Zazen or Ah Zen?

photo of Eugene O’Neill by Alice Boughton

There’s an argument to be made that if everyone were mindful and lived in the moment, that little art would be produced. Are Waiting for Godot or Madame Bovary about living in the moment? It’s certainly unlikely that Flaubert did. However, both had to be conversant with a non Zen attitude (even though there are scholars who have made Zen interpretations of Beckett’s work), as was Chekhov, whose three sisters are constantly dreaming about going to a mythic Moscow that’s the representation of all their dreams and desires—ditto the windmill chasing Cervantes describes in Don Quixote and the “pipedreams” that Eugene O’Neill’s characters suffer from in The Iceman Cometh. Cervantes, O’Neill, Chekhov, Beckett, and Flaubert all understood the enormous power that that  which has yet to be has over that which is. But the sensibility is also a description of imagination. By allowing the imagination to fly from what is to what could be, almost all creators are charter members of the romantic movement, even though the styles in which they work might flirt with the most advanced forms of post-modernism. Yes, it can be argued that all imaginative work partakes of the romantic agony. Even though actually influenced by Zen, John Cage’s 4’33," a work in which there is time, but no sound seems to be reaching for something beyond itself. If nothing else the open space allows in an ineffable flow of non-existence. Any thought, feeling, or even melody can occupy the emptiness, the black hole opened up by the artist’s erasure of all signposts of a familiar present--at least in so far as musical form is concerned.

Gravity

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity is a neo-realist epic masking as science fiction. Seeing it makes one think of Michelangelo Antonioni and the artist Giorgio di Chirico who was the inspiration for Antonioni’s work. Antonioni was one of the only other directors who could have made a movie about outer space which wasn’t science fiction (Red Desert was probably the closest he came). Gravity is literally about space and has some of the qualities of a documentary. The story, hinging as it does on the effect of space debris, is not very far flung. In addition, in most science fiction movies you usually have a big plot and lots of backstory. But this is literally about the effect space has on its two main characters Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) a research scientist and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), an astronaut. The movie is also reminiscent of Waiting For Godot to the extent that the two move in tandem like Beckett’s two characters Vladimir and Estragon, as they seek to survive. In Gravity they are literally held together by a chord. Then the little plot there is unfolds and Bullock is left on her own to seek a kind of salvation and literally rebirth. “Life in space is impossible,” is the mantra of the movie, but Gravity is also remarkably anchored in the probable. Gravity is also reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, only the psychological confinement is created not by a craft but paradoxically by space itself.

All That Fall at BAM

One may or may not accuse Beckett of being a dualist, but no writer is as adept at dramatizing the Cartesian agony. Put in another light, let us just say that Beckett, a la what Harold Bloom said about Shakespeare, dramatized what it means to be human. The Pan Pan Theater Company’s production of Beckett’s All That Fall recently completed a run at BAM. All That Fall was written as a radio play and even though it has been staged as a conventional theater piece, Gavin Quinn who directed, remained faithful to Beckett’s original intentions.The audience sat on rocking chairs in a darkness that was punctuated with brilliant lighting and sound effects. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed Fred Newman on Prairie Home Companion would delight in comparing notes with what Pan Pan sound designer Jimmy Eadie brilliantly accomplished for this rendition with its trains and mooing and constant footsteps. Albeit, this is a radio play, the audience’s being deprived of sight (like one of its central characters who is blind) is curiously Beckettian in and of itself. Disembodiment is one of Beckett's ongoing themes. For instance, in the famous Not I, Billie Whitelaw is just a mouth uttering words. In Film, Buster Keaton gradually looses his sense of self-conception. In the current production of All That Fall, the audience is in the dark literarily and metaphorically. There is a wonderful monologue in All That Fall (which is not to be confused with Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, though it’s striking that two so radically dissimilar playwrights appropriated the same iconography) in which Beckett’s central character, Maddy (Ain Ni Mhuiri), describes having gone to hear a lecture by a neurologist as a way of dealing with her lifelong obsession with horses’s buttocks. The lecturer is giving a case history of a girl he couldn’t help. At the end he concludes that all she suffered from was the fact that she was dying “and she did as soon as he washed his hands of her.” What better argument for a mind/body dichotomy? In another section Maddy's husband, Dan (Andrew Bennett), does an accounting of his existence and figures out that it would be far more profitable if he simply stayed home and did nothing and yet another character is described as coping with pain by beating his wife. “What a piece of work in man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties… and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

The Caretaker at BAM

photo: Shane Reid

If we forget chronology than the first line of Waiting For Godot, (l949) “Nothing to be done,” is proleptic in that it anticipates the question which constitutes one of the last lines of The Caretaker (1960), “What am I going to do?” Rain is hitting the skylight or dripping in to a pail from a leak in the roof or there is the Doppler effect as trains depart the current phenomenology themed production of Pinter’s play at BAM. There are also menacing sounding footsteps coming up to or descending the stairs from the disheveled room in which the action takes place. Actually that room as conceived by Christopher Morahan with set design by Eileen Diss is less an example of the absurdism with which Pinter is sometimes associated than pure naturalism. Architectural Digest could do a piece on the décor with its piles of tied up newspapers, its Buddha,which is eventually shattered, and its two cots. It’s also Empire of the Sun’s warehouse of plundered colonial antiques on a more personal scale. You are familiar with this room even though it’s supposed to be the end of the world. “The name I’m going under now is not my real name,” Davies, Pinter's prime mover, says at one point. “It’s assumed.” Nothing is authentic and that’s the point made by Jonathan Pryce in his arch and urgent interpretation of the role. Davies aka Jenkins is hired to be the caretaker. He only knows that caretaking requires implements. He is also hired to be an interior and exterior designer, but when confronted with the job description he pleads ignorance and then admits to being an imposter. Heidegger said that human beings live an inauthentic existence to the extent that they are not aware of death. Can we assume that this absence may explain the disarray? Is this the absence explains the faulty connections: the fact that there is no time in the room, that brown shoelaces are offered for black shoes, that the elder of two brothers Aston (Alan Cox), who inhabits the room, renders a whole soliloquy about a stay in a mental institution that's supposedly not listened to though it’s reiterated practically verbatim by Davies--a character who also groans in the night, but doesn’t dream, a character who is given somebody else’s piece of luggage when his is taken by accident?