Facing down the bourgeoisie in Minneapolis.
I have no vocabulary. I feel that I’m five. What’s the word for bread? I know! don’t tell me! I know it! just not right now. How about ‘suitcase’? It’s feminine, so… η… not tsaritsa… valitsa! η βαλυήτσα μου. My suitcase. If picking my way through words can be frustrating, I’m slowly getting to know them, know my way around the alphabet. Mid-word sigma still trips me up—is it an a, is it an o, who can tell?—and there’s epsilon that looks like u but is pronounced ee. If I miss my facility with English, the ability to cold-read a text, I am growing fond of this new alphabet. Growing fond of the sound of it, how satisfying it is to say, when I can say it.
A few nights ago I woke around 1:30 and could not stop the avalanche of nonsense in my head, most of which had to do with not knowing what words to say and how to say them. There are, of course, phrasebooks for that. Flicking through the one from Lonely Planet recommended to me I see a lot about bars, about going out, hooking up, what to say when about who can touch what. Which is all useful though how do you negotiate both the book and the stranger you just picked up who is now sitting on the bed? Do you try to read in the dark or have you got it on your iPhone? Are you at his place or your hotel? I guess it’s good the information is out there, but though I might be doing the thing with whitening strips, that’s not the kind of trip I’ve got in mind.
Back in ’86 I was hired for a season at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. It hadn’t been so long since Dalmane came on the market, a new wonder sleep aid being sold as completely and entirely safe and non habit-forming. It worked; one pill let you sleep and wake feeling pretty good, two knocked you out but left you feeling a bit hungover next morning. Vivian and I both used it and maybe we’d come to rely on it more than we should. Not to make excuses, but a couple of years earlier, he’d been through a terrible, heartbreaking time with a musical, The Tap Dance Kid. The workshop had been very happy, and very successful. To make the move to Broadway, two new producers were brought in who set about trying to wreck the show so one of them could take over and ‘save the day’. Though plausible, lacking the talent or experience necessary to do more than smash what had been created and with no ability to build it back up they were finally stopped. But the damage was done. Along with the choreographer, whom he greatly respected, Vivian salvaged what he could from the wreckage but the show when it opened never matched the workshop and the company, which had been trusting and productive, had turned surly and hostile. As a director who prided himself on his ability to work with actors this hurt him greatly, and the ongoing trauma continued to hound him, the stress of it affecting us both.
Anyhow, I’d gone to Minneapolis and was in rehearsal with Saint Joan, the first play of the season; with that underway, we made a start on the second, The Merry Wives of Windsor. As always happened, after a couple of weeks, once the novelty had worn off, I began to miss home. I was using Dalmane to help me sleep; then I ran out. Vivian was now in London, so I couldn’t get him to send me a fresh supply. I’d been getting to know the company, liking some better than others, and I’m not sure how this happened, the exact order of events, but pretty soon I began to feel that something was going on, bubbling up, something like falling in love. That must be why I wasn’t sleeping. Why else would I be feeling so reckless, woozy, and increasingly tired? The focus of my attention didn’t really interest me but he was there, if you know what I mean, a convenient peg on which to hang my inner turmoil. A teenage-style crush can fall on you at any age, and it’s not altogether a bad thing. No matter how it turns out, falling in love stirs up all kinds of emotions, can give you a real jolt. A friend in an LA. nursing home for movie people, at the age of ninety-one fell madly in love with a one-time star who was now a resident. Though it wasn’t altogether pleasant she looked on it as an unexpected benediction at the end of her life, which I thought very sensible. After a year he died; now at ninety-four she still pines for him.
Early on, the director of Merry Wives was heard muttering about the bourgeois complacency of the Guthrie, how he would shake them, smash the old way they did things, promising blood on the stage. Often he was drunk, or stoned, which became problematic as days passed and nothing got done. As he cursed Shakespeare, tearing pages out of the script, we re-wrote the text to fit his declared vision of a post-war, pre-Beatles, 60s Britain in which we were all going to be forced to live for the foreseeable future. As a critique of consumer culture, the stage was choked with rockets, washing machines, and motorbikes, presided over by some very expensive caricatures of the royal family by Gerald Scarfe looking down on us from the back wall. If any of this sounds like fun, it wasn’t. It was desperate, sad, and profoundly un-funny. I was there to play Hugh Evans, the sweetly pedantic Welsh pastor. Understanding that in order to survive I needed to take a more radical approach I concocted a demented scout-master who went everywhere followed by a pack of unpleasant children, hooting and jeering at me as I berated them.
[ ]
One day, while rehearsing some idiotic piece of stage business, I banged my knee. No big deal but to be on the safe side, the stage manager suggested that I get it checked so it would be on record in case it later became a problem, referring me to the doctor the theater kept on call. She was polite but could find nothing wrong. To be honest, neither could I, my knee was fine. But since I was there, it seemed like a good time to explain to her my Dalmane problem so she could write me a prescription. I didn’t need many, just a few to tide me over. Her reaction—like I’d asked for cocaine or morphine—startled me, making this very trivial-seeming encounter stick in my mind.
My insomnia got worse, my crush more agonizingly hopeless. I wasn’t going to act on it because I was, to all intents and purposes, married. If I’m not a saint, I took my then un-made, un-spoken vows seriously because, if you can’t get a license, if there’s no legal structure in place to back you up, all you’ve got to hold you together is mutual good will. And that can be easily broken. So I’d be staggering about the streets of Minneapolis at 3 am—it’s a safe and very pretty city, at least where I was—more convinced than ever by such physical evidence that I was madly, crazy in love, dreaming of time warps and desert islands. Then, after maybe three weeks of this, the dam broke. One afternoon after a rehearsal, I went back to where I was living and slept. It was over.
Maybe five years ago, my part in the assault on the bourgeoise of Minneapolis long since forgotten, I read Lisa Feldman Barrett’s remarkable How Emotions Are Made, in which she describes some of the research being done by her and others into how the brain works, with an emphasis on how we use past experiences to predict meaning from new stimuli: the interoceptive brain that is always monitoring input from the body to guess at probable causes, the model that seems to offer the best explanation of how we make sense of the blaze of sensations that assault us every millisecond, the great ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ of William James.
While in graduate school she was asked out on a date by a fellow student:
I wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but I had been cooped up in the lab too long that day, so I agreed. As we sat together in a coffee shop, to my surprise, I felt my face flush several times as we spoke, my stomach fluttered, and I started having trouble concentrating. Okay, I realized I was wrong, I am clearly attracted to him… after I agreed to go out with him again… I headed home, intrigued. I walked into my apartment, dropped my keys on the floor, threw up, and spent the next seven days in bed with the flu.
It wasn’t love, it was flu. Tricked by her physical state, her predictive brain came up with the wrong solution. Reading this the first time I thought, well okay that’s weird, I can’t imagine anything like that ever happening to me, rational being that I am. Et cetera. More recently, as I read accounts of what were now being described as the toxic effects of the extremely addictive Dalmane, I thought again of the doctor’s reaction: could my lack of Dalmane have been the cause not cure of my insomnia? Surely not. Instead of the euphoria of love had I been experiencing drug withdrawal? Without knowing it, had I become addicted, were my sleepless nights, was my crush, caused by withdrawal from a drug I’d come to rely on? I hadn’t thought of it as an addiction. That word had not been part of my vocabulary. Not so long ago I realize I freed myself of another addiction that went unnamed till it was over. Telling myself only that I was drinking too much I stopped—as I had when I quit smoking. Another addiction by today’s standards. It isn’t that the word was unknown, we just didn’t generally use it to name actions or behaviors. Instead of trying to lessen the sense of shame that used to hobble efforts at recovery, we tended to blame the afflicted. Words define how we think: if you don’t have the words to express a thing, how can you think it? If you change how you express it do you change how you think it?
So I’m having a panic attack, lying awake trying to figure out how the hell I was going to cope with all the stuff that needed to get done before I left for Greece, why the hell was I going there in the first place, why I was making such a big deal of it, and whoever thought that learning the language was a good idea—like that was even possible in the limited time at my disposal when it was clearly the work of a lifetime and the lessons were causing me so much stress I should really just call it quits and… Which is when, with a jolt, I connected my current state of anxiety with my experience in Minneapolis and Feldman Barrett’s flu. I wasn’t anxious, stressed, or panicked—well, a little stressed, but that’s to be expected—I was in a state of extreme excitement. I was… excited the way you’re excited when you’re a kid and you’re counting down the days till Christmas, or your birthday, or till the last day of school before the summer holiday. I’d forgotten how that excitement—simple, direct, naïve—used to feel.
Greek will get done. I’ve come this far, I can manage the rest. When I land I will know enough to get by—when I need it I will remember the word for passport—thanks to the lessons I’ve been taking online with a terrific instructor—at iTalki.com, I recommend it, look out for Leonidas, Γιεα σου! Recently, he introduced me to the Aorist, saying the word over like I’m supposed to know what the hell he’s talking about. Or it’s a special treat. Turns out it’s just the past tense, specifically the past tense in the indicative mood, active voice, used to describe an action that’s over, that happened at some point in the past and that won’t, can’t, come again. This is not the same as what is called in Greek the Imperfect, a past that continues without a fixed ending, an add-on that trails behind us into the present. We don’t quite have this tense in English, the past-progressive comes close but, like much in life, the imperfect can be suggested by context and grammar. I welcome the past tense; active, passive, indicative, and subjunctive. Till now I’ve been living entirely in the present. I know that’s supposed to be a good thing but I’m ready to move beyond ‘I am well! Thanks! How are you?’ and get a little messy.
I’m making this waiting period part of the trip. Why not? I have an App for that: Countdown Star counts backwards or forwards from markers you set; what’s past, what’s to come, by year, month, week, day, hour, minute, seconds… It’s a couple of bucks at the App Store. I have a few markers set, events from the past that occasionally I might check: six years since Vivian’s death, soon to be seven, really? Does it seem longer or shorter? Three years, and two, and then one, since I lost the dogs. If I sometimes feel very alone right now, that’s okay. The date for this trip is my only forward-looking marker. So far. Realistically—and is anything about this realistic?—if this is my first time it could also be the last, so let’s do this thing. Let’s enjoy it as it happens. And let’s understand my excitement for what it is without dragging in the imperfect past. Time for that later. I can’t control what’s in the news, I can’t control what new outrage will or won’t be perpetrated. I can only insist on the importance of small things, of the taste and texture of life. And I can use language to guide my perception about what’s going on inside my head. Right now I’m on the brink of I know not what, as Tennyson might put it. Old habits die hard, but they do die. Being on the brink’s not a bad place to be. I climbed my first Catskill High Peak.
Twenty-eight days, five hours, forty-one minutes, and forty-six seconds. I will enjoy this if it kills me.
Word.