The „timelessness“ vortex

It was actually some time ago, months at least, that I “cracked” the “timelessness” vortex. Back then, I was excited for, maybe, five minutes and never got round to writing about it because, as soon as I finally understand, this kind of thing gets quite boring. Like something I have always known anyway.

Maybe it is useful to look back to the beginning of my blog where I introduced the “text vortex” as, in fact, THE key concept of my text theory. (“Theory” I don’t like much, but there has to be some kind of guideline and concepts for thinking and speaking about non-evident things intelligibly.) Even though the READER figured prominently, I was never that interested in them (that is: me) but – as readers are! – in the TEXT. Readers are people who love to get involved with stories as something that is somehow anchored in their own lives but with this huge potential of carrying them beyond it.

So, readers are usually fascinated with and immersed in the text = the story and the fictional characters. And it is such a tangible, “real” experience that I always wanted to know if it can be described and understood more generally and exactly than this. But I never got anywhere near it until I drew the concept of a TEXT VORTEX into my orbit. The concept is deliberately vague because it is exactly the point that the experience is slightly or considerably different in any single instance of reading. It has to describe some kind of MOVEMENT because we are getting “moved” by the text, if we are really reading it. Something has to happen FOR US at some point – ideally something we didn’t expect. And it changes us, if only for a moment.

THIS movement is the only thing we can be certain of – the only thing we can say with CERTAINTY about a fictional text because it is entirely within our own experience and we cannot be mistaken about it. If we can describe it, we catch the way the text actually worked on us, the way it became reality. The categories of description we have acquired in our life as a reader inform our experience and its description – no text could come into being without these other texts we have already read – but what we really want of THIS text we are just reading is something we haven’t experienced before. We want it to be a singular, exciting experience. At least when we are really reading, not just “checking on it” to find out what it might be about. We can call this experience whatever we want. The “vortex” is, I believe, something a poet used to describe how his poems work, and that was how it came to me when I read Shakespeare’s sonnets. But I could never verify its origin. It proved very adaptable, though, and I began to use it to describe the movement(s) a text creates inside me and which I can describe. The act of describing appeared unfamiliar because we usually never do it. Or so it seems, but I suppose it happens unnoticed more often than we think, inside us, on the way home from the cinema, or explicitly, having this chat at the tube entrance after the show or trying to persuade somebody else that something is worth watching or reading.

(Same with CRITICISM: people who actively produce text - as writers or actors - had an extremely intense relationship with this text which has also been really dynamic. For them their text has been a process which might not really have come to an end. So, the last thing they want is to have someone pin categories on it and thus “kill” the process. What they might be genuinely interested in is our subjective experience – a description how their text moved or changed us. They would want to know if what they were trying to do worked on other people as well as on themselves. I suppose this is why criticism is mostly disappointing and damaging for the creator of a text or a fictional character. They took it extremely seriously – which we love! -  and therefore have a right to expect SERIOUS criticism which - because of the nature of fictional text - always involves THE PERSON who criticises. I try never to say: “This is good or bad” but always that I liked it or disliked it – but this is just the beginning. It’s difficult to say something personal about reading that is also intelligible and substantial. If we got into the habit of describing the text vortex instead of ticking boxes, we’d do exactly that. And on a level that is objective enough to be taken seriously. “I loved your text” is certainly what people want to hear – what I wanted to hear as an author and never did. But even if I had – even if “everybody” loved it – I’d probably found this unsatisfactory. I most certainly would have wanted to know why!)

So, the description of a certain text has to capture how it is SPECIAL, but of course there is REGULARITY as well. Authors know how to move us from experience. Certainly, the more regular a text gets, the more boring, at least for the type of reader I am who would try “anything”, looking for new experiences. (Therefore no Marvel – though the unexpected surfaces even in an environment like this once in a while, and my Olympus of amazing fictional characters would be substantially diminished without Tom Hiddleston’s Loki!)  On the other hand, there are these PATTERNS of movement I do expect – like theatre doesn’t really come alive for me until it reaches a certain level of spontaneity and presence between actors on the stage, so that I can get involved. Another example is that, in poetry, there has to be this singular poetic invention that shows me a certain aspect of reality in a different light. (It occurs seldom enough for me, which is why I have given up on poems, but when it happened these were some of the best fictional experiences I remember.) Or when I am reading a thriller, I always count on being mightily surprised at some point by some audacious but intelligible plot twist (and am therefore usually disappointed). And so on …

One of these experiences I am endlessly fascinated with I came to call the TIMELESSNESS VORTEX. It is one of my favourite text vortexes. It is also kind of complex, but the core feature is this UPDATING PROCESS I also began to describe in a recent post. And the core question about the updating is: Why does it work? Why can we empathize with people that are so totally unlike us because they are Elizabethans, or Greek people from antiquity, or even people from the Neolithic!? – The obvious answer is disappointingly simple: Because “we” haven’t changed that much.

It's the OBVIOUS answer and has to be kept in mind in spite of the entirely different experience contained in the question: “We” have changed A LOT! Immeasurable distance in time and, consequently, environment and mindset is exactly the point of the timelessness vortex. When I was effectively living in Middle-earth, I tried to imagine what it would be like to look a dwarf or an elf in the eye and noticed that I couldn’t do it. But what Tolkien does is that he makes us BELIEVE that we can. The time distance “deepens” the notion of FICTION even more, I think, because we BECOME AWARE that we are dealing with a DIFFERENT reality whereas “fantasy” is different from the start. We know perfectly well that, if we could look a Neolithic human in the eye, we would not recognize them as the same kind of person we are. Maybe we wouldn’t even recognize them as a person at all – even though I think there would be this disturbing glint of “human” that would make us even more aware of the unbreachable chasm. Even if we could meet a person from the nineteenth century – or from the 1980s, for that matter – there would be this feeling of strangeness, incompatibility, a being fallen out of time …

It is this absolute opposite of REAL WORLD and FICTIONAL REALITY that makes the timelessness vortex possible. We KNOW that it is absolutely impossible to know what a person from the Neolithic, from Greek antiquity or even from the 1980s – if we haven’t really lived there ourselves yet! – is feeling, experiencing and thinking at any given moment, but we readily embrace the MAKE BELIEVE the author is creating. Obviously, there are quite different levels of make believe. With the help of my bookseller sister my historical project progressed beyond expectation and I have left the Neolithic and proceeded towards the Celts, reading the first book about Boudica by Manda Scott. And, I almost regret to say, she is still way better than Cornwell at making me believe that I am really walking the meadows in the year 33 A.D., smelling the keen smells and hearing the unfamiliar sounds of nature around me, even feeling materials covering my body I don’t recognize. Similarly - as an example for a historic text - reading the “Iliad”, after a while I could hear the sounds, the noises of the chariots, of fighting, see the flurry of hooves, the glint of gilded armour and helmets, even smell the sweat, the blood, feel the frustration, the triumph, the pain, all kinds of pain. There is a lot of very visceral and interesting feeling in the “Iliad”, and remembering it all gets me back there in the blink of an eye, whereas the “Odyssey” always felt like cartoon figures painted on a wall in bright colours but not even moving. I didn’t “believe” a word of what I was reading.

So, these “primitive” features that we still share with our ancestors, like feeling pain or a sense of smell, facilitate the belief that we could go “back there” – the illusion of actually doing it. Similarly, the “updating process” works because of a mechanism that hasn’t changed as well and which I took over from Vivian Dittmar in a recent post: we recognize a situation, a reaction, an event, a position we are in and automatically put an interpretation on it. This makes us feel (or know what we feel) and this induces us to react and/or act spontaneously. When I read this description, I instantly got convinced that this is how we “work”, even though it felt unfamiliar and most people seem to reject the idea. If I don’t, it also serves as an explanation of how empathy works. We recognize the position somebody else is in and put an interpretation on it which makes us feel for them (or know what to feel = the “sociopath” version! 😉) and (eventually) act on that feeling. It is this common mechanism behind the “timelessness vortex” which is in fact a subcategory of a general text vortex based on the assumption that we can understand other people – which is always more or less far from the truth! It is just the conscious breaching of a time chasm – the unlikeliness of the updating process – that makes it such a big thing, something like the roller-coaster of text vortexes.

I had a really great experience of an updating process recently about watching “Medea” at the Sohoplace Theatre, which I described in a recent post. As usual with “classics”, I know the story so well that it is boring. The only pleasure I got in the beginning was from the “external” updating, seeing it kind of fitted into this brand-new theatre – which I enjoyed more than if I had seen it in a Greek amphitheatre, but in truth it wasn’t THAT different! So, there was a strong “historic” feeling of a kind, but then I suddenly picked up the interpretation given to Medea’s predicament = that she is desperately trying to regain control. This I could totally relate to, so this was the moment the timelessness vortex kicked in and I became genuinely excited.  

 

Obsession

 

Shakespeare’s birthday came and went – but Claudia and I met for a meal and a chat. No actual Shakespeare, though, this year, but things are looking up for THEATRE again. And, in my view of the world, without Shakespeare, theatre, as we know it, simply wouldn’t exist. As I already wrote, I have acted upon my new year’s resolution and went to London for the theatre, and - as if this wasn’t a reward in itself! - in June, “Good” with David Tennant – which I had been so pissed-off to have missed in London! – will be shown in Cineplex cinemas in Germany. Isn’t this good!!!

And then there is the beginning of a new era, as I finally decided it was time for Netflix because of the other thing I was permanently pissed off about, apart from missing all the London theatre: missing everything Richard Armitage is doing except audiobooks for quite a while now, as he seems to specialize in Harlan Coben novels for Netflix. I still cannot quite believe having been able to download “Obsession” AND “Stay Close” AND “The Stranger” to watch as often as I like - plus finding out about loads of great British series I have missed ... On the other hand: How should I make time to watch all this? And to read books on top of it??? Well, there is perks to the invariably cold and wet weather …

Not that any of what I have found so far really needs watching, including Harlan Coben. Now I have seen “Obsession” and – even though I was glad to “update” Richard Armitage – would have forgotten about it right away and moved on to the next thing, had it not been for the birthday chat. Trying to describe what the mini-series is about, I noticed that there was indeed something relevant I had been missing …

 

Relevant in the context that I am still working with the book “Gefühle und Emotionen” (“Feelings and Emotions”) by Vivian Dittmar which I think I have mentioned. It has become my constant companion and will certainly be for some time. The gist of it is that we are constantly creating our own feelings by interpreting what happens to us. Shakespeare, who knew everything about feelings, knew this, of course: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”. Hamlet’s proverbial wisdom contains the theory in the bud which Vivian Dittmar – who has little regard for fiction and mistrusts its meddling with our “real” feelings – unfolds on many pages of her book. Contrary to what “we” may have learned to think (and what I have been doubting all along): At least on the more complex level that concerns us here, thinking always comes first, then feeling, but the interpretation of “good” or “bad” is usually followed by feelings which lead to actions. If we achieve to look on life dispassionately, we might be safe and content but are cut off from life and from ourselves and unable to act. (One of the main issues in “Hamlet”!) Therefore we need feelings – even and especially those we don’t really want. The feelings that are socially relevant and “powers” that shape our lives are anger, fear, sadness, joy, and shame. (I was especially pleased that she added “shame” - the feeling we use to get in contact with ourselves – as I have written a few things about this a long time before I read the book!)

 

All this is not something we wouldn’t know, by the way, if we took the effort of looking at ourselves once in a while. I was especially pleased that looking at myself was all I needed to prove the theory. And it finally explains to me in full my obsession with the truth – with having a “true” and sufficiently complex representation of the world in my mind - because only an adequate interpretation of our reality engenders adequate feelings which lead to adequate actions that may actually solve our problems. It’s as simple as that! And it works not because there is an absolute truth – in the moral or scientific sense – which we could never reach anyway, but because we got shaped in a way to fit our environment. At least if we can get our feelings to work in the way they are designed to, and this is where it gets personal and exerting. According to Vivian Dittmar we are doing all kinds of things with them except actually FEELING THEM.

 

This is where I get to “Obsession”. I didn’t feel anything watching it apart from pleasure about “updating” Richard Armitage and see his’ and Indira Varma’s great acting. They play a married couple that is very well matched, probably even because they are entirely different where feelings are concerned. A typical role distribution here – she is the warm, emotional centre of family life whereas he seems to live for his career, on the margin, slightly – or rather considerably - distanced … In fact this was the first thing I noticed with approval: how good Indira Varma is at expressing spontaneous, “genuine” feelings whereas Richard Armitage is so especially good at EXPRESSING a state of emotional emptiness and supressed feelings. Something we had already ample opportunity to notice in “Spooks”. Secret agents and surgeons – there certainly is a similarity. William in “Obsession” appears MINIMALLY pleased in the beginning to have saved the life of twins by a break-through operation, but the pleasure fades in an instant and there is just exhaustion and emptiness. And this EMPTINESS became the fascinating issue. The opposite pole represented by his wife Ingrid put it into context because it made me notice the different position in relation to family and “real life” that is the reason for the emptiness and the inherent danger. Of course career and professional success is a part of real life but one that can set people apart and lift them above the immediate social reality that, for example, a family provides. Ingrid is deeply invested in this reality, so all these feelings flow naturally and the dangerous obsession to fill the emptiness inside could never arise.

 

At this point I noticed that I have recently seen the exact same story in the theatre – with inverse sign! - in Simon Stone’s “Phaedra”: Helen develops the same kind of destructiveness, filling the growing emptiness in her live with sexual passion, whereas her gregarious husband is invested in rescuing family live. Even though we see much more of the sexual obsession in “Obsession” than in “Phaedra”, the play didn’t leave me relatively cold but created a deep uneasiness I didn’t care to analyse at the time.  Maybe mainly, as I have noticed in my recent theatre post, because I can’t watch theatre dispassionately or JUST enjoy it. I have to engage socially, respectively take a stand. Probably also because it wasn’t the usual pattern of male midlife-crisis we already know too well. - So what? Women are also entitled to their midlife-crisis …!? But what suddenly made BOTH predicaments interesting was the comparison. Comparing, as an act, makes us NOTICE things. I became aware that the term “midlife-crisis” as such doesn’t explain a thing. Or rather “explains away” a REALITY which might deserve looking into. They are two slightly different midlife-crisis’ because in Helen’s case we can see the history of the emptiness, its roots in the past, the sadness it grew from, whereas in William’s case there is just this appalling emotional emptiness at the centre of a perfect life. Great career, great relationship, great kids, great house … How the hell did this happen???

 

When we say “midlife-crisis”, we usually mean the other people. It provides a concept we use to DISMISS the phenomenon and the person who acts destructively – as a lot of midlife crisis’ result in the destruction of the family. (I quite disliked William AND Helen!) What we think of as a diagnose is just a technique of dismissal. - I was pleased by the find because I had wanted to bring FEELINGS into the “timelessness vortex” and find a peg for Vivian Dittmar. Our feelings are certainly a strong candidate for the “pre-social”. They are also – in direct opposition to the importance “we” attach to them - in an appalling state of neglect in our personal and social lives. In my experience, personal feelings in real life are rather what SHOULDN’T EXIST. Even strong expressions of happiness or pride are not always acceptable, whereas expressions of negative and inadequate feelings are not just banned in public but also a difficult issue in private. There certainly are lots of good reasons for controlling our feelings, but, on the other hand, they tend to get neglected and go away. And this extreme neglect and effective dishonesty is probably where the destructiveness stems from. I mean, is emptiness and obsession really the problem of OTHER PEOPLE??? If I really thought so, I would be kidding myself. Wasn’t the best time in my life when I was obsessed simultaneously with something and someone??? - Of course I am trying my best to fill the emptiness with “healthy” stuff now – but is there really a chance this could work? It certainly is better than nothing, but is better than nothing really enough to survive??? To my surprise, I notice that this is a question I am asking myself every single day.    

Because we NEED them

 

In theatre, the classics, (…) are the ones that feel like they resonate in the pre-social part of us. And yet can manifest themselves in each interpretation in the way that we interact socially in that particular era.

(writer-director Simon Stone in the programme for “Phaedra” by the National theatre)

 

The interview with Simon Stone about the production of “Phaedra” I have just seen induced me to take on one of its central questions:

What is a classic?

Not that I haven’t answered it implicitly already, as every avid reader or theatre-goer or -maker has done – like Simon Stone – with the particular focus they have on life, on what they do and on what is their part in the text-production process. (The exactness and focus of his answer says a lot about the significance of what he is doing.) 

As I have mentioned often enough, READER – or, in this case, THE AUDIENCE – is a necessary position in this process, not just where the “end product” is concerned (= the text coming alive on the stage) but also the primary process of conceiving and writing the text for a show. For a start, it informs the SELECTION of pre-existent text to be adapted or used as subject matter. “Phaedra” by Simon Stone is a stellar example because the “classic” bit, in this case, is mostly covered by selecting a title. In fact, the structural similarities with the original story are scanty. It is a completely independent contemporary play – though the idea for the story and the characters certainly sprang from the Greek myth and, without this reference text, the play would never have been written. Nonetheless, Simon Stone might have given it a different title, and most people might not even have picked up the resemblance! On the other hand: had he done so, the National Theatre would not have produced the play, or – if it had been produced in some way – much, much fewer people would have seen it …

So – probably not just but in the first place – a CLASSIC is a means of getting people into the theatre and motivating them to, for example, update their thinking and feeling on immigration and the state of British middle-class family/society (post-Brexit, post-covid!!!) in a theatre way, that is: extremely SOCIALLY. (Reading books or even watching films and TV series, it is possible for me to look on the whole thing intellectually, from a purely aesthetic point of view, or just to enjoy the entertainment or the suspense. Dealing with theatre, I have to be motivated to interact socially, get involved in some way, for the text to work for me at all. I think that this special degree of commitment has always made theatre especially special for me.) 

This leads to the question: Why is this so? Why makes the label “classic” people want to see the show? In this respect I am a good example because, not really knowing what I wanted - apart from seeing Sophie Okonedo and Ben Daniels in a “classic” drama – I didn’t know what to choose for my first evening in London and – with very little motivation behind it – made a “safe” choice selecting another classic. Immediately afterwards I rued it because I had missed the chance of seeing a contemporary play for once. It turned out to be a good choice, though - not least because I inadvertently had  chosen a contemporary play! - It is a big question to ask, and I might never answer it – certainly not in this post.

The ”social” bit that I enjoyed so much in “Phaedra” and missed – at least in the beginning – in “Medea” HAS to be contemporary. The classic has to be “updated” to attract an audience at all. But the enjoyment it provides is probably about its being more COMPLEX than that. There has to be the “pre-social” bit as well – which, in “Phaedra”, was brought to the play by CALLING it “Phaedra”, thereby activating the “pre-social” part of our experience by reminding us of the story we already are familiar with. 

I observed the workings of the classical “vortex” closely watching “Medea” because I became aware of the moment I began to enjoy the play, not just aesthetically – as being “built” into this beautiful theatre - but “theatrically”. When I REALLY started to like the show. I think it would be quite possible – and much more “contemporary”! - to show Medea as a “clinical” case who kills her children because she cannot deal with the situation and “cracks”. This is how I think we commonly judge these cases of mothers killing their children – because it just CANNOT be rational to do something like this! Instead, I became thrilled when I picked up the kind of argument Jason is making for acting as he does. He has convinced himself that it is the best STRATEGY and has nothing to do with enjoying a younger woman in his bed and having more children but is motivated politically/economically and benefits his first family as well. Nobody will suffer, Medea and her children will be safe. - Medea finds that there is no way of arguing with this. And not just that: this argument takes away her RIGHT to be angry because she is in the right and Jason has WRONGED her. Being in this position gave her a certain kind of CONTROL over the situation. Even though she couldn’t do anything to make Jason change his mind, she still had some control over the INTERPRETATION of what is going on. Only when this is taken away as well – and there I loved Sophie Okonedo for the exactness of her interpretation! – she rises from her dejected state to RETAKE CONTROL in the seemingly most irrational way, but in fact the only way she can still find to cross Jason’s plan, even though it is self-destructive. This is, I think, where it suddenly gets very political (“post-Brexit”!) and very timeless AT THE SAME TIME. Where “the classic” comes into its own.

Two very different ways of dealing with a “classic”, very interesting to compare. Even if I hadn’t had the programme and Simon Stone, the question would probably have sprung up. My intuitive answer to it, though, told me that “What is a classic?” is not yet quite the right question. There is no definition or criteria “set in stone” that we can use to identify a classic text. What the question probably means is why some texts BECAME “classic” in our general estimation whereas others didn’t. There even are classic texts that fall out of the canon (and into oblivion) because they have outlived their usefulness, whereas others are added or re-discovered. My intuition therefore is that texts become “classics” BECAUSE WE NEED THEM. 

This need, in my experience, is connected more to the “pre-social” or “timeless” bit than to the “social”/political/contemporary” content which has to be there to make the experience more believable/connectable/enjoyable … whatsoever. But, as to its specific content, it is also ephemeral and exchangeable. The more recent this content, the better for the play to become a success on the stage because we feel spontaneously implicated, but without the pre-social part the experience remains kind of shallow. At least this is my own impression about contemporary plays:  that I either find them rather non-comital and boring or manage to discover something “timeless” in them, thereby getting them into the "timelessness vortex".

The more often I repeat it, the better I like the notion of the “pre-social” instead of the “timeless”, and, I think, looking into these concepts is the interesting issue, not the one about the “classic” that I had answered anyway. In fact, I find myself right in the middle of looking into them …