If there is, I haven’t found it yet

As a theater practitioner, I have often asked myself the question: “How does one stage a dream?” Convergence — that is, using facility to move from page to stage? Masturbation — that is, indulging the senses to create something that is resonant to one’s proclivities? Smoke and mirrors — or covering up inability with artifice? After all, we live in a society that is disturbingly tolerant of mediocrity these days.

Director Bartlett Sher fights against this notion by saying that one must distill through “deep genre” in search of what something is really trying to say. For playwright August Strindberg, it’s about descending into a person’s subconscious, searching, and then waking with steely resolve to funnel one’s dreams into a measurable meter of reality. It’s about creating dramatic action of one’s own passions. Call it #winning. On the flipside, #notwinning — the story of my 20-something life.

In the precipice of fear and abandon, I seem to have misplaced what humans cling to most when all is lost. What is known to many, from victims of tragedy to harbingers of social change, as quite simply, hope.

For people like myself, it starts with a dream, one that no amount of naysaying can topple. When that dream is challenged beyond the everyman perception, you end up with an impregnable shroud. That’s probably how much that dream meant to me in the first place, and that’s how much, for no reasons other than the uncertainty of any considerable undertaking, it set me up for failure. Go big, or go home, right?

IN THE BEGINNING

These days, I wake and my dreams aren’t as vivid. They say that on a clear day, you see forever; that on the clearest day, you can make out the crevices of a Supreme (not Jessica Lange). These days I can’t even see past my own window. I wonder: Has a rise in prescription made me that much nearsighted?

It’s funny how there are cracks in the universe that I have squeezed myself into. I thought that there was something that needed fixing (no, I am not Olivia Pope) and that my fortitude would be the connective tissue that would tie it all together. I thought that there was a secret that only I knew. And that it would manifest as deus ex machina that would spark a revolution, in places I thought it was needed. I learned the hard way that maybe, for most, a revolution was unnecessary. Brecht: “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” Me: “Unhappy the land that thinks it doesn’t need heroes.” It seems most people are content to be like those cavemen in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Sure, there’s Jobs, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. But there is also Major Barbra and Don Quixote. A lost cause.

BLACK SABBATH

I recently went on a sabbatical to find answers to questions that have been plaguing me ever since a sickness purported to diminish my capacity. In a modernist world where you are what you accomplish, this sickness could have very well eradicated my intrinsic use.

In the film Hugo, it’s said that everything has a purpose — even machines. Clocks tell time and trains take you places. Which is why broken machines made the protagonist sad because they could no longer do what they were “meant” to do. Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose, it’s like you’re broken. If purpose was my currency for living, then I am the walking dead. In that I have become “machinal,” in the thoughts of Sophie Treadwell, have I become broken in the humanist sense? In pursuit of a dream, have I lost myself to the machine?

In a world that has grown increasingly epistemological rather than ontological, knowledge-based rather than relishing the simple fact of existing, I found that affliction gave me a free pass when life threw me lemons. It was like the perfect scapegoat. Reverse placebo, I was told by friends. I had convinced myself of the disability so well that my body believed my own lie. I had singlehandedly destroyed my own destiny.

DENOUEMENT

I found out recently that, well, I didn’t have it. You would think I’d have been ecstatic. What I found was that, like Stockholm Syndrome, I had become attached to my captor, this menace called affliction. I found that I savored a perverse joy in justifying my shortcomings, or the heady distance between where I was and where I wanted to be as endemic of my condition. I was a masochist, yes, but in realizing this new endgame, I had become sadist as well, wanting to inflict as well as experience the depravity of my own doing.

I’ve probably never worked harder in my life as when I set out to prove myself and others wrong, and that a dream, no matter how farfetched, is definitely valid. But when expectations and reality don’t meet at the proverbial footbridge, I ended up retreating into a form of fiction.

Was it sickness? Or was it that, after much dissertation, the thing that goes bumping in the night wasn’t really a thing after all. The boogieman was no more than a shadow cast by my own doubt. I was a modern-day paraplegic sitting on the detritus of my own doing. But when facts would simply not corroborate my claim, and I didn’t have that to fall back on lest I become the Boy Who Cried Wolf, I found myself utterly discombobulated. I was someone who could neither see nor experience the fire of my own dream because I had become all of a sudden averse to the one thing that had kept it company all these years: doubt.

THAT THING CALLED…

Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt said that doubt was as powerful and sustaining as the concept of certainty. While I found myself pursuing my dream with the latter, a form of energy that was hallucinatory, addictive, and sexy, I had grown suddenly averse to its “double,” without which the very concept of certainty or sexiness couldn’t exist altogether. The Magneto to Professor X. 
If doubt be the greatest empowerment of an artist, shares theater director Peter Sellars, I had forgotten that the key to my artistic identity was the nature of my doubt. For really, what is certainty but stagnation?

I never really knew what I was doing back then. Heck, I still don’t know I’m doing now. But a dream is in essence a story I tell myself to make sense of who I am. We need stories. They are integral to our survival. If it’s anything my forebears used through various ups and downs in their careers, it’s stories. The alcoholism and profundity of Tennessee Williams. The achievements and missteps of Julie Taymor. The box office flops and virtuosity of Stephen Sondheim. In a way, their stories have given me permission to have the one thing that is often forgotten by the modern man in light of precedence. And in Manila, public perception — that is, permission to fail. They give me permission. Probably what it is is this: it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. And for a doubt-ridden first quarter, I think I can live with that.