Buddhism in Shakespeare

Posted 2:15 PM by sean
I am auditioning for Measure for Measure by George W. Shakespeare tomorrow, and I find myself in an interesting exercise. You take a passage of lines in Shakespeare's text, and you convert it to your own words. The idea is to a) figure out what the hell you're talking about and b) to show that the bard never wasted a word. You will never be able to translate him and use less words, he was that economical.

One of the sides (parts of the script chosen by the casting directors to prepare for an audition) is a scene where the Duke is talking to a prisoner. The prisoner has just told the Duke that he is praying for clemency, and that all he has to live on is hope or death. The Duke tells him to choose death over hope.

Here's the passage, with my translations

******
Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter.
(If you are probably going to be killed in the morning, it would be best to decide that death is what you want. If you manage to survive, awesome. If you get killed, then you'll be getting what you want.)

Reason thus with life:
(Yeah, I know, you can't really choose death. Okay, then think about life in the following way. Address the idea of "life" and say:)

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep:
(If life is taken from me, I've lost something that only fools would put too much stock in.)

a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,
Hourly afflict:
(Life is no more than the wind that comes out of you, and that weak-ass wind is affected by every single little disturbance in nature. Anything that happens from the farthest point in the sky to where you stand now can shift that breath off course, every single minute of every single day...)

merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun
And yet runn'st toward him still.
("Life" is, by definition, just postponing the inevitable. You're gonna die, death knows it. Every day that you delay death you are still spending one more day getting closer to it. In this way, choosing life is betraying the choice you will have to make one day anyway, you may as well choose it now.)

Thou art not noble;
For all the accommodations that thou bear'st
Are nursed by baseness.
("Life" is actually just a collection of the lowest acts that we are capable of. All of the higher aspects to being a man are actually in defiance of the urges that life pushes us towards.)

Thou'rt by no means valiant;
For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm.
(There is no bravery in continuing to live, this tenuous ridiculous existence that pales in the face of lying in our eventual crypt. Being alive, acting in fear of death, is cowardly.)

Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more.
(Your whole life, you're tired. The act of living is exhausting and the only time you aren't exhausted is when you sleep, something that you do all the time and wish you could do more of. Which is weird because death is no more than eternal peaceful rest, and you are terrified of that.)

Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust.
(There is no "life", pre se. The thing that you think of as life is actually just a mass of synapses and atoms that you've collected and control for a few years before the inevitable destruction arives and you have to let all those particles go back to the cosmos.)

Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,
And what thou hast, forget'st.
(There is no peace in existence. Every day is a struggle to deal with the shit you've already got and to try to get more shit. You don't even know what all shit you already *have* and yet you think by going out and getting *more* shit, somehow that will make you happy. And it never does.)

Thou art not certain;
For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,
After the moon.
(Every single day, life seems to be something different. There is no consistency in existence, it changes and shifts and splinters the same way that the moon is always in a different aspect and a different place in the sky.)

If thou art rich, thou'rt poor;
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.
(You can't take it with you where you're going, and you are going there. It doesn't matter how much wealth or stuff you amass, you're gonna lose it once you get to where you're going. Plus, the more stuff you think you have, the more relationships you have to manage, the more you share your life and others share their lives with you, the harder it is to make the journey.)

Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,
Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner.
(Look, even if you think there is some kind of good in life because you share it with the people you love, I've got news for you. Even your frickin' *kids* are gonna be old and miserable and die one day. If you leave your fortune and your stores of happiness to your friends, if you leave it to your offspring, there will be a day when they will be laid up with horrible pain and sores and they're gonna moan and turn over and say, "Christ, I wish I was just fucking *dead*.")

(There is an alternate view of these words which is "even your kids are hoping you'll die soon" and that may be closer to the text, but I'm not playing it that way.)

Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both;
(You can't ascribe any happiness to being alive and young, or alive and old, because the fact is whichever one you are, you are always wishing you had the other in a half-alive daze.)

for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld;
(When you are a kid, you're broke and you have to rely on the old people to provide for you, the whole time knowing that a) you're gonna become old one day and b) when you get old it's gonna suck.)

and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant.
(So now you're old, you have the money and prestige and power you had to beg for when you were a kid, but now you've totally lost your sex drive, you don't care about the people in your life, you have no energy or vitality and you look like shit, so what difference does it make that you have all this awesome stuff?)

What's yet in this
That bears the name of life?
(Seriously, how does it make any sense to choose anything else? There's nothing worth chosing in being alive.)

Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.
(And still, people don't realize all the ways that I just described life as a thousand times worse than death. We walk around terrified of the one thing that can bring us any kind of peace and rest. It's only in death that everything that is currently wrong with our lives can be made right.)
****

And when you do a Shakespeare play, or at least when I do, you translate every goddam line like that. It's actually sometimes a good idea to do with any play. Subtext, y'know, it's that chewy nougat center of the text.

We Buy With Our Hearts

Posted 10:34 AM by sean
My mom is suffering through a trip to Utah. She grew up a mormon, but has always been a political liberal in her heart so, regardless of her feelings about Jesus (or rather, because of them) she has a hard time being around the mormons any more. It's a tough job, believing yourself to be a rational person and being surrounded by religious zealots.

About ten years ago, when we were all still in college (or pretending to be) an arts professional of some kind came to speak at Carolina, to meet with the up and coming professionals. For some reason, the only two people who met with this dude were my best man Mac and my best wo-man Jordana. They joke about the meeting (he told Jordana to part her hair down the middle- y'know, for career success) but one thing that the guy said to Mac stayed with him and has haunted our conversations ever since. He said, "people don't buy intellectually. They buy emotionally and then justify the purchase intellectually."

And that's where we are with politics, religion and science. Do you go to church once a week? Then you are going to find a way to justify the war in Iraq. Because you are voting for the guy who says Jesus is his favorite philosopher. Do you never go to church? Then you are going to be against the war in Iraq. Because you are voting for the guy that will protect our civil rights regardless of theoretical moral imperatives.

But none of that has anything to do with the war in Iraq. Going to war in Iraq with little regard for the fiscal fall out to the United States is a *liberal* action. It is the *left* that has always raised their voices against imperialist governements, against tyrants who trample on the human rights of their people. We bitched and screamed during the 90s because Clinton wouldn't stop the bloodshed in Africa and Southern Europe.

(Don't fucking start with me, Iraq is a retarded war. Iraq should have been 17th on our list of countries to invade. We all know it, I'm not supporting the war. This war, I believe, will prove to be the undoing of America as a superpower, like when England tried to fight the French and the Americans at the same time in the 18teens. I love America, the idea, the points upon which our country was founded, and this war is going to prove to be the end of our great experiment. It won't happen overnight, but we are fucked, and it's because of this war. So don't get all up in my face, that's not my point.)

The real problem we have is that Bush attacked the muslims because he believed God told him to, and to avenge his father. It's all wonderful and Shakespearean, but those of us who don't believe that God speaks to people are outraged and terrified. If this man believes that the end of days is approaching, what's to stop him from making irrational decisions? If this man thinks that Jesus is coming back soon, he's going to act like there aren't another 250 thousand years before our planet gets too close to the sun for comfort. And we're horrified because we feel that Bush may not even be aware that our planet is round, let alone getting closer to the sun. And I'm pretty sure we're wrong about that, Bush knows a lot more than we give him credit for.

Now, I've got almost no common ground with Bush. It's weird, they've picked a guy to be president with whom I have *nothing* politically in common. His father was pro-choice and not terribly religious, Reagan was, y'know, in SAG, but this guy I don't think I could have a conversation with him. I don't understand the way his mind works, I don't understand why he says the things he does, I don't understand or agree with a single action he has taken since becoming president.

But I come by that with a shitload of reading. (Sometimes, knowing I'm an idiot works to my advantage, I have to do research or I'll be stuck there with my pants around my ankles). I don't agree with half of what Kerry wants to do, but I've also accepted that I'm an artist living in New York, married to a Jew, who played golf all day on Monday. I'm not a regular guy, and I have to accept that the country shouldn't bow to my will. I can't expect the full fiscal weight of the government would go toward creating lasting pieces of art at the expense of large corporations. I'll vote that way, but I know I'm in the minority.

I'm just trying to think before I buy. Don't call the president an idiot just because he believes that Jesus told him to invade Iraq. Almost everyone in America believes that God has talked to someone, and even those who don't, do believe in some kind of higher power that is helping them, leading them. Call him an idiot because he believes a war in Iraq will bring peace to America, which is stunningly wrong-headed. Never in history has this been true, and our President made his decision long before he had enough information to even make a guess.

All I'm asking is, are you saying he's an idiot because of the Jesus thing, or because of the bad policy thing? On the other hand, are you supporting the tax cuts and the war because you think they really have improved our lives, or is it because you think this man loves the same man you do? Or more, I'm not asking that question, I'm saying that it's an important distinction. It's important to cast our vote intellectually before we let ourselves justify it emotionally. When someone challenges you on your position, listen to what they're saying and then go do some research. It's got to be better than dismissing it out of hand, and it's the only chance we have of stopping the impending destruction of America.

Kindness

Posted 2:45 PM by sean
My family are a bunch of jerks, or so the conventional wisdom goes. We're all a gaggle of self interested, self obsessed navel gazers who feel massively entitled and who overestimate not only our talent and intelligence, but also the value of our opinions. We are the kind of people who put other people down in order to feel better about ourselves and we do strut around stinking of moral certainty. In short, because we are best in small doses, we see ourselves as Saffron, the most sought after and expensive spice, when actually we are probably more like chili powder, stinging and acrid in large amounts.

I should just end the blog right here.

The truth has no similarity to the fantasy, though. It is true that the five of us kids have a certain identity that a lot of other family's don't. We definitely see ourselves as offspring from a single source in a way that almost none of my other friends do. Which is strange, considering we don't share all the same biological parents, but we are definitely attached to each other. We are all in our thirties and forties, and yet we still try to spend Christmas morning opening presents in someone's living room together.

Pathetic, really.

Now, here's the truth...

Michelle is one of the most maternal and non-confrontational people I have ever known. She gathers people to her now in the same way she used to collect wounded souls even as a small child. She has actually given so much of herself during her life so often, that her reserves are starting to run out. It is physically impossible for her to stop caring about you, even if you're a jerk, sometimes especially if you're a jerk. If I were to go into a battle, Michelle, above any guy I know, is who I would take. And I mean an actual battle, a physical battle with guns and knives. Because I know Michelle would make the most humane decision at any moment, and I know she would never, never, never quit. She would die trying to carry me out of the jungle, she wouldn't know it was time to cut her losses. She has stayed at jobs and with fellas that weren't worth ten seconds of her time, but she did it because she cannot find a way to not care about the outcome.

Ian is best known for his constant womanizing, which is hilarious. Sure, he spent about ten years trying to get girls to like him, but that's ignoring the first 22 years when he was so completely bent sideways by his responsibilities to the people around him that he couldn't bring himself to even *kiss* a girl for fear of what it all might mean. Ian was a hopeless poet growing up, savaged by the ignorance and small mindedness of his grade school and junior high. It was Ian that told me, point blank, about how important it is to listen to people, to find common ground, and it was that lesson, more than anything else, that made me an actor. His life now is somewhat luxurious, but his casualness and so-called dilletantism has been earned with decades of loneliness and panic that he was keeping from everyone except whomever happened to share a bedroom with him in high school.

Steve has embraced his own curmudgeon-ness, doing his damnedest to try to reinforce the worst you might think of him. He *loves* being seen as the grouch. If I call him, he checks his caller ID, answers the phone without speaking, waits for me to say, "um, hello?" before saying, "you called me, whadyawant?" And he does this because he doesn't want it widely broadcast that he is actually a manic crusader for the happiness of the people he cares about. When I was living a life of quiet desperation (who am I kidding, it was the loudest "quiet desperation" you've ever heard) it was Steve who would pay for stuff for me and ignore me when I thanked him. Our whole lives, it was always Steve who gave the best presents, who would remember Birthdays, who would listen to a problem and then find a solution and enact it without discussion. Steve has led the hardest life of anyone in my family, the most plagued by bad luck and circumstance, and he's always responded with generosity and kindness that the world has yet to pay him back with.

Kent has always been a sort of gentle giant, but in order to understand fully his grace in this world, you have to look to his kids. He has two teenage sons, both of whom adore him and consider him a friend. I had a lot of friends growing up who thought their dads were their buddies, but these were always pushover jackass dads, the ones who would buy us pot. On the subway, Kent said to Sean Patrick, "Dude, get your fucking head out of your ass." and Sean said, "that's okay, I'll stand." and Kent chuckled. I just about died. It's hard work, being a dad nowadays. I suppose it always has been, but right now it seems particularly tough, and if you met Sean Patrick and Lucas, you would think Kent was a genius. To me, he's always been the guy I could be if I got really lucky, happily married, music coming out of my basement and an example of level headed spirituality and intelligent kindness for my kids.

But, other than that, we're pretty much assholes. And, if you get on the wrong side of any one of us, you'll have all five of us pricks giving you shit.