Something a little different:  Atypical pain

Added a short essay on the aftermath of Katrina, Irene, and Sandy.  It’s a reflection on what we do and don’t seem to learn from these momentous acts of nature that our human hands seem more capable of exacerbating than resolving.  We seem to come together, under the impact of the disaster, but all too quickly go back to regarding our fellow humans as competitors for limited resources rather than our companions in the struggle to progress as a human community.

Sometimes I get so scared…

There were rumblings today about Iran possibly being willing to negotiate about their “nuclear program.”  I try to forget that Israel is poised on the verge of starting a war like we have never seen before, a war horrible beyond imagining.  But here is the New York Times saying that some suspect that Iran is only trying to “buy time,” two weeks from the U.S. Presidential election in proposing talks.

Buying time?  Two weeks?  Are we really that close to Israel attacking Iran, with or without U.S. immediate military support?

While Obama and Romney spar, far more like prizefighters than statesmen.  Are these the men, and the men and women around them, who will decide our fate?

It terrifies me.

The age of the universe

The conventional way of describing the universe, saying “a little under 14 billions years old” has struck me for a while to be wrong:  that the Big Bang happened about then.  Now ,Oct. 12, 2012, we can see it right on Google.  It’ll pop up with 13.75 billion years quicker than you can change a channel with your remote:

But as best we understand it today going back to Einstein says that time is tied up with mass, that mass warps time.  How we understand gravity today is based on this, in fact.  So we sometimes may hear the expression “time loses meaning as we go back as far as the origin of our universe.”   As mass became denser and denser as we understand the universe was at its birth, then time also ceased to exist in the way we understand time today.

So the universe went from a point outside of time as we know it to time as we think we know it today,  how long was the time when time had no meaning?  A minute, a second, an eternity?  Just as that question has no meaning, neither does the 13.75 billions year figure.

About ten days have passed since I finished a run of acting the part of Henry Ford.   Playing Henry Ford is not like playing Mark Twain.  Samuel Clements, so far as his persona is concerned, was a wonderful man who sometimes said things that sounded crass, but weren’t, not really.  Ford, on the other hand (in this Mark St. Germain play, Camping with Henry and Tom), is a fundamentally base man.  He is very fucked up.  I’ve played unpleasant characters before.  Sometimes you feel like the people you act with take personally your role with them on the stage.  Sometimes you feel like you are the nasty son-of-a-bitch you’re portraying.

When I played a nasty union boss in a Clifford Odets play, my friend and director told me something that he’d learned from a director he respected: “An actor shows his character flaws not by what he reveals on stage, but by what he refuses to allow to show.”  I kept this in mind throughout doing Ford.  But as much as it’s “fun to play a villain, a real prick and an asshole, it’s no bullshit that you do get some contact of some very dark places of oneself.  As they say, it’s necessary to do that to get any reality to your character.  Even so…

I wonder if this is fundamental to any artistic process:  that both dark and light need to be explored.   I think so.  I think of a Beethoven symphony or Van Gogh’s Starry Night or James Joyce’s Ulysses or the poetic songs of Dylan and blues and jazz.  In theatre, except where there’s a terrible struggle going on inside the character, there’s often the dark and light are dichotomized into different characters.

There’s the wonderful quote by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) that rumors of his death were “exaggerations.”   I wonder if this is something that has happened to the power of the written word.  I wonder if we have come to accept the notion that life has been reduced to postings on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube or 10-second television sound bites to the degree that the written word in the form of essays and books is irrelevant, anachronistic, the domain only of the most academicians and other “intellectuals.”  Perhaps the death of the word has been exaggerated.

Perhaps the word is only badly injured, in intense need of rehabilitation, not altogether abandoned to the landfill of history.   Perhaps it will rise like Lazarus.  Because it is the word that makes us human.  And, as much as we may admire the great apes and the infinitesimal bacteria, as much as we are ashamed of what humans have done in the name of humanity, we should also be proud of what we are:  Thinking, choosing, curious beings.   Beings who can express complex and wonderful thoughts to each other.  Beings who can be moved by what we read, whose lives are affected by what we read.

There will always be diversions, ways for us not to think.  Who can blame us?   There are plenty of good reasons not to think, not to dig beneath the surface of the reality presented to us.

But there will always people who do think, who have not given up, who have not stopped trying to figure out how to make better sense out of this world.

I guess that’s why I write.  And why I read.