Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 18 October 2007
What she knew. To "write what you know," for a dramatist or for that matter for any other creative artist, is an easy trope to disseminate in the classroom or textbooks about writing. Creation is a form of knowing, of coming-to-know something that was previously unknown. If for the sake of argument we can even say that the word "knowledge" is appropriate, it is knowledge that comes through the process of creative discovery, of an imaginative entering into a landscape of the mind. Beauty is not an issue here; landscapes are not beautiful in and of themselves, they are cold hard things. Only the perspective of the observer can wrench a recognisable beauty from them. Knowledge is an examination of, a familiarity with, landmarks in that landscape. (And certainly discoverable, too, in music, as discoverable as these landmarks are as they're described with the spoken word.)
In that destructive trope is supposedly a recipe for creation: the easy definition, in that what is known is history, memory, science, experience. But that is not knowledge of a landscape; that is trivia, grist for the imagination. Bodies in that landscape, too, can be entered, discovered; the explorer finds recognisable features of the lay of his own land in the landscapes of others.
But it is possible to know. The subtitle of my new play about Jokasta is "What she knew," and it is only possible to explore that by entering her experience as the Sophoclean landscape presents it to me. Whether or not Jokasta is a fictitious character is immaterial; I can enter her body, her features, see a landscape through her eyes. And make notes, for the store of knowledge that I can then call upon when writing the words I would have her speak. But this is not study; it is experiencing imaginatively her body and landscape. Because desire is recognisable, a common human trait, I already have this path into her. (I've found Helmut Newton's portfolio Sex and Landscapes and Paul Cava's very different Children of Adam useful suggestions for my cartographic essay.)
But it is an imaginative path, education a dynamic process between perceiver and perceived. And it is amoral: Brecht's Galileo says "I must know," and it is the passion for knowing that leads him to defy the culture and the church. To find and express a new knowledge. Bearing Galileo in mind, it must be said that knowledge is not something one learns, one picks up in books, one sees through a telescope, or even within everyday experience or memory. It requires discipline and sacrifice. Knowledge is not to study, to remember, to learn. To know, the poet must dare.
Posted at 9.03 am in /Organum
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