All this is grim news. What can the frightened actor try to do? Unfortunately, ‘trying to do’ is itself part of the problem. ‘Trying’ leads to concentrating and . . . ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’ We need to think laterally, because Fear has us careering in a circle, increasingly blind to the outside world.
First we must keep cool and remember. The rules of the target will hold good for you however much you try to break them. The rules are there for you, not you for the rules. You can try to defy them, but you cannot change them. They are beyond your control; and only because they are separate from you, outside you and free from you, can the rules help you.
Now they come to the rescue.
The rules are inseparable, but if block strikes it helps to remember them in a sequence, in order to separate one fear from its multiplying other:
1: There is always a target
How can this help practically, when you are blocked? Well, this must also mean that you cannot be alone, however hard you try. Even if you abandon the target, it won’t abandon you. There are plenty of targets out there; all you have to do is see them. You cannot annihilate the target; you cannot destroy the world.
2: The target exists outside,
and at a measurable distance
There is a measurable distance between you and the target. You and the target cannot fuse. You are separate. You cannot find the target inside you. We may not like the taste of this rule, but the medicine works, particularly when inside seems to be in darkness or chaos. Space and time do exist. Fear cannot destroy them. Fear pretends that space and time are our enemies. Indeed this may be the case for the characters: perhaps Romeo and Juliet dread separation and crave total, unachievable union.
Bad news and good news
This is the first example of a useful principle: bad news for the character is always good news for the actor.
There is a distance in space between Juliet and Romeo. When bidding farewell, she may yearn to cling to Romeo. But for Irina, the indestructible distance between Juliet and Romeo is immensely useful. For Irina can reach and reach to prevent her new lover from leaving. This unbridgeable distance may be Juliet’s enemy, but it is Irina’s friend. For Juliet may want there to be no distance. Juliet may want to unite with Romeo, but she can’t, and not just because the balcony gets in the way. Romeo is different, separate and therefore out of her control. Juliet can reach towards Romeo; she can try to bridge that gap between their bodies and their minds. But Juliet will fail; whatever Juliet wants will always be just out of her reach. But Juliet’s frustration is Irina’s hope. For Irina, on the contrary, this distance is the best possible news, an all-important space that Juliet can keep trying to span, and keep failing. This enabling distance is crucial for it ensures that Irina can let Juliet try as hard as she likes, and Irina can rest assured that Juliet can never accomplish what Juliet wants.
This enabling distance provides the actor with an obstacle to overcome. If there were no obstacle to overcome, there would be no quest. No quest: death. Every living moment contains an element of quest. Irina can rely on the unalterable rule that there is me and there is the other and that there is a measurable, changeable yet ineffaceable distance between the two of us.
It may help to unknot the following principle: the actor can never complete what the character wants because the character can never complete what the character wants. In other words, Irina can play the scene for all she is worth and Juliet will still have something left to need and some distance left to be covered. Juliet never gets all that she wants. Juliet never achieves her goal, or finishes her journey. Incompleteness or separation may be the character’s enemy, but they are always the actor’s friend.
The point and the path
Creation keeps us apart, however much we may try to unite. We are not fused, and can never become fused. Fear often makes us believe we are fused. We must never forget that a specific distance always separates us from the target, and this gap can never be destroyed. The space opens a distance, a distance that enables. As soon as there is a distance, there opens a potential path.
And even the most rudimentary path has two points, the beginning and the end: me, and where I can go. Fusion paralyses; distance moves.
As the God of Genesis cleft the abyss into night and day, so we can split the scary nothing into two points. Where there are two points there is a possible path, and we can always imagine moving along a path. And as soon as we can move, we can also breathe.
Belief in the specific distance helps conquer the two great symptoms of Fear. ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘I can’t move’ are the twin products of Fear, and they go into business to manufacture Fear themselves. Fear then sells the franchise to make little factories to create more of himself; like a retrovirus that confuses the protecting cell into behaving as a destroyer.
3: The target exists before you need it
We cannot create a target. The target does not need to be created. As soon as we feel lost, the target is already waiting to be found. As we have seen, this does not mean that a target can exist in the past. Nothing exists in the past because the past does not exist. This is comforting because the target is ready and waiting for you to see it. The target is already there on the surface; it is not buried in some deep place where only clever people know to dig.
When I am asked what I would like to eat tomorrow, my eyes focus, shift and refocus trying to discover what is already there. All I have to do is find it. I have to find tomorrow’s beer and pizza in the ‘there and now’. I have to see what is already there. What I see is already there, I cannot fabricate it. I can neither create nor invent; I have to find.
4: The target is always specific
Fear attempts to blur the outlines of what we see. Fear smudges the differences between things. Fear insinuates that we must never see things too clearly otherwise we will see the bogeyman. Of course, this is a lie. Fear makes us scared to see the specific, because the specific will diminish him. We know then that what we are looking for is specific.
If the face of the thing that is feared seems to have a smudged outline, we need to brace ourselves and study the scary blur. Oddly, we will find that the face never seems to get any clearer. The more we examine it, the more the face smudges itself to avoid scrutiny and exposure. Indeed, were we to dare analyse the face, it would disintegrate in our hands like a mask made of dust.
5: The target is always transforming, and
6: The target is always active
As we have seen, the target must always be changing and the target must always be doing something active. If it doesn’t change or if it is completely still, it’s dead. If it can’t move, it isn’t a target. So the blocked actor knows to search for something that is:
specific
moving
outside
changing
active
waiting to be discovered
needing to be changed
This helps Irina narrow the field. She knows now not to look for something that is:
general
still
internal
constant
passive
needing to be created
unchangeable
– which is precisely what Fear has led her to expect.
But what happens if the target appears to vanish? What happens if the target seems to abandon me to the clutches of Fear? If all six rules fail, then what is to be done? Fear has made the specific seem general, movement frozen, and all distance in time and space welded into a new and horrible alloy. More devastatingly, Fear has split the saving present into a delusory double, the past and the future. What can I do?
Well, you can copy the enemy’s strategy. Fear uses the delusory split into two, so why not you? You must first find a target, the ‘night’ or the ‘future’, or Romeo, in panic anything will have to do – and then split it. These are ‘the stakes’.