Incremental Fossilization: Old, Young, Duane Davy, and Kurt Vonnegut

(Thanks to Dan Stern and SLATE for this photograph of Kurt Vonnegut: AP/WIDE-WORLD)

Ah, age.

Relentless, unpitying, constant-- even when you sleep. The hours tick by, the seconds and decades fleeting, and what do you have at the end of the line?

Well, that was cheerful.

As we rehearse "The Taming of the Shrew," for the Park District, I have had a few revelations regarding age. The most recent event in this process-within-a-process was Monday night, which gave me the impetus to finally write about it; an inkling I had long had but declined to indulge.

One of the oddities about writing is that in the crafts of both news and fiction you learn that the best writers (Joyce, I suppose, or Tolstoy, or E. B. White or the Associated Press) write from the lofty abstraction of the Third Person. Like Eleanor Roosevelt's axiom, too, you are encouraged to write, as much as possible, about ideas. Ideas, I suppose, as rendered into character or action.

As I recall she actually was referring to conversation ("Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people"), but for the purposes of writing, other people are characters; hence, as above, ideas. I do not know if, for instance, E.M. Forster might be taken to task by Eleanor Roosevelt for his gossipy internal dialogue writing about Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore; I doubt it. Writing about other people renders them an abstract, does it not? Arguably Thackeray writing "Vanity Fair," a monument of scuttlebutt, was "discussing people;" but of course that's literature. A corollary to the Rooseveltian maxim might be that if the people you are discussing are produced by your own imagination then I suppose you can do what you like with them, and it may not be considered mere gossip. Then these characters may indeed stand in for and do the duty of "ideas;" a notion as old as "Pilgrim's Progress."

To further complicate this notion of who is where saying what about whom is the nostrum considered by most everybody to be the final word, "write what you know."

Emily Dickinson, for instance, was able, without attacking Lepanto by sea, accompanying a failed Himalayan expedition, recalling a thousand pages' worth of an entire past world after nibbling a cookie, or running the bulls at Pamplona, to write some of the most deathless poetry extant. All done without stirring far from the here-and-now of her ancestral Amherst; the human condition, and that of her own heart, being the essential palette and canvas.

But now I find I have wandered off into the tall weeds.

In our little Shakespeare production, with the exception of my acting friend Peter (we have done four Shakespeare plays together), and Karen, the director (we have been acquainted for over twenty years, from back in the day when she was my Meisner method instructor), I am the oldest participant.

Interestingly (for me, at my age, married as I am to a young and beautiful wife twelve years younger), I play "Gremio," a part known in the pantheon of the commedia as "Pantaloon," according to my old employer The Encyclopedia Britannicca, a "stock character of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte-- a cunning and rapacious yet often deceived Venetian merchant.

"Pantaloon dressed in a tight-fitting red vest, red breeches and stockings, a pleated black cassock, slippers, and a soft brimless hat. Later versions of the character sometimes wore long trousers (pantaloons)."

In this production I'm wearing a black brocade tunic, laced with black cord, and black brocade knickers, with no cassock (Karen explained to me that despite the definition above, for our theatrical purposes a cape in sunny Italy would be inappropriate). The cap and slippers remain uncorrupted, with the addition of a big black cane. I have also asked for tooth-blackening and an eyepatch, but the luxury of these appliances will probably remain upalong, and I will be bastilled with only my scanty bag of actor's tricks, for getting the desired effect of decrepitude.

This brocade tunic and I have a history. In "As You Like It," I wore it to play the evil Duke Frederick:

She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience,
Speak to the people, and they pity her.
Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone. Then open not thy lips.
Firm and irrevocable is my doom
Which I have pass'd upon her; she is banish'd.

Later, I saw my colleague Christopher Prentice dogged out in this rig in "MacBeth." In its past, this raiment adorned Keith, Karen's rock-musician-turned-technical producer husband, who was probably coerced into donating it to the theater's wardrobe. I think Keith may have also outgrown the Mittelalter-Rock (think the "Dropkick Murphys," or "Cornix Maledictum") for which he zazzled. Life, as it were, marches apace.

Oddly enough for such a life-affirming comedy as "The Taming of the Shrew," we have had a rather dark time of it, since the unexpected death of Assistant Director Duane Davy. Duane was an ex-Air Force flier, an architect for the City of Chicago, and bachelor. He was a quiet and retiring man, but told some of the most interesting stories about flying.

"You should get a private license," I urged him.

Duane had a distinguished, long head, a long face, and a narrow aquiline nose. He scrunched up his bearded chin and said, "Civilian equipment-- after you've flown military equipment-- is …disappointing."

Karen said she saw pictures of Duane when he was younger. "He was cooler than cool," she said. "Never married, but he had his girlfriends. He had a bicycling girlfriend; he had a camping girlfriend; he had a girlfriend for going out to nice places for dinner."

The Saturday before he died I bummed a cigarette from Duane and asked him how his Lincoln Square rehab was coming along (he bought a century-old house with a wraparound porch and was retrofitting it a room at a time. We had the "King Lear," cast party, there. It had a huge front room and a fireplace, and Duane was installing massive woodwork on the porch, extending it into the backyard with a gazebo and trellis).

"It's going OK," Duane said, blinking his gentle eyes and turning his cigarette in his big fingers. "I finished my bedroom and it's pretty nice. I take it a room at a time, if I don't feel like working on it, I don't. I'm in no hurry." I bought him a pack of Marlboro Lights but there wasn't enough time to give it to him, and two days later I had smoked the last one, for him.

While staying Assistant Director, Duane also was slated to step in to replace the part of the "Pedant," which would have been his first time onstage at the Chase Park theater.

His service was in Plainfield, Illinois, last Saturday. I did not go, but some of the folks in the cast did. His people were dairy farmers, west of here, somewhere. Karen said his sister arrived during Duane's last illness (he suffered an embolism biking on the lakefront and lingered for two days), concerned about the milking.

He there does now enioy eternall rest
And happie ease, which thou doest want and craue,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some litle paine the passage haue,
That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,
And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

-Spenser, The Faerie Queene: Book I.

The cast, out having a drink, has raised a glass to Duane a couple of times, already.

Onstage Monday night we were trying to execute a bit of business; popping our heads out from behind a set-piece. I found myself trying to work out, with my fellow players Adam and Jon, the order of the business. I suggested maybe I should scrunch down, first, so they might pop out above me, rather than trying to stretch over them. My reasons were that they were more flexible, smaller… I searched for the word…

"Young," Adam said.

"Well, it's not that, exactly," I said, trailing off. Fortunately for my own kismet, as well as the psychic health of our little play, not to mention my own honor, tattered a robe though that may be, I was too taken aback, initially, to make some kind of protest. Adam could well have been referring to my characterization of "Gremio."

"'Petite,' actually, was the word I had in mind," was the unuttered wisecrack ranking among the standard set of clever put-downs, being a tall, broad man, I could have whipped out. My reluctance to resort to violent expostulation was also actuated by the acute consciousness that however big and strong you are at fifty, a youngster half your age who knows how will eventually beat the hell out of you, if only by virtue of staying power. And besides, truly, how weak and foolish can one allow one's pathetic old Ego to make one, even unto personal violence? Finally, I did not turn away with a hollow, old, feeling in my chest, and weep a little, later on.

No. Dragging old Self into every conversation, taking everything personally, suffering delicate injury at every turn; it is too pathetic. "Fear boys with bugs," as Petruchio has it.

In a flash, something reminded me of my old friend Kurt Vonnegut. Well, he was not my, "friend," actually. My sister was an English professor, and I met him in my early twenties at a cocktail party at Iowa State University, down the road a piece from The University of Iowa, where he lectured for the UI Writers' Workshop. I was sunburned and lanky, smart-alecky and confident, young and boisterous, full of half-baked ideas, testosterone, and unguided enthusiasm. I probably raved about Melville, or Sterne, or Kesey, or made lame-brained and pointless conversational excursions into an exegesis of "Player Piano," or "Breakfast of Champions," or "Sirens of Titan" (which I still have never read).

Vonnegut was rather reticent, and with a half-smile and an interested gaze seemed to regard me as a large, strong, playful, and somewhat out-of-control puppy; with a mix of interest and trepidation, bordering on fear.

Whatever I said, I recall he responded, "I understand," with a kind smile and encouraging nod.

He wrote, in "Slaughterhouse Five:"

Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. 'So what do the Three Musketeers do now?' he said.

Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn't time-travel. It had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow.

One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times-living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.

Now they twisted out from under Weary's loving arms. They told Weary that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren't going to wait for them any more.

And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.

Onstage, there, with these lithe young men, was I Billy Pilgrim, timid, frail, and old before his time? Or Roland Weary, overbearing, clumsy, clueless and bovine? "Young," I for sure was not, anymore.

Fifty may be the "new thirty," but a pratfall takes a lot more out of me than it did, before. I can still work like a mule and lift at least my weight, stage-fight with a broadsword (although not for as long a time), and speak thirty lines without breathing hard, but entropy, as it were (and that's a pun), will have it's guerdon of us all.

LA

We went to Hollywood last weekend.

On Hollywood Boulevard we passed two men, talking. The younger man was six feet tall, with a pale complexion and lean physique. He had long legs and stood slightly back on his hips, pelvis angled somewhat forward, his arms crossed over his chest. He had unusually blue-black hair, with a single curl down the center of his forehead. The man he was talking to was sunburned and heavy, with a shaved bullet-head, bald on top, wearing heavy glasses on his nose. His arms were thick and fuzzed, and he was holding a camera. The older, heavy-set man was wearing a Madras shirt with notches in the ends of the sleeves, and khaki Dockers. On his feet he had a new pair of tan Kobe Bryant Nike Air Force One shoes. The lanky young man was wearing red high-top boxing boots and blue tights, red briefs, a red cape and a blue body suit with the Superman logo on his chest.

"And how old are you," the heavy-set man said, with a Midwestern accent.

"Forty-four," the young man answered, with an affirmative nod of his head, that tossed the little forehead-curl a little bit.

Down the street, I heard the main D-C+9-G chord progression of Lynyrd Skynyrd's back-answer to Neil Young, "Sweet Home Alabama;" over it the familiar, still smoking-hot guitar licks of Gary Rossington (before both his arms and legs were broken in that 1977 plane crash), under it Leon Wilkeson's solid bassline (before the crash had almost amputated his arms, punctured a lung, and knocked out most of his teeth); and in place of the late Ronnie Van Zant's hard and streamlined silver pipes I heard a soft, almost ethereal, whispering, sibilant voice-- an angels' voice.

"The Hawks," are Glap, Andy, and Tanya Ross, three kids from a small town near Munich, Germany, who moved with their mom to LA in 2005. They were born, respectively, in 1985, 1987, and 1996. Glap followed the lead-line note-for-note.

Beneath their feet were golden stars etched into the polished granite. Muhammed Ali. Antonio Banderas. John Beradino (born Giovanni Berardino in 1917, he was an American League infielder for the St. Louis Browns, the Cleveland Indians, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and an actor. He had a guest role in a 1955 episode of the TV series Adventures of Superman, in an episode called "The Unlucky Number," playing a small-time criminal struggling with his lifestyle, who wanted to reform. After appearing in more than a dozen B-movies, as well a supporting role as FBI agent Steve Daniels in the espionage series, "I Led Three Lives," he was offered the role of Dr. Steve Hardy on the soap opera General Hospital. He played the role from the show's start in 1963 until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1996). Edgar Bergen. Halle Berry. Olive Borden (born in 1906, she was an American actress in silent and early talking motion figures, known for her pitch black hair and overall beauty. She was one of Mack Sennett's 1924 bathing beauties. She died October 1, 1947). Matthew Broderick. Sandra Bullock. Jerry Buss (born in 1934, Gerald Hatten “Jerry” Buss is the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team). Jackie Chan. Ronald Colman. Spade Cooley (Donnell Clyde 'Spade' Cooley was born in 1910. He was an American Western Swing musician, big band leader, actor, and television personality. His career ended when he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his second wife, Ella Mae Evans. He died in 1969).

Kevin Costner.

When The Hawks started to cover Eagles' tunes I lit a cigarette and moved on. (Come on, man. I had a rough night and I hate the fuckin' Eagles, man!)

People speak of "the street of broken dreams," and when they do I am not sure where that street is anymore, in America. Reading Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal today made me think it was that street, or maybe Main Street. Not Hollywood Boulevard, where three munchkins from Münchner can rock out and make a little coin.

"The Bushes are winners;" she wrote, "the Clintons are winners. We know this, they've won. The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system. For a generation, two generations now, they have had the same dynamics in play, only their friends are on the blue team, not the red, or the red, not the blue.

"They are, both groups, up and ready and good to go every election cycle. They are machines. There are good people on each side, idealists, the hopeful, those convinced the triumph of their views will make our country better. And there are those on each side who are not so wonderful, not so well-meaning, not well-meaning at all. And some are idiots, but very comfortable ones.

"Is this good for our democracy, this air of inevitability? Is it good in terms of how the world sees us, and how we see ourselves? Or is it something we want to break out of, like a trance?

"It would be understandable if they were families of a most extraordinary natural distinction and self-sacrifice. But these are not the Adamses of Massachusetts we're talking about. You've noticed, right?"

Yes, we have.

But it is the transcendence of all we are and all we have or have not, to be in a state of constant becoming, that is the chief aim of man. Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed, said Blaise Pascal, summing up the transitory nature of our consciousness. I saw it once on "The Tonight Show," with Johnny Carson. He raised his skinny Nebraska finger and said, "Here comes a moment," then he touched The Desk, and said, "here it is," and then, sweeping the flat of his palm out toward Tommy Newsom, said, "now it's gone." He raised his eyebrows at the guest, who I think may have been Carl ("Billions and Billions") Sagan.

Point well made, Carnac the Magnificent, and sans the gaudy turban.

The attainment of power for power's sake is not new; the achievement of notoriety purely for the purposes of notoriety seems as if indeed it is new, a product of the Media Age, when celebrity for celebrity's sake has little to do with natural beauty, extraordinary ability, creative power, incisive thought, or an all-encompassing heart. Nobility in common men and women was never rare. Arguably nobility and true strength of character for everyone is more possible, more likely, more conceivable, than at any time in history, since so many datums of the lives and accomplishments of women and men are now available, along with their perversities. "Finally," said Walt Whitman, "the morality: 'Virtue,' said Marcus Aurelius, 'what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?' Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same—to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete."

The current benightedness of American leadership is only a local phenomenon; a quark, a comet, a temporary series of quantum and evanescent events, against a firmament starred by the Jeffersonian, Lincolnesque, Wilsonian, Rooseveltian, and Trumanesque; somewhat more permanent embodiments of a greater celestial polity.

According to Wikipedia's article on relativity, "Physical observers are considered to be surrounded by a reference frame which is a set of coordinate axes in terms of which position or movement may be specified or with reference to which physical laws may be mathematically stated.

"An inertial reference frame is a collection of objects that have no net motion relative to each other. It is a coordinate system defined by the non-accelerated motion of objects with a common direction and speed.

"An event is something that happens independently of the reference frame that might be used to describe it. Turning on a light or the collision of two objects would constitute an event."

When the lights go on, they go on at certain coordinates, in one reference frame. Passing by on the street outside, what would you see, in another reference frame, moving relative to those first, certain coordinates, at a particular velocity v along the x axis?

If you are hungry, and the lights go on at a turkey dinner, do you then break in, and violently seize a drumstick? Do you pull your jacket tighter, search your pockets for a smoke, slouch down the street? Do you pass from the pool of one lighted streetlight to the next, a slow-moving cipher in the chilling night? Do you pass, relatively, from one stasis to the next along a motion parallax, opposite the stuffing and sauce, or hope to make friends later, much later, in the Trailways bus station, at the soup kitchen, toward a new understanding of independence, along a continuum of loneliness, your scrotum contracting in the chilly wind, your eyes tearing, and the pinch of broken soles creaking as you mobilate ahead, all these independent experiences affirming Hubble's constant, the redshift of galaxies, the Universe's expansion, and how long ago it was when all your family were collected around a single board, happy and in love?

Current research estimates this was approximately 13.7 billion years ago, but with significant ambiguity and founded only in faith, in various model family postulations, and studies of meerkat populations in the Kalahari.

On August 17, 2007 two German physicists, Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, both of the University of Koblenz, said they had broken the speed of light. According to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity this is impossible.

In an experiment, microwave photons traveled "instantaneously," between two prisms separated by distances of a few millimeters to a meter. To propel an object faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second per second), Einstein posited, would require an infinite amount of energy.

Where this energy might originate, how it will be used, and where it will go afterwards, the German physicists would not, or could not say. No matter disappears; everything transforms.

The Hartman Effect predicts that time becomes independent of barrier length for thick enough barriers, ultimately resulting in unbounded velocities, so individual photons may appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light.

Once upon a time we sat in a rooftop garden in Lincoln Park. Harry was angry and hurt. Jerry was serene and unperturbed. Joe was big, sheepish and shy; he was the architect. I was the Man in the Middle.

"'Everything That Rises Must Converge,'" I quoted, apropos of nothing, to break the silence. It was a short story by Flannery O'Connor. I thought everyone had heard of it.

Pursing his lips over his iced tea, his sunglasses reflecting the Lincoln Park treetops swaying in the summer breeze, Jerry snapped, "must convert. Everything that rises must convert." He wrapped his mouth, already starting to wrinkle, around the straw. Then he used his construct in a sentence, so I would try and remember it, probably: "During the next century, sea level rise could convert as much as twenty-two percent of the world’s coastal wetlands to open water," he said. Later Jerry was stabbed nine times in his foyer by a cocaine dealer and killed (the houseboy found him), and Harry died of AIDS. Joe's office is still in the Northwest Tower Building on Damen and North, and I am still acting and trying to write, although I choose my professional acquaintances more carefully, now.

The Universe wastes nothing. Where, finally, will everything come to rest? At the scene of a prehistoric Mayan blood-rite? In an immanentizing and scornful séance in the court of Hammurabi? At the end of a length of dirty gold chain and hardened drops of amber flashing above the flames in a fire pit surrounded by Picts in ancient Ireland?

The Hartman Effect also predicts one might be murdered in Encino with a revolver, shot multiple times in and around the head, by a cocaine, margarita, and Zoloft-addled wife or lover, your ashes scattered over Santa Catalina Island's Emerald Bay, only to subsequently enjoy an afterlife in syndication as a Conehead.

Clearly, The United States is getting the leaders it deserves, in spades. Whether this is due to pop culture (where every truth no matter how righteous is reduced and distilled to its potential market in music, image, and idiom) or a leadership in thrall to the oil patch and Detroit, or addicted to perks of the Presidency like oral sex from the staff or payoffs from Chinese lobbyists, is unknown. Famously, Edward Gibbon said, "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Less famously, he also said "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book."

Seldom have I been so inspired.