Thinking About Sociability, Aloneness, Drtama and TV

Much of the drama and melodrama on television is, for me, but an arrested form of unswerving regularity and consistency, like some electronic ritual, theatre of nostalgia, a genre that is emblematic of some of those thrilling, yet comforting, days, episodes, experiences, of yesteryear. Nostalgia is a repetition, a return of the past to the present and it has many forms in life in the media of which the who-dun-it and much of the amusement and distration of TV are but its varieties. The analysis of print and electronic media reveals a whole world of understanding and critique to the daily consumers of its products. I leave readers to follow-up on my comments should they be keen; the literature on media analysis is now massive. This business of habituation and habit is a critical one in my life. “By a seeming paradox," writes philosopher John Dewey, "increased power of forming habits means increased susceptibility, sensitiveness, responsiveness. Thus even if we think of habits as so many grooves, the power to acquire many and varied grooves denotes high sensitivity, explosiveness. Thereby an old habit, a fixed groove if one wishes to exaggerate, gets in the way of the process of forming a new habit while the tendency to form a new one cuts across some old habit.” In these early years of my late adulthood I have habituated many of my life's activities; I have acquired many fixed grooves with the aim of developing of writing activities to their fullest. This theme of habituation could be applied to many areas of my life down the years with many permutations and combinations. Perhaps at a later date I will do so. __________________ TRIUMPH ...it is the nature of sociability to free concrete interactions...and to erect its airy realm...the deep spring which feeds this realm and its play does not lie in...forms, but exclusively in the vitality of concrete individuals, with all their feelings and attractions, convictions and impulses. -Geoege Simmel, The Sociology of George Simmel, Kurt Wolff(ed.), Collier-Macmillan, NY, 1964. This is unquestionably the community, an instrument of mega-proportions with a community feeling that will triumph over everything and become as natural as breathing, necessity itself.. So: what is crucial is our subjective orientation toward the community in all its manifold aspects. This is our elan vital; this is our therapy, our centre, our norm, our basis of judgement, our overcoming of antisocial dispositions, our indestructible destiny. Here is creative tension: the individual and community, that much talked about dichotomy that stifles our capacity for joy; where we are learning new bases, new instrumentalities for happiness after centuries of darkness; where guilt and innocence play in a drama whose roots are largely unseen; where the alone and the lonely are found in a complex web of social intersticies; where the greatest theatre of all plays life on the stage and we play with a required courtesy, hopefully genuine, a certain reservedness, but not as stiff and ceremonial as the past. It seems purely fortuitous: the harmony, contact and dissonance, the easy replaceability of everyone we meet, the democracy we play at. And we must play on the stage as players with our parts-not indifferent-interesting, fascinating, important, even serious, with results: after the action, the play of several acts with many scenes and exchangeability. Ourselves, our self, our personality may just vanish or become coated with the many colours of ‘otherness’. Enter thou among My servants, And enter thou My paradise.* For here you must lose your self to find community and we have much to learn about loss of self. It is here we shall find the community feeling that will triumph over everything, as naturally as breathing. Ron Price 1 December 1995 (revised for Theatre Australia 6/8/07) * Seven Vallies, (US, 1952), p.47.