But as this isn’t a culinary blog, I digress.
It’s hard to believe that we only have one more quarter left in this year. Then again, starting classes last October in the Hackney space does seem a long time ago. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, though what exactly is hard to encapsulate. A neighbor back home asked me what I’ve learned (Midwesterners being innately practical), and what I found myself saying was “Something about presence. And timing.” Not a very definite answer, I’ll admit, but it does touch on the essence of a lot of what we’ve done.
I should probably write just about that sometime, but as I go back, presence and timing are on my mind in a different way. A few months ago I was sure that I wouldn’t come back for the second year. I thought I might not even finish the first. It was in that period of time last winter when I just didn’t have a sense of where I was on the learning curve, or whether I was on it at all. And no sense of where I was in terms of why I'd thrown myself into this whole mess (for a mess it was, then). I’d also lost a sense of my own presence to myself, you might say, because I just didn’t feel at home anymore in whatever had brought me to leave everything I was doing “in my previous life” as well as where I was living, my home and my community. The vocabulary that I’m newly immersed speaks of being in your body and there was a sense of estrangement because I had little or no sense of what I looked or sounded like. I felt vacant, empty, alien even to myself physically and spiritually. I wouldn’t have thought to say it in these terms, but I just wasn’t very present to myself or to others at that time. So in moving through that, I feel like I've regained a sense of presence in my own life. That’s not what I had in mind when I answered my neighbor’s question in the driveway the other day—I was speaking more of stage presence and awareness of others in an ensemble, which also has to do with timing (knowing when a scene or a story needs you to say or do something, or needs it from someone else so it’s your job just to hold on and allow for it to happen*)—but there’s something of presence and timing in this larger life sense that I’m also learning in new ways through this Lispa experience.
Part of that knowledge comes in a confidence that it’s not time for me to leave Lispa yet, that I'm making some headway now and that I'll continue to do so. I do go back, however, with the awareness that time is going really fast, and I want to be more aware of each thing that I do. To continue to exploit this metaphor—I’ll let loose my grip and release this poor thing soon. I promise.—I want to be more present to this sense of passing time and to make better use of the time I have left in London. Just a small example: We concluded last term with The Brawl, as mentioned before. My part in our presentation was as a quiet, fussy laundromat owner, every thing having a place and everything in its place, cleanliness being next to godliness, and all that. My character kept to himself as tensions rose around him, straightening up, taking an almost fetishistic pride in keeping the floor mopped. This was, as they say, my mask. Not a physical mask, but it was what you would have seen of my character if you’d watched the presentation. It was my character’s persona. (Somebody pointed out to me a couple of years ago, talking about “the three persons of the Trinity,” actually, that our word persona comes from a (Latin? Greek?) word for mask.) And when everything was falling apart at the laundromat and everyone was making such a mess of things, flinging clothes around, using a bra as a choking rope, you name it, my “countermask” emerged as my character went berserk, screaming, throwing things around, dumping bags of clean and folded laundry on the floor, until another character floored me with a strong right hook. I think I realized at the time, though not at the level of full consciousness, that I was talking way too fast in my berserk state. I was paying more attention to the rest of what I was doing. But I want to have a fuller awareness of the moment to be able to attend to more than just the most obvious elements. A fuller sense of presence in the moment, both to be more intentional or practiced in what I’m doing, and also what others are doing around me. (On the flip side of all this, as my laundromat guy was mopping earlier in the scene, so into that activity that it was almost as if waltzing with my mop, I missed the moment in which I was to do a key physical element of the story: I was to pick up one woman's panties that had dropped out of her laundry bag and mistakenly put it in someone else’s bag. The whole brawl eventually would spring from that. Luckily I found the bright red panties on the floor just in time, and actually had to cross the stage with them to catch up to laundry bag #2, which ended up working out better anyway since it drew people’s eye to them in a way that picking them up at the moment we'd practiced wouldn't have. But one of my scenemates told me afterward that I'd almost given him a heart attack when I’d missed my cue. As you might expect, I still have a lot of awareness to cultivate going in both directions.
That last was an awkward sentence, I realize, written as they were calling my flight in Philadelphia. And I was going to go back and rewrite it, but now that I look at it again, having just arrived back in London a few hours ago, it gives me a chance to segue into an item I just read in the Guardian:
One evening about 150 years ago, a busy House of Commons was listening patiently to Sir Robert Inglis, a High Tory and bitter foe of Roman Catholic and Jewish emancipation, or anything with a taint of liberalism, although he happened on this occasion to be complaining about an injustice. A prisoner had been denied visits, known in the legal phrase as “right of egress and ingress”. Or, as Inglis unhappily put it, “Things have come to pretty pass when an Englishman may not have his wife backwards and forwards.”¶ We know this scene from a famous pen. “The shout of laughter in the house was electrical,” Benjamin Disraeli recorded. “Sir Robert Peel, who was naturally a hearty laugher, lost his habitual self-control and leant down his head in convulsions.”
Once again, I digress, but wasn't it worth it?
More later. I have to get out and enjoy this lovely day.
* footnote to the asterisk above: looking back on this sentence later, it kind of describes parenthood too, doesn't it?
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