Once within a space there was a girl who loved to laugh and there was another girl who did love to cry. One may suppose that a love of crying is unnatural. One may suppose that the girl chose to love what all people ought not to love. Perhaps. Never the less one girl laughed and the other would cry. She would cry over the caterpillar who resigned to his cocoon, never to be seen again. She would cry for the setting sun and for the leaves in October. She cried when her grandfather passed away. The other girl would laugh at the butterfly taking flight for the first time wobbly as he was. She would laugh at the sunrise and the trees in spring. She could dress herself and she always imagined that the trees could not, like her, choose their clothing and so nature had played a trick on the trees by clothing them in leaves and the shining sun was in on the whole thing to show their preposterous clothes and embarrass the trees every new morning.
“What a lovely, incomplete story”, you might say. Well thank you. I know it is incomplete I only told you the beginning so that you might write the end. But I’ll tell you what the ending must be and you will decide how to write the ending accordingly. One of these little girls is wrong. Her joy is completely misplaced and this perversion is not to be born. One girl will have none of the other’s persuasion and so she devises a performance that will mock the other girl so that the whole world will ridicule her deviant attitude. Artistic as I am I understand the need for creative liberty and so will allow you to determine who is wrong and who is right.
More often than not, and especially in the case of Dario Fo, one is born at a time not of one’s choosing and in a place not of one’s choosing and in effect thrown into one’s existence as I have thrown you into my narrative which is not of your choosing (ah, the other shoe now drops! You see the point). Life, like the rest of my story, hinges upon the performances which presuppose that one attitude is right and the other is wrong. Dario Fo performed accordingly and we attribute his performance to in some way or another, affecting the social order. This would mean then that “social order” is then only the random throwness (if Heidegger can use that word so can I) of one’s existence leading to one’s conviction that something is right or wrong and to be thus organized in a system of social structure. What causes these performances, better yet, what causes the conviction to perform in such a way and is that cause justified (bringing us to yet another question concerning Justice as ____(fill in the blank) but lets not get carried away)? Does the performance which aims to subvert social order have a sort of self righteousness found upon random circumstances? Would that be right? Doesn’t my question commit the same act of judgment? If I’m looking to leave this cul-de-sac of inquiry what sort of performances ought I, like the girl in my narrative, devise?
At the end of my final blog I want to sign off with a quote from Foucault: "I never wrote things other than fiction, and I am perfectly conscious of it. But I think that it is possible for fiction to operate inside truth."
I swear for a minute there I thought you were going to segue into that "two girls, one cup" thing that has found it's way into a couple of lectures this year somehow. Anyway, I suppose the two girls are simply choosing which way to look at the same thing (the girls from your story - not the girls with the notorious "cup"). There is subjectivity within every independent observer, yet there is obviously only pure objective reality in all the noumena that comprise our world. I think what Fo saw as wrong with the church was it's over-reaching into the lives of those who did not either believe in a supernatural deity, or believe in the church's doctrine. It seems to me, ok to have different views of the same noumenon, just so long as my view doesn't delegate what yours ought to be. Also, I believe that there is some element of self-righteousness in every deliberate act and that, by itself, is not necessarily bad (for example, Let's say I work at a soup kitchen because it makes me feel better about myself...). I wouldn't cast Fo as one who is simply looking at the same thing differently. He isn't pushing a worldview or a doctrine in the way the church does - he is merely countering the church's view with what he deems to be their own hypocrisy. Rather than saying "No, the caterpillar is not dead - the butterfly is born", he is saying "You state that the caterpillar is dead, yet there is no reason that I ought to look at the metamorphosis in that way alone". It is this type of hypocrisy that he, I think, seeks to expose.
ReplyDeleteThis was a rich entry and there's so much to discuss about the things you wrote. I wish I had more time to address all of them. You could have titled this entry "Two girls, one caterpillar".
Ben,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the style you used here to develop your point. I found it very intriguing. The subjective nature of performance is something that is very important to realize. I think you did a good job of bringing that out here.
Killer intro! Perfect for talking about Fo. But don't just ride away into the sunset wafting rhetorical questions in the conclusion. Take a stand.
ReplyDelete