On Friday, March 6th, I headed home on a mid-morning train from NYC. We had been busy. The day before, we had finished a third table reading of The Grace of God & The Man Machine. The atmosphere had been wonderful and the actors had greeted each other with hugs and kisses, celebrating the act of making theater.
Other than my wife, this was the last time I have been within six feet of anybody for almost two months. Everyone in the world I know is in quarantine.
I have tracked my friends in New York and elsewhere, as some of them have gotten the virus, gone dark, and returned to report they are better but have lost friends to the disease.
The realization that this will not end easily for anybody has been made clear every morning as Iāve watched a cold spring come to Maryland under iron gray skies. I have been waiting for good news or some sign of change. I want the everyday life that I will always remember but will not see again.
Today, I decided to gather the little things that I might have taken for granted before, and make them into an exciting life that must be coming.
My social media manager Katie Marinello has already posted the Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal article written by Michael Millemann about the law school class that we taught with Eliot Rauh. We have been notified that it continues to be one of the most downloaded current articles. I read it, and instead of taking it for granted I celebrated it as part of a new beginning, a new opportunity.
A year ago this week, I recited my 7th annual Harvard Alumni Association poet laureate poem (a āseriousā bit of frivolity which I dearly love). This year, because the alumni meetings will be held virtually, I was asked to write it and have it videoed for presentation tomorrow. Instead of being disappointed I will not see my friends and fellow alumni and present it to a live audience, I reviewed the video and found myself laughing.
Finally, the play I was afraid would die in New York City after that great reading, we have just been informed is a finalist for the New York Rave Theater Festival and is being considered for perforce in NYC in October.
A different world is evolving now, but at least personally it is starting to feel like we are starting to wake up from a sleepless night to a coming spring.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Iām sure you did not know W.H. Auden. He died years ago. And I am absolutely sure he does not know you. But in times like this he is sanity from the dark.
Look at the care he put into this in order to talk to you. Carefully measured 8+\- beat rhyming lines that you can tap out on your knee, like a musician, as you listen. It is sing-song. It has humor.
Why would anybody bother?
Because the genes have made us human, and humans must communicate even from the quarantines of different worlds and times.
Why would a dead man reach out to you and encourage you to love in an indifferent universe ?
Humankind is nasty, but itās capable of love and humor in the face of indifference. Why? It needs community.
We will get through this and we will come together because of it.
Okay, I may have a problem. I am a recovering lawyer and now aspiring playwright and poet. Is it possible that I miss time sheets? āEvery six minutesā for a lifetime?
People used to say: āYou are what you eat,ā but what if you are what you ādoā or have done?
Maybe Iām getting worse. At the law firm, I made a rule that if anybody could finish a story that I was telling I would stop telling it.
Now I donāt care. If I can get a second laugh or even a third from the same story I will repeat it, again and again. (And Iām going deaf so Iām the only one who doesnāt have to hear it.) It could be senility. It could be Iāve lost any sense of embarrassment, but it definitely demonstrates no merciful memory loss, at all.
The other thing is, even in retirement I must āwork.ā I have grown even more intolerant of delay because everything Iāve written should be on stage by now! Damn it!
What has happened to me?
In the past year, I have written or rewritten three plays. One (Onaje) has been produced in New York, two will be produced in New York (Vox Populi, for which I wrote the libretto, and The Grace of God & The Man Machine). Another, The Naked House Painting Society, is looking for a home.
Yes, I used to be impatient as a lawyer but now my stuff is not produced fast enough? Do I still need litigation? The need to measure work on massive conflicts in tight building blocks of measured time along with a new project have made me afraid.
I have started working on a poem based on Danteās Inferno. Danteās Inferno has 34 cantos and 23 six-line stanzas in each canto. That in itself was my wake-up call. How sick is this?
The law can definitely create ādelusions of grandeur.ā Might it also imprint the structured, ordered, anal impact of time sheets?
Is it now that I require 34 cantos and 23 six-line stanzas in each canto? Seriously? But I havenāt given into it yet, I think.
Still, as I started the Prologue and began to āwrite about what I know,ā I found a schizophrenic litigatorās theme begging for harmony. This is how it starts:
Prologue
With first light, or birth, or perhaps before/
And maybe after, comes the dialogue:/
The debate in the mind. Waves on the shore/
Each overriding the last. No monologue./
Two nagging voices in constant conflict./
One āas doubtā the other āas hope,ā both spent/
Bickering on some path I did not pick/
Living the daily schedule of events/
As I wake and wonder where each day went:/
The debate in the mind. Waves on the shore/
Each overriding the last. What event,/
What plea, what prayer from my central core,/
What keeper of my life long travel log/
Can cure me of this endless dialogue?/
I start with a sonnet? How sick is this?
T.S. Eliot said:
āevenings, mornings, afternoons,/
I have measured out my like with coffee spoons;ā/
And the poor man was just a banker.
Still, it will be funny and too long for me to repeat, so that may be progress.
Perhaps because I am older, or perhaps because I am now a playwright and a recovering lawyer, I decided I would make a commitment to a more spiritual Christmas this year.
I committed to finding a passage out of the comfortable consumerism, āJingle Bell Rockā on the radio, Alvin and the Chipmunks and the hula hoop, and into a less self-deceptive and more spiritually aware holiday.
My problem is I excel at self-deception.
In the past, I have always believed that I was sufficiently into the festivities to fool myself, and I would let the transformative spiritual moment gently pass.
No, in truth I am a wizard of self-deception.
I fool myself in little ways all year long as I artfully keep my āspiritualityā ā like my āmodestyā ā at bay.
For example, I have a room right next to my study that contains the framed memorials of the important accomplishments (of which I am so very proud) from my life as a lawyer and playwright.
When I enter this room, I am reminded that I donāt take myself too seriously, because it also contains a sink, a toilet and extra toilet paper. But of course, it is not a private bathroom. If nature calls, our guests are forced to see what I am proud to believe I have made of myself, framed and on the walls when they lock the bathroom door behind them.
I have employed this same gift of willfulness and self-deception when I have prepared myself to let the holidays gently pass by each year.
But as I have said, I think things have changed now that Iām a playwright and recovering lawyer.
I have been forced to see things less as an advocate and more as an observer.
A judge or jury renders a verdict, but there is no redemptive celebration thereafter. Rectifying and resolving social wrongs, if that happens at all, offers no thought of spirituality and in my case, may regrettably explain the bathroom.
But as a playwright, I have come to observe that my plays are meaningless unless the actors commit to giving them life and the audience commits to embracing the performance and the work.
So I have observed that some ethereal things do not come to pass at all unless there is belief, commitment, and then action.
This year, I will find the time for that individual commitment and action on Christmas Day. After I celebrate the joy of being with my family, I will take a walk ā perhaps just a little walk ā out by myself alone and consider the universe, which I do not understand. Iāll stop for a moment and realize that even if I have no belief in a heaven or a hell, I accept that cold hand of āgrace,ā which is what so much of religion and spiritual faith is about. And then when I return back home, Iāll try not to see if anyone is locked and reading in the bathroom.
Working on the libretto for the operetta, Vox Populi, has brought me back to my love of poetry.
My favorite poems create a universe with a few words. Two good poems with a similar subject, put side by side, can introduce the creator of the other.
Like a painter organizes color and shape with his or her brushstrokes, the poet organizes a vision with the sound and rhythm of words:
āWhose woods these are I think I know./
His house is in the village though;/ā
The brushstrokes? The sound and rhythm of these two lines? Speak them out loud. They are like the rocking of a hammock they are so smooth and quiet.
In complete contrast however:
āI sought a theme and sought for it in vain,/
I sought it daily for six weeks or so./ā
Brush strokes? This is not like the rocking of a hammock, it is like riding a three-legged horse.
Those are the opening two lines of two completely different poems by two completely different people. Now letās look at the last two lines of these two poems.
āAnd miles to go before I sleep./
And miles to go before I sleep./ā
Brush strokes? The same rocking hammock. Compared to:
āI must lie down where all the ladders start,/
In the foul rag-and- bone shop of the heart./ā
That mustāve been a hell of a rough ride? You are correct.
They are both about the end of life. The first by Robert Frost is entitled āStopping by Woods on a Snowy Eveningā and the second by WB Yeats is in titled āThe Circus Animalsā Desertion.ā
Both are about āacceptance,ā it seems to me, but that acceptance comes in completely different, very personal forms. Frostās, in a late evening snowy New Hampshire woods, and Yatesā, with the casting off his āCircus Animalsā (his lifeās work of Irish themes).
The libretto for the operetta is meant to be baudy and entertaining. My poetry, on the other hand, is a personal statement that is directed from me to the reader. Itās from my heart.
I have placed links to both poems below for your review and your own contrasts and conclusions. Feel compassion for these two people. They are writing because they are reaching out to you.
As I turned away from Degasā statuette of a dancer at the Musee DāOrsay in Paris last week, I almost missed the imitators. The imitators were lining up, looking at the statuette and striking a pose. The reaction was not mocking and somehow not disrespectful. The imitators were reacting to a man-made object created out of his imagination. The interaction is what mattered.
When I was in high school, I read a line from W. H. Auden that said āpoetry makes nothing happen.ā It stopped me in my tracks. It was the late ā60s. I wanted to do things that made things happen. I became a lawyer. I made things happen.
Now I know I misread the line. Auden was making fun of all those things that appear to make things happen but really donāt. Art makes things happen in that it offers the chance to interact with a created object from another personās imagination.
But why does that matter? It seems that at the center of our existence we travel a number of years in the mundane pursuit of what we need to survive, but art offers a conversation with another who is, or has been, on that same journey. It offers, but does not demand, this conversation.
In the same gallery, hordes of people were moving from picture to picture, cell phones out, photographing the exhibit as they hurried by. They had not accepted the offer. They were just capturing the object.
The imitators had accepted the offer. They were interacting with the Degasā statuette.
The conversation can happen in many forums but it is always between the artist and the self. It can come through some or all the senses. It can be theoretical. It can come with an artistās demand for your attention, as with Andy Warhol asking you to notice common objects, but for me it is always a very personal person-to-person communication.
It can also be environmental. On my way home, I noticed the statues in the park and the park in the city as I walk through. The art of the statue inside the art of the park surrounded by the mundane existence of the traffic and commerce of the city.
I found Audenās quote:
āFor poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.ā
In Memory of W.B.Yeats
(d. Jan. 1939)
He says all this better than I but I had to learn it for myself.
