Stop Moving

It was almost impossible for me to get to the computer today. The binge is working. I don't want to blog anymore. A Year Without Internet sounds like a wonderful idea.

Nick stopped me this morning. I don't remember what exactly I was doing. It might be that the task seemed too urgent to allow itself even to be named, or maybe there were so many tasks intertwined that I couldn't distinguish. I've sung a few sad songs here to the effect that my husband works too much (and what is too much?...etc, etc.) but this last week he has actually been in tech, and everybody here who does theatre is nodding sympathetically, "Oh, yes, tech, the time when production departments start work at their usual time in the morning and then don't stop until until sometime in the early hours of the next day."

Yes, tech.

This morning I had one small window, squished between events, during which I was not the primary caregiver for our babies, and every domestic, personal, interpersonal and intellectual pursuit clamored for preferential treatment.

"Pick me! Pick me!" That's the laundry. "You're going to be late." That's the clock, counting down the minutes to my next obligation. "Yoo hoo!" There's my car registration, who is apparently in character similar to a yodeler, reminding me that it will save time in the long run if I can just get ahead on all my paperwork. The hardwood floors are reminding me that Stella is going to crawl any day now -- she's already mobile via rolling and wiggling -- and under the radiators is disgusting, and those three books I just ordered are sitting on my desk, probably gathering dust, because I'm not much with a dust cloth, and...Oh! I have got to get on the phone because Thanksgiving is practically tomorrow and I haven't even asked what we're supposed to bring.

And Nick stopped me. I guess it was for a hug, or just to get me to notice that he was home, which is the rare event that started the whirlwind in the first place. And for a moment, I stopped, and the world seemed very simple, and manageable -- if only for a moment -- and I thought, how powerful this is: the gesture of stopping. You can, just stop.

I'd love to tell you that when I started moving again all those pressing concerns were magically gone. They weren't. But, then again...I don't know. We made it where we were going on time. Stella hasn't started crawling yet. I still need to take care of the car registration, but the paper pile didn't combust, or even grow.

"Stay put."

So says the angel, America, to her unwilling prophet in Part Two of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Halt the mass migration, she demands. It is causing tremors in heaven. Your constant, incessant movement is disrupting the fabric. There is no continuity. There is no zeitgeist. You must find a way to stop moving.

If you could, would you un-invent the automobile? Would you undo the industrial revolution? Would you return to an era pre-Enlightenment?

Well, sure, if it didn't also mean I would lose my right to vote. And my washing machine. And American democracy.

We can't stop the flow of progress. There's been quite the campaign, for as long as I can remember, asking Time to (please) reverse directions. We just can't seem to get that bill to the floor.

But we can use these imperfect instruments, ourselves, as best we can, to keep discerning our direction. And artists are a part of that, as storytellers are. We are the mirror -- not James' mirror now, that cold piece of glass, but Shakespeare's living players -- aiming, with the highest level of our consciousness and the very best of what it is that makes us human, "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

In my case, this means that I have to stop talking long enough to hear what I have just said. I have to catch the self-conscious preening, or the invective, or an unsupported statement like, "the American work week is getting longer and longer," by which I mean that my husband's work week is getting longer and longer, because the next show is about to open and he is in tech. I found all three of those mistakes in Thursday's post and then fixed them, feeling strongly that I had worked on it for a too-short period of time and with a too-cloudy mind.

You see, this is what a bunch of blogging does to me. It makes me sloppy. Experiment over. Can I go?

But this is also my directive. Blogging, for me, is an experiment only in the sense that I tend to look at everything as an experiment, because I am an ongoing learner and passionately interested in cause and effect, particularly in the field of human motivation. As much as it might tempt my theatrical imagination, this is not Woyzeck and his diet of peas. There is no Doctor, paying me to do dangerous things to myself so that he can take notes on my gradual descent into madness. This is not really an experiment. This is my life.

And, more specifically, this is my work. I've created no unnatural impulse here. I have a certain set of skills and impulses that lead to this. Whether on a blog, or in the theatre, or someplace else I haven't been yet, this is what I do.

The above is my explanation -- for you and for my tired self -- of why I don't get to take a day off. And why I'm here, even though it is barely under the wire, and it is night, and I am tired, and I risk making more mistakes. As my husband very kindly offered, it is a matter of discipline.

Stop moving. It requires an act of will. Stop moving, and look around.

Is She Still Talking?

I can't blog today. I can't spend another minute listening to my own voice. And the book that Kirsten recommended, Three Steps on The Ladder of Writing, has arrived. As Milo would say, "Bye bye, mama."

But I am here to fulfill my posting obligation. For anyone who comes here because these posts make you think, here are a couple of topics to think about, on the subject of writing. And, if anybody else wants to talk for a while? Please, feel free!

1. Can I Get An Editor in Here, Please?

Hurrying to get dinner started, I felt like yesterday's post went out before it was finished. Then, reading it back, realize that it is too personal for me to be able to tell. This is like my experience with playwriting; at some point it gets too close for you to be able to see it anymore. I'm not comfortable with that. It seems like an editor would be of use.

And...I didn't mention this at the time, but about a week ago I had a very strange typo. I think I tried to make up a word. Nobody said anything, and I noticed it and fixed it a couple of days later, so you can't go looking for it now. But I wondered: Does anyone notice these things? Or do you assume that I know what I'm doing and that it was just a word that I knew and you didn't?

2. The Second Impulse For Fiction.

I talked in Exit, Pursued By a Bear, about the impulse to fictionalize in order to entertain the reader. Now I'm feeling an impulse to turn to fiction to satisfy the writer. To put it crudely, now that I've used my mother's death, on the 18th day of my blogging month, I might have just run out of material.

What I'm preparing to do is not fiction, but it isn't documentary either. I'm accepting that I need to be at home with the kids, so if I'm going to practice the craft of storytelling, the available subject is me. And I'm organizing me into something that is interesting enough to write about. On the page, this looks perverse. Why do I have to do experiments with my life? Why don't I just write fiction?

Hilda the Hippopotamus

Here's a thought experiment, of which neither part is precisely historical.

Let's say that I find myself in a period of creative drought. (Okay, that small part is precisely historical, although not current.) In my frustration and sadness over this, I go looking for a culprit. Who can I blame? The obvious answer is my children. The babies are the thing that is new, this must be their fault -- or, rather, my fault for having them. Motherhood is an intense distraction that has made my thinking less clear and therefore affected my ability to make good art. And motherhood is important to me, so I choose to prioritize that over the art, with which it appears to be in conflict. Either way, I'm going to have to starve a part of myself. I can't have both.

What if I believed that babies are a normal and unavoidable part of the work as a creative being with ovaries -- maybe even used that big word, "necessary" -- but that the internet was optional, and a distraction? What if I heard people saying, "Lots of people who do theatre do just fine without internet. There are things that you just have to give up in order to make it in this very competitive profession, and internet may be one of them. You need to concentrate, and you may have to clear your life of distractions like internet. It's your choice, of course, but if you're going to go and have internet, then you just have to accept that it might be damaging to your career."

I'm going to rename this blog The Question Binge, because, apparently, the only thing I like better than expressing myself in long form is asking open ended questions and then changing the subject.

My husband told his office yesterday about our plan. I didn't hear about this until after bedtime -- what you might call pillow talk -- and I was fighting sleep to hear him talk about it. Actually I found myself thinking, "is he still talking? does he really have more to say about his feelings right now? Because I'm going to have to get up with the kids in about five hours."

And I have to share it with you just like that (no offense, Nick) because these are the revelations that become available to us as women become equally prominent as dramatists, storytellers and social critics. We find that the experience of wanting to selfishly fulfill your own physical needs at the expense of your partner's emotional needs is not associated with masculinity. Women do it, too. (I know, right?) I can only hope that this sort of revelation can wear gradually at the Mars/Venus map of mysterious, planetary-sized gender differences, which I find leads us in all directions away from the hard slog mix of accountability and forgiveness that it takes to actually succeed in our relationships.

But that's a side note. The story is that my husband was proud of me. As I was fighting sleep, Nick was telling me that he was proud of me. He told me that his coworkers had been impressed. They had assumed that this bold feat of A Year Without Internet was something we were attempting, and that we would discover on the way whether or not we could actually pull it off. Nick had corrected them to the effect that when Esther decides to do something, it will get done.

Thanks, honey.

Now that it's morning -- and I am exclusively a morning person, yet another reason, I'm discovering, why theatre directing maybe isn't exactly the best career for me -- I'm realizing that the kind of conversation that my experiment sparked in Nick's fast-paced, high-stress work place is precisely my goal. I do have a real desire for personal growth. There's nothing like having a couple of kids to let you know how much growing up you have to do. But I also have a strong impulse to publicize this experiment, and in that, I'm asking one great open ended question. One person says to another person, "I know someone who is going a year without the internet." The other person asks, "Why?" Mission accomplished. One person says to another person, "I know someone who is going a year without the internet." The other person asks, "How?" Mission accomplished.

Those two little questions, given even a tiny bit of real attention, can have more impact than all the meandering explanation I can possibly do here on this blog. We are such powerful creatures, we humans. We transform our environment. We make moral decisions. It can never be a bad idea to remind ourselves of our strength.

During our usual Tuesday library date this week, Milo brought to me a book by Richard Scarry, in which an unusually large playground monitor named Hilda -- I think she's a hippopotamus -- learns how to manage her own very special gifts. However, she doesn't gain this wisdom until after she rips down a couple of doors and sends the playground merry-go-round spinning down into a hole in the earth.

And, you know, it is a riot here on this spinning merry-go-round. It's going very fast. But I am not the first one to suggest that it is helpful, every once in a while, to see out of the corner of one's eye that someone else is trying to get off.

Now

I don't know what I'm going to write about today.

This is abnormal. I am the sort of writer who writes because I have so much to say, and my craft is forever trying to catch up with my enthusiasm. But I'm starting week two of posting every day, and suddenly I find that the drafts in my list of posts are all finished, the ideas for posts that I've had swimming in my head are all used up. My posting has caught up with my thinking.

I'm HERE.

In the "psychological experiment" category, it's a plus that I can't sustain essays like the one I wrote yesterday: several pages of carefully crafted prose that support my chosen course of action, decorated neatly and tied with a bow. We both know that it isn't really advertising revenue that drives the clanking, clinking Internet machine. It's us. I'm here, and you're here, and we came to see each other.

Hi.

Lisel said yesterday that the internet makes her feel like a hypocrite. Here we are, representing ourselves in real time, like conversation, except I don't always know who the "you" is in my conversation. I don't know if "you" is understanding me. Maybe I misspoke, or hit the wrong key, or didn't give context, or in any of a hundred other ways failed to communicate. Maybe "you" is just in her own place today, and she can't hear me anyway. But whether I reach "you" or I don't, my attempt is printed here in black and white, and it's easy to interpret it as fact.

I recently alarmed myself by dashing off an email -- on my way to take Milo to the library, with him climbing over my chair and chanting, "liberry, liberry"-- and realizing when I got back that the heartfelt statements that I made in that email could be perceived as quite extreme. Doesn't that happen to us all the time these days? We deliver unprepared address, in the moment, and then there it is on the screen, already sent, made permanent in cyberspace. I think it is accurate to say that the most harmful misunderstandings in my life to date have emerged from a careless email. I know that the cruelest thing I've ever said was via text.

I have an Emile Zola quote that I live by, that I have on my Facebook page (and isn't that proof that it's important?!) Slightly paraphrased, because I'm here, now, and doing it from memory, it says, "If you ask me what I came here to do, I, an artist, will tell you. I am here to live out loud." And I have made every effort to do that.

In the context of the theatrical movement of naturalism, which is how I studied Zola, that quote is about having the courage to reveal truths that others might leave hidden, like poverty and suffering, and -- even more alarming -- unkempt kitchens and boring lives. At least, as an artist, I've always thought of it as courage. I am courageous enough to reveal the truth of my condition, to share with you the reality of my imperfections in the interest of a deeper, more meaningful shared experience of life. But in the context of the internet, it doesn't seem to require any courage at all. Now everyone is doing it. Now it's the way we interact. There are no rehearsals. You don't carefully compose your naturalism so that it's properly lit and you can hear the actors. You just turn on the tap and let it flow.

I'm flirting with this now. By committing to write something every day for a month, I'm not always writing because I have something to say. I'm coming up with something to say so I can write it. Pro or con? I don't know. I haven't thought about it.