Ripeness is all

I once stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. Now, Scott may not have been as overjoyed as Susan who, to her surprise, began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to her journal.

The dreams were more vivid and complex than usual, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Sendak took comfort in art as he ventured into public television.

Like coming here today, I was anxious about this. Would I be all right? And I have a little tiny Emily Dickinson that I carry in my pocket everywhere. And you just read three poems of Emily. She is so brave. She is so strong. She is such a sexy, passionate, little woman. I feel better.

So what did the 75 year old writer want to be when he grew up?

My big concern is me and what do I do now until the time of my death. That is valid. That is useful. That is beautiful. That is creative. And also, I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax. Where we just had fun... I want to see me to the end working, living for myself. Ripeness is all.

Sendak’s invocation of ripeness reminds me of the vivid dreams that lined up with my acting class back when. And my vivid dreams now.

By day, I’ve left my comfort zone to make a video about a sensuous song, It Falls Away. At night, dreams sway luscious in the branches, or squish beneath my midnight ramblings.  I’m not so sure about the comings and goings of dreams.   

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes?

Except that maybe it’s the other way around. Art comes first. Dreams, and vivid intrigue, follow. As Sendak mused, ‘when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain.’

This berry bears our artist mission: get our souls away from the languidly familiar, out onto the fertile plain where dreams chase us down to captivate our longing. Each act of art, whether absorbing or making it, is birth and death and depth perception in between.  It's where the wild things are. It’s where the master placed his benediction:

Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
William Shakespeare, King Lear

Artist candor

‘We have an anti-semitic president.’

Not the kind of thing my sister and I expect to hear the cardiologist say as he listens to our dad’s heart.

My sister’s Israeli, occasioning the doc’s statements of certitude on Arab religion (violent), universities (substandard) and government (violent and substandard).  Oddly, my Jewish sister is left to defend Islamic beliefs subverted by unscrupulous leaders.  The Gentile physician ignores her completely.  The middle east is defibrillating; Koranic teaching is the culprit.  Case closed.

Somehow I’d expect a more nuanced approach to political science from an educated man.  Which only shows my unsubstantiated bias toward the belief set of academia.  As though more intellectual tools and exposure equals broadmindedness and curiosity.  Surely medical science refines itself by embracing more, not less, rational evidence.

A friend of mine circulates ernest emails pitting wise conservatives against pompous liberals in couplets of rectitude:

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.
A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

I shake my head as I hit delete, thinking that as long as there are voters who practice black and white thinking, we’ll have politicians who pander to them.  This, the unctuous underbelly of democracy, encourages gladhanders to exploit the us-them battleground.

It sometimes feels like hopelessness incarnate.

Enter, artist.  Ply your nuance.  Encourage doubt.  Eschew the easy answers and web-ready glib gloss besmirching your and my and everybody's lips.  As one artist philosopher of the day warns,

The end of the world came and went while you were on Facebook.
Dan Piraro, Bizarro

While you were on Limbaugh, Colbert, CNN, Fox, Hannity and Dowd, clouds of intelligent uncertainty passed you by.  Art is where we explore certitude with a double edged sward.  Slice question marks into the self-righteousness belly of the beast.  Generate beauty, lots of beauty, to remind us all of our capacity for love.

Hear the remonstrations of the muse:  ‘Paint me.  Make me real.’

Photo John T. Bledsoe, Library of Congress

Fellowship of the rope

‘In each of them, we find the amalgam of the child carrying old wounds and the adult who has learned to cope with a world oblivious to his or her individual dream.’
Jennifer Weil, Old Town Playhouse

These are words flung out to a waiting audience by the director of Gene Abravaya’s new play, The Book of Matthew Liebowitz.  Words to secure our ascent up a fictional mountain of contiguous words, astutely drawn characters and a well conditioned ensemble.

And why do we, audience or artist, entertain metaphors of mountaineering, with our own lives already rife with challenge?  Why explore, discern, respond to created worlds?  Charlie Houston, veteran climber, put it this way:

You're surrounded by beauty. No matter whether it's a storm, or a sunny day, or clouds, or not, the mountains are simply beautiful. I've never been a great climber. I'm just a competent climber and I know my limits. But I love getting out and doing it.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

Just ‘getting out and doing it’ for the beauty is impetus behind many a climb, fuel for exhaustive preparation and try.

But there’s more than solo gratification on the line.  Actors, musicians, writers and their audiences - even in the heady free fall of oxygen-lite extroversion - pull themselves together and upwards by means of what Houston, no stranger to death defiance, called a ‘fellowship of the rope.’

You knew that your life was in the hands of somebody else, and his was in your hands. And it made you climb perhaps more carefully. You didn't push the envelope quite so hard. But it also gave you a feeling of... there was an emotional or a psychological bond between us... at least as important as the physical bond. And that's why climbing with rope is... To some extent, it's more dangerous, because if one man pulls, slips and pulls you off, you're both gone. But on the other hand, as happened in our case, the fact that we were roped together saved all our lives.
Charlie Houston, Bill Moyers Journal

I’ve experienced this invisible tensile strength with musical companions, on stage, in studio, at rehearsal; a bond like no other.  Why climb creativity's sheer slopes?  Summoned by beauty, lured by dream, secured by interdependence, we do it in search of home.

I’m reminded of lyrics I wrote once, not yet calling love the rope, but knowing it full well.

Set out to climb impossible mountain.
Could not be done.  I did not care.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I thought I’d find my dreams up there.

Top of the world, you are alluring. 
I can’t deny your mystic slope.
I hear you scream your warning. 
Echo of madness, echo of hope.

Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
I changed my mind, I turned in my tracks.
Set out to climb impossible mountain. 
Love took me home and home took me back.

Susan Weber, Everest

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Photo Felicity and Phillip, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

The people's largesse

A little girl, maybe seven, ploughs into me on her way out of the girl’s locker room.  ‘Daddy!’ she calls into the empty foyer of our local pool.  ‘My dad’s got my bag,’ she tells me.

‘Maybe he’s in the boy’s locker room,’ I offer.  ‘We can call him from the doorway.’  We both try.

‘Daddy!’

‘Anybody in there have a little girl?’  No answer.

So we head back to our locker room with me listening to the girl’s steady stream.  ‘I already have my suit on but I need my bag to put my clothes in,' she points out.

By the time we’ve got on goggles and caps and I’m saying her dad’s probably waiting for her on the pool deck, I notice the girl is studiously ignoring me.  She’s gotten a grip on worry and gotten in touch with something her parents taught her.  Rules.

Ah yes, ‘don’t speak to strangers’ and ‘don’t speak to kids who aren’t supposed to speak to strangers.’  In our rush to fix a problem, we’d both forgotten rules and roles and business as usual.  Strange woman.  Dutiful child.  Zero trust; all hallowed rules.

There are times when our great need, or loss, or even greater love temporarily interrupts the who’s who of trustworthy others.  After 9/11, it’s often noted, a national, even global suspension of distrust between strangers took effect.  Safe distance gave in to compassion and kindness.  It reminds me of cherished reunions with my family, whose Weltanschauung could not be further from my own.  I’m not the only one who loves her kin far more than she misjudges them.

I admire the girl swimmer’s resolve to ignore the stranger lady, as her parents told her to.  I told my little boys the same back when, to keep them safe.

But for grown ups, I’d welcome a person of stature to challenge us all - we the rule followers who curl up in our cozy sense of who belongs and who is never to be trusted.  Lead us not into self-preservation and other-ignoring but toward a role model our seven year olds may one day embrace.  A future where pundits and pols and the overlords who own them are shamed by the peoples’ relentless courage to include.

When such a leader emerges, I pray the stones we throw will miss their mark.  Long enough for us to awaken and think, as adults, for ourselves.

And with each other.

Hold Your Hand | Revolution Pie & Friends

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks...

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