Home and Away
5/9/96
HOME AND AWAY
"What is your original face before
your father and mother were born?"
OK. I admit. I'm unbalanced. So what else is new. And what are you going to do about it? Nada. That's what I thought. Hiding behind your facade of pseudo-sanity. You're crazier than any of us! Because you pretend to be sane!
How can you hope to be cured if you won't admit you're sick! And if you are playing a role in this sick society you are most certainly sick yourself. Do you think you can just don the mask of a participant when you go to work, and peel it off when you come home? By participating you become a participant! When does the masquerade cease? When you come home from work and blow it out your ass before your astonished and horrified family? When you fart around the golf course? When you fall physically ill and go under the surgeon's knife? It's all part of the play, the unending play.
The play in which I play the fool. Not that there aren't many parts for fools in my play. Our play. Let's put on a show! we say. And here it is. The garage show to end all garage shows.
World wars, depressions, plagues, exultations, assassinations, mass exoduses from and entrances into asylums...it's all here for our delectation. We've all been given our lines. Every morning there's another shooting call to answer. In fact, we shoot all through the night as well.
The hours are long, very long, in this play, this movie, this travesty, this farce, this tragedy. Sometimes we're death at the box office. Not one living soul comes to see us, but still we're acting our hearts out! Other times, when we're desperately yearning for privacy, the whole world turns out to stare and glare at our shame. And once every million scenes or so, everything blends together beautifully. We're at the top of our form, we're beautiful, and noble, and we're doing just what God intended us to do, we're practicing the craft we've spent our whole lives perfecting, and miracle of miracles, the whole neighborhood comes out to see us!
Ever afterwards, or at least until our next disaster, which is probably right around the corner, the memory of our triumph is seared in the minds of our fellow humans! Not to mention in our own minds! Yes! We are our own best audiences, seated in the amphitheaters of our skulls, watching our own antics. It's a theater in the round, and the stage is all around us. It's surround-sound. Except when we have blackouts. Then we can't remember, or at least deny, what the hell we did and said. Unless others give us our notices and insist on what they saw and heard us do. And when we blackout, the reviews tend to be hideous. No! we cry. That was someone else! An actor who looked like me, sounded like me, coincidentally had my stage name!
And once in a while a forgiving critic tells us not to take it to heart, that some other bastard wrote our part and we had no choice but to play it. But we know in our souls that even when we blackout we make up our lines as we go along because we are not only actors but also playwrights and directors and stage managers and ticket takers, all rolled (roled) into one, in a production of our own making.
Now the weird thing is that not only are we all playing roles in this gigantic pageant called life, but some of us are playing roles within roles. We are players, actors. And it is only as actors that we get a chance to be something "real," to be firemen or soldiers or lovers or fathers or mothers.
Because those of us who are playing truly dedicated actors are never anything else in "real life." Those of us whose primary fealty is to the life of the imagination are all too aware that we only pretend to belong to families, fight for our countries, bring home the bacon. Do you know when we REALLY love, and hate, and murder, and save, and transgress, and redeem? Do you know when we really ACT? Act with our whole hearts? When we act, on stage, or before the camera, or before heaven's eye, or in the public eye, or in the mirror of our mind's eye. Then we speak the lines that others have written for us, or the lines we are writing for ourselves. That is when, at last, we inhabit our characters and discover who we are.
We players are the ultimate subversives. We are not to be trusted. Or perhaps we are most to be trusted because we are more keenly aware than anyone that we are just playing at being human beings, that we are just playing at being participants in this society, this cosmos.
We know, deep inside, that we are aliens, sent here from another world. We merely clothe ourselves, for a few years or decades, in flesh suits. We learn languages, but none are our mother tongues. We are exiles in this universe, but we can remember nothing specific of our homelands, of the paradise from which we came and to which we truly belong.
And that is why we struggle to recreate that world, that world we cannot remember, but for which we yearn every living and sleeping moment. We roam this planet like ghosts, looking for a way back home, and, in our groping despair, our failure to be anything but displaced persons, we call ourselves players, actors, artists, tricksters, spies, fools, panhandlers, politicians, sculptors, writers, painters, prostitutes, entertainers, comics, architects, musicians, weavers, cardsharps, hustlers, showboats, channelers, seers, prophets, preachers, and palmists.
We are all from an alien cosmos, a parallel universe. But some of us seem to have forgotten it. Some of us actually believe, or pretend to believe, that this world is our home. We play our roles earnestly, humorlessly. We believe what we believe, do what we do, the world is what it is, and that is all there is to it. No nonsense! We are soldiers, priests, mothers, even artists, even actors! Some of us actually believe that we are actors! We forget that we came from somewhere else. We think that we are what we pretend to be.
Look at this actor over here, in this unemployment line. He not only believes he's an actor, he believes that he's an unemployed actor. I know he's playing an unemployed actor. What he really is is a being from a parallel universe which cannot be known by the mind of man, puny, benighted, man.
And here's another actor. He's a star, or at least he believes he is. And he plays heroes in the cinema. And as if his lack of irony about himself weren't already ridiculous enough, he also has deluded himself into believing he actually IS a hero.
He plays cowboys in the cinema, and so he has bought a ranch in Montana, though he was born and bred in Brooklyn. He rides his horse on his newly purchased range, and imagines he cuts quite a figure with his expensive boots and sunglasses....until his horse steps in a gopher hole and catapults him into a barbed wire fence. And there he is, home and alone on the range, and just for a moment, as he disentangles the barbs from his torn shirt, he sees that he is laughable.
Now he has two choices. Does he feel shame, and desperately hope that no paparazzi in an overhead helicopter snap photos of him while he's down and bleeding on his bruised keester? Or does he laugh? Does he get the joke of himself? Does he see that he was only playing at being a moviestar cowpoke, and that in his movies, he was playing again, and that he was also only playing at being an actor, and that he was playing at being a human being as well? Does he keep laughing at he realizes that he really doesn't know what he is, that his whole life has been a masquerade?
And if he has laughed this hard, this long, does he then wonder what it is he will do with the rest of his life? What else does he know how to do but pretend to be a human pretending to be an actor pretending to be a cowboy hero? His fans take him for a movie star. His wife, if he has one, takes him for a husband. Shouldn't he just go along with the joke? If he remembers this laugh for the rest of his life, if he stays true to this realization, will his ability to manage in the world be devastated? Can he get the joke of his life every living moment of his life and still go on?
Will laughing at himself this way lead to despair and disability? Will he, once he disentangles himself from that barbed wire, be able to climb back on his horse, if his horse hasn't broken its leg? Will he be able to go on with his life, or will he just sit there, on the lone prairie, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh?
And if, somewhere in his soul, he always and ever afterwards is laughing, what is he laughing at? At what a deluded fool he is? At the memory of that other place, that placeless place, which was, is, and always will be his true home? Will he know, from here on out, in his heart of hearts, that there is only one truth that matters, and that truth is heartbreaking, and that is that we are all lost, and know not who or where we are, and that we only find our way when we realize as much?
Will he then dedicate the rest of his life to phoning home, to keeping up the wires between the self that he is in this world and his true self, the self that he has always been, the self from whose breast he was torn when he was born?
Will he know that his life is a double, and perhaps a triple or even a quadruple exposure, that he inhabits one world overlaid upon another? Will he forget himself from time to time, or perhaps for years at a time? Or will he always keep that covenant which was that laugh, that laugh he had at his own expense?
And if he stops laughing, but remembers the echo of his laughter, how will he find his way back to the joy he once felt at realizing he was nothing and nobody? Will he go back to making movies, and try to make a movie that shares his joyful realization with the world? Will he stay on his ranch, and keep riding the range, and hope that one day his horse will step in another gopher hole and send him flying so that he will once again come to his senses by losing all sense of who he thinks he is?
Is there a heavier burden with which to saddle a child than to make that child believe that he or she is somebody? Of course the child is somebody. Of course the child is nobody. Don't fence him in without giving him the key to the corral. Or must each of us figure out for ourselves how to get out of our corrals---the corrals others have built for us as well as the corrals of our own making? And if we are able to get ourselves out, will we also be able to get ourselves in?
--FIN--
HOME AND AWAY
"What is your original face before
your father and mother were born?"
OK. I admit. I'm unbalanced. So what else is new. And what are you going to do about it? Nada. That's what I thought. Hiding behind your facade of pseudo-sanity. You're crazier than any of us! Because you pretend to be sane!
How can you hope to be cured if you won't admit you're sick! And if you are playing a role in this sick society you are most certainly sick yourself. Do you think you can just don the mask of a participant when you go to work, and peel it off when you come home? By participating you become a participant! When does the masquerade cease? When you come home from work and blow it out your ass before your astonished and horrified family? When you fart around the golf course? When you fall physically ill and go under the surgeon's knife? It's all part of the play, the unending play.
The play in which I play the fool. Not that there aren't many parts for fools in my play. Our play. Let's put on a show! we say. And here it is. The garage show to end all garage shows.
World wars, depressions, plagues, exultations, assassinations, mass exoduses from and entrances into asylums...it's all here for our delectation. We've all been given our lines. Every morning there's another shooting call to answer. In fact, we shoot all through the night as well.
The hours are long, very long, in this play, this movie, this travesty, this farce, this tragedy. Sometimes we're death at the box office. Not one living soul comes to see us, but still we're acting our hearts out! Other times, when we're desperately yearning for privacy, the whole world turns out to stare and glare at our shame. And once every million scenes or so, everything blends together beautifully. We're at the top of our form, we're beautiful, and noble, and we're doing just what God intended us to do, we're practicing the craft we've spent our whole lives perfecting, and miracle of miracles, the whole neighborhood comes out to see us!
Ever afterwards, or at least until our next disaster, which is probably right around the corner, the memory of our triumph is seared in the minds of our fellow humans! Not to mention in our own minds! Yes! We are our own best audiences, seated in the amphitheaters of our skulls, watching our own antics. It's a theater in the round, and the stage is all around us. It's surround-sound. Except when we have blackouts. Then we can't remember, or at least deny, what the hell we did and said. Unless others give us our notices and insist on what they saw and heard us do. And when we blackout, the reviews tend to be hideous. No! we cry. That was someone else! An actor who looked like me, sounded like me, coincidentally had my stage name!
And once in a while a forgiving critic tells us not to take it to heart, that some other bastard wrote our part and we had no choice but to play it. But we know in our souls that even when we blackout we make up our lines as we go along because we are not only actors but also playwrights and directors and stage managers and ticket takers, all rolled (roled) into one, in a production of our own making.
Now the weird thing is that not only are we all playing roles in this gigantic pageant called life, but some of us are playing roles within roles. We are players, actors. And it is only as actors that we get a chance to be something "real," to be firemen or soldiers or lovers or fathers or mothers.
Because those of us who are playing truly dedicated actors are never anything else in "real life." Those of us whose primary fealty is to the life of the imagination are all too aware that we only pretend to belong to families, fight for our countries, bring home the bacon. Do you know when we REALLY love, and hate, and murder, and save, and transgress, and redeem? Do you know when we really ACT? Act with our whole hearts? When we act, on stage, or before the camera, or before heaven's eye, or in the public eye, or in the mirror of our mind's eye. Then we speak the lines that others have written for us, or the lines we are writing for ourselves. That is when, at last, we inhabit our characters and discover who we are.
We players are the ultimate subversives. We are not to be trusted. Or perhaps we are most to be trusted because we are more keenly aware than anyone that we are just playing at being human beings, that we are just playing at being participants in this society, this cosmos.
We know, deep inside, that we are aliens, sent here from another world. We merely clothe ourselves, for a few years or decades, in flesh suits. We learn languages, but none are our mother tongues. We are exiles in this universe, but we can remember nothing specific of our homelands, of the paradise from which we came and to which we truly belong.
And that is why we struggle to recreate that world, that world we cannot remember, but for which we yearn every living and sleeping moment. We roam this planet like ghosts, looking for a way back home, and, in our groping despair, our failure to be anything but displaced persons, we call ourselves players, actors, artists, tricksters, spies, fools, panhandlers, politicians, sculptors, writers, painters, prostitutes, entertainers, comics, architects, musicians, weavers, cardsharps, hustlers, showboats, channelers, seers, prophets, preachers, and palmists.
We are all from an alien cosmos, a parallel universe. But some of us seem to have forgotten it. Some of us actually believe, or pretend to believe, that this world is our home. We play our roles earnestly, humorlessly. We believe what we believe, do what we do, the world is what it is, and that is all there is to it. No nonsense! We are soldiers, priests, mothers, even artists, even actors! Some of us actually believe that we are actors! We forget that we came from somewhere else. We think that we are what we pretend to be.
Look at this actor over here, in this unemployment line. He not only believes he's an actor, he believes that he's an unemployed actor. I know he's playing an unemployed actor. What he really is is a being from a parallel universe which cannot be known by the mind of man, puny, benighted, man.
And here's another actor. He's a star, or at least he believes he is. And he plays heroes in the cinema. And as if his lack of irony about himself weren't already ridiculous enough, he also has deluded himself into believing he actually IS a hero.
He plays cowboys in the cinema, and so he has bought a ranch in Montana, though he was born and bred in Brooklyn. He rides his horse on his newly purchased range, and imagines he cuts quite a figure with his expensive boots and sunglasses....until his horse steps in a gopher hole and catapults him into a barbed wire fence. And there he is, home and alone on the range, and just for a moment, as he disentangles the barbs from his torn shirt, he sees that he is laughable.
Now he has two choices. Does he feel shame, and desperately hope that no paparazzi in an overhead helicopter snap photos of him while he's down and bleeding on his bruised keester? Or does he laugh? Does he get the joke of himself? Does he see that he was only playing at being a moviestar cowpoke, and that in his movies, he was playing again, and that he was also only playing at being an actor, and that he was playing at being a human being as well? Does he keep laughing at he realizes that he really doesn't know what he is, that his whole life has been a masquerade?
And if he has laughed this hard, this long, does he then wonder what it is he will do with the rest of his life? What else does he know how to do but pretend to be a human pretending to be an actor pretending to be a cowboy hero? His fans take him for a movie star. His wife, if he has one, takes him for a husband. Shouldn't he just go along with the joke? If he remembers this laugh for the rest of his life, if he stays true to this realization, will his ability to manage in the world be devastated? Can he get the joke of his life every living moment of his life and still go on?
Will laughing at himself this way lead to despair and disability? Will he, once he disentangles himself from that barbed wire, be able to climb back on his horse, if his horse hasn't broken its leg? Will he be able to go on with his life, or will he just sit there, on the lone prairie, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh?
And if, somewhere in his soul, he always and ever afterwards is laughing, what is he laughing at? At what a deluded fool he is? At the memory of that other place, that placeless place, which was, is, and always will be his true home? Will he know, from here on out, in his heart of hearts, that there is only one truth that matters, and that truth is heartbreaking, and that is that we are all lost, and know not who or where we are, and that we only find our way when we realize as much?
Will he then dedicate the rest of his life to phoning home, to keeping up the wires between the self that he is in this world and his true self, the self that he has always been, the self from whose breast he was torn when he was born?
Will he know that his life is a double, and perhaps a triple or even a quadruple exposure, that he inhabits one world overlaid upon another? Will he forget himself from time to time, or perhaps for years at a time? Or will he always keep that covenant which was that laugh, that laugh he had at his own expense?
And if he stops laughing, but remembers the echo of his laughter, how will he find his way back to the joy he once felt at realizing he was nothing and nobody? Will he go back to making movies, and try to make a movie that shares his joyful realization with the world? Will he stay on his ranch, and keep riding the range, and hope that one day his horse will step in another gopher hole and send him flying so that he will once again come to his senses by losing all sense of who he thinks he is?
Is there a heavier burden with which to saddle a child than to make that child believe that he or she is somebody? Of course the child is somebody. Of course the child is nobody. Don't fence him in without giving him the key to the corral. Or must each of us figure out for ourselves how to get out of our corrals---the corrals others have built for us as well as the corrals of our own making? And if we are able to get ourselves out, will we also be able to get ourselves in?
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home