Doing And Not Doing.....

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Wednesday, 5. October 2005, 19:30:18
So I was laying in bed the other morning thinking about meditation. I've been under a great deal of stress for some time, coming back from a relatively recent major surgery, and then completing a difficult season at the theatre. And this past spring seemed to be filled with deaths in the family. My brother and I have few remaining relatives; neither of us have kids, parents are long deceased, and then in May my crazy Aunt Arly (shanty Irish for Eileen)finally passed away at the age of 90. That leaves my older brother, myself, and my uncle Georgie (whose health hasn't been great of late either). In late winter my brother had lost two of his dogs to old age and illnesses, and then the real blow came in March when his partner of 31 years died suddenly of a heart attack. There for breakfast, dead by dinner. It's the kind of shock that's hard to absorb.

So over the past couple of months I decided that if I didn't get serious about handling the stress in my life I was likely to end up going down the same road as my brother's lover, and decided subsequently to go back to meditation. It's something I've toyed with for years, but never taken really very seriously. And lying there in bed I was struck by the irony of what my decision implied. I was going to grab this task, this activity, called meditating by the lapels and make it work for me, by god. Rather than doing the practice for itself, and consequently allowing it to become all about "not doing", I was going to wrestle it to the ground once again and turn it toward my ends, my goals.

Later that same day I was teaching a graduate student who is currently taking a class beng taught by my wife, what amounts to a scene study class, and his frustrations with his own work struck me as paralleling my earlier thoughts. He has taken on a long monologue to work on that is actually a patched together piece from a longer scene. It's a monologue that he's done before, for some time, but which he keeps coming back to because as he put it, "It haunts me, and I don't think I've ever really figured it out". And as he talked about it, it's structure and it's meaning (to him at least), it became clear that he is struggling to find something in the piece that is deeply personal to him, something that will perhaps help him figure out why he is who he is as a person. In other words he's too close to the material.

And in that process, in that rigourous if misplaced examination of self through that particular piece of literature, he had somewhere along the line stopped thinking like an actor and was thinking more like a therapist or a sociologist or a journalist or something. He was taking what we do as actors as part of our craft, the breaking down of text to better understand through it's structure and language and rhetoric who that character might be and what he might want, and turning that craft toward his own needs and goals. As a result he was getting no where with the material, because he was wanting it to tell some other story, some tale about himself that he doesn't fully understand yet, or won't yet allow himself to look at fully.

Acting, when it's done well, is done well because it proceeds from craft. And that craft is about, at least as a first step, putting aside one's own needs as a person and individual in order to, very simply, understand. Who is that person I'm being asked to transform myself into. And in the process of letting go of ego, in that task, the doing hopefully becomes its own reward; it becomes about "not doing". And the surprise, if one is aware enough I think, is that what one discovers then can often later provide answers to some of the questions and doubts and fears we all carry around on a daily basis.

Acting isn't therapy. It's a craft like any other that need to be respected for what it can and cannot offer, what it can and cannot do. If approached mindfully it can become its own reward. There is joy in the feel of wood in the master carpenter's hands that justifys itself, well before the wood is turned into some beautiful and useful shape.

Doing and not doing.........