Every person is unique
and yet also like every other person. Our visible, external appearance is different
from everyone else’s, of course, that is all well and good, but there is also
something inside each and every one of us which belongs to that person
alone—which is that person alone. We might call this their spirit, or their
soul. Or else we can decide not to label it at all in words, just leave it
alone.
But while we are all
unlike one another, we’re alike too. People from every part of the world are
fundamentally similar, no matter what language we speak, what skin color we
have, what hair color we have.
This may be something of
a paradox: that we are completely alike and utterly dissimilar at the same
time. Maybe a person is intrinsically paradoxical, in our bridging of body and
soul—we encompass both the most earthbound, tangible existence and something
that transcends these material, earthbound limits.
Art, good art, manages in
its wonderful way to combine the utterly unique with the universal. It lets us
understand what is different—what is foreign, you might say—as being universal.
By doing so, art breaks through the boundaries between languages, geographical
regions, countries. It brings together not just everyone’s individual qualities
but also, in another sense, the individual characteristics of every group of
people, for example of every nation.
Art does this not by
levelling differences and making everything the same, but, on the contrary, by
showing us what is different from us, what is alien or foreign. All good art
contains precisely that: something alien, something we cannot completely
understand and yet at the same time do understand, in a way. It contains a
mystery, so to speak. Something that fascinates us and thus pushes us beyond
our limits and in so doing creates the transcendence that all art must both
contain in itself and lead us to.
I know of no better way
to bring opposites together. This is the exact reverse approach from that of
the violent conflicts we see all too often in the world, which indulge the
destructive temptation to annihilate anything foreign, anything unique and
different, often by using the most inhuman inventions technology has put at our
disposal. There is terrorism in the world.
There is war. For people
have an animalistic side, too, driven by the instinct to experience the other,
the foreign, as a threat to one’s own existence rather than as a fascinating
mystery. This is how uniqueness—the differences we all can see—disappear,
leaving behind a collective sameness where anything different is a threat that
needs to be eradicated. What is seen from without as a difference, for example
in religion or political ideology, becomes something that needs to be defeated
and destroyed.
War is the battle against
what lies deep inside all of us: something unique. And it is also a battle
against art, against what lies deep inside all art. I have been speaking here
about art in general, not about theater or playwriting in particular, but that
is because, as I’ve said, all good art, deep down, revolves around the same
thing: taking the utterly unique, the utterly specific, and making it
universal. Uniting the particular with the universal by means of expressing it
artistically: not eliminating its specificity but
emphasizing this
specificity, letting what is foreign and unfamiliar shine clearly through. War
and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites—it’s as simple as
that. Art is peace.
Translated by: Damion Searls