Z is for Zorro

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
26: Zorro

I must have been 15. Yes, that's right. It was at the start of our O-Level course on English literature. Our class went to see a performance of Shakespeare's Henry IV, part i in Newcastle. It was our set text.

I mean, I'd been to the theatre before: pantomime at the local community hall and musicals in London and York (that's old York, by the way). This, though, was different. It was so alive. So real. So truthful.

That was it. I was hooked. I have been a theatrical of sorts ever since.

Earlier this month (and was it really only this month), the lights went down on our latest show at the Finn-Brit Players: two one-act plays by Harold Pinter, including A Slight Ache, directed by me.

A little description is necessary here. The play sees Edward, a neurotic writer of philosophical essays (a bit like a blog A to Z, I suppose), talk himself into a self-destructive mania brought on by the presence of a matchseller. Meanwhile, Edward's wife, Flora, persuades herself into seducing the matchseller and sealing Edward's demise. The matchseller says nothing and wears a balaclava.

A balaclava.

You see, the reality about the matchseller is hidden. Everything that we think we learn about this character is assumed or projected by the other two. If tragedy is self-creating, then this play is truly Edward's tragedy, and arguably Flora's tragedy as well.

Now this is going to go all meta. Because what is theatre other than an audience interpreting characters on stage and projecting ideas onto them? What are actors other than balaclava (or mask or make-up) wearing agents provocateurs, engaging the audience in an act of consensual deception? Where is ... the reality? The truth?

And how do people relate to each other any differently in real life?

There is one sentence in particular in A Slight Ache that still resonates in my inner ear. In one of his moments of psychological disintegration, Edward shoots back at a comment by his wife with the line: "And stop calling me Edward."

Ouch! Confusion of identity? Confusion of theatricality? Once more, the truth is an elusive little swine.

Cut back to teenage me.

One of my favourite programmes on Saturday morning television was Zorro. Not the cartoon version, which I found, well, two-dimensional. No, the acted black-and-white version with Guy Williams in the lead role. Classic.

It's a superhero formula, of course. An unassuming real-life guy has a masked alter ego who selflessly saves the world, or just the country. Look at Batman, the alter ego of a namesake of mine.

Ah, it's those masks. Like the balaclava, or like stage make-up, they hide reality and distort truth. They may well do it all in a good cause, but at the end of the day, after the villains are sent packing, to find true fulfilment, Batman needs to be Bruce Wayne and Zorro needs to be Don Diego de la Vega.

The irony, of course, is that by stripping down to reality, as would happen if the matchseller removed his balaclava, the superhero also becomes fallible. But isn't that weakness more ... human?

I don't know what has brought this on in me now. Maybe the matchseller has had an influence on me, too, but I tire of the balaclava. That is, I tire of the masks that we, all of us, wear every day. Even this blog is a mask of sorts: a constructed view of its creator, differing from and maybe even replacing your view of the real person whom you may or may not recognise in the street.

So here I am at the end of my A to Z, and I find myself swiping a Z for Zorro line in the sand. Zorro represents the mask, the illusion, and the alter ego. My line in the sand says that I refuse my consent beyond this point. I am no longer satisfied with being and seeing less than the whole truth. There must be more than that out there, waiting to be discovered. I must re-evaluate my theatre, my writing, my ... many things.

Thank you for coming with me on this A to Z journey, dear reader. It's been a bumpy ride, but perhaps I will be back sooner rather than later. Who knows?

Y is for yesterday

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
25: Yesterday

Midsummer in Finland. Time to re-discover The Beatles, re-organise the future, and re-evaluate the past.

'Nuff said.

X is for Xanadu

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
24: Xanadu

I have completed the first step of my promise to myself. It's goodbye to all that. Kanikoski has left the building. No more corporate whoredom (for a while, at least).

So to the next step: the journey, the trip, the grand world tour. Whatever.

Whatever. That's the key, isn't it? For I guess we are all in some way attempting to find the elusive whatever that may on the off-chance fulfil us. The problem, as always, is to be sufficiently open that we may just recognise whatever when it comes along and slaps us in the face, and sufficiently wary of any false whatever that we don't start chasing ultimately fruitless shadows.

It's an age-old quest, whether narrated as poking around for a holy grail or searching for Mr Right. And people have had very different ideas of what form whatever might take. So over to you, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree".

Well, quite. Pleasure-domes have always been vogue when it comes to exploring whatever. Very sensible, this. For a while. Until the gloss wears off.

"A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played".

Fine. But putting aside the likelihood that most creative writing gurus would jump on poor Samuel Taylor for using the word dulcimer twice in just four opium-heavy lines, how does this get us closer to whatever? Our sardonic post-postmodern age does not easily accept a drug-induced vision of a musical Abyssinian as a worthwhile marker on its quest.

"I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!"

Good, good. Samuel Taylor was wise enough to throw some killjoy iced water on the flames. He knows it's all dangerous illusion. He's a post-postmodernist at heart.

But nevertheless, I cannot stop myself feeling that a more ethereal Xanadu, a city of dreams or whatever, is out there somewhere. This is the Xanadu I seem to be seeking; not the opulent Chinese pleasure-dome. Though it does bother me a bit that the Xanadu quest may be just another way of, as The Eagles put it, "ridin' fences".

Yes, that song has been much on my mind lately, too. For freedom read Xanadu:

"And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'."

But meanwhile, we must all tread our own paths and make our own mistakes. So here's to the quest for Xanadu.

-----

Quick plug: Seeking the Xanadu within? The Finn-Brit Players open their latest production in Helsinki next week. 5 - 13 June: two short plays by Harold Pinter, including 'A Slight Ache' directed by yours truly. Bookings are coming in fast at finnbritplayers.com.

W is for wanderlust

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
23: Wanderlust

Decisions, decisions.

I recently took one of those immensely silly but occasionally fascinating personality tests that you get in certain sorts of magazines and on Facebook. Yes, I took it on Facebook. I'm one of those people.

Anyway, this particular quiz sagely revealed that if I were a Shakespearean character, I'd be Hamlet. Apparently I think too much (go on, tell me something I didn't know) and am torn by conflicting philosophies and fears.

Um, yes. Maybe. Or maybe not.

With this in mind, and having written in recent (and yet distant) blog entries about my wavering attitude to solitude, my thoughts turn to wanderlust. Mayhap solitude and wanderlust are not necessarily companions, I soliloquize, Hamlet-like, at the Swiss cuckoo clock that ticks above my computer desk. But that conflict of philosophies is not the topic here.

No. It's time to go public. A decision has been made.

How many times do we make truly life-defining decisions? I suspect that we subject ourselves to status-quo-affirming or go-with-the-flow indecisions on a regular basis. But what about swimming against the tide and proactively putting ourselves through the process of change?

Back in 1990, as a goofy and fresh-faced graduate in a dead-end job, I decided to walk out and throw what little cash I had into a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language. A year later, I applied for a job in Hungary, was offered one in Bulgaria, and have been in ex-pat exile for 17 of the 18 years since accepting.

Now, approaching the age of 42, contemplating what might be termed a mid-life crisis or the 7-year itch or the answer to which Douglas Adams never really found a satisfactory question, a similar turning point lies ahead. For yesterday, dear reader, I signed my resignation papers.

Yes, in two months, I will begin what I consider to be a well-earned career break. I will exit corporate life with sufficient financial padding to keep me in baby carrots for a good while, plus a sketch of a plan to visit at least some of the bits of the world that I haven't visited yet.

It's that wanderlust thing, see. There's stuff out there and I want a taste of some of it. And when the money runs out ... well ... I'll deal with that later.

Meanwhile, I think Fortinbras would like a word....

V is for veracity

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
22: Veracity

One frequently used symbol of the process of maturing and 'settling down' is living in a house called 'Dunroamin'. I dislike the name 'Dunroamin' with quite visceral ferocity. It breathes unbearably smug self-satisfaction on so many levels.

Firstly, the occupants of said dwelling imply that they have seen not just some, but as much of the world as they need to satisfy their obviously satiable curiosity. Secondly, they imply that they are now above all that or, even worse, that they have become the keepers of some sacred wisdom.

Even now, in my forties, as my wishes for a comfortable life turn more than usual in the direction of shelves of leather-bound books and servings of hot-buttered crumpet in front of an open fire, I still find 'Dunroamin' just plain wrong. I never want to lose my curiosity, whether it involves travel in a physical, spiritual, or intellectual sense. It's such a part of life. You might as well just call your house 'Dunthinkin' or 'Dunlovin'.

Of course, the search for truths (plural) in life is not only external, it is also internal, and for a couple of years now I have been following this part of my urge to roam through a good, long look at Jungian psychoanalysis.

One thing that this has brought me is a conviction that, however hard we try to prevent or deny it, we carry our prior experiences of life with us at all times. Our previous 'roaming' travels with us in our minds and affects our current 'roaming'. It is then our choice whether we let it weigh us down into 'Dunroamin', or whether we use it to achieve greater understanding and clearer vision, as we seek our truths.

This leads me on to another thought. How is it, in Western culture, that the search for truth, for veracity, is somehow mostly linked with identifying the bad stuff? The 'cool' is so often a portrayal of the dark, the bleak, and the distasteful. It is almost as if we go through life in a state of perpetual adolescence, angry at the ugliness around and within us. In fact, we seem to be fed by an adolescent-oriented pop culture that nurtures this mindset and strives for the teenage coolness that lies in the depressive. Even in the 'high' literary world, the special praise is reserved for the view of "the skull beneath the skin".

The case for the positive is not helped, of course, in that many of the images of 'not the Dark Side' really do lack depth and insightfulness. I am certainly not a fan of the thick sugar coating that is lavished onto much of what passes for modern day 'romance'. It has me reaching for the sick bucket as much as the next self-disrespecting, black-denim-clad misfit.

However, veracity should involve both yin and yang. Yes, we need to be honest in seeing what is rotten, but we also need to be honest in seeing what is good. It's quite easy these days to see and say that the world is crap. But to see and describe the beauties of the world in an intelligent and truthful post-modern manner? Now there's a challenge.

Back at Jung, I wonder how much of the crap is just in our heads anyway. As a culture, we yearn for things to love, and yet we sneer at much that might go some way to satisfying this need. I postulate, therefore, that it is not the love object that we miss. It is the post-adolescent ability to allow ourselves to feel and accept that love.

To put it another way: there is more in the world than crap, but the crappiness in us often prevents us from seeing it. And that crappiness; where does it come from? Is it in our nature? Is it due to bad experiences that, in our busy lives, we fail to sufficiently process and understand? Or is it down to a contemporary culture that focuses on the Dark Side of the Force?

To understand the veracity of that balance would be wisdom indeed.

The almost obligatory Obama post

I justify this intrusion into my A to Z as a post-script to my last entry.

Following the inauguration speech of the 44th president of the United States of America, I flipped through a few bits and pieces here and there to read about the rhetoric involved, because I tend to look at that stuff.

One point in particular caught my thoughts and my mood. This was a comment on the difference between the incoming and outgoing chappies in terms of approach to policy-making.

In Obama's speech, this took form in terms of choosing hope over fear. A recognition of hard times, but a positive mood towards making things better. We're in trouble but we can work together, get over it, and move forward.

The analysis contrasted this to the regime of George W, which, it argued, was defined by negatives and the fear factor; by can't and don't. We can't protect the environment because we'll wreck the economy. We can't maintain human rights because we'll be letting our enemies escape. We can't ... all sorts of things ... improve universal health care, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or even count all the votes; we don't accept other points of view and we won't change our ideas.

Essentially, the plethora of can't and don't scenarios reads like the journal of a committed depressive, caught in a cycle of self-destruction.

As I posited under unknowingness, negative leads to negative. In the case of the no-longer-incumbent, this included a drift to an astonishingly low approval rating.

As an antidote, cut to another US presidential inauguration, rather longer ago, and "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Thank you, FDR. So it's time to live and learn once more. It's time to see what is light and what is right, and not waste a lifetime wallowing in self-pity and darkness.

U is for unknowingness

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
21: Unknowingness

We're getting towards the end of the alphabet. I'm not sure that I thought I'd ever get this far, and there are 'difficult' letters ahead. Time for some sort of meta-analysis.

I've tried some limited introspection before. But how is this larger exercise helping, and how much more do I know myself now? In fact, how far do any of us know ourselves, and to what extent do we depend on others for a view of who we are?

Then, if the mirrors that we and others hold up are unflattering, and the reflected image is unpleasant, does negative always reflect negative, forever stuck in the same destructive thought, in some sort of spiralling, self-damning image to eternity?

It would be, in this situation, all too tempting to try to run away from ourselves. Which is, of course, impossible, and can only lead to pain.

It may seem that I'm digressing, but the riverbed drift of this thought is that it's time, maybe, to return to some basics. If I'm not happy with me, then nobody else will be happy with me. If I'm always negative about stuff, then negative stuff will continue to happen. If I'm always being closed, then things around me will continue to be closed.

I don't think I've painted a particularly positive image of myself so far in this A to Z. The initial entries started off on the track of describing things that I am not. A lot of the later entries became accounts of the darker side of my personality. And, as was pointed out to me, even the entry on jocularity was quite a humour-free zone. The last year has, it seems, thrown me off balance.

Healing injuries, as I have discovered with my shoulders, takes time and effort. It is necessary to identify the underlying condition, then to treat it, and then to allow time for rehabilitation.

This is also true of emotional injuries. And we all have them. Often they have been piling up since early childhood, accumulating and increasingly debilitating. Maybe in the rush to get on with life (or to attempt to get away from ourselves), we don't pay them enough attention, so that the scars never truly heal. So that the underlying pain prevents us from being who we truly are.

For example, what is the emotional injury in that, for more than 20 years, I have had to be wary of shoulder movement and strain? Never stopping before to properly heal the underlying condition, has this physical restriction led to emotional restriction? Has this emotional restriction led to a lack of fulfilment? Has this lack of fulfilment then led to an expectation of failure, which has ultimately stopped me from being me?

So the dominoes tumble.

To live life at all, healing is necessary. Maybe it is only now, with this A to Z, that I have started to properly identify the issues at hand. With my shoulders approaching full function, maybe I can now, at last, start the real treatment and rehabilitation.

T is for timidity

An A to Z of bits of Bruce

20: Timidity

Good friend keltanen posted on language the other day. More specifically, on a podcast by Stephen Fry, urging us Anglophones to be (presumably) more like 'the Frenchies' and actually enjoy the words we speak, rather than getting all splenetic over a rogue apostrophe.

Out with the anally retentive intercourse with commas, and in with all the plentiful fruits of wordplay and wit.

All well and good. Say no more.

Except that I'm drawn in two directions at once: a desire to leap exultantly from the whale-bone corset of grammatical correctness and dangle my participles for the adoration of all, and a nagging thought that it's good to be understood.

But if my natural, innate psycho-/socio-/syntacto-linguistic self is yearning to be let out to roam the literary fields unmolested, seeking truth and love and all things yummy, what does that say about my other, culturally nurtured, self and its quest to impose order on chaos and understand just what the hell is going on?

Is the latter clearly in the wrong? Can my two selves coexist without tearing each other apart?

Hence the timidity thing. Because I often get stuck between the two, on the fence between me and me, telling each side not to be such a complete wazzock and please listen to the other for once.

And it's not just language. Oh no.

It's also self-expression, even life, as a whole: to express or not to express, to dare or not to dare, which leads through the logic circuits of my mind to the conundrum of linguistic determinism.

If I free my words in songs of Fry-like effervescence, will my soul follow, soaring in their wake? And if so, does the reverse apply, so that my occupation as purveyor of definite articles and scourge of imprecise adjectives restricts my emotional inner life, like a grumpy grammar teacher with a spanking stick?

I don't think that's quite the case, because sometimes it is only by speaking an idea out loud that one can realise the absolute nonsense that lies behind the veneer.

So do I have to heal and grow my soul in order to produce language that truly speaks? Maybe, but if this is the case, where is such growth to be found if not in words?

I wish I could sing like no one is listening and love like I've never been hurt and all the rest of that marvellous advice to the over-wary. But they are, and I have, and pretending otherwise is all very well but, dammit, if I go on like that it becomes chaos and someone gets hurt. And when I keep it all in, someone gets hurt anyway.

So I retreat to my fence and plead with my yin and my yang to stop pulling me in all these different directions and just let me sleep for a while. Then, maybe, when I wake up, the sun will be shining, the bees will be buzzing, and the beavers will be swimming in the lake. The language will be both voluptuous and clear, the song will be both expressive and easy, and I will be both loving and loved once more.

S is for solitude

An A to Z of bits of Bruce

19: Solitude

On this day of Epiphany, let's start with three little pieces of me.

Piece #1: The novel that I am currently reading is The Solitude of Thomas Cave, by Georgina Harding. It's a cracker. Set in 1616-17, it tells of a crewman on a whaling ship who sets out to be the first person to spend winter in the Arctic. I'm only half way through, but so far, what he has tried to log as a scientific experiment has instead been dominated by visions of his lost love, who died in childbirth.

Piece #2: Back in spring 2007, which now seems a lifetime away, I visited Ljubljana. In one of my photographs from that trip, I described myself as "a solitary tourist". One response I got to that was concern that I had been so lonely. Phooey, said I. Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

Piece #3: Rather more years ago than that, as I was coming to terms with the end of a relationship, I said to a friend that I needed more time to myself. "No," replied my friend, "you need more time with other people."

Now let's place the pieces into the jigsaw.

I think my attitude to solitude is changing. Maybe it's to do with turning forty and middle-aged, or maybe it's to do with having just spent a year of convalescence in love but largely on my own. In any case, whereas in spring 2007 my solitary sojourn seemed totally natural, things seem different now. I am beginning to view solitude as a state that I have visited to recover from emotional trauma, but not as a state in which it is wise to live for long periods. I have become too accustomed to the emotional hospital bed, if you like.

Compare India and Finland. Despite the difficult conditions that can exist in India, which may seem almost impossible by European standards, many of the people living together in close-knit groups of friends and family seem genuinely content. In Finland, it is comparatively easy to subsist alone and pretend that all is well, but many people who do that seem utterly miserable. They may blame other factors, but miserable they are.

Of course it's not easy to live with others. There is always a trade-off, a balance, so that each person gets enough space, independence, and respect. But in the end, isn't it the emotional connection to other people that makes this life worth living?

I must review my attitude towards solitude. Happy Epiphany, dear reader.

R is for reminiscence

An A to Z of bits of Bruce
18: Reminiscence

"Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention." Ah, Sinatra!

Christmas ... New Year ... the time to get all mushy about looking back. Though, given how I've felt through much of 2008, what I really want to be doing is looking forward. Perhaps I spend too much time, as my father put it in a well-used sermon of his, "looking in the driving mirror".

I don't want this to be about regret, however. That's a strong word. We all remember things that we could have done differently, but here we are. Doesn't regret imply that we'd rather be somewhere else, doing something else?

Looking back is a difficult thing, in any case. There can be a temptation towards an Orwellian rewriting of the past. We either cast ourselves in a better light, blot out our worst moments, and imagine we were better than we were; or we do the opposite, and take the guilt for things that were actually beyond our control.

It's a little like being the type of person who, to me at least, appears to decide that they will feel or not feel a certain way. There is dishonesty in that. Someone who decides how to feel, rather than truly feeling it, must surely be denying to themselves who they really are. In the same way, not accepting the events and decisions of our past for what they were is like a denial of our own identity. And without identity, we are in limbo, unable to see ourselves, unable to move forward.

So reminiscence can be positive, even essential, if used in the right way.

And where did all this come from? I hang my head in shame. From a sequence in It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, on daytime TV in Britain last week. Everything is going wrong for Kermit and he wishes he had never been born. In the spirit of A Christmas Carol, he is obligingly shown an alternative reality in which he had never been born: Gonzo is an unsuccessful busker, Fozzie is a pickpocket, and Miss Piggy operates a dubious telephone service in an apartment full of cats. Needless to say, seeing such a nightmare scenario, Kermit realises the true value of friendship and thereby manages to save, if not the world, at least his theatre.

So move from regret, to reminiscence, to the future. What have I done to make a difference? How can I make a difference again? Can the Muppet Theatre survive?

With that thought, it will be 2009 in a couple of days. Happy New Year, everyone!