What I think I understand better today is this. For today anyway, I think the best way to describe the neutral mask is to say that he or she is Promethean. I don't remember that Greek myth in detail, but what I do recall is that Prometheus was the one who stole fire from the gods and brought it to humanity. Why? That may never be explained, but his urge, his act, his story reflects something in the human spirit that rebels (or rather that pays no attention to the things that would hold it back), something that reaches for transcendence, that embodies human striving. Something that does what it has to do, not out of duty but out of what it naturally desires and needs, and for the good of us all because it's what we all want and need.
Jotted below are my notes from a three-minute break between Movement and Improvisation classes today. I recognize that they might not make much sense to some readers--I never could quite understand what Isabel was talking about when she blogged about her first-year experience here two years ago--but it will to others. The break between classes came just after a short talk by Thomas following an exercise in which we were playing with the dynamics needed to lift a hugely heavy barbell from the floor and hoist it over our heads. (There was of course no barbell. It was all an imaginative exercise in which we had to explore and act out the most efficient way of doing it using just body dynamics):
I think the mask is Promethean.
[Quote from Thomas:] "If you want to create something original, you have to learn to swim against the current. If you're satisfied just to be a nice performer, that's something different."
This is why the mask knows no small movements. This is why its psychology never second-guesses and its thoughts never hold it back. The mask says yes to its creative impulses. It is alert. It generates and it reacts. It is fully alive. It is not 'sentimental.' (But if it is to have an exodus, it has to be more complex, less of a jumbo jet. So part of the problem yesterday was the mismatch of the assignment.)
The key is in the question Why? [and especially in its unanswerability.] "Why should you lift that great weight?" Thomas asked. "You could just let it lie there." Similarly: Why create? Why journey? Why even breathe? That question--why breathe?--may best reflect the motivation of the mask. So it's not just remember to breathe. It's remember that you do. And know in your body that if you don't, you can't even be. If you don't breathe, you are nothing. If you don't breathe, you die.
So much of this first year is designed to get people to find the Prometheus within. To discover what it is we deeply want to create. To push each of us to discover for ourselves What is my vision, my gift, the specific creation that only I can bring to the world? What is my Promethean fire? And if we really find that, and if it truly is Promethean, then we will have to find a way to bring it forth. Otherwise it's simply an idea, a whim, a hobby.
As always there's a lot more to say about this, and it touches on some of the most obvious questions--why did I choose to leave ministry after some 20 years? why did I leave home, partner, and country to pursue this holy(?) grail in a far country, even and especially when i don't consider myself an actor or a performing artist?
I'll surely return to this question from time to time, but a quote has been echoing through my mind of late when I've thought of these questions. It really doesn't address some of the weightier parts of my decision, but I'll mention it here because it's a familiar way into the question. From Thoreau's Walden:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Stay tuned.
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