But it was tremendously odd. I sat there, deep in the balcony, sort of looking around to see what people made of it, and everyone seemed quite dutiful. It's saultary to remember that we can often be of the most service to a strange place in preserving our own ways of thinking. Sort of why I spent one January in this city listening to a tape from the RSC every night. Preserving the λεγειν -- the way of making the world reveal itself to other people. Another example, from last week's reading, Chesterson's trifle The Flying Inn, when the Englishwoman mulls over the Gurdjieffian teachings of the strange prophet, and compares them to her own sensibility, realizing that while the ideas were logical, they revealed themselves as not aware of the deeper reality that surrounded them. And simple logic prevails when speaking about a machine, but deeper logic prevails when speaking about the world in which we have our being.
On a prior visit, I saw a production of Streetcar at the war theatre here. No subtitles, but in addition to knowing the play well, I had worked on it in one of the more worthwhile method-based training programs in the city, with a very highly regarded teacher. I watched them, and though the production was a bit of a trifle, I could see that they were using it cut across the open field, no road being there, but the simple matter of a quick improvised decision or two, and they were in the same place that the folks in that room in NYC were in. This despite the fact that with all of the cultural revolutions hre, the acting pedgagogy has been completely emptied out -- they've collectivley thrown out the Stanislavskian bath-water, and something was peculiarly heavy in it, and landed outside the door with a thud. But in scattered moments, they got there.
And the peculiar slow, Pinteresque production of the Sam Shepard piece in Bucharest, walking down the street afterwards wondering if the the instruction at the beginning of the play that it was to be performed relentlessly and without pause was lost in the fact that the local word for intermission is "pausa". I recall a well-heeled gentleman in the lobby expressing some concern at the fact that I didn't speak the local language, and there were no titles -- I refrained from telling him how many nights in undergrad were given over to arguing about the nuances of Sam Shepard's work. I skimmed through a biography of his that suggested that many of his experiences in the city were similar to mine -- if you don't engage in certain social rituals there, you'll have plenty of time to sit in a coffeehouse and read. Which isn't entirely a bad thing. Spent quite a few evenings with Gurdjieff, as I recall.
Back in the Romanian second city, I recall visiting a statue in the neighborhood (that, full disclosure, I had found on Google Maps), and then tracking down a cumbersome translation of his works at the local university library, which made for a pleasant afternoon. That's the sort of thing I try to do, and the sort of person that does those things is the person who is a bit of a stranger to the place. So to encounter the place, (and perhaps say some things that might help them understand things like Joseph Heller and Tennessee Williams), I must be a stranger to it. Three's a reason the Bosnian Serb border guards call me "cowboy", and the Sarajevo Canton veterans marching in the parade call out to "Indiana." I am simply from the other place. And if that's the case, one might as well be that, if only in order to meet the strange place.
This begins with writing. And as I try to rebuild things, despite all of the interposed forces and faces, I'm going to have to start getting more words down on paper. Or whatever paper's become these days.