November 12 – Day 56

There is this common misconception that the key to being an artist is to have a life full of drama. It is this idea which often leads to unnecessary turmoil and strife in one’s day to day existence. One of the most valuable lessons I am learning here is that while we as artists need to find fuel for our work, the key to accessing emotional depth is a sense of tranquility in one’s real life. There will always be suffering and hardships but as the Buddhists remind us, that is simply a part of life, meant to come and going, flowing through our beings like a wave. We had a fascinating conversation today about the drama OF life versus the drama IN life. It is so interesting to me to consider the ways in which we, or I rather, can create drama to avoid dealing with the true realities of a situation – we create problems in our world so we don’t see the real issues affecting us. Tonight I went to see the Seagull (Chaika) at MXAT’s temporary space and while the production was terribly dated and Trigorin was nearly twice the intended age, I couldn’t help but feel tied to the work. The more I study Chaika, the more I feel as though I have a deeply personal connection with these people and this story. In so many ways I feel like this is my story. The characters in this play are so terribly real and their struggles remind me so much of my own. They are people of vast passion and ideals but they are tormented by their reality. Everyone of them loves the wrong person and is so indulgent in their own art that they can not see the effect of their actions on those around them. This play conjures so many questions in my mind; why we love the people we know we shouldn’t, why we continue to make choices that we know will only break us despite our conscience awareness of the reality of our situation. In the last scene of the play Nina returns to the young man who helplessly loved her even as she wept in his arms over her own desperate love for a man he despised. Two years have passed since the previous scene and her transformation is devastating. The man she loved drained her of all her joy, her promise, her happiness, her light. He took everything that made her beautiful and used it to better himself and then cast her aside. Nina is left as a shell of a human being and on the brink of insanity. She is too immersed in her own pain to see that pain she creates in the young man who still loves her even as she rants for another. These ideas of love and loss and loving for the wrong reasons are as universal as they are unique and while we can never understand the true pain of Nina we can empathize for her suffering and what memories it invokes in us. At the end of the play Nina calls herself the Seagull. It is a metaphor I can only now, after so many weary days, fully comprehend. I feel such closeness to her but it is with such gratitude that I know now that I can never be the Seagull and for that I feel truly blessed.