Process XXXII

Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
- Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime"

Maisie Williams & Zach Wyatt
"I and You"
(Hampstead Theatre, 2018)

And now, Whitman. I had not yet read Song of Myself. My familiarity with the piece has been circuitous, most recently through Lauren Gunderson’s play I & You.

I read Gunderson's play a few years ago, when it was published in American Theatre magazine. As everything was shutting down fifteen months ago, Hampstead Theatre posted their production on Instagram for free, and we watched that. The plot revolves around two teenagers who don’t really know each other, writing a paper on Whitman ... but that’s not really what it’s about, and it would be telling to say any more.

But to date my most intimate connection with Whitman’s poem is jazz pianist Fred Hersch’s interpretation of the work, Leaves of Grass, featuring vocals by Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry. I do not know where I first heard of it, or why I acquired a copy, but it was regular bedtime music as I sat in the dark, tapping on my laptop as our single digit-aged children drifted off to sleep in their new bunk bed. It was a magical time.

My Early American Poetry class has been provided with recordings of Whitman's poem, read aloud, with annotations which are helpful. I sat on our new patio, listening to scholars discuss and interpreters read this most American of poems (is it?) as I pass my free-writing notebooks into the fire bowl, to burn.

The symbolism may be a little heavy-handed, but do I care? These were for writing, not reading. The only text I hope to leave behind is what I intended to. And oh! There are journals in the attic, over ten years of personal thoughts from my mid-twenties to my late thirties. When I thought I should leave behind a record. Those also have to go. 

I had an illusion that future biographers might want to know what was going on in my head. I no longer entertain such thoughts. The only people who will have to deal with these things are my offsrping.

Divesting my parents’ home, I came into possession of their letters. And their parents’ letters. I cannot destroy those. I just can’t. And so they remain, for my children to deal with. The least I can do is to take myself out of the equation. They won’t need to make a decision about my personal writing, because it won’t be there.

Play a Day: The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin

Jessica Huang

Reading a play a day for a month has been exciting, exhilarating, inspiring, all the good things. It also means getting up early most days, even weekends, to read the play, ruminate and then blog about it. It's kind of messing with my sleep schedule. Also, exercise.

Now that I have gotten in the good habit of reading so many plays by so many different people, I hope to continue, maybe on a weekly basis, if not more often. We are in the homestretch now, after today there only four more days/plays in April.

For Wednesday I read The Paper Dreams of Harry Chin by Jessica Huang, and available for download from New Play Exchange.

The only child of a Chinese immigrant father and American mother struggles to cope with his needs following her mother's death. The plot gets more involved than that, mysterious and magical, and yes, there is a mystery to be solved. But the premise, coping with the ghosts (literal, imagined) of the country left behind, are universal, and have a particular resonance in this country.

Once we speculated if it would be more challenging had mother passed before father. My brothers and I never discussed it, until that time when he had passed and we agreed that would have been much more challenging. The men need the women, it does not go the other way.

Which reminds me, I need to call my mom.

Harry Chin would prefer to leave his past behind, his daughter Sheila insists upon knowing her heritage. Only recently I learned a little about my own father's past. He was adopted, but chose never to search for his birth mother. He claimed he did not want to know. But I wanted to know. I did not even know his ethnicity. Caucasian, sure. But from where?

Luxembourg. Huh. Really? That's weird.

The parent wants to abandon their culture, the younger to embrace that which has been abandoned. Who get to choose?