On Jekyll and Hyde

I first read this story as a teenager, but after seeing Baylor’s wonderful and sprightly production, I finally understand it. Directed by master’s student Josiah Wallace, this adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher is a darkly lit montage of Victorian England’s seamier side of filthy alleys, morgues, flop houses, dark streets, corpses and solitary gardens. The play is not as possessed of forbidden science or occult practices as it with the solitary human heart. What is more frightening? To find you are capable of incredible violence and unrelenting cruelty? Or to find that although admired, loved, and applauded by all, you lead a sickening and solitary life of few friends and no family? Ultimately Robert Louis Stephenson, the novelist who penned the original, was probably less concerned with the potion his mad scientist concocted than he was with unleashing the horrific beast that resides within us all, controlled, just below the surface. The question is: can we forever keep the beast contained? Stephenson, Hatcher and Wallace would all say that, no, that’s not really possible, and that’s why the alter-ego, Hyde, slides to the surface. In the end Hyde is a monster who hides in the shadows, screams, hits, threatens, yet he also a man, indistinguishable from any other. To think that we absolutely control our emotions, that logic is always at our fingertips, that rational thought is our only response to any situation is totally absurd. The most frightening idea presented by the play is that many of the abusers look like Jekyll and are shining examples of decorum and respectability until they can get their victims alone and hurt them. Symbolized by a red door, a continuous rupture with logic and rational thought was the centerpiece of the work, and characters came and went, at one point in the guise of a doctor, or a professor, or a policeman, and then morphing into the violent, menacing, and irrational Hyde, and then changing back again into reasonable English Victorians with their lilting accents and proper manners. The ensemble seemed strangely constrained at times, torn between their need to repress their energies as Victorians and their need to let it all go in the guise of Henry Hyde. I admire both their guts and their courage, and it was obvious that they trusted their director. The only thing that would have made the play creepier would have been a more nuanced Hyde who shouted less, but then again, that’s just me. The set, a minimalist piece of moveable ironwork, kept transforming itself into new places, almost as unpredictable as Jekyll himself. The lighting was subdued since the entire production was cloaked in night, darkness, fog and mist, which was appropriate given the subject matter at hand. Too much rational empiricist makes Jekyll a dull boy indeed, but the unanswered question remains: There, but for the grace of God, go I?

On Pitas Payas, a fabliaux (an adaption from the Libro de buen amor)

My friend Pitas just came back from a painting job that he did in Flanders. He was there two years. I wouldn’t be telling this story except that before he left for Flanders on that fateful day two years ago, he celebrated his one month anniversary of being married. I won’t mention his wife’s name but let’s just say that she was younger than he was. In fact, I think that when they married she was all of nineteen. He told me about accepting the job in Flanders, and that he was worried about his wife. He was afraid to leave her for so long. They had only been married a month, so he suggested a plan to keep her safe from harm and from temptation: he would paint a small lamb on her stomach. If the lamb was intact upon his return, then she would have remained pure and above temptation. Well, Pitas left for his job, and his wife got very sad. Everything month seemed like a year, and she was so lonely. You guessed it, before long she had made friends with another man, and in no time, the lamb was gone–rubbed off. One might be critical and say that she was inconstant and conniving, but she was so young and so lonely. I mean, who could blame her. So the rest of the two years past and one day a few weeks ago news arrived from Pitas that he was coming home. His wife was frantic. I’m a painter too, so she called me up, “Can you paint a little lamb on my stomach like the one I showed you two years ago? Like the one Pitas painted on my tummy?” I said that of course I could, but I had something else in mind. I gathered up my paints and brushes and headed for her house, but I didn’t paint a little lamb, I painted a full-blown ram with the sweetest set of horns you ever did see. Pitas came home and the first thing he wanted to see was the lamb. His wife obliged. He said, “But dear, I left an innocent little lamb behind. What’s this? A full grown ram?” I wasn’t there, but I heard reports that she said, “Pitas, what do you expect if you are gone two years? A little lamb turns into an enormous ram in two years.” Poor Pitas. The moral to this story is simple: if you don’t pay attention to what you have, it may wander off and get lost.

On fast food

Lately, most fast food is neither fast nor food. Certainly, fast food covers the major food groups–fat, sugar, salt and caffeine, but isn’t there more to life than just choking down a burger and fries with a sugary, caffeinated drink? Sometimes I wonder if fast food joints aren’t a sign of the time poverty that both lowers our standards and robs us of life? I don’t mean to pick on these well-meaning businesses that serve us burgers, fries, chicken, fish, tacos, pizza, burritos and sandwiches, but we seem to be sacrificing a lot more than our basic nutrition by frequenting these places. Perhaps fast food is a weird oxymoron that invalidates the real meaning of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Perhaps none of these meals was every meant to be inhaled in some linoleum clad anti-aesthetic eating factory. For lunch today I sat with a retired colleague and we talked while we ate and neither he nor I was in any hurry. The food was all freshly made that day, including the chili which was really quite tasty. We took our time. None of our food came wrapped in anything. No ketchup, no fries, no cheese–why do they have to put that creepy orange cheese on everything?. Do we lose track of our souls when we submit them to a regime of fast anonymous food? Perhaps a family should spend time eating together–it certainly couldn’t hurt. I don’t really dislike the foods served in fast food joints–lots of salt, lots of fat, what’s not to like? But neither the empty calories nor the anonymous atmosphere of that food and those places can help with digestion. Eating for human beings is much more than just eating. Our gregarious nature leads us to share food in groups. Major religions have festivals in which a common meal is obligatory, often imbued with deep religious and spiritual significance. Fast food robs significance from the experience of eating. Once in awhile fast food might solve a momentary problem of eating when time is not on your side, but I would suggest that perhaps we all need to take a good long look at ourselves if this happens frequently. Fast food is bad not because it’s food, but because it’s fast. The burger and fries are not bad because they come in paper containers, but they are bad because we consume them with little or no expectation of doing little more than just filling our stomachs. That’s bad.

On melancholy

Tomorrow I get the opportunity to teach Spanish Romanticism. For the Medievalist in me, this is a bit of a stretch since contemporary literature holds no interest for me, especially anything written as recently as 1836. I mean, really, has enough time passed to really test if this material has any real value at all? I think not. But, on the other hand, teaching Jose Mariano de Larra does have at least one huge bright spot: melancholy. I get to teach literature that is concerned with feeling sad for the sake of feeling sad. “Christmas Eve of 1836” has to be one of the most self-deprecating pieces of writing ever penned. I don’t really know which is more interesting–his satire or his cynicism. Certainly, the literary voice narrating a horrible December 24th is pushing every social criticism button it can find, devastating the object of that criticism: the writer. The melancholy hits in waves like thunderstorms “training” over the same patch of flooded ground with no end in sight. Melancholy may be the opposite of happiness, but why anyone would want to continually wallow in it for days and weeks at a time is beyond me. For a moment, perhaps melancholy might be a literary posture that one might adopt for a moment in order to prove a point or illustrate a tight piece of irony, but why would a sane person perpetually gravitate towards a pitched mid-life crisis? So your plants die, you feel sad, but then you have an excuse to go to a greenhouse and replace that ugly thing that died: no melancholy. You feel bad for the baker across the street who lost his wife, but she was a horrific crab of a person who browbeat him endlessly–no melancholy. You sit on a dark, rainy evening, working on a poem about death, sipping a little something, scratching out a few words on your notebook. Raindrops are falling on the window, you pull on a warm woolen sweater, you write a few more words about gravestones, moss, old wrought iron, creepy trees, dark shadows, tears that silently fall across a cheek, an empty chair, a missing voice, and although the poem is not perfect, you now have something to work with: bones, dust, shadows, nothing. You are plumbing the depth of melancholy, but now it has become truly conventional, removed from your soul and converted into art.

On Gatsby

Originally, I got to know Gatsby because I was invited to his lavish parties out at his “house” in West Egg. I’m not much of a party guy, but my girlfriend (now, ex-girlfriend) said it would be fun. I knew better. I had seen a million of these guys come into the business, get used up, and vanish, die. Yesterday, some two-bit mechanic broke into his house and shot him. I lied just now when I said I didn’t know Jay Gatsby before I went to his party. Years ago, when we were both innocent kids growing up in Minnesota, I knew him as a quiet, Jim Gatz, a normal guy with honest aspirations and dreams. Then the war came, we were sucked into the great war machine, we went to Europe and our paths crossed again, albeit briefly. He was just a kind, humble guy in those days, but I could tell he was also hungry. Yet even in war, he was nothing like the strange, cold monster I encountered on the lawn of his mansion. We didn’t talk. After I came home from the war I found that my girl had married someone else so I moved to New York and got a job on Wall Street. My accounting degree from a small liberal arts school in the Midwest was just the ticket I needed to get into banking. I even look the part–skinny, glasses, bad hair, but I have mad accounting skills. To say that Gatsby was up to his ears in illegal activities is to not really understand the problem at all. He helped move merchandise for his mob, laundered profits into legitimate businesses, and fronted for some pretty nasty cats up in New York City. Let’s not get squeamish or prissy, but part of my firm’s business was to launder money, and some of these bootleggers had tons of it–cash. Now, there is nothing wrong with cash, but if you have lots, the government wants to know where it came from. You know, did you pay your taxes? Gatsby was a great front for his syndicate because he looked the part–handsome, blond, broad shoulders, charm, great smile, he didn’t drink or gamble, didn’t womanize or take drugs. It’s kind of hard to trust a guy with no vices, although I always suspected he had at least one. The difference between the two of us is that I was just an anonymous accountant with a bad scar who worked in a windowless office on Wall Street. I may have skills, but no one wants me to represent the firm in public. So, for a ton of money, Gatsby sold his soul to the Devil so the Devil could launder his money and turn it into legitimate business ventures. Gatsby looked the part of a legitimate businessman, but he was as dirty as they come, and I would know, I’ve seen them all. Gatsby’s cut made him a millionaire, made him a success, but it also made him numb to almost any and all ethical considerations. He didn’t enjoy his parties, and I get the feeling he knew almost no one there. I assume he was killed because of a woman, but that’s rather irrelevant, especially for Gatsby. Too much money too fast will kill you every time.