THE FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

A devil’s bargain is one for which the price is too high.  The devil in question might be Christian and might be supernatural, but maybe not.  He’s only a metaphor.  Weighing the deal, trying to understand who won, can’t really be done except in retrospect over a whole lifetime, which is maybe why we get so interested in death beds, hoping that at the last minute there will be some kind of insight we can use in our own lives. A summing up, a balance.  Of course, most of us just struggle along without any Devil involved.

The best Devil stories are the ones in which the bargain is not made for plain old predictable money, but rather for a talent, a way to be more than usually gifted with skills admired by other people.  There’s the great tales like Paganini about learning to play the fiddle with skill so extraordinary that it seems supernatural to other people and might even be accused of casting spells on them, so they have to dance until they drop.  Bargains with the Devil are often accompanied by admiration, but the kind that leads to envy and then possibly to punishment.  Even death, which is then blamed on the Devil.  As well as elaborate post-mortem tortures.  But there are also stories about the shrewd peasant who outsmarts the Devil.

The forbidden is an area where the Devil thrives.  Good reliable law-abiding people push stuff over into the dark -- sex, drugs, defiance of authority. Disorder, dirt, disease.  Failure to submit.  Human relations written large and supernatural.  In short, stigmatizing is connected to the idea of the Devil’s Bargain.  If you are “bad,” and still succeed in spite of resistance and punishment, then the Devil must be helping you.

In my own life, the most dangerous bargain has been what a scholar might call -- to give it significance -- the Faustian bargain: greed for knowledge.  I might rename it -- to take the supernatural and the sexual out of it -- the Curious Cat bargain.  “Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought it back.”  I want to know things.  When I say “know,” I don’t mean facts and statistics, but something more like “experience” or “connection.”  I can earn skills or get a degree in some kind of field, but exposure to life itself teaches me something different: the taste of wind, the feel of grass, the sight of long horizons, the smell of the grizzly bear’s breath.  This yearning causes people to make devil’s bargains by climbing mountains, going under the ocean in bathyspheres, taking drugs.  What is it LIKE, we wonder. 

I read.  Some would say I’m making a devil’s bargain by reading so much instead of making money or cleaning house.  They don’t think reading is real.   It’s my choice.  Instead of asking friends what’s “good,” I listen for what people I admire claim is a book that changed their lives.  So Benedetti says “Literature as Experience” by Bacon and Breen was his key to the galaxy.  I order it and I’m reading it.  So far I’m about halfway through and it seems as though I’m reading a text about “rhetoric,” esp. in the comparison of two fabulous stories: one a classic moral tale by Petronius  ("Beside her in her weariness sat a very loyal maidservant who both patterned her tears after those of her grieving mistress and renewed, as often as it burned low, the light placed in the tomb.") and the other a coming-of-age story by James Joyce.  ("The space of the sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violent and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns.  The cold air stung us and we played until our bodies glowed.")  TOTALLY different in style, content and intent.  Each powerful in its own way.  Is interpretation some form of rhetoric?

Now I have to see how all this fits into my own experience.  Benedetti and I were at NU School of Speech at the same time, me in Speech Education (which is supposed to be about teaching high school kids but was actually a Devil’s bargain so I could use my scholarship to study religion, theatre, and writing.)  Beny started in the theatre department but transferred to Interpretation,  I’m puzzled, but not because he transferred.  I don't understand the difference between standing behind a lectern with a script that might not have been written as a play, acting out the parts but also the narrator, versus actually “impersonating” a character in a set?

Different as we were in expectations and goals, I think we were alike in wanting a “meta” level -- reflection at the level of structure, “framing,” the major cultural movements of human thought in life and society.  At the end of the Fifties, the heroisms of WWII -- and the existential despair after it -- were giving way to structuralism.  The way concepts were formed and integrated in the mind were becoming self-conscious.  But there was competition from modernism: stream of consciousness and free association.  (There must be a good book about all this.)

Curiously, Beny transferred to Bacon and Breen as alternatives to Krause who trained both Bacon and Breen.  (And who admired them.)  What was the difference?  I see from this book they wrote that they are “cool.”  Intellectual.  Quite male.  Admiring of technology.  Very Fifties.  As Beny says,  “What did you expect?  It WAS the Fifties.”  

Krause was so remote from this style that she never even wrote a book.  Yet she knew the “meta” level in her own way, insisted on it in her teaching of acting by pointing to the script.  But she also went to the reality of the person doing the acting.  What skills and realizations did they need to reach in order to bring this script to life for an audience?  (“The Space Between Us.”)

I went in still another direction, which by now is taking my whole life.  (My Devil’s price.) I thought, why act in plays when there is so much of life that explores the same human issues directly?  The answer is that it’s not safe to push up against real life the way one would push up against the proscenium-framed play-life.  The risk is high, higher even than trying to break into Broadway or Hollywood.  Esp. if one goes to the “other” of different countries, different levels of society, which is essentially what I did when I came to the Blackfeet reservation where the questions are very, very big.  So far no answers big enough.  

So I went to religion in the church setting with real people -- not at the “structural” or institutional level where the attention is on theories and systems which is the world of the seminaries and universities -- but to the actual heart aches and exultations of people.  I found that you could not deal with real people without knowing their real place and time.  AK again.  But I wanted more “meta” level.  So now that I have made the devil’s bargain of exchanging money (by retiring early) for time to read and write, I’m finding it.  If I could just understand it.

Remarkably, it leads back to the point in my evolution when I took the only two classes I nearly flunked.  I got C’s in them (Acting from Krause and Philosophy of Religion from Paul Schilpp) which meant I endangered my scholarship which was contingent on at least a 3.5 grade average in the days when grades really meant something.   (Everything is a bargain.)  The reason I got bad grades was that I paid no attention to the final exams.  I’m STILL absorbing those ideas, still using them, still hearing the Devil’s violin.  So far I’ve paid the price with no regret.  I hope I can afford my book bill.  

Next up:  “Hunger: the Primal Roots of Modern Addiction” by Bruce Wilshire and “The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains our Insatiable Search for Meaning” by Daniel Bor.    “The End of Acting: a Radical View” by Richard Hornby which is AGAINST the “Method” acting so made sacred by fans of James Dean and Marlon Brando..    Beyond theatre, beyond school, beyond religion -- way out there on the edge.