An intense, magnificent four days

Four of us - Bren and I, Kari and Don - and four intense days of sight, sound, and sense just a few hours from home. Here are my lingering impressions.

It began with Turner at The Clark – a painter half a century ahead of his time whose seascapes reminded me on the one hand of strobe photography, on the other of a depiction of the cosmic, quantum soup – caught in the Ice Age. Startling use of light and shadow and color and action depicting a reality of the whole rather than a simplistic, two-dimensional mirror of the world . . .

From there a stop in a softly falling, silent snow with Frost - only it’s not snowing, now or then, as a young Robert Frost pulls an all-nighter in June and his brain suddenly pops into another world and here, in the room where we stood, he pens an extraordinary, brief poem at the pinnacle of his career.

“Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow. ”

. . . and perhaps we are just a tad closer to the mystery of how such stuff gets from within to without. . . one room in this new Frost home/museum is a tribute to this poem, exploring it in many ways.

Ah Frost, he sleeps now and forever above us, not 10 minutes walk up a hill from our beds in the motel during these August nights in 2003, and I understand for the first time as I look at the huge, flat stone that marks his grave, how much he really meant to me. Here lie the bones of the man who was my inspiration for so much . . .

The monument is tall, the elevator small and tight, the view restricted by narrow, barred windows . . . it had to be done. It is there, it dominates the landscape, a huge phallic symbol echoing the larger one in Washington and so you go up and you look down and you see its shadow stretching out across the mown grass and road and reaching for little Bennington, huddled amidst the mountains of Southern Vermont. . .

From pictures to words – Turner to Frost – eyes to ears and now the ears get a real workout. It is 1960, is it not? The Woods Tea Company is playing in the park downtown. Who? The Woods Tea Company. Four aging young men doing an intense, fresh, and unforgettable improvement on the folk groups so popular in that era of our youth. And we are there – it’s free – and we bought two albums and we sang and clapped and have something we did not expect to carry home with us . . . humor and good music.

And we haven’t gotten to the core yet, the reason for being here at all – which is Shakespeare & Company, an hour south in Lenox, MA where in the “Rose footprint” they will put on an energy filled 75-minute version of a Midsummer’s Night Dream. It is slap stick, it is vaudeville, it is Shakespeare performed at its best, and the children are giggling and the adults enthralled, and it is only a warm-up . . .

Warm-up for Much Ado About No Thing – mafia dons with shotguns in 1950s Italy and a crooner recalling Frank Sinatra as fictionalized in the first Godfather movie, and at first you are put off and perplexed, but soon stunned by how well this all actually works. It is a full theater production, done with the same imagination and energy that had awed us the year before when this group did Macbeth in a Banana Republic with shades of the modern American Empire. But it was the ending – the incredible music and dance –that took my breath away, for it was one of the purest expressions of joy – of a zest for living - that I have ever experienced in the imitation of life that is the dramatic art. Dancing and singing in Broadway musicals have attracted me before, but left me somehow flat and empty. This filled me, renewing my own love of life.

There is a reality here in these live performances that makes me loathe that flat dead world of the screen - ah, now I have offended all movie lovers – not my intention. But there is something to breathing and feeling and seeing and hearing in three dimension, up close and personal that is simply lost amidst all our technological perfection in CDs and celluloid and television screens. Perhaps it is simply that it can only exist in the NOW – and then in our memories. . .

And it wasn’t over. They have won me, this Shakespeare group in the Berkshires. I don’t need to go back to Stratford, Ontario, much as I loved it there. They have, as Don pointed out, an intensity, and energy and an imagination that is simply rare. And it was on display the next morning at its best in a home-grown, jam-packed 45-minute educational romp by four terrific young actors giving us “Shakespeare & The Language That Shaped A World” by “William Shakespeare And Our Education Program.” (I’ve emailed them to see if this has been published anywhere.)

I wish I could adequately describe it. I wish every high school student in the English-speaking world could see it. And every one of whatever age who wonders why we keep the world of a long-dead playwrite alive. All I will say is the actors outdo themselves, switching rolls and plays with the rapidity of a . . .

Well, a Gatling gun. That was the next impression. We were in Connecticut, heading home, but detouring to the New England Air Museum and I found myself explaining what 6,000-rounds-per-minute really meant and feeling for an instant some of that old thrill at being surrounded by military hardware - and then the revulsion set in. It was the Cub Scouts that brought me back to reality. A pack of them, with their leaders choking on manly pride as they explained the significance of a Corsair fighter or B-25 medium bomber – and I cringed as I watched the next generation of warriors being lured to their stupid, wasteful deaths.

What impressed me in this hanger with these war machines was three things:

1. How the men shrunk and the machines grew – how the man was a dominant factor in the tiny Fokker triplane of 1917 with its wood and canvas wings and wire controls. And how, by the time he was sitting alone atop a WWII P-47 “Jug” he already looked tiny, the machine dominating. And then comes the F100 Super Saber, a gleaming tribute to our engineering skill and the man is the jellyware, a tiny, soft, expendable, part of a gleaming, impossibly fast, powerful and deadly machine. Man – the builder who buries himself in his creations.

2. The machines too transformed themselves. They looked clumsy and unsure in 1920. They seemed confident and determined in 1940. By the late 1950s they had a sleek, streamlined purity to them. And now. Now they are represented by the Warthog – just about the ugliest thing that ever flew - a ground-attack aircraft, a tank buster bristling with guns and rockets and engines stuck together with all the grace of a tinker toy assembled by a disturbed child.

3. What incredible brain power, what incredible industrial strength, what exhausting creativity went into the creation of all these monsters and all to what end? To kill other human beings. The museum glorifies the machines, it glorifies the men who flew them, it prepares the next generation for the “thrill of victory” and for the pure waste of all that is good in us.

So was this a downer? After so much that is good and loving and perceptive and energetic and right about man – after art, and music and theater? Perhaps. But it didn’t really bring me down. It was more simply a reminder of the reality in which we live.

One of the many things we saw in “Shakespeare & The Language That Shaped A World” was a no-holds-barred reminder of how absolutely violent many of these plays are – how they so frequently revolve around murder and mayhem. Even in “Much Ado” there was a constant reminder of a violent world as actors brandished shotguns and were quick to draw switchblade stilettos at the slightest provocation. And yet, as I say, here was this incredible joy of life at the conclusion, this vibrant expression of what I like to think of as the cosmic, quantum dance that is at the heart of all.

I guess that is what was missing at the museum until I looked real closely. I found it as I sat and gazed at a tiny glider slung from the ceiling. It was of wood and canvas. The control column was a small stick that hooked to some wires. All was visible – no mystery here about how this modest machine worked. It was about as complicated as a child’s sled. And no mystery about the pilot. Like the child on the sled, he sat in the open, just inches above the landing skids, and I suspect he experienced the depth of fear and the height of joy as the wind sung through the wires and for a few moments he was part bird, part man, sliding down that hill of air, buoyant, yet inevitably coming back to earth.

So too with me.

Posted by Greg Stone at August 19, 2003 07:26 AM | TrackBack