CoEternity

 

    Unsympathetic Time presses, forcing me to drag my words out, onto the page. I would like to be good at the process as well as the product, to be able to savor that indulgent, impossible-to-imitate style and substance  like those of--I don't know--maybe Mark Twain and  Tennesse Williams? Sure, these guys are long dead and appropriately canonized–-but so’s my old man.
    As a stage actor who left the business and later returned, I appreciate the lifelong pursuit of printed words by those mentioned above--those sounds that can so please an audience when spoken.

In fact, I can reach for much more of the these writers' thinking, humor, evolution of thought and changes of heart in their work than I can for those of my own father. That is, of course, the way it is for most of us; we like stories by others because our own go unrecorded and become unremarkable as a result.

    Dad wrote down but a few lines, which I found after his death, that revealed the quickening soul of a thoughtful individual whose life had taken a generally pleasant course, but whose certainties were, naturally, undermined over time. I want more lines so that I may look between them for the pieces of him that are passed to me. With a daughter and a son following me in this life, I plan to leave a body of work that at least touches their future with the transitory mood, depth, ineptitude or sheer loquaciousness of their old man.
    Planning and playing for audiences has dominated my actions for fifty years. Though my muse and I communed privately until our puberty, my urge to speak with justified conviction showed itself early when I attempted to join adult conversation, imposing my eight year-old wisdom whether invited by the elders or not. Because Dad and I had private, weighty conversations during all our years, from the time I began to talk and until the day he ceased, I practiced organizing thought in the most benign of climates. Dad listened without succumbing to a father’s dismissive prerogative; he massaged my growing brain muscle and never gave it the impatient punch.
    When my poetic urges grew chest high, that is to say, to heart level, I had no quashing timidity to temper enthusiasm. Some teachers perhaps wished that I’d had a better self-censoring ethic, but others asked me for more, demanded more. It is my eternal burden that I haven’t written enough. I don’t even have a little diary to irritate the ex-wife. No, wait–that’s sounds like a fiction opportunity, one that must be marketed as creative non-fiction.
    Just now, writing has taken over from performing. I first went onstage to read my own poetry out loud and took the prize from my high school talent show at age seventeen, beating out folk singers, rock bands and instrumentalists. Doing plays in college the next year, I realized that how words are said is at least as important as the words themselves to the ears of an audience. Now, having spent literally thousands of hours before live audiences using the (mostly) well-shaped paragraphs of others, after turning words in my mouth and discovering the infinite utility of alternate readings, I long to set down words that may ring silent favor in the ears of unsuspecting readers.
    An actor friend of mine with Broadway credits found our audiences in Atlanta charming, and his term for “standing ovation” was “surprised and delighted” as in, “We got another surprised and delighted tonight.” The hope that any reader of my words could be surprised and delighted by what I smear on a page sends me back to the laptop with the same sense of urgency and confidence that used to drive me to audition.

    The way I write reflects my affection for the spoken word and for the sounds that we readers supply in our heads. We go to bed with the book, and we have an affair of the mind–and sometimes heart–with the patient, deft and thoughtful lover. I mean writer. She whispers or shouts or blows in our ear and the time whiles sweetly away.
    All of an actor’s skill is marshaled in order to move the play forward, bringing the audience along, employing the same patience, the same ability to get out of the way of the story that a wordsmith must own. The capable actor compels the viewer to bring himself into the story, to apply his own mood, his intelligence and doubt to the action before him. When in the wrong body–that of the wrong actor–action is crushed by heavy-handedness, embarrassed by self-consciousness or undermined by condescension. Self-importance lurks in the wings, calling to the insecure performer as if supplying a cue. The competent actor shares space with the incompetent and is exposed from head to toe without the protection of a favorable camera angle or Vaseline on the lens to soften the wrinkles. You put your whole self in, and when the show is over, the only proof that this event happened at all lives in the fading memories of strangers leaving the theatre and starting their cars.
    Now, off the stage, I usurp the roles of producer, director, male lead, ingénue, costumer and sage writer. The mere possibility that all this role-playing can be accomplished within my twitching brain is seduction itself: who needs to share the credit, the genius, the shining light of matchless insight?
    Enter the writer's public website to calm the ego, to kick the ass and to coax performance in the direction of plain honesty, honesty that is upheld by competence, fueled by insight , emboldened by surrender.
    May we all be surprised and delighted.