Travelogue 1046 – May 28

The Price of Pearls

Memory is a set of pearls on a thread.

Last night, as I was putting Little Ren to bed, she said, “Poppy?” She was sleepy and had already been drifting off. Her sister and her mama were getting ready for bed. They were in the bathroom, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Little Ren alone. I lay next to her as she curled up under the blankets. “Poppy,” she said. “Can I say something?” This is a conversational formula the two girls have adopted lately. “Yes,” I answered. “I love you,” she said, and she fell asleep.

These moments make a parent’s life. My little girl fell asleep, and in the hush afterward, I felt connected to a string of moments that had some kinship to this one, quiet and tender. I don’t often think about those moments. They might have slipped away forever if not for being recalled by Little Ren. In these latter years, my life has been an active one, and my attention to the softer side of life has been neglected. 

The issue here is value. How do we assign value to memories? The good news is, the price of pearls is fairly high in our age. We cultivate memories actively, documenting everything, collecting hard drives full of photos. The bad news is it might be an era of inflation. When there are so many pearls on the market, how do we maintain value?

An interesting corollary: how do we value the real moments? The ones generating the memories? We laugh at the tourist who snaps photos without pausing to look at the site with their own eyes. Are we better? Do we know and feel the value of the experience without its pearl, without the memory? Are we living vicariously, through ourselves? Meaning, are we living direct experience, or are we methodically diverting the experience into something to be assigned value later, in the pearl market?

Travelogue 1045 – May 26
Why Do Artists Love Workshopping?

I’ve written a few short plays, and I’m organizing a little event this spring to introduce them to my eager public. My little event is not a stage performance, though. It’s a reading and a discussion. It’s a step toward performances in the autumn, and, strangely, I find this workshop just as exciting as the final performance.

Why do artists like “workshopping” so much? I think a lot about artists and writers, wondering why they do what they do. They are like an exotic species, and I must observe to figure them out.

You might be tempted to compare art to any other product. Perhaps the artist is even freer than other producers. They are licensed to be eccentric and innovative. Isn’t it enough to reveal the final image, idea or dance and delight the world? Why reveal the process? Doesn’t that risk disenchantment and boredom?

But I don’t think the traditional business model quite fits here. Art work as a consumable product is a failed analogy.

To be fair, I don’t think a “traditional business model” exists anywhere. The idle right-wing fantasy of the world being run like a Ford plant is based on warped nostalgia. Ambitious young businesspeople today long to be creatives. Everything is workshopped; every project incorporates agile methods. It seems to me that the 80s devotion to free-market economics – promoting business models as “efficient” – was essentially an anti-democratic movement – painting democracy as “inefficient.”

Anyway, art, like democracy, is a messy process. We do art because we love doing art. The love for making art speaks to art’s definition. In its roots, art means skill. In Greek, artizein meant to prepare. The focus of art was always on the process. We share art most when we share the process.

Art is thinking out loud. It’s a public conversation, a project in transparency. The art object captures human instinct and thought. Why are we so curious about, say, the mechanics of sculpture? How did he or she do that, we ask, and we are quite stirred by the thought of that individual chipping away at stone for weeks or months. We feel flattered somehow. His or her hands represent our own.

Theatre is the messiest of the arts. We love theatre because we love the mess: actors, writers, technicians, possibly musicians and visual artists, all hashing out some very tentative and fleeting moment on the stage. The making of it is the making of a community. The members of communities quarrel; they disappoint each other. They inspire each other. It’s a lot of stress for something so fragile. But the “product” is the work itself. The work challenges, and it rewards, and it educates. It ennobles people because it brings them together in realms of speculation.

There it is. We love workshopping. Every rough draft is a final. Each audience response is art. An art lover should never hesitate to attend a workshop, thinking they want a finished product. Finished theatre is just the curtain and the applause. Would you buy a ticket for the final bow?

Travelogue 1044 – May 22

A Soviet Star for Trying

 

What is satire? I’ve written a short play that might be broadly classified as satire. It’s about an anonymous dictator who is deciding on whether to invade a neighbouring country. I wonder what might have inspired that! It’s a silly play, meant to entertain, and it really only communicates the obvious, that dictators are despicable human beings. So where is the satire in that? Shouldn’t satire tackle broader topics? I’m curious.

 

The first definition to come up for me on Google is: “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.”

 

Merriam-Webster says satire “is a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn.” All right, so we can now call late-night TV ridicule satire. Is that enough?

 

Something makes me hesitate to use the word too liberally. Is it enough to mock the powerful? Trump and his army of the brain-dead, Putin with his cold-as-ice Bond-villain persona, they make ridicule redundant.

 

I see, scrolling down further, another angle on satire: “(in Latin literature) a literary miscellany, especially a poem ridiculing prevalent vices or follies.” The Latin, satura, is described as meaning “poetic medley”.

 

This I like better. This suggests two elements as gatekeepers. Does the satire have some artistic value on its own? And does the comment have a broader social relevance? The satire says something – in an aesthetically pleasing or interesting way – about people and society in general. I think of “Candide”.

 

Well, my piece is anything but “Candide”, and it does not qualify as satire, according to my own little exercise at definition. But it’s still a fun play. Having standards does not negate anything. It just raises the bar, clears the mind, issues a challenge.

 

We can feel two things at the same time. We can be proud of what we create for its own merits, and we can appreciate traditional categories for arts. What do we gain when we label a cheap thriller a “novel”? What does the book gain? It can still be a fun read without being shelved next to Tolstoy. Are we giving stars, like in kindergarten?

 

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Travelogue 1043 – May 6
Standing By Roe v Wade

Little Ren is in a loving phase. She loves everything with an equally approving regard. She loves the flowers of spring. She loves the rabbits and the ducklings. She loves our neighbours, and she loves the ants that occasionally make it into our apartment. She plays with imaginary babies of all sorts, baby unicorns and baby kitties and baby humans. Everything that is alive, and everything that she pretends is alive, is the object of her benign attention. It’s a kind of Christ-like phase, in which everything is blessed in her sunny mind.

They will grow up, my girls, and great realizations will continue to dawn on them, fashioned by the greater complexity in their lives. One day, they will stumble upon an idea of human dignity. It’s an idea that comes in waves, first as a noble intention and then as a pragmatic intention. Dignity means something more after every betrayal, after every insult, after every hard exigency. It’s not easy for human beings to live together in society.

Little Ren fights with her sister constantly. The two girls often declare each other ‘stupid’, and they vow they will never play with the other again. How do we develop respect? The visceral only accretes. It grows a layer of intellectual protest; it grows another layer of moral entrenchments and righteousness. Adults walk the streets with tickertape commentary about everyone they pass scrolling through their minds. Everyone is offensive on some level. How do we develop respect?

One strategy seems to be empathy. The realization that life is a miracle comes in a flash; the realization of what it means to live any single life takes long years of listening. It takes maturity.

Little Ren’s “sanctity of life” phase I have loved. Every phase my girls have enjoyed, I have loved. A part of me mourns the passing of each, but I know there are more developments to enjoy. Even the hard ones I will love. Maturity is in some mysterious way an end unto itself. These are principles bound up in the larger one of human dignity. That is a lifetime.