2024-03-28
I have a dear friend who, if I'm being completely honest, is more intelligent, erudite, and witty than I am. Despite this, they are kind enough to have continued a long-running email volley with me. My trying to keep up with their brilliance occasionally leads me to saying something coherent.
This was excerpted from one of those lucky conversations.
Despite my minimalist sensabilities, the time I've recently spent up to my ears in the project that is #ThisOldClownHouse has had me thinking a lot about how we silly humans fill up our lives. We seem compelled to gather so much stuff, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word.
We pile up hills to die dramatically on. We choose personal crusades which may or may not define us. We go through cycles of obsession, collection, and emptiness.
Some even collect postage stamps, which I think is particularly perverse.
I'm pretty sure that we do all of this, and so much more, because life really is just mucking about and passing the time until something happens.
In theater, we talk about "the interruption" and how important it is to break up the monotony. In this way, the stage is a poetic magnifying glass being cast on one of the crueler truths of reality. In those scenes where something finally happens there's a moment before it does, and in that moment it's seldom more clear that we do all this stupid make believe stuff because the alternative where nothing happens would be so painfully lonely.
And so, we fill space with anything we can. We make families. We make friends. We assemble towering monuments to made up things, and topple the made up monuments to other people's made up things like houses of cards. We'll do anything, anything...because the idea that we're otherwise alone in the universe is really too awful for most people to bear for more than a moment.
It's also why those stamp hoarding weirdos freak me out. Why aren't they writing letters to friends instead?
There's a quote by a particularly well known weirdo which I particularly adore. His name was Ram Dass, and he said this thing that's been with me ever since I first heard it:
"We're all just walking each other home"
If you remove the possibility of there being a "home" to "walk" to, you're left with something that reads more like a Beckett play: There's nowhere to go, and we're all just desperately trying to keep each other company.
How we do this varies so much.
When I dwell on this overly, one of my clown partners likes to say to me that we are all specks, who matter to each other. I think this is beautiful. Through it is this simple idea, that we're all alone out here, except for each other.
If you think about human inflicted atrocities through this lens for even a moment, it's boggling. Though, perhaps tragically, more comprehensible.