My friend T and I were talking the other day about the bizzaro quality of our current psychic/emotional states in this strange, strange period before grad school. Back before undergrad, our young, plump egos filled us with anticipatory energy, convincing us that we were smarter, more talented, and wiser than all our compatriots. The sky was the limit and we were the cream of the crop, destined for great things.
Eight years later we both share common ground in a very different emotional landscape. Our performance work here in Chicago has required a great deal of energy, money, time, and sacrifice, and although we would both happily do it all again, we feel utterly worthless, incompetent, and much less talented than those around us. Some of these feelings are objective: our standards of artistic success have risen considerably over the past few years, and we're consciously working to defeat all strains of dilettantism in our work. But there's more to it than that: I think we're facing some sort of fundamental death (or rebirth?) of our egos. Zbigniew Cynkutis of Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre talked about a similar (if more legitimately dramatic) conundrum inherent in the life of a true actor (ie a non-dilettante):
"...Broken knee. The price. Broken (first) marriage. Broken life. A loss of privacy. The devotion to this profession: but such a heavy life, heavy work against myself; yes, it was necessary to work against myself in order to be better, to achieve better quality. And this way of thinking made me feel that I was a very average actor. Not someone very talented. Not someone who had a calling....something came out of this work. It helped me to understand the life of others, my own life, the world. Maybe it was not a very well-selected job, but it was done honestly. But this job came to be like a scalpel in the hands of a surgeon. A lot of pain."
- 'Grotowski's Laboratory Theatre: Dissolution and Diaspora,' Robert Findlay
So go figure. In addition to all this hard-headed Grotowski theory, T and I have both been tearing through Buddhist literature (Trungpa, Chodron, Nepan, Thich Naht Hahn, Suzuki roshi), and T - Mr. intellectual masochism himself - has also been pouring over a lot of psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, Zizek, Freud...even Count Masoch himself). The common ground between the schools of thought is a desire to tear through the curtain of comfortable deceit and face the world in all its beautiful and horrible honesty. Peel away the protection and face things as they really are. And that is good, wonderful, freeing, the best thing I could hope for, sure. But it's also VERY VERY PAINFUL. And not only in purely "artistic" areas, since the deeper one delves as an artist the more the line between lived life and artistic life vanishes.
For instance, although I'm very lonely for companionship these days, I've given up on all romantic endeavors. All of them, in every form. Why, for God's sake? Because for one, if I look at myself and my life as honestly as I can I know that I am emotionally and practically incapable of holding down a relationship, and for two, I have habitually used the presence of other people to distract me from the problems in my own life. It's all so obvious, but I don't think I've had the determination or courage or just plain stubbornness to look at it at face value until now. So instead of getting stuck back on my reliable old wheel of samsaric pain, I'm working to walk a new path, one that moves away from cultivating my own ego or hurting others.
So although I might have anticipated that this summer would be a time of drunken laziness before the rigors of grad school begin, instead it's turning out to be a reductive period of self-reflection and release of the non-essential. Although this time is proving to be uncomfortable, I think it may turn out to be uncomfortable in the way one's nerves are plucked as a doctor excises a tumor.
"The philosophical or intellectual understanding of pain is not enough. You must actually feel something properly. The only way to get to the heart of the matter is to actually experience it for yourself...Sudden enlightenment comes only with exhaustion. Its suddenness does not necessarily mean that there is a shortcut...One must make the journey because...at the point where you begin to be disappointed you get it."
- "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism," Chogyam Trungpa rinpoche
