At the beginning of Lockdown One many of us whose lives had been filled with ‘doing’ delighted in the prospect of compulsorily ‘being’. We would all become gurus, hermits or lyricists rejoicing in the minutiae of nature and contemplation, sniffing flowers and gambolling across the sunlit hills clutching daisies. I am reminded of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Patience’ where the ‘Heavy Dragoons’ realise that being an aesthete and poet is more appealing to the girls.
“Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen, An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean! Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand. “
That reads uncannily like my first Blog back in March!
In 1969 I was cast in 'Patience' as The Lieutenant the Duke of Dunstable in 'Patience', a Heavy Dragoon – “They are fleshly men, of full habit!” who had to dress up and pretend to be an Oscar Wilde type of aesthete.
If you’re anxious for to shine in the high æsthetic line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them ev’rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
Barring the reference to a young man, the next line could worryingly describe this blog.
And ev’ry one will say, As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
Incidentally it was on stage in this role, dressed in tights and floral blouse pretending to be a poet that Deirdre first saw me, and of course fell rapturously and frenetically in love with me which left her clawing at the stage door.
Back in March we were going to indulge ‘being’ and were released from ‘doing’. Now we’ve got to a stage where we’re sick of just being and want to be doing. We realise that we validate ourselves by imprinting ourselves upon our environment and community, not being sure ”What we are For” otherwise. The great theme of Greek Tragedy was to what extent do we determine our own Destiny and become agents in our own fates. The most famous speech in all drama, “To be or not to be” is about Hamlet’s struggle between being and doing.
We’re sharing Hamlet’s dilemma as we await Boris’s instructions about Christmas. Having become accustomed to being passive, with a purely negative purpose in life – stay out of hospital – we’re going to be told, take responsibility for your own decisions. It’s Daddy Boris saying you’ve reached 18, you must now decide for yourselves. Of course we’ve become used to personal risk assessment, some of us have even had to do them on behalf of others if organising any sort of function, and if we’ve chosen to engage in activities that require us to be proactive and assert our existence, like booking a table in a restaurant or planning a church service.
It’s a question of not succumbing to the “At risk and Vulnerable” designation as a life habit, waiting at the window for someone to call and feed us, if we can possibly avoid it. If we can avoid it then we should be the people who do call on and support others. Our wills may have become enfeebled after months of not being exercised. It’s easy to give up and leave everything to others. Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s a series of psychological experiments were conducted by people like Milgram and Seligman into what happens to people who have the power of choosing and self-determination taken away from them. The results were expressed in terms like ‘learned helplessness’, atrophy, despair and in some spectacular cases collusion with unacceptable moral actions.
This is the fine balance now about which we have to decide: sense and safety and validation of the self. I think now we’ve got to ‘Do’ if we don’t want to not ‘Be’.
Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”