Mysteries and Secrets

Neil Gaiman

.

Neil Gaiman is an incredible treasure of storytelling, whom I can appreciate largely due to the years-ago efforts of

Expatriate Dave

to make me experience as much of Mr. Gaiman's work as possible. Since that time (around age 17, this was) I have consumed every iota of his work that I could, and his work includes comics, other literature, movies, a

daily 'blog

and numerous odds and ends besides. If you don't know his work, you should, even if you don't consider yourself a fan of fantastical fiction. He has very good ideas, and he steals awfully well. By which I mean that one of the things I love about his work is the way he can tie together disparate old ideas and stories with new ones and make something appreciably unique. This could be considered a decent description of what any artist endeavors to do. Neil Gaiman is an artist.

I decided to write about him today because I have noticed many disparate ideas and stories coming together for me lately that point his way. In brief:

• I'm reading a book about him I received for Christmas.

• He was just on "The Colbert Report," which I stayed up to see (WAY past night-before-open-call bedtime).

• He just made Wife Megan's esteemed list of Famous People With Whom She Would Like to Have a Conversation.

• I've been enjoying the fiction-writing process of late, especially with Friend WHftTS.

• Expatriate Younce actually confessed some writerly desires to me the other night -- a victory for the cause of Fiction, I assure you.

• He recently experienced a personal loss that makes me wish I could do something for him, as he's done so much for me.

I had an opportunity to share a word or two with Neil Gaiman a few years back, when he was in town signing copies of his short-story collection,

Fragile Things

. He was interviewed by John Hodgman, which was hilarious and insightful, and then took a seat at the back of the room to sign hundreds upon hundreds of signatures. I waited my turn in line with my and Megan's books, and I thought about things. I had a signed copy of his novel

Stardust

that I had won in a costume contest back in my home town, and it seemed unbelievable that I was going to watch him sign a book from my very hand. I wondered what I would say, and suddenly the whole thing felt eerily familiar. Looking back, I realize the panic I felt was the exact same feeling I have waiting for an open call. Suffice it to say, I thought of a million things I could say. When I got to the table, I squeaked. Something. I don't know. I think I've since blocked it out. But I know it was squeaky, whatever it was.

The Zen Buddhists believe that the elimination of desire is a key to enlightenment. When I want something as much as to be cast off-Broadway, or to get into a discussion about mythology with Neil Gaiman, I can see their point. It can be crippling.

Mythology, as a concept, is a very interesting way of looking at our lives. Obviously I would say so -- see name o'blog -- but a few thousand years' worth of actual mythology may be said to back me up on this as well. I used to think of mythology on the whole (and prepare for more sweeping generalizations here) as a way of devising answers to difficult questions. I was taught that these stories came about because primitive peoples needed an answer to things like lightning storms, death and babies. I won't argue against that theory, but it is only one theory. The more I learn about them, the more I see the enduring mythologies as stories and beliefs that return people to essential questions, rather than direct answers. Moreover, I see mythology not as giving us guidelines or neat morals for our living, providing context, so much as it

changes our story

. Stories influence other stories, and one person's life can be said to be a (hopefully) long, largely sequential story. What I realized while standing in that line was that Gaiman's stories had profoundly affected my life, my story. In fact, just at that moment, it seemed entirely likely that his stories had had the most influence on mine, out of all of them. Thus: Squeak.

I don't know if myth and mystery have any relation, etymologically speaking, but I find them to be very closely related. Brothers, almost. In his famous

Sandman

graphic novels, Gaiman resurrected DC Comics' versions of Cain and Abel as the keepers of mysteries and secrets, respectively. According to that particular mythology, a mystery is a mystery because it was meant to be shared, a secret a secret because it ought to be forgotten . . . if it can be. Mythology, fiction, stories, they all confront unanswerable questions in one way or another, and it's by sharing them that we fulfill their functions. So I hope you'll share in some of Gaiman's, because it's no secret that they're uncommonly good.

Remember to Write . . .

F

riend WHftTS

has been writing. He/She/It is very good about doing it, and also good (though perhaps I should say "grood") about writing about when he/she/it doesn't do it. And thankfully, I have been invited into that rewarding little world of writing writers who appreciate the act of writing and writing about said act. We've made a small collaboration by writing a couple of short stories within the same world -- a world WHftTS created -- and exchanging thoughts and critiques on them. It rules.

Some of my RPG buddies wonder why I can't get thrilled about games that involve a lot of combat and strategy. I think it's because I always have some small voice at the back of my head that says, "I know this story, and it only has two possible endings." I love narrative, and I love storytelling, and I am really enjoying having someone with whom I can discuss the craft behind it all. It's still very mysterious to me, how words (not to rule out images, melodies, etc.) can be built together to create responses in us, and how the best of those creations can work over and over again, personally affecting each reader, or audience member, or writer. Storytelling, I think, is the overlap between my various appreciations for theatre, cinema, reading and writing. It often makes me wish I was a better storyteller, because while I sometimes do well with crafting such things, actually being the one to

tell a story

is not something at which I usually excel. An actor does some of this, but not alone, not directly. Storytellers, as such, are rather magical people to me.

Expatriate Younce

and I had a summer in which we shared these "assignments" with one another. They could be anything at all, really, from scavenger hunt to essay writing. It was pretty awesome. (That being said, I hope and pray none of my completed assignments

ever

appear on these here internetz [Buddy Younce, I'm looking in your direction...].) It was a way of having new frameworks with which to work in doing something creative, or interpretive. This always appeals to me, whether I complete a given assignment or not, because it keeps creativity in the realm of a dialogue. This idea of dialogue, communication, extroversion, fuels me somehow as a creative person. That's part of why this here 'blog is the best journaling I've ever accomplished, why live theatre is the work to which I've given the most of my efforts. It's rewarding but, more importantly I think, it is shared.

In the spirit of that: Please think of one of your favorite stories. Now, think of the best delivery you ever received of said story, be it a personal telling, a movie, a book, etc. Now, imagine the best

possible

delivery of that story for you -- the medium, the person or people involved, the environment, the works. Seriously: Please write your responses in "reactions" for this entry. I'm really curious. It doesn't have to be an ultimate answer; it just has to be

one

of your favorites.

Ever thine,

-Jeff

Block? Block. Block?

Friend WHftTS has

a recent post

on his/her/its 'blog that reminds me of how irksome the collaborative process can be. It is easy to feel lost or frustrated, or both, and sometimes the whole damn thing hardly seems worth the effort. It has to be a strong choice, I think, to collaborate with particular people at a particular time on a particular work, and we have to be prepared to have it go

completely different

from our expectations. Even then, we may contend with that familiar urge to go ear rippin'. And anyway, we don't always have a choice in one (if not any) of these areas. Theatre, in particular, involves a lot of ball-passing, and very rarely does any quarterback make a 90-yard dash that results in a touchdown.

Ew. When I resort to sports metaphor, it's time for a new paragraph, at least.

Having just come off a highly collaborative process, I'm very sensitive to WHftTS' frustration over people who block. By "block," in this sense, I'm drawing a parallel between collaboration and improvisation (much safer metaphorical territory [is that ambiguous?] for yours truly). A block, in improvisation, is when someone says "no" to a suggestion. A pretty straight-forward rule: Don't say no. Until you consider that the very rule you just stated violates itself by its negative construction. Then think of how conditioned we are to say "no," automatically or otherwise.

Then

consider how many different ways there are of saying "no," or blocking, without using that particular word; without saying anything at all! It is often quite challenging, saying "yes" to everything. Hell, it's challenging saying yes even once, in some contexts.

It would seem, at first blush, that some critical faculty is required for collaboration, and it is. The trouble is, saying "no," or arguing, is too easy. "Easy?" you demand. "You call that struggle easy?" In a sense, yes, Dear Reader. Blocking is itself a much simpler, more direct choice than, say redirecting, or even trying out whatever's just been given to you. Therein lies much of the problem with blocking, even that of the most sensible and creative variety -- it contributes nothing.

When we teach improvisation,

Friend Heather

and I get people in the practice of saying, "Yes, and..." at the beginning of each sentence. This is a good ritual for keeping communication open. The first, and most consistent, breach of this rule that always occurs is someone saying, "Yes, but...". Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that one says "yes, but" because they sincerely have a better idea. Hands down. No question. What harm then? The harm is that in disagreement so abrupt and direct, one halts the flow of energy, which is more important to a collaboration than almost anything else. Perhaps worse (for the blocker), in a good collaboration you may find yourself ignored. Like water, the group's efforts have to keep flowing, lest they become stagnant, and you, Dear Blocker, are in their way. More to the point, though, there are other ways of influencing the flow, ways that run less risk of ignoring what might turn out to be a problem-solving idea at that. Focus, explore and contribute, rather than block, and odds are that you'll get a better result every time. Maybe in some cases we can and ought to direct a given collaboration. That can be helpful, but no matter how much your direction is needed, you never own the collaboration. It's always the groups'.

The other block I have on my mind is one WHftTS addresses rather frequently as well: writer's block. Or, I should say, WHftTS addresses the cure, which is regular writing. A discipline. Like a pulp detective, I can't help but feel the two blocks are related in some way(s). I spent a couple of months away from my play

Hereafter

-- never reading it, much less writing on it, in that time. My intention had been to spend the last two weeks of

R&J

working it over, but the first week was packed with workshops, and the second . . . well . . . I just couldn't get to it.

It has become apparent to me that I'm actually suffering from a bit of writer's block. That seems natural enough. My writing in general over the rehearsal period had been sporadic at best, downright occasional at worst, so I'm a little out of practice. Plus, I care an awful lot about

Hereafter

, and so I don't want to mess up whatever I've already gotten right. Plus, I can't recapture how I felt when I was writing it. Plus . . . I mean, I wrote the two best pieces of it months apart from one another, with no regard for unity . . .. And . . . uh . . . er . . ..

"Yes, but . . ."

You can block yourself. In fact, what may be so very frightening about collaboration is that it mirrors the internal process so well. They're both instinctive, wandering, exploratory quests, filled with wrong turns and time, time, time. They're best approached with patience, enthusiasm and direction, albeit ever-changing direction. It's hard enough work without getting in my own way.

Short Shrift

Quick one here, as we've a manatee this afternoon, and I'm busily preparing for a quick trip home afterward for my day-and-a-half off. The coming week will be jam-packed for me: Shows, teaching acrobalance to the theatre's

conservatory class

(sans my usual teaching partner), teaching a workshop on career management at

Marywood

, and choreographing fights for North Pocono's

Midsummer's

(you may recall our teaching there

back in October

). My hope, however, is to do a proper entry about some of the process behind

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

sometime tomorrow, between getting my tax paperwork straight and working the kinks out of my rather bruised body.

For today, I just want to say thanks to everyone for their thoughts and encouragement in seeing us through this process. It seems to have been a project that has inspired a lot of enthusiasm in people, and created a certain synergy in the community -- both the local community, and the larger, meta-community of our far-and-wide friends and family. I was reminded of this vast, unseen network of support in a couple of ways in the past twelve hours. Last night, after the show, I was greeted by several students from both Marywood and North Pocono who had attended. This was a big deal to me. It's a kind of community that is only created by open sharing, and a willingness to learn, and I can not value it highly enough.

And then this morning, a different kind of reminder. I woke a bit groggy from a late bedtime, and lingered in bed, checking my email on my phone (not even thinking of

casting news

, I assure you). In my inbox was not one, but two messages from friends letting me know that I showed up in their dreams last night. One is a friend whom I haven't seen in years, that worked with me on the very first show I ever acted in with David Zarko as director, and the other is a friend who lives all the way out in merry olde England. I regard it as an unequivocal good omen when I show up in others' dreams. This is the kind of thing that I'm sure I have Facebook to thank for, yet I also feel that it's owed in part to the power of this play. It's the kind of story that signifies so much to so many that it has only to be mentioned and one finds oneself making strong associations, and perhaps thinking of younger times. That alone is reason to do a funny, mad-cap version of

Romeo & Juliet

; that alone is worth the work and tears. Thanks, everyone, for keeping the star-cross'd lovers alive in your hearts.

Also, in one of their dreams: I was Han Solo. That's neither here nor there, but I had to mention it...

Tropic of Gemini

I unintentionally read the anti-

Romeo&Juliet

a little while ago: Henry Miller's

Tropic of Cancer

[link N

quite

SFW]. It is putting it rather on the glass-half-full side of things to say that the book served as a cleansing of my cynical palette before I embark on one of the more profound studies of innocence. When I finished

Tropic of Cancer

, I put it down with a victorious sigh, relieved that I would never have to read it again. Friend Patrick is flummoxed by this behavior in me, my determination to finish any book I've started, no matter how awful the experience. (I did give up on

this book

last Spring, though, because it is just freaking shite.) I can hardly explain it myself, except to say that it is perhaps a deeply ingrained habit. Whatever the cause, I generally read only one book at a time, and when I start a book, I finish it, or it finishes me.

Tropic of Cancer

very nearly finished me.

It's a little troubling to have so loathed a book that has come to be widely regarded a classic. It's supposed to be a work of considerable genius, and has been praised unequivocally by folks like Orwell, Mailer and Vonnegut -- all writers I greatly enjoy and admire. This isn't the first time I've not enjoyed a classic. I've often not enjoyed Dickens and Joyce. And by often, I mean just about every time I've curled up to give them another read. I do believe, however, that this is the first time in my adult life that I've taken such an active distaste for an accredited author's work. That is to say, it is unique in my experience to feel revulsion for something I've read, and perhaps this speaks more to Miller's genius as might any actual critical response I could make. It's not prudery, per se -- I love vicarious sex and violence, whether that's a good or bad thing. Love Anais Nin, so far loathe Miller. So what is it?

It is, I believe, the cynicism. The sheer, unrelenting, unapologetic cynicism. To hear Miller tell of it, I would not have made it out of 1930s Paris alive; there are suicides in this book, and they are all-too understandable to me. It seemed as though every character maintained his or her existence merely to progress to the next selfish experience, and after not too long I was utterly bogged down in the sense of hopeless, purposeless puppetry. I read

Of Human Bondage

not too long ago, and it was almost as if Miller had taken Carey's latter (also frustrating) selflessness and turned it on its ear so hard it went into coma. Miller's narrator (or voice, depending on the ratio of memoir to narrative at a given moment) is given to short sentences of profound and usually brutal imagery and metaphor that definitely would have appealed to me when I was sixteen. Now, they strike me as naive and self-centered and, as far as I was able to tell, the narrator undergoes no lasting change in the course of the story. Was there even joy in this story, really? Miller is famous for philosophically sucking the marrow from life, but this seemed more to me like continually jumping off a building for the three seconds of the sensation of flying.

What this is really about then, for me, is a struggle to process my experience in reading the book. How did, or will, the book change me? You could make the case that it won't . . . but that I feel it already has, and what remains is to understand that effect. It hasn't sapped my hope, at least. If anything, it makes me rail against its perspective, which seems so short-sighted and inconsequential that I want to grab the narrator by the neck and just shake him until he snaps out of it (or something else snaps). Why do none of these people believe in anything? What drives them to write, or do anything lasting, if it is all about survival and gratification? Maybe these are the questions Miller wanted us to ask, or maybe I'm just to narrow in my perspective on the era. If I had to say what effect the book has had on me, I'd guess at this point that it has strengthened my resolve to help and inspire others through my work. And I have to confess that I hope Henry Miller would've hated that.

Lest this read as some offended rant against a slice of literature history, I will say that at times I felt the raw power of Henry Miller's control of the language, and his willingness to savor words without making them self-important or inaccessible. Some of his ideas rang out, too, despite my prejudice against the perspective of his narrator. I wrote earlier in the month about the

supposed virtue of beauty

in art, and a strong argument could be made for there being a unique and important beauty in Miller's work. For me, however, I'm thrilled to go work on

a love story

very soon (and possibly even more thrilled to finally be on to reading it on the subway).

The

love story, for some people, and I'm going to do my damnedest to make it a guilty pleasure to begin, and full of consequence and beauty at the end. And maybe that's what Miller meant.

But I really have no idea.