I think it's a glorious thing when art, in whatever form, returns from the depth of your memory to offer comfort beside some experience occurring in present life. This week, as I was feeling quite sorry for myself at having allowed myself to be drawn in by a man, a piece from Tennessee Williams' Small Craft Warnings did just that for me.
A few weeks ago I began going with friends to hear a particular band play at various Brooklyn venues. I went for the music, but found that the attention the drummer began paying me wasn't exactly a turn off. No one can dispute that talent is really freakin' hot. So imagine my surprise when at the last show that I attended, he acted as if he didn't know me. As it turned out, his girlfriend was also in attendance. I felt pissed, embarrassed, sad, violated in some weird way (although nothing physical had ever gone down)... but I realized that it wasn't actually about him... I was lead on, taken in, and then surprised. It was the unexpected twist that knocked me for a loop. I thought I knew the score and then, bam... not so much. It could have been anyone; I had no feelings attached to this man in particular... it was the feeling of being sucker punched that made me retreat to the comfort of my protective emotional walls with just self pity to keep me company. Well, for a day anyway. Then, a wise woman (no, not Erma) reminded me that the capacity for feeling surprised is a necessity for living a full, not to mention artistic, life. If one could not allow themselves to be open to surprise, they couldn't be open to happiness either. Nor humanity. Some surprises are painful, hurtful... but just as many are joyous.
I immediately thought back to a production my mother, Ms. Erma, directed when I was around eleven years old. In it, Quentin speaks of his "having lost the ability to say: "My God!" instead of just: "Oh, well." I remember thinking how amazingly sad that was. I was only eleven or so and couldn't comprehend the entirety of Williams' work but that, I got. That I understood. That I thought was probably the most heartbreaking thing that could ever happen to a human being. I actually swore a silent oath to myself (I was a dramatic child, after all) that I would never let that happen to me. This week I was reminded of that monologue and found comfort in revisiting my younger self as well as the work. And I found myself: surprised.
So I say bring it on, life. Bring it on, losers and assholes. I will protect myself but I will not shut down. And thank you, Mr. Williams, for reminding me that uncomfortable feelings will pass but the joy of experiencing it all is what life is truly about.
QUENTIN: That's closer, much closer. Yes, that's almost it. The word that I had in mind is surprise, though. The capacity for being surprised. I've lost the capacity for being surprised, so completely lost it, that if I woke up in my bedroom late some night and saw that fantastic fish swimming right over my head, I wouldn't be really surprised. Oh, no. Wide awake. But not really surprised. There's a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they're addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise. This lack of surprise and variation in their... "love life"... spreads into other areas of... "sensibility?"... Yes, once, quite a long while ago, I was often startled by the sense of being alive, of being myself, living! Present on earth, in the flesh, yes, for some completely mysterious reason, a single, separate, intensely conscious being, myself: living!... whenever I would feel this...feeling, this... shock of... what?... self-realization?... I would be stunned, I would be thunderstruck by it. And by the existence of everything that exists, I'd be lightening-struck with astonishment... it would do more than astound me, it would give me a feeling of panic, the sudden sense of... I suppose it was like an epileptic seizure, except that I didn't fall to the ground in convulsions; no, I'd be more apt to try to lose myself in a crowd on a street until the seizure was finished... They were dangerous seizures. One time I drove into the mountains and smashed the car into a tree, and I'm not sure if I meant to do that, or... In a forest you'll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that's scarred, that's blazed by lightening, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment any more but just go on, continue for two or three hundred years more?... This boy I picked up tonight, the kid from the tall corn country, still has the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth. All the way up the canyon to my place, he kept saying, I can't believe it, I'm here, I've come to the Pacific, the world's greatest ocean!... as if nobody, Magellan or Balboa or even the Indians had ever seen it before him; yes, like he'd discovered this ocean, the largest on earth, and so now, because he'd found it himself, it existed, now, for the first time, never before... And this excitement of his reminded me of my having lost the ability to say: "My God!" instead of just: "Oh, well." I've asked all the questions, shouted them at deaf heaven, till I was hoarse in the voice box and blue in the face, and gotten no answer, not the whisper of one, nothing at all, you see, but the sun coming up each morning and going down that night, and the galaxies of the night sky trooping onstage like chorines, robot chorines: one, two, three, kick, one, two, three, kick... Repeat any question too often and what do you get, what's given?... A big carved rock by the desert, a... monumental symbol of worn-out passion and bewilderment in you, a stupid stone paralyzed sphinx that knows no answers that you don't but comes on like the oracle of all time, waiting on her belly to give out some outcries of universal wisdom, and if she woke up some midnight at the edge of the desert and saw that fantastic fish swimming over her head... y'know what she'd say, too? She'd say: "Oh, well"... and go back to sleep for another five thousand years.
