View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
But it’s utterly ridiculous to say that people are vile. If we step outside and pay a brief visit to the nearest supermarket or the nearest café, we’ll find ourselves in a position to see, scattered perhaps among scenes of ugliness and greed, examples of behavior that is thoughtful or kind, moments when someone could easily have been cold or cruel but in fact was not. Perhaps we will see the very same person do something harsh and a moment later something gentle. Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there’s something particularly disingenuous about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it’s already over.
WS: Yes.… I feel like saying that your approach to discussing these things is a bit like the approach of a sculptor—with hammer and chisel you attack the big block of marble, and from a certain point of view, all your gestures could be seen as rather hostile or aggressive as you pursue the somewhat negative activity of cutting down the stone, but in the end something rather glorious is revealed. I think you’re suggesting that to live in illusion, to be a slave to the worldview of your time and place, or to be all your life a follower of orders—these are all in a way different forms of oppression. But I think you’re suggesting that all human beings have the capacity to collaborate in the task of guiding their own lives—and the life of the place where they work, the life of their community, the life of the world. It would be so amazing if people could take that possibility seriously.
Yesterday I walked through a neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings on shabby streets, and I ate lunch in a lousy restaurant. The bread was hard, and the lettuce was rather stiff as well. But to tell you the truth, the experience wasn’t that bad. I could survive some lousiness, some uncomfortableness, some decline. Back on the street, I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world. We’d have no control over what would happen. We’d let go and fall. How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it’s been great, the life of comfort, good lunches, predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed—I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.
<3
Well, I didn’t expect to be understood, and I quickly realized that I’d never be able to “make my living” as a writer of plays (assuming as I did, without ever thinking about it, that my “living” obviously had to include at least the minimum of bourgeois amenities—telephones, heating, “good food,” etc.).
Clearly it was an odd position. There was a certain ghostliness, one might very well say, about writing for people who probably wouldn’t be interested. And that sense of a flat landscape stretching out forever was heightened by the fact that, as a writer for the theatre, I was not joining an artistic community committed to any particular struggle or agenda. The cafés of the Impressionists and the bars of the Abstract Expressionists had no equivalents on the streets I traveled. I didn’t live in a world like Renaissance Florence, in which sculptors vied for the honor of putting their particular subtly different vision of a hero or a god in a public square, because as far as I could see there were no types or models toward which I ought to strive, no public squares, and, in a way, no public.
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I’d be writing, there’d been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system for teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.
Well then, what was the outcome? Was the game lost or won? Were the plays worthwhile and valuable, or weren’t they? Regrettably, I may never know. Freedom and self-confidence enabled me to write ambitious plays. I amused myself, and then I died, I suppose, with the results of the experiment still undetermined.
MS: There is only one reason to be envious of the people who write very successful songs with three or four chords, and that is that they earn the kind of money that gives them a kind of freedom that Elliott Carter may not have. So it would be nice for Elliott Carter to go to the restaurants that Elton John can afford. But if the price was that he had to write music exactly like Elton John’s, then he would do without it. And that’s it. If I had to write the kind of sentences that Jacqueline Susann wrote, you know, write the kind of novels that she wrote, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head high anywhere! I’d slink into restaurants—very expensive restaurants—and I’d slink into expensive hotels. And I’d be ashamed to say what it was that I did.