TITLE: Three Uses of the Knife
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 05, 2018 10:21 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I just finished David Mamet's Three Uses of the Knife,
a wide-ranging short book with the subtitle: "on the nature and
purpose of drama". It is an extended essay on how we create
and experience drama -- and how these are, in the case of great
drama, the same journey.
Even though the book is only eighty or so pages, Mamet characterizes
drama in so many ways that you'll have to either assemble a definition
yourself or accept the ambiguity. Among them, he says that the job
of drama and art is to "delight" us and that "the cleansing lesson
of the drama is, at its highest, the worthlessness of reason."
Mamet clearly believes that drama is central to other parts of
life. Here's a cynical example, about politics:
The vote is our ticket to the drama, and the politician's quest
to eradicate "fill in the blank", is no different from the promise
of the superstar of the summer movie to subdue the villain -- both
promise us diversion for the price of a ticket and a suspension of
disbelief.
As reader, I found myself using the book's points to ruminate about
other parts of life, too. Consider the first line of the second
essay:
The problems of the second half are not the problems of the first
half.
Mamet uses this to launch into a consideration of the second act
of a drama, which he holds equally to be a consideration of
writing the second act of a drama. But with fall semester
almost upon us, my thoughts jumped immediately to teaching a class.
The problems of teaching the second half of a class are quite
different from the problems of teaching the first half. The start
of a course requires the instructor to lay the foundation of a
topic while often convincing students that they are capable of
learning it. By midterm, the problems include maintaining the
students' interest as their energy flags and the work of the
semester begins to overwhelm them. The instructor's energy -- my
energy -- begins to flag, too, which echoes Mamet's claim that the
journey of the creator and the audience are often substantially the
same.
A theme throughout the book is how people immerse themselves in
story, suspending their disbelief, even creating story when they
need it to soothe their unease. Late in the book, he connects this
theme to religious experience as well. Here's one example:
In suspending their disbelief -- in suspending their reason, if
you will -- for a moment, the viewers [of a magic show] were
rewarded. They committed an act of faith, or of submission.
And like those who rise refreshed from prayers, their prayers
were answered. For the purpose of the prayer was not, finally,
to bring about intercession in the material world, but to lay
down, for the time of the prayer, one's confusion and rage and
sorrow at one's own powerlessness.
This all makes the book sound pretty serious. It's a quick read,
though, and Mamet writes with humor, too. It feels light even as
it seems to be a philosophical work.
The following paragraph wasn't intended as humorous but made me,
a computer scientist, chuckle:
The human mind cannot create a progression of random numbers. Years
ago computer programs were created to do so; recently it has been
discovered that they were flawed -- the numbers were not truly random.
Our intelligence was incapable of creating a random progression and
therefore of programming a computer to do so.
This reminded me of a comment that my cognitive psychology prof left
on the back of an essay I wrote in class. He wrote something to the
effect, "This paper gets several of the particulars incorrect, but
then that wasn't the point. It tells the right story well." That's
how I felt about this paragraph: it is wrong on a couple of important
facts, but it advances the important story Mamet is telling ... about
the human propensity to tell stories, and especially to create order
out of our experiences.
Oh, and thanks to
Anna Gát
for bringing the book to my attention, in a tweet to
Michael Nielsen.
Gát has been one of my favorite new follows on Twitter in the
last few months. She seems to read a variety of cool stuff and tweet
about it. I like that.
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