My thespian identity is like a sexual orientation, something I discovered without choosing it. Maybe all children play make-believe, but I played American-rebel-and-British-officer with my English friend in a corner of the playground while the other boys played softball, a sport I never practiced voluntarily. In the third grade, I drew knobs on a shoebox, put it on the teacher's desk, and "entertained" the class by reading under the desk a radio program I had written. I don’t recall thunderous applause, but by senior year I directed, wrote, and starred in a show for a high school assembly. I also had a tape recorder (maybe the only kid in town) and gathered with friends to improvise “radio” programs. The first time I auditioned for a university play, I was cast in the lead as a bearded, wigged magician. The rest is history (see https://www.youtube.com/user/BanjoBillGreen for recent madness), and I have often puzzled over what that says about my personal sense of self, my ego.
Nearly all religions agree on the problem of selfishness. The sin of pride, from which the other six sins proceed in the medieval view, is to elevate yourself above your context, to pose at the center of the universe. There's no real reason to prefer what benefits me over what benefits you--why it's better for me to win and you to lose--but, of course, I feel that way. Selfishness is innate. The I-sense is insatiable. No amount of honor, power, love, toys, money, or pleasure can satisfy it. Alexander wept at no more worlds to conquer. Seeing your success, even at no expense to mine, I feel envy. Call it Original Sin. My only hope for peace is to love you as I love myself--not for your benefit but for mine. I inevitably suffer if I cling to ego and its bottomless jealousy.
All the great religious teachers warn against ego and advise merging ourselves with something greater. Teachings of unselfishness fan across a spectrum from the Christianity-lite's feeding the poor to the Zen understanding of all self as an illusion. The need to overcome selfishness, relax the I-sense and its insatiable desires, is a rare universal in world religion—not only endorsed by virtually all faiths but self-evident in the world. A contented pauper is transparently happier than a billionaire President raging red-faced against his enemies.
My particular ego, the fellow called Bill Green, has acted in over a hundred plays in the last six decades. I’ve lost count. There was a pause when I had to teach night classes, but I’ve averaged over two roles per year except for that, some big, some small (“there are no small”). The actor’s ego is proverbial, but my experience is that a stage role can stretch, relocate, even batter my I-sense (maybe not if, like John Wayne, you play yourself, but I do characters). Acting has conditioned me to regard street dress as costume, habitual self-presentation as self-construction. It’s prophylactic against the illusion that I actually am my persona—the visible mask of, say, a job, reputation, or social image—a dangerous form of possession that can lead to suicide. It’s simple sanity, I think, to understand that I’d be the same me, my life equally worth living, if I “lost everything” and ended up despised and dirty in a jail cell or homeless shelter.
I’m not claiming to have defeated ego, which is like bragging about my modesty, but maybe the grasping for “mine” has been relaxed a little by the acting process. I’ve heard of actors refusing to play characters they disapproved of, but that sounds to me like Mr. Ego rampant, a confusion between the signifier and the signified. Some of my best acting experiences—maybe qualifying as spiritual—have been as toxic villains like Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird, feeling a chill that “there but for the grace of God go I.” In The Secret of Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton, a lodestar of my long-ago Catholic conversion, expresses this through his famous detective. An American begs Father Brown to tell his "secret," how he solved dozens of murders: “You see, I had murdered them all myself,” Brown confesses. “I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”
Brown resists the American’s suggestion that this is a figure of speech, a metaphor for reconstructing a crime. On the contrary, in a nod toward the doctrine of real presence in the mass, Brown insists, “I mean I really did see myself, and my real self committing the murder.” Killing in the material world is easy, Brown scoffs. Much more difficult is to intend a murder up to the final step of withholding one’s consent (absorption akin to Method acting), which Father Brown describes as “a sort of religious exercise.” Moving “inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions” is, he suggests, spiritual discipline. Maybe I know what Chesterton means. It’s about looking clear-eyed at my Shadow, Carl Jung’s personification of all my unexpressed potentials, good and evil, so I can stop projecting them on others. It’s about seeing the beam in my own eye so I don’t obsess over a speck in somebody else’s (Matthew 7:3). “No man’s really any good,” Father Brown says, “till he knows how bad he is, or might be.” It is a very bad thing to believe that you are good—much worse, I think, than pretending you are.
Shortly after John T. Malloy’s Dress for Success was published in 1975, I read the book and took it to heart. Malloy demonstrated that different styles of dress fit different venues, that effective style can be determined more-or-less objectively by scientific polling and observation, and that people who dress appropriately are better received. My analogy is that dressing “right” in a social situation is like paddling a canoe rather than a square jon boat. There is less resistance. This wasn’t a new idea to me. My father had explained how, as a new high school teacher of vocational agriculture in a rural school, he always wore a suit and tie, and he credited this in part for his rapid promotion. As a hippie fellow-traveler in graduate school, I had ignored his advice, but Malloy’s scientific method convinced me. Every morning before going off to teach college, I donned one of two almost identical dark suits with wingtip shoes, black socks, a white shirt, and a tie. This simplified my mornings. No special care is required for formal dress, and it quickly becomes habit, much easier than selecting a look du jour from a palette of casual dress.
The suits were uniforms, like the orange robes of Buddhist monks, not to be confused with my ego (with things more essentially me such as family, memory, and opinions). The necktie was part of a costume design for the role of “Dr. Green” and harmonized with his duty to impart traditional knowledge and methodology learned from older neckties. As soon as I got off work, I eagerly shucked the uniform and only lightly identified myself with teaching, so that I gladly retired, and now the suits and ties gather dust in my closet. Some people become their jobs and are disoriented by retirement. I eagerly quit teaching and became an actor, singer, and writer.
The subject came up at a party with a university English instructor—who, incidentally, soon left the profession, despite his Ph.D, to become an IT analyst—who said he had to “be himself” in class, which involved wearing jeans and cool shirts. He expressed it as a point of integrity, part of being true to himself. This seemed nonsense. His self was yards of cloth? A costume was his identity? A wardrobe his me? I’m too much of an introvert and willy-nilly a thespian to see this as anything but affectation reified, fashionable rags hiding the heart. Of course, he might say the same of me, only with a less interesting rags. We can’t help having personae, and my difference with him may be semantic. His costuming style may have helped him “get down” with the kids in class, so he avoided authoritarian regalia. Sometimes when I took substitute classes, I was mistaken for an administrator. I don't wear a suit and tie today offstage, and, when I’m directing a play, I try to look "artistic." It wasn’t my friend’s avoiding banker dress that confused me. That made sense. It was conflating clothing with "himself."
My worry would be if he actually identified dress style and its social reception with his sense of identity outside of social context. The private self is still an ego-sense, still hungry, but at least able to withstand famine. Dis-identifying self from the variable surfaces presented in social interactions--events that the Stoics warned are beyond our control--is only a first step, I think, to seeing the ego for the actor that it is. And this is itself only a step toward transcending it—toward identity with the eternal—which seems to sit at the luminous core of every religion.
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