verses versus

To learn is the someday you’ll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they’ve shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There’s grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth’s bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I’ve made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one’s a god.

The Red Poppy

Well, I’m deeply frustrated all the time. All my plays usually follow a two-year-period of deep frustration and not-writing and there’s usually an aha moment that surfaces gurgling from the pit of despair I’ve fallen into and unlocks the play for me after I’ve convinced myself that I will never write a play again.  But I had an aha moment, I guess in my late 20s, when I stopped thinking about What Kind of Play I Wanted to Write and What Kind of Writer I Wanted to Be. I just gave up. I accepted the fact that I’m a little stupid. That I don’t know exactly what I want to say. That I don’t know what kind of theatre I want to make. That I don’t know how to classify it. I stopped thinking strategically. I stopped trying to prove to people that I was smart through my writing. I stopped trying to write stuff that I thought other people would like. And all that followed a long period of bad writing and deep, deep frustration with the fact that my talent couldn’t live up to my taste. I mean, it still doesn’t.

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally - that what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that. But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection; we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world. A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them - but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.