Catastrophe Practice (30 page)

They wait. They watch the audience. After a time
—

They wait. It is as if they are apprehensive of making a decisive move
.

They watch the audience. They make slight movements as if to counterbalance any movement they see in the audience
.

Then Siva stands, balancing on the very front edge of the raised first floor, facing front. Dionysus helps her, carefully
.

Florence, back left, begins to walk forward towards the footlights
.

Dionysus and Siva are on the top front edge of the raised first floor. Siva stands with her arms out as if ready to dive — or to jump or to fly. Hortense and the Moor are side-by-side at the footlights; they smile apprehensively at the audience
.

When Florence is parallel with Anderson, halfway between the back and the footlights, he joins her in walking forwards towards the footlights purposefully. When they reach the front of the stage they put their hands up as if to lean or push against a vertical plane there
.

There is a bang — as if something has given way and the whole theatre is about to pivot on its left-to-right axis at the front of the stage; the stage coming up and the auditorium going down
.

The CURTAIN comes down
.

It would be unusual for these plays to be performed. What actors are practised at is the portrayal of characters at once formidable and yet helpless — like pornography, or Macbeth, or muscles on an artist's drawing-board. One of the most touching of modern plays is Beckett's
Happy Days
; in which the heroine — buried at first up to her waist and then up to her neck — can give — oh! — such magnificent performances! trapped and indomitable, just like ourselves. And so we get comfort. Almost no grown-up plays (or novels for that matter) show anything of life as a successfully going concern: this is reserved for children's books and fantasies. To suggest working optimism in a sophisticated world is to be thought presumptuous: sophistication is held to involve seeing difficulties but not skills: what actors and audiences like to be reassured by are reminders of our common cheeky awfulness. In this predicament we are one of a crowd — in a sort of gay Darwinian tumbril. An attempt to get out — to show imagination or intelligence as a means for satisfaction or happiness — is to suggest — Look, you too can do it! but only if you work at it, if you think, and even then you may fail: there is always bad luck — for you or for others. And it is this that is taboo: the point of a taboo being to protect against misfortune and difficulty. Conventional acting has come to be concerned with the entrapment, comic or tragic, of a person at odds with his environment or himself; with failures of connection within families and societies; with inabilities between friends and lovers. From the webs of such predicaments such consoling beauties can be snatched! like sad, exotic insects. And it is with such images that people feel at home; publicly and privately. And the areas in which chances of success have any meaning —
within an individual; between one part of him and another; through these connections to the chance of an effective relationship with the outside world — these are channels that have to remain almost secret: as if the forces running through them have to be insulated from earth. And perhaps they do, with so much prevalence of entropy. But not at some conjunctions, possibly, where minds like ends if open can be lively. But to portray such a network would be to do not just with acting but with what acting is not — non-acting being that which is guarded by but which also can sometimes be conveyed by acting — that liveliness, current, that can be glimpsed just behind the eyes and then the glimpser and that which is glimpsed have to look away; but not perhaps before they have recognised and been recognised: still with not much spoken: speech having to do with the guarding, not the secret. On the stage and in films directors have sometimes used non-actors to try to show something of this reality behind words and behind eyes: but this has usually been done for the purpose of portraying innocence, and not for the demonstration of intelligence and cunning. But it is for such careful balancing, connecting, creating, that a human being seems to be for: this is what his consciousness seems to consist of the creating of conjunctions that can, like any other form of procreation, give not only energy but pleasure. What is missing at the moment in even the most brilliant films and plays is any sense of what all the brilliance is about: a framework, a glimpse even, which will explain (and thus give joy to) what knowingness is up to: a sense of its efficacy and profit. Such an understanding could, as has been said, probably not be much spoken of the third ‘eye' (the ‘eye' of Siva) that is said to lie behind the other two can be a judge, and destructive. But still, this could be shown, even harmlessly, in a play; non-acting being with difficulty acted. For only some would see it. And so, who would be imposed on? An actor, not acting, by being conscious of himself, would appear slightly above himself: being conscious of this, he would be able to move as it were between his two: it would take someone else, conscious of this, to see it. So who would envy it? An actor might be able to show to a member of an audience what
it might be like to be truly oneself — a condition of ‘truth' being a situation in which an observer can both observe and get some assessment of his observation — and this would be just an exercise in the ability of choice; of being chosen.

[I once wrote a screenplay from one of my novels in which I tried to say something of all this: the film was made: there had been interest in the ideas. Then when the wheels began to turn, the actors to act, I was told — Look, when it comes to it, acting is not about the question of what is acting and what is not, what is truth and what is not, what is testing: acting is about people who are recognisably simple and all-of-a-piece; we cannot act characters who are tormented and yet succeeding — people are either one thing or the other — and if they are seen to be struggling, then they are distraught! Again, I once wrote a novel in which my hero, a politician, made out that he was distraught deliberately in order to satisfy the needs of people around him: he had a delicate mission to perform and needed protection from the simple demands and intrusions of others. But in keeping the effective and hopeful part of my hero somewhat secret I succeeded in deceiving not only the people round him (and sometimes even parts of himself ) but also my readers: for it was insisted, again — Look! it must be that this man is simply distraught! how can there be a successful end to a mission [for the mission was successful] by a man who you say is skilful but appears distraught? If distraction is what is being acted then there can be no such thing as success in the not-acting: things are necessarily all-of-a-piece: if we do not know just where we are, then are we not distraught?]

In the attempt of an actor to move between what acting is and what it is not — and by doing so to demonstrate ‘truth' — there would have to be something of the self-questioning of Brecht's Chinese actor who ‘expresses his awareness of being observed… observes himself…will occasionally look at the audience and say “Isn't it just like that?” ‘: a question not of — What will happen next? — but of — What is happening now? — the former question involving helplessness (though perhaps comfort in helplessness) because the answer is unknowable;
the latter involving pleasure in prospects, because the facts for hypotheses and testing are there. There would be a going-round, a sifting, a searching — on the part of actors and audience alike — to see what in the end, as in a riddle, is left. This is something of the way in which the mind does work: consisting of connections, eliminations, selections: such processes being reflected in, and by, the world. How else could consciousness work? What would it be able to be conscious of? And the waste' that there would be as a result of all this would be — in the world, in a person (in a play?) — most useful: for what can be searched for, found, with no rejection? and so, what is wasted? Liveliness can often only be described, circumscribed, in terms of what it is not: of what is around it: of what it comes up against: in life, in language. And so what a function for waste — a seed-bed for children! Or for gold, diamonds: which require much hard work: the processes of which are not obviously dramatic. They are a persevering, a waiting, a labouring, a dedication — and then the seeing, the discovery, of what, as a by-product, is there. Not a fabrication with the roots out of the earth like barriers in the mind or a cancer: but the something glimpsed behind the eyes as if with a third eye, or like love. But not, as has been said, for those who do not have it. But then, again, they would not want it. And so there is this freedom. And by not being envious, people might also not want to kill it: not even (the mind so quiet) if they see it. It is on some such stage as this that there might be being enacted, as Nietzsche said, ‘the great hundred-act play reserved for the next two centuries in Europe…the most terrible, the most questionable, and the most hopeful of all plays' — the play of putting to the test not just this truth versus that truth but the question of truth itself: its style, its substance, its patterning. It is for this that there would have to be a code — in so violent and occupied a country! Such a language has been poetry: but poetry often protects itself in music. And music comes in so separately: through little pipes in the ceiling. This code, to create, would have to invade, connect, grapple with — not just others, but with this danger of separateness in mind, itself. Its message — to stand back, to
coincide with, to go between, to be re-born — would be — a bright day on a mountain: people under watchtowers in the night; a skill, an encirclement, a cell, a conception. If this cannot be stated explicitly it can be grasped, let go, sought out again: as happens to anything that is loved; that wants, in what way it can, to perpetuate itself — a bird, a seed, a play, a three-headed baby —

These plays go round and round — for diamonds or stones; for corn or chaff; a grid, a riddle — both for characters and actors, trying things out, and for audience or readers, seeing what is there. This happens wholly neither on the stage nor on the page nor in the mind of watcher or reader but in between: in the sifting of what is going on' and who is it who sees this': with the imagination, perhaps, that these questions are the same. But what is left will be in the mind; and of the people who make it so. Works of art, of literature, have been like this — resonances depending on those who work for them, giving and getting. Or on the luck which makes some give and get. But if there is liveliness beyond luck there has to be imagery to deal with it — this is what consciousness is like — an imagery not static but teeming, burgeoning, bursting; referring to, responding to, simultaneously different faces of itself; by these reverberations influencing that which is similar in the world. It would be something not analysable nor ultimately penetrable but palpably working; in violent harmony, in itself, alive, against the listlessness of entropy. And there will be those who see this and those who do not: depending on — a preference? for life rather than death? for cheerfulness rather than ease? for discomfort rather than despair? It may be that there is simply some randomness of selection in this coming of consciousness to terms with itself: but the fact that the substance of people is the same as that of the things around them might imply (though it is this again that cannot be much talked about) not only the ability by knowing oneself to know the outside world, but the ability of the outside world as it were to know oneself; to know its own kind, that is; to recognise those who are fitted to it, perhaps, by being conscious of it — ‘recognise' in the sense that by fitting they may survive. Or those parts of one that
are thus fitted may survive. And those that are not, will not. There is amongst people, it seems, an ordering force (or there is not) that can make them (or some parts or products of them) in relation to the outside world like their genetic equipment in relation to themselves — cells, genes, chromosomes, DNA — things forming, proliferating, interlocking, being sent out into the world — by which there is decided — however much unseen, even in such a public area as their bodies — not just what will be formed but what will be passed on — the to-and-fro, the patterning, the activity, the liveliness. These processes are random in that the fate of an individual is not known: they are not random in that the knowledge of an ordering is there. And the skill of a human being, perhaps, is simply to see this; and to try to prepare — not for what he cannot change, which is the burgeoning which comes from outside — but the ground which is himself; on which thus he can choose that some seeds (there are myriads) rather than others might grow. Which choice, learning, indeed is his — between death and life. There is in everything living something quite passive, and active; passive, and active: that folds in on itself, lets itself go; folds in on itself, lets itself go: thereby picking up — what? — an old love? a girl at an airport? a baby? both itself, and its complement; one or two, but they get through: and produce — all the building, exploding, increasing, being cared for: the baby not just for itself but for others; and these, too, the same: and so — for anyone seeing or reading these plays — hold on — there is, yes, the grid, the riddle: it goes round, in the mind, where there are these reconciling totems: and fold in here — there will be chaff, gravel — and here — for, corn! diamonds! — all so that life may go on; anthropologists explain