I was sitting at The French Press today, per usual, when a commotion from State Street caught my attention. A parade came marching down the sidewalk, signs and drums loudly declaring: “STOP! GLOBAL! WARMING!” While it took no more than a minute for them to pass by, it got me to thinking: are there enough people out in the streets of Santa Barbara that are oblivious to global warming for a show like this to be justified? What gives these people the right to interrupt a peaceful Saturday morning with shouting and drumming? And if I’m not mistaken, isn’t the correct term for “global warming” now “climate change”? All these questions and seemingly no answers! At least not from the protesters in that parade.
But I think there is a certain underlying issue here. The issue is not ‘global warming’ but the fact that we can join groups that march around and “raise awareness” about things we already know about while not actually furthering a solution to the problem. We get on our soapbox, so to speak, and TALK (or shout) a lot, but where is the action? Walking down State Street yelling “Stop global warming!” gives me no practical way to actually stop it or even know where to start. From what I know about climate change, in many ways it is a little late for us to be shouting about being eco-friendly. All that CO2 is trapped in the atmosphere from years ago when nobody gave a damn about Mother Earth. Wouldn’t it be more helpful to stop marching around and start actually living as if we cared? Wouldn’t our time be better spent turning off all the unnecessary lights that are on than marching around making a spectacle of ourselves?
And this brings me to The Bald Soprano. Thursday night (and last night and probably tonight) I saw Eugene Ionesco’s play put on by fellow Westmont students. Going in I knew nothing about it. I had no idea what to expect. After 2 hours of non-stop laughter, I fell in love. It is one of the most absurd and backwards productions I have ever seen, but strangely it struck some kind of chord in me. I walked out on Thursday night in disbelief, wondering if I had gone insane. I walked in on Friday night with as much excitement, if not more, than the previous night. Granted, the cast switches characters every night the show is running so you never see the same show twice, I felt as if I could have watched the same people play the same part and still be as satisfied seeing it twice, three, and four times over.
Between the showings, I went to a lecture on Eugene Ionesco, the playwright, on Friday afternoon. What I learned from that still sits steeping within me. He wrote the Bald Soprano in the midst of learning English as a third language. It was from copying nonsensical sentences from an English work book that Ionesco came to believe that language was absolutely meaningless. Words are just “shell casings with no meaning.” While I have not lost that much hope in language, I can see where this line of thinking is justified. I think those bellowing environmentalists are a prime example of this. Marching around shouting the same sentence by no means gives it the meaning needed for me to act on it. And this presents an interesting line of thought: maybe it is our actions that give birth to language and not vice versa. I can more easily ascribe a meaningful word when I see a human being living in a certain way than if I were to walk around saying, “Don’t steal! Brush your teeth daily! Call your mother!” These phrases seem absurd to act on when merely shouted or said; this is just what Ionesco demonstrates in The Bald Soprano. The Smiths and the Martins’ conversations lead no where in particular because they use language as meaningless shell casings. They bring to the surface the cliches we shamelessly inherit from generation upon generation of spoken and written language.
So bring me to a seminar on green energy and practical ways to practice it and I’ll give you my attention. But please don’t shout meaningless phrases at me. Take your soapbox elsewhere cause I ain’t listening.
