Dramatis Personae

Life is forever falling short of art. Ars longa, vita brevis. Shakespeare named his theater the Globe because he well knew that thespianism is un-Christian. If God assigns you a role to play – you say, “I am a Christian,” and your words can be either empty or full – then you play that role upon the stage which is our theater, the Earth. Someone who struts and frets his hour upon the stage by play-acting whiles away time that he should be devoting to his true pursuit, which is being himself. Nietzsche says, “Become what you are,” and for the religious man, this requires development; he has to live up to his words, which is a process of becoming. This is, moreover, why speech about being is misapprehension of our true nature as human beings, for existence is not given to us. Our lives are constantly threatened, and we have to work to maintain ourselves in food, clothing, and shelter. The value of our lives might be infinite, but provision for them is not. Charles Darwin, about whom the existentialists do not like to hear, being allergic to the scientific approach, called it the struggle for life. Marx called it the class struggle, if we are to credit Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of his words. “The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude.” The virtues being built into struggle, those who despair of life’s failure to secure us immortality, the longevity (ars longa) we impute to the work of art – which, however, is contingent on the perishable human intelligence – are forever dancing on a precipice, and if they cannot reconcile themselves to the dispelling of our dreams, our exposure, they are liable to throw themselves over the edge. As to those who question why we ought not, I cannot go there with you, having been there myself. “The only philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide,” said Camus, and for this, deserves more consideration than to be read as a high-school primer in anomie. Theater which horrifies us with recognition of ourselves as mutilated by the world is religious in origin, if tragedy originated in ritual worship of the gods. It is perhaps on this ground, the umbilical cord linking theater to ritual, that the distinction between acting at the Globe and acting on the globe can be contested. Theater links us to the past, in which magical enactments were experienced as real, shamanic dances invested with the power to heal. Who goes to the doctor’s office expecting to put nothing in will get nothing out. There has to be a will to believe that we can be healed. We can be led to act by theatrical performances which break the fourth wall. Lenin criticized that vulgar interpretation of Marx which eventuates in milquetoast preaching, saying that when he, Lenin, spoke before the people, they would give him a hearing. If we think our existence is granted to us, we have no promise to make to ourselves that we will secure it for ourselves, and being incapable of promise, we will be incapable of conviction. It is a shame that that mode of speech which says “I shall” has fallen out of favor in contemporary usage; it tells us that something religious has been bled out of the social fabric. Blood is thicker than water, which is why the baptismal font perhaps produces those with a less visceral tie to the divine than those of us who are circumcised. People wonder why the Jews have been around so long, and it is doubtless not because we have been play-acting. These lines of text are the umbilical cord to Pharaonic slavery. There is temporal depth to the Jews, at least those of us who are awake to our significance, as there is to the theater of tragedy, which is so effectively commodified as comedy, true to its origins in its distortion of them. “Wasn’t that a scream?” Comedy defuses the horror latent in tragedy by reiterating the form of the drama at a higher level, leaving the emotional impetus a step behind, freeing us for enjoyment of pleasure. The Japanese Ran (not to be confused with the English word) depicts a hero who is assassinated by the villain and dies laughing. He confutes the latter’s would-be triumph, and outlasts death in memory.