Catastrophe Practice (10 page)

Ariel takes his hand away from the footlight. Helena turns from the footlights. She goes to the back of the stage and faces front
.

Judith speaks from the swing sofa, back left
.

Ackerman goes and joins Helena at the back of the stage
.

Judith watches Ariel
.

Ariel moves round the stage
.

They wait; occasionally glancing at the audience
.

After a time, Jason comes on from behind the ruins of the loggia. He wears an old overcoat. It is as if he were about to go home
.

He stands watching the others, who have turned away from the footlights
.

Then he calls —

He looks at the audience
.

The others are still
.

Jason comes forward. He stares at the audience; then down over the footlights. Then he squats down where the wire goes over the footlights. He takes hold of it
.

— They were mucking about one day —

He pulls the wire in
.

— In the fields, the factories —

He stands: coils the wire
.

Said — Don't look now, Daddy; something's burning —

He lays the coiled wire at the front of the stage
.

He speaks as if not acting
.

It was too expensive a system anyway.

He turns to the Maid and the Footman who are in the circle of stones
.

Where were you two sitting?

The Maid and the Footman stare at him
.

Jason looks amongst the audience
.

After a time he goes to the crack in the rocks and
takes a screwdriver from his pocket and squats down as if to disconnect the wire there
.

Jenny calls —

Jason looks up at the audience
.

Then he goes to the circle of stones and takes the blanket off the stretcher. Underneath are two pillows
.

He gives these to the Footman and the Maid
.

Jason goes back to the crack in the rocks. He squats down
.

Jason disconnects the wire
.

Jason stands, and comes back to the Maid and the Footman in the circle of stones
.

He waits
.

Would you like a bath?

The Maid and Footman watch him
.

Helena murmurs —

After a time Ackerman says awkwardly —

They wait, as if taking care not to look at the audience
.

Jason goes to Jenny on the steps of the ruined loggia and rumples her hair. Jenny moves her head away
.

He turns to Judith
.

In birth, love, not much of pain is remembered.

Helena is by the balustrade, facing the circle of stones
.

Judith is sitting on the swing sofa, left, facing the circle of stones
.

Jenny is on the steps of the loggia, right, facing the circle of stones
.

Ackerman is by the footlights facing the circle of stones
.

Ariel is by the footlights facing the circle of stones. Jason looks down at Jenny
.

Jason looks at Judith. He smiles
.

Judith, on the sofa, smiles back at him
.

Jason holds out a hand to the Maid and the Footman as if to usher them off the stage
.

The Maid and the Footman remain within the circle of stones
.

Jason lowers his arm
.

Everyone except the Maid and the Footman go off the stage
.

The CURTAIN comes down
.

The word ‘alienation' has had other vogues than that of being used to describe Brecht's acting technique (‘the demonstrator and demonstrated are not merged into one'): Hegel and Marx used it to describe the predicament of a man in modern society being cut off from, yet dominated by, his environment: Sartre used it both in this way and, as Brecht seemed to try to do, in the way of describing a man's difficulties in being at one within himself. Being-at-one, Sartre said, was a characteristic of the unconsciousness of a thing: the fact that a human being had consciousness meant that there was a division between the self that was conscious and the self it was conscious of: consciousness consisted as it were of this gap: it was a lack, an anxiety, a ‘nothingness' because it was not a ‘thing'. It was by virtue of his no-thing-ness that a man had freedom: he could move, decide, choose: but because he could not become an object in himself (and thus be-at-one with himself) his choosing, and what was chosen, were still within a condition of nothingness — and thus were absurd. Haunted by the pain of this a person tried to find some object in an ‘other': but this ‘other' was trying to find some object in him: so there was collision between persons as if two bodies were trying to occupy the same space at the same time. This was hell. Sartre saw human violence as inevitable not just because of economic scarcity (there would always be too many people fighting for too few goods) but because of this primary predicament in which a man could not be at peace with others because he could not be at peace with himself. Men did in fact form groups: they transferred their anxieties on to groups: but the cohesion of a group was ensured by the threat of violence to an enemy without and to a potential traitor within. This indeed is a description of much in modern
politics. Sartre's logic however depended upon verbal tricks. The jump from the recognition that a man is not a ‘thing' to the despair that he is therefore ‘nothing' — the assumption that duality, distancing, are the same as vacuity, lack — these are personal presuppositions, using logic as a weapon, and it is on them that Sartre's pessimism rests. Sartre talked of his deep disgust with himself — the ‘dull and inescapable feeling of sickness' which ‘perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness'.
¹
Given this controlling feeling, it is likely that a man's experience of himself should seem absurd. But this is an affliction, it is not a necessity — this supposed inability of consciousness to heal or surmount its own split.

One escape from despair at the predicament of consciousness was to make a scapegoat of science — to blame scientific ways of thinking for a man's alienation from society and within himself. At the time when Sartre and Brecht were beginning to write their novels and plays Husserl, a philosopher, was launching a full-scale attack on science. From the days of Galileo, Husserl said, thinking had taken a wrong turn: there had been an insistence that nothing should be taken as ‘real' except that which could be described in terms of measurements and equations: but these latter were abstractions and not the stuff of actual experience. Experience was to do with sense-impressions and feelings — upon which measurements and equations were imposed. It was within the ambit of this peculiar transposition by which abstractions were called objective and actual experience was doubted as illusory that life, not surprisingly, appeared absurd. Husserl suggested that a form of science should be attempted in which abstractions should not dominate ways of thinking about experience: that since ‘objectivity' was in fact structured by the ‘subjectivity' of minds, what might be studied, once this was admitted, were relationships between the two — the forms of ‘subjectivity that, by their prevalence, made the experience of ‘objectivity' possible. Advantage could be taken of the very ‘lack of coincidence' within the self that had caused Sartre such despair; since it was by this that a man might be able to study, with his mind, his mind's phenomena. And Sartre's further despair that
each man's consciousness was inextricably at loggerheads with others', as if in a game of violent musical chairs, could be countered by the actual experience that each individual ‘knows himself to be living within the horizon of his fellow human beings with whom he can enter into actual, sometimes potential, contact: as they can do (likewise he knows) in actual and potential living together'.
²
It is true that each man remorselessly confers his own meanings on experience: but amongst these meanings there are criss-crossings, sometimes collisions, sometimes connections: these form the web of a communal (‘objective') subjective world. It is here that people can meet — can get pleasure, even, from some such banging into each other as in musical chairs — by the ability to stand back and observe, even laugh at, themselves. It is within this sort of dexterity — the ability to transpose, to create from, a situation of potential violence — that there can be valid freedom and healing and choice.

Another way of asserting that consciousness need not involve despair was not to berate science but to ask that its attitudes should be taken more seriously. Jacques Monod, a biologist, has said that it seems likely that the need for a man to try to explain his existence is ‘inborn, inscribed somewhere in the genetic code'.
³
It was this that had given impetus to the projections of myths and religions — for huge philosophical systems like that of Marx. These have been necessary for the formation of societies, which in turn have been necessary for survival. But in the course of evolution there has been selected an aptitude for scientific method — ‘the systematic confrontation of logic and experience' — and it is this that now seems necessary for survival. The old myths have become too dangerous: in an age of H-bombs, societies requiring enemies and scapegoats are unfitted for evolution. But at some level the animist traditions of thousands of years remain: scientific method, although practised in special disciplines and honoured by lip-service almost universally, is divorced from ways in which people ordinarily feel and behave. Western societies, Monod said, still ‘present as a basis for morality a disgusting farrago of Judaeo-Christian religiosity, scientific progressism,
belief in the “natural” rights of man and utilitarian pragmatism': and Marxist societies still ‘profess the materialist and dialectical religion of history'. All these systems are ‘outside objective knowledge, outside truth, and strangers and fundamentally hostile to science. . . The divorce is so great, the lie so flagrant, that it can only obsess and lacerate anyone who has some culture and intelligence or is moved by that moral questioning which is the sole source of all creativity.' ‘Modern societies have accepted the treasure and power offered them by science: but they have not accepted, have scarcely even heard, its profounder message — the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises; for the complete break with the animist tradition, the definite abandonment of the ‘old covenant” and the necessity of forging a new one.'
⁴
This was a fine cry — similar to those which called for a new covenant in art, in literature — and it came from a scientist at grips with actual processes of creation. But the old questions remain — of just what is this new covenant between scientific method and daily life to consist? what is the style of the ‘profounder message' after the ‘revision of ethical premises'? Monod, like Brecht — like the old animist theologians before them — found it easier to talk about what faith does not refer to, rather than about what it does. But again, he gave hints. Evolution through natural selection — one of the basic tenets of modern science — is, in the case of man, hardly ‘natural' any more: it is not the ‘fittest' in any traditional sense who are now most likely to survive: ‘even genetic cripples live long enough to reproduce', and the qualities of ‘intelligence, ambition, courage and imagination' upon the favouring of which the future of the race would seem to depend, whilst still having personal advantage, have now no obvious genetic advantage — ‘the only kind that matters for evolution'.
⁵
This deposition of nature has come about through the agency of modern science: but science has as yet no alternative to the ‘naturalness' of selection. Men have not thought it proper (‘who would wish or dare?') to take the place of nature in this way: and in this, given their confusions, they are probably right. But it is in the facing of this sort of
situation that there is the chance of some new covenant. At the moment there are only taboos: there is no structure of thinking or of language with which to deal with these things — to deal both with the judgements arrived at through scientific knowledge and, at the same time, with the value judgements of ethics — although these latter have a status as it were equal to that of more precise scientific knowledge since they too have evolved through processes of natural selection — as has the ability to learn. This is the area, the gap, in which there might be the rainbow-bridge of a new covenant — the ability to become accustomed to talking, with authority, a language which will refer to all these forms of knowledge at the same time.