Zen and the Art of Portal Maintenance

This blog entry is full of some rambling thoughts and ideas from the last few days, tenuously tied together by a thin metaphor. It's the way my brain usually works.

I've been playing Portal recently. For all of my Pop Culture interests I am woefully behind the curve on videogaming. For those who haven't played the game the basic premise is that you are a test subject in lab, armed with a Portal Gun, a device that allows you to create portals that allow you to teleport between different areas of the game. It’s essentially a puzzle game where the player uses this one idea to navigate increasingly difficult maps. It’s a portable hole.

I first encountered this idea in a Saturday morning Warner Brothers cartoon.

The Hole Idea by cartoonexpert

And then with a silly Marvel Comics
villain called The Spot.

I'm not going to talk very much about the game of Portal. If you’re interested I'm sure there are tons of internet articles discussing and deconstructing it in far more detail than I can. I bring it up because of other things that have happened in the last couple of days, interspersed with playing Portal.

Here’s where the thin metaphor kicks in.

Out of the blue I pulled my old paperback copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig off the shelf yesterday, the exact same copy I read thirty years ago. This book is considered a classic for many reasons. It is about many things, including motorcycle maintenance, but in brief it is a discussion of the differences between a Classical understanding of the world (Science), and a Romantic understanding of the world (Art), and the attempt to reconcile them. This description couldn’t be more basic or less explanatory of what the book is really about, but I’m not going to attempt to summarize what took Pirsig nearly 400 pages to discuss. Go read it.

I have often said that this was a very influential book to me, but quite honestly, other than some of its main highlights, I couldn’t have told you very many details about it. My memory (there's that topic again), has convinced me that this was an important book to my personal growth, but I couldn’t elaborate with any specifics.

I don’t reread too many of the books in my life. I know some people revisit favorites on a regular basis. I have nothing against that practice, but with rare exceptions I just don’t do it. There are way too many books I haven’t read yet to spend time with things I’ve already experienced. I’m particularly hesitant to reread those books that I think of as significant and life-changing. What if they don’t live up to my memory? Will that taint my formerly positive assessment of them, or will I just be able to accept that I’m not the same person in need of those lessons at this point in my life?

So, with a little trepidation I opened the book and began... and was immediately sucked into the narrative and have been devouring it again. Within the first thirty pages I read a couple of paragraphs that floored me. Here it was, that thing that made this book life-changing for me that I could never remember precisely or explain to anyone. There’s more to the book than just these two paragraphs, of course. But the point is what I experienced was reading something that I now take for granted as one of my primary ways of viewing the universe, a way of being in the world that is so second nature that I don’t even think about it very much any more. This book is the first place I ever encountered these ideas that now form a core of my way of thinking.

In that moment a Portal opened and I was in touch with Wayne in his early 20s, being blown away by these ideas and wrestling with what they meant and incorporating them into his life for the first time. This hole in time allowed me to relive those informative moments through the eyes and mind of someone older, more experienced, and hopefully wiser. It was different than simply remembering something. It felt like an insight into the path of my life, a direct connection from the person who first read those words to the person I am, reading them now.

Books are Portals. That's probably not the most original or insightful thing I have ever said, but it’s true. In this specific case it was a very personal sense of connection, but it happens with books all of the time. Whenever you open the cover of a book you are creating a Portal, allowing you to see another world or another point of view. You step through and are transported to a new mental location, coming out the other side in a different place than you were before.

Like I said, not particularly profound, but there it is.

After the initial revelatory experience afforded me by the time travel of prose I continued to read, and while that experience didn’t repeat I continued to be engaged in the story. I am reading it as a different person than the one who first encountered it. Whatever affinity I may have with 20-something me, that experience and many others have changed me. I am different and so is the world. While the words on the page are the same they are being absorbed through different eyes and carry different meaning.

Part of the problem in addressing the Classical/Romantic split is that each of them not only have their own language, but each has a different way of processing information. One’s a PC and one’s a Mac, to use a recent metaphor. It’s difficult to find a cross-platform common ground without degradation of information.

Which is true in so many of the issues of the world. Part of our problem in understanding others is that we often have incompatible operating systems. It’s true on the personal level and when multiplied out to include large groups it gets worse. Religions obviously have different operating systems. So does the Conservative/Liberal split in politics. Same underlying commands written in vastly different language codes. No wonder we get so many error messages when trying to make a point with someone who believes differently than we do. It’s not just the language, it’s the entire underlying architecture of the system.

At one point in the book the narrator is unable to reach some old friends because they have a different phone number than the one he remembers and is afraid he will not be able to find them (this was first published in the pre-internet 70s). He does find them, but muses about changing technologies:

“It's not the technology that's scary. It's what it does to the relations between people...”

Which made me think of Facebook, which is another kind of Portal.

Our newsfeeds are full of little windows into other people’s lives. I know a lot of people who are not comfortable with Facebook, or social media of any kind. I think, like anything else, it’s how you use it. I don’t post anything very personal there, using it as a place to promote my various projects, to keep in touch with what’s going on in friend’s lives, to see what events are going on around me I might be interested in, to find links to articles and news stories, to be exposed to new music and books.

But there is a danger to it as well. Those little Portals into other peoples lives can cause some consternation and misunderstanding. “It’s what it does to the relations between people...” I know a lot about people who I don't really know. I get glimpses into their lives without being a part of them. This can lead to a completely false sense of intimacy, as if I know them much better than I actually do. These Portals can create a sense of connection that doesn't exist. It can, of course, lead to knowing people better in the real world, but what we see is a curated version of that person. I guess the argument can be made that that is what we see when we first meet anyone, but this feels different. Somewhat voyeuristic.

The other piece of this that I find problematic is discovering things about old friends that changes the way I feel about them. I often see posts from old friends expressing opinions, usually in the realm of politics or religion, that I find radically different from my own. I don’t like my reaction when I see this. While I want to respect the opinions of others there are times I just shake my head in anger and disappointment. It makes me sad to realize how far we’ve grown apart. I still love the people they were, and I like to think that in one on one, face to face conversation those things really wouldn’t matter. But it also makes me wonder that if I met them today would we have any common ground to build a friendship on.

This is the equivalent to rereading a favorite old book. What if this person doesn’t live up to my positive memory of them?

Which brings me back to the Classical/Romantic division Pirsig talks about. Not that any human relationship is that easily categorized. The binary is too simple. But I think some of it comes back to our different operating systems. Some of the disagreement and inability to genuinely discuss some of these issues is that our entire underlying informational structure is different. I think it is important to recognize that, though maybe it's just me throwing up my hands and giving up on actually communicating with anyone with a different mindset.

So I have to ask, what has this technology done to my relations to other people. I look through a Portal of time and see the person I used to know, filtered through memory and the stories I tell myself about them. I look through the Portal of Facebook and see something that challenges those memories and stories as filtered through my current state of observation and interpretation.

Both are true stories, and both are imaginary tales.

And round and round we go. The cycle never ends.

Or, as Robert Pirsig said, “The real Cycle you’re working on is the cycle called ‛Yourself.’”

Imaginary Stories

As I write this DC Comics is once again planning an event called Convergence that will change, in some way or another, the nature of the continuity of its universe. This is only a little over three years since the launch of the New 52, which threw out (in my opinion anyway), seventy-five years of history and legacy. Over at Marvel Comics they are hyping their new Secret Wars event, and while the details of what this will eventually mean are vague it looks like Marvel will also be doing some restructuring of their continuity.

And, of course, the fans are losing their minds. Not everyone. A response I'm seeing a lot of is the eye-rolling, “here we go again” kind of exhaustion that goes along with these big events.

But that's not really what I want to talk about here. Not really. I've been through reboots and Crises and Zero Hours and Incursions enough to know that, in the world of Marvel and DC Comics, this too shall pass. What I want to talk about is the larger issue of the idea of “Continuity” in comics (and to a lesser degree in other media), and why it's so important to fans, and I want to do it in the context of my previous post about memory and recapitulation.

First, some background.

Continuity wasn't really an issue in comics for many years. Throughout the 40s and 50s readers were content to read self-contained stories that had little relationship to each other from month to month. We knew Superman's background and his supporting cast. As long as these were maintained, anything else was fair game. DC would actually label any story that broke these very basic and simple guidelines as “imaginary stories,” meaning, stories that take place outside of continuity.

It was in the Silver Age of comics (roughly the late 50s through the mid 60s), that continuity became important. Marvel certainly pioneered this concept by making all of their titles exist in the same world in a much more coherent way than DC had done prior to then. Events in one story would have lasting ramifications. If Aunt May had a heart attack in one issue she would still be in the hospital in the next. It created the illusion of the passage of time and reflected the real world more accurately.

This was easy enough to maintain when there were only a handful of books and a few years had passed. It became much more complicated as time went on. Tony Stark created the Iron Man armor while a prisoner in Viet Nam. The Fantastic Four launched a rocket into space to beat the Russians in the space race. Things like this made complete sense for a number of years. Not so much fifty years later.

These sorts of issues have usually been addressed obliquely by Marvel with a sliding time scale. It wouldn't be mentioned for awhile and next thing you know Stark is building his armor in a cave in Afghanistan.

Continuity, the sense that there is a canonical storyline, is important to many fans. I am certainly guilty of this. As much as many of us say that all that matters is that we are told a good story, part of our definition of good story is dependent on how well it fits in with our own sense of the continuity of the characters. Whether fans say they care or not, it has an effect on what books they read and what kind of emotional investment they have in the characters. We all have a head canon of what “actually” happened to these characters and what didn't.

In my personal head canon Hawkeye is morally opposed to killing no matter how many stories Brian Michael Bendis wrote indicating differently. The DC New 52 makes no sense to me if Dick Grayson didn't grow up with Wally West and Donna Troy and become adults while they were in the Teen Titans, none of which is true according to current continuity. And yes, these are some of my personal bugaboos, but we all have them. As much as I say I want change and different points of view and these characters and universes need to grow and change, the truth is I always have a certain knee-jerk reaction against anything that contradicts my version of what took place, and I'm ready to pull out the back issues to prove my point. It's all right there in black and white and four-color printing. This actually happened. It's canon!

Which makes me ask the question, “Why?”

In my last blog I talked about the unreliable nature of our personal memory, about how none of us have access to the reality of any past event, simply the story we tell about it. I can tell an anecdote from my own life that other people who were there will remember completely differently. The truth is, we're never sure of what really took place in any definitive way. There is no official canonical version of our past. We live our lives with the illusion of continuity but all we really have is our own personal head canon of what we believe happened. The stories of other people may contradict our version, or add a different dimension of information. This current moment is defined by the story we have constructed about our previous lives, but if any or all of our memories are suspect, then who the hell am I right now.

Welcome to Existential Angst 101.

No wonder a definitive continuity is important to us in our fictions. How nice it would be to pull out a back issue of our lives from twenty years ago and check to see what happened exactly the same way we experienced it then. Then we could argue with someone with a different opinion with some degree of authority.

Even if it is unconscious, we long for certainty in our lives. It's part of why we write fiction and tell stories. In our search for order amidst the chaos we create a narrative. We attempt to impose plot and structure on the random events of our day to day, to make sense of the many unrelated aspects of our existence. When something breaks our sense of continuity in comics we feel betrayed. I remember Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson being married... what do mean that never happened? But it's easier to argue over this obviously imaginary story than it is to reconcile conflicting narratives about our own failed relationships.

In the introduction to his story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow (Superman #423), Alan Moore, in direct reference to the aforementioned practice of labelling out of continuity stories as Imaginary Stories, famously said, “This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?” At the time this was seen by many as a negative reaction to DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, which consigned much of Superman's previous history to non-canonical status. None of those stories were real any more, as if any of them had any reality beyond the printed page anyway. I think it was more than that. I think it was commentary on the breadth of the imagination.

The old stories don't go away when the official continuity is changed. They're still there anytime someone picks up a back issue or a trade paperback collection. Grant Morrison addresses this overtly in the pages of Animal Man where a group of old DC characters who had been consigned to Limbo by the Crisis discover, “Every time someone reads our stories we live again!”

Unless you have been keeping a running diary of your life, written as events happened to you, you probably don't have a canonical history that you can refer to. Even if you do, maybe it's time to start questioning the back story you've been telling about yourself. Maybe not. How is the story you tell helping you live life to the fullest? How is your story limiting you? Maybe it's time for a soft reboot and a retelling before a Crisis makes it necessary.

Imagine a better story for yourself.

Recapitulations

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.”

– Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse

I have started a project that probably has no end, and no real immediate goal other than the process itself.

Because I don't have enough to do, apparently.

I recently read an advance copy of The Sculptor, the new graphic novel by Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame). My main thoughts on the book will appear in a review for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, so this blog isn't meant as an examination of the book. But The Sculptor was a springboard for thinking about a whole lot of stuff, primarily the nature of memory and how we construct the story of our lives.

The main character in the book, David Smith, is a sculptor. Most of his work is an attempt to capture the small moments of his life, to immortalize his memories in stone so that fleeting impressions will not be lost. The story is also about the reality that death awaits us all sooner or later. The classic idea that when you die your entire life passes before your eyes is used to great dramatic effect in the narrative. I think the essence of this notion is that in that last moment we will find some kind of clarity as to what all the small events and memories of our lives meant. What was the structure and theme of this life I've led? What did I learn from all of this?

Which got me to thinking about my own memories and life. Parts of our lives “flash before our eyes” every time we have a memory. So, I thought to myself, why wait until I die to try and see the whole picture and see what I can learn?

In the series of books written by Carlos Castaneda, books that were very formative to me at one time, he introduces the idea of Recapitulation (The Eagle's Gift, 1982). Recapitulation consisted of “recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.” The purpose of this was to engage the past in an effort let go of the things that held you back, to escape the demands of ego. Recapitulation is “genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.”

In short, it is used to heal. This idea isn't new or exclusive to Castaneda. It's part of most forms of psychotherapy.

I've been watching the Showtime series The Affair this week. No real spoilers here, but the conceit of the show is a “He Said, She Said” sort of dialectic. Both of the main characters are relating the memories of what took place, and the differences are significant, indicating not that they are lying (though they may be), but that each of them perceived the events through their own subjective filters (what some friends of mine have been referring to as Reality Tunnels). Events had different meanings and significance for each of them, based on their own experience and perceptions. They are both unreliable narrators.

Memory is the most unreliable narrator we know. Any given event is a moment in time that passes, only to be relived through the subjective memories of those who experienced it. No two people ever remember things exactly the same way. The difficulty in getting to the truth from eyewitnesses is evidence of this. What we end up with is a consensual reality, a version of the world we can all agree on even when it doesn't really mesh with what we remember. Over time, the story, if told well enough and often enough, replaces the actuality, often in the face of overwhelming evidence. The historical reality is always replaced by the story we tell about it.

And we all tell different stories.

I'm fascinated by this. It's one of the themes in my Arthurian novel, Bedivere: The King's Right Hand. The tale is narrated by Sir Bedivere in the later years of his life, and he is very aware of not only the failings of his own memory, but of how the stories and legends of King Arthur have already supplanted what he remembers as the truth.

I've read that our memory of an event is an ever-renewing process as well. When we have a memory of something what we are actually recalling is our previous memory of it, like rewriting over an already existing file. Each time we have a memory we are different people than the last time we remembered it. So now it is filtered through different layers of understanding, changing its meaning, therefore changing the actual memory every time.

So, that project I mentioned... Yeah, I'm trying to log all my memories. All of them. I know. It's impossible. That's okay. There's no deadline. This isn't for public consumption or any kind of project I ever intend to put out into the world (though some of the more interesting or funny stories may make it into a blog or a Facebook status update occasionally). This is navel gazing at it's finest.

I'm trying to be somewhat organized with how I do this. I do just jot down random things as they come to me. Not everything, of course.There's simply not enough time for that. It's amazing how many little memories you can have in a single day when you just start really paying attention to how you think. I've created files organized into various categories, like specific school memories, broken down by grade, or describing everything I can about the house I grew up in. I'm working on a list of every concert I've seen (I've seen a lot), and trying to track down dates and venues and who the opening bands were. I have some old ticket stubs and of course the internet helps. I have specific memories of all of these, some more vibrant that others.

The process is a rabbit hole, of course. When I focus on one topic, say first grade, it's amazing how many things come back that I haven't thought of in years, like snow forts and head wounds and the time the teacher broke the paddle on Kathy's butt.

So why do this? To get a better understanding of my own story and look for the recurring themes. To let some of it go, I suppose, though I don't have a lot of regrets. I'm one of the lucky ones who had a pretty happy childhood. To get ideas for stories. To enhance my creativity. To record my memories before they're gone (for whose benefit after I'm not sure).

One of the problems that David Smith has in The Sculptor was that he was so invested in capturing his past that he had problems living in the present or making new memories. I don't think that's a problem. My recent bout of hibernation and introversion aside, I have a pretty full life, and will hopefully continue to have one.

In the meantime, Once Upon a Time, that reminds me of a story...

An Evening With Neal Adams

This is an overdue story, but I've been telling it again recently, so I thought it was time to put it in writing.

Last April 25, legendary comics artist Neal Adams made an in-store appearance at my place of employment, Phantom of the Attic Comics in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.

Neal with most of the staff of Phantom of the Attic Comics.
Me, Dave, Neal, Jeff (the owner), and Jim

Neal Adams is easily on the top ten list of most influential comics creators ever. I don't have time or room here to address everything he has had a hand in creating. He helped to revitalize Batman in the early 70s, establishing a more realistic and darker take on the character than was usual at that time, laying the groundwork for the version everyone is familiar with today. Along with writer Denny O'Neil he was responsible for a series of stories featuring Green Lantern and Green Arrow that brought a social relevance to comics that had never been seen before. He established a tradition of heroic but realistic anatomy, and realism in general, that was revolutionary when he first began.

I could go on and on, detailing all of this, but that isn't what this is about. Go look him up. There's a lot to learn.

For me personally, Neal Adams was one of the first artists whose name and style I was able to identify when I was a young comics reader. One of the first fan purchases I made, something comic book related that wasn't a comic, was a collection of Adams art called The Neal Adams Index. I mailed away from an ad in the back of a comic. It was magazine format and had a checklist of his work, and a lot of unseen black and white artwork. Because I was a kid I colored in some of the pages with magic markers.

Adams was scheduled to appear at Steel City Con. Apparently, when he travels, he likes to schedule additional appearances at other, local comics shops. We were recommended to him and after some phone tag the signing was set up for Thursday evening at the store.

In all of my years of going to comics conventions I had never met him before, so when I was asked by Jeff (my boss), to go pick Neal up at the airport I had a little fanboy moment. Now, I should say here that I have met a lot of comic book professionals. I've interviewed Stan Lee. I've had beers with Frank Miller. I have postcards of encouragement from Scott McCloud. I used to hang out some with Steve Bissette and John Totleben (two-thirds of the Swamp Thing team, along with Alan Moore, who are responsible for the creation of John Constantine). So, I'm not a rookie. Truth be told, it's been a long time since I've really been a big fan of Neal Adams. I still love his earlier work and give total mad props to his place in history. But I don't get all excited over any new projects by him.

But, this felt a little full circle for me. He was the first comics artist I was genuinely a fan of.

So, I drove out to the Pittsburgh Airport to pick up Neal and his wife Marilyn. I was determined not to be a complete fanboy goober immediately. I think I was pretty successful in that. I met them and shook hands. They were friendly and outgoing. On the way back to the city we talked about where they could grab a bite before the signing. Neal asked questions about Pittsburgh. The conversation was pleasant and lively.

The store filled quickly. To say Neal was outgoing is an understatement. He held court. He's a showman. A carnival barker. A salesman. He told many stories about his days in the industry, filled with personal anecdotes about himself and other professionals. While he was friendly and made time for everyone who showed up (and stayed well past the allotted time with no complaint), I had the distinct impression that his bombastic persona was off-putting to some people. In the days after the signing I had several people say they thought he was arrogant.

And he is. The thing is, he's earned it.

There is anecdote from that night that sums this up for me. Among the many art prints he was selling was one that featured the cover of Green Lantern #85 from 1971. Here's a picture of it.

Here's the link to the Wiki page about this issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbirds_Don't_Fly

A young woman was looking at it closely and Neal said to her, fairly loudly and proudly, “That cover completely changed the history of comics!” I was at the store counter when he said that and my first thought was, “Wow! What an arrogant thing to say.” My second thought was, “He's completely right. I said the exact same thing about this cover to my comics class just a couple of weeks ago.”

So, is it really arrogance when the facts agree with you? Maybe we're just not used to hearing such a definitive proclamation of achievement, so it sounds like arrogance. We're always expected to be humble with what we accomplish, sometimes to the extent that we all downplay things we rightfully should be proud of. History has borne out his claim. Why shouldn't he be proud of it?

"I am the greatest!" Muhammad Ali would proclaim to anyone. Neal Adams is the Muhammad Ali of comics.

Neal also had a fairly long story about being the first artist to draw male nipples in comics, so there's also that.

While he was at the store I had him sign my copy of The Neal Adams Index and told him my story of how he was the first artist I was a fan of. When the signing was over I drove him to his hotel in Monroeville. He talked pretty non-stop the whole way out there. I was happy to listen. He's comic book royalty. He's earned it.

A Christmas Carol

I haven't done a lot of acting. Not in any real sense anyway. Not compared to many of my friends who are professional actors. I had the lead in my third grade production of Boots and his Brothers. In fourth grade I played a vulture in an adaptation of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who. I was Will Scarlet in a sixth grade musical version of Robin Hood. I did a little improv as part of a college program I worked with, but then in 1990 I moved to Pittsburgh and met a bunch of people who took improv and theater very seriously. I was so impressed and intimidated by them I never participated (though I stage-managed one show and have had a couple of small parts in locally produced movies since then).

My one real experience on the stage came my senior year of college when some friends and I staged A Christmas Carol.

It was something of a guerrilla production. It was December, 1982 at Waynesburg College (now University). At the time there was not a drama department at Waynesburg. The details are a little fuzzy but I believe the previous Drama professor had left and the administration was not sure there was enough interest on campus to justify hiring a new one. It was a small college, around 600 full time students at the time (there are a lot more now), so they may have had a point. Nevertheless, a lot of us were not pleased at this direction.

So we decided to put on a play.

I'm not sure why I got so involved. I had not been part of the drama department prior to this. I guess some of it was just a belief that the Arts are an important part of education. It was a creative process, so that intrigued me. I'm pretty sure that at least part of my motivation was just standing up to the administration.

The primary movers in this production were my friends David Ealy, Julie Smith, and myself. It was the end of the Fall semester, so we were all up to our ears in papers and finals. Because of the time of year we chose A Christmas Carol. We didn't actually find a version of the play. We wrote an adaptation of it based on the original story. It was a public domain property so we didn't have to worry about licensing fees or any of those types of financial matters. It was relatively short and hit the primary moments of the story without a lot of filler.

We went to the administration, told them our plan and asked for support. Their response was mixed. They said we could do it, but there was no faculty advisor to help us out, or any money available for a budget. There was an old playhouse on campus, but it was closed down and all of the heat and electricity had been turned off, so we couldn't use it. They did give us a key and said we could make use of any of the props, costumes or anything else we could find in there.

So we spent a lot of time wandering through a cold, dark building searching for things we could use. We did pretty well for ourselves, and the sense of adventure was worth every minute (even the moment when a stack of old flats fell over on David).

David, Julie and I began the process of looking for actors through flyers and word of mouth. Luckily, due to the small size of the campus this was not that difficult. We managed to pull in a lot of support in a fairly short period of time. We scheduled auditions and cast the roles. We all worked on props and backdrops, painting and hammering in the same dark, abandoned playhouse. We rehearsed in spare classrooms and dorm rooms.

Since we couldn't use the Playhouse we had to come up with another solution. The third floor of Miller Hall, the college's administration building, has a large open chapel with beautiful stained glass windows and a cathedral ceiling. There is not a stage, so we decided to build one. We scrounged every three-foot riser on campus, carried them up three flights of stairs, arranged them in a large rectangular pattern in the front of the hall and covered the cracks between them with masking tape. The painted backdrops and props were installed in a frenzied time crunch.

We weren't allowed to do this until the day before opening. This meant we didn't get a chance to block out the play in it's actual location until the stage was complete. Our first dress performance of the entire show was in front of our opening night audience.

We didn't sell tickets. The performance was free. We put up flyers and told everyone we knew. We ended up doing two standing room only performances.

We enlisted the Lamplighters, the college's choral group, to sing Christmas Carols as people came in. It added to the festive ambiance, but it served another purpose as well by covering up the sounds from backstage.

Except there was no real backstage area, just a narrow space between the backdrops and the wall. The actors all got into costume and makeup before the doors opened and then hid back there for the whole show, quiet as mice.

David took the lead role of Ebeneezer Scrooge and spent the entire performance on stage. Julie had no desire to be on stage so took on the roles of director and stage manager, and probably worked harder than any of us. I forget who played most of the other roles simply because I have lost track of and forgotten many of my collegs friends in the last thirty years.

I played the role of the Ghost of Christmas Present. I wore a long, green robe edged with white fur and carried a staff that was probably seven feet tall. There was a holly bush growing outside of one of the women's dorms and both nights someone went out and clipped fresh sprigs of it to fashion a wreath around my head.

I would like to say that the performances went without a hitch but that's not exactly true. There were no major glitches, but a couple of moments stand out. Tiny Tim, the five or six year old son of a friend of mine, said his one line wrong the first night. He realized it right away and looked mortified but it was sufficiently adorable enough that the audience forgave him. Ralph, the guy who played Marley's Ghost, simply could not remember his lines. Ever. The first night I noticed that when he was on stage he was holding his arm out in front of him, gesturing menacingly the entire time. Turns out he had written his script on the white cloth sleeve of his costume. On one of the nights the chains he wore got caught in the cracks between the risers, so Ralph recited his entire line from the edge of the stage, shaking the entire set every time he tried to move forward.

In the end we were successful. The hall was filled with people from the community, not just the college, all of whom seemed to really enjoy it. One of the Deans congratulated us and said that we had managed to bring the Christmas spirit to campus in a way that had been lacking.

And most importantly it convinced the administration that a Drama department was worth having. They hired a Drama professor and reopened the Playhouse. Since then the old Playhouse has been torn down (it was in pretty bad repair), and a new performance space was built. It's probably arrogant to believe that Waynesburg University would have never had a Drama department again if not for us. But in the winter of 1982, with the help of Charles Dickens, we pulled off a little Christmas miracle.

Nothing but... So help me, God...

Recently I went to an art opening featuring the work of my friend Genevieve Barbee. For those who don't know, Genevieve, in addition to being an artist, runs an amazing podcast called the AP Collector. I've appeared on the show twice; once to talk about my own own work and once alongside Marcel Walker to discuss the Chutz-POW! Comic.

Genevieve calls herself a collector of stories. When I arrived at the venue I saw that her podcast recording equipment was set up. After greeting me she asked a simple question (a question she asked everyone at the event).

“Truth or Dare?”

I chose Truth. We sat down at her makeshift studio and she said, “Tell me one true thing about yourself.”

I could have said something like, “I like bacon,” or “I have brown eyes,” and that would have been the end of it. But I wanted to say something more meaningful than that. I think I failed. In that moment, wanting to be honest and truthful, I found it very difficult to say something really true, something meaningful. I suddenly felt like anything I could say was just too private. I ended up saying something like, “I'm a writer, all I do is lie. Maybe that's the answer... one true thing about me is that I'm a storyteller.”

Lame.

My reaction surprised me, mainly because if you asked me in less formal circumstances I would tell you that I'm an open book. Apparently that's a lie I've been telling myself as well. Although, maybe I am an open book, but it's a book that just happens to be fiction.

This morning when I finally decided to write about this after ruminating about it for weeks the following quote was posted by a friend on Facebook.

"That was my father's final joke, I guess. A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him. And in that way he becomes immortal." – From the movie Big Fish.

Our lives, our personalities, are a the result of what we have experienced, of what has come before. But those events are gone, consigned to the past never to be repeated. All we have of our past experiences are our memories, and Memory is a notoriously unreliable narrator. Our memories are not exact replicas of the facts. We never really have access to the truth of what happened. Our memories become the stories we tell ourselves, not a representation of what really happened.

So what one true thing can any of us tell about ourself that isn't in some way, inadvertently or not, a lie?

Stories grow and change in the telling. Every time we replay a memory or tell a story from our life we are reinforcing the narrative that exists in our mind, which may bear little resemblance to the actual facts of what occurred. No two people experience any event the same way, so the memories they have of it, the stories they tell, are different.

This feeds on itself. As we experience more of life and discover more and more of who we are we tell the stories that reinforce our self-image. You would think most of us would want to present ourselves in the most positive light but that's not always the case. Think about it... we all know those people who describe themselves as unlucky, or bad with money, or hot-headed. Their life usually illustrate these descriptors. They have become the story they tell. In many cases people are told these stories, are convinced they are true, when they are too young to know who they really are. It is far too easy, even as an adult, to become trapped by someone else's narrative.

I'm fascinated by this dichotomy between history and memory, fact and fiction. They overlap and create new patterns and become the story of the world.

This tension is something I play with in my novel Bedivere:The King's Right Hand. Bedivere is one of the knights of King Arthur. Now old he is telling the story of his life. He is very aware of not only his failing memory, but also of the fact that the tales of King Arthur and the knights are already becoming legend.

If I may quote myself:

“Historians have come to me since I have taken up residence here... They want to know specifics... I cannot answer most of what they ask. For all their focus on details they miss the most important element, the human one. No matter how much they are able to chronicle and reconstruct, they still get it wrong.

“The bards touch on the heart of matters, but they could care less about the actual truth of events. Tales of dragons and enchanted knights are more interesting than lists of supplies and the minutiae of running a kingdom. For all of their insight into human nature, like the historians, they too get it wrong.”

In one part of the story Bedivere is discussing Sir Tristan, who in my version is as much a bard as he is a warrior. Bedivere says that Tristan is “a liar, the way all the best storytellers are.”

All of which may be an overwrought way of justifying why I couldn't reveal something really personal. Those who know me well know that I am comfortable sharing intimate details of my life. The older I get though it seems that there are fewer and fewer people who really know me well. While I meet new people and make new friends easily they rarely achieve the depth that older friendships did. Maybe that's age. Maybe the old friends are the people who were there when I was figuring out who I was and now that I have a much better idea of who that is I don't feel the need to share as deeply. So many of the most significant stories of my life, those that truly form the person I am, are far enough in the past as to be completely unknown to newer friends.

And in some cases, in some of the most important cases, my story overlaps with other people's stories. Overlaps in a way that prevents me from telling it. Part of it is not my story to tell. Some of the most true things in my life involve others and to tell them would be a betrayal of those people. I'm sure the story I would tell would surprise them, and be very different from the story they would tell of the same events. There is truth in both versions, but they are separate truths.

So what have I learned from this wrestling with the truth? Maybe I'm not as open as I think I am. Maybe I'm not as honest, primarily with myself. That there are more parts of me that I still feel a need to protect than I thought. That I'm still vulnerable. That I can be very open and honest but I'm picky about who I choose to share with. That I am protective of others as well as myself. That a simple question can still send me off soul-searching.

But even though I'm aware that my memories are unreliable and that my stories have changed the past, I will keep telling them. With age comes new insight. The stories change as I do. So do their significance. In the end all we really leave behind are the stories others tell about us.

What do I want on my tombstone? I used to think the simple words, The End would suffice. Now I'm happy with To Be Continued...