Building Character

No matter how big or how little your place in life may be, you have a grindstone, and people will bring axes to you. None escapes. Also, you are in the business yourself. —Samuel Clemens

I was taught, once upon a time—persuasively and effectively—that, as a singer, you are a set of bagpipes, with a single, necked reed. So, think of yourself as a bagged pipe. Use your diaphragm and lungs together to dumbly squeeze air through your throat, past your vocal cords, and up into and then out of your mouth. The lesson here, for many novice singers, is to relax the body—esophagus, throat, mouth—and then use these tools to shape the internal wind pushed around by the internal bag. As a singer, you are not the instrumentalist; you are the instrument.

When you focus your thinking on how to use your body to shape the air and the sound, produced by squeezing the bag, rather than on how to use your body to try to create the sound, you will find—possibly, among other things—that your throat and vocal cords resonate naturally to a wavy vibrato around the note you are singing—one that you can manipulate for different effects, like a Broadway star on the last open-armed note of the big number, laser-locking on the pitch for a full five seconds before cathartically—or mercifully, depending on your mood—resolving to a glorious and gloriously finished vibrato that lets you know the song's over.

What is curious about these instructions for the singer is that they are ever implemented in the first place, forgetting for the moment that they are actually helpful. Who should need to be told that they don't create air?

Likewise with drawing, which comes tumbling out of humans in infancy along with singing. Yet, like singing, it too is 'spoken,' at first—created, it is imagined, by the draw-er. One draws to draw and one sings to sing. Circles and dots and basic vocal play and imitated sounds and melodic chunks. These ixionic human forces do not make their way through us with the intention of producing landscapes or still-lifes or memento mori, and certainly not impressionist paintings. Nor is our singing intended to produce arias or gospel songs, and certainly not operatic solos. We must shape and teach our voices and our drawings to give them the character of gospel or rap or country, or of still-lifes or abstracts or neoclassicals—or of strength, passion, despair, and victory.

Repetition is 'character'-building as well, something of which you are already aware—a powerful way that we come to know the characters of individual artists as well as genres and cultures. Let us watch the dancers now join our growing troupe of human musicians and visual designers—trained and untrained apes alike. Rhythmic chant, repetitive sound and movement, elaborate body drawing, and storytelling and learning can be found here, and all across the human world. The individual and the group meld within the artistic current.

Yet, it is our characters that are melded together—our public minds. In order to be of communicative and inspirational and behaviorally coordinative value, our characters must be shaped and taught by the group, just as we cannot help but shape the individual characters around us. In our own ways, we stick out our tongues and widen our eyes and stamp our feet and get in each others' faces, and this has an effect on others and their characters. The group, in turn, teaches us something that can enhance or shape or punish and deter our characters. We jointly control our voices, our movements, and even our imaginations to a small degree.

Character is certainly present in drama and other forms of storytelling. And just like our delusions that we ourselves bring forth singing, manifest objects directly with representation, and that we create, from within solely, our communicative movements, we also tend to believe that character itself is our own supremely important ex nihilo creation. Aristotle corrects us and teaches us:

These elements are used by practically every writer of tragedy, for almost every drama has spectacle, character, plot, speech, music, and reasoning. The most important element in any tragedy is plot. Tragedy is not an imitation of persons but of actions and life, because happiness and misfortune are found in action. The goal of tragic drama (and indeed life) is a proper kind of activity, not some quality. People possess certain qualities based on their nature, but they find happiness or unhappiness depending on what they actually do. Therefore the goal of an actor on the stage is not to imitate character. Character is instead a by-product of action. Actions and plot are what a tragedy is about. That is what matters. . . . And so plot is the first principle and, so to speak, the soul of tragedy. Character comes second. Painting is much the same way. If an artist were to cover a surface with the finest and most beautiful colors at random, it would provide the viewer with less pleasure than a simple outline of an object. In summary, tragedy is the imitation of action—and it is for the sake of the action that characters play their parts . . .

There are rules and conventions and knowings to these arts, then. Be a bagged pipe. Imagine holding a piece of paper between your thighs as you turn or that you're stomping on bugs on the floor or that you are a slave. Beauty is pain. The rules and conventions are the only transforms available to us to map our private individual 'selves' onto our characters and to show ourselves to our communities. Without knowing these mappings, we are just amorphously individualistic forms and features, empty totems.

The orator's brain is locked inside a dark and solipsistic skull as much as are our musician's and dancer's brains. So even around the nightly fire with family, the orator supplies a character. He sings with prosody and peroration, dances with gesture and stance, and represents with story. We can continue in this way to show that art(ifice) and character are inescapably with us, off the stage, away from the museum. If so, then our characters have been with us for a very long time:

At least 40,000 years. If it's 40,000 years that we've been using art and music together in spaces, it had to develop. You don't just suddenly put the whole package together. So, you must go back further and further . . . There's some argument—it's not robust yet—that music predates language. And there are African tribes that use drum language to communicate without words, and it's not just rhythm, they are communicating information accurately.

That's Lynne Kelly, who has spent a lifetime studying ancient and contemporary indigenous cultures, commenting on new evidence showing what Kelly and I both argue—that social teaching and learning and coordination were present at Neolithic "performance sites" long before humans organized themselves into permanently settled agricultural communities. This teaching and learning—oral and pictographic—was accomplished just as it is today, with art: singing (voice modulation, click, rhythm, meter), dancing (gesture, stance, movement, expression), and storytelling, although no doubt with more gravity, purpose, and urgency than is needed today:

The human brain has evolved for stories to work really well, especially if they have very vivid characters. So, they're either hugely ugly or terribly beautiful. Lots of sex and violence—I'm sorry to have to say that, but sex and violence make stories memorable. So . . . all that stuff around the story encodes the actual information that mustn't be forgotten. So then we add the next level of memory which is song. Music is highly memorable. I'm sure those watching here will remember the songs they learned as young children and still remember them now, even if they don't hear them for years. Song is a wonderful memory device. Then you go up to dance. If you add movement into it [that made it] even more memorable again. Then you add the place—the fact that we locate all the information . . . .

It's a technology—it's a learning technology, information technology. Music is an information technology—song and story—but we've sidelined them more to entertainment . . . These are an art form, and there's a whole range of art forms used with storing knowledge . . .

These technologies are used for the whole group. So the elder that's the expert on it will be sharing the information, depending on what level of initiation you're in, but as a group. So . . . the indication in the archaeology is performance sites. Performance is a way of exchanging information . . . the group learns as a group.

This is quite the point. Performance is a way of exchanging information, and everything we do socially is a performance—if you want to call it that—an art, a making toolwise use of our social 'characters'. Simply talking with another, any other, is character work of this kind, with systematic rules, conventions, movements, sounds, gestures, idiomatic representations, transforms of inner intents—and knowledge.

What is writing but more of this art and artifice? Is not all the world a play?

June 15. God be forever praised for His infinite mercy! Land in sight! Rapidly neared it and soon were sure of it. . . . . Two noble kanakas swam out and took the boat ashore. We were joyfully received by two white men—Mr. Jones and his steward Charley—and a crowd of native men, women, and children. They treated us splendidly—aided us, and carried us up the bank, and brought us water, poi, bananas and green cocoanuts; but the white men took care of us and prevented those who would have eaten too much from doing so. Everybody overjoyed to see us, and all sympathy expressed in faces, deeds and words. We were then helped up to the house; and help we needed. Mr. Jones and Charley are the only white men here. Treated us splendidly. Gave us first about a teaspoonful of spirits in water, and then to each a cup of warm tea with a little bread. Takes every care of us. Gave us later another cup of tea—and bread the same—and then let us go to rest. It is the happiest day of my life. . . . . God in His mercy has heard our prayer. . . . . Everybody is so kind. Words cannot tell—

June 16. Mr. Jones gave us a delightful bed, and we surely had a good night's rest—but not sleep—we were too happy to sleep; would keep the reality and not let it turn to a delusion—dreaded that we might wake up and find ourselves in the boat again. . . . .

The authors of the diaries wanted to smooth them up a little before allowing me to copy them, but there was no occasion for that, and I persuaded them out of it. These diaries are finely modest and unaffected; and with unconscious and unintentional art they rise toward the climax with graduated and gathering force and swing and dramatic intensity, they sweep you along with a cumulative rush, and when the cry rings out at last, "Land in sight!" your heart is in your mouth and for a moment you think it is yourself that have been saved. The last two paragraphs are not improvable by anybody's art; they are literary gold; and their very pauses and uncompleted sentences have in them an eloquence not reachable by any words.

The interest of this story is unquenchable; it is of the sort that time cannot decay. I have not looked at the diaries for thirty-two years, but I find that they have lost nothing in that time. Lost?—they have gained; for by some subtle law all tragic human experiences gain in pathos by the perspective of time. We realize this when in Naples we stand musing over the poor Pompeian mother, lost in the historic storm of volcanic ashes eighteen centuries ago, who lies with her child gripped close to her breast, trying to save it, and whose despair and grief have been preserved for us by the fiery envelope which took her life but eternalized her form and features. She moves us, she haunts us, she stays in our thoughts for many days, we do not know why, for she is nothing to us, she has been nothing to any one for eighteen centuries; whereas of the like case today we should say "poor thing, it is pitiful," and forget it in an hour.*

Consciousness is what gives humans character—it's what gives you and everyone else a character: a stacked, carved, and painted totem to show to the world, a double and a triple. These characters—the refined tools of master tool users (not master tool makers) that we stretch out into the social environment—are held closely or at arm's length and have a thousand other of our idiosyncracies and mutations and variances and diversities and queernesses. These characters talk and sometimes they kiss and get married or break up. What we do with them makes them who they are. How the group teaches them makes them what they are.