Got a gift

I know I am not supposed to write this, but when I just reread my last post which I wrote before my summer holidays (where I apparently lost my brains somewhere in the woods hunting plastic animals with a bow, or swimming in cold river water and toasting marshmallows on the beach) I was amazed. Of course I always think I have never written something as good as the last thing I have written, but this time it might actually be true. I have always been very fond of generating concepts and distinctions of my own that really WORK, but this time I actually did. I just couldn’t believe how much “fell out" of this distinction I made between personal and transcendental guilt. In my estimation, I went so much further and deeper into an area I was interested in than I ever would have thought possible. And this is just the kind of thing I like. The kind of thing I am writing for. And there is no way this would ever have happened without writing the blog.

And this is not even all. This time I actually got confirmation that it doesn’t just work for me. I know very well that most of what I am writing is probably bullshit JUST BECAUSE nobody will ever understand what it means. Which means that I will never get any CONFIRMATION that it even makes sense, but in this case I did. My friend read the blog and wrote to me that she thought the distinction I made between personal and transcendental guilt was great. (I deliberately stay very close to what she actually wrote because I found that the exact wording became important.) She said that she now understood why I had been so taken with “The Crucible”. I fully realize just now that we both saw and liked the production, but for totally different reasons ( - except one!). So we never talked about something we both really understood – which kind of supports my theory that the play is so good, and works for so many people, because it has these three, very strong storylines that are intertwined. If you don’t actually “read” one or two of them they are still there as background. But now my post brought our views closer together as she found the distinction I made HELPFUL. And, better still, would like to watch the “Macbeth” film with Michael Fassbender again with this in mind because she suspected it might be the reason she didn’t like it that much either. I had had the impression she liked it much better than I did but, USING THIS DISTINCTION, we discovered that we might have the same kind of reservations about it. And – accordingly - the same kind of understanding of what the play means. How cool is that?

(And I shouldn’t forget either that I found the distinction with her help, analyzing the nature of Prospero’s guilt, because her insistence pointed me to the big issue I didn’t yet understand.)

But this isn’t even all I got. My thoughts about interpretation obviously triggered an amazing statement about this issue which I still don’t understand. Nonetheless, I consider it to be very important, first of all because she wrote that it came to her as an “epiphany” – which is always something we know to be very important but difficult to understand for others because it concerns OUR OWN world. In her experience, reading (different) INTERPRETATIONS of a text is important to her because they are part of her technique of dealing with the world and other people. As everybody is a universe of their own, to get on in the world and be able to deal with other people, she has to find out how they think and feel. If this doesn’t work she might be in deep shit, much worse than if she knows that she will never get on with the other person, or find any common ground at all. And she enjoys reading (different) interpretations (of one text) because they explain the MANY FACETS of a fictional world, in analogy to the many facets of real people and real life issues.

At first I thought I understood what she meant – until I reread my post and managed to get my wits together again after the holidays. Then I became aware that I didn’t understand it AT ALL. And became thrilled. At first I was just thrilled to have got something complex and deep like this as an answer to my post. Then I became more and more thrilled because I realized that I didn’t understand it and, at the same time, became increasingly aware of its importance. This is an obvious contradiction which will require a lot of explaining. There is even so much to explain and analyze that I am quite unable to make up my mind where to begin, so I’ll begin with something that seems to be entirely beside the point.

The best gift I got in my life was a tiny bit of an interview by Richard Armitage on playing Thorin Oakenshield in “The Hobbit”. I think of it as a gift, though it was in fact nothing but a coincidence, something striking me at the exact moment when I needed it and could make the most of it. Without it, nothing that appears to me important about the last few years would have happened. I wouldn’t have written this blog, and I would never have got anywhere I wanted to be ( - though, in fact, I am still sitting in my quiet little corner, peering out at the world where things really happen …) Writing my blog, I am still kind of working off this debt of gratitude. And I have begun to collect these “gifts” carefully, but I don’t think I ever actually recollected this one. It is the most precious thing I ever found, though, written down, it appears trivial:

HC: What has the experience of playing Thorin meant to you?

RA: I think it’s really made me reengage with what I want from my career. It’s not fame and fortune certainly. It’s the ability to investigate a character in this way …

What it means to me is probably more than half of what my blog is about, and I don’t even begin to explain. What strikes me about it in THIS context is the genius of the interviewing person to know what question to ask. Which is strange because it appears to be an obvious question to ask an actor, but in fact this kind of question is seldom asked. And I suspect people might draw a blank in most instances of asking something like this. At least nobody would expect to get an honest and thoughtful answer to it that might actually be too good to be published in - or on - something called “Hero Complex”. Not least because it contains a GENUINE personal experience. And it just struck me that I might have done (and retrieved) something similar. Which is the most obvious reason for me to be thrilled: To get an ANSWER to a question I WOULD HAVE WANTED to ask and didn’t know how to ask. Or didn’t bother to ask, as I always have my own theories already about WHY people are doing things that really matter to them. But I always consider them to be JUST theories and was genuinely pleased to hit on a better one.

And there are at least three more reasons for me to be thrilled. First, I was strangely pleased to discover that I didn’t really understand what she meant – though I can understand the meaning of the statement, of course. But, taking the pain to look at it closely, I began to suspect that it is a very PRECISE statement. And, being kind of a personal “epiphany”, something very obvious to the person who had it, but for an outsider it might take a bit of work to reconstruct the missing steps that might have led to this epiphany. Well, I never mind work when I think it will be worth it. And I will undertake the analysis in my next post because I already know that it will become much longer than I think.

The second, and most obvious, reason for being pleased is that I collected a PERSONAL experience about an issue that has to do with reading and texts. And one that actually is comprehensive enough to be taken as a DESCRIPTION of what is HAPPENING when somebody is reading interpretations. And which even contains an explanation WHY people might do such a strange thing, and ENJOY doing it. There is a lot to work on there for me, I suspect, in my next post, or posts.

Last but not least: what I was most thrilled about, I think, was the HARSHNESS of the statement. I deliberately used the word “enjoy” talking about activities like reading, acting, and comparing interpretations. I personally don’t enjoy reading interpretations – as I have found, for various reasons that I will probably look into further as well in my next posts. I have already collected at least four of them, the most obvious probably that I consider it to be really hard work. But I used the word “enjoy” because it is closely related to the concept of “playing” which I expect to become very important again as well. And I am convinced that “we” often enjoy the kind of things that are really hard work as well as the kind of things we really NEED to do to achieve something important. Not in every case, of course, but quite often we COME to enjoy them, and being successful makes us become better at them and enjoy them more. So, what the “existential” harshness of the statement suggests, and what makes it so compelling, is that it indicates that there is a genuine NEED for something like reading interpretations. And this is exactly the kind of thing I am after.

And I also took the harshness of the statement to be a personal challenge of my way of looking at things. I think I took up this challenge subconsciously - which might have been made subconsciously as well but, I think, was “meant” as a challenge nonetheless. In any case, it was one of the reasons I became thrilled. I think the challenge can be boiled down to the suggestion that my view on the world and on texts is so narrow and limited, not least because, while pretending to know a lot of things, in fact I don’t actually know anything at all because I have no real-life experience. I know that this is what other people think of me, though they might put it differently, not least because it is absolutely true. Now I am about to write the second thing I am not supposed to write, and it is worse, but I found it to be too important to be hidden behind the curtain of decency that I know – and even believe in – not to draw. But, on the other hand, I know that there wouldn’t be any “decent” writing, or reading, or acting, or any activity of this kind, if it was never drawn. It is just a question of when and where and how, and so on. And I have a strong suspicion anyway that there are a lot more people than I think who know what I am talking about.

For me, reading, and dealing with text in my head, has always been not a substitute for but an EQUIVALENT of having sex – even before I knew what sex was. Only when we discover sex we begin to think that it is kind of the answer to everything, but it certainly isn’t. I suspect again that there are a lot more people than I would think who know what I mean because there are probably a lot more people who don’t get nearly as much sex as they want than people who do. I think we just tend to forget that the people we are LOOKING AT are not the norm but the exception. And, basically, what “we” ultimately want is not sex but to be completely satisfied and completely connected with ourselves BEING CONNECTED WITH SOMETHING ELSE AT THE SAME TIME. Which, for a very brief moment, actually happens when we have an orgasm. But I suspect as well that many more people than I would think know better ways to have and extend this experience than actually having sex. And, by the way, have known them a long time before they had their first orgasm!

Basically, reading is this kind of experience because it has this aspect of very intimate communication as well as these peaks where we suddenly feel connected to ourselves, or completely understood and accepted, and where our most secret needs are unexpectedly met. I suspect that there are a lot more people who feel like this about reading than would actually admit it. And a lot of people who would deliberately distance themselves from this experience – amongst other things by putting themselves above the text, writing interpretations. I have never done this – though I have written interpretations, of course, and enjoyed it, much more than reading them. But I have never suffered anyone or anything to separate me from my text. I even know I would never have written fiction in my life if I had let the adults prevail and stopped masturbating as a child because writing fiction, from this perspective, is just a practice to create these peaks and make these needs and dreams materialize. So, to me, it is quite obvious why I am reading the way I am reading, fetishizing the text and putting it above everything else. But this doesn’t mean that it is the ONLY use “we” make – or should make – of texts, or the only “decent” way of dealing with them. When all’s done, the text is JUST the text.

THE TEXT IS THE TEXT, nothing more and, as such, at the same time impenetrable and available for all kinds of uses and activities. Even as a fetish it is not used as something that has a value in itself. (Maybe it isn’t a good metaphor because a fetish is a MEANINGLESS thing which makes a libidinous connection with ourselves possible, whereas a text is a tool to create meaning.) But I don’t think that the text as such is something that has to be treated with respect. Of course we can pretend doing this but, in the end, it always becomes a means of doing what we really want to do, even what appears useful or necessary. The text as such is never meaningful, it is the PLAYING with it that creates meaning. The playing is what makes the text IMPORTANT and USEFUL to us. And there are lots of different ways of playing with it, as fetishizing it and getting connected to hidden areas in ourselves, or using it to create new texts, or trying to figure out what the text means – finding out WHY somebody might have written it and, by this, getting into other people’s minds. Or widen the perspective even more and get into more people’s minds by comparing what they think about the text, and which views of the world materialize in their different ways of looking at it. And even though I hold on to the naturalistic belief that there certainly is SOMETHING I want to screw, and even that it matters what this is - in fact I KNOW that it matters! - I also know that it is just my single-minded way of looking at things. And it probably won’t hurt to widen my perspective a bit. At least I take up the suggestion gratefully, not yet knowing if anything will come of it.

And, by the way, my own scraps of interpretation of “The Tempest”, “The Crucible”, and “Macbeth” became part of the playing. I got analyzed, so to speak, and probably got assigned a place in the extensive library of human thoughts and feelings, no doubt somewhere in the section "There's nowt so queer as folk”, if this section exists. How cool is that, then … !? Whatever – the main point is anyway that there is a lot “in here” still to be explored …