On the last day of the trip, I dropped Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror down Devil’s Throat, a cave in southern Bulgaria near the Greek border. It slipped from my bag as Ana and I were climbing the slick staircase beside the waterfall that roared into the cavern. Upon entering the central chamber, the water flowed in a ferocious torrent before disappearing into a network of unmapped tunnels, which no caver had ever returned from. The cave was once believed to be the mouth of hell, the earthly opening into Hades, where Orpheus ventured into the underworld to reclaim his beloved Eurydice. And like Orpheus, I looked back as my copy of the book tumbled away from me into the darkness.

I found out I had been grudgingly accepted into Ryerson (far from the first on the wait-list, it seemed) less than a month before class was to start. Ana and I moved into separate rooms in a fourteen-storey tower-block residence called Pitman Hall. She was on the eighth floor, I was on the fourteenth. Our rooms had cement walls painted with industrial white paint and thin green carpeting the consistency of a lint brush. That year we each came down with a cold about once a month, the unsurprising outcome of cramming a thousand undergrads into a building with circulated air. All my female friends came down with equally as many bladder infections, also the unsurprising outcome of cramming a thousand undergrads into a building. We avoided the common rooms, as they smelled of microwaveable macaroni-and-cheese dinners and had televisions you couldn’t turn off, opting instead to spend our nights in each other’s rooms, working our way through magnums of bargain-bin red wine. Ana’s room was our preferred spot, mostly because she’d made half an effort to decorate it, hanging gauzy curtains up in her windows and stringing up a strand of white fairy lights. In the first week of school, she threw a toga party. To this day, she still ribs me for showing up wrapped in a fitted floral sheet.

It seemed the goal of theatre school, especially in first year, was to render us empty vessels. Bodies without personalities, tics, or really any defining characteristics. One instructor actually described first year as being about “stripping you down to nothing and building you back up,” which struck me as being a bit Jonestown-y. In his essay Paradox of the Actor, Denis Diderot claimed that the best actors “are fit to play all characters because they have none.” He defined an actor’s ability in terms of absence — namely, an absence of any internal, innate identity. Like the depersonalized characters in pornos, Diderot’s actors were blank bodies onto which the fantasies of others could be projected. Hosts to be possessed. Icon painters suffused by divine inspiration. Diderot’s essay was written in 1773 and published posthumously fifty-seven years later, in 1830. Lee Strasberg, the father of method acting in America, once claimed Paradox of the Actor “has remained to this day the most significant attempt to deal with the problem of acting,” which goes a way to explaining how Diderot’s vision of the actor as automaton, as a body cleaved of its selfhood, has retained such currency in Western theatre schools.