767: “To explain . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 57 begins
57
“TO EXPLAIN Terrence, I have to explain the popularity of my weeping and vomiting. Of all the things I did on this stage, in this house, that was the ultimate crowd-pleasing shtick. Weeping and puking. Tears and vomit. C’est la vie.”
Uneasy laughter, some coughing, the sound of people shifting in their seats.
“Actually,” she said, “c’est la guerre. There was, you remember, a war. Isn’t there always? Hasn’t there always been a war? If we’re not at war, then someone else is. So, there was a war, and there was television, and the television was full of the war. Having a television set here was a relatively recent innovation; when I first went on display I had no television set, and I didn’t notice the lack, since I was often involved in my own thoughts. Television would only have gotten in the way. But Greg noticed that, in the evenings, especially on weekdays, attendance would fall off, just at the time when it seemed to him that it should have been at its largest. At first he thought that this was just the natural result of the hour and the day, that people were eating or asleep or something, or didn’t want to go out on weeknights because they had to go to work in the morning, but while he was out walking one night, he noticed the light of the television sets that lit all the living rooms, and in that light he saw the truth: quite a lot of people—astonishing as this may seem—didn’t want to give up television to watch me. So Greg installed a set in my living room. That meant that people could come to see me and watch television at the same time. A stroke of brilliance, don’t you think?
“Of course, they wouldn’t necessarily see their favorite shows. They had to watch what was showing on my set. Eventually, to hang on to our weeknight audience, Greg talked me into keeping the most popular shows on, but when the television set first joined the act we didn’t bother much about what was playing on it. We just turned it on and left it on, and that was enough to bring people in.
“With my television set going, my audience could watch TV, and they could watch me. Who could ask for more, right? Well, there was more, they soon discovered, because they could watch me watching TV, and I intensified their television experience. When I laughed at some hapless clown, they laughed with me. When I cried at a sentimental movie, they cried with me.”
She turned to me and said, “I think that’s when they started coming here to see how to live, instead of just coming to watch me live. I think they liked me best, enjoyed me most, when I had the television set on, even if it was just flickering in the background, but especially when I was sitting there, doing nothing but watching it. Then they could watch me, watch me watching television, and if I should do anything interesting they wouldn’t miss it, but at the same time they could watch the show that I was watching, and the show was almost always more amusing or frightening or engaging than I was or perhaps it was simply denser, richer, than I am. Who knows? It was certainly a distraction.
“Take the night that Greg left for good. He slammed the door, and in the silence that he left behind him I could hear their anticipation—the audience’s anticipation of some high drama, some histrionics. They had been with me through a couple of hours of screaming and glaring, one of those periods of elevated emotion that most of them hoped to see when they came to see me, and now they wanted to see this episode come to a close. They wanted me to provide the cap, the closing line, but I wasn’t up to it. I didn’t want to give them any more. I wanted to keep my thoughts to myself. So, with my head down, I walked over to the television set and turned it on.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 767, Mark Dorset considers War and Folly from this episode.
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