Just Wrought

When you're lost you read whatever signs you find.

Solipsism becomes me.

Do You Believe in Sound?

Calling all Meat Fans of Markheim! 

Here’s the link to the latest episode podcast. And in keeping with tradition, I am posting the script below the fold, ‘cuz I know how you just love to follow along, right?

 

 

 

Fate has an irony addiction.

Digging up a Leprechaun

I’ve been following threads lately, deeper into the labyrinth. Googling one of my favorite lines ever — “And I said let grief be a falling leaf” —  from the Van Morrison song “Raglan Road”,  I learned that the lyrics were originally a poem by Patrick Kavanagh.  I immediately surfed over to SPL’s site and ordered his collected works, published in 1963.  Once it arrived, I began reading selections randomly. Then I knuckled down and polished off all 21 pages of his early magnum opus, “The Great Hunger” which Kavanagh cannily disavows in the volume’s introduction as a “kinetic vulgarity… not fully born.” Truth be told, it stands as an eye-peelingly, soul-splittingly stark masterpiece.

Being obscure, and growing obscurer, allows an artist a wonderful freedom: a privilege I like to think I share with Kavanagh. Of course such freedom can exact a nasty price if one is not careful. My cultural cousin wasted a good portion of his forties crawling into bottles and sucking down smokes. After losing a lung to cancer, he finally sobered up somewhat, and began again versifying in beautiful earnest.

I have my friends, my public and they are waiting
For me to come again as their one and only bard
With a new statement that will repay all their waitment
While I was hitting the bottle hard.

It was in that later period that he wrote the following, which felt just like Marley’s ghost shaking chains at me when I first read it.

 

Having Confessed

Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow’s judgement—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.

 

Note the shifts in point of view from third person singular to second person ambiguous to first person plural. A glancing critic might attribute this creep to sloppiness, and I won’t argue that it is conscious in any calculated way. What I will posit is that it is a profound tracing of the progressive Catholic perspective: he -> you-> we.

Savor the apparently willful ambivalence of certain lines “God cannot catch us…”. Would it be a good or bad thing if he did?

“We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.”

This line captures perfectly and emphatically the junction of belief and practice where I made my own transfer from happy Catholicism to diligent Zen. And just because I served divorce papers on my Irish faith doesn’t mean I don’t still sit down for coffee or something stronger with it every now and again.

“God must be allowed to surprise us.”

God as dramatist; we as audience, willingly suspending our disbelief. Sure, if you are clever, you might get ahead of God, but why try? Stay in the moment. There are things here for you to apprehend that you are still not looking/listening/being deeply enough to experience. The world is riddled with Easter eggs hidden in the damnedest places.

“We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation.”

The poet chooses his styling carefully here, “Lucifer” instead of “Satan”. Ours is not the already fallen angel’s sin of malevolence, but rather the still righteous pride of the Son of the Morning, the First in Heaven. This is not the pride of “I am better than ______” but that which says, “I understand” when in fact we do not.

This last sentence sounds a lot like a classic ending to a homily given by any conservative pastor of any parish you could name.  And perhaps that’s the point.  Kavanagh’s opened this poem’s bid by rejecting the Church’s holy sacrament of Penance. Additionally, anyone who knows enough to read Kavanagh probably already has some sense of his long-standing struggle with Roman Catholicism and all the damage it has done to his country and culture. So he does not feel the need to leave us with anything but the truth, even if that should overlay neatly onto some pious platitude. He’s already asked you to dig deeper, think harder, “go down on knees”. If you cannot or will not do so, he’ll give you the truth anyway, for whatever it's worth to you.

American appreciation of Irish poets is a lot like our relationship to leprechauns. We folksify the original darkling threat until it is fit for nothing but cartoon greeting cards. (Of course, we  have done similarly to our own great writers. Witness the humiliating post-mortem neutering of the delightfully nasty atheist/pacifist/animal rights activist Mark Twain.) Clever American literati love to love James Joyce above all other Irish poets because he’s nifty and Continental. Ain’t nothing nifty about Kavanagh. Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound expatriated, while Kavanagh, Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams stayed put.  And that, as faux folksy Robert Frost liked to say, “… made all the difference.”

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The Rooks

Mythical Reasons for Not Listening to Sandbox Radio

 

 I Hate Theatre

“I heard I had to see Sandbox Radio in the theatre to get the full experience.”

Hey, listen, as a playwright, let me  assure you that I hate theatre more than you do, and in ways you have never even thought to think of; but just because Sandbox Radio Live! is recorded at West of Lenin’s intimate but fabulous black box in front of a live audience, that doesn’t make it theatre anymore than Mike Daisey reading from his notes in the Bagely Wright makes what he does a play.  (You can delve more deeply into this distinction here.)  The podcast of Sandbox Radio is the full experience. The bonus of going to see it live is like getting to watch Chef Tom Douglas cook your dinner at Dahlia Lounge. Witnessing the prep’s a super-cool extra that only a few people are ever going to get to experience.

 

Prairie Home Companion sucks

“Another “old-timey” radio show?  Been there, listened to that. Next.”

Uh… you’re high.  Give just one of these podcasts a listen and you’ll see how far from Garrison Keillor our Mistress of Ceremonies Leslie Law takes these recordings. The band ain’t folksy, it’s thumpin’!  And the dialogue is distinctly R-Rated. You can listen to Sandbox Radio Live! on headphones at work, safe in the knowledge that what you’re doing is secretly and securely NSFW.

 

It’s Too Late Now

“If I try to plug into Markheim at this point I’ll be totally lost.”

Admittedly, listening to a randomly selected episode of my noir-angel-detective serial is sort of like picking up a comic book mid-volume and trying to figure out what’s going on.  In other words… it’s awesome!

 

Isn’t this a Seattle thing? 

“I don’t live in Seattle.”

Congratulations. I wouldn’t wish living here on a roving band of  Uruk-hai. Lucky for you, each podcast gives you ~90 minutes of rich Seattle experience while you can still bask in the sun and/or snow and/or hurricane conditions common where you currently live.

 

Isn’t this a Seattle thing? 

“I already live in Seattle.”

Congratulations! Don’t tell anybody else how awesome it is here, please! If you need put-off material, I have a great little geeky LOtR-insider joke about a roving band of Uruk-hai you can use. But here’s the thing, fellow Seattleite: even if you’ve lived here all your life, you don’t know this city like the writers of Sandbox Radio do. We’ve found the places, stories and people that make Seattle—hmm, what’s a kind way of putting this?—“unique”, yeah, that’s it. Witness this delicious morsel of real-life dialogue captured and then re-staged from Seattle’s moveable epicenter of danger-tainment, the 358 metro route to Aurora. (All dialogue guaranteed overheard on the back of the bus.)

GUY ONE: You wanna talk about John Lennon? Shit, that shit
wasn’t even meant for him.

GUY TWO: What?

GUY ONE: That bullet. S’posed to be Paul McCartney, yo.
That’s who dude wanted to shoot.

GUY TWO: Really. McCartney?

GUY ONE: That’s a fact. And dude will never get out of prison.

GUY TWO: Well, you know, they were all Irish.

GUY ONE: Sure.

GUY TWO: And I always thought that must’ve been weird, growing up Irish in London. Must’ve been hard for them. Where the music came from, you know?

 

 None of these writers are Davids Mamet or Sedaris.

“Sure, I’ve seen some of Sandbox Radio’s actors on Seattle’s Big House stages.  But if this ‘Scot Augustson’ is so great, why haven’t I seen anything of  his produced  at the Rep.”

Uh… you realize that question answers itself, right? A regular and relentlessly versatile contributor to Sandbox Radio, as well as other great companies throughout Seattle and beyond, Scot Augustson is without question one of the best artists currently living and writing for the stage. (At least I think he’s still alive.  Homey lives hard up in Rat City.) Scot’s always doing something new for Sandbox, ranging from an original poem, to a hardboiled detective story for forest animals to the new sure-to-be-a-hit Seattle serial, Cousin Katie from Ketchikan. The only reason I don’t consume myself with jealousy for Scot’s talent and accomplishments is that his stuff is far too much fun to watch, or, in the case of Sandbox Radio, listen to.  Every time I want to hate him he makes me giggle. Giggling is death to hate. You’d think someone would have put that fact to good use by now.

 

It’s too hip.

“My tux is at the cleaners.”

This bon mot comes from friend and colleague, Mark Handley, best known for his play Idioglossia, which was later produced as the Jodie Foster film, Nell.

It’s okay, Mark. I just pulled your thong out of my dryer.  You can wear that while you listen.  We’re  casual.

 

• Listen to the most recent episode of Sandbox Radio Live! here.
• Select from all the earlier recordings here.
• And if you really feel strongly about seeing it live, well our next show’s at West of Lenin in Fremont on April 29.

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