One Ship in the Night

Night black as pitch. I am swimming in the sea, the water is agreeably warm. I feel protected. Directly over my head, a shooting star, then another, and yet another. And then, on the horizon, a gigantic ship brilliantly lit.

Summer 2009. Philosophers and actors meet on the Greek isle of Santorini. They fly in from all over the world, like shooting stars. A unique situation, a “reunion” of a special kind.

We encounter one another, we exchange, we work together with Kristin Linklater. We even learn to enjoy lectures in philosophy.

This confrontation with the gigantic worlds of past thought, represented by the philosophers, now comes to stand at the centre of my life in an entirely new way. Sometimes it means stress, a night black as pitch, feeling stupid, feeling spurred on to think more deeply about my life, feeling too challenged, then swept along, infected even, and frustrated. Caught up in a bubbling process, as though rehearsing a play for the first time, when I am finally able to let it all seep into me. There are no boundaries.

Everyone had given himself or herself over to the process and opened themselves up to the shared work, each as defenceless as I. Sometimes during the philosophy lectures the entire film of my career as a student played right before my eyes, and the film was Amarcord! Sometimes, for long stretches of time, I could not understand a thing and was angry with myself for feeling so stupid and for not being brave enough to say after a sentence or two, “Could you explain that, could you make it clearer?” Or when I want to justify myself to myself, excuse myself, defend myself on account of my “ignorance.”

Then it occurred to me that it was not a matter of ignorance. Rather, it was an undeveloped capacity in me to formulate readily in words everything I was experiencing and observing—the intuitions, images, perceptions, feelings, the interconnections of all kinds—so that the result was often a traffic jam in my head. Add to that the intensive training with Kristin Linklater, which intensified my compelling desire to speak.

I was amused to discover that this reawakened desire to speak, this rediscovered capacity and freedom to develop my own quirky thoughts, to work with my feelings and experiences and to formulate them, did not directly have to do with the renowned philosophers; nor was it a matter of mastering some abstruse field of “language-andthought” activity. Rather, another origin was in play here, a playful origin, one that I knew about when I was a child, but that I’d lost somehow somewhere along the way.

It became clear to me that the need to elaborate what we experience in the form of thoughts, and then to formulate and hold on to these thoughts in the form of “narratives,” “images,” “transfers of knowledge,” or even a few “notes” jotted down, accords with an innate need of human beings everywhere.

Philosophers and actors, as though they were playing in the warm surf, were trying to realize something that we are most often incapable of, or not accustomed to allowing. To transform what we experience into “knowledge,” and to reflect, but to do so in a sensuous way, as though this “knowledge” were the most natural thing in the world—this is what we were all trying to do, each in his or her own language, each trying to listen to the language of the others, to understand it and to love it.

From this arose the compelling question, “Why do we elevate knowledge of the intellect above intuition, images, fantasy, and bodily intelligence?” But also, “Why do we do the reverse?”

The philosophers’ lectures became each day more direct, more personal, more intimate. They were amazingly courageous, and I was touched to be able to see ever more clearly the explosive power of our association. I sobbed as I heard Mollie telling her story—I mean, of course, her highly complex lecture—and also as I heard Walter sing, and finally, on the final day, when Kevin’s talk came to my ears almost as a kind of gospel.

Santorini reminded me: I cannot separate “knowing” from “experiencing-in-life.”

A night black as pitch. We are swimming in the sea, the water is agreeably warm. We see a shooting star, then another, and yet another. And then: a gigantic ship, all lit up, looming out of vast unending nothingness.