You know someone loves you when...

You know someone loves you when you show them, unbidden, unasked for and unexpectedly the most vulnerable part of yourself, which in my case, I will hereinafter refer to as the Total Anxiety Spiral, which involves speaking rapidly, making very little sense, alternating between tears, contradictory declarations of intent and regrets for the inability to make sense, etc...and that person, in this case my most wondrous Canadian (details in earlier posts) is able to hold space and witness this meltdown without either (a) running, (b) attacking or (c) condescending...but instead listening with compassion and grace, and helped me through the Total Anxiety Spiral to a cherished moment of calm.

And let me assure you, we are not talking about 5-10 minutes here: we're talking Hours...and - wait for it - on Skype.  OK.  So, this person with whom I am so deeply in love, has proven to me once again his capacity for love on a level I've never experienced.  And in fairness to anyone else I was ever with before, I've never revealed so much of myself in such an undefended way before.  But there is a bit of a chicken and egg thing going on here, because if John had not already proven his trustworthiness, which he has done many times over this past month, I would not have risked being visible on this level.

This experience is proving to be the most healing thing ever in my whole life, with one major exception that involves what I have needed and continue to do to not kill myself with substances for over 25 years...but that is the ground beneath my feet and this experience is what is referred to in the badly lit rooms with uncomfortable chairs where I meet people like me as "beyond your wildest dreams."

And like yeah - beyond your wildest dreams as in: how could you dream it, because you didn't even know it existed.  So, like, some serious gratitude to the universe for this gift that keeps expanding day by day and against all expectations on my part of collapse and fears, rational and irrational, that accompany such a deep and irrevocable falling in love.

Which is yet another thing I have never experienced: a mutual surrender.  It's the opposite of the hostage situation where you're waiting for the other to flinch or run or attack.  We've laid down all our weapons and stand in front of each other defenseless...which is not easy...but is possible when the other person is doing it.

And then sometimes one person - that would be me - suddenly experiences a Total Anxiety Spiral - which would be the cue for someone to pick up a weapon to defend against that shit - either him or me. But neither of us did...and this simply blows my mind.  This is the kind of thing I thought in some rarified theoretical part of my brain and some tiny besieged part of my heart was possible but 49 years on earth was doing away with any hopes I would find it.

But I have and that amazes me.

Another kind of love I want to speak about briefly is of my Hunter acting students.  Our class is over and their grades are submitted, so I want to say to them all: you were an astonishing class and I know you will all go on to rock this world no matter what paths you take.

Because they gave me permission to do so, I'm going to add two photos of them vamping, some with fairly hilarious interpretations of the yoga poses I had them do at the beginning of class each day.

So here they are, my lovelies from Fall 2012, who I will miss very much:

Jelana, Dillan, Hermeise, Ladie, Silvina, May, Lissette, Jakayah, Gisella, Kyriakos, Amanda, Jose, Celina & Erica

Anyone who teaches knows there is nothing more moving than teaching a diverse group of students (in this case, ranging from 17-46 and from all parts of the world) who are enthusiastic, curious, creative and responsive to a whole range of stimulus from physical work to pretty heady ideas.  I had the privilege of reading their journals this past week and was astonished at how much they got out of the class and the required text (Joseph Chaikin's The Presence of the Actor - if you are involved in theater and have not read this book, do so now.  NOW.  It's a must.)

So, thank you my lovely students for making this semester a thing of beauty and making teaching seem close to effortless - and definitely worthwhile.

Now, it is time for me to focus on my writing...and teaching some of my own work - oh that reminds me, I have a workshop upcoming at The Brecht Forum Jan. 26-27 (details on right), or you can click here to register.  Having just seen Pina, the Wim Wenders film about the incomparable Pina Bausch's work, which I had the privilege of seeing in the early 1990s and changed my life, I can assure you this will influence the workshop!  So whereas I usually begin with text work, I think we may begin with movement and then bring in text.  Not sure of that, but her heartfelt work has re-moved me and I want to bring some of this into my more 'traditional' cutting it up workshop.  So, it should be exciting!  Also there will be time for participants to make their own work and bring their own expertise to bear on what we do (whether it be performance related or not).

So, come on down to The Brecht Forum for the workshop if you can - they survived Sandy (just) - but experienced a lot of flooding, which is why all notices going out late - and could really use and deserve your support!

Happy New Year!

Just a quick note to thank all of my lovely friends who carried me through a very challenging year, which included the death of my beloved stepfather Tom and brought with it many losses, and to those same friends who are now rejoicing with me in the most delightful and unexpected part of 2012, falling in love in December with my wonderful, brilliant and gorgeous Canadian.

I look forward to 2013 now with wondrous expectation, especially since a relationship begun on Skype (!) has already born fruit in terms of my grandmothers book.  This is because the material is dark and I was muscling through it in the context of five years of grieving and cascading losses.  This was in some ways a dangerous and dubious proposition for my mental and emotional health.  Having John in my life, who is determined to lighten my load in any way possible, has given me space in real life to work on the book without worrying I will get lost in the quicksand of the material.  Or, more accurately, it allows me to get lost in the quicksand, because I know someone - in this case, John - will be there to pull me out if necessary.

Before this extraordinary human entered my life, I had a friend who said I could send her a text before and after I wrote, which I did for many months.  This was incredibly helpful because there was a remote witness.  Another friend suggested I write for 15 minutes a day, which freed me to work on the project slowly.  Yet another friend was very supportive of my writing in general.  A writing mentor read the first few pages and gave excellent feedback.

This is all by way of saying: we never really write alone.  What I am learning by having John in my life is how much I no longer have to do alone, including finding all of my own inspiration and emotional fortitude and strength.  I've never been with anyone who I felt had my back in this and so many other ways and I already see the positive effect not only on my own self but on my writing.

I've been able to reread about 2/3 of what I've written and see what is there, to affirm the multiplicity of voices and the shifting line between fiction and non-fiction rather than conform it to what I think maybe it should look like and begin again to feel, hear, see my own voice and process as a positive thing.  I feel alive and vibrant again as an artist and it feels wonderful.

Happy New Year, everyone!  I wish, pray and hope for you the love I have found in this life with my beloved John, which is something I frankly did not know existed until now.  It just puts everything else to shame.


As a wise Yogi tea bag (!) said yesterday "When there is love, there is no question."

Yes.

The New Victorians (or: Blame Canada)

As I attempt to write this post, which is about - wait for it - being happy and falling in love (!) after a long, long time of grieving and loss, I am wondering if blogs are designed for this.  Perhaps they are meant more for either intellectual/artistic pursuits, specific interests or - well - painful/difficult journeys.

Well, perhaps at least I can focus on the New Victorian aspect: namely, that I am engaged in a courtship on Skype and email with John (the brilliant Canadian heretofore mentioned in my previous blog post).  I now have a very, very special place in my heart for Skype, by the way.  Because while not ideal, it is possible to get to know someone in a way email or phone without video would be impossible.  Oh and also Canada, just because John comes from there.  Yes, I'm that far gone: blame Canada.

New Victorian because this courtship has been based, initially, on ideas (a love of photography and post-structuralism), followed by gradually realizing there may be more ways of connecting beyond that, then "seeing" one another on Skype and engaging in endless and free-ranging discussions that move between all aspects of getting to know each other, sharing more than either of us could have ever imagined possible with one other person in terms of ideas, feelings, life-long projects, modes of being and so much more.  If I go on, I imagine it will make people somewhat nauseous, so will restrain myself.

As some of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor and so the physical aspect of my romantic relationships has been colored by that in many and complex ways, but issues of trust loom large.  So, this enforced extended - non-physical - courtship has provided us with a platform to get to know each other, with growing attraction, but without jumping to this part of a romantic relationship.  Because I frankly don't think I would have the self-discipline to do this on my own, it feels like an (albeit at times deeply frustrating) gift.

John will be visiting me at the end of January, and for the first time we will be in the same room.  This is because he needed to reactivate his passport.  This delay I could do without, but believe it will continue to give us time to build a foundation of growing trust and just getting to know each other, which when you are in the middle of life means filling the other person in on A Lot.

There's a lot more to say than that, but because it feels so new and personal and kind of astonishingly beautiful, I don't want to say much more, afraid that I will somehow devalue this experience by over-describing it.  I am aware that I am so much more reticent to share joy than grief, but please understand: this is such a new experience I am still wrapping my mind and heart around it.  It does feel though like an enormous gift, bigger than I could have expected.  In fact, it is the last thing I did expect.

There is one more thing, though, which is that falling love at 49 and 52 is very different than when you are younger.  At the middle of life, you know what you want and you know a lot about yourself and the mistakes you've made.  It becomes very obvious if the right person comes along, it is shockingly uncomplicated.  My older friends and family who have experienced just this understand my experience more than my younger friends who seem a bit taken aback by the whole thing.  There is also instant karma here, because I was so distrustful of how quickly my mother and Tom came together at the wise old age of 17…so here I am, of course, having a similar experience.  Not in the same way on many levels, but still.  Beware any teenagers what you judge now, lest you become it later on…!

In the meantime, you will be glad to know, I have gone to work, taught my students, been gradually organizing my office for writing - after having printed out the draft of what I have written of the grandmother book, as I follow the next steps on the grandmother book and other projects.  I look forward to sharing more about all this with you in future blog posts, but for now figured I'd change it up a little and share the love…

Oh and hooray, it's the Winter Solstice!  Despite made-up Mayan predictions about the end of the world (which the Mayans don't believe, btw), we're still alive!  Once again the end-of-the-worlders have to go find another date on which to fixate their twisted death wish for the planet.  Sorry kids.  We're still here!

From Isolation to Connection in a few easy steps...

So I’m gonna save the best for last and give you the worst for first.

Divorce sucks.  Deep thought, I know.  Had a conversation with my soon-to-be-ex-husband a couple days ago.  There was nothing horrible about it, except the subject: how to execute divorce documents.  Now, this whole process is as amicable as it gets.  No one’s lawyering up, we’re just trying to get it done.  But even so and even though we both know it’s the right thing to do, the sense of sadness at losing a long-term relationship is enormous.  After the call, I needed to find the marriage certificate, which he needs to file the papers.  Opening up this original document, with signatures of our witnesses and us on that day just tore me up.  As readers of this blog know, that was one of the happiest days of my life, in part because I announced that I was 12 weeks pregnant, which fact was a miracle.  The next day was our honeymoon in Cornwall and the day I miscarried.  One of the, if not the, unhappiest day of my life.  Because of that day, the happiness of the day before was wiped out of my memory, as much as I tried to not let that happen, it did.  This fact did not help our marriage.  We had different ways of grieving and so it goes. 

The phone call at first started in a friendly tone but by the end with the divorce details, it was pretty isolating.  A sense of a gulf that can never be mended – the loneliness one must bear – well – alone.  This is not a unique story.  But it is still a sad story.

OK, so that’s the crappy bit.  But wait, there’s more…

A number of artistic adventures that are potentially very interesting and a connection made in the most serendipitous way with a fellow in Canada who is as much of a Deleuze & Guattari fan as me.  This after wondering for a while now, and even more so after my stepfather Tom died – if anyone would ‘get’ me again – meaning certain idiosyncratic ways of thinking/feeling/ seeing/creating, the resounding and entirely surprising answer appears to be: yes.  So hooray for that.  I will tell you more about this lovely human and his extremely interesting project/s at the end (along with links to some of his work) – so hold on for that, it’s worth it.

I will focus on the most interesting artistic project, which my good friend Spencer Reece is spearheading in Honduras at a girls’ orphanage called Our Little Roses.  Spencer and I went to college together.  I directed him in a number of shows, including Marat/Sade as Sade. From that auspicious beginning, he has become an Episcopal priest and very successful poet.  He received a Fulbright to go down to this orphanage and help the girls there write a book of poetry that will be published.  However, he realized that a book would not be enough to bring attention to this extraordinary place, so he has also managed to bring a documentarian, Brad Coley, on board to film this adventure.  The blog for this project is at http://ourlittlerosesfilm.blogspot.com.

This orphanage and his relationship to it is an extraordinary story that I will let you discover on the project blog.  The reason I’m mentioning it, aside from the fact it’s great, is that Spencer has asked me to go down to Honduras and direct the girls in a show at the end of the year.  I was kind of blown away when he asked, then frankly a little scared, the orphanage is in what is now considered the most violent city in the world.  But when I heard Dr. Diana Frade, the woman who started the orphanage’s description of the place and the work they do there (not farming the girls out to whomever, but instead educating them to become independent professionals), I knew I had to go.  This is not only an important service in a country in which 62% of the population lives in abject poverty (no potable water, not enough food, no real housing, no education), this is a deeply feminist project as well.  When she started this place 25 years ago there was no girls’ orphanage because girls were considered disposable, better off as prostitutes and maids.

Therefore, I will go down to Honduras, listen to these girls and help them create a show that expresses their lives as they see it.  I want to stay out of the way as much as possible except as a guide to help them build what they want, because what seems deeply important here is that these girls’ voices get heard.  Just as in the Frontline show Poor Kids, I want the girls to take center stage not some philanthropic, good for you idea any of us have about them.  So, there’s that.

I also was invited to an African film screening in Harlem and realized as I was watching this Cannes nominated film from the 1990s Tilai that I had never seen a film about Africa filmed by an African director/writer.  Like ever.  This is shocking and shows how much we need to see these films.  It was gorgeous and showed life on the ground without any reference to white people.  Shocking (yes that’s a joke).  I recommend seeing this film.  The director of the mini-festival Fifi-Dalla Kouyate has reached out to me about potentially writing something with her, so there’s another potential project.  I would be deeply honored to do so, especially after seeing her short film of young women and girls dancing and singing in Mali.  There is a kind of ecstatic thing going on that about which I would love to know more.  There are also big issues of women’s rights that need to be addressed that I know Fifi is intent on seeing that happen.  I believe she wants to tell her story and that’s another story worth telling and hearing.

I was also privileged to see a reading of a new play by one of the downtown masters of dark comedy Brian Parks.  His new play is called House and I hope it gets produced soon.  The actors were all great but Eva van Dok was spectacular.  Yes, Eva is a friend, but trust me she excels even her own fine self in this role.  Won’t give it away but if you see this play listed, go see it.  On the surface it’s a comedy about a house, but the darker elements involving deep-seated American psychoses bubble apace and explode (as anyone who’s seen one of Brian’s plays knows will happen).  In this one, though, so elegantly it almost seems like sugar until it’s too late. 

And now finally to the newest brilliant Canadian in my life: John Morton.  Hi, John! (I did clear mentioning him and his work with him in advance, because it’s complex and I don’t want to short change it in any way.)  Because I am not going to assume knowledge of post-structuralist philosophy to read this blog, I’m only going to describe the broadest outlines of his two larger projects and let you go find the articles and links yourselves for the advanced class.

The biggest project he’s embarked on for many years involves discovering what he refers to as ‘image writing’ (a kind of embedded writing on stones done by members of the First Nations in North America).  He happened upon one of these stones on a hike one day, wondered what it was and has been researching and writing about it ever since.  I am only beginning to read the writing about this project and he has said he wants to update the published research so will only say this about that for now.  What excites me about it is the precision of the work, how long he’s been dedicated to it and that he’s been pursuing this on his own without institutional support (which isn’t to say if you are an institution, you shouldn’t contact him if interested!).  He’s been working in collaboration with and sharing all his findings with members of the First Nations.  Academic venues ignored these stones and their markings at first, but he confirmed it with a number of different tribal Elders that writing is in fact what they were doing.

A related project I can give you a link to is published in the online journal Rhizome and discusses the relationship of Deleuze to photography: the text is here and photos are here.  This what started us off connecting, because he put in a search engine Deleuze and photography and I popped up.  Thus began our online conversation (alternating between email and Skype).  I am definitely Not going to summarize that article for any number of reasons, not least of which is it’s written with philosophical precision and multiple references, some of which I know better than others…

But, the most interesting intersection, aside from our mutual love of photography and a penchant for landscapes with vivid coloration, is that both photography and theater are considered the Enemy in most post-structural philosophies because both are considered to be representational and therefore reifying (confirming the solidity/importance) of broader, more accepted structures.  However, because he and I are both artists, we see in these art forms the way they can create difference and variation.  In my case with levels of address and presence and his with various ideas of points of view, subjectivities and positional variance.  I am only now wending my way through the article but also seeing a potential interesting intersection with the Attendant of Deleuze and the Witness in my own work (inspired by the weird twin-set of Kierkegaard and yoga practice).

I am certain I will be writing a lot more about this intersection as time goes on, but I am ending with it here for my readers who have witnessed me grieving over losses for a solid year and a half.  I wanted to share with you this connection, hilariously enough for anyone who’s followed me pissing and moaning over the academy and doing a PhD, made through good old Deleuze & Guattari and my new/old love photography.  Hooray!

..and now a message from our sponsor: Marcel Proust

OK, so a friend read this to me today from Proust's final chapter of Remembrance of Things Past (aka In Search of Lost Time), which is 'Time Regained'.

I spent a summer in the mid-90s reading Remembrance of Things Past in lieu of doing admin work for my theater company.  This was a wise choice.  If you want to change your life - and especially if you are an artist/writer/creator of any kind - just stop what you're doing (outside of bare necessities to make ends meet) and read Proust.  I'm serious.

This is why:

"As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us or even collaborate with us.  How many for this reason turn aside from writing!  What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task!  Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature.  But these are mere excuses, the truth being that he has not or no longer has genius, that is to say instinct.  For instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it.  But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment.  The book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the "impression" has been printed in us by reality itself.  When an idea - an idea of any kind - is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth.  The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen.  The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.  Not that the ideas which we form for ourselves cannot be correct in logic; that may well be, but we cannot know whether they are true.  Only the impression, however trivial its material may seem to be, however faint its traces, is a criterion of truth and deserves for that reason to be apprehended by the mind, for the mind, if it succeeds in extracting this truth, can by the impression and by nothing else be brought to a state of greater perfection and given a pure joy.  The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.  What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours.  From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown."

Marcel Proust - Time Regained (pp 913-914 from Remembrance of Things Past Vol. III trans: C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)


***

I can hear the yelps of protest from my post-structuralist friends and PhDs, the hand-wringing about mystifying artistic processes, the use of the dreaded word 'truth' and of course the 'he' as normative pronoun.  If that is your response, my suggestion is to please breathe, re-read, listen and allow in what he's saying.  Maybe it does not speak to you and if so, OK.  But if it does speak to you, please don't let theoretical ideas of right and wrong get in the way of the resonance.  Remember, too, that Deleuze & Guattari were Proust fans, being arguably the least anti-art of most of the French post-WWII crew.

I am unpicking my way through this thicket right now, shedding the academic tone I had to take to finish my own PhD and allowing back in these kind of basic, beautiful (ah the dread word: beautiful) insights into my life.  I thought I had not allowed the PhD process to interfere with my artistic processes, but I was wrong.  It's impossible not to have it affect one's work.  I am hoping and praying that something good will have come of that process, but right now…I'm allowing myself back into the world of 'instinct' as Proust defines it.

It's scary and it feels good.

Perhaps this was the gift of the PhD process.  The final wonderful paradox: it brings me back here.  Or as Albee wrote in Zoo Story "Sometimes you have to go a long way out of your way to get back the right way correctly."

53,000+ words!

My grandmothers book The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani is meanwhile barrelling along - checked word count and it's over 53,000 words.  This is from transcribing all the handwritten stuff I'd written from May 2011-March 2012 in two notebooks and adding in things, editing, etc.

I still have more research to do (meaning reading All the stuff I have from Jani mostly - not just selected things) and feel I've only scratched the surface.  The voices of both Dick and Jani are warbly at times - in some parts I've gotten closer and other times the writing feels only like a placeholder waiting for the real writing (ie voice) to take its place.  I need to breathe into them both even more deeply.  If they were purely fictional in some ways it may be easier.  But I feel this need to allow them to speak as them, which is way harder than it sounds.

Still, figured I would at least give myself some credit for time in and words written.  There is a lot more.  This may in fact be more than one book.  Not really sure.  Many of the words written so far will need to be edited.

I have boxes of material still to sift through that I didn't know existed when I began.

Wish me luck.  I'll really, seriously need it.

Another painful anniversary

Wanted to not keep writing about this but the fact is it's breaking my heart.  Today - well yesterday now - was what would have been my mother and my stepfather Tom's 29th wedding anniversary.  Last year I was in Maine with them both and we ordered in Chinese food to celebrate.  It was a fun and light time and not one anyone thought would be the last.  We had had Thanksgiving a couple days earlier - same there.

While my mother has been dealing with the grinding day to day loss of Tom for months now, I don't have nearly as much in person presence to mourn except intermittently and I realized today quite painfully that this is one of them.  The next one will be Christmas, which was the last time I saw him alive.  My mother will be here for that.

I have been so concerned for my mother's well-being, I have not paid enough attention to my own loss but today pushed me over the edge.  Because my mother made it clear she was OK with me staying home in NYC over Thanksgiving rather than coming up to Maine because I was so fucking exhausted, I have done so and was given what I now as a gift of a cold to slow me down long enough to know how excruciating this loss is.

My good friend Julie suggested I come up with some phrase that was more adequate than stepfather to describe my relationship to Tom and I am stumped, not because I don't get what she means - stepfather sounds so distant and he was anything but.  This suggestion is what started my crying today and  feeling my own pain - to paraphrase John Lennon.

I'm having a hard time typing because I'm crying while I'm writing.  I know this is a good thing because it means I finally feel safe enough to feel this, that I'm letting go of the sense of shock and emergency that I entered when he died because of concerns over my mother and also probably just because it sucks to feel this much pain.

I may have written this here already and if I have apologies but Tom really got me, he understood me in a whole and real and unsentimental way that only someone who really loves you can understand you.  For me to receive this kind of loving attention from a male person (not in a creepy way - I hasten to add in case that's not crystal clear) was a first.  I'm not sure if I've found its like in the world, the only person that comes to mind was my drama teacher in high-school Terry Ortwein, also deceased prematurely, from Parkinson's.  So it is a profound loss of someone who is quite literally irreplaceable in my life.

I know many of you who read this will have experienced this kind of loss in your life and if there is a gift here, it is that: to know another's suffering, to be able to sympathize as well as empathize with another's loss.

My friend Julie passed on this Rilke quotation she heard on the radio show On Being.  I read it at Tom's internment:

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deeper connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

I believe this is true.  But it does wound us first.  The gift only comes after that.

Yes, but today - after crying Round 1 this afternoon, I sat and watched the twilight turn into the gloaming over the inlet at the tip of Inwood.  I saw gulls and geese and loons and herons turn colors from white to grey to silhouette - and the train and the moon and the radio of the young couple who sat on a bench near me, sipping coffee from the cafe.  Taking it all in.  One of the last blog posts Tom commented on involved me staring out at this beautiful little bit of the world, sun gleaming then, wind brushing the light into whirlpools of diamonds.  I noticed this at the same time as bemoaning the racism across the bridge that had killed a young man who was friends with a student of mine.  It's all here.  It's all real.  This is it.  This is us. It is all of it.  Cherry picking or gloom mongering is distortion.  My shadow side these days is the light.  I am just now beginning to see glimmers of my shadow.