'Personality' is the mask we all wear

Extract from the play

The Mysterious Ambassador from the Real World 

by Peter P. Cheevers 

MYSTERIOUS AMBASSADOR: ...and you wear this mask of personality wherever you go as you presentyourselves to „ourselves‟ and to others. It reflects your self concept - what you seek tomaintain about yourselves - the self/mask you think you have, the one you think you projectand that others perceive etc. People attribute characteristics to you as an individual‟. But it isa mask and it is in the performance of these different masks that you will find anapproximation of what you call 'self‟.

MYSTERIOUS AMBASSADOR: The solution is to recognize that, just like all other peoplein the past, your experience is limited. Due to this limited experience, you often fall prey tothe illusion that what seems to be absolutely true is absolutely true. Just as the belief that theworld is flat or stationary is at best a useful fiction, and not at all real, the belief that the worldhas objective existence is also no more than a useful fiction, an imagination, an illusion. Ofcourse, these fictions fit much of your ordinary experience. But the moment we depart fromthe limitations of the ordinary and expand our experience to include more subtleobservations, these fictions are revealed to be just approximations to something morecomprehensive. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope tounderstand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word'understanding'. „Reality‟ is not the word for what is all about you.And what about your metaphysical alibis. I put it to you that we live and performin a world of „un determination‟ of anonymity and of no fixed metaphysical alibis like self,you, me, subject, mind, self, soul, none of which exists. Will you accept that is the casePsychiatry hasalways been a stranger to unreason
BRON: All contained in language wasn‟t it, that‟s what gets me. What does ourNietzschephile friend call language that 'Highway of despair...with its trudging army ofmetaphors.‟ Strange all this, isn‟t it? People reacting so intensely to theatrical Illusion, Stillthe illusion of theatre, I suppose it approximates the delusions of life.

BRON: (cntnd) And they do all do that, don‟t they? Don Quixote, Alice in Wonderland, TheWizard of Oz, all performances on the way to finding self. Isn‟t that what forty days andnights in the wilderness is, cast out, from the self, and the redemption, the seeing of the lightis the finding of the self, more often than not called God and...

EUGENE: God as an alibi, self as an alibi, mind, soul they are all alibis. By the way that‟snot my thoughts, that‟s...

BRON: Exactly, I would never have thought of that. But what gets me in all these plays isthe male and his inevitable search for himself, and the women in all these narratives,sidelined, performing as pure, feminine, saviour figures. Dante's Beatrice, Faust'sMarguerite, and all the heroines in Wagnerian opera…all female gateways to salvation.

BRON: I don‟t know, all this money and you feel you have seen all this before. It‟s like thelast time I came here and their laughable production of Chekhov, all that infantile ennui.
Everything in that building is commodified. Could be Bogarty, Bogarty and Bogarty, some

HUGO: In this world you have to be wilfully credulous. So you believe, for the two hoursyou sit in the theatre, that the characters performing on stage are real. We also believe thatHeaven is up there and that the stars and our date of birth determine our nature and fate; webelieve that ghosts and poltergeists are real. We also believe that Jesus rose from the dead,that God made the world in six days; we also believe that extra-terrestrials crash-landed inRoswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And that they send vehicles to hover or fly erratically overour planet; Of course, not all of us believe these things. Just that most of us do.

HUGO: I say to them…that everybody suffers from some sort of psychosis, even if it is onlya mild phobia. By these statistics I tell them we are all average, if you take average asincluding 50% of the population. It is normal to be at least a little crazy. So, don‟t worry I sayto them. You are not alone. In the UK, we are a nation of basket cases. Vast tracts of thepopulation suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, then there are the hundreds of thousandswho are alcoholics, millions are pathologically socially anxious, Fifteen million aredepressed. Three million suffer panic attacks. At the last count Borderline PersonalityDisorder was hitting the million, so was „restless legs‟ syndrome. How millions areobsessive/compulsive and manic-depressive. Ten million are addicted to sex. Factoring inwild-card afflictions like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, andallowing for overlap you have to conclude that the majority of the population in the UK arecompletely fucking bonkers. As to our cousins across the pond...

HUGO: (contnd) According to the American psychiatric association there are 35 millionalcoholics in the USA and 80 million suffer from the disease of co-alcoholics. Half theAmerican population is suffering from alcoholism. 20 million are addicted to gambling 10million women suffer from bulimia or anorexia, 80 million have attention disorder, 25million are sex addicts; 22 million suffer from depilating shyness.Eugene, can you hear me? It‟s been good knowing you. But it is in the rise of the therapybusiness that we see the change in human self conception; (in an American accent) the boozeexcuse; the battered child syndrome; computer addiction syndrome, false memory syndrome,foetal alcohol syndrome, parental alienation syndrome, ritual abuse syndrome, selfvictimization syndrome, tobacco deprivation syndrome, UFO survivor syndrome, the abuseexcuse is a general abdication of responsibility. It is dangerous for the very tenets ofdemocracy which presuppose personal responsibility. We have become a victim society. Theabuse excuse is dangerous to the psyche of the United States of America. (Normal accent)And I am classed as being „off the rails‟ for my ideas.

HUGO: At night, when I am alone in my room, I will tell you what I am feeling. I amfeeling what any right-minded person would feel in my position. I think of what is regardedas sane out there of people throwing their voices out in prayer, to the unknown, it is acceptedas sane, yet if they hear a voice coming back they are classed as insane. I think that all thosepeople praying should accept that God suffers from bipolar depression, you knowmagnanimous in summer and mean in winter. And full of the contradictions of the depressed.Water to Mali by way of much needed rain and at the same time levelling a part of Turkeyand killing thousands. He is clearly a depressed person, and quite insane. In fact, I wasthinking of starting a meeting here, living with a deity who suffers from bi-polar depression.

HUGO: Anyway...I think institutions are part of the repression...the repressive stateapparatus…and anyone who tries to reverse this process or interfere in its orderly functioningmight end up in my position.

EUGENE: But that‟s the conspiratorial view. Haven‟t you freed yourself from all thosechains by educating yourself…you have freed yourself from such…discourse.

HUGO: But honestly I see you as part of the discourse. You are one of its performers. I seeyou as a guard in a watchtower. Ok, you don‟t have the dark glasses and you are not chewinggum, and you are not cradling a rifle, like you know, the way you used to cradle the pen

HUGO: But the problem I have with psychiatry it‟s like a medieval triptych, sinner exists;sinner seeks help, sinner saved. But the hinges are wearing. Brain maps; scans…that‟s theway forward...you will become dinosaurs, like teachers.

EUGENE: Thank you for assuring me about my future. Look Hugo, a little neurobabble, isnot going to threaten me; neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, neuroforensics, we‟re in themidst of a neuroimaging frenzy, and a kind of frontier mentality is taking hold. As apracticing psychiatrist, I'm more drawn to the idea of a typical brain contains 100 billionneurons, each of which makes electrical connections, or synapses, with up to 10,000 otherneurons. That means a quadrillion synapses to keep track of at any given time about thenumber of people on 150,000 Earths. Somehow, in the midst of this frenetic electricalactivity, something called "mind" emerges. Neuro imaging is the new frontier we aredecades away from say the diagnosis of depression. In such areas it is spectacularlymeaningless. I will say it has a fantastic placebo effect. participants in research always judgespurious finding more satisfying if you have „brain scans indicate that…‟ at the beginning ofa sentence..

HUGO: Well...I didn‟t mean to

HUGO: I don‟t want to be insensitive, I don‟t want to…lose a friend…but the pen, it justillustrates a point. I mean the pen is like Schrödinger's cat it must have been in asuperposition for you over the past few weeks. You don‟t know, I could have lost it, thrown itaway, burnt it. It is only when you splay your conscience on it that it comes into existence. Soit is in a potential state. Just as I am in a potential state until you see me here eachappointment. The same for me when I think of you. Then we collapse into a state, creatingeach other as we perceive. So it is with the pen, at the moment it is a potential for you.Really, I‟m sorry, I do understand the significance of your attachment for it, your father andeverything, so I will bring it next week. As I said, I don‟t want to lose a ……

EUGENE: Yes, please return the pen. Now can I just come back... the neighbours.What do you mean they are talking to you in code.

HUGO: If you want an experience of talking to the clinically insane then talk to a memberof our social services. Look I have been telling you again and again it‟s been a rationalreaction to insane surroundings…it was rational. Always a label. Worry is „anxiety‟, sadnessis „

HUGO: At night, like this, my breaths are icy...the icy breath of solitude. I tell you it‟s icy inmy state. But I draw on these breaths of solitude. Quoting the old boy, you see. My self hascollapsed. And without a self there is no need to perform. So I live with the threat ofnamelessness, my mind is the unrepresentable; you live with a handful of sand and call it theworld. I love those who do not know how to live…for they are those who cross over

EUGENE: He‟s quite robust about it all…he was threatened and had no other option. Feel Ilet him slip. I remember in South Africa when we were kids and my brother Dirk, and I wereswimming when the tide changed. I made it to the shore, but he was still out there, tried to gethim back in he was slipping from my grasp, but I held him and got him back in. In the futureyou will have to be a cartographer not a psychiatrist. „All psychiatric ailments will be treatedby reading brain maps.‟ Which I told him was tosh. There is a lot of neuro-babbleaccompanying the new frontier,