“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670.
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“He descubierto que toda la desdicha de los hombres proviene de una sola cosa, que es no saber permanecer en reposo, dentro de una habitación” (fragmento 139 de la edición Brunschvicg).
(Véase James Vincent, “We’d rather give ourselves electric shocks than be alone with our thoughts, says new study”, The Independent, 4 de julio de 2014).
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¿No lo he dicho ya? – escribía Rilke en “Los cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge” – Estoy aprendiendo a ver. Sí, este es el comienzo. Todavía no se me da demasiado bien. Pero me esforzaré al máximo. Por ejemplo, nunca me había preguntado cuántas caras existen. Hay una cantidad enorme de personas, pero hay muchas más caras porque cada persona tiene varias.
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“Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time. For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face. Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.”
Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the we.
The environment suddenly shifts in an unforeseen and unwelcome manner.
Move to strangeness
Human beings need security, order, love, and connection
Memories about the past guide this thinking about the future
Reactions to a volcano-like event that shook the foundations of the social world.
Holding an attitude of benign neglect or cynical indifference
A blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one can not react to it effectively
An important part of the self has disappeared… “We” no longer exist as a connected pair or a linked cells in a larger communal body
Truth goes underground
One cannot simply leave behind
Buried in the unconscious, the event is experienced irrationally, in the nightmares
Denials that insist on looking to the future and forgetting the past
Fragmented and polarized social order
Bridging the gap between event and representation
A spiral of signification
Source: ALEXANDER_Cultural-Trauma
Thomas Stearns Eliot, Cuatro cuartetos, Little Gidding.
CLASS TEN
BUILDING A VOCABULARY OF ACTIONS
In an action you must know what you do, where you do it, when you do it, and why you do it. But you don’t know how you do it. The how is spontaneous and unexpected.
An action can be broken up into steps or “beats.” (The expression beats, by the way, isn’t a musical reference. We began calling steps “beats” because members of the Moscow Art Theatre, in discussing their techniques with American actors some years ago, couldn’t pronounce “bits.”)
As an action, “to escape” is to run away from a troubling thought or image, or to run away from danger, but wherever you run you see the danger, take it in and run away from it, like confronting your own image in a chamber of mirrors again and again and never finding an exit. Going from danger to danger is the action “to escape.” It’s the action of Hamlet, Ophelia and Macbeth. The dramatic anatomy of escape is there’s no escape.
The end of the action determines the action and makes it strong or weak.
wrestling with the ideas
Another way of describing “to chat” is to say you’re “shooting the breeze.” That’s a way of saying that chatting is pleasant, it’s polite, it’s airy, it’s light, but it’s empty. It doesn’t matter. Nothing depends on it. It’s a way to pass the time.
It’s normal. It’s fake.
it’s a form of verbal badminton. (Shuttlecock)
…vs to discuss
Even when you begin, you must react.
Our national temperament is intolerant of listening.
Through the actor’s actions, a series of separate but logically connected physical or psychological activities that breathe life into the play and create the moment-by-moment truth.
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“To reminisce,” is to soliloquize
reminiscing is itself a means of escape from the sometimes unbearable realities of the present.
When I reminisce, I become detached and my words take on a poetic quality. To reminisce is to reinvent the world. Remembering is simply experiencing it all over again, which is closer to description.
To reminisce is different from telling a story.
Reminiscing has in it longing, pain and loss.
The reminiscence has a sequence of ideas. Paraphrase the sequences so that the ideas are in you, not in the words. Fill in the sequence with your own words without the text in order to make the words of the author belong to you.
Stella Adler. The Art Of Acting.
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They say I lie or feign/In all I write. Not true. It’s simply that I feel/ By way of imagination. The heart I never use.
Fernando Pessoa. Autopsicography.