|
My email sucks.
anyway . . .
One of the things I feel about my
work and my life, is that I am trying to be an antidote. When I look
around me, I see that people seem to have lost their inner lives. We live
everything out front for the public. Everyone is acting out, wanting to be
heard. People can't seem to hack five minutes alone on the bus, walking
down the street, without having to get on the phone and talk to someone.
In addition, everything in our
culture is designed to make you avoid any kind of serious existential
questions. Cloning, among many other scientific advances right now, call
into question the very nature of life, soul, spirit, etc. If you think
life after the A-bomb was a time for existential angst, this has it beat.
But I don't hear people talk about those things. When I eavesdrop, I don't
hear people talk about anything deep or important. Maybe about problems
they are working through, which seem important to them, but to the outsider, are
really pretty mundane. This is even what I hear people talk about as they
leave the theatre. You've just sat through an intense play about gays
killed in Nazi concentration camps, and as you leave the theatre, you hear the
person behind you saying "So as I was saying, Bob and I decided to get the
BLUE Lexus. You really have to come by and see it . . .
"
I want to make people think about
things other than checking their stock or having the right car. But
everything out their filling up people's inner selves is trying to direct them
back outward, away from anything hard or serious. The closest we get to
serious soul searching is a "confessional" on talk show or a Lifetime
"victim movie of the week" and then we are able to be so distanced as
to be able to pronounce "Thank God that's not me."
Brad--you asked me what the goal is.
This is the goal. To be the antidote--with my life as well as my
art. For myself, and ideally, for anyone who might see one of my shows or
read one of my poems. To go out fully human with my last breath, whatever
the next 50 years brings us. And to me, the only way to be the antidote,
is to stand firm against the kind of materialism that continually directs us
toward things and away from ourselves. Hence, the didacticism when I talk
about the virtues of "voluntary poverty", of not chasing after
money.
"Come on Edna, we both know these children have
no futures."
--Principal Skinner |