Ancient Light

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”
Edgar Allan Poe

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a fun movie. It happily satirised a phenomenon dubbed “golden age thinking”, which is a grand line of philosophical enquiry ending in the thesis that “someone else’s grass is always greener”. The point, or at least part of it, is that things like personal taste, viewpoint and even memory are subjective lenses. Reading Suzan Lori-Parks’ The America Play got me thinking about those things again. The America Play is pretty thematically diffuse in places, and large chunks of it are hard to pin down. Probably the most obvious thing that it does very well is argue how we approach history largely through reasoning biases and treasured myths. Our perspectives come encumbered with the cultural baggage of our past. By having the assassination of Lincoln re-enacted as a fetishised tourist attraction, Parks illustrates how we can fracture objective facts into competing narratives. For Parks History is a prism and not a mirror.

This was the last in a series of texts we studied which sought to blur the lines of demarcation between reality and illusion. In Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire a faded southern belle drifts to her sister’s apartment in the tenements of New Orleans only to clash with the violent, abusive man of the house. It is a compelling read, shot through with sexual tension no one apparently thought could be done on stage, and yet they managed it. It also appeased my hatred of happy endings . As a side note the theatre scares the crap out of me, if anyone in the arts is crazy, its definitely stage actors, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s attempt at re-imagining tragedy. A small time salesman lives and dies in futile ignominy, misguided by the very system he had sworn by. A searing indictment of the grander illusions associated with the American dream and, at its very marrow, a powerful and moving story about a world with not enough dignity for everyone. Lastly in Edward Albee’s
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? two bitter drunks attempt to wrestle themselves from their misery with a series of corrosive mind games. This play is imagination as the darkest of spaces, the characters retreat further and further into their neuroses before they finally purge their illusions, an exorcism that only leaves them cold and broken.

The texts not only construct a blur between the real and the imagined but they also pose the thorny and, I think, difficult question of whether delusion is desirable or even necessary. By Streetcar’s conclusion one half of it’s central pairing, Blanche DuBois, is being carted off to the nuthouse. Williams seems to enjoy playing Devil’s advocate for Blanche, on the one hand her behaviour is strongly symptomatic of insanity. But on the other hand sometimes our working definitions of insanity aren’t logically tenable themselves. Williams was a largely unloved gay child who grew up in the 20s, he was the unfortunate paradigm of being different. I would venture a guess therefore he would take issue with punishing someone for seeing the world differently, if the rest of society could only ground the coherence of its view through numeracy alone. If the ludicrous and untested beliefs that continue to mould public policy prove one thing its that the only truly punishable delusions are the unpopular ones. People who think Elvis is alive or that intelligent life trawled the galaxies only to content themselves with violating a few isolated corn growers are not the only ones with suspicious minds

Willy Loman is one of the fall guys in the ultimate pyramid scheme, camped out under the glass ceiling he is waiting for the trickle down that never comes. There is a game theory expression called “The Concorde Fallacy” that describes how hard it is to reconcile your sunken gains with the fact that you must abandon a treasured yet now unworkable premise and start anew. Equivalent literary devices like peripeteia (which the spell check looks after for me) and anagnorisis explore similar dramatic realisations in literature. Willy never quite gets that though, its probably what kills him. All the plays seemed to paint the default position of the human condition as sadness, which is a pretty responsible thing to do if you want anyone to read them. You can either have your characters dig themselves out of this depression or let it swallow them, and there are fine stories and difficult decisions to be made in terms of each. In Woolf George and Martha have an imaginary child and then George decides to kill him in an equally imaginary car accident, this works somehow. Aside from Neil Diamond’s  “Shiloh” it drew me to Alfred Pennyworth’s monologue in The Dark Knight, “Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more”, which is a frightening proposition the more you examine it.

Conclusions

For the sake of neutrality included are links to two opposing views. Not diametrically oppositional but definitely different. For Richard Rorty the truth is merely a compliment given to sentences “seen to be paying their way”, for Ronald Dworkin  there is always one objective best answer even if the machinery to discern it lies out of view.

If the last 5 weeks taught me anything, besides the whole reality/illusion thing, its that playwrights tend to be really good at plots. It could be because there’s no narrative to pad out the space, but I won’t pretend to know for certain. I read John Banville’s latest book a few weeks ago. Banville is a man not afraid to step over a plot and write really character centred books (though conversely he also writes successful detective fiction as Benjamin Black). Ancient Light focuses on an affair between the narrator and his best friend’s mother (set in the narrator’s adolescence during the 50s) and his daughter’s suicide, set ten years removed from the present. Its a melancholy book, full of Banville’s wry philosophical insights and poetic turns of phrase. It too was a window into history as an imagined space, Banville uses the narrator’s unreliable memory as he attempts to recall events from bygone decades, exploring how we construct crafted versions of the past. Interwoven is the idea  that we gaze nightly on the Universe’s most immense refraction, the idea that light from distant stars is only reaching us now, that above us is a vast canvas glimmering into the past, that we are fixated on the heavens, yet unsure if what we see is really there.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”

Albert Einstein

“I didn’t say half the shit they said I did on the internet”

Albert Einstein