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101 5. The Practice of Fire Walking The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come. —Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika We’ve sought the signs of emotional form through the processes of writing and viewing drama. Emotional form is something well known to writers, a key element of their lives, and how they make and respond to stories. We all register the constant ticking of emotional expression, adjusting to the complex web of needs, anxieties, pain, and pleasure that makes us what we are. Socrates says the unexamined life is not worth living. So we pursue self-knowledge, hoping it will explain everything else. We are the subjects of which plays are made: the most interesting, difficult, obtuse, and infuriating characters we know, characters whose turbulent but blurred psychological landscapes are canvases marked by the fire lines of emotional form. We want to know why do we do what we do. We are drawn to the question because we all have pain or grief that trails us like smoke. We act destructively. We search blindly. We panic, not knowing why. We yearn and don’t know the object of our yearning. We sacrifice, attack, or flee in the competition of daily life. The landscape of self is the one subject that embraces all others. Our emotions form the fuel of our pursuits, obsessive or otherwise. The dramatic enterprise demands that we engage the question, “Why?” We know something mysterious is happening—just from being human, from being players in the big and small parts of the narrative of existence. We realize that our knowledge and our feelings are separated, split apart. We know and feel things, but we don’t always know why we feel them. We create havoc when, dumb to who we are, we act on feelings separated from the knowledge of what they mean. Great dramas always tell us this, in characters such as Oedipus, Ibsen’s Nora, Willy Loman, King Lear. Drama attempts to confront a character divided by some conflict that determines the story’s forward motion, promise an ending that reveals some insight into this separation of feeling and knowledge, and show [ 102 ] The Practice of Fire Walking some consequence because the separation is breeched, or not. These are the operational clauses in the contract of emotional form. Writers’ ideas of character are complicated by many factors, such as parents’ efforts to see that their children don’t become delinquents, by civic and religious forces that erect a wall between acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and by the instinctive impulse to tunnel beneath this wall and to release our demons in our time and in our way. The conflicts that animate us are unique emotional signatures, but writers know this isn’t the whole story. Writers piece the story together by stumbling over and often obfuscating the truth of it. The audience wants to see both the visible and the hidden sources of a character’s conflicted emotional expression. To see and feel that conflicted truth is to be in the embrace of emotional form Adrift between Feeling and Knowing When the separation of feeling and knowledge occurs, the past forces its way through the cracks of this fracture into the present of the character. The behavior that emerges is attached to the barrier between feeling and knowing. Here is an example. The story occurs in a psychologist’s office. Carl is married with grown children. He feels estranged and disengaged from his profession as a pathologist. For some reason, he feels compelled to dress up in women’s clothes, which he has done since he was fourteen. His wife knows about it, and so do his children. He feels no sense of sexual deviance; he simply enjoys dressing up as a woman. He has never understood his compulsion. His behavior has made him private and distant. He visits a psychologist at his wife’s insistence. His children say they will not bring their grandchildren to visit or allow them to be alone with their grandfather until he deals with his compulsion. Time passes, and Carl comes dutifully for his visits to the psychologist . Nothing significant emerges. After watching and listening, the psychologist identifies a profound sadness in Carl. He asks him if this is so. The man bursts into tears...

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