On Stage

The Human Bond Series : VII

I had some Guinness mixed with Budweiser yesterday … my two favorite beers … so … why not? Turned out it didn't anymore taste like either … I was therefore left to identify my new state of mild intoxication with some thoughts from Camus on the subject of absurdity. It was the first time I was in this position and it certainly seemed to contradict what is normal.

 

I don't believe I have any difficulty understanding absurdity … nor do I have any doubts about the world being perfectly orderly and just. Its an acquired taste to put the two together … obviously not for the faint of heart.

 

But there's a pre-requisite … you'll have to do it on stage. Why on stage? … because it is not an experience of physical reality. But you can do it on a 6 inch high platform in your own room with the shelves and bed as your audience.

 

On the stage I may be excused for saying that I truly believe the world and the creative energies are a masterpiece of perfection … in the way they were perceived and brought into our lives … in a round-about-way in the world … engaging an epistemology that involved life, death, marriage, children and taxes. Perfect. I view it today with an understanding of the scheme it engages, involving a little play with the language, expression and the art of living.

 

Still on stage … and half-way through my special concoction … I bring to you now the low-down on absurdity ... The physical life is lived with common sense about the value of everyday activity while the mind probes to unravel creation and examine its finer  points. A person unaccustomed to the practice and suddenly stimulated into it is likely to experience on the one hand … life's serious face … and on the other … emptiness in the landscape of the mind that has opened itself up to examine the nuts and bolts. So … now … we bring to it the meaning of life … its the life of the bard.

 

Its curious to think that life's reality is in some ways the way of the individual and everything out there is an abstract idea formed with words and meanings that we attach to them. Wow! … heavy stuff! … but I just got off-stage and … well yeah … life is lived as an individual.

 

Shakespeare in Macbeth provided a view of the world's stage from the point of unbridled ambition that left little in the way of fulfillment to a man who wanted to lord it over everything. But in viewing it plainly today, away from Birnam Wood, we see it for what it is … a way of life and perception in which man is the instrument of its self constructing nature … as it should be.