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.

Dr. Stump,

It may be best to call Playwriting off tomorrow as I don’t think I’ll be done with anything worth reading. All around me I am beset with ideas but none of them have enough weight. I’m not invested in them, frankly it’s very hard for me to invest in anything for 60 pages without feeling presumptuous. I’ve tried writing about that as well, but again, the question “Why?” rears it’s ugly head. I’m having a hard time drawing upon personal experience, and when I do, I have a hard time justifying placing it upon stage as it seems to cheapen it. It’s incredibly frustrating looking at a work and feeling that it has been contrived, not created, and everything I have done so far feels that way to me. I understand that these are works in progress, however I see no progress between what I have created now and what I created four years ago.

Perhaps I need experience. To spend time searching for value in things around me and try to find a way to transform that into something that would work on stage. Perhaps it will come to me, eventually, in a year or ten. Know I am not discouraged, but rather now have an imperative need to search for value in the world and in my life. I think that now is the time to listen and not to talk.

I apologize, as this must be disappointing to you and I can assure you I am disappointed as well: Shelagh Delaney wrote “A Taste of Honey” at age eighteen and you cannot know how aggravating that fact is to me.

Hope all remains well. I’ll see you in class, and look forward to studying in London with you.

Sincerely,

Ian Carlsen

PS: I am fine if this affects my grade negatively. I understand that if I really wanted to I could turn in a very quick, trite, hackneyed work and receive a mediocre grade, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I am frustrated with academia right now, perhaps I don’t fit in. I can’t seem to separate the body of my work in school from work that I want to remain relevant in the rest of my life. My school mind from my artistic mind. I know however that I must. I am required to create and receive deadlines to do so by. With my other classes this works well: In Prof. Zhao’s Modern East Asia I am doing well, I take notes and write papers, which are critically thought-out answers to questions she poses. This is an example of when academia works.

In theater on a university level, the format is different. We are expected to rigorously churn out examples. There are no questions posed. The object is simply to demonstrate an understanding without asking critical artistic questions or allowing the process to evolve from a natural or real place. Perhaps the only aspect this works well in is tech/design. When applied to performance, the result is cleverly-disguised indicative acting, a series of hat tricks designed to create an example in the quickest most efficient manner thought of. The professor of a scene study class says a character must cry, the class disbands and a week later the actor comes in and pretends to cry, leaving himself at the mercy of the professor to see if his ruse has passed. Acting becomes an inorganic formula, a mechanical response. With writing for the theater the same happens: a formula is given and followed out, but with no place or imperative to write other than the sake of a deadline what results are hollow representations of art with little lasting power. As if someone was going to build a house by ear.

I often wonder if acting, or most art for that point would be best taught in a conservatory or an apprenticeship, after one has had a few years of general education.

If so, then, what am I doing?

Just saw a final dress rehearsal of Doubt, A Parable at PSC. Good, a quality play. Might go to pay what you can night on Tuesday to say it again. The play is a good example Father Flynn’s sentiments on parables, they need to be fictional, real life is to fraught with moral uncertainty for any lesson to be revealed simply, and in the case of the play itself, there is no good parable to be found. I walked in expecting a preachy show, but came out doing a lot of thinking but with no clear answers. This is what I look for in good theater. Brecht and his sentiments make me want to fortify my viewpoints and engage in trench warfare. This was a simple argument with no solution.

Talking with Maureen today after the Sunday matinee of Philadelphia, Here I Come! about telling stories about old friends: “It’s like after someone leaves your life for a year or two they become fiction,” she said. “You want to say to someone that they were real people, that they walked down the street just like you and I but for all other people know it seems like they might have never existed.”

I think that’s part of what I look for in people, I want to share in the personal narrative. Life in the end is so transitory that in response there’s the need for someone to be able to recollect these experiences with to prevent them from becoming fiction. Old friends become, characters you aren’t sure you didn’t just imagine if there’s no one there to say they remember them.

One of my friends keeps an intensely cross-referenced, hand-written diary of most every day of his life, it extends several volumes now. He does this out of fear that he might one day forget what has happened to him, to lose respect for the sheer weight of history which has pushed him to the current moment. It’s something I respect greatly though I am more lax and willing to let things slip. I’ll admit, it’s one of the reasons why I blog, the past is so fleeting and our memory so easily mistaken.

In the end all we will have to talk about is what happened to us, and what is going on now, but what if there’s no one there to remember with?

Walking up to my apartment, I saw three girls in jilbabs pass under a street light as they walked to an apartment across the street. Their silhouettes were so alien and yet so beautiful, they looked like a race of new creatures come to populate our empty world.

It makes me happy to live on the hill.

“So when are you moving to Europe?” was the question asked by one Matt Joyce in the street outside of the White Heart after coming from a rehearsal and a free beer.

Matty Joyce. Matthew Joyce. The man-in-himself. After three years hiatus and a car crash that should have killed him, the former roommate and one of my best friends in high school is back in Portland, walking around drunk on wine and slamming at the North Star. We talk, walk back inside. He pays for a celebratory whiskey shot and we talk a little more. A bit of Maine humor: he’s now living in The Big House, my old roommate Nate Amadon’s former apartment, a place I didn’t know he had any connection with. Small state.

But then the goodbyes and the talk about Europe. Consensus has it amongst those people I’ve fallen out of contact with that I’m moving to Europe soon, no one knows for how long or where exactly but everyone in their turn points to the eastern sea and says that I am going.

So there it is, stark and obvious. If you act in a paradigm long enough it will become you. The little boy who cried Europe. I’ve got to do something big now. I’ve talked a great deal about all of this. Time to start the gears in motion. Who knows how soon, but I feel I need to make it soon, while the time is right. I’m not going to blow all this that I have here and take off, but I cannot renege on this now. I’ve got to start working.

Vanesa always said that I made the most of my time when I could set myself a goal.

I’ve got to leave.

Dave pointed out a website with some interesting resources in one of his posts. Had a drink with him last night as he passed off a rough draft of his thesis for me to look at and edit. A few of international students were out as well as the lovely L, there was much talk of careers, business trips, economics, war and investing or not investing in the country of Vietnam. All this talk had it’s usual effect and I started to feel a bit out of place being poor, out of work and an actor. Still it was a nice night and I hadn’t seen Dave or L for about two months or so.

To put it plainly, I’ve got a lot more to do. I’ve revised this entry from its original five paragraphs because the point I was dancing around was: On all sides I am surrounded by a need to move with the majority of the people I know and settle down and start a career or at least try. At the same time I am continually re-shaping my life and saying: Not yet. I need a fluency in another language. I need my MFA in Acting. I need to live in another country for a while. I need hundreds of strange pictures to hang upon my wall and stories to tell my students and grandchildren.

I will have to live with that insecurity in order to be able to say one day that I have lived a full and productive life. I do not want to be on my deathbed and look back and say “I lived for the weekends.” I want to build my life around my contributions to others. If I end up having a living making cabinets, I want to make damn fine cabinets, the best cabinets in all the land.

The Revolution a la Brian Giles started in the storage room of W&C’s annex three years and eighteen days ago.

Be Promethean, do not be complacent.

Do not turn back, do not let the world stay flat.

ooo

This I feel I should point out, will be the hundredth post on the site. Mark was talking the other day about not quite hitting his stride with his website yet; I don’t know if, after a hundred, I’ve quite hit my stride in terms of content either. Still the posts keep on coming, and perhaps more frequently now that we’ve got our wireless network Bandieria Rossa (I realize it’s misspelled) up and running at the apartment on Kellogg St.

“Give me a days worth of honest work/ and a roof that never leaks / I’ll be satisfied.”

Walked to school today listening to Midlake’s album The Trials of Van Occupanther. The album seems straight out of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, or maybe even On Walden Pond. All the lyrics seem to focus on this desire for validity, to do something of benefit and value to oneself and others that older generations have had.

I’ve begun to think about what an excess of media has done to us culturally and in terms of identification and productivity. Lately my romance has been with entertaining thoughts of doing an internship at a winery somewhere in the Rhone Valley in France. I have little happy ideas about learning French, doing hard work and becoming more appreciative about wine. This is my idea of growing a little as a person into something better.

Upon telling this to someone they responded, “Oh, you must watch Sideways a lot…” and I was struck by the fact that they made that association. I saw Sideways in the theaters a while back and occasionally had recalled that it was a good movie and if I was hard up for good movies and feeling like a non-formulaic romantic comedy I might watch it again but the idea to watch it over and over again never occured. I enjoy wine, though the idea to associate this with watching Sideways, a movie that involves wine, never came to me. In theory though, and in this other persons mind, I could be a person who loves the aforementioned film and watches it whenever the chance arises. I could associate myself with this movie, list it on Facebook as one of my favorites, go to great lengths talking about it, show it to all the girls I dated, etc.

But what would I be doing? I’d be associating myself with an image, a quality that another object possesses while not possessing that quality myself. I could be someone who likes a movie because I like to be seen as someone who likes the things portrayed in that movie and in the end spend more effort on maintaining an image versus finding a substance. A lot of our youth culture is based around this now, so much time is spent worrying about preference and presentation. It’s a phenomenon of ad-culture. Band t-shirts, Red Sox caps, spinning rims, profile pictures, all of these are advertisements designed to convey information about a person that may not necessarily be true. I’ve known plenty of people that have lived in absolute squalor in order to afford a big car to impress women and give off the impression of great wealth to the outside world.

And so we lose the substance, grasping for the shadow. I get so bewildered at times looking for things which have value because in this culture everything is advertised as having this value. This is a byproduct of a consumer society that has been allowed to develop without regulation. There are so many things to do and watch and take up time with. This society encourages imbalance. Obesity is encourages because one will consume more food. Envy is pandered too because it will cause us to seek to emulate the rich by purchasing more expensive products. Ad-culture sells t-shirts. Guitar Hero lets you pretend at art. If I wanted to I could spend the rest of my life watching movies that represent things that I like.

Young Portland. Sitting in the back of Breaking New Grounds and watching the high school kids filtering in and out. I remember a distinct time in my life where a place like this was a sanctuary for people like me. Driving in after school and wandering through the streets of the Old Port till the last coffee shops closed. Clinging fervently to the idea of a city life. Emulating the metamorphosis from student-and-kid to city-adult that I sought so fiercely those last two years of high school. Wishing so desperately to be mistaken for someone living in the city, thinking perhaps that somehow that would make me the person I wanted to be.

And now here I am, and the fat times wane thin. Fifteen cents short of a coffee and getting embarrassed at the counter, though it’s not a big deal the guy behind the counter assures me. Big haul on groceries today $180 bucks worth of groceries bought between Dr. Anderson and I, so the money runs thin and the need for a job rises like a red sun in the east. Fifteen cents short is the worst amount, there’s no hope of crossing that gap. The guy behind the counter plunges his long-fingered hand into the “Take-A-Penny” jar.

Across the street is the hookah bar. The worst hookah bar on the East Coast if you can take my opinion on those things, but still that had a place once in my travels. Occasionally I’ll hear the young folks in the Department talk about going there. Late nights in Portland, living in Gorham, the same childish emulation. There’s a place for it though, and maybe a bit of honesty. The word childish needs a reclamation, everything we do is childish. I hope that when I’m 40, I can look back upon being 33 and say the same thing for myself.

I keep entertaining these thoughts of showing up, spontaneously, to one of their gatherings. To see if they’d let me in, strip myself of all these pretensions that have built up and engage in a bit of reckless fun, a bit of talk, a bit of craic with those more fortunate in age than I.

I dreamed today of Connemara. Talk with David and Maureen, who owned a house on Ballynakill Bay in Tully’s Cross. Letterfrack was right next door, the Old Monastery Hostel and the Twelve Bens. Hiking is different in Ireland and most of it is bushwhacking, no trails, just walk through a field, over a stone wall and head for the top of the mountain. No trails, just make your own way. I didn’t spend enough time there and I want to go back.

So many thoughts of exile, happiness, putting myself in one place for a week, feeling time slow as each event spaces itself out. Time’s measurement is in the passing of events and things move quickly in the city. I woke today with another week gone, measuring things in Fridays, the one day I can sleep in past 8am.

So the fat times are gone and I must grow more careful with my money, or seek a way to increase it. Rent looms like a red dragon on the horizon, May approaches quickly and each time I turn around another week is gone. Fifteen cents short and I need a plan of revision. A goal to set myself towards. London in July and it’s raining outside. I’ll walk home tonight along the Galway Wall with the old umbrella Corey found in Switzerland covering my head and a song on my headphones. It’s a gorgeous night. I’m thankful.

Sustainability is the key, how to make this all work. Connemara, here I come.

There’s the crack, where we saw the mortar fall.
My brother and I. It split the boards, lit
The church ablaze. We held our heads and cried
For the war. The stupid war.

The whole world was fighting,
Each new idea rose from the darkness with teeth.
Now in the church, little purple flowers spill forth.
The mortar, buried deep, takes seed.

Life comes again. Death machines are put away.
In the moonlight the empty church is quiet.
Gone are my saints, my stations of the cross.
Here there is nothing but the ancient sky.

O vastness of space. O great and shining ideal.
What thoughts of nation did each angel hold,
When Lucifer climbed that Arcadian mount
And blew his clarion to the wind?