Serialized NOW

Bill Shakespeare once said that the whole world was a stage…

Walking out of the Yale Art Gallery several weeks ago, my uncle commented on how he was beginning to see the world around him more and more as a play.

The actions of everyone contributing somehow as choreographed parts in some grand, ongoing pageant. I guess your mind may take things to that level after an hour and a half of a modern art exhibit called "Continuous Present," a series of modern pieces emphasizing among other concepts the passage of time, and cause and effect.

On our way around the corner of York and Chapel St., we passed through the gravitational center of a conversation, or what was more like an informal interview between a pair of Yalies and a street-hewn local. In passing, and from over our shoulders, we saw another student directly across the street, trying not to be obvious, with a camera recording the whole thing. My uncle and I, still very much internalizing the art we had just viewed walked right through this exchange without realizing it (or, at least I didn’t realize it), and hence right through the filming. It was about here he made his observation.

He then, the spontaneous photographer that he is, snapped a unique photograph of a young black woman, probably also a student, waiting at the corner passively negotiating one of her iPod’s many play-lists, seemingly unaware that she was juxtaposed to the white, twenty-something male, very professional looking and very animated, pantomiming the subtle nuances of his cell-phone conversation. From that distance we couldn’t hear the particulars of this conversation—he was like a silent film actor.

People came and went, holding bags of things and coffees. Construction rumbled on across the street. And in the background of my uncle’s photograph well across the street, if you look close is the head of a man, his features blurred partly by a screen door, his eyes fixed directly on the lens of my uncle’s camera, and no doubt studying him as he shot the picture.

There is a distinct rhythm in the bustle of New Haven since Yale's been back in session. I've never been around at this time to really experience it.

I think the world around us is a production put on daily; it’s a play with ever changing scenes, spanning countless acts, an endlessly cycling cast of characters and taking place on a proscenium stage that’s as large as the context you choose to live in; your world, your own social circle. Where you:

exercise, go to cash your check, attend class, work, eat, get coffee, fish, bike, roller blade, surf, feed the pigeons, swim, grocery shop, cow tip etc...

There is a cue for everyone to enter, I think. Multiple ones maybe even, at many different times. Listen close enough with your eyes, ears and yes, even your nose, and you’ll realize your cue. They come around a few times, so, don’t worry if you miss the first call. But it’s important to be poised near the stage, listening and ready.

Tunnel vision can really hinder that. With regards to myself, my attention was always turned inward at these times, to a spot where something was missing; a vacant spot I couldn’t fill; someplace empty, where I wondered why there was nothing instead of outward to where there was everything, or at least a great deal of things. Walking around like I had been, I was a lone audience member apart from it all, rather than a player in it.

But perhaps we voluntarily balk at the opportunity to enter at certain times, and who could blame us. Duels are usually a bit over pronounced and gratuitous. Attention seekers pollute the air with their trite, self-aggrandizing soliloquies and I refuse to grant them any. And what serious actor wants to perform in some gaudy Masque, dancing under intrusive iodized lights amid a decadent array of brightly colored clothes, Our view of one another filtered through the false masks they don?

It’s true that in order for artists to internalize what they see, and project a representation of it through their work, they must take a scrutinizing stance just outside of it. Being so immersed in something we don’t truly see and understand its many parts, and can’t adequately address a problem therein. Being so saturated in it, we may become a part of this problem. Most work, a painting, sculpture, novel, etc...functions to identify a problem, societal or interpersonal, and maybe proposes a way to solve it.

But this can become a trap I think, if we allow it. Over time, a mechanism is sprung that takes over as habit, and it confines us to, as Paulo Coelho eloquently states in his novel, Brida, "The worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: Loneliness."

We can learn so much more by being a part of the production than ever we could as just a discerning audience member. Being a part of something unique going on also beats the pants off the role of that griping critic who sits alone up in the balcony somewhere, constantly searching for flaws in the performance through the lens of his stuffy theater binoculars.

I find that the more verbs I fill my daily existence with I expand and diversify my contexts, hence the grander the scale of the stage, and the greater my role in the production.

If you have to stand outside of it for a while and wait, then wait patiently, and never forget the beauty of it that draws you back in.