And I Have Found What I'm Looking For

It's been over two weeks since my last post, but I have been a busy lady. I have spent a lot of time helping a friend with her photography business (I'm sort of the administrator now), but most of my time has been spent poring over plays voraciously trying to decide what to direct in the fall at Playwrights. My proposals aren't due until July 1st, but my local library is closing for 2 weeks after tomorrow, making it much more difficult to access excessive amounts of dramatic literature. For weeks now my desk has been crowded with numerous stacks of plays, collections of Greek works, skinny modern dramas or pairs of Pinter plays, huge, hardcover copies of the collected works of Shaffer, Wilder, and Williams, and a deteriorating copy of "The Noh Drama" which looks like it hasn't been off the shelf in decades.

I wasn't necessarily planning on making my decisions before my library closed, but I figured it would be useful to already have a substantial list of potential by then. Tonight, however, I think I finally struck the play I wanted. It's a little Tennessee Williams play, at times humorous, at times lyrical, fiery and human. I'm really excited about it, and I haven't really felt that way about other plays I've read. There's a couple I got some ideas for as I was reading that I liked and will probably end up proposing as my second and third choices. I've come a long way from my first weeks of reading solely Greek works to yesterday when I read 10 Thornton Wilder plays after several days of skimming morality plays, Gertrude Stein, Harold Pinter, and countless others.

I'm very much looking forward to a break from the work (though I took one for a few days because my brain was starting to hate everything it read) - I've been sharing my leisure reading time with speed dating playwrights, but I'm ready to dive into Harry Potter again. It's been a year and a half since my last series read-through, and as my books live at home during the school year, I've got to get through them this summer before the first half of 7 comes out in film form in November. (5 months from tomorrow!) Also, Augustine and I have been on a break for far too long. He and I have some catching up to do.

Chicagoland experienced one hell of a storm today. It's been raining at some point of almost every day for the last 3 or so weeks, leaving it humid and gross outside after 9 am regardless of the temperature. Now, as it's getting dark, the skies have cleared a little and it looks magical outside.

There will be need soon for a post about ideal/theoretical love vs. living love and how that has suddenly explained to me, at 20, why Harry Potter has mattered to me so much over the last 12 years. I'm not particularly inclined to wax philosophical at the moment, however. I'm just going to shake hands with Mr. Williams and then catch up with an old friend with a scar on his forehead.

Compassion

I've been intending to read The Unbearable Lightness of Being for about a week now. It's been sitting on my desk; I kept picking it up, reading the first paragraph, and getting distracted. Tonight, however, I took a break from reading Greeks and Noh drama and quirky little plays by Percival Wilde to refresh myself with a novel. What I found in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, was much more than what I expected.

Now, as you could probably guess, I'm not much of a frivolous reader. (I'm not much of a frivolous anything. It's a little bit of a problem, actually.) Even the things I read for fun tend to be several hundred pages of intellectual drama, cultural analysis or something. So I wasn't expecting this to be fluff. But far beyond non-fluff, I'm finding (in the first 35 pages that I've read thus far) compelling philosophical debates that (of course, because this is how life works) tie in to a lot of what I've been thinking about and exploring lately. One I'm interested in but going to discuss later is "Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for a shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)." So chew on that with me, and I'll get back to you with more thoughts on it soon.

The other concept I'm grappling with right now is this:

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

I learned (thanks, book!) that compassion, in Latin-based languages comes from a combination of the words "with" and "suffering," but in non-Latin-based languages it comes from "with" and "feeling," giving it a far greater range of meaning and subtracting the negative connotation of the emotion. And I've been thinking a lot lately about not knowing how to help people I want to help, about not knowing how to do more when I feel like there is more to be done. There is always more to be done, and it is terrible to see a need and not know how to fulfill it. I have thought for a long time that one of the most devastating things in the world is when two people who love each other can't figure out how to love each other. I've seen it happen over and over in my life. I'm starting to learn how to work it out for myself, but that doesn't solve the reciprocal problem, and I don't know how to be a part of that solution yet, other than to keep doing what I'm doing. That's a start, I guess.

The premise of The Unbearable Lightness of Being seems to be that it seems easy to be without weight and happy and full of light in the perhaps only life that we have, but in fact if our actions have no weight because this is it and then it's over, what is the point? This is counteracted with the theory that all moments are continually recurring to some recurring result, so that as they keep happening the amass a weight, a consequence.

As I seem to think about everything, I wonder why do something if it doesn't matter? A teacher of mine tells his students that you have to decide that your work matters, because no one will do that for you. And once you decide that it matters, it does. I think people have to decide that their lives matter. This year when I was severely depressed, I realized I couldn't go anywhere, because I was working on 3 shows and involved in half a dozen group projects in school that would all get kind of screwed if I suddenly disappeared. My life may have felt like crap, but it was worth something to someone, and worth something to me, and I had a purpose.

My obsession with purpose and value and worth (and my "Why bother being in a relationship if you don't believe it's not the love of your life?" question) is part of what causes my constant battle with the concept of summer, at least in the last three years. Before the summer of 2008, I was in a show every summer and teaching at a summer arts camp and possibly taking dance lessons. All those things got interrupted before or by college, and I've had a hard time finding a summer job these last few years and thus often feel directionless in the summer. Granted, I have plenty of work to do, NYU Playwrights always manages to find assignments that should be done during break. But in this stage of the game, that work is only serving me, and I need it to be more than that. That's why my acting suffered freshman year in place of my directing scene, which held me accountable to other people. It's partially why my COW suffered sophomore year in place of a million things that involved other people. But eventually this project will involve other people, and regardless, it's what I have to do to have anything to do third year. It's just hard right now, when it's just me in a room with a stack of books two feet high spanning 3000 years and 3 continents. The blessing and curse of drama is its breadth. And the only constraint I've been given - time length - is the one that's driving me up a wall.

I want to make art. I don't feel like I've made much art in a while. Second year seems to be, for a lot of people, about making a lot of disposable art. There's no time to get attached to things. But I try to treat classroom projects like work I would make in real life and making that much work that fast that disappears that quickly is exhausting. My directing project is something I'll have with me for a while. I think it will be really good for me, the way that Hedwig was my outlet last semester when I didn't know where else to turn to get out of my head. Right now though, I don't feel like an artist. I feel like a weird kid in a strange room making jokes about Aristophanes that no one would find funny. I saw Billy Elliot yesterday and was hit over the head with how much I miss dance. I love performing and somehow being in theatre school seems to have taken that away from me a bit. I'm not concerned about my choice to go "directing track" at Playwrights. I'm still really proud of my decision and the way I've articulated who I want to be as an artist for myself. But art school is weird. Grades are a bizarre concept, and we're doing what we're going to do in life, sort of maybe, and it's all just an experiment, but such is life.

This blog has wandered a lot. Clearly I have too much time in my own brain. Dare I say it, I think I'd take a job at Starbucks over sitting at home most of the time.

My friends don't live here anymore. But that's a story for another day.

Transcending

I started writing a poem today in my head and thinking about all the love poems and poems about love that I've written over the years to and about various people. For a moment, I felt bad that some of the poems I have written could apply to more than the person for whom they were originally intended. But then a thought that I think I have known for a while is true but which had never articulated itself in this way came to me: Love transcends people.

Once when Joel and I were having an argument and I was explaining to him how love and our relationship were so important to me. He asked me if our relationship was not about him, and I explained that it was about him, that it was through him that I had learned and was continuing to learn so much about love, relationships, and sharing that with the world. I told him it was about him and it was bigger than him, because - and this part I'm adding now - love is bigger than people, it's God's work through people. I'm still not sure he understands what I believe that to mean. Love is a gift; it's the greatest gift we are given. It's what makes people matter and thus life worth living.

Thankfully, I am filled with more love than ever before in my life, for more and more people, regardless of their feelings in return. I'm watching that love manifest itself in many different ways, ways I never knew it could. It's beautiful and I'm grateful for it every day.

I'm watching Julie and Julia and thinking about loving things like cooking. Julia gave a lot of people - Americans, mostly, I suppose - the gift of French food, because she loved it, as many people love food. Actually, I discovered last summer that when I have the time, I actually love cooking. But most of my friends and I love theatre. And our acts of creation are acts of love, the magic that happens when a group of people commits to making something that didn't exist before, because they love it and (hopefully) believe in each other and want to give their gift to others.

I miss my friends and I miss New York, but I feel so damn lucky to live the life I live and to be learning what I'm learning. I'm grateful that I can enjoy washing the kitchen floor of all things. I'm grateful that even though my best friend is far away and will be going farther, she and I keep in constant contact and teach each other new things every day. I'm grateful that I can love but give myself space when I need it. And if you're reading this, know that I love you.