Monologues on Monologues
Bold Acting Newsletter 008 -- May 28th, 2023 (My brother's birthday)
The monologue inside my head has me regularly the victor. I am fostering grudges, serving up street-justice, putting dickwads in their place. My eyes narrow as I mutter. My brow pulls down. My face now angular feels like it looks like the sharp end of an anvil.
I walk around High Park holding another monologue in my hand. One written by André Aciman from his novel Call Me By Your Name — one of my favourite books (A High Wind from Jamaica, I Capture the Castle, A Whole Life, An Unforgettable Woman, The Animals being my other faves right now). I carry this worn out piece of paper memorizing these lines over and over. Just so I don’t forget how. And because I love the words and the sentiment. It’s the ultimate dad monologue.
You can watch it in the movie of the same name where Michael Stuhlbarg says to his son Timothée Chalamet in the penultimate scene:
… our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.
Those words mix with my words: the judgement of others, the inside joke from twenty years ago that suddenly pops up into the aether (that ancient Greek personification of the bright, upper sky), the How-dare-you!-vindication from the incident at the bank yesterday where I just wanted a little more information on the deposits I had made that hadn’t shown up and then suddenly they did but Parsimonious Kevin seems to have a terrible short-term memory or he’s being coy with me.
The bright upper sky is there but I can’t see it. I’m busy felling imagined foes.
I know those words of Aciman’s. That worn-out heart and that body no one wants to look at. No matter how much work I put into them there is no early parol for good behaviour. Time tramples me. There is no winning in the face of a charging Khronos. Just a little more with my boys please before they go adolescent dark. Just a little more energy and vitality before I am invisible. Just make the global heating go away for a while. And while you’re at it all this inflation and Fascism too.
Khronos clipped Cupid’s wings as a matter of course it seems. It happens to us all. We lose that loving feeling. What remains is goodwill. My wing’s have been clipped but where am I good? I walk around slinging arrows at people I know not, will never see again. Yesterday while me and the boys were driving home from yet another walk through yet another cemetery (Mt. Pleasant, sooo beautiful) there was a man in a Miata and he just couldn’t make that left-turn. He wasn’t aggressive enough. And why had Google maps directed me to turn left off of Mt. Pleasant Road and onto Moore Drive when there’s no advanced green. Just endless weekend traffic. This instagram age we live in makes moving around more difficult than ever. If it’s beautiful we have to brag to the whole world about it and then we’re appalled when the whole world shows up.
I thought about the Miata driver for the rest of the night. He drove home with me. He parked his car in my bed. A new monologue. A new victim.
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!
It is done or it has happened. Wings clipped, heart worn-out. And as for the body … So why not just look up? I mean, if it’s all over. Just look up into the blue.
All grist for the mill, you say? Ah, lucky me, lucky you — that ever-loving mill. Round and round, a wooden chronos of sorts. We charge forth in straight lines as if the wheel we are on wasn’t a circle. We grow used to the watery lashings.
Suddenly blithe crones in Tilly hats on one last canoe trip down slow-moving waters. Everything’s fine.
To feel it all. To remind yourself to stay there and feel. The aether isn’t nothing. It’s the bright, blue sky and that is what endless possibility looks like.
Wait? What’s that sound up ahead? Is that a waterfall?
Nah. Everything’s fine.
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