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Cayle Chernin Blog March 20th
And what I think I know and what I know I think, which is easier to figure. A child once said: “How do you know what you don’t know” or perhaps, “how do you know that you don’t know”. How do you? You can always assume that there is much not known at every learning curve in the road. I have spent most of my life learning and doing, being and struggling, fighting and dying, crying and laughing, feeling, inhabiting my life and enriching that habitation with the scenarios of every part I’ve ever played, any relationship I’ve ever been in, any success or failure I have judged or received, any dream anticipated or conflict resolved or unresolved. I am the sum total of my parts. It’s a living, breathing thing. Now it would be nice to think that I have acquired some wisdom along the way, learned lessons, aspired to changes and accomplished achievements that were both challenging and rewarding. To date, it’s been a pretty good ride. I have suffered and rejoiced and just generally taken it in and let it out to the best of my ability and truth. But hey, talk is cheap, I can say anything. I can say I’m the sort of person who – and lie to others and to myself, I can do this knowingly or unknowingly. Some one once said of me that they loved how excited I get about theories on life and how excited I get when I completely change what I’m thinking, sometimes to its opposite. So what I’ve learned is, sometimes I can trust myself, sometimes not. I can be my own best friend, or devoted to another and they are not mutually exclusive, thank God. It’s evolution. I have spent years of my life handling ‘the gift’ – life itself, I do see it as a gift – an ephemeral, personal chance to make choices, handle what I’m dealt and do the best with what I’ve got. I used to find it amusing to hear other artists, particularly the anointed who can make decisions about who they want in their movie, or who they want to direct them, etc choices, while I laboured with mixing and matching resources, borrowing from peter to pay paul etc and if I could get a gig teaching at St. Christopher house and therefore a Toronto Arts grant to do a project and get Rogers on board through public access cable and get an Ontario Arts Council grant to workshop the project, and on down the line. You get a group of people together who want to explore such and such under the banner of so and so and through that you have a venue within which to learn and grow and develop and share what you know..and make movies. It seems to be simply the route that chose me whereby I was able to create opportunity and essentially feel like I was independently wealthy, doing what I wanted, answering very little to anybody, sure a final grant summary has to be submitted, or barters to be negotiated, edit time or any other logistics, but just like with the live action/animation pieces I have been working on - keep it ‘cheap and cheerful’, it’s a way to do the work – follow the bliss, or feel that raison d’etre and essentially ‘to survive’ with some grace and even dignity. As an actor, free-lancer, I constantly encounter from near and far, the sad head shaking, the concerned “it’s a difficult life you’ve chosen”. Chosen. Not chosen, it’s what happened and I have managed to amuse and distract and engage myself in various ways while trying to determine what’s important: “People are the most important thing” I once wrote and my old friend Eli Rill dedicated his novel A Penny For The Violin Man’ with a Talmudic proverb. .”be kind, for everyone is engaged in their own great struggle”. I have always responded to the notion that kindness is the greatest of all virtues. I made a documentary Called ‘A Man Of Conscience’ with the grandson of Morris Saxe, a man who brought 76 Polish children, orphans from the town of Meizreich, destroyed during WW2 to a farm school in Georgetown, Ontario. Mr. Saxe was long gone and David Fleishman his grandson wanted to pay tribute to his honesty and love of the World. We only had a old home movie of him walking towards the camera and an audio tape of his voice form a tribute dinner his family made for him in his 70ies, in which he said: “I love my friends and I love my enemies too”, One of the alchemical things that happen with acting and what I love so much about it, is how you play a role, you inhabit a scenario and you learn, feel, think with the input of that reality: Recently I worked on the short play ‘Lenten Pudding’, in which my character is ill and hording the recipe for Lenten puddings from my family because they rejected me for my lesbianism: In the scene with my niece who years before had seen me kissing the maid in the gazebo, I say: “ Who are we? We think we know in one decade, then it passes and we’re asking the question again”. Since saying those lines I think of them often. Aunt Ency, the character penetrated me and to whatever degree I became her and she me, we speak with the same words, I find myself quoting her/me. I love that chemistry and what it gives me. And Matthew, thanks for asking me to talk about me and my ideas, and deepest hopes and dreams as I love nothing better than to sit and think..in fact, I think that’s my job..To think, a sort of philosopher/reporter. In my twenties, and even earlier, I realized that my chosen way of life, of ‘being in the World’ was a pretty self absorbed proposition, that it would be years of journalizing, of falling and flying in the face of ‘real life’ versus my fantasy of what could be. Of knowing myself completely. After all, who did I have better access to? I wanted to run that cozy orphanage where children would get what they need and where life would be a flurry of activity, of dogs and cats and people of all ages – (sounds like my childhood, except for the orphan part..growing up in the Maritimes surrounded by extended family and small town community), but I really wanted and needed my time for myself, to live out my time, free of restraints and commitments that define the journey. Every day was about living and learning, finding the information that I was missing, When I started to do really badly in school, that was in high school, I was a stellar student even with the relocation from Stevenville, Newfoundland to Toronto when I was 12..but my school career was on the skids by the time I hit grade ten, or it hit me, right between the who am i’s…My first major failure was high school –eventually I escaped. My parents were horrified and betrayed but I stuck to my guns no matter how much it hurt any of us, myself very much included. It hurt to assert and who knows what was right or wrong. I suffered, they suffered, but eventually life goes on and on, and if forgive and forget is an option it just gets richer every step of the way. My 30ies were really emancipating..after finding myself abandoned and sitting on my trunk in the middle of a Taos, New Mexico road, in the middle of the night, I knew that I was missing a piece of the puzzle, a piece that would have prevented me from being bruised and altered by reality because I was too fucking stupid to realize that it wasn’t just all about me..that’s a simplification of how I happened to have jeopardized my own safety many times, in an unheeding careless way, but that now I had the opportunity to outlive my naiveté and to recognize…let’s call it God. I realized that even though it was necessary for me to be very involved in myself and my process, my obligation to give back my discoveries made in the luxury of independent aloneness was the key to my creativity. The minute I learned something I wanted to turn around and teach it to the next guy. One major relationship into the game and I was sure that me, myself and I was the only ménage a trios I wanted to get into one..one person being more than enough and sometimes too much. What I’m trying to say is I preferred solitary confinement with my journal to very involving life choices that would tie me down to a way of life, like a dog, or child or husband. Or so I discovered when I did enter life. What I’m trying to say is I preferred solitary confinement with my journal to very involving life choices that would tie me down to a way of life, like a dog, or child or husband. I have had intervals of companionship and close relationships, I have always enjoyed the one on one and because I loved my time of creating, thinking, writing, reading, acting, I have loved having partners to play with. I love my life’s work, and still to this day, there’s always something to work on..sadly it can conflict with earning a living, and doesn’t always pay it’s own way leaving me holding the bills, if not the fort. By making the documentary about my Russian Relatives, among other things, I finally understood the loss of childhood: it was wonderful to have my 90 year old Great Uncle Boris connect me back to those good old days of Mummy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa..etc. There have been many projects, acting, writing, teaching, editing that have served my life’s goal of trying to understand what it’s all about – trying to understand other people, their motivations and histories, trying to decipher emotional reactions, and literary excitations. What’s it all about, Alfie? I was first moved by words on paper, Iearned a lot about sex from books and from movies, I adored and still do all the product and by-product of the talented mind in the brave body. I don’t think I’m right or wrong. I’m comfortable and attracted to some people and others seem to be outside the realm of my existence or sensibility. My old friend Mr. Adeney the subject of The Man Who Couldn’t Lose marveled at how a fictional character could become more real to one than an actual person is. I actually don’t think we have all that much power over it all, the Secret notwithstanding, and given the notion that you create your own reality, write your own movie etc..I think we’re dealt the genetic hand, the social environment, the World at its stage in time and we are cast in or help to create a certain reality, we live it out something like a dominoes chain reaction and we survive and briefly collide and those collisions are what life is made of..sometimes we knock each other right out of the water. In my 40ies I enjoyed feeling very accomplished at doing what I do. I felt like I had learned to do many of things I wanted to. Virginia Wolf said no writer should be published before the age of 30, because they are learning, finding their voice and oughten to be paid to do so. Exceptions like Rimbeau, notwithstanding, I have to agree with her when I hear some child actor talking about their next film..but people have their run and sometimes there isn’t much of a run, so I never begrudge. It ain’t over til it’s over. Never say never and kindness is the most interesting attribute and one which we can study all our lives and never really know what allows a person to be good, to be kind to another in that way that is so genuine and meaningful but we can aspire to it..it is not sentimental kindness I am talking about – it is the complexity of really being able to empathize with another. There used to be a story about how truly Queenly, Elizabeth was – many years preceding her current notoriety via the sensational Helen Mirren. Elizabeth had been invited to dine in a simple home and her host used the wrong fork at table and Liz demurred to use the same fork so as not to embarrass the person. Nice, especially in the atmosphere of “You’re fired” and Simon says “You stink” and everybody is telling everybody what is ‘kewl’ and approval ratings from the general public make or break your movie or book or play or right to life..ratings & B.O. define who and what we are and deserve of the pie. You gotta pay to play. I like all the goodies as much as the next person. I’d love just to worry about how to make things happen instead of worrying about affording to be alive..and frankly I can’t afford it..not at these prices. I used to think it was a case of being asked to work my fingers to the bone for a pair of kid gloves, but now I know, it’s a responsibility or you become someone else’s liability. And you don’t want to be liable. It’s practically against the law. They say people will pay you money for what they admire about you, so if someone likes my figure, they might pay me to teach them pilates, hoping it will work for them too. If someone admires my acting, is excited to see my work, laughs and cries and are touched by my words and my meanings, maybe I’ll survive to act another day or sell a doc or get that commercial that will pay for those other joys. At this rate, anyway, I’ll be ready for the remake of Harold and Maude when they finally want me. And Matt, some things stimulated by your blog: In a way Robert Redford and Paul Newman are the same kind of actor – that is, they are iconic Hollywood stars. Redford represents the charm of the one who gets things easy as you said and Newman has the charm of the defeated –his performance as Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof became the paradigm for his H roles: Hustler, Hud, Hombre, in which his persona as the beautiful loser was the continuation of James Dean, Monty Cliff and Marlon who all brought the female side to their male personas and revolutionized what we admire and who we care for. The Method Movement which supplanted the ‘acting style of The British Stage’ and gave us the naturalism of the movies and kitchen sink drama owes much as do these actors to the work of Tennessee Williams who created new heros from his broken people, and it is not a surprise that this ultimately led to the Mass Gay Movement which changed not just culture and entertainment but our lives directly. And another thing. I hate sports..sorry, Matt, and maybe this means you don’t trust me, and I feel badly about that. Let me explain. My worse day was always Sunday when there was nothing to do and my Father had ‘the game’ on TV all day. The blare of white noise, the brutal sharp cheers made me sad. I have enjoyed going to a baseball game, I appreciate the ardour and skill my husband brings as goalie to his weekly games, but to watch any sport is totally not for me. First of all, it all looks like the same game and even if it can be fascinating on a basis of deciphering life, it’s not a metaphor I respond to. Competition has never been a motivator for me..interest, desire, challenge, but I cannot see chasing a ball. I don’t hate and dislike all sports lovers however, I see that there is something different there, it’s interesting but it’s not my way. And in the same way I don’t like applying spiritual insights to how to make money and be ‘worth it’, I don’t really want to understand how it all works by spending half of my life cheering and booing. I think the fact that ball players and actors are among the most highly paid humans in the world is weird. I see all of us as gladiators, performing seals, hoping the judges, the powers that be, the people will choose me, award me, recognize me so I can have..it all. Because then I’ll be a success and have earned a rightful place. Like Van Gogh, who sold one painting in his lifetime but who’s paintings are now a world wide high commodity, I just want to paint and hope to cover my ass while I’m doing it. A piece of work that must come to life, in spite of all obstacles, can exist perhaps as a work of Art, every thing else is Craft. And that’s fine, but what I try to do is make my life and my art work in tandem to produce what I needs must and what I must need, I try to take care of without losing my mind, my heart or my soul to keep body going.
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