Feeling our way along

Take my hand, rest your head on my shoulder.

cDetail from “The Kiss,” Rodin

Tuesday night Richard went to bed before the results of the election were confirmed. I stayed up, and as a gray cloud moved over me, I tried to imagine going on. The first four years of Trump were more “kill me now” and “get me out of this” than even high school. I wrote something to steady myself and posted it on social media:

“I don't know what people are or why they act the way they do, and all the theories I have read over the course of my life are sawdust. I'm thinking how to continue and what swims to mind is write with love and write with imagination and don't let anything stop you, including the sense right now you are numb and flattened. The loss of hope always proves temporary.”

The next day, that is yesterday, I thought about the voice of now. What does it sound like, and in what ways might it sound particular to this time? Is there a volume, a vocabulary, a grammar of our moment? I wrote this:

“How we talk to each other. How we talk to each other so it's possible to listen with enjoyment depends on tone. Tone is in a way everything and also smoke. I'm saying that writing now—as well as always and more than ever—is the way we embrace each other and look into the face of a sentence to keep us standing. Or sitting if you need to sit but not too long because, you know, you could get used to it.

We’ve been shot. A bullet has lodged in our thigh or shoulder. What does the wound look like? How long does it take for the blood to move from the point of entry to pool beside our foot? If we look into the hole, what do we see? A bit of white bone or a silvery thread of tendon?

Everyone can see a bullet wound hurts. To say it hurts adds no information we can use to take our next steps. First thing, we need to slow the flow of blood. We need a belt to make a tourniquet. We need to think where we can get medical care. We need to let our friends know what's happening in the calmest way possible and with the most description rather than abstract language because then our friends will be able to picture and taste and smell our situation, as if the situation is also theirs.

It's calming to think creatively. You substitute a set of feelings that want you on the mat and gasping for a set of feelings that wonder if this is the best word to snap into focus a reality offered so we're not alone. So we're not stranded in our heartsick selves. And so we can keep adding love and circulating our bodies and ideas.”

I’m talking to friends and reading about how others are moving through this period. People want to retreat, and they want to gather, and I think the thing is not to retreat. I think the thing is simply to be with others and talk about something else. The next time I want to fall into a coma, I’ll ask for more theories about why Harris lost.

Can we do this? Can we allow ourselves to remember we are alive only once and for such a brief time and we must not offer ourselves up for other people to use. It’s so tempting for women, especially, to do this. So don’t.

This morning I read an account written by a friend, who last night hosted more than 20 first-year students to dinner at her house. She’s never done that—had students to her house before getting to know them, but they were afraid and lonely. Some are foreign students worried about deportation. They were away from home at a university, and my friend figured a way to feed them and calm them for one important night. She listed all the food she served them. Most of it was very healthy. There were also six pints of Van Leweyn ice cream.

Richard and I have decided to reschedule our upcoming live ZOOM talk, planned for this Sunday, November 10 from 8 to 10PM EST, and presented by My Five Things. It’s called, “How to write a seductive first sentence”—about feeling pleasure as you write and producing pleasure for the reader. This isn’t the right moment to feel these emotions genuinely. You can still register, and whenever the event takes place, people can both attend the live conversation and afterward watch the video as many times as they like. Everyone is invited.

IT HAS NOW BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR SUNDAY DECEMBER 22 from 8 to 10EST and available to view any time after.

Please spread the word. Here is the link register and to learn more about our talk: https://myfivethings.com/class/how-to-write-a-seductive-sentence/

Back in September, Richard and I visited our friends Joanna and Chris. I had an assignment from the Substack publication

How We Spend Our Days

, edited by

Cynthia Newberry Martin

, and after our visit, I asked our friends if I could write about them. What’s weird is they said yes. They didn’t even need to read what I’d write. They trusted me, and after the piece came out, I thought, oy, what if they don’t like it? They did like it. And today I thought why not share with you the beautiful day spent working and eating with loving comrades.

Yes, and.

It’s Sunday, and Richard and I are at the home of our friend Joanna. She’s telling us about the time she was in Nick & Nora, and Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book and directed the musical, decided to change the lyrics of one of her songs right before the curtain was going up. In the scene on stage, Joanna is opening a series of hatboxes, and Laurents said, “Don’t worry, I’ve written the words inside the tops of the boxes. Just open each one and sing what’s there.”

Joanna is telling the story at her kitchen table. The kitchen is big and full of stuff for cooking anything you could want. Joanna is married to Chris, and Chris grew up in a restaurant family. The couple met doing Nick & Nora, and even though the show tanked, it glows in the mysterious space in Joanna’s mind between remembering and forgetting.

In the back of their house is a fenced garden you could call a little farm. When you visit, Joanna sends you home with carrots she pulls out of the dirt, also leeks, every herb there is, and tomatoes. She says to me, “I know you don’t like beets.” I say, “Beets smell like the sorrow of trapped children.”

They also smell like what happened to Joanna that night in Nick & Nora. Laurents mixed up the order of the hatboxes, and when Joanna opened the lids, she looked out at the audience and sang nonsense. She reports this calmly. It heightens the dramatic effect. That’s what makes her a good actor. There she is on stage, living the actor’s nightmare in a real Broadway theater in front of a real audience. People don’t actually drop dead in dreams and very seldom take their last breath on a stage.

I try to imagine the moment for her. The boss comes over to you and says what you must do. You’re not experienced at saying, “Are you fucking kidding me,” and maybe a part of you is excited by the dare. The situation is bigger than you. You’re an actor, and an actor’s job, you’ve decided, is to play whatever part you’re thrown. You’ve developed a reputation for making anything work.

Not for one second could I have done any of these things, it crosses my mind, and I find thrilling the fact that Joanna could jump off a cliff, knowing there would be other cliffs ahead and knowing she would stand up and walk away. That’s what passes for confidence, I think—knowing failure doesn’t mark the end of anything.

That morning in bed, Richard I were planning what we might say about the writing Joanna had sent ahead to us. She’s working on a memoir, and she’d asked for some guidance. It was quiet in our house. The outside is under renovation. In the bathroom, I didn’t have to check to see if one of the workers was painting outside the window.

In the car, we each said three things in the moment we loved. It’s a little practice we do, so I don’t ask him when the deck will be finished and he doesn’t ask me to decide on a paint color for the doors. We passed a farm. I said, “I love the gray sheep. I love when seasons change and you’re in two at the same time. I love the way the women in My Brilliant Friend can’t stop circling each other—half the time it’s ‘I never want to see you again’ and half the time it’s ‘I want to be you’.” Richard said, “I love living in a country I wasn’t born in. I love that it undermines the concept of the nation state. I love the first view of the ocean when you walk over the dunes.” I started to think about our friend Katie, who is selling her house in Maine. She needs the money, and she wants to move on, and I thought you don’t ever have to decide something is for the last time.

I never know how a work session will go. I worry I’ll say too much about what’s missing in a piece of writing instead of showing the person the beauty of what they’ve created so far. Teaching is an art form of its own. To do it well, you have to take in what other people need. You have to look at them and adjust yourself. You have to be a good actor, a good scene partner, and this is something Richard knows well after years of teaching at universities. It’s great for me teaching with him because he’s the one who can really see the other person.

We wanted to avoid making judgments and offering advice, so we decided to work with three elements. First to offer things we’d noticed in the pieces we’d read. Second to ask Joanna to ask us questions about her work. Third for us to ask her questions. It was helpful sticking to the plan, and of course I didn’t stick to the plan.

One of Joanna’s pieces was about auditioning for the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods. She got the part. That’s not the story she told. She wrote about walking around the city, wondering why she didn’t have a repertoire of songs she could pull out of a hat. She thought that’s what other people, who took themselves seriously, always had prepared.

When you’re in a situation like this with another artist, it’s a little like opening hat boxes on stage and making up a song, no matter what’s written on the lid. I think a piece of writing comes alive when the reader can feel the narrator’s love for what the narrator is telling you. I think the narrator’s need to bring the reader close to something intimate is what seduces the reader into continuing. I asked Joanna what the up side was of being unprepared, and her face lit up. Her face is always kind of lit from within. The up side of being unprepared would be where to find the love for her experience and the way she’s lived her life. We spent the day flying, the three of us, bouncing ideas around in the jazz improv that is a rich conversation.

For lunch, Chris served lemon chicken with vegetable fritters and salad from the garden. He’s fit and beautiful. I asked him about being a beautiful man in the world of film and theater, and he said casting directors didn’t see him that way or as “leading man” material. He smiled. Joanna talked about being type cast, too, and how she almost never feels the characters she’s asked to play represent the way she feels about herself. She’s seen as competent—often playing lawyers and judges—and not as sexy as she feels and looks.

It made me think about how we are all miscast as we move through life and how the concept of “identity” is actually a case of mistaken identity. These days, when I tell people for whatever reason I’m 78, I often get the thing about you sound younger, or you write younger, or some other insult offered as a compliment. People think nothing of revealing the horror-show vision of enfeeblement they carry around of people your age. It’s the last refuge of imagined safe “othering.” I say to people, “Everyone my age sounds and looks exactly the way I do.”

Everyone’s life turns out to be a version of the great Hitchcock film North by Northwest (1959), where Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan, who’s accused of being an assassin, and George Kaplan doesn’t even exist. He’s an invention of the CIA. We go through life saying to the people who have typed us—as female, as gay, as Black, as Asian—“I’m Roger Thornhill, not George Kaplan. You have to believe me.” Of course almost no one believes you, and if you live long enough as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, you get to eat pretty well.

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Rodin