Love Thy Enemy

Recently, I found myself in a very uncomfortable situation, about which I will not go into detail.  When I reached out for help, the advice that I was given was that I should "love my enemy."  I was very hurt by this suggestion, and I wondered about it, and my response to it, for a while.  After some weeks of meditation on this phrase, here is what I have realized:

First, I needed to identify my “enemy.”  Perhaps the “enemy” is not the person who wronged me at all.  There are painful memories of those wrongs, yes, but is that person still holding me back, or is the experience?  Are the memories actually the enemy?  So what does “loving” my enemy really mean in that case?  If I can make those painful memories useful, and learn from them, and gain a new perspective on life, is that “loving” them?  I think so.  When I use the painful memories of past wrongs as learning tools, I am “loving my enemy” because these memories are the real enemy holding me back. 

For instance, on bad days I can I feel lost or caught in them.  Sometimes I suffer bitterness and anger when they come up for me, while others I feel regret, sadness and loss.  So I accept the painful past.  I take the memories on.  I say, “I have been wronged, but who hasn’t?  It is not my fault that I was wronged, but it is my responsibility now to move on from it.”  This is “loving the enemy:” loving the memories of a painful past experience.   And now when they resurface, I feel instead grateful that things are different, or proud that I overcame them, or blessed to have loved ones who support me no matter what.  The painful experience is actually something I have made useful, because it has given me a brand new perspective on life and how full and joyful it can be in comparison.

“Love thy enemy” is a cornerstone of forgiveness.  Forgiveness is accepting what has happened to you and allowing yourself to heal.  This is the important next step of my thought process:  Forgiveness does not make what happened to you “OK.”  Also, it does not mean that the person who hurt you is welcome back into your life.  You can bless them on their way, but it is also important to stand your ground.  Standing your ground means making your boundaries clear and respecting yourself.  Neither forgiveness nor “loving your enemy” means that you have to be a doormat for them to cause you even further discomfort, let alone more pain.  I needed help that night standing my ground, not help with “loving my enemy.”  I continue to explore and work on both.

Everyone has a story, and everyone has been hurt in a major way by someone, in regards to their own experience.  The people who hurt us are and should be inconsequential.  Let them go.  As I said, bless them on their way and stand your ground.  This is the best “loving” that you can give.  Love the memories that have become enemies by using them and growing.  Love yourself, also.  Be easy.

Thank you for reading.

Love, 

Clellan

Sister Savannah (Savannah, GA)

Reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt was like coming home.  Well, maybe more like coming home to a step sister who gives you a warm hug and then sits in the corner mumbling wickedly about you.  The book takes place mostly in Savannah, and this Charleston girl did not appreciate the many unfavorable comparisons the author claims Savannahians make between the sister cities.  The wry southern lady's voice in my head kept speaking, "Well, us Charlestonians don't even think about Savannah...let them make all the comparisons they like.  And the Spoleto USA festival is a damn good time..."  The book mentioned more than once how Savannah got the offer to host Spoleto USA first, and, because of their rejection, Charleston got the honor as a runner up.

 Those brief references aside, the book really was delightful.  I felt gratitude towards the New Yorker who moved to Savannah and took his time to right this piece of nonfiction (that's right, nonfiction).  This novel is like a window into old southern culture, and the author had to go into the house in order to unlock and open it for the rest of the world to peer inside.  The author crafts this story with such love and appreciation that a true Southerner will begin to have visceral sense memories of moments in their life that match the tale, and an outsider will marvel at the wonder and begin to love it too.  And if there is something a Southerner likes more than telling a tale, it's having others listen and become desirous of the same experience.

The fact that the book was an extremely popular non-fiction book and reads like a novel is just perfect. In the deep south, what is fact and what is sensational are so hand in hand that no one thinks of "facts" as being mostly boring.  We see the world through eyes that believe in magic, in the witching hour, in the concepts of legends, true love and honorable deeds.  And dishonorable deeds, too, of course, are a large part of that mysticism.

I will not reveal any more than that.  I cannot recap the story or outline the plot since the story, like all good stories, must be told the way it was meant to be and in its entirety.  But you must read the book.  Get yourself some southern culture.

Love,
Clellan

Plays Apart

I forget that in my original manifesto for the book review blog I had a list that included plays.  I have read A LOT of plays in my search for showcase material and monologues.  Here are my thoughts on two of them:

Keely and Du by Jane Martin

With the abortion debate still a hot button issue among many, this play should be done everywhere.  This 1993 winner of an American Theatre Critics Association Award for Best New Play is deeply fascinating, weird, visceral, touching, and smart.  Keely is on her way to the abortion clinic when she is kidnapped by some unspecified extremist group.  She wakes up chained to a bed and in the care of Du, an old retired nurse who belongs to the group and in whose care Keely is entrusted.  They are going to force her to have the baby.  The underlying complexities of both of the characters' lives are explored through their conversations and negotiations.  The climax is thrilling and in the end there is a twist.  The play raises a lot of questions, and as a reader I found myself closing the play with nothing but thoughtfulness concerning the issue.  If you do this play, call me up.  I want to play Keely.  I will audition the shit out of this role for you.

Dying City by Christopher Shinn

Apparently I chose plays that touched on all the hot button issues.  This play was well received after it's 2007 premiere (Ben Brantley called Mr. Shinn "the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today" and if you know Ben Brantley, you know that the praise is meaningful) and I wonder when more theater companies will begin to pick up this gem.  The play goes back and forth between the events that occurred on two nights a year a part from one another; the night before Kelly's husband Craig leaves for Iraq, and a year later when his twin brother (played by the same actor) has come to visit.  I think this one deserves a read for yourself.  Side note:  the original production at Lincoln Center included a stage that rotated slowly over the course of the entire show and wasn't noticeable until some time had passed.


All for now.  More later!

Love,
Clellan

Oyster Point Walking Tours

If any of my faithful readers (if only I updated as faithfully...) will be visiting Charleston in the near future, I advise that you take a tour with the Oyster Point Walking Tour group.

Their website is here:

http://oysterpointtours.com/

The team is made up of a young, vibrant crowd who all love living in the Holy City and want you to love it as much as they do.  As a native of Charleston, I would not endorse any other group.  I'm a local, my family has been residing in Charleston county since before the Revolutionary War, and I'd walk with them.  So should you!

New Adult Fiction: At It's Best (Or...New Adult Fiction: Theater Nerd Edition)

New Adult Fiction has been sweeping away readers who span from preteen girls hungry for an expression of the sexual desires they are beginning to feel to middle aged women hungry to re-experience the time in their lives when sex was new and exciting, to us: the twenty-somethings about whom this fiction is written.

We are a very critical audience, for the most part.

Especially us theater girls.  Who will devour anything worth carrying in our beach bag (Twilight or it's near predecessor Fifty Shades of Grey), but are quick to denounce either as being as meaningless as fluff/porn to as harmful as retrograde anti-feminism.  And while those Hunger Games books certainly had their fierce female warrior, half of us were unhappy with the ending and the other half of us wondered why we had to invest in another love triangle in the first place.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series also features a kick-ass, dysfunctional heroine, but wasn't really written to fit into this genre, even though it does, and is also an import from Sweden so of course it's more liberal in its thinking.  The series even bears the original title Men Who Hate Women, but that title wouldn't fly with US publishers. 

If you are looking for something fun, something that makes you smile the whole way through, that fits perfectly within the new "New Adult Fiction" genre but also takes time to wink at you and drops it down for something real:  then you need to run to the Kindle store to pick up Cora Carmack's LOSING IT.

The heroine, Bliss Edwards (a THEATER MAJOR in a liberal arts program) doesn't bear the "Mary Sue" quality that, say, Anastasia Steele of Fifty Shades bears.  No, she knows that she is attractive, but has never really taken the opportunity to have sex.  She feels weird for still being a virgin at twenty-two.  She doesn't want to jump into bed with someone random, but she would like to get down with someone.  And so, sometimes she gets in over her head, sometimes her emotions get blurry, sometimes her plans go awry and she can't control everything.

A jet-setting billionaire doesn't come to her rescue.  Neither does a vampire, werewolf, fellow warrior, infamous journalist, or anyone else for that matter.  Bliss does meet a guy, since this burgeoning genre means including some form of romance, and it is the kind of guy she's been looking for:  the kind of guy she'd be more than happy to do the deed with, among other things.  Things get messy, because if she just met the guy and things worked out wonderfully the first time (no pun intended) then we wouldn't have our book, or our genre either.  She makes a decision or two along the way, and we get our (SPOILER ALERT) happy ending.

This is the thing I like the best about the book:  Bliss is making decisions.  She's not helpless, she's not clueless, and she doesn't play wilting flower.  She's not invulnerable, either.  This is a perfectly written, human character.  She has goals beyond landing the man of her dreams, and she attains some of them too.  In the end, the book is a romance, so let's not get too critical about the overall importance of her paramour(s).

And, okay, there is also still a love triangle.  But, come on guys, even Shakespeare used those.

Oh, yeah.  Theater majors will love the jokes and winks that we get.  As you're reading, if you find that all of this shit stuff didn't happen to someone in your undergrad liberal arts department, then I want to know where the hell heck you went.

You Deserve Nothing...right?

Alexander Maksik's You Deserve Nothing was just the read that I needed during the week of dread that was the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.  Hannah, my roommate, recommended it to me and mentioned that it was like Dead Poets Society mixed with some international intrigue.  The book certainly peeked my curiosity because I love Robin Williams, used to date artistic/troubled school boys exclusively (you know who you are), and think that bilingualism is hot.  However, the book turned out to be a little different than all of that...

The book was told from three different perspectives: the three main characters.  However, each character in the novel was so fleshed out that I almost remember it as having several more point of view narrations than there actually were.  The names are almost unimportant.  I remember them as their archetypes.  The "sexy professor," the "awkward teenage boy," and the "teenage girl too sexy to know what to do with herself."  Each is on their own personal journey and must make the kinds of life choices we all make, and are all pushed around by the waves of reality that make our desires more difficult to obtain and our choices harder to make. 

There's definitely lots of existentialist influence and underlying tones.  The French setting helps this along, and of course, all of the existential discussions that occur in "Mr. S's" (that's the sexy teacher) advanced English class for high school seniors at the International School where he is employed.  Eventually he has the affair with Marie (the sexpot high school senior), and has a really meaningful experience with Gilad (awkard teenage boy, aptly named), which, consequently, has made me nervous every time I'm on a subway or train platform. 

So, overall, I give it four stars out of five for being a great read that's also really smartly done.  It may be a little too smart for it's own good, and maybe let's Mr. S off a little too easy in the end.  But then again, life is never fair and we all must do the best we can with the hand we've been dealt.

Run, Don't Walk

Every twenty something that I know should pick Dr. Meg Jay's new book The Defining Decade:  Why your Twenties matter- and how to make the most of them now.  I read the book in a 12 hour stint, purchasing the book late Saturday night and finishing it, after a morning of Father's Day breakfast and attending church, on Sunday afternoon.  And when I mean every twenty something, I mean every twenty something.  Twenty somethings who are nannies, yoga instructors, and baristas should read this book.  Twenty somethings who are grunt workers or entry levels at any kind of businesses, corporation or company should read this book.  Twenty somethings who are in graduate school, law school, or med school should read this book.  Twenty somethings should read this book, regardless of what they are currently pursuing in their lives.  Can I say this again?  Read this book!

The book is divided into three parts: "work," "love," and "the brain and the body."  Each contains anecdotes from the author's own life as well as from patients from her practice and experience as a clinical psychologist.  The book doesn't contain a guide about how to make choices that will make your life better.  The book informs you about the ways in which the choices you make in your twenties could impact your life, and how to make the best, most active choices for you.  This book does what a lot of self help books cannot do: it gives you a tailor made approach to fit your own needs and desires.

I recognized a lot of the passages in the book from articles by Dr. Jay that I had read in the NY Times.  Although they were tremendously insightful and interesting as stand alone articles, they were much more helpful in the context of the overall book.  Instead of feeling guilty about where I am in life, and guilty about the way I feel (lost, excited, anxious, ready, nervous, hopeful, terrified, confused), I left the book feeling reassured.  My feelings at this stage of life are normal, but I don't have to stop there.  There are positive things that I can do in my life that both allow me to enjoy my twenties and also begin building my future.

As I said, I feel as though each reader will gain a different insight into his or her life by picking up and reading this book!  Five stars.