Tag: Philsophy

Samuel Johnson on Reality in Theater

Theatre is powerful because it works in exact concordance with the way our heads work (not the way reality works). To quote Samuel Johnson (via Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human): “Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities but because they bring realities to mind.” The truthfulness of the theatre is determined by the audience. Theatre is consensus. And that consensus is a function of characters who speak and act the way characters in our collective head speak and act. In other words: archetypes. Success can only be measured by the ratio of what I (the artist) see, versus what the audience thinks they see. Marcel Duchamp, a great lover of science, suggested this ratio. He said the closer to one-to-one this ratio becomes, the greater the artist. But of course, no one can measure such a ratio.

Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
Eric Bogosian
From the end section – BUILDING CHARACTER MY METHOD FOR CREATING THE SOLOS

Stick Your Hand into the Fire – Reality Check

Michael told Bo that there was no way he was going to watch a film set in a burn unit because every morning he opened his eyes and found his room on fire. That was when he explained about his schizophrenia. Every morning, he told Bo, he lay in bed paralyzed with fear until his father called and told him the flames weren’t real. His father didn’t just tell him; he proved it. Ordering Michael to put out a hand and touch the fire, he asked him what he felt.

“Does it burn?” his father asked. “Does it burn? No? Good!”

Then he ordered Michael to do the same with his other hand. Again, the call-and-response: “Is it hot? Does it burn? Does it burn?” When Michael admitted it did not, his father told him, “That’s because it isn’t real.” He got him to sit up and put one foot on the floor. Never mind the flame. Even if he had to lift his leg with both hands and force it down, he had to put his foot on the floor, then tell Chuck if the floor was hot. “Is it hot? That’s right. Now the other foot!”

Michael slipped into his father’s voice to tell the story, putting on the bullying Brooklyn accent like a bomber jacket, adding dramatic urgency and with it that suggestion of mastery that comes with a performance, even if he was performing a terrible reality that tyrannized him.

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
Jonathan Rosen

Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain – Big Ideas podcast

Renowned British psychiatrist and author, Iain McGilchrist, delivers a lecture entitled Our Mind at War. Drawing from research in his latest book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Dr. McGilchrist explains how an overreliance on ways of looking at the world characteristic of the left hemisphere may be partially responsible for the increase in mental illnesses globally, including depression. His lecture was produced in collaboration with the Literary Review of Canada.

BigIdeas

In Praise of Self Pity

The tears shed by the audience at a Victorian melodrama come under the heading of a good cry. They might be called the poor man’s catharsis, and as such have a better claim to be the main objective of popular melodrama than its notorious moral pretensions. Besides referring to superficial emotion, the phrase “having a good cry” implies feeling sorry for oneself. The pity is self-pity. But, for all its notorious demerits, self-pity has its uses. E. M. Forster even says it is the only thing that makes bearable the feeling of growing old—in other words, that it is a weapon in the struggle for existence. Self-pity is a very present help in time of trouble, and all times are times of trouble.

Once we have seen that our modern antagonism to self-pity and sentiment goes far beyond the rational objections that may be found to them, we realize that even the natural objections are in some measure mere rationalization. Attacks on false emotion often mask a fear of emotion as such. Ours is, after all, a thin-lipped, thin-blooded culture. Consider how, in the past half-century, the prestige of dry irony has risen, while that of surging emotion has fallen. This is a cultural climate in which a minor writer like Jules Laforgue can rate higher than a major one like Victor Hugo. Or think of our changed attitude to death. Would any age but this receive the death of admired persons “with quiet understatement”? We may think that Mr. Auden pours his heart out in his good poem on the death of Yeats, but just compare Mr. Auden’s poem with the product of more old-fashioned culture, say, with Garcia Lorca’s “Lament for the Death of Ignacio Mejias”! Would even Lorca’s title be possible in English? Is lamenting something we can imagine ourselves doing? On the contrary we modernize the Greek tragedies by deleting all variants of “woe is me.” If Christ and Alexander the Great came back to life, we would teach them to restrain their tears.

Once I did see death done justice to. An Italian actor came on stage to announce the death of a colleague. He did indeed lament. He shook, he wept, he produced streams of passionate rhetoric, until the audience shook, and wept, and lamented with him. Now that is self-pity, certainly. One is not sorry for a corpse; one is sorry for oneself, deprived; and in the background is the fear of one’s own death. But so much the better for self-pity. The experience was had, not refused.

The Life of the Drama, Eric Bentley
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