more on Mamet

Finished Mamet's booklength essay "3 Uses of the Knife" last night.

Stunned by it. He describes that the basic structure of narrative -- the 3-act play; "boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl"; the build-up, the middle movement, the crescendo and eventual (inevitable) resolution of a symphony -- are all reflective of how our mind is wired to see events progress, how our lifespan unfolds in our innate philosophical consciousness.

And that in True artistic drama, there is no resolution. Our lives are Manichean in the constant struggle, or see-saw, between our light and our dark. Maybe a moment of peace at the end of the drama, but that is only because that imaginary struggle has ended and we can take a breath. But the walk through the troubled and troubling universe goes on. Because no matter what we want, no matter how we want the relief of resolution, we know in those moments of biting sun-bright clarity that that is not the way Life, the universe, truly works.


Sorry to say, but Mamet here has stirred me more than a decade's worth of President Ikeda's essays and speeches.


Mamet describes religion as relaxing into an appeasement of the Manichean dichotomy, of letting the mind settle into a crevice riven into the middle of the landscape.

Ikeda talks from the perspective of purity; Mamet talks from the place right here, the middle of the city, his people the middle of the last century's full-on hatred and murder. But I need some of that right now. I need to move away from the cleanness, the unattainable imaginary purity of religiosity. The addiction of it. I need to admit, and admit with my life, my actions, the bitter and the sweet grisly grunginess of real life as a human.

A day to feel shitty

It's 1:45 on a day off afternoon. And I feel like shit. I did work Saturday because we had a training class and someone had to be onsite for security. But in the mid of winter, cloudy, windy, "brisk" as they say. Not even snow, not even really white bright snow on the ground -- if any day, a day to feel shitty. I spent almost two hours, I think, chatting with G.. Which was fine, great, but I ended up not getting to morning gongyo til after 10:30 when I got up before 7:00. But then I got a call from Barbara, who wanted to spend 45 minutes discussing work. Then Alain next door grabbed me; he is applying for a job at 844 Delaware, and we ended up talking about... my work. (He did though, tell me he thinks of me not just as a neighbor, not just as a friend, but as a brother. I am rather shocked by that.)

So, technically only three more hours of my holiday weekend. Oh well...

What do I want to do today?

What do I want to do today?

Write.

Not eat meat.

Go to the old SGI Community Center at 4:00 to help the move; I probably cannot join in the physical moving with the other men, but at least to "support", as we say, and to see the new Community Center now all but completed.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning, the ThinkBright channel was running a documentary on Film Noir. Inspired me to - right then - pop open the DarkRoom program (an emulation of the 1980's simple word processor screens) and write up a few lines, of an argument between Ron and Trish in my "The Detective's Secretary" play.

All I want to do it write.

But something is feeling missing, at least when I imagine it. Or someone. It just seems so frighteningly empty. I want there to be a woman padding around the place, or at least away at work, when I write. I want a dog curled up next to the desk near my feet. I want the phone to be ringing, interrupting me, my agent or a producer. I want a laptop to carry under my arm into The Spot, to sit there in public in the doldrums of the afternoon. I want to be waiting for an email of a plane ticket from a theater in Charlotte so I can be there for final rehearsals and opening night.

This is the kind of life many men lead.

The life they create for themselves.

I do not know why I can't just get off my ass, turn off the distractions -- the television, the PalTalk rooms, the food -- for four fucking hours and just start creating this life for myself. (See below, about such a sea change.)

Mamet talks about the fecundity of the "midlife crisis"

David Mamet, from "3 Uses of the Knife" --

Tolstoy wrote that if you don't undergo this reexamination, this revision, in your thirties, the rest of your life will be intellectually sterile. We correctly identify the advent of this phenomenon as a "midlife crisis" and strive to live through it so that we can return to our previously less troubled situation -- believing that this state stands between us and any possibility of happiness or success.

To the contrary, however, this state is the beginning of a great opportunity. Tolstoy suggested that it was the opportunity to change the myth by which one lives; to rethink everything; to ask, "What is the nature of the world?"


[with minor changes to clarify, at least from the way my mind reads this.]

That feeling of abandonment

My therapist, Maureen, tells me that people who score as high as I do on abandonment schema almost always are intensely into a relationship, and when one comes to a crashing trauma-causing end, they jump into a new one immediately, like by the next weekend.

She has never known of someone scoring as high as I do who does not act this way.

But, I am so intense about abandonment from a relationship it is like I refuse to be in one. Absolute avoidance. It feels like my time with Marilyn -- less than four years, never lived together: my only LTR -- was just a blip or burr in a smooth record.

But even my online "relationships" -- an oxymoron, if you ask me -- for me are fraught with freaky abandonment fears. It is the nature of such interactions, even the most intense and personal and emotional ones, that someone online will one day-- disappear.

Just like that. Poof. Nothing but the archived chats. no warning. Just no communication. And most of the time your only contact with them is online, through one paired IM profile and email account. Don't know if they were really married and their partner found out. Or if they made the decision that this was no longer something they wanted to pursue. Or if their computer died, and by the months later when they could finally afford to get a new one, their feelings had just died. Or if the service deleted their account and they can't remember your IM name off the top of their head. Or if they had a stroke. Or if they got murdered in a botched bank robber.

So yes, even though I do not have "real" relationships, I still get rattled to the point of barely functioning, of being a nervous wreck, when someone doesn't pop online for a few days. A brisk white noise of the cold emptiness of the universe.

David Mamet and Herb Gardner

I got about eight books of David Mamet, and a six-play anthology of Herb Gardner plays today, ordered from the library. Mamet is so much fun to read! Sometimes I catch myself reading his plays out loud, sotto voce, rapidfire. Got the Herb Gardner collection from watching "A Thousand Clowns" a couple days ago. Since I went online early on when I began watching it and discovered it was really originally a play, I watched it thinking about how it was originally, on stage. The walk down the fire escape and bolt into the abandoned Chinese restaurant, the visit to his brother's 22nd-floor office, the final sprint making sure he catches the bus for his first day back to work freezeframing him blurred as literally the last image -- looking forward to what this all was originally reworked from.

I have no idea who I am

I'm a 45 year old man, I've had a heart attack and quadruple bypass open-heart surgery, I have an open invitation to MENSA -- and I have no idea who I am or what I should be doing.

"A Thousand Clowns"

Watching 1965's "A Thousand Clowns" with Jason Robards...

Home from work very early sick today -- actually, depressed and partly paranoid, weary and worn and tired from the prolonged cold and snow... -- watching bits of 60s movies on TCM: The Odd Couple, The Apartment, and now most of "A Thousand Clowns".

Some of the reviews of this movie on Amazon talk about how Robards's anti-conformity character changed, or at least affected, their lives or at least their outlook on life.

But, by now we have two generations of Americans reading anti-conformity books in high school -- "Catcher in the Rye" being the obvious -- and listening to heavy metal, and some rap, artists railing against conformity.

So by now, Jason Robards's character -- 30-ish, "clean and sober", with his suits and cardigans and clean undershirts beneath -- seems himself almost someone Holden Caulfield would consider the enemy.

Nothing against the play and movie being as they were on the cusp of "the 60s". But things have gotten more complicated, more complex -- tougher -- since then. It seems so alien, it is amazing to contemplate that this was within my lifetime.

Encouraging quote

“Tomorrow when the sun rises we’ll forget there ever was a night.”

Charles Boyer, the very end of 'Gaslight'

On a snow day...

On a profile I say:

"I just survived a recent heart attack and quadruple bypass open heart surgery ~ what, you think YOU can scare me...?"

But the truth is I'm scared all the time. Constantly aware of the tenuousness of life, moment to moment. It is not exilerating, it does not feel not like ever day I am beating the reaper. It feels like every day I am just scrambling away. But one day He will catch up with me, his cold fleshless lifeless hand gaining purchase, finally, on my shoulders. Pull me down into blackness. One day it will happen.

Sorry if that is not too encouraging...

But it isn't raining NOW...

When I was coming out of the bank this morning, I passed a older, little woman in hat and purse, tell a scruffy but clear-headed quite larger man, "It's a beautiful sunny day, isn't it!"

He said, "Yeah, it's not bad..."

"'It's not bad'? You're here. You're alive."

"It's supposed to rain later, though."

"But it isn't raining now...!"

What the FUCK was I not thinking...??!!

It just struck me...

When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, I lived for 4 years in an apartment on Elmwood Avenue, the hip "strip" here, then and still.

My apartment was three doors down from a bar. I never went into the bar...

And not once did it ever even cross my frigging mind to hit the bar at 1:00 am, chat up a drunk girl, and invite her up to "crash"...

What the FUCK??!! Who was that pre-surgery dweeb??