Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 28

Am I Me?

—From CB—

For me, identity has always been an improv. I was named after my father, only to find years later that his name was actually Bert. I went by my middle name Joy until high school, when they enrolled me in the girls’ gym class—I didn’t realize my good fortune at the time. Even at that point I had difficulty remembering if my name was Joy Conrad or Conrad Joy. Even now, I sometimes pronounce it Con-rad, sometimes Cnrd.

And, while I think I can see what drives people to find their roots or a tribal identity, my imperative has always been to escape mine. I got out of Iowa. I haven’t seen any relatives (except my kids) since my mother’s funeral. At my father’s demise, I met four half-sisters, had a nice drinking bout with them (a fitting tribute to my father), but never had any desire to see them again. I prefer to see myself as a singularity, albeit a fairly normal one.

Not that I lack the urge to be part of a tribe. I have great hunger to belong—as most of us do, I think, But I’ve realized that I’m very shy—except on stage, where I can either be someone named Leonard or Lear, or a highly edited version of myself. I’ve been part of diverse sub-cultures, but always gravitate to the periphery of the campfire. Glad to be here, though I’m not entirely here. For some, the social world expands as one ages; for me, I shrink more and more into the keyboard. Or perhaps I revert to a high school version of myself, standing at the party hoping someone might approach, but—guess what?—they don’t.

Still, those of us for whom identity is an improv are privileged in a way. At best, a self-image is a mask in the Dionysian sense: a channel that evokes what you might not otherwise be able to access. High heels make you feel more elegant, a mustache more of a shyster, whatever. But if that mask welds itself into your face, claims that itself is the entirety of YOU, slaps itself on your Facebook page, then— Well, then you become a secondary character in my next novel.

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on . . .

 One hopes it does, anyway, rather than having to stay after school and write I am me a thousand times with a crumbling piece of chalk.

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Masks . . .

—From EF—

We’re getting close to the end of the fifth draft of our next novel, working title Masks. Nothing autobiographical here, just a story of a family of touring players making an annual circuit playing their own comedies from village to village. Major difference: this is set in the beginning of the 7th Century, they travel by donkey cart, and their circuit is up and down the east coast of Italy.

Another difference: they have a lethal wicker hamper of props, a set of ancient masks carrying a curse: they cannot abandon them, and they are forbidden to use them. They know the masks were taken by the wife’s father in a bloody raid in his homeland, the far north, but nobody knows where the masks themselves were made. That doesn’t matter: the masks themselves know. It’s their story now, and once they have been snatched from their wicker cage to save the family of players from a pirate raid, their power awakens and they will not rest until their saga has been played out. That story is the Ragnarok, the death of the Norse gods.

We know first-hand the power of mask and puppet to take the player beyond his/her limited human experience. In our own work, we know the tale being told before we create the puppets and masks that will being it to life. For the family in Masks, the tale is an unknown, except to six-year-old Bragi. The boy has inherited the Sight from his northern mother, and the masks use him as a channel to let this apocalyptic tale compel the players to give them voice.

As the troupe play their own earthy farces on the summer’s northbound tour, Bragi’s nightmares begin little by little to interfere and leak into what happens on the rough trestle stages. They try to turn southward to get back home before Bragi’s pregnant mother faces childbirth, but one mishap after another keeps them northbound under increasingly surreal circumstances, until they arrive at a realm that can’t be comprehended: Asgard, the realm of the Norse gods. There, they are commanded to play the Ragnarok.

Why? They are told by the Loki-avatar: the gods desire to die. “These gods fed on fear and grew fat with it. Whatever power they held, it was never sufficient. . . . Nothing suffices to conquer fear. Only in death can they be secure. Nothing then to fear.”

This is not at all comfortable to write, for it reeks of our present day. We live our lives as best we can and try to resist the tiny cohort of oligarchs whose lives are so far removed from our own that we don’t seem to be the same species. They have epic wealth and power, but somehow they don’t seem to be very happy. Look at the faces you see daily on the web: would you invite them to your birthday party? It isn’t a great stretch to imagine them bringing on Armageddon just to get out of the damn rat-race.

Our player family survives, a daughter is born, and after the carnage blows away in mist, there is still a branch of the shattered World-Tree. The exhausted parents plant it, the children grow and go on with their lives, and we wait for our own masks to come to critical mass.

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The Reality of Myth . . .

—From CB—

I don’t believe in the paranormal, but we live in it. One needn’t swear to belief in astrology, ghosts, gods or psychic double-shuffles to behave as if we do. Too much is unpredictable, defying logic, incapable of proof. We’ve adapted two Greek myths to the stage as well as the Sumerian Inanna myths, the Norse myth of the Ragnarok, not to mention Frankenstein, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and other frail human attempts to control the inexplicable. We’ve written several historical plays whose characters—Marie Antoinette, Sir Francis Drake—have attained mythic status, at least insofar as their capacity to generate fabulous stories.

The enticing “legend of Winchester House,” which brought us to write the play that led to our new novel BLIND WALLS, was largely a potpourri of speculation by journalists who quoted one another until the “legend” was born. Indeed, one looks for motive in the construction of a mansion of over three hundred rooms (until the 1906 earthquake honed it down to 160). No different from the myths that tried to explain the rising and setting of the sun. You can’t do a guided tour of the sun, but it’s always there.

A lot of our work, both in theatre and in fiction, involves stories within stories. What’s our motive for the stories that we tell? How does that motive shape the story? That was the genesis of the Tour Guide in BLIND WALLS: a man making his living, his whole life, telling a story that he knows is false, though it’s such a damned good story.

As with many of our projects, BLIND WALLS came about through cross-pollination—two stories that intersect—not a whole lot different than our temperaments as collaborators. When we read that one workman stayed on the project for 38 years, until the wealthy widow’s death, we started to piece out the story of someone in the grips of service to another’s vision, and found personal experience of people caught in the pressure of advancement, like the gifted teacher who becomes the feckless principal because that’s the only way he can get a raise.

Those multiple layers of story create a potential dog’s breakfast, and it’s taken many drafts to let it flow. Like most of our work, it defies fitting readily into a genre. The only terrified person is herself a ghost, haunted by the fleshly tourists swarming about her, and a villain desperate to deny her villainy.

Myth is just reality distilled to a very sharp liquor. That’s what’s so tasty.

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Traveling . . .

—From EF—

      Traveling can be harsh. Not so much when getting into our Prius to drive 600 miles a day to cross the country, it’s a comfy car and we have each other, but it does take stamina. On the other hand, grabbing a last-minute ticket and flying from San Francisco to Scranton, PA with a change in Charlotte (Chicago on the way back) was a symphony of Harsh. It was OK because every minute of the trip was warmed and colored by its purpose. I went to visit Camilla Schade.

       Camilla is quicksilver and color, a luminous presence on stage, someone who can take a character onto a roller-coaster and bring every audience member along for the ride. Beautiful and funny, the embodiment of warmth. I flew to Scranton, drove to upstate New York, parked by their little woodland house, and went in to sit on a couch with my friend for five hours. The last embrace was the hardest, because it will have been the last one.

       We met in 1975, when she was to be our newborn Johanna’s babysitter as we created a show called Knock Knock with a student cast at the University of Delaware. She wound up in the cast and we found another sitter. When we moved our theatre’s base to Lancaster PA, we asked Camilla to join us, and she did. We worked together for years, everything from Macbeth to cabaret comedy, and the stories are endless.

       Five rich and beautiful hours. Some of it in silent presence, some of it giggling like schoolgirls, some of it soggy with kleenex, some of it telling funny old war stories to sister Carolyn and husband Bruce.

       Warmth, color and closeness in a place of quiet beauty. The rituals of greeting and farewell, the essentials of human closeness, softness, vulnerability.

       And then the grotesque circus of O’Hare airport, miles of noisy halls and beeping trollies and four-dollar water bottles. Rattle and clang under fluorescent lights, hurry up and wait, staring at the smart-phone, trying to ignore Fox on the screens. What wildly different stage sets we humans create to enclose the multiple stories of our lives. For five hours I was in a place of beauty.

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Into the Wind . . .

—From CB—

At art fairs, I’ve often wondered how it feels for artists to sit by their work as they watch the world pass by with barely a glance. Must be what I felt at the BABF this weekend, as we sit in our outdoor booth hawking our wares: two anthologies of our plays, three novels, and a memoir. First day, two books sold.

We exhibited here two years ago, with not the slightest illusion of breaking even to match the exhibit fee. And there’s the issue of stamina: getting up at 5 a.m. to drive down to the East Bay, set up the booth, sit there all day with lunch and porta-potty breaks, say hello to anything that moves, tear down and pack up at 5 p.m. to make the drive home, then do the same thing on Sunday. But it’s a kind of fatalistic fun.

First, the booth looks damned good, with some of our puppets, stand-up book racks, beautiful signage, and Elizabeth. Lots of conversations and hopes that some of our proffered brochures will result in online sales. This year we had the inspiration of printing 4-1/4″ by 14” broadsides containing two of our flash fiction stories to give away free—more relevant than offering free lapel buttons or breath mints, and hopefully at this very minute someone is reading five minutes of our words and freaking out.

But it is a humbling act to be among 280 exhibitors offering thousands of books—a small fraction of the nearly one million published in the USA in a single year. With our plays, we could either produce them or find another theatre to hoodwink into doing it for us. With books, it’s pissing against the wind.

Which I remember. As a small child, maybe five or six, my mom and I took a road trip to Denver. Nebraska’s a very long state, and about the 15th time we crossed the Platte River, I had to pee. Badly. Once she got started driving, my mom didn’t like to stop, so she just told me to stand up on the passenger seat, roll down the window, and pee. I complied. Never try it. It blows back all over the back seat, not to mention your face. Ah, the trials of manhood and authorship.

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Future . . .

—EF—

Next February, I will be 80 years old. A lovely round ripe number. And sometime within the foreseeable future, I will die. This doesn’t freak me out at all; I will meet it with great curiosity and finally climb up into Hecate’s lap. It helps that I know at least something about the sweet soft young woman who got startled into motherhood and then decided to carry me to term and say goodbye. It helps even more to know that she went back to college, finished her degree, met and married a fine man and had a son. She lived fifty-four years beyond my birth, and thanks to the generosity of my wonderful brother I now wear her silver ring and have a planter whose soil is mixed with her ashes.

In the late 90’s I had the amazing experience of carrying the role of Inanna, the oldest deity of whom we have written record. Later, we repeated the production here in California, then revised and restaged it once again, so I have been through this three times. Every time something new became clear.

The queen of heaven and earth, Inanna is incomplete until she finds reunion with her sister Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld. Once the world had been a seamless realm, but when the division came—light from dark, heaven from earth—the sisters were violently separated. Inanna ruled over pleasure, abundance, and fertility, while Ereshkigal’s task was to consume the dead.

The reunion is not pleasant. The lonely and embittered sister kills her privileged counterpart, and the world above becomes sterile. In the ancient myth, Inanna is brought back to life, but because the descent of seven gates is one-way only, she cannot return to the realm of light unless someone dies to take her place. Eventually a plan ripens: Inanna’s consort Dumuzi will die and come to Ereshkigal, allowing Inanna to ascend to thaw our frozen world, and in six months Dumuzi’s twin sister will take his place below, and he will return to Inanna. Polyamory, it seems, is very old, and it works. Inanna and Ereshkigal do not fuse, they each reign over their original realms and share their lover, who changes places with his female twin every six months. The gates are open, and the earth prospers in the ancient dance of life and death.

Inanna’s story becomes that of Persephone, and I have been an initiate in a recreation of the Eleusinian Mysteries three times. For more than two millennia the Mysteries were the defining experience in the Mediterranian world, available to men, women, slaves—forbidden only to those who had committed murder. It was a capital offense to reveal anything about the ritual, but all were allowed to speak of its effect. It completely changed the initiate’s relationship to death, and fear disappeared.

Implicit in the stories of Inanna and Persephone is the idea that birth and death are a linked cycle that binds us all in communion. No one is exempt, not even the rich and powerful. The seed produces the fruit which produces the seed. We need to find our own Mysteries again. I feel in my heart that many of the rich and powerful are doing their best to bargain their way out of the cycle, that they are terrified of death and will twist and deform life in a mad effort to become exempt.

Me, I think that’s a lot of work. I prefer to live as best I can for as long as my time allows, and then to yawn, relax, and crawl up into Hecate’s lap.

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Impressions . . .

—From CB—

From time to time, I’ll post some writing here that I have no plans for publishing: easier to get a dozen readers here than to jump through hoops for a different dozen. This includes an occasional venture into haiku. I fall between the purists who, even in English, swear by the 5/7/5 syllabic structure and the free-wheelers who say, “Anything short.” Mentioning seasons is a good idea, but I don’t do it much. Countless things are good ideas that I don’t do.

Since it’s my turn to write our weekly blog and I’m just recovering from a naggy-draggy cold, I’ll just offer six from the current hundred and seven.

5.

manzanita

ruddy contortionist

Dionysus

10.

holocaust

and morning coffee bind

two old friends

29.

kitchen window sun

snags the first spider web of

the new-painted kitchen

68.

white parasols

stars making stars making stars

this Queen Anne’s lace

81.

driving in fog

rumble of hog truck behind

first hint of death

106.

WE GAH THU POWAH!

blats over Civic Center

sleepers on cardboard

That’s all, folks!  For now.

 

 

 

 

Memory . . .

—From EF—

The new novel we’re working on, Masks, now in fifth draft, is actually a memoir. The narrator is a man in his forties, writing about his family’s final summer as touring players. He was six at the time, and his time was around the 7th Century. His employer/patron, for whom he serves as both scribe and steward, is fascinated with the bits of story he’s heard, and urges that a full recounting be written. The narrator is willing, but challenged: it’s not just that old memories aren’t easy to dredge up, it’s that the six-year-old Bragi was immersed in a god-coup that was visited on his family through a trunkload of masks.

With each new draft, the story becomes more of a cliff-hanger. Yes, I know what happens next, but at the end of every newly-drafted chapter I’m holding my breath. And suddenly I realized—oh shit, that’s what I need to be doing in my own memoir.

I’ve been laboring away at the ghastly years between starting college (1957) and the clean break of going to California for the first time. I have reams of letters I wrote, college transcripts, helpful newspaper clippings, and my sometimes swiss-cheese memory bank, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job of writing what happened. But I just realized that’s not the point. I have to write about what it was like to be inside that increasingly terrified girl as every single brick in her artificially-constructed persona fell to the ground.

Not only that, I need to reconstruct the years of lies and forgeries and pretenses, the insane devices to wall off the truth. Insane, yes, somehow believing that each subterfuge would actually work, living in a sweat of guilt and anxiety.

I loved seeing the movie, Man on Wire, not realizing that it was a mirror inversion of my own experience. Philippe Petit was an obsessive master of his craft of wire-walking, and in 1974 he strung a cable between the twin towers and danced out there for nearly an hour. He knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly how he would be shattered if he failed; he carried his truth within himself and became invincible.

I hid my truth from everyone around me, but most of all I hid it from myself. I never allowed myself to think about what would be shattered if I failed and never considered how I might turn around and get off the wire. The world we’re living in today is full of people like that. I finally confronted the wreckage of my own making, endured the pain, and started over. Survival is possible.

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Stories . . .

—From CB—

In the past ten years, our writing has moved from playwriting—the profession for more than four decades—to fiction. We’ve written six novels (three self-published), a memoir, and about 40 short stories. Six of those have been published.

This past month, I’ve plunged into rewrite mode on the unpublished stories. In part that’s a way of procrastinating on the 5th draft of a new novel; in part it’s due to April deadlines for lots of magazine submissions; in part it’s just a bulldog belief in stories that’ve accumulated dozens of rejections.

To date, we’ve done rewrites—ranging from modest edits to radical amputations or heart-valve replacements—on 11 flash fictions and 22 longer stories.

It’s been a good—though obsessive—experience. The learning curve from one art form to another that’s radically different has been rapid, and I feel that at last, at the age of 77, I’m coming close to the end of my apprenticeship.

I realize that I’m no longer driven by hope. Hope is a thing with feathers, she writes, but feathers are easily plucked. Just pour boiling water over the hapless bird and the hope comes out readily. The likelihood of building a reputation—meaning a sizable audience that actually wants to read this stuff—is very scant. We’ve explored many realms of storytelling—straight plays, weird stuff, sketch comedy, solo flights, radio, puppetry, video, now prose fiction—and created work I’m proud of, but nothing that has much likelihood of outlasting our demise.

What drives me, then, to haggle with my mate and myself over every third word of a story? I guess it’s a desire for the perfection of a gift. I have a terrible time shopping for gifts: it wants to be perfect for the recipient, for the occasion, for my intention, and perfect in its execution—not to mention affordable. And a work of art is a strange sort of gift, one where you—or I anyway—stand on the street corner crying for someone to take it. Some folks do, but never enough to fill my hunger for giving.

To be a story-teller, story-maker, story-giver—I don’t know why that’s bred in my bones, but it is. It might come out of the overwhelming loneliness when you see that you don’t fit in, and it’s only story that connects you to other creatures with similar eyes and noses.

And I have no idea if the current vast round of submissions or the start on trying to sell our current novel BLIND WALLS will result in little more than a tinker’s fart in a hailstorm. But I stand firm in my support of the tinker’s right to fart.

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An Ad . . .

—From EF—

There’s a vintage ad (1947) quoted on Digby’s website for a Pitney-Bowes postage meter. There’s a big machine in the foreground. Standing behind it, arms crossed and face turned away in disdain, is a sexy redhead in a stylish business suit. Her eyes are closed. To her right is a businessman who is clearly losing his shit. His tie has come unglued, his hair is disheveled, his reddened face is distorted into what would sound like a roar if you could hear it (or maybe a squawk), and his hands are extended in half-claws, half-supplication toward the redhead. His eyes are open, and if looks could kill . . .

What’s the Pitney-Bowes’ caption? “Is it always illegal to kill a woman?”

There’s a story imbedded in the ad. The “only good, fast, dependable, honest-to-Gregg stenographer I got, this redhead Morissey—balks at a postage meter! ‘I have no mechanical aptitude. Machines mix me up, kind of,’ she says.” Two weeks later, she’s in love with the machine. Why? “Now the mail is out early enough so I get to the girls’ room in time to hear all of the dirt.” So he sighs, “I wonder is it always illegal to kill a woman?”

OK, that’s just one ad. There were others. Both men and women read magazines, and presumably this was intended to be normal for both. This is in 1947, after the guys, what’s left of them, are back from the war, and the women who pitched in to keep our mighty engine running are now expected to do what? And what are the guys now competing for jobs expected to feel about that?

Now it’s 72 years later, but it still hits hard.. The artist really captured the guy’s rage: you can feel it, and if you’re honest, you might have a sneaky wish to smack the smirk off the redhead’s face. That’s built into the ad. Somebody got paid to normalize that.

We’re past all that now, right? Look at the rally photos, and you see female faces distorted in gleeful rage alongside their bullnecked compatriots. Equal opportunity to feel like kicking ass. The high that hate gives is now unisex, and people are still being paid to normalize violent memes.

What can anyone do, on the street, in line at the post office, within earshot of the hollering kid at the Safeway? Acknowledge the pain inside the anger, make the gesture that says, “I know, it’s hard, I’ve been there.” Anything that lets the air out of the plastic balloon that separates Our Kind from Those Others, the ones it’s OK to hate.

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