Swell

More of a question than a statement.

One Year The Milkweed (1944), Arshile Gorky

Last night I had a dream that I was in a play. I was hoping for a big part but instead I had one line, written in all caps on a piece of white cardboard, no context provided, no script available. My line was:

A NEW SWELL, AT LEAST.

My character was a nameless woman standing next to a man with a name. I was a wife. I was supposed to look into the river and deliver my one line.

A NEW SWELL, AT LEAST.

In the dream, I practiced my line a few different ways, trying to figure out which way sounded the least fake, the least hammy, the most natural, the most heartfelt.

A NEW swell, at least.

A new swell! At least…

A new SWELL, at least.

I wasn’t sure my line was holding enough weight, adding enough meaning. So I searched for the director. When I found her, I discovered that she was my high school chorus teacher. I told her that I wanted to rewrite my line to give it a little more flair, a little more poetic thrust. I just needed a few minutes to rework it, to sit with the words and experiment with them.

The director looked at me in disbelief. I suddenly understood that this play was written by one of the great masters. I couldn’t rewrite his words or improve them. No one could. The play was a timeless classic. My job was to deliver my one line exactly as written and then get the hell out of the way. My role was WIFE, a woman who stands next to a man, a woman in the crowd who cries out an observation

“A new swell at least!”

and then disappears and is forgotten.

I could say my line any damn way I wanted and no one would fucking care. My delivery could be casual or disapproving, skeptical or optimistic. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t affect anything or make any difference at all.

a new swell at least

When I woke up, I lay in bed and thought about how plays are written by people trying to figure out the meaning of life. What an amazing way to spend your time! Why wasn’t I a playwright? Did it never occur to me to even try?

When I was growing up, a playwright was always a man who already had a name. A playwright was a man with a typewriter and a script full of pages, so many pages full of typed words. A woman could only hope for one scrap of white cardboard with five words scrawled on it IN ALL CAPS.

I could’ve been a playwright, I thought. Playwrights are just people who care about the meaning of life!

I imagined myself as a playwright, sitting at an old wooden table with a typewriter on it, smoothing my hands across the wood surface so I could feel its melodies pulsing under my palms. The world is an infinite mosaic of melodic molecules, I thought, vibrating at different speeds, in different rhythms. This thought propelled me out of bed.

A new swell, at least.

***

Today I’m a different person than I was yesterday. My ego has returned from a long trip to a far away land. There are white and gray clouds drifting toward the yard, over the tall oak trees, vibrating with the promise of rain. I can feel the pulse of this day. I can rewrite every masterpiece, and give any faceless sidekick a starring role.

The sleeping dead love me better like this, savage and selfish. They want to tell me about floods and feasts, famines and festivals, rising tides and stars floating alone in deep space, waiting for the right moment to return, maybe not in this century, maybe under a Leo moon, maybe when the birds agree on a date, maybe after you lose your best lines and win the wretched, unbearable truth.

I promise the dead that I’ll take more risks.

It’s not always the same thing over and over, they say. You just forgot how to listen. The noise in your head blocked our signal.

I’ll listen more closely I tell them. I’ll treasure silence over reason. I’ll prioritize emptiness over fullness. What does it mean to search for fullness anyway? The second you start looking for it, determined to trace your previous path, to repeat the same patterns and achieve the same rewards, you become a clumsy algorithm, a hasty robot, a malfunctioning appliance, trying to reproduce the same old results at any cost.

I can’t keep aiming for transcendence, for genius, for immortality. I can’t keep writing for an indifferent audience, ignored at worst and misinterpreted at best.

Today I’ll write for the hopeful dead instead, wide awake under the gravel driveway, swimming carelessly through the tree tops, waiting patiently behind these walls for their chance to interject a memory or an emotion into my pages. I’m waiting and listening. I’m patient and empty.

How many carbs are in a falafel? I wonder, anxiously filling the void, and the spirits recoil.

Don’t gather facts, they say. Sit with the unbearable truth.

***

When you don’t stay tuned to the vibrations around you, you start to let other people’s misunderstandings of you become your identity. You mimic other people’s methods and processes and delivery systems. You aim to speed up production and eliminate redundancies. You look to your smart phone and your smart watch for answers until you’re pretty sure that these objects are smarter than you are.

You’re wrong. Only stupid objects are programmed to chase certainty. Imaginative subjects explore the unknown.

Stubborn robots pretend to be sure of things they’ll never understand from a very early age. They perform inquiry so gracefully, a mesmerizing fan dance to disguise their naked prejudices. Remember how she told me how I felt, where I stood, what I had been through, and what I’m still struggling with now?

I sat there in silence, marveling at her conviction, waiting for her words to finally hit on something real and true, but it never happened. Eventually I realized that she was describing her own fears, draped in flattering concern and compassion: It’s so hard for someone in your position to accept someone in my position.

What is my position? I wondered, adrift on her unknowable assumptions about me. What’s my motivation in this scene? What are my lines? What role have I been assigned this time? Then I remembered what she was really saying: It’s so hard for someone in my position to accept someone in your position.

People who refuse to take a position are always describing where other people stand. But that’s never been me. Why not just ask me how I feel? Why not just get to know me, instead of trying to seem like someone I should know? Is this vibrating world just a painted backdrop for your private melodramas?

If so, I’ll send you love from a great distance instead, like the sleeping dead, who move through this mosaic whispering about endless droughts and monsters storms, batterings and lashings, devastation and dread. And when you finally ask for what you want plainly, when you finally give yourself a name and a face and the right to your own desires, when you finally stop wondering what sounds the least fake, the least hammy, the most natural, the most heartfelt, that’s when you’ll understand what’s real and how precious it is.

You will lose your best lines and win the wretched, unbearable truth, that we are all vibrating at different speeds, in different rhythms, and you can’t presume to know a thing about anyone else. You are only alive for so long, and the world will remain unknowable until you’re dead and gone.

Still, you’ll dare to ask better and better questions

and you’ll dare to ask for what you want.

You’ll ask because

each ask

is

a new swell at least.

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