Blood and Bones: Part 2: Authenticity
How we yearn for authenticity. In our selves and in others. But how can I claim authenticity for something I’m making up out of my own head?
Part 2 of the series of essays I wrote nine years ago about being a writer in the 21st Century. Interestingly, the villains are still the same. I wrote an early version of this on my Blog here: Peter John Cooper: March 2016
Here is the full text if you’d rather read than watch:
It’s all just stories - none of us knows the truth about anything. But stories are good. They are what we tell ourselves to keep fear at bay, to make sense of our lives, to see things as we want to see them so everything is skewed really. - Stephen Mangan The Times March 5th 2016.
Do you sometimes feel that you’ve turned up in life just after the cop cars and the ambulances and the fire engines have just disappeared round the corner, the smashed glass has been swept away and there is nothing left to see? How much of life is lived just out of sight, just round the corner? It sometimes feels to me as though I’m listening to the world through cotton wool, trying to grasp it with boxing gloves. All I perceive is the shallow and shaky and occasional fleeting moments of experience instead of those big, defining events that everyone else seems to enjoy. My young friend Skidmore would sneer at me on his way to the casino or a day out bungee jumping and say “You live your life second hand You only see the world through Facebook and Twitter,. If you’ve got a problem with the world, it’s your fault. You live in a bubble. You only see the world through a tiny knothole of the rotting woodwork of your front door.”
And yes, all sadly true, Skidders, Old Man.
What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon
“Anyway, we don’t do Truth anymore. Truth is so… last year.” says Skidmore warming in his opinion. “What in God’s name “do you even mean when you ramble on about authenticity You make up stories. You’re a playwright for God’s sake – a professional liar. What on earth do you know about truth?"
As a playwright, All I’m trying to do is to relay what I see with minimum bullshit. But I’m also faced with the task of providing an emotionally satisfying and gripping first-hand experience for my audiences that will draw them in and cause them to be engaged in the way that I am. Audiences very soon sniff out the bogus, the trivial and the disengaged. I need my audience to trust me, to believe in the world, the ideas I put before them so that they are willing to accompany me on my journey. I’m going to have to unpick all these ideas and see what I actually mean by them.
Before I write poetry or fiction I need to understand what truth is.
“You’re no better than all those politician Johnnies you’re always whingeing about. They’re all liars, cheats and fakes” says Skidmore. “I wouldn’t vote for any of them”
Not all politicians are self-serving and mendacious, but those who are always seem to have have louder voices than those who are not. They have learnt that lying and cheating works just as well as a reasoned argument. But it seems to be the case that when we seek out people of authenticity to be our representatives in government, do we almost always end up with the self-regarding, bullies, liars and cheats?
The culture of celebrity on television, the celebration of mountebanks by news media provide an ecology in which everyone is fake because we expect nothing else. But in the digital age, pictures can be photoshopped to deceive. Video can be faked, data altered.
We have lost trust in politicians and people in authority and thereby we seem to have lost trust in humanity as a whole
I have scientist friends who explain that an idea, a theory, is true unless and until something comes along to disprove it. Newton’s laws were universal and immutable until Copenhagen Interpretation of the physics of quantum particles demonstrated another series of laws. Which is true? Or can we say that one is more true than the other? My friends say both sets of observations are true. It all depends on where you are standing. If we are looking at the world around us and the universe beyond, Newton still holds true. But at the quantum level, Copenhagen can be true. Neither conflict because they inhabit an entirely different scale of observations. Look upwards to the stars and you will see Newton, look down to atomic particles and you will see Planck.
Different truths can and do exist alongside each other. That is a revelation to me and something I need to consider.
“There’s always a story. It’s all stories really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” - Terry Pratchett – A Hat Full of Sky.
But there still seems to be a yearning for authentic experience. Something or someone we can get behind.. I guess that’s why Skidmore spends so much of his time in casinos and bars. Or dangling by his feet from an elastic band over a waterfall. Our quotidian existence is so far from feeling any sort of natural engagement with the world that many of us seek out experiences that are near to death. Oblivion. Or bankruptcy. We seek the outlandish, the dangerous, the bitter. But our search for the authentic experience forces us closer and closer to the inauthentic. We yearn to hike through authentic countryside, we long to eat authentic Mexican food at ye olde village pub. In reality the countryside is cold wet and muddy And the authentic Chipotle comes straight out of the freezer. In the end the whole of life becomes a disappointment. Nothing matches the overblown hype and propaganda or the travel brochures.
And Those who live their lives in extremis, who feel crushed by poverty or by a world they no longer feel part of, or can trust, will lash out. They will follow any narrative that offers them a glimmer of hope. That gives an illusion of the authentic. That narrative may be entirely fictitious., It may be a fantasy offering a pot of fairy gold at the end of a Brexit rainbow, but for those who have nothing, it is everything.
Can I as a playwright show a more authentic view of humanity that would contribute in some small way to restoring everyone’s faith in the essential goodness of human nature without compromising the other, palpable truth that people are, indeed, venal, grasping, selfish, prone to violence, self-centred and so on and so forth? Or should I just butt out, as my US friends would have it and go back to looking at the kittens?
"Everything is relative. Stories are being made up all the time - there is no such thing as the truth. You can see how that has filtered its way indirectly into post-truth." A.C. Grayling
Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. The authentic experience occurs within the here and now. It is the wind in our faces, the kick on the shins, the rain trickling down the back of our neck The more senses that are involved the more authentic an experience becomes. It can be brought into even sharper focus by having others experience it with us. “Did you see that?” we ask and are happy that there is someone else present to share the experience. Afterwards, we tell stories about what happened and our emotions well up. Laughter or tears or a shudder of regret.
One authentic experience, many conflicting truths. Human beings and their affairs are so bloody complicated. I don’t really feel any closer to my subject than I did forty years ago.
In the end, the only authentic experience is that of two people in a room looking into each other’s eyes - Theatre.
If we artists and writers do our job properly we can weave a narrative that carries the audience through the emotional landscape and gives a more accurate, fuller picture of humanity. Fiction or not.
And, just to be clear, I’m not advocating Realism as a style ahead of fantasy, naturalism, epic theatre or any other way of portraying the writer’s view of the world. All I ask that there be an underlying idea or ideas that tell me something new about the reality of what it is to be human.
Having observed the world and its people, the playwright can construct a narrative bringing together elements that would never meet in real life. She is at liberty to ask the question “What if…?” of the world and the people they observe. “What if Donald Trump did meet Nelson Mandela?” “What if time travel is possible and we could go back to the beginning of 2016?” The writer then applies her Imagination. The creative narrator imagines themselves inside the mind of their character. She gives it life and credibility and tries to examine what the possible outcome of the question is. But she must retain a consistency of vision or her audience will suddenly jolt awake from the experience and thereby deny it. The writer inhabits the multiverse where all outcomes, all truths are possible, providing that we apply the rules of humanity and human nature.
I think I’m wrestling with something important here. But I’m not sure what. I kind of think that my uncertainty is part of the answer. Isn’t there a parallel with the Newton, Copenhagen thing. Maybe that’s stretching it a bit far but, you know…
I’ve learnt that There can be a variety of truths and realities that stem from an authentic experience. For my audience there is the authenticity of the narrative they are watching. It answers the question, “Do I believe in what I’m seeing? Is this challenging me with ideas? Does it make sense? Is it consistent?” At the same time there is the authenticity of the theatrical experience. Does the narrative carry me along? Am I engaged emotionally? Have I been changed by the experience? Did I just receive an eyeful of the actor’s spittle?
In my next instalment I shall explore this further by thinking about the Greeks Gods associated with theatre, Apollo and Dionysius and how they come to represent those two experiences.
One more thing:
John Le Carre, the eminent spy novelist makes a subtle distinction between “authenticity” and “plausibility” meaning, I think, that I need to create a world that is so dense and thought out that the reader or audience never needs to question its veracity. The creation of such a world, with a complete internal logic is called verisimilitude.
I felt there were more truths in the verisimilitudes of fiction than in the assumptions of history. Leigh Hunt.
By creating such a plausible total world and guiding our audiences through it, we are providing a totally immersive, and, yes, authentic experience where we can explore issues and ideas that might sit uneasily with our own small experience but which in some way we can still describe as True.
Music doesn’t have to be beautiful all the time. It has to be True. It has to have meaning. It has to articulate something that’s important to be said. - Natalie Clein Cellist. BBC Front Row January 12th 2017
