Why hello there you! Yes, you! Just you!!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day - the only holiday where cultural appropriation is completely appropriate and weirdly even encouraged. I am celebrating by avoiding bars and attending a screening of William Shatner’s newest documentary, “You Can Call Me Bill.” I have no idea what it is about. I only know it is a red-carpet premiere and I will get to see Neil Degrasse Tyson interview Bill at Alice Tully Hall and I can’t wait.
Meanwhile, this week I saw Laurence Fishburne in a one-man show called “Like They Do in the Movies.” It was a series of sketches wherein he showed off his considerable acting ability by taking on half-hour monologues from the points of view of several characters that he may or may not have had the pleasure to know in real life (he was clear on the fact that some of the show was fiction), bookended by a cheerfully related horror story of his mother abusing him in childhood. Like most trauma-memoirs, this story was probably harder for him to tell than for us to hear, after all, we left the theater just that much more impressed with his talent once we discovered that he was able to eventually address his conflicting feelings about this terrible discovery and ultimately contain the cognitive dissonance of hating his damaged mother for taking advantage of him, while also loving her for being the most influential and stable support system backing him in his extraordinary (and very long) career. He overcame the internal dichotomy through action. He simply cared for her in her late-life dementia, accepting her with all her flaws. The final scene which had him snapping back and forth in rapid dialogue between himself and his 98 yr old mother was reminiscent of Gollum’s brilliant scene in Lord of the Rings. It brilliantly showed that we are our own worst enemies, and that all of our enemies are softened by love.
What else did I learn during this show? Turns out, I don’t enjoy people sharing their darkest secrets in public any more than I enjoy seeing people overtly pray in restaurants or on subways or street corners. These public and frequently rather loud devotions appear staged to me - productions for an audience. They are not a dialogue between the inner self and its demons (or gods), they are a performance for an imagined audience. Has anyone ever been converted by such a display?
And yet I acknowledge that trauma-memoirs have a place. The idea that others have crossed your way before, that you are not the first to have experienced anything, no matter how awful—well there is a genuine comfort in that. (Perhaps it is only the comfort of seeing that if that other person survived, perhaps we can too. But community is always important. Shared stories are important to the listener.
But I do wonder - what does the creator of such intimate revelatory pieces as “Like They Do in the Movies” gain from this public sale of their most intimate self?
Speaking of intimate selves (and to change the subject): a lovely question was posed to me this week.
Can you silently tell yourself, “Thank you, thank you, thank you?” (try it now!)
Finished?
Okay: how do you know you did it? In other words, who or what “heard” you say that to yourself? Someone/thing separate from the “speaker”? or the identical person? Or what? No sound was uttered so how was it “heard”? What is speaking or listening to inner voices? Memory? Experience? Senses that we have not yet discovered/harnessed? What?
The internal workings of the mind are so treacherously intriguing are they not?
Writing News:
I am embarrassed to admit that I did no creative writing at all this week. I read two books. I went to an animation festival of “spooky and surreal” Fleischer cartoons at MoMA.
I started three blog posts but abandoned them due to excessive irrelevance. I started to write a poem and ended up writing another grant. I am distracted and concerned, you see, about the whole Putin-moving-in news from overseas. My Lithuanian-based friends tell me that American people working over there are packing up so that depending on how our elections come out they can swiftly leave Lithuania during the lame-duck portion of our cycle. They also tell me that mandatory conscriptions into the Lithuanian army may become law for the first time in history.
We are all connected. What happens here does not happen in isolation.
Another of my friends laughed (bitterly, mind you) that there is nowhere to go to escape the effects of American politics. Even the small Pacific Islands are not safe, she said, because after all, depending on our politics many of them may soon be under water.
Random Final Thought:
Here is another sign that is being ignored:
Do you take time to think? I mean, with audiobooks, streaming series, movies, theater and podcasts feeding us our information instead of written matter (books, emails, newspapers) - do you find that you stop and think about things as much? I find that audible content means I ingest much more of it, but I interact with it on a surface level, rarely going as deep into my own opinions (or new ideas sparked) as I can with a book or print or onscreen article. Just thinking aloud….
You're making art by living your remarkably full life!
“But I do wonder - what does the creator of such intimate revelatory pieces as “Like They Do in the Movies” gain from this public sale of their most intimate self?” This is such an important question, one I struggled with a lot in writing my books. It’s why it’s so important to me that there is a politics at work in my poems, if not always explicitly in individual poems dealing with trauma, at least in the collection as a whole that provides the context for those poems.