Mini-Cast #4 - Proof by David Auburn - Final Draft

Proof is a play. It knows nothing about math and everything about mental illness. Math in Proof is what Alfred Hitchcock called the 'MacGuffin', which means the device that moves the plot. It doesn't matter what it is. Proof barely mentions math. Where's the understanding or atmosphere of the math it portrays? The same play could be about chess or sports.

I don't know much about mathematics either. The last math I learned was when I was three and my grandfather taught me algebra, and since then I never learned any high math. If Proof mentioned math except in passing, they could have put it right by me and I'd believe anything they tell me. Proof barely makes the effort - a couple mathematical anecdotes - that's it.

Higher mathematics isn't so essential there needs to be great art about it. But if there's a great play about math, everybody agrees it's Copenhagen by Michael Frayn - about nuclear and theoretical physics. It recreates the mid-WWII meeting outside Copenhagen between the half-Jewish Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr's former assistant and head of the Nazi nuclear program. The uncertainty of what they discussed mirrors the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle - atoms and electrons are so small they can't be observed in their natural state because light's mere presence changes their movement. The principle is a metaphor for their relationship's uncertainty, their memories' uncertainty, our uncertainty about the meeting's purpose, our uncertainty about World War II's lived experience, the uncertainty of war, uncertain lives under totalitarianism, and the uncertainty of being itself.

But I don't think the majority of the characters in Proof have a last name, let alone do we ever know  Proof's mathematicians' discoveries. At the story's center is the relationship between father and daughter - the father a mad genius, the daughter possibly as well. The father, Robert, is obviously modeled on John Nash, a Nobelled mathematician with schizophrenia, made famous by A Beautiful Mind. I hated that movie, loathed it, but even A Beautiful Mind tried to explain Nash Equilibrium - though mathematicians said they failed.

Yet as a case study of mental illness, Proof is one of the most convincing I've seen, and unlike math, I'm in a position to observe its veracity with expertise. I'm sure we will get into reasons why as the podcast continues.

What further compounds a disturbed mind are the vagaries of human behavior surrounding a mind's personhood. A disturbed mind, thoughts already compounded by mental and emotional delusion, contends with behaviors of people dealing with them, whose true motives are never ascertained. There's no one worse at understanding others' motives than a person already beset by delusion. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you, and even the motives of those who love the mentally ill are compounded by resentments, doubts, even exploitations. The vast majority of the mentally disturbed are wired to view their lives with excess negativity rather than positivity, so the petty betrayals of loved ones at their worst are exaggerated by our brains - still further complicated by the inevitability that complaints about our treatment are written off as the illness's exaggeration rather than realistic complaints.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a more admirable artistic rendering of this process than Proof, where vagaries of romance and family wear the mentally ill down until they resolve to live with as few attachments as possible, because demanding anything more may ensure a horrific cocktail of grief and terror that lasts every day for months, years, even decades.

The reciprocal to mental illness's ambiguities is the unfashionable notion that the cerebral overactivity of mentally illness enables creative leaps which the more stable regard as otherworldly. Even though today's intelligentsia are as dissatisfied as ever, few notions are more disparaged today than one that suffering is a necessary part of inspiration and preparation.

And this is a crucial point. Many non-creatives use the idea of the 'suffering' artist to keep creatives in squalor. At its core, it's little different from the Sermon on the Mount's quote: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven." This is the old justification used to keep Christian masses suffering while priests accumulate all the knowledge and wealth for themselves. Furthermore, the suffering creative is an excuse for powerful artists and intellectuals to behave abominably.

So let me conclude by positing a different theory of the suffering artist, not original though I don't know its origin: An artist's suffering isn't what creates great art, creativity's motive is often to create a distraction from suffering. The easiest way to stop a destructive obsession is a constructive obsession. Only somebody in pain would endure the masochism of a perilous task.

Psychologists sometimes speak of 'depressive realism,' meaning depressed people, free from positive delusions, see the world more accurately. This is ass-backward. If the mentally ill see parts of the world more accurately, it's because their brains are wired excessively for that kind of reason to the detriment of other kinds. The obsession required for a brain to more accurately perceive things means that other perceptions go to seed, and that lack of perception severely damages a person's life circumstances - which depresses them.

Creative people are different from uncreatives, not worse, not better, but a large part of your legacy is how you deal with people different from you, and the closest people different than you are creative people. They, more than anybody else, render your lives' judgement for posterity. Be nice to them, because whether deliberately or accidentally, we render all manner of creative means for ironic punishment.