PANDEMIC DIARY — Roaming with Roth

“BURNT ONIONS AND ‘THE MATRIX’”
Part 1: THE MATRIX’ REVISITED
June 14, 2022

In 2001, I completed writing my staged performance piece “Surviving Pearl” [SP}, a kind of tribute to the memory of my mother. At that time, I was briefly a member of a playwrights group. We held monthly meetings as each member would bring a current project they were working on. We read a portion or the whole of the written script, finally asking for questions and comments of the group-at-large. It was at such a meeting that I presented ‘Surviving Pearl’ for the first time…its dry run.

SP is a performance piece, a one-man play in which I play myself and my mother in one-sided conversations where the other character’s responses are inferred by the dialogue. At one point during the performance, I break the ‘fourth wall’, the imaginary dividing line between what is occurring on stage and the audience, by speaking directly to the audience. At that moment, the audience and I are one. I tell them about my mother’s potato soup and describe its preparation. The first step is to cook the onions - “…saute them until they are brown, very brown and caramel in color. Don’t let them burn, otherwise it will taste bitter”. To this author’s memory, I had no intention here other than to share a recipe and have direct contact (intimacy) with the audience.

I finish reading the play to the applause and accolades of my peers. Then it was time for their critical observations and recommendations. One of the writer’s told me that she particularly liked when I broke the fourth wall, addressed the audience as a means of gaining empathy and trust, and then went on to describe my brilliant use of “burnt onions as allegory” …for, well, everything… in the world. I feigned acceptance of her insights and profound interpretation. To be honest, much of what is created in art remains unconscious to the artist and is left to the viewer to establish their own rapport with a work. Furthermore, her reading of that scene was, in fact, adroit and clever. It simply struck me as odd, and a little bit humorous, that of all aspects of the script writing product she would isolate and identify with ‘burnt onions’.

Recently, in conversations, the movie “The Matrix” came up, as it has become an unintentional allegory for…well, just about everything. It began for me in 1999 with the film’s release. To this five decade old cinema aficionado/conspiracy theorist, its message told of powerful forces that have constructed a world of deception, a duplicity of senses, a deep deceit upon which is layered a veneer of material wants, wish fulfillment, not enough’s, dulling dreariness, and arbitrary, distracting appeasements and indulgences. Add to that, the complexly insidious and invasive computer programming within a computer program in which life itself is a simulation, where what we see and what we think we know is a simulation of reality. That human culture is formulated by those ‘in control’ (in control of natural resources, finance and wealth, governments) of the computers and impose all messaging in the form of media, religion, advertising, etc. that ultimately determines our view of the world: how we perceive and experience ourselves and our environment, how we define our plight, and how and what we project onto others. A world of predestined, preprogrammed androids in human form.

This idea originated with Jean Baudrillard, a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. Baudrillard’s magnum opus is ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, the book taking center stage in the opening scenes of The Matrix when Neo opens a hollowed-out copy of the book where he stores cash and his important and illicit computer files. Baudrillard refers to images and signs and how they relate to our contemporary society, wherein we have replaced reality and meaning with symbols and signs such that what we know of reality actually is a simulation of reality - “a world saturated with imagery, infused with communications media, sound, and commercial advertising”. These simulacra - copies, clones and counterfeits - are the signs and imagery that infuse and saturate our society, surpass the ‘real’ world and become ‘hyper-real’ or more-real-than-real. In such a world apathy and melancholy permeate human perception. Empathy is lost to self-interest. There is no room for ‘common good’ as entitlement settles in and each person is in it for themselves.

Now, were this not confusing enough, Baudrillard ‘borrowed’ an analogy from the work of Jorge Luis Borges. “In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that we are living in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.”

[As an aside, The Matrix was not written by The Wachowski Brothers but closely adapted from a story by Sophia Stewart, an author who in 1981 copyrighted a work called “The Third Eye” upon which The Matrix is based. Stewart sued the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver, and Warner Brothers, et al charging copyright infringement and racketeering. She won the case six years later receiving damages cited as one of the largest in copyright infringement history, the settlement based upon gross receipts from The Matrix I, II, and III of in excess of 2.5 billion dollars.. Of particular relevance to this discussion is the fact that then Warner Brothers’ parent corporation is the GIANT, “AOL-Time Warner which owns 95 percent of the media business: New York Times newspapers/magazines; People Magazine; CNN News; Extra; Celebrity Justice; Entertainment Tonight; HBO; New Line Cinema; DreamWorks; Newsweek; Village Roadshow and many, many more outlets.”] At the time of this writing this monopoly has been split into its parts.]

And so it continues, a disintegrating reality, greater reliance and trust in the manipulated illusions and misleading messaging based upon false assumptions and lies. It is these assumptions upon which we create worlds. The lies support the fake assumptions. In this process we create ourselves as projections of the adopted realities composing and fabricating the illusions of a distinctive ‘me’…and ‘them’. Shakespeare would be shocked to learn that in today’s world “To thine own self be true” would be a state so divinely to be wished as to be near impossible. What does it mean, ‘to know thyself’ when with so many outside influences we create for ourselves a being [self] so prescribed, dictated and indoctrinated to that our ‘true’ selves, our heart center, the human core from which emanates our original life force lies beneath an overt, yet somehow diffuse, invisible cloak of money, business, gain, fashion, etc. This onslaught of information is like a storm from which there is no shelter.

This passage was, some time ago, submitted by a dear friend and seems relevant at this juncture. I will close here to end Part 1 of this discussion:

There is this Magic Show…
And, some people live in the Magic Show…
And, some people are the Magic Show…
—————
And, some people wonder what the Magic Show is all about…
And, some people wonder what Magic is…
And, some people never wonder at all.

(to be continued)