Love Poem #1

Your eyes
Smile
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Your smile
Touches me
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You touching me
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You
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Home.

Harper on Tedium

The days are hot this summer and there is no rain. I water my lawn on occasion, and my neighbors water their lawns every day, and the only difference between our lawns are subtle shades of yellow and beige. Our yards are gone except for the weeds, which are flourishing, now that all of that annoying grass is no longer choking the life out of them. They are slivers of green isles in the midst of a grassy dead sea.

Today, in a heroic effort, I mowed my lawn and the clouds of dust rose, and my home became an Oklahoma farm in the midst of the Great Depression. The process of mowing the lawn accomplished nothing but it was full of rituals. The ritual of applying sunblock to myself and getting dressed in my yardwork clothes. The ritual of pulling the mower out of the garage and getting it ready to run. The ritual of saying hello to any neighbors and commenting on the heat. Surveying my lawn as if I have any idea what I am doing. Running the mower and cleaning the mower and putting the mower away. Undressing. Showering. Redressing. Dozens of things to do. Chained together, these rituals created an illusion of productivity and I am searching in desperation for a sense of productivity because it keeps the tedium at bay.

When I phone Harper and tell him about my experience he says my obsession with tedium is pathetic and he calls it a "first world problem", which is not a Harper phrase, but it is accurate phrase. Both of our houses are too hot to continue a phone debate so we agree to meet for an early dinner and talk in a dark, cool corner of our favorite restaurant.

I say, "Help me understand what is wrong with me."

"Okay..." Harper says, "What is wrong with you?"

"I don't know."

"Then...I know what is wrong with you."

"You do?"

"Yes," Harper says, "you are ignorant."

This is a typical Harper logical response. The argument is tied up in an elegant little bow that looks pretty and accomplishes nothing. I try my best to look very annoyed and Harper sees it.

"Of course," Harper says, "People don't want to be ignorant, they want to have opinions because no one wants to look stupid, although "stupid" is a word often substituted for "ignorant", which is not the same as "stupid". If you did not know this, you are not stupid, just ignorant. If you are insulted that I just called you ignorant, as people often are, go look up the definition of the word "ignorant", because, if you don't, and you continue to believe that I just insulted you by calling you ignorant, you are being stupid."

This is typical Harper emotional response. He probably isn't insulting me but I am never completely sure. I try my best to look more annoyed, simply because I don't know what else to do.

"The good news," Harper says, "is that we all can address ignorance by putting in time and effort, and utilizing the proper resources, to reach a well-informed opinion. Before doing that, however, we need to take the time to decide if we really are passionate about an idea. If we don't care about an idea, we don't have to have an opinion. I know it feels like we should have an opinion, but we really, really don't. We need to accept our ignorance and truthfully say that we really don't know."

"Harper?"

"Yes?"

"Can you help me or not?"

Harper thinks for a long time. He strokes his non-existent beard. He thumps his temples. He grimaces and shrugs and winces. All for my benefit.

Then he says, "You don't need help."

"Why not?"

"Because your problem is that you are human."

I say, "There's not a lot I can do about being a human."

"That's true," Harper says, "But you can stop looking at being human as a problem."

"What do you mean?"

Harper says, "Humans spend so much of their lives trying to understand all of the big questions. Sure, we spend plenty of time and effort worrying about what shirt to wear in the morning, or how our children are doing in school, or whether or not the current traffic will make us late for work, but we have also spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on philosophy, theology, and psychology as well. We worry about the absurdity of the human condition, the finality of death and dying, the existence of God, the essence of reality, the origins of the universe and time and matter and energy, to the detriment of living. Do you understand what I mean?"

"I'm not sure I do."

"Maybe we should break this down into specific pieces. What is bothering you right now?"

I say, "I guess I feel ambivalent."

"Could you possibly be any less specific?"

"I don't think so."

"Then you probably should be more specific."

"I don't think I can. Questions about my emotions are difficult to answer. Not that I have a problem with sharing how I feel...on the contrary, I am often too blunt...but I don't always know exactly what it is I am feeling."

"Then you are probably stuck in the middle of a dichotomy."

"What does that mean?"

Harper says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and that was the first dichotomy, and ever since then humans have been creating dichotomies of our own, an attempt to derive Order from Chaos, which is a significant part of being human. We created Good and Evil, and Happiness and Sadness, and Virtues and Vices, and we exercised Prudence in order to decide where it would be best to reside within the dichomtomy because the human condition does not live in either of the extremes, we exist in the blended grays in between, and when our dreams and fantasies gravitate towards one extreme we feel the pull of the other extreme because we need balance to keep us from flying off into a cold, chaotic void of space."

Then, he says, "There is another dichotomy between the extremes of Tedium and Adventure, of Boredom and Stress, of Contentment and Excitement, and it measures our movements along these other dichotomies, how fast, how often, how extreme, and you are static, at the extreme of Tedium, in the center of the human condition, at the crossroads of all of our dichotomies, like the spokes of a wheel with you in the center, in the calm dead silence of the eye of the storm, while all around you life rages on, and while you cannot feel life, you are aware that it is out there and this fills you with despair."

Then, he says, "You are in that time between time, waiting for something to happen, and remembering something that has already happened."

"You mean the present."

"Yes, from the perspective of time it is the present, but it is only one kind of present. I mean, it is a present, but it is a destructive kind of present because, within the context of the mind, a present can be reality or it can be something else entirely."

"Some sort of tedium, something like limbo."

"In Dante's Inferno, the first circle of Hell was Limbo, a kind of catchall for people that he liked and respected who died in original sin, and it is very much like life on Earth. So, Limbo is Hell, but life is not Limbo, it's not a waiting room, waiting is a choice, something that we control. You need to understand that all of us have the power to stand up and leave, and that all we ever need to do is to do something else."

"And what is the 'something else'?"

"Presently, the 'something else' is picking up the check for a meal with a very dear friend who has imparted a tremendous amount of wisdom upon you and has, up to this point in time, asked for nothing in return. After that, you are on your own."

Confronted with Harper's infallible logic, there was but one choice. I paid for our meals and exited the restaurant. Then, I went back into the real world and started looking for something else to do.

The Plunger and the Toilet Brush

The Plunger and the Toilet Brush

(with apologies to Edward Lear)

The plunger and the toilet brush stood beside
A beautiful porcelain throne.
Though they rarely were used
They felt scorned and abused,
Their laments, an unbearable drone.

They complained of the bowl
Til the toilet paper roll
Gave response to their miserable plea,
"Stop being so whiny!
I have to wipe hindy!
You will not get pity from me,
From me,
From me,
No, you will not get pity from me."

Plunger said to the brush
"Before the next flush
I've an idea of what we must do.
Run away and be free!"
And the brush said, "Suits me,
for my bristles are smelly from poo!"

So they both sailed away
For a week and a day
Til they came to a tropical strand.
Any humans around
Used a hole in the ground
And then buried their feces in sand,
In sand,
In sand,
Yes, they buried their feces in sand.

As the weeks passed them by
Plunger said with a sigh,
"My convictions have taken a turn.
Though this island's a beauty
I still yearn for our duty
Of cleaning up doody and urine."

So they set off again
With a sail in the wind
Through the ocean and inlet and bay.
Going back to their home
By the porcelain throne
Where the two of them stand to this day,
This day,
This day,
Where the two of them stand to this day.

Harper on Phantom Wings

There are just the two of us, Harper and I, and we are talking in the dark corner of an all night diner where you can still find a waitress who wears too much perfume and calls everyone 'Honey'. I like to talk to Harper because he's the only person I know who is stranger than me. He also loves words and often mangles the English language in pursuit of that passion.

When two people are first falling in love and they form that little microcosm in which only they exist, Harper calls that the "hamster ball".

When a person discusses something passionately, flailing their arms around like Kermit the Frog on crack cocaine, Harper calls that going "Muppet Buck Wild".

When someone feels particularly emotional and is trying to explain how they feel, and their spoken words are coming out fast and twisted, Harper calls that either a "tangly ramble" or "rambly tangle" or "tangled rambly" or "rambled tangly" or a variety of other permutations. He says all these phrases are synonymous and interchangeable because the semantics are far more important than the syntax, and that, if a "ramble tangle" doesn't care about its order or grammar, then the phrase that describes it shouldn't care about its order or grammar either.

Tonight, we are discussing a phrase that he uses quite often and the phrase is "phantom wings".

Sometimes he says, "My phantom wings are killing me."

Sometimes he says, "Someone should check on her phantom wings."

Sometimes he says, "Stop crushing my phantom wings."

Every time he uses this phrase, as beautiful as it sounds, he confuses people, until he takes the time to explain that the phrase "phantom wings" refers to feeling stressed. This is a sufficient enough explanation for a majority of people. They hang the syntax in their memory banks and hook it up to the appropriate semantics and transparently translate the phrase the next time Harper mentions "phantom wings".

My memory banks don't work that way because my memory banks need concepts and stories to make connections. Besides, Americans have entirely too many unexplained colloquialisms in English as it is and, if Harper gets hit by a bus tomorrow -- which is not completely outside the realm of possibilities considering his inability to pay attention to the external world -- Americans will be stuck with one more.

So I say, "What are phantom wings?"

And he automatically says, "If I mention phantom wings, it means I am feeling stressed."

"Yes, I know that, but why?"

Harper sighs and says, "Takes too long to explain."

But I know Harper and when he says something takes too long to explain, it simply means I have to keep listening until he starts to talk again.

So, I listen, until he starts to talk again.

"In the beginning, there was God and God was the creator and the universe was his Magnum Opus and, when he finished, there the universe existed before time. It was good and the universe was a thing in and of itself, and its purpose was itself, but a work of art is not complete without an audience and the audience had to consist of sentient and rational creatures so that the universe would convey purpose beyond its mere existence. So God created angels as his audience for his work of art. But angels already had total knowledge of everything through their connection with God, so there was no mystery. God was not a Faith for the angels, he was a Fact. There was no conflict and, therefore, no drama, and, therefore, no context of conflict and drama in which a story could unfold through time and this make the universe static. There was only an infinity of praising and glorifying God until the fall of Lucifer and when Lucifer fell, he lost his wings."

"Sorry?" I said, "What version of the bible have you been reading?"

"What do you care? You're agnostic."

"Doesn't mean I don't respect a good book when I read it."

"I'm not being disrespectful. Every good reader who reads a good book sees their stories between the lines. I'm just telling you mine. You want to hear the rest of it or not?"

"Yes."

Harper stared at me, tilting his head.

"Yes!" I said, "I want to hear the rest...sorry..."

"Lucifer was delivered to the Lake of Fire, but hubris is the greatest of all sins, so Damnation was not sufficient punishment. So, God created phantom wings, a remembrance of was it was to be winged and knowledge of was it is to never being winged again and he cursed Lucifer with their bodily pain, carried just above his shoulder blades, as an added reminder of all that he had sacrificed. Lucifer's banishment created the dichotomy of Good and Evil and within those two extremes the angels saw that there existed many shades of gray and they asked God if they could enter into those shades and if they could praise and glorify him with their Faith and without their wings and God was pleased with their Faith so he created human beings as angelic avatars which allowed the angels to experience his universe in a uniquely human way. But, in order to turn God from Fact to Faith, the angels had to forget everything they knew and enter the human condition as a blank slate and God knew that this would cause despair so he gave each human a pair of phantom wings, a much milder form of Lucifer's punishment, to remind them of who they really were."

"And how did you find your phantom wings?" I asked.

"When I feel anxiety or sadness or despair, I dream, and when I dream, I have many symbols and settings and situations that recur in those dreams. Sometimes I think I have an unconscious treasure trove of stress in abstract forms buried somewhere in my mind because many of the dreams are the same. I am late for work, or I can't find my clothes, or I can't find my car, or I have a school assignment due even though I haven't been in school for years. In this dream, all other dreams coalesced, causing two knots of tension in my upper back. And though I don't remember all of the details of the dream, I do remember that it culminated in a scene in a large retail store where I was operating a cash register without any knowledge of how the machine worked and all around me were angry customers waiting for me to finish a complex and unsolvable business transaction. As the crowd threatened to crush me on all sides, the tension above my shoulder blades increased to an unbearable, pulsating pain and then two immense white wings burst through my flesh and muscle, unfurling and flapping with unprecedented power and the crowd was buffeted backwards by the force and I skyrocketed upwards through the ceiling and roof of the store and rose above a cloud cover in the sky until all below me was an endless floor of white mist and all around me was a glorious sunset of reds and oranges and pinks and purples and I felt an overwhelming, giddy joy, an ecstasy, that I knew only as a muted and filtered, human-sized portion of the infinite love of God."

After we finished our food and the table had been cleared and the waitress had brought us our check, I picked up the tab, with no argument from Harper, and I paid for both of our meals. It seemed a reasonable price for the discovery of the presence and purpose of my phantom wings.

Christmas Lights

We decided to hang Christmas lights on the banister and the mantle
It was not Christmas
It was time

The corrugated cardboard box slumped
In a dark corner of the attic
Rarely visited

As I moved it below, stirring the dust
She sniffled and said
"It's just my allergies"
And did not sneeze

Cutting a shallow path through foundations of masking tape I pulled out
A Gordian knot of wires

I said that these things just happen

She said that we should have planned ahead
Been vigilant and taken care

I said that next time
We will

We placed the tangle before us
Untangling together
And there we found

Candles that boil in low heat
Unending bubbles blow
Emerging from the unknown below
Waiting to rise and explode

Blinkers blink
Unpatterned hot and cold

The bulbous head of a grinning Saint Nick
Ecstatic psychosis
We can't tell which is which

Duct tape patchwork littering the lines
So fingers that pry do not fry

Sugar sprinkled on colored globes
Tasting of sandpaper and nothing

And the jagged glass and wedged threads
Of the one we never fixed

When the knot was straightened and snaking along the floor
I found an outlet nearby and plugged it in

And it was beautiful

Harper on Love and Omelettes

The phone was ringing at 3:00 am.

I knew because I looked at my digital clock just after it started ringing.

It could only be Harper, because he is my only friend that calls me at 3:00 am. No human being should be doing anything at 3:00 am. You are either up too late or getting up too early. That is how normal human beings behave. But Harper has never behaved like a normal human being, so I picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hey."

"Harper?"

"Yes, it's me, sorry to wake you, but did you ever wonder about friendship?"

"Yes," I said, "I am wondering about friendship right now...do you know what time is it?"

"No, I don't know."

"Of course you don't."

"You ever wonder about friendship?"

"Yes, I already said I did."

"I have a problem," Harper said, "and I thought you could help me out as part of the friendship thing we do."

People often ask me about the "friendship thing that Harper and I do", because they find Harper difficult to be around for more than a handful of minutes. He is difficult, I won't deny an obvious truth. Still, if you have a Harper in your life, I suggest tuning into the tangled rambles they weave.

After a tough day of work, eight to fourteen hours of facing people who are stupid or crazy or cruel, I like to settle down and immerse myself in the experience of a conversation of ideas. This is my mental comfort food, words that are mystical, magical, abstract, obtuse, fractals of facets of Real Truth. When I crave mental white noise of the highest caliber, Harper is the best source I know. His words quiet me and I am comforted.

"What is your problem?" I asked.

"I think I am in love."

"Why is your love my problem?"

"Because I don't know if I am am in love and you probably do."

"Fair enough," I said, "Why do you think you are in love."

"Because I just flipped a woman a perfect omelette."

A moment of respectful silence from Harper and myself ensued, because a moment of respectful silence is what is appropriate for those people who understand the importance of flipping the perfect omelette. Flipping the perfect omelette is a labor of love, and flipping the perfect omelette for someone you love is the most perfect manifestation of simple and elegant and sublime and perfect love.

For those of you who don't understand, let me lay out the complete list of the challenges that await you. All of the decisions and permutations, the frustrations and barriers, the quintessential essence of flipping a perfect omelette.

Better yet, let me lay out for you Harper's description. I've had to listen to it at least a dozen times, so you all can certainly experience it once:

"Many decisions go into flipping the perfect omelette. First, you need to decide on two eggs or three, and then, you need to decide on how much salt and pepper to add, and then, you need to decide if you need to add a small amount of water or milk or nothing at all, because some people say that the eggs should be pure, and some people say the eggs should be fluffy, and some people say the eggs should be creamy, and then, you need to decide how to mix the eggs, because you can use a whisk, or a fork, and you can spend a lot of time, or a little bit of time, on the mixing process, and you can make the mixture bubbly or smooth, as I mentioned before, and the texture of the mixed eggs depends a lot on all of your previous decisions, but it doesn't end there, because then, you need to prepare the pan, probably a ceramic pan is best, because it is non-stick and easy to clean, but traditionalists love a cast iron, and there are lots of reasons why cast iron is both good and bad, but we need to keep focused on the task at hand, so, then, you need to select a good size, I have tried eight inch, and ten and one half inch, and twelve inch, and all three have pros and cons, but the eight inch gives you the most cooking and flipping control, and then, you need a nice thin and narrow spatula that can handle fragile items like eggs, and you need to select the heat of the burner, somewhere between medium and medium high, because eggs that cook too fast get rubbery, and eggs that aren't cooked enough are runny, and then, select butter, or cooking oil, or both, to add to the pan, and after the eggs start cooking, you need to decide if you will scrape the egg mixture with your spatula and let it settle, or if you will simply let it cook on its own, then, you need to decide if you will fold it over in half or in a three folds, and then, you need to decide if the middle will be wet or dry before the flip, but before all of that, you need to decide on the central ingredients, because some ingredients have more water and some ingredients have less, so you need to decide how wet the inside of your omelette is going to be, because no one likes a soggy omelette, and no one likes a dry omelette, so it has to be just perfect, which is to say that it is pale yellow, and not too brown, on the outside, and perfectly folded along whatever creases you decided upon earlier, which is not an easy thing to do if you mess up the flip, so you need a good flipping technique, flipping just with the spatula, or with both the spatula and the pan, and it needs to be firm on the outside, and tender on the inside, and all of the ingredients need to be nestled comfortably inside the well-cooked confines, and it need to look good, and smell good, and feel good while you are cutting it with a utensil, and feel good while you are chewing and swallowing it, and taste great...and that's it."

And that's it. The mastermind at work.

"Did she like it?" I asked.

"Like it?" Harper asked.

"Yes, did she enjoy the omelette that you prepared for her?"

"I don't know. Can you tell me how I would know that?"

"Did she eat it all and leave an empty plate?"

"Yes."

"Then she enjoyed eating the omelette."

There was a very long pause on the phone while Harper thought about this.

"She enjoys eating the omelette as much as I enjoy creating it?"

"Yes."

"The word 'enjoy' means the same thing for both of us?"

"Yes."

"You don't know that for sure. You are lying."

"Partially."

"Why are you partially lying?"

"Because you probably are in love and it is easier to agree with people who are in love than to argue with them."

"And..."

"And because I am half asleep and I really would like to be fully asleep again in the very near future."

"And..."

"And because, even on my best days, I don't know what love is."

"Why?"

"Because no human being knows exactly. It's just something you have to experience yourself."

"I'm not sure if you know this about me," Harper said, "but I'm not very good at just jumping into things without first doing a thorough analysis."

"I do know that about you, yes."

"And love is considerably more complex than an omelette."

"I believe, in most cases, that is correct."

Another long pause on the other side of the phone, then Harper hung up. Letting me go back to sleep was his way of showing his appreciation for my advice.

The love story does not last very long. Harper was slow to share his feelings although I imagine a considerable amount of thought went into them. I would inquire from time to time how things were going and received very little feedback for my efforts. The mystery lady was never revealed to me and one day, a few months later, she had faded away from his life.

Still, one has to crack a few eggs to make an omelette, and, in Harper's case, he just kept on cracking. His brief love affair, and the subsequent months after the breakup, provided me with some of the best impromptu brunches I have ever eaten: scrambled eggs with lobster, poached eggs topped with caviar, roasted asparagus and soft eggs on toast, crab cakes eggs benedict, huevos rancheros with shrimp, chipotle deviled eggs, curried egg salad with truffles, smoked salmon tarts, custards, flans, and creme brulees. It was a period of unbridled creative energy, completely unexpected, brilliantly executed, and absolutely delicious.

Then, one day, as I showed up at Harper's apartment, my mind spinning with the culinary possibilities of the humble egg, and he served me a cheese omelette.

"What's this?" I asked.

"It's a cheese omelette," Harper said.

"I know what it is..."

"I gave the matter a lot of thought," Harper said, "and I decided that I like omelettes best of all."

I nodded in agreement and began to eat. I like omelettes best of all, too.

My Dinner With Andre transcript

My Dinner With Andre is one of my favorite movies. I couldn't find a good screenplay or transcript of the film anywhere online so I am creating a transcript for myself and other fans of the film.

Wally (narration): The life of a playwright is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living, I became an actor, and people don't hire you. So you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade. Today, I had to be up by ten in the morning to make some important phone calls. Then, I'd gone to the stationery store to buy envelopes. Then, to the Xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do.

Wally (narration): By five o'clock, I'd finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile, checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning, the mailbox had just been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them? After all, I was already doing my best.

Wally (narration): I've lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side and when I was ten years old I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I'm 36, and all I think about is money.

Wally (narration): It was now seven o'clock and I would have liked nothing better than to go home and have my girlfriend, Debbie, cook me a nice, delicious dinner. But for the last several years, our financial circumstances have forced Debbie to work three nights a week as a waitress. Afterall, somebody had to bring in a little money. So, I was on my own.

Wally (narration): But the worst thing of all was that I'd been trapped by an odd series of circumstances into agreeing to have dinner with a man I'd been avoiding literally for years. His name was Andre Gregory. At one time he'd been a very close friend of mine, as well as my most valued colleague in the theater. In fact, he was the man who had first discovered me and put one of my plays on the professional stage. When I'd known Andre, he'd been at the height of his career as a theater director. The amazing work he did with his company, The Manhattan Project, had just stunned audiences throughout the world.

Wally (narration): But then, something had happened to Andre. He dropped out of the theater. He sort of disappeared. For months at a time his family seemed only to know that he was travelling in some odd place like Tibet. Which was really weird because he loved his wife and children, he never used to like to leave home at all. Or else you'd hear that someone had met him at a party, and he'd been telling people that he'd talked with trees or something like that. Obviously, something terrible had happened to Andre.

Wally (narration): The whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous. I mean, I really wasn't up for that sort of thing. I had problems of my own. I mean, I couldn't help Andre. Was I supposed to be a doctor or what?

Wally: Hello.

Coat Check Girl: Hello. There you go.

Wally: Thank you.

Maitre D': Yes sir.

Wally: Uh, sir, my name is Wallace Shawn. I'm expected at the table of Andre Gregory.

Maitre D': That table will be a moment, sir. If you like, you may have a drink at the bar.

Bartender: Good evening, sir.

Wally: Uh, could I have a club soda please?

Bartender: I'm sorry sir. We only serve Source de Pavilion.

Wally: That'd be fine. Thank you.

Wally (narration): When I'd called Andre, and he'd suggested that we meet in this particular restaurant, I'd been rather surprised because Andre's tastes used to be very ascetic. Even though people have always known that he has some money somewhere. I mean, how the hell else could he have been flying off to Asia, and so on, and still have been supporting his family.

Wally (narration): The reason I was meeting Andre was that an acquaintance of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town the night before, and he'd suddenly come upon Andre leaning against a crumbling old building and sobbing. Andre had explained to George that he'd just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie "Autumn Sonata" about 25 blocks away, and he'd been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said "I could always live in my art, but never in my life."

Andre: Wally!

Wally: Wow! My God!

Wally (narration): I remember, when I first started working with Andre's company, I couldn't get over the way the actors would hug when they greeted each other. "Wow. Now I'm really in the theater," I thought.

Wally: Well, you look terrific.

Andre: Well, I feel terrible.

Bartender: Good evening, sir. Nice to see you again.

Andre: Thank you, good evening. Ah, I think I'll have a spritzer, if I could.

Bartender: Yes, sir.

Andre: Thank you.

Wally (narration): I was feeling incredibly nervous. I wasn't sure I could stick through an entire meal with him. So we talked about this and that. He told me a few things about Jerzy Grotowski, the great Polish theater director, who was a friend, and almost like a kind of a guru, of Andre's. He'd also dropped out of the theater. Grotowski was a pretty unusual character himself. At one time, he'd been quite fat, then he'd lost an incredible amount of weight, and become very thin and grown a beard.

Waiter: Your table is ready...

Andre: Oh.

Waiter: ...if you feel like sitting down.

Wally: Oh.

Andre: Yes, thank you.

Wally (narration): I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this evening bearable would be to ask Andre a few questions. Asking questions always relaxes me. In fact, I sometimes think that my secret profession is that I'm a private investigator, a detective. I always enjoy finding out about people, even if they're in absolute agony, I always find it very...interesting.

Wally: By the way, is he still thin?

Andre: What?

Wally: Grotowski. Is he still thin?

Andre: Oh, absolutely. Oh, waiter? Uh, I think we can do without this.

Waiter 2: Yes, sir.

Andre: Thank you.

Wally: What about this one?

Andre: Seven swimming shrimp.

Waiter: Ready for your order?

Andre: Ah...yes. Uh, the aranygaluska. How...how do you prepare that?

Wally (narration): Andre seemed to know an awful lot about the menu. I didn't understand a word of it.

Waiter: Very good, I think.

Andre: Mmm...no, I...I think I'll have the cailles aux raisins...

Waiter: Very good.

Andre: ...the quail.

Wally: Oh, quails! I'll have that as well.

Waiter: Two.

Andre: Great.

Wally: Great!

Andre: And then I think, to begin with, the terrine de poissons.

Waiter: Yes.

Wally: What is that?

Andre: Uh, it's a sort of pâté...light...made of fish.

Wally: Does it have bones in it?

Andre: No bones. Perfectly safe.

Wally: Well...um. What is the, um, bramborová polévka?

Waiter: It's a potato soup. It's quite delicious.

Wally: Oh, well, that's...great. I'll have that.

Waiter: Thank you very kindly.

Andre: Thank you very much.

Wally: Well. And when was the last time...

Wally (narration): So we talked for a while about my writing and my acting. And about my girlfriend, Debbie. And we talked about his wife, Chiquita, and his two children, Nicolas and Marina.

Andre: And I...I'd stayed back...

Wally (narration): Finally, I got around to asking him what he'd been up to in the last few years.

Wally: ...I'm just dying to hear it.

Andre: Really?

Wally: Really.

Wally (narration): At first, he seemed a little reluctant to go into it. So, I just kept asking, and finally, he started to answer.

Andre: ...conference on paratheatrical work then. And, uh...this must have been about...five years ago and, uh, Grotowski and I were walking along Fifth Avenue and we were talking, you see, he'd invited me to come to teach that summer in Poland, you know, to teach a workshop to actors and directors and whatever and...I had told him that I didn't want to come, because, really, I had nothing left to teach. I had nothing left to say. I didn't know anything. I couldn't teach anything. Exercises meant nothing to me anymore. Working on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous. I...I didn't know what to do, I mean, I just couldn't do it.

Andre: So he said, "Why don't you tell me anything you'd like to have if you did a workshop for me, no matter how outrageous, and maybe I can give it to you."

Andre: So I said, "Well, if you could give me forty Jewish women who speak neither English nor French, either women who've been in the theater for a long time and want to leave it but don't know why, or young women who love the theater, but have never seen a theater they could love, and if these women could play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I'd come."

Andre: A week later, or two weeks later, he called me from Poland and he said, "Well, forty Jewish women, that's a little hard to find." But he said, "I do have forty women. They all pretty much fit the definition." And he said, "I also have some very interesting men but you don't have to work with them. These are all people who have in common the fact that they're questioning the theater. They don't all play the trumpet or the harp, but they all play a musical instrument, and none of them speak English." And he'd found me a forest, Wally, and the only inhabitants of this forest were some wild boar and a hermit. So that was an offer I couldn't refuse. I had to go.

Andre: So, I went to Poland and this wonderful group of young men and women. And the forest he had found us was absolutely magic but, you know, it was a huge forest, I mean, the trees were so large that four or five people linking their arms couldn't get their arms around the trees. So we were camped out beside the ruins of this tiny little castle and we would eat around this great stone slab that served as a sort of a table. And our schedule was that usually we'd start work around sunset and then generally we'd work until about 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning, and then, because the Poles love to sing and dance, we'd sing and dance until about 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, and then we'd have our food, which was generally bread, jam, cheese, and tea, and then we'd sleep from around noon to sunset.

Andre: Now, technically, of course...technically, the situation is a very interesting one because, if you find yourself in a forest with a group of 40 people who don't speak your language, then all your moorings are gone.

Wally: What do you mean exactly?

Andre: Well, what we'd do is just sit there and wait for someone to have an impulse to do something. Now, in a way that's...that's something like a...a theatrical improvisation, uh, you know, if you were a director working on a play by Chekhov, you might have the actors playing the mother, the son, and the uncle all sit around in a room and do a made-up scene that isn't in the play, for instance, you might say to them "All right, let's say that it's a rainy Sunday afternoon on Sorin's estate and you're all trapped in the drawing room together." And then everyone would improvise, saying and doing what their character might say and do in that circumstance.

Andre: Except that in this type of improvisation, the kind we did in Poland, the theme is oneself. So, you follow the same law of improvisation, which is that you do whatever your impulse, as the character, tells you to do, but in this case, you're the character. So there's no imaginary situation to hide behind and there's no other person to hide behind. What you're doing, in fact, is you're asking those same questions that Stanislavsky said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character: Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from...and where am I going? But instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself.

Wally: Hmm.

Andre: Or, to look at it a little differently in a way, it's like going right back to childhood, where a group of children simply come into a room, or are brought into a room, without toys, and begin to play. Grown-ups were learning how to play again.

Wally: So, you would...uh...all sit together somewhere and...uh...you would play in some way but what would you actually do?

Andre: Well, I could give you a good example. You see, we worked...uh...together for a week in the city before we went off to our forest and, of course, Grotowski was there in the city, too, and...I heard that every night, he conducted something called a beehive, and I loved the sound of this beehive so...a night or two before we were supposed to go off to the country, I grabbed him by the collar, and I said, "Listen, about this beehive, you know, I'd kind of like to participate in one, just...instinctively, I feel it would be something interesting." And he said, "Well, certainly, in fact...why don't you, with your group, lead the beehive instead of participating in one?" Well, you know, I...I got very nervous, you know, and I said, "Well, what is a beehive?" He said, ''Well...a beehive is...at eight o'clock a hundred strangers come into a room." And I said, "Yes?" He said, "Yes, and whatever happens is a beehive." I said, "Yes, but what am I supposed to do?" He said, "That's up to you." I said, "No, no. I really don't want to do this. I'll just participate." And he said, "No, no. You lead the beehive."

Andre: Well, I was terrified, Wally, I mean, in a way, I felt on stage. I did it anyway.

Wally: God, well...tell me about it.

Andre: You see, there was this song. I have a tape of it, I can play it for you one day. And it's just unbelievably beautiful. You see, one of the women in our group knew a few fragments of this song of Saint Francis, and it's a song in which you thank God for your eyes, and you thank God for your heart, and you thank God for your friends, and you thank God for your life, and it...uh...it repeats itself over and over again, and this became our theme song. I really must play this thing for you one day because you just can't believe that a group of people who don't know how to sing could create something so beautiful. So, I decided that when the people arrived for the beehive that our group would already be there singing this very beautiful song, and that we would simply sing it over and over again.

Andre: One of the people decided to bring her very large teddy bear, you know, well, she's a little afraid of this event, and...uh...somebody wanted to bring a...a sheet, and somebody else wanted to bring a large bowl of water, in case people got hot or thirsty, and somebody suggested that we have candles, that there be no artificial light, but candlelight. And I remember watching people preparing for this evening. Of course, there was no makeup, and there were no costumes, but it was exactly the way that people prepare for a performance, you know, people sort of taking off their jewelry and their watches, and stowing it away, and making sure it's all secure. And then, slowly, people arrived, the way they would arrive at the theater, in ones and twos and tens and fifteens and what have you, and we were just sitting there, and we were singing this very beautiful song, and people started to sit with us and started to learn the song.

Andre: Now, there is, of course, as in any performance or improvisation, an instinct for when things are gonna get boring. So, at a certain point, it may only have taken an hour to get there, an hour and a half, I suddenly grabbed this teddy bear and threw it in the air, at which a hundred and forty or thirty people suddenly exploded, you know, it was like a...a Jackson Pollack painting, you know. Human beings exploded out of this tight little circle that was singing the song, and before I knew it, there were two circles, dancing, you know, one dancing clockwise, the other dancing counterclockwise, with this rhythm mostly from the waist down. In other words, like an American Indian dance, with this thumping, persistent rhythm.

Andre: Now, you could easily see, cause we're talking about group trance, where the line between something like this, and something like Hitler's Nuremberg rallies is, in a way, a very thin line.

Andre: Anyway, after about an hour of this wild, hypnotic dancing, Grotowski and I found ourselves sitting opposite each other in the middle of this whole thing, and we threw the teddy bear back and forth. You know, on one...on one level, you could say this is childish. And I gave the teddy bear suck, suddenly, at my breast, and then I threw the teddy bear to him, and he gave it suck at his breast, and then the teddy bear was thrown up into the air again, at which there was another explosion of form into...something, and these...suppose it like, you know, this is the...this...there's something like a kaleidoscope, like a human kaleidoscope, the evening was made up of shiftings of the kaleidoscope.

Andre: Now, the only other things that I remember, other than constantly trying to guide this thing, which was always involved with either movement, rhythm, repetition or song...or chanting, because, uh, two people in my group had brought musical instruments, a flute and a drum, which, of course, are sacred instruments...was that sometimes the room would break up into six or seven different things going on at once, you know, six or seven different improvisations, all of which seemed, in some way, related to each other, it was...it was like a magnificent cobweb.

Andre: And at one point, I noticed that Grotowski was at the center of one group huddled around a bunch of candles that they'd gathered together. And like a little child, fascinated by fire, I saw that he had his hand right in the flame and was holding it there. And as I approached his group, I wondered if I could do it. I put my left hand in the flame and I found I could hold it there for as long as I liked, and there was no burn and no pain. But when I tried to put my right hand in the flame, I couldn't hold it there for a second, so Grotowski said, "If it burns, try to change some little thing in yourself." And I tried to do that...didn't work.

Andre: Then...I remember a very, very beautiful procession with the sheet, and there was somebody being carried below the sheet, you know, the sheet was like some great biblical canopy, and the entire group was weaving around the room and chanting. And then at one point, people were dancing, and I was dancing with a girl, and suddenly our hands began vibrating near each other like this...vibrating...vibrating, and we went down to our knees, and suddenly I was sobbing in her arms, and she was sort of cradling me in her arms, and then she started to cry too, and then we...then we just hugged each other for a moment, and...uh...then we joined the dance again.

Andre: And then at a certain point, hours later, we returned to the singing of the song of Saint Francis, and that was the end of the beehive. And then, again, when it was over, it was just like the theater after a performance, you know, people sort of put on their earrings and their wristwatches and we went off to the railroad station to drink a lot of beer and have a good dinner. Oh, and there was one girl, who wasn't in our group, but who just wouldn't leave, so we took her along with us.

Wally: Huh. God. Well, tell me some of the other things you did with your group.

Andre: Well...oh, I remember once, when we were in the city we tried doing an improvisation, you know, the kind that I used to do in New York...uh...everybody's supposed to be on an airplane and they've all learned from the pilot there's something wrong with the motor. But what was unusual about this improvisation was that two people who participated in it fell in love. They've, in fact, married. And when we went...yeah, out of fear...of being on this plane, they fell in love, thinking they were going to die at any moment. And when we went to the forest, these two disappeared because they understood the...the experiment so well that they realized that...to go off together in the forest was much more important than any kind of experiment the group could do as a whole. So...uh...about halfway through the week, we stumbled into a clearing in the forest and the two of them were fast asleep in each other's arms. It was around dawn, and we put flowers on them to let them know we'd been there, and then we crept away. And then, on the last day of our stay in the forest, these two showed up and they shook me by my hands, and they thanked me very much for the wonderful work they'd been able to do, you see. They understood what it was about. I mean, that, of course, poses the question of what was it about. But it has...has something to do with living.

Andre: And...and then on the final day of our stay in the forest, the whole group did something so wonderful for me, Wally. They arranged a christening...a baptism for me and they...they filled the castle with flowers and it was...just a miracle of light because they had literally set up hundreds of candles and torches, I mean, no church could have looked more beautiful. There was a simple ceremony, and one of them played the role of my godmother, and another played the role of my godfather, and I was given a new name. They called me Yendrush. And some of the people took it completely seriously and some of them found it funny, but, uh...I really felt that I had a new name. And then we had an enormous feast, with blueberries picked from the field, and chocolate someone had gone a great distance to buy, and raspberry soup, rabbit stew, and we sang Polish songs, and Greek songs, and everybody danced for the rest of the night.

Wally: Hmm.

Andre: Oh, I have a picture. See...this was...let's see. Oh, yeah, this was me in the forest. See?

Wally: God!

Andre: That's what I felt like. That's the state I was in.

Wally: God. Yeah, I remember George...uh, told me he'd seen you around that time. He said you looked like you'd come back from a war.

Andre: Yeah, I remember meeting him. He...uh...he asked me a lot of friendly questions. I think I called you up, too, that summer, didn't I?

Wally: Huh. I think I was out of town.

Andre: Yeah, well, most...most people I met thought there was something wrong with me. They didn't say that but I could tell that that was what they thought. But, you see, what I think I experienced was, for the first time in my life, to know what it means to be truly alive. Now, that's very frightening, because with that comes an immediate awareness of death, cause they go hand in hand, you know, the kind of impulse that led to Walt Whitman, that led to "Leaves of Grass", you know, that feeling of being connected to everything means to also be connected to death. And that's pretty scary. But, I really felt as if I were floating above the ground, not walking, you know, and I could do things like go out to the highway and watch the lights go from red to green and think, "How wonderful!"

Andre: And then, one day, in the early fall, I was out in the country, walking in a field, and I suddenly heard a voice say, "Little Prince." And, of course, "The Little Prince" was a book that I always thought of as disgusting, childish treacle, but still, I thought, well, you know, if a voice comes to me in a field, I mean, this was the first voice I had ever heard. Maybe I should go and read the book. Now, that same morning I'd got a letter from a young woman who'd been in my group in Poland, and in her letter she'd written, "You have dominated me.", you know, she spoke very awkward English, so, she'd gone to the dictionary, and she'd crossed out the word "dominated" and she'd said, "No. The correct word is 'tamed.'" And then when I went to town and bought the book and started to read it, I saw that "taming" was the most important word in the whole book. By the end of the book, I was in tears, I was so moved by the story.

Andre: And then I went and tried to write an answer to her letter, cause she'd written me a very long letter. But I just couldn't find the right words, so, finally, I took my hand, I put it on a piece of paper, I outlined it with a pen, and I wrote in the center something like, "Your heart is in my hand.", something like that. And then, I went over to my brother's house to swim, cause he lives nearby in the country, and he has a pool. And he wasn't home. And I went into his library and he had bought at an auction the collected issues of Minotaure. You know, the surrealist magazine? Oh, it's a great, great surrealist magazine in the twenties and thirties and I...never...you know, I consider myself a bit of a surrealist. I had never, ever seen a copy of Minotaure. And here they all were, bound, year after year.

Andre: So, at random, I picked one out, I opened it up, and there was a full-page reproduction of the letter "A" from Tenniel's Alice In Wonderland, and I thought, that...well, you know, it's been a day of coincidences, but that's not unusual that the surrealists would have been interested in Alice and I did a play of Alice, so, at random, I opened to another page and there were four handprints. One was André Breton, another was André Derain, the third was André...I've got it written down somewhere...it...it's not Malraux...it's, like, someone...another of the surrealists. All "A"'s, and the fourth was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote "The Little Prince". And they'd shown these handprints to some kind of expert, without saying whose hands they belonged to, and under Exupéry's, it said that he was an artist, with very powerful eyes, who was a tamer of wild animals. So, I thought, this is incredible, you know. And I looked back to see when the issue came out. It came out on the newsstands May 12th, 1934, and I was born during the day of May 11th, 1934. So, that's what started me on, uh...Saint-Exupéry and "The Little Prince".

Andre: Now, of course today...today I think there's a very fascistic thing under "The Little Prince", you know, I...well, no, I think there's a kind of...I think a kind of S.S. totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere. You know, there's something, you know, that...that love of, um...well, that masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle, you know what I mean? I mean, I can't quite put my finger on it, but I can just imagine some beautiful S.S. man loving "The Little Prince". Now, I don't know why, but there's something wrong with it, it stinks.

Wally: Well, didn't George tell me that you were gonna do a play that was based on "The Little Prince"

Andre: Hmm. Well. What happened, Wally, was that fall I was in New York, and I met this young Japanese Buddhist priest named Kozan, and I thought he was Puck from the "Midsummer Night's Dream", you know, he had this beautiful, delicate smile. I thought he was the Little Prince. So, naturally, I decided to go off to the Sahara desert to work on The Little Prince with two actors and this Japanese monk.

Wally: You did?

Andre: Well, I mean, I was still in a very peculiar state at that time, Wally. You know, I would...I would look in the rearview mirror of my car and see little birds flying out of my mouth. And I remember always being exhausted in that period. I always felt weak, you know, I really didn't know what was going on with me, I would just sit out there all alone in the country for days and do nothing but write in my diary, and I was always thinking about death.

Wally: Huh. But you went to the Sahara.

Andre: Oh, yes, we went off into the desert, and we rode through the desert on camels, and we rode, and we rode, and then at night we would walk out under that enormous sky and look at the stars. I just kept thinking about the same things that I was always thinking about at home, particularly about Chiquita. In fact, I thought about just about nothing but my marriage. And then I remember one incredibly dark night, being at an oasis, and there were palm trees moving in the wind, and I could hear Kozan singing far away in that beautiful bass voice, and I tried to follow his voice along the sand.

Andre: You see, I thought he had something to teach me, Wally. And sometimes I would meditate with him. Sometimes I'd go off and meditate by myself. You know, I would see images of Chiquita. Once, I actually saw her growing old and her hair turning gray in front of my eyes, and I would just wail and yell my lungs out out there on the dunes. Anyway, the desert was pretty horrible. It was pretty cold. We were searching for something, but we couldn't tell if we were finding anything. You know that once Kozan and I...we were sitting on a dune and we just ate sand. No, we weren't trying to be funny, I started, then he started, we just ate sand and threw up, that's how desperate we were. In other words, we didn't know why we were there, we didn't know what we were looking for, the entire thing seemed completely absurd, arid, and empty, it was like, uh...like a last chance or something.

Wally: Huh. So what happened then?

Andre: Well...in those days I went completely on impulse. So, on impulse, I brought Kozan back to stay with us in New York after we got back from the Sahara, and he stayed for six months. And he really sort of took over the whole family, in a way.

Wally: What do you mean?

Andre: Well, there was certainly a center missing in the house at the time. There certainly wasn't a father, cause I was always thinking about going off to Tibet, or doing God knows what. And, so, he taught the whole family to meditate, and he told them all about Asia, and the East, and his monastery, and everything. He really captivated everybody with an incredible bag of tricks. He had literally developed himself, Wally, so that he could push on his fingers and rise off, out of his chair. I mean, he could literally go like this, you know, push on his fingers and go into like a headstand, and just hold himself there with two fingers. Or if Chiquita would suddenly get a little tension in her neck, well, he'd immediately have her down on the floor, he'd be walking up and down on her back doing these unbelievable massages, you know.

Andre: And the children found him amazing, I mean, you know, we'd visit friends who had children and immediately he'd be playing with these children in a way that, you know, we just can't do, I mean, those children, just giggles, giggles, giggles about what this Japanese monk was doing in these holy robes. I mean, he was an acrobat, a ventriloquist, a magician, everything. You know, the amazing thing was that I don't think he had any interest in children whatsoever. None at all. I don't think he liked them. I mean, you know, when he stayed with us, in the first week, really, the kids were just googly-eyed over him. But then, a couple of weeks later, Chiquita and I could be out, and Marina could have flu or a temperature of 104, and he wouldn't even go in and say hello to her. But he was taking over, more and more.

Andre: I mean, his own habits had completely changed. You know, he started wearing these elegant Gucci shoes under his white monk's robes. He was eating huge amounts of food. I mean, he ate twice as much as Nicolas ate, you know? This tiny little Buddhist when I first met him, you know, was eating a little bowl of milk, hot milk with rice, was now eating huge beef. It was just very strange. You know, and we tried working together, but really our work consisted mostly of my trying to do these incredibly painful prostrations that they do in the monastery, you know, so really, we hadn't been working very much.

Andre: Anyway, we were out in the country, and we all went to Christmas Mass together, you know, he was all dressed up in his Buddhist finery, and it was one of those...one of those awful, dreary Catholic churches on Long Island where the priest talks about communism and birth control. And as I was sitting there in Mass, I was wondering, what in the world is going on, I mean, here I am, I'm a grown man, and there's this strange person living in the house, and I'm not working, I mean, you know, I was doing nothing but scribbling a little poetry in my diary, I can't get a job teaching anymore, and I don't know what I want to do. When all of a sudden, a huge creature appeared, looking at the congregation, it was about, I'd say, six foot eight, something like that, you know, and it was...it was half bull, half man, and its skin was blue. It had violets growing out of its eyelids and poppies growing out of its toenails, and it just stood there for the whole Mass. I mean, I could not make that creature disappear, you know, I thought, oh, well, you know, I'm just seeing this cause I'm bored, you know, close...I could not make that creature go away. Okay, now, I didn't talk with people about it, because they'd think I was weird but I felt that this creature was somehow coming to comfort me. That somehow, he was appearing to say, "Well, you may feel low and you might not be able to create a play right now, but look at what can come to you on Christmas Eve, hang on, old friend. I may seem weird to you, but on these weird voyages, weird creatures appear. It's part of the journey. You're okay. Hang in there."

Wally: By the way...uh...did you ever see that play...uh..."The Violets are Blue"?

Andre: No.

Wally: Oh, when...when you mentioned the violets, it...it reminded me of that. It...it was about...um...people being...uh...strangled on a...on a submarine.

Andre: Hmm.

Wally: Well. So that was...that was Christmas. What happened after that?

Andre: Do you really want to hear about all this?

Wally: Yeah.

Andre: Well. Around that time...I was beginning to think about going to India, and Kozan suddenly left one day, and I was beginning to get into a lot of very strange ideas around that time, now, for example, I'd developed this...well, I got this idea which I...now, it was very appealing to me at the time, you know, which was that I would have a flag, a large flag and that wherever I worked, this flag would fly, or if we were outside, say, with a group, that the flag could be the thing we lay on at night, and that, somehow, between working on this flag and lying on this flag, this flag flying over us, that the flag would pick up vibrations of a kind, that would still be in the flag when I brought it home.

Andre: So I went down to meet this flag maker that I'd heard about, and, you know, there was this very straightforward-looking guy, you know, very sweet, really healthy-looking and everything. Nice big, blond, and he had a beautiful, clean loft down in the village with lovely, happy flags, and I was all into The Little Prince, and I talked to him about The Little Prince, these adventures and everything. How I needed the flag and what the flag should be. He seemed to really connect with it, so...

Andre: Two weeks later, I came back. He showed me a flag that I thought was very odd, you know, cause I...well, you know...I'd expected something gentle and lyrical. There was something about this that was so powerful it was almost overwhelming. And it did include the Tibetan swastika.

Wally: He put a swastika in your flag?

Andre: No, it was the Tibetan swastika, not the Nazi swastika. It's one of the most ancient Tibetan symbols. And it was just strange, you know? But I brought it home, because my idea with this flag was that, before I left, you know, before I left for India I wanted several people who were close to me to have this flag in the room for the night to sleep with it, you know, and then in the morning to sew something into the flag.

Andre: So I took the flag into Marina, and I said, "Hey, look at this. What do you think of this?" And she said, "What is that? That's awful." I said, "It's a flag." And she said, "I don't like it." I said, "I kind of thought you might like to spend the night with it, you know." But she really thought the flag was awful.

Andre: So then Chiquita threw this party for me before I left for India and the apartment was filled with guests and, at one point Chiquita said, "The flag, the flag. Where's the flag?", and I said, "Oh, yeah. The flag." And I go and get the flag, and I open it up. Chiquita goes absolutely white and runs out of the room and vomits. So the party just comes to a halt and breaks up.

Andre: And then, the next day, I gave it to this young woman who'd been in my group in Poland, who was now in New York. I didn't tell her anything about any of this. At 5:00 in the morning, she called me up and she said "I gotta come and see you right away." and I thought, "Oh, God." She came up, and she said, "I saw things. I saw things around this flag. Now, I know you're stubborn, and I know you want to take this thing with you, but if you'd follow my advice, you'd put it in a hole in the ground and burn it and cover it with earth, cause the devil's in it." I never took the flag with me. In fact, I gave it to her, and, uh, she...she had a ceremony with it. Six months later, in France, with some friends, in which, uh, they did burn it.

Wally: God. It's really, really amazing. So, did you ever go to India?

Andre: Oh, yes, I...I went to India in the spring, Wally, and I came back home feeling all wrong. I mean, you know, I'd been to India, and I'd just felt like a tourist. I'd found nothing.

Andre: So I was...I was spending, uh, the summer on Long Island with my family and I heard about this community in Scotland called Findhorn where people sang and talked and meditated with plants. And it was founded by several rather middle-class English and Scottish eccentrics. Some of them intellectuals, and some of them not, and I'd heard that they'd grown things in soil that supposedly nothing can grow in, cause it's almost beach soil, and that they'd built...not built...they'd grown the largest cauliflowers in the world and there are sorts of cabbages, and they've grown trees that can't grow in the British Isles.

Andre: So I went there. I mean, it is an amazing place, Wally, I mean, if there are insects bothering the plants, they will talk with the insects. And, you know, make an agreement, by which they'll set aside a special patch of vegetables just for the insects and then the insects will leave the main part alone. Things like that.

Andre: And everything they do they do beautifully. I mean, the buildings just shine. I mean, for instance, the icebox, the stove, the car, you know, they all have names, and since you wouldn't treat Helen, the icebox, with any less respect than you would Margaret, your wife, you know, you make sure that Helen is as clean as Margaret, or treated with equal respect.

Andre: And when I was there, Wally, I remember being in the woods and I would look at a leaf, and I would actually see that thing that is alive in that leaf. And then I remember just running through the woods as fast as I could, with this incredible laugh coming out of me and really being in that state, you know, where laughter and tears seem to merge.

Andre: I mean, it absolutely blasted me open. When I came out of Findhorn, I was hallucinating nonstop. I was seeing clouds as creatures. The people on the airplane all had animals' faces, I mean, I was on a trip, it was like being in a William Blake world suddenly. Things were exploding.

Andre: So immediately I went to Belgrade, cause, uh, I wanted to talk to Grotowski, and Grotowski and I got together at midnight in my hotel room, and we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream, and we talked from midnight until 11:00 the next morning.

Wally: God. What did he say?

Andre: Nothing. I talked. He didn't say a word.

Andre: And...and then I guess really, the last big experience of this kind took place that fall. It was out at Montauk on Long Island and there were only about nine of us involved, mostly men, and we borrowed Dick Avedon's property out at Montauk, and the country out there is like Heathcliff country, it's absolutely wild.

Andre: What we wanted to do was we wanted to take, you know, we wanted to take All Souls' Eve, Halloween, and use it as a point of departure for something, so, each one of us prepared some sort of event for the others, somehow in the spirit of All Souls' Eve.

Andre: But the biggest event was three of the people kept disappearing in the middle of the night, each night, and we knew they were preparing something big, but we didn't know what. And midnight on Halloween, under a dark moon, above these cliffs, we were all told to gather at the topmost cliff and that we would be taken somewhere. And we did. And we waited, and it was very, very cold.

Andre: And then the three of them...Helen, Bill, and Fred showed up wearing white, you know, something they'd made out of sheets, looked a little spooky, not funny. And they took us into the basement of this house that had burned down on the property, and in this ruined basement, they had set up a table with benches they'd made, and on this table they had laid out paper, pencils, wine, and glasses, and we were all asked to sit at the table and to make out our last will and testament, you know, to think about, and write down, whatever our last words were to the world, or to somebody we were very close to, and that's quite a task.

Andre: I must have been there for about an hour and a half or so, maybe two. And then one at a time, they would ask one of us to come with them and I was one of the last. And they came for me, and they put a blindfold on me, and they ran me through these fields, two people, and they'd found a kind of potting shed, you know, a kind of shed, on the grounds, a little tiny room that had once had tools in it. And they took me down the steps, into this basement and the room was just filled with harsh white light.

Andre: Then they told me to get undressed and give them all my valuables. Then they put me on a table, and they sponged me down, well, you know, I just started flashing on...on...on death camps and secret police. I don't know what happened to the other people, but I just started to cry uncontrollably. Uh, then...then they got me to my feet and they took photographs of me, naked. And then naked, again blindfolded, I was run through these forests and we came to a kind of tent made of sheets, with sheets on the ground, and there were all these naked bodies huddling together for warmth against the cold. Must have been left there for about an hour.

Andre: And then again, one by one, one at a time, we were led out. The blindfold was put on and I felt myself being lowered onto something like a stretcher. And the stretcher was carried a long way, very slowly, through these forests. And then, I felt myself being lowered into the ground. They had, in fact, dug six graves, eight feet deep. And then I felt these pieces of wood being put on me. And I cannot tell you, Wally, what I was going through.

Andre: And then, the stretcher was lowered into the grave, and then this wood was put on me, and then my valuables were put on me, in my hands, and they'd taken, you know, a kind of sheet or canvas, and they'd stretched about this much above my head, and then they shoveled dirt into the grave, so that I really had the feeling of being buried alive.

Andre: And after being in the grave for about half an hour, I mean, I didn't know how long I'd be in there, I was resurrected, lifted out of the grave, blindfold taken off, and run through these fields, and we came to a great circle of fire, with music and hot wine, and everyone danced until dawn. And then, at dawn, to the best of our ability, we filled up the graves, and went back to New York.

Andre: And that was really the last big event, I mean, that was the end, I mean, you know, I began to realize I just didn't want to do these things anymore, you know? I felt sort of becalmed, you know, like that chapter in Moby Dick where the wind goes out of the sails. And then last winter, without, uh, thinking about it very much, I went to see this agent I know, to tell him I was interested in directing plays again. Actually, he seemed a little surprised to see that Rip Van Winkle was still alive.

Wally (looking at his quail dinner): Mmm, God. I didn't know they were so small.

Andre: Well, you know, frankly, I'm sort of repelled by the whole story, if you really want to know.

Wally: What?

Andre: Ah, yeah. Who did I think I was, you know, I mean, that's the story of some kind of spoiled princess. You know. Who did I think I was, the Shah of Iran? You know, I really wonder if people such as myself are really not Albert Speer, Wally. You know? Hitler's architect, Albert Speer?

Wally: What?

Andre: No, I've been thinking a lot about him recently because, uh, I think I am Speer. And I think it's time that I was caught and tried the way he was.

Wally: What are you talking about?

Andre: Well, you know, he was a very cultivated man, an architect, an artist, you know, so he thought the ordinary rules of life didn't apply to him either. I mean, I really feel that everything I've done is horrific, just horrific.

Wally: My God. But why?

Andre: You see...you see, I've seen a lot of death in the last few years, Wally, and there's one thing that's for sure about death, you do it alone, you see, that seems quite certain, you see, that I've seen. That the people around your bed mean nothing. Your reviews mean nothing. Whatever it is, you do it alone, and so the question is, when I get on my deathbed, what kind of a person am I gonna be, and I'm just very dubious about the kind of person who would have lived his life those last few years the way I did.

Wally: Why should you feel that way?

Andre: You see, I've had a very rough time in the last few months, Wally. Three different people in my family were in the hospital at the same time. Then my mother died. Then Marina had something wrong with her back and we were terribly worried about her, you know, so...so, I mean, I'm feeling very raw right now, I mean, uh, I mean, I can't sleep. My nerves are shot. I mean, I'm affected by everything.

Andre: You know, last...last week I had this really nice director, uh, from Norway over for dinner, and he's someone I've known for years and years, and he's somebody that I think I'm quite fond of. And...I was sitting there just thinking that he was a pompous, defensive, conservative stuffed shirt who was only interested in the theater, you know, he was talking and talking, you know, his mother had been a famous Norwegian comedienne. I realized he had said "I remember my mother" at least four hundred times during the evening, and he was telling story after story about his mother, you know. I'd heard these stories twenty times in the past, he was drinking this whole bottle of bourbon very quietly. His laugh was so horrible, you know, I could hear his laugh, the pain in that laugh, the hollowness, you know, what being that woman's son had done to him, you know, so, at a certain point I just had to ask him to leave, nicely, you know, I told him I had to get up early the next morning, cause it was so horrible. It was just as if he had died in my living room, and then, you know, then I went into the bathroom and cried cause I felt I'd lost a friend.

Andre: And then after he'd gone, I turned the television on, and there was this guy who had just won the "something something", you know, some sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver bottle, and he, you know, you know, he couldn't stuff the check in the bottle, and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face, you know, he wasn't really listening to the guy who was interviewing him, but he was smiling, huh, malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I thought "What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat." Then I thought, "That guy is me."

Andre: And then last night actually, you know, it was our 20th wedding anniversary. And I took Chiquita to see this show about Billie Holiday, and I looked at these...show business people who know nothing about Billie Holiday, nothing, you see, they were really kind of, in a way, huh, intellectual creeps. And I suddenly had this feeling, I mean, you know, I was just sitting there crying through most of the show. And I suddenly had this feeling...I was just as creepy as they were...and that my whole life had been a sham...and I didn't have the guts to be Billie Holiday either. I mean, I really feel that I'm just...washed up...wiped out, I feel I've...just squandered my life.

Wally: Andre, now...how can you say something like that, I mean...

Andre: Well, you know...I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally...but since I've come back home I've just been finding the world we're living in more and more upsetting. I mean...last week I went down to the Public Theater one afternoon, you know, when I walked in, I said hello to everybody, cause I know them all, and they all know me, they're always very friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked? And then one person...one...a woman who runs the casting office, said, "Gee, you look horrible. Is something wrong?"

Andre: Now, she, you know, we started talking, of course, I started telling her things, and she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers who's eighty, whom she's very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which was solved, but the nurse was so sloppy, she didn't put the bed rails up and so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple, you know, so, you know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because of who she is, you know, cause this had happened to her very, very recently, she could see me with complete clarity.

Wally: Uh huh.

Andre: She didn't know anything about what I'd been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt, or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan, so they said, "Gee, you look wonderful." Now, they're living in an insane dreamworld. They're not looking. That seems very strange to me.

Wally: Right. Because they just didn't see anything, somehow, except, uh, the few little things that they wanted to see.

Andre: Yeah, you know, it's like what happened just before my mother died. You know, we'd gone to the hospital to see my mother and...I went in to see her...and I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a doctor, who was a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said, "Boy, don't we have a lot of reason to feel great? Isn't it wonderful how she's coming along?"

Andre: Now, all he saw was the arm. That's all he saw. Now, here's another person who's existing in a dream. Who, on top of that, is a kind of butcher, who's committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of that room, he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world where we become confused and frightened. Cause the moment before, we saw somebody who already looked dead, and now, here comes a specialist who tells us they're in wonderful shape. I mean, you know, they were literally driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here's an 82-year old man who's very emotional, and, you know, and if you go in one moment, and you see the person's dying, and you don't want them to die, and then a doctor comes out five minutes later and tells you they're in wonderful shape, I mean, you know, you can go crazy.

Wally: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Andre: I mean, the doctor didn't see my mother. The people at the Public Theater didn't see me, I mean, we're just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we're all in a trance. We're walking around like zombies, I don't...I don't think we're even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we...we're just going around all day like unconscious machines and meanwhile there's all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us.

Wally: That's right. It just builds up, uh...and then it just leaps out inappropriately. I mean, I remember when I was, uh, acting in this play based on "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov. And I was playing the part of the cat. But they had trouble, uh, making up my cat suit, so, I didn't get it delivered to me till the night of the first performance. Particularly the head, I mean, I'd never even had a chance to try it on.

Wally: And about four of my fellow actors actually came up to me, and they said these things which I just couldn't help thinking were attempts to destroy me, you know, one of them said, uh..."Oh, well, now that head will totally change your hearing in the performance, uh, you may hear everything completely differently, and it may be very upsetting. Now, I was once in a performance where I was wearing earmuffs and I couldn't hear anything anybody said." And then another one said, "Oh, you know, whenever I wear even a hat on stage...I tend to faint."

Wally: I mean, those remarks were just full of hostility. Because, I mean, you know, if I'd listened to those people, I would have gone out there on stage, and I wouldn't have been able to hear anything, and I would have fainted. But the hostility was completely inappropriate, because, in fact, those people liked me, I mean, that hostility was just some feeling that was...you know, left over from some previous experience. Because somehow, in our social existence today, we're only allowed to express our feelings, uh...weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly, everybody goes crazy.

Andre: Well, did you express your feelings about what those people said to you?

Wally: No. I mean, I didn't even know what I felt till I thought about it later. And I mean, at the most, you know, in a situation like that, uh...even if I had known what I felt, I might say something, if I'm really annoyed, like, uh, "Oh, yeah, well...that's just fascinating...and, uh, I probably will faint tonight, uh, just as you did."

Andre: I do just the same thing myself. We can't be direct, so we end up saying the weirdest things. I mean, I remember a night, it was a couple of weeks after my mother died, and I was in pretty bad shape, and I had dinner with three relatively close friends, two of whom had known my mother quite well, and all three of whom had known me for years. You know that we went through that entire evening without my being able to, for a moment, get anywhere near what, you know, not that I wanted to sit and have this dreary evening in which I was talking about all this pain that I was going through and everything, really, not at all, but...the fact that nobody could say..."Gee, what a shame about your mother." or "How are you feeling?"

Andre: It was just as if nothing had happened. They were all making these jokes and laughing, and I got quite crazy, as a matter of fact, you know, one of these people mentioned a certain man whom I don't like very much, and I started screeching about how he had just been found in the Bronx River, and his penis had dropped off from gonorrhea, and all kinds of insane things, and...later, when I got home, I realized I'd just been desperate to break through this ice.

Wally: Yup.

Andre: I mean, do you realize, Wally, if you brought that situation into a Tibetan home...that'd be just so far out. I mean, they wouldn't be able to understand it. I mean, that would be simply...simply so weird, Wally. If four Tibetans came together, and tragedy had just struck one of the ones, and they spent the whole evening going "Ha ha ha ha ha ho ho ho ho hee hee hee!" I mean, you know, Tibetans would have looked at that and would have thought that was the most unimaginable behavior. But for us, that's common behavior.

Wally: Mm hmm.

Andre: I mean, really, the...the Africans would have probably put their spears into all four of us cause it would have driven them crazy, they...they would have thought we were dangerous animals or something like that, I mean...

Wally: Right.

Andre: ...that's absolutely abnormal behavior.

Waiter: Is everything all right, gentlemen?

Wally: Great.

Andre: Yeah.

Andre: But those are typical evenings for us. I mean, we go to dinners and parties like that all the time. These evenings are really like sort of...sickly dreams because people are talking in symbols. Everyone is sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they're really thinking about. Then people will start making these jokes that are really some sort of secret code.

Wally: Right. Well, what often happens in some of these evenings is that these...really crazy little fantasies will just start being played with, you know, and everyone will be talking at once and sort of saying, uh, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if Frank Sinatra and Mrs. Nixon and blah blah blah were in such and such a situation?" You know, always with famous people, and always sort of...grotesque. Or people will be talking about some horrible thing like...like, uh...the death of that girl in the car with Ted Kennedy, and they'll just be roaring with laughter.

Wally: I mean, it's really amazing, it's just unbelievable, that's the only way anything is expressed, through these completely insane jokes. I mean, I think that's why I never understand what's going on at a party, I'm always completely confused. You know, uh, Debbie once said, after one of these New York evenings, she thought she'd traveled a greater distance just by journeying from her origins in the suburbs of Chicago to that New York evening, than her grandmother had traveled in, uh, making her way from the steppes of Russia to the suburbs of Chicago.

Andre: Oh, I think that's right. You know, it may...it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don't know what's going on, is that when we're there at a party, we're all too busy performing.

Wally: Uh huh.

Andre: That was one of the reasons that, uh, Grotowski gave up the theater. He just felt that people in their lives now were performing so well that performance in the theater was sort of superfluous. And, in a way, obscene.

Wally: Huh.

Andre: I mean, isn't it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? When you see a terrorist on television, he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists are all trying to live up to someone's fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist should look and behave. They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment and they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves...

Wally: Yeah.

Andre: ...they don't know what they should be doing with their lives. They're reading all these self-help books.

Wally: Oh, God, and I mean, those books are just so touching, because they show how desperately curious we all are to know how all the others of us are really getting on in life, even though, by performing these roles all the time, we're just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else. I mean, we live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other, I mean, we usually don't know the things we'd like to know, even about our supposedly closest friends, I mean...I mean, you know, suppose you're going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things, but we just don't dare to ask each other.

Andre: No. It would be like asking your friend to drop his role.

Wally: I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality, I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because, if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way, you can sort of turn on the automatic pilot. You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in, and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else.

Andre: That's right, our...our minds are just focused on these goals and plans, which in themselves are not reality.

Wally: No. Goals and plans are not...I mean, they're...they're fantasy. They're part of a dream life. I mean, you know, it always just does seem so ridiculous, somehow, that everybody has to have his little...his little goal in life, I mean, it's so absurd, in a way, when you consider that it doesn't matter which one it is.

Andre: Right. And because people's concentration is on their goals, in their life they just live each moment by habit. Really, like the Norwegian telling the same stories over and over again.

Wally: Mm hmm.

Andre: Life becomes habitual. And it is today. I mean, very few things happen now, like, that moment when Marlon Brando sent the Indian woman to accept the Oscar, and everything went haywire. Things just very rarely go haywire now. And if you're just operating by habit, then you're not really living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb "to be" is the same as "to grow" or "to make grow".

Wally: Huh.

Andre: Do you know about ROC?

Wally: Hmm?

Andre: Oh, well. ROC was a wonderful man. He was one of the founders of Findhorn. And, he was one of Scotland's...well, he was Scotland's greatest mathematician and he was one of the century's great mathematicians, and he prided himself on the fact that he had no fantasy life, no dream life - nothing to stand be...no imaginary life...nothing to stand between him and the direct perception of mathematics. And one day when he was in his mid-fifties, he was walking in the gardens of Edinburgh and he saw a faun. The faun was very surprised because fauns have always been able to see people, but you know, very few people ever see them and...you know, uh...those little imaginary creatures. Not a deer.

Wally: Oh.

Andre: You call them fauns, don't you?

Wally: I thought a fawn was a baby deer.

Andre: Yeah, well, there's a deer that's called a fawn, but these are like those little imag...

Wally: Oh! The kind that Debussy, yeah...

Andre: Yes. Right. So, he got to know the faun, and he got to know other fauns, and a series of conversations began, and more and more fauns would come out every afternoon to meet him, and he'd have talks with the fauns, and, then one day, after a while, when, you know, they'd really gotten to know him, they asked him if he would like to meet Pan, because Pan would like to meet him. And, of course, Pan was afraid of terrifying him because he knew of the Christian misconception which portrayed Pan as an evil creature, which he's not. But ROC said he would love to meet Pan, and so they met, and Pan indirectly sent him on his way on a journey in which he met the other people who began Findhorn.

Andre: But ROC used to practice certain exercises, like, uh, for instance, if he were right-handed, all today he would do everything with his left hand. All day, eating, writing, everything...opening doors...in order to break the habits of living. Because the great danger, he felt, for him, was to fall into a trance, out of habit. He had a whole series of very simple exercises that he had invented just to keep seeing, feeling, remembering. Because you have to learn now. It didn't used to be necessary, but today you have to learn something, like, uh...are you really hungry or are you just stuffing your face be...because that's what you do, out of habit? I mean, you can afford to do it, so you do it, whether you're hungry or not.

Andre: You know, if you go to the Buddhist Meditation Center, they make you taste each bite of your food...so it takes two hours, it's horrible, to eat your lunch. But you're conscious of the taste of your food. If you're just eating out of habit, then you don't taste the food, and you're not conscious of the reality of what's happening to you. You enter the dream world again.

Wally: Now, do you think maybe we live in this dream world because we do so many things every day that affect us in ways that somehow we're just not aware of? I mean, you know, I was thinking, um, last Christmas, Debbie and I were given an electric blanket. I can tell you that it is just such a marvelous advance over our old way of life, and it is just great. But, uh, it is quite different from not having an electric blanket and I sometimes sort of wonder, well, what is it doing to me? I mean, I sort of feel, uh, I'm not sleeping quite in the same way.

Andre: No, you wouldn't be.

Wally: I mean, uh, and my dreams are sort of different and...and I feel a little bit different when I get up in the morning.

Andre: I wouldn't put an electric blanket on for anything. First, I'd be worried I might get electrocuted. No, I don't trust technology. But I mean, the main thing, Wally, is that, I think that that kind of comfort just separates you from reality in a very direct way.

Wally: You mean...

Andre: I mean, if you don't have that electric blanket, and your apartment is cold, and you need to put on another blanket, or go into the closet and pile up coats on top of the blankets you have, well, then you know it's cold. And that sets up a link of things. You have compassion for the per...well, is the person next to you cold? Are there other people in the world who are cold? What a cold night. I like the cold, my God, I never realized. I don't want a blanket, it's fun being cold, I can snuggle up against you even more because it's cold. All sorts of things occur to you. Turn on that electric blanket, and it's like taking a tranquilizer or it's like being lobotomized by watching television. I think you enter the dream world again.

Andre: I mean, what does it do to us, Wally, living in an environment where something as massive as the seasons, or winter, or cold don't in any way affect us? I mean, we're animals, after all. I mean, what does that mean? I think that means that instead of living under the sun and the moon and the sky and the stars, we're living in a fantasy world of our own making.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean...I would never give up my electric blanket, Andre, I mean, because, uh, New York is cold in the winter, I mean, our apartment is cold. It's a difficult environment, I mean, our lives are tough enough as it is, I'm not looking for ways to get rid of the few things that provide relief and comfort, I mean, on the contrary, I'm looking for more comfort because, uh, the world is very abrasive, I mean, uh...I'm trying to protect myself because, really, there are these abrasive beatings to be avoided everywhere you look.

Andre: Yeah, but, Wally, don't...don't you see that comfort can be dangerous? I mean, you like to be comfortable, and I like to be comfortable, too, but comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquillity. I mean, my mother knew a woman, Lady Hatfield, who was one of the richest women in the world, and she died of starvation because all she would eat was chicken. I mean, she just liked chicken, Wally, and that was all she would eat, and actually, her body was starving, but she didn't know it cause she was quite happy eating her chicken, and so, she finally died.

Andre: See, I honestly believe that we're all like Lady Hatfield now, we're having a lovely, comfortable time with our electric blankets and our chicken, and meanwhile we're starving because we're so cut off from contact with reality that we're not getting any real sustenance...cause we don't see the world. We don't see ourselves. We don't see how our actions affect other people.

Andre: Have you read Martin Buber's book on Hasidism?

Wally: No.

Andre: Oh, well, here's a view of life. He talks about the belief of the Hasidic Jews, that there are spirits chained in everything, there are spirits chained in you, there are spirits chained in me. Well, there are spirits chained in this table. And that prayer is the action of liberating these enchained embryo-like spirits, and that every action of ours in life, whether it's, uh, doing business, or making love, or having dinner together, or whatever, that every action of ours should be a prayer, a sacrament in the world. Now, do you think we're living like that? Why do you think we're not living like that?

Andre: I think it's because if we allowed ourselves to see what we do every day, we might just find it too nauseating. I mean, the way we treat other people. I mean, you know, every day, several times a day, I walk into my apartment building, the doorman calls me "Mr. Gregory", and I call him "Jimmy". Alright, what's the difference between that and the Southern plantation owner who's got slaves? You see, I think that an act of murder is committed in that moment when I walk into that building. You know, because here's a dignified, intelligent man, a man of my own age, and when I call him "Jimmy", then he becomes a child, and I'm an adult because I can buy my way into the building.

Wally: Right. That's right. I mean, my God...when...huh, when I was a Latin teacher, I mean, people used to treat me...I mean, uh, you know, if I would go to a party of, uh, professional or literary people, I mean, I was just treated, uh...in the nicest sense of the word, uh, like a dog. I mean, in other words, there was no question of my being able to participate on an equal basis in a conversation with people. I mean, you know, I'd occasionally have conversations with people but then, uh, when they asked what I did which would always happen after about five minutes, uh, you know, uh, their faces, I mean, even if they were enjoying the conversation, or they...they were flirting with me, or whatever it was, you know, their faces would just have that expression just like the portcullis crashing down, you know, those medieval gates. They would just walk away. I mean, I literally lived like a dog. And, I mean, uh, when Debbie was working as a secretary, you know, if she would tell people what she did, they would just go insane, I mean, it would be just as if she'd said, uh, "Oh, well, uh...I've been serving a life sentence recently, uh, for child murdering."

Wally: I mean, my God, you know, when you talk about our attitudes toward other people...I mean, I think of myself as just a very decent, good person, you know, just because I think I'm reasonably friendly, to most of the people I happen to meet every day. I mean, I really think of myself quite smugly, I just think I'm a perfectly nice guy, uh, you know, so long as I think of the world as consisting of, uh, you know, just the small circle of the people that I know as friends or...or the few people that we know in this little world of our little hobbies, the theater or whatever it is, and...and I'm really quite self-satisfied, I'm just quite happy with myself, I just have no complaint about myself.

Wally: Huh, I mean, you know, let's face it, I mean, there's a whole enormous world out there that I just don't ever think about. I...I certainly don't take responsibility for how I've lived in that world. I mean, you know, if I were actually to sort of, uh, confront the fact that I'm sort of sharing this stage with...with...with this starving person in Africa somewhere, well, I wouldn't feel so great about myself. So, naturally, I just...I just blot all those people right out of my perception. So, of course...of course...I'm ignoring, uh, a whole section of the real world. But, frankly, you know, when I write a play, in a way, one of the things I guess I think I'm trying to do is I'm trying to bring myself up against some little bits of reality and I'm trying to share that, uh, with an audience.

Wally: I mean...I mean, of course we all know, uh, the theater is, uh, in terrible shape today, I mean, uh, I mean, at least a few years ago people who really cared about the theater used to say, "The theater is dead." And now everybody's redefined the theater in such a trivial way that, I mean...I mean, God, I know people who are involved with the theater who go to see things now that...I mean, a few years ago these same people would have just been embarrassed to have even seen some of these plays, I mean, they would have just shrunk, you know, just in horror at...at the superficiality of these things. But now they say, "Oh, that was pretty good." It's just incredible. And I really just find that attitude unbearable because I really do think the theater can do something very important, I mean, I do think the theater can help bring people in contact with reality. Now...now, you may not feel that at all, I mean, you may just find that totally absurd.

Andre: Yeah, but, Wally, don't you see the dilemma? You're not taking into account the period we're living in. I mean, of course that's what the theater should do. I mean, I've always felt that. You know, when I was a young director, and I directed the Bacchae at Yale, my impulse, when Pentheus has been killed by his mother and the Furies, and they pull the tree back, and they tie him to the tree, and fling him into the air, and he flies through space and he's killed, and they rip him to shreds and, I guess, cut off his head, my impulse was that the thing to do was to get a head from the New Haven morgue and pass it around the audience. Now, I wanted Agave to bring on a real head and that this head should be passed around the audience so that somehow people realized that this stuff was real, see, that it was real stuff. Now, the actress playing Agave absolutely refused to do it.

Andre: You know, Gordon Craig used to talk about why is there gold or silver in the churches, or something, the great cathedrals, when actors could be wearing gold and silver? And I mean, people who saw Eleonora Duse in the last couple of years of her life, Wally, people said that is was like seeing light on stage, or mist, or the essence of something, I mean...then when you think about Bertolt Brecht, he somehow created a theater in which people could observe, that was vastly entertaining and exciting, but in which the excitement didn't overwhelm you. He somehow allowed you the distance between the play and yourself that, in fact, two human beings need in order to live together.

Andre: You know, the question is whether the theater now can do for an audience what Brecht tried to do, or what Craig or Duse tried to do. Can it do it now? Cause, you see, I think that people today are so deeply asleep that unless, you know, you're putting on those sort of superficial plays that just help your audience to sleep more comfortably, it's very hard to know what to do in the theater. Because, you see, I think that if you put on serious, contemporary plays, by writers like yourself, you may only be helping to deaden the audience in a different way.

Wally: What do you mean?

Andre: Well, I mean, Wally...how does it affect an audience to put on one of these plays in which you show that people are totally isolated now, and they can't reach each other, and their lives are desperate? Or how does it affect them to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events, and terror, and violence? Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? See, I don't think so, cause I think it's very likely that the picture of the world that you're showing them in a play like that is exactly the picture of the world they have already.

Andre: I mean, you know, they know their own lives and relationships are difficult and painful. And if they watch the evening news on television, well, there what they see is a terrifying, chaotic universe, full of rapes, and murders, and hands cut off by subway cars, and children pushing their parents out of windows. So the play tells them that their impression of the world is correct and that there's absolutely no way out. There's nothing they can do. And they end up feeling passive and impotent.

Andre: I mean, look...look at something like that christening that my group arranged for me in the forest in Poland. Well, there was an example of something that really had all the elements of theater, it was worked on carefully, it was thought about carefully. It was done with exquisite taste and magic. And they, in fact, created something, which, in this case, was, in a way, just for an audience of one, just for me. But they created something that had ritual, love, surprise, denouement, beginning, a middle, and end, and was an incredibly beautiful piece of theater. And the impact that it had on its audience, on me, was somehow a totally positive one. It didn't deaden me, it brought me to life.

Wally: Yeah, but I mean, are you saying that it's impossible, I mean, uh, I mean...I mean, uh, isn't it a little upsetting to come to the conclusion that there's, uh, no way to wake people up anymore except to involve them in some kind of a strange, uh, christening in...in Poland, or some kind of a strange experience on top of Mount Everest, I mean, uh, because, uh, you know that the awful thing is, uh, if you really say that it's...it's necessary to, uh, take everybody to, uh, Everest, it's...it's really tough, because everybody can't be taken to Everest. I mean, there must have been periods in history when it would have been possible to, uh...save the patient through less drastic measures, I mean, there must have been periods when in order to give people a strong or meaningful experience you wouldn't actually have to take them to Everest.

Andre: But you do now. In some way or other, you do now.

Wally: I mean, you know, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written, I don't know, uh, "Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen, and I'm sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience. I'm sure they did, I mean, all right, now you're saying that people today wouldn't get it. Maybe that's true, but, I mean, isn't there any kind of writing or any kind of a play, that, I mean, isn't it still legitimate for writers to try to portray reality so that people can see it?

Wally: I mean, really, tell me, why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality, I mean...I mean, is Mount Everest more real than New York, I mean, isn't New York real? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out, I mean...I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in a cigar store as there is on Mount Everest, I mean, what do you think, you see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way, I mean, because reality is...is uniform, in a way, so that if your...if your perceptions are, I mean, if your own mechanism is...is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd because, I mean, it just, I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on 7th Avenue, but I mean...

Andre: Well, I agree with you, Wally. But the problem is that people can't see the cigar store now. I mean, things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now, people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something.

Wally: Well, why...why do you think that is? I mean, why is that, I mean, is it just because people are...are lazy today, or they're bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who've just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck, and now they're just thinking, "Well, what can I do?"

Andre: Okay. Yes. We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks. And it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep? And somebody who's asleep will not say "no"?

Andre: See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, uh, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he's a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand, and he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn't read newspapers, and he doesn't read magazines. He's completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we're living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot.

Andre: And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods, he's 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack cause he never knows where he's gonna be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, "Where are you from?" and I said, "New York." He said, "Ah, New York. Yes, that's a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?" And I said, "Oh, yes." And he said, "Why do you think they don't leave?" I gave him different banal theories. He said, "Oh, I don't think it's that way at all."

Andre: He said, "I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built. They've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners, and as a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they've made or to even see it as a prison." And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree and he said, "This is a pine tree." He put it in my hand and he said, "Escape before it's too late."

Andre: See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. That we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here. Of course, the problem is where to go, cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that, from now on there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there'll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

Andre: Now, of course, Björnstrand feels that there's really almost no hope, and that we're probably going back to a very savage, lawless, terrifying period. Findhorn people see it a little differently. They're feeling that there'll be these pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world, and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet, and that as we, or the world, grow colder, we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets, refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself, and come back. And it's their feeling that there have to be centers now where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world.

Andre: And when I was talking to, uh, Gustav Björnstrand, he was saying that, actually, these centers are growing up everywhere now. And that what they're trying to do, which is what Findhorn was trying to do, and, in a way, what I was trying to do. I mean, these things can't be given names, but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery. And Björnstrand talks about the concept of "reserves", islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function in order to maintain the species through a dark age. In other words, we're talking about an underground, which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages among the mystical orders of the church. And the purpose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture, how to keep things living.

Andre: You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a...a language of the heart. A language, as in the Polish forest, where language wasn't needed. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that's the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that, in order to create that language, you're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass, into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things, and suddenly you understand everything.

Waiter: Are you ready for some dessert?

Andre: Uh, I think I'll just have an espresso. Thank you.

Waiter: Very good.

Wally: I'll...I'll also have one. Thank you. And...and, uh, could I also have, uh, an amaretto?

Waiter: Certainly, sir.

Wally: Thank you.

Andre: You see, Wally, there's this incredible building that they built at Findhorn, and the man who designed it had never designed anything in his life. He wrote children's books. And some people wanted it to be a sort of hall of meditation and others wanted it to be a kind of lecture hall. But the psychic part of the community wanted it to serve another function as well, because they wanted it to be a kind of spaceship which at night could rise up and let the UFOs know that this was a safe place to land and that they would find friends there.

Andre: So, the problem was, cause it needed a massive kind of roof, was how to have a roof that would stay on the building, but at the same time, be able to fly up at night and meet the flying saucers. So, the architect meditated and meditated, and he finally came up with the very simple solution of not actually joining the roof to the building, which means that it should fall off, because they have great gales up in northern Scotland.

Andre: So, to keep it from falling off, he got beach stones from the beach, or we did, cause I...I worked on this building, all up and down the roof, just like that, and the idea was that the energy that would flow from stone to stone would be so strong, you see, that it would keep the roof down under any conditions, but, at the same time, if the roof needed to go up, it would be light enough to go up. Well, it works, you see. Now, architects don't know why it works, and it shouldn't work, cause it should fall off. But it works. It does work. The gales blow, and the roof should fall off, but it doesn't fall off.

Wally: Yep. Well, uh...do...do you want to know my actual response to all this, I mean, do you want to hear my actual response?

Andre: Yes.

Wally: See, my actual response, I mean...I mean...I mean, I'm just trying to...to survive, you know, I mean, I'm just trying to, uh, earn a living. I'm just trying to pay my rent and my bills, I mean, uh...uh, I live my life. I enjoy staying home with Debbie. I'm reading Charlton Heston's autobiography. And that's that.

Wally: I mean, you know, I mean, occasionally, maybe, Debbie and I will step outside, we'll go to a party or something. uh...and if I can occasionally get my little talent together and write a little play, well, then that's just...that's just wonderful. And, I mean, I enjoy reading about other little plays people have written, and reading the reviews of those plays and what people said about them, and what people said about what people said, and...and I mean, I have...I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook. I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing the errands, and crossing them off the list.

Wally: And, I mean, I just...I just don't know how anybody could enjoy anything more than I enjoy, uh, reading Charlton Heston's autobiography or, uh, you know, uh, getting up in the morning and having the cup of cold coffee that's been waiting for me all night still there for me to drink in the morning, and no cockroach or fly has...has died in it overnight, I mean, I'm just so thrilled when I get up and I see that coffee there, just the way I wanted it, I mean, I just can't imagine how anybody could enjoy something else any more than that, I mean...I mean, obviously, if the cockroach...if there is a dead cockroach in it, well, then I just have a feeling of disappointment, and I'm sad. But I mean, I...I just...I just don't think I feel the need for anything more than all this.  Whereas...you know, you seem to be saying that, uh...it's...it's inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today, and, you know, everyone is totally destroyed, and...and we all need to live in these outposts, but I mean, you know, I just can't believe, even for you, I mean, don't you find...isn't it pleasant just to get up in the morning, and there's Chiquita, there are the children, uh, and The Times is delivered, you can read it, I mean, maybe you'll direct a play, maybe you won't direct a play, but forget about the play that you may or may not direct. Why is it necessary to...why not lean back and just enjoy these details, I mean, and there'd be a delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffeecake. I mean, why is it necessary to have more than this or to even think about having more than this, I mean, I don't really know what you're talking about. I mean...I mean, I know what you're talking about, but I don't really know what you're talking about.

Wally: And I mean, you know, even if I were to totally agree with you, you know and...and even if I were to accept the idea that there's just no way for anybody to have personal happiness now, well, you know, I still couldn't accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to just totally, you know, reject Western civilization and fall back into some kind of belief in some kind of weird "something", I mean, I don't even know how to begin talking about this, but, you know...in the Middle Ages, before the arrival of...of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything. Anything could be true, the statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that, then, in the development of science in the Western world, certain things did come slowly to be known and understood. I mean, you know, uh...obviously, all ideas in science are constantly being revised, I mean, that's the whole point, but we do at least know that the universe has some shape and order, and that, uh, you know, trees do not turn into people or goddesses, and there are very good reasons why they don't, and you can't just believe absolutely anything.

Wally: Whereas, the things that you're talking about, I mean...I mean, you found the handprint in...in the book, and there were...there were three Andres and one Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and to me, that is a coincidence. But, and...and then, you know, the people who put that book together...well, they had their own reasons for putting it together. But to you it was significant, as if that book had been written forty years ago, so that you would see it, as if it was planned for you, in a way.

Wally: I mean, really, I mean...I mean, all right, let's say, if I get a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant, I mean, of course, even I have a tendency, I mean, you know, I mean, of course, I would hardly throw it out, I mean, I...I read it...I read it, and...and, uh, I just instinctively sort of, you know, if it says something like, uh, "A conversation with a dark-haired man will be very important for you", well, I just instinctively think, you know, "Who do I know who has dark hair? Did we have a conversation? What did we talk about?" In other words, uh, there's something in me that makes me read it, and...and I instinctively interpret it as if it were an omen of the future, but...in my conscious opinion, which is so fundamental to my whole view of life, I mean, I would just have to change totally to not have this opinion...in my conscious opinion, this is simply something that was written in the cookie factory several years ago, and in no way refers to me, I mean, you know, the...the...the fact that I got it...I mean, the man who wrote it did not know anything about me, I mean, he could not have known anything about me, there's no way that this cookie could actually have to do with me, and the fact that I've gotten it is just basically a joke.

Wally: And, I mean, if I were gonna go on a trip on an airplane, and I got a fortune cookie that said "Don't go", I mean, of course, I admit I might feel a bit nervous for about one second. But, in fact, I would go because, I mean, that trip is gonna be successful, or unsuccessful, based on the state of the airplane, and the state of the pilot, and...and the cookie is in no position to know about that. And, I mean, you know, it's the same with any kind of, uh, prophecy, or a sign, or an omen, because, if you believe in omens, then that means that...that the universe, I mean, I don't even know how to begin to describe this, that means that the future is somehow sending messages backwards to the present. Which...which means that the future must exist in some sense already, in order to be able to send these messages. And it also means that things in the universe are...are there for a purpose, to give us messages, whereas I think that things in the universe are...are just there, I mean, they don't mean anything, I mean, you know, if the turtle's egg falls out of the tree and splashes on the paving stones, it's just because that turtle was clumsy, by accident. And...and...and...and to decide whether to send my ships off to war on the basis of that seems a big mistake to me.

Andre: Well, what information would you send your ships to war on? Because, if it's all meaningless, what's the difference whether you accept the fortune cookie or the statistics of the Ford Foundation? It doesn't seem to matter.

Wally: Well, the meaningless fact of the fortune cookie or the turtle's egg can't possibly have any relevance to the subject you're analyzing. Whereas a group of meaningless facts that are collected and interpreted in a scientific way may quite possibly be relevant. Because the wonderful thing about scientific theories about things is that they're based on experiments that can be repeated.

Andre: Hmm. Well, it's true, Wally. I mean, you know, following omens and so on is probably just a way of letting ourselves off the hook so that we don't have to take individual responsibility for our own actions. But I mean, giving yourself over to the unconscious can leave you vulnerable to all sorts of very frightening manipulation. And in all the work that I was involved in, there was always that danger. And there was always that question of tampering with people's lives. Because, if I lead one of these workshops, then I do become partly a doctor, and partly a therapist, and partly a priest, and...and I'm not a doctor, or a therapist, or a priest. And already some of these new monasteries or communities or whatever we've been talking about, are becoming institutionalized. And I guess, even in a way, at times, sort of fascistic. You know, there's a sort of self-satisfied, elitist paranoia that grows up, a feeling of "them" and "us", that is very unsettling.

Andre: But I mean, uh, the thing is, Wally, I think it's the exaggerated worship of science that has led us into this situation. I mean, science has been held up to us as a magical force that would somehow solve everything. Well, quite the contrary, it's done quite the contrary, it's destroyed everything. So, that is what has really led, I think, to this very strong, deep reaction against science that we're seeing now. Just as the Nazi demons that were released in the thirties in Germany were probably a reaction against a certain oppressive kind of knowledge and culture and rational thinking. So, I agree that we're talking about something potentially very dangerous, but modern science has not been particularly less dangerous.

Wally: Right. Well, I agree with you. I completely agree. No, you know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about the work you've described and...and I don't even know if I can express it. But somehow it seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it, and you ask, "What was it really about?" The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

Wally: And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don't think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you're not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it's our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and...and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but...but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn't be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I'm saying?

Andre: Uh huh. Uh huh.

Wally: I mean, in other words, if I'm sitting at home and I have nothing to do, well, I naturally reach for a book. I mean, what would be so great about just sitting there and, uh, doing nothing? It just seems absurd.

Andre: And if Debbie is there?

Wally: Well, that's just the same thing I mean...I mean, is there really such a thing as, uh, two people doing nothing but just being together, I mean, would they simply then be, uh, "relating", to use the word we're always using, I mean, what would that mean, I mean...I mean, either we're gonna have a conversation or we're going to, uh, carry out the garbage, or we're going to do something, separately or together, I mean, do you...do you see what I'm saying, I mean, what does it mean to just, uh, simply, uh, sit there?

Andre: That makes you nervous.

Wally: Well...well, why shouldn't it make me nervous? It just seems ridiculous to me.

Andre: That's interesting, Wally. You know...you know, when I went to Ladakh in western Tibet and stayed on a farm for a month, well, there, you know, when people come over in the evening for tea, nobody says anything, unless there's something to say, but there almost never is, so they just sit there and drink their tea, and it doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, you see, the trouble, Wally, with always being active and doing things is that I think it's quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely dead inside. I mean, you're doing all these things, but are you doing them because you really feel an impulse to do them, or are you doing them mechanically, as we were saying before? Because I really do believe that if you're just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.

Andre: I mean, you know, when you're young, you...you go out on dates all the time, you go dancing or something, you're floating free, and then one day, suddenly, you find yourself in a relationship. And suddenly everything freezes. And this can be true in your work as well. And I mean, of course, if you're really alive inside, then, of course, there's no problem. I mean, if you're living with somebody in one little room and there's a life going on between you and the person you're living with, well, then, a whole adventure can be going on right in that room.

Andre: But there's always the danger that things can go dead. Then I really do think you have to kind of become a hobo or something, you know, like Kerouac, and go out on the road. I really believe that. You know, it's not that wonderful to spend your life on the road. My own overwhelming preference is to stay in that room if you can. But you know, if you live with somebody for a long time, people are constantly saying, "Well, of course it's not as great as it used to be, but that's only natural, the first blush of a romance goes, and that's the way it has to be." Now, I totally disagree with that. But I do think that you have to constantly ask yourself the question, with total frankness. Is your marriage still a marriage? Is the sacramental element there? Just as you have to ask about the sacramental element in your work, is it still there?

Andre: I mean, it's a very frightening thing, Wally, to have to suddenly realize, that, my God, I thought I was living my life, but in fact I haven't been a human being. I've been a performer. I haven't been living, I've been acting. I've...I've acted the role of the father, I've acted the role of the husband, I've acted the role of the friend, I've acted the role of the writer, or director, or what have you. I've lived in the same room with this person, but I haven't really seen them. I haven't really heard them. I haven't really been with them.

Wally: Yeah, I know some people are just sometimes, uh, existing just side by side, I mean, uh, the other person's, uh, face could just turn into a great wolf's face and, uh, it just wouldn't be noticed.

Andre: And it wouldn't be noticed, no, it wouldn't be noticed. I mean, when I was in Israel a little while ago, I mean, I have this picture of Chiquita that was taken when she...I always carry it with me, it was taken when she was about 26 or something, and it's in summer, and she's stretched out on a terrace in this sort of old-fashioned long skirt that's kind of pulled up, and she's slim and sensual and beautiful, and I've always looked at that picture and just thought about just how sexy she looks. And then, last year in Israel, I looked at the picture, and I realized that that face in the picture was the saddest face in the world. That girl at that time was just lost. So sad and so alone. You know, I've been carrying this picture for years and not ever really seeing what it is, you know, I just never really looked at the picture. And then, at a certain point , I realized I'd just gone for a good eighteen years unable to feel except in the most extreme situations.

Andre: I mean, to some extent, I still had the ability to live in my work, that was why I was such a work junkie, that was why I felt that every play that I did was a matter of my life or my death. But in my real life, I was dead. I was a robot. I mean, I didn't even allow myself to get angry or annoyed. I mean, you know, today, Chiquita, Nicolas, Marina, all day long, as people do, they do things that annoy me and they say things that annoy me, and today, I get annoyed and they say, "Why are you annoyed?" and I say, "Because you're annoying." you know.

Andre: And when I allowed myself to consider the possibility of not spending the rest of my life with Chiquita, I realized that what I wanted most in life was to always be with her. But at that time, I hadn't learned what it would be like to let yourself react to another human being. And if you can't react to another person, then there's no possibility of action or interaction. And if there isn't, I don't really know what the word "love" means...except duty, obligation, sentimentality, fear.

Andre: I mean...I don't know about you, Wally, but I...I just had to put myself into a kind of training program to learn how to be a human being. I mean, how did I feel about anything? I didn't know. What kind of things did I like? What kind of people did I really want to be with, you know? And the only way that I could think of to find out was to just cut out all the noise and stop performing all the time and just listen to what was inside me. See, I think a time comes when you need to do that. Now, maybe in order to do it, you have to go to the Sahara, and maybe you can do it at home. But you need to cut out the noise.

Wally: Yeah, of course, personally, I...I just, uh, I usually don't, uh...like those quiet moments, you know, I really don't, I mean, uh...I don't know if it's that, uh, Freudian thing or what, but, uh, you know, the fear of unconscious impulses or my own aggression or whatever, but, uh...if things get too quiet, and I find myself just, uh...sitting there, you know, as we were saying before, I mean, whether I'm by myself, or...or I'm...I'm...I'm with someone else. I just, uh, I just have this...this feeling of, uh...my God...I'm going to be revealed.

Wally: In other words, I'm adequate to do any sort of a task, um, but I'm not adequate, uh, just to...to...to be a human being, I mean, in other words, I'm not, uh, if I'm...I'm just, uh, trapped there and I'm not allowed to do things but all I can do is just, um, uh, be there, uh, well, I'll just fail.

Wally: I mean, in other words, uh, I can, uh, pass any other sort of a test, and I, you know, I can even get an "A" if I put in, uh, the required effort but I just don't, uh, I just don't have...have a clue how to pass this test, I mean...I mean, of course, I realize this isn't a test, but, um, I see it as a test, and I...I feel I'm going to fail it, I mean, it's...it's very scary, I just feel, uh...just totally at sea, I mean...

Andre: Well, you know, I could imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible, monumental, creative task, and we're not necessarily up to it. I mean, if you felt like walking out on the person you live with, you'd walk out. Then if you felt like it, you'd come back, but meanwhile, the other person would have reacted to your walking out. It would be a life of such feeling.

Andre: I mean, what was amazing in the workshops I led was how quickly people seemed to fall into enthusiasm, celebration, joy, wonder, abandon, wildness, tenderness. Could we stand to live like that?

Wally: Yeah, I think it's that moment of, uh, contact with another person, I mean, that's what scares us, I mean, that moment of being face-to-face with another person. I mean, now...you wouldn't think it would be so frightening. It's strange that we find it so frightening.

Andre: Well, it isn't that strange. I mean, first of all, there are some pretty good reasons for being frightened. I mean, you know, the human being is a complex and dangerous creature. I mean, really, if you start living each moment, Christ, that's quite a challenge, I mean, if you really reach out, and you're really in touch with the other person, well, that really is something to strive for, I think, I really do.

Wally: Yeah, it's just so pathetic if one doesn't do that.

Andre: Of course there's a problem, because the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious, and unreachable, that person becomes. I mean, you know, you have to reach out, you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something. I don't know, because we're ghosts. We're phantoms. Who are we? And that's to face...to confront the fact that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death.

Wally: You mean, because somehow when you are alone, you're alone with death, I mean, nothing's obstructing your view of it, or something like that.

Andre: Right.

Wally: You know, if I understood it correctly, I think, uh, Heidegger said that, uh, if you were to experience your own being to the full, you'd be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as a part of your experience.

Andre: You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting which is so incredible. Then, in the next moment, you start to think about things, work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow. I don't know if this is true of you, but I think it must be quite common. The world comes in quite fast. Now, that again may be because we're afraid to stay in that place of forgetting, because that, again, is close to death. Like people who are afraid to go to sleep. In other words, you interrelate, and you don't know what the next moment will bring, and to not know what the next moment will bring brings you closer to a perception of death.

Andre: You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. I mean, you know, in the theater, if you get good reviews, uh, you feel for a moment that you've got your hands on something, you know what I mean, I mean, it's a good feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you don't know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an affair, and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm ground, you know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are different questions. Does she enjoy the ears being nibbled? How intensely can you talk about Schopenhauer at some elegant French restaurant? Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth.

Andre: Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years. That's completely unpredictable. Then, you've cut off all your ties to the land and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas. I mean, you know, people hold on to these images of father, mother, husband, wife, again, for the same reason. Cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there's no wife there. What does that mean? A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone. Where's that son?

Wally (narration): All the other customers seemed to have left hours ago. We got the bill, and Andre paid for our dinner.

Wally (narration): I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn't a street, there wasn't a building, that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work, and I told her everything about my dinner with Andre.