Currently Listening The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers By Howard Shore, Isabel Bayrakdarian (soprano) see related

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Adown Titanic Glooms

            In the long list of my most embarrassing moments, there have been several lately that have come out near the top. I’ve become incredibly obnoxious in Macbeth: not only am I quoting all the other people’s lines on stage, I had to explain to Dr. Saenger in my other class that he was quoting from Macbeth a week ago (he couldn’t remember from which of the plays comes the line “False face must hide what the false heart doth know,” but really, though, he’s teaching a class on the play). Whenever I come in for quizzes so that I can speak my lines to Dr. Saenger, I get stage-fright and I have to fight the urge to quote Horatio instead (during the part where I’m supposed to say, “This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet, does approve by his lov’d mansionry that the heaven’s breath smells wooingly here,” I almost always want to say, “This guest of summer, the temple-haunting martlet, does with his lofty and shrill-sounding note awake the god of day…” which has a better rhythm, actually.)

            And Booth’s prophecy about how I would get in trouble for stage-whispering came true as well.

            “If you can look into the seeds of time,” I told the witches in a conspiratorial tone, with my hand over my mouth, “and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors nor your hate.”

            “Okay,” said Dr. Saenger. “Your delivery is actually really good, but you don’t need to put your hand over your mouth.”

            “But what if I’m stage-whispering?” I asked in a stage whisper.

            “You can stage whisper,” he replied, “just not with your hand over your mouth. So let’s try that again…”

            And yesterday was worst of all. Saenger came in at the beginning and he told us that we would be doing improv, which I didn’t like to hear because I’ve been in a fairly quiet mood of late and, either way, I’ve never been that good at improv games. He told us it was fine if we did stupid things on stage, because that’s actually the point and it’s impossible to mess up at an improv game. I immediately thought of what had happened on The Office when Michael took an acting class:

            Michael: Think about this: what is the most exciting thing that can happen on TV or in movies, or in real life? Somebody has a gun. That’s why I always start with a gun, because you can’t top it. You just can’t.

            [cut to Michael’s improv class. A girl is skipping across a room. Michael stands off to the side and shakes his head.]

            Improv Classmate 1: I’m looking for my doctor. He’s an angry midget.

            Michael: BOOM! Agent Michael Scarn! I see through your ruse! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

            Improv Classmate 2: I’m not even in this scene!

            Michael: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

            Improv Instructor: Michael, c’mon. What are you doing?

            Michael: I’m making the scene better! The old scene was boring.

            Improv Instructor: No it wasn’t, Michael. Give me your guns.

            So we were all standing around in a circle in the center of the room. Saenger explained that our job was to make silly sounds. Whenever we made a silly sound, we would point at someone else in the circle, and they would have to repeat the sound that we had made, along with another of their own.

            “Zam, pow!” cried Adam, pointing at Zeke.

            “Pow, bam!” cried Zeke, throwing a finger at Amy. I looked on from the side and shook my head.

            “Bam, whoo!” shouted Amy, pointing at Michelle.

            “Whoo, blam!” Michelle cried, pointing at Kim Le, who was standing next to me.

            “Blam, arrggggh!” shouted Kim. She made her finger into a little hook and turned to me.

            I pointed at Brian Gingrich. “Argh, ‘I do not know why yet I live to say this thing’s to do, sith I have cause and strength and will and means to do’t!” I exclaimed.

            There was a long silence. Everybody stared at me uncomfortably.

            Brian shook his head. “‘I do not know why yet I live…’” he murmured, in a flustered tone.

            “Alright!” said Saenger, waving his hands. “You can stop there. Keep going, keep going!...”

            I apologized to Brian when we did our run-through afterwards.

            “I’m sorry about that, Brian,” I told him. “That was a really mean thing to do.”

            “That was a really mean thing to do,” said Brian. I was so mortified by what I had done that I refused to talk about it till today. I think I shall apologize to Saenger when I meet him during office hours Thursday after class.

            It was one of the most embarrassing things that’s happened in a while, but I’m not sure it’s as humbling as what occurred on Saturday when Booth and I went to the bank to cash our checks again.

            “Booth, nothing stupid has happened yet,” I told him, as we waited in the drive-thru line. “This is the first time we have ever been to the bank and nothing ridiculous has happened.” Previous incidents include the time that I used Anna’s door to hit another car, while there was someone else inside the car, the several times that Booth has driven off with the money-can, and (no one could forget) the time he asked about the dinosaur.

            The voice of the teller came over the speaker. “I need to see your state driver’s license,” she said.

            “Oh!” I murmured. “I accidentally handed her my student ID.” I started fishing in my wallet for my state ID card.

            “Wait,” came the voice of the speaker, again. “Are you Wizard Bobby?”

            I turned and stared at Booth. “Wait, what?” I asked.

            “Are you Wizard Bobby?” she asked again.

            “Yes,” said Booth.

            “Oh, okay,” she said. “Never mind. I don’t need to see your ID. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

            She funneled us the money and we drove away.

            “What was that about?” I exclaimed, when we were gone.

            “You’re Wizard Bobby,” said Booth. “Did you ever go into the bank with your cape?”

            “Yes, a couple of times, I think."

            “Okay, then,” he said. “They must have remembered you and given you a name. You’re one of those guys they talk about on coffee breaks.”

            “I can’t believe it,” I murmured.

            “I don’t know which is worse,” he added. “Being the guy who asked the question about the dinosaur, or being ‘Wizard Bobby.’”

            “Thanks, Booth,” I replied…

Currently Listening Elvis: Ultimate Gospel By Elvis Presley see related

And Grace: The Sweet Air of Fall

            After another moment’s thought, I read the passage from the middle section in which Stephen and the Fairy King dig up a moss-oak log so that they can switch it with Strange’s wife and make him think she’s dead (“the old switch-log ploy,” Dr. Gaines remarked, as an aside).

            It was not that he fell asleep exactly, but he did fall to dreaming. In his dream he had gone to the pantry to fetch someone a slice of magnificent pork pie. But when he cut the pie open he found that there was very little pork inside it. Most of the interior was taken up by the city of Birmingham. Within the pie-crust forges and smithies smoked and engines pounded. One of the citizens, a civil-looking person, happened to stroll out from the cut that Stephen had made, and when his glance fell upon Stephen, he said…

            Just then a high, mournful sound broke in upon Stephen’s dream – a slow, sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with thistle-down hair was singing.

            It was all suspiciously like Alice’s adventures in Grimgraven House (I gave Jennifer K. a footnote to read over dinner and she said it reminded her a lot of my story as well). But now that the fall is here at last, and the first few weeks of School are safely past us, and the first of many corners has been turned in what is sure to be a rich and satisfying year, I think I finally have a sense of where the year is going and the things I need to do right now: to be with God each day, to let Him draw me ever closer to my little (and, I may say, ever-more delightful) group of friends, to work on getting into grad school, and to write continually. I want to know, as much as Tyler does, what happens next: but lately I have been obliged to step away from writing so that I could fill in blanks where nothing yet exists.

            “Booth, I finally figured out how to pass my Latin class,” I said to Booth on Friday at lunch, right after my first exam.

            “How?” he asked.

            I pulled out my little green book, which is always the prelude to surrealism now. “I wrote down all of my vocabulary words,” I explained, “and made them into people, places, or events in my magical world!”

            “Holy shit!” cried Booth, who looked a little terrified.

            He read out some of the definitions I had written down.

            Barbatus Ignatius: huge, bearded fellow

            Kedro the Killer

            The Maestorium: the Weepery

            Reginald Calvum: notable British prime minister, who was bald

            Pingo (1881 – 1942): French painter and icon of popular culture

            Cindy Scissums: a hair-dresser

            The Praecorians: a band of Mediaeval traveling monks, known for their devotion to praying…

            “What’s a Discumberist?” Booth asked.

            “That’s a type of recliner,” I answered readily.      

            “What does it mean, though?” he asked.

            “Oh, it means to recline. It was also a revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century. And a band.”

            Booth glanced at me sideways. “You mean the Decemberists?” he asked.

            “No,” I said, with a wag of my head. “The Discumberists.”

            People in Latin have learned of my method and they’re eager to try it out now.

            “That’s amazing!” cried Marie C., when I told her about how I’d passed the test (I made a B).

            “I don’t know how to remember this word,” said Natalie S. “Praesto.”

            “Oh, the Praestorians,” I replied. “They often offered people things. Oh, the musical, Offer Me Praesto.”

            “I’ve never heard of that,” said Natalie.

            “I made it up just now,” I said. “It’s like my favorite musical, ‘Hold Me Tentums,’ starring Figaro, the Italian carpenter.”

            “That’s awesome,” said Marie. “I’m gonna start doing that. It’s the best way to study.”

            “It’s actually a lot more complicated,” I answered. “But a lot more fun. I’ll make notes for everyone.”

            Then, by the next day, I was learning French.

            “What is this?” asked Booth, who was going through my Green Book in his room. He pointed at a drawing of a leaning terraced tower, at the side of which I’d written, ‘Le Abrutir, Lyons.’”

            “That’s a famous tower in Lyons,” I replied.

            “Why is it leaning?” he asked, with a growing sense of horror in his voice. “Did you just rip off the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Look, IT EVEN LOOKS THE SAME!”

            “Not a bit, not a bit,” I replied calmly. “It’s not leaning… see? It’s wobbly.”

            “Alright, fine,” said Booth. “It’s not the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It’s the… Wobbly Tower of Paris, or whatever. Lyons.”

            “The word ‘abrutir’ in French means ‘to have your mind deadened by another person,’” I explained. “So it’s a rather stupid-looking tower.”

            “Is this going to be in your book?” he asked.

            “No, this is just background,” I replied. “I probably won’t even mention it.”

            “So you’re just going to expect everyone to know?” Booth murmured. “This could get really extensive…”

            “Hey Anna,” I said, the next time I saw Anna in the library, “could you teach me how to say French incorrectly?”

            “How to say French incorrectly?” she replied. “Why would you want to do that?”

            “Because I have a friend… that is to say, an imaginary character, in one of my stories, who’s named Alice and she’s really fond of languages,” I told her. “And she’s learning to speak French, and she likes to throw French words around, but she almost always uses them incorrectly.”

            “Well,” said Anna, with a hint of merriment around her eyes, “you haven’t had any training in French, so if you just say the words, I’m sure you’ll say them wrong!”

            “That’s what I figured,” I answered, in a half-way voice. “Thank you!”

            I haven’t had a lot of time these last few days, but when I have, I have been employed in numerous projects: I am making a list of all the emotions I can ever remember having (most of them are very sad, and they would make you cry), I’m inventing a number of imaginary realms within the vast Apeiron, I’ve started copying down those moments of human insight that I seem to have now once or twice in every other entry, and I’m going letter by letter through the English-French dictionary, copying down my favorite words. So far the only realms that I’ve invented are the Land of Shadows (which is where our shadows dwell before they’re sewn to human forms, bleak, grey, crepuscular), the Apeiron itself, and the Seven Valleys of the Stars. I imagine the Apeiron itself as a sort of bare white nothingness, where neither light nor darkness dwells: according to the intricate mythology of John Taylor, the seventeenth-century mystic and precursor of the theory of the Unus Mundus (in my imaginary world, I mean), the first Creator didn’t so much create the Cosmos as discover it. One day or year or one eternity he happened to be walking through the whiteness of the vast Apeiron when he saw a small point like a black dot in the distance. He traveled towards it, thinking it to be not very far away; it took him over 400,000 years to reach the point at last, and when he did it grew around him till he found himself surrounded by a blackness filled with stars.

His Glassy Essence

Currently Reading Milton's Paradise Lost By John Milton see related

Saturday, September 1, 2007

The Mystic’s Map

            The last two days have been unusually alike.

            “A couple of days ago we were at College Station,” Booth told Micah yesterday at lunch, “and we had been cooking chicken. And the chicken had bones inside of it. And the bones had been cooking so long that when we ate the chicken, we didn’t realize we were eating the bones, too. That's how dumb we were!"

            “What a great story, though,” said Micah. “You ate the bones of a chicken. But think how disgusting that is.”

            “I’m pretty sure it makes you the devil,” I said.

            “Yeah, I guess I’m Satan now,” said Booth. “He always eats the bones.”

            “Of course,” I agreed. “Bones are his favorite part of the rib.”

            “Yeah, and he cooks the humans in his little crockpot,” said Micah.

            “That’s why he dresses as a wolf in a granny costume,” I added matter-of-factly.

            For a few minutes I thought Micah was going to die.

            “Hold on, hold on,” he said, as well as he could through not being much able to breathe. “Can we back up about thirty seconds here?” He couldn’t do it, though; he was close to tears.        Booth glanced him over with a worried look. 

            When he had recovered himself enough to speak again, he led us line-for-line back through the conversation to the point where he had started choking up. “Not only does it not make sense,” he concluded, “it’s not even relevant to what we were talking about!...”

            “I’m glad you’re starting to see the way we roll,” I said.

            He ran back into the serving-room to fill his glass again, and he was laughing all the way.

            “That’s the hardest I’ve ever seen him laugh,” said Booth, when he had gone. “And we’ve said funnier things! I mean, was my ‘waaa-tah!’ joke not funny? Come on!” [“What is a kung-fu fighter’s favorite beverage? Waaaaa-tah!’]

            “Yeah,” I agreed. “‘Knee grows?’” [“Why is the black man so tall? Because his knee grows!”] [Neither Booth nor I will be contenders for the P. C. Prize this year]

            I went to bed spectacularly early Friday night because I knew that midnight marked the anniversary of the hour I stepped off my plane in London at the Heathrow airport and I didn’t want to be awake to celebrate. During the eleven hours that I slept last night, somewhere another year ago I would have been wandering about in aimless desperation hoping that I hadn’t lost my bags, amongst a mob of foreigners, and driving in a taxi through the furthest reaches of the vast and endless city towards a certain house upon a certain street I knew I never could have found in any other way. An hour after I had reached my flat, I had taken the subway for the first time towards a boat to Greenwich on the golden-gleaming river, and I spent the day there, wandering alone among the distant-seeming ruins of another world. What a transport: to have been carried, in less than a day, from muttering in fevered anguish round the dreary edges of a desert landscape to a green and rainy city half a world away where all the peoples of the earth exist and live and earn their bread as one.

            One year later, it is difficult to be back here. And yet I know full well how good things are right now: my life is so profoundly better than it was last year, my wealth and treasure of experience so infinitely richer, that living for today is all that I can do. Besides, as Meredith reminded me last night, it’s only been nine months since I returned from London, and the greatest parts about it didn’t really happen till the end – the lostness of it all, the sense that I was just a street or two away from an encounter with the Infinite, which lurked among the streets at night, the shivery feeling I would always get at stepping from a station into crowds or walking through a park beset all round with buildings which I’d seen in photographs since I was young.

            Suddenly the poem comes to mind that I recited for the benefit of Kendra when we went to Stonehenge in the second week:

            Into my heart an air that kills

            From yon far country blows;

            Say, what are those blue remembered hills,

            What spires, what farms are those?

            That is the land of lost content,

            I see it shining plain:

            The happy highways where I went

            And cannot come again.

            I always seem to hope that if I meet with timelessness and leave off all the toils of the normal day, that time will cease or narrow to a trickle and the hours lengthen round me like the shadows in a dark room as the evening falls. I felt that way at Stonehenge, though, there amid the sheep along the edges of the world, at childhood’s end, and life went on somehow – a year of it. The tragedy of being real is that the story never ends, not even when it should have ended long ago. I suppose that is what Tennyson was thinking when he wrote “Ulysses”:

            I am part of all that I have met;

            Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

            Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades

            Forever and forever when I move.

            How dull it is to pause, to make an end!

            To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use.

            As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life

            Were all too little, and of one to me

            Little remains; but every hour is saved

            From that eternal silence, something more,

            A bringer of new things; and vile it were

            For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

            And this gray spirit yearning in desire

            To follow knowledge like a sinking star

            Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

            The good thing is, not much has changed except that I’m a great deal closer to the life I longed for then. It was a dismal moment when I stood with Allison on the platform near the trains at Edinburgh and tried to put in words my recent feeling of the vastness of it all – of Lucifer descending like a meteor from heaven to the earth, of stout Balboa standing silent on a peak in Darien, there at the meeting of two seas, of wings that beat and flap against the night, of airy currents in the vasty deep and all the waters in their magnitude – how could I say all that? I merely waved my arms about a lot and made her wish for several weeks that I had never come. But now I know of what I speak; I know I’m not alone in seeing it – not least with Allison, who seems to see it more than most at times; and oh! that other world, the world that only I can see, for now at least, is rising from the waters like the moon above the seas. 

            I visited Tyler’s room this morning and I talked with Jonathan whilst he was in the shower; Jonathan says that it’s my special blessing and my special curse to be a writer and a mystic, which is another way of saying that I’m all-too-often frustrate with desire, with a longing for a something I can never fully comprehend. And yet: “That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain.” Our blessing is that we get to be Moses, standing on the mountain, gazing in a reverie of silence on the verdant land below. Our curse is that, with all our looking, we can never enter in.