Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 26

Individuals . . .

—From CB—

Yesterday, Saturday, a friend invited us to a National Theatre Live showing of FLEABAG—the stage production, not the TV series—at the downtown Sebastopol multiplex. A solo piece about the performer’s sex life, death of a close friend, death of a guinea pig, etc. Extremely funny and moving, especially so because so much of the performer’s mercurial persona reminded us of our long-long-long colleague Camilla in performance—Camilla, who died this past year.

Returning home after lunch and long talking with our old Milwaukee friend—he was my replacement in teaching at UW-M—I wasn’t in the mood for work, so I watched on Criterion Channel the 1967 Shirley Clarke documentary PORTRAIT OF JASON. Very similar in a sense: an hour and forty-five minutes of one person talking. It’s a gay black man, filmed over a 12-hour marathon, recounting his life, his hopes (never realized), his hustles and cons, with incessant hysterical laughter that tears your gut—not pleasant, yet intensely moving, a film that Ingmar Bergman described as the most extraordinary film he’d ever seen.

At the end of this day of personal testaments, now home with the cats and working on Chapter 25 of MASKS, I feel the tears welling up. It doesn’t have so much to do with the play and the film—both are brilliant, and yet my inner directorial dentist always probes for the flaws—but for the simple fact of mortality. The one is crafted, the other is improvised, yet both embody the bizarre contradictions that our lives embody. For me, they both evoke, in vastly different ways, that extraordinary final scene in Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH where the woman, bereft of her dead baby, gives her breast to the lips of the dying man.

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Forbidden Dreams . . .

—From EF—

On Saturday the 12th, we participated as writer/readers in a special version of LitQuake. This is a San Francisco literary word-fest that is now in its 20th year, and consequently spawned 20 satellite events throughout the Bay Area. Ours was in Occidental, at a magical place that I hope will develop its own quirky and enchanting series of events.

We were an evening’s-worth of writers and poets, each sharing a short segment of our work, then sharing a group paella. The paella’s subjects were saffron rice, chicken, andouille, peppers, and loads of garlic. When I saw the first whole garlic clove, which I mistook for a white bean, I thought, this is gonna be heaven. The readings’ subjects were equally tasty.

Our own reading was a scene from our first published novel, Realists. Its genesis was in 2001, a theatre project at Juniata College (Huntingdon Pa), and its sprawling story, with a cast of eighteen, dictated that this would be its only staging. But the opportunity to work with such a lavish palette allowed some pretty outrageous ideas to take shape. In fact, we inadvertently forecast the political landscape of today. Sorry, folks.

The basic premise was that at some time in the near future, an incompetent fascist (Bud Pert) would be elected President, largely because too many folks chose not to vote. His party, called the Realists, campaigned on a broad platform: “The other guys babble about the issues. Bud Pert says two words: ‘Get Real.’ Vote Realists in 2020. Give it to’em. Hard.”

The resulting victory enabled making dreaming illegal. Pornographic, frightening, a waste of energy, dreaming was unpatriotic and would be eradicated by adding anti-dream meds to the public water system.

In our play (not the novel), we had a Motown-style trio tempting folks to drop their meds:

 

Hey, baby take a walk with me

Open the gate, let’s go down to the river

Hey, baby take a walk with me

        Unlock the door, you know

         You’ve been there before

And you wanna go again (and again and again and again)

Hey, baby take a walk with me

There’s a brand new surprise at the back of your eyes

         And it’s gonna make you shiver

        When you step in the river

And you’re gonna take a walk with me

If you can’t dream, you’re likely to go nuts. And in the novel, a far-out physicist predicts that subjecting groups of dream-starved people to extreme stress would rupture the fabric of reality and result in floating islands of people who can’t communicate with each other. Sound familiar?

Long story short, the Dreamers win, at a bizarre cost, but they win. And we, the LitQuake and other merchants of the written/spoken word, believe that somehow we will win. If we all connect and dream together, maybe anything’s possible. So go on, dream, read to your kids, and talk to each other.

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Inmost Self . . .

—From CB—

A few years ago, I attended a weekend men’s retreat. In the woods, good food, well organized, interesting men of all ages—I left dissatisfied.

That was predictable, knowing me. If I hadn’t been a writer and stage director, I would have made a great dentist. My instinct is to go after every cavity with ferocious intent. I am perpetually critical of workshops, having conducted so many. It may be the satirist’s mind that attracts me to diverse groups but positions me always at the edge. Or it may just be shyness.

The broad intent of the gathering, as I understood it, was to help us define what it was to be a man in the present day; to heal; to open emotionally; to heal; to focus awareness of myth, of guilt, of grief, of friendship; and to heal. All good intents, and no question the world would be a better place if even a tiny bit of that could happen on a wider scale.

What incited my withdrawal? To some degree, probably, because I tend to protect my griefs, my sins, my wounds from public scrutiny: I write fictional characters, not self-expressive lyric. And to some degree because since childhood I’ve had an unfocused, instinctive fear ofmen. Casual friendship, yes. Professional friendship, yes. Deep and sharing friendship, never.

  And perhaps I don’t really want to be healed. I want, first, to be kind. Second, to craft the muck into art.

I have created characters who are selfish, egocentric, self-pitying, and violent. Those are not only observed phenomena: they are part of me. I do my best in my actions not to be true to my inmost self: I greatly prefer to offer the world and my loved ones the kinder, gentler version. No less true: I believe our angels dance with our devils, and they all split the rent.

I admire the Christian experiment in its attempt to purge each individual soul of the kelp and barnacles clinging to it, aiming at something pure. But I fear I’ll always look at the barista’s shapely hips or the last piece of pumpkin pie with lust in my heart.

We are all, I believe, a multiplicity of selves. We’re persuadable to change our habits, our choices and our actions to conform to the standards we set for ourselves, but a much harder surgery to cast out the demons in our souls, even among receptive litters of swine (Matt. 8:28).

I still hunger for friendship and fellowship, and I celebrate those who find it. Meantime, I gravitate to the edge of parties.

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Rivers . . .

—From EF—

      I’m an Aquarius. I remember my surprise when I discovered that it’s an air sign, not water. OK, I understand, but I still have a bone-deep attraction to all things Water. I think it’s sensible that small towns and villages in Italy and France often attach their name to the name of the nearby river or stream, as in Marcilhac-sur-Célé, where I visited for three days in mid-September after visiting Johanna in Italy. The Célé is in south-central France, right on the path of the Camino de Santiago, and Brigitte has a house and gîte (guest cottage) just outside Marcilhac. Our mutual friend Steven had said time and again, “You should really visit Brigitte.” So I did.

         In the village the Célé is a sweet little stream, wooded on one side and graced with a grassy park on the other; both are mirrored in the clear water. There’s an ancient abbey by the stream, and in a short underpass leading from the stream to the abbey’s street I found this sign. (translated) “The underpass is not a urinal. Respect this historic place. Every person found in flagrante delicto will be subject to confiscation of the flagrant object.” Don’t mess with the river.

         The beginning of my stay with Brigitte coincided with the end of a two-week visit from her best friend Sarah, who is from England; they met as teens and have been fast friends ever since. Two amazing women; I hope to stay in touch. Our streams touched briefly; it’s up to me to keep the current going.

         The Célé flows into the Lot, which joins the Garonne and flows into the Atlantic. When I took the train to Paris to fly home, my route was along those rivers to their combined destination at Bordeaux. That seemed fitting. I saw all these little rivers become larger, still reflecting everything along their banks, until they disappeared in the city. I don’t want Brigitte and Sarah to disappear.

         All the little rivers I know, the Sieve, the Pesa, the Elsa, the Célé and the Russian River at home, all flow into an ocean, all are fed by the rain. I can imagine them gossiping, trading outrages and delights, just as I chatted with two Australian women walking the Camino as I waited for my train in Cahors.

         So much divides us, so much connects us. It’s up to us to choose.

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Frustration . . .

 

—From CB—

I like things to be over and done with.

And get very grouchy when things go on and on and on. That was an advantage of our theatre work: there’s a point when it opens, a point when you put it to bed. Even if you love it, even if you have it in touring repertory for years & years, there’s a point when it comes down to “That’s all she wrote!” Maybe something innate in my genes, something from toilet training, or, starting from Cub Scouts, just having too much stuff on my worklist.

And so I suffer frustration with stuff that won’t let go. Stuff that, even doing it today, you have to do it tomorrow. Not so much the bathroom stuff, the food stuff, or even going to the gym, but those chronic tasks that feel as if there’s a finish but there’s not.

Two categories right now. The first is yardwork. We are blest and curst by Ye Gods with care of half an acre. The house takes up part of that, but not enough. It does give us the blessing of space for a garden and stretches of growth that a friend described as, “How very pre-Raphaelite!” But there are certain tasks—weeding, fighting back the ivy and the juniper, picking the scaly growth out of the moss yard—that will never be done till the death of the planet (or me, whichever comes first).

The deeper frustration is creative. Besides our lifelong theatre work (now limping off in the distance), in the last 15 years we’ve written 7 novels (three self-published), 40 short stories (7 published), and three years of weekly blogging. It’s not the same thing.

Yes, some similarities. Rewrites are endless. Every time you perform your play you’re trying another inflection or word choice on that line that ought to get a laugh and never has. Likewise, every time you rewrite a piece on the page, you wrestle with that one inconsiderate comma. But the play gets instant response, even if it’s from a handful of people. For prose on the page, unless you hit it big or write identifiable genre fiction, you’re lucky if even friends will read and respond.

That might feel different to writers who haven’t had the live-audience experience. What’s the difference? I suppose that, for me, with theatre there’s a completion at each performance, even if you have another ten shows that month and two years to go with the piece. There’s an illusion that, for that one day, you’ve ripped up all the ivy, gotten rid of your worklist in one fell swoop, given it your all. Every performance has a beginning, middle, and end.

Right now we’re doing final edits and layout on AKEDAH: THE BINDING, a novel so off-track that we’ll offer it free to friends, and in the 7th draft of an equally weird but more user-friendly novel MASKS, which we’ll shop to agents and publishers. Meantime, I’ll find my sense of finality, completion, whatever you call it, simply in doing, day by day, what I do, whether barbering the moss or excising that cranky paragraph from Chapter 9. Taking satisfaction in that requires a massive soul transformation, but I can put that on the worklist and cross it off when done.

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Home Free . . .

—From EF—

Normally I write my blog entry on Sunday. This is Wednesday. This morning I was walking down Blvd Pasteur in Paris at 5 AM, headed for the bus that would take me to the airport and the plane that would take me home. Now it’s nearly 5 PM California time, but still the same day. Never mind that my body is in 2 AM tomorrow, the sun is golden here and the moss in our front yard is glowing green.

  The word disorienting enters the mind, but what feels right is orienting. During this past week, with CB in one hemisphere and me in another, I have felt more keenly than ever how connection is immediate, instant, and constant. I feel we will only survive if this goes viral.

I vist the stones at Carnac again and remember when my dowsing rods were nearly torn from my hands by the energy of the ley-lines. That was only a confirmation of what I’d always felt there, that there’s an energetic webwork girdling the earth, and Carnac is one of the “hot points.” We have another one here, at Portuguese Beach, and when I visit the ocean here I’m also greeting Carnac.

  Science acknowledges that mycelium are the internet of the forest, that redwoods shift resources to others who are in need, that there is a vast and caring intelligence in the plant world that we would do well to acknowledge and emulate. It makes me smile to think of trains as human mycelium, that my frequent experience of deep vivid conversation with someone in the next seat, someone I will never see again but whose personhood has touched mine, that these sparks are part of a network.

  These two weeks have been dense, fragrant, lively, exhausting, invigorating, and essential for me. A long time ago I wrote this song lyric, and I think I still mean it:

 I don’t wanna leave the train, Mama, I really think I wanna

And yo u can change my station and my destination,

And I’ll cope on the other side

 ‘Cause I’m listening to the weaver, singing in my head

 And I don’t want no rebuttal, ‘cause I know I’m a shuttle,

And I’m carrying a sacred thread.

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Debate Club . . .

—From CB—

I was never in the debate club. My after-school time was involved in play rehearsal, or if there was no rehearsal, just hanging around Miss Young’s room and talking about drama with other misfits. But I had a couple of friends in debate, one a button-down type named John, the other a future Iowa congressman Dennis, a pleasant dummy.

But I think I would have been a stand-out. I had a commanding voice, an analytic mind, and an egotism second to none. Plus, an intense desire to please: I might have had a stellar future in politics.

“Resolved, that we should recognize Red China” was the question of the year, as I recall, and the world was looking to Iowa teens for an answer. Not to mention the billion souls in Red China, eager for our acknowledgement.

My friends were required to develop cases both pro and con, since in the tournaments they were assigned their unshakeable beliefs just prior to the clash. A flip of the coin determined the fate of billions. And so they were playing a character throughout the debate, projecting a firm conviction in their righteousness. Not unlike we drama nuts, though they didn’t have to do it in greasepaint.

Good training for lawyers, obviously, as our legal system operates on the medieval principle of armed combat to determine the truth. God picks the winner, and the jury concurs. (Not that I can propose something better.)

From early on, I felt queasy about this practice. Was debate a search for truth or a sport? Did the fate of Red China depend on the smoothness of delivery and wielding a mace spiked with authoritative quotes? On the other hand, where else did anyone have an impetus to research both sides of an issue? Or to cast the mind into the mind of the other? The debate experience at least implied that a case could be made on the other side.

What seems to be lacking in our experience, whether in high school or in the so-called Real World (which seems more fictional day by day) is the concept of collaboration in search for the truth. Woe betide any elected public prosecutor who doesn’t use any semi-legal tactic to secure max convictions. Woe betide the defense attorney who doesn’t use every stratagem to defend his client. Who’s paid to find the truth? Yet at worst this may result only in a few unjust executions, not mass starvation or world war or the death of the planet. When we extend the game into the realm of politics, there are more chips on the table.

Is it impossible to envision a politics—perhaps starting in a high school club—that’s based on collaboration? On the same search for truth that impels my dentist to seek out each hidden cavity while lecturing me on my deficient dental hygiene?

Granted, if we can’t agree that we want to keep all our teeth or at least have something to chew with—perhaps have our slaves predigest our food—we’re not likely to come to agreement. But I’m not convinced that anyone is born with the innate desire to gun down folks in a shopping mall or to grind down all opposition by any trick in the book. What are the possibilities of games that combine respect for the individual and non-competitive collaboration toward a common goal? Even at the microcosmic level, are there juicier things in marriage than winning the fight?

Must all our debates require a winner?

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Riding the Ley Lines . . .

——From EF—

Wired, tired, and giddy, that’s me. Tomorrow morning we head for the airport, take two planes to get to Milan, then two more trains to get to Pontassieve, where we will be met by Jo and Fra and a car full of groceries. Then about twenty minutes of steep twisty back-country roads to get home to the Mill House, where wine and supper will follow shortly. Sleep, then five whole days of yakking and hugging and laughing and walking and basking in silent presence. And enjoying the feeling of walking barefoot on the 14th-century stone floor in the beautiful little home that has been theirs since February of 2012.

  Then a return home for CB, solo, while I go on to France. I will carry my magic tokens to Carnac, find the ancient stone cross and the wee hole at its base where, years ago, I placed a wish-token from my Swiss friend Erica. She needed help getting money to publish a coffee-table book showing the decades of theatre work she had created. First with Zbigniew Stok, and after his death, with Peter Doppelfeld. Now Erica is Beyond, but her little token is still under the cross. (It worked. The book was beautiful.)

  Now I’m bringing a token from Camilla, our long-time theatre partner in Lancaster PA. I took a mad trip to upstate New York to visit with her while that was still possible, and I asked her if she’d like to give me something to put under that cross with Erica. Yes. I have it in my suitcase, along with one from Flora Coker (friend/colleague since 1966, and still living and working in Milwaukee.) And I have one for me.

  Four gorgeous strong women, two with feet in the Hereafter, two still plugging along in the Now. Collectively we have created and performed decades of stories, brought to life memorable characters. I find great joy in the idea that we will always be snuggled together, a different Fab Four, riding the energy of the ley-lines at Carnac. If you want us, you know where to find us.

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Backstory . . .

—From CB—

Backstory. It’s what’s happened to your character, your family, your country or your galactic empire before the story starts. How did you get to that desert planet and learn to fly dragons? Writing fiction, you figure how to bring it in as it’s relevant without clotting it into one big dump.

Most mornings, the first whiff of dawn awakens my farmers’ genes, I grapple for my sleep mask and launch some idiot dream. Other times, the brain worries some task, an insight or paranoid vision, like a cat ragging the mouse that won’t die.

Last week, working on the end of the 8th draft of a novel that few will want to read, I began early dawn to torment my own backstory. It’s a common question at readings: how much of the novelist’s life is contained in his characters? That same question might be put to the writers of memoir.

I won’t go into my own life story here. That’s mostly contained in our 2010 memoir CO-CREATION. That book’s as honest as we could be, and yet it could be deconstructed in terms of its serving our psychosocial self-images as individuals and as couple. The story of a life is a story. We construct the story we tell about ourselves and the story we believe. Sometimes the two are the same, but even recounting every incident in merciless detail, we’re still selecting the incidents that define us.

Not to suggest that our own backstory is false or that it should be abandoned—that’s best determined in consultation with therapists or lovers—but only that we be aware of what’s there and what’s not; how our chapters might otherwise divide; what functions or disfunctions it serves. It may be grossly self-congratulatory or hideously shameful, but we tell it and tell it and tell it, and we keep on living it because it serves a purpose. It keeps the illusional entity known as Me alive.

The celebrity memoir has a more predictable form. Surviving the traumatic or idyllic childhood; early inspiration; success; the inevitable crash from depression, intoxicants, ego flatulence or anything else offering struggle; and finally rebounding thanks to God, meeting Sal or Sally, yoga or Vitamin C. Not that these stories are false, only that they’re stories. They’re as “constructed” as a novel, with an intent—conscious or unconscious—of bringing about a result: being beloved or elected or rich, or a genuine desire to inspire—many options.

In the political spectrum, stories have enormous power. They can cure cancer, induce genocide, launch armies, drop the bomb, free the slaves, send a man to the moon or eviscerate Planet Earth. Guns kill people, people kill people, but the story pulls the trigger. The real weapons are the stories. It’s the stories we kill with, and they swarm like roaches.

So what’s the backstory I tell of myself? What purpose does it serve? Why does it cling to my face? I live it daily, though I’m only beginning to know it. Perhaps by the time I’m eighty.

What’s yours?

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Amygdala Addiction . . .

—From EF—

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There’s a lot of punditry going around about how the Dems just don’t have the “killer instinct,” or how they are “squishy,” or how they’re full of touchy-feely platitudes. Of course the Repubs will steam-roller over everything because they know how to talk directly. To the amygdala.

         The amygdala is a little structure located deep in the bottom central area of the brain where your head hooks onto your neck. Once I read a pithy little self-help article about anger management. It recommended that when steam is about to shoot out of your ears in a fracas with mate or kids, do something, anything to break the tempo. Deep breaths, leave the room for a count of ten, whatever. But the best, most memorable way I heard it expressed was “Don’t get hijacked by your amygdala.”  That stuck with me.

         The amygdala is an ancient part of the brain structure, sometimes referred to as the “lizard brain,” and it’s part of a team. The cerebellum handles basic functions: breathing, keeping a heartbeat, organizing the muscles to do stuff without falling over. The hypothalamus plays our hormones like a piano, the hippocampus gives us memory, the thalamus organizes sensory inputs and sends that info to our our computing brain; the pons seems to function as the switchboard operator for all these messages and is a key element in dreaming. And the amygdala? It’s the structure that functions as the fire station siren: when it goes off you run like hell or go postal. It triggers a spurt of adrenaline before the conscious mind can make any kind of decision, and when it works overtime it gifts us with fear, anxiety, stress, and panic attacks.

         Adrenaline speeds everything up. Early in my life I developed a pattern of leaving stuff until the last minute, waiting for the fear to kick in, then pulling it all off on an adrenaline high. I needed the fear. It was uncomfortable, it kicked me in the gut, but I relied on it. I wasn’t part of a community, I was solo and vulnerable, and it took years before I began to understand how to reach out, connect, and accomplish things in a gentler and more pleasurable way.

         Music camp. Ensemble theatre. Quaker Meeting. Bonding with a lover. These were a different kind of high, and they all took time and the courage to release the tight defensive boundaries of a fearful self. Not an immediate kick in the butt: something deeper and more productive. It doesn’t deliver like Amazon Prime.

         On the other hand, hate delivers and delivers fast, especially if it’s in a crowd. It’s a short-cut to the amygdala and it is powerful. No thought required. How do we reach out to offer something different, something better? How do we become effective against the power-hungry steamroller? I see a lot of commentary suggesting that we need to hit the fear button ourselves, to warn that we face a collapse into fascism, to enlist the amygdala in our own progressive efforts. But is fear that different from hate? If our human world can only be shaped by the owner of the rowdiest amygdala, how will we ever extract ourselves from this strait-jacket of aggression?

         I don’t know. I’m tired. I’m worn down by the street-eaters and graders that will give us a better Pleasant Hill Road. Their gargantuan machines roam up and down gargling subsonic rumbles, which freak the cats, but they freak me too. (It’s wired into us.) I want to believe that somehow we will bumble our collective way to a world of more peace and quiet and comfort. How can we advertise that the world of the fist is not the way?    

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