Sinéad O’Connor has a moving piece up at The Huffington Post. Please read it.
UPDATE: I just said this below in the comments but it really does bear saying here: I should say that I’m one of these typically low-church protestant types, but that I find much to love in the contemplative traditions of the Catholic Church and other Christian communities. I hope my posting of this piece doesn’t come across as anti-Catholic by any stretch. I was just very moved by it, and impressed with its cogency. A far cry, indeed, from what was done on SNL all those years ago.
Dateline: Monday – Unrest and protest in Syria and Saudi Arabia today. Continuing crises in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya. And those are just the things going on at the top of the news cycle having to do with wider North African/Middle Eastern developments. There’s the natural, humanitarian, and nuclear crisis in Japan. The irradiation of Japanese milk and spinach, long lines and scant groceries and gas. There are new reports, and, it seems, new evidence, of military atrocities on the part of a rogue element in the US Army in Afghanistan.
Are you outraged? How does your soul feel? I feel sick, disgusted, and tired. And I’m a relatively safe, healthy, American civilian. The image of President Obama at the foot of Christ the Redeemer in Brazil last night triggered all kinds of cynical thoughts for me about the audacity of hope. Then I read a piece suggesting that perhaps the President was taking a kind of solace there. Some might say he’s been taking solace for weeks, failing to lead, etc. I don’t know how I feel about all of that. I don’t know if he was prevailed upon by State to authorize the strikes in Libya when his gut seemed to be telling him to keep the US role there as limited as possible. I don’t know.
But I do know this. 1) We private citizens and co-people of Earth cannot succumb to soul fatigue. We cannot ignore the news, and we cannot settle for the coverage we are given. Free people especially must use their freedom to stay informed. That’s just how it is. 2) If you are the praying kind, I hope to God you’re praying. For everything. For everyone. 3) Find some solace, but please, God, don’t roll up.
I’m not a medical professional or a mental health expert but, regarding Charlie Sheen, the possibilities are pretty clear: he either needs psychiatric counseling or is secretly one-upping Joaquin Phoenix and James Franco in a rather brilliant meta-stunt. Unfortunately, people who know much more about these things than I do are convinced we are witnessing the public self-destruction of fellow human being. Increasingly, I believe that many of us are also guilty of enabling and exploiting it.
Jonathan Storm writes a TV column for The Philadelphia Inquirer and has this to say:
Storm is right, of course. When the circus came to Philly last month, people protested. No one’s picketing outside the studios picking from the ribs of what seems to be Sheen’s complete and total breakdown. I know, I know, we’re not supposed to sympathize with the rich kid, the Brat Packer, the guy who has everything and is, of his own volition, throwing it all away. The guy who makes a gazillion dollars a year playing a slightly bowdlerized version of himself on TV. But you know what? I do sympathize with him. And I also happen to believe that when it comes to things like addiction and mental illness, you go ahead and throw volition out the window. I’m not saying he has license to do whatever the hell he wants (he might say that), but I am questioning the callousness of those who would reject all gestures of empathy or compassion to a sick human being merely because said sickness contributes to piss-poor choices and indefensible behavior.
Storm’s quote reminded me of a short story by Franz Kafka called “A Hunger Artist” wherein a caged performance artist fasts for days on end to the delight and initial sympathy of gathered, gawking crowds. It begins thusly:
“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible. We live in a different world now. At one time the whole town took a lively interest in the hunger artist; from day to day of his fast the excitement mounted; everybody wanted to see him at least once a day; there were people who bought season tickets for the last few days and sat from morning till night in front of his small barred cage; even in the nighttime there were visiting hours, when the whole effect was heightened by torch flares; on fine days the cage was set out in the open air, and then it was the children’s special treat to see the hunger artist; for their elders he was often just a joke that happened to be in fashion, but the children stood openmouthed, holding each other’s hands for greater security, marveling at him as he sat there pallid in black tights, with his ribs sticking out so prominently, not even on a seat but down among straw on the ground… ”
The hunger artist has handlers, keepers, and promoters, and these people attach or enforce certain rules to his performance. He must not eat while on display in his cage, and men are paid to ensure he does not eat in secret. Even so, any good crowd has its skeptics. Further, the artist is only allowed to fast for 40 days at a time, and is brought, gaunt and Christ-like, from his cage for a spectacular finale. The 40-day rule is not for the artist’s health, mind you, but rather so that audiences don’t loose interest or compassion. The artist hates the rule, as it prohibits him from perfecting his hunger art, from pushing himself to his absolute limit, from the total annihilation of need and self.
“So he lived for many years, with small regular intervals of recuperation, in visible glory, honored by all the world, yet in spite of that troubled in spirit, and all the more troubled because no one would take his trouble seriously. What comfort could he posibly need? What more could he possibly wish for? And if some good-natured person, feeling sorry for him, tried to console him by pointing out that his melancholy was probably caused by fasting, it could happen, especially when he had been fasting for some time, that he reacted with an outburst of fury and to the general alarm began to shake the bars of the cage like a wild animal.Yet the impresario had a way of punishing these outbreaks which he rather enjoyed putting into operation. He would apologize publicly for the artist’s behavior, which was only to be excused, he admitted, because of the irritability caused by fasting; a condition hardly to be understood by well-fed people; then by natural transition he went on to mention the artist’s equally incomprehensible boast that he could fast for much longer than he was doing…and then quite simply countered it by bringing out photographs, which were also on sale to the public, showing the artist on the fortieth day of a fast lying in bed almost dead from exhaustion.”
Eventually, public interest in fasting as an art form wanes. Compassionate crowds grow disaffected, hardened. The fascinated children embrace their forebears’ ironic love of jokes in fashion. The artist is forgotten, starves to death. His cage goes to a panther:
“Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary. The panther was all right. The food he liked was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded round the cage, and did not want ever to move away.”
About those fickle crowds, you might say Kafka’s cheating about that anyway. Why should they have been made to care about the hunger artist in the first place? After all, here’s a man destroying his body of his own volition. Ah, but that assumes we always pick our cages.
Dear Anyone Who Wrote Articles this Week with Headlines Like “Where Does James Franco Go From Here?” and “James Franco: Will He Ever Act Again?”:
Take a cue from JF. Hang loose. Calm down. Relax. Reeeee-lax. Seriously. Will James Franco ever work again? Really. “Will we be able to take him seriously as an action star in the Planet of the Apes prequel?” Go ahead and read that sentence again. To everyone talking this week about how his primary occupation these days is the deconstruction of his own celebrity, thanks for the update. “His stint on General Hospital was performance art.” Guess what? Any decent art is. And performance anxiety keeps a lot of people from doing their own creative thing. The fear of being defined by someone else, by a critic, a genre, a style, whatever. Most interesting artists have been there. At some point, you realize how silly it is. You get over it, you grow up. It turns out you can write serious essays and fiction some days and blogs about James Franco and how Netflix is like NATO others.
All the media writers dumping on Franco and asking these puffed up questions about gravitas and believability (verisimilitude, to you writer friends) are outing themselves either as silly, members of the Academy, or both. Talk about self-important. Talk about out of touch. I’m not saying Franco’s particular brand of awesome plays in the mainstream the same way it does in the post-ironic haunts I like to pretend exist in all parts of the grown-up world. But it’s still awesome. It’s still about perspective. It’s still just the Oscars. It’s still just movies. Relax, friends. Reeee-lax.
Judd Apatow, if you’re reading: how about a script for Freaks And Geeks: 10 Year Reunion. It’s 1991. Nick Andopolous opened once for the Melvins. Sam is an FBI psychologist. Karen works for a paper company in Pennsylvania. Daniel is exactly the same, except famous. I’d watch that every day.
Happy Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant to you, Cymru. That is to say, Happy St. David’s Day, Wales. Happy St. David’s Day to all with some Welsh heritage, to anyone living in Pennsylvania, to anyone ever having been kept warm by coal, to anyone who’s ever found strength in refusing to go softly into any dark night. To anyone who likes the Kinks. To the Stereophonics, John Cale, and Spencer Davis. To John Ford, Maureen O’Hara, and Roddy McDowall for making this. To anyone who’s ever enjoyed these things.
A weekend away from the computer. That was good. I don’t even know who won what last night. I had planned on watching (that is, DVRing) just to see Franco being Franco, but I didn’t even do that. I hope you all had great weekends.
My production role model. Ray Bradbury via Wikipedia.
I’m on a roll, and I thought you should know. I had a low day yesterday at 300, but sailed through 1700 hundred today. There’s no finer feeling in this process than organic production, the joy of the flow, the subconscious tying together of threads and layers, the dropping of symbols, the way your brain works when you let it. But (and if you’re a writer, I know you know this), you don’t ever start there. You have to do the grueling, embarrassing, tiring footwork to break into those times you’re writing from what our cousins the athletes call The Zone. You’ve heard of Kevin Garnett “playing out of his mind”? Writing can be just like that when you consciously train it to do subconscious work. The key here is work: just ask Ray Bradbury.
Not long ago I heard a sort of writing koan that went something like this:
“If you read one hundred poets, you’ll sound like one hundred poets. If you read one thousand poets, you’ll sound like yourself.”
In the linked post from a blog called Screenwriting From Iowa, Bradbury talks about writing 1000 words a day for 10 years before finding his voice. Now I’m not saying it will take everyone that long, but the point here is commitment, sweat equity, effort. The point here is to write through the desires not to, to write through to your sweet spot, to write enough crap to know what isn’t.
A huge part of my productivity comes from being forced to look at my work through different eyes via workshops, peer groups, and input from professors and my thesis advisor. Recently, I finally took some oft-quoted, not-heeded advice about writing in general from Ann Hood. Namely, blow it up. For me, blowing it up means messing with structure, order, and my preconceived notions about the book’s main conceits. I’m not saying your epic tales should be written by committee. I am saying that I know my advisor and my peers are right about what’s lacking in the story so far. Addressing those needs s up to me. And so I shall. And so I am.
Rest assured, friends, this novel will be finished by May 1. Do stay tuned.
Chris Cocca 