So here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem, and here’s the thing: where he says acting, plug in whatever the hell you’re actually doing… writing, painting, fucking, dying, making breakfast, making art, making sense of the wreckage. And that instant he’s talking about? That’s whatever you’re trying to bring into the world before it crushes you. Same rules apply. Same disease. Same impossible cure.
Helene Weigel in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, 1949
Whatever you portray you should always portray
As if it were happening now. Engrossed
The silent crowd sits in the darkness, lured
Away from its routine affairs. Now
The fisherman’s wife is being brought her son whom
The generals have killed. Even what has happened
In her room is wiped out. What is happening here is
Happening now and just the once. To act in this way
Is habitual with you, and now I am advising you
To ally this habit with yet another: that is, your acting should
At the same time express the fact that this instant
On your stage is often repeated; only yesterday
You were acting it, and tomorrow too
Given spectators, there will be a further performance.
Nor should you let the Now blot out the
Previously and Afterwards, nor for that matter whatever
Is even now happening outside the theatre and is similar in kind
Nor even things that have nothing to do with it all – none of this
Should you allow to be entirely forgotten.
So you should simply make the instant
Stand out, without in the process hiding
What you are making it stand out from. Give your acting
That progression of one-thing-after-another, that attitude of
Working up what you have taken on. In this way
You will show the flow of events and also the course
Of your work, permitting the spectator
To experience this Now on many levels, coming from
Previously and
Merging into Afterwards, also having much else now
Alongside it. He is sitting not only
In your theatre but also
In the world.Bertolt Brecht, John Willett, trans.
Poems Brecht wrote between 1947-1953.
Bertolt Brecht understood what most of us spend our entire fucking lives trying to avoid: you’re always performing, and the performance is always a lie, except when it isn’t. Which is all the time. See the problem?
This Bertolt Brecht poem, it’s him doing what he did best, which was taking the thing everyone thinks they understand (in this case, acting, but swap in “living” or “writing” or “creating anything that matters”) and showing you how you’ve been doing it wrong because you’ve been doing it without thinking about doing it. The Verfremdungseffekt, that alienation effect he was always on about, wasn’t some academic parlor trick. It was survival equipment for maintaining your soul in a world designed to steal it through comfort and routine.
The Now, this immediate, authentic, raw moment we’re all supposedly chasing, is horseshit if you pretend it exists in a vacuum. Your Now is built on ten thousand Befores and it’s rotting into a million Afters, and if you’re not holding all of that in your head simultaneously, you’re just another schmuck pretending to be present while actually being nowhere at all.
Brecht says make the instant stand out without hiding what you’re making it stand out from. Translation: be here now, but remember you’re also there then, and the person experiencing your work is sitting in their own shit-show of a life, not just in your theater. Don’t let them forget the world outside is burning. Don’t let them forget they’re complicit. Don’t let yourself forget.
I get it, this idea that whatever task I’m performing, whatever instant I’m creating, it’s happening in the flow of everything else. The habitual and the revolutionary, happening at once. I’m working it up, showing my process, letting the seams show because the seams are where the truth lives. The polished surface is where meaning goes to die.
Everything else is just ego and commerce wearing an artist costume, hoping nobody notices it’s already dead inside.