Persona

Amplification…

“Tor,” oil on canvas, 1983

The term Persona is derived from the name given to actor’s masks in ancient Greece. Per Sona, for the sound. The mask was shaped to provide amplification for the human voice and then further shaped to visually amplify the expressions an audience, listeners, might expect to play across the actor’s face. Comedy and tragedy each with its own persona….

The foundation of what we now consider the presence of the individual as a person has grown out of an assimilation of the tools of the art of acting, or performance: per, for, the formation…. What had been concerned with projection, the pushing outward of what was within; the voice, the emotions, the feelings held, created, and shared with the help of a mode of amplification…; became a way to consider how we each navigate the world as it appears in a particular light.

Over the course of my life I have learned of that entomology and forgotten it again several times. Each time I’ve rediscovered it this re-realization has always come as a shock. Carried a certain frisson…. It’s the kind of thing that just feels important. While, at the same time it feels as though the “answers” this might provide must prove either facile or just too deep to be understood.

Persona. For me as a teenager in the 1960’s this was a term that arrived wrapped in plenty of drama and carrying a perfume – for the vapors? – of a sophistication that one might never quite be able to live up to no matter how seductive it was to aspire to arrive at such a mental space…. As a young and peripheral, of the edges, American at the time it was all something that seemed to promise answers to questions I was too afraid to admit I was finding them essential.

From the edges I found myself growing up in everything appeared to be external to “me.” Including, if not especially, what a sense of self might be. Everything was somehow out there. Even down to how I should consider who I was. The “answers” had to be external. What was not out there; in the opinions, reactions, and consequences of how I appeared to the others; everything, was outside.

This is a form of disassociation. When we feel alienated form our actual physical self and seek solace and refuge in secondary things, concepts, ideas, narratives applied and believed-in. Nothing is primary. So everything is fraught and removed and in need of interpretation. We are as that pre-Per-Sona audience must have felt. Struggling to hear, to make sense of what was too weak to be transmitted, to be carried on the wind, arising from breath and unable to arrive legibly at the listener’s ear.

We can’t look at this topic without being constantly reminded that acting is a performance and that living is…, well, not entirely the same thing. There is a friction between performance, and what belongs to it, and living, and what pertains to life….

There is a longstanding confusion in play. The “self-consciousness” seemingly at the heart of performance rubs against the expectation that life, that living, should be integral. That is, that life holds together as it is what it is. That its shapes have integrity, wholeness. A transparency that can only be clouded by any attempt to portray one’s existence and place ones self in this “acting….”

From within the limitations of a disassociated state we cannot perceive integrity, integration of the self, except by the ways we catch glimpses of what must be going on inside by regarding the reactions to how it all appears to others. There is no other way of imagining life in any other way than as a performance, a putting on of forms, wearing masks, costumes. Projecting an idea of a self and then wagering one’s existence on how winning that performance might be.

I don’t think life has always been that way. I think that even now there are people who don’t see life in this way. Some, because they have come into existence in cultures that did not distinguish internal from external. Cultures where the interpenetrating connections of everything with everything have never been questioned and therefore the question has never arisen. Others because they have come to some accommodation with the exigencies of existence and have tasted of that interconnection. Some may have just found all of this self-evident in ways that we might admire and aspire to but that remain alien to us in our profound alienation.

For most people all of the time and everybody much of the time all of this is just beyond what effort and attention can do. There is no expectation that there can be any fruit of such an inquiry. It seems an impossible barrier to understanding. We are too busy….

All art is performative. The performing arts are where one must recognize this truth right from the start. Until we confront performance as it is, we can have no embodied sense of what it entails. We remain stuck in our expectations of what it must be. Expectations that have arisen in a disassociated vacuum…. We are left trying to imagine something as it must exist from the inside while all we can focus on is how it all appears from the outside and with a body of experience that lacks any lived-in sense of interiority.

It’s no wonder that we are not a little frightened by the mask of persona….

Nothing has brought me into as close a contact with what is actually involved in performance than my experiences with music, with learning an instrument, with putting all of the individually seemingly impossible obstacles between not being able to do any of it and the monumental enormity of all of the aspects that must come together for anything to actually occur. And yet…. What was impossible one day, one week, one month, one year; eventually becomes “second nature.” What was too confusing, and still remains somehow mysterious, begins to happen as if it were spontaneously occurring without an obvious and believable trail of “cause & effect.” Breakthroughs occur and are experienced as gifts of Grace….

The cumulative effect, rhyming and building on insights and experiences previously found in painting and writing, is recognizable as an act of surrender, beginning with the negation of everything else that might have occupied one’s time and attention, including, and especially at the beginning, all the fantasies and delusions of how one’s time might be spent; and turning that time and attention to this relationship which ties us to our instrument with the realization that without a longstanding commitment to the most mundane and seemingly trivial aspects of the craft, of taking one’s connection with our instrument in through our sense of touch and our sense of hearing and developing the internal, neural, muscular, even skeletal pathways that bring about an intimacy that allows for communication to occur.

There are aspects to this realization, to what is communicated, how and by whom and for whom. The analogy of an inter-membrane transference is there for what is physically occurring. A pathway, thousands, millions of pathways begin to form and are then strengthened and developed, deepened, honed…. The other aspect is a bit less familiar. When we think of communication we tend to expect that something, a “content” in today’s twisted terms of art, is somehow there, inside and what happens in communication is that this content is transferred to the awareness of others. As with the plumbing analogy of electrical systems this is hopelessly and dangerously flawed. And like that analogy, it ends up being our default way of giving up on any more meaningful understanding. Acting on the first we run a risk of electrocution. with this latter conflation we risk so much more….

I’ve long turned to another equally simplistic analogy, but one that has a certain boldness in the fact that it does not hide from its weaknesses. I see intelligence and the creation of something out of nothing that is thinking, making, expressing; as not a process that happens within our skulls, but that what is in our bodies, from every part and from what happens within the neural system that connects them all, is an act of receiving and not making. We are receivers and can be transmitters, but what we communicate does not belong to us; was not “created” by us; and in the end is most likely not really in any meaningful way understandable by us. All that we can do is participate and marvel….

At least that’s the way it appears to someone who took great pains not to succumb to the curse of dying at 27…. Most of my efforts until I was well past fifty involved avoiding the pitfalls that were so clear but whose source within Ego-identification and its total lack of a foundation in what-is remained so tenaciously invisible to me in a fundamental misunderstanding of what creation entails. This confusion appears to be widespread. Almost universal. Even many practicing creator/artists miss this and end up paying the price of their confusion.

Destruction we own. Ego knows how to destroy. That is all it can do in its cursed attempts to convince us of, not only its existence, but its primacy. The cost of this lie is everything. Both as individuals and as a culture when that culture is focused upon Narcissistic desire….

Creation just is. The term is synonymous with universe. Creation is everything. It is the how and the why and the it of all existence. We can no more own it or take credit for it than we can for the rising of the sun or the touch of bark on our hands. The caress of a loved-one….

Performance, as we have inserted it into the expectations holding up our Edifice of Thought, has to fit a schedule. It must be on demand. So, as with sincerity itself, we have found that it is everything and that the best thing is to discover a way to consistently fake it. The other side of the curse of 27 has always been the pressure put upon those who show gift to meet this expectation for the benefit of those who look to them as they do to everything else, as simply a source of “profit.”

In this condition; coupled with the extreme poverty of imagination brought about by our disassociation and its traumas; we confuse the “showman’s” bag of tricks with what actual performance is. We confuse artifice with art…. And, we begin to doubt that there could actually be art. Until we are confronted with an incontrovertibly miraculous performance.

Except that then we ascribe it to something else. Something Ego is willing to entertain. We say that we are confronting an act of genius….

Originally this was meant to mean that a person was a fortunate conduit to something passing through them. The genius as a form of Per Sonus, a mask that amplified and focused a signal passing through it. The genius was not the person but the generator, the creator that found a voice and was amplified passing through a certain person.

Such subtitles have been lost on us in this age of total consumption. In a culture whose only purpose is to perpetuate and celebrate a lie; that the only “things” that matter are the beliefs captivating those who claim control of everything and are willing to destroy everything to defend their conspiracy of falsehood; no other view can even be imagined than the one totally implausible view that certain individuals own the lives that pass through their grasping hands.

There is craft in every art; but it is destructively reductionist to insist that art is merely art-craft. Every representation, every expression, every performance is carried upon art-craft, but if it is genuine it rises above artifice. Art exists within the conditions of rhyme and metaphor. But in its realization it arrives at a fullness that mirrors, transubstantiates, the infinite fullness of the whole of existence, of what it is to be alive.

Art relies on amplification. “For the sound….” For the sound to carry it must be amplified. Loudness equates with legibility and what appears louder we hear as “better,” as we learn in recording, “More is more….”

Immured in a one-dimensional irreality our binary conceptions; the one thing that equates with the subtleties and nuances we fail to appreciate in the lives we so often fail to inhabit; gives us this increased bandwidth that amplification provides.

Every art, by focusing on a segment of perception and using a particular lens, magnifies, amplifies some aspect of existence so that we may perceive it as lifelike. This amplification. This focusing of attention on rhymes and patterns; standing-in for everything and giving us a perspective from which we can discern complexity outside of the life and death struggle for security we talk ourselves into inhabiting instead of living; makes life understandable while, paradoxically re-immersing us in mystery…. The key is that within the contexts of art we can more easily accept mystery than is possible from withing the struggle we have made of life.

Music, not in spite of its ephemerality, its lack of substance, its passing with the time of its making and its permeability to the limits and capacities of language. Its existence as patterns that can only be perceived as a whole when it is finished but that, in that perception and the strength of the impression this makes on us creates the opportunity for its re-creation…. In this music is an art that holds all the other arts within it while only existing while it is being created, leaving behind it only echoes in the silence that it has punctuated….

In this it holds its strongest rhyming quality, the mirror it holds up to the mystery of existence, of what it is to be alive. As with life itself it carries its qualities ephemerally through time leaving behind it but a trace of memories. As with every art, because it renews itself, in its case through its next performance, it, as with every artform, is the only way we can hold some aspect of existence, or life, and contemplate it through time instead of being trapped in the inexorable passage of time….

We never stand in the same river twice. Neither us nor the water, the river itself, is ever the same as it was. Art, music, honors this truth as it allows us to tweak and play with the inevitabilities of existence, holding life in attention long enough for us to make sense of it in some way….

In this it gives us the possibility that we can learn from our encounters with the breakdown of earlier forms of engagement from within an unexamined and therefore indiscernible existence within the whole. Giving us a pathway through our alienation and disassociation; out of our beliefs in reductive oversimplifications taken ad-absurdem in our desperate attempts to avoid our fears of uncertainty forcing us to maintain our allegiance to the lies of control.

When we experience creation happening through us and among us and feel the connections this inspires, breathes into us; we can see glimmers of what it is to be whole, to be integrated, to feel the breath of life pass through us. Each experience of this hammers away at the lies that bind us.

Our time of revelation can appear to be a sheer onslaught of disillusionment. This is daunting in the extreme. Yet without these efforts we remain trapped in lies. We face a purgatory fueled by hate and fear; the joy uncovered by the space; the energy released by disillusionment; can be hard to discern amidst so much grief. Music, art, take us towards the fount of Joy and show us the energy that resides at the junction of mystery and all that is ineffable; the strength courage provides as a counter to the pull of fear towards hate and the curse of the undead.

Life is monumental. It is everything and then it is gone. It can leave traces but these traces, as with physical fossils, can be confusing and hard to put into context. The will to control, our state of fearfulness, is more likely to read those traces as the remains of chimera and monsters of its own making as it is to see them as the shadows cast by a living breathing wholeness that persists and outlives the ages and eons of time; even as it can pass out of existence entirely and perhaps reappear somewhere else, some other time….

Music holds us in that place where we can celebrate and abide….

“Flow,” charcoal on paper