Spirital Atelier

That’s what I’ve done today.

Nothing. No classes, no research, no homework, no studying, no stressing about next week. Nothing. I have accomplished Nothing, and I see myself doing Nothing. If this were a strange occurence, I might be compelled to dismiss it. But I do Nothing far too often, and thus it’s a state of being.

I’ve done Something before. It’s hard to be a junior in college without having done Something at some point. But Nothing, to me, just has an appeal to it. It’s far more comfortable. Like a second skin. Like a shirt and shoes. Like singing should sound.

Nothing moves me, I feel. I am driven to do Nothing quite regularly; it’s part of who I am. And this scares me.

You see, Nothing is frivolous. Nothing is a waste of time. Nothing is a spit in the face of forces beyond us that enable us. Nothing is everything my friends and family want me to not be. But here’s the catch – if I were to choose Nothing, I would get Nothing. There’s no misunderstanding. There’s no ambiguity. Just exactly what I asked for.

Something can means something. Something can lasts longer than the last. Something can affirm anything and everything we want it to. Something can be wonderful. But Something is variable. Random. Fickle, on occasion. If I choose to do Something, I don’t get Something all the time. I can get a lot more Something than I put in; I can get a fraction of Something; I can get Nothing.

And you can get away with Nothing now and again in other fields. Theatre requires that you do Something because it sets itself up as Something. English doesn’t promise to be Something. It promises to work, to express ideas. Political Science doesn’t guarantee that it is Something. It guarantees that it works, that it describes power and government. Mathematics doesn’t prove that it is Something. It proves that it works, that it establishes numerical relationships. Theatre sets itself up as Something, as a transcendental experience that expresses ideas, describes power, establishes relationships, and anything else we can think for it to do.

Something is harder to do than Nothing – a world harder. To do Something, you have to compel yourself. You have to do. You don’t have to do anything to do Nothing. Nothing is, as I said, a state of being, an inert existence. It’s not doing Something. But you can’t do Nothing and expect Something. It’s just stupid.

So my fear is – am I stupid?

It’s a marvel what capitalization can let you do.

One of the things that I can honestly say I’m proud of is my vocabulary. Though it may fail me time to time, I have a vast and expanding reserve of phrases and expressions I can unsheathe as needed. A great deal of this comes from my love of knowing words. I took Latin for five years, working of Caesar and Virgil for great portions of that time. Last semester, I got a B in Greek despite an atrocious attendance record that did get better over time.

Perhaps most telling is that I am addicted to Dictionary.com (and the sister site, Thesaurus.com). Something about going to the site and scrutinizing words I know and discovering words I don’t gives me a rush that very few things in life do. The sense of accomplishment is enough to override whatever mood I may be in, and I feel as though I am better for having done so. I think it’s the only sort of academic pursuit I don’t have to force myself to undergo.

On a whim, I sought out the Word of the Day (a wonderful part of the site) for my birthday. Here’s the listing:

atelier \at-l-YAY\, noun:
A workshop; a studio.
Atelier comes from French, from Old French astelier, “carpenter’s shop,” from astele, “splinter,” from Late Latin astella, alteration of Latin astula, itself an alteration of assula, “a shaving, a chip,” diminutive of assis, “board.”

It’s a provocative word for me in several veins:

First, I am posting for a class which requires me to build a story from self-obtained resources and research. How I look at my future beyond Mary Washington hinges specifically how I craft my work and what I provide myself. And it’s never complete – to me, the point of the class is that it’s never complete. We’ll never be done looking up what we can do, and we’ll never be done deciding what will be done to reach our goals. We’re simply focusing in on a specific question so we can learn what we’re doing. I anticipate that the reading and discussion of materials in a personally driven fashion will continue to my dying days. This is just a singular workshop for us to get our feet wet.

Second, I am admittedly not a great student. Something about going to a class and sitting in a seat for fifty or seventy-five minutes fills me with anxiety, not to mention the four-hour block for this class. I have never done well with homework, and my study skills are laughable. And yet, outside of an academic field, I don’t mind going to obscene lengths to do what I’m interested in. I’ve written poems and plays with words and themes given to me. I’ve gotten very good at DDR, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc. I’ve done statistical analyses of various and sundry observances. At Wegmans, I received a work review that put me as among the most diligent workers in the store. As far as I can tell, I have two possible explanations.

I might fear failure to such a degree that I don’t try at anything of consequence; either it’s a video game or a seasonal job or just words on a piece of paper, but it’s not my education and it’s not my vocation. Or I might fare better in environments where I feel I am an active participant who receives tangible, correlative results for my actions; I want to do something, and classrooms suppress this urge. Both and neither may be right – I still can’t decide.

Third and lastly, I’m in a production where I begin in a workshop for hats. A great deal of my definition comes from my experience there. A great deal of who I am comes from the environment. For the production, it’s vital that the place is a workshop – a place of effort, of strain, and of perpetual turnover.

This last connection means the most to me. We currently are at the stage of the production where all the aural and visual elements of the world are coming together and consequently we have to integrate it. I’m still a work in progress, but I will get there. The world is speaking, and I now have to listen to what it says, both through noises and silences. Additionally, what has been most difficult to me so far is the language of conversation and invitation. It’s all Caryl Churchill has given me, and I don’t seem to hear it quite yet, nevertheless speak it. I confess it’s almost a foreign tongue. I use it, but not intentionally and not masterfully. But I love words, and these are simply new words for me to learn.

I have learned this new word. As I use it, I hope more inspire such discourse within me.

Today, according to NASA’s SkyWatch, Fredericksburg citizens will be able to see the International Space Station in the sky for three minutes as it passes in its orbit. At first, this was only garnered passing interest from me – it’s not as though I couldn’t look the ISS up online whenever I wanted. But something about it kept drawing my focus, so I did some research into it.

A massive endeavor, the ISS was started at the end of the Cold War, when American astronautical engineers were at their most industrious. They found that since there was no competition anymore, their energies were waning. Instead of letting themselves atrophy, they called nations around the world and proposed a collaborative project to surpass all other individual works. Planning and drafting took until 1998, when work formally began. It’s on track to be completed in 2010, and will stay in orbit until 2016. It currently weighs approximately 500,000lbs., and spans 191ft. by 240ft. by 90ft. – as you saw above, bigger than a Boeing 747. Click here to see scale drawings (Note they are in 1/100 scale).

It also travels at 17,240 miles per hour; at that speed and with the distance it is from Earth, this massive structure appears in the sky like this (click to see more):
So why does this mean anything?

As I sat there staring at this blur in the sky at some Idaho house, there was a great disconnect. That is the International Space Station. A crowning achievement in international cooperation and coordination, a paragon in collaborative design and engineering, the current zenith of man’s endeavors to sustain life outside this planet’s atmosphere. But unless you knew that this was the ISS, you would mistake it for a naturally occuring item. It would blip out of your interest as quickly as it came in. And something about that reverberated in me.

A playwright writes a play to communicate an artistic message that came to him or her. A producer reads a play, and finds it suitable to perform for a paying audience. A company contacts directors, designers, stage managers, and any and all stagehands, wardrobe crew, etc. to inform them of this project. A director analyzes the play for its artistic quality and its techncial demands and provisions, eventually conceiving a message to convey. A designer analyzes the play for its technical demands and provisions, eventually conceiving an aesthetic to convey. An actor auditions, either with a prepared monolog or reading the play without time to prepare, and then analyzes the script for its artistic quality and technical demands and provisions, eventually conceiving a series of genuine emotions to convey. A stage manager compiles all this information and his or her own analyses so they are aware of any and all questions or concerns and can answer them knowledgably. At the same time, the company must find ways to present the play to the public in such a way as excites interest and encourages attendance. Labor laws define great portions of the work, and for most of the people listed above, they must start the process anew soon thereafter (if they are not doing more than one production at the time). To describe the process of what we do in theatre to, say, my parents (admitted outsiders to the field), there is little difference in the degree of difficulty between it and building a space station. So much can go wrong in the course of a production, making it a miracle that things go as well as they do. But even when they do go well, what does it mean?

Honestly speaking, an overwhelming majority of people will never see a single thing I do. I will not be remembered by most people, statistically speaking. Most people will also not pay attention as the ISS passes overhead. But for the people that do know, for the people that are looking, it’s a captivating glimpse.

I can say the same with theatre.

It’s an amazing thing we do. We create life onstage, we manifest truths and stories and the worlds we wish we had. No matter what, we have that. And it’s never easy. Creating life is a trying, painful, process. But when it’s done, it’s an amazing sight. And nothing can change that.

So when I’m staring at the six o’clock sky, I’ll have a part of me expand right into that sky, right in time for rehearsal.