Wallace Shawn's 'Essays'

“In a bold mood, I’ve brooded once or twice on the question: Where do the dreams go, and what do they do in the world of the real?”

In an equally bold way, Wallace Shawn ends his foreword to the reader and begins his collection of essays with this statement.  As I read this, sitting on the floor of an empty apartment in Brooklyn with the echoing sounds of other tenants filtering in through the plaster walls, I too pondered this problematic question.  Wallace Shawn’s recently released book, entitled Essays, reads like a glimpse into the inner world and musings of the man — more than the Wallace Shawn we know as actor or playwright.  The actor side of me was drawn to the idea of this book for my previous (and now I know, minimal) knowledge of Shawn’s more public work in theatre and film.  But Essays takes readers for a journey through the life of what seems to be Shawn’s more personal opinions and writings over the years on issues of war, terrorism, art, sex, love, and life under the weights of elitist surroundings.  So often, artists come forward with the memoirs of their difficult upbringings, their troubled and humble beginnings, and their tortured souls.  Wallace Shawn openly and bravely admits his privileged upbringing and life in the presence of New York’s Upper East Side and all the trappings that went with it.

“The schizophrenic nature of this book (essays on war and death, and essays on the windowless miniature world of theatre) gives a pretty good picture of my own mind.  Born by most definitions into the ruling class, I was destined to live a comfortable life.  And to spend one’s life as a so-called ‘creative artist’ is probably the most comfortable, cozy, and privileged life that a human being can live on this Earth — the most “bourgeois” life, if one uses that phrase to describe a life that is so comfortable that no one living it would want to give it up.”

Here, Shawn sets us up for the honest and intimate manner in which he has spent many years writing on those things in the world around him (and beyond) that spoke most to his conscience and understanding of the condition of humanity.   The essays are dated and span across more than a decade of work.  There is humor, to be sure — most poignantly in the closing essay regarding sex:

“It can only be seen as funny that men buy magazines containing pictures of breasts but not magazines with pictures of knees or forearms.”

But with every dose of humor comes an equally astounding brilliance in the way Shawn sees the world around him:

“So it might not be absurd to say that if you love the body of another person, if you love another person, if you love a meadow, if you love a horse, if you love a painting or a piece of music or the sky at night, then the power of sex is flowing through you.”

I found a certain camaraderie in reading Shawn’s distress at a world moving fast and dangerous while he was left to feel safe and comfortable.   As artists, it is easy to feel trapped between the joy and addiction to our work and the pain of questioning whether we are actually contributing even a drop in the bucket toward a solution for some of these larger concerns.

“Sure, it’s been great — the life of comfort, good lunches, predictability.  But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed — I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.”

The Wallace Shawn that most of us know — the goofy comedic actor known widely for his humorous “battle of wits” and subsequent death in The Princess Bride — is not the Wallace Shawn we are shown in this book.  Here, we are shown a man who has led a life of art, guilt, pride, and hard work toward some degree of self-truth and understanding; a man who has been gifted and weighted by the gift.  Yet, his commitment to a no-holds-barred honesty and forthcoming in his writing makes for a fascinating read.  My notes in reading Essays consisted of page after page of simply quoting his words, for they truthfully expressed fears and doubts that I, myself, have thought and been too afraid or unprepared to express.  Truly, where do the dreams go in the world of the real? For Wallace Shawn, they seem to go to the page.  “Essays” seemed, to me, to be a series of daydreams and nightmares scrambling for air in the pages of real-world concerns and threats.  It is beautiful, though, to watch the struggle of these binaries in the musings.

“Somehow poetry and the search for a more just order on Earth are not contradictory, and there may be something necessary, as well as ridiculous, in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.”