luctor et emergo

“According to MacIntyre, Nietzsche gives the twentieth (or more aptly, the twenty-first) century one of it’s possible courses: an increasingly conflictual and violent world in which either truth is relative and we carry guns to settle inevitable disputes or truth has left the world altogether, which just leaves the guns—and our inability to offer any reasons at all for using them, though use them we will.”

—David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo

We have reached an age of subjectivity in moral righteousness. Inevitably couched in our own personal biases, we retain the speech and rhetoric of an objective moral philosophy and thus any man, genius or an imbecile, can rationalize his way to a moral highpoint in which he can justify all his actions. The news today is littered with evidence of this force. Islam rises in the Middle East and it is countered by America’s inflated sense of nationalism and Fundamentalist Christian influence. Each side proclaims the moral high ground, holding onto individual dogmas that proclaim the other to be wrong or evil on a fundamental level. There is no arguing, as both sides are walled up within their respective fortresses of logic. Truth has become a duplicitous force that takes many sides.

A general acknowledgment of the worthlessness of objective truth is needed, before we can progress as a society. No one man is right, and all men are right. We can keep the ideas and old traditions of equality, but only after realizing we are as worthless as the next man, and do not exist with some grand cosmic power of righteousness at our backs. Argument is a good.Dialectics will always be better than bloodshed because the only concrete value we share as a species is life and our experience of it.

How do we get the message out? How do we spread the knowledge of the death of Truth before it is used as a blade against our throats?

THE YEAR, Czeslaw Milosz

I looked around in the unknown year, aware that few are those who come from so far, I was saturated with sunlight as a plant with water.

That was a high year, fox-colored, like a crosscut redwood stump or vine leaves on the hills in November.

In its groves and chambers the pulse of music was beating strongly, running down from dark mountains, tributaries entangled.

A generation clad in patterned robes trimmed with little bells greeted me with the banging of conga drums.

I repeated the guttural songs of ecstatic despair walking by the sea when it bore in boys on surfboards and washed my footprints away.

At the very border of inhabited time the same lessons were being learned, how to walk on two legs and to pronounce the signs traced in the always childish book of our species.

I would have related, had I known how, everything in which a single memory can gather for the praise of men.

O sun, o stars, I was saying, holy, holy, holy is our being beneath heaven and the day and our endless communion.

Reading a bit of Milosz this evening in the late summer humidity, beer bottles clinking and the TV on low in the other room. There’s something about this poem, specifically the last two lines, that always sticks in my memory. I think perhaps, that communion between human beings is indeed the most sacred thing of all. God may exist in the space between two people understanding each other. It seems a worthy enough idea, solid and practical, humanitarian. There’s no metaphor here.

Perhaps when you have a greater understanding of the world, you come to realize that everything prehends everything else. That nothing is without metaphor and that those associations are the foundation of reality itself.

“…the always childish book of our species.”

As I do more film and have my acting experiences altered by that medium, I start to wonder about the assets of the theater. Now there is no arguing that film is now the more popular medium. There are no powerhouse industries pumping out bootleg productions of Hamlet or Rabbit Hole in China. No one sneaks video cameras into Broadway premieres as much as they do to a test screening of a new film. So it stands that the more people are willing to risk their neck, their jobs or at least a $300 camera, the more demand for it there must be.

But what is film if not a form of theater? Actors are still called actors, the director a director, scenes, sound and light are all still managed to provide an effect that enhances what is seen and felt by the audience. So many things overlap that the two at times seem identical. Certainly their artistic value stands A Beautiful Mind is certainly as valuable as Long Days Journey Into Night. So what gives?

The key is in the audience.

The audience, or lack of audience is the big difference. When you’re on stage there is a weight placed upon you. You can feel when the attention of the audience shifts from place to place or when it wanes tragically away into boredom. It’s a hard feeling to describe but it’s there. A meter telling you how well you’re communicating with the audience if the intangible “it” is there, breathing in the space from the stage to the seats. Live theater is a shared experience. Film however is not. That was the first thing I have noticed working in front of a camera. There’s no way to know if you “have it” if what you’re conveying reads. It takes practice to trust what you’re doing.

The audience also changes too. The deal goes both ways. Film is a voyeuristic experience at it’s core. A group of people sit in the dark and peer in on a drama played out by strangers. Nothing can disrupt this paradigm, even if a cellphone rings the movie plays on, the actors don’t stop and request that the person leave the audience. Film creates a division between the actor and audience, it also inadvertently places the actor in a place of reverence, with close up shots, musical underscoring, perfectly timed editing and stunts.

The live theater experience eliminates the barrier between audience and actors. It takes away the need of thousands of dollars for equipment. Though Broadway productions certainly benefit from their high budgets in terms of costuming, lights, sound, etc., theater can at it’s simplest be an exchange between two people, one acting and one participating as an audience. This will always be the most honest venue and the one that in times of crisis and strife that we will turn to.