This is the theme of a project I'm currently working at with my performing arts company. The performance will take place in the Faculty of Law's cells, used by students for behaviour experiments among other things, and it is based on three main references: the
Zimbardo Experiment,
Oscar Wilde's De Profundis and
Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
The only real moment of freedom is when one is born. (I need to find out who said this.) All the rest of our lifetime we are physically imprisoned, from our mother's belly to one's own body and mind.
We start our lives being led, either genetically or through education. Experiences immediately start molding our perception of reality as well, but I believe their importance is gradual and it becomes more relevant as we turn into adults and fully assume leadership of our life's course. From the moment we are born, we start shaping a specific reality. "Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character" (O.Wilde,
De Profundis). At first, as I said, it is led (or at least guided) by others. This guidance loses its strength and importance as we grow up and begin appropriating our own choices and their consequences. Still we continue to forge a certain reality which is absolutely
true only to ourselves.
As Plato showed through he's Allegory of the Cave, there are certain things one will never understand in others by the simple fact of not having any common reference to share. In human interaction, it is common to get deluded, confused, disappointed. Those feelings are just natural defenses we produce to deal with what we do not understand. We are naturally afraid of the unknown. Plus, we might not want to understand. Once your own reality is well established you might actually not want to alter it or disturb its (so hard to achieve) harmony.
We live imprisoned in our own reality. And yet, as everything in life, this is an
extremely delicate fact. Our reality only prevails within a certain context to which we are familiar with and, therefore, interact rationally. From the moment our circumstances change dramatically we cease to be able to respond accordingly. We leave rational to become instinctive. We lose the references, the framework in which we rely upon to be who we are. Our personality seems to become residual and one reacts instinctively to the new stimulus, as if not having any previous references or aims.
The Zimbardo Experiment shows how rapidly a group of middle-class, well educated graduate students completely
tranformed their behaviour when placed in a totally different context. An experiment planned to last two weeks had to be interrupted after six days, to avoid really serious psychological damage to the volunteer graduates, playing the role of either guards or prisoners, or even to the
researchers themselves!
In Murakami's novel,
The Wind-Up Bird, Toru Okada, concludes at a certain point that one can live his whole life together with someone knowing "nothing but the most superficial layer of the person". I believe this is not only true to others but, above all, to ourselves. We never do know ourselves absolutely. Let alone, others! Life is a continuous flow of (repeated) novelty and one can only know how to react to each new stimulus when actually facing it, absorbing it as real. Not only we do not know ourselves under unknown circumstances as we do not know ourselves through other people's eyes, for their sole reality is absolutely mysterious to us. Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello's hero in
Uno, Nessuno e Centomila, desperately seeks his true self within the multiple personas he seems to represent in each one's imagination, to finally realize the only absolute truth relies in not having "any history or past, he is no longer in himself but in everything around and outside of him".
As Oscar Wilde puts it, in
De Profundis, this is Humility:
"But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I ought to do; in fact, must do. And when I use such a phrase as that, I need not say that I am not alluding to any external sanction or command. I admit none. I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world."
We are the world
we live in. We are the people we meet. We are the life as we perceive it. We are imprisoned in our own reality, yes. But we ought to be humble to accept it, understand it and be thankful for it. Only then can we
set ourselves free inside our own prisons for
"freedom is what you do with what's been done to you" (Jean-Paul Sartre). Only then can we be at peace with ourselves. And
contribute to a better world.Berlin Wall Fall, November 09, 1989
we live in. We are the people we meet. We are the life as we perceive it. We are imprisoned in our own reality, yes. But we ought to be humble to accept it, understand it and be thankful for it. Only then can we set ourselves free inside our own prisons for "freedom is what you do with what's been done to you" (Jean-Paul Sartre). Only then can we be at peace with ourselves. And contribute to a better world.
"We were outside, always outside, like heretics or lepers forbidden to pass the city gates.
"And death shall have no dominion.