Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 29

Hope? . . .

—From CB—

A friend posted a Facebook note asking, “What gives you hope?” A worthy question when every day’s news brings a thousand little Hiroshimas of the heart. It elicited many responses, but I found myself unable to think of a thing.

I “hope” for many things. That someone will read my novels. That I’ll live painlessly till I die. That the world will become less murderous. That my wife and our children will have good lives. That the keepers of the broad human menagerie, both wild and domestic, will agree, at some point to allow them a better diet and call the vet as needed—maybe even widen the square footage of the cages.

But what gives me hope? Meaning, I suppose, what makes me optimistic about any particles of the future? Nada.

Of course I’m heartened by a moving story, the ocean, a flowering tree, a political poll, a disaster happening to the right person, a beautiful book, the classics, progressive courage, the love of my lifemate, our cats’ antics, the perpetual pulse of comedy. But for me, none of those come with a ten-year warranty.

That is, they don’t figure into the hope/despair teeter-totter. In my view, the world is way too unpredictable to place any bets, no matter what kinda inside dope I think I might have. Of course I do stuff “in hopes that” but not “with the hope that . . .”

I suppose that involves an emotional disengagement on one level, but for me it’s needful that I see the ocean, a face, my ballot, or that moving story not as “evidence” but in its own presence. Optimism and pessimism, for me, are both dead ends. I can’t control who’s on the other end of the teeter-totter; I can only climb onto the jungle gym and dangle through the maze till Miss Young blows the whistle.

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Metamorphoses . . .

—From EF—

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. Those words of Joseph Campbell are quoted in Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” and they hit me square in the middle of where I live and imagine. I saw this production just now at Berkeley Rep, and I will go back again with Conrad on Wednesday. He intended to go with me, but was slammed with illness in the morning and literally spent the whole day on the couch, with and without cat-covering. I tried to look pitiful outside the theatre and get somebody to buy a ticket from me instead of from the box office, but no luck.

In spite of the hefty price, I came back with a huge jones to see it again, this time with Conrad beside me. We each have a private weekly allowance with no accounting or justification involved, and I had a pretty good stash accumulated. I offered to blow it all on another pair of tickets; that’s how much seeing this again with him means to me. He sensibly said OK, but we do have an annual budget, we should just use it. So we’re going together.

Water. The center of the stage is a big pentagonal pool of water, surrounded by an elevated rim wide enough to walk on. Berkeley Rep is an odd-shaped space with audience in magnificently arbitrary blocks climbing a steep slant from the stage, wrapping almost halfway around. Every seat is a close seat. The front rows are, of course, way close, and in this production, way wet. Towels are provided.

What an image. A grown man in a business suit, barefoot, sits in an elaborate formal chair that happens to be placed in the pool. Midas. The billionaire who has it all and desperately needs more, sitting in absurd isolation with his feet in the water. Later, Cupid and Psyche make love on a red velvet inflated mattress in the middle of the water, and chorus members bring many wide shallow bowls of candles so that their bed is surrounded by floating light.

Floating, splashing, drowning, soggy, the characters of this public dream are always dealing with what we all must have, the element that is currently drowning Nebraska and Iowa. It’s metaphor made manifest, a power unexpectedly experienced when your car drives over low-lying water and gets wrenched in a direction you didn’t plan.

Life is big and wet and powerful, and we fondly imagine we can channel and control it. This public dream walks us through memorable stories of our collective foolishness, with respect and affection.

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Old White Men . . .

—From CB—

Forgive yet another political rant—we’ve got a lifetime supply from every side of the biosphere—but I try to keep them infrequent. I stay pretty aware of all that’s going on, have my opinions, and vote, but I see little point in saying what’s already been said, and I’d rather spend my hours in harmless tasks like writing novels and petting the cats.

But we all have our itchy spots. I’ve now heard the pejorative “old white men” quite a number of times. As an Old White Man, let me say first that I’m not running for President—I’d be a well-meaning disaster. And not wanting to sound curmudgeonly, but—

To me, that phrase is unique in its triple bigotry. I quite agree that there’s nothing intrinsically noble in being white, though nothing inherently virtuous in being black or female—cf. Clarence Thomas & Betsy DeVos. Granted, it’s

functional symbolism to break the ceilings and the chains, but in my view that’s flowed from radical societal changes—spearheaded by individuals but not caused by them. Arguably, Barack Obama (whom I admire) did less to promote civil rights than that old white asshole Lyndon Johnson, and certainly more than hot young Kennedy. And World War II made it possible—ditto with women’s rights.

As for age: the best argument against older guys as President is that two terms might be too much for a geezer, and we want a two-termer. But would you really argue that Ruth Ginsburg is a less qualified justice than Brett Kavanaugh because she’s too old? “New ideas” don’t necessarily equate with youth or inexperience. New ideas (a) aren’t the exclusive province of the young, and (b) aren’t necessarily doable.

So I’m only suggesting that we listen to the “old white men” meme as acutely as we’d listen to “women are weak” or “no blacks allowed” or “he’s just a kid.” It’s understandable revenge, but IMHO it’s unworthy.

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Start of a Journey . . .

—From EF—

       I’m working on my own solo memoir, and I encountered a really good piece of advice. “Start with the hardest part.” OK, here’s a first draft of the beginning of my hardest part, the time between going off to college to the first move to California. Sharing it with you is a commitment: no turning back.

***

       It was 6:30 AM, Sept. 12, 1957, and I hugged my father good-bye as he headed off for his commute to the Chicago Loop. He had to use the station wagon to get to the train station, because the Chrysler sedan was going to take me to Ann Arbor for my freshman orientation. That Chevy “Woodie” had been my ride to high school for my whole senior year, but it wasn’t going to take me to college. It was a dilapidated beast, with a leaky roof and holes in the floor, and I loved it. Brushing snow off the seat in the winter was a small price for independence. But this was my mother’s road trip, and she would drive me and my luggage on the four-hour trip in a dignified sedan.

       My brother got on the school bus and then we were free to go. It was harder saying goodbye to my cats than to any of the rest of the family, because I wasn’t sure I would ever see the cats again. Nobody loved them but me. Nevertheless, it was time, and off we went.

       The first hour was a route I knew by heart. Every summer we’d go to Cadillac that way, past New Buffalo and Union Pier and Bridgman to St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. But now instead of going north through Saugatuck and Holland and Grand Rapids, we headed east after St Joe to Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor. The car was crammed full of my stuff.

       I remembered another time my mother and I had loaded the car to the gills. We were driving the station wagon to take my father’s newest hunting dog north to the trainer, but most of the load was supplies for the summer. We spent the morning lugging everything out and stowing it, and it was about at St. Joe that my mother suddenly shouted, “Oh my God, I forgot the dog!” I can’t remember whether we went back for the dog, but I don’t think so. I think we kept going.

       And we kept going now, with only a short stop for sandwiches and a cup of coffee on the far side of Grand Rapids. It was a beautiful warm September day. The car was a Chrysler New Yorker, maybe 1954, automatic transmission and velvety fabric on the seats. It still smelled new. It was my chariot to a new life. I was launching into what I thought would be a brilliant prologue to a life as a practicing MD. Everything was on my side. I’d been the valedictorian, had won a National Merit Scholarship, and had been admitted to an elite honors program at the University of Michigan. And I would finally be on my own. Three years later, that Chrysler would be my own car at Northwestern University, and its back seat would be my chariot again, this time into a lifetime of love.

       What did my mother and I talk about for four hours? I have no idea. I’m sure I babbled over and over how much I’d miss everyone, that I’d be sure to write often, and how soon Thanksgiving vacation would come: a shorter time than my span at summer camp. I wasn’t going away, I was moving ahead.

       I was clueless. I didn’t understand the scope of what I was leaving behind. My cats. The woods and fields that had sustained me through all my childhood. The baby grand that had been my working-partner. Above all, the iron constraints that had groomed me to be the invincible star student who would soar effortlessly to a brilliant career. I would no longer be stranded nine miles out in the farmland, only being allowed out for dates by the end of my senior year. I wouldn’t have the dizzying stress of state piano contests. I wouldn’t have the oddly useful cocoon of being a high-school misfit with nothing to do every day but follow the assigned halls to the assigned classes and go home to practice the piano and do the homework.

       And I would not spend my home-time fearing what my unpredictable mother would do next, whether it was her impish gift for my sixteenth birthday, Cold Cash—sixteen silver dollars in an ice-cube tray—or a razor-sharp assault on my core. This sounds weird to me now, but I think it’s accurate: I would miss the abuse. In my own way I took on that burden myself, and I did a slam-dunk job of it.

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Six-year-olds out there?

—From CB—

Everyone was six once, or will be soon. And granted that there’s as much variation in six-year-olds as in seventy-seven-year-olds—and even with this guy it changes day to day. Still, I’m asking the question: what’s it like to be six?

Our current fiction project MASKS is a narration by a forty-year-old from the point of view of himself at the age of six. But for me, it’s been a long time since I was he, and though I’ve had two kids it’s been a while. So, beyond referencing child-development books (which can be useful) and simply making stuff up, I’d like to put the question out to the world.

Our character is a boy, and gender differences may be profound, but there are surely commonalities. So I’m asking: can you share any observations or memories of your child at this age? Memories of yourself? Incidents, challenges, confusions, discoveries?

Anything you can share—on the understanding that it may be translated (anonymously) into the mind of a boy in 600 C.E. traveling up the Adriatic coast in a donkey cart with his performer-family?

My own recollection is scant. Confusion, always. As the child of a single mom in dire straits, always a concern about money, and a terrible sense of not knowing how to pull my share of the load. Great fear of being in our two-room shack alone between end of school and time she got off work—babysitters proving very problematic. Intense love of our cocker spaniel. Mediocre at sports, but loving fantasy play, especially getting shot and temporarily killed. The usual playmates, but avoided groups: once the neighborhood kids herded all the stray dogs into a garage and painted them with house paint; I stayed away. Hated my grandmother for the way she criticized my mom, but loved her fried chicken on Sunday—and watching her wring off the chicken’s head. Very selfish, and felt guilty at being selfish.

Some things have changed, some haven’t. I recall trying to make some money by bending the leftover wires of sparklers into jewelry and laying them out by the sidewalk to sell for a nickel. No customers, but good preparation for a career as a writer.

Anything to share?

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Love Story . . .

—From EF—

We impulsively said “yes” to a performance that we’d have to pull out of a hat. It wouldn’t be the first time we let impulse land us in something that a cooler head wouldn’t have done, but there you go. We are friends with another performing couple whose medium is puppets. We use puppets too, but only when we need them, whereas they are totally artists in the puppetry field. They are red-hot organizers, and after a number of wildly successful “puppet cabarets” in Vallejo, the time rolled around for another one, and as usual, we said yes.

Here’s the problem. We’ve been in so many of these that we had to dig to find something new to do. OK, it was close to Valentine’s Day, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do a love scene. A few years ago we mounted a luscious production of Shakespeare’s Tempest; five actors and many many puppets. The young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, have a wonderful scene in which they declare themselves to be man and wife, without asking permission from anybody. It’s enchanting, especially since it’s Miranda who comes right out and says “I am your wife, if you will marry me.”

The only problem was that neither Conrad nor myself had ever performed that scene. It was our production and he’d created the puppets, but he’d played Prospero, not Ferdinand, and I’d only written the score and wasn’t in the cast. So we had to start from ground zero, except that we had the help of a couple of gorgeous puppets, the memory of how sweet that love scene had been, and the essential backup of a DVD of the production.

What I hadn’t anticipated was the voltage that came from performing what was essentially our own experience from fifty-eight years ago, when we took one look at each other and were struck by lightning. Here was a scene where two young people meet as strangers and immediately realize that they should bond for life; it sounds improbable, but we’d been there, done that, and fifty-eight years later we still believe it.

So we used Will’s words and Conrad’s beautiful puppets to transport us back to that moment of our life commitment. I don’t know if the audience recognized how immediate and personal this was, but they liked it. So did we.

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That’s Entertainment . . .

—From CB—

It’s certainly not my only news source, but I regularly tune into Google News to get a broad sense of what’s “trending” for my fellow Americans. At odd times, for no clear reason, I get the Google news feed focused on Nigeria or Peru instead, and it’s nice to know that (a) we in the U.S. aren’t the center of the universe and (b) that other countries can be as vile as us.

But my focus goes today not to the President’s nose hairs but to Entertainment. That’s the news section that ostensibly covers what I’ve devoted my life to. Of course there’s no “theatre” section, and while the NY Times still lumps it under “Arts and Culture,” Google (along with most newspapers) simply says “Entertainment,” meaning, I guess, any human activity that doesn’t involve mass murder, and some that do.

This past week, Entertainment has been comprised of—

ICE Arrests Rapper 21 Savage

Actor Jussie Smollett Calls Himself the “Gay Tupac”

Bow Wow Starts Talking Football

Cardi B and Husband Offset Together after Reconciliation

Kylie Jenner Responds after Teasing Baby #2 with Travis Scott

Bethenny Frankel Makes X-Rated Comment about Pete Davidson

Beatles’ PreBreakup Letters on Sale for $550,000

How to Stream the Puppy Bowl and Kitten Bowl

Here’s What You Can Expect in This Year’s Super Bowl Ads

Vote for Your Favorite Super Bowl Commercial

Meghan Markle Hires her own Birthing Partner

Tekashi 6ix9ine’s New Name on Twitter is “Snitch9ine”

Jerry Seinfeld Sued over Sale of $1.5 Million Porsche

Fiji Water Girl Is Suing Fiji Water

Gisele Bundchen Reveals Why She Broke Up with Leonardo DiCaprio

Lily Aldridge Gives Birth to Baby No. 2

Ariana Grande Is Totally Over Her Tattoo Debacle

Anna Kendrick Tweeted Thanks to Hospital Staff

Demi Lovato Quits Twitter after 21 Savage Backlash

I must remark that no mention was made of which adolescent movie topped the box office charts, and nothing on the Kardashians. They must be slipping. Perhaps they’re all writing poetry.

And I’m curious how you take a curtain call after your breakup, your lawsuit, your childbirth, your tweet, or your tattoo debacle. They never taught that in acting class.

###

 

 

 

On Glaciers & Hagfish . . .

—From EF—

I’ve been reading John McPhee’s In Suspect Terrain, originally published in 1983. His work has been published in The New Yorker since 1963, and I have long been a fan of his relentlessly inquisitive mind and his laser-sharp writing style. While he writes on a vast smorgasbord of topics, geology is an ever-recurring theme. Four of his books on the subject were published in one volume and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, so I’m far from being his only follower. I’d read portions of In Suspect Terrain as they were published in The New Yorker, but reading the whole book now, years later, has a new and deeper resonance.

Our culture is now obsessively attuned to the 24-hour news cycle with a 24-second attention span, and I’m not innocent of this myself. So there’s something magnificent about reading this: “Some geologists have attempted to isolate the time in all time that runs ten thousand years from the Cro-Magnon beside the melting ice to the maternity wards of the here and now by calling it the Holocene epoch, with the implication that this is our time and place, and the Pleistocene—the ‘Ice Age’—is all behind us. The Holocene appears to be nothing more than a relatively deglaciated interval. It will last until a glacier two miles thick plucks up Toronto and deposits it in Tennessee. If that seems unlikely, it is only because the most southerly reach of the Pleistocene ice fields to date stopped seventy-five miles shy of Tennessee.”

The movement of tectonic plates, the gigantic march of glaciers, the presence of oceans in Utah and rivers that run west, then east, then west again, all these are measured in geologic time. Historic time, what we reckon is important from our newly-arrived human perspective, is a tiny modern hiccup. You don’t get this by watching Fox News.

But we are the ones we have, and our tiny square in the quilt of time is all we’ve got, all we can grok. How to recalibrate? Conrad and I do what we can by visiting the ocean as often as possible. This Sunday we had our usual picnic at our usual place, and when the sushi had been eaten and the sake sipped, Conrad took stuff back to the car and offered me, as usual, the chance to linger.

Which I did. I sat like a contented joey in the pocket of the Mother, my own private space with all the amenities: warm sun, soft breeze, murmuring surf. In that half hour I let my boundaries dissolve and came as close as I ever get to the majestic slow pace of geologic time. Then I picked up my chair and came back to the rest of the day.

And I was blessed by the wonders of Facebook. Our daughter Johanna had linked to science writer Ed Yong in the Atlantic, an article about hagfish. In my imagination, it put our current political scene into the perspective of geologic time. Hagfish are an ancient marine animal, very odd, with no spine and no jaws but an incredibly efficient gut. Their claim to fame is their ability to excrete vast quantities of slime in an instant.  

The Atlantic article is well worth reading in its entirety, as Yong is quite a writer. In the process of reading, I had an awful suspicion creep up on me. “Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously.” “Even a shark was forced to retreat, visibly gagging on the cloud of slime in its jaws.” We elected a hagfish.

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Furioso . . .

—From CB—

Today I make a formal announcement of my insanity. I’m nearly halfway through a reading of ORLANDO FURIOSO.

For the unenlightened: it’s Ariosto’s 16th century Italian epic, replete with jousts, beheadings, enchanted castles, virgins in jeopardy, evil queens, Muslim incursions, flying hippogriffs, magical shields, and the definitive model of the cliff-hanger: let us now leave Paris on the verge of destruction and return to woeful Bradamante as she leads Ruggerio’s horse . . .

Notably: it’s 38,000 lines in rhymed octaves, two 700 pp. volumes. A formidable challenge to read, and an astonishingly well-done task for the translator.

Question is, why am I reading this?

Well, first off, it’s great fun, though that’s never been a high priority with me. Other than food and sex, my idea of fun is checking something off the worklist. And my daughter gave me the volumes for my birthday, so I feel a certain obligation, but I was the one who inquired of it. Beyond that?

I wonder if it’s the intense urge at this age, before night falls, to make a mad grab for the immense treasury out there. I try to fill in my gaps in contemporary fiction, as that’s what i’m writing now and need, for practical purposes, to know how wide is the gap between what I’m writing and what sells. But reading Ariosto, Grimmelshausen, Shaw or Heinrich Boll doesn’t really serve any practical purpose, and I, being sprung from the German peasantry, am a pretty practical soul.

It’s also possible that, despite myself, I’m learning pleasure. Not that I get great joy reading of knights getting knocked off horses—got a lifetime supply of that in Le Morte d’Arthur—but I guess there’s something about skilled extravagance that appeals to me. Right now, in the current draft of our new novel MASKS, I’m taking great delight in describing performances of Medieval farces—comic bits I could never pull off as an actor, stuff I’d never actually write for the stage—and the indulgence is immensely satisfying.

In any case, I’m about to embark on the second 700 pp., with all the full frenzy of Orlando. Hopefully the good guys win, though with one hero slaughtering hundreds at a time, I’m not entirely sure what the standards are.

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The Nightmare . . .

—From EF—

This morning I woke sweating and shaking from what felt like the most drastic nightmare of my life. I threw on my robe and staggered downstairs, dizzy and wobbly, and sat down on the floor in the corner of the kitchen and asked the cats to help me ground. I’ve never had a bad acid trip, but this would have been a good stand-in.

All during my childhood, through my teens and into my twenties, I was plagued by nightmares. Eventually I learned some powerful dreamwork techniques, and gradually hauled myself out. It was a relief not to be afraid of sleep.

Now for the last year or so, they’ve made a comeback, usually in the last sleep-shift before morning. Often I’m in a position of responsibility and I find myself unable to cope, or I get lost on the city, or the building I’m in is suddenly huge and unfamiliar. And just for variety, I have some of these complex group-dreams where everything works just fine and I wake with a warm feeling. Not this time.

Conrad and I were preparing for a performance of Descent of the Goddess Inanna, a huge, complex production with a big set and masks and puppets. It was on tour, and we arrived on the day before to unload and set up in a city space I’d never seen before. Instead, the space was filled by some other theatre company, a big bunch of very self-assured and aggressively cutting-edge people, and they didn’t understand our wanting to prepare for the next day’s matinee.

Conrad went off to try to find who was in charge of the facility, and I did likewise. The building was mammoth and complex, many performance spaces on many floors, all thick white stone walls and elaborate curving staircases, old and musty-smelling and not in very good shape. At one point I was going up a back stairs and the whole bannister crumbled and took the handrail with it.

There seemed to be dozens of theatre troupes there, and it was every man for himself. I tried to retrace my steps to the entrance and find a phone to call Conrad, but when I found him, he was staggering and incoherent. Many of the people around us were deformed or disabled. We got out into the street and couldn’t find our van, and eventually we were running up and down endless curved streets lined with metal-front warehouses. Then I woke up. Jesus.

This was a different kind of terror. Not a tiger chasing me down the basement stairs (a childhood classic) or fearing that something happened to the children, or trying to run with my feet stuck in mud. This was being in an incomprehensible and incoherent situation without the skills to push through, and without anyone to help.

This tangled skein is rife with threads to pull. We were for many years part of a vibrant theatre community, but in recent years we’ve been pretty much on the fringes. We’re not in the fast-running current now, we’re at the margins. And we’re not only focusing on the solitary life of writing fiction, we’ve fallen off the edge of the youth culture.

But I think the truly hideous part of the nightmare was finding myself in an uncaring, carnivorous “community,” and I think this is totally a reflection of what our national political structure has become. And it doesn’t take much to find where the deteriorating buildings and deformed people came from. Our national bannisters and railings are falling off.

But we’re in Sebastopol. We have dear friends and kind neighbors here. I will invite them to become my dream allies.

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