Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 30

Seeds . . .

—From EF—

As I write this, it’s Sunday, Dec 30, and this morning I bought baby chard plants at the farmers’ market. Then I bought seeds at the hardware store and a grow-lamp to assist with sprouting my own collard and kitty-grass starts. I’m nuts. Even though it’s California, there’s going to be a form of winter coming soon. I’m really late for planting a winter garden, but I’m going to try anyway. I need to get back in touch.

We moved here in July of 1999, and my first garden was the summer of 2000. I’ve scratched at the soil for eighteen years, and until recent years it’s been pure joy. Now, year after year of being gone on our long-haul touring at the most critical weeks has taken a toll. I still got sauce tomatoes and garlic this fall, but the peppers and eggplant were puny, the basil and chives died, and believe it or not I got about two viable zucchini from my vines. I wasn’t there for them, I wasn’t digging my fingers in the dirt regularly. They didn’t see my face, they didn’t hear my voice; I was a distant parent.

King Lear took everything we had, every minute, from early 2014 through July of 2017—three and a half years. Then it was done. What next? A solo show for me, developed through 2017, performed sporadically through 2018, now in limbo (although we intend to produce a quality DVD this coming year).

My land, my earth, my anchor became a semi-estranged partner, an iffy relationship grimed by a lot of guilt. Now I need to do a hard re-set, and the energy to do that requires rediscovery.

Through much of the first decade of 2000, we were part of several groups that used our abundant house and studio space for gatherings, intensive workshops, and over-the-top parties. We were part of a steady raucous stream of events and people, and that fed our souls. Time moved on, things changed, and there was less exuberant traffic. Then the cycle of rehearsing and touring new major projects clamped down on the faucet, and we have moved steadily into semi-recluse status.

For the fiction-writing, that’s not a bad thing. Our daily intensive focus is enlivened by the cats, but mostly we’re at our own work-stations. And the output has been remarkable, but unlike live performing, nobody applauds. These stories clamor to be told, and we love the creatures we midwife into being, but the daily grind of queries and submissions and endless rejection letters make the birth canal gritty.

So, back to basics. I have to kick butt to get myself outdoors, having contracted a serious case of entropy. I go to the gym six mornings a week, and I growl with delight at my refurbished muscles. Now I need to get my soul to the gym, and it’s a hard job. There is something rooted deep in my core, a psychic crabgrass, that kicks and screams against everything that will bring more life and color to my being.

The past may be prologue, but it doesn’t come with a roadmap. I’ve gone nine rounds against this bugger before and come up standing tall, but that was then, this is now, and I need to learn new tactics. Mama Gaia is my partner now, stronger than ever before, and I will listen to her coaching. Just hold on, dirt, I’m coming.

Just before we moved from Philly to Sebastopol in 1999, we did an interview-based radio series called “Weavers.” A Puerto Rican woman from the Philadelphia barrio, Iris Brown, told us something that is still echoing for me. She was working with neighborhood children to give them hope. This is what she said.

I couldn’t promise them a family. I couldn’t promise them an education. I couldn’t say, “Please stay in school, and after you finish high school, you go and get a trade, or you go to college.” So, what else was there for me to promise? In the spring, I planted a garden. Because gardens bring what they promise.

If I dig the soil, plant it, water it, it grows. My children I can promise nothing for certain. Not what happens tomorrow, in the school, in the street, in the headlines. But a garden. Yes, we will have flowers. We will have tomatoes and peppers and all the green. This I promise. What the seeds promise.

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Meeting Elizabeth …

—From EF—

I have definitely committed to a new project, heart and soul. I am writing a personal memoir, working title Elizabeth, Meet Elizabeth, and the through-line is “Who the hell am I?” It proceeds on two intertwined paths; a chronological narrative of events, described objectively in third-person, with interruptions in the first-person mode tracing themes like lying, kindness, sexuality, motherhood, self-image, etc. It will take a long time to do this (I have evidence from our other books), and my hope is that it will be in final form in time for my 80th birthday, fourteen months from now.

It’s only in the last week that this third-person idea formed, and I think it’s productive. Yes, it’s interesting to cruise straight through the time-line; did this, then this, then this, but I don’t think that’s the point. I like the working title—Elizabeth, Meet Elizabeth—because it works on two levels. The first is the radical reshuffle caused by my finding the truth of my biological roots this last May, and the second is that I have never quite known who I am.

Conrad has a daily writing schedule that governs our lives. I am now attempting to insert my own regular writing time. It’s not just juggling time, it’s juggling attitude. This isn’t a frill, it’s a necessity. There are certainly enough hours in the day, it’s a matter of whether I can say to myself with authority, yes, this is mine, this is important.

So far, so good. “Good?” Well, yes, in the long run. Casting my nets back into very murky waters is certainly troubling. Much of my childhood memory is blanked, but it’s coming back, and while some of it is affirming, there are the other parts. And as I am looking at my young “adult” years, that’s a real challenge.

I think that’s why the “Who was I then? Who am I now?” approach is a good one. I think it’s likely that every person finds that they’ve worn a wild series of personae in the course of their lives: I’m not unique. But if the story of my own journey is to be of use, it will be as a mirror to that process. Mine is a bit more gnarly because of the mother/daughter rift. I never knew what it might be to be a daughter until Conrad’s mother embraced me with unconditional love.    

So I’ve bought my ticket on the roller-coaster and have topped the first crest. I am hoping to become my own best friend.

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Some Thouights about Craft . . .

—From CB—

I’m in several Facebook writers’ groups. There tend to be vast scrawls of graffiti assailing others for idiocy or deeper crimes, and one wonders if masterpieces might emerge if only the writers applied their creativity to something other than converting a serious discussion into a video game. And yet there are those seriously pursuing the art.

As one of those, I’m unusual, maybe, in having earned my living with words for 48 years after leaving college teaching. But that was writing plays, and learning the art of prose fiction is a challenge at the age of 77. Yes, it’s all writing, but it’s rare for a classical violinist to play in a punk band (though I know one who does).

It’s a steep learning curve when there’s limited time to wind through the curvature, and it forces a reassessment of what you thought you knew. Someone posts the first paragraph of a novel, asks for response. That takes guts. It reminds me of our first duo show SONG STORIES, October 1969, Chicago, stepping onstage without the foggiest notion if it’d score or bomb. The last thing anyone deserves, taking that risk, is to be the butt of others’ wisecracks. But what can you say about a first paragraph that you don’t really like?

In fact, in how-to’s about writing best-selling fiction, you pick up the notion of the instant hook: if the reader isn’t grabbed by the first chapter, the first paragraph, the first sentence, you won’t interest an agent, a publisher, or any reader under the age of 90. Do I really need a murder or planetary apocalypse before our hero has breakfast

The first thing, I guess, that I’m moved to say—though I feel like a cardiologist called on to treat scabies—is to stop looking for a formula. This isn’t a glamorous profession. If fame is what you’re after, you’d have better odds of success training for the NBA or as a roofing contractor. But I realize that’s no help.

The best I can offer, from five decades of theatre work, is to hone a strong notion of the present moment. The actor leads the audience moment by moment: one line, one response, one action leads to the next, and if it jumps the groove everyone knows it. Granted, there’s endless fakery: Hamlet’s soliloquy has been delivered thousands, perhaps millions of times, and often it’s just like receiving a package in the mail. It becomes electric, living, only when the thought, the rhythm, and those exact words flow in real time from the actor’s heart. Shakespeare starts one play with three witches storming onto stage, another with a courteous courtiers’ dialogue, another with lovesick poetry: all work.

Beyond that: The opening of a story is an invitation to a journey, and in its language style—the blunt prose of Cormac McCarthy or the rolling phrases of Proust—it lets you know the vehicle you’re riding on. Is this going to be a skateboard or an elephant? Either can work, depending on the reader you want, but if the latter, it’d better be a prizewinning elephant. And where are you going with this? Surprise parties can work fine, or sudden shifts in the story from gentle comedy to vicious assault, but with any surprise you’re putting high stakes on the table. Risky to issue a birthday party invitation to a sex orgy.

The best advice, perhaps, is to suggest going to the public library, taking novels off the shelf, one at a time, reading a dozen first pages. What draws you forward? What mires you hip-deep? What makes you hit a speed bump? And how does this all relate to what you want to do?

I guess that’s what I’ve always done in theatre, and though it’s looking at other work it’s the opposite to searching for a formula. It’s just looking at craftsmanship—at the commonalities and differences between the sculptures of Michelangelo and Donatello, even if your work resembles Giocometti. What in the plays of Neil Simon is applicable to the weird stuff I write? What are the glitches in the work of those I most admire? How do I tell this story, holding the reader or listener moment by moment?

I can’t quite define how any of this relates to the larger issues of living life, but I leave that to others involved with those issues.

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Ley-lines . . .

—From EF—

Today was our ritual picnic at the oceanside, and my dented rattly self is somewhat soothed. I haven’t had such a long slog of depression for a while, and I’m doing my best to reach for my old trusty strategies. I don’t medicate; I’ve battled successfully without that, and I am reluctant to reach for that remedy.

But I will reach in a flash for another old medicine, and it’s helpful to think why it works. If I’m in the right place at the right time and in the right mind-set, Earth herself opens the gates for me.

My friend Lauren Raine, a maker of stunning goddess masks, is on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in and around Avebury (England). Her stated purpose is to further her sense of how humans can communicate with Gaia, and vice versa. Her sense is that the ley-lines of Earth and the meridians of the body are related, and that the concept of bodily chakras may very well be seen in Gaia on a larger scale.

This September in Ireland was the first time in decades I hadn’t gone to my personal sacred space in Bretagne: Carnac and environs. But our first full day in Ireland was at Newgrange, Bru na Boinne, an enormous passage tomb (burial site) from before the time of the Pyramids. An opening called the “roof-box” above the entrance is aligned in such a way that dawn of the winter solstice allows the sun to hit the interior passage with a shaft of light that gradually widens and “walks” its way into the center basin. As soon as I descended from the shuttle bus that winds into the protected hills, my sandaled feet touched the earth and I was jolted with a greeting from Carnac. I yipped and said, “It’s like Carnac!” and the guide grinned with understanding.

I always felt something invisible but powerful working at Carnac, and one year I took dowsing rods with me. I’d begun to suspect that the long lines of stones were mapping ley-lines, and I thought I’d see what the rods said. When I held them and stepped into one of the stone rows, the rods were nearly torn from my hands. I got the message.

I didn’t have dowsing rods at Newgrange, but my body knows the feeling by now. I’m sure that there are hot-spots on the meridians, the intersections of ley-lines, and I suspect that some such power-point is right here on the Sonoma Coast where we go for our weekend trysts. Not so strong at our winter beach, but really potent at Portuguese Beach a mile or so north. I instinctively went there a time or two when I needed to do a strong working, and eventually somebody told me, “Oh, yeah, everybody who knows energy around here knows that place.”

Back in the day I’d get home from my annual European journey and weep for two weeks. Since we moved to Sebastopol, I don’t weep any more, and now I have a better idea why.

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Community . . .

—From CB—

The sense of having “community”—what does that mean? As a child, it was neighborhood kids and then Boy Scouts. In high school I was a loner, but found tribe in theatre. If a school show wasn’t in rehearsal, I’d go down to the drama teacher Miss Miller’s room and see who was hanging out. Community theatre was the big-time for me: smoke-clogged rooms at rehearsal, then out for coffee afterward—me the youngest at the table, which was fine with me. I was still a loner among the general population: my people were those with whom I shared a common purpose.

When I started teaching, we rarely socialized with faculty; our people were those we interacted with, the students. The tribe expanded as we started our first theatre ensemble. In the years of heavy touring, it shrank back to the immediate family and the intense world of one-night-stands—with a few anchor-points like the Baltimore Theatre Project, where you sat late nights around the big kitchen table bonding with whomever was there.

The Lancaster years were rich with a cluster of artists and fans, and likewise Philadelphia. Our westward move wrenched us away from a theatre community and many friends, but we were part of various subcultures that took up the slack. Our venture into public radio gave us a wide spectrum of people—few long-term friends but many encounters that made up for those long, lonely nights of editing the shows.

Now? Vast numbers of friends and acquaintances scattered over the land—whom we rarely see. If there’s a “theatre community” in our area, we’re not part of it, though we have many, many friends whom we rarely see. We attend a periodic poetry salon and a Shakespeare reading group, both much valued, but I feel something lacking.

I suppose it gets back to that element of sharing a common purpose. It may be temporary, it may be illusory, it may be very individualistic—but you know it when it’s there, and it’s not. We have multiple handicaps: we’re old, we’re obsessive with our work, we’re intensely married, and we’ve never quite fit in as one of the gang. I’m far from advertising myself as discontented—we have an incredibly blessed life—but I wish we had tribe beyond those on Facebook. Our work would be better for it.

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Gratitude . . .

—From EF—

Between the toxic effluent from the Camp Fire and the toxic effluent from the Dumpster Fire I have been battling a difficult level of depression. The Sunday trip to the ocean helped, and coming home to an afternoon nap with purring cats aboard helped too. When our then-kittens arrived at our house in June of 2017, they were scared and disoriented. We’d made a box-nest for them in the kitchen, but they cried into the night. I put on my robe, came downstairs, and sat in the corner by their nest all night. My presence calmed them, and it seemed a small price to pay. Now they reward me by the healing that happens when two purring cats park themselves on my belly.

I’m trying to help myself too. Trite as it may be, running the clear water of gratitude through my being washes away a lot of shit. Thanksgiving’s coming, so I’ll share.

We just celebrated our 58th anniversary, and that’s at the top of my list. I’m aware of the extraordinary grace of not only having a long-run marriage, but also one that still throws off amazing sparks. And that union assisted the coming into being of Eli and Johanna, whose lives have endured the inevitable slings and arrows with valor. Our ancestors have all gone beyond, so the four of us are the last branches on our family tree, but counting their two admirable mates, in reality we are six. That’s way more than good.

I rejoice in the work we have created. Thinking back over our many decades of collaboration is exhausting as well as exhilarating, but I can still feel the shimmer of all the lives we’ve touched, all over this country. I can still feel the echo of the terror I felt on tour in 1978 before starting a performance for young teens in Americus, Georgia, where I was sure that skin color and rural roots and profound differences in accents would leave us hung out to dry. Instead, they felt the jazz roots of our dialogue and we all had a wonderful time.

There are artists with whom we have worked whose work takes my breath away, artists who are our friends. They are our tribe, our fellow outsiders, and when they ring their bells, my heart says, Yes.

I’m blessed that we both have our health. Medicare made navigation through Conrad’s open heart surgery and my two hip replacements possible without reducing us to homelessness. And speaking of home, being here in Sebastopol since the summer of ’99 has been our rock, our anchor, our paradise. I wept bitterly when we left Stanford for South Carolina in 1966, and it took 33 years to come back home. That’s fine; 33 is a good number.

Navigating the aftermath of a tumultuous childhood has been a wild ride, and I’m hyperaware of that now as I’m working on my own memoir. I have a new appreciation of myself in having come through all that and not regretting any of it.

And every day I give thanks that I have clean water, enough food, shelter, and warmth. In the words of the poet Jane Kenyon, “It might have been otherwise.”

And this year’s greatest gift, courtesy of Ancestry DNA and the skilled work of a search angel named Kif Augustine, I now know who begot and bore me. I have images of their faces, I am learning more all the time about their life-stories, and I have found three brothers and a sister. In this case, half is more than whole.

In the midst of tragedy and chaos, an attitude of gratitude is a life-preserver.  

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War’s End???

—From CB—

The air is full of smoke from forest fires 150 miles away. I’m reading Dickens and Barbara Kingsolver and the 17th Century Simplicissimus , with Orlando Furioso waiting in the wings. Trump is trumpeting, votes are being counted, and bombs are falling in Yemen. The December barrage of donor pleas has begun to fill the mailbox. The neighbor’s dog is barking, objecting to it all. Our cats are taking a nap.

How does this all affect my life? Concretely, that is, at this point in time? Not much, actually, except for wearing a smoke mask walking home from the gym and the slow upward creep of my blood pressure. Otherwise, I sit at the keyboard working on Chapter 13, which involves combining it with Chapter 14, cutting 500 words, and figuring what it’s all about.

And I should have mentioned the flags up and down the downtown streets of Sebastopol in recognition of Armistice/Veterans Day. I have no problem with recognizing veterans, but I’m concerned that it’s a bit premature to celebrate the end of WW1. Has it ended, or might it at some foreseeable point? Seems to me it directly spawned WW2, which spawned the Cold War, which fertilized the ground for a dozen little proxy wars, which have led to the current post-colonial/neo-colonial massacres in the name of profit.

We’ve now proudly proclaimed Natioalism as the new religion surpassing all others, pumping out the message that it’s essential to the Survival of the Fittest (namely, us): without the biggest piece of the cake, we’d surely starve. WW1 killed millions, led to an epidemic that killed millions more, lead to another war that broke all previous records, led to the symphonic cacophony—better spelled caca-phony—of the present day. War with Iran? with North Korea? with China? Why not? We might win, and those of us left standing could be proud of our loved ones’ sacrifices to allow us to have a drums & trumpets parade.

On the other hand, we might somehow come up out of the trenches, as they did on the front lines in 1914, and look one another in the eyes.

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On the Way Home . . .

 

—From EF—

We’re in limbo. As I write, it’s election day. We’re driving up the I-5, having spent the last week at a theatre conference in Arizona. Now we’re neither here nor there in any way. The outcome of the election is yet to be known. Our theatre friends and artist friends are now far away in every direction; our home and cats are still hours away.

I look out the car’s window and see mile after mile of the Central Valley, the land of bounty and plenty, but it feels so sterile. The trees are lined up for miles in military formation with bare ground at their feet. Many of them are almond trees, and have only a distant memory of their fling with the bees, whose furry bodies have been boxed and crated and trucked to some other location. There are no birds to be seen.

Some fields are bare, waiting for the machines and the water. They’re huge. Modern farm machines are high-tech, and I can almost imagine that they are equipped with GPS to navigate from one side of a field to the other in straight lines. No humans to be seen.

The highway is a solid ribbon of eighteen-wheelers, nose to tail at 65 miles per hour. Cars weave from lane to lane in order to go 80. Nobody is where they are, they’re all on the way to somewhere else.  This is normal. Corporate agriculture is normal. This is how we get to feed and clothe and house ourselves. And if we need a snack, we can stop at a gas station and marvel at the many ways there are to package sugar and salt.

But there is beauty to be seen. The sun is getting low and the light is golden. The hills that can’t get tractored are covered with tawny grasses. The aqueduct that carries water south is a stunning blue.

Although the pundits are nattering on the radio, I’m doing my best to breathe and center. I have no idea what’s on the far side of limbo. As they say, tomorrow is another day.

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A Polish Table . . .

—From CB—

We hold a deep mystery in our lives: the Polish table.

In 1970, we took our second trip to Europe. As in the year before, it was three months and two people on a Lambretta 150cc motor scooter, about 50 km/hr. with our camping gear on the back. From London thru Netherlands, France, West & East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and our first and only time into Poland.

In those pre-Curtain-dropping days, you had to exchange $15 per person per day for Eastern Bloc visas, and given our camping and meal prep over an alcohol burner, there was almost nothing on which to spend this vast wad of zloty. I remember buying three neckties, a tiny book . . . and, apparently, this table.

It’s a cheap little tin thing, 2 ft. by 2.5, spindly folding legs, cream-colored though stained with years of picnics, and it’s given us good service. In subsequent decades, right up to this contemplation of fog on the ocean cliffs, we’ve used our Polish table.

The mystery is this: where did we get it? In Poland, of course. Except that we couldn’t have.

I piloted the little scooter, Elizabeth perched at my back with saddlebags, tent and bedroll strapped behind. There was no room for a table, none. Impossible. It must have been acquired in later years, when we rented a car with the kids. But we’d never gone back to Poland. So why did we call it the Polish table?

Might it have had a Made in Poland stamp on its underbelly? Might we have once made a tacky joke about Polish workmanship? Might it have sailed in from an alternate reality? Might we have sailed in from an alternate reality? We seem to have exhausted all possibilities.

The best we can do, it seems, is to accept the mystery as mystery. An unexamined life is not worth living, they say, but neither, perhaps, is one that can be fully explained.

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First, Last . . .

—EF—

Our Italian daughter sent two beautiful and poignant photos this weekend, both of the Mediterranean at Piombino. It’s the end of the swimming season, and her titles were “The penultimate swim,” and “I guess this was the last.” Swimming is very important to her and to her man Francesco, who was born and raised in Piombino.

“First” and “last.”

Baby’s first tooth. The summer’s first ear of sweet corn. The first trip to Europe. Your first lover. Do you remember? How could you forget?

“Last” is trickier. Sometime you know, sometimes you don’t. When our beloved little red Honda CRX failed his smog test and we took him to the junkyard for our $1000 Cash for Clunkers payoff, we accidentally looked out the window just as a huge machine opened its jaws and picked him up by the nose, causing his trunk to fly open in a final spasm. We knew that was the last time we’d see Rover.

Last September I made my annual trek to Carnac, the long rows of standing stones in Bretagne. I’ve been going there every year since 2002; 2017 may have been the last time. I don’t know.

In 1996 Conrad’s mother’s health became perilous, and we flew to Harlan Iowa to see her in the hospital. The prognosis didn’t look good, and we were arranging for Conrad to go back again when word came to Philadephia that we were too late. We hadn’t known it was already the last time.

Following the wheel of the year is a comfort to me. Every last thing is simultaneously a first thing. For some, myself included, Samhain (generally celebrated on Oct 31 or Nov 1) is the beginning of the new year, and also the end: the end of the harvest and the time when the growing dark begins to be felt. It is the time for remembrance of those who have passed, when they are closest, when the veil is thinnest.

For the first time I will be bringing pictures of my mother and my father into a Samhain circle. They both left life in the 1990’s, long before I knew who they were. I am just beginning with them, beginning after their ending.

I will carry them with me.

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