Shakespeare Camp for the Uninitiated

Last week, I finished M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, a novel about a group of theatre students in their fourth year of a drama program at an exclusive arts college. Their curriculum consists of all-Shakespeare, all the time, and by the beginning of their senior year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, they are both a well-trained theatre troupe and a close-knit group of friends (or, in some cases, frenemies). Things look promising at the beginning of their senior year, and at the start, I was almost envious of their situation, their ability to focus and train in exactly what they love best with a group of like-minded fellows at a small, idyllic-sounding Midwestern campus.

Actually, Dellecher is not at all unlike Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I studied mythology and Jungian psychology, and I can attest that my program had some of the same idyllic qualities—a beautiful natural setting, a program with a particular focus, and a tight campus community, though PGI is in SoCal and has a definite California vibe rather than the strict regimented intensity of Dellecher as described in the novel. Of course, even in paradise, real life goes on; in the midst of trying out for roles and navigating romantic entanglements and friendships, Dellecher’s seven seniors are looking forward to auditions and professional careers once they graduate. They seem on track to accomplish that and are on top of the world at the beginning of the term.

As you would expect, there’s plenty of interpersonal drama and competitiveness among these students. Some of the tensions that already exist intensify as one of their professors focuses on having each student identify and expose his or her greatest strength and greatest weakness to the group in an acting workshop. Sounds fairly harmless, right? I don’t know if this method is common in acting circles; I suppose it makes sense in terms of having actors get in touch with their own motivations, aspirations, and fears so that they can become better actors, but it’s also fairly brutal because it strips away their defenses. In any event, it marks the beginning of the end of the Dellecher idyll as it leads to psychotic breaks among the students. Instead of merely playing their roles, the actors can no longer quite contain what they are meant to be enacting, and Shakespeare’s rivalries, jealousies, and murderous impulses (which are really their own) spill off the stage and into their lives.

Jungians often discuss a technique called active imagination, which is a way of getting in touch with the contents of your unconscious to spur creativity and personal growth through the use of symbols, images, meditation, and other tools. It can be very beneficial but also, perhaps, destructive, if you’re not on solid emotional ground to begin with. To me, being immersed in the myth traditions of cultures around the world for several years of study was one long exercise in active imagination that was tremendously freeing as far stimulating the imagination goes. To me, it’s difficult to think of anything more beneficial for a writer or an artist. In the case of the Dellecher students, all of the wide world as presented by Shakespeare—while deeply beloved as a discipline—has been largely academic until the lines between role-playing and real life are breached. Once the students’ emotions begin to interact in a serious way with the roles they are playing, life begins to imitate art, and real-life tragedy is not far away.

Jung believed that the type of growth people strive for with analysis and active imagination often takes place naturally in the second half of life as people reach a stage in which their undeveloped capabilities, dormant in the first half of life, begin to make themselves felt. It’s generally a very positive thing. The Dellecher students in the novel, of course, are barely out of their teens and not really equipped to deal with so much emotional flooding, especially in the same context as substance abuse and tentative sexual exploration. Previously unimaginable events overtake the students as rivalries and resentments spill into violence and collective guilt.

At the beginning of the novel, I thought that of all the subject disciplines taught at Dellecher, theatre seemed the most rewarding because it has the potential to teach practitioners so much about psychology and human nature. This is true, I think, but as the plot in If We Were Villains unfolds, the downside to all this exploration of the psyche becomes apparent. If Richard, who has always been something of a bully, can become a full-on murderous sociopath, then James, previously the “good guy,” and Alexander, who has always been ready with “bad boy” behavior, can also cross over to the dark side once murderous impulses find a channel to the surface via a staging of Macbeth or Julius Caesar.

Obviously, this isn’t a common occurrence, and you can probably attend your community’s Shakespeare in the Park performances in relative safety this summer (if you were worried about it). Nevertheless, the dynamic the novel describes of unconscious impulses spilling out uncontrolled once they’re no longer contained is accurate, I believe. A witches’ brew of dark emotions in the plays of Shakespeare, a bit of unlicensed therapy from a teacher a little too oblivious to the dangers of probing complexes and insecurities, and a group of talented but still immature students struggling with all the usual problems of young adulthood—what could go wrong? Probably a lot.

To Celebrate 10 Years of Wordplay, I’m Giving Out the Best Advice You’ll Ever Get

With all the activities that come with the New Year—gathering tax documents, renewing car registration, planning for retirement (more on that in a minute), I frankly forgot to mention an important milestone: Wordplay—Writing & Life’s 10-year anniversary, which occurred at the beginning of the year. Yes, it really has been that long. Though in some ways it’s difficult to believe, since I clearly remember the day I sat down and wrote the first post, in other ways it feels like every bit of 10 years and more—the longest 10 years of my life, in fact.

I was feeling very hopeful when I started this blog. I was about to embark on the great unknown of writing a dissertation, and I was also hopeful of possibly seeing other changes in my life. Successfully completing a three-year course of graduate school while working full-time had given me the confidence that I might be able to do other things I’d never done before, including, but not limited to, moving and getting a new job. I didn’t want the job I was in then to be the job I retired from, and I knew that with a library degree I was probably employable just about anywhere. I wasn’t unhappy to be in Lexington, but the idea of moving had been in my mind for so long that I figured it would probably happen sooner rather than later.

Before I started the myth studies program, I was a writer in search of a subject matter and a spark that I hoped would set something alight in my mind—and that is exactly what happened, though not in the way I thought it would. If you had asked me then what I imagined myself doing 10 years on, I probably would have said: I will be living in California, or at least dividing my time between Kentucky and California. I would have said I will be working in a creative field, publishing books, perhaps teaching part-time, and maybe even exploring my newly formed interest in working with images and film. At that point, I viewed my library career as something I was likely to transition out of. But first things first: there was the dissertation to write.

Although the end of 2009 had ushered in some unexplained and unsettling events, as I have said before, it was really more of a Dada phase in my life, not the full-on Surrealistic Nightmare that was shortly to ensue. At the beginning of 2010, I still felt that I could steer my life in the direction I wanted it to go, and in fact, that’s what I was doing. The main anxiety I had was the pressure of the dissertation, and, while daunting, this was largely a good pressure, one I had chosen for myself.

When I look back, I’m thankful that I had my dissertation to think about once all hell broke loose, because it gave me a focus, an intellectual activity that required me to gather myself together and give it my all. If I hadn’t had it to work on at the end of 2010 and during the latter part of 2011, I don’t know what I would have done. But there I was, doing the things I had always done best, gathering sources, reading, and distilling all of that into writing. In a way, completing the dissertation was like one long writing meditation, although I suppose most people wouldn’t think of an analytical process like scholarly writing as a meditation. In effect, though, it centered me and helped me keep my feet on the ground during an extremely bewildering time.

In Jungian terms, I was in dialogue with the Self throughout it all. In some strange way, despite having been semi-agnostic for long stretches of my life, I felt at that time as if I could sense a divine presence hovering at the edges of things, quietly willing me to succeed. It wasn’t just “succeeding at the dissertation.” It was succeeding at surviving. If you’re an atheist, this will probably make no sense to you, but I was a believer in the goodness of God at that time like I had never been before in my life.

Needless to say, most of the things I had hoped for 10 years ago did not come true. Once I successfully completed my dissertation, it was as if I was at a dead standstill. My ability to land on my feet upon leaving one job, which had never failed me before, had suddenly deserted me. There I was, a newly-minted PhD, with—I felt—more to offer than ever before, unable to get any kind of a job. No matter that I was more focused, more skilled, more valuable as a worker than ever before—none of that availed me. I felt stymied at every turn, even when I applied for jobs I would rather not have had. My 10-year plan certainly didn’t include using up my retirement savings just to live, and yet that is exactly what happened. In my wildest dreams I never imagined ending up homeless, and yet that happened, too.

There has, however, been at least one great good thing to come out of it all, which possibly wouldn’t have happened if none of the above had taken place, and that was that I was forced into myself and my own resources and ended up finding a way to turn my frustration and pain into writing. I had always wanted to write fiction and suddenly found that when I turned my hand to it, instead of hesitation over every word and sentence, the words came tumbling out as fast as I could write them. I was pleased with what I was doing fiction-wise for the first time, and that, friends, is no inconsiderable thing.

I’m not going to make it easy on anyone else by saying that the writing has made the last 10 years all worthwhile; what I really feel is that I succeeded in what I was doing in spite of the last 10 years. I chose to finally shed some of my innocence, to acknowledge the darkness I could not get free of, and finally, to triumph over it to some extent by bringing it to bear on my writing. I feel sure that few of the things that were happening to me were happening because of someone’s good intent—just the opposite—and yet the fight I found myself engrossed in eventually had the effect of giving me (and my writing) some much-needed edge. I would never have described my life prior to 2010 as “uneventful,” but in some ways I feel now that not enough had happened to me. I was still almost a child, comparatively speaking. One thing about fighting for your life is that it gives you heaps of fabulous material, if you choose to see it that way.

So now, the time has come to once again look to the future and answer the question of, “What do you see yourself doing 10 years from now?” And I would say, very much the same things I was thinking I wanted to do 10 years ago, as long as I am in charge of making my own choices. I have never given up on my dreams and hopes and am no further from doing that than I was 10 years ago. I’m reaching retirement age this week and have chosen to apply for social security retirement for economic reasons. Living modestly on social security and wages from Home Depot was never part of my plan but is now my reality, so I intend to make the best of it. I make a small income from my writing business (I don’t make much, but, yes, I make enough that I have to report it to the IRS, so I have in effect been a working writer all this time). Perhaps some day I’ll make more than I do now.

Being a writer is what I am, at my core; I never realized that surviving would one day depend on my holding fast to this, but that’s turned out to be the case. I can do a lot of things, but there has never been anything else that I wanted to do as much. It’s as natural to me as breathing. I also want to add that the timing of Greta Gerwig’s film, Little Women, has been rather fortuitous, because that book, given to me by my aunt when I was seven years old, loomed very large in my imaginative life as a child. The fact that several of the March daughters had talents and aspirations, including—most notably—Jo, the writer, didn’t seem at all remarkable in the book and was simply presented as a given. Ms. Gerwig would have no way of knowing this, but my experience of seeing her film on Christmas Day brought me back to one of my foundational experiences as a reader and a writer, confirming for me that, at least where it really matters, I’m right where I need to be in my creative life. It was as if I had circled back to myself.

Whatever talent or passion you yourself are nurturing, openly or secretly, I encourage you never to let go of it. Pay attention to your soul’s requirements, and you’ll never find yourself agonizing over “what might have been.” Find a way to make it happen, and resist people and situations that pull you away from what you know to be your truest self. Stubbornness, often said to be a vice, is in fact a highly underrated virtue, and one I would advise anyone to cultivate, at least in the things that really matter. It will enable you to stand up for yourself. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate my stubbornness doesn’t need to be talking to me.

Thanks for reading my blog, and maybe we’ll have the same “taking stock” talk 10 years from now. Wordplay is not going anywhere.