In most reasonably large towns in the United
States and Europe,
you can find, on some important public square
or street,
a professional theater.
And so, in various quiet neighborhoods in
these towns,
you can usually also find some rather quiet
individuals,
the actors who work regularly in that theater,
individuals whose daily lives center around
lawns and cars
and cooking and shopping and occasionally
the athletic events
of children, but who surprisingly at night
put on the
robes of kings and wizards, witches and queens,
and for their particular community temporarily
embody
the darkest needs and loftiest hopes of the
human species.
The actor’s role in the community is quite
unlike anyone else’s.
Businessmen, for example, don’t take their
clothes off or
cry in front of strangers in the course of
their work.
Actors do.
Contrary to the popular misconception, the
actor
is not necessarily a specialist in imitating
or portraying
what he knows about other people.
On the contrary,
the actor may simply be a person who’s more
willing
than others to reveal some truths about himself.
Interestingly, the actress who, in her own
persona,
may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward,
someone whose
hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for
a visiting friend,
can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel
aristocrat tossing off
malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century
chocolate house.
On stage, her hand doesn’t shake when she
pours the
cup of chocolate, nor does she hesitate when
passing along
the vilest gossip about her closest friends.
The actress’s next-door neighbors,
who may not have had the chance to see her
perform,
might say that the person they know could
never have been,
under any circumstances, either elegant or
cruel.
But she knows the truth that in fact
she could have been either or both,
and when she plays her part, she’s simply
showing
the audience what she might have been, if
she’d in fact been
an aristocrat in a chocolate house in the
eighteenth century.
We are not what we seem.
We are more than what we seem.
The actor knows that.
And because the actor knows that
hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and
a king,
he also knows that when he’s playing himself
in his daily life,
he’s playing a part, he’s performing,
just as he’s performing
when he plays a part on stage.
He knows that when
he’s on stage performing, he’s in a sense
deceiving his friends
in the audience less than he does in daily
life, not more,
because on stage he’s disclosing the parts
of himself that
in daily life he struggles to hide.
He knows, in fact, that
the role of himself is actually a rather small
part, and
that when he plays that part he must make
an enormous effort
to conceal the whole universe of possibilities
that exists inside him.
Actors are treated as uncanny beings by non-actors
because of the strange voyage into themselves
that
actors habitually make, traveling outside
the small territory
of traits that are seen by their daily acquaintances
as “them.”
Actors, in contrast, look at non-actors with
a certain bewilderment,
and secretly think: What an odd life those
people lead!
Doesn’t it get a bit—claustrophobic?
It’s commonly noted that we all come into
the world naked.
And at the beginning of each day, most of
us find ourselves naked once again, in that
strange suspended moment before we put on
our clothes.
In various religions, priests put on their
clothes quite solemnly, according to a ritual.
Policemen, soldiers, janitors, and hotel maids
get up in the morning, get dressed, go to
work, go to their locker rooms, remove their
clothes, and get dressed again in their respective
uniforms.
The actor goes to the theater, goes to his
dressing room, and puts on his costume.
And as he does so, he remembers the character
he’s going to play -- how the character
feels, how the character speaks.
The actor, in costume, looks in the mirror,
and it all comes back to him.
When the actor steps onto the stage to begin
the play, he wants to convince the audience
that what they’re seeing is not a play,
but reality itself.
The costume that the actor wears, and the
voice, the diction, the accent, the way of
speaking that begin to return to the actor
when he puts on the costume, are devices designed
to set in motion a capacity possessed by every
member of the audience, a special human capacity
whose existence as part of our genetic makeup
is what makes theater possible -- that is,
our capacity to believe what we want and need
to believe about any person who is not ourself.
Because let’s be frank -- other people are
not me, and people who are not me will always
in a way be alien to me, they will always
in a way be strangers to me, and I will never
know with any certainty what they’re like.
So yes, it’s possible to believe a fantasy
about them.
Now, I’ve never met my own genes or looked
at them under a microscope, but nonetheless
I feel I can make some guesses about what
they’re like.
One thing I feel I know is that I’m amazingly
responsive to visual cues about other people,
and I’m prepared to guess that this is characteristic
of our entire species.
And this is why people who can afford it spend
enormous sums of money on haircuts and clothes.
And this is why films, which deal in close-ups,
put an enormous amount of attention on makeup
and hair.
And this is why actors in plays take their
costumes very, very seriously.
It’s all because people really do believe
what visual cues say.
A haircut dramatically changes how we see
a person.
A haircut can say, “I’m intelligent, disciplined,
precise, and dynamic.”
A different haircut can say, “I’m not
very bright, I’m sort of a slob, I don’t
care what happens to me, I don’t care what
you think of me.”
There are haircuts that can say, “I find
sex an interesting subject, I’m interested
in how I look, I’m rather fun, and I think
life is great,” and there are haircuts that
say, “I’m not interested in sex, and I
think life is awful.”
Clothes work in a different way.
While the shape of one’s head, as completed
by one’s hair, describes personality, clothes
tell us about a person’s role in society.
But there’s an extraordinary similarity
in the speed with which we respond to the
cues from haircuts and from clothes and in
the strength of our belief that what they’re
telling us is true.
So when the actor comes on stage in the costume
of a king, I’m prepared to believe that
he is a king.
The actor on stage is living in reality.
He knows that there is indeed a king inside
him.
But he also knows very well that Fate has
made him an actor and not actually a king.
The audience member looking at the actor on
stage steps out of reality and lives in illusion
until the curtain comes down.
Our capacity to fantasize about other people
and to believe our own fantasies makes it
possible for us to enjoy this valuable art
form, theater.
But unfortunately it’s a capacity which
has brought incalculable harm and suffering
to human beings.
It’s well known what grief and even danger
can result when we make use of this capacity
in our romantic lives and eagerly ascribe
to a potential partner benevolent characteristics
which are based on our hopes and not on truth.
And one can hardly begin to describe the anguish
caused by our habit of using our fantasizing
capacity in the opposite direction, that is,
using it to ascribe negative characteristics
to people who, for one reason or another,
we’d like to think less of.
Sometimes we do this in regard to large groups
of people, none of whom we’ve met.
But we can even apply our remarkable capacity
in relation to individuals or groups whom
we know rather well, sometimes simply to make
ourselves feel better about things that we
happen to have done to them or are planning
to do.
You couldn’t exactly say, for example, that
Thomas Jefferson had no familiarity with dark-skinned
people.
His problem was that he couldn’t figure
out how to live the life he in fact was living
unless he owned these people as slaves.
And as it would have been unbearable to him
to see himself as so heartless, unjust, and
cruel as to keep in bondage people who were
just like himself, he ignored the evidence
that was in front of his eyes and clung to
the fantasy that people from Africa were not
his equals.
Well, one could write an entire political
history of the human race by simply recounting
the exhausting cycle of fantasies which different
groups have believed at different times about
different other groups.
Of course these fantasies were absurd in every
case.
After a while one does grasp the pattern.
Africans, Jews, Mexicans, same-sex lovers,
women.
Hmm, after a certain period of time somebody
says: well, actually, they’re not that different
from anybody else, they have the same capacities,
I don’t like all of them, some of them are
geniuses, etc. etc.
The revelations are always in the same direction.
We learn about one group or another the thing
that actors quickly learn in relation to themselves
when they become actors: people are more than
they seem to be.
We’re all rather good at seeing through
last year’s fantasies and moving on -- and
rather proud of it too.
“Oh yes, after voting for Barack Obama,
we took a marvelous vacation in Vietnam,”
“We went to a reading of the poetry of Octavio
Paz with our friends the Goldsteins, and we
saw Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi there
-- they looked fantastic”… whatever.
It’s this year’s fantasies that present
a difficulty.
Are we more brilliant than Thomas Jefferson?
Hmm -- probably not.
So there’s our situation: it’s delightfully
easy to see through illusions held by people
far away or by members of one’s own group
a century ago or a decade ago or a year ago.
But this doesn’t seem to help us to see
through the illusions which, at any given
moment, happen to be shared by the people
who surround us, our friends, our family,
the people we trust.
Around 400,000 babies are born on earth each
day.
Some are born irreparably damaged, casualties
of the conditions in which their mothers lived
-- malnutrition, polluted water, mysterious
chemicals that sneak into the body and warp
the genes.
But the much more tragic and more horrible
truth is that most of these babies are born
healthy.
There’s nothing wrong with them.
Every one of them is ready to develop into
a person whose intelligence, insight, aesthetic
taste, and love of other people could help
to make the world a better place.
Every one of them is ready to become a person
who wakes up happily in the morning because
they know they’re going to spend the day
doing work they find fascinating, work that
they love.
They’re born with all the genetic gifts
they could possibly need.
Wiggling beside their mothers, they have no
idea what’s going to be done to them.
In the old days of the Soviet Five-Year Plans,
the planners tried to determine what ought
to happen to the babies born under their jurisdiction.
They would calculate how many managers the
economy needed, how many researchers, how
many factory workers.
And the Soviet leaders would organize society
in an attempt to channel the right number
of people into each category.
In most of the world today, the invisible
hand of the global market performs this function.
I’ve sometimes noted that many people in
my generation, born during World War II, are
obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains
arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz
and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted
the trains would perform on the spot what
was called a “selection,” choosing a few
of those getting off of each train to be slave
laborers, who would get to live for as long
as they were needed, while everyone else would
be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately.
And just as inexorable as were these “selections”
are the determinations made by the global
market when babies are born.
The global market selects out a tiny group
of privileged babies
who are born in certain parts of certain towns
in certain countries,
and these babies are allowed to lead privileged
lives.
Some will be scientists, some will be bankers.
Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically
rich, and others will become more modestly
paid intellectuals or teachers or artists.
But all the members of this tiny group will
have the chance to develop their minds and
realize their talents.
As for all the other babies, the market sorts
them and stamps labels onto them and hurls
them violently into various pits, where an
appropriate upbringing and preparation are
waiting for them.
If the market thinks that workers will be
needed in electronics factories, a hundred
thousand babies will be stamped with the label
“factory worker” and thrown down into
a certain particular pit.
And when the moment comes when one of the
babies is fully prepared and old enough to
work, she’ll crawl out of the pit, and she’ll
find herself standing at the gate of a factory
in India or in China or in Mexico, and she’ll
stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day,
she’ll sleep in the factory’s dormitory,
she won’t be allowed to speak to her fellow
workers, she’ll have to ask for permission
to go the bathroom, she’ll be subjected
to the sexual whims of her boss, and she’ll
be breathing fumes day and night that will
make her ill and lead to her death at an early
age.
And when she has died, one will be able to
say about her that she worked, like a nurse,
not to benefit herself, but to benefit others.
Except that a nurse works to benefit the sick,
while the factory worker will have worked
to benefit the owners of her factory.
She will have devoted her hours, her consideration,
her energy and strength to increasing their
wealth.
She will have lived and died for that.
And it’s not that anyone sadly concluded
when she was born that she lacked the talent
to become, let’s say, a violinist, a conductor,
or perhaps another Beethoven.
The reason she was sent to the factory and
not to the concert hall was not that she lacked
ability but that the market wanted workers,
and so she was assigned to be one.
And during the period when all the babies
who are born have been sorted into their different
categories and labeled, during the period
when you could say that they’re being nourished
in their pens until they’re ready to go
to work, they’re all assigned appropriate
costumes.
And once they know what costume they’ll
wear, each individual is given an accent,
a way of speaking, some characteristic personality
traits, and a matching body type, and each
person’s face starts slowly to specialize
in certain expressions which coordinate well
with their personality, body type, and costume.
And so each person comes to understand what
role he will play, and so each can consistently
select and reproduce, through all the decades
and changes of fashion, the appropriate style
and wardrobe, for the rest of his life.
Even those of us who were selected out from
the general group have our role and our costume.
I happen to play a semi-prosperous fortunate
bohemian, not doing too badly, nor too magnificently.
And as I walk out onto the street on a sunny
day, dressed in my fortunate bohemian costume,
I pass, for example, the burly cop on the
beat, I pass the weedy professor in his rumpled
jacket, distractedly ruminating as he shambles
along, I see couples in elegant suits briskly
rushing to their meetings, I see the art student
and the law student, and in the background,
sometimes looming up as they come a bit closer,
those not particularly selected out -- the
drug-store cashier in her oddly matched pink
shirt and green slacks, the wacky street hustler
with his crazy dialect and his crazy gestures,
the wisecracking truck drivers with their
round bellies and leering grins, the grim-faced
domestic worker who’s slipped out from her
employer’s house and now races into a shop
to do an errand, and I see nothing, I think
nothing, I have no reaction to what I’m
seeing, because I believe it all.
I simply believe it.
I believe the costumes.
I believe the characters.
And then for one instant, as the woman runs
into the shop, I suddenly see what’s happening,
the way a drowning man might have one last
vivid glimpse of the glittering shore, and
I feel like screaming out, “Stop!
Stop!
This isn’t real!
It’s all a fantasy!
It’s all a play!
The people in these costumes are not what
you think!
The accents are fake, the expressions are
fake -- Don’t you see?
It’s all --”
One instant -- and then it’s gone.
My mind goes blank for a moment, and then
I’m back to where I was.
The domestic worker runs out of the shop and
hurries back toward her job, and once again
I see her only as the character she plays.
I see a person who works as a servant.
And surely that person could never have lived,
for example, the life I’ve lived, or been
like me -- she’s not intelligent enough.
She had to be a servant.
She was born that way.
The hustler surely had to be a hustler, it’s
all he could do, the cashier could never have
worn beautiful clothes, she could never have
been someone who sought out what was beautiful,
she could only ever have worn that pink shirt
and those green slacks.
So, just as Thomas Jefferson lived in illusion,
because he couldn’t face the truth about
the slaves that he owned, I, too, put to use
every second of my life, like my beating heart,
this capacity to fantasize which we’ve all
been granted as our dubious birthright.
My belief in the performance unfolding before
me allows me not to remember those dreadful
moments when all of those babies were permanently
maimed, and I was spared.
The world hurled the infant who became the
domestic worker to the bottom of a pit and
crippled her for life, and I saw it happen,
but I can’t remember it now.
And so it seems quite wonderful to me that
the world today treats the domestic worker
and me with scrupulous equality.
It seems wonderfully right.
If I steal a car, I go to jail, and if she
steals a car, she goes to jail.
If I drive on the highway, I pay a toll, and
if she drives on the highway, she pays a toll.
We compete on an equal basis for the things
we want.
If I apply for a job, I take the test, and
if she applies for the job, she takes the
test.
And I go through my life thinking it’s all
quite fair.
If we look at reality for more than an instant,
if we look at the human beings passing us
on the street, it’s not bearable.
It’s not bearable to watch while the talents
and the abilities of infants and children
are crushed and destroyed.
These happen to be things that I just can’t
think about.
And most of the time, the factory workers
and domestic workers and cashiers and truck
drivers can’t think about them either.
Their performances as these characters are
consistent and convincing, because they actually
believe about themselves just what I believe
about them -- that what they are now is all
that they could ever have been, they could
never have been anything other than what they
are.
Of course, that’s what we all have to believe,
so that we can bear our lives and live in
peace together.
But it’s the peace of death.
Actors understand the infinite vastness hiding
inside each human being, the characters not
played, the characteristics not revealed.
Schoolteachers can see every day that, given
the chance, the sullen pupil in the back row
can sing, dance, juggle, do mathematics, paint,
and think.
If the play we’re watching is an illusion,
if the baby who now wears the costume of the
hustler in fact had the capacity to become
a biologist or a doctor, a circus performer
or a poet or a scholar of ancient Greek, then
the division of labor, as now practiced, is
inherently immoral, and we must somehow learn
a different way to share out all the work
that needs to be done.
The costumes are wrong.
They have to be discarded.
We have to start out naked again and go from
there.
