'Interiors'

As I'm down to my last two days in Boulder, my mind is clear enough to maybe start writing and journaling about what's going on in my head. Last night, I watched 'Michael Clayton' with the commentary on, listening to Tony Kilroy and his editor brother talking about their movie. 'Michael Clayton' is a pretty brilliant movie, and when you listen to the commentary of Kilroy's first time directing, its pretty stunning to hear. It took him six years to finally get the movie made, and I found that in a strange way I could identify with everything he was saying, not only about making the movie, but also knowing and listening to that screenplay five or six times. He's another film maker who throws in commentary about plays, so I'm assuming that was where he got his start, writing plays. So many of the actors he has cast in the movie were also theatre actors, or both film and theatre, and boy does he give them something to chew on. If I was an actor getting in a film like that would be pretty exciting, as the scenes are so compelling and structured so nicely. After years of writing plays, when I'm watching a movie the second or third time, I can listen and watch the words go down on the page, and this guy, you can tell has done it lots.

I've also been thinking lots about my current situation, and the struggle of the interior life, and facing and thinking about how much of my current catastrophe is of my own doing and how much of it I had little or no control of. Of course there is much of the interior that attempts to shield the facts of the matter, that I came close to dying, and in fact having someone tell me that I did die going to the hospital. Although I've been close to death much in my life, I can't wrap my mind around this one yet, as it seems like I had a bad nightmare and woke up in a completely different world, with new friends, new ways of looking at things, and the loss of what little possessions I owned. I had a vision of me walking away, much like the one on my facebook page, with a guitar and a bag with a change of clothes. I didn't know where I was walking to, but the walk was direct and still firm and strong. When I was listening to Tony Kilroy talk about Michael Clayton, my interior came very much alive, and I did realize that the reason I'm still walking and breathing is to keep creating, and to somehow get my mind and body back into a place where I can do these things once again. The word, 'interior' keeps coming to me over and over, and I've come to a realization that one's interior life is so often in conflict with the exterior one, that so often in life they aren't matching at all. I was on the phone with Mato yesterday once again talking about getting a play up in Los Angeles, and he said to me, "Raymond, how is it that you are sitting there in your truck talking about getting a play up in Los Angeles when you've just lost all your possessions and you almost died?!" My response was curious, at least in my own interior, "because that is what I know how to do…" And then another funny thought from the movie The Gladiator, "There was a dream that was once Rome…" I'm finding that in fact, except for short periods of time, my exterior life is so very scant, with a few hours here and there of music and art that sustain me, but, still with a rich interior life that I find that I often can't find outlets to articulate. It has occurred to me the last couple of days that we all have these diverse interior lives that so often don't match up with each other. And for me, right now, the interior life has some really broken edges, especially in how to just manage doing the next right thing to survive. Its as though I've taken my interior life so far into asking the 'big questions', that I can't execute the simply ones. Its as though I have to get to these places of disaster to 'start up' the simple ones again. I was talking to my Aunt Renon about the man who continues to walk in front of the bus, even though that most peoples reason would lead them to believe that walking in front of a moving bus is never a good idea. But my interior life doesn't remember the last bus wreck. There is no logic to it, only confusion. So the man wakes up in the hospital once again having walked in front of the bus. Or is it just that the man can never see the bus coming? My God, the scenarios are endless.

I also had a long talk with my cousin, explaining to her this same scenario, and I did understand how that after awhile, no one wants to watch another bus accident. I said, "You only have to remove yourself from the scene of the accident, but can you imagine being the man? As my Dad would say, "It's a goddamned disaster…" Still, in the same way that watching this occur time after time from those around the accident prone man, the man also has to eventually say, "Well, maybe I better get back to the people who understand bus wrecks…" Or in my case, I keep lighting fires…

I also started reading the biography of Genet, again, as always, the interior life seems to know how to start preparing for another grand adventure, as if it will use everything from the latest wreck to create something from the ashes. Genet, like so many writers, died with one change of clothes, his life's chronology was fairly simple but sorrowfully rendered. It seems like he was only alive when he was creating. I was also trying to explain to my cousin what the last five years of my life has been like. The struggle to rise above and win a battle where the timing is completely wrong, (the exterior) where the expertise is there but not the means, (also exterior), where the interior is crystal clear, firm, and direct, but the vision of walking and breathing and creating, and living, is seemingly all done in the frame of a window of a house no one lives in. You could only see it if you happen to walk by and see movement in the window. Inside the house, there is something terrifically compelling happening, but simple living its not. (interior) I did have one very clear idea that came to me this morning, and that was that my interior life really does know what its doing, and has been doing it along time. If I can prevent the sabotage of the exterior life from destroying it, I do have a third act of resolution, and it is compelling, and it will wrap up my life. I think sometimes the artist at my age is constantly struggling with the idea that "okay, enough is enough…" that even though so much of the work has been done, framed in the window of a house nobody really lives in, to the interior of the man who has witnessed it, it is enough. I often struggle with the exit of my life, another vision of a stack of thirty plays, essays, and poems, on a kitchen table of a furnished room, (none of it mine, exterior) with a note that says, "Here it is, my life's work, and there is a life here…really…" It’s a funny existential thought, that the pages and pages of writing are only momentarily filled with color, and the history of it is hidden in some back room of and endless series of rooms that no one ever walks in…

The last thoughts of the day are in regard to loyalty and respect. It is not necessary for all of us to examine our own lives unless there is sufficient belief in an importance of one life and what it is compelled to do or say. That is the job of the artist, to examine not just his own life but the lives of others. I do believe that an artists life can get so muddied up that he does stop examining the lives of others and commenting, and the life becomes self absorbed in crisis and destruction, but there is a certain protection he must have from those who really do support art and its making. The creator can never give up on the act of creation, and those who participate can never give up on the protection of creation. The participants of the creation have to continually strive to understand the interior life of the artist, or the connection is lost. If we can only participate in the creator's life when his interior and exterior life is sychronistic, then nothing will ever astonish, art becomes a luke warm exercise of the pretentious. I have recently lost many items that I cannot replace, but the impulse to create is never, never lost in me, its how I stay alive. I don't expect everyone I know and love to understand this, but perhaps we have just come to the parting of the road, and I can live with that, and I know that you can too. I'll rise again, and I'll probably fall again, but there is a reason for all of it, or is there?