September 20, 2001
On Tuesday, Sept. 18, I organized a theatre event for 90 students and friends to see Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
An evening spent in the magic, hilarity and the sweet themes of romantic love was for most of us a return to beauty and humanity. We were pillowed in the questions of love’s enchantment. The sublime silliness of Titania, queen of faeries, with Bottom the mule headed actor/weaver brought again the reality of imagination and its power. We need dreams and fantasy. We need imagination liberated from the restraints of reason. Yet we need reason to experience the vision and give meaning to imagination.
Where from here do we go? The line, “So bright things come to Confusion” took on new meaning after the tragic events of September 11.
In the play, the character named Bottom, an actor with a large ego, suddenly finds his head transformed into that of a mule. He is awakened after a love sequence with the faerie queen, Titania, and looking about, confused, his head back to normal, he thinks he must have dreamed the experience. Words fail him. He can’t describe what happened. He delivers a funny speech, distorting the words of I Corinthians 2:9: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was." He decides he’ll have Peter Quince, the carpenter, write a song, or a ballad about it. He hopes art will succeed where ordinary language fails.
Author Tim O’Brien said in a NY Times article (9/20/01) that no author can completely escape the imprint of the attack on America horror of September 11. Author Ward Just in the same article said, "The week’s occurrences [of September 11] will be there in the pentimento of the future, in the shadow of the picture within the picture, like when you are looking at a Matisse and the landscape is often painted over a previous work -- you
Can’t see it, but it is there somehow."
Stephen King stuffed earphones into his ears to block out the sound of the television news the morning the tragedy took place. He continued to write his current book through it all because, he said, "... if everybody continues working, they -- the terrorists – don’t win."
As frolicking in the full moon on Midsummer Eve with sprites who bring lovers to lasting happiness balanced out our grief a bit, perhaps Bottom had it right. The moments in the theatre allowed us suspension of time and place for a sigh, for a smile -- before returning to the fractured world outside. And perhaps Stephen King speaks of the place of the artist in this hour. Can art succeed where ordinary communication fails? Let us be back to our work.
NEXT TIME: January's THE WRITING LIFE: The artist, Louise Bourgeois, at age 90, made the statement recently at her opening in New York, "Art is a guarantee of sanity."
Do you agree? See you next time.
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