“I don't... I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things. We...We're just going around all day like unconscious machines... and meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness... just building up and building up inside us.”
“That's right. It just builds up, uh... and then it just leaps out inappropriately.”
“Because somehow in our social existence today... we're only allowed to express our feelings, uh... weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly, everybody goes crazy.”
“I mean, I remember a night. It was a couple of weeks after my mother died. And I was in pretty bad shape. And I had dinner with three relatively close friends... two of whom had known my mother quite well... and all three of whom had known me for years. You know that we went through that entire evening without my being able to... for a moment, get anywhere near what... Not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary evening... in which I was talking about all this pain that I was going through and everything. Really, not at all. But the fact that nobody could say... ‘Gee, what a shame about your mother’ or ‘How are you feeling?’ It was just as if nothing had happened. They were all making these jokes and laughing… I mean, do you realize, if you brought that situation into a Tibetan home... That'd be just so far out. I mean, they wouldn't be able to understand it. I mean, really, the... The Africans would have probably put their spears into all four of us... 'cause it would have driven them crazy. They would have thought we were dangerous animals or something like that.
“Right… I mean, that's absolutely abnormal behavior. But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners and parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams... because people are talking in symbols.”
“Everyone is sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings.”
“No one says what they're really thinking about. Then people will start making these jokes that are really some sort of secret code.”
“Right. Well, what often happens in some of these evenings... is that these really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know... and everyone will be talking at once and sort of saying... ‘Hey, wouldn't it be great if Frank Sinatra and Mrs. Nixon and blah-blah-blah... were in such and such a situation?’ You know, always with famous people, and always sort of grotesque. Or people will be talking about some horrible thing... like... Like, uh, the death of that girl in the car with Ted Kennedy... and they'll just be roaring with laughter. I mean, it's really amazing. It's just unbelievable. That's the only way anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think that's why I never understand what's going on at a party. I'm always completely confused.”
“You know, uh, Debby once said, after one of these New York evenings... she thought she'd traveled a greater distance... just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago... to that New York evening... than her grandmother had traveled in, uh, making her way... from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago.”
“I think that's right. You know, it may... it may be, that one of the reasons... that we don't know what's going on... is that when we're there at a party, we're all too busy performing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That was one of the reasons that, uh, Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well... that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous... and, in a way, obscene.”
“Huh.”
“Isn't it amazing how often a doctor... will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? When you see a terrorist on television, he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers... or single people, or artists... are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy... of how a father, or a single person, or an artist should look and behave. They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves... at every single moment... and they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves.”
“Yeah.”
“They don't know what they should be doing with their lives. They're reading all these self-help books. Oh, God! I mean, those books are just so touching, because they show... how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us... are really getting on in life... even though, by performing these roles all the time... we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. We usually don't know the things we'd like to know... even about our supposedly closest friends. I mean... I mean, you know... suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life. Well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don't dare to ask each other.”
“No. It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.”
“I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality.
“I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now... on our so-called careers... automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority.”
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