Acting

Imagine you’re the greatest actor of all time. Not necessarily that you’ve starred in any plays or movies, just that your acting chops far surpass any other human being’s. What do you do? Do you move to Hollywood and chase after your big break? Do you start performing in the street? Do you really want a reputation as a great actor, or would you rather be known for something else? Do you want to be known at all?

Let’s say you want money. This isn’t an unreasonable supposition—practically everyone wants money. Do you move to Hollywood? The thing is, if your goal is money rather than fame, there’s no reason to prefer movie-making to other more lucrative pursuits. Why not become a con artist? The skill set is basically the same, plus or minus some research and development. The world’s greatest actor ought to be the world’s most convincing con artist. Even a simple con, like marrying some rich old person and waiting for them to die, might well be more remunerative than a movie career. 

Now imagine you’re the greatest con artist of all time. You’ve got all the money you could ever want, squirreled away in untraceable offshore accounts. You’re bored. Everybody’s a sucker compared to you. What do you want? A challenge. Without a challenge, something to focus your tremendous energies on, you’d go insane. But people simply aren’t as clever as you are. Well. So you invest in bettering education. You start programs to cultivate up-and-coming business leaders. Venture capital. You write books and movies about how tough and sexy the game is, how much fun it can be, hoping someone might come along one day and surprise you. You realize that to craft a player as smart as you are, you need to be directly involved in their formation.

Now imagine you’re a teacher, or some kind of mentor. You take a kid that’s angry and ambitious and smart and try to instill in them everything you’ve learned. They surprise you some—they make leaps you wouldn’t have, think of angles you hadn’t considered. They turn into quite good actors, and halfway decent con artists. Still, they’ve got hangups. Deep psychological shit, something that impedes their development, something left over from early childhood, something that partially blinds them. You know they’ll never surpass you. You have to make one from scratch.

Now imagine you’re a parent. You read all the books, all the studies, and apply only the most sophisticated caretaking methods and pedagogies. The kid is an emotional and strategic savant. They learn everything you have to teach in a few short years. But this is no adversary. You have no desire to beat them. You probably couldn’t. At the same time you were creating the perfect enemy, you became a loving parent. You want to work together but the kid has no time for you. They take off, far too early in your opinion, to build a life of their own. Once again there is no one around to challenge you. No one around to teach.

Now imagine you’re lonely. You turn to art, or theoretical physics, or mysticism—something exquisite and useless. People no longer interest you. You immerse yourself in the study of arcane symbols, obscure terms and alien geometries. You become an expert. Whether your theorems are true doesn’t matter to you, only whether they are beautifully expressed. No one precisely shares your afición. The world is inelegant, awful, distracting. Despite your vast fortune it still rears its ugly head now and again. You try to communicate your sublime insights, to buy the world’s silence with awe, but no one seems willing to listen. They are not spiritually susceptible. Instead they are hungry and noisy. You have to do something.

Now imagine you’re a preacher. You can bring your message to millions, even billions of people. All you had to do was apply your acting ability to the task of spiritual sustenance. But your message is getting distorted. For your followers, the sublime is merely an excuse for egregious behavior. Cruelty isn’t sublime, it’s old and vulgar. Your teachings are held responsible for ignorance and barbarism. You know it’s not your fault—in your mystic period, you were never cruel. You step down from the pulpit. Your teachings have already taken on a life of their own. To redeem yourself, you decide to find out what went wrong.

Now imagine you’re a sociologist. You read every book on the subject of human society. You write papers drawing conclusions nobody has ever reached. The social organism, it turns out, is vastly complex. You dip into anthropology, then psychology. They help some, but you find your way into philosophy when psychology runs dry. Philosophy seems like hand-waving, but in the right direction. Neuroscience helps a little, but not enough. No one has a very satisfying answer. You get desperate. You branch out into economics, cultural studies, advertising and programming and law. Everything seems to point to the intractability of the problem—that despite our best efforts, society doesn’t manage to be the way we’d like it to be.

Your kid comes home again. They’re not the same person who left. They’ve tasted defeat. Their answers aren’t much better than yours. They seem afflicted by many of the frustrations that you’ve experienced. You act. You remind them that they still have freedom, possibilities, the chance to do something meaningful. Their attitude annoys you—you’ve stood up stoically in the face of these problems, why can’t they? But you decide your anger is better directed towards the society that put limits on their potential. The historical processes of which you are but a symptom. You begin to read history.

Now imagine you’re a historian. You have a nearly perfect conception of how things got to be the way they are. You can rattle off any number of unfairly maligned or unjustly praised historical figures. You know the names of peasants, concubines and criminals. The forces of history take on the appearance of geometric relations, although you resist this impulse, recognizing it as an oversimplification, a fraud. History is not like mysticism, you’ve learned, except when it is. You realize that people have very little idea of why they behave the way they do, or of what they mean when they speak. You see the threads trailing off of each body into the past, the idiotic accidental past. It infuriates you.

Now imagine you’re angry. You lash out at whatever friends, whatever authority figures cross your path. Your wealth keeps you out of jail. You dream of robbing a bank. Of conning the president. You dream of getting your hands on the launch codes. Nothing can temper your rage, and nothing is extreme enough to sate it. You hate the world and, by extension, yourself. Being reminded of the person you were just a month ago disgusts you. You hurt people—some deserving, some less so. You try to feel remorse, since it seems like a good way to punish yourself, but when you don’t feel it you look for other ways.

Now imagine you’re a social worker. You spend the better part of each day trying to help people who are much worse off than you. After a day at work you come home emotionally drained, intellectually unsatisfied and with the impression that whatever small victories you racked up will soon slip away. You are very good at your job. The people you help thank you profusely, and you relish the guilt those thanks elicit. You no longer have time to read. You begin to detest academics. People tell you to get involved in politics if you really want to make a difference. You laugh in their faces. Politicians are all sociopaths, you tell them.

Now imagine you’re a politician. You are very popular. You know the back channels and the PR maneuvers that will help further your agenda and win you even broader and deeper support. In committee you speak softly and carry a big stick. Coalitions form around your positions. You win several meaningful concessions for the people you represent. They are pathetically grateful. They reelect you in a landslide. You feel like a fraud. You’ve seen how the sausage is made and you know which way the long arc bends—towards poverty and forgetfulness. You publish memoirs. Advisors tell you to run for president. You decline. You tell them you want real power.

Now imagine you’re a banker. With the stroke of a pen you can crash markets and reshape industries. Your reach is global. No economy is immune. The politicians you favor never lose, in your home country or abroad. If they venture off-message you have ways of reining them in. You can make history, sort of. The people around you behave unthinkingly, callously, blindly. You can afford to be generous, but the beneficiaries of your kindness look only to the next payout. Your enemies are frantic, their attacks on you clumsy. You wish they were smarter, but you dread to think how things would be if they were in charge. Your self-interest is above reproach. Your personal fortune is indexed to the stability and profitability of the global economy.

Now imagine you’re poor. This isn’t an unreasonable supposition—most people are poor. You are not happy about it, although you sense a kind of cosmic justice at work. Between food, rent and liquor you can only afford two, and one of them is liquor. You realize nothing has changed. You were always lonely. You were always angry. You talk to someone in the bar and find out they feel the same way. You go home together, or maybe you don’t. You talk about what it would take to make you whole. The word ‘destiny’ is used. Some other people overhear your conversation and move their chairs closer. They are impressed at the breadth and depth of your experience. You show off. They tell you their stories. You decide to get together regularly to drink and talk. You disagree with many of their conclusions. Some of them seem angrier than you are, some lonelier. They have some good ideas, but not much expertise. You start to look for other people who might be able to help. Personalities clash. You argue constantly. Occasionally you’re even forced to admit you were wrong. You talk about your children. You wish you could give every kid the freedom to grow up in a world without arbitrary limits. You wish you could tear down the walls that pit people against each other, the endless contests that bully you into lives of servitude. You wish you could put an end to the stupid brutality of everyday life, the boring landscapes, the repetitive humiliations. You wish you could make your bosses and landlords eat shit. You wish you could talk about something else, anything else, but the same stupid facts just keep getting in the way, wearing you down. You wish you could do something really meaningful. You wish you could look yourself in the mirror and feel proud. After a while, you start putting together a plan. A plan to make all your wishes come true. A plan to make poverty impossible.

Now imagine that plan.

from A Manual for Manuel, by Julio Cortázar

Naturally, the one I told you observes, in spite of such subjective obstructionism, the underlying theme is quite simple: (1) Reality exists or it doesn't exist, in any case it's incomprehensible in its essence, just as essences are incomprehensible in reality, and comprehension is another mirror for larks, and the lark is a birdy [pajarito], and a birdy is a diminutive of bird [pájaro], and the word [pájaro] has three syllables, and each syllable has two letters, and that's how reality can be said to exist (because larks and syllables) but it's incomprehensible, because, furthermore, what do we mean by mean, or, among other things, by saying that reality exists. (2) Reality may be incomprehensible, but it does exist, or at least it's something that happens to us or that each of us makes happen, so that a joy, an elemental necessity, makes us forget everything said (in 1), and on to (3). We've just accepted reality (in 2), whatsoever or howsoever, and consequently we accept our being installed in it, but right there we know that, absurd or false or trumped up, reality is a failure for man even though it may not be for the birdy, who flies without asking any questions and dies without knowing it. Therefore, inexorably, if we end up accepting what was said in (3), we have to pass on to (4). This reality, on the level of (3), is a fraud and we have to change it. Here we have a divergence, (5a) and (5b):

"Oof," says Marcos.

(5a) To change reality for me alone--the one I told you goes on--is something old and feasible: Meister Eckhart, Meister Zen, Meister Vedanta. To discover that the I is an illusion, to cultivate one's garden, be a saint, overtake the sacred prey, etc. No.

"You're getting there," says Marcos.

(5b) To change reality for everyone--the one I told you goes on--is to accept the fact that everyone is (ought to be) what I am, and, in some way, to meld the real with mankind. That means admitting history, that is, the human race on a false course, a reality accepted until now as real, and away we go. Consequence: there's only one duty and that's to find the true course. Method: revolution. Yes.