Creative compromises

(excerpt from letter to Jacek)

It's been sunny for a week now in London. Even hot. Last night with the lights and everything the audience was being slowly cooked. I am in this piece about the persecution of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and I wear this fur coat. It was a great idea when we first created the piece in December. Now it is just hot.

It's been a long distance run to the end of year performance. We have two nights to go and I am looking forward to when things are over. Isn't that terrible - to be performing in something that feels like a job, rather than a joy?

I think a really large part of my frustration is that I feel creatively compromised in the pieces I am in. In part, this is because of the creative process; in part because of what the teachers say (and it bothers me how docilely my classmates accept authority and not think for what they would consider the best solution). In short, I am tired of not being able to create what I want and having to go against my gut instincts. I think that's what is bothering me so much - every time I go against my intuition I feel like an amputated tree. And so after a while.. I feel like a blunted scalpel. My ability to dream becomes blocked.

Here's the other thing... after all these performances are over, we have one month to launch our final project. And so here I am complaining about having to creatively compromise and now I have a chance to do exactly what I want with the most talented of my classmates... and I don't know what I want any more. I was working for a few months on this project about a couple in a relationship, computer programming and carrots, and now suddenly the thread I was following has gone cold. I can't hear it any more. How can something that I was problem solving so intensely lose its connection? (Actually given how intense our rehearsals for the show have been, it's not surprising.)

In this sense, I am facing a problem that I had three years ago writing my Swat thesis: What do I care about, really? There are a gazillion and one things I can write about, but what is the driving question, the story that I have to tell now, today, this week, this month? That's what is most difficult for me. I have these images: a chorus of people dressed in white in this incredible expanse of green grass (there is this huge part near my house with this never ending field); ah... ah... where to go with this? The thing is, I've very bad at constructing bigger things. I can write poems much easier than a short story or novel.

As I am writing this I realise that what I need to do is go back to the truth of the original image and figure out: what is it really about?

some poems by Ali

Something nice has come out of the Craig & Miriam project. It has brought me back in contact with an old friend, Ali Hamoudi, and his poetry. After graduation, Ali headed off to Iraq, where part of his family was. Every so often I would get poems from him.

I knew I wanted Miriam to be in touch with social issues, but the truth is I have been lucky enough to have no direct experience of domestic or global violence. Perhaps this is true for many of us in the Western world, who have the luxury of hearing about “events somewhere else” on the TV or the newspaper. Deaths in Baghdad might can feel as fantastical as Craig's computer game world.

How to stay connected? There are no easy answers.
Here are two poems of Ali's that I like.

Dedicated to the Guy Who Was Crushed by a Tank

I'm writing you this letter because tomorrow I might be dead.
I can hear you snickering in the background
“he thought it had a hand break.”
I can hear you sigh in sorrow
“another life wasted.”
I can hear you justify your reactions
“he was a poor man, small man, worthless man.
He had no job, no life.”
And I can't help but wonder if you’re right.
To think I could do something so noble
as to sit in front of a tank
for a humanity as hopeless as this
and then to realize
There is no McDonald's* in the afterlife.

ali hamoudi 5/Apr 2004

*McDonald's is a registered trademark of the McDonald's corporation.

Tree's Creation

There was a time when I looked at a tree
I said this is beautiful God's creation.
Now all I can see
is resource for the purposes of continuing
endless cycles of oppression.

Though somebody told me the tree would be happy
sacrificed for the sake of God,
thick black bellowing smoke, impenitrable to light,
covered all possibilty
to see/be
creation.

ali hamoudi 9/Aug 2003