Performance: Emersonian Variations
Expression is important in both art and life
In a letter to poet Kimball Flaccus, Robert Frost wrote: “You wish the world better than it is, more poetical. You are that kind of poet. I would rate as the other kind…I’m a mere selfish artist most of the time. I have no quarrel with the material. The grief will be simply if I can’t transmute it into poems. I don’t want the world made safer for poetry or easier. To hell with it. That is its own lookout. Let it stew in its own materialism. No, not to Hell with it. Let it hold its position while I do it in art. My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer. Am I any good? That’s what I’d like to know and all I need to know.”
I started reading a lot of Frost after completing The Artists Fortitude.
It’s been more than two years since completion and upon reflection, performance is one topic that did not receive consideration. Maybe because I was in the throes of writing, the middle of my own performance, caused it to be ignored? Or maybe I had just not thought of it as a subject? Probably the latter. And yet, even though I “completed” the essay, I never felt compelled to publish it in book form…hesitant to move forward. I mean, I allowed it to be serialized here, but still, I just did not feel it was the right time to finally release it as a book—for a variety of reasons. The performance had yet to end…
Between then and now, my views on certain things changed. I read new authors with differing viewpoints—who actually helped answer some of the questions which initially led me to start writing The Artists Fortitude. Does this mean I went back and did a massive revision? No. Because the main purpose was not answering a question but rather exploration, and using all the knowledge and literary talent I possessed at that time to conduct said exploration. In short, I was performing. And The Artists Fortitude was a record of said performance.
Now, when a word like “performance” is used, the temptation to associate ideas of falsehood, manipulation and flaunting presents itself. We might think of glad-handing politicians, celebrities who lied about certain details in their biographies, sleazy salespeople, an ex-friend, boss or lover who exploited your good will, outright con-artists or a fractal combination of all-of-the-above. Or we might take a slightly less cynical but equally dismissive view of associating performance with overblown histrionics, mugging hysteria, and overacting—drama queens basically. These concerns seem especially important in our current time which stresses “authenticity”, and “living your truth”.
Performance may also suggest a sense of achievement and accomplishment—where someone’s performance is judged purely in the forms of results, like sports or financial investing, scenarios of win/lose or profit/loss. Of course, these values are important in a capitalist market-oriented culture where high performing individuals, whether in sports or business, are rewarded and celebrated.
Whether its politicians, business leaders, or celebrities (or some, like Donald Trump, who embody all three), the scrutinizing of their performance, their moves and behavior, seems to be a concern among many who haunt the internet and social media. Really, there appears to be quite a stress on scrutinizing all current events and media’s portrayal of same events—or just media in general—for how they tell their story, how they perform and if they are doing it “correctly” while also charting the progress of whatever respective story is being told, along with terms like “the hero’s journey”, “redemption arc”, “lore” and “world-building” as short-hand reference points. This can drift in to the realm of the paranoid and conspiratorial, where data and text replace God, where knowing the right information becomes an obsessive religious concern, where having the right knowledge—usually by initiation (like taking a “red pill”)—puts one in touch with the true spirit and nature of society, in touch with God basically, because they have the “true” knowledge, their analysis turned in to meta-analysis, data in to meta-data, text transformed in to a meta-text, while everyone else is just an uninformed heathen or “normie”. But just knowing is never enough. One must always feel a need to share their knowledge, one might even say, perform it. Ironically, some of these performances occur on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram—platforms owned by a company called “Meta”—which takes the (meta)data of its users and sells it…
However, there are other realms of performance that relate to our daily life and the artistic works we encounter. Not a performance tied to theatrics or results but the type of performance I feel Robert Frost alluded to above, the type this essay is concerned with: The performance of artistic expression. This type of performance may seem small or unimportant in our world of high stakes politics, cutthroat competitive business, carefully curated social media profiles and big budget Hollywood movies, but for this reason it may be the form of performance most desperate for a retrieval.
“But do your work, and I shall know you,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Self-Reliance. Philosopher Stanley Cavell interpreted this as, “Your work now, in reading him, is the reading of his page, and allowing yourself to be changed by it.” I’m unsure if Emerson really meant that but a writer does want to be read, therefore known, and in turn, many read an author to be known, and let others know they are reading them (even on Meta-owned platforms Facebook and Instagram but also Tik-Tok, X or wherever else), where who we read and choose to read becomes a part of our identity or profile, so reading in itself becomes a performative act—from the basic education level that you want your teacher to know you read the assigned book by answering the questions correctly about the book on a test, to other performative acts, like reading something written by a friend to show your support, to reading a book by a little or disregarded author to show you are more aware than others, or to gain extra knowledge, attain an edge, or to read an author that by reading them you somehow might become known by them, even if reading across centuries, because their acknowledgment—whether it be of a feeling or an idea—affirms something.
And it is not just reading and writing which are performative, but even in daily behavior—from casual to formal interactions—we perform different roles, augmenting our behavior as we navigate daily life, changing our behavior as we talk to bosses, customers, friends, or family. When a man approaches a woman he’s attracted to, his behavior immediately differs from approaching his mother, sister or grandmother. Just as when one talks to a stranger, their behavior takes on a different key (tentative, guarded) than when they talk to friends or family (casual, relaxed, familiar). We may praise one’s ability to talk to strangers, but socials skills such as these—performative skills—usually take years to develop. For men in particular, there’s entire nodes of the internet, from books to videos to chat groups, teaching them how to behave in order to persuade a woman to have sex with them. Naturally, reproduction is the base act of any organism but unlike other animals, we as humans need a somewhat higher degree of convincing to perform the act of mating. As Emerson wrote, “since the Fall”, we have “learned that we do not see directly but mediately”, meaning our conscious nature, our being internally aware of our outer surroundings and others outside of us but internally skeptical—or at the very least, internally tentative—of them, since we are externally removed from them. Thus, in regards to mating with others, it requires more motivation and convincing to reproduce with them than a direct, instinctual need to reproduce like single cell-organisms and other species in the animal kingdom possess. We need to interpret, discern, but also to communicate with the other through speech and gesture, assisting them in their interpretation and discernment, where an act like copulation that could possibly lead to reproduction requires demonstrations of worth and trust, but also persuasion, nuance and maybe even sophistication (though looking good and having luck does help).
In short, performance is a key mediator, maybe the key mediator, of human existence.
Read next part here.