After several years had passed I finally got hold of Chris. The good news is that he’s playing music again. 

The last time we spoke, maybe two or three years ago, he’d put all performing on hiatus. He’d been playing the piano from the age of two and performing since fourteen. By then he’d stopped enjoying it. It had gotten to a stage where he could sleepwalk through an entire performance; his piano solos were now a case of ‘running his hands up and down’, and the crowd still clapped just as loudly. In fact, he had noticed that the louder you played, the louder they clapped, so all he had to do was pound the keys. This was what he did. After the show, members of the audience would come and talk to him, congratulate him, conversations he could now recite by heart, so he’d started trying to provoke some sort of new response: he would act shy to a fault, or suddenly brash and abrasive, or introduce a piercing whinny every time he laughed. He still couldn’t produce a variation. Finally, he decided he might as well play himself in these interactions—which in the end, meant not playing music at all. He stopped performing, and after that none of us heard from him either.

Even with the first wave of the pandemic, where I got back in contact with other old friends, it had still taken me a year to ask his sister for his email. I was nervous about it. Chris had always been disorganised, but I couldn’t shake the fear that this long silence was more deliberate. I wondered if he had fallen into conspiracy theories, turning his back on me and everyone else out of some sort of silent, sudden hatred that we hadn’t seen and couldn’t undo. The longer it grew since I’d heard from him last, the longer I put off contacting him.

But the call went fine, and he was performing again (or at least, he had been before the lockdowns started). Not only that, but for the first time in his life he had been putting effort in: He was now the first one there and the last to leave. He helped others unpack and set up. He talked to everyone in the audience afterwards.

He had even been trying harder with his performance. Rather than playing impressive but cold music, he now worked hard to evoke emotions, and was more discerning in his choices. As the audience clapped at loud solos, he insisted on playing as quietly as possible. He once played an entire solo on just one note, leading the audience into a sort of torment before he let them go.

In his own words, now when he played, he was emotional, ambitious, and thorough—the opposite of his actual personality.

I stopped him short at this choice of words. It resembled the phrasing of a tricky passage in a W. B. Yeats poem that I’d been trying to puzzle out for years, ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’, where he describes his theory of poetic creativity, and what distinguishes the highest poetic achievement:

I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And, standing by these characters, disclose
All that I seek;

Laying out the argument here, and in other essays in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Yeats describes how the great poet conjures the opposite of himself in the writing process. Writing then becomes a confrontation between the self and the ‘anti-self’ (or mask; even anti-mask). The greatest art emerges in the attempt to become what one is not, where ‘the work is the man’s flight from his entire horoscope’, a transcendence of identity, or conquering of destiny.

This idea sits in opposition to received wisdom: unlike the advice to ‘write what you know’, or even ‘express yourself’, Yeats instead envisions great artistic achievement as an attempt at the opposite. Why he argued this, and whether he was right, I’ve struggled to determine.

I asked Chris what he thought. He said it made sense immediately in terms of the direction you choose in a performance solo. If you start by expressing yourself, there’s nowhere else you can take a piece beyond that. Put a forty-year old accountant in a mid-life crisis in front of a piano, for example, and the piece he plays will be stressful, and full of angst and sorrow. Where can he take the audience from there? If, through the climax of the music, this worn, balding man ties the tension with a white ribbon and concludes on a note of hope, the audience won’t believe him—the music won’t feel genuine. The juxtaposition is still sat right in front of them, the last note dwindling into parody.

In contrast, when you start the piece somewhere remote, jumping off from a point of rage, for example—then if a joyful pianist takes it somewhere joyful, it will end on a note of recognition among the audience, a clearing of the initial fog. It’s more important, then, that the ending ring true, not the beginning.

Brian Cranston’s performance as Walter White in Breaking Bad sprung to Chris’s mind too. He had found the character of Walt so different from Cranston’s that the effect had been jarring. But it is because of this contrast that, in the moments when Walt loses control, Cranston can loosen his hold on the character and allow his own intensity to break through. As a result, the most dramatic moments now appear the most convincing. It is as if Walter White was in fact the actor, his former life the charade—which could say the same of us performing our own daily lives.

Because of this, the theory of the anti-mask outlines a broad set of principles of art: 

Art has to travel; it cannot succeed in sitting still. 

It’s not the world as it is but the transformation that rings truer in art; because art is a form of enchantment at its heart, and not a form of documentation. 

The range of human nature that we find portrayed in the work of great artists is no parade of cages, no menagerie; it is the realisation, in every case, that there but for the grace of God go I.

The artist’s task is to find the way back to themselves through the forest paths in others; this consistency of destination is what we call style. Its success in the artist is its success in the audience, because the artist, too, is the other who leads back to us. 

Self-expression isn’t art; it’s therapy. 

All endings are as much a transformation as a return.

The above appears too fundamental to be precise or useful. It is largely what we already know, and more helpful guidelines on Yeats’s theory as a method are still unclear. But it’s also wonderful to hear a friend reaching that higher level of his craft, and hinting at a certainty of who he is through his exploration of what he is not.

It is a good development which settles in in your late twenties: when you understand who you are and pull the world in to meet you, rather than the young struggle of pulling yourself up to meet the world.