December 23, 2012

Odd waking. Disoriented, a little, in the familiar surroundings.

Finished the draft of the Thanksgiving play in the café yesterday morning. Typing it out onto the computer will be the first rewrite. Fighting my own handwriting will be a year’s end penance.

Saw Marley again last night. Met with Casey and then his girlfriend, and got caught up a little on the exciting life in Chicago. I’d looked forward to C’s company, but it was clear the evening would be more enjoyable for him with his girlfriend, so they took our tickets and I bought another in The Remoteness.  MM had picked up some of the mislaid pieces, and the performance was, if anything, stronger than the night before. The audience, though, was turbulent. I sat beside a very big teenage boy, and though that in itself is pleasant enough, my ribs are bruised from his flailing elbows, and never for one moment did he stop vibrating his leg in place. It was like watching a play from atop a washing machine. That was, all in all, a little sweet, for while he was vibrating he was watching the play. Yet around us people were coming and going and whispering to one another. A number of special people were in the audience, and though one applauds that, in theory, how does one profit from an event one fidgets through or talks through or has to leave–repeatedly-- because of hyperactivity or, perhaps, simple lack of self-discipline? What does one say to their caretakers other than “a stage play is perhaps not the best entertainment choice”? We mistrust sacred ceremonies, because they challenge social pieties, but there are some moments more significant to our souls than daily life, and they require special rules. It is not healthy for people to be invariably, invincibly the center of their own lives. Theater can heal this, but only if you let it. It is not all right for anyone to drain attention from the stage for any reason. Hands fly up with exceptions, but I say there are no exceptions of choice. You can’t help having a heart attack or a grand mal, but that’s where it ends. No conversation is necessary while a scene goes. If a child still needs your moment-by-moment care, don’t bring him to adult theater. There need be no curtain speech about turning off cell-phones, for bringing them to the theater should not even be considered. There is nothing so urgent in your life that you need that phone. If there is, stay home and tend to it. Theater is time for you to stand outside yourself. If you can’t or refuse to stand outside yourself, you have wasted your own money and everyone else’s. Your mind is on the stage, or you stay home. No adult needs to leave a play during an act, and if they do, they shouldn’t have come.

When I start in on tirades like this, people think I’m championing respect for actors and the like, and of course I am, but there is far more to it. It’s for the audience member, to extract the full nectar of the experience. The theater is a sacred space where things happen to one outside the power of one’s daily life. You must leave daily life behind for that little space, as if you don’t, the magic will not work. Your hourly concerns must be set aside; you must yourself for a brief time be removed from the center of your own attention. It is a ceremony of transfiguration, and there is no transfiguration to one clinging to every bit of the daily self. There are loud musicals and laugh-riots where one can go and behave as one does in one’s own living room. Choose that, if you need to. Come to serious theater to forget who you are. Come to serious theater for the holy.

I think the same about the classroom. Those who drag in late with their coffee mugs and their McDonald’s breakfasts and their cell phones ever at ready are not actually attending class. They’re allowing class to be a part of their own scattered and incidental lives, maybe, and they may end up accumulating credits, but they have not attended class. We don’t teach children how to leave their comforts behind. We’d call it bullying or insensitivity, I suppose. On mornings like this I think this is the big cheat, the chief educational disaster. We do not tell our children that they cannot be themselves without constant challenge.  We do not even suggest the concept of self-discipline. We’re good at giving a sense of self-worth, a sense of entitlement, but we fail to imply that there must be real qualities necessary to individual worth, real achievements associated with entitlement. We do not suggest that some steps up require dropping everything we have gathered in our arms. Go one hour without your water bottle. Do not unwrap that candy right this minute. Do not necessarily obey your bladder’s first tiny signal. Let it grow strong with the rest of you. No, you actually haven’t received an important text in the last five minutes. Let it go. Forget it. Everything will be better if you do.

I want to remember to add all this to my syllabi, so my students can resent me right off.