Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 13

Chance. . .

—From CB—

This afternoon Elizabeth let me know that Edward Gibbon the historian stood only 4 ft. 8 in. But for a string of circumstances, I would have never known this.

I suppose it began when I decided to apply for Northwestern rather than Harvard, as my English teacher pushed. Had I not done so, and had not Elizabeth been bounced from U. of Michigan and forged her way into Northwestern, we might never have met. And had we not been seated across the aisle in a stage lighting class and found ourselves the only ones in the class laughing at the prof’s jokes, I would never have ventured to talk with her—I’m a very shy person. With that, life began to shape itself, though via change upon change upon change.

I’m within a couple of months of finishing writing a novel based on the David stories of the Hebrew texts, so I’m acutely sensitive to what shapes a life. How do you get from being a shepherd to being a king, and what happens then? Or being 15 and then being 80? I think we tend to see our lives as inevitable, perhaps because we can’t imagine it any other way, perhaps because we’ve absorbed too much fiction where the author has been careful to make things seem perfectly plotted and inevitable.

I just read of rat experiments that concluded that if the baby rat doesn’t get enough touch from its mom, it fails to thrive. The rat mom licks her babies a lot, and maybe more of us need that. Imagine what may be at stake.

Not that it makes a lot of difference to know that Edward Gibbon was short . I’m just fascinated at the utter crapshoot that shapes our lives. We’re born, we hop a wild camel, and we slide off where it stops. Somewhere along the way, we write a college admissions essay on where we think the camel will go.

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Tax Forms and Turkey Necks…

—From EF—

I made a major booboo and missed a deadline. Personal income tax returns are due April 15th, and until 2015 that was true for partnership returns too. Then the IRS moved the partnership due date up to March 15th, because the income from the partnership is part of what gets taxed on your personal returns. (You don’t pay tax with the partnership return, you just declare the income.) When the IRS is reviewing your Form 1040, they want to know ahead of time what you got from your partnership. For fifty-five years my panic date had been April 15th, old habits die hard, and this year I screwed up.

To complicate things, I started to write the memoir right when Covid hit. The creative side of my life claimed a bigger chunk of my consciousness right when everything else was coming unglued, and my normal accounting routines fizzled. I managed the March 15th deadlines for 2020 and 2021 by shortcuts that were accurate, but the data was in a scraggly form. With two years of records all over the place I had a hard time getting it all together for 2022. I could either punt again or pay my dues by stuffing three years of figures into the right Excel sheets. I said “enough already” and started going through old stacks and files and doing two extra years of data entry.

So what about the turkey necks? I rely heavily on a local independent market that has high-quality meat and regularly discounts older packages into a sale bin. I saw a huge bunch of turkey necks marked way down, and I couldn’t resist. I took them home and put them in the pressure cooker Friday night, and trusted I’d figure out what to do with the soup on Saturday.  

I like to cook, and I’m good at it, but meal planning is not my strong point: I look at the fridge and figure day by day what I might put on the table. These days I am moved more by necessity and available time, but when Saturday morning came and I found a package of two huge turkey thighs at the market, inspiration struck. I found myself moving onto a path of culinary creativity in spite of my accounting obligations. I took these big buggers home, mashed them together skin side out and roasted them like a whole bird.

Meanwhile, the unadorned soup got drained of bones, adorned by onion and celery, black peppercorns, bay leaf and carrots, simmered and reduced, and the whole house smelled divine. I was in the middle of complicated maneuvers with accounting entries and something wasn’t balancing, but nevertheless I went back to the market, bought mushrooms, scallions, sugar snap peas, and a charming form of pasta called orechiette (litttle ears). I chopped and diced veggies and bank records and turkey and by mealtime came out with a balanced spreadsheet and a divine dinner. Let’s hear it for multitasking.

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Surprise. . .

—From CB—

In the film MEPHISTO, the lead character—a prominent German actor during the Nazi era—speaks of the element of surprise in acting. Apart from the core issues the movie raises, I’ve been thinking about that speech in relation to all forms of storytelling.

The paradox is that sudden, startling events only work if they’re prepared and supported by what’s gone before. The suicide at the end of THE SEAGULL only works because its possibility is prefigured earlier in the play, then Chekhov sets us up with an atmosphere that promises to end the play with a Chekhovian tone of comic sadness. The news is delivered in a whisper, and the mother who will be destroyed by it has not yet heard it.

In the theatre, it happens in different ways. In the play itself, of course, as described above, but also in the life of the actors and their interaction. I’ve sometimes described a scene, pissed-off-edly, as “two actors each rehearsing their audition monologs.” I.e., each performance would be the same no matter how the other actor did it. As in jazz, the life is not only in the notes they play, but how they breathe together, how one’s riff informs the other’s riff.

 

I’ve seen too many performances that are “live” in the sense that real actors are there, but otherwise dead, dead, dead, no matter how “professional” the work is. At such times, you yearn for the moment when someone goes up on his lines: suddenly that glitch makes it “real.” Or a college staging of HAMLET, I playing Laertes, when the guest actor Hamlet began improvising the duel: neither of us being fencers, the audience was treated—at last—with a memorable scene.

I recall our experience playing DESSIE, a play we had on tour for 9 years, well over 400 performances, and other short sketches we’ve played hundreds of times. Keeping it live means a very tight attunement to your partner. To the audience, two performances might seem identical; to the players, they’re alive with the unpredictability of life: I step over the cat if he’s there, not if he’s not.

On the written page, the challenge is more difficult. Of course it happens in major plot terms, in an unexpected response from a character, in the intrusive appearance of a hiccuping waiter in midst of a painful cafe dialogue. But it also occurs in the surprising shape of a sentence, a twist on a common cliche, an adjective that stings.

Each art form creates life in its own way, whether on stage or on page or on film or canvas or disc. It’s the surprise that strikes you if you walk into a room at the Prado that’s filled with Goya’s “dark” paintings, and you’re suddenly on a whiplash ride through his mind, or looking at a Rembrandt self-portrait and seeing him look at you nakedly across the centuries.

Life isn’t all surprise, nor is human personality totally a function of your kidneys; but without’em you’re dead.

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Logjam. . .

—From EF—

I’ve finally busted out of a major slump, with Tuesday being the champ. I was spinning my wheels on current memoir writing and hadn’t even been able to let the job of writing the blog flash before my eyes for more than a nanosecond. FB tells me that others were similarly plagued by malaise at the same time. By the time I was at the day’s end, I felt as if I had a giant compression band mashing my ribs.

This was weird. On Sunday we’d gone down to the Circus Center in SF for a class recital and had a wonderful time watching Eli and Meg and their colleagues perform the original work they’d developed in Toby’s new class—not exactly clowning, but infusing any performance medium, whether trapeze, mime, or stand-up with the clown’s comic energy. It was wonderful to watch, and afterward we all went out to a nearby sidewalk cafe and enjoyed a late lunch together. No bad traffic coming or going: a very nice day.

On Monday we went to the ocean and apologized for being a day late. She didn’t mind. It was warm and calm enough for us to have our picnic out on the bluff, and the gulls were doing special acrobatics. Maybe they’d taken classes at the Circus Center. And at evening’s end we lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace and talked a while and snuggled a while and went on from there. Another very good day.

So how did Tuesday get to be such a rank dog for me? I had the full roster of gross compulsions—raging to snack on anything in sight all day, completely unable to concentrate on anything, desperately sleepy and unpleasantly cranky. By bedtime I felt so jangled I despaired of sleep but did my new pre-sleep ritual anyway, lying down quietly on the couch and inviting a cat to climb up on my stomach. That is usually calming, and indeed it was. I focused as best I could on breathing and brought up a couple of what I call “panic mantras,” and those worked too.

It was amazing. I could actually feel the bands loosen and my mind quiet down. By the time it was time to climb the stairs, I felt OK. Then I got the best night’s sleep I’ve had in quite a while. Today I unlocked my snaggles on the writing and feel I can get back on a roll. Tuesday, you threw a tantrum, but I caught it and threw it out of the park.

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It Passes. . .

—From CB—

I don’t like losing stuff. A trip back to Chicago resulted in seeing my decrepit freshman dorm—an old house labeled the “economy dorm”—replaced by a Burger King, though I was reunited with my freshman good buddy Michael. Not long after, I got word he died.

We took a road trip that passed through South Dakota, and I wanted to see the house and school where I braved a very cold winter and a grim stepfather in my third-grade year. Weaving through Rapid City, I discovered the house and neighborhood gone, even the school and the hills in between, erased by a freeway exchange.

During the course of eighty years of life, lots of the places and people who were vivid to you are just plain gone. Last year, our long-time collaborator Camilla died; a year or so before, a beloved mentor. A few years further back, my high school girlfriend. At this point, the dozens become hundreds.

This comes to mind having just returned from a drive north to Blue Lake, CA, 250 miles either way, to attend the grand opening of a bar. We’ve been longtime friends of fellow ensemble-theatre makers, the Dell’Arte Players, who spent many years touring, based in tiny Blue Lake, then founding a school of physical theatre that draws students internationally. We’ve performed there several times and spent many hours of philosophizing & drinking together.

A few weeks ago, Joan died, one of the founding trio—a huge shock, as we hadn’t even known she was ill. The others of the trio have phased out their work with the school, and one of them, Michael, has just bought the town’s only bar—just across the street from the theatre. Thursday was their grand opening, with Irish dancers, a bagpipe ensemble, storytelling, a band, and a huge crush of locals.

For Michael, it’s another beginning. For us, it’s a severing of ties with that theatre, as no one remains there that we know. We’ll surely visit again, hopefully see some new work, and schmooze around nearby Arcata, but it’ll be a bit like our search for The Hut—a greasy-spoon joint with an incredible jukebox where we hung out 1960–63 while at Northwestern—still there, but made sleek and trim.

Most unsettling was my visit back to the Water Street Arts Center many years ago. A three-story building—former hotel, former toy-train factory—that was the first home of our fledgling Theatre X in Milwaukee. This was the locale of a major career shift, our first pregnancy, some extraordinary theatre work, some horrendous business meetings—many memories. Now, ground floor, it was a yuppie bar; up the stairway (halfway up which Elizabeth first told me she was pregnant) was an insurance company. I sat in the bar looking for the slightest evidence of what it had been—nada.

I’m reminded of Hopkins’ poem that begins “Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving…” and ends “This is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.” Yes, in these places, for these people, it’s perhaps our own mortality we mourn. It flashes by, a sweet smell of daphne, then gone.

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My Memoir. . .

—From EF—

Elizabeth: One of Many—A Memoir of Discovery. Hey, my book is in print!

It’s here. And I’m still here, although given some of the twists and turns, I think I’ve been very lucky. This memoir has been a long road, but now I’m holding the first part of my life in my lap and I like the feeling. I was startled when Conrad suggested the cover photo, “Lizzie the Slut” from my solo piece Dream House. It’s right, though. She’s the exuberance that was me as a little kid, the freedom that got gnarled and boxed for a long time until I found her again. And the red nose is the classic clown’s fuck-you to boundaries.

I didn’t find it easy to look at all my selves in the mirror and paint their pictures. “One of many,” right. Prodigy, liar, valedictorian, shoplifter, award-winner, forger, dissociating depressive, radiant bride, stubborn survivor, and by 1974, the end of this volume? I was a mom carting a toddler and a seven-month belly into the free-lance wilds of a new touring theatre company—with a cast of two.

I’m lucky I’m a pack-rat. There were cartons of unsorted snapshots, letters, newspaper clippings, report cards and general goo. My memory was gooey too, with lots of blank spots, but as I wrote, more and more memories came forward. The best gift was discovering that little kid, the one who laughed and played in the dirt and loved to climb trees, roam in the back woods alone, and imagine there were elves and fairies out there somewhere.

Some of the boxes were radioactive. I wrote hundreds of letters to my folks while I was in college, and after my mother died I discovered that she had kept them all. Packet after packet of thin onion-skin stationery, neatly typed, chirpy and cheery and full of hi-I’m-fine. I started to read some and then couldn’t; I’m an actress and I could hear that voice and cringe at the fakery. I put the box in the back of a closet. Later I played a trick on myself and made a chronological catalogue of every one of them, putting only two or three phrases down for each one before putting the box back in the closet. It worked, because after a while I could discipline myself to read the catalogue, almost as if it were the table of contents of a novel, and then I could use the letters for the real work.

“Memoir of discovery” is an accurate description. I know I’m not alone in having memories that had to be shoved under the bed. In finding them, hauling them out and preparing to share them, I began to see that every single one was human, bearable, and in many cases, the wrong turns got to the right place. It’s a good story, and I’m happy to be telling it.

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David. . .

—From CB—

I wrote earlier that I’d started a novel based on the King David story. It’s a few month later, and I’m on the third draft, middle of chapter 11. Once starting rewrites, they tend to go on and on.

Meantime, I’ve read two King David novels. One, by Joseph Heller (he of CATCH-22), was a rambling excuse to write some sexy stuff and mock a supposed hero—which is a ready temptation to anyone who’s still recalling the Sunday School version. The second, THE KING DAVID REPORT by a German novelist Stefan Heym, is better written but more about the narrator’s challenge of writing truth under an authoritarian regime; he stays at a distance from the main character. Both useful, though, in clarifying what I don’t want to do. Also I’ve read some useful Biblical commentaries. And two movies, both unmentionable.

I’ve often said that I rarely write what I know but more what I WANT to know. I may have some notion at the outset what attracts me to a subject, but it’s only in the writing that I slowly come to know my intentions. In this, certainly the story itself is compelling, enough incidents for at least a year-long miniseries or a five-hour movie of Russian angst.

It’s based on the Biblical story (I and II SAMUEL and the start of I KINGS), though not a substitute for it. it’s very much worth a read (NOT the sweet shepherd boy impelled by faith). Great mythic storytelling, certainly on a par with Homeric saga and a lot shorter.

My version, I guess, is more like a jazz riff on a standard tune: it’s certainly not the original, but it hits the needed notes for recognition, and it’s what the story means to me. It alternates between a straight third-person narrative and the first-person voice of the old man trying to fathom the meaning of his life. Being an old man trying to fathom the meaning of my life, I empathize—even though I haven’t achieved a kingship or slain a single Philistine.

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Neither of our cats give a damn for what we write. They parade across the keyboard and sniff the hand that makes the typos. It matters not that our words are deathless, that when we finish this book no one is likely to read it, or if they do, it may lie on their stomachs like the monsters of Beowulf, slain just for the hell of it.

The trick is to take on the cats’ objective attitude while continuing my tatter on the keys.

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Silence and Connection…

—EF—

I love silence. It’s hard to come by, given that the inside of my head can spew things on so many different levels, but it can be had. I have a process I’ve thought of as “stopping time,” but I could also call it “claiming silence.” It has ranged from my process of close communication with a wild mama raccoon over a span of eight years to the ecstatic out-of-time hours I have spent under a rocky overhang on Brittany’s Belle Isle, eyes closed, listening like a musician to the infinite variety of voices in the waves. Within the cocoon of Covid isolation, I have had even more opportunity to delve into the infinite richness of silence and to begin to understand its role in connection to everything.

When I think of silence, I’m not imagining a situation where there is zero sound. For starters, that would almost demand a sensory isolation tank, and I haven’t saved enough allowance to afford that. For me, silence is an attitude. It’s being in the presence of something or someone without doing anything other than sensing as deeply as possible what or who is there, on its own terms. In the January issue of The Sun magazine there is an remarkable interview with Douglas Christie, who is a professor of theological studies at a Jesuit school in Los Angeles. The main focus in this piece is silence and contemplation, the role they play in bringing connection with everything that is, and their deep roots in the desert.

That mama raccoon wasn’t begging food, she was just standing up by the glass of the sliding door to the patio, nearly touching it with her nose. Inside, moving very slowly, I lowered myself to hands and knees and brought my own nose close to the glass. We looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, and some nights after that we’d do it again. Once it had just been raining lightly, and she had one jewel-like drop on her forehead where her third eye would be. It seemed right. It connected my own world with hers for that time.

Earlier this year a huge scarlet amanita mushroom, just one, popped up right beside the steps up to our house’s walkway. I sat and looked at it quietly for a while, and wondered how far its connections went, and who else was on the line. I loved thinking of that buried webwork. The waves at the beach cave on Belle Isle are kin to the water that entrances me every Sunday at our Sonoma County beach, and knowing that goes a long way toward easing the regret I feel at having likely already said farewell for all time to Belle Isle and the wooded walks around Carnac’s great stones.

When I’m on my knees saying hello to an earthworm that’s been disturbed in my garlic bed, it makes me grin and appreciate the lowly industry of the little bugger. I laugh at thinking of him as a small soft version of the redwood root that wriggles under the bricks of our walkway, pushing them up to court a stubbed toe. All these things would escape my notice without the silence that allows the hum of connection to be felt.

I’m glad I don’t thirst for power. A clenched fist isn’t useful for a caress. The silence of unarmed village Ukranians standing quietly in front of a stopped Russian convoy is much louder than the noise of a screaming mob. Tomorrow, their silence may be ruptured by cluster bombs, their breath sucked out by thermobaric weapons, but in this moment, there is power. The gigantic truck’s wheel rolled three inches forward, then three inches back, and I felt sorry for the guys inside. They signed up expecting wham-bam, and got stopped by silence.

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Freedom?

—From CB—

A question that progressives constantly ask, fluttering like a moth at the candleflame, is: why do people choose to support policies against their own interests? The proposed answers: They’re stupid. They’re deluded. They’re intrinsically racist or sexist or privileged or wanna-be serial killers. I don’t think those answers are helpful: yes, maybe in self-aggrandizement, but not in political strategy.

Odd assumption for progressives: that “their own interests” are all economic. Yes, of course, some people vote on this basis, but few wear t-shirts or bill caps with dollar signs on’em.

In Dostoevsky’s NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, the narrator—riddled with self-hatred and one of the most repulsive characters that I’ve ever encountered in literature—addresses this question directly. His answer has given me troubled thought. They want freedom.

Not political freedom or freedom to do as we please or even freedom to be the boss, but freedom from the mandate of 2+2=4. The mandate of responsibility, of logic, of doing what’s in our best interest, of surviving—to succumb to these strictures is to have your name wiped out.

More and more, we see our heroes as irresponsible wackos. Many times I’ve heard, “I don’t agree with Trump, but he says what he thinks.” Even his business failures are triumphs of freedom: he outlives them. JFK retains his noble stature despite his womanizing and his legions of promoters. Entertainers seem to float above it all, unless they happen to commit whatever’s the sin-of-the-week.

My dad wanted no kids, and he deserted my mother when she bore one. I met him later in life, maybe the loneliest man on planet Earth, in flight from his second wife, who was dying of cancer. He’d wound up siring five daughters and made them each swear on a Bible never to have kids. He was in radical revolt against 2+2=4.

I see this in scorched-earth conservatism, but I also see it in the absolutism of progressive groups, in youth-culture songs where you can’t remotely comprehend the lyrics, in students trying hard not to learn, in a culture whose people are not citizens but consumers. We fear being an interchangeable part on Henry Ford’s assembly line. We fear having no tribe that gives us embrace, so we’ll settle for any tribe that seems like a tribe, and the easiest way to bring a group together is rage.

I feel the great plague that roils us isn’t Trumpism or socialism or religion or atheism—it’s nihilism. It gives us infinite freedom to die.

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Joy. . .

—From EF—

When I planned to take the periodic solo day we each do about once a month, I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar, it’s just that February first was the first day that Bicentennial Campground was available and I grabbed it. I love that place, a tiny three-space primitive campground tucked into the Marin Headlands, way off the road from anywhere to anywhere else. I make a reservation for a tent, but don’t pitch one at this time of year. It’s much easier to just put my sleeping mat and down bag in the back of the Prius and stay overnight in the little secluded parking space. This time I knew nobody else had a booking, and I would have it all to myself. It’s so weird and wonderful to have such beauty and silence available within sight of the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It wasn’t until sunset that I remembered that it was Imbolg, Brigid’s Day. Imbolg translates loosely to “in the belly,” the time for deciding what intention you will invite to make you pregnant for the rest of the year. Wow. What serendipity, to be in this sacred place where the land opens to the vast ocean, and to have the whole night in green silence.

After long inner rummaging I chose three things: to invite the experience of joy whenever possible, to tell the stories I have to tell, and to work steadily on getting rid of things that are no longer necessary. I’m working on all three.

Joy comes to me in many ways, and one of them is music. I was recently gifted with someone’s cast-off baby grand piano and have been slowly and steadily reclaiming the neural pathways that were ground into me in my years of being wedded to the keyboard. I chose one major short work for an initial focus, because it’s what propelled me into being an actual musician, not just a clever performing seal: Bach’s E-minor Sinfonia. Not the bravura flash I’d been proud of: a gorgeous spare structure of repeated phrases and harmonies, a beauty that can bring me to tears. It turned my head around when I was seventeen, and it’s a joy to embrace it again. Like the experience of performing Macbeth for sixteen years, time has opened new doors in this iteration.

We were in the car getting our regular Sunday sushi before heading to the ocean, and Vivaldi was on the radio. For an instant it didn’t click and I thought oh, Bach, then realized, no, dummy, it’s one of the Four Seasons. It was summer when I went into the store and late autumn by the time I came back. I was reveling in the energetic harmonies and told Conrad, “I love Bach, but Vivaldi really knows how to party.” It was the perfect send-off to the afternoon at the ocean, a surge of joy.

Today I’ve been thinking about how much joy I have at my beck and call in my head, all the music that’s there on my own personal memory-channel. I was in the chorus at Interlochen National Music Camp the year we did Verdi’s Requiem, and I can still pretty much listen to the whole thing in memory. That moment when the quiet choral plea, Requiem eterna dona eis domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis, suddenly erupts with a full-bore tenor solo demand, Kyrie Eleison. Our tenor was a very large man with a voice to match, and when he burst out of that meek harmony with the golden trumpet of his voice, my heart nearly burst through my ribcage. When I’m listening in my mind, it still does that. Every time.

Edith Piaf singing Milord will reduce me to tears in a nanosecond. When Orff’s Carmina Burana gets past the big bold intro to its last segment, O Fortuna, its erotic build puts Bolero in the shade. Chicago blues could wake me from the dead. I love listening to music, live or recorded, and I am also blessed to have my own streaming collection in my cranium.

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