Some Thoughts on Clown's Relation to Acting

They are those naïve creatures fully invested in bringing something simple and beautiful into the world; a dark/real/knowing world that regards beauty with suspicion. The clown arrives with a special, unique gift to show people. These offerings are impossible dreams of the imagination ("today I shall jump head first from this plank into that barrel while eating fire-gelato! Ready? One…two..."). But the clown is full of hope that if s/he tries really really *really* hard, that her/his heart can truly fly the dream. Maybe the heart is enough, after all? When the dream inevitably collides with reality (or gravity), the failure that we on the outside fully anticipated makes us laugh. It makes us laugh, I think, because we have all felt the cruel fallibility of extreme hope. It is one of the few essential bonds between human beings, and one that we reckon with best collectively. Yet at the same time most of us know that, like the clown, we too will try the impossible over and over again. There is a clown in every one of us, and s/he is always looking for another reason to hope...despite the crushing vice of daily, socialized existence.

In acting practice, the challenge and beauty of this work for me is that that the activity must mean something real for the actor. The offering must come from the actor's intensely personal imagination. The useful gift on stage is the one you fantasize fantastically about doing without typically letting people know (I really have always wanted to be a fierce hip-hop dancer). In other words, there must be real risk. Delightful risk. And now you will show them how great you can really be at this thing. This act requires enormous belief and even bigger courage, because it's probably going down in flames. But that is the sacrifice of the actor, not just the clown. *That* is the lesson. And when the actor gives away that much - and gives it away and gives it away - then the spectators feel something real in their hearts, too. Then we are together, failure or no. And sometimes - and here is what always gets me about this work - when the heart wants it bad enough and the brain gets out of the way, the attempt succeeds almost like magic (and you should see the gift of pure joy and shock on an actor's face when the unexpected works!).

There is a real, personal cost to good acting, and clown makes the price tag big and colorful. I think that's what I love most about doing/teaching it. There is so much covering of the holes in actors' souls. Young acting students trained under typical methods try to paste over the holes by putting on the masks of characters…that is, when they aren't shoveling nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, or applause into the chasms. But acting that hides our secret hopes, resistances, fears, and desires is just bad acting. Plain and simple. It connects to nothing and nobody. No matter how unrealistic those driving fantasies are, if they are hidden, then so is the human engine that propels the actor into an entity that compels the rest of us to look. To listen. To feel something.

"The place that you rip open again and again, that heals, is God."

It all feels like it's going to end, and I'm in a hurry to get to whatever I'm supposed to be doing before it's over. I see people on screens who used to look very young when I was very much younger. I don't feel a substantial change in myself, but then I see people with the same names on different screens nowadays and they seems so aged. And in those moments what I feel and what I know about time disconnect. What I know triumphs and sets a stopwatch ticking backwards. "Tick-tock, tick-tock...you're older than you feel, and you're still phutzing around with writing papers and stuff. Tick-tock..." It's all going to end. And I'm in a hurry to get to whatever I'm supposed to be doing before it's over. But it's not going to end any time soon. Probably.

It's that uncertainty that spurs on the problems. I know my declaration to enter a monastery, made right after I finished my qualifying exams, was joked about and amused people. It was amusing, after all, in its absurdity. And then the anxiety train slowed down and dropped off its cargo of spinning and insomnia and oxygen hunger. And a life of war-torn solitude seemed even more droll. But here I spin, and the refuge of hygienic sleep that was so heavenly has been disturbed by two rows of teeth grinding each other to dust. Pain wakes me up each morning.

Still, to pull away into solitude is the exactly wrong impulse. But sometimes I feel destined to drop out of the universe of people eventually in order to deal with this once and for all; which is probably as impossible as the solitude is absurd. Finality, I mean. Staying and reckoning truthfully and in the flux is important. It will forever be in flux, and to address the worrying in quarantine...I think I would have to stay in quarantine with it. I've gotten better at seeing it. I know it's there, and I see that it's always been there. In this sense, personal history is very reliable. But anxiety is an clever doppelganger, and it still sends me on all sorts of pursuits that have the effect of making me doubt that it is the culprit. But it is, even when I can't remember that. I'm trying to remember that.

But it's not going to end any time soon. Probably. And in the best moments I slow down. Breathe. Lessen the criticality of everything temporary in relation to the temporality of life. Get a little honest about who I am to others, and who they are to me. Listen with my heart to music. To people just as scared as I am, but in different ways. Love a little more. Resist faith a little less. I retreat to an interior monastery while staying fully engaged in the dirty, awful flux. The wound heals. I rip it open again and again. And it heals nevertheless. And God? I don't know. (I feel like they sliced me open with a scalpel at too young an age, inserted their beliefs, sutured over the torso-length hole and said, "Don't worry, it'll grow. Just give it time. It will grow." And now those beliefs are wrapped around and intertwined inextricably with my organs and nerve endings. To rip one set of innards out is to bring the other with it and with finality.) So God? I don't know. But something. Probably something to make friends with, or at least regard with only part-time suspicion. And I'm okay with something.

Some Important Thoughts for...

It's strange the way that the clear idea of something can make it true. Or make it happen? When I used to hear people say that they were losing sleep over this or that, or when someone would speak of fearing sleep because of its proximity to death...well, those claims I never thought much about. But anxiety's persistence is all the clarifying power any dark claim requires to be brought into the light. In a way, anxiety is the operative; the shadowy minion who clings to the dark while enabling the heightened perception of early morning heart palpitations, minute-by-minute crushed facial muscles, sleep as a realm to be dreaded. Anxiety is the crude conjuror casting spells faster than their mental antidotes can be recited. And by the time one comes full circle to one already dispelled, the remedies have grown entangled and must be sorted out before being recited. The clear idea feeds the imagination, which has some sway over the body and thus makes the idea tangible. Reality, even if it is an imagined reality, is the endpoint to thought.

I didn't used to worry this much. I always worried, but just not this much. And there are so many things that seem real that just aren't. They're not. But my book of counter-spells can't keep track. Nevertheless, in a way all of this is reassuring. Not the product, but the magic behind it. Because if anxiety can create demons, why can't faith create angels? If I could just get my energy pointed at faith instead of anxiety. That's the trick. There is a boost coming.

I will go to New York in August, if not before. I am excited beyond what I can show yet, just because it is still a ways off. I am excited for the city. But much more, I am excited for several days of consistent contact with a good friend. Calculations and fantasies, the material from which anxiety draws, have no power in that place. Calculations and fantasies. In the worst moments of terror, in hostel rooms filled with strangers, in spaces unfamiliar and psychically damning, anxiety could not achieve its mad-making goal. The demons of the night were held at bay during the day by angels: driving adventures, miles of walking, and resisting luggage charges. I will go to New York, and I will sleep because the clear idea of something can make it true.

Who Knows What A Little Loosening Brings

I am writing my disseration. I am drinking wine. I am listening to music from an iPod shifted to random. It's Saturday night at 9:45, and I love this feeling. It's full of what is possible as much as it is by what can be finished. The doing balanced by the done all in relation to what will be. Love it. It's pregnant and ready to burst with friends and potential and a passion for what I do. What I will do. Damn, I love these moments. I remember when life used to be one big moment like this. Before real worry and real challenges set in. Before Babylon was broken by language, and the fragments started coming out coherent but meaningless. Before strategy cared about formulating its way through desire backyard. When desire hadn't even yet met strategy, and was just desire all on her own. When desire and reality were the best of friends, and they skipped through the muddy puddles of chaos knowing that change is the only constant, so let's not worry about staying the current. Just float.

I'm tired of thinking. I'm ready to do. Finally.

Just floating. I love this. Just a few reintroductions to be made.

The Furrow

I am sitting in a café in Seattle, and just about every third person is typing away on a laptop while they drink their cafés and munch on their cookies. And as I look at a row of six of them facing me, I am surprised to notice that they all have this slight furrow in the middle of their foreheads. Mac loyalists, PC users, white, non-white, male, female, with headphones or without…all united by a tight little crunch between the eyebrows. Whatever they all are doing must be very important and/or *very* hard. And all of the jaws are firmly shut; probably so that none of the critical thoughts slip out onto the floor. One woman even has to stop typing occasionally to massage that little area of brainy muscle.

Along this wall there is only one person who does not have a laptop. She is scrawling away with pen on paper. Her brow is not furrowed. Her mouth is slightly open. She pauses frequently to look around and stretch, and sometimes after a stretch she laughs lightly but visibly to herself for a moment before beginning to write again.

Here’s a test. Another laptopper just sat down. Lid open…food and beverage carefully placed next to the computer…purse and coat arranged just so…fingers to keyboard and…yep! There it is. The forehead squeeze. Ha! ‘Eleanor Rigby’ just came on.

However, I must admit, I think that’s exactly how I look when I drive.

Lord Chandos's Language Problems

It was my junior year in college, and I was playing the role of Voltemand in Hamlet. Never heard of Voltemand, you say? That is likely because his lines are the first that directors chop in their efforts to bring Shakespeare’s enormous script down to something of a manageable production. Voltemand is an ultra-obscure character with about five lines. He’s the kind of character that scholars do mounds of impossibly improbable research on in order to make themselves feel as though they can magically create something meaningful out of nothing at all. Suffice it to say that I had ample off-stage time to do my homework during evening rehearsals.

So there in the lobby I sat one evening, all five or so lines memorized, reading some Russian novel for my literature course. I was a good reader. A strong reader. I always had been. I drank in the words and accepted the various flavors that each author sought to provide my literary taste-buds. Little did I realize how liquid words could actually be. As I read about Anna’s approach to the tracks or Alyosha’s mystical misfortunes (why can’t I recall what, specifically, I was reading?), my psyche began to question the promise that the words had always fulfilled. I wondered why these particular groupings of words in arrangements called sentences meant anything at all. How did this structuring of signs equate to some cohesive and significant story that could then be interpreted? Furthermore, what about the make-up of these letters into representations called words? These agreed-upon compositions of symbols were supposed to mean something to me? Was the glue supposed to be in my head, or on the page?

I read the present sentence. I read it again. It made no sense…or…I didn’t know what to make of it. All significance was suddenly drained out of these now hollow characters. I gave up and concentrated on a word. Nothing. This book full of pages full of chapters full of sentences full of words full of letters was supposed to be telling me something, but I didn’t understand how or why.

I was in crisis. I was a junior Theatre/English double-major who had forgotten how to read.

And in that moment I flashed back to Mr. Darby’s fourth grade class, where one afternoon, in the midst of a larger problem while doing my accelerated math class work, two plus two no longer equalled four. I mean, I knew it was supposed to add up to four, but I didn’t know why it should beyond having been told that it must. Why? How? I told Mr. Darby that I had forgotten how to add. He laughed until he realized that I was serious, at which point he chided me. I shrugged my shoulders and wrote down ‘four’.

Numbers and I made amends. Words and I have never been as fortunate. Ever since that crisis I have remained a slow reader. I get through it, but I limp along, sometimes having to read the same sentence over three or four times before accepting it. I feel awkward, slow, constantly compensatory.

Today, however, I came across Hofmannsthal’s “The Letter of Lord Chandos”, and somehow I feel a little bit less alone in this…a bit more modern, if nothing else…

“But the crisis cuts even deeper still, for Chandos finally loses his faith in the reliability of language as such. One day, when talking to his daughter and trying to impress upon her the necessity of always telling the truth, the concepts emanating from his mouth begin to dissolve, to take on an irridescent coloring, and to flow over into one another so that he is still unable to complete the sentence and runs away in a kind of panic. All of which means that Chandos is beginning to realize affectively what Saussure was beginning to formulate scientifically at about the same time: that language is an arbitrary system and that there is a gap between the illusory security afforded by language and the fluid complexity of reality.

Having lost the blinkers imposed upon him by socially sanctioned discourse, Chandos finds himself forced to listen to himself thinking and to scrutinize his language, a process that he describes as ‘unheimlich’ – a German word that literally means ‘uncanny’ but also carries connotations of not being at home. Indeed, Chandos likens this process of self-scrutiny to the experience of looking at the skin on his little finger through a magnifying glass: what he had taken for granted turns into something strange so that his skin looks like a ploughed field full of hollows and furrows. As a result, the familiar world starts to dissolve; everything begins to fragment; and the resultant fragments turn into even smaller fragments that Chandos cannot capture conceptually. As part of this process of disintegration, language itself becomes strange, and words, when scrutinized closely, induce a sense of vertigo in Chandos that makes him feel his is falling into a void.”

Spider

Perhaps I should sleep during the day. The light fuels slumber. The dark seems fertile soil for disquiet.

When the sun ignites above the borderline, peace arrives and the pillow encourages dreams. Concern-less.

When the sun burns out below the horizon, my mental limbs come alive like Cégeste’s lifeless body lifting away from the ground. Fear-full.

What does it take to be here?

Just Before Dawn

I stopped singing love songs to myself the in the pre-dawn hours of the day, for fear I was no longer fabulous. This is the reckoning he said would come, when pleasure forgets to lubricate your joints, and the putridness of poisonous tequila petrifies your bloodstream.

I instead heard insidious, whispery refrains of misplaced choices and unproductive failures. I relived the intolerable imperfections and historical lacking of my whimsy. The sad strings of an empty and solitary future wept and whined, manufactured by my own mistakes. The green monster slithered about, clenching my brain stem and boring its way through my cerebral cortex.

An artificial ultraviolet light streamed in between the silhouetted door and the carpet. My hands became as heavy and immobile as two bricks of lead. This isn’t music. My ear is fixed to the floor. My field of vision limited to the sounds I can’t see. There is no music. There is only a cacophony of oversight and underestimation; the product of ideals with no courage…dreams with no ambition. Barren and bereft.

Get the fuck up.

The Situation

“It has become essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favour of these desires.”
-Ivan Chtcheglov

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what it positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
-Raoul Vaneigem

Sprouting

you-pry-open-the-door-of-the-outhouse-of-i'mnotgoodenough-and-
suck-in-a-lungfull-of-fresh-air-as-the-stench-of-the-shit-and-waste-
of-your-unprovocative-and-solitary-existence-pours-out-thick-against-
the-back-of-your-head-catching-you-mottling-you-tempting-you-
holding-you-seducing-you-terrifying-you-thrilling-you-murdering-your-
freeing-you-between-what-you-have-always-been-
and...what......you............might........................be

the sea of pink liquid in your belly swallows
churns
are you allowed to be loved
are you sure

you've been in here a long time now
since
you never tried the door
it has never been locked

beauty opens
open vomits
vomit mutes
mute

quickly now
speak your truth
before it drowns in its own momentum
separate it from your fiction
write yourself a new one

i you

a tiny death

This spine cracks
splinters

revealing more bone

exposing a half pound of faulty rhythm
These shoulders roll forward and back
twitchingly

trying to relieve the compressed capillaries

crushing cartilage
This sternum plunges into the cavity of this stomach

strings and percussion

antagonistic notes
Flesh tears away from your third dimension
making room
and the compass needle spasms for a north

the ecstasy burns
the ecstasy burns

your eyes moisten to douse the flames
yes
you are allowed

They unfurl
...shredding your heavily fortified corpse
...reminding your heart what it's for
...breaking away
...inviting life

The viscous joints unhinge and drip
Sleepy sinews stretch and whine
animate
Oddity retakes your ground bound eye
lifiting it skyward
and the clouds design angels
to join the descent

Drink

the universe

at once

Each divide

a new birth

feel the shiny feathers preen peel
and fill the creaking void
wisp the air
shudder themselves alive

These plumed appendages are not yours to direct
They do not direct you

Lifted soft by air
Sprung into the question
Draining the emptiness
Ringing the moon
Responsive only to love
Defiant of gravity
Shrinking from intention

Tips of toes tickle the ground
Your flight must fail
All the rest is frenzy