Zen in the Art of Writing

No tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically, must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.

There are seeming exceptions to this, in which novels or plays end at the height of tension, but the release is implied. The audience is asked to go forth into the world and explode an idea. The final action is passed on from creator to reader-viewer whose job it is to finish off the laughter, the tears, the violence, the sexuality, or the sickness.

Not to know this is not to know the essence of creativity, which, at heart, is the essence of man's being.

If I were to advise new writers, if I were to advise the new writer in myself, going into the theater of the Absurd, the almostAbsurd, the theater of Ideas, the any-kind-of-theater-at-all, I would advise like this:

Tell me no pointless jokes.

I will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter.

Build me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamentations.

I will go find me better wailing walls.

Do not clench my fists for me and hide the target.

I might strike you, instead.

Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship's rail.

For, please understand, if you poison me, I must be sick. It seems to me that many people writing the sick film, the sick novel, the sick play, have forgotten that poison can destroy minds even as it can destroy flesh. Most poison bottles have emetic recipes stamped on the labels. Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.

The art aesthetic is all encompassing, there is room in it for every horror, every delight, if the tensions representing these are carried to their furthest perimeters and released in action. I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.

Where Mexico surprised me with so much darkness at the heart of the noon sun, Ireland surprised me with so much sun swallowed in the heart of the fog to keep one warm. The distant drummer I listened to in Mexico tread me to a funeral march. The drummer in Dublin tread me lightly through the pubs. The plays wanted to be happy plays. I let them write themselves that way, out of their own hungers and needs, their unusual joys, and fine delights.

So I wrote half a dozen plays and will write more about Ireland. Did you know that people meet in great head-on bicycle collisions, and suffer from fearful concussions for years after, all over Eire? They do. I have caught and held them in one act. Did you know that in the cinemas each night just an instant before the Irish National Anthem is due to explode its rhythms, there is a terrible surge and outflux as people fight to escape through the exits so as not to hear the dread music again? It happens. I saw it. I ran with them. Now I have done it as a play, 'The Anthem Sprinters.' Did you know that the best way to drive at night in the fog across the boggy midlands of Irish country is to keep your lights off? And to drive terribly fast is better! I have written that. Is it the blood of an Irishman that moves his tongue to beauty, or the whiskey that he pours in to move his blood to move his tongue and tell poems and declaim with harps? I do not know. I ask my secret self which tells me back. Wise man, I listen.

So, thinking myself bankrupt, ignorant, unnoticing, I wind up with one-act plays, a three-act play, essays, poems, and a novel about Ireland. I was rich and didn't know it. We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

So again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion, or my Ouija subconscious again.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.

We never sit anything out.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

MY THEATER OF IDEAS

The time, indeed, is theatrical. It is full of craziness, wildness, brilliance, inventiveness; it both exhilarates and depresses. It says either too much or too little.

And one thing is constant through all the instances cited above.

Ideas.

Ideas are on the march.

For the first time in the long and plague-some history of man, ideas do not merely exist on paper, as philosophies in books do.

Today's ideas are blueprinted, mocked-up, engineered, electrified, wound-tight and set loose to rev men up or run men down.

All this being true, how rare the motion picture, the novel, the poem, the story, the painting, or the play which deals with the greatest problem of our time, man and his fabulous tools, man and his mechanical children, man and his amoral robots which lead him, strangely and inexplicably, into immorality.

I intend my plays to be first entertaining and grand fun that will stimulate, provoke, terrify, and, one hopes, amuse. This, I think, is important, to tell a good story, to write the passions well, on to the end. Let the residue come when the plays are over and the crowd goes home. Let the audience wake in the night and say, Oh that's what he's up to! Or the next day cry, He means us! He means now! Our world, our problems, our delights and our despairs!

I do not want to be a snobbish lecturer, a grandiloquent dogooder, or a boring reformer.

I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all the history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.

I have been stopped once too often by policemen at night who ask me what I am doing, walking on the sidewalk.

I have written a play called 'The Pedestrian,' laid in the future, about the plight of similar walkers in the cities.

I have witnessed innumerable seances between television sets and rapt, transported, and oblivious children of all ages, and I have written 'The Veldt,' a play about a wall-to-wall television room in the very near future which becomes the center of all existence to a trapped family.

And I have written a play about a poet-of-the-ordinary, a master of the mediocre, an old man whose greatest feat of memory is to recall how a 1925 Moon or Kissel-Kar or Buick once looked, down to the hub-caps, windshields, dashboards and license plates. A man who can describe the color of every candy wrapper ever purchased, and the design of every package of cigarettes ever smoked.

These plays, these ideas, put in motion now on the stage, I hope will be considered a true product of our time.

1965