The ancient Greeks loved their theatre. If you had visited Efes in Turkey, the ancient Ephesus, you would have gone to the theatre and sat in one of the seats, hewn out of the bare rock of a mountain, looking down on the small stage deep below, with a backdrop that would make the set designer of the most lavish Broadway show cringe with envy: the full expanse of sky and turquoise sea. Who can beat that? Ancient Greeks and Romans looked down, with their little amphoras of popcorn, watching Sophocles and Euripides. Maybe even the apostle Paul, a regular visitor to the city, sat here watching some heathen play after an exhausting day of proselytizing. Even an apostle needs some downtime, after all. The Bible doesn't relate if he was into theatre. Maybe not, he seems to have been rather the serious type.
But I digress. What I really want to talk about is the peculiar style of acting in Greek theatre: all actors wore masks. This mask was called a persona. The word is derived from the Latin: per sonare, sounding through. The mask amplified the actor's voice, so he could even be heard in the cheap seats. Soon the word acquired the meaning we use today, The role that one assumes or displays in public or society; one's public image or personality, as distinguished from the inner self.
Every culture has its own favorite mask to speak through, a favorite persona to present to the world. The quintessential persona of our culture is The Happy Smile.Â
Everybody smiles all the time or at least tries to. In photos, everyone smiles: the K12 student in the class picture, the student in the graduation picture, the CEO, the President, even the clergyman smile when photographed as if they are having the time of their lives. Does anyone ever look serious in a Selfie? Maybe sulking or pouting, but not like a serious person. I imagine a blue sky, the warm rays of the sun being unable to reach the surface of the Earth because they are blocked by a gigantic Cloud of Selfies, billions of faces, all smiling inanely in the camera: young and old, man or woman, straight or gay, of all colors and sizes. Not smiling on a Selfie is one of the deathly sins of our generation. For an alien scrolling through Instagram it would look like the family of humans was composed of nothing but nitwits!
The Smile is cultivated from a young age. Even babies have been brainwashed into smiling. Mothers try to elicit smiles in their children from a young age. At first, the baby doesn't understand: why is that woman is behaving in such a strange way, what does she want from me? After some trial and error, the baby understands it is a smile his mother wants, so it thinks: I better go along with this nonsense, otherwise I might not get my next breastfeeding.
Two moments made me acutely aware of this phenomenon.
The first one was during a Vipassana retreat. One of the rules of the retreat was no talking and no eye contact. After a day or two, in the restaurant, we just sat, slouching, staring past each other. All pretense had disappeared, the persona evaporated. I realized how all my life, unconsciously I had molded my face into a smiling mask. In the retreat, any incentive to shape your facial expression, or even your body, disappeared. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see the slouching bodies and unmolded faces of the other participants. Their faces looked sagging and not happy nor smiling. But I experienced a sense of inner peace. It was so relaxing not to have to present some happy face to others! Every single one of the participants looked depressed from the outside, but inside, one felt happiness. Just the opposite of how things are in our society.
A few years later, I was waiting for a friend to arrive at my apartment. I looked down in the street and saw her arrive on her bike and attach it to a lamppost. Her face didn’t look happy, even strained. When she arrived at the door, she was all smiles. I am sure it wasn’t a conscious thing on her part. From then on, I began to observe this phenomenon in other friends as well and in myself. I understood this was a general phenomenon: when people imagine being unwatched their face is different.Â
The preferred societal persona says something about a culture, it is an expression of an ideal to strive for. This doesn't reflect well on our society. Our culture's ideal to strive for is an effortless, fun life, ultimately superficial, a perpetual coca-cola ad.
In Western art, until the 17th century, no one smiled. Jesus never cracked a joke on the cross. Only in the 17th century Netherlands did Frans Hals and Rubens begin to draw and paint smiling faces. Still, most people in portraits looked solemn. In the 19th century, nobody ever smiled. In photographs, everyone looks serious. The ideal the Victorians strove for was, obviously, seriousness and industriousness. It is impossible to imagine Darwin or Bismarck smiling in a photo, or at all!
In ancient Greek theatre, you needed a mask to be heard. Nowadays, this is not necessary anymore, so take off your mask! Try for 15 minutes a day, while in public, not to contort your face into a fabricated smile. Even better, be aware of what your face and body do while in society and be amused at the follies of human nature. Be gentle with yourself and others, for we are vulnerable creatures, easily broken, like Greek vases in a sunken ship on the sandy seafloor, deep beneath the turquoise waters of the sea.