Back to the Course

The golf course is an unforgiving place.  The walk today was an exceptional experience for me: four pars, 3 bogeys, and 2 doubles for a nine-hole total of 43.  Today I joined up with two other fellows on number four after sinking a long putt on number three for a par.  One of them, a few holes later, said that I seemed to be an expert on getting up and down because I was hitting my irons so well from the fairway.  I said, “Thank you.”

As I played, and walked, I was taken up with thoughts about my moving center, my intellectual center, and the interplay between them.  It was an interesting afternoon.  I’ll get into more of that later but now I want to write a little bit about the eyes.

Often we talk about vision in a allegorical sense; what is your vision? How do you see it? What is the vision of the company? All of these and other references to vision impart a much different meaning to it than seeing with the eyes.

Probably because the eyes are such a major sense when compared to the other four senses, it is only natural to impart to them more importance, to give them a more prominent place in our expression of thoughts.  A diagram of the senses with each of the sensors given a proportional size to its importance doesn’t even show the eyes because they would be disproportionately large in comparison.

Yet when one strips away the myth, the allegory, and the literary references, the eyes are one of the five senses with which we experience the present in which we are involved – now, and only now.  We can’t experience the past or the future with our senses; for that we use our memory and imagination.  These two are often melded into one another as imagination affects memory when we try to remember, and memory influences imagination as we project into the future.

The eyes are a tool of the brain-body and they occupy a unique position on/in it.  They are placed on the front of the head, only about three inches apart, and yet they are able to accurately gauge distances and relative movement of objects anywhere from a few inches to several miles away.  Not only that but they can do this in bright sunlight and in starlight.  But they cannot see the face in which they are set without the aid of a mirror, which reverses left and right unless compound mirrors are used, or by recording, photographic or digital images; still or moving.

Today I became aware that I was able to see all around, up and down, back and forth and almost all of my body, except my face.  The question came to mind, “Is this a message, is there meaning to this?”

The design would indicate that it is not important to see the features of one’s face.  Vanity instills in us a desire to see same, but apparently it is not/ was not deemed important enough to make allowances for doing so without the aid of special equipment.

Yet everyone else around us can see our face.  And because their vision is so acute, honed by thousands of years of evolution and fine tuned by a lifetime of experience, they are able to see in our face the emotion that is transiting our brain at that instant.  Only the skilled actor can control of the countenance and either hide or display a particular emotion; and even then they are wont to give it away.

In playing golf, the eyes are a tool used by the personae of primarily the moving center to determine what motion and to what degree that motion has to be delivered.  They are used by personae of the intellectual center to analyze the situation ahead of time to set it up properly and afterwards to provide feedback on results.  The disciplined golfer does not allow other personae to interrupt this process.

It was my work for today, for the most part, there were struggles among personae; there were physical constraints due to age and ability, there were distractions but, by and large, they were kept to a minimum and the result was a score of 43.

It was an experiment that was successful.  It was premeditated and prescribed; it was called to mind every time the ball was addressed to be hit by whatever club including the putter.  The results speak for themselves and it is worth another attempt.

There is memory associated with each of the major centers of the brain-body; intellectual recalls facts and formulae, emotional recalls situational feelings, social recalls how best to deal with different individuals, instinctive recalls what to do in a threatening situation, sexual recalls how to act/react for procreation, and the moving center recalls what to do to produce a specific movement.

This moving memory, often called muscle memory, is what allows us to ride a bike after not doing it for forty years,  to pick up right where we left off the last time we danced, rode, swam, skated, skied, hiked, ran,-- you name it.

On the other hand, developing moving memory is time consuming and often frustrating.  Recall how often you were unsuccessful in executing a desired moving activity until the technique was finally mastered.

This moving memory exists in many unsuspected forms.  Stair climbing—try a set of stairs that doesn’t have an eight-inch riser; sitting—sit down on a bench that is less than the normal height; yet one can unerringly put his hand on the soap in the soap dish in the shower with his eyes closed, face lathered with shampoo, and water running all over him.

The goal is to allow this moving memory to take over in making a move after realizing that the appropriate work has been done to allow it.  When putting, the last thing I think is, “There’s the hole, there’s the ball; put the ball in the hole,” then I quiet all but my moving golf persona for the putt.  The result is often a rattling in the cup or a tap-in.

Prose, Poetry, and Script

Here we are in the middle of June, the first 100 blog posts have been published in three volumes entitled “Notes on Life and Living” and the three readers have given them rave reviews.  (They are available for $20 each if anyone is interested/ that amount just does cover the cost so I’m not ripping anyone off.)  Now I have prepared 18 philosophical poems about the same subject, As I Live My Life, and will print a limited number of them in a booklet.

Poems in this form are enjoyable to write; they are of a structure that I invented for conveying more or less esoteric thoughts.  The general form is two sets of two lines each of assertion, four lines of exposition, two more sets of two lines each of expansion, four lines of erudition, two lines of advice, and a one line conclusion.  It works for me and I’m the poet.

The objective of writing scripts for plays and movies hasn’t been abandoned; I keep talking about it but haven’t put pen to paper, finger to keypad yet.  The one play I wrote was pretty good, it didn’t go any further than an edited first draft so no one has taken it apart for me to rewrite.  I did it in a playwriting class and defended it fairly well; the professor thought I showed promise.

It seems to me that script writing almost has to be a collaborative effort, at least at first.  This assertion is borne out by famous play writes and the multiple credits on screenplays that I see in movies.  That a single individual can write a script from start to finish without collaboration would mean that the writer is a genius or has had the benefit of having done it with others many times before and knows what works and what doesn’t.

One of my Whodunnit buddies has written three scripts to date and I was lucky enough to perform in one of them.  They held water for the genre and audiences like them.  The Whodunnit process requires collaboration; an author can write what he/she thinks will work and then it is reviewed by objective third parties, has a dramatic reading, and finally goes into rehearsal.  Problems can be discovered anywhere along the way and rewriting is required time and again.

The ideal of a writer in his garret turning out finished plays is just that, no relation to reality.  In truth, the script is hammered over and over again until it takes the shape that will stand performance.  I doubt that the Whodunnit process is unique.

When talking to the co-author/director of my most recent movie appearance, he allowed that the script we used was the back story to the original script idea, which was found to be too ephemeral  for performance.  Much work went into the original concept such that when the back story became the script, it was finished in short order but not, however, without getting a paid professional to review it before production started.

This script, for a feature length movie, was approximately 80 pages and there were a lot of stage directions included.  Having observed this one closely because I was in it, I have to assume that it is fairly close to the “real deal.”  With more experienced actors, directors, and cinematographers, I can understand shorter scripts.  In this case the writers wanted the story told a certain way and, since one was also directing, that’s the way it was made.

The same was true of Atomic Bombers, a play I was in earlier this year.  The director was the author about 25 years earlier and he admitted that the way he directed it was a slightly different take on the story from the perspective of today’s post 9/11 world.  I’m sure the nuances were subtle because the script was the same original script used for the first production back then.

I am registered for a class in script analysis that should help me in this quest for putting my thoughts on stage.  The fact that I’m not a crusader, idealist, or activist may work against me but I am a philosopher and as long as I keep to my field of life and living and present my characters as being involved in that, I just may be able to pull this off.  The format could be Whodunnit, could be classical, could be comedy, and could be soap opera; they all will work because they all reflect life and living.

There is such a condensation of expression via words from prose to poetry, and such an expansion of expression when the ideas are put into play because the audience becomes emotionally involved without a written page.  This becomes my reason for doing it.  I’ve seen the economy of words that poetry allows, I’ve seen the complete expression that prose allows, and I’ve seen the way actors using the same script can interpret it differently but still faithfully.

The question that is begged is why?  Why would a reader bother to read others’ thoughts?  Why would an audience sit through 90 minutes of a whole lot of others’ ideas on a how a situation could be portrayed?  The answer is for entertainment, for the escape of not having to come up with the idea but rather have the idea presented to them to be enjoyed, accepted, or rejected.

Each reader or audience member has a different angle from which he/she is experiencing the work.  Some are on the top level of what is said and done; others are concerned with how it is said and/or done; and still others are commenting on the technique that the production company, in all the aspects of it, used to create the desired effect, and there are still other aspects of a production upon which people concentrate.  When writing prose, poetry, or script one cannot take all these things into account.  A good author brings a story, which allows each to enjoy along his own line of analysis and thus be entertained.