--Haunt by Bastille

Does this one, just, really hit anyone else? Not because, as it might suggest, of some great realization of how often people lie--while true, I think that’s a realization that we have a lot earlier than adulthood--but because of just how rare it is for there to be a single truth, one right answer? We spend twenty years, give or take, expecting one day to just sort of understand it all--something in the back of our minds is somehow sure that someday, maybe when we graduate college, They’ll show us all into a room, sit us down, give us a little induction and some directions of what to do now? “Welcome to The World, we’re glad to have you, here’s what you do and how to do it?”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s been a Right Way for so long, and no Righter of Ways than the one that we look around at daily happenstance in the World and see? And yet, when you really get down to it...it’s just people? Just regular, ordinary, un-magically-enlightened people, just doing their best without any sense, at least specifically, of what’s acceptable/good/right?

Having spent about three total years now doing occasional directing for theatre, working primarily with amateur actors interested in the plays for personal enjoyment or, perhaps, fulfillment of an arts credit, I think I’ve condensed my views on the singular thing that makes an actor great into one thing that I’ve resolved to always tell my actors: “cut out the middle step.” Let me explain.

Probably the most basic thing that everyone’s heard at any level at all of acting is to act off of objective. It’s the first thing that ever comes up in any acting class and honestly the first thing that comes up anywhere acting is concerned. I found, though, that just saying it isn’t much help: it prompts actors to consider what their objective is, sure, but most of the people I’ve worked with are just as lost once they’ve figured it out, because they’re not sure how to implement it.

Actors still need concrete terms. They need to ask themselves, then, “how does my character specifically go about getting at this objective? How does my character react to this character, who wants to help me on my way, or this other character, who seems to want to hinder me?” Actors then, of course, extrapolate from what they know of their character and formulate a plan of action for what they’ll do on stage. So the actor’s preparation process goes like this:

Figure out objective

Figure out how my specific character implements objective

Play character

What’s interesting about this is that the first two steps implicate the actor as a relevant party. 1. The actor sits down with the script and asks themselves what the character wants, 2. The actor looks at their character, recalls the objective from step 1, and makes an executive decision about what makes sense for the character to do.

And this works very well! Being able to think about a character beforehand in depth and formulate what they will do on stage according to everything known about the character is a pretty damn good way to act. Famous actors do it.

But not Benedict Cumberbatch, and not a select few of today’s brilliant actors. These actors cut out the middle step entirely. Watch Cumberbatch perform: there’s no consideration, there’s no scriptedness, there’s no analytic looking at his character, because to him it’s somehow completely clear. Cumberbatch himself, as a person, plays no role in the process. He eliminates step 2 entirely because instead of Benedict Cumberbatch sitting down to find an objective, it’s Sherlock/Stephen Strange/Hamlet who figures out their own objective and has no need to figure out how to implement it, because it’s clear to them: of course they react this way, of course they pursue their goals this way, because that’s just what they do. It’s just a raw reaction. Cumberbatch’s performance:

What is my objective?

Continue accordingly

Of course, I don’t expect that my amateur actors hear me say “cut out the middle step” and suddenly deliver the greatest monologue ever heard to man, but I think it’s a useful philosophy, because if your goal is to eliminate yourself from the process, fill the vessel with nothing but your character, your performance is all the more convincing.

Me, tonight, playing “The Game is On” from the BBC’s Sherlock on piano. Not the best performance, but I did learn it yesterday.

“The game, Mrs. Hudson, is on!”

Imagine trying to hold a bit of water from a faucet in one’s cupped hands. No matter how tightly the fingers are pressed together, or how perfectly bowl-shaped the palms are, it’s next to impossible to retain all the falling water. And if one does in fact manage to collect any water, even the tightest grasp will prove futile in arresting the slow, seemingly causeless draining which follows.

So it is with water, and so it is with thought. To take all facets of one’s mind and focus them on one specific task is superhuman, and any effort to maintain a certain level of focus for an extended time is typically in vain.

And so it was, just a little while ago, when I sat down with the intention of writing this very essay. Try as I might to “cup my hands” and somehow focus the erratic faucet-water of my thought, I simply couldn’t. In fact, the water seemed to go everywhere but its intended target: splashing my refrigerator, lightly sprinkling my other schoolwork, marinating the mess of papers positioned sporadically atop my desk, and sadly completely soaking YouTube.com.

As I sat in my sleek modern office chair at my mismatched wooden desk, watching the time tick by on my ancient digital clock, wondering how I could possibly write a sufficiently impressive first essay on a small moment, the only topics which came to mind were almost humorously cliché. The one time I took a shot in a soccer game and missed? My first time driving a car? The time I passed out during a choir concert in the National Cathedral? The thinking I was doing for this very essay?

Please, anything but that last idea.

Still the metaphorical faucet-water continued to fall, landing anywhere and everywhere except in my similarly metaphorical cupped hands, while the scintillating cursor on my blank white screen pointedly blinked a mockery of my idiocy.

I placed my literal hands atop my desk, closing my eyes and raising my eyebrows in a demonstration of frustration and defeat.

Just then, a literal drop of water fell from the ceiling, landing just in between my thumbs. Though I internally cursed the plumber we’d had in last week for his failure in fixing the pipes, the leak also caused me a faint smile. I’d had an idea. Not the “Eureka” kind of idea, but rather the kind that makes you sit back in your seat with a “huh” that’s amused, confused, and satisfied all at once.

Nodding to myself, I began to type. Perhaps, I thought, I should begin from a purely metaphorical standpoint. Explain the water allegory, then relate it to mental process. Next, introduce the small moment, and briefly apply the metaphor to my hapless procrastination. Succinctly describe my work environment, insert a brief quip about how atrocious this essay idea is, and finally narrate my uncovering of the aforementioned metaphor. Wittily recount writing the essay I’d just finished.

The English language is a funny thing. Despite the hundreds of thousands of words it offers, it’s almost impossible to describe a situation in just one. One moment in time is simply too complex, too nuanced, too multifarious to describe in a single utterance. At any given point in life, our minds, our consciousnesses, our multitudinous thoughts would be almost insulted by summary in a single word. Because what one sublime word could possibly possess the audacious capability of epitomizing the human spirit?

There are, of course, exceptions—a truth that I myself discovered at the happy age of ten.

It was a sweltering summer day, the type of day on which one can’t venture into nature without feeling stifled by some ever-present heavy blanket of sultriness, when the heat waves writhe and shimmer in the air over the soccer fields, and when fruit pies might be veritably baked in parked cars. It was on this day I allowed myself to scoff at the verbose masterpieces of literature’s greats, for I had found a word which perfectly summed up my own thoughts. One word. I came upon it without really thinking. In fact, quite the opposite. It seemed the word had sought me out, somehow suddenly conscious of its majesty and inestimable prosaic value, searching frantically for a way to be heard, dreading the application of some other second-rate term or, god forbid, an imperfect sentence. It pushed itself to the front of my head, and rendered all my other thoughts irrelevant by its invaluable presence. And truly, it was a sublime word, one which somehow captured the details, the intricacies, and the complexities of my inimitable predicament and forced them into its superlative four-letter form.

Shit.

Flailing down a twenty-five-meter pool while upwards of eighty people watched, gasping for air and forcing my eyes open despite the stinging chlorine, I really had no other word on my mind.

It had started with my being forced into the car at 4:30 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. Despite my most desperate pleas, my mother was firm, and I ended up sobbing in the backseat of her Volvo V40 as I was whisked away to the certain doom that awaited me at the Bannockburn Swim Club.

Upon my arrival, I was informed rather curtly by the oldest of my swim coaches that not only would I be swimming but also that I’d be swimming the twenty-five-meter butterfly. Butterfly, what with the difficult arm motions and complicated breathing technique, is almost always the bane of a young swimmer’s existence.

My timidness probably proved an advantage on that fateful day. Had I been a little less self-conscious, I might have thrown a fit and caused a scene that, to say the least, would have been embarrassing. Instead, I settled for a meek question: “Coach, do I have to swim fly?”

I cursed myself for my stupidity—in my shaken-up state of mind, I’d asked the coach who was notoriously strict, rather than his more friendly counterpart. I hardly heard the response—“No! There is no option!”—before I ran to correct my mistake.

The other coach, though, didn’t prove the savior I was hoping for. With a friendly smile and the words “Well, why don’t you give it a try?” she might as well have been damning me to hell.

As my ten-year-old frame slowly progressed from the waiting seats to the daunting edge of the pool and my ten-year-old mind slowly progressed from discomfort to terror, I wasted more energy trembling and biting my nails than I’d use in the subsequent race.

My body numb from nervousness, I stepped up to the pool. Shaking, I barely heard the start. I threw myself into the water, I brought my arms up as I’d been taught, I straightened my body and pressed my legs together, and after what seemed like an eternity I hit the water.

My goggles fell off.

A few months ago, I was very quick to hop on the train of people like Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, people who classify themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” It was the concept that they represented, though, and not the way they worded their beliefs that stood out to me. I, in fact, resented the descriptor “not religious” as one which seemed almost dismissive of my atheism, perhaps because somewhere in my subconscious those two words meant that I, someone who does not believe in God, cannot wonder at the mysteries of the world, cannot have true morality, cannot really be humble. It’s a sentiment echoed in Miguel de Unamuno’s atheist prayer, in which he seems to dismiss atheists as people who, given that they do not have God, do not have meaning in life. Did my lack of “religion” make me this way? Was I truly such a bland person, who could not wonder? Ironically, the reason for my rejection of the wording is the same reason for my easy acceptance of the concept.

My beliefs were abstract. I believed deep down that God was not real. Reasons for this conviction of mine were numerous and constantly evolving. But, in eighteen years on earth, I had experienced fulfillment, love, hope...and as such continually wished to convince myself that such feelings were representative of something greater than myself, something greater than even science. Surprisingly enough, such were the beliefs of Albert Einstein. Einstein believed that somewhere in the unity of science and religion were these concepts: love, fulfillment, hope. The explanation of these things, he thought, was offered by science, but it was shallow to call them merely chemicals.

I wanted to believe this. To take the greatest moments of my life, moments of fulfillment, moments of love, moments of hope, and quantify them, explain them with neuroscience, with numbers, with equations, seemed wrong. It seemed to invalidate these moments. A catholic priest with whom I spoke last summer told me a story about an interaction he had with an atheist friend of his: in response to his friend’s positing that religion is false and that the one truth is science, he replied “Then what do you call your love for your wife? Is that just chemicals?” The man, of course, could not affirm that that was the case, for the evident reason that to do so seemed to invalidate his love, and for the more pressing reason that his wife was within earshot.

So where is the explanation for these things? Where my friend the priest found Catholicism, I wasn’t sure where to go. I certainly didn’t believe that the logical next step from “I feel love, fulfillment, etc.” was “there is a sentient, benevolent, omnipotent being in the heavens who made the earth and watches over all of us without intervening,” but I certainly wasn’t sure where to go. It’s for this reason that the “spiritual but not religious” camp drew me in so easily. It offered a simple explanation: there is no God, but there are things greater than ourselves that we don’t understand.

I spent the course of a month with this identification of my beliefs: spiritual but not religious. It was a discussion of scale that made me question. The argument of certain aggressively anti-atheist writers is that, if God did not create the Earth, if He did not create humans in His image, etc., then isn’t human life meaningless and nothingness? We are, after all, as individuals, imperceptible in the eyes of one looking at our planet, which is imperceptible in the eyes of one looking at our galaxy, in turn imperceptible in the eyes of someone looking at our observable universe, which, most likely, is imperceptible in the eyes of someone looking from even further out. We amble meaninglessly around a rock that flies over and over again around a blazing ball of gas, so it was four thousand years ago, so it will be four thousand years from now. Even distinguishing oneself among humans - curing cancer, inventing the emission-free car, things like these are completely and utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of space and time.

What? Scale! Why should I, or you, concern ourselves with the viewpoint of one who observes our universe? In fact, by such an argument, they are as meaningless to us as we are to them. They simply don’t concern us. Here we are, on Earth. And in my eyes, and in your eyes, life is meaningful. Advancing society is supremely meaningful. What matters is not how pointless we seem in the eyes of some hypothetical being quintillions of miles away, but how pointless we seem to ourselves, to which I say, not at all.

These last two paragraphs seem irrelevant, but are included for the purpose of making an analogy. This next paragraph is completely unnecessary, but I feel I cannot address the “pointlessness” argument without detailing the following.

And, secondly, so what? What if we are pointless? It’s an argument popularly made against atheism, but in my opinion it strikes a greater blow against religion. In saying that “since we don’t want to feel pointless, we choose to believe that there is a god who created us for a purpose,” such a theory frames religion as not only a human creation (which invalidates it a bit) but as a human construct made for the sole purpose of making ourselves feel better (which I believe invalidates it a lot).

Back to the two first paragraphs on pointlessness. I conclude, from these, that we as humans have no business saying that we are pointless. Why? Scale. In our own perception, we are not pointless, and that is all that matters. Perception: It’s not greater than ourselves, and yet it is the basis of ourselves. By parallel, I made the following conclusion. Science isn’t necessarily “greater than ourselves,” or “not understood,” but that doesn’t have to diminish it. I take exception, now, to the priest’s usage of the word “just.” By the same scale argument, science and chemicals, explanations that we have for concepts like hope and love, aren’t “just” science and chemicals. Just as our own perception of ourselves is important because in our frame of reference it is important, so can science be supremely important to us. Not classifying love etc. as things beyond human understanding does not, in any way, diminish the importance of them.

By classifying these things as “greater than myself,” I was making the same desirous leap that I rejected in the paragraph that started with “and secondly so what.” Wanting to believe that these things were beyond my understanding led me to will myself into believing that these things are beyond my understanding. The conclusion I’ve since reached is that science, “just chemicals,” as the priest called it, is in fact sublime. The explanation, in my mind, does not lessen the reward of things like hope, fulfillment, love.

So, like I was asked on the scale of doubt quiz, does science have all of the answers? Well, no, it doesn’t. It is, though, theoretically capable of having all the answers - in other words, I believe everything has a rational explanation.

One might next ask me what exactly I believe the purpose of life is. In your mind, life ends, they’d say. Believing that nobody watches you, that there’s no reward or punishment after life, what’s to stop you from living a viceful life for only yourself? A more moderate person might ask, do Epicurus’s beliefs then hold value for you? If your only existence is this life, shouldn’t you just set out to reduce suffering, to enjoy life?

The following paragraphs should, to be accurate, include the words “in my opinion” in each sentence. To avoid being tedious, they aren’t there, but the following is not something that I believe should necessarily be held as a universal truth but rather something that I believe is true.

The meaning of life isn’t to enjoy it, as sad and pessimistic as that sounds. Happiness, of course, is supremely important. But I’ve been talking about it for four pages: fulfillment always trumps happiness (where happiness, in this definition, is a feeling of instant gratification stemming from a single decision (have some ice cream, go to the movies)). Fulfillment is the goal of life, and achieving it warrants a bit of suffering. The meaning of life is to find meaning in life, to make meaning in life.

A blinding light which sears through my eyelids jolts me awake. Unsure of where I am, I sit up abruptly, and the top of my head nearly collides with an oaken handrail which, I’m certain, would have been the cause of a nasty bump had my four-and-a-half-year-old frame exceeded three foot six. I notice two things. Firstly, by way of the boat’s excessive tipping, I’m lying on the wall adjacent my makeshift bed. Secondly, the harsh light which woke me is the sun framed in the circular porthole opposite me. Blinking spots from my eyes, I toss away my pillow, the stand in for my teddy bear which my parents had deemed unnecessary on this particular trip. I carefully exit the tiny bedroom in the cozy downstairs section of my grandfather’s yacht. In a valiant effort, I pull myself up the nearly sideways stairway onto the main deck, where I find my parents and grandmother, like me, hanging on for dear life to absolutely anything attached to the deck.

Funny as their desperation was, though, it wasn’t what drew my attention that day nearly fourteen years ago. No, despite the sun whose blinding light commanded me to close my eyes and return to the blissfully shaded depths of the ship, my gaze went first to the imposing figure behind the wheel. Standing straight relative to the boat but almost horizontally relative to the earth, was the nearly bald, towering man I called Grandpa. Despite the relative chaos on deck, he intently stared ahead with a smile on his face, gripping with both hands the massive wheel that I myself couldn’t turn, try as I might.

But that’s all. Apart from that one memory of a man who, to my younger self, must have seemed superhuman, I recall nothing of Grandpa save his funeral. He passed away on 3/16, 2006 – a date that bore special significance given his house number and universal password was 136. And though I don’t consider myself religious, I found myself questioning my atheism when my family and I began to find the number everywhere in the months and even years after his death. It wasn’t until I was twelve that I found one of Grandpa’s old hockey trophies, the item which inspired me to learn about him, Jonathan Welch, my namesake whom I never knew.

I found it buried deep in my dusty bookshelf. My parents told me it had been given to me after Grandpa passed, before I was fully able to recognize its significance. Made of what I believe is solid bronze, the trophy features a stocky man in full hockey gear standing on a pedestal, looking forward at what I can only conclude is an imaginary puck. His intent gaze recalls Grandpa’s expression that morning on the boat. In his hands, he clutches a hockey stick, a piece of metal which protrudes from the rest of the trophy. in what I assume was a rough trip from my Grandpa’s old office to my bedroom, the stick is slightly bent at the end. One of his hockey-skate-clad feet extends just behind his body, while the other holds his weight, forming a picture of motion so realistic that one almost reaches out to catch him lest he skate forward off his pedestal. Despite the years, the trophy still shines with a dull sheen, though the athlete’s back and left thigh have been dulled by contact with human hands. Still, the bronze man’s gaze and apparent adroitness lend him a fiery spirit far too intense to be diminished by time.

The base on which the bronze man stands is black, save a small plaque which better withstood time and today shines a bit brighter. Left to right, it reads R.I.I.L, 3rd PLACE, 1960, CRANSTON EAST. Today, it brings a smile to my face to remember the chills I felt when I read the text top to bottom and found the second line read, quite simply, I36.

With this finding, I endeavored to discover more about my grandfather. My impression that day on the boat, it seemed, had been correct. He had been nearly superhuman – talented, driven, athletic, brilliant.

Everyone has a subconscious list of things they’ll never do. For most men, “reluctantly remove makeup” is somewhere on that list.

But there I stood, cotton swab in hand, nearly sobbing in front of the distorted mirror, wiping the last speck of golden glitter from my face. I can’t really describe how I felt just then—saddened, I suppose, that such an incredible experience was finally coming to an end.

Closing my eyes, I forced myself back in time a few minutes, willing the last echoes of the words I’d spoken to stick with me.

And Robin shall restore amends.

It was closing night, and though I was proud of what I’d done in the past three days, I wanted nothing more than to do it all again. Looking around the makeshift green room and all but breathing in the stifling quiet, I felt it was safe to assume my fellow actors and actresses felt the same.

Two days before, the same room had seemed like a different world. The noise from, among other things, shouted jokes had been almost deafening. Our trip down the stairs after the curtain call had been, to say the least, joyful. As was customary, each actor and actress had gleefully slapped their hand against the smiling face painted on the wall of the stairwell as they passed. Actors laughingly removed their makeup, most with a quip about the insanity of green face paint. The walls of the dressing rooms nearly shook with shouted celebrations and congratulations. Costumes littered the floor, forming something of a hallucinogenic carpet of bright colors.

But to the cast and crew in that transformed workshop three days later, opening night seemed a fantastic dream. The beige-walled room remained deathly quiet as the older actors clung to their last moments in the theatre program as one would savor the last piece of candy, the bliss of the moment soured by its impending conclusion. Proud though we were, the white smiley face received only a few halfhearted taps. Luminescent makeup, my own included, unwillingly found its way to cotton swabs. The actors, though we had much to celebrate, hung our costumes on the rack one last time with gazes worthy of a parent sending their child off to college.

Like most good things, our production had ended too soon.

Still, I stood there before that makeshift mirror, and marveled at how otherworldly and removed opening night had felt.

Saddened as I might have been, I wouldn’t have traded that moment for anything. That feeling, that bitter fulfillment, was simply inimitable. Nothing—no grade, no sports victory, no brilliant musical performance—could compare to how I felt just then, standing shakily under three bare lightbulbs.

On the eastern bank of Halfway Pond, about seven miles from Norton, Vermont (population 169), and a stone’s throw from the Canadian border, stands a quaint off-the-grid log cabin. It’s my family’s happy home for a couple weeks late in the summer each year.

Situated just below the forty-fifth parallel, the rustic dwelling requires, to say the least, dedication to reach. There are no roads to facilitate a journey there, no signs to assuage doubt as to the way, and no hint that a cabin might lie at the end of the trek. The walk through the forest is like an odyssey to another simpler world, another long past time. With each step down the barely evident grassy trail from the shoddily paved Hurricane Brook Road to the cabin itself, I shed an element of my stressful life at home.

Every morning there, I wake up to the trickling of the pond water through the grassy marshland just a few feet from the cabin. The sunlight, pushing in through the slits in the wooden wall, devises nonsensical shapes on the floorboards. And the birds, like faint muffled bells, tinkle a contented “good morning” from the trees.

Taking leave of the coziness of my cot, swinging open both the wooden and mesh front doors, and stepping outside into primeval nature at its purest state is simultaneously soothing and overwhelming. I look across Halfway Pond to the raw and untouched forest on the western bank, then turn my eyes southward to where the pond water begins to move, spilling into the mile-long Hurricane Brook. The sun filters through the green leaves of the intimidatingly tall trees while squirrels and insects scramble like cogs in some unpredictable machine of nature.

The day might be spent rowing or swimming in the freshwater Halfway Pond, trekking in the dense forest, or reading in the tranquil shade of the cabin. More often, though, it’s spent in silence, drinking in the purity of nature. There’s nothing in that place even remotely reminiscent of the outside world. No car horns, no sounding telephones, not even any light pollution at night.

So if it’s anything, it’s an escape, a place that I sorely miss for the eleven and some months of the year when my life is occupied by deadlines and pressure. It’s somewhere I can remind myself that, once in a while, it’s worth it to just stop and appreciate what’s around me. It’s incredible.

Or at least it would be, if it were true.

As far as I know, there aren’t any log cabins outside Norton, Vermont, and there surely aren’t any belonging to my family. I don’t know about the trees and bushes on a path which may or may not exist, I’ve never seen Hurricane Brook, and I’ve certainly never swum in Halfway Pond.

But there’s a reason I can describe this place. It’s because yes, every long night when I push through to finish that last bit of homework, every stressful evening when I’m plagued by uncertainty about how I did on that test, and every painful morning when I drag myself out of bed, I’m thinking of this hypothetical relaxing log cabin on the New England marshland.

This is fernweh. Simply put, fernweh is a German word, translating loosely to “wanderlust” and more specifically to “homesickness for a place one hasn’t ever been.” Coming from the words fern (far) and weh (pain), it’s a feeling we’ve all felt at some time or another.

So no, I’ve never been to any peaceful cabin in the woods, let alone one in Vermont. But still I know this place. I’m homesick for it, though I’ve never set foot in it in my life.