To A Past Love

So I’ll admit this post is only tangentially relevant to reading, but it is relevant to being a bohemian in suburbia. Last night I was sitting around with two old friends and as part of a discussion of open-source programming, they tried to explain basic computer science to me. I had the slightly panicked feeling I’ve often had over the last four years, of being the stupidest one in the room, and considered, not for the first time, the fact that the things I chose to study exhaustively in college never seem to come up in basic conversation with my “home” friends. I seldom have a chance to impress people with my grasp of Alice Saltzman’s 14 scene study questions, or the vowel progression. (I did try to show my mom how I could speak with different resonances once, but I think she was unconvinced of its larger real-world applications.)

In bed later, I was reading The New Yorker, which I have loved and subscribed to for probably almost ten years, and which I generally aspire (with mixed success) to read cover-to-cover each week. I gave my mom the food issue to read recently and she said she liked it, but that there was a shortage of “warm and fuzzy articles”—that they were all sort of tough. This is fairly characteristic, and usually it doesn’t bother me (I feel I am exercising my brain), but last night I was reading an article about a religious organization which has declared a British political economist their Messiah figure, and finding it uncharacteristically one-sided and a little tedious, when I came across a poem. I often skip the poetry in The New Yorker—it’s usually over my head, and I’m too impatient to spend the time with it that is required—but this one caught my eye because it was titled “New York Poem.” (The author is Terrance Hayes.) It begins, “In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown…” and goes on to give disconnected images of people on the street, audio clips (“Someone says ‘abattoir’ is such a pretty word/ for ‘slaughterhouse.’ Someone says/ mermaids are just fish ladies”), and sweeping, near-cliché statements (“In New York/ not everyone is forgiven”). The poem addresses the city and the people of the city, captures the disjointed bustle, fragmented existence, ambivalence and juxtaposition of unmatching things (sci-fi, Miles Davis) that characterize a New Yorker’s daily life, and although most of its specific images meant nothing to me, the rhythm of it, the stew of all those things, good, bad, mundane, wild, shook me awake. I felt a little jolt of recognition and delight—my city, you’re still the same—that moved me much more than anything in the well-researched, excellently written article about the cult. And this was sort of a double validation—not just, oh New York! but oh poetry! Oh art! At this moment you’re trumping journalism and the “real world,” and my chosen path doesn’t seem so useless and irrelevant.

But of course, the dick of it is, I’m not in New York anymore, and I’ve had a lot of ambivalence over whether to go back. A friend of mine asked me recently what had made me fall out of love with New York, and the answer is complicated. In some ways it really has been like a breakup—when I decided to leave, I felt like I had to abandon something that had been a source of joy and inspiration to me for most of my life. I could no longer read E. B. White’s Here is New York for comfort, no longer feel pride and kinship watching Woody Allen movies. I had to be mentally disciplined enough to stop romanticizing it, the way I’ve tried to make myself stop romanticizing men I’ve broken up with, so I could get over it and start my new life elsewhere.  But it’s difficult, when the friends who do validate the artistic existence, who I can talk to about Shakespeare and Chekhov and Adler for hours, are all inextricably woven into the fabric of the city. One of my best friends called today to tell me about taking a cab the wrong direction to a breakfast date; a line in Hayes’ poem, “everyone/writing poems about and inside and outside/ the subways, dear people underground/ in New York,” made me miss my friends badly, thinking of those girls in boots with bags full of books and notebooks, scribbling and journaling and reading and trying to fit creativity into a hectic life where you travel two hundred blocks a day minimum just to go to work and back.

The answer to my friend’s question about falling out of love, I think, is simply that as a child, I fantasized that I would come to New York and become part of the skyscraper-successful, high-heeled elite; that I would be a glamorous, ambitious workaholic, caught up in the frantic pace, ravenously taking in theaters and museums, mastering the life of the very busy and talented. And when I began to feel like I would never be one of those people, and instead spend my life feeling inadequate as they rushed past me on the sidewalk and cursing the construction crews that woke me up at 5 a.m., it seemed easier to look for a different place to be a star than to tough it out in the Empire City. It really was like a breakup—I wept, I said nasty things, I fantasized about other cities, and in the end, on my last day, I took a walk by the East River and said a calmer, more loving goodbye, acknowledging that it wasn’t New York’s fault, we just weren’t as compatible as I originally thought.

But it’s been the case in my romantic life that sometimes, even when I think something’s over, it’s not; and that the time we spent apart was a necessary growth period enabling us to move on to the next stage of being together. And I haven’t given up hope that that may be the case with New York as well. So I’d like to leave you with the other poem in this issue of the New Yorker. It’s a sestina, one of the only poetic forms I’m actually familiar with, because I wrote a sestina about New York in eleventh grade.  Poets.org offers this definition: “The sestina [is] a thirty-nine line form…[that] follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi.” This sestina by Ciara Shuttleworth is made entirely out of end words.

“Sestina”

You

used

to

love

me

well.

Well,

you—

me—

used

love

to…

to…

well…

love.

You

used

me.

Me,

too,

used…

well…

you.

Love,

love

me.

You,

too

well

used,

used

love

well.

Me,

too.

You!

You used

to love

me well.

The Writing of Plays

One of the many unpaid but arts-related things I am doing as a bohemian in suburbia is reading script submissions for a theatre in DC. So far I’ve read only one script, but I read it a lot, because I wanted to be sure not to a) throw away the next Angels in America or b) waste my supervisor’s time because I was too polite to be honest. Already I feel like I’m getting a bit of an education in playwriting. Like many of us, I suspect, I have my own eternally gestating only semi-autobiographical play that I pretend I will someday write (which was developed mainly in college while not paying attention in class), and I felt a surprising sympathy with the author of this play (who I will call M), despite her semi-rude cover letter (addressed “Dear Whomever”) and the work’s obvious flaws.

For some reason I expected to be cold-blooded, cruelly analytical and highly critical, searching for evidence that I am a better writer than most of the world. (Please tell me that’s how most of us read unpublished writing.) But instead I found myself touched by M’s ambition. Her play is a family drama set on one day in the1940s, framed by the main character as an older woman looking back. In a monologue at the beginning of the show, the narrator has some lovely lines about memory, and the stage directions ask that the lighting mimic the effect of thoughts swirling around the mind. My embryo of a play uses a similar device—it’s in memory, framed by one character’s reflections—and I’m pretty sure I came up with that idea because I just didn’t know how to start. I didn’t know why it was important to tell the story, or even maybe what exactly the story was, so I decided to push that responsibility off onto this poor character. I’d find some reason the story was important to her, and that would carry the weight of justifying the existence of the play as a whole.

The problem in M’s script, however, was that her play ultimately didn’t have anything to do with memory, and the narrator character seemed to have acquired no wisdom in the fifty years that had elapsed since her experience as a young woman. She served mostly as a voiceover of her younger self’s thoughts, albeit with a slightly indulgent, removed tone. She made no mention of a secret family illness brought up in the past-day plotline, nor did she really reflect on the choices she made as a young woman. It seemed silly to have the framing device at all, since it didn’t add any depth to the story.

But the greater danger, I realized, is not that you’ll include an unnecessary style element, but that you’ll be tempted to express in the narration (or voiceover) whatever you’re trying to say—what you want to write a play about—without your play necessarily living up to those promises. M’s play never really got anywhere, even though its dialogue was often entertaining and I was sometimes swept up in the characters. Ultimately it didn’t explore a theme, or come down on either side of a question. What was expressed in the monologues was never really expressed in the dialogue and the action of the greater play. That is the harder trick, I think—to somehow make your characters tell the story, and not by saying, “This is the story.” In Translations, Hugh articulates some of the themes of the play, but his proclamations are in keeping with his pedantic nature, mocked by some of the other characters, and supported by the overall action.

Another difference between experienced playwrights and people like me and M is that the professionals seem to feel less necessity to dictate every moment. (I’m generalizing here, of course; some well-known playwrights are outrageously specific with their stage directions, like Eugene O’Neill, or Frederick Knott, who wrote Wait Until Dark and seemed to think actors had no ability to interpret any but the most straightforward lines). Again, I sympathized with M on this. I definitely understand the impulse of, “I see it in my head, I want to describe it so that the director makes it happen exactly like that.” Ultimately, though, if you’re writing something that doesn’t leave any room for interpretation by other artists (actors, directors, designers), you’re writing a novel. What amazes me about great playwrights is how they learn to tread that line. Write something incredibly specific and evocative, so it’s inspiring to other artists—they have some idea of what to do with it—and yet something that leaves room for them to do what they do. Or, to phrase it more concretely, it’s learning to tell stories mainly through dialogue, which seems like a skill set totally different from telling stories through pictures, as in a screenplay, or through inner thoughts/narration, as in a novel.

Obviously, there’s a craft involved with any work of art, and there’s plenty of writing, amateur and professional, that would be vastly improved with a more rigorous edit. Maybe one rule of thumb should be to tell your story as simply and concisely as possible, at least as an exercise, to make sure there really is a story underlying whatever fancy stylistic trappings you dress it up in. (Another favourite fantasy of mine is to allow key plot points to emerge through dance, my personal substitute for the movie montage; really just an excuse to be lazy about writing the scene itself.)

But ultimately, I think part of what makes a great work of art is ambition and a willingness to risk overreaching. Every time I read Angels in America, I am astonished at Tony Kushner’s creative audacity. Putting God on trial? Roy Cohn haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg? Talking Mormons in the diorama? Outrageous! But a masterpiece. Thank god he never said no to himself, I always think. On the other hand, he had something to say that was huge and powerful enough to justify his 6-hour two-part epic. And that, I suspect, is the other half of the battle. As one of my teachers might say, you have to develop a huge soul along with a huge craft.