Why do we like what we like?

IT'S EASIER to sleep if your head is elevated, and so people use pillows. If you want to attach one piece of cloth to another piece of cloth, a sewing machine can be extremely helpful, and that's why Isaac M. Singer made sewing machines. But why do people make and use what we call "artistic" objects?

It's a question that seems particularly puzzling if you make such objects yourself, in a way devoting your life to it, without quite knowing why you're doing it.

George Gershwin might possibly have wondered to himself, "Why do I write songs?" and yet, as soon as he wrote them, many, many of his fellow humans were eager to sing them, and others were dying to listen to them, and when they heard them, they all felt better and happier. So even though, in a way, those facts don't quite answer the original question--they don't quite explain Gershwin's drive to write music--still, in another way, what more of an answer could Gershwin possibly have wanted?

Everyone knows that if you're hungry and depressed, a little ice cream can bring a moment of relief, and that's why we like it.

I presented my early plays to the world with many of the same feelings that Gershwin probably felt when he presented his songs--in each case I had given my all and done my best to make something that I found pleasing.

Nonetheless, my first professional production in New York (in 1975) provoked a level of hostility in its small audience that was seriously disturbing. In my second production, the anger of the audience seemed to diminish a bit, but they seemed stricken and miserable instead--hurt, or baffled.

Every day I wake up wondering what has happened to those early plays of mine in the intervening years. They haven't caught on, apparently, even after all this time. And the years I spent writing them--what were those years? Were they like the years that recovered alcoholics describe--"lost years" spent wandering in a desperate haze from one night's incomprehensible encounter with someone or other to the next night's horrible barroom brawl?

NOT LONG ago, I made a film with a group of people, and we'd poured a significant portion of our lives into making it, along with quite a bit of thought and passion, and finally it was shown at a film festival. And when the screening of the film was over, a moderator asked the audience if anyone had any questions for the filmmakers. Almost instantly, a man spoke up from the center of the auditorium. "Yes, I have a question," he said in a loud voice. "What was the point of that?" Now, let's note that his question could have meant two different things. He might have been wondering what the point was for us in making the film. Or he might have been asking what point there could possibly have been for him in watching it. But in a way, I feel that my whole life seems to revolve around the fact that I'm crawling through the streets every day unable to answer either version of that question about anything I do.

You have to understand, I do read my plays myself every few years, including the ones that people have liked least. I read them, I change a few words, I improve a few lines, and I'm surprised once again that so few people liked them. "What is it about me and all those other people?" I think to myself. I like orange juice, and so do they. I like the performances of Roseanne Barr and Robert De Niro, and so do they. But I like my own plays, and they don't. Why is that?

People always say that "tastes differ," and that that's just a fact. A lot of people like spinach. Many fewer like dandelion greens. When certain people take their clothes off in public, they're worshipped and rewarded, while others are arrested or taken to an insane asylum. But if you have a stake in the answer, it's hard not to ask, "Why the spinach? Why not the greens?" Is there no comprehensible reason that the spinach is more popular?

Of course there are answers, but you'd have to devote your life to a scientific study of preferences in vegetables in order to begin to find out about preferences in vegetables, and it would be the same with all other areas of preference.

Leaving aside my own plays, I've always been curious why, in comparison to most people I know, I enjoy plays in general so much. I can't, obviously, answer that question either.

I do like plays, though. There's something so chaotic about them. And I like to write the text that appears in a play, that is part of a play. For me, a play is a wonderful pile-up of bodies, lights, sets, gestures, clothes, nudity, music, dance, and running through it all and driving it all is a stream of words, sentences. Words and sentences are (to me) aesthetic materials, and a purpose that I think one would have to call aesthetic can certainly be the governing element in writing a play. One plays with sentences the way a child plays with matches--because they're unpredictable. In fact, sentences make up a sort of jungle in which I seem to be living. And somehow an artistic object comes into being, that is, an object that exists for the purpose of being contemplated.

And the contemplation of an artistic object can induce a sort of daytime dream, one might say. And perhaps it's somewhat odd for a play to have that intention, at least in comparison to a painting, for example. Agnes Martin's paintings put the viewer into a trance, while Bertolt Brecht's plays were specifically designed to wake people up. But a play might possibly try to do both.

I WONDER if the daytime dreams induced by artistic objects may not be really rather necessary for people, as nighttime dreams unquestionably are. If they weren't necessary, then why would every culture on earth invent music, songs, poetry, what have you? Perhaps it's the case that, in order to live, we must process our experience first rationally, and then irrationally. But if such dreams are actually necessary in fact, that goes some way to explaining the horrible atmosphere that has hovered in various rooms in which my plays have been performed. In other words, at night we can all create for ourselves the dreams that we need, but the creation of the artistic objects that stimulate our daytime dreams is contracted out to a particular group of people, and in our society it's a self-appointed group. So naturally the various dreams that we dream at night are not criticized by anybody--there are no reviewers in the Land of Nod--nor do we need to defend our dreams or make any claims for them. But as we all find ourselves in the frustrating situation that most of the artistic objects we need and depend on for our daytime dreams must be made by other people, it's not surprising that we're finicky, critical and sometimes even angry when these objects are presented to us--we're constantly complaining, like diners in a restaurant who repeatedly send bad-tasting dishes back to the kitchen. And then, perhaps inevitably, centuries ago, analysts of art brought the concepts of "good" and "bad" into the conversation, and most of us, as irritable diners, frequently use this vocabulary in discussing our artistic meals, although it often merely adds to the prevailing confusion, because a parsnip is not really a "bad" carrot, it's a different vegetable.

So. What type of dreams do you enjoy? There are clearly different categories of dreams that vie for primacy in each human soul. Some are dreams of conquest, victory, or revenge. Others are dreams of sensuality, beauty, joy, kindness, and love. Artistic objects are not brainwashing machines. They have influence, not power. But I think we're influenced by our daytime dreams, just as much as we're influenced by our family and friends and our personal experiences. So to me it's reasonable to think that a world in which Chuang Tzu and George Eliot are widely read will be less dangerous than a world in which people read only sadistic stories or military magazines.

Certain theorists definitely disagree with that opinion. Actually, there are people who dwell almost obsessively on the fact that an exposure to "art" did not prevent certain famous men from doing horrible things. I feel I've been frequently reminded, for example, that the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich played Mozart on the violin during the same period in which he planned the extermination of the Jews. But my speculation on this, if I may offer one, is that, perhaps because of his history and who he was, Commander Heydrich did not fully absorb the human possibilities that others have grasped through listening to the music of Mozart. Similarly, the young English major Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people in a famous massacre at a college in Virginia, even though a kindly professor of English had given him private tutorials in creative writing and had even tried to speak to him sympathetically about his own problems. She did her best, but Cho was too deeply trapped in the quicksand of his own mind, and the lessons in creative writing didn't save him. He didn't hear enough, or understand enough, of what his teacher was trying to tell him. Mozart, being a composer of music rather than a supernatural creature from outer space, was not up to the task of convincing Reinhard Heydrich to get off the path he was on and move to another one. But just as the failure of Cho's teacher can hardly lead us to say that no kindly teacher has ever helped or saved a student, so it seems preposterous to leap from Mozart's inability to reconstruct Reinhard Heydrich to the claim that composers, painters, and writers have not influenced the world by offering humanity their wisdom and their vision of what life could be.

Dreams can help, although they don't make their points in a direct way, and sometimes no one can say for sure exactly what their points really are. Dreams can even agitate for change, or for a better world, sometimes simply by offering people a glimpse of something agreeable that might be pursued--or crystallizing into a vivid nightmare something awful that ought to be avoided. Dreams are actually involved in a serious battle. Despite a certain lightness in their presentation, they're not joking.