Prelude to the dance

here goes nothing...

As a relatively recent convert to the usefulness of a behaviorist perspective in descriptions of learning, I don't feel strongly wedded to the concepts or vocabulary that Skinner proposed so long ago, as resilient as they've proven to be. My appreciation for them is almost exclusively pragmatic: as long as the behaviorist lens serves my aim of unfolding my own latent strengths, making the best of my weaknesses, and helping other creatures to do the same, I'll hold it happily to my eye. But the moment it threatens to obscure the view, I'll toss it.

I'm fickle that way. When I was a theatre scholar (a role I never wore all that convincingly), I loved the idea of "interdisciplinary" study, and I delighted in conversations that spontaneously transgressed the many boundaries - essential, methodological, temperamental - dividing scientific from literary culture (to borrow C.P. Snow's categories). But formal efforts to close the gap seemed almost invariably to encourage the contempt for "fantasy" that's endemic among scientists and academic fantasists (i.e. literary types). Humanities departments are rife with relevance envy, and many of their faculty are eager to prostrate themselves before every promise of effectuality: you mean I might finally say something, do something that touches the world? Wow, hey. Some expunge the embarrassment of being mere doodlers and dreamers by becoming utterly prosaic (and untrained) scientists. Others eventually take up dog training. Ha.

I mean to say that I'm not immune. I caught the neuroscience bug early, and I got excited a few years ago when the contagion spread among my theatrical cohorts. But nothing quashed my enthusiasm like hearing the moderator of a conference seminar sternly remind us that the terms in play were technical, highly specific, and not to be fooled with in any loosey-goosey metaphorical way. Or hearing a director marvel about how wonderful it would be when she could attach electrodes to her actors' heads and discover what a sense memory really was.

Who's going to speak up for the reality of subjective experience if not for the dreamers and fantasists? What can scientists learn from us - why should they suppose we have anything to teach - if we surrender the stage before the play begins? Loose, sloppy, idle, playful, inexact - these are just some of the many strengths of literary culture. We cavort under the banner of "Not Quite." We spill ambiguity and uncertainty in our messy wake. That's our job, and it matters. Big time.

All this because I want to insist that science (generally) and Skinner (specifically) should not have the last word in every conversation about direct physical pressure in training. Next time!

Skinner and Hamlet II

This attempt to bring two unlike minds into harmonious - or anyway not rancorous - relation will necessarily proceed slowly and piecemeal. One of the minds is, after all, fictional, though that may be the least of the challenges I face.** As a gnatty little amateur in the realm of Big Ideas, I am bound to get ahead of myself and run down a dozen or more dead ends before I find a viable path. My arm is strong and my hatchet is sturdy, but it doesn't have the keenest of blades, so I hope, gentle reader, that you'll forgive the rough work I make of this.

Who, me? Stalling? OK. I've already said that I don't think any of us (paramecium, porcupine, person) arrives tabula rasa in the world. Some native and individual proclivity for order springs into being at the moment of our inception, hungry for the world as it makes itself known to us through our various and varied senses. However, the world feeds our hunger so immediately, generously, and unremittingly that it may be impossible ever to say what any of us is in isolation from the world as we know it at any given moment.

When stated so broadly, this seems obvious, but I could say instead, "Oh, of course you're a different person with your friend than you are with your mother, and I've no idea whatsoever how you might act if your life were on the line. No more than I have about how I would act. There's nothing solid in your character or mine - we are creatures of circumstance." Or I could point you to a recent article in Discover detailing the possibility that schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and MS could be caused by a retrovirus embedded 60 million years ago in the ancestral DNA of every monkey and primate, a virus that fortunately only becomes active in special environmental circumstances. Perhaps it is only in these extreme cases that "foreign" matter speaks to us so intimately and shapes our lives so dramatically, but I'm not willing to bet on it. 

If Catholic cosmology reigns, the Ghost who speaks to Hamlet may indeed be honest, but there's no purgatory in the Protestant universe, so he needs be a demon. Freudians hear the voice of the superego, and evolutionary biologists the mischievous mutterings of a rogue amino acid sequence. Behaviorists? Good question. Maybe they'd say (in their best Jesse Jackson imitation): The Ghost is moot!

**I still love the line from Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo, wherein a depressive in the Depression played by Mia Farrow falls in love with a movie archaeologist (Jeff Daniels): "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything."

Mind-shaped world

London's (or rather, England's) National Theatre took a cue from the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years ago and began a series of "live" high-definition broadcasts of selected shows from its season. The quotations wouldn't be there if we lived in New York, where audiences really do see shows in the moment they're being performed, but here we watch them "live." A couple of non-NT shows have made it onto this year's bill, and last night Peter and I joined two or three hundred other people at Portland's World Trade Center (still standing, but not so tall as the "real" but absent WTC) for a pre-recorded performance of A Disappearing Number by the group that used to be known as Théatre de Complicité (sorry, can't find the hat for the a) but now goes more simply by Complicite. Their work tends to the densely imagistic, cerebral, and fractured-- they don't disdain story, but they find other, unexpected paths to empathic connection. I'd seen their Noise of Time nine years ago in London and found it more intriguing than moving, but A Disappearing Number makes excellent use of their intellectual and emotional agility, as they leap nimbly from the abstract to the personal and back again.

The play weaves a fictional contemporary romance of the more or less conventional sort with the true (or at least non-fictional) romance of minds that took place between two mathematicians in the early twentieth century, Srinivasa Ramanujan and G.H. Hardy. The latter story gets unfortunately short shrift, but is implicitly honored in Complicite's romance with "maths." Fictions about mathematical and scientific genius usually have the quality of a trip to the zoo-- they invite an audience to peer through steel bars or scratched plexiglass at the strange creatures trapped within. Proof is a case in point, also A Beautiful Mind (though the book makes a more capacious cage than the film). In contrast, Complicite manages ingeniously to communicate something of the flavor of the genius itself, of the beauty that lights a mind like Ramanujan's, alien as it might at first appear.

Even in that last sentence, I have bumped inadvertently against the subject I want to address here. Late in the play, a contemporary mathematician tries to explain to her exasperated husband how it is that math is more real to her than the life they (sort of) share. She quotes Hardy from A Mathematician's Apology: "A mathematician is working with his own mathematical reality. 317 is prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way." The line hit a nerve with me, and I misremembered it later without Hardy's qualifications: "317 is prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped one way rather than another, but because it is so, because reality is built that way." I've been getting impatient of late with people I might have considered intellectual kin, all the "bright" atheists who mock religious metaphysics but endow human reason with a numinous glow.

I hope that everything I write here will attest to my lifelong affection for empirically grounded reason. Math? Science? I'm a fan of both. It's just that hubris makes me itchy, whatever its source. My admiration for the scientific method is partly inspired by its implicit modesty, but that modesty goes missing sometimes when its practitioners champion themselves as the lonely votaries of Truth. Meanwhile, those who immerse themselves in "pure" math and logic (Plato's great-grandkids) don't dirty their hands with empirical observation, and their claims on Truth can be still more overweening.

I'm not a fan of the radical skepticism that permeates the "postmodern" worldview, which spirals out into an infinity of dead ends: I know you think so, but what do I? I think the search for common insight, common knowledge is possibly worthwhile and anyway much more enlivening than a proliferation of solitary sandboxes. And yet. The temptation to overreach is strong. I suppose I am a child of Kant, in the sense that I believe every description of the world is necessarily a description of the self. Empirical investigation is constrained not only by our specific and limited senses but by (un)certain a priori structures and biases that are more or less particular to us as different species of animal and different species of human. Not least of these is the bias toward meaning itself: our desire to make sense of what we perceive drives us to see relationships (e.g. of similarity, of coincidence, of cause and effect) where none may essentially exist, and it operates for the most part "in secret," below the level of conscious thought.

The dialogue between nature and nurture begins too early to allow us ever to untangle it completely (generations before an individual's conception, as recent epigenetic research has demonstrated). However, we don't need to arrive at any definitive account of what or how much is pre-written on the slate to recognize that the slate has a given shape and a surface that can only be marked in given ways (a blackboard likes chalk as paper likes a pen). Think of the senses we are missing, and those we possess in only stunted form. How would our notions of "objective observation" be altered if we could more directly perceive magnetic fields like a pigeon, shapes and speed like a bat, scents like a dog?

Yes, we have extended technology into many areas of our sensual blindness, but how much is lost in translation? If I see a sound's echo as a tight burst of peaks and valleys on a scrawled page, and learn to recognize its distinct pattern, is my apprehension of reality expanded to the same degree as if I had acquired the skill of echolocation? If a blind person scores perfectly when I test her knowledge of Newtonian optics ("420 nanometers?" "Violet?" "Yes!"), will I congratulate her and hand her the keys to my car? No. I will apologize for raising her hopes unrealistically and invite her to ride shotgun.

In their unapplied forms, math and logic try to leapfrog past this epistemological quandary. The symmetries they seek are self-sufficient, independent of the marriage (whether it may be intimate or estranged) between the mind (sorry, a mind!) and the world. If a consonance exists between those symmetries and empirical reality, we can never really know it. Hardy seems to have acknowledged this, in a line from the same Apology to which the play continually returns: "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way... It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind. We may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it."

The question seems finally to lie in how wide we presume to draw the circle of "we." Complicite did a remarkable job of making maths' beauty visible, audible, palpable to some of us who don't normally perceive it. But what does my dog Pazzo care for the elegance and emotional resonance of a convergent infinite series? I cannot tell whether he cares for elegance at all. The joy he takes in snatching a frisbee from the air at the moment it pauses in flight suggests that he does, but when he drinks from the toilet I am forced to reconsider.

Skinner and Hamlet I

I don't imagine it will come as a shock to anyone to learn that most of my friends (who trend to the liberal and artistic) wrinkle their noses at any mention of B.F. Skinner. As I've described here, I used to wrinkle mine, too. I've devoted many previous entries to a defense of Skinner, because I believe his insights have been undervalued in many circles (certainly the circles where I've been traveling). I think the reflexive rejection of behaviorism by many humanists poses a barrier to the interdisciplinary dialogue that we need if we hope ever to marry (or even to weave together as independent threads) mechanistic and holistic accounts of cognition and action, our descriptions of brain and mind as they impel the body (or vice-versa, as Antonio Damasio has intimated in his somatic marker hypothesis). Of course, many behavioral and cognitive scientists have been just as stingy and unthinking in their refusal to admit the significance of intangibles like emotion, belief, and individual character to their investigations. The imperatives of their discipline more formally forbid it.

If we cannot invent or cobble together a third vocabulary that encompasses subjective experience and objective observation, we will have to develop fluency with the conventions of scientific and poetic description at once, to take full advantage of both languages while recognizing their respective limitations. It's in the interests of this bilingual approach that I have learned to love Skinner-- I have been intent these last few months on countering my own prejudice. I feel a little more confident now that, if I invite my inner artist back to the table, the discussion won't devolve into a shouting match: "Deluded parasite!" "Heartless bastard!"

Trailing Colors blog

There's still plenty of time to procrastinate, but I have a new blog going to lay the ground for next May's production of Trailing Colors. If you're interested, you'll not only find info on the play and its staging-in-progress but a host of links to articles on the evolving situation in Rwanda, also on elephants. The wonderful bit of news that I've just posted is that JoAnn Johnson will be directing. We hope to get a cast and production team assembled soon.

Get the full scoop here.

Doh!

I’ve just finished reading an excellent book by the witty and dashingly erudite self-appointed chronicler of "wrongology," Kathryn Schulz. In Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, Schulz doesn’t argue in favor of error, exactly, but she makes a persuasive case that we urgently need to acknowledge and make peace with our bottomless capacity to be wrong. She describes the myriad ways that our perfectly natural fear of mistakes (and the psychological upheaval that mistakes sometimes entail) can stunt our growth and stifle our noblest impulses. Our terror of error has an especially corrosive effect on our ability to feel compassion: it compels us to reject, sometimes violently, any perspective that challenges our own. Only a humble appreciation for our limitations (of apprehension, of intellect, of moral standing) can restore a healthy suppleness to our lives and interactions. Schulz also notes that, while the gap between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it can sometimes gape terrifyingly wide, without it we would lose a vital element in human experience: Art lives there, and only there. As she charmingly puts it, “Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness.” Yes, it's good to make Plato roll in his grave, and keep him rolling!
 

The theatre seems to me an especially inviting place for the exercise of humility and compassion. Sitting more or less safely in the audience, we can vicariously rehearse a thousand ways of being horribly, disastrously wrong. In their very structure, plays insist on a multiplicity of perspective, and the best of them never come to rest in any definitive point of view. Moment to moment, they encourage us to embrace one truth, then another, to inhabit competing theories about our place and purpose in the world and to live out their repercussions for an intensely distilled hour or three. Some see this as a means to teach the avoidance of error: here’s what not to do. I see it as a means of reminding ourselves (because we continually forget): we err, we have erred, we will err again. We had better get used to it.

Thus I am drawn in my playwriting (and elsewhere) to the murky territory where good intentions collide with reality, where common passions steamroller “common” sense. I love smart characters who do stupid things for excellent reasons. Problems of scale fascinate me especially: in a world that technology has virtually collapsed, we live at once too close and too far from each other. The temptation to abstract other people’s suffering seems dangerously high, so that compassion itself sometimes becomes a blunt instrument, and the law of unintended consequences prevails. 

Errors of scale and distance lie at the heart of a play that lies close to my own heart, Trailing Colors. It's set in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, not in the midst of evil but in its confused wake, and it concerns most centrally a species of blundering that may not be uniquely American but appears endemic: call it oblivion heroicus. It leaps tall buildings in a single bound! Then it lands splat in the boggy boggy mud. Graham Greene skewered it beautifully in The Quiet American, and Philip Caputo made a palpable hit with Acts of Faith. I'm too sentimental to be so mercilessly satiric, but I do have sharp words for privileged women writers who feed their fictions on others' pain.

 

Ahem.

It's never too early or late to embrace being wrong, which is why I have tentative dates set for a production of Trailing Colors next year: May 5th-29th, 2011. More details to follow.

Playing for keeps

We closed a satisfying four-week run of Proof with a matinee performance last Sunday. After striking the set and restoring the theater to black emptiness (a state of infinite possibility), we gathered at the BBQ joint around the corner for another demolition project, this one internal. A variation of the old Tootsie Pop question: how many beers does it take to get to the center of an actor after the play is done? I'm sure it depends on the actor-- after all, some don't drink anything stronger than cranberry juice-- but even a smart owl might have a hard time saying how we slip in and out of character while remaining perfectly, distinctly ourselves. A very smart owl might say we don't. We can't play at another self without allowing the self that's playing to blur and be altered. An actor's working philosophy and methods may encourage her to close the distance with her character or maintain a critical detachment, but there's no safe distance: she can't avoid getting touched, bruised, stained by the experience she shares with her fictional counterpart. Her work partly consists in deliberate failures of integrity.

There are many stories of "method"-oriented actors getting lost in the emotional and psychological wilds of the fictions they inhabit. I caught a cautionary glimpse of one famous disintegration back in 1989, when I saw Daniel Day-Lewis play Hamlet at the National Theatre in London. It was an extraordinary, incandescent performance, also-- quite palpably-- a risky one. Day-Lewis appeared to have only a fingernail's hold on common reality, and the ground was eroding fast. A little more than a week after the show I saw, during one of Hamlet's encounters with the Ghost, Day-Lewis experienced what he later described in an interview with Simon Hattenstone as "a very vivid, almost hallucinatory moment in which I was engaged in a dialogue with my father" (who had been dead for years). Day-Lewis left the stage and never returned, but this did not finally register with him as a professional failure. On the contrary, he counts it an unusual success: "To me, it was like a natural conclusion to the job I was doing. If I hadn't arrived at that centre of confusion, I would have probably felt a sense of disappointment." He's nonetheless clear on the cost: "I don't think I had a breakdown, but I daresay I wasn't that far from it. I broke myself down."

That open courtship of confusion marks out the reckless (though in many cases highly disciplined) end of the broad spectrum of acting methodologies. At the other? Brechtian alienation? Mametian ventriloquism? It could be any approach that discourages emotional identification between actor and character as a dangerous or distracting indulgence. Unfortunately for those who would like to keep their selves whole and clean, even the "merely" muscular habitation of an alien persona may resonate inward.

Consider a recent bit of research out of Italy, as reported in New Scientist. In a study of patients with "locked-in" syndrome, unable to move anything but their eyes, Luigi Trojano discovered that they had great difficulty (relative to a control group) interpreting the emotional content of facial expressions. Trojano speculates that we depend for our understanding of others' emotions on our ability to mimic them physically... which supports the further speculation that muscular imitation conjures emotion. A scientifically tenuous proposition at present, but it accords with the experience of actors and others whose masks shape and reshape their faces.

Just pretend!

There are many people from many fields now exploring the roots of the common (it appears biological) compulsion to play, and speculating on the adaptive advantages it may confer in the broad evolutionary sense and in the individual life. A coherent but inclusive definition of "play" is difficult to pin down, but I want to focus for now on play that includes an element of pretend, the magical "as if" that spreads a safety net under behavior that would otherwise be intolerably risky. Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist and author of Inside of a Dog, has spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours viewing and reviewing video of dogs at play, seeking to determine among other things how dogs effectively contract with each other to "fight" for fun.

The play bow-- head dipped and front legs outstretched while butt and tail are raised-- appears to be dog Esperanto for "I didn't mean that, and I don't mean this either! Ha!" An exchange of bows, deep or hieroglyphically sketched, typically initiates a friendly bout of wrestling or chasing, and the socially hep dog will repeat the gesture anytime the play contract seems to be fraying. As is the case with people, some dogs have a harder time than others remembering the rules of the game and honoring the agreed-upon distinction between "real" and "pretend." Indeed, play wouldn't be so compelling if that line were perfectly clear, if the safety net weren't a little patchy and the thrill of risk were entirely banished. But that's cold philosophical comfort when you're taking one dog to the vet because another never really got the hang of bite inhibition. (More on the scary side of Kili in a later post.)

One of the reasons I finally decided that I could not hack being a theatre scholar is that I could never quite take theatre seriously, and I honestly didn't think I should. The scholars I most admire-- many of whom are commonly judged to be either hopelessly old-fashioned or lightweight-- are playing in earnest. They recognize the essential frivolity of their occupation (in both senses of the word), its glorious extraneity to "real" life, but this is not a barrier to their investing their work with passion, wit, imagination. On the contrary, the magical "as if" liberates their brilliance as it has that of the artists whose work they study. Unfortunately, they appear vastly outnumbered today by scholars with extremely poor bite inhibition, maddened by their own irrelevance and deeply resistant to the pleasures of play.

Behavior modification in the theater

I'm not an actor, but I sometimes play one onstage. It's a humbling task-- especially for anyone who's accustomed to exercising creative control.

The process of submitting one's mind, body, and voice to someone else's words and someone else's vision makes this erstwhile playwright and director a little testy; I've often caught myself in rehearsals speaking out above my pay grade (the expression is entirely euphemistic in the context of the "semi-professional" company I've been working with for the last year). When I'm in the throes of some urgent insight, I seem unable to honor the principle of divided labor that helps to keep peace in a room full of contending minds and egos. The next time I direct, I hope I will show better patience than I have in the past with actors who are unhelpfully helpful! As with teaching, I sometimes have the guilty thought: please God, don't let me get a student/actor like me! (i.e. total pain in the ass)

The irony (or maybe the gift) in the present situation is that I am playing a character who could also use a horse pill of humility. On Thursday we opened a production of David Auburn's Proof, a tale of love, madness, and math. Catherine, the protagonist, appears to have inherited her father's prodigious talent with numbers, but she fears that this legacy might be entwined with another: Dad went nuts, and the fact that Catherine is celebrating her 25th birthday in the company of his ghost doesn't bode well for her own sanity. Maybe an adorably self-effacing, drum-playing mathematician named Harold Dobbs can tether her to the here and now, but only if she can trust him with the closely guarded secret of her genius. She's written a groundbreaking proof regarding prime numbers (Auburn is artfully vague on the particulars). Will he believe it's hers?

Catherine's mistrust (of other people, of her own mind) is her most formidable antagonist; my character only rises to the level of an irritant, but a supremely irritating irritant she is! I play Claire, the older sister, who only knows Catherine well enough to know everything she needs: downtime, vegetarian chili, and a move to New York.

The image is an Ulam spiral. Numbers can blow your mind, no matter how strong your grip on sanity.

Learning to love Skinner

I wouldn't have guessed a year ago that I would be singing the praises of B.F. Skinner and behaviorism. Back in 2007, I had written the study guide for a local production of Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman and included an article on the psychology of child-rearing. My research took me a little deeper than the popular clichés of rats in mazes and babies in boxes. I knew that Skinner's "air crib" was built for comfort and relaxation, not as an experimental torture chamber for his daughters. Contrary to the sinister popular mythology, both grew up healthy and perfectly sane.

My aversion to Skinner was philosophical and temperamental. What could be more dry and reductive, I thought, than a scrupulous and obsessive focus on physical behavior? What perceptual lens was more likely to blur or destroy the vital distinction between creature and machine?

I'd spent more than a decade practicing, studying, and teaching theatre; I'd devoted myself to the excavation of inner lives. Tangled motives, fevered passions, and impossible dreams: these were my bread, butter, and jam (apricot). Behaviorism waved a dismissive hand at all of it. The men in white coats did their quiet work-- essential fluids out, formaldehyde in-- until the gloriously irreducible mess of human (and animal!) sentience could be contained in neat rows of data. They were undertakers who supplied their own corpses.

But if you want to see true mastery in the art of rubber-gloved bloodletting, you need to read some contemporary theatre criticism. The more theoretical the instruments of analysis, the more sanitary the violence they perform (and the more freakishly unrecognizable the body on the chilled table). By the time I took a new look at behaviorism, I no longer imagined that "the humanities" had any special claim on "humane" modes of curiosity. Whatever tenderness and humility had once characterized their engagement with the ineffable-- well, it had all got effed up, as far as I could see.