The other day I was walking down the street and I thought, I’m having the time of my life. Of course there is the thought and then the perception of the thought, and then a thousand splintering references and referendums. I laughed at myself, cringed at the sentimentality, sang the schmaltzy refrain, and recalled how I would cry during the final scene of Dirty Dancing as it was projected silently on the wall across from the hostess stand I manned six nights a week during my first summer in New York in 2018.
The restaurant I worked at is no longer there, shuttered in 2020. A month ago I walked my friends to the site of my brief and glorious stint as a bartender to find it permanently closed; I was working there just four months ago. It does not feel like I’ve lived here long enough for anything to change. It is my third New York summer, but the first one in which I and the city are fully present and accounted for. It is a perplexing season—in our superabundance of honeyed time, I keep catching myself prematurely mourning the end, repeating elegies from summers past.
For the next three weeks I am in a workshop of The Caucasian Chalk Circle adapted by Thulani Davis from the William R. Speilberger translation of the same-titled 1944 play by Bertolt Brecht, which was itself based on a 14th century Chinese classical verse play by Li Qianfu. We have read a plot summary of the original, Davis’s first rehearsal draft, the translated Brecht play, and the final draft of Davis’s adaptation that premiered at the Public Theatre in 1990 (in that order). We have just begun to tangle ourselves in the web of story, translation, interpretation, ownership, and language. It’s only been a week, there’s so much to say, but I’m hesitant to capture it.
I am an ardent believer in the above sentiment when it comes to writing. That first exhortation—fueled by emotion, channeled from the divine source, synesthetic, kinesthetic, and projectile in intensity—is almost always trash. Not because it doesn’t capture truth, but because it doesn’t communicate it. With that being said, I am thinking about this impulse to self-narrativize: to take a collection of your own experiences, abstract them enough so they are not bound to “the original matrix,” and then shape the resulting material. This newsletter is a direct result of that impulse. A walk down the street is an opening paragraph. A terrible job is an inciting incident. Life exists only teleologically, marching towards the archive.
For some context as to the contents of my mental soup: I finished reading Just Kids by Patti Smith the same day that I mainlined several writings on Brechtian Verfrendungseffekt (alienation/distancing effect), and I am currently reading a collection of short stories with an autofictive flavor. The third story, Triumph Over the Grave, follows a writer. He muses:
Writing. It’s easy work. The equipment isn’t expensive, and you can pursue this occupation anywhere. You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape…Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie…
Brecht has this thing about digestibility. When we go to the theater, absorbed in the illusion, there is no time or space to engage with what is being presented. Catharsis kills intelligence. The events must be alienated to serve a purpose. Similarly, in Patti Smith’s afterword, she affirms that her book was written to fulfill a promise to Robert Mapplethorpe—that she would tell their story—and it could only come in this form, forty years after the height of their relationship.
I’ve been almost everywhere Smith writes about and yet the landmarks are gone or unrecognizable. The cast of characters—rock stars, prodigies, visionaries of the generation—are also gone, or so steeped in their “living legend,” that to imagine them all as just kids, piled into the rooms and stairwells of the Chelsea Hotel is almost impossible. Smith paints them with an attentive and humanizing brush—at turns passively benign or personally inspirational figurines in the menagerie. Given her immense talent, writing what happened on a page and casting it in a light, left Smith with a fabulous memoir; but reading it, I was also acutely aware that this did not seem like a person who was living for said memoir. I was fascinated by the character of her younger self who seemed totally unprocessed, hyper-present in some cases. Of course, this is how Smith wrote her past self, perhaps she was plotting all along, but it doesn’t appear so. She was not living for a story, her life just became one.
Perhaps this is not a radical notion, but sometimes I wonder if we’re all too reflective. Too quick to determine the lesson of last week’s mistake, too able to shape the story of an experience even while it’s still happening. On our first day of the workshop, our director told us she’d read a study somewhere that curiosity and judgement cannot function in the brain at the same time.
Interesting thoughts here! I can see “the workshop” is making an indelible impression on you!😁