Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

This elegant and ancient exchange of information, what I mean by the word presence, is not entirely automatic. A full exchange requires that attention be paid to the other. I sense the personhood of him or her; I choose to take in the signs. Similarly, I may choose to be as little present to the other as possible, shutting down the flow of signs as much as I am able.

Such behavior is, of course, necessary for most people in a highly populated world. I could hardly get through the practical obligations of my day if I made myself truly present to everyone I encountered—buying my newspaper, riding the bus, walking through town. I accept and am grateful for the fact that others pull in their signals, limit their own spheres of presence. In contemporary urban or suburban society, people who do not “pull in” are considered mentally ill. One sees such people sometimes on the street, attempting intimate human contact with everyone they encounter. Their capacity and desire for presence, if directed in some slightly different way, might make them into saints. But their indiscriminate search for presence and their equally profligate (or generous) offering of themselves provokes in a populous setting responses of fear, pity, anger, and ridicule. Our strong response to such people should teach us this obvious lesson: the power of presence. We do not want it forced on us; we do not want to offer it on demand. Presence is serious stuff, and valuable.

I should make the point here, to which you may have been objecting, that some aspect of presence is given and received automatically. Though I do not fully encounter the stranger who sits next to me on the bus, I am certainly well aware of him and I expect he is of me. I am, as an inevitable and necessary part of my animal self, always receptive for signs of danger, sex, challenge of status, or affiliation. At the same time, I send out messages about my own status, level of danger, availability. In a world composed largely of strangers, we keep these senses and messages active, but they are automatically regulated.