What is a Human Experience?
How art carves meaning into a meaningless void
In the play Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros), there is a character - a Logician. The author of the play is a french writer Eugène Ionesco, know for what Martin Esslin called later called, referring to the writers of his era, The Theatre of the Absurd. The absurdism conveys the language in such a way that it doesn’t reflect logic of the language or the situation, but is otherwise intelligible, not in a sense that it has meaning, but rather that it invokes meaninglessness.
In the early 20th century, another french writer - Antonin Artaud - called for a theatre of cruelty. In his book A Theatre and its Double, Artaud invokes that life - as meaningless as it is, as captured in a language, is a Double of theatre - not the other way around. Artaud was against language in theatre, but not in a sense that he wanted only the body. What he called for is to create a language of theatre. Specific to itself, contained in the performance - mortal, like life. Late author Sarah Kane recalled:
Theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts (…) I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind.
How does one write something that can only be shown in theatre? And better yet, what happens when you leave? What have you experienced?
The Meme Theory
Aristotle noted that mimesis is a core function of the art. To mimic the reality in such a way that it exists in and around someone’s mind. Through mimesis comes catharsis - a cleansing of sorts.
But the debate is not really about how does one mimic our material reality. Instead, focus on how to mimic an internal-external relation of reality and the mind. How you experience something like paranoia or psychosis, even if you never experienced it.
An image is not merely a copy - it’s even above the Platonic idea. To illustrate this, let’s pull a, rather lengthy, quote from Sibila Petlevski’s paper on Choreomanic NeuroDance:
Neuroscience research has shown the common mechanisms which link the performed and observed activity at a neutral level. Neuroimaging has revealed the activation of frontopariental neural network which takes part in observing and imagining activities. There has also been new insight into the problem of I representing the other (..) The perception of other people’s actions activates areas of premotor and parietal cortex somatotopically: watching buccal activity activates cortical representation of the mouth, just like watching moving arms or legs activates corresponding representations of the arms or legs. (Petlevski, 2017: 5-6)
The basis of mimetic theory is not rooted only in observation of the arts, but in the exact mechanisms that those observations employ. The image is not only in mimicking the act, it is the ideal act of the observer.
Let’s circle back to the character mentioned at the beginning - the Logician. His function in a play where everyone turns into a Rhino is to try to explain the fallacy of this occurrence. Obviously, this situation is absurd, but the only one noticing is Bérenger, a man hopelessly in love with his colleague. As everyone around him turns into a rhino, he doesn’t - but the play culminates when a Logician, an analytical mind that explains syllogisms to everyone and rational way of thinking, turns by his own free will into a rhino, in spite of the obvious truth that he isn’t one.
A Logician is a parody character, but a character nonetheless. When Daisy, Bérenger’s love interest, joins the herd, Ionesco doesn’t state that the herd are actual rhinos. Rather, they are a collection of minds that failed at being rational or irrational, in love or without one.
What Ionesco is referring to is how people of all classes succumb to fascist ideology. Being a rhino is a simile of being in a herd - either through pure logic or by not employing one.
The last line of dialogue - or rather a monologue - is a character talking to himself on the possibility of becoming one with the herd, but ultimately decides not to. This ending has inspired me when I wrote The Life of Cardboard, where Hala, my protagonist, ends her performance by not detonating the bomb strapped on her body. Instead, she decides to leave life of cardboard in search of a real reality.
Reflecting on it, I know what she was looking for. A person she imagined - a tiny, cute girl from the north that spoke one sentence within which was contained something akin to - I guess love.
Hala’s performance wasn’t real. We all know that, as much as we know that turning into a rhino is not a real possibility. But the nature of these analogies is that they convey in a specific language, deprived of pure logic, what the experience is.
Mine and other’s characters
As troubling it is to say, I love the characters I write with. They accompanied me through my tough times, times of meaninglessness, times when I felt deprived of emotions.
The aforementioned Sarah Kane wrote Cleansed, a love story filled with sadistic violence, cutting limbs, rats carrying cut off feet, scenes of torture, rape and murder. But she never explicitly said that someone has to have their hand cut off.
Instead, she expected the director to interpret these as an emotional state, as a relation of external-internal - representing through language of performance what it feels like to be painfully in love - and what love can endure.
Kane died by suicide in 1999, never witnessed her last play 4.48 Psychosis open in the Royal Theatre. But it’s that existential thing that she wrote in that play - a state of pain where questioning the logic of existence is what the meaning is - it does not need one, it simply - is.
Cruelty in Artaud’s world is an idea of being able to represent raw emotions that emerge from the fact that - we exist. We feel pain in order to feel loved or cry without reason when we see a scenery so devoid of any kind of meaning that the I is the scenery - it circles back to mimesis - it becomes the Other that the scenery is.
And that synthesis of I and the Other is a compelling one, one that needs to be studied from multiple perspectives, with different methodologies and theoretical approaches. But deep inside, what actually we need is to accept that the boundaries of reason and the limited scope of our perception are the being that makes us human.
The game of being with/the Other
In an article she wrote for The Guardian, Kane asked herself: “Why can’t theatre be as gripping as footie?”
She opens with:
Bollocks to Edinburgh – I’m off to Old Trafford. First day of the season and the sun is shining on the Theatre of Dreams. But the first 85 minutes are a nightmare. United are 2-0 down to Leicester with five minutes to go. The crowd start to leave. Sherringham scores, but with only a minute left I’m on the verge of saying, “Bollocks to football – I’m off to the festival.”
Then a miracle occurs. In the last minute we’re awarded a free kick 30 yards out. David Beckham steps up and curls it into the back of the net. A stiff two fingers to everyone in the country who hates him for being rich, talented and shagging that bird. The talents of myself and writer-director Vincent O’Connell are very nearly lost to the nation as we disappear through the roof of the North Stand.
Kane wrote about the experience of a match being unpredictable, existential, closely connected to the emotional state of flow, of mere existing and acting at the same time, both conscious and free to be unconscious. She continues:
I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain at the foot of Edinburgh Castle a few nights back, and found myself longing for a theatre that could speak so directly to an audience’s experience. It rarely happens.
What I enjoyed about her writing is that she likes this idea of raw power that theatre and the arts have. Her love for the theatre is a love like one could share with a person. And that love, amidst all the violence, amidst horrific tackles performed on the pitch, is what made her a playwright I envy.
The reason why I write and read fiction is that I never want to remove myself from this realm - the realm between ideas and material reality, where everything exists in one shape or the other. Many writers can relate to their protagonists, much like I can relate to Hala and her alienation. It was the experience I could not explain to myself, one encounter, that made me write a whole play.
So far, my essays were about rational analysis, but I’ll share something personal. The moment one night when a person sitting in front of me told me that my eyes were “beautiful and have a very human touch” was the moment that I understood that person for maybe the first time. I couldn’t convey in any way, shape or form what it means. But it filled the meaningless night of drinking into a simple construct that doesn’t need to mean anything.
It just needs to be. And maybe I’ve managed to explain to myself (by writing Hala’s story) that I felt happy when I saw those brown eyes and little imperfections above a simple, yet unique smile. Like that night when I saw the same thing, but unique in its own right.