Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 20

Heartshare . . .

—From CB—

I was struck by a comment of Garry Kasparov during a chess Masterclass I’ve been watching. When he analyzed a game he lost, he said, he was enraged when he saw he’d made a blunder—not at his opponent but at himself. This resonated strongly with me.

My bouts of anger are almost entirely at myself. I can think of a few people for whom I’ve had long-term resentment (either because they’ve hurt someone important to me or because they’ve cost me money), but very few. Much like my mother, who once said, “It takes a long time to get on my shit list, but once you’re there, it’s damned hard to get off.”

But my shit list is very short, and most of it is me. At one time I attributed this to a fundamental cowardice: I hate confrontations. But I’ve come to see it otherwise. I think it stems from a huge sense of self-esteem: I expect much more from myself.

It’s simple to find the source of this: a mother’s love for her only child. But resulting, oddly, in an almost pathological sense of responsibility—seeing her struggle after being abandoned by my dad (which was indirectly my fault, I guess, for being born). But I hold myself to a higher standard than I expect from the rest of the human race, not that I do much better. I guess it’s only-child privilege.

How to let go of that? Frankly, I don’t know if I want to. It’s a snuggly teddy-bear I kinda take pride in, and I guess it’s not only me that clings to flaws like a second or third nose—weird, but it’s me. But that teddy-bear gets a bit smelly from the snuggle.

At age 19, I married a challenging girl, who became a challenging woman. Gifted, wounded, a beautiful floral minefield. For her, knowing me was probably, to quote a line in our play, “like mind-reading a coconut.” Or maybe a coconut rolling wildly down the freeway. How did we make it together through sixty years and counting?

I’d propose a weird word: “worship.” That’s usually heard as “I love you, you’re a god/goddess, you’re perfect, I light a candle or kill a pig for you, I dote on your merest fart!” Not my meaning. I’d say it much simpler: it’s simply the act of giving close attention to something outside yourself.

There are times when conflict seems inevitable: is it my doll or yours? As if the doll’s very life depended on the answer. But during the Cold War, I often said that if the Soviets could really hear what our criticisms were, and if we could hear theirs, and we all could manage to address them, there’d be no Cold War. That hasn’t worked on the world scene, but it’s worked pretty well in our marriage.

We both have old buried landmines. We have differences in aesthetics and temperaments. We have different modes and speeds of reaction. We have different blind spots. We likely even have different views of our similarities. What we share is a willingness to listen.

In recent years, we’ve formalized it into the Heartshare, an admittedly New Age term we picked up from an intentional family. Either of us can ask it, and it’s infrequent. It simply involves sitting down, on the couch in the living room or upstairs by the fireplace, speaking a concern or a hurt or an anger, listening and being heard. There’s no dialogue. One person talks, and when he/she’s finished, the other can respond. Both listen. That’s the challenge. Both listen and take away what’s heard. It’s incredibly hard to be that simple.

But I think that’s an aspect of “worship.” You have the respect of the other to hear and to hear in return. We don’t get that from gods, who rarely speak back, though I answer only for my own experience. But if we don’t get it from at least one fellow human, we won’t get it from gods.

We don’t often use that ritual, but it’s always there. It’s worked into our days. And would that I could speak to myself and listen. I do it in writing, I think, but that’s in masks, in costumes, in other personae. It only works when you’re naked.

###

 

 

 

 

Beginnings . . .

—From EF—

Today is the birthday of Meg, the beautiful consort/mate/partner/wife of our son Eli. Meg is a strong agile performer on the circus static bar and a kick-ass stage performer, but when she was born she was an early arrival, tiny but clearly a fighter. My mind tries to imagine them side by side at birth, Eli having clocked in at over 8 pounds. By now they match each other very well.

Conrad was a big baby too, born in Denver to a mother who was in the process of being deserted; the final disappearance took a couple of years, but on that cold October morning in Denver she was all alone and had to call a taxi to get her to the hospital. It was a long hard birthing, but when she finally held her son in her arms, he was already the light of her life, the baby her husband had forbidden her to have.

When I was born my mother was alone too, having been shipped from Milwaukee to Brooklyn to avoid disgrace. I don’t know what her birth experience was like; I don’t know if she ever got to hold me. After I was born she finished her degree, married a good man and had my brother Dan.

Going back a generation, Conrad’s mother Margaret was born to an Iowa German farm family, middle child between two boys, and consequently of no family status. Her mother was cold and unloving, but she thrived anyway, got off the farm, and made her own life. When she became a single mom, she put rivets in the Enola Gay, drove a dynamite truck, and did whatever it took to raise her son.

Conrad’s dad, Bert, was born in Kansas, the youngest of seven children; the father was a farmer who migrated from Pennsylvania to Kansas when evicted by the Battle of Gettysburg. He subsequently claimed to have been born in Florida, and changed his name to Conrad. After deserting Margaret for daring to have a child, he ran off with another woman and had five daughters.

My mother Elizabeth was born to a beautiful woman who had a stellar business career until she married a widower seventeen years her senior; the marriage failed, and Elizabeth spent years in private boarding schools. While a student at UW Madison, she became involved with a fellow musician, and I was the result.

My father Robert had a tumultuous childhood; his mother died when he was four years old, a victim of the flu epidemic. His dad couldn’t cope, and he was raised by his uncle and aunt. He was one of the recording tech crew who carried heavy equipment around the countryside recording the music that became part of the Smithsonian Collection, and served in the military with expertise in radio and radar. He married and had three kids; I doubt he knew he’d already made a baby.

So many threads, so many stories. This is why we’ve made theatre, and are making novels. Every single person you pass on the street has stories like these. We are all unique, and all connected. I tell you my family stories here because they’re likely to make you think of your own. Each of us has a hero’s journey, and they’re all different, and they’re all related. Let’s live in a world where we honor these stories, all of them.

 

###

 

Empathy . . .

—From CB—

In our newest novel—just finished the 7th draft—a person observes that it’s hard to have empathy with someone who stinks. This thought haunts me, perhaps in part because lots of characters in my plays & novels tend to stink.

Of course we love the lovable villain, and we sympathize with folks whom the writer signals we’re supposed to like. Some of it’s the hair-do. It wants to look neat and appealing, not an expensive helmet, but definitely showing some expertise. And in fiction, movies, plays, we like the people who make us feel generous to like them.

Nothing wrong with that. We want to feel good about ourselves. If we’re white and middle-class, we don’t want to be as evil as we’re charged with being. We want something to happen, whatever.

The issue arises for me because this novel has been a struggle. Everyone in it stinks in different ways. It probably jerks you around worse than anything we’ve written, except maybe our 1975 play DESSIE, which went on to have hundreds of showings. But there, we learned very fast: follow it with a discussion to let people vent. Here, no possibility.

I always hit a glitch when I hear someone say they love a novel or movie because they can identify with the character. For me as a writer, the imperative is to lead the reader to empathize with those whom he/she don’t identify with. But this isn’t a best-seller formula.

I have no answers. I only pose the question: with whom do you empathize, and why?

Dogs and kids, pretty easy. They’re powerless. The oppressed, however you define them, sure. Someone like you or someone who represents your political stance, no sweat. Beyond that, it’s a crapshoot.

And folks who sound angry, they just need to control themselves.

I’ve sometimes set out on the streets of San Francisco with my pockets full of dollar bills, intending to distribute them to beggars. I’ve found myself unable to reach two bucks into a coffee cup. Why is that? I have my own answers to that question, but are my answers true?

I sit at my computer, asking how. The guy who’ll walk a mile for his neighbor, who’ll fight the forest fire, who’ll stay up all night with his cancerous cat, will he raise a finger for the family down the street, and which finger will he raise? Which will I?

It does begin with empathy—the most problematic of emotions. We ration it out in hummingbird bites. And yet it’s all that will save us.

###

 

Unmaker . . .

—From EF—

I don’t want my head to explode. Limiting time on the web isn’t helping, because the lunacy is expanding daily on an exponential basis. I am seeing an army of women with long blonde hair curled fetchingly over their shoulders in identical hairdos and am thinking, where were they all ten years ago? Did they just get cloned? I never saw anything like it before, and these ladies are all spouting the same very strange things. Who turned on what faucet?

It’s not exactly comforting to read history. It seems abundantly clear that whatever shit we’re cranking out at the present moment has been cranked out again and again over the recorded centuries, but every time the wheel turns it’s like, “Oh, this is awful, this never happened before.” I’ve been remembering a concept that flew over my transom a few decades ago, an interesting filter for looking at these events..

A popular genre author wrote a whole series of speculative fiction that I liked, and I have a bunch of his paperbacks. Central in his plots was a different dyad than the Christian one. It wasn’t good versus evil, it was the Maker versus the Unmaker. No value judgement implied, just that one force connects and creates, and the other dismantles and decomposes.

I’m having a hard time comprehending the hideous division that is parting our population like the Red Sea. Calling one side a cult is one way of describing it, but it still leaves the underlying question: what’s the magnet? What energizes the cult? My rational mind can’t grasp it, because its effect is counterproductive to a functional life for all of us, including the cult members.

So I think about the Maker and the Unmaker. The Maker is a force of connection and creation, the idea of a web that connects us all. The Unmaker devotes itself to dismantling the web, severing connection, isolating humans into units competing for survival.

There is a word for a thought-form, an entity that rises from a focused human collective and then becomes an independent force: egregore. It isn’t hard for me to picture the Unmaker as an egregore that feeds on things like the torch-bearers in Charlottesville or any number of the right-wing rallies, an egregore that has been around for millennia. If there is such a thing, it is being well fed today, nursing on the rich milk of the amygdala.

Rage and fear kick the amygdala into overdrive, and the Unmaker is on a roll. What feeds the Maker? Individual acts of kindness and support don’t have that flash-bang quality, but it’s useful to recall what has happened when a child falls in a well, or kids get stranded in a cave with the water rising, or Manhattan suffers a total blackout. People tune in to the frequency of the Maker and pull together. I don’t know how we can make that happen, but we must.  

###

Choice . . .

—From CB—

My days are mostly predictable. Starting with the first light of dawn, I make my first decision: whether or not to reach over the edge of the bed and put on my sleep mask. Do I start the day ignoring the light through my clenched lids, or do I snake out my hand for a chilly grope on the floor?

Some would wear it through the night, but when I try that, it wrestles around my head for eight hours and tangles in my hair. Some would use the weighted blinders, but I’m one who rotates through the night like a Cuisinart, and they’d go flying.

I didn’t always have this problem. It was only in my sixties that my German peasant genes kicked in at dawn to yell, “Go milk the cow!” This despite never having had a cow, and it’s proved futile to argue that it’s the wife’s turn to milk the cow.

I hate making choices. But of course my linked professions as director/writer/actor/designer demand it. Less so as actor: you make decisions, of course, but you’re always in the present moment, and the present moment has a way of shoving you into the next. With the others, you make changes up to a point, but eventually it’s balls-to-the-wall.

At a certain age it dawns on you that, on the level of human history, your choices simply don’t matter. You can cut this sentence or leave it in, you can paint your puppet with burnt umber or raw sienna, you can have another shot of vodka, and the world will little note nor long remember. And yet if you set your own standards, they can be as compelling as the Ten Commandments, or more so.

It all works out eventually. You put on your sleep mask and snooze, or you don’t. The alarm burps at last, and you stumble to the can. For a brief moment, then, at the start of the day, you share comradeship with the vast majority of humanity, regardless of race, creed, gender, or who they voted for or would like to kill. The bladder links us in a way the heart never can. And then we go on with the day.

###

Is Sleep Weird?

—From EF—

I am startled to realize that I think sleep is really weird. Like most of those kindly described as “elders” I have a nonmonogamous relationship to sleep: we get together in fits and starts. The impending election is finally no longer impending, so my sleep experience may improve, but I wouldn’t bet on it. On my best nights I wake up for a while around three and then sleep all the way to six. A couple of nights ago I hit the pillow about eleven, slept deeply for a while and thought I’d made it to three. It was twelve-thirty.

But for quite a while now when I prepare to embark upon sleep I realize, this is really weird. Humans putter or stumble or roar through their day and then everybody keels over and conks out. What’s that about? I crawl under the covers and get my pillow just right and sidle sideways to get some body contact, and then we both hope to black out for a long time. Gone. Blotto. Every night.

If I succeed, then the sideshow starts. In this last month I have been challenged to get through an amazing number of assignments. They have usually involved trying to organize a large number of diverse people going in quantum directions, and the exhausting thing is that sometimes I seem to be doing all right for a while. But when I wake up I’m all worn out.

I’m not afraid of death, I like to imagine it as some sort of release from the work list. But if sleep is a preview, I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the movie. And I keep coming back to this bizarre thing of people spending a third of their lives, if they’re lucky, being blacked out. Imagine a being from elsewhere in the multiverse landing in the middle of the night and finding that everyone has passed out. “What happened here?”

Native Americans thought the white man was nuts. How could anybody get through life without dream wisdom? Maybe we’re not thinking about it right. What if sleep were a ticket to imagining all the possibilities we hadn’t chosen? And what if that could enrich our sense of choice? There are some scientific speculations that dreams are the psychic equivalent of flushing the toilet, but I don’t quite warm to that idea. I often get bizarre messages in my dreams that turn out to be pretty intriguing and sometimes tell me what I didn’t realize I felt.

So maybe sleep isn’t really weird. Maybe it’s a mandatory assignment, a necessary confrontation, an opportunity to shake hands with the multiverse. That’s interesting. I wonder where I’ll go tonight.

###

Fear . . .

—From CB—

Writing the day before the election, it’s not easy to ignore it, yet there’s no great joy in chewing cud. I’ll compromise in saying something about fear.

Right now we’re doing the final edit and layout of a new novel MASKS for January publication. It follows the northward journey of a family of farce players in the early Medieval, mainly from the POV of their six-year-old son. He’s learning to be a player, he’s learning to harness the donkey, and he’s learning fear.

It’s only in reading it over for about the thirtieth time that it’s become clear to me how fundamental a theme fear is in the story. In life, fear hasn’t been entirely foreign to me, but mostly it’s that low-grade chronic worry inherited from my mother, that nagging what-if that eventually works itself out. Certainly the imagination runs rampant, and I can recall some truly parlous quagmires, but you just do what you can, and you don’t do what you can’t.

On a personal level, it’s always helped to be averse to confrontation, to maintain a low-level vigilance, and to squeeze my childhood eyes tighter when hearing creaks in the night. No question but that I have a protective shell. When I was very young, I learned how to “jump” myself out of scary dreams before the monster caught up. The result was very boring dreams, but once I got to sleep I wasn’t afraid of the night.

And I suppose, in my waking life, I retain that sense that it’s all just a play that I write, though none of the actors have learned their lines and you don’t know what to expect, except that your best-laid plans . . .

Just intending this as personal description, not as a how-to. I’ve had a very black view of humankind since the age of 15. In another book, I wrote, “Anything this side of baby rape is a miracle.” Nothing surprises me, except the fact that we haven’t wiped ourselves out. Yet for me, that ground-level gloom intensifies both my love of what’s good—there’s a great lot I do feel is miraculous—and my will to keep chipping away at the glacier.

But coming back to fear. There’s a primal terror that horror shows rarely touch, with their exploding heads and sudden shocks and monsters closing in. It’s that moment when the familiar soul becomes the Other. Not the moment when the chortling Jack Nicholson appears with an ax, but the first moment his wife sees what he’s typed—that the man she knew is no longer there.

That’s what chills me now. As much as I thought I knew—through reading, through an early childhood on the other side of the tracks, through travel, interviewing all sorts, talking to audiences in 38 states, I’ve never before seen what Ionesco put on stage: a collective, wide-spread transformation into rampant rhinos.

And it makes me more understanding of the child in MASKS. His immediate terrors—whether of imminent death or of forgetting his line in the play—are what we all go through unless we’re deaf and blind. His deeper fear is contained in a casket of masks they carry on the journey. They’re useless in the troupe’s repertoire of farces, they carry an inherited curse, and they take up space on the donkey cart. Why does the troupe persist in carrying them, even as they begin to come to life? And why do we?

But I’ve opted out of nightmares. Instead, I wake up thinking.

###

 

 

Shelter in Place . . .

—From EF—

Shelter in place.

What if this is the rest of my life? I do have one person who is fully huggable skin to skin, and he’s my beloved. I have an active garden that is still squeezing out ripe tomatoes and succulent peppers and crisp colorful chard, and it’s yelling at me to get my ass in gear and get the garlic bed ready because the planting’s already late. I have two cuddle-intensive cats who have not yet forgiven me for staying overnight at Salt Point this last week, so they are both sitting on my chest when I take a nap. I can’t go to the gym, but I’m getting some traction on putting a program together that can take up at least some of the slack (pun intended.)

What do I mourn? I already grieve not being able to perform for a live audience but I’m having some success putting that energy into writing the memoir. The thought of never embracing my daughter in Italy again is painful beyond belief, but we are lavish with phone calls and Facebook. In the past we tried Skype and didn’t like it, ditto FaceTime, but they do exist. I’ve always loved doing radio and have called it the most intimate of broadcast media, so perhaps the phone will continue to be the blessing it is at present.

Long-distance travel has always been a cherished experience, and I would have loved to go back to Italy and Amsterdam and Carnac again. But I have found that many of these places I have visited and loved year after year are so engraved on my memory that I can go there virtually. Really. I tried once walking from Plouharnel to Penthievre in my memory, step by step. I know this road well because I’ve more than once gotten off at the bus at the first rather than the second and then walked an hour to get to the hostel. I remember which wildflowers grow where, I remember choosing to walk the railroad ties for a while because the ground was so crumbly, I remember what it feels like when I get to the stand of ancient pines whose layers of needles are a soft carpet, I remember what the sound of the waves is like through those trees, and most of all I remember the light. I can still go there.

And my one solitary ancient stone at Carnac is still standing in the middle of a farmer’s pasture. So many times I have embraced its warm gritty skin and placed offering and burned incense at its base. I think it is a hot point on a ley line and I think another hot point is at Portuguese Beach, so maybe that’s another version of Skype.

If this is the rest of my life, it can be rich if I make it so. It’s up to me to reach deep into that fragrant loam and cultivate what can supply the energy that will be missing from the mix. I have a darkness that lives within me that constantly wants me to roll up like a pill-bug and sink into its dark, but I can reach for the light. That is the most important task.

###

Doing No Harm . . .

—From CB—

I’m in the periodic limbo stretch. Just finished stages of multiple projects—6th draft of a new novel, interior layout on another ready for publication, billionth rewrite of a short story (well, start with a title like “William Blake at Starbucks” and see what happens to you), etc.—and wondering what’s next.

Fortunately, this next week I’ll have my fingers in papier mache, creating a mask for a friend, and that’s a project with a finish. Words are another matter: they never dry up. Words are like politics: there’s always something more to do.

Which brings up the election. Bots run rampant in my brain at 2 a.m., stilled only by counting my breaths or imagining myself screaming Whee! Whee! Whee! in a crowded subway. (Those who know me would find that image uncharacteristic.) Writing—even writing political Facebook posts—is a form of vaccination: immunizing oneself by taking in a less treacherous form of the virus. Writing is pretty harmless.

Excluding, of course, words for a demagogue or a California proposition or a legal brief—those can have their effect. But a short story or a novel, not so much. That’s scant comfort, of course, if your readership numbers in the dozens.

Yet there’s a certain grim comfort in the notion that you’re doing something that (a) is up to your standards, (b) has integrity, and (c) does no harm. Organic farmers, massage therapists, and chess masters can share this, but most professions run the risk, however slight, of ending in something hideous.

Not without exceptions. Uncle Tom’s Cabin may be credited or damned for promoting abolition, causing the Civil War, pushing Black stereotypes, mixing protest with sentiment, inspiring the theatrical “Tom show,” etc. (Nevertheless, a compelling story, in my opinion.) So it could be that our words might have effect, at least if we were a best-seller second only to the Bible. But we’ll just have to risk it.

###

Silent Presence . . .

—From EF—

Our son Eli came to visit today. I’m not sure if we’ve been together at all since the virus moved in. There might have been a time early on when we sat distanced with masks in his apartment in the Mission, but I’m not sure. What I do know it that it’s been a long time.

We had our daughter with us back in February when I had my weekend 80th birthday party, and Eli was with us then too. She was here for a week and then got back home to Italy in the nick of time. God, that party was a blessing. I got to see and hold my beloveds in a bunch, and then the doors slammed.

So today was very special. We had coffee at HardCore, picked up sushi at Fiesta, went home to prep the picnic, and then went out to the ocean. Sun, waves, sake, and a gull. Conrad and I always go to the same spot, and when we have scraps we delight in making a gull happy. Today we didn’t have scraps, but we had a gull. I can’t be sure it’s the same one we’ve entertained in the past, but she stayed with us the whole time anyway. At first alert, standing, watchful, and then just hunkering down in a warm sandy patch nearby until we got up to go. Silent presence.

Back home I puttered in the garden, gathering some arugula for Eli to take home to Meg, and some catnip for him to take to their cats. Dinner happened without drama. Mostly, the three of us were together in the house in afternoon comfort, playing with the cats and then sitting in silent presence. We had a good meal and Eli went home.

I think it’s the ultimate intimacy, silent presence. It feels so good, like walking alone in moonlight. Nothing asked, nothing judged, just being there. I remember nursing; no way to meter the milk, it just happens.

I look forward to the time when the stream of life runs gently again for all of us. For now the two of us are our own still waters, our own embraces and our own silent presence. If you are someone I love, I am with you too. The next full moon is on Samhain, Oct 31st, and that is when the veil is thinnest between the worlds. When you are in silent presence with all you hold dear, I will be with you too.

###