Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

The fault which people find with him is this, that he is not practical. He won't take the world as he finds it. If he can mend it, well and good; we all ought to do something to mend it; but while we are mending it we must live in it.

Weekly Wisdom from Mr. Trollope

She had learned, or thought that she had learned, that most girls are vapid, silly, and useless - given chiefly to pleasure-seeking and a hankering after lovers; and she had resolved that she would not be such a one.

will-o'-the-wisp

I'd really like to be more consistent in my blogging/grieving than I have been of late--looking back at my earliest posts, I'm pleased with my output.  I wrote consistently, weekly.  As I began to  work more frequently, I wrote less, but this blog served as guidepost, marker for the work I was doing--from expectation (when my eyes start to recognize the world around me in light of the play I'm about to begin) to post-mortem (when my eyes start to adjust to how the play has helped me see the world).  My last entry was written in the cross hairs of these markers--as one play was ending, and another already beginning rehearsals.   And I ended the entry with a thought, a thought towards travel, and a desire to see the ocean--and I kept my word: as I started to write this, I was miles high, flying across the country to the west coast to visit the sea.  There was an effectiveness to having written this wish down-- an incentive toward accomplishment. The play closed a week ago, and I'm celebrating it with a trip to see its main character, that "old devil sea," and while I feel like the play is already very far away, I see it all around me--especially mermaids on ladies' room doors (funny, actually, how many mermaids you find in how many bathrooms when you start to look for them).  As I go about my life, I am surprised to look down at my wrist and see the remnants of accidental scratches made there by another actor, by a character.

      There's poetry in this--wisps of art and life intertwined.  Poetry: two years ago I was writing poems for the first time, and posting some of them here.  As I was performing Anna Christie, I started to feel the urge to try again, only this time it didn't come as readily as it did before. I tried over and over, wrote and re-wrote.  And I'm still writing, but taking it slow this time (as my father, the real poet, advised). In the meantime, I have been eyeing creative writing workshops in the same way I often scroll through the pages of anthropologie.com.  I wish I'd been in the poetry workshop this summer; I wish I wrote fiction and might be a candidate for their fall writing course, "Writing about Animals"--they get to take trips to the Bronx Zoo!  I'd like to think that if I was writing fiction, it would have animals in it.  Animals as metaphors are nothing new to literature, or to my mind; as a child actor, I used to instinctively refer to my feelings about and memories involving animals to stand in for things--feelings, situations--I had not yet experienced for or with humans.  It is no wonder that animals are so prevalent in children's literature--they give us "love without speech," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote,  when we are just starting to learn to speak this language.  Animals are good to work with; they require our imagination.  So like poetry, fiction, and drama, animals, too are our creations--a kind of knowing unknown, a kind of a sea--just like the ocean, and the theatre, and these characters we leave behind, these wisps of artistry and humanity, and these fading scars on a wrist that belonged to another me.