Being a playwright, I'm attracted to the concept of scripts, and scripts not just on the printed page, but everywhere. I unabashedly generalize the concept. I see scripts in the way people dress, or how they talk to one another in line at the post office. How they celebrate their holidays. Or pray. Or speak to the boss, or interact with the help. So, when I say script, I mean words and actions that are bound to the situation and to the roles we choose to play in that situation. Sometimes we really do know the words or actions by heart ahead of time. Other times, we improvise, but within clear guidelines, and these guidelines help us to know what to do and say.
- An experienced teacher teaching long division for the seventeenth year is following a script: “So don't forget, this is the hundreds place.”
- A grief counselor expertly helping a child get through the loss of her mother, is going to be following a script: “Is there a favorite memory you'd like to share?”
- A construction worker informing the college student that he can't be walking past the orange warning fence, may also be following a script. “Hey bud. No.”
I'm aware that my definition of script is a bit idiosyncratic. But I find it useful. For me, it calls attention to a fact that a great deal of what we say and do in this life is generated without a whole lot of effort on our part—in more or less the same way as we walk to the park or do the dishes. You just do it. You don't have to think all that hard.
What about the downsides to scripting though?
They do exist.
This morning, for instance, I had to get a filling done on a tooth. My appointment was for 8:00, and I woke up early to light the stove, have breakfast, and do a little reading—all with an eye to leaving enough time for the walk to the dentist. I walked. And at 8:00 sharp, I arrived. And how much good did all this concern for punctuality do me?
I waited and waited. And the waiting room was small. And a very loud television was broadcasting very bad news. After forty minutes, I got up and presented myself at the window. You might say I was Disgruntled Patient, speaking to Harried Receptionist. And, true to the part I was playing, I had already put on my outdoor hat, and I had an arm through one sleeve of my coat.
“Forty minutes is a long time to wait at eight o'clock in the morning,” I said.
“I'm sorry, we're behind. But your chart is next.”
I sat back down. Five minutes more and just as I was pulling on my coat again to leave, the assistant poked her head out the waiting room door and called my name. I went with her.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Oh...could be better.”
Well, I suspect news had gotten around, because everyone was polite and kind to me. The dentist was whistling as he shot me up with Novocain. And as I sat in the chair, waiting with a fat lip for the stuff to take effect, the assistant chatted on about the cold weather. And then—and this killed my script—she talked about about her pellet stove: her pellet stove that kept her home warm in the winter! She was a complete geek about her pellet stove. Full of information about it. Full of affection for it. Which of course could have been annoying. Except that for some reason it wasn't. “Okay," I said to myself, "I have a choice. I could rebuff her and continue to follow the script of Disgruntled Patient. Or I can talk to this woman and actually relate. The choice is mine.”
So I started to talk. I talked about my new wood stove at home. I talked about the general project of homesteading. And surprise surprise, pretty much right away the two of us were off to the conversational races: talking pellets, BTU's, the price of corn, and the uses of being off the grid. Within five minutes, Disgruntled Patient had made a full exit, and there I was sitting back in the dental chair, more or less satisfied with my place in life, and ready to get myself a filling.
Now, please note: we need scripts. We lean on them. They help us through all sorts of situations. They help us to come up with words to make our opinions clear. They help us apologize. They help us get through funerals and weddings. They help us cohere as communities and as colleagues. They help us to ask each other to dance.
But even the good and helpful scripts sometimes outlive their usefulness, sometimes within minutes. My own (retrospective) opinion is that Disgruntled Patient probably belonged to the category of useful-for-a-time-but-important-to-discard. After all, for a time I did have reasonable cause to complain: the office had probably over-scheduled itself, and no one had apologized, or done anything to make my wait more pleasant or easier. On the other hand, what was the point in perpetuating the business, once I had had my say? Seems to me that, just as with everything else in the world, there are limits to scripts. Limits to how long the show can go on. Or ought to...
More on life-scripts next week!
HB
(Next Post Saturday, December 6th)
We bought a wood-burning stove recently, to help keep us warm here at Sunnyside through the winter months. Four or five days still have to go by before we can light it; the insulating mortar in the chimney has to cure all the way and harden up. But the stove itself stands in the dining room, like a cadet at attention, ready to be commanded, and our stack of wood outdoors beside the hedge looks forward to shrinking. All that's left is to fire the thing up. Put it through its paces. And then of course sit back and enjoy the warmth and the beauty of the fire.
Now, I don't want to make 9-volt Nomad into a venue of praise for home improvement. I love our home, but in general when it comes to home improvement—well, let's just say that almost nothing depresses me more effectively than even just five minutes of one of those TV shows in which the home-owners gravely consider whether it'll be granite or stainless steel for their kitchen counters, or whether a ten-foot ceiling is of sufficient height for the upstairs bathroom. These programs seem like prime instances of our culture's obsession with surfaces, and remind me that whole industries thrive on creating human dissatisfaction with life as it is, though life as it is would be beautiful and interesting enough if we bothered to look deeper than the all-consuming skin.
So. This post is not meant as encouragement to buy a stove. Really it's not. I intend it as a sort of balanced recollection. An attempt to trace a line of reasoning. I want to ask “why did we at Sunnyside get a wood-burning stove, and why might it be more than an extra, a vanity, a thing owned essentially for the sake of show?”
Here are few reasons that I would put forward:
First, Northwest Indiana is prime ice storm territory, and in the aftermath of a really bad storm, it's possible for the power (and therefore the forced-air furnace) to be off for weeks. Now, my wife and I prefer it at least tolerably warm in the home in winter, and by that I mean oh sixty degrees (15 C) and a sweater. Our houseplants, which are largely tropical, would of course not take kindly to an indoor freeze; and many of these are heirlooms from my mother and grandmother, which I would never want to lose. Then too there are all our vegetable seedlings, which we start indoors in flats many weeks ahead of spring planting. Their loss would be a tremendous waste of labor, and would substantially reduce our harvest.
Second, we're trying to reduce our carbon footprint, and within certain parameters, heating with wood can be considered carbon neutral and sustainable. New trees can be grown to replace those that have been burned, and what carbon is released in their burning gets stored in their growing.
Third, it's a do-it-yourself kind of thing—heating with wood—and I like that. I like the idea of just saying no to the utility's gas, lugging in the splintery wood, and getting down to the business of keeping soulfully warm. I especially like the idea of getting up early on a cold morning and making a fire for my wife, whose need for warmth is tied up in the meaning of my existence. Then affection makes the labor light. Then, in the streets of the City of What's Difficult, I walk uphill, humming a tune of love.
Fourth, our wood-stove will serve as a means of travel! To the past! To the ends of the earth! You see, I have such fond memories of stoves and fires. When I was a boy living up in the high hills of Southern India, at about seven thousand feet, it would get plenty cold believe me, and we heated with wood sometimes, and had a wood-burning stove in our kitchen. I can remember so many rainy afternoons sitting in the kitchen on a yellow bench just letting the stove transmit its warmth to me—me like a grateful planet, and the stove, my sun. I remember one particular day, me coming home from school in the rain, and our housekeeper Pushpam toweling me down. She let me squat right in front of the stove to dry. I shivered extra-dramatically and she laughed. On another occasion, I got too close to the stove and branded a little length of my thigh on it. I still have that scar.
Years later, when I was living in the highlands of New Guinea, and going to boarding school, I stayed in a boarding house that came equipped with a ginormous fireplace. There were coils above the fireplace to harvest the heat to heat our water. And every morning, as an agreeable daily chore, I would get up early in the quietness and light a fire in the hearth, so we all could have hot showers. Then I would go out walking on the red dirt roads of the base, and my hands would smell like ashes and embers half the morning. On Friday nights too sometimes, when everyone else in the boarding house was out doing something social, I would stay home and make a fire and sit and watch its lovely life cycle from fuel to flame to ash. This was oh-so-therapeutic for me. Sometimes the fire was my only company.
Fifth, the stove can be considered a gift to others and to the future: when it's cold and we have guests for dinner. Or when there's that big emergency, which we hope doesn't come, but might. Then too, given the future that I see in store for us, which is a very uncertain one, I doubt if the stove will ever be replaced or torn out on a whim. I think people will see its value.
So do these reasons convince you? I myself admit that I can't know for sure. Maybe it makes perfect sense to have it. Maybe a future of difficult circumstances will prove its purchase to have been a choice fortunate beyond belief. But maybe too, vanity is always mixed up in decisions like this, and you can't get away from that, no matter how hard you soup it up with poetic appreciations and semi-green homesteading/emergency-preparedness justifications.
Ah, what a bitter paradox it is—this conflict between two domesticities—between the comforts of our individual homes, and the health of our home-at-large the Earth, from whom so much is taken to provide those comforts! Sometimes I wonder whether we can do anything these days without tromping hard on the life of the planet. Humanity has heavy feet these days, there's no denying it. There are so many of us. And all of us want more than what we truly need.
I like thinking about this stove's long ride into the future though, because I do anticipate that it'll have a longer life here at Sunnyside than I do. And what I hope more than anything else for the stove, is that whoever owns it after us, will use and love it too, and find meaning and poetry in the making of a fire. Of course, even with me, as time goes on, a good number of the initial pleasures of the brotherhood of the flame will doubtless wear thin, and the whole business of tending the stove will grow to be more of a chore. But then I'm not afraid of chores either. Chores are what makes the world go round. Chores are universal. Even Adam and Eve in the fabulous biblical garden seem to have had chores, and that was paradise.
HB
(Next Post Friday, November 28th)
The other day, I went to a lecture-recital given by two musicologists, one of whom we have gotten to know here at Sunnyside, because we like to invite people to dinner here. The point of the lecture was to propose an approximate date of composition for a violin sonata written by the Archduke Rudolph, who was a longtime friend and pupil of Beethoven. Some of the evidence offered (for dating it as they did) turned out to be purely musical in nature, and their reasoning went like this: “We know for certain that such and such piece by Beethoven was written in such and such a year, and it includes such and such a theme. Now, a theme found in the archduke's sonata is very similar to this one by Beethoven, and we think the pupil was probably imitating his teacher. So it seems likely that the Archduke's piece had to have been written after...”
Now I really get into this sort of thing. I just like it when other people solve these little puzzles of history and interpretation and then inform me of their findings. It provides a kind of vicarious scholarly thrill. “Hey that seems possible,” you can say. Or “Nah, I don't believe it.” But the point is, you yourself don't have to do the work. Someone else does it all for you, and you get to just sit there and hear them tell you what they've figured out. So what's not to like?
I also like the skepticism that decent historians have for their own work. You hear them say things like “it seems likely,” or “we think it's possible,” or “it may be a bit of a stretch, but probably...” I'm a big fan of the reasonable doubt. I think humility is in order in almost all our endeavors, and I don't see enough of it afoot in the world.
Well, anyway, I found the lecture interesting, as well as convincing. As well as expressive of responsible humility.
But there's one moment of that lecture that I want to zero in on here.
Again, there were two presenters. Two musicologist/performers, and they delivered the lecture together, and occasionally as the lecture proceeded, they would play portions of the pieces in question, to illustrate their points. And at one point, one of them—the one who has visited us here at Sunnyside—said, in her beautiful German accent:
“Hear now, the noble theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's Archduke trio.”
Well right away I knew I wanted to write something about that sentence: first of all, because it's a beautiful-sounding thing, just chock full of nice round o's, and don't you just love the lovely, formal, antique-sounding imperative “Hear now...” Most of all though, I took an immediate shine to the word “noble.” It heartened me. I believe it was an act of love, using that word. An act of philosophy too.
How so? Well here's the thing. We live in a world obsessed with surfaces. With analytical reduction to component parts. And with supposedly objective measurement. We anatomize. We deconstruct. We do not characterize from the heart. "How could a set of notes be “noble?” we ask. “How can you prove they're noble. Where's your nobility measurement tool? What scale would you use?"
But here was a scholar who just didn't really seem to consider the possible doubters. She just said “Hear now, the noble theme...” Which really asserted a whole way of looking at life. A way that says “No, the heart matters. How we subjectively characterize a thing matters. And if I say the theme is noble, that's because that's how it feels to me. And sometimes it's important to say what you feel. Students, listen. Sure it's important to say what a thing looks like from the outside, but it's also important to articulate what you think may be “inside” of it, at the unseen heart of it. And to make that judgement from the inside of yourself.”
I hope I'm starting to make myself clear.
Let me try from another angle too. Think of any human being you love. How is it possible to love someone without ascribing qualities to him or her? Sweetness, kindness, handsomeness, thoughtfulness... Likewise with every great work of music or literature or art, or with any aspect of the world. How after all, can we possibly relate to something, I mean, really clasp it to the heart, if we cannot say “this is what it makes me feel like. This is how I would describe it.” Then too, what is life, if not a period of time in which we're given (mysteriously!) the privilege of taking in the world and all those that inhabit it, and all the beautiful things they make and do, and of clasping them all, as many as possible, to our inmost heart?
Now. This isn't to say anyone ever has to accept anyone else's personal characterization of anything as the final word. I might have listened to the “noble theme,” and after hearing it, decided that no, it wasn't exactly noble, but say "solemn" or "brooding" or oh, maybe even "chocolaty," or “indigo blue.”
(I like adjectives. They are one of the handiest ways of connecting ourselves to our experience. You say the right adjective and it's like you just roped yourself a calf. Or shot a swishy basket. Or finished a dot to dot when you were a kid.)
So was it noble, the theme? Well, as it happened, when her colleague sat down at the beautiful, long, black, and shiny piano—and played the theme of the slow movement of Beethoven's Archduke trio—well, I sure felt that “noble” was right. Stately. Serene. Communicating a sense of power properly employed. Of restraint flowering from certainty of worth. Of merit made visible. Of quality declaring itself, spelling out its own true name. Sure, noble was right. Spot on.
Now. To me becoming a nine-volt nomad is all about altering my perceptions. It's about trading in our culture's fanatic attachment to stuff and to gleaming surfaces. It's about letting go of the obsession with power and speed and efficiency and productivity and reputation for expertise. Maybe above all, it's about realizing once and for all that the universe isn't just going to cotton to all our wishes, so it would be way better for us to stop trying to make it do so, and instead appreciate it the way it is—the way it presents itself to us, take it or leave it. We can't have infinite economic growth. We can't have infinite sources of energy sending us infinite flows of information forever. We can't have runaway prosperity in every way in our lives. We can't. The survival of the earth depends on us learning that we can't.
But! We can have the beauty and power of our minds. We can have interesting lectures. We can have friendship. We can have the music of Ludwig Van Beethoven. We can even have adjectives.
A friend of mine once told about a professor of his, who consistently referred to his wife as “the marvelous Alice.” This is, again, the sort of thing I'm talking about: consciously and persistently using the power of the mind to alter and refine its own relationship to the world at large. Not in order to manipulate and acquire. But to remind ourselves, with faithful consistency, what we cherish and where our sources of enchantment lie.
“Hear now: the noble theme...”
HB
(Next Post Wednesday, November 19th)
For those of you who haven't yet noticed, I've started a second blog, in which I am presenting a novelized version of my second stage-play, The Cliffs of Incognita. That play was premiered several years ago, and I am still proud of the production and the script. Nevertheless, for some time now I've wanted to do something more ambitious with it. I want more villainy. More politics. More enchantment in the place. More oaks. More moss. More epistemology. More grief and joy. More girlhood and boyhood. More questions. More butterflies. More logging. More of a eerie sense of parallel between the story's world and ours. In general more.
And so I am presenting The Cliffs of Incognita in a blog, creating it week by week in serialized form for as long as it takes to unfold what I hope will be the gorgeous mental silk of the story. I do this partly as a challenge in literary improvisation—a mental lark, a DIY dare—and partly too because I consider blogging to be as practical a means as any to force myself to move forward with an extended tale, and at a clip that takes into account my mortal nature! It's natural to be a little afraid of the larger project. It's a big, fat, and rocky something-to-climb and you look up and the whole unaccomplished thing looks down at you and says "ha, you?" You wonder how, page after page, you'll be able to keep up the quality. You worry for the integrity of the plot, which should be like a well-made dome; supporting itself from every testable spot. But the only way to see your way up to the view is to trust to your gifts and get to work and climb. And again, what better way to encourage the daily work of the literary ascent, than to publish your work piece by piece, and in a forum in which the whole argument all at once is neither expected, nor desired? A place where piecemeal improvisation and experimentation is almost the expectation.
So. I think the blog's the ticket.
Vladimir Nabokov once compared literary drafts to sputum, and roundly condemned anyone who would show theirs around for observation. Hmm. That's a pretty strong opinion, one that's based on an image of writer-hood that I doubt was ever really embodied in any actual human being, even great VN himself. Here I mean the image of the indomitable and indefatigable craftsman, working in utter privacy, hunched at the desk. His many drafts snow him in. But the great salty snowplow of his mind plows on.
I'm saying that the creation of literature actually happens much more socially than this, whether or not it feels that way to the writer. A writer may be responding to someone else's work (the Cliffs fits into this category.) Or maybe the writer has an argument with society at large—some injustice or evil to expose. Or maybe she sees something beautiful and holy and worth rejoicing in, and wants to hold that up for others to see and love and admire as well. Or maybe it's just the phenomenon of the world itself that fascinates or obsesses her, and she just has to get it all down dammit on paper. And the list goes on as lists tend to do, but in any case, none of this happens from one side. Nor by any means exclusively at the desk. I know I draft a lot of my work in discussion with friends and family, and in readerly conversation with my books. All of this is social. Changing. Relational. Inchoate. Provisional. Sputum-like, I suppose, if that's the way you have to think of it. Germy. Full of life's beginnings.
Even when it comes to the actual written words, no writer can write at optimum quality without a sympathetic reader's eye as a guide. Again, even the great V. Nabokov—and he is truly great—had his canny and long-suffering wife Vera alongside him day after day, playing chess against him, driving him here and there to his butterfly-catching venues, and yes, critiquing his stories.
Now of course with a extended project like The Cliffs, I expect that once the initial draft has been blogged to completion, all sorts of things are going to have to be taken apart, pieced together, and adjusted to get the whole machine to really fly. That's the breaks. That's the way the ball bounces. But none of this—none of it—means that a good writer, just like a good jazz musician, can't make something week after week, that's worth checking out. Fearless improvisation is the stuff of art. It's where the whole kit and kaboodle kicks off. It's how the game is played.
All of which is to say that I can't promise a perfect Cliffs of Incognita the first time around. Only a fool would make a promise like that. I can, though, promise to make its creation an interesting ride, week after week, until a decent draft is done.
So, if you haven't already checked it out, and you're willing to take the chance, please come over for a visit! The Cliffs of Incognita await you!
HB
(Next Post for 9-volt Nomad will be November 11)
