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.

I'VE SOUGHT THIS WORLD FOR MANY YEARS

In dreams there was always a sense of a world behind the world, the world as it was in raw code before the brain sorted it and transformed it into what we call "reality."  Everyone told me I was nuts.  But now, now, I feel it.  I feel as though I’d just discovered that I am wearing red shoes and can click the heels together.

Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding” turns out to be a crystallization of a point of view that I used to think was a form of humanism that I’d worked around to radical inclusion, which I called “everythingism” to mock the whole idea of “isms.”  Sometimes I called it “scientific mysticism”, the kind of thought evoked by galaxies or the cleverness of microbes.  Some call it “Scientific Atheism”, because they can’t tear their minds away from the theism/atheism dichotomy.

Johnson calls his thought embodied meaning or sometimes immanent meaning.  It seems to enable what I call “sacrality,”  the overwhelming feeling that can come upon a person suddenly and that is named and described various ways, though it’s not quite describable in words.

This is Barbara Ehrenreich’s description in "Living with a Wild God":  “The world flamed into life … Something poured into me and I poured into it … It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all the things at once.  Every mundane object in the street and the shop windows around her gave off a blinding glow. She had no sense of being different from the effulgence — she was it and it was she. The “only condition was overflow. ‘Ecstasy’ would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria.”

This next version is from Madelon Sprengnether’s book, Great River Road: Memoir and Memory”.  "I'd been sitting quietly after a Sunday meeting service at the Franciscan monastery I sometimes attend when suddenly I felt a sensation of warmth and illumination.  It was as if someone had flipped an interior light switch.  This feeling was not uncomfortable.  Rather, it felt ordinary and natural.  It was just there--something like waking to the sound of birds, the difference being that my awareness of outside and inside had vanished.  As if someone had opened a door or lifted the bars of a cage.  I wasn't frightened by this transformation.  Instead I felt pleased and curious.

I got up from my seat, walked to the entrance of the building, greeted my friends and chatted with them, all the while aware of my unusual state of being.  I was still myself, recognizable to others, and familiar with my environment.  Yet something subtle had changed.

This was nothing like taking drugs--speed, valium, grass--all of which I'd experienced at one point or another in my life.  I was completely myself, yet also not myself.  I drove home in this curious state and then sat in my car in my own driveway, reluctant to do anything that might disturb whatever was happening.  By now, I felt that I was in some kind of field of radiance--as if light were dancing through me into the grass, trees and sky of my own front yard.

'If this is what it's like to die,' I thought, 'then it's all right.'

Just as suddenly as this experience arrived, it left.  Still sitting in my car, I felt that the light switch had been turned off.  I didn't feel bad--as if coming down after a high--but rather that I'd returned to my ordinary way of being.  I'd experienced something extraordinary--and then it was gone.”

These are intense and rather exceptional instances of real experiences previously claimed by ”religious” institutions and credited to their saints.  But Johnson has a different language system for them based on embodiment.  Here are principles derived:

1.  There is no radical mind/body separation.

2.  Meaning is grounded in our bodily experience.

3.  Reason is an embodied process.

4.  Imagination is tied to our bodily processes and can also be creative and transformative of experience.

5.  There is no radical freedom.

6.  Reason and emotion are inextricably intertwined.

7.  Human spirituality is embodied.

Listed in this bare bones way, (remember that Billy Collins poem that begins the video I linked in the last post), these statements seem argumentative to the point of madness, which is pretty much the way T is seen by people who deny the reality of their bodies by flying away to equations and history.  The website where I found the descriptions of intense immanence was originally meant to reconcile art with psychoanalysis.  Now it’s struggling to reconcile psychoanalysis with neurology, which in my opinion is a better use of their energy.  Art can take care of itself.

But so far they’ve been unaware of the embodiment research.  They consider spiritual events to be a form of dissociation: maybe “hemispheric synchrony” or “temporal lobe transience.”  One sophisticate declares, “In my study of poets who have had dissociative experiences (Victor Hugo, for instance, during his exile on Jersey), there is often a reaction against the old religion and a sense of mission to create a better one. I had no conversion experience, only the desire to get that feeling back again.” 

Embodiment thought has nothing to do with religious institutions, so why would it suggest a conversion from one institutional dogma to another?  It is entirely outside the conventional, logic-based Enlightenment system as well as the millennial supernatural claims privileging adherents in the Western world.  Johnson’s term for this latter is “propositional thought.”  Propositions are not far from dogmas.

I come to embodiment through through theatre, Blackfeet, animals, and formal seminary training, which gave me vocabulary but not for embodiment thought.  Now I fall upon Johnson’s terms and phrases with glee.  “The origin of meaning in organism-environment coupling: a nonrepresentational view of mind”, “qualitative dimensions of movement”, “image schemas”, “primary intersubjectivity”, “vitality affects”, “the grounding of meaning” — I haven’t mastered all these terms yet, but finding them is an experience of recognition rather than the usual struggle to master multisyllabic Latinate words.

Maybe this is because my seminary years (1978-82) were right in the middle of this body of thought as it developed.  But I did not come to it through courses or any professors.  (In fact, they actively suppressed this thought path.)  I was reading the metaphor books and absorbed their “frame” by myself.  Fascinating as it was, I was not emotionally gripped by these materials until 2006 when I began to correspond with T. because he was not theorizing — he was just doing it outside any academic, publishing, medical, authorization, political group.  He was another case of recognition.  He was an “embodiment.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson co-wrote “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) which is a major classic in cognition and “Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind” which continues that line of reflection as do other books separately and together.  There are other people. (almost all men, at least the ones who are promoted.)  Here’s a George Lakoff clip that explains why thought is physical and every word is both symbolic and neurologically physical.  This is the information that mended the split between physical and mental.

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

What I was after — still am, ultimately — was not theory but practice.  I had several times performed “services” with Unitarians that broke through to a different level than just acknowledgement while sitting in pews.  I didn’t know how it happened.  I wanted to be able to do it purposely.  (T. had the same interest.  Not in church.)  I think this embodiment frame is the one that will go there.