Last night I dreamed I was called in at the last minute to cover two nights of a run of Hamlet. As Hamlet. People seemed quite comfortable with this decision. And so did I until I showed up for call. Suddenly I was sporting a beard, sideburns, and heavy eyebrows. Next I was in a costume that was acres too large. I looked like I was playing dress-up in my dad's suit. Kind of fits, eh? The only thing that fit were my boots - my own trusty black boots that I wear every day during the winter.
No one seemed too eager to get started. The audience can wait they all said. Let's eat. There's a restaurant next door. We could walk right into the kitchen and later during the show, we made entrances from the side door of the restaurant. I would walk through all melancholy danish-like and get hit smack in the face with the delicious odors of roasted meats, sweet breads, and boiling stews. Which improved my disposition mightily.
The set was a long alleyway center stage that split off into a series of horse stalls going stages left and right. It was dark except once in awhile I'd get hit by a pinpoint spot or a flood of strips rising up from the floor aiming across me and then sweeping out towards the audience. Gertrude and Claudius were always onstage lounging on a couch in the center stage left stall. We talked without looking at each other. I'd start a line in the back of the house and walk forward declaiming it, then the response would come from somewhere around the stage wherever the actor I spoke to was positioned.
Lines: I started to panic. My mind was trying to recall Hamlet's lines from Act 1, scene 2 and then I'd get fearful and panicky and well you know the actor's nightmare thing. I came up with strategies for getting through - like scribbling key phrases on the set or stashing my script somewhere. Except, I really did know the lines once I was onstage, it was the reality of sleeping and not being able to remember that caused the panic. There were many pauses and the sense that we didn't sync up with each other. I was always out of time. No one complained. We were discovering something new together and people were patting me on the back - all very encouraging.
I was always aware that my suit didn't fit. That I was wearing a ridiculous beard. That my boots fit and felt comfortable. I was forever futzing with my left shirt cuff. It became a signature gesture. I always knew what I was doing was a performance and I performed without trying to become immersed, lost in Hamlet. I was always aware that we were connected to a restaurant and that there was another world of activity going on through that door downstage right. It was always dark but I could see the audience when I wanted. I knew what was going on outside of the theater - buses and cars and people searching for pianos. Later I left the performance and started searching the neighborhood for a place to hide. I had my 20 month old son with me and we had to be careful. We had to get home before dark when the vampires and the anti-terrorist units came out.
Last year I dreamed of Bill Murray and Karl Rove just before the New Year. This year it's Hamlet meets I Am Legend. I wonder if this dream has anything to do with my decision to pretend I'm Susan Sontag? Memory be green and the new year not yet minted.
It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is the time. - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1
1) Are You A Theater User? Stephen Wright explores the idea of usership versus spectatorship and the challenge usership asserts over the expert - ie. artist, critic, gallery with respect to the artworld in this post. It's interesting to read the essay through a second time and substitute theater for art - as in theater users rather than theater spectators.
2) Thoughts On Reading J.M. Coetzee Since there's so much intertextuality when do you really stop reading Coetzee? Or where does one novel end and the other begin? That said, even when you're not reading Coetzee you are still reading Coetzee. Because you can't read a novel now without dismantling the rhetoric. The fun hasn't stopped though.
Where does writing start or end? Confined to the novel isn't it all one long stream of narrative bounded by different covers and signed by the author?
Who actually writes? What if you refuse to be the author? Speaking of Cormac McCarthy - what happens if you, as a reader, refuse to imagine what happens to the kid at the end of Blood Meridian? Simply refuse to have authorship thrust upon you? Does your denial change anything? Do you rip a hole in the narrative? Does the action continue without you?
I'm sure that Ms. Stein has said this all before.
4) No Pardons for the Bush Administration
5) I Am Jack's Aching Nostalgia: Take 9 At one point during the winter it occurred to me that there is another type of writer's block. The kind where you're not digging deep enough to get at the things that haunt you, the things keep you from moving forward, or the things that keep you up at night wondering if you have writer's block, or the things that keep you awake at night wondering if there will be tomorrow and if there is, what terrible shit hole will it resemble? These are the times you should be writing. You're awake aren't you?
Your writing reeks of stuckness. Don't wait too long or you'll stop writing altogether and that won't be a happy place either.
List of Things to Write About:
Textures and qualities of sound, color, light.
Layers of darkness.
Of being smothered, confined, cut off, buried alive.
Of finally being delivered.
Recycling difficulty.
Expecting too much or too little.
How our stories don't match up.
How we fail and fail and fail.
How desperately we cling to the fine thread of it all.
Mendacity, baby.
Last summer I had Fifth disease (after the third - rubella- they couldn't think of any good names) and I had joint pain and swelling in my hands which made it painful to write. At one point, I thought, "this is it. I'm done. I'm going to have to learn to signal the alphabet with my eyelids or start writing very tiny like O'Neill and rely on the love of a good woman to get my plays typed up." But I get hysterical that way sometimes.
6) Stuck Inside A Moment You Can't Get Out Of
Now.
You know how you're driving down the freeway and that U2 song comes on the radio? Not that one. You think back to when it was first released and driving through the desert at top speed. Then you add up the years. Whoa, kemosabe. Careful of the windsheer. You are here and yes, they've been playing U2 non-stop on the radio for over twenty years.
I keep slamming up against the contemporary lately. It's disorienting. The slamming thing is not efficient. Is meditation the answer? I've been reading Pema Chödrön.
At any given moment and often simultaneously: I feel like Veruca Salt - I don't have time for instant gratification. Why can't it be now? Hmm? Please slow down. My daughter starts kindergarten next year and she won't be all mine anymore (not that she ever was).
Where is the contemporary? Where is now? This is sure to become an obsession.
7) RE: I Am Jack's Re:Realigned Priorities #6 Writer's block. It's on my mind lately. Popping up like the rift in Tyler Durden. It's hooked around a tangle of events and images that I'm going to sift through here. It might take more than one post. Hark ye and: Prepare. I'm going to start at the beginning.
Several years ago I had writer's block. It lasted five years. This is after writing for practically my whole life (at least since the age of 8). Suddenly the words ran out at 28. I reached a point where I had to admit to myself that I was no longer a writer. I hadn't written. I didn't write. I had no words. The words came back my Jesus year. Two books- On Writer's Block by Victoria Holt Writing Down the Bones by Nathalie Goldberg - got me writing again. Through reading these I came to believe, especially after the Goldberg book, that there was no such thing as writer's block. What started it all?
Betrayal.
I was living in a house with four other people - one a close friend from college. One afternoon I came home and found my *friend* in the middle of the living room with my pages spread out on the floor. My *friend* was sifting through them and copying my words into his notebook. He even underlined phrases in red marker. When I asked him what he was doing, he was so casual about it - "oh, just going over this for you." Which, considering the circumstances, was quite a collected response. Thinking over it now, I'm kind of impressed.
It's rare that I've felt so betrayed. I can think of only a few times when I've felt that exposed and invaded. Looking back - most of the writing was utter crap. Obviously there were words worth stealing. But, yeah, instead of being angry, I really should have been embarrassed.
As a side note: It occurs to me that maybe this experience gets to the heart of my objections to the use of the word steal and accounts for my visceral response to people telling me they steal from me. It explains why I don't see it as a compliment. I recognize it's not the same thing, intellectually I get the difference, but emotionally the two are conflated and - bang - it unhinges me. Good to figure that one out finally. How to stop the response?
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Writer's block. That's the target. My personal bout with it. The details of it are simple: I didn't write. I didn't read. I didn't do much but go to my temp job and spend the rest of my time slogging around town contemplating throwing myself off a bridge. Yes. How very dramatic and self-absorbed. But also very real and terrifying too. I would literally force myself to walk home- avoiding the bridge and the thoughts that each day were getting closer to becoming action. And you know, I'd given things a decent shot. Why not cash out?
On one particularly dark day, I went home and stretched out on the floor. Looking up, I noticed my collection of Hunter S. Thompson books a friend had given me for Christmas a few years before. I'd read Fear and Loathing and Hell's Angels but hadn't picked up any of the others. The Great Shark Hunt caught my eye. I stayed up all night reading. I was absorbed by this book. I let it take me. At times I'd stand up on my bed and read it out loud to myself. Sometimes I'd hold it in my hands and jump up and down for awhile. When I read the line "Well, nobody laughed when Banquo's ghost came to the party...and remember the Baltimore colts," I fell onto the bed and laughed until I cried.
And I started writing. Letters. I composed letters to Hunter S. Thompson. It was still terrible stuff - no one would have thought once about stealing it and eventually I developed the good sense to stop sending them (yeah, that's embarrassing too.) The thing is: composing with Thompson as my audience started making me sharper. I couldn't sustain my voice for very long, but at least I was hitting the target. To this day, when the writing isn't hitting I'll attack it by writing a letter to HST.
And William S. Burroughs started visiting in my dreams. He'd sit on the end of my bed and sort through my books admonishing me to re-read The Wasteland. "You've got to go back to The Wasteland, young lady. You haven't read Eliot since 1980." I'd roll over and brush him off. "Eliot is key," he kept repeating. "Eliot is key." I ignored him. That's the kind of idiot I am. But he didn't let up. I'd be directing something and my research would hit on a quote - from where? Right. The Wasteland. I wrote a play and what was the criticism is received? It is as if a woman has written The Wasteland.
The universe will work it's magic with or against you. Surf sister, surf.
We are quiet here. Except for whatever beast it was that screamed through our woods. The children are still talking about it and truly, I've never heard such sounds coming from an animal. High-pitched caterwauling coming from the dark outside the bedroom window. Not of woe. But of frenzy and anger. Most unholy sounds. I expect in the morning to find a trail of bones and ripped, bloody flesh.
I finally went outside. Had to locate it. The faint light from the porch lamp does not deter it. Finally see some small animal pushing through the tall grass. It looks white and unrepentant. Keeps moving. Turns towards the house - suspect it sees us. Still screaming. Dogs across the canyon bark in protest. The little beastie returns their call with more furious rage. Turns away from us and disappears in the grass. What can it want? What can it be looking for? Why so twisted with wrath?
Flashlight beams across the dark of the tree canopy. It's gone to visit our neighbors. Don't go down the hill little buddy, it only gets more civilized.
