Be your husband if you'll be my wife

Last night Jeff and I laid in the dark. He lay on the couch, his surgeried-knee propped up. I sprawled on the floor, dissolved into full-body contact.

We were listening to a CD Renee burned, a song by Jeff Buckley. Who I'd never heard of. He's dead now -- drowned two years after this song was recorded.

How do you know you have 5 years to live, asks Lyon.

The song was recorded live at some cafe (Sin-e, in New York, late in the night on December 31, 1995, I googled later). They're talking, he's mumbling, no one's listening. He starts tapping his boot. One. Two. Three. Four. With a little snap on the and. One. Two. Three. Four AND. One. Two. Three. Four AND.

That's it -- just him tapping, that odd off-snap, and a clinking cafe full of people talking.

When he started to sing, it was such a weird high moany wail I couldn't understand the words.

No instruments ever. Just this one dude, wailing in his own head, about a woman. He headed off the cliff and fell forever. It got more and more personal, private, until even the snap disappeared and it was just lost words over foot-tapping. Not for effect but because that's as close as he could get to coming or crying while still singing. Then, from far oblivion, the opening lines again, so tiny and thin you could barely hear them. And out.

Fucking incredible.

We listened to a few more, then went back and played that again before crashing. Nothing else came close.

It wasn't the lyrics. It was the truth of the singer.

Be your husband if you'll be my wife
Be your husband if you'll be my wife
Be your husband if you'll be my wife

Stick to the promise that you made me
You've gotta stick to the promise that you made me
Stay away from johnny lee

Oh mama gotta love me good
Oh mama gotta love me good
Oh mama gotta love me good

If you want me to, I'll cook and sew
If you want me to, I'll cook and sew
If you want me to, I'll cook and sew

Don't you treat me so doggone mean
Please don't treat me so doggone mean
Cause you're the meanest woman I've ever seen

Oh mama love me good yeah
Oh mama love me good yeah
Oh mama now love me good
Oh mama now love me good

Be your husband if you'll be my wife
Be your husband if you'll be my wife
Be your husband if you'll be my wife

You can hear it here. It was used as the soundtrack to a video, but the video doesn't really apply. Shut your eyes, lay in the dark, and listen to Jeff sing in that tiny Sine Cafe one hot New York summer night.

Dostoevsky

A moment of beauty, courtesy of Joseph Lavy.

Dostoevsky

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

-- Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet, Black Sparrow Press

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

-- Albert Einstein

splash!

test for spammers

8/24
2:10pm

I put up a post yesterday that instantly got spam-comments all over it, so I took it down.

This is a test to see whether I can camouflage & evade by a) posting a new post, but b) back-dating it BEFORE today's date.

Here goes.

studying the seal's eye

I took this course recently. They led us in a visualization exercise. Imagine you are somewhere beautiful and safe...

Once we were serene and relaxed, we went somewhere -- I was on a bridge over the river by my house. A group of higher beings joined us. Mine were all standing on the water. Then we joined their circle. I saw a bunch of male beings of white light, plus three animals as tall as the humans -- a crow, a bluejay, and a seal. I started studying the seal's eye, noticing how it was brown and shaped differently than a horse's or a dog's, and didn't have any white around it, when --

One of these beings is your higher self, said the facilitator.

My higher self is a seal.

Your higher self has a message for you.

Splash! The seal suddenly reached out a flipper and, as bright-eyed as ever, splashed me in the face.

200 new, 8 returning

It's weird -- my own blogs look like everyone else's to me. "Why is this one so slow to update?" I think impatiently, looking at my own blog. "I haven't seen a new post here in DAYS." I'm cranky that the person appears to be out of town, or off their game; not posting daily, as I would want.

I have the same feeling about Raw Umber, but stronger because I like that writing more.

Which is hilarious.

But true. I write Raw Umber to map the firmament. There's a star. There's a star. Blackness here. Raw Umber feels like a haiku of haikus; wide slow leaps.

According to my sitemeter stats, I'm running at a fairly steady 215 people a day on this blog. Except that, apparently, only 8 of those are returning readers. So either 200 people a day decide NOT to return -- 200 people EVERY SINGLE DAY. Or some of y'all aren't taking cookies, so you just appear to be new each time.

I could probably name the 8 people. They're the ones who go, "Hey, so those are the new glasses? Sweet." Or, "I'm up on your blog, just tell me what else is going on."

I have one reader who says, "I catch up once a month or so. I skip past the theatre stuff, get the gist of your life, hope for the deep." Another who says, "I catch up once a month or so. I ONLY read the theatre, get the gist of your life, hope for the deep."

For deep, see Raw Umber.

If anyone's writing it.

something has shifted in me

"Something has shifted in me," I told my manager today. "My unconscious now believes, This place is different than the others. Old resentments and vigilances are dissolving."

"So now do you feel in integrity?" he asked.

I paused a moment, to check my body for the answer.

"With my teams and product unit, yes. With the company, no. My ethics & values diverge from the company's." We sat in comfortable silence for a moment. Sun streamed through his window. He was reinstalling World of Warcraft onto his new computer from several CDs -- "This takes forever with the patches" -- and pushing all the binder clips on his desk into a small pile. I was leaning back on the couch, all ten of my fingers wriggled in among the pokey-suction-frobby things on a ball that sticks wherever you throw it.

So what does that imply, I thought.

"The first thing I can see to do," I said, "Is to bring me, my work, and my teams into shining integrity with my ethics. Become the change I want to see in the world." He nodded, then spoke thoughtfully about his 13 years at the company, what integrity was, why he does feel in integrity with the company.

It was exactly the right level of conversation. A great use of my one-on-one time.

I have looked at actors for seven years

I watch actors like some people listen to music. I hear in their bodies the thousand truths.

My eyes are changing.

When I began directing, I could only see the radiance of a human being. Every human who stood up before me was luminous. I could gaze at any of them for hours.

Eventually I began to be able to see -- like a second lens -- where they were in their authenticity. When did they become vast, when did they vanish, when did I believe them.

I saw a Chinese man do that this week. He looked upward to answer a deep question. His shoulders softened, elbows lax on his knees, all the tension falling away from his face, soft eyes, blinking. For those moments I could see him. Like a child, an actor, an otter.

With Grotowski- or Suzuki-trained actors I see bodies so articulate that words are not needed. The text actually functions as an independent track.

In Leonid Anisimov's actors, and in Eugenio Barba's, I could see the full master instruments. Not a violin but a Stradivarius. Not any Stradivarius, but this particular fragile dark-toned one, with these hundreds of thousands of hours of practice.

I could not see what other directors saw when they looked at actors. I knew a) it was different than what I saw, b) they could all see it, and c) they agreed. It was one of the ways I knew I was still learning. To me, the actors looked like animals, like angels.

Living in the Odin Teatret's rehearsal rooms for two months changed my eyes. I have been gone from there a year and a half, and only now have my eyes completed their transformation.

Now I can see what the other directors see. I see it all -- the infinite luminosity, the training, the mask, the suppleness of the instrument and the spirit, the body, the language, the longing.

I was working on Chekhov with the Odin's apprentice actors, when -- "I'd like to do Chekhov," said Tage mildly. I felt like someone had scalded me. My body felt it before my brain did. I could FEEL, like a river of fire pour through me, what that meant. The maturity of this actor. His mastery. His fragility. His babyness. I could feel his limits & weaknesses, his strengths, his wryness -- how much he knew that Chekhov knew, what he knew that Chekhov didn't, what Chekhov knew that he didn't. It was like discovering the sky.

In that moment, something cracked in me.

Look how big he is
Look how big Chekhov is with him in it
I'm the same size I always am with actors, with Chekhov
Look how big I am

That was the moment I shifted as a director. When I felt myself with Tage and Chekhov on that infinite plain of light.

Talent is a water-table, available to all, says Katagiri Roshi. We tap it with our human effort.

Why do we work? asks Leonid Anisimov. We work to make all people Talented.

Pruning blogs

I can only write about two blogs steadily. Maybe two and a half, but one of the primaries suffers. Today I killed two of mine, to make time for this one.