My New Play (on The Group Theatre)

In the Maze of Our Own Lives, which I've written and directed, inspired by the story of The Group Theatre, opened on October 20, 2011 at TJT in San Francisco and will run until November 23. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on, and, in many ways, is a culmination of my work up to now. It’s an offering that I want everyone I know to share.  

You can see the full schedule, get tickets and see a video we made last summer during a workshop for the play at Brown Paper Tickets

Robert Avila, one of the Bay Area's finest theatre critics and writers has just written a feature on the play for the SF Bay Guardian.

I co-founded TJT in 1978 when I was exactly thirty-three years old.  On my last birthday, I was sixty-six. For what amounts to half my life, I’ve been able to work within a single artistic home, something rare and wonderful in the world of  American theatre.

But all homes are temporary and TJT, that dream made real, is about to end – at least in its current form. Many of you have already heard this news and know why we’ve decided to close the company at the end of the 2012, thirty-fourth season.  If you haven’t, there’s a brief account on the TJT website, http://www.tjt-sf.org.

The founding members of The Group Theatre created  a community of trust that allowed them to “build a dream”  together and, from it, make a new kind of theatre – one that could shape a still-young, American culture. The plays they produced – particularly those by Group member Clifford Odets – became touchstones for generations of American writers: Arthur Miller, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, among others.

For me, the great discovery of my five years of research has been that the Group’s story is, perhaps, its greatest and most far-reaching gift to all of us who followed. As I came to know the landscape of that story, I recognized its contours in the turbulent history of all the American ensemble theatres whose work inspired TJT’s: The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, The Free Southern Theatre, Bread and Puppet, Teatro Campesino, and more. I saw that before 1931, when Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and about twenty more young theatre-makers started the Group, there had been no ensemble theatre in this country.  I felt as though I had found my ancestors.

When my travels through the 1930s began, I had no idea that TJT was approaching its own end as an ensemble theatre or that In the Maze of Our Own Lives would launch its last season. Life, in all its brilliant, ironic and poignant artistry, has rhymed our story with the Group’s. There’s a hard-won wisdom embedded in that story: the closing of any single theatre is not, as Harold Clurman put it, a catastrophe.  So it is with TJT.  He continues to say that the real catastrophe would be the loss of the values, the impulses, the inspiration and the energy that gave rise to the Group, to the dream of a theatre that could be “a dwelling place for the whole family of decent humanity.”  

Neither did I have any idea, when I began work on this play, that  a new movement like  Occupy Wall Street and all the gatherings it has inspired around the world would be embodying so many of the same hopes for real democracy that motivated the Group. 

In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an offering to the ancestors and to the future. In 1978. Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman and I made TJT’s first original piece of theatre, Coming from a Great Distance, the first piece of modern Jewish ensemble theatre in this country, as far as we know.  At the time, I knew almost nothing about the Group Theatre.  Much of what I’ve learned as we crossed the great distance from then to now is embedded in this play and this production. 

It is said that the last words of the legendary figure, the Baal Shem Tov, subject of TJT’s 1978 play, were, "I am going out one door, to come in through another." May this work be the “other” door through which the soul, spirit and story of The Group enters. In these times, we can’t live without it.

In the Maze of Our Own Lives would not exist without the enormous collective contribution of the cast, designers, musicians, staff, crew, our families and supporters of all sorts.

Maze card design by Julie Giles

Dance of Exile photo by Irene Young

In the Maze of Our Own Lives photos by Ken Friedman

David Mitchell: Hope and Genius

Most reviews of Cloud Atlas start by discussing David Mitchell’s dazzling narrative surprises, his “Russian-doll”-like use of nested or linked  stories that form a larger, over-arching, meta-narrative blah blah…Sorry, I don’t mean to get snarky and I’m really making fun of myself, since I say things like that all the time in all sincerity. But I think that this line of reflection misses Mitchell’s essential greatness which, imho, greatly transcends, though is certainly served by, his technical brilliance, namely, his profound engagement with that oldest of human stories: the struggle to free ourselves from the cruel, oppressive – and usually literal – enslavement to which we subject  our fellows and ourselves. 

In Cloud Atlas, he plays variations on this theme, first, in its mercantile and violently racist forms in the nineteenth century colonial South Pacific, and then through the corporate greed of the recent past and present, a hellish future bio-tech-enabled slave society,  an finally, and even further post-apocalyptic future where small communities try to protect the fragile remnants of human culture from stronger predatory tribes.

What amazes me is that I finished reading Cloud Atlas  feeling stirred, hopeful  and invigorated; not at all what the description of the content in the last paragraph might lead you to expect. But that’s Mitchell’s genius. His vision is so deep, so inclusive and his love of language and people so palpable that in his work, hope trumps despair, no matter how difficult the truth he tells may be.

His earlier novel, Ghostwritten, reads like an previous incarnation of Cloud Atlas.  Even though I read it after reading the later work, I found it compelling in its own right as I did Mitchell's recent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which made its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List and a number of best of 2010 lists. It's a more formally contained work that stays in a single time and place for the most part. Given that they happen to be the port of Nagasaki in the late eighteenth century and that the central characters are a repressed Dutch clerk working for one of the world's first multinationals (the Dutch East India Company) and a beautiful and brilliant Japanese midwife disfigured from burn scars creates challenges of the kind that Mitchell seems to thrive on.  The Dutch merchants were more or less quarantined by the xenophobic Japanese of that imperial era to a tiny, artificial island in the Bay of Nagasaki and only permitted to set foot on mainland Japan by special permission. The  tension between two different peoples energizes Mitchell's story of the consequences of encountering an "other" with love or with fear, with curiosity or with a need to subdue.

I don’t believe that his work is all that “difficult” or “not for everyone”  any more or less than any other distinct piece of art, which is always subject to personal taste. But good storytelling is simply that. And if you hang in with Cloud Atlas. beyond the first two sections and begin to trust that Mitchell is not just messing with you (he isn’t!) the powerful current of his storytelling will carry you away

Read This Book!

I feel compelled, as never before compelled by a book, even before I finish reading it, to shout, especially to my male friends who, like so many American men, do not read fiction, you must read this book immediately! I’m talking about A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias.

In brilliant and transparent prose, Yglesias[1] fearlessly explores his own life as a husband, a stumbling young lover, as a devoted caretaker to a dying wife, as a man full of rage and helplessness and as a writer. Here’s one of the many paragraphs that made my heart stop:

“And in that paralyzed silence, he realized that ther was something in his brain which -- despite all the hours spentlearning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer -- he hadn't known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nin years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gonem and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn't always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.”

If time allowed, I would have inhaled this book in one reading. Instead, I find myself stealing moments that turn into hours, standing in hallways or at the kitchen table when I should be washing up and getting back to work, transfixed by one devastating recognition after another. I’ve been married the same length of time as Enrique, though, kinehora[2], my wife is healthy. Like Enrique, I could not believe my overwhelming good fortune in winning a beautiful, accomplished and loving woman, though I had to wait until I was almost forty. Enrique meets Margaret in his early twenties. By alternating chapters telling the story of their meeting and courtship in the “bankrupt New York” of the seventies, with chapters set in the novel’s present time of 2004, days before Margaret’s death from bladder cancer, Yglesias has found an ideal narrative structure that allows the reader enough relief from the inevitable arc of loss to keep reading what otherwise might be unbearable. Instead, by moving back and forth in time, he gives us a prismatic view of two lives growing together like wisteria and roses and coming apart as any living being eventually must.

Perhaps I’ll return to this after I finish reading the book, but my admiration, appreciation and sense that this book is answering questions that I had not known how to even ask, prevent me from waiting to post this.

---

[1] Rafael Yglesias is a half Jewish, half Cuban and Spanish novelist and screenwriter who, like the protagonist of A Happy Marriage, Enrique Sabas, dropped out of school when he was sixteen to write his first novel. He stands in the middle of three generations of writers. His parents were Helen and José Yglesias both noted novelists and non-fiction writers who were also part of New York’s left-wing literary culture for many years. His son Matthew is a writer and highly respected blogger on politics and his younger son Nicholas is also a novelist.

[2] Yiddish. Literally, a compressed pronounciation of the sentence: Keyn ayn hara, “No evil eye” used as a magical defense against bad fortune when the possibility of future good fortune or catrastrophe is mentioned

The Tzaddik from Montreal

The Leonard Cohen concert in San Jose, on November 13, was one of the best musical performances I've ever seen/heard in my life. Actually, it was of a whole different order. Here's this seventy five year old man who sings, with only one break, for 3 hours, incredibly complex music with a band of nine consummate musicians and singers, and often, in the course of a song, sinks to a position where he's seated on his heels singing his heart out like Jolson, sometimes to the audience and sometimes to one of the musicians, having a deep conversation with whomever he's with, in musical phrases. Then, he rises fluidly, in one motion on those 75 year old knees, moving like a cat. An old cat, but still... He literally skipped on and of stage several times and constantly, humbly, with no artifice, thanked the audience (after intermission he thanked us for hanging in and not falling under the influence of "my songs which are allegedly so depressing.")

He introduced the band once in each half of the show, bowing in Zen Buddhist-inflected reverence before each one’s considerable skill and talent. He gave each one a “title.” Dino Soldo, the reed player is “The Master of Breath,” Bob Metzger, legendary studio guitarist is “The Architect of the Arpeggio.” Javier Mas, a string player from Barcelona is the “Shepherd of Strings” and drummer Rafael Gayol is the “High Priest of Precision.” He honored Sharon Robinson, his collaborator for the last 10 years or so, who has written the music for many of his recent songs, and who sings gloriously, with an extended solo version of Boogie Street. Belying its title, the song starts with a heart-rending, gospel-influenced, a capella verse. He also gave the angelic Webb sisters, who, with Ms Robinson form his impeccable back-up chorus, a song of their own. Accompanying themselves on guitar and Irish harp, they had thousands in tears with If it be your Will one of L. Cohen’s most nakedly spiritual songs.

The audience of 10,000 or so at the HP Pavilion ran from young fashionista types to old Jewish types like me with a full range in between. The common factor was the universal appreciation for the man and his music which very often reached levels of collective joy.

Generous, funny, self-deprecating, gallant, graceful, knowing, beautiful, inspiring. The concert may have permanently altered a few of my neurons, in a good way. He is a bona fide Tzaddik. (Heb. a holy person; a spiritual leader similar to the Buddhist notion of the Bodhisattva, one who places the spiritual health of the community above his or her own personal enlightenment.)

My attendance was a gift from my dear friend Jonathan Greenberg, a renaissance man if there ever was one, and an equally serious fan of L.C.

You can buy most of the individual songs from the set on iTunes or at Amazon or get the entire Live In London on CD or as a DVD, (which I have yet to see). You can also hear a typically haimish (Yiddish: down home, personal, real) Terry Gross interview with il Maestro here.

The Voice is a Ladder between Worlds

I dreamed I was singing in harmony with a long-lost friend, our voices vibrating in the air that was both inside and outside of us. It was an ecstatic feeling, as such singing can be in waking life as well.

The dream led me to reflect on the truly mysterious attributes of the human voice. The dictionary lists 24 different meanings for the word, but let’s stay with the top two:

1. The sound or sounds uttered through the mouth; 2.The faculty or power of uttering sounds through the mouth by the controlled expulsion of air.

Through the activity of muscles, nerves and breath, our bodies make sound. Mouth, tongue, teeth, lips give this sound shape and texture. Its resonance comes from the empty spaces inside us, from the vibration of bones and flesh. In all its meanings, voice is invisible, and travels across space as wave forms that set in motion tiny pieces of bone and cartilage deep in our ears which, in turn, connect to our brains, nervous systems, bodies triggering a range of involuntary responses in the listener.

My first experiences of the numinous, as a child, came through hearing. Though I had only the most superficial and literal understanding of the central Jewish prayer, Sh’ma Yisroel… Listen, Israel, this force we call God, is indivisible, is One, I knew from experience that the sacred came to me through hearing human voices under certain circumstances.

Between the ages of eleven and nineteen, I went to a summer arts camp for kids and adults. My mother got an office job there to pay my tuition. My father worked on the maintenance crew and acted in The Taming of the Shrew one summer. I was introduced to theatre, graphic art, ceramics and music in open-air studios surrounded by pine trees whose resins melted in the dry summer heat releasing an odor that still comforts me whenever I smell it, over fifty years later.

The high point of the summers was the annual folk-music festival run by Pete Seeger. In those years that place must have been one of the few that would hire him, ignoring the blacklist which had been terrorizing the country. Hearing Pete Seeger sing the South African song of liberation, Wimoweh, with that falsetto African yodeling he did, stirred my insides and gave me goose bumps When he sang The Bells of Rhymney over the dark crashing chords of his 12 string guitar, something in me swelled and vibrated.

Then I heard blues for the first time. Pete brought Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry up to that Mountain enclave to perform and give workshops, Sonny’s whoops that would pick up his harmonica’s cries when they reached their peak disturbed me as, later, would the voices of Robert Johnson and Bukka White. Brownie’s deeper voice contained landscapes and textures, sun-warmed, smelling of earth and tobacco.

By the time I was fourteen I owned a number of Folkways archival anthologies of the old folk blues people from Mississippi and Texas and other places that might as well have been other planets, so far from my middle-class Southern California were they. Their singing was more raw and much less polite than anything my parents would listen to, and it was where I heard God.

I also heard and felt the sacred in the voice of the young, overweight cantor who taught me my portion of the Haftorah, the Prophets of the Hebrew bible, that I was learning for my Bar-Mitzvah. Irwin Halpern, in his twenties, already a husband and father, not much more than ten years my senior, must have been raised in an unassimilated enclave of traditional Jews. He had learned to sob out those modal melodies and intricate melismas that Eastern European cantors had refined over the centuries. There was something in me, very old, that responded passionately to Cantor Halpern’s channeling of these sounds. The same part that responded to Pete Seeger’s voice and Brownie’s and Sonny’s. Was it the minor third interval that George Gershwin recognized as one of the elements that Jewish and African-American music had in common? Their resonating bodies that focused and amplified their voices which rose directly from the ground? Whatever the connection, it was powerful and blew away the echoes of Pat Boone and Johnny Mathis whom I slow-danced to at parties.

At the same time that I was drinking in the blues, Appalachian ballads and black gospel, I carried a growing bag of shame and frustration over the fact that I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t sing. I was told by a succession of teachers from 4^th grade on to just mouth the words during the winter classroom choral events. I knew they were right. My “tone deaf”-ness had been confirmed when someone gave my father a tape recorder. They had just come on the market that year, 1954. I was nine. The microphone energized my father. He became playful in a way I’d rarely seen. I loved being with him like this. We spent hours singing old songs from the vaudeville shows he’d seen as a young man, and he’d imitate Danny Kaye and Spike Jones. I sang along and piped in with stuff I’d heard on the radio or the playground. This was before music had ever really stirred me the way it would in a couple more years. When my father played back the whole hour or so that we’d recorded, I was appalled. My father sounded pretty much the same as he had when we recorded. But I sounded nothing like the voice I imagined I was producing. What I heard was the weakly quavering voice of a little boy who had no idea what pitch and rhythm were.

I started playing guitar two years later, in the mountains. I still believed that I couldn’t sing. But gradually, my voice started to respond to the sounds of the guitar. The guitar began to teach me. It taught me how it felt to match my voice to its note and to let my voice move with its voice. I began to understand how it felt when I was “on” pitch, more or less in unison, as opposed to being off the note. I started letting myself sing along in groups. Down by the Riverside. This Land is Your Land. I met another kid in my high school who played guitar. He’d learned old cowboy songs from his grandfather and I played and sang along with him. Old Shep. Little Joe the Wrangler.

But I was a long way from trusting my voice. It hadn’t recovered from its delayed adolescent deepening and frequently went its own way, out of control.

Meanwhile I had decided that I wanted to be an actor. Up until then, I hadn’t articulated any particular choice of livelihood. As a six year old I’d passed through a scientist-president-cowboy phase and a writer phase and then forgot it all until a moment when I was ten or eleven and a character actress came into my parents’ cleaning store next to the rear entrance of Republic Studios (now, part of CBS) and chatted with my parents for a few minutes. And right then I knew I wanted to be an actor. I knew it deeply and fiercely though I had little idea of what an actor actually did.

I’ll skip forward a couple of decades during which I completed my secondary education, acted in some pretty dreary high school plays but had a great time playing Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – up in the mountains – went through four frustrating years in the UCLA Theatre Arts Department with a year of education abroad in France, Spain and North Africa, embarked on a career as an actor in film and TV, got involved with improvisational and other kinds of experimental theatre and avoided going to New York or London which were the only places where there seemed to be a chance of actually getting some real training.

The only training I had received was conventional. At UCLA, it amounted to an incoherent hodgepodge of received wisdom from the “learn your lines and don’t bump into anything” school of acting. I remember being told, in an acting class, that I had a “wonderful vocal apparatus” but given no clue as to what that meant.

Luckily, I stumbled into a powerful source of inspiration that countered the deadly flatness of the academic theatre of those years. Jeff Corey, another legendary figure whose life had been shaped by the anti-Communist blacklist, brought me home to myself by insisting that the actor had to bring his or her own personal, quirky creativity to any role. Use yourself was the secret formula that broke the trance of the purely mechanical approach I had been taught at UCLA. Jeff was the first teacher I’d had who talked about impulses – the irreducible atom-like quanta of intention or desire that manifest as gesture or utterance. Something that begins inside the actor ends up outside. I had been given a way to claim my own experience and I was grateful and frantic to put it into practice.

Although Jeff spoke eligaically about the Group Theatre and the values of experimental, ensemble work, he was, for the most part, helping actors get jobs in the Hollywood marketplace. And though I was happy to make as much money as I could in that world, in my heart I pursued a dream of a very different kind of acting in a very different world.

For three years I worked with an Improvisational group that, unlike the comedic, second-city flavor of improv, aimed at creating powerful, moving, coherent and completely improvised full length plays at least once a week.

In almost all this work, voice was taken for granted. Even in the experimental improv work, the focus was on character and structure with little attention to the basic elements that actors work with: voice, body, thought, emotion…

Then, in the early seventies, I worked with a director who had come out from New York. He had been in the first production that Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review, created with a group of young actors who would become The Performance Group, and nurture talents like Spaulding Gray and Willem Da Foe and eventually transmute into The Wooster Group after Schechner left.

This was my introduction to work based on the ideas of the Polish radical theatre philosopher and director, Jerzy Grotowski, about whom I’d been reading for two or three years in The Drama Review. Schechner was one of the first American directors to be influenced by him.

Sam Blazer had acted in Schechner’s Dionysius in ’69 but his real ambitions were toward theatre criticism and directing. I read a brilliant essay he wrote in the L.A. Free Press and was impressed. When I heard he wanted to start an experimental company in LA, I jumped on it.

[Sam died a few years ago in the Bay Area where he had become a therapist working in the Gay community.]

Sam had us do long exercises lying on our backs on the floor that began with whispering our own names to the ceiling over and over and gradually moving the whisper toward voiced speech. He told us to let our voices lead us, to go where they needed to go. I remember hearing multitudes of voices calling my name whenever I did that exercise. My mother of course, schoolyard bullies, lovers, but also voices I couldn’t name. Some of them didn’t seem exactly human. Even less human were the voices that emerged in other explorations when Sam asked us to let go of language and let our voices roam the space and ramble through their own possibilities, pushing on limits of high and low, loud and soft.

The company got smaller and smaller as time went on. There were sessions when Sam and I and Harvey Perr, the playwright who was working with us to shape a play out of our explorations would be the only ones in the studio; my voice, the only one at large in the space.

Sam introduced me to Grotowski’s notion of vocal resonators. Where conventional vocal training usually speaks of only two areas of possible resonance – the chest and the head – Grotowski held that every part of the human body can resonate, that the voice can root itself in a hand, a stomach, a knee. This became my first foray into the vast landscape that the voice can travel. Later, I would discover more when I spent a month in a southeastern French village working with Marita Gunther (1928 – 2002), one of the elders of the Roy Hart Theatre and a direct conduit to the work of Alfred Wolfsohn.

[from Left: Grotowski, Wolfsohn and the young Marita Gunther in London, Roy Hart in performance]

Alfred Wolfsohn believed that the so-called “normal” voice was a pale fragment of the true potential of the human voice. There was no reason men could not sing soprano or women bass, no reason not to give voice to all the angels and beasts within us. He had come to his ideas about the voice, in part, while by hearing the cries of dying soldiers on the battlefield during the First World War. After the war he experimented with the voice in Berlin, at a time when so many healing processes seem to have been developed – Wilhelm Reich, Ida Rolf, Fritz Perls, Charlotte Selver and others were nurturing seeds that wouldn’t fully flower for another thirty years or so. Wolfsohn worked mainly with opera singers until the Nazis came into power and as a Jew, knew he needed to escape.

In London, Roy Hart, a South African Jewish actor, became Wolfsohn’s protégé and, during the sixties, founded his eponymous company. Marita Gunther had been Wolfsohn’s most advanced student as well as his lover. Roy Hart, his wife and his mistress all died in a car crash just after the whole company had relocated to a crumbling chateau in the South of France. By the time I got there, in 1987, a second generation was starting to take the leadership from the founding members who had survived the early years of desolate winters doing odd jobs, repairing the chateau and building a respected international teaching company with a large and devoted following.

Every day for a month, Marita guided me into the “dismemberment” of my voice and then helped me put it back together. Using a process named, with ironic understatement, “The Singing Lesson,” she would begin at the piano asking me to follow the notes she played. These series of notes might be the usual fragments of major or minor scales that we all know so well. But after a while, she might have me repeat one or two notes and then suddenly say, “There! Again!” and I’d try to remember what I had just done. Before I knew it I’d be in a completely unknown territory. Sounds that I’d never ever heard myself make poured out of my body. Marita would exhort me to go further or lower or higher. My skull might feel as if a laser was boring through from the inside out, or two different sounds might be coming from my throat at the same time, or…

The RHT have old recordings from the sixties of Roy Hart himself performing something from one of the few productions that the theatre presented in their London days. You hear what sounds like two distinct voices, though one of them sounds bleached and desiccated like an image of a hungry ghost from a Tibetan Buddhist thangka

What Roy Hart was doing though, was very different from the chorded vocal techniques we’ve grown used to after repeated exposure to the Tuvan Throat Singers or the Tibetan Monks. It wasn’t part of an indigenous tradition of singing with the whole voice. It was Western; it sounded tortured but still carried a sense of the numinous. The right voice for Euripides.

Most days after my Singing Lesson. I would ramble around the narrow roads and goat trails to one swimming hole or another that someone had told me about. A river with a name as sinuous as its shape, the Salindrinque wound its way around the dry, rocky hills of Les Cevennes, the region we were in. The Salindrinque had many smaller tributaries and there was no end of deep holes with water-striders stilt-walking lightly on their surfaces.

I went everywhere on foot which was anything but a hardship. The weather was glorious that summer and the distances were long enough to make travel eventful, but short enough to keep it pleasant.

One day I walked back from a long afternoon at the best of all the swimming holes I’d found. I could lie in the sun on a fifteen foot wide slab of granite to warm up from the bracing water. The swimming hole was in a deep and narrow valley with no houses nearby. As I hiked up to the road, I sang wordlessly, deeply pleasured by the freedom, and a sense of mammalian contentment that saturated every cell. I kept vocalizing, letting my voice roam where it would. It felt fuller, deeper and at the same time, brighter than I was used to. A green lizard, about two feet from head to tail tip rain up the white plaster wall of a house I was passing. Its green was as vivid as a chameleon’s, a radiant, joyful color that looked exactly like my voice sounded to me.

I’ve written and told that story a lot. There’s an earlier version somewhere in an old entry in this blog. One of my favorite gleanings from the world of neuroscience is the discovery that memory is actually nothing like a tape recorder or a camera. Memory, they say, is something we create, over time. As we retell ourselves and others the story of an event, we begin to remember the telling rather than the original experience. The process actually causes physiological changes in the protein structures that build up as memories accumulate. You can read more about this in A General Theory of Love, a book that I consider one of the most important that I’ve read in the last ten years, at least. So in telling this story over and over, perhaps I’ve created a lens that lets me know my voice in a new way.That moment, on my walk in the Cevennes, has become a green metaphor for the mystery of the voice.

Pete Seeger on a 1950's short-lived TV show hosting Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. They're about the ages they were when I first met them as a young teen-ager.

photos, from top: Pete Seeger and a young folksinger; Brownie McGee; Jeff Corey; The Performance Group in Dionysius 69; Jerzy Grotowski, Alfred Wolfsohn and Marita Gunther sometime in the 1940s, Roy Hart; bridge and stream in the Cevennes where the Roy Hart Theatre is based at the Chateau de Malerargues.

Pay Attention

Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer prize winning story from the April 8, 2007 issue of the Washington Post tells about an experiment they conducted that involved the young virtuoso violinist, Joshua Bell, performing in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station during the morning rush. If you haven’t heard about this or read the article, I suggest that after you’re done here, you take a look. The Post asked Bell to dress as a street musician in jeans and baseball cap and play with an open violin case at his feet to see what would happen. When they asked Leonard Slatkin, the conductor of the National Symphony, to imagine what would occur, he predicted that at minimum, a hundred people or so would gather to listen. A pretty humble prediction considering that Bell is arguably the greatest violinist on the planet and that he would be playing a Stradivarius valued at 3.5 million dollars in a place with great acoustics. The article goes on:

“Bell decided to begin with ‘Chaconne’ from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it ‘not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version.’

“Bell didn't say it, but Bach's ‘Chaconne’ is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.”

On the Post’s website (link above) you can watch a couple of minutes of video and listen to the entire audio recording of the 45 minutes that Bell played. In spite of the background train and human noise, I find the music passionate and soulful.

As you might guess by now, a lot fewer than 100 people stopped to listen.

“Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.”

Reading this catapulted me back to Paris, 1965, when I was seeking maybe not my fortune, but at least a few francs for a meal and a bed by playing traditional blues and fingerpicking folk songs like “Railroad Bill” and “Freight Train.” Before I learned the ropes, I was thoroughly ignored. Like the Bell experiment showed, context is all important. No one paid attention a solitary guy with a guitar on a Left Bank street corner at one in the afternoon no matter how well he played the blues (medium OK, I’d humbly submit). But, find an attractive young woman to pass the hat, work a crowded café at dusk when everyone’s having their apéritif, et voilà, the five franc notes would fall like lovely autumn leaves into the hat. Later, when I hooked up with a Yemenite-Israeli Gospel singer between her bookings with “Big Jones and his Little Sisters,” an American quartet she fronted, passing as African-American, real crowds would gather until a squad of gendarmes would break the party up.

I also thought of the Native American blessing that one may walk in beauty. Years after my street-singing days, when I was going off on a long and arduous tour of Europe with TJT, someone advised me to always look for experiences of beauty as I traveled. It was wonderful advice because it opened my attention to the possibilities that are part of every moment.

In relation to the “Muse,” attention is paramount. Inspiration lurks everywhere, whether it comes in the form of angelic music offered up freely in the unlikeliest of venues, or the faint call of a bird at the edge of morning or an overheard story.

In some forms of Buddhist meditation, the only instruction is to pay attention.You can start with the breath, but you’re told that your mind will, of course, wander, so pay attention to its very wandering. If thoughts start pouring or zooming through your mind, pay attention to the thoughts. Don’t believe them or take them seriously, just pay attention, notice that thoughts are moving through your field of awareness. Or bodily sensations, sounds, memories, emotions.

That same kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t judge or choose or try to change anything is also essential to any kind of improvisation, which is to say, essential to the creative act.

Check my latest newsletter for some related books and some experiments, exercises and games to help wake up your own muse.

photos c corey fischer

Person April 8, 2007

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"...like chords of deep music"

I met a man named Karl Knobler at Deb Fink’s party for the closing of Dead Mother, the recent TJT production I was in. Karl’s a psychologist, about my age, and we immediately began the kind of allusive conversation full of digressions and surprising sudden turns that feels very similar to Jazz. The kind of conversation I take delight in.

As we jumped between a few dozen topics, Karl mentioned the idea of “Affective regulation” (see the work of Dr. Allan Schore, www.allanschore.com) To explain the concept, Karl told me how women, whether they have had children or not, will exhibit dilation of the pupils when hearing a baby cry. Men’s pupils do not dilate under those circumstances unless they have already become fathers.

Reflecting on this later, I was reminded of some lines from a poem by Rilke: “…that harsh hand / that kneaded him as if to change his shape.” (Robert Bly, Tr.) and thought about the ways we are worked upon by the aggregate of experience, time, the natural world, the stories we live until we become utterly transformed.

I remember a moment in Australia, thirteen years ago. I had just come out of the ocean. I’d been swimming for a long time at Bondi Beach, even body surfing a little. When I got out of the water I could still feel the energy of the waves surging inside my body. And I imagined myself as having been reshaped by the water. Could this be the “purpose” of a life: to be transformed – cooked, in a sense, ripened – into something nourishing for some larger being?

Usually, when I think about creativity, I’m the creator. But these notions of being changed on a neuro-cellular level by life, reverse the field. I’m the raw matter, we all are – being sculpted, carved, tuned, plucked, dissolved and reconstituted in new forms.

I welcome another path away from seeing the “Artist” as some isolated, unique, solitary, almost hermetic figure; a controlling, masterful, domineering archetype which the world can maybe do without for a while. Perhaps it was in recognition of being altered by powerful forces that the first “art” emerged in the world. In expressing our creativity we are continuing a dance with Big Life, simultaneously tasting our power and our humility, harmonizing our unique voice with the great chorale.

One more memory. 1987. The Cevennes, hill country of Southern France. My wife has just departed for Poland, where she will join nearly a million Poles on a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna at Czestochowa, the patron of Poland and symbol of the Solidarity movement. I’m staying on in the Cevennes to continue a very arduous kind of voice work led by a members of the Roy Hart Theatre, a compelling and eccentric theatre company based in a chateau in the region. I spend 5-6 mornings each week in a studio there and, after lunch, ramble around the rivers, streams and gullies of the Cevennes, seeking rumored swimming holes and stumbling over vestiges of old dry stone walls that had been assembled with precision and love in another time. One hot, bright afternoon after finding a perfect swimming hole, big enough to stoke across, deep enough to kick down into numbingly cold water, after hours in and out of the sweet clear water, after drying myself for the last time on a granite slab, I walked back to the village where I was staying in blissful exhaustion, letting my voice roam free, wordlessly singling melodies I’d never heard before. As I walked, my voice opened in all directions and suddenly a sound clearer and richer than I’d ever heard come from my body rang out and at that very moment, a large bright-green lizard, shot into view onto the bone-white stucco wall of a house. In the logical magic of the time and place, I had no doubt the sounds that had been coming out of me had conjured or summoned the Lizard. Its color and my sound were identical.

The Man Watching

by Rainer Maria Rilke (Tr. Robert Bly)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

In the current issue of my newsletter, Musing on the Muse, I suggest the following as a response to the idea of “being created” that I explore in a much shorter version of the above writing;

Do a ten minute timed writing experiment. Alternate beginning each sentence with “Once I was….” and “Now I am…” Complete each sentence as you go, writing as quickly as you can, not allowing your hand to ever stop moving on the page until the 10 minutes is up. Let go of any need to “make sense.”

Here’s what happened when I tried it myself:

Once I was sap

Now I am crystallized honey at the bottom of the jar

Once I was heaven

Now I am a water logged plank

Once I was golden tumbling

Now I am reddened patience

Once I was hungry all day

Now I feed wolves

Once I dreamed of a blazing touch

Now I dream of maps

Once I remembered all their names, the color of their thighs and the songs they sang

Now the glue is dried out and the photos have fallen from the album

Once I ran along the shore until the sun was gone

Now I am wrapped in blankets

Once I bit cords of silk

Now I sew dishrags

Once I barked in confusion, circling the city

Now I know how to breathe

Once I slept on the moonlit roof

Now I give my body to the water.