METHOD ACTING IS A FORM OF EMBODIMENT

In undergrad classes (1957-1961) I was on scholarship and had to maintain a B average, which I did.  Luckily, I had enough A’s to offset my two lowest grades: a C in acting and a C in philosophy of religion.  These are probably the two courses that have been most meaningful in my life during the half-century since.  Part of the reason I got low grades is that I was thinking about the issues too much to focus on tests of content.  Both professors were exceptional: Alvina Krause and Paul Schilpp.  I want to talk about Stanislavski’s Method acting as AK taught it.

Basically, this approach to acting was very similar to Mark Johnson’s understanding of embodied meaning, using sense memories to manage the actor’s inner life in a way that communicated the meaning of the character in a play.  We worked on our bodies as instruments — doing exercises of posture, voice and movements — but also increasing awareness of each other and building empathy.  A big component was studying cultures and how they pattern emotion and reaction, what the embodiment people might call “framing”.

Alvina Krause

But always the base of operations was the senses, including internal body feedback.  It is now a pretty well-confirmed premise that the brain’s index to what it knows, particularly memory, is filed according to senses associated with the content so that it is not frivolous to think of grasping a concept in terms of the sense-ambiance of the moment, for the senses interact to create a sort of globe that contains knowledge.  This is why Johnson speaks of “the aesthetics of human understanding.”  The director of a play aims to create just such a “globe” of sight and sound in a way that will illuminate the meaning of the presentation by being both vivid and coherent.  It should offer feeling, not just evidence.  The same is true of religious ceremonies.

When intensity is high and the actors have properly entered the inner lives of their roles, something palpable happens that is fabulous but also a little frightening until the actors have a bit of experience: the boundaries melt, onstage becomes realer than real, and somehow the audience is able to participate in that.  Even actors working for film find this to be true, though it’s more difficult for a number of reasons.

Paula Ragusa and Dick Benjamin

my classmates

Still, it isn’t necessary to have an audience or at least not a big one.  These moments happened in acting class with only a few observers or even when working in practice halls.  The most powerful idea coming out of embodiment theory is the ability to “merge” or attune with other people.  In terms of music, it’s being perfectly in tune, and in that context it’s also very powerful.  Bob Scriver, who was famous for the quality of his high school orchestras in the Fifties, used to say that if junior high musicians learned to play perfectly in tune, they could sound as good as professionals.  Witnessing true engagement between actors is much like hearing music perfectly in tune.

A friend who expected to become a psychiatrist used to observe AK’s acting classes with me, a practice that was neither encouraged or discouraged so long as observers were quiet.  I met him when he was my assigned biology lab partner.  Much of our discussion after these acting classes was about rationality versus emotionality.  He was from that kind of student (usually male) full of introspection, trying to reason out the meaning of life instead of experiencing it.  I was the other way around, skipping in and out of logic, which was why we were friends — one of those opposite relationships, which can be very intimate, but maybe not physically.  He was not a “cold” philosopher: his close cohort called him “Hume.”  I loved him dearly and we remained friends after I left for Montana and he went on to a Ph.D. and teaching.

I’ve repeatedly sketched out my current understanding of how persons grow through life, beginning from conception, continuing through the school years, on into adulthood and through until death.  After one drastic pruning of brain cells in toddlerhood, there are several points of brain expansion — actual neuron development and connectome thickening — as at the adrenarche, puberty, and a crucial reconfiguring in early twenties that has no name except maybe maturity.  By this time a person is no longer confined to what’s inside one’s skin, but through empathy can extend awareness into all living beings and the world that sustains them.  Interaction, attunement, attachment, concatenation, and other subtle things with multi-syllabic names have embedded mere embodiment into a system of understanding and action.  It happens all by itself and may not be conscious at all.

Russians have not been so confined by the Platonic roots of thought that have made an obsession of what was once Enlightenment, which actively rejected emotion as a distortion, some kind of reversion to animal life, not as real as what Johnson calls “propositional” thought.  This elevation of math-driven and introspection-developed rationality, as free from emotion as possible, has become demonic in its ability to enforce dogma and justify domination.  It is the engine of terrorism and the enablement of crime.

And it’s stuck.  Even the UU’s with their list of principles that are supposed to be bulletproof, can’t get past them in order to join the universe and act with effectiveness.  Few can grasp that insisting on a list of principles is what the principles were supposed to oppose, a path to arrogance.  Once a person has arrived at a totally logical and convincing “proof” of something without awareness of the emotional structure of their own brain and the frame of their own family and culture, it is very hard to give up.  Efforts to enforce a rigid conviction of “rightness” is at the base of many a malignant family.

Of course, the Russians, for all their inquiry into the physical dynamics of emotional life, have not learned how to manage their rage and romanticism into a viable government.  Maybe it is the anguish of always slipping back into scarcity and brutality that drives their interest in operant conditioning, inherited mind, and the sharing of melancholy.  Or maybe their environment is so harsh that it limits them somehow.  Humans can never entirely overcome the planet.

"The Cherry Orchard"

Making oneself transparent is not always easy and is sometimes painful.  Sustaining empathy for other people takes energy and courage.  They don’t always want to be understood, particularly if they are victims of stigma that has taught them that the only safety is secrecy and deception.   For them, to be detected and understood is to be targeted.  Therapists and playwrights investigate under very specific and guarded circumstances and even then some inner dynamics are explosive when exposed to “oxygen.”  Actors and writers use various personas to buffer and reinvent, but the strategy doesn’t always work.

Community, if it is trustworthy, sustains individuals, keeps track of who they are so they can explore.  Therapy circles have never gone out of fashion, though some have turned toxic.  Others have devised a protocol, a system that guides discipline, that guarantees integrity, until it as well becomes corroded and worn.   Something like that has happened to both Freud and Stanislavski.

WHICH KNOWLEDGE DO YOU LOVE, PHILOSOPHER?

Our “group mind” considers a “Ph.D”, a Doctor of Philosophy, to be the height of intellectual achievement, despite the hollowing out and rotting of that degree today.  Nothing like getting to know a bunch of contemporary Ph.D’s to dispel that particular indicator of superiority.  The “love of wisdom” dates back to a time when the Greeks and Romans thought that — reasoning it out — men were all missing a rib because God removed one to make Eve and women had more teeth than men.  Oh, and men are naturally superior to women.  Philosophy meant reasoning things out, which is fine except their original evidence was never collected from reality and there was always a strong tilt towards the status quo.  “Intellectuals” sat around thinking, ignoring the real world, and imagining categories of things that don’t exist.  

The taxonomy of animals (including us) named according to appearance was shaken up when genome research revealed that their category assignments were often mistaken.  (Most comprehensively when Euros renamed the North American animals according to their resemblance to Euro equivalents.  Including, notoriously, Indians.)  A revolution through science and direct experimentation has also challenged our understanding of human thought.  Not just the content but also the way humans are in the world, how they form and use their minds.  This short post is what I’ve managed to grasp so far, so I’m probably wrong in some ways, but I think my core understanding is reliable.

First of all, this radical anthropology is NOT philosophy, and philosophy is NOT knowledge of reality.  (One of the issues is whether there IS reality.)  It is a set of assumptions built up mostly in the academic setting, which has given shelter to peoples’ love of sitting around arguing.  They’ve used the time to invent categories and then hand them out to a world eager to enforce them, even criminalize them, if not build religious systems on them.  First was God, reducing all conversation about religion to focusing on a giant humanoid in the sky or some replacement.  Lately it has been defining desire, both sexual and wealth-defined groups.  Philosophy is a “holodeck” that makes virtual worlds seem real.

The Star Trek holodeck.

I’ll start with neurology, which has been focused on the brain.  Gradually we realize that the brain is only the dashboard for a creature existing as a skin-defined entity in the world.  Thinking -- as the accumulation of data, as decision for action, and for storage of memory -- happens all over the body.  

The first beginner’s mistake is to privilege the neurons that manage relationship with the out-skin world.  Even when I was in college ’57-61, everyone paid more attention to in-coming stimuli of the nerves (tormenting rats with shocks and sounds and isolating them until there was nothing to do but get addicted).  No attention to what the nerves told the muscles to do, which wasn't pretty.  Scientists tried to control what the rats did (conditioning) instead of observing how rats lived naturally, which was intensely social.  They could not see the flesh they themselves “lived in” any more than a fish could see the water it swam in.  And they tended to be cold fish.

Though dominated by how we know the world -- the senses -- to the philosophers or even the scientists not long ago were ONLY the five sense organs.  They had no suspicion that there were 200 different kinds of cells in the brain capable of sensing things like how close to a wall the person was.  The many information systems feeding from cells to the brain (both specialized cells using neurons and regulating molecules that use liquid circulation instead of neurons) — intricate and plentiful as they are — nevertheless are limited compared to an elephant’s feet (which pick up very low sounds from the earth) or the pigeon’s head (magnetic GPS).  

The striated muscles of an imaginary (virtual) being.

"Ganesh, is that you?"

Decisions and control over action can be automatic, nearly automatic, or hard-wired like an instinct that says “if-then” — if you lay an egg, sit on it!  Consider the diff between smooth and striated muscles.  “Smooth muscle is an involuntary non-striated muscle. It is divided into two subgroups; the single-unit (unitary) and multiunit smooth muscle. Within single-unit cells, the whole bundle or sheet contracts as a syncytium (i.e. a multinucleate mass of cytoplasm that is not separated into cells). Multiunit smooth muscle tissues innervate individual cells; as such, they allow for fine control and gradual responses, much like motor unit recruitment in skeletal muscle.”  No one works on developing their smooth muscles in the gym.

Which takes me to the most major ignored nervous system in the reflections of philosophers, at least those with Euro-mind sets:  the autonomic nervous system with its sympathetic v. parasympathetic reciprocality.  They're considered "just" emotional.  Many features in the body are paired: one kind of molecule balanced by its antithesis, one muscle working against the skeleton in tandem with a second contracting oppositely.  The gut, though smooth muscle, “thinks” because it is a kind of second brain with a neuron sleeve and a high response/production of the same molecules as the brain.  We say, accurately, “I have a gut feeling this won’t work.” 

A heart/lung casting made from the real organs.

Another crucial and neglected loop is the hydraulic pumping of the blood through the heart/lung so as to re-oxygenate the red blood cells.  Using the same tubing plus the interstitial fluid of the inner sea that bathes the cells, are the white blood cells.  AIDS has made us crucially conscious of those free-lance identifiers and destroyers of microbial invaders.  They recognize, they act.  Is that not “thinking” of a sort?

But not to academic philosophers who are obliged like lawyers (a side branch of philosophy, creating categories and dealing with them, forgetting they are invented) to rely on precedent and all the big shot thinkers before them.  When the Deconstructionists got to these folks and began to remove the pick-up sticks from their houses built of cards (I love mixed metaphors) they were hair-raising to big shots.  We still don’t know whether they were like Sampson pulling down the temple on his own head.  (Hair, heads, temples.  Such images.)   But there are now cracks in the pillars.

Sampson brings down the temple while in it.

The “thinking” systems within the body, those that maintain the homeostasis necessary for survival, are not conscious.  To philosophers (who were NOT scientists) they were therefore not interesting because they wanted to think about a certain KIND of consciousness which was enshrined in language and far more prestigious, “higher”.  What Ph.D.'s do.  That is introspection, reflection about one’s own convictions.  Anything less than that was “animal,” just flesh.  Subhuman.  Therefore they failed to confront the necessary homeostasis issues that kept them alive to think.  

In fact, they carefully avoided and denied much, to the point of cruelty and oppression.  Physical well-being, unless it is a matter of dominance, doesn’t seem to interest them.  And yet experiments reveal that thinking is dependent on attitude and blood supply, which is a matter for the in-skin body and its well-being, so as to produce actions that take it effectively into the out-skin world. 

Blackfeet at the beginning of the 20th century

The great survival skill of humans is the ability to create homeostasis out of multiple environments.  They can adjust to being peasants living on a lot of hard work and a minimum of high-carbohydrate food.  They can adjust (less successfully) to being uber-wealthy, devoted to rich food, alcohol, uncomfortable clothes, and sitting.  

In fact, our variousness saves us, weaving back and forth through the genome, annotated by the epigenome, and adjusted to suit the materials at hand, so that someone somewhere can survive whatever the environment throws at us, whether an asteroid or a drought.  Sometimes — make that “often” — I think we are most vulnerable because of our thinking in Ph.D. virtual terms instead of relying on our gut impulses.  Bodies know valuable things.

THE FIRE OF THE SENSES

How do we get past assumptions?  For instance, I want to know how sensory information gets from outside the body to inside the body, but almost every post I find with a search engine assumes that there are five senses.  It’s been known for a long time that there are MORE than five senses, there are MORE than the sense organs we can see (i.e. specialized cells that aren’t organs or that are deeply internal).   What the sensory cells convert from light rays or surface textures, etc., do NOT go directly to the brain -- they are filtered and altered along the way -- even when it gets there the brain can only send the consciousness what the consciousness work platform will allow.  That means fewer than ten concepts at one time (though they may be “chunked” complexes) and that a sense-perceived emergency can knock them all off the platform.

This is new information.  Like the new info we’re collecting about the cosmos, the detailed and verifiable knowledge about our own bodies is changing everything so much that when I try to respond to “questions” on the website ideas.aeon.co, the inquiries seem useless to me and probably any answer I gave would be unintelligible to them.  Some people complain that they can’t follow my blog posts as it is.

A person is like a flame.

I no longer see a person as a unified entity, but as a process that is constantly changing, burning like a flame in a landscape also afire with energy, swapping combustions as predator eats prey, or kindling new fires by giving birth, blooming, forming alliances.  It’s sounds so very poetic, but it is a whole new culture coming out of science.  The old questions about which is better, science or religion, are simply from another older era that defined human experience in terms of institutions and psychological systems that just don’t fit anymore.

A delinquent trespassing offensive aggressive boy has to be understood in terms of forces both among human beings and throughout his ecology -- climate, economy, genome, epigenome, penetrating codes in the form of viruses and bacterias, ideaforms in the individuals around him.  This new way of thinking is such a sweeping difference that there is often a shortage of vocabulary.  And yet -- far from being abstract -- we can see on sensitive instruments the results of trauma, falling in love, making choices.  All cells are only molecules charged with electrochemical potentials, leaving a signal on the flow patterns of oxygen.  And cells are all there is, so much as to almost be unmanageable without metaphors of relationship.

Bad boy

This is not Newton’s mechanics.  This is music among us.  Before it can be organized into a transmissible form (the organization being to some degree dictated BY the form -- is it image, sound, print, voice or some other code?) there must be an originator, a person who can “compose” the form, and a receiver who can decode it.  That is, though I’m using music as a metaphor here, music itself is a code that constantly identifies players and hearers.  Consider the body of “literature” that is rock music.  The lyrics (wailing and non-word shouts count as lyrics -- any sound from a human throat) and all the other dimensions (beat, violence, loudness, repeated chords) are all part of something that goes to the gut of the intended audience and fills them with emotion.  The codes of feelings are the ones that transmit best.  Incoherence is part of the language.  Even numbness is the meaningful blank page that separates the print.

Evolution proceeds by filling the space that it can find, where it can thrive and enrich survival of living beings.  If we interpret bad boys as a danger to the rest of us, we will kill them, if only indirectly by depriving them.  If we listen to their music, see their growing bodies for what they are (the grace of their growing, the energy of their movement) we’ll make space.  As it is, they find their growth in drugs, gangs, and vandalism -- destroying themselves.  Offending us.

Potential.

We are told that our complex brains are not completely formed to the maximum until the person is twenty years old.  Many bad boys don’t live that long, so how can they bring human potential to bear on their own potentials?  The populations of whole nations have shorter and shorter lifespans because of alcoholism, pollution, squalor, famine, lack of shelter or support.  But comfort and preoccupation can also shut down the developmental arc of the mind before it gets to the point where it can take the person to full use of his or her senses.

Everything in creation is an interaction.  If narwhales, frogs, or soil micro-organisms go missing, there are holes punched and they will remain, accumulating, accusing.  But new vocabulary is arriving and cries out to be recognized.  If mirror cells that can perceive the thoughts of other humans are destroyed before those who have evolved them can learn their use, it will take the whole planet in a different direction.  But how many people even know there is such a thing as a “mirror cell,” much less can manage empathy?  It’s not one of the five senses that have been so hammered into our preconceptions.  Does anyone ask ideas.aeon.co how best they can develop their mirror cells?

They ask, “How can secular people benefit from prayer?” but without defining “secular” or “prayer.”  In a world where the more sophisticated define religion in “secular” (whatever that means) or radically inclusive ways, what do we make of “prayer” which comes from a specifically Abrahamic context, a petition to a big being in the sky?  Does such a question force us back into old categories that ought to be deconstructed by now, or does it press it forward into more helpful assumptions?  (One cannot escape assumptions -- it’s the way the brain works.  It’s “chunking.”)   The answer one gives depends on the way one personally defines the terms.  

The way one personally defines these words depends upon their life experiences  Take this place on the boundary of the Blackfeet rez where lives are drawn from pretty much the same landscape and occupations.  On the white Belgian side, people know that prayer is to God and know several traditional prayers they find comforting, though they can no longer recite them in Belgian.  On the Blackfeet side, among the more traditional, prayer might look a lot more like smudging with sweetgrass.  Some can still pray in Blackfeet.  I cannot know what they said before first contact.  I suspect it was far more focused on survival.

The inner swirl

We can still ask bad boys what they pray for and how they pray.  I know of some in Paris who attended mass regularly until the priest asked them not to come, not because he accused them of being insincere but because he claimed they scared other worshippers.  So the question could be, “Should the priest have excluded them?” or it could be “Should the priest have counseled those who were afraid?” Or should it be “Why would people in a sanctuary still fear those who are Other?”  Even, “What is it about Abrahamic theology that makes people fearful?”  Or “Why do bad boys love to attend mass?” Or "How did this guy get to be a priest?"

And now we have to turn to Joe LeDoux and the “Amygdaloids” for an analysis of fear, which turns out to be complex, some of it entirely dark and limbic, and some of it just a failure to ask the right questions.  You won’t get the answers from this vid, but maybe you could read the books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH_HSj5ysy0

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-03-18