PRELUDE

                Before we begin this evening’s journey, I want to thank the Residence Life component for the invitation to kick off the “Last Lecture” series.  When first approached, I was flattered…and then I faltered. Given on occasion to “second think” others and, as a man of the theatre, always looking for the subtext behind what others say, I began to wonder if the invitation had any hidden meaning.  Was there a message locked in that invitation? Was I on my way out the door?  The conspiracy theorist in me thought perhaps the administration was using this event as a tool to “off” me or, at the very least, to tell me to have my say and then “shut up.” I consider myself a “boat rocker” so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had reached wits’ end with me. Before I sound completely paranoid, the thought was only momentary and I proceeded to compose, rather freely, in my head what I might share with you this evening.  Although I rarely enter a classroom with more than an outline, I’ve been composing for a couple of months now, throwing out ideas almost as quickly as they would come and always wishing I had a scrap of paper and pen handy to jot down that beautiful nugget that had risen to the top before I lost it below the turbulence I call my brain. Again, I thank you for asking me here this evening.  I am truly flattered.

 I began my career as an educator at Vanderbilt University.  As a part of the freshman orientation week, there was a required evening event called “The Raft Lecture.”  The premise was “You are on a lifeboat with two professors from the disciplines X and Y.  To survive, one of the two will have to be thrown overboard to the sharks.  Who will live and who will get the toss?” The intention was to demonstrate the level of academic discourse, argumentation, and persuasion a student might expect in the college classroom. The evening was both thought-provoking and filled with good humor.  Professors considered an invitation to participate an honor. Similarly, Carnegie-Mellon University had a series called “The Last Lecture” which provided popular professors the opportunity to have the podium as though it were their final chance to say what they believed had to be said, a summation of their life’s work.  Randy Pausch entitled his moment “Really Achieving You Childhood Dreams.”  You can view the presentation in its entirety on YouTube.  I highly recommend it.

Earlier, I used the word “turbulence,” and I’ve titled tonight’s talk “Of Tempests, Old Tapes, and Teddy Bears at Middle Age.” Randy Pausch used a classic three-part organization for his lecture.  I’ll borrow that.  Fortuitously, the day I was polishing tonight’s presentation, my Google “Quotes for the Day” had the following from the notable English author and critic, Samuel Johnson:

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

My graduate mentor suggested to me that a good designer “doesn’t borrow…he steals!” Artists call it “appropriation.” I’ll call it “inspiration.”

Pausch articulates his thoughts under these headings: Childhood Dreams, Enabling Others to Realize Their Dreams, and Lessons Learned. Considering the attention his lecture received in the media, I’d do well to follow his example although his presentation both intimidated and humbled me. As I begin, I should warn those of who’ve not heard me speak in public: I love words. For me, language is a delight, a refuge, a defense, and a vain effort to let the world know who I am and where I stand even if my footing is no more than quicksand. I performed the role of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempestmany years ago in my undergraduate days at Sewanee: The University of the South. In Act One, Shakespeare gives a pointed commentary on language in an exchange between his voice, the magician Prospero, and his monstrous slave, the creature Caliban:

 PROSPERO 
Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which
good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

CALIBAN 
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

I hope by the time I conclude you’ll not find you’ve been cursed.  But it is good to remember that language is a sword that swings for both good and ill. Keep this speech in mind when I enter the middle passage this evening. As a final caveat, I want to underscore that what I’m sharing are my experiences, my memories, my past, present, and future.  As much as I might like to be objective, all of what I’ll say is clearly colored by my particular view of the world.  I’m not soliciting sympathy Nor am I trying to sway your opinion.  Further, hard as it may be to believe, I am an introvert rather than an extrovert but I learned very early, well before I had Shakespeare’s words, “All the world’s a stage…”and I play my parts on a daily basis.  Honestly, don’t you, too? As a social animal, I regard myself as a lone wolf rather than leader of the pack. Some of what I say, you may find funny.  It’s absolutely alright to laugh.  I am good-humored although I do not regard myself as humorous.  I can only remember one joke. It is lewdly suggestive, sophomoric, and absolutely inappropriate in mixed company.  I’ll not subject you to it this evening.

CHILDHOOD DREAMS, NIGHTMARES, AND FANTASIES

I’m going to mention here some of the sources for the old tapes that have played in my head and shaped some of the choices I’ve made in my life, many of which were not good but could have been worse.  Otherwise I’d not be in front of you today.  I’ve played a lot of roles in my lifetime and I began to learn these parts early.

Life is dangerous; of that, there is no denying.  Our awareness of our precarious position has made its way into numerous expressions, all of which are now tried—but true—clichés: We “sit on the fence” in a space “between life and death” worried about the sword of Damocles overhead while sitting on Ocam’s razor. Every choice we make has a potentially negative consequence but onward we plunge for we, like the people of Moses, find ourselves “between the devil and the deep, blue sea.” We make “sweeping generalities” about one another rather than “cleaning our own houses;” as a matter of fact, we’ve been told of the dangers of living in glass houses while we’re chunking rocks at someone else yet we’re compelled to “cast the first stone” or place our “pearls before swine’ because we cannot avoid it.  Or so it seems. If you’ve ever said to another, “Look who’s calling the skillet black” (or is that a kettle?) how is it that you recognized the malady if you haven’t suffered from the same plague yourself?  Yes, life is dangerous. It is inherent in our humanity.  We can inflict pain and we can receive it.  Newton expressed it as a physical law:

 For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The internet explains it this way:

The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects. The size of the forces on the first object equals the size of the force on the second object. The direction of the force on the first object is opposite to the direction of the force on the second object. Forces always come in pairs – equal and opposite action-reaction force pairs.

If you haven’t already lost a loved one , a friend, or acquaintance, to death then sooner or later you will.  Our experience of the death of someone dear, while having clear stages as identified in contemporary psychological literature, is very individualized.  I suppose one might argue it is as personal as our relationship is with, or outside of, an experience with the Universal Force I choose to call God.  My wife—my REAL best friend forever—died in May and a very close buddy—an old college roommate—in December. I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster for the past seven and a half months.  I don’t look forward to repeating the ride any time soon but that’s beyond my control, isn’t it?  I’ve known what Hamlet shares with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

HAMLET:

I will tell you why. So shall my anticipation prevent
your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen(300)
moult no feather. I have of late—but wherefore I know not—
lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed,
it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame,
the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging(305)
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how
noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving
how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in(310)
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the
paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence
of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Hamlet, from the beginning of Shakespeare’s much revered work, finds himself in circumstances well beyond his ken.  He certainly wasn’t in control nor have I been. I know that healing will come but the scar will remain.  Death changes those left behind. Before now, my most significant experiences with death were my parents who died within twenty-four hours, mom of cancer and my father of a heart-attack. Hours before dad died, he told me, for the only time in my life that I can recall, he loved me. I’d hungered to hear that all my life and, although I wish I’d heard it many times prior, at least I heard it once. Having said that sentence, he took a fifth of bourbon into his bedroom that night.  The man was visibly broken.  I’m now the age he was when I found him sprawled across the kitchen floor, his dentures askew, his glasses twisted, and his digitalis open on the kitchen table. He’d also told me he couldn’t see how he would spend his life alone in my childhood home. I’m finding being alone without my boon companion of thirty years is hell. But my dogs offer a bit of comfort.

My initial reactions to issues of death and dying were formed by my childhood religious instruction in a parochial school. I learned the necessity of the sacrament of baptism and I understood—if being told qualifies as understanding—that only the baptized…strike that…only baptized Roman Catholics could enter the kingdom of Heaven.  My father wasn’t baptized and had grown up in a primitive Methodist church.  Begging him to get baptized so he wouldn’t burn in the fires of Hell—made all too real by the nuns— became a frequent bedtime ritual for I see in my mind’s eye what would happen to him when he died and it wasn’t going to be pretty.  “Honor thy father and thy mother” was the strongest commandment I learned as a child and became a source of great anxiety and confusion. I couldn’t have told you why at the time.  The words from the Old Testament became more than an admonishment.  They were a brick wall.  As I would discover at middle age and thanks to a patient therapist, I could hardly express that for which I didn’t have words.  From the time I was three years of age until I turned ten, I had God-awful, blood-curdling, wake-up-with-a start, screaming-mimi nightmares. My mother would drill me as to their source, my pediatrician kept asking me “What’s wrong?” and I took these inquiries to mean there must be something wrong with me, what was happening to me was my fault because, as the nuns had told me, “We’re all sinners.” I was quite certain a place in the pit was reserved for me. I couldn’t tell anyone I was sexually abused.  I couldn’t give voice to the events from which I had dissociated.  The commandment told me to honor.  To utter the truth would have been a violation of my contract with God.  I was being used and my identity as a person was subsumed. So, by day, I played whatever part I could to “get by.”  And I sought refuge in food.  The boys on the playground called me “Fatso” because of the weight and “Sissy” because I was hardly athletic.  My father’s idea of teaching me about sports was to permit me in the den on Saturdays and Sundays while he had a few drinks and made calls to his bookies.  We had the same understanding there that we had when he violated me: “Don’t make a sound.”  

I’d love to present you with a Randy Pausch childhood.  When I viewed his lecture on YouTube I muttered to myself “idyllic.”  His selections of photographs in his Power Point were classic American Dream moments. Without belaboring a point or disclosing too much as a therapist once told me I had a habit of doing, I can tell you that my earlier experiences or my recollections of that “blissful” time in my life, are  unpleasant or, at the least, neutral. 

The brightest point in childhood was my mom.  I adored my mother.  She was my safety net and I, in turn, was her “prince.”

REALIZING MY DREAMS, REALIZING YOURS

Eventually, we come to a place that is often filled with shadows but from which there is no turning back: the choice of a career.  I’d had some jobs before and during college. I’d sensed a calling from time to time toward one vocation or another but I found I had an unwillingness to commit to much of anything for several years after college I floated between graduate school and the world of work.  I got a taste of what it might mean to teach and what it might mean to have a life in the theatre.  I didn’t rise one morning and say “I know!  I’ll become a professor.”  It just happened.  The first day I entered the classroom I realized no one had taught me to teach.  The learning curve was steep.  I’m thankful I’d had significant experience on the stage as an actor and my skills in improvisation were well-honed. Lucky for me the subject matter of the theatre is the human experience.  Some would regard that a carte blanche as far as potential lecture topics.  Some of my students might argue that’s the route I’ve taken.  But my point is EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.

LESSONS LEARNED LESSONS I’M LEARNING

I have a key-wound pendulum clock in my den.  I purchased it with a remnant of my inheritance when my parents died.  Among all my possessions, I value the timepiece although I bought it on sale from a mail-order catalogue.  There’s a patina of antiquity about it although I’m quite sure it was cheaply made in Japan. The item has value because I have made it valuable. I find the tock-tock-tocking of the pendulum quite comforting and the chime on the half hour and hour reassure me that time is moving as it should in my world.  But there’s a problem.  I’ve never been able to adjust the pendulum so that the time told by the clock in synch with the rest of the world.  The arc scribed through the air is either too long or too short which means the clock runs too slow or too fast.  I am like that clock.  Too often I find I am out-of-step with the world around me, unable to really connect as I swing on my journey through space.  I’ve sought to address the problem for years tweaking who I am but never quite hitting the correct rhythm.  I’ve finally reached the point with the clock that I reset the time only when the hour it strikes is noticeably off and there are some days when the clock runs down altogether.  As far as personal adjustment is concerned I believe I’ve finally reached a point where being out-of-step is really okay.  I was made that way.  I accept my uniqueness and how I came out of the factory. If you pardon the pun, I’m late at coming to this realization and I hope you’ll achieve self-acceptance earlier than I have. So, the first lesson I’ve learned is:

You may reflect on the past but you need not relive it.

Live for today. It is all anyone has.

This is nothing new.  Much of what I have to share is not.  But it is a lesson I have to repeat often.  I lose sight of my advice to young actors: “Be in the present moment.” It is so difficult to just be, to still my momentum forward or backward, staying grounded and letting people and events wash over me in the stream of living. Looking back can really hurt.  A gospel tune about Jacob’s ladder has this line in the chorus: “Every rung goes higher, higher/Looking back just brings regret.”  Guilt, regret, anger, sadness: all strike me as related.  I’ve had these emotions and the residual effects over and over again to the point a friend asked, “Gary, what’s in it for you? What are you getting out of this?”  My answer had to come as an admission that I chose to remain in the past because I feared living in the here and now.  My fear was always of a moment in the future when someone might reject me, devalue me, objectify or exploit me.  Well, I tell you that fear is another link in a chain that can keep me from experiencing freedom: the freedom to be the creation my Maker intended for me to be.

At the conclusion of Saint Paul’s oft recited First Letter Church in Corinth, Chapter 13:

11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And the evangelist Saint Mark reported Jesus rebuking his disciples with these words:

14…Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.

15 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

It’s never too late to have happy childhood.

I wouldn’t take nothing’ for my journey now,

I’ve got to make it to Heaven somehow.

Though the devil tempts me and tries to turn me around.

He’s offered everything that’s got a name

All the I want and worldly fame,

But if I could, still I wouldn’t take nothing’ for my journey now.

When I can’t, God can.

          As far as my father’s abuse, I have yet to bring myself into a state of forgiveness. I know I need to address this inability.  Fourteen years ago, my first psychotherapist recommended I go to the site where my parents’ ashes were scattered and forgive them.  I tried but the words were empty.  I don’t think it is a matter of will. I believe that forgiveness is a state of being.  I’m not there yet.  I am aware that my not “being there” holds me back.  But in the larger context of the universe, I know my father is forgiven by that Power that is greater than me.  That belief has taken a mighty movement of the spirit housed in my bodily shell. I thank the person who gave me the phrase “niversal salvation” to describe what will happen if, indeed, we are held to account in THE END.

Emotions are neither good nor bad.  They just are.

But, golly, didn’t I hear “Don’t get mad.  It’s not polite,”  “Your words can kill another human being,” or the classic “Boys don’t cry.” What happens when the messages received are out of synch with what is perceived as happening in actuality?  I believe psychologists use the phrase “cognitive dissonance.” So rather than running the risk of offending anyone, the only available choice is to not feel at all. What sort of existence is that? 

Faith in something larger than me is necessary to my survival.

Don’t let anyone shove you into a pigeon-hole

PROSPERO 
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm’d
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck’d up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.