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Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Thursday, January 24, 2013
On Connection
Connections stem from vulnerability. A friendship may be struck amidst a shared interest, cousins may coexist by the threads of familial ties, but true connection resides only in struggle- and in the sharing of it.
A familiar story: a man and a woman begin dating. They are attracted to one another, they share common interests. Months pass, and they still enjoy each other’s company. They have established a relationship.
These months pass in the shadows; the relationship is but a silhouette. There is pleasure — perhaps even joy — but there is no connection. There is no connection because these first few months are agonized over. Each spends so much time, so much energy in crafting the persona that they present to the other.
The man says: I am a PR specialist. I love baseball and, when I was a kid, trains. I am knowledgeable about wine and literature, but I have a soft spot for raucous comedy. That is all you need to know.
The woman says: I work in HR. I read a lot of Paulo Coehlo and can’t resist a good pasta alfredo. I rewatch Casablanca every year, and I want nothing more than to spend a week in Paris. That is all you need to know.
The woman’s father dies. They attend the funeral, and the woman loses control. She puts on a smiling face, but an obviously forced one, until she can’t take any more, running out of the funeral home in a frenzy.
The man follows after, finding her at the gas station across the street, smoking a cigarette.
I didn’t know you smoked.
I quit. But I still have a weakness.
She left her armor in the funeral home, and does not care to retrieve it.
I have to smile for my mother, she says. We were never allowed to show emotion. A true lady never reveals herself. That’s what my mother always said. When I was sad, Dad always knew, but he also knew that tears weren’t allowed, so he built me a treehouse in the backyard. When life overwhelmed me, he would sneak me out to the treehouse and let me sob until it was all out.
He missed all of my recitals, though. Every one. Work was always more important. He was a good man, and he was not.
She goes on to tell of her jealousy of her sister, who always outperformed her, in everything. She spent her childhood concocting ways to sabotage her sister, to deflect a little of her parents’ pride towards herself. She needed it, she fed on it, but she only ever seemed to catch the morsels her sister dropped.
This is weakness, and this is life. This is where true connection is established, because life resides in the cracks in our armor.
This is not a phenomenon restricted to dating couples. We do it everywhere, with everyone.
We put on our personas, our masks, with our boss, with our friends, with our parents, with the barista at Starbucks.
That’s okay, of course. All of these people serve different needs. I am a football and a Tolstoy fan. I adore them both, but I present them each with the part of myself that they serve. So it is with people- they see that part of us that they serve.
But they only see the surface. We hide the weakness. We. We lament the very lack of connection that we — only we — can establish by opening ourselves and saying “This is me.”
The man says: I am terrified of going bald. I make myself the hero of childhood stories when, in fact, I was often purely a spectator. I choose to eat steak when sometimes I prefer pasta because I want to convey masculinity. I have been fired for incompetence, and I was grateful for it, because I was truly terrible at that job.
The woman says: I am afraid of turning into my mother. I am envious of women who make more money than me. I work so hard to look beautiful every morning. I pretend to enjoy Henry James and George Eliot to make myself look smarter, but they both bore me to tears. I eat salad when I really want a steak.
Now, they are connected.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
The Unmentionables
We spend our lives in minutiae. Trivialities have become — or perhaps have always been — the backbone of our existence. It’s a shame, really.
The things that matter, typically, are off-limits. So much so, in fact, that without the exile of the meaningful, art would not exist. It is the primary goal of art to shed light on the meaningful. Great art goes deeper than we are willing to, usually shocking our delicate sensibilities.
Kokoschka, by turning the mirror on himself, turned the mirror on us, and we did not like what we saw. Freud, though his conclusions were largely off the mark, exposed the cogs and the levers that comprise our depths- and we still struggle to confront the truths he illuminated.
For more modern examples, look to Zero Dark Thirty which takes us to a place we’d rather not go, makes us aware of a world we’d rather not acknowledge.
Even Louis CK, perhaps the most successful comedian of our day, has risen to the top precisely because of his willingness to spotlight the most revolting aspects of our nature.
Art would not exist without the need for it- but where does the need come from? From the depths of our souls, from the darkest corners of our being, where we hide the realities we dare not expose. Perhaps if we bury these things deep enough — if they never see the light of day — it’s as if they don’t really exist at all.
The tragedy of this suppression is not simply an abstract uneasiness between reality and our projection of it. Burying our very nature has pragmatic consequences.
To use perhaps the most poignant (and obvious) example, let’s talk about sex. It is perhaps the basest of all instincts, the most primitive of desires. In fact, I can think of no better word to use here than base, which is rooted in the Latin basis. We’ve twisted the word to mean that which is without moral principles, but the fact is that we attach these principles to instincts which are the basis of our being, essentially attaching man-made ideas to natural phenomenon. What is more foundational than the desires which spring from our need to procreate?
Yet we spent centuries, even millennium stigmatizing the act- and what has been the result? We’re no nearer to understanding sex than we were hundreds of years ago. Our suppressed desires culminate in the most profitable industry known to man. By condemning the act, we cultivate a world in which men and women are quite content to fork over large portions of their paycheck to satisfy their desires. We put sex in movies, in books, in magazines, even on billboards, because our appetite for sex is so unquenched that we must turn to other outlets to satisfy that appetite.
Yet perversions still exist, atrocities and molestations occur more often than we’d like to admit, or even acknowledge.
By its very suppression, its demonization, we give sex unparalleled power over us.
Does it not seem strange that parents still struggle to convey to their children the literal starting point of life itself? We have pamphlets, seminars, classes devoted to talking to our kids about sex, and by the time we’ve taken in all the information and prepared a plan, we find we are too late. They borrowed a friend’s mother’s magazine, or caught a cable show when we weren’t looking, or are even discussing the enterprise freely amongst their circles, and we are left to wonder what kind of world we live in.
That is a question we should, of course, ask: what kind of world do we live in? We must also be prepared to answer the question truthfully: we live in a world in which the most foundational aspects of the human experience are intentionally hidden from view.
Many great movies and books have taken a page from Woody Allen: expose, even magnify the neuroses to which we are all vulnerable. The Artist nearly swept the Oscars last year because of its naked portrayal of a man’s simple but unwavering desire for recognition, and the crushing consequences of the world withholding that recognition. The Catcher in the Rye masterfully opened the door to a world which we all experienced as a teenager: a world of overwhelming confusion and angst.
We love these stories because we identify with them. We see our own hidden depths in them. They touch us, they move us, and we applaud.
And as soon as the movie is over, as soon as we close the book, as soon as the heartbreaking song is silenced, we return to our lives, to our loved ones, and we strike up conversations about football, about the weather, about ohmygod, did you hear what Suzie’s boyfriend said about Jane?!
Art succeeds because it exposes these truths to the light, holding them up for all to behold, saying “See! This is what we are made of! Not atoms or oxygen or blood, but neuroses, fears, desires, and hope!” Art reaches inside of us, pokes and prods into our darkest corners, and finds the things that we have hidden- and when it finds something once lost to us, we applaud. We applaud art for having the courage to do what we do not: to look at reality with clear eyes and say: “I will not fear you.” The only sure way to control our reality is to withhold fear. To fear a thing is to see it through broken glasses. By removing fear, by embracing the truth of our reality, we remove the glasses; we see clearly- and mastery, even of reality itself, will only come to those who are willing to see clearly.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Friday, January 11, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Through the Eyes of a Child
The other day, my daughter and I were playing detective. She was the detective, and I played the part of the exasperated client. I had lost my keys, you see, and desperately needed her to find them for me.
In her preparation, she commandeered my leather messenger bag, putting together a ‘detective kit.’ I offered to make her a permanent kit, so we found an old organizer, a flashlight, some papers, and a few other things. A detective must be properly equipped.
While making the kit, I noticed that she’d found and included my old Blackberry. I’ve been using this phone in rehearsal for my current play — being so light and expendable, it worked perfectly — so I offered to let her use my old Android phone, a three-year-old HTC Incredible which I hadn’t touched in two years. We swapped phones, putting the Incredible in the kit.
At the end of our little skit (don’t worry- she found my keys), without thinking, I told her that she needed to keep the phone in her detective kit. A private eye can’t exactly go walking around without a phone now, can she?
When I made the offer, it was of, to say the least, fleeting importance in my mind, almost an afterthought.
Then my daughter smiled. A huge, ear-to-ear, ohmygod I can’t believe this is happening to me smile.
“I have a phone!? Really? Seriously? I have a phone now!?”
I immediately felt the need to manage expectations.
The phone doesn’t make phone calls, honey, it’s not ‘hooked up.’ I suppose, though, you could connect it to wifi and do some stuff with it.
She didn’t care that this was, essentially, an older, slower version of the tablet she already has. She just let herself get carried away by the excitement.
It reminded me of a description of the word ‘geek’ I recently read. According to the author, a geek is someone with a license to get excited. It’s not appropriate to be overly excited about anything; it’s not the adult thing to do. Geeks, though, make no qualms about their excitement. When a new phone, or a new app, or any number of wonderful devices or services spring up, we get excited, offering no apologies. We’re free to let the excitement carry us.
But why is this an exception, rather than the rule? Who came along at a given point in time and convinced us that child-like excitement must be banished once we pass into the realm of the grown-ups?
Excitement is the stuff of progress, after all. Who ever accomplished anything that they weren’t excited about? Edison was excited about light. Picasso was excited about perspective, and Mark Twain was certainly excited about Tom Sawyer.
It is the excitement which moves us forward, which propels us into the next stage. It is those who can find an excited child, kneel beside them and see with their eyes, through the muck of reality to the dreams waiting to be lived, that create our tomorrows.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
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