Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions - Hardcover

Introduction

The young woman—a girl, really: eighteen—was touching. She was writing plays and frustrated that they were invariably about herself.

I failed her. My advice boiled down to “There, there.” She was young; later she would be old. Things would sort themselves out.

On the ride home from her question, I gave myself a do-over. Make a helpful answer. In the mirage of a second draft I said this: “Acknowledge that you’re the center of the universe, then radiate.”

She wanted a specific exercise; she wanted out!

Go online, I told her, and bring up the front page of the New York Times from the day you were born. Read every article. In amazement.

True, we no longer believe A caused B then C happened, as playwrights who thought they were emulating Ibsen did. This should not be taken to mean that nothing causes anything. More that everything causes everything. We travel through clouds of influence. The New York Times will show you some of the influences into which you were born.

Do they stun you? Does any of it seem familiar? The New York Times was already guessing what would be happening now; was it naive? Does anything explain that thing your dad is always saying? Does some fact interest you for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with you? Pursue it. In some distant manner, it’s connected to you.

The best thinking says “the self” is a fiction (I have a piece about that), yet it’s a fiction that we all believe, our most intimate experience. Maybe it’s nothing more than our tendency to repeat. Maybe we repeat because when we do, we recognize the behavior and the familiarity is com- forting. So the self is just the consolation of our tendencies. This is too deep for me.

The reason I never write personal essays is that I have no idea who “I” is. Setting out to write some, I had to locate my main tendencies and, for the sake of convenience, label them.

I would say I am an Urban Recluse.

The phrase is problematic, luckily. My brother, who trained as an economist, once accused me, as though I transgressed, of being the kind of human integer that screwed up his quantitative analyses (at last, a virtue!). Maybe so. My life goes heavy on the interiors: still, it’s crucial that their windows look out on the densest, most complex, most confounding system of social arrangements yet devised. It’s what I like to watch. Then I make up stories about it.

My tendency.

When I call myself an Urban Recluse, I know the phrase doesn’t constitute an identity, much less a self. It’s the angle from which I radiate, and that’s all I have to say about it.

MANIFESTO

Wisdom

I am a very wise man.

How I know this is, a number of people have told me so, among them several who consider my intelligence average and my talent meh. Wisdom is another quality altogether.

It might surprise you to learn of my wisdom, especially given that my life is patently disastrous. It’s the old saw about doing and teaching, which, in addition to being a truism, is true. You can see it in all kinds of situations. For example, drawing from my own world, there’s not a theater critic alive capable of writing a play, yet two of them are competent reviewers.

When it comes to developing wisdom, failure turns out to be an advantage. I once talked to a group of playwriting students among whom, startlingly, was a woman who had written four novels that had been decent commercial and strong critical successes but who claimed she had no idea what she was doing. I didn’t believe this. You simply cannot have four consecutive flukes. She was adamant. Years later, I read a book about the early days of Barbra Streisand and I understood what the novelist meant.

It seems that Barbra never valued her singing because it was too easy for her. “I just open my mouth and it comes out right,” she said.

This is what the novelist found so perplexing: she had stories to tell and she knew how to tell them. Having read novels, she was able to write novels. She knew what she was doing; what she didn’t know was how to describe what she was doing.

I don’t teach playwriting very often, but when I do I’m pretty good at it because I’ve faltered as a playwright in so many ways. I look at the student plays and think, almost dotingly, “Ah yes: that mistake! Remember it well. Made it myself in the hardscrabble winter of eighty-six.” Failure begets consciousness begets, sometimes, technique.

I’ve messed up at living even more spectacularly than I have at writing, thus my status as a fount.

If I have a limitation as a wisdom-giver, it’s my too-easy assumption that others are far more capable than I am. As a result, I become testy when they don’t follow the rules I set out for them, rules I would never think of applying to my own life. I’m trying to get better about this.

Before I was a wise man, I believe I was a bit of a charlatan. That was during my late twenties and early thirties. People were always coming up to me and thanking me for changing their lives when I said to them such-and-such. The problem was that when they quoted such-and-such back to me, I neither remembered saying it nor had any idea if I believed it. In those days, my wisdom was what I would call cadential wisdom. The sentences I put out had the shape and rhythm of truth but were actually rather vapid. You can go far on this talent.

The late Maya Angelou wrote the beautiful memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. After that, she became a public figure, in which role she was a virtuosa of cadential wisdom, and the power of the curious things she said was magnified by her extraordinary speaking voice. This is why when Oprah shares something like, “Dr. Angelou once said to me, ‘Oprah, it’s cold out; put on a sweater,’ it never quite hits us with the prophetic force with which it evidently bushwhacked Oprah.

Elaine Stritch, rest in peace, was a great actress and riveting Broadway star. She was also imputed with a high degree of cadential wisdom. Show folk thought she carried all sorts of salty insight. I worked with Elaine for two weeks in the late nineties and I thought she was out of her mind. Being out of your mind is not a detriment when it comes to cadential wisdom, as long as you find adherents for your particular wisdom-giving style. This sort of thing has been going on forever. In its modern form, it can be traced back to the sixties, when traditional authority was lain siege and people were freed up to submit to whatever bogus, mumbo-jumboing authority they found sexy. It made no difference that the things these authorities preached never tallied with what was really going on, because so many people had stopped thinking. They had simply stopped thinking.