ANDRE: I do just the same thing myself! We can't be direct so we end up saying the weirdest things. I mean, I remember a night, it was a couple of weeks after my mother died, and I was in pretty bad shape. And I had dinner with three relatively close friends, two of whom had known my mother quite well, and all three of whom had known me for years. You know that we went through that entire evening without my being able to, for a moment, get anywhere near, you know, not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary evening in which I was talking about all this pain that I was going through and everything. Really, not at all, but the fact that nobody could say: "Gee, what a shame about your mother." Or: "How are you feeling?" It was just as if nothing had happened! They were all making these jokes and laughing. I got quite crazy as a matter of fact. You know, one of these people mentioned a certain man whom I don't like very much, and I started screeching about how he had just been found in the Bronx River, and his penis had dropped off from gonorrhea, and all kinds of insane things. And later, when I got home, I realized I had just been desperate to break through this ice!
WALLY: Yep!
ANDRE: I mean, do you realize, Wally, if you brought that situation into a Tibetan home? That would just be so far out! I mean, they wouldn't be able to understand it. I mean, that would be simply... [laughing:] simply so weird, Wally! If four Tibetans came together, and tragedy had just struck one of the ones, and they spent the whole evening going "HA HA HA HA HAW HAW HAW HEE HEE HEE!" I mean, you know, Tibetans would have looked at that and thought that was the most unimaginable behavior! But for us, that's common behavior.
WALLY: Uh-hunh.
ANDRE: I mean, really, the Africans would have probably put their spears into all four of us, 'cause it would have driven them crazy. They would have thought we were dangerous animals or something like that. [Wally murmurs agreement.] I mean, that's absolutely abnormal behavior.
WAITER: Is everything all right, gentlemen?
WALLY: Great.
ANDRE: [Without enthusiasm; almost simultaneous with Wally:] Yeah. [After a pause:] But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners, and parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of sickly dreams, because people are talking in symbols. Everyone's sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they're really thinking about. Then people start making these jokes, that are really some sort of secret code!
WALLY: Right! Well, what often happens at some of these evenings is that these really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know, and everybody will be talking at once, and sort of saying: "Hey, wouldn't it be great if Frank Sinatra and Mrs. Nixon and blah-blah-blah were in such-and-such a situation," you know, always with famous people and always sort of grotesque? Or people will be talking about some horrible thing like, like the death of that girl in the car with Ted Kennedy, and they'll just be roaring with laughter! I mean, it's really amazing. It's just unbelievable. That's the only way anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think that's why I never understand what's going on at a party, and I'm always completely confused. You know, Debby once said after one of these New York evenings, she thought she'd travelled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening, than her grandmother had travelled in making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago!
ANDRE: Well, I think that's right! You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don't know what's going on is that when we're there at a party, we're all too busy performing.
WALLY: Un-hunh.
ANDRE: You know, that was one of the reasons that Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous, and in a way obscene.
WALLY: Hum!
ANDRE: I mean, isn't it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. [Wally says "Yep."] They don't know what they should be doing with their lives. They're reading all these self-help books...
WALLY: Oh! God! And I mean, those books are just so touching because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though by performing these roles all the time we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don't know the things we'd like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean...I mean, you know, suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don't dare to ask each other!
ANDRE: No! It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.
WALLY: I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality. I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called "careers" automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive, or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot! You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else!
ANDRE: Right! Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans. Which in themselves are not reality.
WALLY: No! Goals and plans are not--I mean, they're fantasy. They're part of a dream life! I mean, you know, it always just does seem so ridiculous somehow that everybody has to have his little goal in life. I mean, it's so absurd, in a way. I mean, when you consider that it doesn't matter which one it is.
ANDRE: Right! And because people's concentration is on their goals, in their life they just live each moment by habit! Really, like the Norwegian, telling the same stories over and over again. [Wally murmurs "Um-hum"] Life becomes habitual! And it is, today! I mean, very few things happen now like that moment when Marlon Brando sent the Indian woman to accept the Oscar and everything went haywire? Things just very rarely go haywire now. And if you're just operating by habit, then you're not really living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit the root of the verb "to be" is the same as the verb "to grow" or "to make grow."
WALLY: Hunh! [Pause. Serving sounds. Laughter at another table.]
ANDRE: Do you know about Roc?
WALLY: Hunh?
ANDRE: Oh! Well! Roc was a wonderful man. And he was one of the founders of Findhorn. And he was one of Scotlan--well, he was Scotland's greatest mathematician, and he was one of the century's great mathematicians. And he prided himself on the fact that he had no fantasy life, no dream life, nothing to stand--no imaginary life, nothing to stand between him and the direct perception of mathematics. And one day, when he was in his mid-fifties, he was walking in the gardens of Edinburgh and he saw a faun! The faun was very surprised because fauns have always been able to see people, but, you know, very few people ever see them. And [Wally looks blank]...you know? Those little imaginary creatures. Not a deer.