I was in the bar for the wireless internet. I’d spent several weeks, in the winter proceeding, feeling tethered to the screens in my life less like a person engaged in tool use and more like a person possessed by a demon, a falcon who cannot for the life of me hear the falconer. When my internet company cut me off for nonpayment, I decided to see the opportunity in such an experience, and did not have it reconnected. I am an optimist.
This quickly escalated. I bought a blackberry from 2012 off of eBay (accessed by way of the internet at the library, where they’re just giving that stuff away), and soon my screens had been rendered storage and display devices instead of portals to hell. I could access the portals to hell only after the effort it took to leave my apartment, and purchase myself a little treat. So I was in the bar, with a glass of terrible house wine, and I was free to fiddle with some writing, and mess around on Instagram, and muse out loud about how I wanted to see my friend Michael Imperioli play Mayor Peter Stockmann in Amy Herzog’s new adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, but could not afford to.
Can somebody buy me a ticket to go see this play? I wrote, as an instagram story. As my Instagram following had ticked modestly upwards, I thought perhaps someone following me was some manner of successful Wall Street investment banker with a more money than joy in their life, and that this person might want to go see a play with a very loud poet from Canada. Why not? It was worth a shot. The answer’s always no if you don’t ask! I’ll be delightful company, I added. I won’t even say the F word too much, I promise.
When I got a reply, I found it was not at all some Wall Street Banker with more money than joy, but Michael — my friend, the actor.
When do you want to come?
Weeks later, other kind and generous friends had granted me the use of their entire apartment, out in one of the boroughs of New York that hasn’t been completely gentrified and still seems suspiciously full of normal people. It was the day I had a ticket to see An Enemy of the People, and I had slept terribly. I feel most Canadian in New York City — the contours of the culture nearly identical to mine that I am lulled into a false sense of security, and then bang my knee against some sharp corner of cultural difference. Canada is not a particularly ambitious country. We are neurotically self-effacing. We are deferential to a fault. New York has an energy that is fun, and exciting, and frequently unsettling. It makes it hard for me to sleep.
I pulled myself out of bed, and I was miserable, body aching from some unknown origin point and my mind manic and racing. I wandered my friends’ apartment, trying to snap myself out of it, trying to negotiate with my complaining body, taking coffee and amphetamines which I hoped would cure me of my systemic disorder but seemed only to quicken the void. I decided that perhaps even more stimulants might help me, and having run out of coffee I began an inefficient and stumbling attempt to leave the apartment. Somewhere in the middle of it, I cautioned a glance down at my packed purse to find it sitting in a dirty little puddle on the tiled bathroom floor, unzipped and displaying my water bottle half-open. I dished out my wet blackberry. It wouldn’t turn on.
Realizing you’re running late while coming a very far distance on public transit is a uniquely humiliating kind of terror. The bad thing arrives from such a great distance, something you can see coming but are powerless to stop, like a leisurely attack by a very slow shark. By the time I reached my stop I had exactly seven minutes for the eight-minute walk from the station. I left the train at a full run in the corseted party dress I’d brought for the occasion, breasts strapped more or less to my chin, orange 20-yard skirt bunched at one hip in the crook of my arm, lace kimono flapping stupidly behind me, my shoulders slouched in the direction of Broadway. I bolted through the stinking neon insanity of Times Square, dashing past the suits on their third patio martinis. “Late! Late!” Hollered one, after me. “You’re late!”
To my relief, I found the line still moving inside when I arrived at Circle in the Square, heart clattering against the inside of my silly outfit. The activity had knocked some sense into the body that had been refusing to cooperate since the night before. Terror had invigorated me. I felt like a human being for the first time all day as I took my seat — which was excellent. Thank you, Michael.
An Enemy of the People, which runs through June 23rd at Circle in the Square in Manhattan, and for which Jeremy Strong recently won the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, is Amy Herzog’s modernized reinterpretation of the 1882 work by Henrik Ibsen. The economy of a small Norwegian town hinges on their hot springs. When the physician employed by the baths discovers the water to be poisoned by industrial runoff from a nearby factory, he feels compelled to tell people about this, and in his attempt to do so discovers just how complicated it can be to tell the truth. I hope that does not count as a spoiler. The play is, like, a hundred and fifty years old.
I care a lot about the truth, for high-minded ethical reasons I thought about a lot in college, and because I think that it’s the only way to treat other adults with respect. I only tell lies to children, complete strangers, and the potentially dangerous. In all other circumstances, I am pathologically honest — because I think I should be, and because I’m not smart enough to do anything else. I’ve never told a lie so small or insignificant that it has not bloomed like rot in a petrie dish, growing perversely and upon itself, becoming so quickly massive and unwieldy it’s not worth the original benefit of the lie to maintain. The older I get, the more I realize that a lot of my commitment to the truth probably has to do with the fact that the truth was not a dangerous thing, when I was growing up. I had parents who wanted me to tell the truth, who believed that the truth was important, and I generally had my truth-telling rewarded. I am starting to understand that this is not the case for everyone.
I don’t know what writing is if not an attempt to tell the truth. I once heard Neil Gaiman say that a writer is always telling the truth, even when they’re using fiction — an art form made of lies which only really works if those lies tell the truth. My favourite piece of writing about writing is The Movie Assassin by Sarah Miller, in which she warns us that the act of telling the truth — and, in doing so, often foregoing money, and praise, and the approval of powerful people — is always a matter of integrity. Money, praise, approval and recognition are all things that can be taken away. If they are — when they are — we are left with our integrity, or with nothing at all. Maybe we can’t expect everyone in the world to live like this, because it is a practice which regularly sucks, and is hard. I think it’s necessary for some of us to take up the mantle, though. Scientists. Journalists. Poets. All artists, maybe.
In An Enemy of the People, our hero Thomas Stockmann tries to preserve his integrity by telling the truth, and finds that this is not only difficult because of the influence of power in his life, but because there are very serious and important moral questions that come along with telling the truth. Telling the truth often causes real human suffering, on a social and economic level. Is Thomas Stockmann responsible for that, when he tells the truth? A dedication to the truth is a kind of moral position. We can’t commit to the truth unless we believe that the truth is important. Why is the truth important?
The philosopher Immanuel Kant once tried to make an argument for the importance of the truth which relied on reason, instead of faith. He developed something called the categorical imperative: if you have an opportunity to make some kind of decision, think about what the world would look like if every single person had to do exactly what you want to do. If this causes a contradiction, then it’s the wrong choice. Telling a lie is only possible because people generally expect other people to tell the truth. If, instead, everyone could generally expect other people to be telling lies, then telling a lie becomes impossible. Lying creates a contradiction in terms. Therefore, lying is wrong.
The categorical imperative is pretty easy to poke holes in. People are animals, not machines. We make choices for complex, organic reasons, which are as logical as they are emotional, and traditional, and in an effort to preserve things that are important to us — like safety, or love. There are a lot of very obvious examples of situations in which it’s a much better idea to lie than it is to tell the truth. My favourite example is from an issue of Savage Love, which I read in the back of a NOW Magazine when I was in high school. In it, Dan Savage advised someone not to tell their partner they’d been unfaithful. It had been a one-time thing. Nobody knew. The cheater was never going to do it again. The only real problem was that the cheater was wracked with guilt, and this hurt. Dan said that this was a case where telling the truth would only serve to transfer pain from someone who deserves it to someone who does not. Maybe sometimes, telling the truth is selfish. Maybe sometimes the truth us mine to carry.
I tend to take this position towards Kant, and the categorical imperative: Kant was a smart guy. He knew that people make choices like animals, and not machines. The point of the practice is not to provide a template for all moral decisions (a bad idea, generally) but to provide a useful tool of self-assessment when making moral choices: if I find myself wanting to make a different choice than the one I’d expect every other person in the world to make, here, then why? What makes me so fucking special?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the truth, and why it matters — contradictions, respect, and so on — and for these reasons I was actually very nervous to watch my friend Michael play Mayor Peter Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. I knew I’d want to write something about what I thought of it, and since Michael is an adult, and a friend, and an artist I respect, I would have to tell the truth, and maybe he would read it. What if I didn’t like the play? I’d never seen An Enemy of the People before. The little bit I’d heard about the play made me worry I was maybe going to see a play about the project of centrism — which is, unfortunately, something about which I have a lot of strong opinions.
Centrism is, I think, often written off by both the left and the right as an insidiously dangerous foolishness — one that favours a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive one which is the presence of justice.1 In this view, one of a handful of things that the left and the right can agree on, the approach submits to fear of powerful outside forces and in doing so sacrifices integrity. It is either blind or indifferent to the container it offers up for the other, worse way of doing things.
I don’t think this is an adequately charitable position. Centrism is a political approach with roots in the work of Aristotle, a notorious smarty-pants who had the benefit of having lived approximately one bajillion years ago, and so has had basically the maximum number of other smarty-pantses to pick apart and improve upon the things he wrote. Centrism is the politicization of conciliation. Conciliation is often balked at as a kind of weakness, when I think it is more charitably understood as the recognition of idealism as mendacity in the face of what is necessary.2 I do not think it’s a weakness to do what one must to avoid disaster, to be the person who is willing to forego shouting and whining for what one wants but instead look for the middle ground between the shouting and whining of others who will not shut up for long enough to become solution-oriented. As a political approach, it does the things that it does for reasons that make sense.
In an America that is still influenced by the effects of Cold War propaganda, where actual left-wing politics sometimes seems like the last remaining public taboo, “liberal” tends to be used to mean “left-wing,” when liberalism in both theory and in practice in the United States is a centrist political philosophy. In times of peace and reason I’m usually perfectly amenable to the middle ground. Who am I to tell people what’s good for them? What makes me so fucking special?
My issues with the middle ground are leftist ones, and have to do with what a centrist approach looks like in specific situations. These are not times of peace and reason. As the political compass slides right — far, far right, which is the direction it is indisputably going, the world over, currently — the centre slides that way, as well. It has to. That’s what centrism does. All we have to do, really, is look at what constituted the middle ground political and economically thirty, forty, a hundred years ago, and we can see the kinds of concessions the centre has had to make, and to whom they’ve had to make it.
My second-favourite pieces of writing on writing is Why I Write, by George Orwell, where he writes that if he was living in a time of peace and reason, and not a time of radical right-wing populism, he’d maybe have written things because they were beautiful, which is what he really wanted to do. Orwell wanted to write beautiful things that were good and made people admire him, because he was a normal writer. The man who became the most famous political writer in history insists himself to be a normal writer, which is to say “selfish, lazy, and vain.”3 His belief in democratic socialism, and the writing he did to promote it, was an expression of this: he wanted to be right, and recognized and praised as right, and he wanted to make things that were pretty and good because it made him feel good about himself, and he wanted to do this in the easiest way possible. Writing against capital, and the far-right populist ideologies which defend and promote it during times of economic hardship, and the way that this is done at the expense of the lives of human beings we should care about and want to protect, as well as our collective human dignity in general — this is simply the easiest way do these things.
I wondered if I would care less about the truth if I were less selfish, lazy and vain, as the lights went down in Circle in the Square. I sat in my party dress, in my good seat in a nice theatre in the capital city of Western civilization, and my friend walked on stage and people erupted into applause. I am a normal girl. I grew up assuming I’d inherit some specific set of circumstances, and had the normal kinds of dreams and aspirations, and what I emerged into was instead another age of economic crisis, another age of war and far-right populism, where we turn and turn in this widening gyre, and cannot for the life of us hear the falconer, and capital morphs and mutates into something more like feudalism than anything else, while environmental catastrophe threatens to make climate refugees of thousands or millions of us in a single moment, leave us running for our lives with nothing but our integrity, if we still have it.
I often worry that I am less part of the problem as I am a shining example of exactly what is wrong with the world: that my dedication to my identity (my identity!) as an artist is also a dedication to the liberal world order, that the best parts of me lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, and writing is an irrelevant act and I should commit myself instead to law or politics like I assumed I would for a while in University. The play started, and I braced myself. The centre cannot hold, and I tend to agree with Orwell that work which lacks political conviction devolves into humbug, generally — and work about the liberal world order cannot provide political conviction, anymore, because the liberal world order is dead.
That isn’t what I saw, though. The play was so good. Thank God!
Ibsen is famously suspicious of his own characters, including — especially — the ones that represent a kind of self-insert, which Jeremy Strong’s Thomas Stockmann is. Good art is a window pane. It’s not impossible, but it is very hard, to get away with anything that isn’t true. An Enemy of the People was written largely out of Ibsen’s frustration that his last work, Ghosts, had caused so much controversy. Ghosts is a satire which questions the blind acceptance of social norms and conventions, especially around the social and medical realities of sexuality. It talked about sexually-transmitted infections like they were real, because they are. To put it mildly, people did not like this.
Dr. Stockmann is questioned along lines familiar to any truth-teller engaging in the act of telling the truth. Do I have authority to claim access to the truth at all? What consequences are present in the effects of the truth? Is it reasonable to assign me responsibility for those consequences? How do those consequences stack against the consequences of concealing the truth? What are my motivations for all of this? Am I just trying to overcome the way I felt dominated by my brother as a child? What makes me so fucking special?
I’m probably betraying my political convictions to say that I did not find any of these lines of questioning to be hugely effective, and that instead of some appeal to the liberal world order (RIP), what I watched was a story about the complicated implications of right action. Negative consequences are usually presented as evidence that taking some action was bad, actually — but I can’t imagine an actually important choice that isn’t going to cause some degree of hurt, inconvenience, or discomfort. Requiring that right action have no consequences is a kind of idealism, which is to say mendacity in the face of what is necessary. I have been flirting with the idea that retaining one’s integrity has more to do with being able to withstand, manage, and accept the consequences of right action than it does with being able to anticipate the action with no negative consequence at all. As the consequences roll in, am I willing to accept responsibility for them? Am I willing to feel what I need to feel — shame, fear, remorse, loneliness — while also maintaining that the choices I made were reasonable, given the information I had, and the things I think are important, for reasons that make sense?
The work is perfectly forward social commentary, which implicates the audience as individuals with free will, and as art-observers, and as people sitting in a nice theatre in the capital city of western civilization. I was reminded of the profound privilege and incredible responsibility that we both bear and enjoy to be honest to ourselves, and to our loved ones, and to our community, and to participate in the generation of the moral conditions of the society in which we live. I saw a story about the enduring way that kindness and loyalty endures the threat of abandonment through friendship. I saw questions about the risk of conflating “dangerous rhetoric” with actual acts of violence against human bodies.
I also got to see my friend do something amazing, in a way I’ve never seen him do it in other work of his I’ve seen — the physicality of Mayor Stockmann crackling with power, and with control, and with a very intelligent genre of smarm.4 There was a thing he did with his arms that made me jump up in my seat, not just because it embodied the character so compellingly, but because it was familiar, like something I remembered from a dream — who did I know who did that with their arms? As I was thinking this, Jeremy Strong did something similar — the two actors doing body language like funhouse mirrors of one another, like people who’d grown up emulating each other and also defining themselves in each others’s negatives, like brothers do.
When the lights came up, my phone was still bricked. I wanted to go to Michael and congratulate him. I’d never been backstage at a theatre this big and prestigious, and getting to do so would be fun, and I am a normal girl and want the normal things for girls to want. I knew he’d invite me, but I also knew that all of my tech was dead. I had no way of reaching him. I thought about asking an usher. I am so aggressively Canadian. I am neurotically self-effacing. I am deferential to a fault. I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I left with everyone else. I have a mantra for this. Inhale: you are not the plucky lead in an indie drama. Exhale: you are literally just a guy.
Outside, I waited with everyone else to see if Michael came out to sign things, and I tried not to feel embarrassed. Inhale: don’t worry if things don’t go the way they’re supposed to go. Exhale: There is no way that it’s supposed to go. Michael emerged and started signing playbills. I tried to make myself obviously visible at the back of the throng. When he saw me, his eyebrows shot up.
“Didn’t you get my text message?”
“My phone is dead!”
I was ushered over somewhere I could wait for him. I am an optimist. I talked to another friend of his about the influence of Caribbean culture on Toronto, and then my friend came, and I got to put my arms around him, and tell him honestly — thank God! — that I loved the work he had done, and thank you, and isn’t it a blessing to be here in the widening gyre, even out of earshot of the falconer, even as the centre cannot hold, to miss your text message, and so get to stand and watch more people adore you.
I am quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. here.
This is Nietzsche.
If you haven’t read Why I Write by George Orwell yet, please do so. It’s very short.
I’ve been informed that “smarm” (verb. Adjective: “smarmy”) is Canadian slang (by way of Britain.) You should start saying it. It is awesome.