Jacob Wren > Quotes

“If we make a union in these fields, is there anything we can do to ensure it doesn't become corrupt? Or that later it doesn't only look after the people who work here, we just look after our own, and everyone else can fend for themselves? We need to fight for ourselves, here and now, but we also need changes so large and impossible they encompass the entire world.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Often the idea of survival is mentioned in relation to capitalism, as in the phrase ‘economic survival’ or the thought ‘I need to earn money to survive.’ However, in our endeavour we hoped to sever survival from economy, striving for a purer form of modernized surviving. Our fight would be a fight for survival and the fighting itself would be our life, not in the sense of employment but in the sense of a full reality with all of the inherent risk, complexity and completion that living implies.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“The most effective lie is always the closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie. There are various approaches for understanding dreams: as evidence of some deeper psychological truth, as alternate realities, as subtle yet surreal mental reprocessings of our daily lives, as experiences equally valid to those had while awake. Due to the acuity of their strangeness, dreams practically call out for interpretation. However, since we don’t accurately know what consciousness is, since we don’t know precisely what or how we experience being awake, why would we be able to know what happens when we dream? There are also various approaches one might use for understanding a lie. But one aspect generally agreed upon is that to tell the complete truth, and only the complete truth, at all times, is a disaster. There are different ways of being honest.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“There is a difference between literature and just writing in your diary. I think perhaps the difference can be measured in degrees of pain. Hard work is also a factor. When I abandoned poetry there were so many questions lost to me as well. It remains astonishing to me the degree to which poetry has lost all value and meaning within the conditions of what I loosely refer to as corporate capitalism. Absolutely amazing.”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“And my theory about professional artists was as follows: artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community. Instead they are those individuals most willing to exploit their own creativity and inspiration, most willing to gain personal profit from their unconscious and its emanations, those with the most missionary zeal for the dissemination of their own idiosyncratic perspectives. Questions of pure creativity clearly lay elsewhere.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“But no, I’m sorry. I can’t end there. I haven’t yet said everything I want to say. A little girl is at school, out in the playground with her friends, and she sees a flower and says to her friends, just thinking out loud, wondering gently to herself: Do you think flowers have feelings? And for the rest of the day her friends tease her relentlessly, with every new opportunity that arises. Do flowers have feelings, that’s so stupid. Right, flowers have feelings. All day and for the rest of the week: stupid flowers have stupid feelings and that little girl feels she is never going to say anything like that ever again. She has already learned that when you open your heart or express genuine, innocent curiosity or wonder about the world, your friends will pounce on the opportunity and use it to hurt you as viciously as possible and there is nothing anyone can do to protect her. It’s simple stories like that that really break my heart.”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“I don't really have any positive vision of the future, don't know what kind of world I'd someday like to live in or if it's even possible to achieve something better than this. I only know that the billionaires are attacking us, again and again taking measures that serve no other purpose than to increase their own wealth and debase all other aspects of life. And when you are attacked you must fight back, in whatever way you can.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Capitalism is not the simple desire to make a profit. Capitalism is the fantasy that growth can continue at a consistent rate indefinitely. When a child is young, it cannot yet imagine being an adult, so it thinks it will keep on growing forever. The fantasy that you can grow forever is exhilarating, one of the many aspects that make children seem so alive. We live in fantasy, all of us, all of the time, to a greater or lesser extent.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“{T}here are millions of books published every year exposing the world's corruption, and the corruption of the world only increases. Each book, in its own way, has teeth but nothing to bite into. No clear way to attack. There are also millions of books pushing for things to remain the same, or teaching you how to make money at the expense of others. Everything balances out, but the balance is so deeply imperfect, always tilting further and further towards the worst.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“There is pleasure in reading a version of myself I know in my heart could never exist, since mine is not an iron mind coldly calculating every possible option and outcome. Instead I am a businessman who loves excitement, loves tension, loves risk and the unexpected, and just happens to possess an extraordinary, on occasion even miraculous, degree of good luck.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“He tells me he can't believe how bitter he has become, how sour, that all his life he had been one of the most fun, one of the happiest, one of the most joyous people anyone knew, and now he was like a crumpled piece of steel covered in rust. The way he describes himself, a 'crumpled piece of steel covered in rust,' I don't think I'll ever forget those precise words or his voice as he said them.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“The almost complete, but temporary, loss of self that was involved - a loss of self present in all intense sexual encounters - doubled as an open door through which one could enter new areas of thought, as if one had left one’s old self behind, as if within this new, amorphous territory, in which one was no longer one’s previous self but had not yet become anything else, infinite modes of discovery became possible. The intimacy of our nakedness made us feel, or at least gave the illusion, that we were so much more directly engaged, both in dialogue with the larger world of ideas and with each other. This directness of being intertwined, exhausted and sated, of drifting in and out of sleep and having the strains of our discussions, of our nighty lessons, freely intermixed with half-remembered dreams forms the basis for a different kind of learning, learning that enters not only through the mind but also through skin and sweat and pores. In this way ideas are divested of their previously cold abstraction and instead gain heat, momentum and complicity. This is the deep learning, and there is no conduit for it other than one’s intimate and ongoing personal experience.”
― Jacob Wren, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed

“our personal anarchy is composed of deep pain and intense joys”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“One afternoon I was playing, lost in the music. I worried each time that I became lost in the music a little bit more, that maybe someday I wouldn't want to come back, that this refuge from the tension and potential violence - violence I'd done everything to incite - would once again become a refuge I wanted to make my permanent home.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Something we talked about many times is that if art or literature only shows that the world is awful, perhaps it is only adding to the awfulness rather than combatting it.”
― Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

“I went to the theatre and what I saw hinted at my desires but mainly felt like their frustrating opposite. If in conventional theatre you had costumes, characters, acting, scripted narrative, piped-in music, and artifice, instead I wanted people dressed in their normal clothing, being themselves, walking a tightrope between structure and spontaneity, music we loved played on vinyl, CDs, or with instruments, anything and everything that might bring us just a little bit closer to authenticity or reality. There was a kind of theatre that already existed and a kind of theatre that didn’t yet exist, might never exist, and I knew which side I was on.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I wonder if in this book I’m giving away all my secrets. Then I think that’s okay, if I live long enough I’ll get new ones.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“The work of PME-ART is highly collaborative and is also very much about collaboration, about people working together, trying to negotiate what is meaningful to them, where and how they disagree, and how such agreements and disagreements might be evocatively conveyed. Collaboration is definitely not easy. As a teenager in Toronto I would see many one-person shows and think the reason there is only one person onstage has little to do with art and much to do with economics. I would see many shows where the people onstage felt like employees primarily doing what they had been told. Instead I wanted to see people onstage doing what they wanted to do, and felt that this wanting should include active, alive ways of working together.

However, looking back over the past twenty years, I also have to admit that I’m not completely sure collaboration is the place for me. It seems I am temperamentally ill-suited for it. Twenty years of doing something I’m ill-suited for and justifying it to myself through compelling artistic results. (This book is in many ways the story of this struggle.) Because though collaboration has never felt good, I still believe in it. Perhaps I believe in it even more because I find it so difficult. Perhaps I believe in it too much. We are all here on this planet, in our various societies and communities, and like it or not we must find ways to work together. The fact that it is often not easy makes it all that much more necessary.

I sometimes wonder if over the years I have over-relied on the metaphor of the collaborative process as microcosm for various global-political realities. It must be a way for me to feel that what I’m doing is more important than it actually is. I think this might be true of all art. Art is a place where the artist feels what they are doing is more important than it actually is. I sincerely wonder if we’ll make it another twenty years.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“cynicism is only ever a kind of broken idealism”
― Jacob Wren, Families are Formed Through Copulation

“I had started as a playwright but didn’t want to be a playwright anymore, didn’t want to put words in other people’s mouths, wanted instead to create situations that provided everyone involved with maximum autonomy. It somehow seemed more ethical to me if performers said and did things they could take full responsibility for.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried-wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“What are the clichés that accurately reflect me, that me and my class of assholes seem to say over and over again, like super-elite broken records. That the poor are lazy, that we work harder than everyone else and deserve every penny we make(in my particular case, this happens to be true), that we are the global class and therefore effortlessly, with great skill and determination, run the world.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“What if you were to fight fire with fire, money with money, belief with belief? Would it be possible to get rich in some way that, at the same time, could decimate the Right, disgrace power? To form a religion that could undermine their strength? What business plan, what church, could set the foundations for such an attack? (...) A church that is also a business. Because religion is like a fantasy, a dream, and maybe money is also a kind of fantasy, they belong together. So then a religion in the form of a dream that hurtles forward towards the future, because money is an energy stored away for what comes next, but also a dream for now, because there's no living without cash. A dream for the future and a dream for now.”
― Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song

“I know business, I know money, and therefore I know that they are always slightly troubled by the realities of sexual prostitution, since sex is something that can never be stripped clean.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Friendship is a strange idea, difficult to quantify and, at times, even more difficult to maintain. Clearly a friend is someone you enjoy spending time with. However, a friend is also someone you continue to support even during periods when they are considerably less pleasurable to be around. The loyalty of friendship often contains a kind of tautology or feedback loop: the longer you are friends the more loyal you become, and the more loyal you become the longer you remain friends.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“Good sex is almost happiness. But it is within this ‘almost’ that a universe of complexities and difficulties begin to open.”
― Jacob Wren, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed

“Not as much now, but more when we first met, Sylvie would sometimes talk about the power of being the official opposition in theatre or in art. That the official opposition can sometimes do more to change things, both more to change the discourse and more to change concrete policies and actions, than those actually in power. The official opposition has the freedom to push as hard as they want, to act purely on principle, and by continually doing so they can keep things moving toward change.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART

“I was clearly fascinated by him, but had the strange sense that he was equally fascinated by me. As far as he was concerned I was the devil itself, but the devil always holds a variety of attractions.”
― Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor

“I was in Europe for the first time with a desire to place my work within some larger international context, and I was finding it, but as I was discovering it bit by bit I was also discovering how deep my dissatisfaction with theatre and the world were.”
― Jacob Wren, Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART