‘Yes, Pecan!’—and weightier matters

I feel a bit removed from all the Obamania at home, but I do get it filtered through my favorite British newspaper, the Guardian. Very happy to see that the new prez is taking steps to dismantle some of the ugly and/or stupid remnants of the Bush legacy—Guantanamo and the secret CIA prisons, the gag rule on abortion funding and insistence on abstinence-only education, dreadful decrees of environmental degradation which Bush opened up with a stroke of the pen at the end of his days in power.

The British also have enough distance to delight in the more trivial aspects of this celebration, like Ben & Jerry naming a new ice cream flavor in echo of Obama’s campaign slogan. Sometimes there’s a bit too much distance, however, as in what may have been the unkindest cut of the week: a letter to the editor that read, “It was interesting to see that President Obama’s first change was to have the fat lady sing first.” All humor has an edge.

I didn't think I would, but I confess to moments in the past week when I wish I were still ministering in a congregation. Not only do I miss the community, as noted at Christmas, but I also can't help but think how fruitful a time this would be to be in an articulating place in such a community back home as the country moves into this new era. And also (on the shadow side) in dealing with the horror and conflict of Israel's assault on Gaza.

I really don’t miss the budgeting morass that goes with ministry in a time like this, but altogether what a fascinating time. (But no, for any who are wondering, I'm not putting my denominational Profile together.)

I do wonder if the papers back home are covering the attack on Gaza as fully as the British ones are (the US being so self-defined by its support of Israel). What I read here is truly horrific. The white phosphorus burns, the physical and psychological toll on children and dismay over the longterm effects this past month will have on a generation of Palestinian kids. One of Britain’s leading playwrights, Caryl Churchill, was so outraged by recent events that she wrote her newest play—started and completed it—in just one week. “Seven Jewish Children—A Play for Gaza” will be performed next month at the Royal Court theater. Admittedly it’s only 10 minutes long, but in a remarkable turnaround this play will go from inception to stage in less than a month. It will be performed for free, with donations accepted afterward for a charity called Medical Aid for Palestinians. After it’s performed here, Churchill will publish it online for anyone to download, and they can perform it for free as long as they take up a collection for the people of Gaza afterward. Theatre groups in the States should keep an eye out for this. Community and church groups, too, I’d think.

Less globally, more personally...

Closer to home: In class we've moved from colors and paintings to music this week. Each Movement and Improvisation teacher has brought in a different piece of music for us to respond to. Quite a range: from a contemporary piece by a group called the Rachels, to Bartok, to Miles Davis ... to the soundtrack from a Looneytunes cartoon. (Just try to express that one with your body! If you get a chance sometime, close your eyes during an old Looneytune and listen to the music by itself. Then imagine somebody composing it. And then imagine an orchestra recording it. There's incredible artistry there. And here all I thought was that it was simply Saturday morning entertainment for (Baby Boomer) kids.)

At times I feel like I know what I'm doing here at Lispa, but only at times. A week ago was another low point, as you may have gathered. This week has gone somewhat better, but at times I wonder if in smoother times like this I've just pushed my difficulties underground again. Sometimes it seems that that's not completely a bad thing. When I bring up whatever it is that pulls me down and hold it before me as if it were a mirror, I just get stuck in it. (Hmm, interesting Narcissistic reference there that I didn't intend.) But if I can draw from this darkness like a tree draws from shit in the soil, maybe I can convert it into something more fruitful. Perhaps.

Anyway, I continue to work on this.

Thomas holds three-person tutorials each week in which students do some free-form two-handed charcoal drawing with eyes closed. Then we see what came of it, talk about the experience, and try to discern something from what emerged on the page. It's not as much like reading tea leaves as it might sound, but yes, it is very subjective. That's the point, really, I think. Anyway, this was my week to take part. What emerged in the first of my two drawings was very dark—bloblike, I thought initially. But Thomas has a away of reframing things, eliciting insights that are quite helpful and more than wishful thinking. He also has a knack for drawing on observations of how we've expressed ourselves in our Movement and Improv classes. He mined some helpful imagery from my "drawing" which I first found so very ugly and formless. He saw in it (and so in my efforts) something reflecting a wild dark flower, marked by a strong male energy, fed by anger and struggle. Something potentially poisonous, perhaps more in its being bottled up than in its expression. He always encourages us to hold onto those drawings. Maybe I'll bring mine home and post it on my wall. I do think there's something there.

20 January 2009

For several years after 9/11, the seventh-inning stretch at Minnesota Twins games was fouled by the Twins organization encouraging the raucous singing of Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.” Actually that last phrase is redundant. Nobody ever sings that song any way but raucous. Adding it to the seventh-inning stretch always seemed a corruption of innocence to me, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” being the most harmless of songs.

I would have used the title of Greenwood’s song as the heading of this entry if it wouldn’t have rung the echo of the jingoes’ anthem. Because the inauguration of Barack Obama did indeed make me deeply proud to be an American citizen. There are a lot of us who nodded in agreement a few months ago when Michelle Obama--now our First Lady--said something about how being proud of her country wasn't a feeling she could take for granted.

I’d unwittingly signed up to work the night at my call-center job tonight, but arriving a few minutes early for my 5:15 shift I saw one of the TVs in the lobby tuned to the swearing-ins and the inauguration. Another American and I stood there for over half an hour watching as much of it as we could, from Rick Warren to Aretha Franklin to the swearing in of Joe Biden, to Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman (and a couple of other instrumentalists I didn't recognize) playing Aaron Copland. And then came the swearing in of Barack Hussein Obama--as amazing in name and it was in deed--and his inaugural speech. Surely I wasn't the only one who was relieved even for him to make it to the end of his presidential oath without the in-breaking of some ballistic mayhem that would threaten his life. And then came the resonance of his somber, uplifting speech. My fellow American and I ended up being late to work, staying there in the lobby until the end of his speech. No one could have gotten either of us to move. Being on time for a few hours of market research couldn’t hold a candle to the most important event of the day. Even the Brits, both black and white, who put other things on hold for a few minutes to watch were caught up in what was happening.

More on this later, I'm sure.

Headline of the week

From the Guardian, Tuesday 13 January, over an article about Bush reflecting back on his presidency:

9/11, two wars, Katrina: 'We had fun', says Bush

Painting with a darker palette

This term at Lispa we're working with color and paintings. Apparently Jacques Lecoq, from whom this school's approach to theatre grows, had his own theories of color, and so following his language we speak of how fast colors are, what are their dynamics, how much space they take up. For example, according to Lecoq, red is the smallest color or the most compact. Blue might be the biggest? Green has its own distinctive sense of direction. On some of this I'd agree. On other bits I'm not so sure. Anyway, as you might guess, it's all quite abstract. Much more so than when we were observing how a piece of paper reacts when crumpled and released, or how a balloon inflates. And so when we work in Improv class and move as we think green moves, or make sounds to express how we think the yellow in a Van Gogh sounds, well, this is an entirely different level of challenge.

Off the cuff the other day I said in a conversation that I have a clear and definite idea of what I'm trying to express in Improv maybe 3 times out of 10. These days I'd say that ratio is a bit optimistic.

And, you might ask, what use is all this? I can't give an answer right now. But I can't help but ask the question, too, even though I keep telling myself I need to allow more time before I impose those questions on this experience.

Maybe it's having turned the corner on the new year, but the questions of where all this is going--what it's opening up for me--are more present than they were last fall. Surely some of this has to do with conversations Robin and I had when I was home for Christmas--in particular, questions about whether she can or will join me for the second year. Frankly this whole thing is a struggle--financially as well as in terms of relationship and coordinating with each other's plans. So there are lots of reasons why I might be increasingly concerned over where all this is leading. There's little justification for staying the second year if it won't help me get to wherever I want to go afterward. And Robin in particular needs to know whether to plan on coming for Year 2 because that decision determines whether she looks for arts residencies for the fall and for a renter for the house. Those things just can't wait till I finish the school year in July.

In short, I'm feeling pretty weighed down with all of these indefinites. And working with such abstract subject matter ... I was going to say that it doesn't help, but maybe it's an apt reflection of these other things I'm dealing with. Thomas warned (or promised?) that this term would take us into darker emotional territory. This is my shade of it for now, or part of my experience anyway. And I'm coming up against challenges (again) of how much of what I'm going through I'm willing to share with my others, which furthers my feelings of isolation and marginalization. Emotionally, this is a hard time.

I skipped out of school early on Thursday and took Friday off today, too, hoping that constructing a long weekend for myself would help me get a handle on some of this, or at least re-establish enough distance that I can work with it more productively. Before leaving school Thursday, rather than just sending word with a classmate, I decided to go tell Amy I'd be skipping her class. It seemed the more appropriate way to go about it. On the way over to Studio B (in a different section of Three Mills) I ran into a fellow student whom I don't know well. She asked how I was doing, etc., and when I indicated that I might skip the afternoon class she asked, "Is it the age thing?"--which I thought a very surprising question, coming from someone I've only talked with 2 or 3 times and have never had a class with. Am I that transparent? Or are others as aware of this as I am? (I'm afraid it's more the former than the latter.) She also told me what we'd be doing in class, just coming from it herself: viewing and doing improvs on a painting by Francis Bacon. Which one I'm not sure, but this is the kind of image that comes to mind. (What my classmate described could have been a painting like this one or one of Bacon's others that include images of flayed bodies.)

Part of me thought, well, this is exactly what could be helpful right now, to give expression to this kind of darkness. But I still decided to pass for the day. That kind of expression is where I think I'm headed, but I want to develop my skills a bit more first. Otherwise I think it might be too much like a beginning swimmer jumping into the middle of the English Channel in the midst of a storm. There is a bit of a therapeutic element to this school, but I don't want to use it that way too much. Self-absorption isn't the route to go. I've seen a bit of that in others here (though not too awfully much) and I really don't want to go there myself.

What lies beneath

One aspect of the program that's different this term is watching films with Thomas on Monday evenings. There've been two thus far--"Rivers and Tides" about environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy and "Touch the Sound," a documentary about deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie. I'd seen both before and skipped Evelyn Glennie this time around, but watching "Rivers and Tides" the other night reminded me of how you see different things in a good film when you see it again in a different context. Just one example was when Goldsworthy spoke about how what you see on the surface is affected by what's beneath it. Two images that accompanied that were watching a river flow over a rock and a wood-and-clay installation he made in a village in France. The installation looked at first just like a wall that was being plastered with local mud, but as the mud dried, a pattern emerged in the cracks that echoed a serpentine pattern he'd built in underneath.

Artistic expression is like that, of course, always influenced by what's going on below the surface. And (having stepped out of the practice of ministry myself, I'm more willing to reveal) the little secret that ministers seldom speak of publicly is the worry over the nakedness of their own preaching. They so often preach the message that they themselves long to hear. Faith is so personal, so autobiographical, so often formed by need, desire, and circumstance. It's a crime when people bleed it dry.

So I come back to the question of how much of my own soul and emotion to pour into my work here--and how much to reveal. At the foundational level, I think we all have to draw from what lies beneath the surface. But if expression is too self-referencing, it's not enough of a communal event and experience. I think the task is in large part to give expression to what is honest and personal in such a way that others can read themselves into it. (I always thought that was the best preaching, too.) But these days I feel like my awareness of my own inner state is too out of balance with my capacity to express it with the combination of power and subtlety that I want. Yes, I know that adage "practice makes perfect" as well as anyone, but with so much of this being so intensely personal, it's not quite like staying late after baseball practice to take some extra grounders. I'm trying to find my way here in what is still new territory for me. And sometimes it feels a bit like venturing onto thin ice.

A new home at Three Mills

Classes started again this week. Everything feels a bit unsettled and new. The school’s new location is Three Mills Studios, which is home mainly to film and TV studios. Eastern Promises (a recent David Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts) was made there—sorry, no celebrity sightings so far this week—as were Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and (I think) the recently released RocknRolla. Some West End theatrical productions also use it for rehearsal space, though there seems to be some prejudice against the East End, which is where this is. Danny Boyle, on the other hand (director of Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later, among other films), lives in Hackney, which is close by, and does apparently enjoys using Three Mills, among other locations. Much of this information comes from the administrator who welcomed us on Monday. And who also asked us not to hassle any stars who show up on the premises. Not that we’ll necessarily see them. Apparently Madonna never left her Winnebago except to go through a tunnel to her studio when she was here, whether to shoot a music video or when she was still with Guy Ritchie, who made Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and RocknRolla.

And—coming attractions—a film to watch for this summer, at least for the Three Mills connection, is Lesbian Vampire Killers. Sorry to have missed the filming of that! How would that have been to run into those folks in their make-up in the on-site café?

Follow this link to find out more about Three Mills Studios. For a fuller look, check out the downloadable brochure from their website.

More on classes later. I fully intend to write less about Acrobatics this term! But a fun side note: Robin emailed me a song last night she said really reminded her of me. The lyrics go something like "I tried to do handstands for you and now you've left me black and blue..." I'm told that we can include music when we do our end of term acro presentations. Maybe I should play that song.

London: City of Canals?

Actually, yes. It’s cracked with them.

Sunday I explored a part of town called Little Venice, over by Paddington station. When you debark from the nearest Tube stop you actually walk uphill toward Little Venice, which is a bit odd, but there you have it: the canal is higher than some of the surrounding streets. And actually it’s nothing like Venice aside from having a canal or two. No charmingly decaying buildings, no labyrinthine waterways. At first I was a bit disappointed as I walked the street beside the canal. But when I crossed over to the other side and could get down to the walkway right by the water, its charm grew on me. Canal boats—many of them some 20 yards long and maybe 8 feet wide—line the waterway, a few tied up side by side. Many are residences to what I assume are independent-minded people. A welcoming sign indicates that boats can be moored here at no charge for up to 14 days a year, with a fine of only £25 a day for overstaying. There are also tour boats, of course, plus a floating puppet theater and a delightfully cozy canal boat/café. The canal itself was covered with broken ice. A pair of swans made their way slowly through the alleys between the ice sheets.

The stately beige three-storey buildings that overlook the canal indicate a high income level for the area’s permanent (unmoored) residents, but the canal boats themselves look comfortably downscale. Wood smoke drifted up from little chimneys, and many boats had old bicycles roped to their low roofs.

I took a side jaunt to explore a distinctive-looking old church with a long narrow footprint reminiscent of the boats themselves. I think it was called St. Mary Magdalene. Though it was 2 in the afternoon I could hear a service going on inside. As I got closer I made out what was apparently a small African Pentecostal congregation, with trumpet, drums, and a miked singer. Apparently it’s an Anglican church, but my guess is another congregation uses it on Sunday afternoons. I looked for an open door, but gave up shortly after finding a very cold-looking African youth in a thin white liturgical robe pounding on a door to no avail. Apparently he was supposed to be inside, but either the loudness of the music, the powerful presence of the Spirit among the worshipers, or the remoteness of the door from where the action was in the long building prevented anyone from hearing him.

A couple of other vignettes from Little Venice: The surprise of coming upon a sailboat with a tall mast on a waterway crossed by very low bridges (though there is another waterway leading in that I didn’t explore). And watching a Canada goose (or whatever the British equivalent is), sliding along on the ice, head bent over to concentrate on its own feet as it flapped its wings for balance.

Just another lazy Sunday afternoon in a city full of unexpected delights.

Silent night, candlelight, ember, and flame

I was home for Christmas. It was great to be among the family again. Didn’t make much of an attempt at all to see other people. Once you start, where do you draw the line? I did get to catch up with some friends and neighbors, but the main goal was to be with Robin and the kids. I’d say “Mission accomplished,” but besides being a bit impersonal, that phrase has a hollow ring anymore and the experience was anything but hollow.

One aspect was a bit empty, however, at least temporarily. I did miss having a larger community to celebrate Christmas with. After 16 years of ministry at the church in our neighborhood, it felt a bit odd not to go there for the Christmas Eve service. But professional boundaries and courtesy being what they are, it wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to show up at First Church on Christmas Eve this year (or next year either, for that matter). I was keenly aware of the time that evening, and as people were in church just a block away for the last part of the service, Robin, Isabel, Tucker, and I were gathered around the piano in our front room singing carols. It was actually a lovely way to spend that part of the evening, singing with the family, but I was glad that no one suggested singing “Silent Night.” I don't know if the tradition still holds at First Church (though I assume there’d be a rebellion if anyone tried to change it), but that’s the carol that has concluded the Christmas Eve service there since before I came. The whole congregation stands in a circle around the sanctuary, candles in hand, the lights are turned off, and the flame is passed from candle to candle all around the room till the sanctuary glows with warmth as people sing that loveliest of carols.

A year ago at the end of the service, right in the middle of “Silent Night,” it occurred to me that that might be my last Christmas with First Church. I didn’t know what was ahead, but I had a feeling that 2008 was going to be the year that I made a change. That wasn’t a particular goal. I just knew the time was ripening. So, looking around the candlelit room one last time, I’d gotten quite choked up. It made it hard to speak the benediction right afterward. I’ve known many of those people for so long, did their weddings, baptisms, confirmations, memorialized and buried their loved ones. The warmth of candlelight ushers in a silence and reflection that we lose with incandescents and (especially) fluorescent lights. It was one of those moments I’ll probably always carry with me in memory.

So as we sat around our piano at home this Christmas Eve and sang, I was grateful for the silence regarding “Silent Night.” We did end up singing it as a grace for our family meal right afterward, but I sat silently, not wanting to break down and hijack the emotions of the evening. We went to a different church for a midnight service, and I was quite blue for the first 15 minutes or so, but by the end all was calm, and more bright.

Now I’ve just arrived back in London (I write this on the train in from Gatwick to Victoria), and it will soon be time to turn my thoughts to the coming year again. But not just yet. Though home is now, in very quick order, some 4000 miles away again through the bewilderments of modern travel, you always bring parts of it with you. It’s like those stories of the ancients carrying an ember from hearth and home to kindle their fire in a new place.