I get nervous about writing about specific things that I love or once loved. It is easy for me to mount a defense of the field that I work in, of literature and artistic production as a whole, because that is the sort of vague “love” that disintegrates and becomes its own separate, distanced logic when pressed. But when I try to talk about something specific, something that is of great personal significance in an academic and analytic manner, I get very nervous. So nervous that I don’t do it.
In a number of ways, I think my writing often explores things that I find interesting or emotional. There’s consent in this relationship with my audience. I choose a number of things to write, and then they are shaped into content for that audience. I’ve agreed to it. But when I take something that has a meaning to it that I don’t fully understand, that I am not fully prepared to write about, writing becomes a dangerous activity, because I don’t know exactly where it is I’m headed, or why I’m headed there in the first place. I know something happened, something very important. In a sense, I cut myself open for my reader and challenge them to interpret the entrails, hoping that they have the skill (empathy?) to read such things.
So, reader, here are three scenes; take them. I don’t want anything back:
Scene 1
I have never liked basements. In the first house I remember living in, the basement floor was always cold. There was a place to do laundry in the corner, a musty old storage rack that didn’t hold anything, a guest bedroom, and another small room that held a couch, a chair and a television. Cobwebs were always hanging from the ceiling, no matter how much I swung at them with the end of a broom. My grandfather was fastidious about recording things on his television in Texas, and he would often send out recorded VHS tapes of movies and television shows as Christmas presents. I remember fondly the King Kong movie from the 70s he sent out that had a flash of breasts that I paused, rewound, paused rewound for nearly three hours. I don’t remember when I discovered some of the tapes with episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on them, but when I popped one in the VCR, and sat back to watch, I was unprepared for the formative obsession I was about to develop. Opening monologue:
“Space. The final frontier.”
There was some other stuff, but that was what really got me, clued me in to something mysterious and wonderful. The person I am now wants to dismiss this admiration as trite, but there’s a child somewhere in the folds of time pushing back harder than he can. And my heart isn’t really in it.
Descending into the creepy basement became bearable because it meant that I got to watch the adventures of Captain Picard and his intrepid crew, zooming around the galaxy, righting wrongs, asking deep and penetrating questions. I remember one in particular, “Where Silence Has Lease,” where the ship flies into a pocket of space that is not anything at all, but it turns out to be a giant laboratory for a malevolent space-scientist-god. There’s a particularly chilling scene where the crew is wandering around in an exact replica of their own ship that is mysteriously empty. Close to the end of the episode, Picard explains what death is to one of his crew members, who unbeknownst to him is the scientist. He says:
“Considering the marvelous complexity of the universe, its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension, I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other “practical” measuring systems, and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.”
The sound that filled the room after this was the sound of my six-year old brain melting. I couldn’t understand a lot of what was being said, but for some reason, I felt like I needed to lodge this information away somewhere until a later date. I still have it packed away, and it still gives me chills, and not from the simple denotation of the words. It’s something deeper, something I can’t quite unpack, and maybe never will be able to.
Scene 2
I am sitting in the audience at the Cort Theater in New York City. The stage is a few rows in front of me, the set a familiar one: a tree and a bench. There isn’t much in the background, just a few bits of rubble strewn about over a weathered hardwood stage. I leaf through my Playbill, ignoring the advertisements for makeup and other shows, and instead look a the cast page, reminding myself once again that this is really happening, that I am about to see Patrick Stewart perform on stage. It is 2014. I am older. I know he is just a man, just another person living out there, who happens to perform, but there’s that child again, yelling something I can’t quite hear.
I’ve told myself that I’m going to try and get his autograph after the show, that if I get the chance, I will tell him my story, and he will understand and appreciate the impact he’s had on my life. Maybe afterwords, we’ll go out for drinks and become good friends. Eventually, I get to eulogize at his funeral. This is what my mind does, creates ridiculous scenarios and follows them to their conclusion. Is it the child’s or mine?
The lights go down, and the audience goes silent. The actors enter, McKellen and Stewart, to raucous applause, and the play begins. I remember a set a friend designed for this play, a set that takes place on a playground, a swing-set and a see-saw in place of a bench and a tree, a child-cast Waiting for Godot, which he did mainly to avoid working hard on constructing a miniature balsa wood set design. At the time, it was satisfying for me on a level that the original stage directions were not quite satifactory.
Sulfur burns my nostrils. Someone nearby has farted, which somehow seems appropriate given the blunt, vulgar corporeality of the play on stage. The actors are performing with the skill and humor of age, and I am slowly lost in the performance, spellbinding in its inanity and sense of detached pathos.
Scene 3
“That passed the time.” Vladimir utters this after the mad dance of Pozzo and Lucky concludes for the first time.
It cuts. I no longer want an autograph, I don’t want to see the actors after the show. The memory lodged in my heart worms its way free and expands in my chest. I have to let it go, or it will rip me open. The actor gave it to me, and now he gets to take it away, demanding the return of his furniture of his universe.
He is just a man, a man who meant so much to a child who needed so very much. Now I need different kinds of nourishment, for I am something different now.
The play finishes, I stuff my Playbill into my jacket, into my heart, and I leave. The child looks back once, and then he comes along with me. He didn’t really want the autograph either.
Not really.
twells 