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In the middle of the play, in the middle of the act, a stranger wanders out onto the stage…
What does this mean? And what does it mean that this play, this image, this thumbnail, can mean so much, can encapsulate so much, so much of experience, can somehow epitomize life?
Begin with this. When a stranger wanders out onto the stage, everything goes still. The action stops, the actors stop, — everyone stops, and starts. The audience sits up, even wakes up, is drawn in. I therefore associate the image with the word aufhören. In German this word means stop. Er hört auf zu singen means he stops singing. But there is more to it, a layer beneath the surface. When you look at the word as such, you see that it means listen up, or meant it once. Yet today the word means stop so simply and unambiguously that native German speakers are surprised when you bring it to their attention, pointing out to them that the word they use to say stop, in and of itself, says listen up. It is as someone had used pennies their whole life without realizing, or having forgotten, there is a face on the surface of them. And it is not hard to imagine how the meaning of aufhören could have changed. Imagine a teacher standing at the front of a classroom of students working at their desks; she needs their attention so that she can give them new instructions; she tells them to listen or, more emphatically, to listen up. As they look up, they leave off what they had been doing; they stop working and start listening; and, over time, the stopping part of the meaning is so foregrounded, selected, that it becomes the whole meaning, the meaning of the word, period. Listen up comes to mean stop. As if to symbolize that starting something new, taking in the new, requires becoming still, stopping.
Then think next of our headsup. Immediately, it is a command telling someone to lift their head up, to look up. It is used as a warning about an imminent physical arrival, an announcement that somebody or something is incoming and should be taken account of. In its remoter uses, it means the same thing for arrivals and incoming projectiles of other sorts: look around, something’s coming your way, be ready for it. And it is no accident that awareness of surroundings, vision and uprightness are connected in this way. The lifting of the head, the assumption of the standing posture, is a central moment in our shared natural history, some six million years ago. It gave us hands for making tools. It made our eyes more important than our noses, making us creatures of sight, and up remains the direction of vision and the visionary. Standing up was one of the birthdays of the human, — a moment we find reenactments and anniversaries of in our lives. Since we move with our feet and work with our hands, we work with our heads down. To work is to focus or concentrate your awareness, to shrink the field of your vision and attention, to be closer to the ground. We are on all fours in working. Headsup, then, the command to stand up, to get tall, to see, means the end of work, the moment of retreat and retirement, detachment. It means the suspension of the activity, the obliteration of its conventionalities. It means the enlarging of the field of vision, the taking in of more space and more objects. In the largest sense, headsup means to take in the new, to be open, to wonder, and when we lift our heads we reenact this central event and renew our humanity.
There is a third note in this file: starting. To start means to begin, but it also means to jump in surprise, to be startled. Start, offspring of startle, overlaps in meaning with begin, is one of our two main words for beginning, — as if to enshrine in our language the fact that beginning and the unusual, the unexpected, go together. Beginning, really beginning, is always pushing off, setting out onto the seas of the new and unknown, — that’s why it’s hard to do. And why stop there? Isn’t it... impossible? Don’t we actually need to be caught off guard? Don’t we need, not just to begin, but to start, to be startled, to be started into something new? Don’t we need a rip, a sudden arrival for us to be torn from what we were doing and to see or hear what we do not yet see or hear? Something from outside, someone unknown, to make an entrance and show us the way toward something new? For us to begin? Or begin again? In any case, it happens this way. Whether we want to or not, we do, over and over: we begin again, in wonder. No matter how comfortable we become under our roofs, in our nests, in our nearness, something always breaks in and points us out, toward the sky, the horizon, the unknown. And what breaks in, what comes from outside, arrives dramatically. And so we begin with a start, — the stagestranger. There is no other way of beginning.