Re: RAT Re: obscurity

[MMA <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>]

Another country heard from....

By concentrating on individual feelings--how Karen feels or ought to feel,
or how I feel in response to Karen or to someone else's response to Karen
or to someone else--this discussion of obscurity misses a more important
point.  Neglect is not a passive act. It may appear to be mere
inattentiveness, but it is designed to disenfranchise, to disempower--to
make you go away.

Our therapeutic culture, our mutual impulse to heal ourselves, is not
necessarily wholly benign and to the extent (I can't believe I, the most
diffident and cynical of men, is actually writing this) that it has
displaced, at least on the left, the more confrontational and politicized
modalities of generations not long past, it is also designed to
disenfranchise and disempower.

Whenever you feel something happening to you, it is salutary to enquire
whether is comes at the hands of other people and, if so, what their agenda
might be.  Scrutinize, if you will, who is neglected and who is not in the
world of the funded non-profits, and you will see very clearly how much
more attention is paid by those with annual salaries to the others with
annual salaries than to any of jobbed-in workers who actually make things
for production.  Moreover, you will see (I believe) that there are patterns
of inattention which are directly related  to the dependence of the theatre
upon any particular subclass of individual. Ask yourself who is invited to
the biennial TCG conference, and who is not.  Why designers are preferred
to actors and actors to writers on, let's say, panels and boards of various
sorts.  Do you really imaging that the salaried artistic class is
neglecting itself they way it has neglected you?

All of you on the RAT list, together with the institutions (?) you have
created, are being neglected as furiously and as strenuously as possible by
the salaried artistic class because they (if not you) are locked in a
battle for ownership and control.  They may be more or less brain dead, but
they are not asleep at the switch, and neglect--which is designed, as I
said before, merely to make you go away--is the most potent of weapons. It
is, dare I say it, almost effortless--a kind of coefficient of friction.

So, what is to be done?

My friend Mr. W_ recently spoke with two fellow writers from the West
Coast, men far gone in years like ourselves--occasionally anthologized,
infrequently produced. They were thinking, they said, of moving to Paris,
but then it crossed their minds that perhaps they had merely to relocate to
New York to find green pastures. Choking back hollow laughter, Mr. W_ 
inquired of each how they had come to this astonishing conclusion. "Because
you guys take better care of each other back there," they said. Which is
true. Our coffee gets just as cold just as fast as yours, but in the circle
around Mr. W-- there are, in fact, people who try to take care of each
other. From time to time, you understand. We are as selfish and as
self-absorbed as you, but we have learned in Mr. W_'s Academy to adopt the
old Tammany backscratching ways.  We recommend each other for things. We go
to each other's plays (and hold our noses, perhaps, but we go and the going
is what matters here). We buy each other drinks of various sorts and
temperatures. We try to take care of each other, as best we can.

And surely you in RAT have the promise of a community in which everyone
proposes to know and to recognize each other, and to what end if not to
take care of each other. To stop this wanton neglect which is the very
fiber of the salaried class.  So when the West LA Man (who also knows a
fair amount about the last half century of life) speaks sharply and says to
stop whining, he is perhaps merely trying to wake you up, like the zenbo. 

It is, alas, something of a waste of time to examine your own  feelings
when someone else is trying to hurt  you.