Actors - and Professors of Power!

Once the "Word is God" (the Eternal supposition) is translated to "I -we - stand for, am - are - representative of, the Word of God" (the Temporal betrayal) the authority-actor takes comfort from the God-wall at his back (wraps its cloak-of-power around his shoulders) and faces those to-be-authorised, daring to believe in his own God-granted invincibility. The divine position may be an open sky, fronted by pillars, raised by steps, cut off and made more mysterious by curtains. Those to-be-authorised may have their own raised viewpoints, according to rank, or be flattened to the dark ground. The essential demand is that they face each other. Those in authority open their mouths and the voice of God comes out; those-to-be authorised are there to listen, to be told what to do, to be led into the conclusions they must draw. They have no real say in the proceedings; but they have a certain power over the authority-actors. That of judgment. They can look to the God behind authority and see authority itself in God's shadow. Authority pouts divinely, but can never quite get its act right.

By its nature, and its profoundly accepted conditions, that part of the world that operates by profession, in allegiance, understood or not, to the powers-that-be, has to work by regulations at odds with those demanded of the being-breed, whose sacrifice is of a totally different kind. Its profession is to accept the higher wisdom of the properly appointed (and approved)professors. The more willing it is to do this, the more benign the professors can be in the treatment and advice they dole out. It has to assume, for its own good, that the act of profession it meets with every public moment of its life has been designed solely for its own benefit. (The confusion of that assumption exactly states the everyday condition of life!)

Actors beget actors, as the need over the eras and ages requires dramas on a larger numerical scale. Royalty (the first rank of actor in the name of God) needs its court, its inner ministry; these actors need their commanders and political and social structure-bearers out in the field. As Authority sucks in more to its needs, so word of mouth no longer suffices. Lesser authority has to be trained and institutions have to be set up. All actors, all professors of power.

As one gets drawn into the power-structure, the more one has to profess rather than be. A separation has to grow between inner truth and the truth necessary to play the role authority is prepared to pay for. Eventually the two truths may appear to merge, as the being convinces itself, for its own ability to survive in the controlled world, that there never really has been any difference between the truth experienced and the truth professed. The God-wall, from which all power derives, becomes both surrogate parent and dictator, however benign.

In theatre terms, then, all stage structures that retain the back wall (proscenium, end-stage, side-stage, semi arena) come from the same stock. Each offers a variation in degree of authority, and in the nature of its benignity; but all accept that the voice of God comes from behind, whether as encourager, goad or whip. Where the audience receives from, and the degree of its spread, it remains in front of authority's actors; however much the arc of its "spray" says something about the nature of the exercise of authority (on a thrust stage, it may appear that the actor is chancing his power as he moves out from the touch of his all-powerful boss) the defendable position that is occasionally sallied from is never unclear in the performer's assessment of his own safety. "God's in his heaven - and all's right with the world - provided I can nip back quickly enough!" (I use "he" and "his" uneasily; replace them with "she" and "her", if you like, or "they" and "their", or "he/she" and "his/her" to the tune of your own ear!)

Every citizen faces ranks of actors, each rank increasing the impenetrability of power. In the theatre, the most immediate rank stands in the lit-space, and seems to absorb all the glory and charisma. From this front rank come the celebrities the present is plagued with. But, of course, as elsewhere, there are ranks of more powerful "actors" behind them, who get their power from their hiddenness. Nothing symbolically shows that more than the proscenium set-up. Behind the curtain is the "real" world of the professors, served faithfully (so we are led to believe) by the slaves who ensure that the performance is able to function technically; but much more effectively defined by the ranks of decision-makers who increasingly turn on the word of God the further away they are from the stage itself.

The crisis though is essentially stuck fast in the folds of the curtain. The system has created the professional as the front-runner. There are sufficient professionals on tenterhooks about the role they play. Their reasons for operating from the lit space may be a thousandfold. Many look to spark the revolution from within, by a way of pushing the process to a more honourable world during the blinks of their superiors' eyes. (Some of their superiors think they are doing that too.) Stage actors particularly (but not uniquely) think the contents of their programme, the scripts that blaspheme against the very symbolic structures they pay their lip-service to, somehow overcome the insistent authoritarianism of the form. By doing so, they actually conduce a greater homage. To turn a form you have to break it. Revolutions that think they can take the form over for their better ends succeed only in becoming the better tyrants.

To shift out from the curtain, even getting rid of it; to play to two or three sides and not one: this may daringly dabble with evolution (the contemporary position) but the back wall stays inviolate - and whilst that is the case, the King keeps his crown, in one guise or another, the professing class still has the hand of authority urging it on. God (allowed to be there or not) - monarch - court - civil service - institution - professional class remain in control of the various contours of the hill. The doers say what's what. And in the valley (also with its created rifts) the receivers, the hoi-polloi, the ordinary-made-mediocre, the strivers-to-better-themselves, the scapegoats, the rejected, the unfortunates and the mavericks are fed messages over and over advising them how best to cope with their inadequacies.

Professionals have to step out of the lit (raised) space - and what then? The symbols are in place; shifting them into practice is what today's life on a hair's-breadth is all about.

roundels in honour of the round

(i)
when energy was born it asked this question
which way dear parents do i go from here
mum fluttered indifferently (i blame exhaustion)
dad pointed with his sexual gear

so energy thrust straight ahead and fostered fear
at once its dreaded source became a bastion
too holy to be doubted - mum flipped a gear

she sought revenge on dad for his lewd suggestion
taking too long of course - things went nuclear
the scale of the damage was too much to ingest when
dad pointed with his sexual gear

(ii)
she sat with her flowing skirt spread out on the earth
and tore the garment into strips from toe to waist
laying them to point around the wide world's girth
my way the truth flows best

dad laughed his head off at the pointless waste
and energy itself was seized by powerful mirth
perhaps mum's petalled skirt was not well placed

in time mishandled plenty breeds its dearth
dad's roisterous one-way-ism was disgraced
energy began to sense what mum was worth
her way the truth flows best

jubilation

since the essence of wisdom
is that wealth is the source
of great suffering surely
the under-developed countries
should honour the western bankers
for forcing them to enjoy
the fruits of such dire poverty

Which is enough (enough is too much did Blake say?) for now.

Greg

Brief post for a brief possibility

We live in the most dangerous of times, when an aeon, with its eras and ages, is coming to an end. The macrocosm and the microcosm are in accord. Not coincidentally, the new God of science has put the means into the human hand to destroy itself and its environment. We are on a knife-edge to oblivion. Massive cosmic changes seem to be lined up for our solar system to pass through. The delicate balance of natural forces that enables Earth to sustain life, and human existence, may be in acute jeopardy. And in the day-to-day dilemmas of all of us, without exception, we act out the effects of those vast pressures through a collection of behaviours we pretend to be inspired by cock-ups inevitable to the human condition.

Slowly though, if painfully, we realise that if the macrocosm lays down its heavy patterns on the microcosm, the microcosm may, by the alteration of its day-to-day procedures, have some power to change the overwhelming template. We are scree in the foothills of the authoritarian (authority from above) mountain. Its only alternative is the egalitarian (authority-from-below) uprising. This is the simple, but immense proposition locked up in the shift from the symbolic proscenium to the symbolic round. We cannot deny the aeon or its eras their power; we cannot undo the ages our forebears have gone through, in consequence of these larger, untouchable structures, to bring us to this sorry (maybe) but crucial point in time. We can though, even if we are doomed through tardiness to fail, grasp the significance of those patterns working themselves through in our lifetimes, and attempt to rejig them at the point of possibility - now, and all the nows to follow if we are allowed them - if we allow ourselves that common-sensical privilege.

In order to understand it, I have reduced it, for my own benefit and limited ability to grasp, to the story of theatre structure. Of course, the problem is vaster, more awkward and frighteningly more complex than where and how plays are performed. But for a pin-head brain, maybe a pin-hole camera is a good way to begin to understand the changing nature of light.

This is a brief post - for a brief possibility. But, for all my obfuscation so far, I am now at the stage of this argument where something may become clear. I have to go on holiday for a week. I'll be back!