Creator and creation

In today's post, I'm going to ask a question, not because I'm trying to lead people toward a particular answer, but because I don't know the answer myself.

The topic comes up because yesterday was Johann Sebastian Bach's 334th birthday, and the classical radio station I frequently listen to had an all-Bach-all-day program.  I approve of this, because I love Bach's music, and have done since I first discovered classical music when I was twelve years old.

The radio was playing one of Bach's (many) religious cantatas, which was gorgeous, but it started me thinking about one of his masterworks -- the St. John Passion.  And that's when I started to feel uneasy, because there are passages in the St. John Passion that are decidedly anti-Semitic.

The gist is that the villains of the piece are the crowds of Jews who demand Jesus's crucifixion, and who are depicted as deliberately rejecting the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.  (Which, I suppose, they did, if you accept the biblical account as historical.)  But it's obvious that the Jews are being cast in a seriously negative light.  This is consistent with Martin Luther's theology, which was even more clearly and virulently anti-Semitic.  And Bach, after all, was a devout Lutheran.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

On the other hand (and you'll find there are several hands, here), even the powers-that-be of the time didn't condone maltreatment of Jews based on the biblical accounts and the St. John Passion specifically.  The senate of the city of Hamburg, for example, issued an official proclamation in 1715 that, relative to performance of Bach's piece at Easter, "The right and proper goal of reflection on the Passion must be aimed at the awakening of true penitence…  Other things, such as violent invectives and exclamations against… the Jews… can by no means be tolerated."

The fact that they had to state that outright, however, certainly is indicative that there's something to the claim that the Passion is by its nature anti-Semitic.  And that got me to thinking about the relationship between a creator and his/her work -- and to what extent the opinions and behavior of the creator can be kept separate from the worth of the work itself.

Other examples come to mind.  H. P. Lovecraft, whose horror stories were a near-obsession when I was a teenager and who to this day influences my own fiction writing greatly, was an unabashed racist -- something that comes out loud and clear in stories like "The Horror at Red Hook" and (especially) "Facts Surrounding the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family."  The best of his stories -- gems like "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" -- are largely free of the ugly racism he apparently embraced, but in his case, saying "He was a man of his times" only goes so far, and after discovering his bigotry I've read Lovecraft with some serious misgivings.

Orson Scott Card's homophobia is another good example, although I must say I wasn't that fond of Card's fiction even before I found out about his anti-LGBTQ stance.  Even Tom Cruise, whose loony defense of Scientology makes me wonder if he is sane, is undeniably a good actor -- Minority Report and Vanilla Sky would be in my top-ten favorite movies.  But I can't watch him without remembering him losing his mind and leaping about on Oprah Winfrey's couch.

The truth is that keeping the creator and the creation separate is at best an exercise in mental gymnastics.  On the most venial level, authors like myself need to be careful about our public personae, because that (after all) is the brand we're trying to sell.  (It's why I try to keep the vehemence-level down in any postings I make about politics on social media -- a difficult thing, sometimes.)  But it goes deeper than that.  Even if our own ugly opinions or weird personality quirks don't explicitly leak out onto the page, they're part of us, and therefore part of what we create.  Separating the two is nearly impossible -- at least for me.

So we're back to where we started, with the question of how a person's flaws color the perception of their work.  And I honestly don't know the answer.  I'm sure I'll still continue to listen to Bach -- and continue to be inspired by Lovecraft's ability to tell a bone-chillingly scary story -- but there will always be a twinge of conscience there, and probably there should be.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Acting out

When I was (much) younger, I acted in a couple of low-key theater productions.  I won't say it was a bad experience, and I think I played my roles reasonably well, but to say I suffer from stage fright is an understatement of considerable proportions.  Frankly, it's a wonder I didn't hyperventilate and pass out as soon as I walked out on the stage.

Part of my problem is that I was never able to get past a feeling of "this is me out there on stage" -- to let go and become the character.  I've talked to some amateur (but dedicated) actors since that time, and one and all they say that once they get out under the lights, the fear evaporates, and they are able to be their character --who is, after all, not the guy whose knees are knocking together because he's terrified of being in front of an audience.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Comedy and tragedy masks without background, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This perception of good actors sinking themselves into their characters is apparently exactly what happens, to judge by a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science by Steven Brown, Peter Cockett, and Ye Yuan of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), called, "The Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An fMRI Study of Acting."

In this study, actors were directed to portray scenes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and then were hooked up to an fMRI scanner and then asked questions about how they would act in a variety of specific situations if they were the character.  And what they found was pretty intriguing:

[This is] a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting.  While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person (1P) perspective.  Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours.  Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be.  In other words, they have to assume a ‘fictional first-person' (Fic1P) perspective.  In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing.  In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare's drama.  Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe, including the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices.  Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a "loss of self."

Which is fascinating.  It also makes me wonder what would happen if the same experiment were performed on individuals who weren't trained actors, and especially on people (like myself) for whom acting is a seriously trying experience.  Is the problem that we can't deactivate our dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices enough to get absorbed into the part -- so we can't "let go" enough to stop being ourselves?

Steven Brown, co-author of the study, thinks that's exactly what's happening.  "It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you," Brown said, in an interview in The Guardian.  "The deactivation associated with a reduction, a suppression, of knowledge of your own traits I think conforms with what acting may involve...  Actors have to split their consciousness, they sort of have to monitor themselves and be in the character at the same time."

So it's not simply a loss of self; it's a selective switch-off of the parts of your self that motivate your actions and feelings.  There's always the supervisor there, making sure things don't go too off-kilter, but apparently it's difficult to act convincingly if you don't on some level stop being yourself.

This also brings to mind cases of actors who did seem to lose themselves entirely.  Andy Kaufman comes to mind, best known for his role as the hapless Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi.  The boundaries between Kaufman the actor, Kaufman the comedian, and Kaufman the created fictional character seemed blurry right from the outset.  He was famous for strange stunts like challenging audience members in his stand-up comedy routine to wrestle him, reading out loud for two hours from The Great Gatsby instead of performing his shtick, and (once) inviting the entire audience out for milk and cookies after the show -- which enough people took him up on that it required 24 buses.

While no one ever did an fMRI on Kaufman -- when he died in 1984, the fMRI had yet to be invented -- I really wonder what was happening in his prefrontal cortex.  You have to wonder if those regions involved with the sense of self turned off while he was acting, and stayed off.

In any case, the whole thing is interesting, both from the standpoint of human behavior and that of neuroscience.  And once again it makes me realize how fluid our perceptions are -- and that our sense of self is, truly, a creation of our brain's biochemistry.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]