Which I took of myself--texting while running still seems to be legal in New York--about 1 mile into the 1.8 or so I ran to start yesterday's chem-athlon. The intent was to run and pant and sweat for the days leading u to a battle with the Red Devil, a main ingredient in the 4-day stint we are now starting.
I ran from parking the vehicle at our garage back to the apartment--the aforementioned almost-2 miles. I briefly checked in on N, who was deservedly getting extra sleep after the incredible success of her Second annual Storylines Award, sponsored by the NCV Foundation--which is really just N's heart and drive and her Dad and I following in her wake doing our best to help make things happen.
From the apartment I went to the gym and did 5.7 miles on the bike in half an hour and then 20 laps in the pool in just shy of eleven minutes.
The day before I ran the full 2 but skipped the bike and just swam as I was needed back at the apartment to help Mom and Jim pack the Sam's Club food from the vehicle into our fridge--a task I arrived perfectly too late for, so that I could bemoan how much I had wanted to help without having to lift any trays of veggies or ginormous bottles of apples Juice.
The Award speaks for itself, or will when N gets this year's photos and info up on the site soon. Suffice to say it was phenomenal, and this year's author/judge, Naomi Shihab Nye, was a beam of pure light throughout the evening.
Alas, the Devil, while still quite the terror personally, has been put off to later in the weekend, and the battle waged against the chemo as been oddly, disconcertingly, um, mild.
This week has been a strange one. The past few weeks, to be honest. I have been battling on a couple fronts, internal and external.
From the inside comes the fact that the last round, the last 4-day blast, was not so bad, and so the last two weeks found me spiraling about without much to fight against, gaining weight--which is the correct thing to do but bruises my ego--and in general flailing a bit. The therapist brought it into nice focus by pointing out that as this progresses, unless I have a string of bad luck for the record books, my battles will get more and more 'quiet.'
A loud and violent battle makes sense to me. Pound my plowshares back into swords, as it were. Get nerved up for the spray of blood, the scissoring hooves of warhorse's feet, the stench of death on the battlefield.
That gets the blood going, creates a stage (theatrical analogy intended) for the coming difficulties and efforts to alleviate them.
So if things are going to be...fine, then I find I am quickly backsliding into who I was before.
Everybody says cancer changes you. And they mean 'after.' Obviously, making you dead changes you, but that isn't really what I am going for. I mean the 'after' of maintenance. The 'after' of cure, the 'after' of 'hey, remember when I had Leukemia? When that year was stolen from us?'
And, blood-doping-or-not, cancer-defeating champion or not, arrogant-or-not, I have always been and will always be drawn to Lance Armstrong's gift of cancer: the allowance to fully rebuild himself from the skeleton outwards. In his case make himself the best cyclist ever. In my case to put muscle where I want it and extra weight where I don't, with a specific eye on marathons and triathlons. And, lets' be honest, looking good for years and years.
But the psychological battle is, as I was told this Tuesday morning, quieter. And, I think for me, more difficult.
The White Zen pragmatism that has helped get me through a lot of the hardest times--the 'this is happening, so what do we do? OK, let's do that thing?'--serves better the wildly terrifying and the deeply urgent.
In talking it through with the therapist--and I think I am giving her more ink because she had greater success with me in therapist-ing: in talking or questioning enough to lead me to the conclusions so that they were already planted in my bones before we even discussed them--was an analogy of the 'battles vs. the quiet evolutions' as being like the strengths and weaknesses of Method acting.
So: brief history: Method acting was created by Stanislavsky, memorialized in his book 'The Actor Prepares,' and carried to a new world and audience by Michael Chekhov, nephew to the great Russian playwright. The Method is, at its most basic, a way to break down the components in a scene or character so that an actor can find personal truths to connect them to. A sad scene will be aided by the actor finding his or her own sadness and channeling it into the play's words in rehearsal. An actor who is supposed to have not slept for days before a scene might want to not sleep for days to truly understand that situation.
The part of the Method that most western actors forget is that A: it was designed for theatre, an B: it is supposed to disappear near the end of the rehearsal process. You go through this deconstruction, and you build your character and your scenes, and then you forget all of that process because it is in your body and you go out on stage and you knock'em dead.
Western actors and the teachers making oodles of money off them very quickly bastardized the Method all to hell and created numerous generations of actors who could cry on cue, badly chew scenery with the best of them, and create deeply moving intensity.
They often could not, however, listen to anyone else on stage, collaborate in a fluid performance, or play the less weighty scenes: "Hey, Charlie, what time is it?" "I don't know, maybe 5?" with any less intensity, leaving audiences exhausted by plays that seemed to take themselves WAY too seriously, and after-show meetings with actors who certainly did.
And they tried to transfer this to the screens, both large and small. Soap Opera acting, where every situation is dire and every bad line is delivered like it means the whole world, is a good place to watch the Method butchered by gringos and their half-baked instructors.
There are some very famous Method actors--Dustin Hoffman being one who frequently comes to mind because, in a moment of great fatigue and inability to go on, The God Olivier suggested to him maybe he should just 'act.'
It makes for a great story, and helps my cause of ignoring the Method, but it does not paint the whole picture.
As an actor--professional since age 13 in 1985--I can tell you that we are almost all very very insecure, that our arrogance is a rapidly built and agonizingly defended wall around the voice in our heads asking 'am I worth anything, will someone please love me, when will the next applause come?' We're a little pathetic that way, and the sooner we come to terms with that character flaw and either accept it or carve it out of us like a hangnail, the better off we'll be.
But many of us are not clear of that insecurity, that fragility of ego, and the Method allows us to think that we have some structure to hide behind, some set of moves and preparations that will lower the possibility that we will fail on stage or screen--because when we fail on stage or screen we are really just allowing the cosmos to tell us "yes, in answer to your earlier query: you are worthless and nobody loves you. And you could lose a few pounds, too."
So there are many, many great actors who are Method. But I firmly believe that they are great actors, without it. They have just built the habit of the Method and see no reason to let it go. It is like athletes who won't shave during the playoffs: I think we can safely say that doesn't make them hit or skate or catch any better, but it makes them think they can, and that is all that counts.
So, back to me. I hate the Method, have studied and discarded it, and find that the moments when my natural skill--that intersection of genes and environment that have made me the dissembler I am and will always be--can tune into the quietest moments on stage or screen or recording; those moments where I or my character are of the least value to the story, but where my continued involvement--deferential, glad to be of use--will help create the overall sense of a Full and Total Reality...that's fucking acting.
And that's fucking living. I can swash my buckle against the vomiting, the exploding pancreas, the agony like rainstorms having seizures in your skull. I can stand tall against the endless lapping waves of nausea. I can cry to N when it just gets so long, the loss of regularity, the erasure of a sense of the person I was 'before.' The disease.
But the the cure; the recovery; That's a different journey. It is a slow and patient climb back up towards normal, where I hope and intend to pass my old self, and walk a little further along the path. A better man, a fitter man, a man who knows how precious it is to not be here, on the 10th floor, plugged and tubed, measuring my urine output in coffee spoons.
'There will be time, there will be time,
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.'
These days are introspective, as the Eliot will attest. These days are hours to fill with careful living, and the slow, spare making of plans. Of looking forward, and making sure I can see myself in the picture.
In the hospital just over 24 hours, we have had the schedule for this visit changed--lengthened--twice already. We'll be here till Late Sunday Night at the earliest.
But that's what needs to happen, so that happens.
I am not violently ill. I am just getting more and more tired, less and less comfortable. I don't feel poisoned as much as just adrift, too far from a finish line. Like walking back from falling through the ice--knowing you'll get home, but cold, and weighted, so weighted, soaked jeans anchors scraping red and raw shins, thighs, hips.
But home awaits. Warmth, familiarity, and perhaps a quiet moment to listen to the lessons you've learned, and be improved by them. Forever.
