I’ve been newly appreciating the easy, the cliché, you could say: the mysteries of Jaqueline Winspear, Donna Leon, David Baldacci, episodes of Call the Midwife, the hymns of my childhood, that I hum under my breath. I’m barely concerned with whether the stories are as complicated as life. Life has no easy threads to pull from the skein. Life has few criminals who get locked out of sight forever. Real life has nothing to match the self-assured measures of “I come to the garden alone/ while the dew is still on the roses,” and the rest of it, which surely you must know.
“Surely you must know” is the key. The mutuality, which there’s precious little of left in our culture. The ball of yarn turns out to have dozens of short pieces, each a different story, each originating from a different source, a different religion, different ethnic sensibility, different upbringing. If we could convert the whole world to our way of seeing, if we could “buy the whole world a Coke,” as the old commercial went, we could eliminate the angst, the dissonance.
We just finished a Kathy Bates film festival at Cordia. In “Unconditional Love,” Grace Beasley, (A.K.A. Kathy Bates) a housewife is ecstatic that she’s won a ticket to hear her favorite singer, her romantic crush. She simultaneously finds out that her husband is leaving her. She flies to England for the concert, only to discover that her beloved singer has been murdered. And that the singer was gay. She and his former partner set out to find the murderer. They do, and at the end, she’s gained enough self-confidence to collude with the singer’s lover to bury the singer, against the wishes of his family, in his flamboyant fluffy pink outfit.
Everything’s cliché. Lonely housewife. Crush on famous person. Fandom. Gay-dom. And a murder, solved. I was doing my smirky snicker. Stupid movie. Then I got into it. Into it in a gentle, lost way. Which is what this kind of writing causes to happen.
This kind of writing is metaphor. Instead of the grit and rubble, instead of nature red in tooth and claw, this kind of writing rises into the realm—you might say this—of religious ritual, where everything stands for something else. The murderer = evil. The housewife = those trapped in a role. The famous singer = unfulfilled aspiration, romance. The gay partner = the good to be found in those people on the margins.
This is not where we live, but it is where we live. Don’t we swing between grit and fantasy, between complication and clarity? I could say the fantasy provides relief, but then what am I doing? Making pleasure useful! The passion for universal usefulness is an American flaw, one that kills pleasure. Fantasy is itself. Poems are themselves. They are not morals.
I’ve joined the Cordia Players, a readers’ theater. We just gave a reading of an old “Our Miss Brooks” episode. I had the pleasure of being the lovelorn Miss Brooks, with a 50s dress with a red flower on the neckline, red lipstick, stockings, and the dorkiest shoes I own. In the episode, as in all of them, I try to get Mr. Boyton (Jerry) to notice me. I haven’t had so much fun in forever. Plain fun. Simple fun. Fun I think I have had to spend a lifetime of angst, striving, and worry to arrive at. A freedom.
What a serious child I was! How hard I’ve worked! It’s an enlightenment to be silly. To waste my time. To throw off the yoke of responsibility, not as a rest in order to get back to work, but for the hell of it. Maybe you have to be my age to see this.
There’s something I want to say, that I intuit, about the silly movie, the silly play. It is in the moments of un-yoking ourselves that we’re alike. The laughter, the dancing, the music that cuts through—ignores—dismisses—mocks our self-righteous striving, that lifts our heads out of the muck of necessity into the realm of infinity, where there is no life and death, no right or wrong, no this or that, only the moment of being alive.
You know all this. That is, if you grew up feeling secure enough to be silly, if you were not, like me, the first child, tasked with redeeming the lostness of your family, fixing the world, and in your spare time, weeding the family’s overrun flower beds.