On April 12 I was standing before the audience of Fugue
saying “I fear going blind.” It was one of the many fears my character
confessed to: months of writing paralysis, sadnesses, blindness. A few days
before the opening of Fugue I had reached a breaking point, the result
of utter and somehow final exhaustion triggered by bitter disappointments,
other people’s traumas, and a general sense of nightmarish dysfunction I didn’t
have the training to cure or the strength to absorb any longer.
A week after Fugue
I experienced a strange episode that began with an ocular migraine which
distorted reality in frightening ways, and ended with a detachment inside
my eye. For hours I thought I was going blind. I remembered the lines in Fugue,
my monologue about blind writers, about Borges going blind the year he became
the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, and took over 900,000 books
he could no longer read. I thought, “I did this to myself by writing it.”
Self-fulfilling prophecies and all that. Every time I opened my eyes a storm took
over the world with gray clouds and flashes of lighting that made me doubt my
perception. 2019, my “best year yet” if I was to believe horoscope predictions,
had finally defeated me.
And although I loved Fugue with a passion,
outside the protective space of the stage, reality crumbled. An artist I had
trusted instantly and completely disappeared in the middle of a collaboration I
had poured my life into. His departure felt like a terminal betrayal. The
present stagnated. The future felt dark. I could no longer read for hours, stare
at the computer screen, do my job. A sadness I could not describe covered
everything, like a giant, suffocating blanket. I felt ashamed and diminished by
it and, for the first time in years, completely alone.
And then one day I learned of an experiment, a
research project whose premise was this: modern life has led to isolation
which, in turn, has fueled a vast range of disorders; if there’s a pill for
depression and anxiety, why not loneliness?
I kept reading. I discovered a book called Our
Psychiatric Future and felt both curiosity and horror. I kept thinking
about this extraordinary scenario: a pill for (against?) loneliness. The
Matrix. The Blue Pill. Our fear of emotion. The monologue in Fugue that talked
about it. “And then the panic sets in. The nausea, the numbness, the erratic heartbeat,
the overwhelming sense of terror. A total loss of control. A fall – a falling.
You tell no one. It’s not what real men do. The Master Builder hangs the
largest wreath on the highest tower. Panic doesn’t come into it.” Except that
now it does – panic, loneliness, a fear of old age, of mortality, of banality,
of putting one foot in front of the other in the desert of the real whose sole
inhabitant you are – forever.
I thought: to eradicate loneliness we must find and
annihilate its cause, numb the soul to it, kill emotion altogether. How would
one isolate that particular emotion, the one leading to loneliness? In
other words, would the pill “cure” all emotion until, zombified but tranquil,
we’d wait patiently for the day when we feel…nothing?
Research on loneliness led me to Aging and Immortality
Studies (although the immortal vampire is the loneliest creature I know –
remember that), which led to the Journal of Happiness Studies, Emotion Theory, and then movies like Her, then Sophia, the humanoid robot activated on Valentine’s
Day 2016, ready to punctuate the monotony of our comfortable but deadly
isolation.
Slowly, a few characters emerged: a psychiatrist, a
Big Pharma representative, a few test subjects, an AI robot, and a
revolutionary, a member of the resistance who warns that the suppression of negative
emotion may feel like happiness but will lead to the end of life as we know it.
And so, out of fear, disappointment, and exhaustion,
having finally left Fugue behind, a new play has emerged – is emerging –
like a cure.
