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Convergence-continuum.[amazon_link id=”B001VGQIQW” target=”_blank” ]Act A Lady[/amazon_link], by playwright Jordan Harrison, gets off to a fast start when Miles (Clyde Simon), a small time grocer or dry-goods man, tells–half pleads with–his accordion-playing wife, (Lucy Bredeson-Smith), that he and two other men, True (Wes Shofner) and Casper (Stuart Hoffman), from the local Elks club want to put on a play that will require their wearing ‘fancy-type women-type clothes.’ But despite the fact that it’s 1927, in Wattleburg, Minnesota, the play is for a good cause, Christmas for the kiddies, and the women-folk seem to be of a mind to allow it to proceed.

The three men get a director from Germany, a tough no-nonsense woman, Zina (Lauri Hammer), and a competent make-up artist, Lorna (Denise Astorino)–both of which they will need. For you see, the men aren’t going to put on any play for the kiddies, their going to put on an 18th-century costume drama: fancy-type women-type clothes and buckets of pasty white makeup: we’re talking whalebone and hoops, petticoats and gowns and enough over-the-top court-style intrigue to cause even the staunchest Elks club member to let his beer warm as his heart palpitates.

But the women folk underestimate the power of the petticoats and gowns, and soon each man is having a gender-bender of an identity crisis. Each man finds his inner woman, and soon its difficult to tell which man’s self is walking down the sidewalks of Wattlesburg. Whatsmore, even the women get in on the action led by German director and the devil-hunting accordion player–who breaks down and puts on pants.

[amazon_link id=”B001VGQIQW” target=”_blank” ]Act A Lady[/amazon_link] was by all reports the bell of the ball at the [amazon_link id=”0970904614″ target=”_blank” ]Humana Festival in 2006[/amazon_link] and is very ably directed by Arthur Grothe. Without a doubt, Clyde Simon, Wes Shofner, and Stuart Hoffman do a most excellent job and clearly have fun doing it. Each is smug and humble as a Wattleburg Elks man–excepting the playful flirtation of True toward Lorna and, of course, the playful flirtation of Casper toward True–and outrageously petty, willful, and conniving as an 18th-century lady.

As the murderous plot of the court intrigue revs up, the gender confusion in each character matches the intensity–culminating with each male character (in drag) having an encounter with his male self (played by the ladies in male dress). In true Jungian complexity, each male confronts his Anima and although the confrontation leaves much to be desired, the point is made that each man is undergoing a profound transition and change. But this change does not fall solely on the men, the women too (who get short-shrift in this script) find their Animus and along with it not only the necessity but the gumption to take control of things.

Ripe with plots, counter plots, sub-plots, and intrigues, [amazon_link id=”B001VGQIQW” target=”_blank” ]Act A Lady[/amazon_link] is a meeting between [amazon_link id=”0199540187″ target=”_blank” ]Moliere[/amazon_link] and David Greenspan and is a swell way to pass an evening’s entertainment.

I have been reading [amazon_link id=”0140150706″ target=”_blank” ]The Portable Jung[/amazon_link], edited by [amazon_link id=”1577315936″ target=”_blank” ]Joseph Campbell[/amazon_link], by way of introduction to Jung’s ideas. 

I have always been fascinated by Joseph Campbell and Campbell makes frequent reference to Jung and the notion of the collective unconscious, that the “universal similarity of human brains leads to the universal possibility of a uniform mental functioning.  This functioning being the collective psyche.” p95 Which in turn leads to the “interesting fact that the unconscious processes of the most widely separated people and races show a quite remarkable correspondence…in the extraordinary but well-authenticated analogies between the forms and motifs of autochthonous myths.” p94-5.  Thus Campbell’s book the [amazon_link id=”1577315936″ target=”_blank” ]Hero with a Thousand Faces[/amazon_link] and so forth.

But what really got me going on this subject this morning was that I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about human memory and computer memory and neural nets and moving the mind into a machine; partly based on strange dreams I’ve had, a screenplay I’m writing, and various pieces of non-fiction and science fiction that I’ve been reading.  The thought that got me going was the similarity between the notion of the Borg in Star Trek with the collective unconscious–rather, the Borg being a sort of mechanical incarnation of the idea of the collective unconscious: that is, one underlying level of intelligence that informs all collective “subscribers.”

I recently read the book [amazon_link id=”1587991225″ target=”_blank” ]The Age of Spiritual Machines[/amazon_link] by Ray Kurzweil, a read I highly recommend to anyone seeking intelligent, thoughtful notions of what technology, human ambition, and the future holds.  Kurzweil himself has spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and detailing the future merging of human and machine intelligence–as well as the physical (virtual?) body.  At some point, for instance, the bionics implied by the [amazon_link id=”B005LFQRTC” target=”_blank” ]The Six Million Dollar Man[/amazon_link] will not only not be out of the question but will be everyday facts.  Blind people will see and the deaf will hear via neural implants; human memory will be vastly augmented with neural implants that may very well contain the entire recorded history of humanity.

I was also thinking about the relationship between the function of myth and ritual in society and the collective unconscious and the social forces represented by the Borg in [amazon_link id=”B00005Y1NF” target=”_blank” ]Star Trek The Next Generation[/amazon_link].  After all, the function of myth is the oral or written representation of ritual and the function of ritual is to create the mythic “all-time, ever-where” in the present–the universally present moment, a sort of ontological trick of the drum-beaten, fire-lit eternal moment.  Specifically, the function of ritual is to make uniform the behavior of people in a society, so that all are “programmed” with the same written set of instructions and behaviors and directed toward a uniform goal.

This got me thinking about an Australian aboriginal ritual that I read about somewhere, in [amazon_link id=”B001HZD4QY” target=”_blank” ]Iron John[/amazon_link] or Primitive Mythology or in [amazon_link id=”0192835416″ target=”_blank” ]The Golden Bough[/amazon_link]; hold on, I’ll look real quick…

[amazon_link id=”0140194436″ target=”_blank” ]Primitive Mythology[/amazon_link] p88 “The transformation of the child into the adult, which is achieved in higher societies through years of education, is accomplished on the primitive level more briefly and abruptly by means of the puberty rites that for many tribes are the most important ceremonies of their religious calendar.”  Why these rites are so important, what happens if they don’t occur, and how this deficiency is everywhere present in America is the subject of an entirely separate conversation.

In the ritual discussed here, I will paraphrase to spare you all, the essence is that the boy(s) undergo a ritual in which he is marked, usually physically (broken tooth, circumcision, etc.), so that he 1) can never be the same child that he was, and 2) so that he now physically is like or similar to the tribal hero or ancestor.  With the Central Australian Aranda, as Campbell points out, it is thought that “children born to women are the reappearances of beings who lived in the mythological age, in the so-called ‘dream time,’ or altjeringa…” the point being to expand the boy’s ego “beyond the biography of the physical individual…joining him to his eternal portion, beyond time.” p89  More specifically, and to my point, is this “in the ceremonials that he will presently observe the tasks proper to his manhood will in every detail be linked to mythological fantasies of a time-transcending order, so that not only himself but his whole world and his whole way of life within it will be joined inseparably, through myths and rites, to the field of the spirit.” p89

So, I was thinking how like in many respects the concept of the function of the Borg is to the function of myth and ritual, in that in seeks to emasculate the importance of the individual and elevate the importance of the group.  Necessary, certainly, in a tribal society where a group of selfish individuals would annihilate the entire fabric of the social group and destroy the whole society. The same thing is certainly true in our society, we simply benefit from numbers–that is, those who are adult and focused on group goals are able to compensate for those who are selfish and focused on individual aggrandizement and the onanistic pleasures that attend it.  In many ways this is why the concept of the Borg is so terrible, as the infantile mind reels at the notion of the ego-destruction that follows inevitably from such a group-focused notion.

Is it possible that all the ambitious dreams and inventions of a society founded on the notion of “rugged individualism” will likely lead to a technological future in which every mind is connected to a vast, centralized machine, a Borg-like collective (un)conscious that rules us all?