Sarah Ruhl
one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
64. Eating what we see
I was recently reading a Victorian novel (as I have been on and off for 30 years, but for brief forays in and out of Modernism) and thinking about how the 19th century was the age of the eye and the mind. That is to say, a profusion of words created imagery to be contemplated. Since then, imagery in daily life has rapidly escalated. A constant profusion of images to be digested in daily life, and therefore a debasement of words…In the medieval age stained glass was one of the few daily images offered up for reflection and meditation, and now in the present moment we see God knows how many visual images a day—I think by one recent estimate the eye had to process three thousand visual images a day (and just think if one’s job requires one to walk by Times Square now and again, the horror). If the Victorians lived in an age of the word making the image, we now live in the digital age: touch makes image.We live in the age of the eye and the hand—one touch, and visual imagery is created, with no word mediating or intervening. We are coming closer and closer to the illusion of being able to eat the image as opposed to contemplating the image. Iphones make images feel almost edible. So do food blogs. Simone Weill thought it was important that we, as purveyors of the sacred, learn to contemplate the object rather than eat it. That spiritual training teaches the eye to behold rather than to devour. Is it possible that theater is a holding station, a site of resistance, to this feeding frenzy of touch and image, of mental consumption? The stage is a physical marker preventing us from touching the object of contemplation, and because there are real people acting, we feel that we cannot own their image or touch their image. Recently I was with my five year-old daughter at the theater. She whispered and pointed to the stage “Are those real people?” She asked me. “They’re actors,” I said. “But are they real people?” She asked. “Yes, I said.”
I realized that she must have asked this because of the profusion of digital images that she sees. She didn’t wonder if the characters were real, she wondered if the actors were real. This is perhaps why the new generation will find theater exceedingly exciting (or else exceedingly dull)—a place where word still conjures images of the invisible world but the people are real.