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.