There remain three more uncomfortable choices for Irina.
The fifth uncomfortable choice:
creativity or curiosity
Renouncing creativity seems heresy to the artist. However, trying to be creative is disastrous. Being consciously creative is closely related to concentrating. Curiosity is more liberating; curiosity is connected to attention and the target. Trying to be creative has a nasty habit of sending us home.
Of course all human beings are creative, but our creativity is a symptom and not a cause. We do not control our own creativity, any more than we can control our feelings. We can, however, control what we do.
The sixth uncomfortable choice:
originality or uniqueness
Originality is another quality that we believe we can control. However, originality is not a cause of life; it is only one of life’s many symptoms. In a way, our creativity and originality are none of our business. Irina is unique. Irina is irreplaceable. Nobody can play Juliet like Irina, because nobody can see quite like Irina. When Irina sees through Juliet’s eyes it will be a unique pair of Juliet’s eyes. Every actor who plays Juliet will see through a different pair of eyes, because each actor is a different and unique human being. Moreover, each time that Irina performs her role, so Juliet will also be slightly different. We can each see an infinity of different things; and these infinities are infinitely different. One look up on a clear night makes such numbers seem less preposterous.
On the other hand, if Irina tries to create an original Juliet, a Juliet who tries to break with tradition, she will block herself. Trying to create something original is doomed to failure. For whenever we try to be original, we end up looking exactly like everyone else who is trying to be original. We produce work that is born dead and decomposing things look increasingly similar.
Whenever we try to be original it is evidence that we have lost confidence in our uniqueness. We may fear our uniqueness might not be there when we need it, or, what is more sinister, we fear that what is different about us may actually be inferior. Particularly when young, uniformity can seem reassuring. But uniformity is impossible. Uniformity is only an ideal, always a dangerous one. But it shouldn’t frighten us too much as it has never actually existed. Like attention or presence, uniqueness is given to us, it has to be accepted and is out of our control. Like anything else out of our control, we suspect uniqueness simply because it just might let us down. So we invent an imaginary substitute, a synthetic dummy, which will be our personal creature. Hello originality, goodbye uniqueness.
If Irina sees her targets specifically, openly, and accepts that whatever she sees has a potential to go well or badly, then she will reveal a Juliet who is utterly unique. However, if Irina decides to create an original Juliet, she will create something that cannot breathe; and, as said before, all dead things start to look the same. True conformity starts only when we rot.
Consequently, any pressure put on Irina to create something ‘new’ is catastrophic. The more we strive to be original, the more we obliterate our inherent uniqueness. The more we try to be ‘new’, the more repetitive and reactionary we become. We are new. We cannot be otherwise. We have no business trying to be anything. We can be nothing at all by an effort of will. Creation renews us and our surroundings every second of every day whether we like it or not. Newness happens to us without our permission.
Although we are out of control, we like to give ourselves the illusion of control; and so we attempt to ape creation. We also are going to make things new. Our vanity is not born of arrogance, but of fear.
I have seen it all before
If Irina hears ‘I have seen it all before!’, she should consider less the criticism, and more the critic. ‘I have seen it all before!’ exposes the observer, not the observed. When the ‘I’ no longer sees well, everything does indeed end up seeming uniform. Sometimes everything else does start to look alike, but it is not the fault of everything else. The more we die inside, the more we see death outside; and death, the specific-hater, always homogenises.
The problem does not lie in the outside world, which could never achieve homogeneity even if it wanted to. The problem lies in our control, in what we will and will not let ourselves see. If ever we start to feel that we have ‘seen it all before’ we should try to sneak up and catch ourselves unawares. Then we will see that the problem is not in the outside world, but originates from inside ourselves; we are losing our curiosity. Lack of curiosity is a symptom of a secret suicide; the only forensic evidence is not an empty pill-bottle, but a persistent drive to find something new.
Everything that lives is always new. Human beings depend on that newness. We are an intrinsic and irreplaceable part of endlessly renewing creation. The new already is, we cannot create it.
If Irina feels she has to serve up something new to the director or to the audience or to her colleagues or to herself, then she will manufacture a dead performance. Ironically, this still-born performance will seem strangely familiar to everyone, including Irina. If Irina sees through Juliet’s eyes what Juliet must see, then Irina’s own concealable but indestructible uniqueness will illuminate every corner of her performance. Whatever Irina sees is new. Whatever Irina tries to make new is as old as death itself.
The seventh uncomfortable choice:
excitement or life
If Irina panics that her performance is dead, then she must go back to the target. The target is the source of all her energy. It is fatal if Irina tries to excite herself into life.
We have imaginations to connect us with the outside world. When we fear our dependence on unpredictable creation, we use excitement to impersonate life. Life happens, and we are part of it. Life happens to us when it wants to. However, we do not like life as much as we suppose, because it could drop us at any moment. So again we invent a more obedient substitute.
And we manufacture excitement. Excitement is something we can do to ourselves. We can provide for ourselves. We don’t need to depend on anyone or anything to give it to us. Excitement is a medicine we prescribe for ourselves. Sometimes, however, life is exciting. When Irina sees something utterly alive in rehearsal or performance, she will flush with life and the effect will be thrilling. But as we know, if she tries to revisit that state the next day, it will have vanished. Because what happened was never a state, it was a relationship, a direction. All states die; and they rot fast.
If Irina feels she has to make an exciting choice, she will invariably block herself. The search for the new and exciting severs our connection to life. The scramble seems to be about the outside world, as we rip through experience, frantic to grab that elusive high. However, this scramble tries to find in the outside world what we fear we lack within. The scramble for the new and exciting has secret links to the mafia of self-dislike.
This tear through sensation produces one strange effect. All at once we start to resemble everyone else on the same stampede; our uniqueness gets trampled beneath the sightless hooves. We are different and unique in our enthusiasms and generosities; but we all toe a strict party line when we complain that: ‘I have seen it all before.’ The hunt for the exciting and the new makes reactionaries of us all. Seeing things is life enough.
A digression: spontaneity
The performance that seems unspontaneous seems dead; even the Noh master must in some way seem spontaneous. ‘Spontaneous’, however, is not the key word; the key word is ‘seems’. Being present may be crucial for the actor, but to know total presence may well be an unachievable ideal. Presence is one of the many gifts we can neither manufacture nor earn. Pushkin’s Salieri raged that Mozart had done nothing to earn his genius. We cannot earn our gifts, but we can learn not to slam the door in their faces.
‘Spontaneity’ seems to be connected to presence: ‘If I am present, I will react in the moment, and so I will be spontaneous’ – and certainly, when blocked, Irina will feel deeply un-spontaneous. However, few commands curdle more than ‘Be spontaneous!’ – although ‘Don’t be self-conscious!’ comes pretty close.
It may reassure Irina to remember that however present we may be, no one is ever entirely consciously spontaneous. Insofar as a reaction is conscious, it isn’t spontaneous. True presence may, God knows, have occurred in a human being; total conscious spontaneity never has. The psychopath rarely springs from the dock to strangle the judge, and when he does, he makes a decision. On the whole, human beings do not lose their tempers with those who are far more powerful. It is astonishing how we can spontaneously yell at someone who is small and on the other side of a windscreen, and miraculous how spontaneously we lose that spontaneity when all seven feet of that someone swings open the car door. Whenever a bully crumbles, his ‘spontaneous’ wildness freezes instantly into a highly trained and vigilant circumspection. It is amazing what sophistication of control we can suddenly develop.
But what does happen when we lose our tempers? An unpopular assertion that the actor can use is that we always decide when we lose our tempers. This may seem to contradict all that has been said about the target: ‘I don’t decide anything, it is the target that makes me do it.’ However, the expression ‘losing my temper’ needs some unpicking first. ‘Temper’ is fairly straightforward, meaning balance of mood. We have little or no control over how angry we may suddenly become, but we always decide what we do, within the constraints of the given circumstances. ‘Losing temper’ implies loss, loss of control. To lose something always has an active element.
Active loss
Even when loss is used in terms of grief, there is an active element. To lose a friend, who suddenly dies, seems entirely inactive. ‘I didn’t want him to die.’ But we need to see this loss, or we live in denial. Seeing is active (as is denial). Grief and mourning demand recognition of loss, a letting go, and this part is active. We must do something to bid farewell.
Even the most hot-headed take a nanosecond between hearing the insult and throwing the punch. Suspects only resist arrest if they feel they have a chance of escape. When we see one man struggling in the middle of ten police, it is rarely because he is optimistic; normally he is defending himself from being hurt.
We tend not to resist against the odds, and always choose the battles we fight. Is there an exception with someone who is self-destructive and argues and fights with everyone, the braggart who, as my father would have quipped, has his own private graveyard? But such a person somewhere, sometime, will have negotiated an internal deal with himself to be always arguing and thereby alone and, so, at least un-disappointed. He is still getting what he thinks he wants. For all his fury, he is still calculating.
Calculation
Calculation may be unattractive, but everybody calculates. The baby’s calculation for food or attention delights and amazes the young parent. We invent concepts of innocence, wildness and spontaneity because plotting shames us. We just don’t like it that ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all’.
It is sobering to remember that displays of uncontrolled and spontaneous temperament normally conceal ultra-control. An actor famous for cocaine binges and assorted madcap wildnesses was discovered late at night on stage, measuring the distance from ashtray to cigarette box with a ruler.
Spontaneity does not quite happen in the way it claims. What does happen when I lose my temper? I see something that enrages me, and I decide what to do. The process may happen at such speed that it is barely conscious. I might decide to lick my wounds or kick the cat; in short I decide whether or not to lose my temper. I may decide unconsciously and in a split second to lash out ‘spontaneously’ and sod the consequences. I may feel the adrenalin of fury pump my temples, but unconsciously and at lightning speed I will decide and control whether or not to use that ‘out-of-control’ energy.
It is a note that some actors have found useful, if inexplicable, that: ‘You see something, and then you do something else.’ Of course, that something else has to be seen as well!
We do not do what we see. We see something and then we do something as a result of what we see. Every thought, of course, is a target. Every thought is a new thing seen.
A digression: aesthetics and anaesthetics
We use anaesthetics to take away pain. And in part they work; they take away our sensation of pain. But anaesthetics do not remove the cause of pain, and pain is important because it tells us something is wrong. If fire didn’t hurt, many of us would have no fingers and would not thank whoever had painted our tiny hands with painkiller. The anaesthetic cannot remove the danger of fire, merely the most useful symptom of a burn.
Civilisation excels at manufacturing anaesthetics. However, the causes of pain have not fundamentally changed since we became a species; we fall ill, we get lonely, we feel hungry, we feel cold, we feel sad, we feel unwanted, we feel unloved, we feel abandoned, we feel ignored, we feel insignificant, and though we must die, we don’t want to.
If the luxuries of modern life fail to insulate us we can still avoid unwanted sensations by tampering with the wiring. We redirect the imagination so that instead of connecting us to reality the imagination actually severs us from the real world. The imagination degrades into the fantasy and only ensures that we no longer recognise the pain that we are, in fact, feeling.
The word aesthetic comes from the Greek root meaning ‘things as we see them’, in other words, ‘targets’. Anaesthetic can therefore be construed as: ‘without targets’. We devote a lot of time and money to reassuring ourselves with anaesthetics of every sort. Indeed one of the main reasons we go to the theatre is to witness characters and situations in which the anaesthetic does not work so well. One of the similarities between Tragedy and Comedy is that both reveal the anaesthetic wearing off.
Civilisation always seeks control of our perceptions, and like the rest of us, Irina is anaesthetised to a greater or lesser degree for the rest of her life. But the characters that Irina plays may see a lot more than we do. We desperately need Irina to see, however briefly, a more real world, where joy and pain are felt for what they are.