‘‘Living in a double world’’

© Verneri Salonen

I.

We get information about our surroundings through our senses.

- The senses are five or seven or nine depending on who counts and what you count as a sense. But whatever way you count, the senses you count are there to provide us with information about the concrete, physical world we live in. They help us orientate in a concrete three-dimensional, physical space common for all of us.

- When I say that this is black (brown, red) I assume, even if I cannot be sure, that you see the same thing as me, that your perception of the colour is the same as mine. At least we can compare our impressions, agree or disagree about something that is our common observation.

II.

Parallel to this outer world, there is another inner one.

- Of the inner world, we have no common observations. We know something of it, and recognise, or assume, that also all other persons have it, but we have no means to directly look into that world, not into our own, and not into that of other people.

- This inner world as the world of memories, dreams and visions.

- The conscious conception of the world is, in reality, very limited, and very young. The conscious mind, if you look it neurologically, is located in the youngest part of the brain, forming a thin slice on the brain surface. What happens in the deeper parts stays hidden.

- The consciousness is like a small flickering light in the big darkness that surrounds us; it is a lonely island rising from an endless sea.

- Only a small part of our mind is awake. The bigger part of us is asleep; asleep in the sense of not being recognised by the conscious part. A big part of our life takes place underwater, in darkness.

III.

Why is this interesting, talking of spaces?

- The inner world, even if it follows a bit different rules concerning, for example, the dimension of time (memory does not go the clock, everything in the inner world seems to be timewise equally close or far), there is still a dimension of space. Our memories, dreams and visions take place in a three-dimensional space, in a room.

- Considering this fact, and the parallel existence of the outer and inner reality we can say that all rooms are two rooms, one concrete physical one, and the parallel inner one. All rooms are two rooms, all houses are two houses, all cities are two cities.

- The psychologists speak of the collective unconscious. One could also think of an inner landscape, an internal topography, parallel to the outer.

IV.

- Why is this interesting right now, as we are in a theatre?

- A theatre is a place where we, together, as a group, tribe or flock, can get a collective insight or rather a glimpse of that inner space. The stage is an imprint or reflection of the inner world upon the outer.

- We can share this inner world only through metaphors; when we try to share experiences of the inner world with other people, we find ourselves stumbling around in labyrinths, where meanings mirror meanings that mirror meanings. Faces are hidden behind masks that are masks for other masks. This is the world of theatre. In theatre, nothing is what it is.

- The theatre, the stage, is a place where the inner world can become visible and tangible in our common outer world. In the theatre, inner entities can be touched, can be discussed, can be shared in a seemingly objective way. In the theatre, dreams become objects.

- When inner things take tangible three-dimensional shape, there is the fourth dimension added: time. Time as ”before and after”. With this before and after comes causality, which is the tool of reason, which again is the way we can cope with the outer world as opposed to the associative relations between entities in the inner world. We can speak of reason as opposed to association. Reason is like a life-jacket for the mind swimming around in the big sea. In the theatre, the logic of the outer world is superimposed on the inner experiences as a kind of reality-test. In the theatre, the clash between the “inner” and the “outer” results in what we call dramaturgy. A good dramaturgy does not kill the inner, associative stream of images, but lets it, on the contrary, run through the before-and-after-logic of the concrete outer perception like a life-giving stream.

V.

Now, what makes the theatre?

- What makes the theatre Is the presence of a stage. What makes the stage, is the ”ramppi (Finnish)”, the ramp, the verge, the edge that divides this physical space here the stage, from that over there, the audience.

- This line is in most theatre spaces accentuated through a very distinct architectural gesture, as a kind of border, but in fact, this border is not a physical, but psychic one. It forms a symbolic division between those in the audience and those on the stage. And those on the stage are not just anybody. Those on the stage are physical representations of psychic entities from the inner world.

- Actors at work are in a specific state of mind, they are ”empty". They have, in order to be able to embody entities from the inner reality, using techniques that are thought in theatre schools, or learned by practice, freed themselves of their individual, private personalities. These psychic entities are what we normally call role characters.

- Theatre, even in its most modern post-dramatic form, is an atavistic sport, dealing with a mechanism that has been there for tens of thousands of years. To be more exact, from that very moment, when the human mind for the first time, put up the head of consciousness above the surface of the big sea; from the very moment when we became conscious of our own existence; from the moment Adam took the famous bite of the famous apple. This was the moment that split the human mind into two and created the double world.

- Thus, in the theatre, we have, on the other hand, the audience and the so-called actors on the other. The audience on the conscious side of the border, living in concrete physical reality, and the actors on the other, in the area of the unconscious, inner reality. Those in the audiences are awake, alive, those on the stage are asleep, hypnotised, or auto-hypnotised, in a form of trance. We have the side of the living, and we have the side of the dead, dead in the meaning of ”soul” or ”spirit”.

- We have the realm of the living, and we have the realm of the dead. This realm is called ”Hades”, in the classical Roman mythology, “Tuonela” in the Finnish mythology. These realms are separated by a river. In classical Roman mythology, the river is called "Styx". In Finnish mythology. we know it as the "River of Tuonela", "Tuonelan joki".

Language carries memories in itself. "Tuo”, “tuolla”, “tuonpuoleinen” are Finnish worlds that relate to this, meaning “over there”, on the “other side”. In the German languages the corresponding word is “hin”, like “dahin” meaning to go "over there"; in Swedish "hän” like “därhän” going "over there", or "hänförd”, meaning enchanted, lumoutunut (which is Finnish), or "hädangången" meaning passed away. In Swedish, there is moreover an old name for the devil: Hin den Onde, ("Hin the Evil)). In English, we have ”hind” like in ”behind” or ”hindsight” or, interestingly enough, "hindbrain", meaning the deep part of the brain. These are all old words, reminding us of a time, when a holistic view of existence was still prevailing, and when the things I here try to articulate, were common knowledge.

- The border between the audience and the stage, the ramp, "ramppi", is equivalent to this river. Sitting in the audience, we can safely look over the river, into the lands of the dead. There, on the other side, on the stage, naughty, devilish ongoings take place. We have all experienced the awkwardness, when an actor, over the river, looks directly at us. It is the gaze of the dead looking at the living that frightens us.

- What happens in the theatre today, is, even if we seldom reflect on it, precisely the same as we can imagine might have happened thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. The hero, the shaman, in a state of trance, achieved using specific techniques (dance, drumming, usage of psycho-effective drugs (mushrooms, plants)) departs on a trip into the lands of the dead. There he, or she, meats with the ancestors, and with magic creatures (totemistic power animals). He returns to the realm of the living to share what he, or she, has learned. (Compare for example with the New Testament episode describing the time Christ spent in the desert) In this process, characters existing in inner reality, characters that somebody calls ”archetypes”, help the tribe to overcome its current shortcomings and problems relating to its life in the concrete physical reality. In this sense, the characters of any play, old or new, classic or modern are our totemistic ancestors. More than often they are also historically dead, the story set to take place long ago.

VI.

Thus, the cruel fate of mankind, having tasted the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

- is to live in a double world. The Paradise and the Hell are actually just two sides of the same coin, both representing the inner reality. The crucial point here is that we, the humans, after The Fall of Man are excluded from direct access to this inner reality, now hidden. The life is eternally divided, the human perception of reality painfully split.

- We can talk of this split in the human constitution also as the breach between the human in the human and the animal in the human. The human part is ”awake”, the animal part is ”asleep”. The exclusion from Paradise is the punishment the human gets for becoming human. Once a human, the human is no longer free, innocent. Consciousness brings shame. The hybris of the human is, by becoming a human, to have challenged God (the order of nature) in an irreparable way.

- The history of man is the history of the ongoing war between reason and instinct, between human and the animal hidden in the mind of the human. Somehow I think that this conflict, this "mega-bug" in the system will turn out to be, for the human race, if not directly fatal, at least a question of fate. (like the size of the dinosaurs turned out to be critical for the survival of this group of reptiles). In the end, the question is epistemological. What is knowledge?

- There is a need, I think, to find a way back to the holistic view on existence, that our predecessors had. There is valuable wisdom hidden in the realm of souls. As a result of the way western thinking took in ancient Greece and Rome, we have been extremely suspicious of this kind of wisdom. We tend to speak of it as superstition.

What is superstition? It is knowledge backstabbed by another knowledge. Persecuted, expelled knowledge.

- This esoteric knowledge, I think, in a situation, where humanity seems to be dragging itself towards a major abysm, should be carefully re-evaluated. So-called soft data would need to be accepted as hard data. It sounds like a small thing to do but accepting this would, in fact, be a major change - in almost everything.

- We would, for example, need to accept art as a source of hard data. We would need to accept, that the "search" process of art can be valid as "research". Art would need to be esteemed, not as something primitive, something you do when the rest of the things are done, not as a mere cherry on the cake, but as a main source of solid, valid information. Many things would need to change. We are not there yet. Let´s hope we get there in time.

Erik Söderblom, October 2019

Text is keynote from the “Experience Space” event, organized by Aalto University Experience Platform in collaboration with Espoo City Theatre

Photo © Verneri Salonen