Impro (book) (stolen)

Seeing as the book was requisite reading for Palantir so one naturally grows curious as to why.

Perhaps the top brass looks upon it and thinks, “well, we have to be good improvisors, flexible to the situation” and thus makes it recommended reading.

Palantir is among the famous workplaces where the “hierarchy” is relatively flat — at least if I recall correctly. Another example of “flat hierarchy” would be Valve, those behind Steam and its store.

Maybe they adopt this model fully knowing implicit hierarchies shall form in its absence. Those who want to rise can rise, instead of letting the bureaucratic guardrails slowly corrode merit.

The book of course explores both of these topics, but perhaps most importantly, Palantir employee so positioned, one must understand how everyone contains multitudes: that they can animate their own demons, and you’ll play along. Once you don the mask, that is…

Anyway, though the book was thorough on how to do well in theatre, sometimes the conversation — rightfully so, of course, rightfully so — read to me weirdly vacuous. Just to me, not necessarily to another reader.

There was a feeling of vacuousness because of the source of the conversation: theatre. This is just purely a side effect of no longer being able to watch movies/tv/anime at the moment, probably.

But when you think about theatre, what we’re really doing is putting on skinsuits. Though the actors may summon their own version of suffering and find their catharsis in their ending, nevertheless we’re taking the human condition and putting a skin suit on it. Empathy works in the same way, no matter how lauded. You skin what you’re looking at alive, slip it through your arms and take guesses on their state of mind.

Some would argue this allows us to entertain the darker or stranger parts of existence, or give way and patience to those so enduring, but imitating life and trying to rise above it for dollars with each ticket paints such tragedies rather trivially. Putting on another’s skin suit contains the same triviality: there are only a very select few that skin themselves before shoving their limbs into another’s suit. Otherwise one’s own skin transfigures the experience, claims it for itself.

Thus all trivial, because the actors and the audience are granted reprieve when the curtain drops. But those who have had the curious tragedies must deal with it for the rest of their lives, with everything they must endure on top of too. In this sense, the depictions are unfair: how could an actor ever capture the magnitude then?

Anyway, when the author has interludes discussing with the actors how they felt and what it meant or the boundaries they’re breaking, well, you could certainly say it’s necessary, but maybe I am a statistician at heart.

I don’t find individual human experience and emotion, at least in the common casting, all that interesting or edifying. Whatever mask you put on and feelings unearthed doesn’t change the baselines; most feelings are of a wispy constitution, woven through fictions read and commanded by the secret ones who know how to word things so suggestively one cannot refuse the entertainment. If we’re looking at a fundamental ascension or disintegration of the character, then that’s interesting, but I’m not sure; sometimes we elevate the small-talking mundane in place of it. Maybe it’s uncomfortable to see the individual completely sunken into an abyss they must climb out of. Maybe it’s also because it’s hard to forget you’re one of billions, secluded and casting away delusion that you’re anything more than a node: these works which try to dispel this notion feels awfully sinister.

How many grow up hoping to be princesses and knights while instead the grunts and of the night? Never have I seen the effects of elevating the individual and suggesting you can rise above it all to be affirming: it is only when the individual is possessed of something non-human altogether. Something manic and completely defies the common mold: this is why exactly the “Mask” section of the book could be interesting, though the discussions of the masks seem derivative. I wish to have read about a mask truly frightening, resting in the norms and manners we take for granted, maybe.

Again, this is just a separate thought from reading it: it shouldn’t at all reflect on the book itself. It’s still a great book. In fact, it makes one wonder how many masks you’re wearing today; how much channeling you’re complicit in. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration that this entire website is only another mask. It’s hard to say who exactly writes here, or why. I do not understand, but it keeps coming back.

The part in the novel about the status games we have to unconsciously play was great reminder too. Though a tad uncomfortable, seeing as one would hope to “rise” above it or at least find a square of equals even if it’s all delusional. There seems to always be a hierarchy… but how much more preferable it is to never play at all (out of cowardice, more than anything).

There were a few quotes highlighted while reading… let’s see if we missed anything.

There were a few highlights, but they stand on their own and seem strange to include here. There’s only one excerpt to include:

When the students begin Mask work, and ‘characters’ inhabit them for the first time, it’s normal for everything to be extremely grotesque. The spirits often seem straight out of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (Bosch himself acted in plays in which Masks were used). Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick’ scenes: they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on.

But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siècle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.

What do you think? Do we truly repress benevolence?

It doesn’t seem farfetched. After all, how many today wish for us to give up “The Game” entirely and assume we can all hold hands and live together prosperously. Even if such a spectacle were to succeed — a month of utopia for the frantic — one can then look at what would happen then.

That is, populations would multiply, demands would grow: you would have a crop of humanity cultivated by the central planners until it goes off the wheels and mass death/starvation correct the course. Because in Nature there is always a balance to maintain.

When we pretend resources are infinite, or when we pretend we can ignore whether Nature decrees someone to live or to die in our finite lands, maybe then we can play with benevolence. But the core of every life is understanding that benevolence is not possible in our world: unchecked so it destroys.

Thus, there is no such thing as true benevolence as displayed in mask work. Because that requires forgetting The Game of Life. All human benevolence mimics that of symbiotic relationships, or parasitical. There’s always terms & conditions. We learn to repress true benevolence, because we learn it is of no use.

All the more reason to don a mask: to discover what else is lurking and employ it toward our games and ends, of course. The roleplayers may have been right all along…