the Way of the Showman
Philosophical and esoteric perspectives from a modern day Showman.
Each season is different in its approach. S1 is essays. S2 is one book length attempt at Understanding Showmanship, S3 is conversations with remarkable Showfolk. The brand new Season 4 explores the relationship between Showmanship and Play.
The host, Captain Frodo, internationally renowned circus performer, director, writer, husband and dad lays out, in great detail, his practical performance philosophy for performers who seek to deepen the conversation with their audiences and themselves. You can find him, and more of his writing at: www.thewayoftheshowman.com
the Way of the Showman
147 - Imagination at the Heart of Reality (Showmanship & Play 29 of 30)
What if imagination isn't just fantasy, but the very faculty that brings our world into existence? In this philosophical deep dive, we explore the fifth and final criteria of play: that it is imaginative and improvisational.
Unlike previous episodes in this series, I'm not arguing that imagination benefits performers—that connection is self-evident. Instead, we're examining imagination as the arena where showmanship unfolds. From the initial creative impulse to the finished performance, imagination pulls things into existence, transforming fleeting ideas into tangible reality. Whether I'm developing a kung-fu card routine or connecting with fellow artists like Ben Hart, imagination is both the process and the destination.
Drawing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's profound distinction between "fancy" (mere recombination of existing elements) and true "imagination" (the fundamental creation of reality), we discover how performers participate in something approaching the sacred. When Coleridge describes imagination as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation," he's elevating our creative work beyond entertainment into genuine co-creation with reality itself.
The space where imagination thrives best is what poet David Whyte calls "just beyond yourself"—that frontier between inner and outer worlds where we momentarily forget ourselves and are restored by what we meet. Here, in this conversational intercourse with reality, true freedom emerges. Through improvisation, we learn to trust our impulses, revealing ourselves to ourselves through the choices we make.
What distinguishes a shopping mall clown wearing a plastic wig from a transcendent artist like Slava Polunin? One remains a shallow collage of clown elements; the other creates a living entity that reveals deeper truths. Intelligence—from the Latin "inter" (between) and "legere" (to choose)—means choosing wisely between options, the very heart of improvisation and imagination.
As we conclude this exploration of play and showmanship, remember that we play "because it's fun, because we want to do it for its own sake and our own sake, and because we love to explore the rules of all possible ways of relating." In play, we find our fullest expression as human beings.
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Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I'm Captain Frodo and, as always, I will be your host and your guide along the way as we set in on the final rounds of this very long and drawn-out project of understanding play, what it is and how it relates to showmanship. I started these episodes all the way back in February February 6th in 2024, when we did the introduction to this. But, as it is with the Way you think, you have one major mission in mind, like in a video game, but then there are all these little side quests. So the episodes came out intermittently but regularly from the beginning of last year. But then there was a long break almost a year later, at the end of January, when we finished we Are the Children, part one and two, and we dived into meeting Maria Seneca, where we talked about Freak Show for four episodes and that takes a long time on this podcast to get those four out. And then we had four episodes where we talked to Jay Gilligan about Mystere, which has been really great. Now that I was back in Vegas, it was great to meet some of these other performers who were actually in Mystere and in other Cirque shows that had been listening in on that. So that was very nice. So, hey, for as much.
Speaker 1:As we went on the side quest into two side quests there, chris Canfield brought us back on track in episode 136 and since then it's been all showmanship and play, because it was really exciting for me to have a man such as Chris Canfield, having directly citing my work, as an influence on the show that he did, the games we, which has actually been performed since last we spoke. So it would be good to catch up with him, work out what he is up to and how that show went. Always interesting to hear how a show goes from imagination to reality, which is the theme of today's episode. So, without further ado, we will go release episode 11, that number 11 consecutively about showmanship and play, since we spoke to Chris Canfield, which is kind of like the start of the part two of season four, if you will. Back in the day there used to be, we had a mid-season finale back in ages ago, and then we now are in the trot for the final two rounds. So let's get into the heart of reality and talk about imagination and improvisation. All right, so we are in now, the penultimate episode I always like to be able to use that word a penultimate a second to last episode and we are looking at criteria five.
Speaker 1:Out of the five criteria that we have explored so far, we have reached the final one Play is imaginative and improvisational. So should we just go through those one criteria. One play is so fun and enjoyable that we don't want it to stop. Criteria two play. This purpose is the play itself, not achieving further goals. We play because it's fun in itself and not because we want to achieve further goals. Three play is self-motivated, which means it's fun in itself and not because we want to achieve further goals. Three play is self-motivated, which means it's entered into voluntarily. Last episode that came out, we talked about how play has rules and how breaking those rules pretty much is at the heart of what we do as performers. And that brings us to the fifth and final criteria, which means we are getting towards the end, as how this directly relates towards showmanship, and that is that play is imaginative and improvisational. But I think I will approach this final of the five criteria for play a little differently than the others. I won't be focusing so much on showing or arguing how imagination and improvisation can be beneficial in our work as performers, as I feel that the deep and necessary role for this, for any creative performer, is rather self-explanatory and in the previous almost 30 episodes we have already explored this deeply Because if you make your living creating and presenting your creations for people, be they spectators or readers, you have to use your imagination every step of the way.
Speaker 1:Imagination is what allows us to create something from practically nothing. When a feeling like a simple sentence or an encounter with nature or culture triggers a creative impulse in us and we begin the process of making this impulse into a work of art, it is the imagination which takes us through each of the leaps from initial feeling to a fully realized creation. Imagination pulls things into existence like our ideas. I'm working now on a kung fu card thing where I catch a card with my foot using a toaster that is a card fountain, and as I have these ideas and the props that my father has built one of them, and as I work on trying to put this stuff together together, I am using my imagination to pull it into existence.
Speaker 1:Then I had a really beautiful chance encounter with Charlie Caper in the street in Edinburgh as he came out of a second-hand store with some empty cardboard boxes and then took me to their place, which turned out it was just a few meters away from where I lived and there was Ben and Nemo in the house and all of a sudden, charlie Caper had to go with his cardboard boxes and collared knitting needles. He had to go to do a tech rehearsal. And then I mentioned my idea oh, I want to do this thing where I catch a card with my foot and then Ben, as the encyclopedia that he is, could go. Hmm, I can think of I can't remember how many it was now, but I can think of three people who did this and then he listed them off and talked about them and talked about the different methods. Once I'd shown him a video of what I was doing, he was like oh, you could do this. And what about this thing that Ricky Jay did so great to meet fellow travelers in the imagination and improvisation where his ideas were? Just a couple of those things that he said went straight into my act, and it was lovely to hear that some of the ideas that we had spoken about for his act actually had manifested onto the stage in his current show, ben Hart, someone I'd love to talk to on a podcast too, but anyway.
Speaker 1:So this is all just to say imagination pulls things into existence, imagination pulls things into existence, and as we arrive at the big word of existence, we have arrived at one of the most important aspects of imagination, namely as we've said, I've repeated it many, many times the creator of our reality. Imagination is the creator of our reality. So let's look at the showman as an improvisational agent in the arena of imagination, because as a showman, I am a creator. I create stuff to show to other people. To do this, I use my imagination.
Speaker 1:I start with a feeling I'm interested in something, I want to learn something, I form a picture that inspires me, and the interest becomes an impulse to act. I feel something deep, special and particular, which I find so significant that I want to share it. To share it, I start a process of making something which aims to give others an experience which again could give rise to that same feeling in them. It's like I work hard to go this current thing. I'm thinking about ninjas. They are superheroes of my childhood, that, uh, whose powers weren't so much supernatural as to be just, uh, overly inflated, um, and I'm, and I'm weaving that in and I have these feelings in regards to that and I'm going to connect it to the catching the card with my foot and whatever, and, uh, and I and I and I now want to connect it to the catching the card with my foot and whatever, and I now want to give in some sense, that feeling that I have for them and that framework of connecting to these strange characters, almost mythical kind of martial artists, not almost completely mythical, anyway. So now I have these ideas and I want to show something and do something on stage that gives rise to that same feeling in my audience, and I have many of these kinds of impulses, things that makes me go. Hmm, this is interesting. And not all of these things manifest into acts or shows or poems, but some of these pursuits continue until a realizable, presentable idea emerges All along the way.
Speaker 1:This process uses my imagination. In fact, this is an imaginary process. My finished artwork is my imagination realized, and a caveat there is that it's my imagination realized, but as a showman I'm then interested in it, resonating with those who experience it when I do it, so that they're having a fun experience along the way that they lean in and want to be invested in it, etc. So, you know, I playfully present it so that it will connect with them. Now I use my imagination to picture the act and also to picture me performing it. Then the clearer I manage to make this picture in my imagination, the higher the chance is I will realize the idea and actually get to perform it for someone. You know, that's what we talked about last time if I really understand it and understand what it is that I am presenting, and then the audience can more easily find meaning in it.
Speaker 1:But, um, but the imagination's role does not end there. I also picture sharing that feeling or original picture or idea of ninjas or whatever, let's say by speaking a poem, you know, like ninjas or like, yeah, using poem, something that resonates actually through the halls. I also then, when I'm going through this, I imagine being in the audience when the act is performed and I can imagine every angle, every point point of view, and through this process I realize the original impulse in both senses of realization. So to realize that original impulse the idea of the ninja or the idea for the poem, it realizes it. And realization means both to gain a fuller grasp of something. And also, to realize something is to give it actual sort of physical form, so the imagination can realize my ideas. It's also I get to understand what the idea is and they get to understand what the idea is. And it also gives physical form. And the imagination is the arena for every part of this process. It is the playing field. So, to add to this, when I finally actually perform my creation, recite my poem or do this ninja act, I am creating an experience that will live on as part of the imaginary landscape of possibility and biography in my audience, of possibility and biography in my audience. That thing that I showed them will only live on inside them. I create art and I perform shows, and both are acts of imaginative creation. So this is why I think that the showman's arena is imagination.
Speaker 1:Now, how do I manifest my ideas and feelings? How do I bring forth and make my imagination real? To do that I have to experiment. I try one thing and then take stock of this first draft. Then I alter it, improve it and, on the way, whichever way I think or feel might be right. So I'm just going on a feeling here. I try something else. I'm inspired by the impulse of considering my first draft. It's like read it through and I'm like, hmm, oh, and reading what it is that I have written sort of fires me onto the next ideas. So I follow every whim and inclination that I might have. Sometimes I do this in my mind.
Speaker 1:Other times I practice acting stuff out in my magic room or sometimes even on stage before an audience, and whether I aim to arrive at a skill or finding the right order of words to make them express what I want to feel right order of words to make them express what I want to feel, what I want or what I feel or what I think, then I do whatever seems like the best thing to do in that moment to get closer to my goal. It's like always checking in along the way as I'm doing it. It's like, whatever I do, whatever order of words and actions seems right, whatever I have to say will guide my further actions and decisions, and always checking in and going like, hmm, is this getting towards this? Uh, uh, the idea that I have, or what the main idea is mixing ninjas with magic or whatever it is and then I let these, these previous thoughts, influence me and my next choices. So I am in a dialogue with myself and with what I am doing. So I'm in dialogue with my inner ideas and feelings and I'm also in dialogue with when I'm standing on the floor actually going through it, and sometimes I realize in this process that hang on a second, I've overwritten this, there's way too many words. And then I get up and you start to actually act it out and I realize, okay, well, I can just do it, just do two things. You don't need one minute of talking in between here or whatever.
Speaker 1:So sometimes, quite literally, by writing out questions, if I'm reading a draft and I sort of get stuck, or when I'm wondering something, I don't actually write the questions to myself. I look over whatever draft I'm working on and when I get to a place in the text which doesn't make sense or where I want to expand, then I actually ask myself what the possibilities are for expansion in this text. At this moment I'm faced with an actual question where I'm writing well, the cards are connected in my ninja thing. The cards are kind of connected to the ninja throwing stars, and then I'm going like how are they, how will I make them connect to this, and how difficult it is to catch a card or whatever, which links into what Ben Hart pointed to when I talked about throwing cards. But anyway, and then when there's an actual question written on the actual page that I'm writing and I'm sort of faced with an actual question, then I'm forced to write myself an answer, like sometimes even asking of the question is enough to make me know how to proceed. And asking a well-formulated question is, I have come to believe, that's often you're halfway to the solution.
Speaker 1:Now, much of the preceding examples has been about texts and ninjas, so this doesn't mean that it only pertains to writing, but I do tend to always even whatever stuff I'm doing. I am writing stuff down in notes or, as I do, on cheap notepaper, spiral-bound notepaper where I can tear pieces out and whatever. So any show or any creation aimed at being performed has a script. If you never write anything down beforehand, beforehand, the actions you go through and the words you might say still makes up a script For me. Actually writing it out makes me scrutinize and develop my ideas further and deeper, and a lot of what performers say whilst performing circus or cabaret acts bears witness to them not having been written down and scrutinized. But the script is not just about the word spoken. All actions are also part of the script.
Speaker 1:The script, be it written or stored in muscle memory, encompasses what I am thinking in my head, but also what I am thinking in quotation marks, with my heart and my hands. Each of these kinds of intelligence forms the other. It doesn't form it, it informs the others. So there's a reciprocal process between my ideas and my thoughts and how I feel about these things, or how I want the audience to feel, and then it's always inspired by the thinking that's done with my hands and my body.
Speaker 1:As I'm walking around in my room, I'm engaged in an exploratory conversation between these different kinds of knowing. Like in any good conversation, I am present and listening at least as much as I'm talking, and when I'm responding I try to shape this response so that it resonates with as much of what was said. Like I'm aware of what I've written in the script so far, so I don't always tear it down by coming up with new ideas. I try to be in response to what's already there, like that improvisational game. Yes, and so I try to say yes to what I have written myself, but I want to add to it, not always adding in more words or more time, but I want to add depth to it or whatever. I'm in a dialogic flow of call and response and, just like in any conversation, I make up my responses as I go on and going along. In other words, I am improvising, I tinker and I improve and I tweak and I correct and I take stock and I redesign my approach on the fly and by experience, and then I end up with more insight along the way as to what I'm actually saying. So, for as much as the final result seems like I already knew exactly what I was doing I don't know how many times I've performed something for a long time and then I add in a new line or a new gag or a new connection, and when I do that, I go. I can't believe that I have done this act 300 times and without this bit in it, because this is the crucial bit. So it never ends.
Speaker 1:The improvisational stuff and how, that the little improvisations and ideas that I have after I've made something, how I then arrive, um, at the new news, like like a mountain trip that I'm walking on, and I arrive at a new and I get this new, uh view where I can see the whole world and go, oh my lord, look, now I understand what I did before. Anyway, there's always improvisation and I improvise to arrive at my imagination and to use my imagination improvisationally. So not to arrive at my imagination. I like to use improvisation to spur on and to dig in and get into the imaginative realm, just as I use my imagination in an improvisational way by asking myself questions and holding my ideas lightly, as I spoke about with Jay Gilligan a bunch of episodes ago. So improvisation is how the showman acts as an agent in his arena of imagination. Improvisation is how the showman acts in his arena of imagination.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so to go quickly back over before we sort of move on here, to go quickly back over before we sort of move on here, just to revisit a little bit how these five criterias of fun and enjoyable and play are seemingly purposeless and how it is self-motivated, how play has rules and how play is imaginative and improvisational. Because we play because it's fun, because we want to do it for its own sake and our own. No, we want to do it for its own sake. Its own sake. We do play because it's fun and we want to do it for our own sake as well, because we love to explore the rules of all possible ways of relating. So I'll read that sentence. I wrote that sentence down so that I could get it.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to compress the five criterias into one sentence that we play because it's fun. Criteria one because we want to do it for its own sake. We do it for play's sake, because it's fun in itself, but we also do it for our own sake, which is kind of criteria three, which means that it's self-motivated, and because we love to explore the rules of all possible ways of relating. So all possible ways of relating comes through play and imagination. That's how we find all the possibles and we are exploring the rules of all this. So this is maybe a new sort of definition boiling down all five criterias we play because it's fun, because we want to do it for its own sake and our own sake, and because we love to explore the rules of all possible ways of relating. So yeah, that basically sums up all of the first four criterias and it has this fifth and final criteria baked into it, because it sort of infuses and underpins all other the all the other criterias and, as we've just talked about. It also infuses imagination and improvisation, is connected to, or at the heart of the very process of creating any kind of shows and, as we'll see, it might be of more than just performances. So all of the play criteria, they have an imaginative component that is like the soil from where that criteria or that aspect grows.
Speaker 1:Each one of the previous criteria are constantly generated by imagination and realized through improvisation, like I just talked about before, the rules are made up and tinkered with, and the motivations that fuels our endeavors. That all of this comes into being in the arena of the imagination which, as we have said, is the showman's arena. The showman is a playing human being, a complete expression of homo ludens. Imagination is the showman's playground and in this playground he acts through improvisation, by making it up as he goes along. The showman's particular imagination seeks to explore and discover the best games to share with his particular audiences. And this is the imaginative improvisation that we engage in when we make work. We sit down to write or get on the floor with our props and ideas, and then we follow our bliss as we play, we follow our heart, we let ourselves be carried away by what we say and do At this playground of ultimate freedom, the arena of the showman that is the playground of ultimate freedom To follow one's heart is to be guided by the principles of play. This, then, is our point of contact with the world and our fellow sentient travellers in it.
Speaker 1:Each of us are individual expressions of what is possible for human beings to be. We're all players in the game of being human. Each of us are individuals but also human. Each of us are individuals but also human. The traits of play are the traits of our shared humanity. Our preferences varies, but only like the waves of the ocean. The ocean is one body, even as the waves of the surface always manifest themselves differently, each wave completely unique, but still part of the ocean. We all surf those waves, and this is where all differences in human culture and interest is found. But just beneath this surface of constant roiling fun and ever-changing waves, we share a deep human sameness in the love of play.
Speaker 1:And here comes a quote. And here comes a quote man only plays when he is, in the fullest sense of the word, a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. Frederick schiller, uh, wrote this, uh, back in 1793. Yeah, let's try and read that one more time. Man only plays when he is, in the fullest sense of the word, a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays Friedrich Schiller. Now, this is the credo of the showman as a representative of the fully realized human being in both senses of realization. Human being in both senses of realization, that we're only playing when we are human and we're only fully human when we play. If we, then as show folks, if we are representatives of mankind, then we are fully realized human beings. We're both realizing it in coming to terms with our mind and grasping it, but also in the sense that we are making it real.
Speaker 1:But after all of this stuff here now, imagination is such a huge thing. So what kind of imagination are we talking about here? And I want to sort of this is getting more and more existential or we're getting deeper into everything here. So, because you know, imagination is a super complex word and it has many meanings and it's often used in a sort of belittling way, like when we say you're just imagining it or you just made that up. Used in this way, it denotes an escape from reality into mere you know, in quotation marks just make-believe. This is not the kind of meaning that I'll be focusing on. As truthful as this meaning is in certain contexts, there are other, deeper ways, though, to understand imagination, and that is to understand it as the human faculty which, quite literally, brings the word into existence for us.
Speaker 1:Now I want to talk about something great that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about. You know Coleridge, the guy that wrote the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a famous poem. He was also quite the philosopher, and in his book Biographia Literaria from 1817, in chapter 13, he made a strong distinction between these two kinds of aspects, these two aspects of imagination that we just talked about the just make-believe and the human faculty which brings the world into existence for us, and he used the word fancy to denote this first mere make-believe. So he goes oh, he called this mere make-believe, he called that fancy, and he reserved the word imagination for the latter kind of fundamental creation, or, as he's called it, the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and that's how he expressed it. So let's look at both of these two aspects of imagination fancy and imagination. Let's start with fancy.
Speaker 1:So what distinguished fancy, according to Coleridge, is that it is not really bringing forth anything truly new. It is much more connected to memory. It is the act of taking content from memory of ideas, had situations, lived, emotions, felt, etc. And then combining and recombining these in novel ways. Elements of memory are dislodged from their specific occurrence in time and space and then they're placed together in a mosaic, like puzzling together Lego bricks. In this way, images, actions or ideas fuse together into new ideas. We create these mosaics with our choices. We can freely connect elements from our consciousness in whatever ways we want to recombine them. And they are novel creations that take you. But this is what Coleridge says. He says that they are novel creations that take you. But this is what Coleridge says. He says that they are novel creations that take you away from reality into make-believe and fantasy. And for Coleridge, these recombinations and flights of fancy can be valuable in their own right as escapes from reality into stories and jokes and simply switch off and relax, which, of course, can be both useful and also necessary.
Speaker 1:Despite it having its place in human lives, you know, coleridge maintains that fancy forever will remain pieces joined together and never truly become a new whole. So this is the just or mere aspect of imagination that I have mentioned a few times. But from now on I will just call this belittling aspect or this small aspect of imagination. We'll just stick with Coleridge's terminology here and call that fancy. And that said, I will not be looking so deeply into this kind of aspect here, because that's I don't know. I think also that so much of what we do as performers is that we're reconnecting old ideas and putting it together and, as we'll look, the kind of imagination that we're sort of that I'm talking about here is that that is not understood so often, uh, so deep that it, you know, I'm not even sure how closely it connects to our everyday putting together of throwing cards and ninja stars and a toaster card fountain, but there it is.
Speaker 1:So, according to Coleridge, imagination is the universal faculty which shapes and connects the raw sensory data from the world into coherent experiences. Imagination is what connects us to and shapes our relationships to others, the world and everything in it. Like the world meets us with its sight and sound and feeling and all these, all that stuff comes into us. And then the connection of all, all of that analog input or whatever, of the sensory light that comes into our eye, that gets transformed in our head, uh, that this is the thinking process, kind of so.
Speaker 1:Imagination is the faculty for this. Most it's because it's kind of unconscious, this bit. We puzzle together the world and we don't think of it as it happening, we just go this is how the world is. But if we had eyes, that was totally different or we had a sense that was completely different from any one that we had, we will just take that aspect of it, like how does the bat you know when it's there and it's making those noises, very loud noises, and it bounces back. How does that thing feel to have you know?
Speaker 1:Anyway, there is a puzzling together of this which is different than just sticking together one idea with something else from memory. This is the basic creation of reality, because imagination, like this imaginative faculty, is like this, part of it is unconscious, it just happens. And in this way it is similar to the actual thinking process, because when we think, we are aware. We are just aware of the process of our thoughts. We are aware of our ideas and our thoughts, but not really on how thinking brings thoughts into being or how it makes us conscious of what we think, how we think, how this thinking shapes it. Only in very specific circumstances can we think about our thinking process, and even when we do, we are dealing with a very peculiar situation where we are using thinking as a tool to study itself, which means it has many problems and pitfalls.
Speaker 1:But similarly, imagination is constantly happening quite unconsciously as we walk through life, as it constantly synthesizes all of our impressions from the world and shaping our picture and understanding of reality. It makes holes out of the many individual sensory impressions. So there is a real world out there, with trees, traffic and tornadoes, and we encounter and grasp aspects of this world through our senses. Our eyes tells us part of the story, our ears tells another, and hopefully this is a complementary part, and so on with all of our other senses. And we know that each of our senses have their limitations. We can't touch something unless we are close enough to place our hand on it. We can't see unless there is enough light. Yet if we had eyes that could see infrared light, we could see a lot more at night, like how certain snakes and other cold-blooded creatures can, and apparently insects also, like mosquitoes, can see the heat of infrared light, which is what guides them towards warm-blooded people such as myself to feed on. So we know that there is certain aspects of reality available to mosquitoes that is only available for us humans through instruments like infrared cameras, and from this we can draw the conclusion that the world always will be richer and more multifaceted than we can immediately perceive it to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm realizing here that I'm, of course, going very deeply into philosophical things of of trying to distinguish what the thinking is, and that thoughts are just a product of our thinking and all this. But I find these to be like when I really look at what imagination is, I find colbridge's idea here of imagination that's like bringing reality, like this is the level one of it where we are actually encountering just the world and then it shapes it into what we experience. You know, I think this is really important when we deal with when people go, oh, do you have a real job or is this a serious thing? And they're going like, oh, yeah, we are dealing directly with imagination and I'm aware that a lot of the time we just deal with fancy, but we also deeply go into the imagination in the Coleridgean sense. So the process of perception is more than a passive intake of data points.
Speaker 1:The activity of human perception also has a thinking component as well as a feeling one. So we perceive and we think and we feel. So what we? Yeah, anyway, we see the white and the black of a trunk of a tree and we recognize it not just as a collection of colors on a certain material, we recognize it as a tree, a tree like many others, and we see it is a kind of tree very closely related to the other white and black trees. The shapes and like, this white and black leafy tree is similar, yet different from the green needle pine trees with their coarse gray trunks, which you know, is on the other side of the path that snakes through the Scandinavian woods where I'm thinking about these things so further.
Speaker 1:What a tree is to each of us varies dependent on how much we have meditated upon trees, on tree-ness, how much scientific knowledge we have about them, whether we have read of Tolkien's love and respect for trees, or how many times we've waded through the forest snow with our grandpa to harvest a tree for Christmas, and so forth. Each of these things influence what it is that a tree means to us Because, as William Blake puts it, a fool sees not the same tree, a wise man sees that a tree means to us. Because, as William Blake puts it, a fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees. He said that in the Proverbs from Hell. Now there are elements of trees which are added to the perception of the tree by the power of human thought, feeling and imagination, like all these thoughts that we have, like how Tolkien.
Speaker 1:He apparently said in a letter or something he said I am obviously much in love with plants and above all trees, tolkien said, and always have been, and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill treatment of animals. So, tolkien, he really loved trees and all this thinking about tree-ness and about it, how it, how it is like frozen in time and in on a. It functions on a different time scale than us, and all these things are his feelings towards these. Like he talks about how he feels that when somebody hurts a tree, how it it feels, like to him, like someone's hurting an animal. This is like feeling, which is his personal relation to it, and it's the thoughts of how. Like all of this comes together and it is a kind of co-creation between Tolkien and the world. He takes everything in and then the experience of what that is is the sort of sum of everything and it adds depth to it, like the wise man sees a different tree because of this.
Speaker 1:So this means that our grasp of the world it is not just a world being what it is where it stands out there, but to grasp the world is a participatory act. We participate in the creation of reality. Grasp the world is a participatory act, we participate in the creation of reality. And this is that thing of that thinking happens and we're only aware of the thoughts because we really remember this, that we are participating in this creation and that we, when we look at the tree when I look at the tree, it's different from when my daughter looks at a tree or whatever, so we don't really remember it, but I believe it to be true and in a certain but a very real sense, we are participating in the creation of the universe. That's a big thought right there, because the world becomes present for us half through perception and half through imaginative creation. Perception is always underpinned by imagination. We string together facts of perception into a necklace where the string they're all threaded on is imagination. We see the world we expect or get the world we deserve. Everything depends on the amount of and kind of imaginative attention that we engage in, this participation in the creation of our reality.
Speaker 1:Coleridge calls primary imagination, which he describes as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. What about that? That's a crazy sentence he describes. He says that imagination is a repetition in the finite mind, that's our mind, of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. That means he imagines our human imagination to be a reflection of the active creative process in the nature of God, the I am, this I am thing. This is a reference to when Moses asks God to tell him his name and God answers I am who I am. In other words, this kind of imagination, primary imagination, is a sacred act. So this is pretty serious stuff, not at all an escape from reality, but rather a sacred participation in reality. So yeah, I just threw in that little thing about calling it primary imagination Because, yeah, coleridge, he divides actually imagination.
Speaker 1:So we have talked about fancy, but then he also has what he has, these two levels of primary and secondary imagination, and for as much as these specific terms don't really matter to get at the heart of what imagination is. I think it's important to just look at it. So I thought I'd just read what he wrote, back in 1817, I think, where he wrote his biographia literaria, and he writes about this the two levels, or whatever, of imagination. And he says the imagination, then I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation. In the infinite I am. So that's what we've just talked about up until now.
Speaker 1:But then comes, continuing the quote the secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects as objects are essentially fixed and dead. So all right, let's unpack that a little bit before we go on. This is a little side quest here, just to understand that. But it will make sense when we sort of bring it back to going. What is it that we actually do so as much as, uh, reading these quotes it can, sometimes, when it's just so dense because that sentence I have had to work with that, uh, to really understand what it is that he talks about it's quite, uh, it's quite dense, you know, and that's you know. But the secondary imagination it is like, as he says, in that it is an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as an identical, it's, you know, in the primary, sort of. Anyway, I'm getting lost here, trying to, I'm just going to continue on, but don't worry too much about that quote. You can always find it if you wanted to dig deeper into it. You can always find it if you wanted to dig deeper into it.
Speaker 1:But the first aspect of true imagination, as opposed to fancy, for Coleridge is to create a reflection in our mind that captures actual aspects of existence. It sees the black and white patterns on the trunk and it sees this is a birch tree. And I won't say that it completely captures it, since reality, as we hinted at when we talked about how our eyes can only see certain parts of the light spectrum, that it is always more than we can grasp at any time. Reality is, but I would still say that our acts of perception, mind, heart and senses included captures reality, not fully, wholly and final, but reality nonetheless. When we see a bird grab a stick off, when I see him grab a stick off my lawn and fly up into the trees behind my house, I believe I have caught a glimpse of reality, and that it's beautiful. And this is an example of a primary act of imagination. I am connected to aspects of reality through this act of participative imaginative creation, seeing that which actually happened. I could see the trees from where I'm sitting and writing. I can see a bird grabbing it and I can see where it flies up into the tree and that it's a magpie that is jumbling together these sticks. And I'm connected to these aspects of reality through this act of participative imaginative creation. I am encountering reality and you know, when you dig too deep into imagination, you can sometimes lose track of what's real and what isn't. So.
Speaker 1:Coleridge's secondary imagination, I think. Why I'm even talking about this is that I think that this lies at the heart of poetic creation, which is what we are engaged in when we take the art of showmanship seriously, because this first part of just seeing something and creating an image of reality, an imaginative image of reality in our mind, we're not functioning quite on that level. So that's why I'm bothering to talk about this secondary imagination, because the secondary imagination is not quite as fundamental as bringing the world into existence. But it is not just sticking one thing next to another and following a preordained path either, which is what Coleridge calls fancy. Secondary imagination is possible for all human endeavors but is prevalent in great artworks, which is the example that I will use, because it is a more active and conscious process where an artist reshapes and transforms reality, but not just by passively reordering elements. It is more of a digestive process where impressions and feelings and ideas gets taken into the artist into me, for instance and they're then assimilated. Through this process. They're also being then transformed, assimilated and through the process, transformed into a new whole. And this process is more organic than mechanical.
Speaker 1:Colbert just reckons it's an example, like an example could be Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night, which is not a straight-up imitation of a starry night. It is a starry night painted after being digested and processed by van Gogh, not just in his mind, also like through the actual brush, through how he did everything, his skill, with his hands, with his emotions, it all comes out as a whole. Their emotion and expression is the important thing. The swirling sky is no longer passive and general. It becomes infinitely specific and personal. It shows us the starry sky, as we might have glimpsed it in the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft, as a painted manifestation of the great, indescribable mystery, fascinating yet terrifying in the same instant.
Speaker 1:Exactly what the painting means, or the scope of what emotions it can stir in us when we take time to imaginatively live ourselves into a viewing of it, can't be easily summed up. And that is the point. The world is richer, you know. Referring to that world is richer than what we can grasp. So whatever you can say about Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night will not once and for all define it.
Speaker 1:The nature of great works of art is that they continue to speak to us. They are wellsprings of meaning and they do not run dry. In literature we can see this in how, each decade or two, we need a new translation of masterpieces from other languages, for inevitably, translations will be the products of its time and by the interpretation of the translator, they will speak particularly to the specific era of humans that read that translation. Then, after 15-20 years, a new translation will come along and give new generations of readers layers of meaning that reveals a truth to them more apt and well expressed than the previous translation, whilst literary masterpieces like Goethe's Faust or Saint-Exupery's the Little Prince will continue to inspire new meanings and new wonderful translations. I just bought at a shop here in Haugesund, norway, called the Little Bookshop, who sells English books. I just found a new translation by one of the person who has translated Goethe's Faust and who recently have re-translated it, because he was. As soon as he got his copy of what he had written, he started to go hmm, maybe this is different, maybe Goethe was going this, maybe I could change this. And thus this is now a dude who has 15 years on, 20 years on, has reinterpreted his own interpretation of what Goethe had written into a language that we can understand now, because the great works of art transcend even their creator's own ideas and opinions about what their work is or isn't.
Speaker 1:So, my brother-in-law, chris, we were talking about the early days of the internet and I was talking about David Brin, a sci-fi author, and Chris said that he'd had a discussion with him a long time ago on the internet about whether the Lord of the Rings was about the world wars and whatever. And I was going well, he would, and Chris thought it was and David Brin thought it wasn't. And I thought that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle, that there is definitely pictures, because Tolkien was involved in the war and there's no doubt that that lives on in him, but I don't think that that was the story that he wanted to write. He didn't want to write an allegory of the world wars. So, anyway, I think that, and even then, if that was what he did, which I don't think it was then the story actually has a truth in itself and each one of us can connect to it. And the fact that so many people are connecting to the Little Prince or connecting to Goethe's Faust or connecting to the Lord of the Rings when we read it and every rereading allows us to see something different in it, every reading allows us to see something different in it that I think that the ideas are connected in that story and the meaning that we find in it and the understanding that we make out of it. That transcends even the author. So what they meant is not, or what they exactly meant might not be the final word in that, might not be the final word in that. So a key element of secondary imagination is the ability to convey deeper meaning, like in the example of the starry sky by Van Gogh, where the picture, although it has easily distinguishable elements like fields and mountains, a church and houses, seeing it affects us in a way that tells us that there is more going on here. It is a picture of a starry sky, but it is also more than that. It is revealing itself as multiple things at the same time, being at once a landscape while simultaneously being itself differently, as a state of mind, as a particular aspect of experience.
Speaker 1:David White, the poet that actually I've read this poem before on the podcast, but it continues to connect to me and I think his poem called Just Beyond Yourself really captures this co-creation of the world by primary imagination and our self-creation through secondary imagination. So he says in the poem, david White says Just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be Half a step into self-forgetting and a rest restored by what you'll meet Just beyond yourself. I'm repeating it Just beyond yourself, it's where you need to be, half a step into self-forgetting and the rest restored by what you'll meet. As we have already touched on, reality is a conversation between ourselves and the world and in this conversation, like White's notion of self-forgetting describes the role of listening deeply and openly enough to open an exceptional state of being. This is connecting back to what we talked about of how, when I'm writing a script and I'm in dialogue with that script, this is also happening at every given point with reality, at just the time, like David White describes it, the state of forgetting, or so at just the time when the road is closing together at the far horizon and deep in the foundations of our own heart. That's when you have arrived at this space. When the world outside and inside comes together, you arrive at this space, this exceptional state of being. The space can only be arrived at in the intersection between the outer and the inner worlds, not in one or the other, but in the patient awaiting in hope at the frontier country, the no man's land where these things are coming together, because if we only speak and forget to listen, the interaction is no longer a conversation, it's instead a monologue like this is what I'm doing here now, but I'm hoping that you're connecting to it that it's not a closed self-referential loop. I'm in here and this means that if we close stuff like that, we're too busy shaping the story that we're telling and too busy collating and collaging things that we already know, which means we are in the domain of fancy.
Speaker 1:To only talk is to forget, to step beyond ourselves. It is to forget the self-forgetting part of the poem, you know, to let the other, conversant, affect us. We are locking ourselves off from whatever is offered. Listening is this half-step into self-forgetting. The act of listening is to leave a room open in ourselves where what the world has to offer can flow into, where our imagination can do its magic of revealing new holes in the content of the world. When we take great care in what we say and then listen carefully, a new step becomes possible within us. Our words and a response from our converser, who we're talking to, be that a person, a mountain or a work of art, opens room for an internal further conversation in us.
Speaker 1:If we only focus on what to say next, just wait for the other to finish talking so we can continue, then we miss this subtle conversation, the encounter of our shared contribution, the space between, where no choices or naming has yet to happen. So that's like the pure perception, or so, before we name it. This is a space, and it is fleeting and effervescent. This space of not yet knowing, the as of yet unnamednamed, is an uncomfortable place of being. We must not hastily and irritably power on with too much of our own baggage and opinions, lest we will miss the insights that awaits us just beyond ourselves. We are so often too quick to think we grasp the nature of something. I certainly am, but I am making a conscious effort to leave more room in myself for what I meet, to let myself be restored by what I meet, to get more renewal of myself through what I meet.
Speaker 1:And the poet John Keats takes the ability to withstand this powerful human tendency as a sign of a great thinker. Since it is an act of not doing something, he calls it a negative capability. He describes it as being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. So to let the thing in question be what it is and not immediately classify, codify and name it too early. As David White puts it, in our conversations with reality, each offering up of ourselves must be followed by a taking in from the other other. This must have a moment, this in between those there's a moment and a space where the call and response can rest, to resonate with each other, where what we have to offer and what the world offers in return, this has a room to relate and the connections which will become available for us through our imagination. These two things need to percolate a little bit. Another word for conversation is intercourse, and this word is also short for sexual intercourse, from which the most fruitful encounters gives rise to entirely new entities, new life. What's true for sexual intercourse is also true for conversational intercourse in all its forms, spoken or as actions in the world.
Speaker 1:In this meeting room, where two things are kept alive and in relation, without being named, is where there is space to play. This is the space for true imaginative free play. In the true open-hearted encounter of two emerges a third space, a joyful kingdom of play, as Schiller calls it. This is the human playground, where the human being can reach its fullest expression as itself, in the kingdom of play which emerges in the intersection between the kingdom of forces and coercions of external influence and the laws and moral dimensions that lives within us, where the rules of the outer and inner world combine in ways that are only available for one player in one moment, in one particular space where they can act according to their own play impulse.
Speaker 1:In these rare and subtle moments, true freedom enters into the world. I believe this to be unbelievably important, that it is this, this tiny little space of reality. This is where free will comes in. I don't want to go on that whole thing because maybe that is just a belief that I have, but I believe that it is this. If there are any freedom, it is found in this particular little what do you call it little space of reality, the space between. This is where freedom enters into the world. In this space which is there before the possible or the endless possibilities is actualized into a particular thing, then we seek the intelligence of play to manifest it. This space is the heart of the kingdom of play. To manifest it, this space is the heart of the kingdom of play. Play is to sit in this space without irritably reaching for fact and reason and for a stolen moment at least, we can manifest the five criteria of play, guided by our own volition. In joyful love of the experience, we can imaginatively wait in hope of glimpsing with our imagination new rules of aspects of the infinite game which we have yet to discover and learn from. So the manifestation of play of all the five criterias, meaning this one more time that it is that we are guided by our own volition and joyful love of the experience and we can imaginatively wait in hope of glimpsing with our imagination new rules of aspects of the infinite game which we have yet to discover and learn from.
Speaker 1:All right, to finish up today's episode, I would just like to talk a little bit about improvisation, since that is the second aspect of the fifth criteria, and it's kind of weird, but we can actually be good at improvising. It's kind of weird that someone can be good at making it up as they go along and taking decisions in the moment. But this contradiction, like many things, is only something which on the surface seems contradictory, but this is the case. We can be good at it. You know, we can practice taking decisions and prepare to be spontaneous in such a way that we ourselves and or audiences enjoy our choices. There are so many things that steer us that unconsciously or consciously guides us towards our choices and our inclinations.
Speaker 1:To take improvisation seriously as a field of study shines a light on how we express ourselves and also on what lives in us that finds an expression and what happens to not find an expression. To make the process of paying attention the actual process of paying attention to what lives in ourselves and how we go about integrating this into our interactions with the world as we encounter it, is one of the most valuable pursuits a person can engage in. The process shines a light at ourselves and our own inclinations. We gain understanding of it if we pay attention when we do this. Further to this, it also teaches us how others perceive us. As we go on in our exploration and practice, we get a better grasp on how these two things overlap. We learn what our impulses are that most pleases ourselves, but since we get constant feedback from the faces and sounds and actions of our fellow improvisers if we're doing this in an improvising class, then we are fed a constant model that tells us how we are perceived and enjoyed or not enjoyed by others.
Speaker 1:Perhaps this is pertinent to me, because my daughter has started doing improvisational theatre and I couldn't be happier. Add to this that it was not something that I got her interested in or pushed her towards, and we have a perfect crescendo of good feelings in an old performer such as myself. Not because I think she should become a performer. I really hope she pursues an education beyond performance so that more options will be open to her. I always thought I would have an education or even an occupation in addition to my performance. My father loved magic and we performed together a lot, but he always had another job alongside the shows. I've never had that job alongside the shows. I've never had that. When the pandemic came, my one skill and passion became quite literally illegal. I rediscovered then the value of an education that can open other doors than the hearts of audiences. No, the reason I am so happy my daughter is getting into improvisation is its ability to teach the exact things of self-discovery. To use Erwin Goffman's phrase, it teaches you the presentation of self in everyday life, and I believe one of the looming problems of our time is that young and old feel lost and without drive and direction, that they feel out of touch with their passion. Playing in a way that fosters improvisation and imagination, like what happens in improvisational theatre and theatre sports, trains the exact skills that lets us hear that quiet voice of our bodies, the whisper of our desires, of our minds and feelings of our heart and in this sense improv can be an antidote to this lostness. And in this sense, improv can be an antidote to this lostness.
Speaker 1:Impro-theatre, as Keith Johnson called it in his 1979 book called Impro, is a great tool to keep the child in us alive by transitioning play into a more grown-up kind of play, by calling it impro. The free play of childhood is where we develop the compass to navigate the world and find our way. With an ever-growing curriculum and heightened performance pressure to perform well on standardized tests in schools, the play is vanquished from the children's everyday lives. The school activities that are steered and led by adults are also at an all-time high, each with their own sets of clearly defined goals and practices that are done to become better at something, and these things are, as we know by now, they are, at odds with play. Play, as Criteria 2 reminds us, is of value in and of itself, not to get better at something else, and the value of play is in the playing. Any further benefit comes as a byproduct. The impro theatre games that my daughter plays are won, as they call it, by whomever happens to take the best or funniest or saddest, or whatever rules they invented for the game they played. That's the winner of those it's like which, and these things changes for every game. Along the way, she will learn about what games she likes to play and maybe even what games she enjoys, after me and her have had a particularly good time before her class, or the contrary, if I have lost my patience about some adult preoccupation like having a tidy room or something of the kind, what games does she like when she's not feeling her best? Maybe she learned something about that there.
Speaker 1:You know, play and playing strengthens our inner voice and it teaches us how to pay better attention to ourselves and our way through the world which, when it comes down to it, we must walk alone. We are not alone in the world, but only you walk your way. Others come along with you lovers, teachers, children, parents but only you walk all of your way. You must set your goals, your destinations and choose which guiding stars to follow. To set your course by. Play is the education you need for this, improvisation a tool in that education. So what is, then, a wise player? To sum this all up? Well, not to sum it up, but to get to the end of this penultimate episode.
Speaker 1:Improvising imaginatively teaches you to trust that your inclinations and impulses are important and can be trusted. But this is where the practice is important, because there are plenty of impulses one might have that might turn out not to be our true desires. The path of improvisational play exposes ourselves to ourselves. It exposes ourselves to ourselves by having us continually needing to take choices based on our own decisions. In the moment, the sum of these decisions not all of which were the best choices teaches us what and which of the impulses that emerges from us that actually resonates with our own ongoing idea, or ourself. True ongoing ideas like what is that we actually care about in there? We took that. Maybe we just went for a simple joke in a scene, and then that wasn't ourselves, but it still is somehow as part of us. How do we learn about the one that we actually want to identify as? So with the choices, you get to take lots of choices and we look back at those choices and go, hmm, so of course the whole of us is one person, but we are also multitudes. Human beings are born unfinished. We're not so much human beings as human becomings. Our entire life is a becoming. We become ourselves, but we become ourselves differently all the time and in each relationship, be they to people, places, things or any other encounter in reality or, for that matter, in imagination.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, making the right choices is the true meaning of the word intelligence. The word is made up of two Latin words intel, which is a form of the word inter, meaning between, and the Latin word legere, which means to choose or pick out. It's the wise choice. In this light, intelligence means to pick out or choose wisely between all the options. Being mindful and practicing how to choose wisely is, then, the definition of intelligence. So this is what we find at the heart of improvisation.
Speaker 1:So fancy and imagination are then in the eye of the beholder. It's hard to work out, so let's just finish it up by looking a little bit at these two things that started it all Colbridge's ideas of fancy and imagination. Because exactly how can we distinguish between mere fancy and a true poetic creation, which Colbridge calls the secondary imagination? As far as I can tell, this is extremely difficult to work out Fancy being created out of slapping things together and secondary imagination being the result of a more organic process, as he describes it. This, I think, is actually indistinguishable.
Speaker 1:Some examples, like a clown in a shopping mall wearing a yellow plastic clown wig, handing out badly made balloon poodles to children whilst their parents sloth about buying stuff, might be on one end of the spectrum, whilst Mary Oliver's poetry, beethoven's music and the films of Milos Forman might inhabit another end of that same spectrum. The plastic clown slaps together elements which adds up to a collage of clown. The shopping parents would be right if they called him a clown. Yet he would be nothing more than a caricature, an empty placeholder for what a clown can be. He is the reason why parents think clowning is childish the fact that he doesn't go any further than the parts he's slapped together. What you see is what you get with him. He is what he looks like a shallow, grease-painted face with a plastic red nose in the middle of his face. If we scrape the thin layer of white off, it will reveal the face of a person that's pretending to be the clown. The very shallowness and inability to move you deeply makes him an example of fancy.
Speaker 1:Yet with the great clowns like Slava Polunin, famous around the world for his snow show, we immediately see through the simplicity of the wild-haired clown into the joyous kingdom of play. His bed becomes a sailboat and effortlessly he brings our subconscious alive. He breaks down the hardened barrier between the real child that you were and the child that still is alive somewhere inside you. He shows you that clowning is not childish, it is childlike. The key attribute, of course, of child being childlike is to be playful. The feeling that permeates an encounter with Slava's clown is that if you scrape his face or tear at his nose, he will bleed.
Speaker 1:This makes Slava's clown a creation of secondary imagination, alive and real as a whole living entity which, as all life, always will be more than what we can exhaustively say. This means that the heart of the matter here is not to the exact method by which an artwork is made, but the experience that it affords the experiencer of the creation. It's what the audience experiences. If the work reveals deeper truths or experiences that weren't obvious before, I would say it is a work of secondary imagination. If the coming together of parts is reliably experienced as a whole, unified and new creation, as if all the elements belong together and combinatorially makes up one which is more than the sum of its parts, then I believe Coleridge would call it or say that it has been, that has been made by secondary imagination. I'm just making this up, you know, trying to understand that long sentence we read half an hour ago. So this means that we might find works of secondary imagination in the stochastic, random process employed by Jackson Pollock's action painting and in William Burroughs's cut up technique. I mean, jackson Pollock whipped paint onto canvases and William Burroughs literally, you know, cut up pages that he had written of any kind of text and then he was sticking it back together again into new sentences and pages, so making a collage of his own work. And both of these techniques could lead to either works of fancy, which means that they would be decorative and have some sort of novelty value, but they could also be experienced as glorious examples of secondary imagination, poetic creation.
Speaker 1:The important thing that I come back to again and again is the experience of the audience. It is the feeling that they have when they watch an act performed, a painting hung, a piece of music played. The feeling of the performer is also important, but I know from experience that my own feelings of how well I performed in my act at any particular night does not reflect how my audience experienced it. I have had nights where I was deeply unsatisfied by my work. And upon exiting the big top, I am faced with spectators that would no lie in their fire tells me how much they enjoyed it. So the audience are the final bastion of judgment on whether what I did was but a slapdash job of random actions, words and situations, or if it was a transcendent experience. I believe imagination is the deciding factor in shaping the outcome of their judgment. If their faculty of imagination is set to fancy, if they think the work of a showman in a circus is mere frivolity, chances are they will experience the act as a work of fancy. But if they, consciously or otherwise, think there is value to be found in the circus experience, they're more likely to engage in an act of secondary imagination. I don't know if Coltridge ever thought this way, using fancy and imaginations as modes of perception rather than modes of creation, but if he didn't, I think he should have All right, folks, that's all we have for today, and I would just like to plead with you If you do enjoy what's going on here and you get value from it in any way, please bring it up to a friend.
Speaker 1:Tell a friend that the podcast exists and that you like it and point them towards it. I would be very, very grateful if I met you in the street, maybe in Edinburgh, maybe in Adelaide, maybe someplace out walking in the forest, like has happened, where people go, greetings fellow travellers or give me a little quote from something that I say. It still pleases me to no end to know that there are people out there who are listening to this and that gets value from it, and I would love for more people to find out about it. And since I am so absolutely terrifying, terrible to a fault, in remembering to tell people or to work, send out stuff on the internet about it, I am relying on you to be my ambassador Show people, point them towards the way and, on that note, until next time, take care of yourself and those you love, and I hope to see you along the way as we get to the final and exciting episode of this play and showmanship journey.