At the End of the Tunnel

What Nick Garcia and The Empty Boat Theatre Company have done with his new play, There's Chinese Tunnels Under Boise, is create an archeological experience of the soul. Or rather, the soul of an Eighties hesher grappling with life, the loss of a girlfriend, and the wisdom burried in a video game. But I can't tell you anything more about the plot. For like any top-secret dig in the middle of the desert — yes, even the barrens of Boise, Idaho — Garcia's esoteric finds can't be revealed to the (unpaying) public until a deeper understanding of our memories and motives is decoded from the middens. Or from the Iron Maiden posters on the wall, the Schaefer beer cans littering the road. We may think we know the ghosts of our past, but what do they know about us? What do they have to show us about the false perceptions, the misplaced nostalgia, we pad around the clay-brittle edges of our most cherished memories? 

Like Elliot's The Wasteland, Tunnels floods the viewer's senses with cultural references only an initiate can fully appreciate. Yet this dizzyingly funny story runs deeper than it's cave paintings. Mixing comedy with tragedy, the play is a redemption song set to 70's and 80's rock and roll. And by the last scene we are left searching under the couch cushions for lost insights, broken joysticks, ancient clues as to who we think we are and why.   

The Experiment: Day Sixteen, the Lovely Wreckage

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy.

                          – from Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.

Now another change. Gone is the ennui of the empty house, the clicking quiet of the wooden floors, the cool uncertain mornings, the faint despair that seeps in without having Anna and Ada with me. And while I miss them more than ever, I've gotten into a good dutiful rhythm of work and play: steady work at the house I'm remodeling, tending to the garden when I get home, a beer in the hammock with a book in my lap, or futball in the evenings with the immigrants at the park. All I seem to need – outside of my girls – is a simple life of sport and literature for work not to feel too pointless and for life to hold some beauty for me. My desires seems as reduced and refined as those of Salter's protagonist in A Sport and a Pastime; as simple and hearty as Turgenev's in Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

But of course that beauty is no more than a sugar high without the sustenance of my women folk. When I was single it wasn't that way. Beauty then was an ideal, an actual element on the chart, so real you could study it from every angle, pursue with your senses and know esthetically in your mind its existence from the materials and shapes of the world about you. I won't say that's changed. But somehow, with family, I have, or my pursuit of it has. I still value Beauty just as much, but have less time to approach it esthetically, yet more time, by demands of family life, to feel it in my heart. More time to know the beauty of my wife in the happiness and struggles of merely trying to make dinner or time to go for a walk; more time to know beauty through the dearness of my daughter growing and learning about the world. Perhaps it's a more grounded sense of beauty, a less theoretical one. Less prosody and more prose. Less prose and more pinch of Ada's plump cheeks, a cheeky question from her and a check on the old bachelor state of contemplative and sometimes self-indulgent interaction with life.

But interestingly, experimentally, it's been a state I've been able to slip back into these last weeks – which has been therapeutic for me, a good artistic relief. But now I'm ready for the lovely wreckage of family life again.

And knowing they're to return from Colorado in a couple days has had me kicking my heels in anticipation. For Ada's birthday I'm building her a playhouse in the side yard – five by five feet of salvaged lumber, two windows and a used door under a shed roof, clad horizontally in pine I'd salvaged from my job. I worked on it yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a blustery sky of chalk blue shaking the trees now and then and whirling sawdust up into my eyes. The little house came along, the framing slowly clad course by course like a sleepy girl pulling on her socks. I had meant, on my last big night solo, to ride off to a bicycle rally (the Hellodrome race put on Boise Bicycle Project), but the rhythm of work had me charging along, as did the suffusing excitement of knowing Ada and Anna were due home the next day. A beer and then a whiskey soda added to the suffusing, but not the saucing. Mixed drinks and miter saws go hand and blade. Yet I had that humming feeling, serene, that has you pausing to admire the windy light in the walnut leaves, the gliding shadows on the grass, the surging green of late spring over the valley and overhead like the whole world's a floating garden and you're just a chittering, nut-drunk squirrel tinkering away at your nest in the trees. Tinkering and sprucing and knowing your little fur family is soon to be with you, soon to be home.

While all that sounds a bit corny, it's true. And maybe that's what this three-week experiment has taught me: how much I've changed since my solo days – “grown” sounds self-congratulatory – to need my family close for any artistic effort to hold much meaning for me. Without Ada and Anna all the rest is a glorious sunset seen alone from a hilltop. That used to be alright, the being alone and the beauty just for me, perfectly alright. But it isn't anymore.

The Experiment: Day Eight

3 June 12

Who said, "History is what happened, but literature is what people thought about it"? Anyway, it's true. Reading Dos Passos' letters in the hammock under sifting leaves, a swollen blue spring sky; feeling connected not only to the world but to its history, through the time-capsule of Dos' missives.

At this point he's reporting for Life Magazine from Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and from his writing you get a real insider's feel for the subtleties and contradictions in the struggle between Socialism and Capitalism. Dos was perfectly on the side of the working man and Labor up through the Thirties. But what he and many, Orwell especially, saw in the Spanish Civil War was the divisive Communist Russian effort to put down any revolutionary elements in the fight against Franco. And later, when post-war Europe became a testing ground for “monolithic bureaucracy”, as Dos called it derisively, he grew wary of the Russian's designs on the rest of the continent. He was always for individual liberty and loathed any restriction put on it, whether by Capitalist monopolies or the one party systems claiming ground in eastern Europe.

Nowadays it's mostly conservatives on Fox News who do the clamoring for liberty. But the left has always been concerned about the matter, only from a different angle. The right's fear of Big Brother is so restricted to Big Government that it can't see how corporations have gotten a strangle-hold on our society. It won't even consider how government might be our only chance, through elections and civic participation, to have some say in the matter. (Other than doing all we can to buy local and avoid corporate production lines.) To the right, Government is just more oppressive bureaucracy, a hangover from twentieth-century Europe, while Business is the golden embodiment of Free Will trotting over the level playing field of the Free Market to deliver bounty to the masses.

But both gov and biz are just systems, intrinsically neutral until profit motives and human frailty are introduced. These days I'd sooner take my chances with a government of the people, one that must at least consider the results of the ballot box, than a massive corporate structure that feeds on profits and stock market value at all costs. What kind of “freedom” do we have when your choice in food stuff is a decision between CrackDonald's and Maulmart, when the radio plays an elevator music medley of classic rock and jingoistic country, when the only way out of your suburban coldesac is a drive and then an onramp and an offramp into another suburban culdusac, or when the only option politically is a right of center Republican and slightly less than right of center Democrat, both in the sway of industry interests. The few “freedoms” we see manifested these days are typically coming out of the left, alternatives to the “monolithic bureaucracy” of the corporate model in the form of non-profit and public radio, a return to small-scale organic farming, efforts to improve mass transit and healthy communities through bicycle facilities, etc. I point out the obvious only because I'm tired of the right's constant claim to protectorate of individual liberty when they're the ones in the driver's seats of the SUV caravan rolling over the little guys out front scouting for new paths out of this mess.

Now I'm beginning to rant, and make bad metaphors, and ruining a serene swing in the hammock. I don't know if the far right and far left can ever unite in their fight for “individual liberty.” But a mis-portrayal of the labor movement as merely the villain in the Cold War isn't helping. (See public sector scape-goating from Minnesota to Idahota.) Socialism was around long before the Cold War and what the Communist Party did under its banner, long before it became Reagan's whipping boy. A good read of the thinkers of the past century certainly does help one's view, though, and spirit. Twain said, History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But, may I add, only if we're listening for its verses. And those tunes surely aren't being played on the corporate air waves.

The Experiment: Day Three

26 May 2012

Woke this morning with difficulty getting out of bed, due in part to soreness from soccer the other night, yet due in larger part to the lonesomeness of the house. A patter of rain on the roof, the flush green trees and white bell flowers of the courtyard. Where is my little Ada tramping about the rooms calling for us to make breakfast and start the day? Prying myself out of bed, the first thing to do was make a fire, give some soul to the house. I put on a coat and carried the wicker basket outside to the wood pile under the dripping eaves, came back in and made a snapping fire in the hearth. Then with Weekend Edition on the radio keeping me company, made coffee, eggs and toast, tidied up the kitchen and ate breakfast at a table very empty despite the newspaper sections scattered across it.

I have one duty today: to get out query letters for the novel. Duty lends structure, but not purpose. That must come from within. Oh where oh where is my Anna and Ada to distract me from it all?

The question we are faced with is the question that is always there, even if at times the noise of family life obscures it: what am I to do with my life? Practically speaking the question appears as: what am I to do today? But that is just an incremental exercise of the larger dilemma. And if, like most of us, you don't have a sure answer for the primary question, then merely spooning coffee grounds into the pot can feel like a colosol effort against the question of existence. This is where religious types might step in and coach faith and purpose found in god. But it's also where more skeptical souls might eschew those comforts for the hard-earned insights of doubt. Sartre's protagonist in “The Wall”, knowing that by not doing nothing he has condemned his comrade to death. In Buddhism there's a maxim: the roots of your doubt must be as deep as the roots of your faith. We can't get too cozy in our ideas about the world or our own existence. Discomfort is like a poker at the fire, keeping the logs turned over and the artistic flames snapping.

Speaking of discomfort, last night I wandered into something pleasantly strange. Tired as I was, I couldn't stand being in the desolate house and went for a walk downtown just to get some air, a drink, a view of the piled silver clouds left over from the rain, a catch at whatever randomness might throw at me. And for my efforts I found a band from Italy (from Treviso, in fact, not far from Venice) playing at a coffee shop on Main. Father Murphy is their name, and by how good and obscure they were, I couldn't help wondering what the hell they were doing in this tiny venue with only about thirty people watching them. The three-piece included a skinny guy on guitar, a woman who looked like Patty Smith on keyboard, and a mad genius on drums. Adjectives? Haunting, deconstructive, Noise but clean, cerebral, ceremonial, a continuous contorting dirge that comes at you in shearing waves that make you think of industrial warehouses on the outskirts of Milano. The vocals were more melodic wail than singing; the drumming more likely to convert the kit into a cello or a sheet of torn silk than to produce rhythm; the guitar a fiercely plucked harpsichord. It was all just dark enough to make you wonder how the musicians could endure their own lives.

But then after the show I talked with them and they turned out to be perfectly charming, kind, polite Italians. (It's so typical to meet some rough-looking Italian punk and they're the nicest cordial kid you'd ever want to introduce to your nonna. All good mamma's boys at heart!) I didn't catch the drummer's name, but we chatted about Treviso, the punk scene in Portguero, the six-month tour they were making across the U.S., the long stretch between Chicago and Seattle that had them stopping over in SLC and Boise, the friend of their producer who set up this weird little gig. I told him I'd never seen drums played like he did. Yes, he replied, he was trained as a violinist and always forgets he is playing drums. He was excited to see Seattle and Olympia, as Nirvana and Cobain were big inspirations when he was young. I met the other two band members, thanked them for the incredible show, and we wished each other a reunion in Italia.

And then I walked out into the quiet night. And for a little while I'd done it, forgotten my doubt, left my little patch of existence for the nether realms of a punk band from the land of my ancestors, the land of my escapism.

The Experiment: Day One

23 May 12

Now here's an interesting experiment: Take a rather solitary fellow, used to typing or striking it out on his own, make a family man of him – a full convert, doting dad and happy hubby – and then pull his wife and daughter away from him for a few weeks and see what becomes of him in the wake. A contented reversion to his original hermitic self? Or an eddying emptying soul unable to make up his mind if he should scramble eggs for dinner or rake the leaves in spring or type love-sick sonnets on the old Royal gathering dust in the toolshed?

Day One: driving away from the airport, wistful visions of Ada blowing me kisses from Anna's arms as they mill into the crowd of the loading dock; arriving at home, dumbfounded by the silence of the house, the placid order of things, no random toys underfoot to twist an ankle, no wild bawling or screeching or laughing to echo the walls and swirl the mind. A sparrow chirping in the yard, it's call sharp as glass in the quiet. What to do? And what for? Sit down to write a novel in the 18 days I've got to myself? In one go put down all the stories I've had pent up inside by the flurrying demands of family life?

Or put on the game? One game. Relax a little in the void. So I watched the second half of the Timber's versus Chicago soccer match, then, needing to move or sink entirely into oblivian, I bicycled to the gym, shot around, did a round of weights, then returned home and with a sad plate of dinner on my lap (reheated pasta, pan-fried Italian sausages, garlic-stuffed olives and strips of nori for “salad”, nothing that took any kind of effort, of course – oh, the great force required to pop a Peroni!) watched the Sounders match interspersed with runs of the Sixers-Celtics playoff game. When it was all pathetically over I showered and fell asleep reading Dos Passo's Adventures of a Young Man.

And that's who I was again, a young man. An older man idling in a younger man's track and the course was unsatisfying, boring as hell, in fact. Sports as filler? Books do so much more than fill, but still even reading seemed a prop against the vast lonesomess hanging like a Hokusai wave over the bead. I dreamt weirdly of Christopher Hitchen's voice, reading from an essay on his literary influences while rows of shelved dusty books flew by my nose.

Springing Through Us

Spring

The pear blossoms are pure

White against the blue green willows.

The willow cotton blows in the wind.
The city is full of flying pear flowers.

The petals fallen on the balcony look like snow.

How many Spring Festivals are we born to see?

         -- Su Tung Po (from Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Poems               
                                                                               from the Chinese)

Outside my window the crab apple tree is in full bloom – a hot pink that curls back the eyelashes. It's as if the old gnarled tree lifted her dress to show the fine legs and frills of a dancing girl in one of Lautrec's paintings, and I can't stop staring. The contrast between rough, earth-dark, knot-holed branches going every which way in a mess of neglect and the delicate heaps of mauve and rouge petals spilling both skyward and into you is a strange inducement of love and sympathy and sorrow. The kind of feeling you get when you see a picture of your grandmother in her lovely youth.

The poignancy of Spring, the rush of beauty that reminds us in its rushing of its passing. It's hard to take sometimes. The first crocuses and daffodils and tulips trickling in, and then the buildup of golden rod and pear blossoms and plums before the surge of magnolia and cherry, dogwood and locust, the sycamores dumping seed pods into the streets, the trees faintly green and faintly greener each day as you strain not to miss a leaf of it. You almost want to duck your head and wait out the flurry until the somnolent heat of summer arrives. Almost.

I like how the Japanese make a national holiday of the blooming cherry trees. To think it's actually a national past time to go out picnicking under the white blossoms and drink wine and read poetry and gaze out at the elements as though a kind of prayer, a kind of religious act, were being experienced.

And of course it is. Through that prayer, up in those snowy flowers, in the pale spring sky, is the life of all of us, from chittering squirrels to the spirit of long-dead gramps in the clouds, from the kids goofing in the grass to the woman beside you with her bare shoulders in the sun. If you take a moment to look, that's what you see and that's what hurts most in seeing it: the beauty of us all with the goneness of us all, the petals holding in their perfection their passing, revealed in the turn of the seasons, as we ourselves are, our families are, our loves and hopes and downfalls are, as the longest prettiest afternoon spent drinking wine and watching up at the clouds is, fading only to come through us again. Though somehow it's always the gone feeling that sticks, deep as the apple blossoms are bright.

Coyotes and Handkerchiefs

22 February

An afternoon of steady light snowfall, a good fire snapping in the hearth, Caruso singing from the record player, and Ada sleeping soundly in her jumper. (One moment she's leaping for the moon, the next she's flopped over her saddlehorn snoozing like a drunk cowboy.)

Yesterday we went to see La Boheme at the Egyptian Theater – a surprisingly good show that had the tears soaking my shirt collar long before poor Mimi's death. The soprano who played her, a Greek with a clear light-filled voice who looked not unlike Maria Callas, had me reaching for my handkerchief with every aria. It's pathetic how often one cries at operas, if only because as drama they're so goofy on the surface. If you only read the librettos you'd find the stories lacking, unrealistic, maudlin, verbose, etc. But add the soaring music, the compressed experience of a theater house that reduces all the world to a single poignant drama, the beauty of the human voice shaping cathedrals in the air, the loss of yourself in that beauty, and before you know it tears are trembling from your lashes and emotions and memories long put away are tremmoring up to the surface. In a way opera is good therapy. Was it Sophocles who said great tragedy must be cathartic in the end?

Opera is so peculiar, what with all its silly yet effective artifices. The mere movement of acts is a lesson in story arc. I love how you'll hear some famous, bittersweet passage of music and what is actually being said onstage is “my feet hurt, take my shoes to the cobbler.” Or “the old man has stamina,” or some other sexual innuendo that Italians can't refrain from. You're reminded of who opera was really written for back in the day – not just the ladies and gentlemen in the box seats, but the poor sops in the back row reaching for their flasks and hankies.

1 March

More snow! We're making up for a scoreless first half of winter. Yesterday it dumped all morning, heavy as a down comforter thrown over the neighborhood, the black trees silhouetted in white and looking very Victorian.

Here's news: have been working a desk job, the first in my life. I'm a project manager for a certain green building company in town and for once I'm not sweating at hauling lumber or a fire pack. Strange to see the hours go by and nothing of material mounting in front of you. Oh, things are getting done, but they're like spiderwebs, intricate and invisible until you walk through them and gunk up the works. The spiderwebs are built of phone calls and emails and bids coming in from contractors and more phone calls and meetings with clients and the only time you get up from your chair is to lean over the plans or pace the office like a house cat watching the snow tumble down through the wrought iron limbs of the maple trees outside the window, hoping to catch sight of the mailman.

Not that I'm not liking the job. It's great, actually; fine people and a good opportunity to learn something new. Something so new that the change in duties is akin to an anthropological experiment. I figure by the age of forty everyone should have swung a hammer or worked with their hands somehow; so to be fair, the same life-criteria must go for having worked an office job. I simply never knew what it was like. There's that restless feeling of a school boy looking past his books out the window at the day outside, envious of the squirrels, the delivery man barreling past in his yellow truck. I can stand staring at a screen when writing only because when writing I'm somewhere else. I'm skiing with or putting on motives or pouring a drink for one of my characters. I am on the other side of that window, leaving the school books behind.

But office work doesn't leave much play for the imagination. It's numbers and hard lines of plans and none of that Byronic stuff that so distracts a dreamer. It's work, and one must work doing it, and I welcome the chance to test my strength at it. Though this is no ordinary office job: I'm working with people in the trades who are salty characters any writer would be glad to know; and we're building something quality, a house not some pyramid scheme, and once this big remodel gets rolling I'll be on site much of the day, back to using my back, surely cursing enough to clear my soul of the abstracted spiderwebs, refreshed for the comforts of the office again, where I can save my hurting knees for the slopes.

7 March

Why is it we constantly want what we don't have? When we get older and look back that want is called nostalgia. And when we're young with the world before us the urge is romantic. But when we're somewhere in the middle, with fire still in us but the woodpile lowering, when we see how certain things are playing out and must decide whether to accept them with some contentment, or to fight on at risk of overlooking the good things one does have in life – what do we call it then? Sentimentality? A heightened tendency to bawl at the opera house?

Speaking of romance, in the early hours the coyotes and horned owls can be heard calling and hooting for each other longingly across the hills. A yellow warbler pair hovering at the bird feeder. First spears of crocus appearing in the yard. A waft of warm weather from the south and like a good bird herself Ada refuses to stay indoors. Springtime is her favorite new word. Though I want is the champion phrase of the day. Can't say I blame her, considering the season, the near end of winter when the faintest smell of sunshine drives the bugs to hatching, the redwings to trilling, and every species of teenager to wearing short-shorts in mid-fifties weather. I want is what nature puts in us to roust us out of winter, the season and the stage. The photo of W.C. Williams as an old man smiling among the plum blossoms comes to mind. And the yank of Ada wanting me to quit writing comes to hand.