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.