Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

by Alan Alda

  Here’s what gets me about artists: I’m touched by the artist’s courage and generosity.

  This is what it’s like when you decide to be an artist: First of all, you don’t decide to do it. You’re kidnapped by it. You never know if you have what it takes. After years of doing it, you’re always back where you started, a beginner. Because every time you head for the horizon, it’s not there.

  An artist looks at life and the chaos of nature, then takes a brush, a violin, a camera, or his or her own body and plays a plaintive song of desire on it. A desire for understanding. Who are we? Why are we the way we are? Can we ever become what we wish we could be?

  All artists, I think, are poets—whether they arrange words on a page, make steel and stone into buildings, or leap into the air, transforming their bodies into visual music.

  The poet puts the right words in the right order so that the colliding of their sounds and meaning makes your neurons flash like a pinball machine. And like the poet, artists of all kinds take the viewer’s nervous system and snap it like a whip. They refresh our vision. They press our reset button. They make the colors of the world as vivid as they were when we were children and saw them for the first time.

  Artists try to say things that can’t be said. In a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling; a taste; a painful longing. But the net is always too porous, and we’re left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

  We often tune ourselves to the oscillations of nature: the rhythmic beat of the heart—or the sea running up the shore, then pulling back—or the bang and slam of the shutter in a storm. From these elemental rhythms spring the one-two beat of music and the push and pull of a play on words. They’re the antagonist and protagonist of drama. They’re the essay’s ebb and flow of argument.

  We ride this rhythm—and it rides us. Like a wind sock in a heartless gale, the artist whips back and forth to the beat of nature, free of care and, sometimes, just as free of safety. I love my fellow artists for the dangerous life they lead; for the exhaustion of their birth pains; and for how they bet their lives on the slim hope they can make something worth looking at or listening to.

  We may amuse and delight, but, like Shakespeare’s clowns, we also ask the most impertinent questions about who we think we are. Where would we be without artists? We would be gray automatons in a gray landscape picking gray flowers for gray lovers. Life would be grim.

  And where would we be without the humanities? Life, I think, would seem far more meaningless. The search for wisdom—and for a deeper understanding of who we are—is the daunting challenge for the humanities. They are that part of our common brain that reflects on our actions, questions our desires, and forces us to declare what we value. In some ways, we’re all artists—practicing our skills, but also reaching into the dark for an answer.

  In the dark of the cave, we hope to find light—not from the torch, but from the sparks that fly as we decode the handprint on the wall.

  I wish us luck.

  So I guess I felt that day in a rush of optimism that art can, at least, make life less meaningless. And maybe it can. But I have to be honest with myself. It isn’t all the high-flown talk about humanity that makes me feel alive. It’s really just the moment of play, when everything else disappears for a while. That’s when a lightness overtakes me and I’m standing beside myself, watching. I see myself commit little mistakes, but I don’t judge them. And I see little moments that are surprisingly good. But I don’t judge them, either. I just notice them. Everything happening is good because it leads to something else. And so it comes back again and again to the ecstasy of it.

  But I wonder if even that’s enough.

  At eleven o’clock the curtain is down, and you’re walking back down the ugly little alley from the stage door to the street. You’re in the world again. If you’ve been very lucky, you’ve had a couple of hours where time stood still for you. But now it’s over. And it’s not true that life is short but art is long. Powers fail, and passion gets spent. Life is short, and art is even shorter.

  Isn’t there anything that will get us through to the very end? I kept looking.

  Chapter 9

  * * *

  The Meaning of Life in a Glass of Water

  They were buildings so tall, they had thrown out television signals across all of New York City and beyond, so simple and staunch that one glimpse of them, in a movie or on a souvenir plate, instantly said, This is New York. One by one, they descended to the ground, billowing an ugly, toxic cloud while disbelief and confusion rose in each of us from a place in our chest where once we had felt safety and comfort.

  The towers came down, carrying with them the lives of people who had left us not at the end of their time, or even in an unexpected accident, but in an act of ignorant, malicious hatred. When that happened, a little patch of meaning seemed to come loose from us, like a layer of skin gone dead. Remember how after the disbelief came a desperate urge to do something? We all felt it. It was intolerable to think there was no action you could take. Out in the countryside where we lived, I went with three of my granddaughters to a shoe store. The girls were four, seven, and nine years old, and we gravely picked out a dozen pairs of heavy work boots for the rescue workers. We brought them to a truck parked across from the village commons, where two women on the back of the truck were hoisting up contributions meant for Ground Zero. In the days that followed the attack, so many people sent truckloads of boots, blankets, and work clothes that trucks piled up along the Hudson and many tons of supplies never made it across the river from a warehouse in New Jersey. But it hadn’t been wasted effort, because we all needed to take some kind of action. The satirical website The Onion published a fake news article that, while it may have been meant to be funny, captured with poignancy our desperation. It told of a woman in Topeka, Kansas, who felt so helpless, so in need of doing something, that she baked a cake. Then she covered it with strawberries and food coloring in the shape of an American flag. Like her, and like millions of others, I made American flags, too. I went to a website and printed out flags that I taped to the rear windows of the family cars. I nailed a pole to the fence at the end of our driveway and tied a hardware-store flag to it.

  As you walked the city in the days following the attack, you would see dozens of flags thirty stories high in the windows of apartment buildings. People had pasted the flags to their windows on the chance that someone would look up and know that someone else was pulling for them. During these weeks, the flag had stopped being an expression of particular political leanings; it belonged to all of us again.

  Three weeks after the attack, I got a phone call from the actor Richard Masur. He had been on the site since the rescue work began and had been volunteering to organize help for the rescue workers. He asked if I wanted to come down and talk with the workers on the site and show support. I did; and a couple of nights later, I was on a boat with a small group of theater people. As we made our way down the Hudson to what had become known as “the pile,” I didn’t know what to expect. We were going there mainly to listen, to give people a chance to talk and unburden themselves.

  The boat docked, and we walked for a few blocks among darkened downtown buildings. Then we turned a corner, and the sight hit us. Work lights illuminated the scene almost as if it were day. Steel shards reached many stories high, piercing the black sky. Climbing over the wreckage were firefighters, police, and construction workers from all over the country; cranes were lifting huge pieces of debris. They were removing the concrete and steel carefully, because under it were the remains of colleagues, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters.

  I went into a tent where workers were taking a break and sat down with a cup of tea across from a young police officer. He had lost his partner when the buildings fell. I offered him the chance to talk about it, hoping it would give him some relief, but I immediately regretted it. His face was flushed, his eyes were strained,
and he spoke almost as if it were his duty to recount the details of his loss to anyone who asked. I saw no relief in his face, only pain. I spent a few more minutes with him, thanked him for what he was doing for all of us, and excused myself. I didn’t want to prolong his sadness. He needed a professional to listen to him, not a well-meaning amateur.

  I went out to the edge of the pile and shook hands with a few of the workers. Someone handed me a phone and asked me to say hello to his wife. I could hear in her voice that she missed her husband and worried about him. After the call, I asked if they were getting all the supplies they needed. They said they were doing all right, but one of the men mentioned how much they’d enjoyed a few candy bars someone had sent over. The others agreed and said they were sorry they’d run out. I was surprised at how such a small thing had given them a lift.

  After a few minutes, I excused myself and stepped away because, again, I had the impression they were accommodating me by talking with me, and I had come somehow to accommodate them. I was off by myself when a man in his fifties came over, put out his hand, and introduced himself. His name was Johnnie Bell, an ironworker. His face was lined with days of nonstop work on the site, and he spoke softly.

  “Can I ask you something? Look at that—” He pointed over to the pile. “There are people here from all over the country. They figured they were needed here, and they came. Some of them haven’t seen their families in weeks.” His eyes locked on mine. “It would be awful if we lost this spirit of pulling together after all this gets cleaned up. We’re one country now.” I thought of the flags we had all put out. We were one community again, one nation. “It doesn’t matter now about religion or race or things like that,” Johnnie said. “We gotta stay this way. I don’t hear anybody saying that.”

  I promised him that when I got the chance to say in public what he’d just told me, I would do it. Then I got back on the boat and went uptown, still wishing there were something more concrete I could do.

  The next day, I made phone calls until I tracked down someone at the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania. I told her how much a few candy bars had meant to the workers and asked if her company could send a truckload of Hershey bars to the site. She said they’d wanted to but that they had sent only hard candy because of the pileup of trucks. They were afraid that in the sun’s heat, the chocolate bars would melt. I gave her the address of a warehouse forty blocks north where we had embarked for Ground Zero the night before. The shipment could be kept cool there. She thanked me, and a truckload of Hershey bars was dispatched to the workers. I had accomplished my own version of baking a cake.

  A sense of helplessness can be overwhelming in an emergency, and we take action, sometimes any action, to hold off that feeling. A need to act seems built into us. Just getting from birth to death can seem like one grand emergency, and action is how many of us make our way.

  Will Durant published a book in 1932 called On the Meaning of Life, in which intellectuals and artists of the time told him what meaning life had for each of them. One of the simplest and most honest statements was a letter to Durant from Carl Laemmle, the movie mogul. In it, he said he was happy to do business and make money, but most of all, simply to work. Work gave him all the meaning he needed. And he preferred that to “the sourness and hopelessness that comes with too much abstract thinking.”

  A life of action may not seem synonymous with meaning, although a lot of us act as if it were. And for all I know, it is. It seems right that Laemmle would focus on action—because he was a moviemaker. Twenty-four hundred years ago, the Greek dramatists saw the importance of action in our lives and mined it. In the theater they created, they invented a ritual of action that to this day captures our attention like nothing else, with maybe the exception of sports, the other great ritual of action formalized by the Greeks.

  A couple of years after 9/11, I was asked to speak to writers at Southampton College. And I asked if I could talk about the essential ingredient of drama: action.

  Dramatic action is not, of course, found in scenes of running, jumping, and crashing. Dramatic action takes place more in the mind than in the muscles. And it’s as essential to good dramatic writing as are great ideas and grand themes; even more so. After roaming the stage for fifty years, trying to keep audiences alive, I’ve learned that if the play is not rooted in dramatic action, no one will watch it.

  Standing in the wings from the time I was a child, I saw actors holding the audience’s attention. They did it almost effortlessly, and at first I couldn’t tell what the essential ingredient was. Then, when I was eighteen and my eyes were opened to the world of ideas, I read Aristotle’s Poetics, and I felt as though a secret code had been whispered into my ear by a man who’d been dead for 2,400 years.

  I wanted to tell all this to the writers at Southampton College, but it seemed dry and intellectualized. As we drove to the college, I told Arlene I didn’t know how to make it vivid to them. She was driving the car, and as usual, she had an unerring sense of direction. “Why don’t you think of an image you can start with?” I thought about that, and by the time we got to the college, her question had led to one of the best moments in any of these talks I’ve given, because it was a moment in which I said nothing.

  I came out onstage and asked for a volunteer, someone relatively brave. A young man came up from the front row, and I poured him a glass of water from a pitcher. I asked him to walk with the glass to the other side of the stage. He was a little self-conscious, and there were a few titters from the audience.

  Then I crossed over to him and filled his glass to the very brim. There wasn’t a millimeter of space between the water and the rim of the glass. “Okay,” I told him, “now walk to that table over there and put the glass down—but don’t spill a drop.”

  The table was all the way on the other side of the stage. The water was so high in the glass that it didn’t seem possible to take even a step without spilling it. I upped the imaginary ante: “If you spill anything, your entire village will die.” He and the audience chuckled at this attempt at melodrama, but having been given a challenge, he really didn’t want to spill the water. Slowly he moved forward, and there was utter silence in the auditorium. Thirty yards away, six hundred people were focused on the rim of the glass tumbler. When his hand tilted slightly and a small bead of water started slowly down the side of the glass, you could hear a gasp from the crowd. Agonizingly slowly, but with mounting tension in the house, he made it to the table and put down the glass of water. There was thunderous applause.

  I asked the audience to decide which trip across the stage had been more involving, more interesting. For me, the difference between these two identical physical actions was in the desire, the wholehearted striving, to achieve something. Dramatic action started in his brain and radiated to his toes and his fingertips. It made his every motion something we couldn’t take our eyes off.

  For years, as an actor, I’d had to find ways to take lines that had no action in them and find the action. Now, speaking to fellow writers, I was imploring them to look for the action before handing off the play to the cast. What is this character after? How is he trying to get it? Without that knowledge somewhere in your bones, the play runs out of gas and chokes to a stop. The hardest are plays in which the playwright feels it’s necessary to tell the audience things the characters already know. It seems almost impossible to write a historical drama without saying things like “Well, Mr. Lincoln, the war has been on for three weeks now.” What is Lincoln supposed to reply to that? “You’re kidding. Three weeks? I haven’t been getting the paper lately.”

  Bald-faced exposition, where the author brings us up-to-date by making the actors fire off a barrage of information that they would never bother to mention if an audience weren’t listening, is often considered allowable—sometimes even a necessary part of constructing a story. But I asked the writers in the hall at Southampton that night to think radically and actually forbid themselves exposition. David Mamet says that pl
ays should start late and finish early. And by that I think he means: Get in after the exposition and leave before the neat wrapping up. I think so, too. At the very least, I told them, let the opening scene of Othello be your guide. Roderigo and Iago are fighting about money. Roderigo is tired of paying him to plead his case with Othello. And in the course of their fight, in order to prove his point and keep the money, Iago makes it clear how tough a person Othello is to work on and manipulate, and we know everything we need to know about Othello and Iago, but it’s all been active.

  I think before any actor enters into a scene, it should be necessary to pass under a sign in the wings that reads, “You are not allowed on this stage unless you want something with all your heart and soul—and have a way of getting it.” Right before I go onstage, I almost always ask myself, What am I going out there to do? How am I going to get what I want? Even in a mostly one-man play like QED, where I played the physicist Richard Feynman and talked to the audience for two hours, I asked myself what I wanted from them—the real people I’d be talking to. I think this question is what makes a play move forward. More than that, dramatic action even tells you who the character is, because what people want and how they go about getting it is a way of saying who they are. (And like so much of what I’ve learned onstage, this is true of life as well.)

  All this has to be felt personally, though, not clinically. I always know I’m close to being able to play a character not when I merely feel that I could want what he wants, but that I do want it and, in fact, that I deserve to have it. Then, depending on the kind of play you’re in, either you get it or you don’t. The difference between comedy and tragedy is that in a comedy, people usually get what they want; in a tragedy, they get what they deserve.