Travelogue 918 – June 27
The Price of Sugar
The heat is muggy and oppressive. Sleeping is difficult, and so is work. The humidity stifles ambition. Last night, the sky was flashing with lightning, and I was wishing for a hard, cleansing rain. But the heavy clouds never offered anything but a drizzle.
My little family sat together in the living room with the TV on and the window open, half lying on the couch in a torpor. We snacked on mandarins and cherries. We’re constantly thirsty these days, and so we eat a lot of fruit. Especially now that we’re trying to be healthier. Baby has been lecturing me about my chocolate habit.
Last week, Papa was groaning about terrible toothaches. They came on every evening during our family time and made Papa very grouchy. That’s when Baby started with her lectures about chocolate, and Papa has taken her point. Now we have bowls of fruit everywhere. I’m not sure the dentist would approve. Sugar is sugar, natural or refined, right? Maybe I have to eat plain oatmeal for the rest of my life.
Dutch dentists waste no time. Within minutes, he had produced an x-ray. Within two more minutes, he was pulling on the offending wisdom tooth. Not ten minutes afterward, I was ejected onto the street with a wad of cotton in my mouth. That was after paying sixty euros, by the way. I questioned the woman behind the counter. “Really, that’s all my wisdom tooth is worth? That was a part of my body. That tooth was attached to my jaw for many, many years.” She wasn’t interested.
I wandered down the Nieuwe Binnenweg in a mournful state, my cheek numb and my mouth full of cotton. I could think of no better way to honour the tooth’s memory than to buy some pastries as Jordy’s the best bakery in town, placed strategically near my dentist’s office. I couldn’t eat anything yet, so I carried on with dejected walk, bag of goodies in hand. I would end up passing most of these treats on to the girls.
The girls went to bed, and the long, slow summer evening dissolved into darkness behind the flashing clouds There was still no relief from the humidity. I opened the front door, desperate for some air. I sat outside a while, watching the lightning. A number of neighbours were doing the same. It was kind of pleasant, after all. The storm did bring with it a cooling breeze. There was nothing else to do in this heat. At least there was no pain. My tooth was gone, and there was peace.
Saturday, June 27, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
Travelogue 917 – June 19
All the Questions
It was a lovely day spring day, the last spring day. The weather was intermittently sunny –intermittent often being the best we can hope for in Holland – and so I promised the girls they would each get a ride on the bike. Baby Jos I took across the river to the bakery for treats and to the Zeeman’s for socks for both girls. They burn through those little socks very quickly.
Baby Jos is so big now, she barely fits into the bicycle seat. We have to buckle her shoes into place so they don’t get caught among the spokes of the wheels, but she’s such a tall girl her knees rise high above her lap and swing back and forth as we ride. She’s so heavy, the back tire provides little cushion against the bumps in the road. This summer I have to teach her how to ride a bike. I didn’t expect her to grow so quickly; or perhaps it’s the time that’s grown so quickly.
They have their similarities, Time and Baby Jos. They are both incessantly asking me hard questions, ones I can’t answer. That’s Baby’s conversational style now, insistent questions. Her goal in conversation is to be heard. She wants to hear her words fed back to her, and she gets upset when someone is too distracted to do that. That aggressive note seems familiar. Ah yes, it’s the unrelenting bray of American political discourse. How could I have missed that? In a child, it’s a stage. In adults, it’s the desperate shouting of bullies. It’s the sad cry for help of the morally deficient.
Baby Jos is no bully. She already has her moments of being uncannily perceptive. She hears what you say. She notices what you’re feeling. She can be surprisingly sympathetic. Papa has been experiencing another round of tooth pain, and Baby Jos gives him a hug sometimes and says she wishes she could give him a special present. The present would make everything better.
Baby’s questions reflect her intellectual and moral growth. She’s constantly acting out stories during the day, stories populated with cats and butterflies and dinosaurs. She needs to figure the world out. Her urgency is the hunger for life.
The urgency of political bullies is the urgency of arrested development, adults who need to be heard though they have nothing to say. Society has failed to come up with mechanisms to care for people like this. Instead, our society keeps parroting the false notion that all opinions are valuable and confusing that notion with the much more sacred rule that tells us every person is valuable. My wife values me as a man and as a partner, but she does not value every opinion of mine. I have learned that I am not as smart as I thought I was, and I have been able to do that without being discounted as a human being.
I have a feeling that Baby Jos will play a similar role in my life. She corrects me all the time. She is the big sister through and through. She knows how things should be. “You need to share, Pop.” Yes, Baby. “If you don’t share, then your babies won’t have any, and we will cry.” I’m sorry, Baby.
We have made it across the river, Papa pedalling hard up the big hill and coasting down the other side, pointing to the pretty river below. On the way back, we watch a boat emerge through the narrow passageway underneath the same bridge. Baby Jos corrects me. “That’s a ship. Like what Sinter Klaas comes on.” Oh yes! She’s remembered the December school activity, in which the class went to the pier to watch Sinter Klaas’s arrival. She has a great memory.
And she continues to jabber some more, and she continues to ask her questions. I turn to tell her I can’t hear. She’s behind me, and the wind carries her voice away. But she keeps talking anyway.
All the Questions
It was a lovely day spring day, the last spring day. The weather was intermittently sunny –intermittent often being the best we can hope for in Holland – and so I promised the girls they would each get a ride on the bike. Baby Jos I took across the river to the bakery for treats and to the Zeeman’s for socks for both girls. They burn through those little socks very quickly.
Baby Jos is so big now, she barely fits into the bicycle seat. We have to buckle her shoes into place so they don’t get caught among the spokes of the wheels, but she’s such a tall girl her knees rise high above her lap and swing back and forth as we ride. She’s so heavy, the back tire provides little cushion against the bumps in the road. This summer I have to teach her how to ride a bike. I didn’t expect her to grow so quickly; or perhaps it’s the time that’s grown so quickly.
They have their similarities, Time and Baby Jos. They are both incessantly asking me hard questions, ones I can’t answer. That’s Baby’s conversational style now, insistent questions. Her goal in conversation is to be heard. She wants to hear her words fed back to her, and she gets upset when someone is too distracted to do that. That aggressive note seems familiar. Ah yes, it’s the unrelenting bray of American political discourse. How could I have missed that? In a child, it’s a stage. In adults, it’s the desperate shouting of bullies. It’s the sad cry for help of the morally deficient.
Baby Jos is no bully. She already has her moments of being uncannily perceptive. She hears what you say. She notices what you’re feeling. She can be surprisingly sympathetic. Papa has been experiencing another round of tooth pain, and Baby Jos gives him a hug sometimes and says she wishes she could give him a special present. The present would make everything better.
Baby’s questions reflect her intellectual and moral growth. She’s constantly acting out stories during the day, stories populated with cats and butterflies and dinosaurs. She needs to figure the world out. Her urgency is the hunger for life.
The urgency of political bullies is the urgency of arrested development, adults who need to be heard though they have nothing to say. Society has failed to come up with mechanisms to care for people like this. Instead, our society keeps parroting the false notion that all opinions are valuable and confusing that notion with the much more sacred rule that tells us every person is valuable. My wife values me as a man and as a partner, but she does not value every opinion of mine. I have learned that I am not as smart as I thought I was, and I have been able to do that without being discounted as a human being.
I have a feeling that Baby Jos will play a similar role in my life. She corrects me all the time. She is the big sister through and through. She knows how things should be. “You need to share, Pop.” Yes, Baby. “If you don’t share, then your babies won’t have any, and we will cry.” I’m sorry, Baby.
We have made it across the river, Papa pedalling hard up the big hill and coasting down the other side, pointing to the pretty river below. On the way back, we watch a boat emerge through the narrow passageway underneath the same bridge. Baby Jos corrects me. “That’s a ship. Like what Sinter Klaas comes on.” Oh yes! She’s remembered the December school activity, in which the class went to the pier to watch Sinter Klaas’s arrival. She has a great memory.
And she continues to jabber some more, and she continues to ask her questions. I turn to tell her I can’t hear. She’s behind me, and the wind carries her voice away. But she keeps talking anyway.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
Travelogue 916 – June 10
Jurassic Dreams
At breakfast, I asked the girls about their dreams. Little Ren answered, like she had before, that she had dreamt about baby dinosaurs. She’s been fascinated with dinosaurs for a while. She loves cute babies, and she loves dinosaurs, and so she dreams about baby dinosaurs. Even a baby dinosaur can be cute.
I went through a dinosaur phase as a boy. It’s fun to learn about them again. What a wonder that these monsters existed, wandering the whole planet as some sort of alpha genus! What a wonder to think it was so long ago, and that they lasted for so long! Dinosaurs flourished for something like 160 million years. It boggles the mind. Humans have been around for three million. And they’ve been writing for only about five thousand. That’s one two-hundredth of one million years. It took them a tiny fraction of that five thousand years to develop industry and threaten the planet with a mass extinction. And we look at dinosaurs with horror!
It’s also strange the hold that dinosaurs have over us. We dream about them. They star in our films, TV shows, and theme parks. They inspire us and frighten us. It can’t be entirely coincidental that the first great age of paleontological discovery overlapped with the triumph of Darwinism in science and culture. The dinosaurs seemed “survival of the fittest” in blood, bone and teeth. They were the embodiment of brutal nature. We loved them. The metaphor of “Jurassic Park” is apt; they’re more real, more present, than they’ve been in 60 million years. It’s odd to consider that for most of humanity, living through their brief five thousand years of ascendance, there was no awareness at all of these great monsters from the past. Aurelius, firmly convinced that time provided no surprises, might have been surprised.
For some, the idea of dinosaurs, so wed to ideas of evolution, is oddly threatening. I think the religious right finds dinosaurs the moral equivalent of Democrats. Maybe they are fallen angels, like Obama or Pelosi. Maybe Democrats are essentially figments of our imagination, too: fever dreams to make believers toss and turn at night.
Little Ren wasn’t frightened by her dream, even though the story sounded as though it might be. Two baby dinosaurs followed their mother into a cave. There were two raptors hunting them. The cave shrank, and so their mother shrank, too. She was a baby, too. I think this is the gist of the dream. I admit, I’ve had to interpret some of Ren’s language.
Baby Jos is more into dogs now. She received the gift of a mechanical puppy for her birthday a few days ago, a puppy that yips and whines, walks and sits, eats and sleeps. Jos and her puppy Sparkle are inseparable now. I’m afraid this can only lead to uncomfortable eventualities, like the burden of living pets, real puppies and the hair they shed, the food they quickly process, the needs for baths and walks and training. I might prefer a baby dinosaur. Let him loose in the neighbourhood, and he fends for himself in Darwinian fashion.
Jurassic Dreams
At breakfast, I asked the girls about their dreams. Little Ren answered, like she had before, that she had dreamt about baby dinosaurs. She’s been fascinated with dinosaurs for a while. She loves cute babies, and she loves dinosaurs, and so she dreams about baby dinosaurs. Even a baby dinosaur can be cute.
I went through a dinosaur phase as a boy. It’s fun to learn about them again. What a wonder that these monsters existed, wandering the whole planet as some sort of alpha genus! What a wonder to think it was so long ago, and that they lasted for so long! Dinosaurs flourished for something like 160 million years. It boggles the mind. Humans have been around for three million. And they’ve been writing for only about five thousand. That’s one two-hundredth of one million years. It took them a tiny fraction of that five thousand years to develop industry and threaten the planet with a mass extinction. And we look at dinosaurs with horror!
It’s also strange the hold that dinosaurs have over us. We dream about them. They star in our films, TV shows, and theme parks. They inspire us and frighten us. It can’t be entirely coincidental that the first great age of paleontological discovery overlapped with the triumph of Darwinism in science and culture. The dinosaurs seemed “survival of the fittest” in blood, bone and teeth. They were the embodiment of brutal nature. We loved them. The metaphor of “Jurassic Park” is apt; they’re more real, more present, than they’ve been in 60 million years. It’s odd to consider that for most of humanity, living through their brief five thousand years of ascendance, there was no awareness at all of these great monsters from the past. Aurelius, firmly convinced that time provided no surprises, might have been surprised.
For some, the idea of dinosaurs, so wed to ideas of evolution, is oddly threatening. I think the religious right finds dinosaurs the moral equivalent of Democrats. Maybe they are fallen angels, like Obama or Pelosi. Maybe Democrats are essentially figments of our imagination, too: fever dreams to make believers toss and turn at night.
Little Ren wasn’t frightened by her dream, even though the story sounded as though it might be. Two baby dinosaurs followed their mother into a cave. There were two raptors hunting them. The cave shrank, and so their mother shrank, too. She was a baby, too. I think this is the gist of the dream. I admit, I’ve had to interpret some of Ren’s language.
Baby Jos is more into dogs now. She received the gift of a mechanical puppy for her birthday a few days ago, a puppy that yips and whines, walks and sits, eats and sleeps. Jos and her puppy Sparkle are inseparable now. I’m afraid this can only lead to uncomfortable eventualities, like the burden of living pets, real puppies and the hair they shed, the food they quickly process, the needs for baths and walks and training. I might prefer a baby dinosaur. Let him loose in the neighbourhood, and he fends for himself in Darwinian fashion.
Friday, June 05, 2020
Travelogue 915 – June 5
Our City
I carry on with my reading of Aurelius’s “Meditations”. (Would the emperor have objected to that title? The term wouldn’t have carried the same baggage for him as it does for us, its vaguely eastern flavour, or perhaps its suggestion of parallels with essay writers like Montaigne, who Aurelius might have found effete. Would he have understood the kind of packaging he and his writings have been subjected to, making him a viable literary product?)
Reading the Meditations during the various crises of 2020 has thrown some of his principles into interesting relief. Take passage 33 from Book Ten, for example: “In short, never forget that nothing can injure the true citizen if it does not injure the city itself, and nothing can injure the city unless it injures law.”
On the face of it, this sounds like a naïve, or even primitive formulation, but right away it confronts us with Aurelius’s emphasis on social identity. While ideas about interdependence are not too challenging, we’ve drifted so far toward individualism that Aurelius might have been astonished. Imagine his reaction to images of gun-toting demonstrators gathering during a pandemic, shouting they needed a haircut.
What’s a haircut without other people? What’s writing without readers? What’s public health without the public? What’s policing without a society that trusts you? Aurelius would take it further. Inherent in humanity’s purpose is service - to each other and nature and the gods.
Key to understanding purpose was reason. Human reason was created by nature in nature’s image, and it provided the link between service as purpose and service as action. It guided us in the moment. Staying to true to reason and nature would supply purpose. And this purpose was given meaning by service. Nature, in this way, served as law. We interpret nature’s law with reason. And thus we arrive at another sacred principle in the Roman mind. It’s axiomatic that Roman law was critical to the success of the Republic and the Empire. It became a world view. Divinity and law would have been difficult to untangle in the Roman mind.
Noting that the words citizen and civilization derive from the Latin word for city, (and the word police from the Greek word for city,) we begin to see familial relationships among the concepts. We begin to realize how important the city was to classical cultures and how far-reaching the metaphor. As classical culture fell into permanent decline, the concept survived in Christian theology, St Augustine writing about the ‘City of God’, extending the metaphor further. Aurelius was not writing about the physical city of Rome, but about the community of humanity. In this context, we note that, in the quote above, he refers not just to the random citizen, but to the ‘true’ citizen. Does that mean true by definition or true by loyalty? I don’t have the original in Greek at hand, so I’ll guess that it amounts to the same thing. The human loyal to reason and service can never be injured in his essence. Only through lapses in reason can the member of the human community be separated from purpose and compromised.
What can this tell us in 2020? Is it possible that Floyd’s death awakened our own fear of ‘injury’ in a state that has fallen from grace? The police have proven – even more so during the demonstrations – that their perceived purpose has drifted far from service. Are we owning the cognitive dissonance between how our police and government act and what reason tells us is decent and safe and corresponds to nature’s law? That’s a liberal interpretation, I admit. Aurelius spoke much more to personal responsibility than to political science. Maybe it explains better why someone, one among hundreds of thousands, might protest, perhaps seeing the protests as his or her true city. He or she risks physical injury but finds safety for the soul there. Rather dramatic, that interpretation. But it’s worth considering: how do we find that city of Aurelius’s vision?
Our City
I carry on with my reading of Aurelius’s “Meditations”. (Would the emperor have objected to that title? The term wouldn’t have carried the same baggage for him as it does for us, its vaguely eastern flavour, or perhaps its suggestion of parallels with essay writers like Montaigne, who Aurelius might have found effete. Would he have understood the kind of packaging he and his writings have been subjected to, making him a viable literary product?)
Reading the Meditations during the various crises of 2020 has thrown some of his principles into interesting relief. Take passage 33 from Book Ten, for example: “In short, never forget that nothing can injure the true citizen if it does not injure the city itself, and nothing can injure the city unless it injures law.”
On the face of it, this sounds like a naïve, or even primitive formulation, but right away it confronts us with Aurelius’s emphasis on social identity. While ideas about interdependence are not too challenging, we’ve drifted so far toward individualism that Aurelius might have been astonished. Imagine his reaction to images of gun-toting demonstrators gathering during a pandemic, shouting they needed a haircut.
What’s a haircut without other people? What’s writing without readers? What’s public health without the public? What’s policing without a society that trusts you? Aurelius would take it further. Inherent in humanity’s purpose is service - to each other and nature and the gods.
Key to understanding purpose was reason. Human reason was created by nature in nature’s image, and it provided the link between service as purpose and service as action. It guided us in the moment. Staying to true to reason and nature would supply purpose. And this purpose was given meaning by service. Nature, in this way, served as law. We interpret nature’s law with reason. And thus we arrive at another sacred principle in the Roman mind. It’s axiomatic that Roman law was critical to the success of the Republic and the Empire. It became a world view. Divinity and law would have been difficult to untangle in the Roman mind.
Noting that the words citizen and civilization derive from the Latin word for city, (and the word police from the Greek word for city,) we begin to see familial relationships among the concepts. We begin to realize how important the city was to classical cultures and how far-reaching the metaphor. As classical culture fell into permanent decline, the concept survived in Christian theology, St Augustine writing about the ‘City of God’, extending the metaphor further. Aurelius was not writing about the physical city of Rome, but about the community of humanity. In this context, we note that, in the quote above, he refers not just to the random citizen, but to the ‘true’ citizen. Does that mean true by definition or true by loyalty? I don’t have the original in Greek at hand, so I’ll guess that it amounts to the same thing. The human loyal to reason and service can never be injured in his essence. Only through lapses in reason can the member of the human community be separated from purpose and compromised.
What can this tell us in 2020? Is it possible that Floyd’s death awakened our own fear of ‘injury’ in a state that has fallen from grace? The police have proven – even more so during the demonstrations – that their perceived purpose has drifted far from service. Are we owning the cognitive dissonance between how our police and government act and what reason tells us is decent and safe and corresponds to nature’s law? That’s a liberal interpretation, I admit. Aurelius spoke much more to personal responsibility than to political science. Maybe it explains better why someone, one among hundreds of thousands, might protest, perhaps seeing the protests as his or her true city. He or she risks physical injury but finds safety for the soul there. Rather dramatic, that interpretation. But it’s worth considering: how do we find that city of Aurelius’s vision?
Wednesday, June 03, 2020
Travelogue 914 – June 3
Comedy and Art
Movie 4 for my ten-movie Facebook challenge was “Being John Malkovich”. “The Apartment” (Movie 3) had wit. It had style. It was elegantly performed and produced. It was my inspiration to write for theatre. At the same time I caught “The Apartment” on TV “Being John Malkovich” was coming out in movie theatres. I was absolutely enchanted. Who wasn’t? It was bizarre and entertaining throughout. It was unique and also familiar, making you wonder why it hadn’t been done before. It was clever, but the humour was written deeper into the code of the script than witty dialogue. The premise was funny. The performances were great. Just Malkovich’s “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment” was worth the watch.
Watching it was one of those artistic experiences of possibility. This was a writer’s movie, and Charlie Kaufman was a kind of revolutionary in his time. The intellectual challenge here was ‘why not?’ Why not be this silly? Why not re-imagine celebrity this way? Why not imagine an evil puppeteer? And cast Cusack?
Comedy can be categorized in many ways. It has opened itself to me in three phases, I would say, as I’ve thought about it, written about it, tried creating it. The first is the witty, “Apartment”, sort of comedy. This would naturally be the sort that appeals to writers first. Witty comedy is playful, and it continually refreshes itself. It finds its own limited audience among those who have a love of and facility with language.
The second sort was the “Malkovich” sort, in which the comedy was in the premise. ‘In the architecture’, I want to say because the successful writer here is an architect. The concept itself is the joke. It’s daring, and it’s exceedingly hard to achieve because building a funny house means making it funny all the way through, from blueprint to furnishings. It takes more than populating a standard drawing room comedy with unusually funny characters, and manipulating them in very funny ways, as Oscar Wilde might have done. The imagination needs to be engaged in every detail of the structure.
The third sort of comedy to capture my imagination has been farce. I think it would generally be categorized as the basest and the easiest form of comedy. Why do I come to it last? I don’t know, but I do. Maybe it’s the joyfulness of it. There’s art to wit, but there’s less joy. And joy in a concept piece serves a higher purpose, which might be said to diminish joy, if you think joy is its own purpose. A couple years ago, I delved into the Commedia dell'Arte, inspired by my trip to Venice, to perform a farce of mine, as it happens. I started reading and thinking about the Commedia dell'Arte compulsively. I can’t say I broke the code - I sensed mysteries about art and psychology there, - but I did gain some perspective about the evolution of farce from simple street entertainment.
The fact is, since I’ve been in Holland, most of my theatrical writing has been farcical. I’m just wrapping up another silly project now, a serialized Zoom production that was a spoof on “Game of Thrones”. I wrote and directed, and our theatre group performed it. We spent two months on it. Why? It was a lot of work, and the story was ridiculous. We didn’t rehearse; each episode we read once and taped. These were not little gems of sophistication. It was a quarantine project to amuse ourselves. And still I love these videos.
What I keep secret is that I see great art in these little pieces. It isn’t the art of the polished sort. It isn’t the sort that speaks of mastery or that suggests the Sublime. It’s the sort that captures the kind of convergences that I think makes theatre so vital: just the right gesture for just the right word, timed just right and delivered with pleasure. It makes me think of that wonderful word ‘happy’, which, in its etymological roots suggests chance and luck. I’m in love with this kind of art right now, the kind that shows spontaneity, is uneven and imperfect, but every so often produces the radiant moment.
Comedy and Art
Movie 4 for my ten-movie Facebook challenge was “Being John Malkovich”. “The Apartment” (Movie 3) had wit. It had style. It was elegantly performed and produced. It was my inspiration to write for theatre. At the same time I caught “The Apartment” on TV “Being John Malkovich” was coming out in movie theatres. I was absolutely enchanted. Who wasn’t? It was bizarre and entertaining throughout. It was unique and also familiar, making you wonder why it hadn’t been done before. It was clever, but the humour was written deeper into the code of the script than witty dialogue. The premise was funny. The performances were great. Just Malkovich’s “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment” was worth the watch.
Watching it was one of those artistic experiences of possibility. This was a writer’s movie, and Charlie Kaufman was a kind of revolutionary in his time. The intellectual challenge here was ‘why not?’ Why not be this silly? Why not re-imagine celebrity this way? Why not imagine an evil puppeteer? And cast Cusack?
Comedy can be categorized in many ways. It has opened itself to me in three phases, I would say, as I’ve thought about it, written about it, tried creating it. The first is the witty, “Apartment”, sort of comedy. This would naturally be the sort that appeals to writers first. Witty comedy is playful, and it continually refreshes itself. It finds its own limited audience among those who have a love of and facility with language.
The second sort was the “Malkovich” sort, in which the comedy was in the premise. ‘In the architecture’, I want to say because the successful writer here is an architect. The concept itself is the joke. It’s daring, and it’s exceedingly hard to achieve because building a funny house means making it funny all the way through, from blueprint to furnishings. It takes more than populating a standard drawing room comedy with unusually funny characters, and manipulating them in very funny ways, as Oscar Wilde might have done. The imagination needs to be engaged in every detail of the structure.
The third sort of comedy to capture my imagination has been farce. I think it would generally be categorized as the basest and the easiest form of comedy. Why do I come to it last? I don’t know, but I do. Maybe it’s the joyfulness of it. There’s art to wit, but there’s less joy. And joy in a concept piece serves a higher purpose, which might be said to diminish joy, if you think joy is its own purpose. A couple years ago, I delved into the Commedia dell'Arte, inspired by my trip to Venice, to perform a farce of mine, as it happens. I started reading and thinking about the Commedia dell'Arte compulsively. I can’t say I broke the code - I sensed mysteries about art and psychology there, - but I did gain some perspective about the evolution of farce from simple street entertainment.
The fact is, since I’ve been in Holland, most of my theatrical writing has been farcical. I’m just wrapping up another silly project now, a serialized Zoom production that was a spoof on “Game of Thrones”. I wrote and directed, and our theatre group performed it. We spent two months on it. Why? It was a lot of work, and the story was ridiculous. We didn’t rehearse; each episode we read once and taped. These were not little gems of sophistication. It was a quarantine project to amuse ourselves. And still I love these videos.
What I keep secret is that I see great art in these little pieces. It isn’t the art of the polished sort. It isn’t the sort that speaks of mastery or that suggests the Sublime. It’s the sort that captures the kind of convergences that I think makes theatre so vital: just the right gesture for just the right word, timed just right and delivered with pleasure. It makes me think of that wonderful word ‘happy’, which, in its etymological roots suggests chance and luck. I’m in love with this kind of art right now, the kind that shows spontaneity, is uneven and imperfect, but every so often produces the radiant moment.
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