And when I allowed myself to consider the possibility of not spending the rest of my life with Chiquita, I realized that what I wanted most in life was to always be with her. But at that time I hadn't learned what it would be like to let yourself react to another human being. And if you can't react to another person then there's no possibility of action or interaction. And if there isn't, I don't really know what the word "love" means, except "duty," "obligation," "sentimentality," "fear."
I mean, I don't know about you, Wally, but I just had to put myself into a kind of training program to learn how to be a human being. I mean, how did I feel about anything? I didn't know. What kind of things did I like, what kind of people did I really want to be with, you know? And the only way I could think of to find out was to just cut out all the noise, and stop performing all the time and just listen to what was inside me. See, I think a time comes when you need to do that. Now, maybe in order to do it you have to go to the Sahara, and maybe you can do it at home, but you need to cut out the noise. [Street noise: honking.]
WALLY: Yeah. Of course, personally I just--I usually don't like those quiet moments, you know, I really don't. I mean, I don't know if it's that Freudian thing or what, but--you know, the fear of unconscious impulses or my own aggression or whatever--but if things get too quiet and I find myself just sitting there, you know, as we were saying before, I mean, whether I'm by myself or I'm with someone else, I just, I just have this feeling of: "My God! I'm gonna be revealed!" In other words I'm adequate to do any sort of a task, but I'm not adequate just to be a human being. I mean, in other words I'm not--if I'm just trapped there and I'm not allowed to do things but all I can do is just be there, well, I'll just fail. I mean, in other words, I can pass any other sort of a test, and I, you know, I can even get an A, if I put in the required effort. But I just don't have a clue how to pass this test. I mean, of course I realize this isn't a test, but I see it as a test and I feel I'm gonna fail it, I mean, it's very scary. I just feel, just totally at sea. I mean...
ANDRE: Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible monumental creative task. And we're not necessarily up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile the other person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such feeling. I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly people seem to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon, wildness, tenderness! Could we stand to live like that?
WALLY: Yeah, I think it's that moment of contact with another person. I mean that's what scares us. I mean, that moment of being face to face with another person. I mean, now, you wouldn't think it would be so frightening. It's strange that we find it so frightening.
ANDRE: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty good reasons for being frightened. I mean, you know, a human being is a complex and dangerous creature. I mean, really if you start living each moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge! I mean, if you really reach out, and you're really in touch with the other person? Well, that really is something to strive for, I think; I really do.
WALLY: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.
ANDRE: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms. Who are we? And that's to face--to confront the fact that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death.
WALLY: You mean, because somehow when you are alone, you're alone with death, I mean, nothing's obstructing your view of it, or something like that.
ANDRE: Right. [Street noise: siren.]
WALLY: You know, if I understood it correctly, I think Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full you'd be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your experience.
ANDRE: You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting, which is so incredible. Then in the next moment you start to think about things: work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow. I don't know if this is true of you, but I think it must be quite common. The world comes in quite fast. Now that again may be because we're afraid to stay in that place of forgetting, because that again is close to death. Like people who are afraid to go to sleep. In other words: you interrelate and you don't know what the next moment will bring, and to not know what the next moment will bring brings you closer to a perception of death!
You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. Well, I mean, you know, in the theater, if you get good reviews, you feel for a moment that you've got your hands on something. You know what I mean? I mean it's a good feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you don't know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm ground. You know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are different questions: does she enjoy the ears being nibbled, how intensely can you talk about Schopenhauer in some elegant French restaurant. Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth.
Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years, that's completely unpredictable. Then you've cut off all your ties to the land and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas. I mean, you know, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: 'cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there's no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?
WALLY'S NARRATION: [Piano music: Eric Satie's first Gymnopédie. The restaurant is empty. The waiter comes over with the bill.] All the other customers seemed to have left hours ago. We got the bill, and André paid for our dinner! [Change of scene. We are looking out of a car window; it is raining, or has recently rained. Shops go by.] I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets! There wasn't a street--there wasn't a building--that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There I was buying a suit with my father. There I was having an ice-cream soda after school. When I finally came in, Debby was home from work. And I told her everything about my dinner with André.
Source URL: http://www.cloudnet.com/~jwinder/dinner.htm
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Mon, Jul 15th, 2013, via SendToReader