Intermission
It is Friday night, and I am at home. Not knitting, sort of cleaning, sort of working on a song. Feeling a bit -- not blue, but not sure what, exactly, that we have returned to our routine, assuming memory and mortal, mortal fatigue, too-aware of the momentum we must now conserve and build upon. Trey is back at work. And I'm dieting and not supposed to drink, and can't bring myself to get riled up about the usual crap. I feel -- flat. I lay on the floor.
It would be easy, especially if I were drunk, to coax this flatness to resemble the old wound, the familiar knife on which you pivot. But I can't, don't care to. That wound no longer lies behind that particular door.
I remember my acting teacher telling me how emptiness was a gift, and how I learned that to be true. The moment you accepted that you were blocked, could even visualise the block as a large mass in your chest, see the edge under your clavicles, something would open up and deepen: the obstruction became the hidden door -- Tomorrow we go to my mother-in-law's birthday dinner. Mother-in-law. I have one. I am a grown lady with a mother-in-law. A husband. A honeymoon. We will have a child. I have a job. I am grown. I am yet my same self. All the Lillets at once. There is no compulsion in this moment. And the flatness suddenly buckles and yields its gift -- it reminds --
that these words, these facts, do not chafe or diminish or misrepresent or restrict -- it is like memorizing lines -- lines you commit to heart and incorporate and in doing so you are freer than you could ever be otherwise for the momorized lines are the trellis the conduit for the real life -- like a poem -- the constraints are what electrify. Every actor knows that when you have it down, you are the most surprised and surprising, engaged and engaging, electrified and electrifying, free -- when you are committed -- And the apartment blooms around me once again, as if the power came back on.
And then know anew these two things to be the same:
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.
=
Yes I said Yes I will Yes.
It would be easy, especially if I were drunk, to coax this flatness to resemble the old wound, the familiar knife on which you pivot. But I can't, don't care to. That wound no longer lies behind that particular door.
I remember my acting teacher telling me how emptiness was a gift, and how I learned that to be true. The moment you accepted that you were blocked, could even visualise the block as a large mass in your chest, see the edge under your clavicles, something would open up and deepen: the obstruction became the hidden door -- Tomorrow we go to my mother-in-law's birthday dinner. Mother-in-law. I have one. I am a grown lady with a mother-in-law. A husband. A honeymoon. We will have a child. I have a job. I am grown. I am yet my same self. All the Lillets at once. There is no compulsion in this moment. And the flatness suddenly buckles and yields its gift -- it reminds --
that these words, these facts, do not chafe or diminish or misrepresent or restrict -- it is like memorizing lines -- lines you commit to heart and incorporate and in doing so you are freer than you could ever be otherwise for the momorized lines are the trellis the conduit for the real life -- like a poem -- the constraints are what electrify. Every actor knows that when you have it down, you are the most surprised and surprising, engaged and engaging, electrified and electrifying, free -- when you are committed -- And the apartment blooms around me once again, as if the power came back on.
And then know anew these two things to be the same:
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.
=
Yes I said Yes I will Yes.
posted by Lillet Langtry at 10:27 PM
1 Comments:
Bellisima,
Si, el silencio es un milagro.
-L.
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