INSIDE OUTSIDE

All around the town...

INSIDE OUTSIDE

All around the town…

We’ve been to Birmingham together. Not for naught. Telling the tale of that journey focuses us on a deep and oft repeated truth of ACTING HUMAN practice. 

“The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~Muriel Rukeyser

I promised several posts back to amplify how story and narrative relate. In the interest of keeping that promise I’ve narrated my engagement in the “Salute To Freedom.”

The distinction between story and narrative is of the essence. 

WE LIVE LIFE AS STORY AND TELL STORY AS NARRATIVE.

Our lives lived alive are identical to the Universe. Story we play in a ‘seeing place’ (remember Greece?) called Universal Theater. 

As Sharon Salzberg wisely said: “We are not in traffic, we are the traffic.”

We not only play in the theater, we are the theater. Identical. One singular sensation. Our identity is as wondrous, as protean, and as vast and infinite as all within and beyond this Universe, we enfold and unfold as one in all Galaxies, known and unknown.

“What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen.” 

~James Baldwin

WISDOM PRACTICE

Everything changes. 

Everything connects. 

PAY ATTENTION!

The only inherent innovation in ACTING HUMAN practice is the realization of an ironic truth. ‘Acting,’ which is typically consigned to the realm of mere entertainment, makes for a fertile and potent life and consciousness expanding practice. 

NOTE: Entertainment when clearly seen is much more than merely mere. 

Furthermore, acting is what we all do all the time.  We call it living. The topper is that acting, which we do all the time, usually mindlessly, can with intention serve as valuaable practice as it has a well established, endlessly adaptable, and readily available body of evolved principles and useable teachings. 

The quality of our attention sets in motion our capacity to live whole and enlivened lives. To see, to observe keenly, to pay attention in ways that show us, in body, mind and soul, that story is what we are made of, and is our natural element, the subject and object of life lived alive. 

Narrative is an overlay we create to make sense of it. That’s where the game gets sticky. The need to make sense can, and often does, cause great confusion, pain and suffering.

We want to come wholly alive. The process evokes fear. Thoughts hold us in check. We remain prisoners of our minds, we mistake our thinking for ‘common sense’ reality.

“Reality is a group hunch.” ~Frank Zappa 

That hunch dictates that we conform to sensible living, going along to get along, locked into herd mentality, deprived of ignited imagination until and unless our hearts come to the rescue. 

Rev. King, as we read two weeks ago, said in Berlin:

“Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.” 

Jazz is Universal music. It vibrates in harmony with the essence of OUR IDENTITY. It can liberate whole HUMAN ACTORS to live alive on Earth. 

To act, to live truthfully, and to play jazz skillfully are synonymous expressions of wholly alive humans in everyday life. 

Both take skill and come from heart energy. Courage and empathy. With practice we can learn to embrace our whole selves as creators of humanity.

“I like to say that playing jazz builds our humanity in that it presents us with the challenge of not knowing what is going to happen. And not knowing what is going to happen is what improvisation is all about. There is an element of the fear of the unknown, the fear of something different, or the fear of being outside your comfort zone. Hesitancy and reticence, to a certain degree, create the monster called fear.” ~Wayne Shorter

BACK TO BIRMINGHAM

Limited only by narrative (story telling) skills, I told the truth, but not the whole story. I don’t yet ‘know’ the whole of it. It remains in process. I didn’t ‘know’ the whole of it while it happened. I lived the story not the narrative. I still live the story. And I still don’t know.

We all live in story, never fully knowing its source nor its reach. Story, an ‘infinite game,’ arises without beginning or end.

Narrative plays a ‘finite game.’ It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Story in my Birmingham experience, as lived then and lives now, at ever changing levels of awareness, implicate and explicate.  

Many narratives can express in explicate order. A few, in part, for illustration:

Willie Dennis

Willie was first and above all my dear friend. He was not only a wonderful musician and trombonist but a sweet and gracious man. He encouraged me and taught me tacitly. He was nineteen years older than me.

We played together frequently for the sole sake of playing tunes and trading improvisations. Fun and practice. I learned a ton from him. He was far and away more experienced and accomplished than me. I could play, he could really play. Willie would drive me into musical spaces that left me physically breathless. He’d laugh, I’d shake my head, then when I caught my breath, laugh along. (Check him out on Wiki.)

Two years after we were together in Birmingham he was in a car crash. Central Park. Dead instantly.

I can share narratives about Willie Dennis and/or Central Park. Both he and the park play fascinating roles in my life. Each, every bit as poignant and profound as Birmingham.

Parts and wholes inhabit our lives as story. Always.

Willie’s relationship with Morgana. My time with her in the days after his death are narrative worthy. 

All of it is alive in the story (lived experience) on the morning we left to salute freedom. Unseen. Unknown.

Many would say these are ‘just’ accidents. No pun intended. I don’t do puns, and when I slip (rarely), I’m immediately regretful unto sobbing.

I’ve come to appreciate that patterns shape life and creative expression. We’ve touched on the Hero’s Journey, mythic narratives, grounded and distributed in widely varied cultures covering expanses of time and space. Hang around, there are more essential and amazing patterns to reveal.

If we pay attention to unfolding story, as lived, we see into the mystery, we see the wonder of birth and death in tandem, we see the multiplicity of life’s facets, the fractal nature of the lives we live. 

Most often, distracted by what we’ve come to accept as ‘practical’ and ‘real,’ we take life for granted or, if we get a glimpse of its mysterious and magical nature, we quickly explain it away as woo-woo and rush back to serious business.

Morgana King

Morgana enjoyed an illustrious career as a singer’s singer. She had a four octave contralto range, recorded 30 albums, and even though she’s been at work for more than ten years, she was nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 1964.

The Beatles won.

The kid trumpet player from whom Morgana snatched a bag of reefer on August 5, 1963 was no more likely to answer to the title Professor Dubin as he was to win an Olympic Gold in the high jump. There was plenty of getting high then and to come, though virtually no jumping. Certainly none on purpose.

As it turns out, I spent the first 18 years of the 21st Century teaching with a full professorial appointment in the Television and Film Department of the ‘esteemed’ Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, though I’d never properly graduated from high school.

Simultaneously I continued to write and consult in Hollywood. Like I told Martin, I’m a trumpet player. Hollywood? How did that happen? Little do we know.

At Newhouse, I fashioned and taught a course entitled Script Analysis which devoted an entire semester to the study of one script, “The Godfather.” It tells the story (as a scripted narrative) of the Corleone family.

The father’s name is Vito. His wife and the mother of his children is called Carmela. They are immigrants from Sicily.

Carmela Corleone was played in the film by Morgana King. My friend, and Willie’s wife, was born in the Bronx like me. Morgana and I, at different times, attended James Monroe High School. 

Carmela has no spoken lines in the film. She does take the stage during its memorable wedding scene, to sing “Luna Mezz’o Mare,” a classic Sicilian tarantella.

Morgana went on to act in other projects, including “Godfather II.” Coppola is reputed to have often solicited her advice on the authenticity of scenic elements as she was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants.

Another dollop of synchronicity. I taught an Introduction to Screenwriting class which included a student, Angela Saggiomo, from Philadelphia, which is where Willie Dennis, then known as William DeBerardinis, was born and raised.

Angela, home over the summer, told her family about our class and mentioned that I, her much beloved teacher, was a jazz musician. They asked if by any chance I knew of her great uncle, Willie Dennis. She had never heard of him. 

Angela returned to school in Fall, to among other things take another class with me - I had many recidivists. She fell by my office to relay her family’s question. Well, you know the answer. 

I learned from Angela that parts of her family, not all of them, were upset with and had disowned Willie, as he had left his nice Philadelphia bred Italian wife for a Sicilian saloon singer in New York.

Both Morgana and Willie had teenage marriages. They met in 1961 at Birdland, married each other shortly thereafter, and exulted in the loves of their lives for four years. 

I stayed in touch with Morgana until she she died, at 87, in Palm Springs on March 22, 2018.

OTHER POSSIBLE NARRATIVES

There are many narratives that the lived story of Birmingham can spark. Each of which move in and out of story that flows as life lived in my experience. Seen and unseen. Narratives that center on…

James Baldwin.

Central Park.

John Lewis.

Children.

Death.

Harlem.

Jews.

Bebop.

Among a plethora of places, people, and events. . .

WE LIVE LIFE AS STORY AND TELL STORY AS NARRATIVE.

Much more on how the story/narrative process influences creative living and the practice of ACTING HUMAN to follow. Please stay with us and bring friends.

Until next time. . .

Lights Up!