Well, I'm finally finishing a certification in TLA: almost 10 years and $10,000 in classes, workshops, airfare, and medical bills later! My reading last night for the penultimate class was about Suzan Lori Parks' play Venus, which brought to mind this essay I wrote back in 2007 when Parks spoke at the Portland Arts & Lecture series.
She skips onto the
stage, tosses her waist length dreadlocks over her shoulders and plants her
feet wide and pigeon-toed like Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann. Suzan-Lori, who changed her name from Susan to
Suzan as the result of a typo on a promo poster, dons a coral knee-length
straight skirt, gray top, and calf-high black cowboy boots. With hands on hips, elbows and shoulders
thrust slightly forward in oxymoronic cuteness, knees locked back, she reminds
me of Bad Becky, a childhood neighbor girl.
I expect Suzan to draw toy pistols from a hip holster and zap the
audience with literary witticisms.
Instead, this 42-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner (Topdog/Underdog (2001)) begins with, “Anna Nicole Smith died today,
and you know, people laugh, and it’s supposed to be funny, but, you know, she
was a person too. As nutty and wacky and
loopy, she was a person, too…so just, like, wave to her as she leaves the
building, because she was something.”
Such compassion emanated throughout her 90 minute homily. “Listen in and out,” she advises through a
slight lisp. Then she rolls to the outside
of her feet in an unassuming way and asks how to “conduct oneself in the
presence of the spirit.”
I am temporarily
seized by this muse, by the suggestion to treat inspiration “as an honored
guest” and “entertain all my far-out ideas.”
Only occasionally in my 46 years have I fully entertained the muse and
my edgy, unconventional ideas.
Typically, I am so consumed by a need for approval that I do not dare
blurt out the true meanderings of my mazy mind.
As a child, I spent most of my time in my imagination, creating fantasy
lives when I was bored, needing to get out of yard work, or detach from a
socially painful elementary school scenario.
I visited complex story lines every night that I couldn’t fall
asleep. I used the index finger on each
hand to represent a character and created dialogues between the two fingers in
the back seat of my mom’s lime green station wagon. I would whisper, not wanting to be caught,
and occasionally my mother would ask what I was doing back there. “Nothing,” I would lie as I worked out the
hurts of my youth on my index fingers.
Parks also revealed
her imaginary childhood adventures
under the piano waiting for her mother’s high heels to click by. She read Harriet
the Spy and Hotel for Dogs and
then, when asked, “What are you doing under there?” responded with, “I’m
writing my novel.”
Wish I had thought
of that line for myself.
“The play is
always happening,” she declares. “I just
plucked something out of the ether.” Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day for a
year. Her efforts resulted in the recent
publication of 365 Days/365 Plays (2006).
Many of the works are in production at theaters across the country. If the voices tell you to write a play a day
for a year, you say “OK!” Parks explained.
“In the presence of the spirit, you don’t say, ‘What do you mean?’
”
I remember reading
that Georgia O’Keefe painted a painting a day for the discipline, or perhaps to
stir her artistic compost.
I started writing
a poem a day for a while.
Then it became a
poem a week, a poem a month, and finally a poem if I happened to be inspired
and made the time to write it down.
I slighted the
spirit yet again ~ didn’t even offer her a glass of wine when she came to visit
because I was too determined to lead a proper life with a proper income from an
acceptable job, own a house, keep it clean, go to bed by 10:00 and never reveal
the true outrageousness of my spirit.
After 1825 days of depression, I finally decided to quit my stable job,
sell my clean house, stay up after midnight, and trust the voice that dared me
to write, fill that life with constant creation and open every pore to the
spirit with a resounding, “Yes!”
So here I am,
signed up for a semester at Goddard and writing a Villanelle a day, well, not
quite every day, but the point is, I let myself be consumed by the spirit, in
love with the spirit, and I listen to words outside my own undulating mind.
My good friend and
housemate Donna sent me a card while I was at Goddard. “Gazing out the window while rinsing the
morning dishes, she chased her thoughts in circles, until they escaped through
the screen and onto the mulberry tree.
From a distance they actually made sense.” On the back of the card by Susan Mrosek it
read, “A person needs a place to unfold her truths and extract the humor. That place is the Pondering Pool. Perhaps I’ll see you there.”
So here I am, in
the ‘Pondering Pool’, wondering about the space between and the power of
language within that space. I long to
breathe only the ether that Suzan-Lori Parks speaks of; I long to be immersed
in synonyms and similes, hyperbole and raw truth, the day to day 365 every day
fascination with language as a symbol for enunciating our human condition. I stepped out to the edge of the tide and the
shoreline; now I walk through the wavy waters of artistic unknowing and, like
Parks, I hope to set off to Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse and remember who I am
and who I am supposed to be.
