The M-Word

Such things seem to come as if from nowhere, accidents merely, unplanned, unsought as well because--well, because you hadn't thought to ask. And so when you first picked up a book because it had within it a novella called The Flying Yorkshire Man, which you were only mildly charmed by, you went on to read the next novella, Turnip's Blood, and it was as though you'd grabbed an electric eel. There were no search engines in those days, no Google or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, there was the library and that brought you little relief. In those days, you were sprawling all over the L.A. Basin to hang out where ever Morty Jacobs had a gig at what in some places passed for a piano bar. On one particular night he mentioned a freebie gig he'd volunteered for, a gift to the West Valley Democratic Club, because it was coming on election time and one of his neighbors was running for a vacant congressional seat, and besides, there was this lady he wanted you to meet.

Turns out this lady, this Rachel, was the one who'd written Turnip's Blood. Turns out she'd wanted to see some of your stuff. Turns out she let you read the handwritten manuscript to what she was now bringing to a close, The Green Kingdom. Turns out you thought her short story, Final Clearance, that no one was willing to touch, would be a natural for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Turns out she even trusted you to dramatize it. Turns out. Turns out she and her husband were incredible sources of support to you and although the M-word was never spoken, there was this on-going exchange of substance and thought between you that you somehow understood was a part now of your literary genome, extending well beyond her death, into your dreams, your sense of self, your sense of what it is to have someone care and to have someone in turn to care for and to cause you to evaluate with regularity what it meant to care for someone.


There was a time in your life, believe it or not, when baseball was on your mind, when you judged people in terms of their knowledge and concern for baseball, when the sweet coordination of a double play, short to second to first, or the Nuriev pivot of second to short (in the face of the oncoming runner) to first seemed so exquisite it brought a spasm to your chest. You knew you could never achieve those jetes and so you practiced instead the reaches and sprawls and one-handed thrusts of the first base position, thinking your height somehow trumped coordination. Not surprisingly then, you took to an admiration of Lou Gehrig and so, also not surprisingly, you suffered some of the silliness of the movie, Pride of the Yankees, to see the baseball scenes. The disturbing sensations that came along at the fraternity dance scene were about, you know, girls and the distraction of girls, a force you recognized as the beginnings of a competition with baseball and with writing. The fraternity dance scene comes in the YouTube Pride of the Yankees, starting at minute 2:50 of segment two, where the Southern-sounding blonde comes on to the Lou Gehrig as portrayed by Gary Cooper. After seeing Pride of the Yankees enough times, you understood that you were watching the film for reasons other than baseball. Years later, never mind how many, you sat in a guest cottage in a semi-rural part of Santa Barbara, watching that scene from a video cassette, being instructed by the very actor who'd portrayed the Southern blonde, coming on to Gary Cooper. "He (Cooper) was, as you know, a man who liked women," she said. "But the key to his success with them, I tell you from experience, was not from his performance, which was certainly adequate, but from the way he conveyed his wanting to be with you." You learned a good deal about un-baseball that evening, particularly her breakdown of the three approaches an actor takes in conveying a scene. "You play it from the head, or the intellect, from the heart, or the emotional/spiritual, or you play it from the crotch, or the place of sexuality." A stage-trained actor, she went over scenes you had written showing you missed opportunities or mixed messages. You tried to absorb the messages as she shared her Strasberg assignments: wearing a fur coat, board the Fifth Avenue bus at rush hour, and hand the driver a twenty-dollar bill. Pick a fight with a department head at Bergdorf. Watch scenes from movies and plays, guessing where the lead or second lead was originating from. Write scenes in which one character feels one emotion while speaking another. You still have Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares with her name and notes in it, and the book of Greek drama with her notes for playing the various roles. When she invited you over to chose books from her library, you started to ask why, knowing she suffered terribly from emphysema, but even then she was teaching you things. She put a finger on your lips. "Subtext," she said. "Look always for the meaning between what is said and what is done." Two days later, a nun from the Vedanta Society called to tell you, "Virginia is out of pain now."

Rachel. Virginia. The M-word.

Mentor.

More Dots to Connect--or to Collide

When you were much younger, there was no dearth of ideas, only the manner of their presentation and your response to them. Ideas, notions, concepts, were presented to you as though by liveried waiters, with dramatic eclat, with trumpeting flourish. Your response to them was of an agreeable single-mindedness. It was not as though you were incapable of doing numerous things at once, rather you knew, you felt there was enough time to allow the singleness of focus. One thing at a time. One thing into which you threw yourself in much the same way Sally throws herself into the consequences of a scent.

The short story of a student, Kelli Noftle, reminds you with great vividness of what it was like to be thirteen, the rampant rage of hormones trumping subtext events such as politics and the reading of political philosophers, the studies supplemental to approaching religion confirmation ceremony, the concentration-camp atmosphere of junior high school, and all around you, the vivid, exciting split away from swing and traditional jazz of a emerging harmonic progression called be-bop (which, had he lived longer, it is fun to speculate that Johann Sebastian Bach would have discovered).

It is comforting in its way to have this single-mindedness of purpose. The individuals you admire seem to carry it with them as they age, producing the work you admire and use as your individual pole star while engaging the subtexts of career, romantic relationships, parenting, friendships, and the necessities of aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Often you admire and envy this ability as much or more than you admire a given project.

Along comes the later game, bringing with it no lessening of ideas, perhaps even more and better ones to compete with the subtext. But now, there is a kind of cosmic sound track to go along with this procession, this Trader Joe's of the mind. It is the voice of that manipulative cynic, Andrew Marvell:

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot drawing near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity..."

In a real sense, Marvell had in mind exactly what Kelli's thirteen-year-old boy had in mind, because within the same poem, Marvell goes on to suggest:

"The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace..."

When I was about the age of Kelli's horny thirteen-year-old, I became convinced that knowing this poem by memory would help enhance my virginal transition toward the plateau of those who had indeed embraced in the fullest and finest sense of that trope. (It never helped! Yet I still remember the goddamned poem.)

From all this arises an avalanche of questions: Can an artist of any sort be known from an inspection of the clatter and collision of ideas and notions whirling about within? Should we be content to keep our focus on the individual work and its implications? Should we try to find out as much about the artist as possible to expand our potential interpretation of the individual work? Would we better appreciate an individual Meditation from Marcus Aurelius if we knew his life at closer hand? Would we appreciate The Tin Drum more or less from our recent knowledge that Gunter Grass was not only a Nazi sympathizer, he was a ember of the Waffen SS?

One of my treasured cyber-acquaintances is with a photographer who lives a good thirteen hours away. (Twelve if you fly Air New Zealand, Digby Wolfe says). Known to me only as Pod, I am drawn regularly to the photographs he posts on his blog, photos showing--sometimes simultaneously--a splendid sense of humor, an immense curiosity, a well-developed photographer's eye, a sense of composition, a moving ability at narrative prose, a sense of whimsy, great curiosity, and more qualities that fall within this creative terrain. Only last week, in a comment he left on these vagrant pages, he mentioned having read the novel by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murikami that I a even now in the process of reading. Is it possible to get an accurate take on a writer from another culture who writes in another language, Pod pondered. "i loved it, but i don't think i understood it as well as i would if i was japanese. i love their horror films too, but again, there is always something i feel i don't quite 'get," he wrote.

In a more-than-tangential way, pod illustrates my point about the degree we can be influenced by mere exposure to the work. Having pondered his question, I rather suspect I will see more or look longer at the next picture he posts.

My treasured mentor was a delightfully supportive and imaginative person. Would I have enjoyed her own work as much as I do if I had not known she was refused admission to medical schools because of having experienced one or two petite mal seizures? Possibly not because I was so caught in her work. But my answer now is Of course it mattered because I so wanted to be like her that I took in as much about her life as I could.

Right now, 8:41 p.m., August 10, 2007, Santa Barbara, CA, my answer is the weasel answer: What remains of us is our performance, which is to say the amount of our self we put into our work. It keeps Marcus Aurelius alive for me, although I suspect that if I think it through, I could apply pod's comments about Haruki Murikami to my take on Marcus Aurelius.

For the nonce, go figure.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

I've been fortunate to have had two mentors, one the writer, Rachel Maddux, the other an actor, Virginia Gilmore.

Many of the things I learned from Rachel had to do with discovering ways to make a character come to life on the page by demonstrating--not describing--what that character wanted, then relating that agenda to the story at hand.

Virginia, an Actor's Studio alumna, showed me the same basic thing: how to focus on the core image of a character in relationship to the thematic and situational pressures of a given story. It was fascinating to hear Virginia speak of her acting class assignments, shared with her close friends, Lee Remick, and Marilyn Monroe. Boarding a Fifth-Avenue bus at five in the afternoon, with nothing smaller than a fifty-dollar bill. Being imperious and haughty to a saleslady at Bergdorf. All calculated to teach the actor how to overcome humiliation, inflict it, empathize with others and, specifically, to project the deliberate avoidance of empathy, which is to say denial.

I have for some time tended to feel a community in which the actor and writer overlap, relying on, among other things, timing. It is no accident that the community has expanded in my view to include the musician and the photographer, each dealing with the way time is spent/employed/manipulated.

Although I have been a music buff from about pre-teen to the present, it was not until I interviewed Leonard Slatkin, Conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, that I even thought of the orchestral policy of manipulating time in music through the simple raising or lowering of the vibrations per second of the note A. The standard A is 440 vibrations per second. Each time you go to a live performance of a n orchestral or chamber group, you see/hear the players tuning their instrument to the A 440. Some European conductors like the results when they tune to an A at 338; some American conductors apparently like the possibilities from an A at 442. Such tweakings can contribute to an orchestra sounding faster or slower. It is not an obvious effect, merely a contributory one, a part of the conductor's personal "take" or point of view on tempo--how time is enlisted for an effect.

A photographer I was watching, particularly after she downloaded her afternoon's digital images the better to discard the ones she hated, file and perhaps Photo Shop those she saw fit to keep, announced with that lovely certainty of understanding and familiarity, "It's [photography is] all about light." A predetermined amount of light, entering a predetermined aperature in order to record an image.

Writer, actor, musician, photographer, using time to inform a desired result. In setting forth on a venture of writing, acting, performing, photographing, each uses time as a part of an element that transcends technique and delivers on the reader, viewer, hearer, audience an emotional impression. Thus does time become a part of a vital technique of narration.

All the user needs is that lovely portmanteau word, the narrator; or that even lovlier portmanteau phrase, point of view. What am I looking for when I expose an image? I heard the photographer ask. She was talking aloud, to herself, working it out--a link in its way to a pair of questions I ask students in my writing classes: Who's telling the story? And why?

On some basic level, I think we come through middle school understanding the persons, first, second, third. At some later point, we find out about multiple and omniscient.

It may take some of us--me included--longer to arrive at what comes next, just as it took me so long to consider what I learned from Leonard Slatkin about the manipulated A. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator like, say, Billy Budd, a naive, innocent, giuleless sort? Is the narrator a naif such as Don Quixote? And from that we have the even greater sophistication: Is Forrest Gump really thick in the head or merely (emphasis on irony here) Quixotic?

Do we believe the anchor who reads the evening news? Do we, accordingly, even watch the evening news?

What degree of acceptance do we give a work on, say Reconstruction (as in the United States Civil War), when we know the author is a Southerner or, conversely, a New Englander? Do we want the reader to accept, reject, or question? Relative to the effect we hope to evoke, what steps do we take to provide it--at what aperture do we set the lens, and how long do we allow the light to enter?

Most Homo sapiens appear to be hard-wired with Pairs of Opposites, polar clashes of conscience, emotion, moral gravity. We are at the very least prone to conflicting visions on the same topic. I am at this very moment seeing and feeling the to me dire consequences of Hillary's win of the Democratic nomination for 2008, vowing to write in Ralph Nader, thus not only making a choice but "making a statement" as well.
With the actual ballot before me in this nightmare scenario, will I hold to my resolve or be yanked off course by the voice of compromise.

Who is the narrator or narrators in a given story? This person, these people, need to have enough light allowed to enter the aperture of their personality to provide a vision of the complexity that lives and thrives within each of us.

Sidney Carlton is enough in appearance like Charles Darnay to pass for him in A Tale of Two Cities. Paris and London, the two venues of the novel, are made similar and polar; as well man's nature may be one of self-aggrandizement or nobility of a sort that is a sarcastic footnote to the broader concept of nobility so abundant in England and France at the time.

In order to know our narrator, you need to, as Virginia Gilmore did, put on her fur coat, and board the Fifth Avenue bus with a fifty-dollar bill. It helps that she told me of another story that came when she wore that fur coat--and nothing, absolutely nothing else. Reeled precariously, trying to stay on top of her drunken state, but losing out and tumbling down the long, circular staircase, into the lobby of a posh Swiss hotel.

Who is telling the story and why? For whom do we root? And why?
How much light do we let in? And through what aperture?
What is the key, the tone, the tempo?
Are we as transparent as, say Morgan Freeman or are we caught in the slipstream of some agenda as, say, Jack Nicholson?

Do we try to lull our characters into a false sense of security so that we can verbally capture them on paper when they are no longer posing? Or do we tell them up front?

There are no right answers, but the wrong answers emerge if we fail to take these issues into the crucible of our own creative urges, the better to determine our own motives.