What Should We Be Worried About?

THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

RICHARD FOREMAN

Playwright & director; founder, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater

The responses to this year’s Edge Question are concerned with problematic aspects of this world or of current discourse that are, I believe, ultimately noncorrectable through either direct thought or direct action. Time, of course, will alter the parameters within which these problems are situated, and they will be absorbed or transcended by new, evolving parameters that will eventually dissolve them. Even if “the end of the world itself” is threatened, that too will lead to some other state—inconceivable perhaps, but even as a vague allusion we humans will dismiss it as beyond thought and not to be wished for. But that understandable rejection arises from the same psychological base implied in the word “worried,” which is the linch pin of this year’s Question.

One can say that the “worried” can be thought of as a means of focusing upon a particular problem. But the very act of picking one problem out of the many available constructs the trap into which we all fall the minute we begin thinking about the world. We should in fact be “worried” not just about a single selected problem but about all possible problems.

But most important: What does “worried” mean, other than the inevitable fall into human consciousness that focuses the mind—producing inevitably science, politics, and everything else in the world as we know it. There seems no responsible alternative; indeed, it is the only historical alternative to the disreputable “blissed out” state of passivity and removal from the real world, as known to us through our rigorously conditioned mechanisms.

Perhaps—but perhaps not. I reference not only suppressed mystical traditions—plus more acceptable philosophers, such as Heidegger and phenomenologically oriented contemporaries—but first and foremost my early collegiate inspiration in art theory, Anton Ehrenzweig’s great books The Hidden Order of Art and The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing. Ehrenzweig demonstrates how artists in many disciplines, from many different historical periods, operate not out of normal focused vision but out of wide-angle unfocused perception—and thereafter soon discovered similar theses, hidden or not, in other “official” Western thought. But how does theory relate to real-world problems of the sort we should now be worried about? Well, de-focusing on obsessive worrisome problems often leads to the sudden emergence of a solution where previous directed effort had often failed. (Eureka!—Poincaré, etc.)

So what should we be worried about? Perhaps the failure to stop worrying, when stopping can (all by itself, after the proper preparing of the ground with concentration and “worry”) lead to sudden vision.

It’s tricky, yes. And difficult. And sometimes a frightening risk—giving up everything we “know” when it’s “knowing” that gives rise to the uncontrollable virus of worrying. But I suggest that this year’s question is a hidden trick. That was not the intention, I feel sure, but I do see it as a trick question for all half-brilliant, half-sleeping human consciousness.