Date: 2005-01-24
To: the green room - part I
Miles today: 0.0

Much of this entry comes from an email written to Scholar, with whom I¢ve been corresponding. She¢s thoughtful and funny and I very much look forward to meeting her. Some of this entry comes from an email written to Longhaul, of whom the same things are true. I don¢t think either of them would mind my revisiting some of that correspondence here, especially since it touches on topics I¢ve been wanting to discuss here.If you¢ve been reading along so far, you already know that I have passions mixed in nearly equal parts for both the arts and the outdoors. For the past year or so, I've been thinking a lot about the way in which we, as a culture, tend to think and talk about these two things, and why we involve ourselves with them, and why that involvement is important, and what it gives us socially and personally. And what I've found ¢ at least informally - is that the language people use to talk about what we tend to think of as two radically disparate categories is strikingly similar, whether that language is in the vocabulary of neurology and flow states in the brain, or the vocabulary of community and subculture and belonging, or the vocabulary of social and environmental change, or the vocabulary of religion and divinity and mindfulness. In everyday terms: They are different things, but often done for the same reasons.Scholar wrote, an entry or two ago, about the intense experience she had writing her senior college thesis, and how she cleared her writer¢s block by going for a walk. I laughed when I read her description of the writing process, as I told her, because it rang so familiar. My senior year I'd been putting off writing and putting off writing, and finally spring break rolled around at the end of March and with much cursing I told myself that it was absolutely, no more game-playing, finally time to write the d***d thing, both because it was very nearly due and also because I had recently been cast in a show, and knew that as soon as break ended, I would be busy in rehearsals every night.My three roommates had all dispersed to various locations for the break, so it was me, alone in our house, and the heating system was temperamental at best, but no matter: every day for nine days I sat down at the computer and said, "okay skippy. you're not going anywhere or doing anything till you've written ten more pages. suck it up." And usually I'd manage to finish the day's allotment by 7 or so, and I'd reward myself with a walk to the local video store, pick out a movie, walk back home, eat dinner while watching whatever mindless entertainment I'd picked out, and crash, only to repeat the next day. And those evening walks, as I told her - well, let me tell you, New England in March ain't so pretty, but it was like walking in heaven after all that intense and focused sitting: the air, the space, the motion. Anyway, thinking back on that week, the funny thing is this: though it wasn't remotely physically sustainable, the way I lived that week - i.e. I'd be a blithering wreck if I tried to keep that up long-term - there was still something intensely exciting about thinking so much and so fully about one general topic, about following all those mental tangents, about having a time and space cleared out in my life where all I had to do, all I had to worry about, was this one thing, and to find all the myriad places it could take me. Strangely exhilarating. And the kicker is that it was an exhilaration not entirely different in nature (sic) from the exhilaration I¢ve felt after climbing mountains.Both exhilarations reside, maybe, in a kind of freewheeling focus, the one being primarily intellectual and the other primarily physical, but both rooted in a deeply felt presence and attention paid to the physical body, the temporal moment, the immediate idea. And as Scholar pointed out, mind and body are reciprocally related - so there is that, too.So there it is, again, in yet different language, the reason why I¢ve always loved the theater: it yields the same exhilaration as the other two, in yet a third manifestation. It's been, for me, an intellectual and emotional and artistic high, but in a medium that is entirely dependent on being physically present and focused. An actor's body is her tool and instrument. So - intellect, emotion, art, exhilaration - but through the physical body. As expressed by who I am, where I am, how I am. It makes so much sense to me. It seems so - there's that word again! - natural. And so again: a private conviction that my love for the arts and my love for the outdoors are in many ways the same thing. When Scholar responded, she wrote, ¢ I think that any form of artistic expression carries that union of the physical and the emotional and the intellectual. I suspect it's just more pronounced, more evident in acting. But art, in any form, is physical -- whether it's acting, or dancing, or pottery, or painting, there's a physical component, a physical act. Any time you create something, you imbue it with a piece of yourself -- on a literal level, the physical investment of time, labor, sweat, energy; on a spiritual, emotional,¢¦ level, it becomes a physical extension, a manifestation of you.¢ She¢s right, of course; entirely so. What interest me are the ways in which we remember that fact, and the ways in which we take it for granted. ¢Imaginary journeys can lead to real places,¢ writes Neil Stannard. After all this, what, then, this plan to walk? This trail, leading onwards and forward?A little. A nothing. A world. An endeavor that means, in the end, exactly as little or as much as you choose to make of it. Still: I am here.