It has been two and half months since my previous blog and I suppose one might say that a lot has happened, as  in it has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster.  I am still technically unemployed, and by “technically” I mean I am working on starting a small business (a downtown diner of all things) with another person (who is putting up all the money).  At the same time, there is the ebb and flow of personal relations with the all the dysfunction and chaos that comes from that.

There is much more than that, but the details aren’t important.  The details keep changing, as does my perception of them.  I have been dinking with this particular blog over the course of the past two and half months, and each time it becomes something a little different than the previous draft.  Most of the time, it was struggle, because I kept wondering just what the point was I was trying to make.

Just what is it that I am trying to say?

Sometimes a blog will seem to write itself.  Not that I see it in its entirety before I start to write, rather as I write, it just starts to unfold with a few hits and misses, a few strands of thought that come out of no where, a few tweaks to the flow.  As one of my professors once said, there are some thoughts that can be thought unless one starts to write it all out.

There are times, however, when what needs to be said just never quite gets to surface.  It is there, but what I am putting down in words is just going over the surface, or around the bush.  What is there in words are some thoughts that seem like they’re close to it.  With this particular blog, it was something another professor said to me and some others one night over drinks.  

He lamented that he wished his students would realize “while all deaths are tragic, not all deaths are worth writing about.”

Just because the story deals with a tragic event (e.g. someone’s death), doesn’t make the story deeply poignant nor filled with genuine pathos.  A poem about a little red wheel barrow can be more illuminating about the fragility of life than a short story based on a the recent death of one’s dearest grandmother.  As writers, the professor added, they need to be able to answer the reader’s question: Of all the things I could be reading, why this, why now?  I would re-phrase this sentiment: While all deaths are tragic, not all takes on a death are worth writing about.  

Done poorly, even Hamlet turns into irritating bathos.

There may be multiple ways to re-tell the story of grandmother’s passing that will cause most readers to pause with that experience readers seek from good literature.  But there are vastly far more ways to re-tell the story that is hackneyed and trite.  

Herbert Blau wrote the following about theater performance, but it is true of all of the arts:

Since there are stranger things in heaven and earth, what moves us there?  Think about it: even the familiar, outside, may move us more.  The slightest infraction of daily life, the barest slight, will affect  us in depth more instantly than most scenes in a play.  A small disappointment may ruin a week, and surely the death of a dog, a horse, a rat may shake us more than the death of King Lear. Indeed, it is now a staple of acting technique to use the memory of the death of a dog to support the emotion an actor might need as, say, Kent or Edgar at the death of Lear.  The squashing of an insect may prepare you for the murder of Duncan. With imagination enough, it may prepare you as well for suffering the moral consequences.  Or, with the paranoid scruple of a Kafka, there’s a metaphysic in the insect, which has its emotions too.

Then what moves us to the theater and why go there to be moved, when the routine, accidents, and psychopathology of everyday life can provide us with the emotions we are experiencing, and even more intensely? It is not emotion, emotion is cheap.  What we are really experiencing is something other -- instinct scrupling, an afterimage, the integrity and shape of emotion, a sign, the consequent order  of emotion, the cost, an afterthought.

It is the experience of something other that one also seeks in a blog, not only as a reader, but also as the writer.  The previous blog and this one (and maybe others to follow) are focused on a particular moment in my life, which to me was not only significant as an experience, but also becomes symbolic for something else, something larger.  Somewhere in that experience, in the remembering and thinking through it, is some other insight, other awareness about my own life, an illumination of the larger context.  A answer through the retelling to the type of ‘what does my life mean?’ ‘where is my life headed?’ questions.  Even as I believe that I will only get a partial and incomplete answer at best.  And that answer can’t be trusted.

But also out there is the possibility that in the retelling, there are others who might get some kind experience of something other.  The shape of emotion from some long ago trauma that brings some kind of relief or healing letting go, or an afterimage which clarifies why a relationship didn’t go as planned.

It is unlikely, but the possibility is there.  Chances are it will fall into the bin of hackneyed retellings, a piece that was important for me to put out there, but not much beyond that.  Much like so many of the minimalist autobiographical monologues that Spaulding Gray helped popularize.  Even if entertaining or amusing, never rising above someone talking him or herself.   

Gray wrote in his journal on Feb. 1, 1972:

I am the story. The exercise is the articulation of the present me!

There is a self indulgence that comes with any artistic attempt to articulate anything, but the autobiographical monologue is truly at the front of the pack.  "Come in and sit down," the performer says to the audience, "and listen to me talk about me."

Yet while it is a self-indulgence that borders on solipsism in some cases, the autobiographical monologue performance is also an act of courage.

Gray from a journal entry on April 20, 1970:

    I want to see
    why?
    because seeing makes me feel more alive, but at
    the same time it makes me feel that I could kill myself
    all I have written in the past boils down to these
    questions
    How much truth can a person take?
    How honest will I be able to be?

Of course there are those who take the approach that just being honest about every detail of one’s life, especially the ugly, the embarrassing, the kinky, the twisted facets makes it more honest.  Similar is the one who creates the work of art with the sole intent to shock the viewer.  But more often than not, giving a rant about one’s seedy or dark side, about one’s traumas and tribulations, no matter how “truthful” is just a more sensationalist way to keep from looking at the deeper truth beneath it all antics and wounds.  Like that gnawing sense that some day not only will one’s self die, but so will everyone to whom one loves.  

Or, while still breathing, that if we stop for a moment we’ll see that not only at some level we’ve been a fraud, failing to live up to our own expectation, ideals and values, but worse that there is nothing really there.  Herbert Blau again:

A mere peaceful coexistence on the level of the polluted earth is still a task for scoundrels, at the dubious end of ideology, at the possible end of history, when our lives are still dominated (incredibly) by the prospect of an actual disappearance.  All theater comes against the inevitability of disappearance from the struggle to appear.  The only theater worth seeing--that can be seen rather than stared through--is that which struggles to appear.  The rest is all bad makeup.
 

In recent weeks my own personal insight has come to this: I fear being stared through.  I have struggled for a long time to simply appear, and when others seem to stare through me, it says to me that have failed, no matter the extent of effort of that struggle.  And given the years put into the effort, it would lead one, or at least me, to conclude there is a likelihood it will never happen.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and be real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

To paraphrase Gray:  How much truth can a mockery take? How honest will a mere half be able to be?