Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 24

Why Write?

—From CB—

Whenever I start writing my blog, the week it’s my turn, it starts out political. I justify this by considering it my hobby to save the world. But it tends to focus on the absurdities perpetrated in the name of stuff I believe in, given that the Bible tells us to pluck the fat slug out of your own eye before you claim 20/20 vision, or something like that.

But this tends to have all the practical effect of telling your kid, “Don’t put beans in your nose!” It falls on dead ears or stuffed noses.

Yet by Sunday I stop fulminating over the national pig manure. I flounder for some other subject worth the time it takes to write and to read. Which leads inevitably to the question, “So why write this?” Which leads on to “Why write?”

That’s one of those riddles like that posed to Oedipus by the Sphinx. His cleverness got him the kingship, a city’s plague, an Oedipus complex, and blindness. Unwise to be too clever when the Sphinx poses a gotcha.

But you can’t ignore the question. The usual answer re. any and all motives is, “To make money.” But while it’s made us a living from our dramatic writing, the novels make nickels for catfood and the blog not a cent. So there must be some other excuse. Other possibilities:

To save humanity. That takes many forms. Political impact? Hardly. Humanizing folks? Well, some may dig it, some may feel that my humor is a meat-ax. Those who prefer a whodunit or a screamer or a hot-panter or star wars have other options. We’ve had some plaudits but no hard evidence of spiritual uplift on a continental scale. At heart I guess I’m a satirist. Like a good dentist, I go at every cavity with vehement intent. But however much dentists fill a real need, they don’t feed the starving masses. Nor do words.

To gain immortality. A quick trip to the local library cures you of that. Thousnds of books on the shelves, hundreds in the 50-cent bin, millions being chugged out every year. We manage modest sales, a few dozen giveaways, and fifty-odd copies of each book in storage, awaiting our kids to puzzle out, at our demise, “What do we do with these?”

To escape Council Bluffs. In my adolescence I’d go to the library, read Saturday Review or The New Yorker, scan the shelves for anything that sounded Russian or weird, and fantasize that literature might be the bus ticket out of my two-bit Iowa town. I imagined critics in ravenous search for genius, elegant parties with deep conversations and free food, anything to lift me out of my little coop in the working-class end of Council Bluffs. I did get East and then farther East, and I found a profession—theatre—that took me beyond the cornfields, and sometimes even offered free food. But I’ve never quite—in my own head—escaped my Midwestern adolescence, and I fear I’ll never hop a psychological copter outta there.

To self-actualize. Maybe so. I don’t much admire my Essential Self, so it’s not what I want to empower. But it is self-exploration of another self whom I desire to grow into being. I guess I only write about stuff that’s part of my soul, for better or worse, and I’d like it to be for the better. It’s starting to be, and before I croak I hope it will.

And yet, all that said—

For whatever reason, I want to speak truth, and I want that truth-grapple to enter the collective human soul. I want to express the sweet beauty and hope in that climb up the beanstalk. I want to cry or exult or bitch or cavort with my characters—every one of whom are as precious to me as brother or sister. I don’t want to live in the fantasy worlds I project, yet I feel an inexplicable need to walk through them and smell the geraniums. My grandma had geraniums, and they’ve always been kind of a floral joke to me, but for her, I believe, they were her one spot of beauty. We must honor those spots of beauty.

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Love . . .

—From EF—

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of the most perfect love stories I have ever seen on film. It’s a vessel of desire on a slow-moving stream that becomes ever-wider, ever more powerful, and when the story ends, as it must, the water does not stop.

So much comes from seeing and being seen, from listening and being heard, and from taking the time to let that happen. The pace of our lives today isn’t well suited to this, but it can happen. Choosing to sit in silent presence with someone is truly possible, but intention is required. Also, it makes a difference where you are. And who you are.

The filmmaker, Céline Sciamma, assembled a cast of women, only women, except for the boatsmen at the beginning and a messenger at the end, and the breathtaking rocky seacoast is one I have known intimately for more than twenty years—Quiberon, in Brittany. Every time I go there, it makes me listen to my core and enter slow time. She chose wisely.

I have written music for the theatre in much the same way as is done for film, and I am skilled at making it do its work without calling attention to itself. But here, in this film, the sound score is nothing more than the natural sounds—until halfway through, when something startling erupts from a circle of village women around a bonfire. And then again, at the end, when a full-bore orchestral performance of Vivaldi lifts both central chracters out of the performance they are hearing into the stream of their loves’ memory.

For me, the love story between women was a choice like every other in this film: empowering. Because the relationships are one step outside most of my own experience, but both perfectly natural and inevitable, I paid attention in a more immediate way. When we staged The Tempest with life-sized puppets, audiences invariably began their comments with “Oh . . . that kiss!” It was the first love-commitment between Ferdinand and Miranda, slow and delicate, followed by the well-known startle of “what have I done” that made a sweet comic zing—but it was between inanimate objects. Inanimate, made more than animate. And the fact that the audience knew it was puppets made their response magnitudes more personal.

Because the whole film is so perfectly integrated and allows the time for real seeing and real hearing to happen, the impact is large and luminous. I believe in love, in its sweetness and in its grief, and seeing this was a gift of confirmation.

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Back in the Saddle Again . . .

—From CB—

Normal life has been disrupted, for which I’m always grateful. I hate routine: I want each day to dance its own jig, and when I see it falling into gym/coffee/writing/walk-home/lunch/etc. etc. etc., I start fearing death. In our latest novel, the child thinks of death as just lying there with the flies landing on you, and it makes good sense to him why people fear it.

But when routine is disrupted, like this week, I start getting very antsy. Last weekend was Elizabeth’s 80th birthday, a wonderful celebration which left sumptuous leftovers and a fractured schedule in its wake. And realizing I have another 20 months before I’m 80. I’ve been trying to catch up with Elizabeth for nearly 60 years, never quite managing it. Even when I make a mad dash, the months keep getting in my way.

But this week I watched a movie, I went to a circus, I took a mighty load to the dump. I read a very well-written, popular novel that offers all the joy of popping pimples—not my favorite pastime. I ate a vast bunch of leftovers and tried to get back in harness. And I wrote a long political screed, which I decided not to post, though I may do so in the future. Looking forward to 8 months of sleeplessness as we stumble forth to the election.

I feel as if I’ve worn the wrong suit to the Senior Prom. I can’t get my rage factor turned up against my fellow Democrats. My candidate Warren apparently made a stir in the debate by demonstrating the attack-dog skills required of a candidate, but I fear it hasn’t given her much of a bump in the polls. It doesn’t seem enough in this Super Bowl to flex your muscles against the other guys: you need to cripple the members of your team—not fatally, of course, but just hitting their toes with a hammer. Rage is a mark of sincerity.

But that pulls me off track. This week I’ve managed a few snail-cramps forward: finishing the 10th draft of our novel MASKS, getting the first performance of RASH ACTS scheduled, and starting work on a new novel based on an old, old play—five chapters into it but having qualms—while also looking back at an unpublished piece to see what it needs.

So this week I intend to get back into full swing of a routine that revs up my discontent to a degree where I feel part of things. I hate to feel left out.

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Eighty . . .

—From EF—

        It feels really good to finally be eighty, flat-out 100% eighty, and not “almost eighty,” as I have been claiming for a while. It’s a lovely number, isn’t it? Round and balanced and substantial. I like it. And the weekend of partying was right up there on the scale of pinnacle lifetime experiences.

         Our daughter Johanna flew in from her long-time home in Italy, with a recipe list and an agenda: “Mama, I’m doing the cooking. Get over it.” Her pinnacle product was the birthday cake, one for each of the two days: Google “Russian Honey Cake” if you want a picture, but here’s the Cliff-notes: caramelized honey, butter, eggs, whipped cream, all in many many layers between 9-inch disks of batter pre-baked into a cross between a cookie and a crepe. She arrived on Tuesday, shopped with me on Wednesday, cooked all day Thursday and all day Friday, and staged it all into completion on Saturday and Sunday. More than forty people came over the two days.

         I loved the little eddies of conversation amongst people who hadn’t known each other before, the intense tide-pools of conversations that hit a strong bond, and all the ebbs and flows in between. When I was a kid, I loved snoozing on the couch just outside the rooms where the grownups were talking: I was safe, nobody was paying any attention to me, and their voices blended into a lovely music. Here, I could swim among the tide pools, be an intense focus in one place and then just hang on the shore and listen to the music. This was a special occasion, and I was in bliss.

         The essential binding element to this was Conrad, our son and daughter (Eli and Johanna), and our friend Flora Coker—she has been a beloved artist/colleague/friend since 1966: she knew both kids since they were a glint in the eye. She spent the weekend with us here, and gave Jo a lot of support, and reminded us how long and lovely a trip this has been.

         Now I have a bale of beautiful cards, and the skin-memory of lots of hugs, and a full tank of energy for launching back in the memoir that had to take a week off. And it has been beautifully bordered with the visit of a long-time close friend from New York who flew in to say a warm hello. I spent all day Monday taking him to our special places along the Sonoma Coast and down into the magic land of Bolinas, and it was a gift to me to share what I love with someone I love.

         Onward!   

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Redrafts . . .

—From CB—

Having just finished the 10th draft of our new novel MASKS—more yet to be done but this is basically it—I’m in that flounder stage. I have an idea of what’s next, but haven’t quite yet chomped onto the earthworm and got myself hooked. It’ll happen soon, I fear, but there’s time for a quick swig of air.

Meantime, I’m going back to what was a frequent practice: daily spans of free writing by hand in my notebook. Most times I have no idea what I’m going to write: I face a blank slate in my head. . . . The cat is trying to bark. . . . I sit beside a stranger I will never know: myself. My handwriting is nearly illegible, and sometimes the content as well, but I trudge on through at least a page, and sometimes I’m amazed at the genius or drivel emerging.

It’s a useful way to break out of the EDIT mindset, that slow stalking of perfection that pervades the later drafts of anything—a necessary stage but fatal at the outset of a project. As with anything, it’s a constant see-saw between Freedom and Control. It’s taken me maybe 60 years to learn that balance in the art of theatre; in starting to write fiction—well, not entirely starting, as this is our seventh novel—the process begins anew.

This new draft, I think, is a breakthru in that old literary saw, Show, don’t tell. Telling is delineating what happened, how your hero looks or smells, etc., and some of that is fine. Show means bringing your reader into the presence of the event—as theatre does by its very nature, except in shows that fall into endless narrative monologs. With MASKS, each draft has made an advance in different ways, but all more substantive than just decisions on commas or finding a juicier verb.

It occurs to me that my life has been a series of redrafts. Nothing as dramatic as the crash-and-recover that pervades movie stars’ bios or as cliched as staid-prof-finds-new-love, but still fairly dramatic in my own Midwestern way. It may be that all stories are about redrafts of lives and the slow, lifetime discovery of your own true voice. The two of us have been blest in having each other as mates: somehow accepting that process of change in one another. We weren’t born that way, and some of our quarrels have been more volcanic than anything we’ve done on stage. But somehow we’ve stumbled through the jungle and the pigpen and the maze toward that concept from Robert Heinlein: Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

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Writing . . .

—From EF—

I’m trying to take myself seriously. I was astonished that I could finally get into a responsible routine of physical workouts, and going to the gym 6 days out of 7 in the morning is a complete 180 from my previous inability to stick to anything. The current challenge is to do this with writing the memoir. I have an Everest confronting me here.

Conrad writes like a demon, day after day, on a clear schedule. It’s daunting to imagine constructing something like that for myself, but if I don’t, I’m gonna crap out on this important task.

Conrad has a writing problem: he has an itch. He can’t write in any one place for very long. His current strategy is to go to the gym, then to the coffee house with his homemade cannon-ball muffin, then maybe to the library for a while, and finally home about noon, acompanied by his trusty iPad.

A couple of years ago, he constructed a very elegant desk retreat for himself on one side of our studio. Big trapezoidal desk, office chair, lamp, the whole nine yards. It never took off for him. But now it’s become mine.

I took my pink Himalayan salt lamp out there, set up our tiny Lear speaker system in tandem with my iPod, and set a little space heater at the corner of the area. When we created Frankenstein I made some backstage lights that used very low-wattage bulbs, like night-lights. I grabbed one out of storage and set up a ghost-light. This is one of the most romantic images I have of theatrical stages, the solitary bare bulb on a stand at the center of the stage that is left lit when everybody goes home. Finally, we have a ghost-light in our studio.

So I’ve gotten through one whole week of writing in the studio from 10 to noon. Big deal, but it’s a start. There’s something about the ceremony of entering the pitch-dark space with that tiny amber ghost-light in faithful attendance, setting a small thermos of hot water beside the laptop, turning on the audio (currently ancient Armenian music), switching on the little floor heater, and sitting down to write.

I had an interesting span of dreams stirred up by inviting old buried memories to surface. Some mornings I wake up in a hot sweat, but others leave a complicated glow. The world around me is increasingly surreal, and I hope to put page after page into a path toward being grounded.

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Of Death . . .

—From CB—

[Note: If you are yourself at death’s door, or know others knocking there, you should read this only knowing that I’ve lost recent friends. I speak of this with humor, but a humor born of pain.]

A number of people have died. That’s been going on a long time, and the human race has mostly come to accept it. With age, you realize that either you watch your loved ones go west or they watch you, and there’s grief either way. Unless you’re such a sonofabitch that they’re glad of it—though your dog may be sad for a bit.

But if you’re reasonably lovable, you’re likely to have friends and relatives who won’t be happy about it. So you have two problems: them and yourself. For them, you can offer directives—cremate me, get drunk, bury my heart at Wounded Knee, etc.—and you can try not to leave a big mess. Not so easy, though, to make your campground as clean as you found it. There’s the money and property, of course, though that may be simpler than the vast mass of trinkets, correspondence, photos, books—or in our case puppets, videos, scripts, music files, blog posts, stage props—that you can’t bring yourself to get rid of . . . until somebody has to do it for you.

That’s one problem I start to face at 78. I like to plan ahead, and I have an almost pathological sense of Responsibility—but I’ve still got a number of projects on the table and probably will continue to have until my heart or kidneys decide it’s time for a break. So the big mess is almost inevitable.

(Might be the up-side of atomic warfare is that it gets rid of you and also your boxes of crap.)

The other challenge is to clarify to myself what I think about death. To a degree, the “clean-up” compulsion is a way of dodging the issue. Like a grunt in the trenches, if you focus on picking fleas you might stay sane through the night bombardment. But that gets me only so far. Eventually the bombardment intrudes on your concentration.

For many, the prescription is belief in life after death—from economy-size metempsychosis to jumbo Heaven with all the trimmings. To each his own, but for me that’s never been credible except on the mythopoetic level—to which I take frequent vacations.

And yet . . .

It’s the subject—the required course—that we all face. Some avoid it through accumulation of power, money, or other symbols of invulnerability. Others, like myself, curl into our sardonic cocoons, talk of “kicking the bucket,” “taking the flop,” “buying the farm,” “going west”—the standup comic blatting on until his mike goes dead.

In fact, I strain hard to imagine a world without me. Shouldn’t be that hard, as before my birth I couldn’t imagine a world with me so I’ve at least had nine months of trying to imagine the impossible. There’s refuge, of course, in finding peace through Buddhist focus on impermanence, but while my prefrontal cortex may grok that, it’s harder to convince the voters on the cellular level.

The best I can do right now is to create a kind of story in my head involving a hero who’s left the party and never shows up again. Hopefully, I’ve still got some years to rewrite this first draft.

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Unruly Collections . . .

  —From EF—    

 Anybody else having a hard time avoiding unravelling? At times in my life I have felt that I am an unruly collection of different people trying to pass as somebody with one face and one name. It was a healthy experience to use that to make a play, Dream House, bringing all those separate personae out onto the stage and eventually fuse them into one.

These days I feel more as if I am actually one person but the world around me has run whooping and hollering into a multiple-personality psychotic episode. On our weekly visit to the ocean (Arched Rock, on the Sonoma Coast), I remarked that Mama never wears the same dress twice. Last week was jade-green, today was pewter-gray, and the impressive swells kept peaked knife-edges until the moment they frothed into white. Not like the ones I’ve seen in the past with rounded tops, these were like bent metal. But it was all clearly the mighty Lady I know and love.

However, half a world away, Australia is on fire. Volcanoes are erupting in Indonesia and Hawaii. Jakarta is flooding. The permafrost is melting, while here in my back yard the garlic is thriving in spite of my being tardy with the weeding. We can satisfy our craving for greens with my garden’s collards and giant green mustard and chard. The rain has been benevolent, so far no rushing eroding streams, just a mighty purr from all the green things.

At our Sunday-morning coffee place, a lady made a friendly approach to beg a ride to the center of town, where we were going anyway. En route, we traded some snippets of selfhood on a more vulnerable level than common chit-chat, then went our separate ways. Looking at the web’s news, a large number of people are jockeying to do as much personal damage to each other as possible.

Women gather in huge demonstrations to promote what women do: nurture, comfort, nourish. It’s magnificent, but nothing has changed. Meanwhile, groups of people meet regularly to create hand-written postcards to strangers, urging them to vote. It’s possible that change can happen, one on one.

So now, this week, we begin the hard-core psychotic break of what happens in the Senate. It will be reported to us, and we will try to discern what’s truth and what’s spin and whether we can actually tell the difference. And Conrad and I will carry on with the 10th draft of the newest novel, and try to hone and refine its story to be what it really wants to be. May we all be able to make our stories be what they want to be.

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Peace Negotiations . . .

—From CB—

Yesterday I was in San Francisco for a dental appointment. Early morning bus, then art museum, then our old standby Cafe Trieste for lunch, then bus to the dentist, then checked into the Adelaide Hostel for an overnight. Out to eat, then back to the hostel’s kitchen to write.

The hostel has an upstairs lounge, but I prefer the basement where the combination of a blaring TV, late-night drinkers, and conversations in French or Spanish create a loneliness that serves me well—my mind wanders, but not so much as in dead silence. I finished my overdue biweekly blog post, but abruptly I had the seeds of a new one.

An older guy, maybe mid-sixties, was watching a documentary on whales while chatting up a young woman from Boston. “I’m from Boston,” he said. They talked about Boston a while, and then it died. The TV turned into something louder than whales, and the guy continued watching—or at least pointing himself in that direction.

A youngish black man turned and asked him, “Are you watching that?” A reasonable query, one would think, simple to answer with yes or no. Instead, it sparked an explosion.

The older guy responded with fury, “What does it look like?”

“I just asked.”

“Can’t you see?” And suddenly all of Northern California was afire. Neither got up from his chair, but the rhythm of whap-whap-whap was growing lethal. I got up, walked over to them, said something like, “Hey, change the rhythm.”

I never do stuff like that. I claim a coward’s privilege. I never had a fistfight past fourth grade. The times I’ve tried to act as a peacemaker on the Web have never won me the Nobel. And I recall what happened to Mercutio when he tried to intervene in swordplay.

But in this case I persisted. “Let go of it, it’s no big thing,” I said to one and to the other as they continued shouting. And then the older guy stormed upstairs, either to lodge a complaint at the desk or to call down a drone strike on the kitchen. I went back to working on Chapter 26 and drinking my Jameson.

Later I lay in my cubicle of the 10-bed dorm reading. The youngish black man came in and I heard him speak to a friend about the dust-up. “Don’t know what his problem was. Think he just doesn’t like black guys.” And he may have been right. Surely he has more experience with that than I do.

But it struck me: How does he know? It could as well be that the older guy is feeling his age, that the girl is uninterested, that he’s got nothing to do in San Francisco at night except watch TV, that this young twerp is implying he’s not even conscious—

Not something I’d thought of until I reached that age when gray hair makes us invisible, useful for nothing except to blame for the state of the world. Experience has led me to a hypothetical perception, as the black man’s experience has led him to a different perception. Neither of us knows, though for both of us it likely adds evidence to our preconceptions. Even the other guy probably doesn’t know what moved him.

Lots of land mines out there. Walk with caution.

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Critter Comfort . . .

—From EF—

       If my scratch notes are right, our brother cats were born Mar 10, 2017, part of a litter of five, their mom-cat’s first. (Her next litter was 10; fecund lady.) We picked them up on May 31, when they were almost 12 weeks old. Males, Shadow and Garfunkel, smoke-black tabbies, one long-haired, the other now a sleek fur fireplug.

         I have always loved cats. Nothing against dogs, we had Ruffle for 14 years and I loved her dearly, but I am definitely a cat lady. When we got a couple of beautiful Siamese in 1968 it was heaven for a while—our first big house, even if it was in Columbia SC—but then it soon became obvious that Conrad had a severe cat allergy. The diagnosis took a while, so by the time we had to give our beloved cats away, it was two moms and nine kittens. That hurt.

         As we spent our decades touring and staying in host houses, antihistamines were Conrad’s constant helpers when we were staying with cat-lovers. But by the time we got to 2016 or so, we realized that he hadn’t needed the antihistamines for a very long time. Eventually it dawned on us—we could have cats. And we got ’em.

         Their first night with us was gnarly; soft bed or no, they were away from Mama for the first time, in an alien environment, and they were very vocally unhappy. I got up, put on my robe, came downstairs and sat by their bed in the corner of the kitchen cuddling them all night. I guess they imprinted, like ducks.

         They are particularly attached to me, and this makes touring difficult. We have a beloved friend who stays with them when we’re gone, and as far as I know they love her and are comforted with her. But when Conrad came home a week before I did from last year’s fall trip to Europe (we often split our itineraries), he came in the door and was greeted with wild affection. The cats then went to the closed front door and sat there, waiting. When he told me that, my eyes got wet.

         So yes, our furry companions need me, but it goes beyond that. I need them. If I lie down for an afternoon nap, it takes a max of ten seconds for the first cat to land on my belly, and the second is not far behind. I can’t begin to say what a comfort that is for me. That warm purring weight, the sense of trust, the connection—it helps me detach from the insane politics and the rat-scratch of accounting and bills and cash flow, and just sock into the sweet pleasure of the moment.

         We and the cats survived the fire evacuation in fine fettle, thanks to theatre friends in Santa Rosa who lost electricity but didn’t have to evacuate. I’m trying to refine our refuge plans for the eventual earthquake. I appreciate the fact that if we and our cats remain in good health, I will still have my furry friends when I am 90.

         But right now, I am in the dismal swamp of our current political flu, more virulent than ever, and I’m just trying to fight the depression that is always worse in winter. My furry companions, I realize, are an important asset, a reliable link to a state of warm meditation; thay take some of the razor edges off my awful inner engine. Hail, companion animals.

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