January 26, 1595

(William Shakespeare)

If I close my eyes I can breathe in the same rhythm as the universe. It's tides of rich noise wash over me like a symphony, swirl around me in ascending spirals. I reach out and trail my fingers in them, and they come away wet, sweet tasting like ambrosia. The air, saturated with ethereal music--Bach and Keith Jarrett--and the dynamic whiteness of a spring rainstorm, flows heavy with their liquid undulations. The candles--ancient legacy of Prometheus, of a restive antediluvian child-world bursting with caustic orange heat--glow dimly, and cast trembling shadows on the walls, the cave walls; they are conflagrate stars, tossed in the infinite waves that break upon us. US--a two-body island of beatific calm in the center of a singing ocean.

May 23, 1993

To everyone involved in the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream,

I just came out of the theatre and I knew I had to write to tell you how much entralled I was with the play.

It started out as a special project option for the most ambitious students in the class. I always did those in LA9--I was hungry for more learning than the freshman survey courses could feed to me. I was universally hungry then, I think. I wanted to take in the whole immense expanse of space and swirling galaxies and burning brilliant stars, without really understanding it, without ever having felt it all flow through me so that I knew the nature of it. So I read A Midsummer Night's Dream for our spring Shakespearean festival, and performed in it as Titania in white gauze and flowers. My teacher was Lysander, in purple doublet and breeches and his wife's knee-highs (incredibly amusing to the freshman sensibility).

But the play seemed...well, not to fit. It was so delightful, so darling. But underneath there were things that disturbed me: the defeated queen of the Amazons had become a demure, deferent mate; Helena's dark, twisted pain made me feel guilty for laughing at the lovers' situation. I wrote it off as a less mature comedy than my other favorites (like As You Like It)--that was before I understood the great truth: that there is not one of Shakespeare's works that cannot be made whole and harmonious and fully resonant with the right passionate intellect animating it. Nonetheless, my best friend and I wriggled our way into the senior English trip to Stratford, Ontario to see Dream.

I suppose I'll never know if it was Stratford that made me fall in love with Shakespeare, or if I'm in love with Stratford because he seems to visit there so often. The two passions have begun to take on separate lives now, but then, and as long as I can remember before that, they were practically one inside my heart. Tanya and I looked forward to that trip for months, and when the day finally arrived (5/23/93), we were out of our heads with excitement. If we'd known what awaited us, we probably would have exploded.

June 24, 1993

Dear Julie--

This is just a short note to thank you for your wonderful letter addressed to the Midsummer Night's Dream people. I thought you might like to know it was posted up on our callboard where it gathered an appreciative crowd,

4. INT. - THEATRE LOBBY - NOVEMBER - EVENING

We're in the vaulted lobby of an architecturally modern performance hall. #1 (female, teens) and #2 (female, late 20s) are standing facing each other, saying goodbye. Both are dressed up slightly, and #1 is wearing a heavy winter coat. They are staring into each other's faces, and there is a long silence before they speak.

A single tear swells out the outside corner of #1's eye and begins creeping down her cheek. #2 lifts her hand, little finger extended, and sadly, tenderly touches it to the droplet. #1 convulses in sobs before the motion is completed, wrapping her arms around #2's neck. When they pull back, #2's eyes are also brimming with moisture.

#2

C'mon, I'll walk you out.

November 4, 1993

Hey Goddess!
What a magnificent day it was yesterday, to see you again, and to meet your friends and schoolmates. The giddy excitement it left me with is still running through my blood. Ui!

It was a physical reaction unlike any I’d ever experienced. The symptoms have come back since, at other great theatre, but never to such a degree or with such a totality of physical confounding. My hands and face tingled violently, my knees were weak, and my cheeks were wet from weeping. It was the curtain call that finally pushed me over the edge to tears (the second time I was crying by the end of Bless This Place). The merry dance welling from the still reverberating silence was, in its simplicity and spirit, an encompassing farewell to the miracle of the past three hours. I have compared it so many times to a gong, at long last expertly struck, a perfect synthesis of tones that reverberates endlessly, outward in concentric circles, until it dies into eternity. Plays inside plays inside plays, comedy within love within sex, questions answered with symphonies, slapstick, kisses, energy, phallocentric scenery, fear, women kicking ass, rock music--epiphanous depths of meaning and pure joy. I was alive, in the active sense of the word--animation, vibrance--I had touched infinity.

March 10, 1995

Subject: Hang in there!

I've come across some great new words in my recent reading which I'll share with you because you're into new words too--bibliolatry, eschatalogical, antinomianism, shibboleth, chiliasm, eudemonics (the theory or art of happiness!), euhemerism, amanuensis, nicodemism, thaumaturgy, necromancy, expiate, theodicy, deism, apostasy, syncretism, execration, scabrous, salvific.

	The door to the dressing room hung open discreetly 
	“I have to go have a meeting with the director.  You can sit in here and listen, if 
you like.”
								and the voices and laughter 
drifted in.  I perched on a four-legged stool, surveying a countertop covered in a tangle of 
makeup, wigs and ribbons, and dried flowers.
	“...you cut her off too early , it would be better if you 
left a pause before you spoke.”  “Yes, you’re quite right.”
						    The mirror was framed, inside the ring of 
bare lightbulbs, with rows of photographs--Steph, [censored], and I on Ontario street, Steph 
and her mum when she was a baby... The costumes hung on the opposite wall, next to a 
portal which revealed a tiled and dark and strangely wide shower.
	“We’re doing miserably and no one’s communicating and he’s talking about 
dramatic pauses.  He has no idea what to do.”
									     The street leading 
away from the stage door, with its blazing awning, was dark and quiet--Yonge was busier.  
The bar itself was warm and spacious and busy.
	“We usually end up going out for an hour after the show.  Do you want to come 
meet everybody?”
							         Three tables had been pushed 
together, and the actors clustered around them, smoking.  They drank beer.  We drank mint 
tea, cheap, but tasting cool and green like real mint leaves--a rare treat.
	"So you just saw the show?”
	"Yeah, I really enjoyed it.  You guys did a great job."
									     Their voices eddied 
about me, mixing with the gentle clamor of the crowded room. 
	"So did you see the posters?"  "Yeah, ‘second smash month’.  By that reasoning, in 
January it'll be our ‘second smash year!’”  laughter
								      They were interesting.  I 
heard swearing, talk of eudemonics.  But Steph was talking to me, and the time--the last 
evening!--was too precious
	"What is power?”
                        too precious to turn away from this to banter with hazy television faces.
			   “I've been trying to explain it to [censored]--in French the word has 
a much narrower meaning, and he doesn’t understand why it’s so important."
I smiled.  It was the cafe all over again, quiche and iced tea (she paid, over my protests--
always does), I haltingly explaining my developing truth-relativism--my great book of 
someday--while she leaned forward, interested, and answered me in scholarly language.  15 
and 27, barely introduced.
	"Isn't power just...the ability to control something?"
				Or sitting on my living room floor, leaning on [censored]’s 
knees, wondering how passion and reason are related.
	"To change it?"
							    Or hearing in her kitchen over 
breakfast that morning about the dream companions of her (the materialist’s!) childhood 
returning, speaking to her prophetically through a homeless man, Sara and Sydney, me.  A 
revelation so awesome I wrapped my arms around her waist for support.
	"Or to resist change."
									         Or, reclining 
pastorally in the woods, wrapped in May verdure, the words “Would you like to make up a 
ritual?” plying the silence.
	"So power is the ability to proactively initiate a chain of events?"
			       It never stopped, and it never ceased to take me by reverent 
surprise.
	"Yeah."
		So I leaned forward, met furrowed brow with furrowed brow, and found the truth 
that’s not supposed to exist.
	"Well, that's surprisingly simple."

May 28, 1995

1. Take a deep breath. Light the envelope with the candle, and send whatever words you want to use to summon Stephanie away with the smoke.

2. Burn the rose petals while reciting Titania's monologue. Add their ashes to those of the envelope. [...]

15. Remove the wet cloth from your head, and squeeze the water out to put out the candle while saying "Use Your Power".

It was a shimmering fairy landscape of stained glass and living mud. The green-yellow leaves, heart shaped, were illuminated like tiffany lampshades, darker where they overlapped, dappled walls to the gravel path--riverbed--that crunched wetly with our footsteps. On the beach the sand was hard with moisture, the sound of the waves forceful and wintry. The reedy grasses were a black and shining underbrush through which snaked single-file paths, beaten down by forgotten footsteps. A tall swingset, bright paint chipping, stood dripping surreally in the center of a wide green glen--leaning back as we flew the border of thick trees, seen upsidown, was robbed of intelligibility and became an abstract lushness. Water was everywhere. We were swimming. I dragged my sockless and saturated feet through a puddle to clean them of the clinging sandy earth--a concrete puddle: unbelievably, civilization returned Above the quivering jeweled green, steel and glass skyscrapers cut the grey sky, looking impossibly quotidian juxtaposed on the magical landscape. On the dock, as we faced the full height of the city across the water, it began to rain in earnest. Other intrepid walkers huddled under black umbrellas; we, bareheaded, turned our faces to the sky till they streamed, and then looked out to watch an impenetrable white mist billow off the lake to obscure, foot by foot, the entire angular vista. The water spirits caressed me, the wet enchanted earth spoke of life and the breath of the universe, chastising me for the sodden spirits that had ever accompanied the greyness of chill Michigan rains, seen with perceptibly sinking heart through a beaded windowpane in the dim postdawn light. I no longer hate the rain.

i. [Stephanie]

I've touched a sphere where Dreams are breathed with life,
Where Truth lays down her head near fantasy,
And revelations dance in to the fife,
And all great things may, for a moment, be.
I've known a room where life rings in a chord,
And melodies in epic swell begin
T'Explain the golden secret's of life's hoard,
And peaceful songs reverberate within.
I've felt, embraced, in honeyed firmament,
A safe-wrapped sleeper and a song-stuffed bird.
I've drunk the spreading silence of content
In friendship that's beyond the end of words.
	In sunny Love all clouds are burned to light,
	And brilliant skies are herald to true sight.


ii. [Tanya]

I fain would know: what honors, piléd high,
Could match the guerdon of a warm embrace
That never asks the trouble, nor the why,
But ready is with starlight and kind face?
What pledge could touch the sisterhood of souls,
The safest joy of holding hands and hearts,
Of selfsame loves, felicities, and goals,
My music hearing in another's part?
With what bright jewel could I my thanks convey,
When love turns darkling loneliness to light?
What priceless gem the shining debt repay
Of reckless laughter welling up from night?
	No gift but this: all my heart's love for thee,
	In endless volumes for eternity.


iii. [after Keats]

Much have I drunk of beauty and of truth--
	That double nectar of the rainbow's cup.
	The bard's immortal lines have been my sup
Since revelation first approached my youth.
Oft did I thrill to their harmonious roll,
	And oft did note their composition fine;
	Yet never heard the symphony divine
Till under that domed O I met my soul:
Then felt I like some ancient thinker wise,
	Philosophizing order out of chance;
Or like old Ptolemy who turned up his eyes
	And saw in heaven's face a graceful dance--
Great circles upon circles 'cross the skies!--
	And heard the starry music as they prance.


iv. [Stephanie]

The Universe is drifting with the mist--
	He's taken his reality to wife.
	Somehow we walk beyond the edge of life
In countrysides formed from our spreading souls.
The ritual fires glow, the thunder rolls,
	The music dissipates, rain strikes the pane.
	Midst singing silent surf two hearts are lain--
The world is washed with beauty till I weep.
Enshrouded by the dewy green-jeweled deep,
	The luminous spring verdure: island leas,
	We forget the steel and concrete seas
That course so close upon the shore surreal.
Rejoice! For what could not be dreamed is real:
The miracle of life made whole--and kissed.

[This piece was part of an application for a scholarship of some kind that I didn't get. The assignment: write an imaginary conversation between yourself and a famous American.]

A heavy fog shrouds New York Bay, obscuring the grimy skylines that crowd the water – docks and warehouses tumbling one upon the other as if greedily grasping at this last uncluttered expanse. In the liquid silence, I am no longer even sure they are there. I close my eyes, and am acutely aware of the hardness of the metal beneath my back – a toenail, cold to the touch. I relax against it, allowing my flesh to mould to its unyielding contours. The air that I breathe is wet. It smells like the city after a thunderstorm: the enhanced noxia of exhaust and refuse, the urban cleanness of damp steel and concrete, the freshly wakened life of imaginary spring wildernesses.

	Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!

I open my eyes and turn my face upwards.

“Hmmm?” I inquire vaguely.

					No queen’s
	Perfume and no Elysian field delights 
	My soul – give me the odor-peopled scent
	Of New York mists.

Liberty’s face, over 100 feet above me, is hidden. But I smile up at it.

		      You’re not correct, you know.

“About what?”

	The wilderness you sense, the vibrant green
	Of endless rolling fields and savage woods
	And mountains purple in the dusk is not
	Imaginary.  It’s forgotten and
	Obscured, perhaps, but never can be lost.

“I want to believe you. But don’t you think we’ve forsaken it? Misused and sullied our land, hated and destroyed each other? We are no longer connected to the land you speak of, that awesome and savage America. It no longer exists – we’ve consumed it.”

	You can’t deny – the ancient smell remains.

I can tell she is laughing at me. Her condescending self-assurance annoys me, and I pout.

	Come, come, you’re trying to renounce the past.
	We are a people with an energy
	Electric and alive – as is the Earth’s:
	We kill as easily as we give life.
	Our power, good or ill, is of the place
	And of the journey.  That is why the rain
	Will, timeless, always smell of our land’s soul.

“I don’t understand the connection.”

	I journeyed on the Isère – tempest-tost
	I crossed the sea that men once thought did edge
	The flattened world.  I reached these shores on June
	The seventeenth, in 1885,
	And saw this city of a hundred tongues,
	Of men uncountable, of condensed life,
	And felt the globe expand before my eyes 
	To fill a space too great to comprehend.
	I knew, as well, what Verrazano felt –
	The first to penetrate this bay by sea,
	Its blue expanse spread out before his ship
	The Dauphine, proud-prowed and salt-batterèd,
	Its sheltered harbor dotted, like the sky
	At night with stars, with Indian canoes.
	Or later Cartier, my countryman,
	Who Hochelaga scaled – old Mont Royal –
	And saw from its proud summit leagues and leagues
	Of sleeping, savage forest, stretching to
	The winds.  Or Bedloe, who did sometime own
	The land on which I stand, a continent,
	Unknown and unexplored, for his backyard.
	Before all these, in our time-hazy dawn,
	The ones who voyaged o’er the ice-locked earth
	Stepped first upon the frozen north of this
	New World, a hemisphere unpeopled theirs
	To fill.  It is our one uniting truth:
	That each of us has known that awe profound:
	The maiden view of this infinity.

“But I was born here, I didn’t experience that. Neither did most Americans – we don’t understand it anymore. We deny what connects us and focus on our differences, constructing ‘us’ and ‘them’, insiders and outsiders, hating immigrants for being what we were 100, 200, 300 years before.”

	The mind is not of import; it’s the blood
	That counts.  I saw at Ellis disembark
	Your ancestors, a hundred years ago:
	The Levins, Rothmans, Russos, Samuels –
	Renouncing their Old World affinities,
	Made homeless on the sea, they answered with
	Their lives the irrepressible demand
	Of this land’s hungry and embracing soul.
	In you that journey is – in all of you –
	And Ellis is a monument to this.

“Is that why you said it – because you felt the place calling?”

	Said what, my child?
				“‘Give me your tired, your poor,
	Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...’”
	The People are my blood: 2 millions mount
	Each year my double stair – my artery
	And vein.  So too have they enfilagreed
	The land with pulsing streams of life.  As we
	Awaked this place from its expectant sleep
	It animated us, our deepest soul,
	In spiritual symbiosis: it
	Respires, and our lives are its measured sighs.

I fall silent. I am still not convinced. To me, there is a difference between a bond acknowledged and a bond forgotten. Does it matter that we are all linked if we deny it? Does it matter that we are a part of our land if we make war against it? The mere fact that these infinite relationships exist just does not seem an adequate reason to summon infinite numbers of destitutes.

	I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

She says, half to herself. For her, the past cannot be separated from the present. It’s implications, its insatiability are still the reality. But to me, the time when that door was golden, when we existed wonderingly in a spacious relationship, appears irrevocably left behind. But then a breeze stirs the fog, and I catch a glimpse of her proud face, presiding over the hidden harbor. The sheer force of her conviction, visible in her features, transcends my objections: the beauty of her world has seduced me, in spite of them. Perhaps that’s why Liberty is here: to make us remember the past, even if we can no longer believe in it.

[Acknowledgments: My thanks, for words, ideas, and information, to Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus”, Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (part 1)”, and Francis Parkman’s France and England in North America.]