He has nothing, but looks everything.
tweet this“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” - Algernon, The Importance of Being Earnest
I’ve played him before…more than once, and yet, each time I come back to those lines, those zingers, and I think I can’t do this show another time, I find something fresh, not in Algy, per se, but in what he brings to me. I think I may been Oscar Wilde. Or maybe I am.
Everybody gets one insane obsession, right? I think he will be mine.
So much has changed over the last few months…I suppose that happens to everyone: you think you’re fine, and then you grow up. It doesn’t really come piecemeal, does it. At least, that’s how I’ve felt lately. Good morning, Kris, life. Phone rings, life. Email/blogs, life. Life is in so many places, these days. I just realized this week how threatened I’ve been by online posts. What the hell is that even about? How is that threatening, and yet, it is…rather, it was. Not because I was physically in danger, but once anything is published it sits on the very dangerous precipice of interpretation. And I can’t run around to everyone who may or may not read what I’ve read, and explain the backstory.
That’s what the online world takes away from us: the backstory. We are at the mercy of other fingers, and are kept from intruding with our explanations, upfront…the damage must necessarily always be done first. And for some reason, if and when we get the chance to defend ourselves, it looks shallow, and limp…merely excusatory prose written after the “truth.” How quick we are to assign “truth” to original comments and posts and bulletins…at least, it seems that way.
No, wait. It reads that way. And what danger there is one person’s reading of another’s person “truth.” We are denied, it feels, an equal opportunity to express our thoughts, as if that right was snatched away from us before we even knew it wasn’t up for debate. Sure, I can turn around and post my own thoughts, but then what does that really say about communication, and the future of it, when it’s so hurriedly fills it tank to full before hitting the Information Highway.
Who are we really, online? It’s all carefully controlled representation, but of what? The people we wish we were? If that’s true, then Wilde was right: All the world’s a stage, but the play is badly cast.
I’ve never wanted to be an understudy so much in my life.
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