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Thom Pain (based on nothing)as seen at Dobama Theatre on 4 February 2007.

I think the biggest thing of interest to me about seeing Will Eno’s Thom Pain, as opposed to reading it, was the interpretation made in the presentation; or, using the more cliche lingo, the "choices" that were made.

In the post performance discussion, Scott Plate said that he and Joel Hammer had made decisions regarding the character that were different from the New York show. This was based on descriptions provided by Tony Brown, who apparently saw the original show in New York. Brown said that the character/interpretation was somewhat vicious in his incarnation and distant. The performance was menacing and left the audience with a distinct and pervasive feeling of having been ravaged.

The performance I witnessed was that of a more neurotic character, a man who was decidedly in mental chaos: clear and articulate, piercing and insightful; then muddy and worried and uncertain. I found the character, as presented at Dobama, to be worthy of empathy and concern: a human character worthy of compassion.

In seeing the performance, as again opposed to reading the script, I was surprised at how clearly the "spine" of the work became clear: the failure to connect with the family, the loss of the dog, the failure to connect with society, the loss of the lover. These points of the play stood out very well, in my mind–where in the text they were somewhat more difficult to discern. In seeing the piece I found it highly compelling. Additionally, the intentionally theatrical moments of the performance: where the character addresses and interacts with the audience, were very real and had a tantalizing influence on me as a spectator: even though I knew they were coming. In fact, I found this the most peculiar part of the experience: knowing full well something was coming and the nature of that something and yet still being affected by it.

I also noted that one of my favorite lines was botched; but I gained a completely new appreciation for one line that still haunts me, and likely always will. The line that was botched was: "And somewhere in the same night another youth bleeds between her legs, wondering what for, sure she’s done something wrong, unsure whom to tell." I was very disappointed because I thought it so profound. It was either botched or cut. I found it profound and disturbing all at once, along with the line that has become my favorite: "What a surprise to have a body." I am not sure why these two lines resonate so deeply with me, but I will try to put a finger on it. I think it is Eno’s very precise association of bodily events with the mind’s judgment of the self. The mind searches the universe incessantly to make connections between things. That is what makes great artists and inventors and businessmen and–well, any great person–great–is their ability to connect things that are unconnected. It is the true act of creativity in the world. A person can do something or create something or write something never being sure that it hasn’t been thought or written or created by someone else before. But the connection of two disparate things: two things that have not been connected is an original act; unique in that it creates something larger than itself and releases a new energy into the world. The mind is always trying to connect things: connect, connect, connect, connect–what does this mean, how does this relate to this other thing–why me? What have I done? And that is what is haunting about Eno’s lines. The mind judges. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding from your “secret parts” (to use the Medieval phrasing) is very bad. There is no reason for it. The mind is magical. The mind connects unrelated things to create meaning. That is magic. That is why science will always loose to the superstitious mind. We are hard wired to believe, to our souls, things that are refutable: but to the mind as hard as scientific fact will ever be. To the primitive mind, a yellow bird pressed against the skin will take the yellow evil of jaundice away with it out the window. It makes perfect sense. If it doesn’t work, then it is not a reflection on the concept, but on the recipient. The girl lying in the dark will associate this bad thing happening to her with some act that she must have committed. Somewhere a brooding justice falls on her for what she has thought, or may have done, or may have thought, once, of doing. Blood doesn’t just happen. There is a reason. And in the illogical darkness: the murk of the primitive jungle in our unconscious: judgment. Taboo.

I know this feeling. Who doesn’t? And I am moved, wrenched to think of that girl in that darkness fearing that she has done something wrong when the body is just doing what it does to advance the species. Oh, how science takes the magic from us. How clinical and removed it is. Cut off your arm and it becomes a thing. The sensation it has provided you is gone; the utility of movement is lost. Science. Of science, as Yeats says, more poetically than I can ever dare imagine:

from The Song of the Happy Shepherd

"… Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass –
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs – the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth."

I find that I am strangely drawn to this play. I enjoy it. The more I think about it the more I find myself discovering. These are excellent qualities in anything. But I also don’t like that I am drawn to it. My mind rebels against these postmodern plays, or these post post modern absurdist plays. The plays that all the "hot" writers write; the "up-and-coming" writers. They seem to me hyperpersonal. It is as if each is vomiting his or her neuroses. I feel at once like quoting a Neil LaBute character and a character of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There’s an odd combination. In The Shape of Things, Adam says, outraged at the end,

I’ve completely missed the point here, and somehow puking up…all your own shitty little neuroses all over people’s laps is actually art–

Nick Carraway, at the beginning of The Great Gatsby remarks,

I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accuses of being a politician, because I was so privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon…

I feel often that I am somewhere in between these poles when it comes to "new" theatre. I am pulled constantly between the poles of expressing myself and hoping that my own little, neurotic experience is universal enough that it connects with people; or expressing myself through attempts at displaying universal, epic themes, and flinching away from the postmodern accusation that you cannot generalize anymore–that horse is dead and beaten and buried.

I am clearly moving into a new phase in my own writing. I know this. I can feel it, and feel the urge to explore. This is good. I just wonder if it will lead me to a clearing in the jungle that no one wants to visit. A place that is not only unremarkable, but perhaps, repulsive.

That is to say, to sort of crystallize this, what is theatre today? What is the point of it, what is the goal of it, what should it be? I am torn between my traditional expectations of the Aristotelian model: the proud and noble character who experiences a reversal, fails, repents, and is destroyed in front of everyone; to the now post, postmodern offerings of completely destroyed personalities offering up their dreadful experiences as something universal. One could argue that it is a reversal of what is right (or is it just beginning at a different point?). I am reminded of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when the resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the resentment of those beings who are prevented from a genuinely active reaction and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant self-affirmation, slave morality from the start says No to what is “outside,” “other,” “a non-self”. And this No is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value–this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back into itself–that is inherent in resentment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all. Its action is basically reaction.

That is, what has been viewed as good, right, and moral is viewed by those who are disaffected as evil, wrong, and immoral. Hence, the inversion begins. I am torn by this and think often that what I am seeing in modern theatre is nothing more than the utter dissolution of anything noble or (hating to use the loaded word) moral. And I don’t know that I mean that in a religious judgmental sort of way, but a more humanistic way: that we elevate what is debased and dismiss what attempts to lift.

Well, there is no easy way to wrap this commentary up. So, it will be left as it is, with that flat and petered-out ending. These are my thoughts, though, on the 19th of February, 2007. Where they shall lead me on the 20th, and 21st, and all days after I must wait, like everyone else, to see!

I have been reading The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, by way of introduction to Jung’s ideas. 

I have always been fascinated by Joseph Campbell and Campbell makes frequent reference to Jung and the notion of the collective unconscious, that the “universal similarity of human brains leads to the universal possibility of a uniform mental functioning.  This functioning being the collective psyche.” p95 Which in turn leads to the “interesting fact that the unconscious processes of the most widely separated people and races show a quite remarkable correspondence…in the extraordinary but well-authenticated analogies between the forms and motifs of autochthonous myths.” p94-5.  Thus Campbell’s book the Hero with a Thousand Faces and so forth.

But what really got me going on this subject this morning was that I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about human memory and computer memory and neural nets and moving the mind into a machine; partly based on strange dreams I’ve had, a screenplay I’m writing, and various pieces of non-fiction and science fiction that I’ve been reading.  The thought that got me going was the similarity between the notion of the Borg in Star Trek with the collective unconscious–rather, the Borg being a sort of mechanical incarnation of the idea of the collective unconscious: that is, one underlying level of intelligence that informs all collective “subscribers.”

I recently read the book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, a read I highly recommend to anyone seeking intelligent, thoughtful notions of what technology, human ambition, and the future holds.  Kurzweil himself has spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and detailing the future merging of human and machine intelligence–as well as the physical (virtual?) body.  At some point, for instance, the bionics implied by the The Six Million Dollar Man will not only not be out of the question but will be everyday facts.  Blind people will see and the deaf will hear via neural implants; human memory will be vastly augmented with neural implants that may very well contain the entire recorded history of humanity.

I was also thinking about the relationship between the function of myth and ritual in society and the collective unconscious and the social forces represented by the Borg in Star Trek The Next Generation.  After all, the function of myth is the oral or written representation of ritual and the function of ritual is to create the mythic “all-time, ever-where” in the present–the universally present moment, a sort of ontological trick of the drum-beaten, fire-lit eternal moment.  Specifically, the function of ritual is to make uniform the behavior of people in a society, so that all are “programmed” with the same written set of instructions and behaviors and directed toward a uniform goal.

This got me thinking about an Australian aboriginal ritual that I read about somewhere, in Iron John or Primitive Mythology or in The Golden Bough; hold on, I’ll look real quick…

Primitive Mythology p88 “The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonies of their religious calendar.”  Why these rites are so important, what happens if they don’t occur, and how this deficiency is everywhere present in America is the subject of an entirely separate conversation.

In the ritual discussed here, I will paraphrase to spare you all, the essence is that the boy(s) undergo a ritual in which he is marked, usually physically (broken tooth, circumcision, etc.), so that he 1) can never be the same child that he was, and 2) so that he now physically is like or similar to the tribal hero or ancestor.  With the Central Australian Aranda, as Campbell points out, it is thought that “children born to women are the reappearances of beings who lived in the mythological age, in the so-called ‘dream time,’ or altjeringa…” the point being to expand the boy’s ego “beyond the biography of the physical individual…joining him to his eternal portion, beyond time.” p89  More specifically, and to my point, is this “in the ceremonials that he will presently observe the tasks proper to his manhood will in every detail be linked to mythological fantasies of a time-transcending order, so that not only himself but his whole world and his whole way of life within it will be joined inseparably, through myths and rites, to the field of the spirit.” p89

So, I was thinking how like in many respects the concept of the function of the Borg is to the function of myth and ritual, in that in seeks to emasculate the importance of the individual and elevate the importance of the group.  Necessary, certainly, in a tribal society where a group of selfish individuals would annihilate the entire fabric of the social group and destroy the whole society. The same thing is certainly true in our society, we simply benefit from numbers–that is, those who are adult and focused on group goals are able to compensate for those who are selfish and focused on individual aggrandizement and the onanistic pleasures that attend it.  In many ways this is why the concept of the Borg is so terrible, as the infantile mind reels at the notion of the ego-destruction that follows inevitably from such a group-focused notion.

Is it possible that all the ambitious dreams and inventions of a society founded on the notion of “rugged individualism” will likely lead to a technological future in which every mind is connected to a vast, centralized machine, a Borg-like collective (un)conscious that rules us all?