ANDRE:"Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible monumental creative task. And we're not necessarily up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile the other person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such feeling. I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly people seem to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon, wildness, tenderness! Could we stand to live like that?
WALLY: Yeah, I think it's that moment of contact with another person. I mean that's what scares us. ...that moment of being face to face with another person. ...you wouldn't think it would be so frightening. It's strange that we find it so frightening.
ANDRE: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty good reasons for being frightened. ...you know, a human being is a complex and dangerous creature. ...if you start living each moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge! I mean, if you really reach out, and you're really in touch with the other person? Well, that really is something to strive for, I think; I really do.
WALLY: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.
ANDRE: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms. Who are we? And that's to confront the fact that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death."
Last night Canaan and I were in conflict about consequences for his negligent actions. During our intense (but calm) discussion, we would often put our foreheads together, as if we were locking horns. I do this with our other children too, even for simple affection and eye contact. Marion usually grabs my beard, but I do it anyway. The eye contact, in particular, is overt and beautiful, even in conflict. I will be sad when I can no longer stare into the mysterious eyes of our young children.
(big sigh)
Other than my marriage with Kelsie, this kind of intimacy, affection, communication, and depth of relationship is almost non-existent. This was very exposed to me through the film "Old Joy", of which I previously posted. There is a great need for genuine, real affection between enemies, strangers, and friends (especially male friends).
However, we have become almost incapable of disassociating our true self from our mask...and many of us have given ourselves completely over to method acting...
ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.
...I mean, isn't it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. They don't know what they should be doing with their lives. They're reading all these self-help books...
WALLY: Oh! God! And I mean, those books are just so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don't know the things we'd like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean...I mean, you know, suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don't dare to ask each other!
ANDRE: No! It would be like asking your friend to drop his role."
to be continued...
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