The city is white. The strand is white. The sky is blue paler than the ocean is blue.
The sail that just broke the horizon is white. It’s white, right? Tell me it’s white.
The king will tell you The same damned thing: You are the king. We are… everything.
The sail is black. It’s always been black, going all the way back. It’s black
*
“Evil” is a shorthand: a convenient knot on a string Every day we dress the children in white cotton for the king.
We say, “children”, but we mean something else, surge of protein: most will survive. When was the last sail you’ve seen that wasn’t white?
It’s white, right?
The sail is white. The sail is white. And life is woven light. Monsters are movies. Life is mood.
Face down on the sand is a what not a who.
And whos that are whats are food.
*
Your heart is a labyrinth where the minotaur lives. The bull-king's heart is weak and wormy, compromised by compromise. But this is only what must be because this is what you want. You're free.
*
You cannot be forgiven. I cannot be absolved. Ours hearts are ash, lungs saltwater, and stomachs stuffed with children seethed in belief.
Our labyrinth is formed in curves not angles. That singing is sirens, not angels. All the forever we’ve lost is now.
I recently mentioned this play in my last essay “The Misuses of Art” and then realized I had not posted it anywhere for those who might want to read it.
I had great fun watching my son open and close this piece at last year’s SOAPFest, as well as witness the exquisite work of his fellow cast members Tracy Hyland, Michael Patten and Heather Hawkins, so masterfully directed by Annie Lareau. Such a great staging. I’ll never forget it.
An essay called “The Uses of Art” has generated a lot of traffic here at Just Wrought in the three and a half years since I posted it.1 I’m not sure why it’s so popular, maybe because it’s short and quick and has the kind of easily scannable list that’s very attractive on the internet these days. I’m still quite proud of the piece, even though I should probably admit now that I just sort of tossed it off from accumulated old notes. Recently, however, my thoughts have gone in a converse direction, towards those employments we generally assume art can be put to that it really can’t, or at least not very well: the misuses of art. A few months ago I began brain-brewing a list (by no means complete):
Persuade through rationality
Sell itself
Self-evaluate
Maintain objectivity2
Manage its own knee-jerk radicalism
Recognize its own inborn conservatism
Successfully proselytize for any particular religion or political party
I have not been on television since my brief, ill-fated appearance on Romper Room in Baltimore, circa 1972. Miss Sally was asking the circle of kids what their favorite drink was and when she got to me, I said, “Whiskey”. Even Mr. Do-Bee looked shocked. (In my defense, my dad had once given me a sip and I wasn’t as horrified by the taste as everyone expected me to be.) When the broadcast was done, my mom yanked me out of WBAL’s studio so fast I thought she was going to dislocate my shoulder. Oddly, I was not asked back.
Happily, last week I made my triumphant return, along with Amy Love, to talk about Sandbox One-Act Play Festival (or SOAPFest, as the kids are calling it.) The festival opens tomorrow night and runs for only this weekend. It features brand new plays by Scot Augustson, Emily Conberre, Elizabeth Heffron and myself , presented by some of Seattle’s very best directors, designers, technicians and actors.
Now that Amy and I are tv stars, tickets to the three night run are unlikely to last long. I recommend getting some while the getting is good. (Order tickets here.)
And if you’re wracking your brain for a gift to bring to celebrate these world premieres, just remember: whiskey’s still my favorite drink
. . . As we formulate our strategies for dismantling America’s gun culture:
A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is precisely what a direct attack achieves.
“You haven't shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I'm not gonna go stand under that safe.”
This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:
…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!
What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)
In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.
Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.
So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially. My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return. If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse.
But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?
Some say Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was the first to proclaim, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Others say it might have been Göring or Himmler.* One thing’s for sure: once one Nazi blurted the banality, it didn’t take long for the rest of them to parrot it. Originality and wit were never hallmarks of the Third Reich. Some years later, the English satirist Malcom Muggeridge did what English satirists do best, and turned brown-shirted thuggery on its head: “When I hear the word ‘gun’, I reach for my culture.” And in case you were wondering, that’s what America needs to do next.
The United States has now fully entered the long reaping season that our gun addiction has sown. We have watched in paralyzed horror from Columbine through Virginia Tech through the Café Racer massacre, mere blocks away from my own house in Seattle, right up to and through the seemingly ultimate abomination that was the Newtown Tragedy. I say “seemingly ultimate” because we all know Newtown will not be the end, but rather only a particularly vicious chapter somewhere in the middle of a book we seemed doomed to keep writing.
I have occasionally over-indulged myself with ranting on Facebook about this national sickness, and I have almost always regretted it. Gun-loving friends (and not-such-friends) prefer to shrug and pout, posture and taunt, flicking out comebacks like, “What are you going to do? Pass a law? You think that'll help? Good luck.” Until now I haven’t had the time, inclination or clarity to properly respond. But here goes:
No, I have limited interest in politics per se. Political solutions are necessary but not sufficient. As the gun-addicts love to remind (and threaten) us, outlawing handguns and assault rifles will merely turn gun-addicts into outlaws. (I am personally okay with that, by the way. Addicts need to find bottom.) We have to go deeper than politics to change our entire society. That’s where art comes in. Art can do all sorts of things that politics can never— and should never— hope to. Artists can and must, analyze, prophesy, seduce, synthesize, convince, cajole, ridicule, probe, scour, purge, alienate, repatriate and heal. To make that short list shorter, we must employ all the uses of art to win our country back from this insanity. We must surround the sickness with non-violent culture, like a healthy white blood cell engulfing and dissolving a pathogen.
I’ll be posting more essays as part of a larger conversation about how art can be key to disintegrating America’s gun cult. I am a playwright primarily, so mostly I am brainstorming potentialities of theatre, but I am equally eager to hear anyone and everyone’s thoughts on other creative tactics. Including gun-lovers. I love you too, sick and frightened as you are. I encourage you to join the conversation that will lead to your rehabilitation and your country’s ultimate recovery.
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