Tennessee Williams: Someone To Tell It To
“Our myths,
like the Chinese lamp over the bulb of reality, are not yet in place, or they
are askew. We wake up, get a taste or a glimpse of what we face, and we put the
myths back in their proper places,” Tenn told me.
The day is full of our creative,
delusional operations. If we pray at this time, eat the right foods, meet
friends for lunch and uplifting conversation, read the right books, attend the
proper functions, attend to our work, apply the virtues and attributes we have
selected from the spiritual buffet, we may make it to our beds in a peaceful
state of mind.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” we murmur,
calm and surrounded by God’s love and his angels. We sleep and we dream, just
as we were previously awake and dreamed. Tenn learned that some of his Jewish friends believed that our souls
were taken from us in our sleep, sent back to God for repairs and adjustments.
Perhaps the soul traveled and picked up knowledge suitable for the particular
journey prescribed by God for this soul. If we are lucky, our soul is delivered
back to our body before we awake, but some souls can’t be mended; others can
never find a task for which it is suited. Death occurs. The soul never returns.
So the observant Jew awakes and immediately expresses gratitude for having been
allowed to wake and live again. “The Jew finds his pardon has been granted.”
Tenn said, “his show has had its closing notice ripped from the theatre doors,
his warranty has been extended.”
Both Tenn and Irene Worth traveled to
ancient caves, some in Lascaux, France, where the first examples of art are
believed to have been found. Worth also traveled to Africa and the Middle East,
the “very heart of the world,” as she called it. Deep within these caves are
drawings, symbols, words. Desires etched with sticks and blood and embers from
the first fires.
“I think it was prayer,” Worth told Tenn.
“I think the images were friends they
needed,” Tenn countered. “I can’t know if they invested these crude
images--which were definitely human in concept--with supernal powers or
abilities. But in the dark, in the night, or in doubt, they could look at these
images and imagine that they cared and understood and might help. Before there
were crosses of burden to be borne, there were crushing doubts and fears, and
they could be released to this…what? Friend?
Ally?”
They needed--as we all do--someone to tell
it to.
Irene Worth |
“That’s it,” Tenn said. “We have our
stories-- which is to say our lives-- and we need to have them observed. I
matter! Look at me. I feel! Honor that. I’ll be there for you. Please, in the
name of whatever I have created to tell my story to--God, Satan, the Blessed
Virgin, Krishna, a tree in a veldt, a doodle on a cave wall--know that I walked
here and I matter.”
Irene Worth also told Tenn of African
tribes who honored, and perhaps worshiped, trees and the leaves produced by
them. “We would see the largest, most incredible trees,” Worth told me, “and
you felt that their roots must have extended to the center of the earth.
Perhaps the roots of this tree could connect me to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I
was born, or New York City, where I lived and worked. You touched the tree and
were led to believe that you were connected to everything and everybody. True?
I don’t know, but I felt the power of the moment. I believed when I touched the
rough and ancient bark of that tree that I was touching something that had been
a witness to so many things in history and time. Now, it was a witness to me.
Am I now part of that tree?”
The most fervent of pilgrims might write
down their hopes and dreams--their prayers--on pieces of paper and bury them at
the root of the tree. Tenn imagined that people must have dug in to the earth
to place their own petitions and come across centuries of lists, admonitions,
requests.
Tenn never made it to the grand trees of
Africa, but he told me that he went to his childhood home and made a similar
pilgrimage. I did not ask if the home of which he spoke was the one in
Columbus, Mississippi, at Main and Third Streets, or the Episcopalian rectory
in which he lived with his parents and grandparents in St. Louis. Tenn had written his prayers on a piece of
paper, which like all blank pieces of paper he endowed with spiritual power,
and had buried it at the foot of the grandest tree on the property. I tried to
imagine Tenn arriving at the home, one of which was operated by the state as a
museum, and the other bearing new tenants, with a spade and a piece of holy
paper and digging a few feet down into the earth.
“I had my little ceremony,” he told me. “I
had my list of prayers. I looked up at the tree, which had seen me before,
which I hoped remembered me. I had passed it so many times. I had kicked it in
anger. I had leaned against it and had dreamed. I looked above and beyond the
tree to the sky and threw a prayer up there, too, just in case. If God had made
the tree and made it powerful, I might as well send a copy of my prayer to
him.”
Tenn closed his eyes, said his prayers, and
buried the piece of paper.
He told me that the piece of paper held
three prayers.
Would he feel comfortable telling me what
they were?
Of course, he replied, nonchalant. We had no
secrets.
Tenn’s three prayers were:
I want to
write.
I want to
write.
I want to
write.
“If I write,” he told me, “I live. I
matter. I have drawn myself on the walls of the cave that is my heart and the
heart of others, who may feel as I do and recognize themselves in what I write.
There must be others who have felt as I have, who have feared as I have, who
await their salvation, whatever it may be, and whenever it may come.”
He needed, as always, someone to tell it to.
Crosses to bear. Crosses made of wood
harvested from trees. Blank pages harvested from trees. Kahlil Gibran, a writer
to whom Tenn had submitted at one point, wrote “Trees are poems that earth
writes upon the sky/We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may
record our emptiness.”
Tenn claimed to remember a tree written
in the works of Rabindranath Tagore that held sticky blossoms to which all
dreams flew and adhered. Or that could have been “The Sweetheart Tree,” the
Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini song made popular by Johnny Mathis, a record of
which Tenn owned and played incessantly during 1965 and 1966, dark years that
were partially enlightened by the lyrics.
They say there's a tree
in the forest,
A tree that will give you a sign;
Come along with me to the Sweetheart Tree,
Come and carve your name next to mine.
A tree that will give you a sign;
Come along with me to the Sweetheart Tree,
Come and carve your name next to mine.
They say if you kiss the right sweetheart,
The one you've been waiting for,
Big blossoms of white will burst into sight
And your love will be true evermore.
Tenn could recall that it was Tagore-- whose Creative Unity had been a gift from his mother--who had written
“Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening Heaven.”
“I need my connective devices,” he said.
“I need the beads of the Rosary and the branches of the tree and the balconies
of Royal Street. I need the Stations of the Cross, which may honor the
Assumption or, in my revision, the writing of Streetcar on St. Peter Street. I
need to stand at the caves of Lascaux and witness the work of a fellow man, who
needed someone to tell his stories and his worries to, or I may have you drive
me to the corner of Coliseum and Constantinople, where I once was loved. All of
this connects. All of this reminds me that I once wrote and may write again.
All of this lets me know that I lived and I might have mattered.”
© 2015 James Grissom
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