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208 pages, Paperback
First published June 18, 1979
Many writers of great talent have failed to write successful plays (Blake, Keats, Tennyson, among others) because of a failure to understand that drama is not primarily a literary art. Shakespeare is a great writer even in translation; a great production is great even if you don’t speak the language. A great play is a virtuoso display of status transactions—Waiting for Godot, for example. The ‘tramps’ play friendship status, but there’s a continual friction because Vladimir believes himself higher than Estragon, a thesis which Estragon will not accept.
[..]
If you observe the status, then the play is fascinating. If you ignore it the play is tedious. Pozzo is not really a very high-status master, since he fights for status all the time. He owns the land, but he doesn’t own the space.
I learned that my imagination wasn’t ‘good’ enough. I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal. The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.
[..]
People trying to be original always arrive at the same boring old answers. Ask people to give you an original idea and see the chaos it throws them into. If they said the first thing that came into their head, there’d be no problem. An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He’s not making any decisions, he’s not weighing one idea against another. He’s accepting his first thoughts.
[...]
Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.
"Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
- Macbeth, William Shakespeare
“Whether an honest performer wishes to convey the truth or whether a dishonest performer wishes to convey a falsehood, both must take care to enliven their performances with appropriate expressions, exclude from their performances expressions that might discredit the impression being fostered, and take care lest the audience impute unintended meanings.”
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts..."
- As You Like It, William Shakespeare
“The mind is its own place
and, in itself can make a
heaven of hell or a
hell of heaven.”
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
“External perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling ‘hallucination’ a false perception, we must call external perception ‘a confirmed hallucination.”
- Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”
― I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter
"At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true."
"One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of anxiety on the musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?)"
"People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities."
"One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I’d have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.
(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they’re watching, and crossing their arms tightly, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less ‘involved’, less ‘subjective’. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)
"I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school’s seemed to coincide : in writing, for example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency). I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect. In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough. Everything had to be corrected and brought into line."
"I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children. But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry."
"Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher’s relationship with them."
"‘Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner’s,’ I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. The actors seemed to know exactly what I meant and the work was transformed. The scenes became ‘authentic’, and actors seemed marvellously observant. Suddenly we understood that every inflection and movement implies a status, and that no action is due to chance, or really ‘motiveless’. It was hysterically funny, but at the same time very alarming. All our secret manoeuvrings were exposed. If someone asked a question we didn’t bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an ‘innocuous’ remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time."
"TRAMP:
’Ere! Where are you going?
DUCHESS:
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch …
TRAMP:
Are you deaf as well as blind?
Audiences enjoy a contrast between the status played and the social status. We always like it when a tramp is mistaken for the boss, or the boss for a tramp.
Chaplin liked to play the person at the bottom of the hierarchy and then lower everyone."
"[...] we found that people will play one status while convinced that they are playing the opposite. [...] many of us had to revise our whole idea of ourselves. In my own case I was astounded to find that when I thought I was being friendly, I was actually being hostile! If someone had said ‘I like your play’, I would have said ‘Oh, it’s not up to much’, perceiving myself as ‘charmingly modest’. In reality I would have been implying that my admirer had bad taste. I experience the opposite situation when people come up, looking friendly and supportive, and say, ‘We did enjoy the end of Act One’, leaving me to wonder what was wrong with the rest."
“Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you.”
- Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
"A further early discovery was that there was no way to be neutral. [...] The messages are modified by the receivers. [...] You can see people trying to be neutral in group photographs. [...] If someone points a camera at you you’re in danger of having your status exposed, so you either clown about, or become deliberately unexpressive. [...] If status can’t even be got rid of, then what happens between friends? Many people will maintain that we don’t play status transactions with our friends, and yet every movement, every inflection of the voice implies a status. My answer is that acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together."
"I can achieve a similar effect by saying ‘I smell beautiful’ as ‘You stink’. [...] Tragedy is obviously related to sacrifice. Two things strike me about reports of sacrifices: one is that the crowd get more and more tense, and then are relaxed and happy at the moment of death; the other is that the victim is raised in status before being sacrifice."
"This is because normal people are inhibited from seeing that no action, sound, or movement is innocent of purpose. Many psychologists have noted how uncannily perceptive some schizophrenics are. I think that their madness must have opened their eyes to things that ‘normal’ people are trained to ignore."
"One way to teach transitions of status is to get students to leave the class, and then come in through the real door and act ‘entering the wrong room’. It’s then quite normal to see students entering with head down, or walking backwards, or in some other way that will prevent them from seeing that it is the wrong room. They want time to really enter before they start ‘acting’. They will advance a couple of paces, act seeing the audience, and leave in a completely phoney way."
"You then have to work together with the student, as if you were both trying to alter the behaviour of some third person. [...] The movement teacher Yat Malmgren told me that as a child he’d discovered that he didn’t end at the surface of his body, but was actually an oval ‘Swiss cheese’ shape. To me, this is ‘closed-eye’ space, and you experience it when you shut your eyes and let your body feel outwards into the surrounding darkness. Yat also talked about people who were cut off from sensing areas of themselves."
"The mime must first of all be aware of this boundless contact with things. There is no insulating layer of air between the man and the outside world. Any man who moves about causes ripples in the ambient world in the same way a fish does when it moves in the water.
"In life, status gaps are often exaggerated to such an extent that they become comical. Heinrich Harrer met a Tibetan whose servant stood holding a spitoon in case the master wanted to spit. Queen Victoria would take her position and sit, and there had to be a chair. George the Sixth used to wear electrically heated underclothes when deerstalking, which meant a gillie had to follow him around holding the battery. I train actors to use minimum status gaps, because then they have to assess the status of their partners accurately, but I also teach them to play maximum status-gap scenes. [...] Maximum-status-gap exercises produce ‘absurd’ improvisations."
"If you observe the status, then the play is fascinating. If you ignore it the play is tedious. Pozzo is not really a very high-status master, since he fights for status all the time. He owns the land, but he doesn’t own the space. It must be clear, I think, that even the stage directions relate to status. Every ‘silence’ is lowering to Pozzo. I remember a reviewer (Kenneth Tynan) making fun of Beckett’s pauses, but this just shows a lack of understanding. Obviously Beckett’s plays need careful pacing, but the pauses are part of the pattern of dominance and submission. Godot earns its reputation as a boring play only when directors try to make it ‘significant’, and ignore the status transactions."
One of my students spent two years in a classroom where the teacher had put a large sign over the blackboard. It said ‘Get into the “Yes, Sir” attitude.’ [...] Intelligence is proportional to population, but talent appears not to be related to population numbers. I’m living in a city at the edge of the Rocky Mountains; the population is much greater than it was in Shakespearian London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has had many thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the poets, and playwrights, and painters, and composers?
Someone asked Kubrick if it was usual for a director to spend so much care on lighting each shot and he said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone else light a film.’
You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of ‘artist’, but actually to create something means going against one’s education.
We have an idea that art is self-expression—which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of the God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s.
Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind ‘the intellect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.’ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators … regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.’
My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. [...] Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person.
One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of anxiety on musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?).
Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more ‘respectful’ teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children.