Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 27

Akedah . . .

—From CB—

What do you do when a story grabs your head in its jaws and won’t let go? It’s like an earworm, that unbearable impulse to repeat a song, a rhyme, or an ad slogan over and over until you can bear no more: you confess your terrorist deeds and take the Boy Scout oath.

In my current brain, it’s the Akedah, Hebrew for binding, specifically referring to the myth of God’s directing Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. At the last moment, he’s reprieved and a ram is provided: God still requires blood, just not the son’s. But Abraham has proved his obedience and is duly blest.

Right now we’re finishing the eighth draft of a novel updating the tale to a father/son journey from Chico CA across Yosemite and Death Valley to Las Vegas and on to Shiprock NM. Two years ago, I drove this route. We expect to publish it early next year and to give away copies, just to have it done with.

Why has this story captured me ever since I first heard it in Sunday School? Of course I was told its moral, but it burrowed more deeply. You could pull off the bloated tick’s belly, but the head held tight.

Some years ago, we did a workshop at a Lutheran seminary. We asked the students—future pastors all—to listen to this odd story as if they’d never heard it and had no notion what it meant. “What does it spark in your mind?” They then divided into groups and came back with treatments of how they might focus a play. In one group, it was the straight interpretation, except that Abraham held a pistol to his son’s head, not a knife. Another, that it was Isaac commanded to kill his father. Another, that the dad was getting directions though a CB radio with very bad reception and was incredulous of what he was hearing. Another, focused entirely on Isaac’s mother Sarah back in the tent.

Like all great stories, it can’t be corralled by “the moral of the story is . . .” It’s a bramble with vicious barbs.

I don’t start out with a message I want to express, rarely even for a Facebook blurb. I’m drawn to a ground where I want to dig. I may find dinosaur bones, a vein of gold, or the petrified dregs of a privy. I only know that I need to dig. Why there? I don’t know. At some point I’ll probably speculate on the why: something to do with my father, with me as a father, with the yearning of men in the desert? I’d be interested to know, but right now I can only shape the story as it wills, and I may have to fake knowing what it means.

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Hail the Goer, Again . . .

—From EF—

      It hurts when you don’t know when they set sail, you only know you missed the chance for a last goodbye. I’d been a long time feeling guilty about sending an email, and when I sent it, it bounced. I had a bad feeling, and asked a mutual friend. She didn’t know but asked another friend. No. Theo is no longer with us. Oh.

         Our last visit with Theo, the last time we got to Amsterdam, was in 2016. In years before that, I often made the trip to Italy to visit our daughter Johanna solo. It’s only in the more recent years that CB has felt comfortable with time and money and we’ve traveled as a duo. When it was just me, I slept on Theo’s cot or in his back room, but this time we got a room in a student hostel and met Theo for dinner in a place he knew across the street.

         That visit was both sweet and painful, because it was clear that Theo’s mind was beginning to slip, and he was aware of it, and it was hard for him. Nevertheless, we had wonderful reminiscences and laughs, and I didn’t know it would be the last time.

         I have never known a more loving and generous soul on this planet, with the exception of Conrad’s mom. Here’s the history. We were part of Theatre X in Milwaukee from 1969 to 1974, then hived off to become The Independent Eye. In the years after our departure, Theatre X came to the attention of a major gallery in Amsterdam, The Mickery, which also produced theatre events. For years and years Theatre X would go to Amsterdam, mount a radical new production, get paid what they deserved, get critical acclaim, then come back to Milwaukee. During that time, Theo entered their world.

         Our own company, The Independent Eye, mounted a production of John Schneider’s Acts of Kindness in 1982. Some elements were autobiographical, and I played a character whose inspiration was Theo. Back in 1979, we’d been invited to perform in Jerusalem, took the kids with us, and figured that as long as we were across the pond, let’s take another couple of weeks in Europe. While there, we camped in what had been the old Olympic Stadium, and we got in touch with Theo, all four of us. He never forgot the 4-year-old Johanna’s joyous story about the frogs in the campground.

         Once Jo relocated to Italy, I took to making an annual solo visit, always via Amsterdam. Between 1998 and 2015 I visited Theo fifteen times. So much to remember, even though the visits were usually for only a day and a half. Once we took his folding bikes and cycled together west to the ocean beach, stopping at a park for a picnic. Once we went to the magical island of Marken. Once I went with him to his church service. Once we went to a fish shop that had three little tables in a back room, where we sat and ate the fish Theo had picked out at the front counter. Many times we would take a leisurely afternoon car trip around the polders, stopping for ice cream or tea. And then there was the year when I lost all my money and ID and credit cards and passport the afternoon before my return flight, and Theo was with me all the way as I negotiated at the consulate and finally got a temporary passport so I could fly home.

         In the early years of this odd friendship, I know Theo was a bit puzzled how it had come about, but within a few years I knew, from his emails, that it pleased him. It more than pleased me. We relied on being able to have those brief and colorful visits every year. I know so many odd bits and pieces of the Netherlands, beautiful little Vermeer portraits given to me by my friend Theo. He was a soul like no other. Hail the goer.

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The Afterlife . . .

 

—From CB—

Someone on a Facebook group I visit asked, “What are people’s belief in an afterlife.” Most respondents were of the opinion, “There isn’t one.” There were a few expecting reincarnation or union with a higher consciousness, but few takers for Heaven or Hell.

            My own view was more nuanced or—another way of saying it—dodged the question. I tend not to speculate on issues that don’t concern me, and while it’s a question of cosmic implications, I see no way to answer except by dying, and then how would I post it to Facebook? Nor do I see that the promise of an afterlife would affect how I live in the present. I’d study the same whether or not I expected the prof to give a final exam.

            But I disagreed with the expressed idea that “afterlife” is just a cultural construct to keep the peasants in line. I think it’s at our core: a strategy for survival. Not all of our strategies are effective—you can’t outrun a bear—but the instinct goes back to the lowest levels of evolution. It’s manifest in the cockroach scurrying over the counter and reaches its apogee with our human achievement of symbolic thought, wherein *humiliation* is a greater threat than a bullet to the head.

            And possibly the greater terror—worse than being consigned to Hell—is no longer to exist as an individual. Thus the terror of Alzheimer’s or of losing the past, and thus the threat of Ibsen’s Button-molder, who simply foretells that Peer Gynt will be melted in his ladle and recast into something new.

            Artists have their own stratagems, apart from engendering new humans: the paintings or pots or plays, the songs and stories we make. It’s an illusion, of course: who actually reads that 17th Century emperor of letters John Dryden today? If you’re not both a genius *and* extremely lucky, will you even merit a NY Times obit? My 30+ plays, 200 dramatic sketches, 5 novels, 40 short stories, 20 bins of puppets, hours of public radio, thousands of performances, and infinite press releases and grant applications—indeed, they express my heart to varying degrees, at least a cioppino of diverse ingredients—the fish stew of a soul. But who will be there to eat it?

            In fact I think I’m pretty much past the supposition that fame would promise eternal life or even that it adds much meaning to the brief span of our years. Of course I want readers for our novels, audiences for our plays, just as I have a mate for making love. But I know only that I’m compelled to tell stories as best I can, to connect with my fellows as best I can, to love my family as best I can, with no intimations of immortality.

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Hail the Goer . . .

 

—From EF—

Hail the Goer

  The Heart Sutra is imbedded in the part of my heart filled with the words that give me goosebumps. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, hail the goer.” (Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgati, bodhi svaha.) There is a simplicity and beauty in this chant that sank its hooks deep into me before I knew what it meant.

  I had it in my mind with the death of my actress-colleague in Zurich, Erica, someone whose artistic stature blew me away since our first meeting in 1979. It was a regular ritual for me to visit her annually when I went to Europe, first with her artistic partner Zbignew Stok, and after his death, with Peter Doppelfeld. I stayed in their little theatrical kingdom on Silhkai, a three-story narrow building overlooking the waters of the Sihl, and many’s the late afternoons we spent in the rooftop garden with white wine and deep conversation. She was an immense creative force, creating a long series of performance pieces illuminating some of the finest minds we have ever known, like Van Gogh, with stage-pieces entirely made from bundled straw, his painting made literal.

Cancer. Fuck cancer. She had one bout of diagnosis and treatment, and when I last visited she was trim and vital. Three months later, she was gone.

Hail the Goer.

And our artistic partner Camilla Schade. She confronted breast cancer, went through the treatment, and took her unbounded creative energy into more projects. Then the demon returned in a different form and took her away. We spent a golden five hours together at the end, and I will never forget that blessing.

Hail the Goer.

And someone I never knew personally, Paul Krassner, died today. He was the icon of comic resistance for Conrad and me through years of our memory, and today, he crossed over. In our time of turmoil, we will miss his acidic humor, his unerring skewer.

Hail the Goer.

And the time will come when we will join that mighty march. It is inevitable, and should be given respect. When I go this September to Carnac, in Bretagne, I will carry time-messages. I already placed a token there for Erica, when she was searching for monetary support for a major book, and it worked. At the foot of that ancient stone cross I will place three more tokens this year: one for Camilla, one for my soul-sister Flora, and one for myself. We belong together.

Hail the Goer.     

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My Inheritance . . .

—From CB—

This week, for reasons unfathomable, I’ve been thinking about my mother. She died some years ago, age 85, and left us enough money for a downpayment on our house. I’ve been thinking what else she left me.

PHOTOS—

     A pile of photo albums: the family in front of the Christmas tree, the family in front of the car, the family in front of the house. endlessly. Oddly, we’re always smiling, and it wasn’t forced, except on visits when we had to watch the Lawrence Welk show.

WILL—

    And when I hit the teen years and discovered my own, we had many tempests. Yet she could bend—not with a boss or a salesclerk or some honcho in charge, but with me. Having struggled for money all her life, she was deeply anxious about my going into theatre rather than engineering, but finally it was, “Whatever you’re happy with.” Same with my marrying young. Same with my leaving professorship for taking a chance on a rag-tag theatre troupe. She’d worked all her life at drudge jobs—from bookkeeping to riveting B-29s to assembly line at a meatpacking plant to driving a dynamite truck—and simply wanted me to do what I wanted to do.

    What I didn’t inherit, to my regret, was her confrontational instinct. I hate conflict. I hate my own anger. I don’t like it in others, but I could use a bit more of it myself. As a playwright, I’ve rarely worked well with other directors of our work because I’m too compliant. I can’t bring myself to complain about the neighbor’s dog. On the other hand, it’s perhaps contributed to my high creativity in finding compromise.

CONTRADICTIONS—

    As a writer, I look first at my characters’ incongruities, and much of that, I think, comes from trying to comprehend her. She would certainly have supported Trump’s policies, but she always voted—or didn’t—on whether or not she liked the guy, and her assessment of him might well have been “big fat blowhard.”

    For a time she had been dirt poor, with the challenge of being a single parent, but she had no sympathy with anyone on “handouts.” She would have been appalled at the current family separations, but would have blamed the mothers for putting their kids in danger. At family gatherings our kids would hear their loving Grandma spout racial epithets —“The niggers are all over North Omaha”—and we would have to explain, “Grandma’s just that way, and you’re not going to change her,” as I knew from having that fight many times. We’re each a menagerie of personae.

ACCEPTANCE—

    She had a capacity to accept the inevitable. Two failed marriages, but while she was dead honest with me about my deserter dad’s faults, she was honest about her love for him. When she was courted in elder years by a nice man with what was, to her, absolute disqualifiers (a farmer, a Catholic, and with strong family ties), she married him—in large part, I think, to provide for her old age without being a burden to us. When she was seriously ill, receiving regular transfusions, as soon as it became clear to her that she was beyond recovery, she died rapidly—an iron will turned inward.

    Odd to think of that as a survival mechanism, but it was for her and it is for me. Shit happens, and my head goes instantaneously to, Okay, what do we do? It’s a challenge to realize that I need to precede that by an appropriate allowance for grief or rage, and I try to be mindful of others’ emotional timelines, but it serves its purpose for my own process to proceed on, Damn, that’s life. What’s next?

RESPONSIBILITY—

    I’ve always thought that my father, through his negative example, gave me an almost pathological sense of responsibility. But maybe in a roundabout way, my mother contributed. “You’re the man of the house,” she told me at the age of five, and I was painfully aware of my inadequacy for that role. But a little guilt goes a long way. I was no better than any only-child at taking on the dishwashing or lawn mowing that would make a difference, and I married someone with a technical bent that made “man of the house” irrelevant. But traits kick in at various levels. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE—

    It was always that. In my own life, I can only claim that for three people, my wife and my children. Love for and a stake in many friends, but for me “unconditional” for only a few, and it’s as literal as my mother’s love for this little brat who stomped on her boyfriend’s shiny shoes.

***

            Lots of genes that I wish hadn’t come from her, and lots that didn’t, but I’m grateful for what she gave me.

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Lookee Here . . .

—From EF—

I have developed a highly itchy reaction to any photo wherein one person, grinning at the camera, is pointing his/her (usually his) index finger at the other person. “Looky here!” One person who does this a lot is he-who-shall-not-be-named, and I thought my ick-reaction was a product of how I feel about this “person.” Then I began seeing a lot of photos with this same gesture being performed by someone I know personally, someone for whom I have a big heap of respect and affection. And I still went “Ick.” So what’s up with that?

We live, IMHO, in a Top-Dog culture, where dominance is the name of the game. The domination memes are so baked into our consciousness that they don’t register as that, and the use of the meme may have nothing at all to do with an attempt to dominate. It takes a aha-moment to get it.

There was a study done, multiply reported, that went something like this. In a mixed group, a researcher named Jackson Katz would ask a question: “What do you do on a daily basis to prevent yourself from being sexually assaulted?” In general, men were initially confused, then answered, “Nothing. I don’t think about it.” Then the women responded, and they had a long list of their multiple actions, from holding their car keys in their fist as a defensive weapon to putting a male voice on their answering machine. It would take a whole page to list these, but all women will know what I’m talking about.

So neither men nor women are putting this at the top of their consciousness, it’s just part of what they do on a daily basis. Why should this matter? Because it takes for granted the inherently different lives lived by men and women. Should this be accepted? 

OK, what about the common photos of two people, one grinning and pointing at the other? This is what I get, whether or not it is intended. The pointer is putting himself in the dominant position, and reinforces this by grinning directly at the camera. “See me? I’m telling you to look at this other person, and I’m telling you that they’re really special. You know me, you think I’m special, so you’ll pay attention.”

Why am I writing about this, other than to vent an irk? Because I’d like to share a wish to see from the other side of the mirror more often, to walk in other shoes, and to have the sand to be able to ask, “Is this what you really mean?” When our kids heard their beloved grandma use vile racial terms, we would say something privately to them later, “Well, that’s just Grandma, that’s the way she grew up.” Looking back, I can’t remotely imagine how I could have spoken of this to her. But we are on different ground now, and much of it is turning to tar-pits. 

So if your shoe starts to stick to the sidewalk, I encourage you to lift your foot, see what’s under there, and think where you’ve been walking. Then see if there’s anything you can do to clean it up. 

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Stir & Stew . . .

—From CB—

We’ve returned from four days at a music festival a couple of hours north of here, about our fourth time and for once not blindingly hot. Very mellow days, in fact, very laid-back schedule, good sleep except for the final night when our neighbors were jamming till 2:30 a.m., and a sweet laid-back vibe overall. It’s conceivable we could have tuned into email and the news, but we didn’t. The walks to the music stages were long enough to tune us in, and our tent & tequila were welcoming.

I did carry one obsession with me, as I must: the final chapters of the sixth draft of our new novel AKEDAH. Oddly, in the days when the writing was essential to our livelihood, I was probably less obsessed than now, when there’s little problem paying the bills and consequently the obsession has.a purity that risks overdose. My iPad is easily charged from the Prius’ battery and accompanies me over the musical acreage, allowing me at times to be distracted by a mad Scottish quartet or a girl (now grandmother) band from the Sixties or a headliner I never heard of or a very sweet slide guitar. I managed three chapters of the revision, and we finished the tequila.

Today we returned, unpacked, washed all the tuppers that had held Elizabeth’s exquisite camp meals, and caught up on the news—pretty much as bad as I’d expected, though not entirely. Though our house-sitter kept things in order, our cats swarmed us as expected, and I picked a basket of plums from our teeming tree.

The mind compartmentalizes, I suppose as a survival tactic. I can read the news or a friend’s pain on Facebook, and then I can pet the cats. All are felt, but none hold me fast in their claw. In a way it’s like my wandering from stage to stage at the festival and then to my writing and then to supper and then to the snuggle in the tent—these things all exist side by side.

It’s especially odd with the novel. It comes out of an unproduced play from a number of years ago, an update of the Abraham/Isaac story, implacably grim. It’ll be the next thing we publish, though it’s very hard to imagine who’ll want to read it: the more humane it becomes, the grimmer. In fact the only way I can justify publishing it is to take the money we’d budget for promotion and apply it to giving books away gratis. That’ll happen some time after the first of the year. Right now I’m just trying to get it out of my head.

Yet it doesn’t dull the magic of the plums or the cats or the music or my mate. It’s just part of the stir and the stew.

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Down in Flames . . .

—From EF—

In early May I went on a whirlwind trip to upstate New York to see our dear friend and theatre-partner Camilla Schade before she passed through the veil. It was to have been a family visit, Johanna was planning to fly in from Italy (Eli and Meg had been able to go to Lancaster the week before, to see her cancer-memoir-reading, Bones). But we got word that our planned visit would likely be too late, so I canceled and rescheduled myself solo. It was a hard trip but a luminous visit.

Passed through the veil. That’s pastel and poetic. The brutal truth is that she died of cancer, and the dying was hard work. She was embraced and supported by her husband and her sister, and there was a gentle and capable hospice nurse. But it was hard work.

This past weekend Conrad and I took another whirlwind trip, a five-hour drive to Blue Lake (near Arcata, which is near Eureka), to see Going Down in Flames for its final performance. Then we drove home the next day. Camilla had been a force of nature, a gifted comic actress. Our friend Joan Schirle of the Dell’Arte company is another force of nature, a gifted clown/actress, and her lead role in Going Down in Flames was embodying another force of nature, Joan Mankin.

Joan Mankin had a long career in the Bay Area as theatrical actress and over-the-top clown with the Pickle Family, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and every major theatre in the area. She co-created many works with the Dell’Arte company over the years. A no-holds-barred redhead, Mankin took off her clothes when she felt like it, and took a sly delight in al-fresco peeing. In other words, it was difficult to grok when she started really going over the top.

Mankin had been collaborating with her brother Danny on a play about a clown getting dementia, a project they started in 2010. Much of that early work is present as scenes in Going Down in Flames. After a few years, fiction became fact: Joan Mankin was diagnosed with Frontal Temporal Dementia, and she died in 2015. After years of grieving, Danny said, “It’s time. Let’s do this.” The play was developed in Portland, performed there, and then did a weekend’s run at the Mad River Festival in Blue Lake. We had to be there.

Any death rocks the world of the loved ones. But when the loss is of a soul whose life is writ large, like Robin Williams or Prince or Joan Mankin, it’s a tsunami. Joan Schirle opened her gates and let Joan Mankin come in to play, and we were all blessed with tears and laughter.

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More Goddamned Politics . . .

—From CB—

I try to avoid political rants, except for brief snarks. But watching the early process of candidates struggling for position, I’m struck again by an earlier theme: the construction of identity.

It’s not difficult to understand why the Founding Fathers created a system whereby the President would be chosen by supposedly educated, patriotic gentlemen of means—perhaps akin to Plato’s “philosopher kings”—though its flaws were soon evident. But any system of democratic choice depends on our extremely diverse mental processes in assessing other human beings.

Yes, it makes sense to abolish the Electoral College, to lessen gerrymandering, to move election day to the weekend, etc. Those all would result in more representative results, but not necessarily better. I’ve been pretty cynical about the process since the age of 15, though I’ve voted in every election since I was eligible and will continue, though I may certainly stand accused of “perpetuating the system.”

I have no concrete proposals. Good thing, since they’d never be heard. But here are what I see as flaws in our collective consciousness:

Voting by general impression. He’s charming, projects hope, talks like us, is full of rage, says what he thinks, long-winded, scolding, bad hair, too earnest, looks honest. For many (on all sides of the aisle) it’s like voting for class president: pure likeability or tribal identity.




Constructing a demon opponent. He’ll unleash nuclear war. She’s corrupt.


Constructing a “soft” opponent. Soft on communism, soft on soft on crime, and any woman would just be plain soft. Akin to that is aversion to the “flip-flopper.” If you change your mind on an issue, even if for the better, you’re indecisive. I’ve changed quite a bit since the age of 12:, so I’d be disqualified.


Change for the sake of change: clean out the mess in Washington, shake things up, bring in an outsider. Doesn’t matter how we change stuff: just that we do.


We want a king. Few of us want a “weak” President or even a weak mayor. We want someone who does stuff, whatever it is. That tends to favor males, despite the records (positive or negative) of Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa, or Maggie Thatcher. It involves a faith in a toxic masculinity, a will to dominance, a muscledom, a scorn of collaboration or compromise.


Attachment to issues. That seems it should be at the top of the list for any voter. But I distrust it. You can look at voting records, but that favors a candidate who has none, and it ignores the context and total content of the bills the candidate voted for or against. And you can have your list of issues, but can the candidate truly make it happen?

I think of myself as a progressive, yet I blanch at a recent analysis of the Democratic candidates that rated them as more or less “progressive.” That’s about as meaningful as our high school class vote for homeroom president, when I refused to raise my hand because it meant absolutely nothing: would Don or Shirley better fulfill the nonexistent duties? The teacher—a nice man—made me stand in the hall during class for my betrayal of democratic principles for which people fought and died. What are we actually talking about? I don’t care if it’s progressive or antediluvian as long as it’s good.

I just finished rereading Lewis Carroll’s ALICE books—thinking about another adaptation—and what I hadn’t really seen before, though obvious, is how outlandishly the characters adopt that same road-rage protection-of-identity as we read of daily and for which we vote. Characters bristle at anything threatening their logic, their authority, even their madness, as if clinging to a slimy slug. A poor thing, but mine own.

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Success . . .

—From EF—

Well, at least I don’t have to decide whether to impeach myself, but I am indeed going around in circles trying to put a whole pile of procrastinated accounting stuff in shape, so I sympathise. For me, overdue tasks have the aura of wet smelly mop, and the stinkier they are, the harder thay are to tackle. Sometimes I get somewhere by pretending I only have one thing to do, and choose the one that’s shortest and easiest as an appetizer.

Given how knotted and gnarly we all are these days, can you imagine what would happen if there was a national organized synchronized Knock Off Just One Thing That’s Overdue Day? If everybody, all at once, turned in their homework? Maybe we could get energy to start straightening out our national mess.

But I did do myself a huge favor today. Two weeks ago I needed to get a new system installed on my main computer, so I cleaned up its desktop, got rid of a bunch of silly crap, and backed up everything on Time Machine. When the spiffed-up unit came back home, I realized that an ancient app called NotePad had disappeared; the new system didn’t support it. Our laptop still had the old system, with a Word backup of the NotePad, but I hadn’t updated it, so the most recent info wasn’t there.

Here’s the catch: NotePad was where all the usernames and passwords were. Yup. After taking some deep breaths, I realized I could go to that Time Machine backup and get the data. I did a search on the backup but there was no .npd file. I web-searched and found an installer for the old warhorse app, put it on the laptop, and created a new NotePad. After filling it up with the stuff from the Word backup, at least I had something. I snooped in the System and found where the new data file was hidden. Back to Time Machine: nope, nothing there. Despair.

So I was writing an email to my genius Mac guru, describing my problem and asking if there might be some magic twanger that could find my stuff. And as I was writing, I looked at what I’d said and a lightbulb went Shazam! Within the System files there’s a Library with a file called Preferences. But for a reason I don’t remotely understand, there’s a User that has its own Library, with different stuff in its Preferences. So I went back to the Time Machine backup, found how to access that User, and whaddya know, my file was there.

Long story short, don’t break your brain trying to understand how a Mac works, just let it all wash over you and celebrate with me that I got my damn passwords back. And more than that, I could ditch the rancid guilt of not having protected my data. I DID do the right thing, I just didn’t know where the file would be, and the experts didn’t know either.

So maybe we can collectively back up our heads and do a restart and see whether sheer mulish determination might find an answer. It’s worth a try.

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