Wow, Alice, this leaves me speechless.
m
----- Original Message -----
From: weeklong-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
<weeklong-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
To: weeklong-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <weeklong-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tue Aug 17 05:22:59 2010
Subject: Re: [Weeklong-l] "...let the world slip, we shall ne'er be
younger."
Oh, Clayton, we were ALL meant to be traipsing through your front yard at 1
am last night. My plane flew WAY off course.
I am slowly beginning to process all this myself, just watching moments
float by in my head, and tearing up from emotional complexity, or is it from
simple love and lack of all your company and the project of the words that
has me going?
As it always does, Winedale widened my field of inspiration to keep me
connected to it, and to you. On the plane I picked up Marilynne Robinson's
extraordinary novel Gilead, a book-length letter from an old man who nears
Doc's capacity to hold the world in love. He is a preacher who is the son of
a preacher who is the son of a preacher, writing of his life in 1950 to his
seven-year-old son, whom he knows he will not see grow up. Passage after
passage spoke of the experience we had just shared. Here's one. I'll trust
that the "spiritual but not or no longer religious" among us, and I count as
one, might appreciate it together:
"Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the
audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us
artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of
as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well
do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? ....
Well, we all bring such light to bear on these great matters as we can. I do
like Calvin's image, though because it suggests how God might actually enjoy
us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into
understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's
enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course..."
A resident at the artist colony where I work produced the attached
improvised call and response duet between an Irishman and a Lakota man. You
might want to play it with speakers rather than just on your computer. Both
songs are, in the singers' respective cultures, songs of exile. Their
singing it together marked a moment of suspension of bitter feelings between
the two cultures; witnesses felt a lifting of burden. It feels like exile to
me to be away from you. But this says that in a more beautiful way.
Again from Gilead: "So you must not judge what I know by what I find words
for."
Alice
From: Clay Stromberger
<cstromberger(a)mail.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: <weeklong-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:01:16 -0500
To: <weeklong-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: 'Bekah Meyer' <rmeyer(a)mail.hockaday.org>
Subject: Re: [Weeklong-l] "...let the world slip, we shall ne'er be
younger."
Aw, hell. I was doing okay until I started reading all these heartbreakingly
eloquent emails. I think I had fooled myself into thinking that you guys were
all just on a particularly long run to the Mercantile. I'm still wondering
why I didn't see Zig traipsing through my front yard at 1 a.m. last night
while I lay out on the hammock and tried to gaze up at the stars, which was
damn near impossible because they were mostly washed out by the city glare. I
knew the Milky Way was up there somewhere in all its dazzling glory, just as I
knew the Barn was sitting out in that meadow in the night, eloquent in its
dark silhouette and its deep silence, and that all of you were in your homes
or in a way station on the way to that destination, replaying the week in your
minds as I was.
Family life and its particular challenges took over immediately after an
hour-and-a-half drive through the late-afternoon heat in that
un-air-conditioned Volvo, and I'm trying to experience all the cleaning and
work and play going on here (a nephew in town from Massachusetts staying with
us for a week) as an extension of the lovely Sunday morning we spent cleaning
the Barn, and of everything that led up to that final moment. But I'm really
craving time to process the week in some way. And really really missing each
one of you, and all the characters you inhabited and brought once more to
life. For some reason I miss Justice Shallow most of all right now...!
Augie once said, when a Camper was talking about a wave of feeling homesick,
that it was the "worst sick of all." I think my heavy heart is telling me
I'm
homesick for a place that is a home to me, to all of us. A home for the soul.
But it's not a place we can live forever. I felt that particularly keenly as
I drove away and left Joy, red-eyed, as the final Weeklonger at the Barn,
sitting out in the shade on a picnic table awaiting the arrival of her
husband. I think of Antipholus S., heading out into the world, a drop of
water seeking another drop. And yet I'm home now, too, where I belong. It's
a paradox, one we are fortunate to be able to tangle (tango) with over the
years, decades.
I hope to gather with some more of you water drops and get a storm or a little
stream (clear, I hope) going sometime soon. Zig, thanks for the invite, with
the nephew in town I probably can't get away, but will try to negotiate a
swing-by at least.
I'll write more anon. In the meantime, still wondering if I'm sleeping or
waking, mad or well advised... and when Madge is going to come around the
corner so we can work on the schedule for tomorrow!
A health to you all -- and to those that you love --
Love,
Clayton
PS Bob, say hi to Cicely H. for me, would ya?
On Aug 16, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Bruce Meyer wrote:
I, too, returned to the 'real world" at
0630 today to deal with recruitment
strategies, cost over-runs, and unrealistic expectations. I will admit that I
am having a very hard time not speaking in meter, not singing for my supper,
and not sweating through my clothes and "checking my stream". Bob put it
eloquently. I am already in withdrawal from the magic....
>> "Pees, Robert"
<rpees(a)AkinGump.com> 8/16/2010 11:39 AM >>>
This morning I returned to my job as a tinker of sorts. I took the D Train,
which, by the way, is not "fleeter than the roe." For me, last week was
exhilarating-to have such wonderful people convince you that you are a lord
indeed is true magic. I am so grateful to all of you. Right now I'm typing
this in an office on the forty-first floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, but it
is not nearly as high as the throne you created for me on a wooden platform
in a converted hay barn in Fayette County Texas.
All my love,
Bob
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Clayton Stromberger
Outreach Coordinator, UT Shakespeare at Winedale
College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin
www.shakespeare-winedale.org
cell: 512-228-1055, cell #2 (backup): 512-363-6864
UT Sh. at W. office: 512-471-4726
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