Minkgirl Muses

ELEMENTARY

It's been 3 weeks since I've blogged. I feel bad about it, because to honor the Jewish New Year in September, I made "fresh start" plans including the goal of writing twice a week. And then I immediately failed to live up to my own goals. How surprising! But of course, that's the way life is. Maybe this is the universe's first gift of the year to me - a reminder that human plans are mere scratchings in the sand. What matters is that you keep picking up the stick.

But, today is a 21 day, the beginning of the 2nd month of my 37th year, so it's a fine day to refresh, renew and try again. And anyway, I tell myself that I haven't been writing because I've been busy changing my life. Or rather, my understanding about the context in which my life takes place - which in my overly cerebral case is basically the same thing.

For the past 3 weeks, I've been working almost obsessively on a job application for a full-time tenure-track teaching position at the University of San Francisco. I taught for this department last fall, just before coming to England, and the experience confirmed my suspicions that a university environment might be the landscape in which I could finally make use of all my skills and interests, while living a fairly comfortable life-style at the same time. This was my first academic application for an American university (I've done about 5 for schools in the UK), and it was quite arduous getting all the materials together - letter of application, graduate transcripts, letters of recommendation and support, and the terrifying "Statement of Teaching Philosophy." This last piece was the most troublesome and painful to achieve - it felt just like writing essays for college or grad school admission - trying to figure out how to say that you're cool and interesting with succinct and stylish language while avoiding cliches and hyperbolic metaphors about the value of art.

If it wasn't for Lord Limescale, I might have given up on the whole project. 5 days before the mailing deadline, I finally sat down with some sketchy notes with the goal of hammering out a killer STP. Nearly 9 hours later I had about 5 paragraphs written in a voice that was not my own, which felt wooden, forced, and most importantly boring. When LL came home from a long day in the Chicago salt-mines, I begged him to read what I had written, and he confirmed that I was going about the project in the wrong way - trying to write in an imagined "academic" tone for a mysterious audience whose expectations I had no way of knowing. He dug through some older drafts, pulled out a few nuggets and proceeded to make me an outline laced with simple, direct instructions like "write about this here, and don't use too many big words." His final words of wisdom were: "Persuasive writing is like cooking. Keep your wits about you, and follow the goddamn recipe! Small adjustments are fine, but don’t throw a handful of oregano into the masala." Sage advice for so many situations.

His generous assistance gave me hope and the will to try again to say what I mean and feel instead of what I think others might want to hear. It's amazing how desire ties us up in knots. I really want this job, and that want drew out all my insecurities, and made me doubt who I am and what I know. But by embracing my fear and working through it, I was able to approach the project with some curiosity and a little bit of humor. The best I can do is the best I can do. Whether or not I get this job is actually out of my hands (although I wouldn't mind it if you took this opportunity to make a sign for luck and a mental wish that the hiring committee accidentally spills coffee on all the other applications and decides to choose me because they're too embarrassed to ask the other candidates to resubmit their materials!) But perhaps more important even than whether or not I get the job, is the fact that I learned something significant about myself and my motivations for making art by engaging in the application process.

The title of the USF theatre department is the "Performing Arts & Social Justice Department." Kinda grand. While I love their mission of developing socially conscious artists, I've always felt like a bit of a poser suggesting that I am one of those. I am at best, an accidental activist - the kind of person who goes to political marches because the friends she's made brunch plans with are going and it sounds cool. I always feel good about it when I get there. I get engaged by the issues. I usually think "hey, I should participate in more direct political actions, because I really enjoy the collective spirit and believe in their effectiveness in changing the way people think and behave." But at heart, I am an introvert. I tend to take the easy way out and send money or a letter addressing issues I care about rather than getting out and mingling with others. And at heart I am a privileged middle-class white girl. The troubles and tribulations I have had to deal with in my life are paltry compared to what the average African woman my age has lived through (provided she lives this long.) So it takes more to knock me out of my comfortable little life than it might a person who is living closer to the edge to begin with.

But one thing that has always moved me is people. The phrase "the personal is political" has always rung true to me - even though I think it has been widely discredited in our apathetic age. I remember two years ago this fall a young schizophrenic woman, who was essentially living in a homeless shelter and who had been unable to access appropriate medical support, stripped her 3 children naked and threw them one by one off the pedestrian pier on the Embarcadero into the Bay. This incident haunted me for months. I imagined the children bobbing in the water, the 7 year-old reaching out for the 10 month old and maybe trying to hold her aloft for a moment before they both succumbed to the cold and the waves. I imagined the rescue workers desperately trolling the waters around the pier, both hoping and fearing to find what they were looking for. And most of all, I imagined the woman, "waking up" to what she had done at some future time and the terrible inescapable anguish that would engulf her for the rest of her conscious moments. This event lodged in my imagination and forced its way into my consciousness at the most inconvenient moments. I found myself having nightmares for weeks, crying in budget meetings, having to pull off to the side of the road when an unexpected wave of grief hit me. I know a big part of my reaction had to do with the fact that I shared something with this woman - we are both mothers - but of course I have every advantage and every support, while she had every obstacle. And I felt tremendously angry and disappointed with myself and everyone in my community that we had failed this woman, failed to recognize her deep need before it was too late, failed to be the village that one actually does need in order to raise healthy successful children.

Where I meet the phrase "social justice" is in the simple non-intellectual plane of empathy - the place of "co-feeling." Facts and statistics have always sailed right through my head, but imagining another human being facing their darkest moment creates inescapable images that lodge in me like hot lead. The question is how to transform that co-feeling into some kind of action that will contribute to changing the circumstances that created such a tragedy in the first place. And after wrestling 6 rounds with my STP, I think I can truly say that I believe this is what theatre can do in modern America - manifest characters and their stories in a way that penetrates our information-saturated brains and marketing-perverted hearts so that we care about another person's dilemma enough that we actually get off our asses and do something to help them.

I already knew this in some inner chamber of my heart, but having to write about it for others made it crystal clear to me, and also helped me understand the ambivalence with which I have approached mainstream theatre-making in the past few years in a new context. I don't know what the future holds - if I will get this job or another like it, when I will make a play again, how the recent realization that I don't ever want to direct Shaw or Marivaux or O'Neill will affect my career - but I do know that being in touch in a deeper way with why art matters to me is a good outcome for 3 weeks of work.

I'll leave you with the opening of my STP. May your next 3 weeks be as full of revelation as my last 3 have been.

Be well.

"When I was younger, I made theatre because I found it exciting and challenging to imagine fantastic worlds and then try to manifest them using the imperfect materials of bodies, wood, light, and paint. But now when I make theatre, I am motivated by a desire to give witness to what I see happening in the world and to conceive of alternative ways of being. I believe that theatre can function as a significant tool for social change, but not in the splashy sense that it will cause people to quite their day-jobs and riot in the streets for justice. Rather, I think theatre’s chief value in modern America is that it can create empathy and understanding between people by telling compelling and complex stories in imaginative and emotionally engaging ways. And I believe empathy has revolutionary consequences.

I can read in the paper about a woman who has lost her young children to the state because she left them in a locked apartment while she went to work. I can be shocked or saddened by this story and still go about my day and do nothing to help her or her children. But if I spend a few hours with this woman, in the body of an actor, if I hear her stories and watch her struggle with the economic and social challenges she faces, if I meet her children and see where she lives, if I try on her shoes for a time, I will not be able to forget her so quickly. I may walk out of the theatre with a visceral understanding of how fine a line there is between us. And the truth of that may inspire me to do something I have never done before, like write my congressman about the lack of affordable childcare, or volunteer at a shelter, or simply offer help to my neighbor when she needs someone to unexpectedly look after her kids."

Labels: Career Anxiety, Creative Process, Rebirth