The Two Theatres of Life

Human life is composed and regulated by a seemingly infinite network of stages and spectacles that breathe meaning into our invented worlds.

The set-pieces of power, repeated infinitely until they appear absurd, somehow retain their magical hold on our lives. We know the Wizard of Oz to be fraudulent, we see through him every day, yet humanity, messy and complicated, clatters on, too confused, too entangled in the daily mechanics of its forward motion, to stop and pause for serious reflection.

Thus we live in simulations. Our desires are sorted through them; ecstatic identification with the shades of certain ceremonies, the manifold roles, whether glorious or vainglorious, validated or disdained by loudspeakers, twitter accounts, television screens, demagoguery, received wisdom, lisping smiles.

This very human theatre is preserved by walls: everywhere we turn, on every street, in every home, in every mind, walls manage the excessive sense-phenomena of existence, the verbose gestures of nature. Inside those walls, we project images, beside those images, we erect further walls, inside those walls, more stages, and so on, until we’re so completely entangled with spectacle that we struggle to say whether sky is blue. The covert dissemination of value within this system usually serves the status quo and protects power and privilege from internal disruption.

William Shakespeare once said the world’s a stage. My friend, and fellow Mercurian, Michael Swatton, suggested the world was less a single stage than a set of private stages on which we are blind to the parts that others play. We have our exits and our entrances; yet the performance as a whole is lost on us. In a world of hyper-specialisation and atomisation, it is difficult to see beyond our own tiny scene.

I composed a poem to evoke this feeling of alienation:

This world may be a stage
But we are blinded to the parts that others play;
We have our exits and our entrances,
Our costumes fit for purpose,
The tiny scene in which we pose and speak;
But other scenes remain a mystery,
A flood of noise in which our hearing’s drowned.
Sometimes we rage against our circumstance,
Having discovered snippets of truth elsewhere,
A festive blood that’s drunk behind
A poorly painted set.

The world may be a stage
But some have lost their willingness to play.
The masks that we and others wear
Begin to feel threadbare,
Unconvincing, asphyxiating.
The walls that separate the acts
Have grown as tall as worlds,
The gates as fiercely guarded,
A maze within a maze,
Compartments and compartments.
Such human happiness
That comes and goes
With foggy lineaments of stone
And war: a broken stage
That whispers death
Among the poisoned towns of paradise.

Costumes are as natural to humans as feathers to birds, except we don’t fly with them, we only excavate imagined identities through them, purveying their meaning as though they represent ultimate truth, and not some bungled conspiracy of misnomers. Even when a look of fatigue appears at the corner of the eye, or a note of disbelief slips onto the tongue, we are reluctant to relinquish our fidelity to the acts in which we have stranded each other.

Entangled with this very human theatre is a second, more primordial form of theatre: basic, existential roles that Carl Jung would classify as archetypes. This more timeless theatre is host to the primordial act of being alive, of dressing up in human form, having flesh, ears, eyes, hair, all the sensory organs, intelligence, wisdom, appetites, merits and failings of a human.

This primordial theatre is the original theatre of the universe. The stage is often stark but always meaningful: the illumination of the stars, the waning of the moon, the winter whispering forgetfulness into the earth, the spring inviting flowers to rise beyond their death and dance on carpets dizzy beneath the eyes of stars.

When we connect with this second theatre, we discover another set of roles: lover, giver, father, mother. Even the role I’m playing today, mystic, though loaded with self-consciousness, touches this basic underlying reality, this impossibly grandiose drama of existence.