Dear Audience...
So now that we know that the audience is gonna read this thing, let's put something interesting in here like we had before. What shall we contemplate? The consistancy of a chocolate chip cookies? The space-time continuam.... continueum... continewum...
posted by Anonymous at 10:50 AM
8 Comments:
The space time continuam... yes, please. That's one we haven't talked about before.
Time. How do you feel about it? Does it go too quickly? Too slowly? How long does a year feel to you? Do you feel like you're young or old? When will you have lost your youth? When will you be adult? How do you measure and undestand time on a personal level?
Time goes by entirely too fast and "seventeen" will be far too big of a word for my brain to contemplate, come February.
Honestly though, I've always been averse to the passage of time. Does anyone else feel this way?
I used to think that once I hit fourth grade I would be old. It's been many years and I never felt the switch.
O Jeez, I've been freaking out about time lately. I feel like I'm running out of it very quickly. I know that college is still a ways away but it feels so close. I feel like my last hours of High School life are slipping away and there's nothing I can do to stop it. There are still so many things I want to do before I go to college, it's like I'm dying or something. It's madening I tell you, madening I say!
I feel like, and I've said this before, my past is going to start forgetting me after I go away to college. And I don't know if I can handle that. I heard that somewhere before and I thought it fit perfectly with how I've been feeling lately. It's like I want to go out and do bigger and better things but at the same time I'm enjoying my life the way it is now, and I don't want to fade away from the friends that I have now. I don't want to leave everything that I know and love behind. And I know that it's just my insecurity of going out into a bigger world, but I don't care what it is, it still sucks... Feels good to get that of me chest... Me hearties...
Danny, I think that's awesome that you are feeling this struggle. Not that I want you to struggle... but that you are present in the present and that you want to continue being in the present. I think that's a great thing. And something that it took me much longer to get to than you. But, if I can say anything from experience, be careful not to worry too much about losing the present or it will already be gone. You know?
Jean Paul Sartre was a philosopher who wrote a novel called Nausea. In it he said something that plays over and over in my brain, the gist of which is: life, existence, has to be a balance between living and telling. In order to tell (think, communicate, make stories) you've got to stop moving foward for a moment and stand still or sometimes even look back. But in order to have anything to tell (or write about... hence Poet's dilemma) you've also got to live. The two go hand in hand... living in the present moment and then reflecting on that moment.
I think this was the driving theme for me in writing Rain. I was getting to know and love all of you and, I don't know if I've told any of you this, but watching you all reminded me of when I was in high school and it was the first time I actually thought about how amazing life was then.
When you're living in the present, especially when you're in high school and you are constantly discovering so many things about yourself and others and the world at large, I don't think it's really possible to grasp the fullness of the present moments... to be able to pause everything for a second and see how beautiful life, especially your own life, is.
But then you guys gave me that opportunity -- the opportunity to be a part of your present -- and I felt like I was getting to experience life at 15, 16, 17, 18 all over again only this time it was so much better than the first time because this time I was able to see it all objectively by watching you. And what I saw was stunning and so, so, so inspiring. And so I was hoping that I could write a play that would show you guys what I saw... that would allow you to hold your lives in your palm for a moment and see how they glisten. That would allow you to observe and cherish your present before it evaporated. That would let us all... smell the rain when it is actually raining.
I guess that's what theatre is always trying to do -- get us to grasp our lives for a moment, notice them, and be moved by them.
But. Time never stops, does it? It's amazing to me how much you have already grown and changed in the short time I have known you. Many of the aspects of you that inspired aspects of the play, have already morphed into something new and I catch myself wondering if you haven't outgrown the play in some ways... but then the good thing about theatre is that it is living -- the thing that we created is not static, but constantly evolving, and so I hope we find that the play is growing with us all and becoming fuller and fuller all the while.
Wow. This has turned into the longest post ever and I haven't even gotten to what I want to quote yet... think I'll take a little break here and give your eyes a rest.
Okay. So I've been reading Eugene Ionesco's Fragments of a Journal (Ionesco was a Romanian playwright who was born in 1912 and lived in Paris and wrote absurd plays) in preparation for the Non-Traditional Theatre class and I came across something that sounded quite familiar to Gretchen and Justin's conversation in park...
Here's what he said:
"Ever since I was fifteen, that's to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that's to say into the abyss, ever since I beacame fully conscious of time, I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I've tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it's as though I had run alongside of it.
What is life? I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, forever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plentitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.
I am at the age [he was in his 60s then] when you grow ten years older in one year, when an hour is only a few minutes long and you cannot even note the passing quarters. And yet I still run after life in the hope of catching it at the last minute, as one jumps on to the steps of the last carriage of a moving train.
I remember the quarter of an hour break at my primary school. A quarter of an hour! What a long, busy space of time; enough to think of one game, play it, end it, start another...
Of course, even before I was fifteen, I had this sense of time passing. Thursdays and Sundays went by; I mean I knew they were going by. Discovering time means being aware of its passage, believing and indeed being sure that tomorrow will come, waiting for something, expecting something.
I had always been told that the days followed one another, that the seasons came to an end. Of course, this was what they told me and I was bound to believe what grown-up people and the schoolmaster asserted. I had been told it, granted. But 'next year; was only a word; and even if I believed that this 'next year' would one day come, it seemed so far away that it wasn't worth thinking about; the time in between was as long as eternity; so it was just as if it was never going to come. You made no plans, you could make none, since it was so far ahead, so very far ahead. ... In any case, though tomorrow was going to come, though the seasons would end and then return, it was they that would go and come back, while I should stay in the same place. The sun and the stars moved around me, who stood still at the centre of everything. The earth and its colours and its fields and its snow and rain [!!!] all moved around me. I don't know at what point it was that I must have taken some sort of step. How did it happen? From that moment onward I became aware of the past. I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away."
So yeah. Whatcha think bout that?
I think it sounds like me. Oh no, I'm turning into a sixty year old Romanian man...
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