 'experts' want you to believe it is complicated because that keeps them in a job. THINK. But when I use a word like spiritual you will think I am some sort of religous nut. No. I'm not. I'm a normal darling just like you. However. Due to our compartmentalised thinking, COMPARTMENTALISED, we don't feel that the question of the sacred or the spritual applies to something like depression. Or the theatre, for that matter, DARLING!. Well. I understand this. People feel fragmented. Unconnected. They don't feel connections between things in the same way they don't feel connected to say, the environment. Which is a pity. (Today I shall mainly be eating fruit! ((Fast Show.)) If you read 'the experts' of course you'd know, that the originsof theatre are religous. The Greek Theatre was a Religous festival. Not like Edinborough, eh? The stories in Greek theatre are about man's relationship to the Gods, or to that OTHER LEVEL, sort of above us or below us or something. If you look at boring, unreadable old Homer, these two levels are absolutely clear. Especially in the Illiad. (That's a book by him. Hint.)The Gods on Mount Olympus, watch the Greek war, like on T.V. and then zap down occasionally to interfere a bit. Men and Gods. Now. NOW. This is exactly like Waiting for Godot! Two distinct levels, but in 'Waiting For Godot', it's more modern. Here we got the 'real' level and the 'symbolic' level. The tramps on a road, that's real. The situation, a crossroads, at twilight, with a single tree, waiting for a mysterious man, that's SYMBOLIC.but in both things it's the way these two things interact, the Gods with man, and in Waiting For Godot, the way the real level interacts with the symbolic level, the interaction of these two levels, which is trying to get us to a third point. And what is that third point? Jones on the back row. Yes! The Feeling Level! That mysterious place where something magical happens, we hope. Well. It's definitely a complete mystery to most people. It's as if some bits in their brain are missing, or some strand of their d.n.a., because when you talk about stuff like this they stare at you live some kind of confused and very dumb animal. But not you dear! Oh no. Not you! So to recap. All of the above is only to try to make us luvvies think about how their could be more meaning in our present theatre and how we could put it there. If we wanted to. If, that is.
Going back to good old Shakespeare, we can see how aware he was of what I am banging on about in Loves Labours Lost. Here it constitutes the theme of the play! The King of Navarre and his 'mates' set up an Academe dedicated to pursuits of the mind alone, taking an oath to this effect. The joke is though that no matter how many oaths you take, the flesh has a habit of asserting itslef. Shakespeare is making fun of the stupidity of denying there is a feeling level to life, whilst at same time recognising that it is 'the norm'. He creates this dramatic action of the academe and the oaths in order to play out dramatically the consequences of this denial. Hopefully rather comic consequences. Although there is a sad note at the end. In other words the very idea of denying the feeling level is Th our greatest dramatist, quite preposterous. QUITE PREPOSTEROUS!!!! For what was Shakespeare? He was the ultimate 'all-feeling' man. He felt everything. Deeply. And in the plays, take away the language pyrotechnics, the brilliant stage business, and the narrative, and what have you got? People who feel! Lear is angry. Hamlet is depressed. Lady M. is ambitious and a bit inhuman. Claudio, in Measure for Measure, is afraid. Fearful. And, AND, they all feel in relation to other things. For Macbeth it's the uncanny. Lear it's the Gods. Hamlet it's court society and family. And it's this and this alone, that gives the MAGIC to his work. Without it it would be dead. Flat. Academic. Now. Here's another fact, Mr Stephen (know-it-all) Fry! One thing that inspired the renaissance and in particular Shakespeare was Hermetic Literature. This is the Greco-Roman way of gnosis found in the tractate attributed to Hermes Trigmesgistos the Greek incarnation of his Egyptian counterpart the God Thoth.
Now. Sounds like rocket science but it aint. It was just that they read some books of weird sort of philosophy and it made sense to them. They thought it was cool!
* * * * *
Ask Atum
To flash a ray of illumination
Into your awareness
Giving you the power to grasp in thought
His sublime being.
For the invisible
May only be seen with thoughts
Which are themselves, invisible.
* * * * *
You have to remember the Elizabethans still had one foot in Rationalism and the other foot in Magic, so this kind of thing made more sense to them than it does to us. And what is 'Magic'?, apart from the name of the new Springsteen album? Eh? Boil magic down to its essential component and it's like a seance. Contacting of other 'levels', like say, the 'spirit world'. And what chracterisies these other levels is you can't rationalise them. They aint material. (n.b.wether they are what people believe them to be is another question.) It's like being aware of people's shadows. Does a shadow have any material existence? And yet, would you deny that it does exist? This last argument could be put straight into Hamlet. But what we are talking about is the Occult. A thing popularised somewhat in last 100 years. But still a thing which is marginal. Concerned with minorities. Something that most people can't see the damn point in. Let's be honest. Going back to good old Hermes, he neatly puts the root problem. He says, if by magic you could see things the way I do, or the way the Gods do, then you'd know the meaning of the word sublime, which is, wait for it Godot! that everything we so rigidly insist on in terms of what absolutely neccessary for new theatre is nonsense. A product of our ignorance of the invisible element, simply because it is invisible which think, don't meant it aint there! OR! OR! Put another way, it's like all those thousands of directors you've worked with who were so very focussed on getting what THEY wanted and who really didn't give a damn about what YOU were feeling. Not a damn. Can you understand that? That you have suffered because of this? You have. Don't look at me that way. I'm telling you! Well. O.k. Maybe you still don't get it. Oh hum.
