On stage, Bernardo and Francisco work to identify each other.

Since Francisco asks Bernardo to stand, we could imagine  Bernardo as sitting? But that would be odd.  Most likely, “stand” here mean, “present yourself.”

But which self?

Your standing unfolded self, apparently. 

Here Bernardo and Francisco begin the drama of recognition, a drama you and I live with everyday. 

If Shakespeare did not exactly invent the drama of recognition, he  is its chief explorer and has mapped it extensively.  As it is so central to the “who’s there?” problem, let me talk about this drama for a few moments. 

When we see someone across campus and wave at them and they wave to us we say, casually, that we “recognize” each other.  But to “re-cognize” someone, as a closer look at the word reveals, means not to know but to re-know.

Tomison, for instance, can recognize Sean on Tuesday because he knew Sean on Monday.

Yet now imagine if Sean looked like himself on Monday but on Tuesday looked like Simba or The Hulk or Harry Potter.  In that situation, Tomison would need quite a bit of convincing to believe Sean is “there.”  Luckily, Sean is not likely to change so much in how he looks in just a day and the fact that we more or less keep our physical form during our lifetime makes it possible to manage reality and to ‘re-know’ one another from day to day or even year to year. 

We can agree that overall it is a good thing the atomic particles that hold the world together don’t suddenly re-shape everything all the time.  This is one of the ways the limits of reality offer an advantage over the limitlessness of art.

But just because Sean has not metamorphosed physically does not mean all that much to the drama of recognition as we actually live it.

What if, for instance, on Monday night Sean got rejected from university?  Or accepted?  Now, who’s there in Sean’s body on Tuesday? Not Simba, perhaps, but also a different Sean, one that must be “re-known” by Tomison.

Look at the way that guy is hunched over as he walks?  Is that Sean?

Look at the way that guy is walking with his chest puffed out?  Is that Sean?

And what does it mean to be Sean now?  Which self of Sean is unfolding now?  Who’s there in the moment before he got the news about university and who’s there the moment after?

Who are you?  Sean, always Sean.

But . . . who’s there?

The guy feeling disappointed or proud about college.  

Do I need to tell you how complicated this drama can get if you see Sean acting a little more hurt or a little more arrogant than you think he should?  As someone you might now see as a player?  Do you say something like this? “I barely recognize Sean since he heard about college.”

And what about you?  What about how you see the world and so see Sean?  Has he changed in the wake of his news about college or are the eyes you look through shaded in their own way by pity or jealousy?  You say you barely recognize Sean but maybe he can’t “act” like himself around you because he feels you looking at him as a failure or with envy?

“Ever since I got heard about college,”  says Sean, “you see me differently . . . or don’t see me as who I am now, as I am . . . here.”

This sort of drama, this drama of recognition, becomes especially powerful and tricky because you are not only seen by some other person, you also see how other people see you.  You see them seeing you.

If you do not know what I mean by this, or if you do not think seeing others seeing you is a formative part of life, let’s imagine another scene, one as reductive as Sean and university: You are twelve years old and you go home with a bad grade on a test or, if you like, a good grade on your test.

You tell dad you got an “F.” 

Do you see him seeing you with shame and thus feel humiliated or do you see him seeing you with love and feel O.K.?

You tell Mom you got an “A.”

She says “good job” but you see in her eyes that your good grade is still not good enough. 

Or  . . . or . . . . is her reaction what you imagine you see?  And now you wonder if there is anything you can do to impress her.

Indeed, let’s even extend the script of this second scenario a bit:

Perhaps you are so desperate to see mom seeing you with approval that nothing she does will ever make you feel the pride and love you want to feel.  You have become convinced she is never going to give you the praise you want so that just like the friend who looks at Sean with too much pity or jealousy you look to your mom with more need and desperation than she can ever provide.

There is not enough love in the universe for a single child, Freud says (or should have said) to fill our bottomless need to be seen and known.  What’s worse is that often want to be re-known with just that much love every moment of our lives. 

As it happens, on the day you tell mom about your “A,” a friend has accompanied you home.  To them you complain: “My mom never celebrates my accomplishments.”  Now your friend says, in surprise, “really, she smiled and said ‘good job’ and I sure wish my mom would be that effusive about my accomplishments.”

You see something absent in how your mom sees you.  As a result of this you react with longing.  Yet your friend sees her seeing you with surplus.

As an audience member to your drama–a ghost–your friend exposes the problem not in how your mom is there, seeing you as never good enough, but rather in how you see her seeing you.

Obviously no single such moment shapes us forever and for the sake of example, these scenarios are simplified.  But such moments shape who we “are,” how we see, and how we see ourselves being seen. 

No wonder our being re-known in one moment is shaped by how we have been known in another moment, or all other moments.

And no wonder we get into ongoing debates about “our identity” with ‘identity’ being jsust another way of trying to capture all the ways we have been seen and want to be seen, a way of answering: Who’s there?

For despite how many steps I built into the drama of Sean and Tomison or you and your mom,  there are actually many more, since how we see ourselves being seen happens at the speed of light.

*

It gets still more complicated too because the drama of recognition takes place through the prism of imagination.

For surely as you go home with that “F” or that “A” and before you tell Dad or Mom about your grade, you imagine how they will react, how they will see you.  You may imagine with great fear your dad’s scowl or with desperate hope your mom’s smile.  You are so in your drama, imagining it, that whatever happens may be secondary or unbelievable.

Your imagination of what you fear or what you hope for as you walk home with your test informs (or pre-informs) your reality to such a degree that you can’t possibly see dad or mom accurately, may even doubt your friend when they give you an audience-like view. 

How can you be my friend if you do not take my side?  How can you fail to see my drama as I see it?

Is your friend failing to see what you see?  After all, you know your parents better than they do.  But then maybe their eyes were not clouded by your knowledge and imagination. 

Your friend, to say it again, just knows your parents where as you re-know them, or fail to re-know them, because of how you see them seeing you.    

Who has the best hold on the reality of all this?  Mom? Dad? You? Your friend?  Is it more informative to be the actor involved in the drama of recognition or the observer (almost a ghost), trying to know that drama?

Back on campus this might–might–sound like:

I just know Sean will be unbearably proud if he gets into college . . . I won’t be able to see him without resentment  . . . I will see him seeing me as “less than.”   . . .  As a result I will act distant and resentful towards him. 

Except that if you can think all this ahead of time you are much faster and more self-aware than the average human.  Because such back and forths, such, recognitions of our self in the drama of seeing and being seen are rarely this clear to us.  They happen too fast and ‘matter’ too much.  As we all know, as we all “recognize.”

*

In my description of the drama of recognition, any moment in life is a kind of atomic bomb, one second of recognition exploding into all the rest.

Again, you know it is not quite so severe nor quite so “dramatic.”

And yet listen to the conversations in the learning commons or dining hall or dorms and you might hear that what is often called gossip is really just people trying to understand or trace back or tolerate such moments:

Who did she think she was when she  . . .?

Do you think he really thinks you . . .?

Did you see how they looked at you when  . . . ?

All of these are ways of asking “who’s there?” Of unraveling, after the “act,” the drama of recognition. 

Hamlet (as all art does to some degree) freezes this light speed back and forth so that we can consider it. 

We can lay out the map of knowing and imagining, see ourselves looking through the eyes of a character, haunt their world without being known, go back over it as many times as we wish. 

If we go slowly enough, as I am trying to do in these posts, we may yet hang on to some part of what comes with knowing, being known, and being re-known.  An opportunity to grasp the infinite.

Because, “Nay, answer me” can be understood as:

Who are you now that you see someone here who can see you there? 

And,

Before I bring to you the whole drama of how you might see me or how we might imagine ourselves seeing each other:

“Stand, and unfold yourself.”

Unfold the flag you wave from across campus so I can see whether you walk with pride or shame.

Unfold the map of where you have been every moment of your life–parents, school, friends–so I do not disappoint you, nor you me, in how we see each other.

Unfold the script that has been written for you up to this point and which we will, now, write together as our future.

*

The friend who sees me seeing how I am seen by my dad or mom enters the real drama of my stage.  They are less a ghost than we are now, in the audience, watching Hamlet.

More matter.  Less a ghost.

Life does not allow us to step back altogether from the drama of recognition.  Art does.

In the theater, where we cannot be known by those on stage, we will not be re-known as someone we are not. We are free not to exist.

In reality, where we exist and are known, how we know and re-know one another will depend on the authorities we appeal to and create. 

More on this, should you be there, next time.

–Mr. Ted