Sibling Assignment #73: Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Meaning of Life

It's time to really get back in the swing of things on this blog. I'm dreadfully behind in writing sibling assignments, so one of the first things I'll do is caught up.

InlandEmpireGirl raised this question for Sibling Assignment #73:

As the school year here is the assignment. Write about a school experience that was significant to your school life. Describe the experience and why it was significant.

InlandEmpireGirl remembers being a public poet in the sixth grade here and Silver Valley Girl explores arriving at a deeper understanding of the relevance of essay writing, here.


When I enrolled at Whitworth College in 1974, I don't know what I thought I would discover through my study of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare course was required for my English major. Eileen, whom I would marry in two years, loved Shakespeare and we decided to take the course together.

In my two years at North Idaho College, almost all of my study of literature was concentrated in the twentieth century. I fell in love with the modern study of stories and poems that explored the lonely, alienated condition of the human being in an empty and meaningless world and the great weight of responsibility the modern human being carried to make meaning out of h/her existence in a world devoid of essential meaning.

I had experienced this meaninglessness in the summer of 1973 when I was nearly killed at the Bunker Hill Zinc Plant. The accident resulted from a random human error. It was purposeless, unprovoked, and unrelated to whether I was a good person or to anything I did.

I was blinded. During the days I was blind, my eyes turned inward and within myself I saw the very nothingness that modern writers explored as the one universal truth about life. I confronted the benign indifference of the universe within myself.

I came to believe that forging meaning in such an empty world was up to me. Through my study of literature at North Idaho College, I obsessively worked to figure out the meaning of my life and life itself.

When I commenced my study of Shakespeare, I thought I would find in Shakespeare's plays a well-ordered world, free of the absurdity of the modern world. I thought I would find these plays outdated, irrelevant to the struggles of my existential crisis.

The first day of the course, our professor, Dean Ebner, introduced Shakespeare by telling us that we would be entering into an exploration of the meaning of life. I gasped. Why would studying Shakespeare's plays and his characters involve exploring life's meaning? I thought that "back then" it was figured out and that it was thanks to the obliterating impact of the two world wars in the twentieth century that the meaning of life had been erased. I thought the question of life's meaning was a modern question.

Early in the course, the plays did not shake me up. I didn't feel the tremors of anxiety and doubt about the meaning of life I had felt studying modern literature.

But then we studied Othello. Iago began to shake me. I couldn't believe that an "old writer" from the turn of the 16th into the 17th century could have imagined and created such an amoral and duplicitous character so energetically committed to evil. I couldn't believe Iago's glee.

I was reading Othello in the basement of South Warren Hall and began to tremble. The character Othello was in an existential predicament. The world of loyalty and trust that Othello had assumed to be intact started to unravel. Absurdity, chaos, unpredictablity, all engineered by Iago became the dominant reality of his world. He couldn't make sense of it. Fear and rage fuelled by his outrage at the deterioration of his world view began to destroy him from within himself. Othello lurched from extreme distraction to murderous calm, unable to forge meaning out of his disillusion.

I was getting it. There is no such thing "back then". It hit me. Human beings have always wrestled with how to make sense out life, out of the excruciating demands of mutablility, out of the pain and disillusion of things in life never being what we might idealize them to be.

As we moved forward to Hamlet and especially King Lear, I spent more and more time leaving my dorm room and walking through the November fog that encased the towering pine trees on Whitworth's campus, feeling the passion of Shakespeare's tragedies, exploring how my life at this very young age paralleled the uncertainty, painful self-exploration, loss of idealism, and riddling mysteries Shakespeare brought to life in the actions and interior monologues of these characters.

To this day, thirty-four years later, Shakespeare is the philosopher and artist I look to with the most trust to help me understand what a dicey, often unfair, and inherently contradictory experience human life is.

Shakespeare's plays and poetry helped light my understanding of all other writers and all other philosophers I've studied.

It was through my study of Shakespeare that I have come to understand the complexity of the stories of the Bible and the parables and poetic words of Jesus.

No other writer has so profoundly shaped my perceptions, insight, wisdom, or understanding of love, war, politics, despair, redemption, restoration, human nature, and the condition of human life itself.

Three Beautiful Things 04/05/07: Comedy, Chip, Hangover

1. I haven't taught Literature of Comedy for about five years and what a pleasure it was tonight to see the surprise on my new students' faces when they learned this was a course in love, community, family, healing, vitality, goodness, flexibility, reconciliation and not gags and goofiness.

2. I had a nice lunch with some of the students from the theater program, some of whom I hadn't seen since Othello.

3. Sitting in the back of the room, hungover, asleep off and on during class, Adam came to life and told the class valuable facts about Andrew Carnegie as we discussed "Gospel of Wealth".

Three Beautiful Things 03/03/07: Bye Bye Senator, Emily, Heaven

1. Finally, I took the time today to go to Perfect Look and lose my anonymous Senator look. My hair and beard are shorter again. I enjoy getting my hair cut and beard trimmed as much as anything I regularly do. Sometime in the near future, the beard has got to come all the way off.

2. Much Ado About Nothing was the LCC Shakespeare production a year ago. I played Antonio. Our prop mistress, Emily, works at Rainbow Optics. I went there today to have the temples of my eyeglasses tightened. When I arrived, Emily came around the counter and we hugged and we had a fun conversation about Othello and future theatrical possibilities.

3. Marmite and crunchy peanut butter on an Orowheat Extra Crisp English muffin, toasted...well, Marmitetoasty is right: heaven.

Othello Melts Into Air, Into Thin Air

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air . . .

Prospero's words sum up the feeling I had after we our last performance of Othello. If you've performed live theater, you know what I mean. The weeks and weeks of rehearsal, of the tech crew working to get properties on and off the stage, the hard work getting the stage lit and the many sound cues right and getting the images right that our production projected on silk screens and the hard work the costumers performed to dress us up in our roles all vanishes into memory and into thin air when the last performance is completed.

When I performed in my first play in Eugene, it took me a whole day to let go of Prospero, the character I played. I was morose. I didn't want Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to vanish. I wanted to hang on to it. I was attached to it. But, then when I played in other plays, I began to enjoy the idea that like the pageant of life itself, there is actually very little that happens in a given day that we can hang on to.

Life is transitory. Live theater magnifies this reality. It is futile to hang on to the moments and events and experience that pass. Yes, we can have a record of them in pictures or verbal description or on video tape, but these records are not the thing itself. The thing itself is always gone, vanished, into thin air.

So, Othello is gone. It touched our audiences. Our cast had fun together. I hope the tech crew had fun. They were under more pressure than the actors. Their work, too, has vanished.

Saturday night's performance was video taped. I doubt I will watch it. I'd like to keep the memory of Othello in my mind where I will stretch it, magnify it, give parts of it special emphasis, and move away from the documentary truth of the play. In many ways I would rather have the truth of this play live in the subjective reality of my mind. I'm not that interested in the objective truth of the video tape. I want to live in the experience of our performances vanishing. It's the mystery of live theater that so much pleasure is derived from something that is worked at so hard and turns out to be so impermanent, something that vanishes into thin air.

Three Beautiful Things Plus a Bonus 02/17/07:Sisters' Blogs, Window Commercial, Closing Night....and the Camera's Back

1. As of today, both of my sisters have started blogs. Yesterday, I mentioned Silver Valley Girl. Her blog is here. Now Inland Empire Girl has started her blog. It is here. (Will Mom be next?)

2. I succeeded this morning in my role as the man whose windows are so beautiful that people from up and down the street gawk at them and I come out of the house and look puzzled and then say, "Oh! The windows! Mark and Company did them." I then walk toward my car. Bryan, who produced the commercial, filmed our performance of *Othello* tonight and I talked with him before the play. He gave the shoot a huge thumbs up and said editing the commercial is going very well already.

3. *Othello* closed tonight to a beyond capacity full house and as I left the stage during our curtain call I could see tears in audience members' eyes and saw looks of awe as the standing ovation formed and cries of "Bravo!" rang through the theater.

Bonus beautiful Thing: I went to LCC's Lost and Found yesterday and there was my camera. The thought of having to buy a new one was fun, but I'm glad I have my familiar one back.

Three Beautiful Things 02/12/07: Nap, Copia, Bach in Kellogg

1. Exhausted from late nights and mental effort in playing *Othello*, I had the afternoon free and took a restorative nap.

2. My students wrote wonderfully insightful components to a single sentence about *Into Thin Air* that covered the whole blackboard!

3. Burning copies of the Goldberg Variations for my students made me think of the time I took a long walk in Kellogg while my dad was terminally ill and Glenn Gould brought me relief from my worry and sadness.

Three Beautiful Things 02/09/07 : Dog Grooming, Television Commerical, Poetry

1. Beth, Snug's groomer, was very happy with how cooperative Snug was while being groomed and said Snug was her favorite client for the day. (She said this at about 11:30, so the day was young, but still.....!)

2 . I heard someone was looking for me before *Othello* started tonight. It was my former student, Bryan. He runs a video production company. He's been hired by a window cleaning outfit(I think that's what he said) to shoot a commercial on Saturday. He asked me to be in it, so I get to try out another new avenue of acting.

3. Reading Palestinian poetry today in ENG 106 gave all of us the experience of looking at the experience of living in Palestine from a poetic perspective, very different than always seeing it as political.

Three Beautiful Things 01/29/07: Catharsis, Deportee, Soda

1. Matt plays the Duke in Othello. He's done early in the play. He watched the play tonight past his departure. He wept three times during the production. He wept as he told the cast how powerful he found their performance. He said people who saw this production would be better human beings. We witnessed catharsis taking place in our fellow actor Matt.

2. I might be able to help Vasil not get deported to the Republic of Georgia.

3. During our dress rehearsal tonight I changed out of costume and put on my street clothes so I could go out to the pop machine and purchase and drink a Diet Pepsi. We are not to leave the building or drink anything but water while in costume.

Othello: Off Stage

While audiences pay, of course, to watch what happens on stage at a play, I enjoy what happens off stage during the building and performance of a show. The only thing I don't enjoy is off-stage love drama when members of a cast start up romances or when cast members end romances during a show's run. But, short-term intimacies are inevitable within a cast and I accept such will happen.

Here, in these pictures, is what I'm interested in. It begins with the technical dimensions of the play. Whereas the actors provide the heart and soul of a play, tech. provides the spine. Without this spine, the actors' work would collapse.

The big props get built in the prop shop:

Like this bed.

The pillows on the bed where Othello murders Desdemona are red, at least in rehearsal, and suggest the violence gushing out of Othello's jealous soul, even though his murder of her is bloodless:



If we could perform this play in black and white, then the red pillows would be black and match the color of the murdering Othello's skin color as well as suggest the color of mourning:




Where does the tech crew place the bed on stage? Spike tape tells them where:


The action is illuminated by dusty, ordinary looking lights:

Gels are often placed over the lights to create numerous effects by casting a variety of colors onto the action and the props:



The lights are run from the light board:


Large props come from the prop shop and small ones from the prop box:



Like this bell whose ringing tells the audience that alarm and chaos have taken over (note, too, that actors and techies also enjoy marking walls with comments):

It's hard to have chaos and fighting without swords:

This lantern brings the smallest light to a very dark and deadly scene:

Off stage, some actors spend off time reading sheet music:

Some study the play's script:



Others prefer lighter fare:


Some are sustained by water:


Others by Pepsi:


Pizza is popular:


Many enjoy junk food:



And last Sunday, some of us wanted to keep an eye on the Patriots/Colts game; no matter that the reception in the concrete bunker of our downstairs theater foyer was not so good:



What else do the actors of Othello do while off stage?

Chip decided to be emo, and asked me to snap a photo of him:


Ramsey was reading until the sight of Chip swinging Shena around arrested his attention:


Tyler studiously keeps a journal:

Karyssa covers her eyes and looks inward:


Scott reads a magazine:


And I left the green room for a while and experimented taking self-portrait pictures:

Three Beautiful Things 01/23/07: Knight, Tech, the Dancing Machine

1. When Texas Tech basketball coach Bob Knight feels secure and isn't under (perceived) attack, he is a pleasure to listen to. Driving home from school today, I listened to Dan Patrick talk with him and enjoyed it. At his best, Knight is an engaging, perceptive, intelligent, self-depracating guy and the dark side recedes.

2. Slowly, patiently, and, I think, surely the tech. dimension is taking shape in our production of Othello. I love seeing the props, sound cues, movement of props and other tech things fall into place. It's as if a play has a triple spine or backbone: script, acting, tech. When all three click together it's genuinely awesome.

3. Starr Kelso posted a video of Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine from the Gong Show at his blog. Watching it before I left for school today got me revved up for work. Man. I loved the Gong Show!

Three Beautiful Things 01/22/07: Costumes, Recovery, Angel

1. Othello costume parade. So much color! So much variety! So much genius!

2. Snug is recovering nicely. His wound already looks better. He's wiped out. So am I! He is wanting to be physically closer to me, even more than usual. I hate having to leave the house to go to work. I want to be home with Snug while he gets his feet back under him.

3. Angel came by today to ask for a recommendation for financial aid at the U of Oregon. It is very gratifying to think that a few words of support on her behalf might result in this lovely, intelligent student having a slightly easier row to hoe if the University will financially aid her.

Three Beautiful Things 01/21/07: Snug Injury, Photo Taking, Wucky

1. Snug and I went to the Emergency Vet Hospital to make sure a wound Snug suffered at the swiping paw of a cat wasn't too serious. Dr. Mark McConnell treated Snug: he's a University of Idaho grad and I had on my North Idaho College hoodie and we had a good talk about Idaho. The best news is that Snug did not suffer serious injury.

2. We had an eight hour rehearsal today for Othello. I took Snug with me and we had a lot of free time to walk together and I took a lot of pictures. I enjoyed most taking pictures of the sculpture of the small boy in the huge chair with a tree growing out of his head.

3. Rick Wainwright, one of my favorite friends when I was in junior high and early high school commented on my blog post about the 1970 Kellogg-Wallace baseball season. (The picture at the top of that post is of the 1971 team.)

Three Beautiful Things 01/19/07: Back to Poetry, Othello Surgery, Into the Wild

1. Thanks to the blizzards and ice storms and quarter inches of snow that befell Eugene over the last ten days, my Intro to Poetry class met today for the first time since last Wednesday and I loved discussing poetry again with my students.

2. The play Othello needs some trimming and I helped Sparky and Will go through the play and make some judicious cuts here and there to further reduce the play's run time.

3. Kelly dropped me an email to say that she had picked up a copy of Into the Wild at Smith Family Bookstore and loved reading it. I was thrilled that she enjoyed this book. It has been one of my favorite books to teach and to reflect upon over the last five to six years.

No Longer a Shakespeare Scholar

Twenty-five years ago I was, in the small world of the University of Oregon's English Graduate Program, a promising scholar of Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama in England. For several ensuing years, I read Shakespeare scholarship, studied Shakespeare under terrific professors, attended a few national and international conferences of Shakespeare scholars. I became a teacher of Shakespeare at Whitworth College, the University of Oregon, and Lane Community College.

To me, what has marked much of my study, my attempts at writing, and my teaching during these past twenty-five years has been a lack of immediacy in my experience with Shakespeare.

My experience with his plays became so heavily guided or mediated by the writings of scholars and the instruction of my professors, that I often found myself wondering whether I was really working with Shakespeare's plays or if I was experiencing the writing about his plays come to life.

I went to many many performances of Shakespeare's plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Often, in watching the performances, my mind was so crowded by interpretations I had read of the plays, that I came to the performances with fixed ideas of what the plays ought to convey. For example, when I went to the play *Othello*, I had a fixed idea, largely formed by reading scholarship, of who the character Othello ought to be and had trouble enjoying portrayals that did not fit with my preconceived ideas.

I had some confidence in these preconceptions because they had the stamp of scholarship on them.

I am playing a very small role in *Othello* right now. I am watching more than acting. I am having a glorious experience. Because I have not been reading much *Othello* scholarship and because what I have read has receded from my immediate consciousness, I am having this unusual and most welcome experience of having this play come alive as if I've never seen or studied it before.

I have lost any preconceived notion of who or what the character Othello ought to be. Therefore, as I see Will, our production's Othello, develop this character, I'm seeing an Othello I've never really imagined before come to life. I can't be specific right now, but I'm seeing a whole different physical Othello, an Othello with mannerisms, facial expressions, emotional qualities at particular times in the play I have never thought about before.

It is exhilirating to experience this learning about Othello come from a live embodiment of this character as Will brings him alive. Will is reading lines in ways I've never heard them. I'm hearing words, lines, passages in ways I've never heard them.

When I was a scholar, I would have assessed Will's creation of this character based on what I'd read. Now, since I've resigned my scholarly pursuits, I am not assessing. I am seeing and enjoying an Othello come to life as Will creates him. It's a new Othello. I'm not measuring this Othello against a literary understanding of the character. I am enjoying him as he emerges, accepting him just as Will creates him.

In other words, I'm having a more immediate experience with this character and with this play than I ever did when I studied it in my office. I'm not thinking of the character or the play in terms of a class essay or in terms of interpreting the character or the play for a class of students. I'm simply experiencing the wonder of this complex creation of Shakespeare and Will.

I find it very hard to teach Shakespeare as literature any more. It has been the lifeblood of my professional life, and it seems an insufficient undertaking to me. I want to be a part of the immediate life of these plays and that occurs in performance, in being a part of seeing the play's production come alive in every aspect, from the boards and nails to the moving bodies creating action.

Maybe I'll get scholarly again with Shakespeare. I don't know. But, for now, I want to learn more about these plays from being a part of plays being produced and from acting. It's more immediate. It's more unpredictable. It's more risky. It is, in the end, for me, more alive.

Three Beautiful Things 01/16/07: Popcorn, King, Othello

1. I got too excited about making popcorn tonight and the top of the air popper blew off because of the kernel volume. I had to laugh at myself for my eagerness and promised to be more popcorn moderate next time.

2. The temperature in my 8:30 WR 115 classroom was 57 degrees. It was snowing outside. The campus was on the brink of shutting down, and did at ten o'clock. And, yet, in spite of the distractions of cold, snow, and closure, my students got involved in learning about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and made excellent contributions to discussion. You won't catch me complaining about "these students today". My students today were wonderful and were wonderful in less than appealing conditions.

3. I watched a rough but moving run through of the last half of Act V of our production of Othello. It was moving. I felt an upsurge of emotion for the power of the acting and of confidence that we are going to have a very good show.

Three Beautiful Things 12/20/06: Sam, Snug, Hanky

1. Turns out that my brother-in-law's cousin at Vandal Sense and I are not only distantly related, but have a lot to correspond about in relation to Kellogg. His father is three years younger than I and his mother lived a block away from me in Kellogg. Our correspondence is new and already very interesting. How fun!

2. Othello director Sparky gave me a little stuffed lion for Christmas to commemorate playing Lion as Snug the Joiner in our 2005 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream which she also directed.

3. I watched Tara and Ben play their Emelia and Iago handkerchief scene today and, with six weeks to go until the play hits the boards, they are off book and exploring all kinds of sexual tension and gamesmanship between the two characters. It was sublime watching them play today. I tingled.

Three Beautiful Things 12/19/06: Jealousy, Merry Christmas, Writing

1. Othello director Sparky has visual amazements in store for audiences who see our show this February and she sent me jpg's of some of the sensual, sensuous, frightening images that audiences will see during this production.

2. I bought dog food and cat food today and the woman working the counter showed genuine interest in my upcoming travels to Kellogg. I took a risk. I wished her Merry Christmas. She wished me the same. My leapt with joy at the exchange.

3. Reviewing writing my fall English Composition students finished fills me with satisfaction as I read their improved eloquence and deeper intelligence.

Three Beautiful Things 12/17/06: Merry Christmas, Christmas Gift, Ruth Ames

1. Having Scott appreciate my post "You'd Think Stalin Was Coming to Town" and, at the end of rehearsal, he loudly, enthusiastically, heartily, and sincerely wished me a Merry Christmas. It was among the first such "Merry Christmas" greetings I've shared with anyone in Eugene this year. It felt good.

2. Buying the Deke a new digital camera and anticipating the enjoyment she'll have taking pictures of our dogs as well as the children she works with teaching music. I'm also hoping she'll express her wonderful and often caustic wit through her new camera.


3. Tonight, because she was working on her own, I appreciated how Ruth Ames is doing a first-rate job assisting in the direction of Othello. She is clear in her directions, helps keep Sparky aware of production details and what time it is, does her best to chase down tardy and absent actors, and helps free up Sparky to give her best attention to helping actors and to her exercising her rich imagination.