Theatre of the Mind
Theatre of the Mind
Abbey von Gohren
On Private Theatrics and White-Washed Tombs
In the depths of my mind, I am a Pharisee. A Pharisee of Pharisees. I did not realize it for a very long time, because the entire operation is hidden inside. You’d never know just by looking at me. The whitewash is on the outside of the tomb for a reason. The human heart is a mystery, a labyrinth of caves, some of them chock full of rotting bones. The truth is, I am capable of hypocrisy even without an applauding crowd. Pathos disintegrates into nothing but pathetic.
We all begin with pathos, that desire to connect and create empathy. Humans, more than most creatures, seem to crave an audience, recognition, favor. Dogs, some will argue, also like attention, to nose underneath the hand that lies on the couch arm and steal a caress. Yes. But people, too, will come back again and again for that dopamine-laced “like” in a way that seems somehow even lower than the animals. (How far we’ve fallen from a little lower than the angels!)
Listen world, I decided that I’m not the kind of person who’s going to clamor online for commendation—it’s distasteful and vulgar. I’m better than that. No, I can no longer entrust my “story” and “status” to mere humans who might disappoint. Rather, I will bring insta inward and populate my brain with bots who never fail to hit that little heart button. Even better, I’ll come up with something more permanent. Run the roll-call and fund it, I’m sure opening night will be a smashing success, as long as we invite all the right people.
Let me put this more straightforwardly: my lust for attention, once banned from its Facebook indulgence, turned inward and started to pull the levers to lift the curtain on the theater of my mind. On this stage, I am the hero and others are the antagonists or onlookers. If I take my actual life experiences, add a little extra characterization and spice, I can continually churn out appealing dramas that reflect favorably on me, the main actor and playwright. Sometimes I sit in the audience, too. Other times, I construct an image of God in my mind who nods indulgently from a box seat at my performances, blessing my trite plots and shoddy costumes.
In my theater, the character who plays me always wins out. The point of the sketches is to boost my own pride or bolster my morale, especially in the wake of some actual, historical damage to my comfort or ego. This show is off-off-off Broadway, way far down a dead-end street. I keep it well within the bounds of my secret heart. It’s so deep, in fact, that I often don’t realize there’s a show on. It’s like a TV always on in the background where I tune in from time to time when something especially interesting catches my eye.
Just now, for example, there’s a rerun of a scene playing where I triumphantly answer that person in the grocery store that, in fact, I am very committed to the causes of the environment despite what you might have mistakenly presumed with your narrow worldview. I compost, damn it! Here comes another: there’s a person tailgating me for five minutes, who then zooms around me (very unsafe!) and ends up stuck in the same traffic jam. See, honey? We all get there in the same amount of time. Don’t you know you’re wasting your life, your anxiety? I am not nearly as impatient as you, can’t you see that? Do you see that, God? I look up to the fancy section lined in plush red velvet. (He does see, and my chimerical vision of him approves my action over my neighbor’s.)
My fantasies are strange, perhaps. But the point is they all serve to make me a successful protagonist, and to put others in a position lower than me. Now, it may seem exacting and legalistic to not allow myself this smallest of luxuries, at least inside the confines of my own head. “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” But in reality, I am ashamed to think of the people I love whom I’ve internally placed in the position of loser. People I know, love, work with, play with. It’s odd, even evil—and I’m sick of it.
*
It took me thirty-odd years as a sentient being to wake up to the party in my own head. And by party, I mean the kind that leaves regret trailing behind like streamers of crepe paper dragged through unidentified stains on the center rug, while the dog laps up leftover manhattans.
Now I’m in the hangover stage: the dull headache, the fog of nebulous recollections. My face grows hot with shame again. I call the same people back for a replay, a repost based on my remorse, a witty reply in turn. But this time I am on top, the belle of the ball while others excuse themselves to use the toilet. It all hangs low like cigarette smoke, stale and familiar. I grimly put my thoughts out the door with the trash.
Who will deliver me from this body of death? I need a real transformation, something more like a shedding of a skin, like a lion prying my dragon scales off—excruciating but necessary. I need anything but a mere costume change.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic hints at the true rewards if one manages to shut down the theater of the mind: “we must continually suspend the work of the imagination filling the void within ourselves. If we accept no matter what void, what stroke of fate can prevent us from loving the universe? We have the assurance that, come what may, the universe is full.”
What a promise: face the void within ourselves, and find a universe to love. Let the lease lapse on the playhouse, leave its stage and seats empty, and find fullness beyond. According to Weil, we must face the suffering of emptiness and utterly avoid trying to fill it with fancies and fantasies. To not seek recompense for being brought low, either real or imaginary, this is how we let the void have its work in us. This does not require a dramatic martyrdom scene, and it’s just as well, because I’m pretty sure that kind of stuff sells pretty well in the old boarded-up theater.
Instead, I face the void: I wipe the counter again, pick up the toy, send the necessary email. Weil explicitly links menial tasks to a death of self, a process she calls cutting down the tree, making a cross out of it, and picking it up daily. She explains:
The extreme difficulty that I often undergo to complete the tiniest action is, in fact, a favor given to me. That way, with ordinary actions and without attracting attention, I can cut the roots of the tree… extraordinary actions include a stimulant where one can’t help but do them. This stimulant is completely absent from ordinary actions. To find it extremely difficult to do an ordinary action is a favor… we must not ask for the difficulty to disappear, but rather implore the grace to make use of it… that grace may transfigure it.
Humble acts are the most effective in cultivating humility, the hardest to accomplish, and therefore a favor and gift.
Jamie K.A. Smith recently reflected on Thomas Merton’s take on humility in his email newsletter, and it too sheds some light on this daily work of undoing our own selves. One of Merton’s insights, says Smith, is that there’s a kind of false humility that is actually just conformity to the expectations of others. There are many ways our self tries to work on its own image this way, all of which appear humble but are actually the opposite. To that end, we employ what he calls “spiritual disguises.” Whether we try to pass ourselves off as a holy person (someone exceptionally in touch with spiritual realities) or an artist (someone especially attuned to artistic expression or genius), the goal is ultimately the same, even if we’ve subtly hidden it even from ourselves: we want to see ourselves being seen. Smith helpfully quotes Merton:
True humility excludes self-consciousness, but false humility intensifies our awareness of ourselves to such a point that we are crippled, and can no longer make any movement or perform any action without putting to work a whole complex mechanism of apologies and formulas of self-accusation.
Humility, according to Smith and Merton, has very little to do with me and other people. It is, rather, a function of how I relate to God. I love what Smith says about this: “One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends.” What would it look like to live free of expectations, both outwardly and inwardly?
There is a passage from the great rabbi Abraham Heschel which casts a vision for this kind of existence. He calls it the “pious life” but it has more to do with receiving rather than the striving we might usually associate with piety. Heschel invites us to rethink piety as a grace-marked life, one that is simply forgetful of self and full of the remembrance of God. It is the life that Simone Weil describes on the other side of the void and also perhaps the one that Christ showed us by obeying his Father and loving us to the end:
Whatever the pious man does is linked to the divine; each smallest trifle is tangential to His course. In breathing he uses His force; in thinking he wields His power. He moves always under the unseen canopy of remembrance, and the wonderful weight of the name of God rests steadily on his mind. The word of God is as vital to him as air or food. He is never alone, never companionless, for God is within reach of his heart.
*
I stroll again past the Theater of the Mind, where sometimes a show still flickers late at night, and I try to quietly make my way around back and pull the plug on the lights. I still do this many times a day. I wonder whether the audience will finally disperse, and whether I’ll have the courage to pull my own eyes away today, to face the void of the darkened theater. I also wonder if good shows could play here, with a variety of different heroes, and whether love could be born and borne out on this same old stage. In lieu of living as a “walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” could I become real flesh and blood again with a heart so full of the universe that there’s simply no room for self?
On Sunday I pray alongside my fellow parishioners lines handed down to me over generations, not of my own making: Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen. Despite my desperation and occasional despair at this body of death, I have come to rely on the weekly drama of the Eucharist to give me a chance to join a larger story, the flesh-and-blood Body of Christ who humbly take Christ’s body and blood. I don’t think I can really find a better show in town.
Abbey von Gohren
Writer & Editor
Abbey lives in Minneapolis with her family. She spends her days mostly playing in the snow with her small sons, foraging, writing, and occasionally jumping into classrooms to spend time learning alongside children of all ages. She is also managing editor of Veritas Journal.
Photography by Alina Levkovich