When I wrote last week about the visual reading of a text I merely scratched the surface of a topic that can take a lifetime to live, let alone extract meaning from. What we are looking for is the authentic truth of text as it relates to the Now. In such a journey we can not arrive at final answers but merely place ourselves in situations of danger wherein we have gone to the extreme of what is possible and thus risked our very understanding of Being.
This revelation of what is and what might be is the very fundamental of art. It is not a factuality that we are concerned with so much as an essential essence. Our calling can be nothing short of the presencing of the innermost drives and desires of humanity. For if we are not interested in these fundamentals, we are engaged in mere entertainment.
By this I in no way mean to say that we can or should only look at drama. After all comedy, in its way, has the potential to reveal as much or more about us as do darker dramas. What I am speaking to here is a rawness. An essential quality that forces us to look deeply within our very souls and take in what is reflected in the work. As Heidegger writes in Early Greek Thinking, “Danger is when Being itself advances to its farthest extreme, and when the oblivion that issues from Being itself undergoes reversal.”
When reading a text we must look as deeply as possible to extract the most fundamental understanding of Self. This is not always fun and rarely easy, for Human potential is vast and reaching out to the extreme edges of that potential is a long journey from which one may not return whole. Quite often we do not. In fact we often return transformed, having found our boundaries we return to the center of Being only to discover that new horizons have opened up to us. The more we explore that potential the more the potential itself expands.
In The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger claims that “[i]t is precisely in great art . . . that the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge.” While this approaches the truth it is not quit correct for at its root this claim assumes that the creator and the work are in some way separate at an existential level when in truth the two are bound together as discrete manifestations of a single being.
In the process of creating a truly great work of art the artist is dealing with the very fundamental nature of reality interwoven with the materials at hand. Thus through the creative process the very nature of reality is transformed, shifted, even if slightly from what it was before the work came into existence. In the same way, the artist too has been transformed, the creation of the work being a process of expelling that particular idea or complex of emotions from their inner landscape to the external world of manifest things. The artist, far from being inconsequential, recedes from the world while the work itself directly engages the world and continues transforming it. In creating a new great work, the artist has manifested a new center of gravity around which external reality must now adjust itself.
It is this depth that we are concerned with when we read a text. We must reach deeply into the text and simultaneously into our Self in order to extract the meaning from which we might build a great work. To bring forth a truly transformative work necessitates staring into the very oblivion of Being, reaching beyond the abyss and into the unknown. We must risk our most fundamental understanding of self. We risk becoming something we neither know nor understand, for only through that full acceptance and engagement with risk and danger might we hold any hope of creating a truly great work.
There are few theatre artists who will take this risk and fewer still people outside the arts who would do the same. It is rare to find someone willing to break down whole systems of knowing in an effort to find a new meaning and understanding of Now. Too easy is it with a play or an opera to fall back on its own geneology of performance. To say that it is and has been set in such and such a location before so that must be good enough for us now is a false answer. Such an approach, while common, does a disservice to the text and fails the artist at a most basic level. Through such an engagement we can do nothing but deal in superficialities and superfluous decorations.
What is a setting? What does it mean to set a play? Where are we placing it and ourselves? We are not time travelers, nor are we explorers of physical terrain. We are explorers of the soul and heart of humanity. Our maps must be made of thought and emotion. We must look to the landscape of the mind, explore the seas of the heart, before we ever set foot on the dry land of external reality.
Our visual reading of the text can not rest upon the immediately recognizable features of the world as given to us by media and daily life. We must look beyond that. We must look to the very root of the matter. Only then will we discover the true setting within which a story might be told.
