My Wat

Every so often I'm asked by a friend to work on a new independent project.  Currently I'm reading (or trying to read, anyway...) Alexander Wat's My Century:  The Odyssey of A Polish Intellectual, which was given to me by R.B.  He also gave me a copy of Wat's Lucifier Unemployed, a collection of Wat's short stories.  We're talking about possibly putting some sort of script, performance piece, or...whatever...together about these texts.  Reading through My Century a few passages instantly connect with me about my artistic process, my life, and my thoughts in general about life lately.  Considering it's so difficult to find the concentration to write lately, I thought maybe taking down someone else's words might set off a few sparks.


From the introduction by Wat's interviewer for the book, Czesław Miłosz, I found a few statements that seemed to be more about someone working on an artistic process rather than an intellectual statement of his life:


"It was not Wat's intention to be a chronicler of his centrury; what he sought was the secret, hidden meaning of events."
-  p. xx


In the last few years especially I've become less concerned with addressing the implicit and inherent political statements out of various theatre pieces.  I've come to appreciate writers like Samuel Beckett who wrote about such things as the "secret, hidden meaning of events."  His writing doesn't seem to be tied to one particular political context, or way of thinking, and his dramatic writings seem to live somewhere out of time...in all times.  If only I could achieve something like that with my work.  My writing.  My acting.  Anything.


On living in a different culture Miłosz notes about Wat's experience in America:


"As of now at least, more good people are to be encountered in America than Europe.  Theirs is, however, a somewhat seemingly careless goodness because there is a low level of psychological intensity in human exchanges here, both of the good and the bad.  If Wat, a typical Central European intellectual, had expected debate, deference, an attentive and devoted audience, he was sadly mistaken.  He soon realized that no one had the time for long conversations here, that everyone was on his own.  You want to give a lecture, fine, give it. You want to write, write; you don't want to, so don't.  All this creates an impression of indifference, of the individual vanishing into a landscape and masses of people, both of which dwarf him.  This impression may often be mistaken ,but it can be depressing."
- p. xxi


I often feel this way, and I was born and raised in the Untied States.  I can remember a graduate school professor, M.C., commenting that I "seemed to be carrying the weight of a thousand years of history" on my shoulders.  It was in that same conversation, in that awful pizza joint across the street from Meadows School for The Arts, that he tried to reassure me about my inability to get along with some of my fellow classmates, or to make any sort of meaningful connections with them by saying, "You know, Mark, not every conversation, every social interaction in your life has to mean something deep...right?"  Those are words I've tried to hold onto since then...especially since leaving school for the arena of the working world of theatre.  There are more and more times when conversations seem like they're just skirting the surface of even superficiality...even with those who call themselves intellectuals.  And those who don't...?  Well, there's a sort of animosity that comes from anyone who perceives someone else as one...as if they're angry that they were denied some access to that knowledge. I find myself at times avoiding interactions with these types, but completely nixing them out of one's life does expose one to, like Wat, feelings of vanishing into the landscape and masses of people.  However, the standards seem to have changed since Wat's day.  Being an intellectual in his day, or his social group was defined by reading philosophy and intimately knowing the inner workings of a totalitarian regimes prison systems.  Today, simply watching some other TV program than a reality show makes one a pseudo-intellectual.  The intellectual bar has been lowered, but the feeling of isolation remains the same.


The following is a statement I think, if properly reworded, could help my theatre students understand something about their processes, but I'm not quite sure how to phrase it in a way that could help them:


"Stature is not easy to explain.  It is not measured by what is called talent, because the talented are not always deserving of respect.  Neither is it measured by intelligence itself, for various uses can be made of that faculty.  Stature is like authority, and when granting it to someone, we do not doubt that we are giving that person any more than is deserved by nature."
- p. xxiii


Finally, for tonight at least, there is a statement directly made by Wat that was about the 20th century, but could be about today's general climate...about my general internal climate...


"I don't know if it was an advantage or a disadvantage, but we had begun to realize that the old had come to an end.  Some absolute change had occurred and you had to make changes; it didn't matter how, what, to where, but you had to break things, change. ... First and foremost, there was a need, intellectual but emotional as well, for a total renewal, a feeling that some sort of earthquake had occurred, an absolute earthquake..."
- p. 4


That about says it for me.  


Who knows if we'll end up creating that theatre piece.  I need to finish hacking up a lung before I can deal with a creative process, or the earthquakes happening all around and within me lately.  There's only so much thinking, or considering one can do when dealing with annual bout of bronchitis.  


God my lungs hurt.