Ever fail
Someone said something nice about me on the internet the other day, and it messed me up for hours. I was in the Guadalajara airport changing planes on my way home to Chicago from Mexico City, where I'd been on vacation and where I walked ten miles a day and had long lazy breakfasts and ate fried grasshoppers and flowers in Oaxacan mole on a twilit plaza and they were stunningly delicious. Anyway, someone said something on Twitter, in response to someone else's query, to the effect of everything I did was great.
Which is, on its face, an uncommonly kind and startling thing to say and sitting in the plastic chair alone there in the airport while my friend wandered off in search of food, all I could think was how it is so utterly, baldly not true. I spiraled, fearful. It was ridiculous, but I fretted. What if one of the people who actually knew me -- worked with me -- saw that? They would scoff and roll their eyes, knowing full well that I was an inept, procrastinating, corner-cutting hack. That I overpromised and underdelivered; that I might put on a convincing show at times but the seams are fraying and -- as my aching, aging body often feels when attempting some implausible circus trick -- honestly there's little chance I can pull this routine off much longer, and if I stopped, really, no one would actually notice.
Like everyone I walk around with a laundry list of failures crumpled up in my bag. I'm not going to read it for you, because that in itself would be self-serving; because then you would write me back and say, "Oh, no -- that was great!" And I don't want that; please don't do that. I'm just trying to hack away at something seemingly unpromising -- the carapace of a bug, maybe -- to find its smoother center.
The last couple times I've been to Puerto Rico, my reporting partners and I stayed in the vacated apartment of a peripatetic dancer and choreographer, who was perpetually on the move, out of town at one workshop or teaching gig or another. Taped above the inside lock of her door, on a tiny square of paper, were those words: "Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (I just looked to see if I had taken a picture of this with my phone, but of course, appropriately, I failed to do that as well.)
Beckett's famous quote has been appropriated by "disruptors" (gross) in this our terrible century, but I did not begrudge the dancer her mantra, partly because her work -- which I've only seen on video -- is about laziness, procrastination, and rest, something I can enthusiastically get behind with each passing day. And also because as a creative strategy it must be working as she is right now performing in the Whitney Biennial.
My friend Danny Thompson wrote a play about Beckett, kind of. It was called "The Complete Lost Works of Samuel Beckett As Found in an Envelope (Partially Burned) in a Dustbin in Paris Labeled "Never to Be Performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue. I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!" I never saw that either; I can't believe it. How did that happen? A failure.
It was, by all accounts, very very very funny. Danny was a champion of dilly-dallying, of digression, of telling elaborate jokes, and of spending as much time as it took to find the smoothest, most perfect, yet baffling center. (One day, he took some footage of Beckett walking around Berlin and recut it as the opening credits to a 1970s cop show a la Streets of San Francisco, and let me tell you it is SMOOTH. You can watch it here http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/watch-the-opening-credits-of-an-imaginary-70s-cop-show-starring-samuel-beckett.html).
I am using the past tense here because, of course, he died. May 20, suddenly. It was such a shock. We, his friends far away, found out he was sick on Saturday and then on Tuesday that he had died. A beautifully written account of these events, by his lifelong partner Meredith Neuman, can be found here. Various other tributes to him are accumulating around the internet; here's one, by Jeff Dorchen, and another by Dave Buchen, and a third, by David Isaacson, is here on the Theater Oobleck website. One of the best that I read, as you do, when someone dies and all of a sudden Facebook morphs into a force for good, an embodiment of love and community, was by my friend HB, who said: "Maybe Danny had to get out of the way so we'd all be forced to fulfill the promise we made to ourselves, silently, at one time or another: to be more like him."
I'd like to think that by trying a little bit to do something obscure, and make it bafflingly perfect, and probably failing but oh well, and by spending Sunday morning* free-associating in a newsletter and shooting slo-motion videos of my cats rather than writing the press release I'm supposed to be doing right now, I am honoring Danny. I admired him so much. He made me want to be better, funnier, lazier; more generous, more true.
A friend sent me something she'd written the other day, before my vacation, and asked for feedback. It was good, I thought, but overly smooth. And because I know her and she is my friend and I was privy to the actual happenings about which she was writing, I knew the she was lying. Shading. Polishing. Cutting off the ugly edges to make something clean. So I told her that, gently I think, and a week later, the day after I got home from wandering the streets of Mexico and having a wonderful time and also being hit over and over by waves of grief for my friends who are suffering Danny's loss even harder than I and for the world at large, she sent me a revised version and it was baffling and honest and angry and drenched in weirdness and grace and so very good.
Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth. Inside the smooth center is a jagged star. Or a grasshopper.
PS: I designed the lights and did some other things for the latest Theater Oobleck show, Mickle Maher's IT IS MAGIC, which runs Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through June 29 at the Chopin Theatre. Shows are selling out so you want to get in on this action now.
PPS: Also, I'll be selling Belt books at the Printer's Row Lit Fest next weekend June 8 and 9 if you want to come hang out. Find me in the Small Press Tent, tent E, on Dearborn about halfway down the festival strip.
*There's got to be some poetry in the fact that I wrote this on Sunday morning and it's been hung up in the TinyLetter spam filter ever since. Ever try.