In the fourth week of October I will host a series of workshops at the Austin Arts & Service Celebration. The program seeks to offer veterans the opportunity to learn from professional artists; the general hope is that veterans will establish connections within fields that often seem difficult to enter due to their inherent complexity, their obscure codes of behavior, or the skill level required. 

Here is the description of my workshop: 

Getting into the minds of ‘others’ can be a daunting task, but it is an essential skill for writers. The goal of the workshop is to help writers develop empathetic details about characters unfamiliar to themselves. It unfolds in three phases. In the first phase, we free-write on seemingly innocuous details. In the second phase, we develop a bland characterization of someone we have never written about before: a basketball coach, or a university janitor, or whomever the case may be. In the third phase, we develop a scenario in which our ‘bland’ character notices and interacts with the innocuous details the we depicted in Phase 1. The exercise, in sum, forces us to confront the ‘other,’ get inside their heads, and empathize with their daily existence.

If you are a veteran, and you think this workshop sounds interesting, then you can sign up for it at at the AA&SC website. 

There will also be a series of panels presented by industry professionals on a range of topics, including writing, publishing, film-making, and the like. 

This week, I had the privilege of staying at Rubber Repertory's Pilot Balloon Church-House. My partner, Karen Alvarado, was scheduled to come with me, but she had to go to NYC over the weekend for auditions. I missed her presence. But her absence compelled me to write a piece that tracks the contours of our feelings for each other.  I suspect I will post more about that in a few weeks. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share some images from a very small project I worked on while I was here. As a part of Rubber Repertory's  fundraising efforts, they offered their donors the opportunity to receive a piece of postcard art from the artists staying with them in Lawrence. The postcards presented a challenge, as straightforward writing felt inadequate for the medium--I write postcards all the time, and would never classify those as 'art.' So I experimented with a few new methods, so to speak, to earn my keep. The images below don't tell half the story, but I hope they will help me remember the work. 

The postcards I made were inspired by a handful of Mexican youths I saw on the metro near the Autonomous University in Mexico City; I watched them cut themselves with bottle glass and beg for pesos--but the passengers gave them nothing. 

Here's a partial list of materials: postcard, brother EM430 typewriter, milk of magnesia, club soda, soap, distilled vinegar, a memory of Mexico, a broomstick, a shower, a ceramic baking dish, absorbent paper, and a fourteen gauge needle that I brought back from Iraq. 

Many thanks to Rubber Repertory's Josh Meyer and Matt Hislope! I was lucky to have the opportunity to visit them in Lawrence! I am going to miss them, and the intensity of openness with which they listen to human experience. 

Last night, two new landing pages went up on this website: 'Cryptomnesia' and 'Veterans' Voices.' 

Cryptomnesia is the tentative title of a new play I am writing for the Department of Theatre Arts at Lawrence University. The play will go up alongside three other pieces: Antonin Artaud's SPURT OF BLOOD, Samuel Beckett's WHAT WHERE, and Caryl Churchill's THIS IS A CHAIR. 

When a new play is produced alongside other works, it typically appears in the company of other new plays; the experience of watching new work often elicits forced smiles and weariness, though a new piece can occasionally fire the imagination. The situation, in this case, is different. Artaud, Beckett, and Churchill are twentieth-century ogres, powerful and easily seen, mistreated but often admired for their strength. Of the three, only Churchill still lives. Artaud was loquacious on the purpose of art, but the other two typically remain silent. 

I'm writing Cryptomnesia, a short play that will appear at the end of the program. It would be very easy to fuck this up, but things will turn out okay. Promise. 

The other page describes Veterans' Voices, a program that I've been working on with Paul Woodruff. Paul comes from another generation. He served in Vietnam as a young Army lieutenant. He wrote plays as a young man, but ultimately focused on Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Thucydides. He studied at Oxford, earned a doctorate from Princeton, and then came to the University of Texas at Austin. After playing a pivotal role in the development of one of Texas' honors programs, he became the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, a position dedicated to improving the education of young students; this was an especially important task, because UT-Austin is a vast research university, and young people can easily get overwhelmed by the atmosphere. The purpose of public universities is higher education; active research plays a critical role in helping young minds ask and answer difficult questions, but it is also important to develop connections between young students and seasoned students--undergraduates and professors. Paul's work as Dean of Undergraduate Studies helped the university take major strides in building these sorts of relationships. He developed courses that ensured that young students have the opportunity to learn from professors who have a special gift for teaching. Paul also knows a great deal about Greek drama, having translated many of the tragedies and comedies of ancient Athens. His favorite modern play is Edward Albee's The Goat: or Who is Sylvia? 

Paul has written a number of plays. I am especially interested in two of them: Ithaca in Black and White and Geoffrey's Jerusalem. It is one of my goals to produce these plays. I am working with Paul on Veterans' Voices because it will help me reach that goal. 

What is Veterans' Voices? Since Paul and I have refused to incorporate the project into a non-profit, that is a little hard to pin down. But the main thrust is to communalize the cost of war at an emotional level. We do this through play readings, group recitations, story-telling, and (most importantly) listening. As playwrights, we try to tell the stories of others, and show how these stories reflect our life and times. As educators, we help place the experiences of individual people into the framework of a wider community. Sometimes, our purpose is classic catharsis. But other times we aim for pure expression. 

Paul's is a member of UT-Austin's philosophy department. As a philosopher, he has written three books for a wider audience: The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, Reverence:Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, and The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness, and Rewards; I think these books help express our values. Paul and I are a value-driven partnership. If you start with values, and then look for opportunities as you happen upon them, then you have a pretty good idea of who you are going to be, even if you are not entirely sure of how you are going to do it. 

Today I participated in a mid-term review for a studio architecture class. I know very little about architecture. I am aware that I prefer some spaces to others. I suppose I think about acoustic quality and sight lines when I'm in a space. I care about cleanliness, or at least some vague efforts made in that direction. And I'm probably still pretty good at coming up with inventive ways to storm a building. 

But I'm largely clueless. I was asked to attend the mid-term review because of my dual backgrounds in theater and the military. The students in the class seek to design a 'space for veterans,' that includes a few studios and theaters for artistic expression. 

A few weeks ago, the same class asked me to describe a few of my favorite spaces. I told them that I expected to loathe the museum-minded efforts to rebuild the playhouses of Tudor and Stuart England, but that the performances that I experienced at the London's Globe and Staunton's Blackfriars checked my instincts. Instead, I found these playhouses remarkably alive. The audience-actor connections forced players on both sides of the stage to actively participate in bringing about the theatrical event. The effect, in fact, was even more pronounced in these spaces than in any other situation of universal lighting. Why?

I think part of the answer comes from the beautiful use of space. It feels special to walk into the Globe. It resembles walking into a modern sporting arena, rather than a stodgy bourgeois playhouse on the West End or Broadway. If you've entered with friends, they suddenly become strangers because you've never seen them quite in this context--engulfed in carved timber and overwhelmed with spectacle. Once the play begins, the life on stage calms the senses, and the narrative restores a bit of order to the mind. But then the words take on their own life, and the journey begins again.

The shape of the theatre space also makes a difference. Below, I've inserted an image of the Owen Theatre, a part of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Notice that it's shape resembles the wooden-U of the Blackfriar Playhouse. 

In all three of these spaces (the Globe, Blackfriars, and the Owen) the audience members can see one another just as easily as they can see the performance. Sometimes, it's even easier to see the other audience members--and this is part of the power of space. Unlike a movie theater or a darkened playhouse, I am forced to confront other members of the public, and measure our relative responses to the performance. Did we laugh at the same jokes? Do we cry? Do we stare blankly? Do we even bother to blink? Look at each other? Flirt, or scowl? These are not distractions, but rare moments of connection.

And so when surveying the student projects, I looked for theater spaces that challenged the audience in the first instance, even before the start of a performance. I looked for spaces that I would want to wander through, even if no performances are going on. Meditative spaces. Spaces that wait for words, but that are not afraid to speak back. Spaces that are not a black box, but a box built for play within a wider and unalterable world.

Should a theatre space honor veterans? Perhaps. More importantly, it should honor our shared humanity. If theatre does something good for veterans, it rekindles a sense of play, a sense of imagination. It wakes a dormant fearlessness of making friends and companions, and building a new sense of community and public sharing. 

Orde Wingate redefined infantry operations in modern conflict. He was an artillery officer by training, but never cared much for the work. His methods, instead, helped infantrymen survive against the threat of artillery. We can find traces of his methods in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Modern military units such as the U.S. Army Rangers still train with his teachings in mind. 

My own training in Ranger School began with the following story from Judges, Chapter 7, verses 1-8:

"Early in the morning, [Gideon] and all his men camped at the spring of Harod. The camp of Midian was north of them in the valley near the hill of Moreh. The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’ Now announce to the army, ‘Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead.’” So twenty-two thousand men left, while ten thousand remained... 

"But the Lord said to Gideon, “There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I will thin them out for you there. If I say, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go; but if I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the Lord told him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues as a dog laps from those who kneel down to drink.”  Three hundred of them drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs. All the rest got down on their knees to drink. The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home.” So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelites home but kept the three hundred, who took over the provisions and trumpets of the others."

Wingate used the story of Gideon to inspire the men he led in Israel, Abyssinia, and Burma. He adopted the name "Gideon Force" in Abyssinia, and tried to do so again in Burma, but the GHQ India prevented it. Still, he told the story over and over again. He wanted his men to believe they were select, and that they were specially chosen--if not chosen by God, then at least chosen by Orde Wingate. 

No one at Ranger School mentioned Orde Wingate's name, but they repeated the story of Gideon nonetheless. It stuck me as odd at the time, because soldiers in the infantry rarely quote the Bible. They might makes jokes about God and Satan, but they do not use the Bible for its parables or stories. 

This is a very small example, but it shows the seeping sort of influence Wingate had on modern armies.

                                                                           ******

Professors and career soldiers sometimes use the term "military science" to describe the process wherein soldiers study, adapt, utilize and teach new strategies and tactics. Wingate himself certainly found the idea of 'military science' attractive--his education at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy taught him to look for discernible patterns in warfare, and the British military training manuals of the period resemble engineering textbooks, with piles of tables and charts, and in-depth studies of munitions.

Many authors have attempted to chronicle Wingate's strategic innovations and their subsequent importance to military science. Yet Wingate bore a complex personality that marked every action he took in his short life. He ruthlessly castigated incompetence, yet playfully encouraged insubordination. He brandished a zealot's faith to rally his men, yet abandoned his religion (and sincere belief in God) at an early age. He modeled his life after the Old Testament prophets, yet earned a reputation for his cutting-edge use of modern technology. Reducing his life to a handful of 'strategic innovations' mis-characterizes the nature of his experience. 

                                                                         ******

The seemingly polar tendencies found within Wingates' personality represent external tensions, not internal contradictions; a human being is not limited to the simplistic set patterns handed down through history and myth. Every time we examine the life of a human being, we should expect to see a story of variation, not conformity. 

After a few weeks in the archives, I feel I am in a great place with the Wingate research. With my training in qualitative methods, psychological analysis, political philosophy, and military operations, and find myself well suited to apply my skill set to understanding Wingate's life in a unique way. Already I have come across new evidence that previous studies have either ignored or missed. Wingate, for example, wrote extensively on human nature and on war as an extension of politics--no other authors have tried to reconcile his stated philosophical views with his actions on the battlefield, and so I have a unique opportunity to study Wingate from a new angle. 

I plan to write about him in two ways. First, I will examine his life in a work of comparative biography. I will examine a series of most-similar cases; the juxtaposition will describe the commonalities between each individual, but I will highlight the unexpected differences. In doing so, I can help us understand the individuals that initiate 'special operations', and the people who voluntarily join such units. Second, I will write about Wingate for the stage. 

With my work on Wingate, I am glad to shift away from the more theoretical terrain of modelling evolutionary science as well as the explicit application of psychological models to empirical cases. Instead I can embrace a more humanistic approach to understanding life. In my case, the techniques fro playwrighting have always borne a strong resemblance to biography. For my plays, I spend hours and years closely studying historical documents, sifting through apparent contradictions, and finding the through-line that allows one person to house seemingly opposite beliefs. American Volunteers, The Priceless Slave, and Westhusing in the House of Atreus all make use of this technique. Then I find the shape and form that brings out the elements of the story that most people tend to ignore. By placing my emphasis on the most unusual elements of character, I believe I free up my imagination to contradict my assumptions regarding human behavior; instead of forcing an individual into my cookie-cutter conception of life, I allow them to dictate the terms of the game. 

Human beings go to great lengths to both encourage and destroy diversity; they obsess over preventing 'deviant' behavior. But we also reward individuals who think 'outside the box.' These tendencies are an essential part of human nature.

Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2009.

Hermione Lee approaches the study of biography as a practitioner as well as a critic. Her 2009 book, Biography: A Very Short Introduction, reflects a thorough and personal knowledge of the craft of life-writing. She especially empathizes with writers facing the impossible task of constructing “the complete, true story of a human being” using the tools of a “mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone.” Her hesitant embrace of the genre playfully manifests itself throughout the book, as well as in her own works, especially her wonderful 1997 biography of Virginia Woolf.

Lee digs into the actual words of biographers and brings to surface the pivotal moments and techniques that allow the transcendence of books such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. In a chapter called “National Biography,” she traces the struggles of Thomas Carlyle and other writers to determine what (and who) they should include in biographical studies. Changing habits, tastes, and trends shaped the biographical works produced throughout the years, or at least helped determine which works received a wide readership. Lee’s winds her way through the practice of biography by means of questions that strike the conscience of many life-writers: what is the purpose of biography? What tone should biography take? What elements of a life should one include, and what should one discard? What is the proper relationship between a biographer and her subject? Which metaphor best describes biography—the gruesome scientific cuts of autopsy or the feelingly sketched drama of portraiture?

Throughout, Lee stands at a remove from much of biography. She disapproves of biographical accounts constructed with a sensationalist tone. She argues against life-writing that produces smear campaigns rather than an empathetic investigation. She rightly censures authors that crudely denigrate the lives and choices of their subjects. And she often sympathizes with individuals who grow queasy at the idea of another human being investigating and summarizing their life for profit.

She addresses a particularly pertinent problem for the modern world of biography—to what degree should a writer embrace the use of modern psychological theory to understand a person’s life and interpret their behavior? The greatest biographies seek to understand the very minds of their subjects, so that the individual under review seems to breathe life into every page; the muscular theories of psychology (ancient or modern) seem like useful tools for digging into the earth and excavating the mind of an individual. But Lee seems to side with Richard Ellmann on the use of psychological theory—it too often manipulates the biographer, rather than the biographer manipulating a generalized psychological theory. She argues that “some of the most masterful literary lives of the mid-20th century—Leon Edel’s Life of Henry James (1953-77), or George Painter’s Marcel Proust (1959)—now seem skewed by their psychoanalytical bias… however rich and deep Edel’s account of James’s social, personal, and literary context, such moments in his biography seem over-schematic and infantilizing.” In Lee’s reading, psychoanalytic biographies fail to endure except as “historical moments in the interpretations of those great writers’ lives,” a fate she ascribes to all biographical approaches. To give a work greater longevity and spirit, she seems to suggest building a new theory of psychology, one custom built for that particular individual human being. Yet it seems impossible to believe that one can approach the life of another without assumptions regarding human nature, and that these assumptions direct one where to look when describing the life of the individual. At the same time, one can readily appreciate her point that biographers use psychology or psycho-analytics too readily, and without enough questions (one might say the same of religious or Platonic or philosophic interpretations of individual life).

Her selection of quotations enliven the book and often present an ironic edge to the proceedings—she begins with a ‘theme’ for each chapter, and then uses pertinent quotes and examples to steadily undermine the theme’s power to convey the attributes of a successful life-study.

A particularly fun thought comes from a Robert Graves poem, “To Bring the Dead to Life.”

To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man's embers
And a live flame will start.

Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.

Limp as he limped,
Swear by the oaths he swore;
If he wore black, affect the same;
If he had gouty fingers,
Be yours gouty too.

Assemble tokens intimate of him --
A ring, a hood, a desk:
Around these elements then build
A home familiar to
The greedy revenant.

So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.

Today we remember Graves more for his memoirs, poetry, and historical fiction rather than his early biographies of T.E. Lawrence, but all of those genres can burn close to biography, and may require similar skills. He and Lee both see the odd spiritual pairing found between the biographical writer and his or her subject matter. Biography lacks the medical precision and efficiency of the autopsy, or the immediacy and efficiency of portraiture. But it requires a unique art, a dance with the dead, wherein the dead gain strength from the writer and begin to move again; the writer, however, comes closer to joining the dead with each line.

Refreshingly, Lee provides neither a ‘how to’ list for life-writers, nor a ‘definitive’ guide to recommended biographies. She instead introduces the key ethical and academic questions pertaining to biography. The answers to those questions arise as suggestions rather than prescriptions, and come from not only her own viewpoint but from the many sources she uses to guide the book’s conversation. 

Orde Wingate left Egypt in March 1933. Aboard the ship home, he met a Mrs. Alice “Ivy” Patterson and her daughter, Lorna. Lorna was sixteen at the time. Upon returning home, he and Peggy Jolly broke off their engagement, as he bashfully admitted he'd fallen in love with someone else. The army assigned him to the Royal Artillery Regiment at Bulford Camp, Salisbury Plain. 

Wingate eventually married Lorna in Chelsea on 24 January 1935. 

In the Wingate files at the IWM archives, I found a letter written to Lorna's mother that betrayed an unusually close intimacy between Orde Wingate and his future mother in law, Alice Ivy Hays. Hays later attempted to shape Orde's legacy in a positive direction when she wrote a book called There Was a Man of Genius: Letters to my Grandson, now out of print. The following letter sheds some light on the unusually close nature of their relationship--it's not the sort of thing a prospective son in law typically writes. I found the letter in folder OCW /3/4  1934.

Below, I've typed out the contents of the letter. [I've put my own notes, as well as illegible words, in brackets.]

The letter shows something of his zeal--and his ability to drive hard at those who care for him. There's clearly some feeling between Orde Wingate and his mother in law--enough to driver her into approving of the marriage, and then to write a book about her son in law.