Sensei

When I get very frustrated or scared by life, I tend to do something somewhat strange: I look for martial arts schools. Then, after a little searching, I realize why I'm not finding what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for a martial arts school, but a

sensei

(or

sifu

, or "teacher"). Oh sure: I'd like to be strong like that (head-crackin' strong) and learn stuffs related to inner peace and balance (and head-crackin') but, as with

my early demands on directors

, I'm actually seeking guidance. More specifically, I'm seeking someone I can respect and who can rearrange me into someone who makes sense. You know: someone like

Pat Morita

. Thank you for that, My Childhood. When you have a moment, I'd also like to discuss the long-term psychological effects of way over-prioritizing

Thundercats

time.

It appeals to me on many levels. Martial arts offer the masochistic side of me a delightful little playground of self-induced torture, which is ultimately always more relaxing to me than, say, relaxing on a beach in San Juan. (The distinction between relaxation and exhaustion has always been for me a rather tenuous one.) It's also plain ol' simple. Now, there is

nothing simple

about the actual martial arts, but there can be something basic about them in the sense in which they are often portrayed in film: montages of incredible repetition. If you just, keep, smacking, that, granite, post, it, will, break, with, a, tre, men, dous, sense of catharsis. And there is the head crackin', of course. I'm not too proud to confess the personal appeal of that brute mastery over the world's greatest prey. Yeah, okay: I have some issues.

THAT'S WHY I NEED A SENSEI!

Look, my desire is deep-rooted and sincere, in spite of what may come across in my "humor" here. I'm also aware, however, that I'm making an essentially juvenile error of perception. The movies tell us that the mentor in this sense will initially be inscrutable and/or terrorizing, then there will follow a sort of hazing by which one is broken down, only to rally at the last possible moment and prove him or her self to be worthy of the master's heretofore latent genius. Then this paradigm is relentlessly

repeated

, in smaller incidents, until it all culminates in one final, intense repetition of the story -- usually some ultimate competition or battle. The student is punished relentlessly through Herculean (albeit exceedingly brief) trials, barely surviving to see the end, whereupon s/he wins the day with some detail from the previous repetitions that makes the audience feel that thrill of a conflict between surprise and expectation. And then, somehow, the student does something to show us that s/he hasn't really changed at all -- s/he had it in her/him all the time/time.

I don't mean to say the hope depicted here is juvenile. Hope is great stuff. Then again, so is a realistic relationship to one's environment. We undervalue sanity in the movies, and that's all to the good. It makes it easier to agree amongst ourselves (read: appeal to a large audience). In the rest of life, hope -- like love -- needs a support. It is, of itself, not a true virtue. Both may be necessary (and I believe they are) but they aren't virtues. Hope is a thing with wings, but not a cargo jet. Get not me wrong: I love hope (and I hope love?). It's just that, we sweat and bleed and nothing is as simple as a montage would have us believe. Even with a continuous rock'n'roll soundtrack (sorry iPod [I may need to lay off the parenthetical statements {for a little while}]).

No, what's juvenile is putting one's hope into any one person, and I include oneself in that estimation. Even if we are the hidden master of Wushu, we're absolutely going to need support once in a while, and usually at the time we most revile the idea of asking for it. We need one another. It's in this sense that the allegory in a good ol' pulling-up-bootstraps film does indeed have relevance to one's life philosophy: We need teachers, and we need students, and we can never be certain which of these we are at a given moment. The mainstream movies are made for simplifying -- or distilling, if you prefer -- this kind of complexity into a nice, iconic story for the masses. So maybe it makes sense that on an individual level, this sensei paradigm doesn't work in the same way. It is too unique, too dynamic. Too valuable.

All I'm saying is, it feels better with a sensei, and if you have a single, universal sensei, then it's a whole lot less fuss. I mean, I'll still be smacking this granite post over here if you need me, but it would be a lot more fun if I could blame it on someone else. Let's commence to the head crackin' climactic battle already! Yes, sensei, may I have another?!

Attention Spanning

There's a commonly held opinion that our attention spans are shrinking, and many people attribute that to our rapidly evolving communication and entertainment media. I don't disagree as to the causes for the phenomenon, but I do question that lack of specificity in this summary view of our ability to, and interest, in maintaining attention. I mean, if you take a little time to really examine—

Ooo - lookit - puppies!

What was I saying? Ah, yes: abbreviated attention spans. Was there ever a time in our history when culture didn't seem to be accelerating? You could point to the so-called "dark ages," but what you'd be pointing at would actually be a gap of written record, not some great backward lurch of civilization. No, I believe this sense of cultural acceleration lies more in our psyches and personal perspectives than it does in some larger, more-objective sense of time itself. We are an impatient bunch of creatures. It's part of what motivated us to develop tools and agriculture, and it applies to the human psyche whether you're talking about Twitter or gunpowder. We always want something "better." Ambition and impatience are kissing cousins, at least in my mental genealogy.

I think what we're really talking about when we worry over attention spans is worry over being a part of it all, of being included and/or contributing. I'm talking about more than trending here; perhaps Zeitgeist is a better word, but that still implies a cutting edge, which is more limited than my idea. My idea has less to do with something concrete and static, or even directional, and more to do with movement. Instead of staying ahead in a race, adapting to rhythms and adding something to a dance, maybe. Sometimes we're on the fringe, and sometimes we're setting the beat, but always we want to be in there and a part of it.

Naturally, my idea is going to be an inclusive one. (You can take yourself out of the Unitarian Universalist Sunday sessions, but you can't take the UUSs out of you . . . rself?) But in this case, I tend to be in total agreement with myself, and not just because it's to the advantage of my argument. (I promise. [Myself.]) It may sound like a philosophical argument, and it is, but it's also a practical one. Everything changes, and everything has the potential to change very rapidly, so it's good both to have the willingness to adapt and the centeredness to choose. For me, its akin to the error of multitasking -- namely, that it can't be done effectively. What can be done effectively is to do one thing at a time, and be able to switch tasks rapidly while keeping priorities straight. That can be effective, but true multitasking is a fault to any objective. Unless of course your objective is to make a mess of something.

If our attention spans have, on the whole, gotten shorter, its a result of successful adaptation to our environment, and anyway I don't see it as an irreversible condition. Music can be an amazing salve to a wind-burned attention span. Theatre, too, if one is willing to give it a chance. There's a general idea that entertainment, as such, is also a primary culprit in the criminalizing brevity of our attentions, but there I disagree as well. In fact, entertainment is pretty self-nullifying if it doesn't take us in well enough to influence our sense of time in some way, be it for the better or worse. The word itself, to "entertain," comes from an idea of holding something together. Maybe that refers to people's attentions, and maybe it means keeping the dance alive.

Inversion

It's surprisingly pliant and strong fabric, stretchy, but just to a certain point where it locks and holds at whatever length marks its limit. It's called a "silk," as if it represented a single object rather than a length or segment of some endlessly stitched material. "Silk," also as if it were the softest textile to use, but be careful: it will give you subtle burns, taking away skin at such microscopic increments that you won't feel the blister until much later. As with most circus skills, you've been deceived by how easy the experienced performers make it look and, in at least a small part, by the seeming innocence or mundane appearance of the "silk" itself. Nothing of the performance of that skill suggests throbbing forearms or aching, limited lats in the slightest.

So the first thing you learn is how to climb, which is also the first deception. It would seem as though you're powering your way up, Greco-Roman, arm over arm. In point of fact your abdomen is the one of whom a lot is asked, lifting your feet as high up the tail of the fabric as you can so you can lock it between your feet and push with your legs until a new, higher point is within the reach of your ready arms. Once you've climbed, it's time to learn to descend. That's the slide down, but a controlled one, because even at a reasonable pace the silk can tear at your dermis. If you want to be demonstrative, you can add a certain flair to releasing your grips, extending your arms out wide to accentuate how little you feel the burning resistance between your clenched feet.

Next up is to learn a couple of locks, or positions in which the fabric holds your weight without much help. From the ground you step up into a foot lock, and learn new sorts of pain from the silk, which has instantly attained the leveraging attributes of a jiu-jitsu practitioner. You see yourself down the road a ways, your new blister healed and with an instinctive understanding of how to settle your foot into this lock without your toes cramping but, for now, both aspects are toying with your pain relays. The hip lock seems okay, once you learn to trust the twist involved and to be cautious of your external reproductive organs (an interesting trade-off in advantages for your upper body strength, if you possess said external organs), until you try the straight-leg variety, which performs a relentless shiatsu massage on the delicate nerves in your hip flexor. Perhaps all this nerve conditioning is more than you ever wanted, and gives you pause, but you're on to the next thing and are sure everything will be all right now that you aren't in a straight-leg relentless-shiatsu hip lock any longer.

Why is it that all the deaths related to circus practitioners you've heard of lately happened off of silks?

The next steps integrate what you've picked up (or limped through) with inversions and, eventually, drops. That's a large part of the appeal of silks; they very easily encapsulate the dual appeal of beauty and danger people associate with circus acts. Because of the forgiving behavior of the material (ha ha), the performer can not only climb it and flare it out and bind themselves up, but he or she can also drop, fall, spinning toward the ground, saved at the last possible moment by the bobbing silk. Obviously, the more dangerous the drop seems, the better response there is to be had from the audience. Dropping head-first is something you want to do. And it takes practice.

It's a funny thing, being upside down. You never really,

really

get used to it. Practice doesn't ever quite make it to perfect. There's always some part of you that insists that things are going to continue as they have, with the ground beneath your feet and your balance based from there on up ("up" being a direction associated with your standing "up" hair). So when someone tries to teach you how to tie yourself upside-down, you have the curious sensation of feeling proud of being able to pull it off. Then they ask you to fall face-first toward the floor, and you have the curious follow-up sensation of trepidation over whether or not you tied yourself upside-down in the right, un-cracked-spine manner.

Drop! Catch! Not even a bloody nose, and you suddenly have an easier time imagining yourself enduring pinched muscles, swollen forearms and blistered ankles.

Last Thursday

Wife Megan

and I took our first circus class together, and were taught beginner's silk lessons by

Friend Cody

. I have been eager to rejoin the world of circus training, so there was little doubt in my mind about the fun and challenges to be had. Still, one wonders if he has lost anything, if the risks now outweigh the rewards, if new patterns will allow for older enthusiasms. I haven't, they don't, and they do. Can't hardly wait for this Thursday's follow-up lesson and time for more drops and inversions.

A Myth Gone Public

Last night I attended the public The Public reading of

Christina Gorman

's play,

American Myth

. You may

recall

I attended a reading of her "work-in-progress" back in November, and this was that. I feel more at ease to address the play by name, in spite of it still bearing the WiP nomenclature, because this was a seriously serious reading, my friends. The Emerging Writers Group

advertised

, and filled the center section of the Anspacher Theatre (dear God, what a wonderful space!), and I don't want to name-drop here. I really don't. But suffice it to say that there were some very respectable names attached to the acting and directing of the thing. So, Christina, I'm outing you, whatever other work remains to be done on your script.

American Myth

deals with a fictional set of characters, but ones plucked out of the headlines like a

Law & Order

episode (only more insightful, of course). It deals in questions, which is probably my favorite thing about Christina's writing. All plays tend toward argument; conflict, after all, is drama, and vice versa. But there's nothing like a play that encourages one to ask questions rather than deliver a personal judgment, and

American Myth

does this for me. It asks what history is, both personal and national, and what we want or need it to be. It questions the motivations of the supposedly moral, and the supposedly immoral. Maybe it's simply the Unitarian Universalist in me, but I love pondering these questions because I can never be absolute in my judgments of others in my daily life. A play that impartially (hyper-partially, perhaps?) explores all the angles of a moral conflict resonates very personally with me. Plus, the script has all of Christina's usual wit and incisive display of human behavior that I've come to expect from her work.

Actually attending the reading was a sort of strange experience for me. I went by myself, with which I'm normally fine but this time, somehow, felt conspicuous about. Christina was wonderfully and specifically grateful for my attendance, and that went a long way to comforting me; in fact, for the brief moments I was in her presence I felt totally at ease. Yet apart from that, even as I was simply sitting and reading, waiting for the performance to start, I was uneasy and downright riled up. It's taken me a while to put together what could be the source of this, but this morning I realized that it was being so close to so much of what I want . . . and not having it. Of course I couldn't figure that out last night -- I was fully invested in the play and its development. This morning however, as I packed my chattel for

today's workshop in Philadelphia

, I put it together.

As much as I parlayed my feelings of rejection regarding

the

AFAWK

changes

into moral outrage and philosophical questioning, the fact is that I had allowed myself to become too dependent on the whole effort for the wrong reasons. I very genuinely cared about the story we were trying to tell, of course, and felt committed to our work and intentions. All that was not compromised. However, I had in a way come to rely on the show as a ticket to somewhere, and I have to admit to myself that part of my response (or lack thereof) to the casting changes was petulant and careerist. We had a reading at The Public scheduled, and then I felt it yanked out from under me. Yes, I care about that show; yes, I put good, hard work into its creation; yes, it is deserving of a life beyond our Fringe Festival performances and sacrifices ought to be made to ensure that. But I also want very badly to be valued more than I yet have as an actor, and that very visceral urge pushed on me hard when all of that went down. I had another opportunity to rejoin the process shortly thereafter, which I ignored. Maybe it was because of all the reasons I said, to distance myself from the story we created before, etc. But also, I was hurt by my own sense of slighted ambition.

Believe it or not, I do not want to dwell on that episode, apart from coming clean a bit on the whole thing.

As Far As We Know

continues in its development, and I'm very happy to hear that it lives on. It is wholly deserving of whatever success and attention it can create, as are its current creators. In fact,

Friend Nat

is one of those "creactors," which I find oddly comforting -- he's like a God-father for me. I mention it not just to come clean, but also because what allowed me to realize the source of my anxiety last night was that it felt just like an emotion I used to have in high school and college all the time.

I would sit down in the auditorium, or little theatre, and wait for the lights to dim. I was usually by myself, for whatever reason. (Often, that reason was because it was my third time seeing the show and I had run out of folks who wanted to see it.) I would sit and sit, a mounting sense of anticipation and dread occupying my heart and head. Then the show would begin, and I would get wrapped up in its machinations, but one part of me would always be on the outside of that. That part would feel wrapped up tight, strong, full of urge and impulse. And it would only feel more so after the bows were had, and the applause faded from memory. That urge sits there in every performance and whispers to me,

"I want to do that.

"I want to do that . . ."

1 2 3 SPRING

This weekend I went down to northern Virginia to celebrate a friend's birthday and Easter, and to meet my new niece-in-law, Hannah. It was a very fast trip, and a car was rented, which makes for a great deal more ease of travel, in spite of involving a great deal more effort on my part. It also allowed me to skip out on my own early Saturday morning for that birthday's adventures. The lucky birthday boy's wife arranged for a group of his friends to experience

Inner Quest

as adults. This was a popular field trip for all of us as children but, I must admit, it is

so much way better

as an adult. For one, nobody makes snide comments about one's athletic prowess, or lack thereof.

Well, it's done with a better sense of humor, anyway.

It was a fairly fascinating experience for me on many levels. As a youth, I only ever went to Inner Quest in my overweight phase (ages 5-16, this "phase" was) and I certainly didn't have a lot of background on the sorts of things they ask you to do there. I was a Boy Scout, and we do some challenging things in the Scouts, but rarely anything so singular as a zip wire, or climbing a 35-foot ladder (somehow that's more frightening than rock climbing). So perhaps needless to say, I was far better equipped to handle its challenges--physical and emotional--as a 31-year-old circus enthusiast. I didn't so much get a feeling of redemption from this experience, as I felt a strong need to make up for lost time. I wanted to run through, do everything, and do it all twice if I possibly could.

We did a zip wire (coast across a valley on a pulley attached to an airline cable), the "trapeze" (climb 30-or-so feet up a tree and jump from a platform to catch a trapeze), the "squirrel" (you're tied to a rope that runs up to a pulley very high in the air, and your friends are on the other end; at "go," you run in one direction and they, the other) and a "woozle" (two tightropes that wedge apart; you and a partner put your hands together and try to stay on them as far out in the widening wedge as possible). Of all of these, the trapeze was definitely my favorite. It was an awfully Batman-ish sort of challenge, and the terror I felt on that platform was unexpectedly strong. Pushing through that was an exhilarating reminder that there's a lot of new stuff I can still tackle physically, whether it's making up for lost time or finding all-new challenges.

Wife Megan

and I are, in fact, planning to take our first aerial class this week.

The other way in which this adventure was fascinating, though, was a quieter, less-terror-inducing one. Inner Quest is principally a team-building course, and they host school, church and corporate groups for day-long bouts of group challenges. This day was a bit like watching my own workshop curriculum writ large, stretched across valleys and up oak trees. Whether I'm teaching acrobalance or commedia dell'arte, there's always an emphasis on group work, on creating a sense of ensemble. That priority even ties back into the times I was first experiencing Inner Quest; growing up, I felt a very strong connection to the groups I was in that worked well together, theatre-oriented or otherwise. For me, there's a synergy to collaboration that simply has no match in individual efforts (if in fact any effort can be said to be purely individual). So I find the work of leading such inner-quests fascinating.

Our guides in this day, known to me only as Kate and Corey, were very accustomed to one another and seemed to be genuinely enthusiastic about the work. It was a miserable day weather-wise, rain-soaked and chilly, which made for mud, but they made sure we knew that by showing up on such a day we had impressed them. The emphasis was on fun, this being an adult birthday party, yet they kept up with their leadership techniques from what I could tell. I was struck in particular by how Kate dealt with an especially terrified friend on the trapeze platform. She just talked to her, but underlying the conversation was an awareness that she needed to balance distracting the jumper from the terror while focusing her on the task at hand. It's a delicate technique, and one that's impressed me ever since someone used it on me when I was a boy, to get me unfrozen from climbing up a couple of airline cables to the zip-wire platform.

I have had a few incidences of having to coax people into attempting the activities and/or challenges my workshops present. Some have gone better than

others

, of course, but it's an interesting and essential aspect of teaching. Everyone is accustomed to the idea of "requirements" for a given class or workshop, but requiring something is in my opinion antithetical to the learning process. The first step of learning is choice; take that away, and even when students accomplish something it is fleeting, personally unimportant or even ultimately resented. Inviting someone to challenge themselves, doing so in a compelling way, is a precious ability to cultivate in both teaching and other forms of leadership. It allows for progress and individuality. I'll be thinking about this a lot, no doubt, during

my workshop at Swarthmore tomorrow

.

There's only one thing better than springtime in NoVa, and that's autumn. But spring is pretty wonderful too, with its cherry blossoms and budding deciduous trees. I'm glad I got down there for our short weekend, and played outdoors a bit while there. On Sunday, in fact, Megan and her dad built Nephew James a new playground in the backyard. I slept in and missed most of the build, but selfishly scooped up a great deal of the payoff by playing with young James upon his first discovery of the fantastic addition to the yard. It was chilly. I definitely wished for it to be warmer as we romped around the castle, but kind of relished the youth of the season along with the youth of my companion. Before we know it, he'll be springing off platforms and hurtling through space. Eager as I am for warmer weather and more activity, the present moment is pretty wonderful, too.