I've been reading through some plays of Edward Bond, who's bizarrely mesmerizing work,
The Sea, we're hoping to do in one of our early seasons. Yesterday I came across an inspiring passage from his introduction to a play called
Bingo (which is a loosely written biographical sketch focusing on some of William Shakespeare's crooked business dealings). The introduction is a stunning affirmation of the need for Art --theater especially-- as political ammunition, as a mirror to hold to society, and (most applicable to myself and my colleagues) as a means of maintaining personal sanity in an uncertain world. To be fair and honest, I read it with a certain super-natural gusto (sitting with goosebumps under a sunset, listening to apocalyptic music, and having consumed far too much espresso), but my enthusiasm for the passage has not waned a day and some mental distance later.
So, I will now quote a great quantity of it here on the blog while interjecting some of my own modest cometary:
"Shakespeare created Lear, who is the most radical of all social critics. But Lear's insight is expressed as madness or hysteria. Why? I suppose partly because that was the only coherent way it could have been expressed at the time. Partly also because if you understand so much about suffering and violence, the partiality of authority, and the final innocence of all defenseless things, and yet live in a time when you can do nothing about it - then you feel the suffering you describe, and your writing mimics that suffering. When you write on that level you must tell the truth. A lie makes you the hangman's assistant. It betrays the victim and this is intolerable - because you are mimicking the victim, and the most important thing you know is the innocence you share with him. So if you lie the world stops being sane, there is no justice to condemn suffering, and no difference between guilt and innocence - and only the mad know how to live with so much despair. Art is always sane. It always insists on the truth , and tries to express the justice and order that are necessary to sanity but are usually destroyed by society. All imagination is political. It has the urgency of passion, the force of appetite, the self-authenticity of pain or happiness - imagination is a desire that makes an artist create. The truths of imagination are strictly determined and necessary. They aren't 'revealed' to artists, they have to work and train and learn so that they become skilled at discovering them. But every artist often feels that what he's created is 'right' and he's not free to alter it. It's life that in comparison seems arbitrary and random - because society is usually based on injustice or expediency but art is the expression of moral sanity. Philistinism is so shocking because it assumes that, on the contrary, creative imagination is arbitrary and random, a self-satisfying game, mere fantasy - instead of being vital to human development. And of course, what artists more frequently lack is enough of this creative imagination. Or perhaps they only play it down because they're told art is for the rich and intellectual, that science is work but art only luxury or play. Perhaps also because many people do in fact 'exist' without art. Well, they've only had to do so in modern industrial societies and that's one reason why these societies are stagnant and inhuman."
Frederick Nietzsche once said “That is the kind of artist I love, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art — panem et Circen.” If you've ever read any Nietzsche you know he didn't confess love too often. His reverence for the artist is a rare exception to a generally cynical critique of all men who live in the public sphere from priests to scientists to politicians. In Bond's writing, I appreciate this particular portrait of the artist: a man or woman who struggles always to understand the disparate qualities of the world, to run those observations through his or her own moral sense, and then to communicate that end-product to an audience. That communication is most significant and imperative when it operates bellow the flaccid plane of intellectualized rational appeals and acts directly through passions, instinct and innate moral senses. What generates a moral response? -- a cold radio broadcaster recounting the horrors of Nazi concentration camps or a film (Shindler's List for example)? I think most people can easily tune out the rational appeals of a journalist, but they are grotesquely entertained (and then spurred to action or thought) by an effective film or play.
I've never had quite as dark an opinion of industrialized societies as Bond ("stagnant and inhuman") and it should be noted that he was writing this introduction in 1973, the height of the Cold War, Vietnam, and Stagflation. Nonetheless, his lamentations regarding consumerism and what has become the bizarerity of macro-economic theory are worth consideration. I don't know too what extent I agree... but there is certain relevance to our present day recessionary concerns:
"Money is an important social tool. It's the means of exchange and of accumulating the surplus necessary to create modern industry. But we've reached a point where money isn't used to remove poverty but to create and satisfy artificial needs so that consumption will maintain profits and industry activity. Keynes said that to maintain effective demand in an economy it would be better to pay men for 'digging holes in the ground' rather than that they should be unemployed, but he added ironically that he presumed a 'sensible community' would find something more socially useful for them to do. Well, a lot of the trash we produce for civilized consumption is far more silly and dangerous than holes in the ground. And that's only concerned with keeping society running - the far more difficult work of making it civilized is mostly ignored. We think we live in an age of science, but it's also an age of alchemy: we try to turn gold into human values. "
Surely since the rise of Milton Freedman's Chicago school of economic theory we've dispatched much of Keynes' disaster capitalism. But, an echo may remain in the oft-repeated appeals for increased consumption (and government deficits) and the contractionary results of saving.
Next, Bond describes the dangerous scapegoatism and dehuminzation of national enemies propagated by Governments in their natural pursuit of increased power and control. Obviously the Vietnam war is a past concern... as you read the following, I suggest substituting the word 'desert' for the word 'jungle'.
"It seems that sometimes people can be made to behave badly with frightening ease and rapidity, but it only seems so. Their awareness of human values doesn't simply vanish. People have faults... but human values are the most enduring things we have, stronger than our rational minds. We have the need and right to to protect ourselves and our families, and in a crisis we help those we know, not strangers - but it isn't easy for us to do this at others' expense or to make others suffer. It's difficult for human beings to be unkind, and unpleasant to be arrogant. There's always a reason for aggression, and the only effective weapon against it is to remove the cause. Fear is lack of understanding, and the only way to remove it is by reason and reassurance. Even the hate that comes from fear and aggression begins as a passion for justice. That isn't a paradox. Why did Shylock ask for his enemy's flesh? Because his own had been spat on.
There are two main sorts of political aggression. The first is the aggression of the weak against the strong, the hungry against the over-fed.That's easy to understand. The strong are unjust, and to survive and get elementary rights many people are forced to act aggressively. The second aggression is of the strong against the weak. How can America drop bombs on peasants in a jungle if, as I said, a sense of human values is part of his nature? It takes a lot of effort, years of false education and lies, indignity, shabby poverty, economic insecurity - or the insecurity of dishonest privilege - before men will do that. The ruling morality teaches them they are violent, dirty and destructive, that the only decent course open to civilized man is to act as his own jailer, and that men in jungles are even worse because they're as savage as animals and as cunning as men - history proves it. So he drops bombs because he believes that if the peasant ever rowed a canoe across the pacific and drove an ox cart over America till he came to his garden, he'd steal his vegetables and rape his grandmother - history proves it. And history like the Bible will prove anything.
An old fascist (or an old miser) is always bitter and cynical. Not because his conscience troubles him! - but because he lives in conflict with his fundamental sense of human values. Men can only be content when they live in peace and shared respect with other men. It seems odd to say these things in a century of fascism and brutality, but the world is unhappy and violent not because we're cursed with original sin or original aggression, but because it is unjust. The world is not absurd, it is finally a place for men to be sane and rational in. Of course demands for justice sometimes conflict. But the reason these conflicts are hard to resolve is that the judge is often more guilty than the other parties. Most established social orders are not means of defending justice but of defending social injustice. That's why compromises inside a nation or between nations are difficult to get, and why law-and-order societies are morally responsible for the terrorism and crime they provoke."
I'm also a true believer in the innate goodness of man (when he is aware of his actions) and also a true believer in the dangers of systems that by their nature strip men of their awareness in the name of collectivized control. I'm fiercely libertarian in ideology and loath nothing more than any force that seeks to divide our common humanity into sects, be they religious, nationalistic, or otherwise. Barring my own political missions, read on as Bond finishes by reiterating
his mission as an artist.
"I wrote Bingo because I think the contradictions in Shakespeare's life are similar to the contradictions in us. He was a 'corrupt seer' and we are a 'barbarous civilization'. Because of that our society could destroy itself. We believe in certain values but our society only works by destroying them, so that our daily lives are a denial of our hopes. That makes our world absurd and often it makes our own species hateful to us. Morality is reduced to surface details and trivialities. Is it so easy to live like that? Or aren't we surrounded by frustration and bitterness, cynicism and inefficiency, and an inner feeling of weakness that comes from knowing we waste our energy on things that finally can't satisfy us? That's true of all parts of society, from the theater of the absurd to the broken windows of a youth club. It's not so odd, then, to say that people are only happy when their lives are based on human values. If we survive we have only two possible futures. Firstly, as technological ants engineered from birth to fit into a rigid society. Or secondly, as people who live consistently by the values that are part of their nature."
Bonds final binary: Techno-Fascism or Jeffersonian Utopia are extreme (perhaps he'd suggest that self-destruction is a far more probable denouement), but -at the very least- his call to the artist for articulation of moral sanity is a noble one. It is a call that I personally, and, I think, all of us at 1st Stage intend to help answer.
In any case, that all was just the introduction to one of Bond's plays. I can't wait to take part in the staging of one in its entirety. And, hopefully, I've excited some of you enough to come and see his work. He's rather underplayed here in America and it's time for that to change.
