luctor et emergo

Settling into summer, or at least an absence of school to completely preoccupy my time. Have been spending more time with Ms. Vanesa Saric (we went hiking in the White Mountains yesterday, the picture was taken by her in Crawford Notch) and settling out of the academic world for a little while. There are necessities yet taken care of, things that I can’t leave unchecked for too long. Meeting with a few employers tomorrow after getting a hair cut with Travis at 9:00am sharp. Need to get on top of the paperwork and loans for the Readers Theater Workshop in London this July, figure out what I’m going to be doing on the weekends as well. Sometimes it feels like I barely have my head above water before I see the next wave coming down on me. Luctor et emergo, I guess: I struggle and I emerge. Life just looks a lot different when you’re on the down part of the struggle working upwards.

All of this has really been getting to my mood lately. Needing to set things right and having big commitments looming down already is something I deal with, though poorly. I needed to get out, to make an accomplishment, to exert force. Having coffee with Vanesa on Saturday I asked her what she was doing the next day. She had no plans so, in that moment we decided to go hiking. I went home and in a half-hour had a trail picked out. We got up early the next morning and headed out.

There’s an amazing transition between perspectives when you climb a mountain. Driving into Crawford Notch and seeing the granite cliffs sweeping upward from the valley I got a distinctly dreadful feeling of doubt in my gut. I always have apprehension before climbing, no matter when. I get this nervous edge and it propels me up the mountain until suddenly, three hours later I’m on an outlook peering down into the valley below and barely able to see the car we arrived in. Suddenly it all reverses. You’re on top. When the worlds mesh it’s exhilarating. There’s this distinct feeling of accomplishment mixed with exhaustion that you cannot get anywhere else. It fills you.

I have no idea how I’m going to get all I need to get done in the 9 weeks I have until I get on the plane and leave for London. No idea, and nothing as complex as a long-term plan right now. Still, I know I can do it. Or at least I trust in my ability to pull it off.

Long term stunt. Like Ireland this past summer. Bit by bit and hopefully this will all work out.

I’ve got my passport. Who the hell knows.

An excerpt from the preface by Heinrik Ibsen, here he comments on his first play, which critics claimed borrowed extensively from the form and themes Heinrik Hertz’s play Svend Drying’s House:

It might be maintained with quite enough reason that Hertz in his Svend Dyring’s House had borrowed, and to not a considerable extent, from Heinrich von Kliest’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, a play written at the beginning of this century. [...] But does anyone doubt that it would be possible, that with a little good, or a little ill, to discover among still older dramatic literature a play from which it could be maintained Kliest had borrowed from here and there in his Käthchen von Heilbronn? I, for my part, do not doubt it. But such suggestions of indebtedness are futile. What makes a work of art the spiritual property of it’s creator is the fact that he has imprinted upon it the stamp of his personality.

I rejoice. It’s a liberating thought. The work is not what matters, but rather the ideas behind it, the motive, the doing. Art involves the discovery of new ideas, but also relies on the preservation of old ones. It’s a cultural record, the direct physical manifestation of our collective unconscious. It manifests and perpetuates, occasionally something arises that’s novel and shatters a few molds, but then that is assumed into the mass of our thinking and perhaps something else is dropped, but who knows if it’s ever lost, or if these noble discoveries are only reflections of past truths lost to time?

And from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

So now we continue. I’m optimistic, though right now a bit more tabla rasa than I would like. Who knows what discoveries we’ll make, or when we’ll make them? I guess I don’t feel I need to write an earth-shattering work of staggering proportions, because what if it has been written before? Yes the idea is grand, and for my short life, maybe the ideas I seek to create and pursue will be of importance for a short span before dropping once again into obscurity. It’s as if at times of creativity I should feel like a man wandering a junkyard at night, feeling and groping in the darkness, occasionally lifting objects aloft to be understood by starlight.

Small cast party for Philadelphia, Here I Come! at Jeffery Roberts. Great conversation, some good wine. I’ve always been blessed with this cast in terms of conversation. Each member is their own specific individual but we share our experiences so readily. Plus we’re not adverse to the occasional lewd comment, which helps. I’ve developed a lot of interesting ideas around memory and it’s role through this process, and at some point I hope to delve into them a little more on here once the show ends tomorrow and I suddenly have more free time than usual.

I think that the more a person’s quality of life decreases, the more attached they become to physical objects. When I was a kid, and even now, I occasionally make a mental list of things that I would rescue, should the place where I’m living catch on fire. The amount fluctuates as things come and go from my life. But how much stuff is truthfully necessary?

Again, Grange’s question: What is valid?

As I continue to think about this, less and less stuff seems essential. I am indebted to countless things, but my possession of these things is in the end not entirely necessary. Knowledge and experience are the only things that one really needs to carry forward into the future. Contact and interaction with other people is of course of the utmost importance (I would not count my life to be of any quality if it weren’t for the people I am surrounded by) but books, music, art, tools, everything in the end is to be shared by each other.

Dr. Walter Stump recently bequeathed to me the complete Yale Shakespeare collection. He was emptying out his office, and on our last day of classes together offered them to me. I graciously accepted, but it was this gesture that I found very moving. For the past week he had opened up his office, which was about ten feet wide by twenty feet deep and completely filled with wall to wall bookcases, to students allowing them to select up to ten books each day from the stacks and I began to think about the underlying metaphor of this diaspora of literature. What do you really carry away from books? Knowledge. After a while the book is not necessary and should be given to someone else who can learn from it. The same for any other tool or instrument. Always for the public to use, always for the younger generations.

We seem so very far away from this idea. I recognize it as an ideal, but I believe that it may be something to work towards and apply on occasion. Gift giving for instance, take something you have but don’t use and give it to someone who may have use for it. Perhaps this is a bit communistic, but perhaps it’s something that should be considered.

How many things would you need to rescue? Truthfully. Living well, I think you’d find the answer is fairly close to zero.