LOST SOULS
August is traditionally Shrink vacation time, and though I am not engaged in psycho-therapy, I have many times in my life attempted to examine and benefit from different forms of analytic and participatory therapy..I liked gestalt because it was like acting, and enjoyed a few months with a lovely very tall woman in Boston, who consoled me because I was very unhappy at that time, in a job for the Department of Health and Welfare, doing the School Success Study. The job was great and lucrative but there were some personal issues with my roommate involving Country Joe (fishless at the time) and my own difficulty with doing anything other than my creative work. In The Cities Of The Interior, Anais Nin tells the story of a Painter named Peter who was in great hock to his landlady and to cut to the chase, hangs an effigy of his failed self, and so dispenses with it and her. Every time I play a role, I think of it a little like that..not necessarily a failed self, though’ all selves have failures. You learn from ‘the mistakes’, and you don’t have to question the good things. Yehudah Burg, Kabbalah guru has come to visit me daily with meditation and Hebrew words I can look at and pronounce. I clicked on something somewhere and now I am hooked up to Kabbalah. Today: “give yourself ‘unconditional love’”, what’s not to love about that morning smile. I even liked.. “don’t look for yourself in others, look for others in yourself”. I did it all that day, and inexplicably, I am ‘seeing’ differently..you see what you wanna see – you look for what you want to see. Makes sense. I now have the 72 names of God cruising along as my screen savers and my name is: NUN NUN ALEPH (#53) -- HAVING NO AGENDA. Self-interest, ulterior motives, and hidden agendas give way to pure acts of friendship, unconditional love and giving.Again, what’s not to like. Funny, just before this arrived, I was in conversation with someone who invited me to what I realized was a marketing party to get into a small business distributing nu-age, healthy anti oxidant chocolate and I said, “Oh I’m not the one for this. I don’t like having an agenda. I don’t sell”. And I thought of my old friend Marcus Adeney again who spoke of being successful as having two elements: “the people who seem to make it in this World do so through the authentic play of their talents in the society and these men of keenest insight are the first to throw away their security in a simple dedication to a way of living, to the life of the imagination”. LOST SOULS: This is the script I just finished and will try to get a reading of and find an interested ‘producer’. I was thrilled in seeing Brooke Johnson’s one woman show Trudeau Stories at Summerworks – an incredibly wonderful piece of work..she was absolutely fantastic..the show moved so beautifully through tears and laughter and fond remembrance of a very famous man, seen here through the gentle eyes of a girl, then a woman who had an ongoing contact with the like-minded person who befriended her. At one point she describes a meeting in which Trudeau seemed uncharacteristically pre-occupied and ‘down’..he whispers in her ear: “lost souls”, and I felt a synchronistic surge of connection, as I had just typed my new title on the front page of my script with this quotation from Marcus: “There are in this World, lost Souls. People whose associations incapacitate them from fulfilling their proper destiny” He was speaking about his younger brother who changed at the age of 11, perhaps was autistic..but somehow Marcus felt his brother’s life was devastated. In my story set in a retirement home, many of the characters in and around are in varying states of devastation. Myself I have always had a pen chance for ‘lost souls’ as inherent in being lost is the potential for finding yourself. This connects for me to The Lamed Vuv’niks, legend has it that the term “Lamed-Vuvnik” refers to the traditional Jewish belief that there are 36 (the numerical value of the letters lamed and vuv) tzadikim or righteous people living in each generation doing acts of kindness in secrecy. “Tradition tells that on the merit of these 36 people, God sustains the world from generation to generation.” Over the centuries, whenever one of the 36 died another would take their place. Since the future of the world rests on the 36 they must be treated with utmost respect or the world will perish. Simple enough. Treat 36 men and women with respect. In Lost Souls, my heroine, romancoholic, Libby Mirsky falls through a 3 D worm hole. According to The Kabbalah, God executes the Act Of Creation by collapsing in on HIM self, sucking out the light and creating the void, the vacuum THE BLACK HOLE – that place where the Laws of Physics don’t apply. Then releases some back into: a measured dose of his energy back in: An Emanation (EXHALE controlled) stream of pure white light HOCHMA from The never ending Source. YHWH – the unpronounceable name : sound of Soul breath, Secret of The Structure of The uni Verse, each Letter a different strain of energy – to move Conception to Creation. The propelling force of creation: THE IDEA Evolves through THOUGHT to ACTION. Slideshow Mashup: Jason (J Brown.com) has come up with a new software for the integration of live performance with digital components. Such possibilities include the use of background projections as settings, the introduction of "synthespians", the manipulation of virtual objects by the actors, and the creation of special effects such as rain or fire. Previously, performers wishing to use digital effects were limited by the available software programs, which were neither user-friendly nor stable enough for live theatre's demands. I don’t know where I read this (I think George sand)but approaching Labour Day, it feels right on the money: “The mind is a kaleidoscope— discouragement—satisfaction—and finding the way again. There are no happy endings. Happy moments, yes. The drama and all the poetic approaches continue to be.” Return from Lost Souls to Cayle Chernin Blog
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