Thoughts of death and dying Feb. 2, 1986
Well, my play/sitcom came off better than I expected.
While some people may be lying to me in order to make me
feel better about what might be a national disaster, I wasn’t quite as embarrassed
as I thought I’d be.
I’m not quite ready to hear the truth, however, and so
avoided people like Michael who I knew would give it to me unvarnished and with
no regard for my feelings.
The play was one of those idiotic exercises in writing I
engage in in order to teach myself how to develop a plot.
The characters were shallow and the emotions unbelievably
mushy. The only parts that worked for me involved the comedy. Fortunately, the
festival had worse.
Yet sitting through it and watching the other plays was a
strangely uplifting experience.
Even the best of the lot (which was not mine) showed that misdirected
emotions could be worse than shallow efforts like mine.
My play has other flaws that will take time and experience
to cure.
Some of the other plays have fundamental weaknesses such as
plot design and ideas. Some of these plays were obsessed with suicide and death,
seemingly strange for just graduated college students.
But Michael and I have seen these themes played out in the
literature of undergraduates as well in many of the stories and poems submitted
to the magazine we edited, constant thoughts of dying and playing with the idea
of death.
Roland gorged on these subjects in his poetry and fiction,
often revolving around the concept of Satan, devil worship and evil. He claimed
his creativity came out of evil, and eventually he stopped writing on that
account.
But he may simply have used this as an excuse, having seen
finally his limitations as a writer
William Blake claimed that creativity comes out of that part
of self that is unreasonable and raw, a part of the self that needs to be focused
by a more controlled self.
He referred to this creative side, this energetic side as
hell. Yet he attributed life and living to this part, not to death.
Mary Ann gave up writing partly because she could not
control the source of her creativity. When an old lover kept popping up into
the middle of her work, she panicked and abandoned it, later wrapping herself
up into the “goodness” of religion her husband steered her towards, discouraging
even banning her art as “sinful.”
All of her writing before meeting him were full of life, and
those few poems she wrote afterwards were not.
Kathy, who was part of Morgue crowd along with Roland, also
played with the idea of death in her poetry – as well as in life. She gave up her
poetry after her marriage.
I suppose death and dying are safe subjects when you are
young, ideas you can play with from a distance like dynamite.
But I suspect that a sense of alienation touches young
people.
While most of the stuff submitted to the college magazine
was not very good, the best of it always centered on death, perhaps the one
subject they could write about that was not beyond their personal experience.
This was true in this playwright festival, where nearly all
the pieces made fun of death, as if trying to limit its attraction, morose
people talking, a practical joke involving death and dying, several plays
involving thoughts of suicide, and two plays involving slashing of wrists.
All this would seem merely speculative except that national
statistics indicate most of the suicides in America come out of this age group.
I suppose I’m different in that respect, managing to avoid
thoughts of death by portraying characters with shallow emotions.
Perhaps it is safer that way, being on the outside of real
feelings, blinding myself to the idea that I might someday have to face death,
evil, dying or even myself.
Although, I have built a bubble around myself in some ways, and
I think perhaps it might be time to go back and learn how to feel again, so, I
can bring those feelings into the characters I write about.
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