The Tao's a Stage: Self-Abandonment and Beyond

There can be a very fine line between self-neglect and self-abandonment. When we speak of self-abandonment, we usually are speaking favorably about someone, having in mind a person who is so caught up in something that he or she has forgotten themselves utterly in the moment; we have in mind someone whose time and attention are unreservedly focused in selfless devotion. Generally, self-abandonment is a good and wholesome thing because generally self-abandonment means devoting oneself to something positive and healthy and in the process having little time for morbid introspection, wallowing, or self-pity. Yet there are times in which self-abandonment can become unhealthy as well, stealing time away from other things of equal or greater importance. Nevertheless, we are content to leave self-abandonment alone, seeing it for the virtue it most often is. Self-neglect, by contrast, is certainly not a virtue and is altogether too common.

What is self-neglect? It might be described as a mindset or a mental attitude, at least in part. In many instances, it is a mild to moderate form of depression and its causes and effects often blur together so that it is not easy to identify what are its roots and what its offspring. Self-neglect may even describe the negative side of self-abandonment where a person gives so utterly to a worthy cause that other worthy causes, including one’s own health, are compromised. The practical conclusion of a person thus abandoned is burnout and breakdown, for in order to adequately offer ourselves to worthy causes, we must be physically and mentally up for the task, and if we do not budget a certain amount of care for our well-being, we may find ourselves on the brink of collapse. Self-neglect, then, is when, for one reason or another, we stop taking care of ourselves as adequately as we ought. Americans are notorious for falling into various degrees of self-neglect, particularly when the chief virtue in life is to outperform the Jones family.

Working on a client site recently for an M.D., I chanced upon a brief article by Edward T. Creagan, M.D., entitled “Don’t Succumb to Self-Neglect.” He writes:

His comments are simple and timely: they were exactly the reminder that I needed as I am caught up in this very busy season of my life. In many ways, that busyness is a form of self-abandonment in its most positive sense, but it has recently been threatening to spill over into self-neglect as well. And what has been keeping me busy? Three things: I am working on a piece of on-line software that will allow an M.D. friend’s registered patients to schedule appointments right from their Web browsers; a program that will also allow her and her office staff to manage those appointments, automating the process of sending out reminders and providing fingertip look-up for patient data and records. Not only do I want to do the best job possible because I pride myself in my Web development, I also have an eye toward future expansion, creating not just a software application for this particular doctor friend, but developing a software application I can then market to other busy professionals, doctors or otherwise, who would benefit from such a time-saving means of making their life easier while simultaneously supplementing my own income with the nominal fee attached. (How is it that money so often gets tied up in issues of potential self-neglect?)

The second thing that has been keeping me very busy are my own classes. I am taking two graduate courses, one entitled “Technical Writing for the Computer Industry” and the other “Theologies of Language in Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton”: lots of reading and writing involved in both. The third thing that has been keeping me busy, and the thing that ties with the Web development for first place in sucking the life out of my world, is my own teaching. The way that I have structured my courses this semester, I have papers to grade virtually every class period. Most of these are quizzes and responses which take only a few hours of time each week to grade. But I now have a ream-sized stack of term papers to process as well, and in terms of self-neglect, sometimes I can feel so overwhelmed that its seems like I intentionally seek to sabotage myself and undermine my efforts to ensure that I never do put instructor’s pen to student’s paper. The truth is, I do not mind grading quizzes and responses—I even enjoy reading term papers—but I loathe grading them with a passion. It is probably one of my least favorite things to do in life: I would much rather just read and at most comment.

In any case, I have actually tried writing a newsletter several times this week, but I never felt that what came out was newsletter material. Again and again, I kept coming back to the theme of self-neglect. Yet to be entirely honest, there is only so much one can say about the subject without belaboring the point: such topics generally only require a gentle reminder, no more than Dr. Creagan’s six paragraphs, of which we here cited three. So I will share with you one of my attempts at a newsletter, written this Friday between the two classes I teach. It is, unsurprisingly, about teaching, and in many ways I was working out my “lecture notes” on paper. There is nothing overtly spiritual about it, and yet I do believe in what I do, that my teaching has practical and positive ramifications beyond the subject matter. That is to say that teaching writing is itself a good and important thing, but particularly as I am teaching at the college level, I believe there is also the hidden curriculum as well: there are those elements that are transmitted “beneath the surface” that apply much more readily to the quality and character of our lives. Certainly writing is an important skill—communication in general is what binds us together and connects us to other human beings—but I trust you know what I mean when I speak of elements of character as well. So then, here are Friday’s “lecture notes” in the guise of a foiled newsletter.

Teaching is one of those occupations capable of doing violence to certain persons. Perhaps there are those who are such seasoned veterans with such resilient personalities that they are rarely if ever affected by their teaching and can simply go about their affairs. But not me. I am rather green at teaching, though I have taught Sunday school and am now in my second year as a GTA. Perhaps it is my greenness, my idealism, my youthfulness, my introversion even? but teaching often does me violence.

Classrooms are populated with persons, persons have personalities, and the entire population of persons in the classroom taken as a whole has its own collective personality. Classes are very much like overgrown persons in fact, not only in that they have personalities, but in that no two classes share the same exact one. Thus far, I have taught two sections of the same class each semester, and almost always the classes are night and day to each another: the first class thinks reading A “sucks” but finds reading B rapturous, the second class thinks reading B is mediocre but reading A is nothing short of brilliant. One class likes the fact that we have class discussions, the other hates it; one class wants more workshops, the other thinks we’ve got too many already and more should be cut out. And so it goes.

Teaching does violence to me: it requires me to stretch and flex and accommodate each new classroom, each new environment, without stretching too far, flexing and accommodating too much. It requires me to access the needs of this class and not that one, to think on my feet, to ask myself why I connect here and not there and what should be done to maximize the connections and minimize the disconnects. There is no manual or guidebook that comes attached to a given class, no ten commandments of thou shall and thou shall not.

A teacher’s worst nightmare is the class that is perpetually bored: the actions of the students indicate that no one in the class is interested or cares. It can be incredibly difficult to try to teach a class like that. Imagine, for example, if you were to give a presentation in front of a small group of people, and you had to give that presentation twice. The first time you give the presentation, the people are craning their necks and straining forward in their seats, so eager are they to hear what you are saying, their interest evident, electric. The time flies by, and when the Q&A is shut down due to time constraints, it seems it has only just begun. Even then, people file out slowly, no one eager to leave, all still desiring to discuss what was spoken. Feeling elated, you enthusiastically prepare for your second presentation of the same speech, but this time you are greeted by stony silence, people looking out the window, at their feet, and your notice someone in the back of the room has even fallen asleep. Your presentation ends prematurely because you’ve already said what you had to say, and the Q&A is finally shut down due to the tortured lack of response. Even if both speeches were presented with equal brilliance (a likely impossibility, as audience feedback or lack thereof tends to greatly impact one’s delivery), the latter presentation would leave everyone feeling like the talk, as a whole, was a disaster. Now let us consider another scenario.

I have never had any serious inclination toward acting. At one time, I thought I might be rather good at it, but I never made it into a religion as do many of the theater majors I have seen who are as addicted to performance as any addict I know. And when it comes to acting, we are dealing with something in motion: we are dealing with actions, and gestures, and body language, and the interaction of performers and audience via the medium of a stage. We also have the differences in staging, in lighting—in live performances, there are hundreds of variables that can affect the final presentation. What is more, a good many of the college performances I have attended were turned into training sessions: the director shows the performance video to the students the next day, they pat one another on the back and minimize their disappointment that what should have been grand and majestic came out only so-so, they point to what is good, are more critical (or at least caring) than their audience on what is bad, and then they go back to the grindstone, in their dedication and devotion to their art, putting in hours and hours more time. Sometimes, even, there are moments of magic, and events and shared scenes often become just a little rosier in the remembering and re-telling. Now I could be entirely off base in my descriptions of the college actor: I am a writer, and I am only imagining what it would be like to be an actor: if you like, I am only playacting here.

I can imagine too what it must be like to teach acting. You are dealing with living people, and you are attempting to teach an ephemeral art. There must be a lot of hands-on and a lot of coaching, a lot of, “You did that quite well, but I am just not picking up the feeling here,” a lot of what other people would consider thankless devotion for one or two hours of magic on stage and a whole new sea of faces next semester. One would have to have it in one’s blood, I would think, in order to return semester after semester to teach a number of aspiring hopefuls, a few with natural talent, and a great many more, frankly, who will need many more hours of time and perhaps even divine intervention before their results even come close to shining.

I would imagine that there is some overlap between the teaching of writing and the teaching of acting. In both cases, what you are teaching is, if not ephemeral, then certainly not nailed down either. How many different variations in writing, especially in creative writing classes as I am now teaching, how many different variations of acting, particularly in the colorful personalities who are often attracted to the stage, flamboyant persons, many, who are as colorful as the costumes they sometimes wear? Then too, acting and writing require certain skills that re-create for others human behavior and characteristics.

Anyone can read a book, but not everyone can write; anyone can watch a movie, but not everyone can act. Likewise, while a good many people are not very perceptive, a good many more are highly so. Yet it is one thing to be perceptive—to “read” another person’s actions and behaviors and to pick up the subtle undercurrents in the room—and quite another to know exactly what you have seen and to be able to reproduce it yourself, translating it into the sights, and sounds, and motions of the stage. The writer or the actor may not need to consciously know all these details, just as if you know the general direction you are to walk, you do not necessarily have to consider each step taken. Yet in another sense, both the writer and the actor—at least if the writer is writing about life and not merely about abstractions—need to not only “read” the world, but know what they read and how to reproduce that reading as writing, as acting. An actor needs to be able to not only read people, but replicate the microscopic, often imperceptible movements that communicate; so too, strong prose is capable of embedding many small details that take the narrative landscape to new heights, animating one’s cast of characters, real or otherwise, with mere words. Perhaps, as with method acting, an author can “reach within,” the outer actions following just as our feet follow one another as we travel in the direction required. Yet an awareness of actions and their meanings is important to the actor—and no less with the author who must in words indicate the subtle communications that pass between persons. The power of observation—and the ability to replicate what is thus observed—is of key importance to either art.

In a few short moments I will be gearing up for my second section of teaching this day. I have acting on the brain, because I am hoping to use it as a metaphor for writing. I took a theater appreciation course as a sophomore, but otherwise, I have had zero courses in theater in spite of the fact that I know a good many persons whose lives in one way or another intersect with that department. Therefore, to make sure that in my class illustrations I do not put my foot in my mouth, I am required to do a little bit of research on acting methods and the like. Fortunately, I have encountered these ideas here and there in my own reading, so I do not have to start from scratch. But I do need to make sure that the right term gets applied to the right concept, and that I describe in broad brushstrokes the general idea, calling on the “theater people” in the classroom to fill in any gaps I might have left out or to add any points of clarification that I might have missed.

As I have been thinking about teaching and writing and acting, I have further been thinking about Confucius and martial arts and systems of ethics. For one thing, I wanted to venture away from the method acting pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavsky that is so popular here in the States under the banner of “The Method.” This particular theory of acting requires the actor, in one way or another, to put themselves emotionally in the place of the character they will be portraying. “My character has an alcoholic father and his mother is a prostitute. He has to steal to survive. What would that feel like? What would the inner psychological state be of such a person?” The Method requires the actor, as much as is possible, to put himself or herself into the emotional shoes of the other and recreate those actions. “In this scene, I am interacting with the character’s mother. How would my character respond to his mother, particularly in this circumstance? How does that differ from how he would respond to his father? Or how does it differ from the way he addresses the city council members when he puts on his top hat, adorned with his official duties?”

Method acting is interesting and provides an unique lens through which the non-actor may view life. However, what I was really searching for was the style of acting that focuses not on states realized inwardly before being manifest outwardly, but rather the theory (or theories) that learn by observation the various behaviors—a finger twitch, an arched eyebrow, an expansive gesture—translating this unspoken, external language to an inward realization. My research indicates a theory of acting known as Biomechanics (BioMX for short), though that still does not sound correct, and in a few short moments, I have to stop typing this newsletter and go teach class. Once there, I will see if the theater people in the room have different terms or have been taught different things about this approach to acting, and I will let you know what I uncover, if anything.

For now, let us just note that BioMX seems to focus on a more “scientific” approach to acting. That is, according to this view (and perhaps other views as well, for that matter), all acting is reacting: for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction, and to be alive is to react, or, if one prefers, to respond. As a science, mechanics is interested to measure bodies in motion: how much force, what velocity and vector, what is the nature of impact between two bodies, what reaction follows what action tabulated down to exacting degree. Bio attached to the front of mechanics suggests the idea of living bodies, thus biomechanics to the actor would be the study of not only motions but the interaction of motions, one “body” affecting another “body,” the interaction and interplay of “somebodies.”

There is, of course, real life on the one hand, then there are the various ways that real life may be described or represented on the other. Acting, writing, and teaching are all once removed from real life: they are representations of reality, but not themselves reality, or, for the logical purist (to use but one example), reality includes acting, but acting does not include reality (else we wouldn’t call it “acting” but something else).

With that in view, I was thinking of Confucius. We have said before that Eastern ways of looking at the world are holistic, that unlike Western ways of looking at the world, they do not break life into smaller units to dissect and analyze, favoring this binary over that one, such as the tendency in Western spirituality to favor the spirit to the denigration of the body and its desires. Eastern thinking instead seeks a “both/and,” desiring a truth that multiplies rather than divides meanings. I thought also of the Tao (道, also Dao), an idea that predates Confucius, an idea that would have been part of the very atmosphere that Confucius breathed. The Tao, coming from a typically Eastern perspective, is not really the Tao at all, as though it were a discrete entity separated and isolated from all others. Rather “the” Tao, usually translated as “the Way,” speaks of the road traveled, the traveling of the road, the person traveling on the road, and so on: the totality of the travel, the road, the person and all else involved as a metaphor for the good, beautiful, and virtuous life and the way that it is realized. What is more, for Confucius, those who have gone on before us are trailblazers: there is a real sense that to walk in the Way, to walk in the Tao, is both to walk in the footsteps of our forebears as well as leave our own footprints behind for our progeny. Such a concept is not so unlike the great crowd of witnesses cheering us along.

I thought of Confucius because much of my thinking about acting involve modeling, that concept we described in the recent issue Green Eggs and Ham: Colors Blue and Beyond. One very important way that we learn is through observing others. We do not live in a vacuum or in isolation. Likewise, an actor does not merely study his character, but his character’s interaction with other characters, the different social contexts in which that character must act and react, and the atmospheric space and context that influence these behaviors. Again, what works in one classroom with the same teacher teaching the same course material does not necessarily work in another classroom with the same teacher and material. Among the many ways the two could differ, the way students respond, either with enthusiasm or lethargy, invariably changes what might otherwise be an identical lecture or presentation: highly responsive students create a more energetic delivery on the part of the instructor and thus both students and speaker benefit, the one fueling the energy of the other and vice-versa.

All of life may be seen as action and reaction, give and take, the interaction of elements. For the trailblazer, he or she cannot see how that blazed trail might look unless it is mirrored in the eyes and voices of those onlooking, for he or she is traveling a road that no one else has yet traveled, at least no one else that he or she has personally known or seen. Yet for the one watching the trailblazer’s step, the way is made more clear, both by what is communicated and what is not, both by the firm, sure tread as well as the false steps and starts. That is, we learn as much by the mistakes of the one blazing new paths, if we are perceptive, as we do his or her effective leadership. The trailblazer creates the pattern and the template; the trailblazer not only walks the Tao but actively creates it.

In my first class, the class that tends to be less responsive to group discussion, I have been repeatedly surprised several times this week to have feedback offered, suggesting that my teaching style and methods are more effective in that class than I might have thought. In particular, one student is near completion of her degree and hopes to become a GTA like me. She is taking my class only because she needs it to complete her minor in creative writing; I am not sure what her major in English involves, but she has taken care of most of that coursework already. She stayed and spoke with me after class today, filled with nervous questions. I encouraged her to carefully observe all her instructors for the rest of this semester and the next, noticing what approaches seem to work, what elements do not work so well, and not only to be perceptive in “reading” the interaction between instructor and students, but if possible trying to find out precisely how they do what they do in the hopes of reproducing it herself.

Among the things that surprised me was how self-conscious I have felt several times this semester when I misspoke in class and had to go back later and correct my error. Making errors in class does not particularly bother me: at least for the most part, I have moved beyond that insecurity. But there are times I feel that there are issues of incompetency as well: that in watching my own feet travel and create the Tao, I have misstepped. However, what she suggested was that my willingness to admit and correct my mistakes creates even more rapport, making me more accessible, students more willing to stick out their own necks, and in general contributes to the overall learning environment.

I did not mention Confucius to her, but what I did mention is along the lines of the Tao: as a student of teaching, she has an opportunity to observe my own “trailblazing.” I never had an instructor act exactly like I act and cannot always see how I look. Yet she has the opportunity to study and assess my teaching style, finding out what is effective and what is not. If she pays careful attention, there will be certain areas in which I lack confidence that she will not, because she has seen my actions and is aware of their effect on both her and the rest of the class. Therefore, as observer, she has a form of knowledge available to her that as initiator I do not. Things tend to look rather different from differing vantage points, and part of the apparent cleverness of the critic amounts to as much. (That may explain why critics who are also artists themselves tend to be more rounded and less caustic.)

I mentioned the metaphor of acting to her also, in terms of helping her fine-tune her writing, for that is another concern of hers. She wants to polish and perfect her creative writing, both for the sake of writing well, as well as for the sake of teaching well. I thought then of acting and how actors must not only be perceptive but “re-creative,“ and even more when I got home and started to prepare for the class to which I will have to flee in just five minutes. I thought too that acting requires a lot more interaction than I had previously considered. We may, at least in America, isolate the actor, setting him or her up on a pedestal, but in truth, actors must work in concert with other actors and the audience, the effort a communal one. And I have thought much about community lately, perhaps especially since I tend to be something of a loner who has tended somewhat to look down on communal things. Acting in particular deals not with the abstract ideas with which I have become comfortable and which seem at times more solid and stable than human actions (which ebb and flow, and in general, as is the inherent property of motion, are in a constant state of flux); acting in particular deals with motions, actions and ideas seen only secondarily as means to the ultimate re-creative end. (I would ask myself: is human motion ephemeral? Or are human affairs the real? Or, another possibility, is the real invariably ephemeral? I gravitate toward the latter.)

Now if you will excuse me for a moment, I must go teach class. We will see how much violence is done to my person today, and when I return, I will finish my account here.

Having now returned (the time frame of the printed page, much like the time frame of the stage, differs rather dramatically from real life), I must say that no violence at all was effected, unless it was to open me up further like a flower that sits too often wilted in front of his computer. In fact, the class seemed to warm to my tales of Confucius, my thoughts on method acting versus BioMX, and how the best pieces of writing often follow the advice of Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) to court officials in his celebrated 1528 publication The Courtier: that is, in order to display your good breeding as an official of the court, you must work hard to cultivate the social graces that paradoxically make it seem as though you were simply born with high manners. Put differently, the most sophisticated social etiquette is so highly practiced as to appear natural, as though one innately possessed such aristocratic ability from the cradle. Likewise, often the best writing appears natural and organic, paradoxically made possible by its carefully crafted excellence.

Perhaps if I have written and written well, you were so caught up in your reading that you failed to remember that what you were reading was a failed newsletter sandwiched between two layers of self-neglect. We began this newsletter with self-neglect, we then cut in with thoughts about teaching, writing, and acting (taking place after my first class and before my second), the paragraph above chronicles the only paragraph that made it to the page after the second class, and now here we are, this imaginary red X on the page showing our current coordinates. I cannot say that this particular piece of writing—this newsletter—bears the signs and signature of Castiglione’s careful courtiermanship, but I can at least pray that in days to come I will not feel so fragmented—and further, I pray that we are all mindful of self-neglect versus self-abandonment, learning to distinguish between what does matter and what does not so that we may be of greater benefit to ourselves, to others, and ultimately to him in whose service we dedicate our lives.

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The Tao’s a Stage: Self-Abandonment and Beyond