It’s true though. It feels like a new life. I just got back from the park, the Bosphorus, where I climbed over rocks to sing by the lighthouse. Some people came by to chill, which is obviously funny to me, and a guard showed himself and told me I could continue. I don’t need to get a space yet, you know what I mean? Sometimes, I still have to, vaguely, like barely a material, move through some blocks in my head but they are dissipating. I think just like writing, no, unless you are naturally brilliant, like you woke up like that, you still have to work on it. You can do a lot with your voice actually. Like writing, what makes a good singer?
A clear tone feels better than vibrato sometimes depending on what you’re singing. Cracks and fragility have their effect, too. That’s what I like. The storytelling of it. There are people who are just super gifted and intelligent, but what that sounds like varies. I love Blossom Dearie, for example. And that isn’t easy, either, not in my opinion.
I moved to the park after I warmed up, and I faced the parking lot so I can project not sing to no one lounging on the grass. I’m under a shady tree. It takes me hours to fully warm up. I figure that’s the old cobwebs, just getting back into shape, quite simply.
After two hours, I’m good to go. And then, I gotta go and get back to work. I have to make a little more time. I picked a couple of songs that I can work on in a studio for a couple of hours. I can’t really believe it sometimes. I started out singing. I keep repeating myself.
And I’m in Istanbul. I’m not in LA or NY. I can probably find a place to sing, right? Obviously, my book is my priority right now. And sometimes I go, uh, Bukowski, really? It’s not all like that, but how do I put this? It’s like, I can communicate that I don’t speak the language in a variety of way…this note that pops into my head sometimes: decorative.
I just finished When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back by a Danish poet, just heart wrenching because she lost her son, and she has sections where she uses no period, it’s just a long sentence of commas, so I can apply some of that in trying to communicate in a foreign language, too. Just the run-ons. And she keeps circling around the death of her son.
When I was putting together my competitive book analysis, I didn’t understand the exercise at first. It’s a formal exercise not about the subject matter if I understood that correctly. It’s like this book but instead of circling around “that,” I’m doing this. I’m reading for that purpose.
Right now, I started this diary, and I still don’t always understand some of these dreams that I can have. I usually have to continue to reframe. Dreams are dreams, too, I don’t necessarily think it always has to mean something but I get excited, and I can knock myself just a little, it feels, but then, dreams have their function so that’s continuing to work itself out. These dreams more gave me pause. I didn’t know that I had these sorts of feelings or struggles in putting myself out there.
I was thinking about it this morning. It’s not that I’m trying to talk about my childhood as if I went through so much, so much adversity, or something. Both my parents were sick. The situation I found myself in when I was four affected me. I was a bad seed. There’s really no such thing. I understand Steinbeck’s reflection on Cathy Ames…that some people are born with a malformed soul, right, and that villain evidently spoke to me since I had, more so than anything else, a villain on my hands. It’s not that I actually villainize people. In terms of what happened there…anti-hero? I’m not so sure. Even just the unconscious belief system that there’s evil. Well, if you talk to some people, they might approach that subject differently.
I don’t know what to say about a malformed soul.
In any case, there’s nothing wrong with me, but that’s not the environment that I found myself in. That was real, it really happened. I did have some fundamental readjustments to make, that’s what I call it, based on what I learned from this experience. That’s the Oldest Storyteller. And if that story reflects a specific type of intelligence then good. It’s rather simple. I worked through these foundational issues, meaning, this was step one. My mother gives me away in this fashion, and I can place her problems or my heart for her aside, and my father responds in an odd, bizarre way. He’s a kidnapper. I’m living with strangers by the time I was four. We’re dancing the lambada, that too, because the whole house was filled with love songs, not just music.
Heartbreak is king, okay. I’m four.
I like that story beyond the little rookie psychologist I decided to become.
I continue coming into myself in a new way mixed with a little bit of the old that I lost along the way, or I guess it didn’t matter, but you have to understand, both my parents were sick. By the time I got to college, I had another family, basically speaking, sort of, so they didn’t get it, I didn’t get it, though it’s so obvious it’s almost stupid looking back on it. But that’s retrospect.
I get the feeling that the reader is truly going to get it before anybody else does in Christmas in Naples is a Sport. Yeah, makes sense, and oh no, stories repeat themselves, and why is that? Well, some stories are rather common. That too. But still. I kept on getting a new family, it’s not that family isn’t important, but I woke up a few times back there like…why am I here?
Those four years. My parents were sick. Even my bonding patterns have changed. And no, I didn’t have a field of problems, per se, but if I were to break down my life, I’m just excited to have more fun…be a little more secure in what I know, actually.
I’m about to get some lunch and turn to Christmas in Naples…
I don’t have a problem with what life is supposed to look like. That’s never been my problem. Like I’m not singing and thinking oh, I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with age, either, which is a characteristic I’ve noticed in some members of my generation. I’m just doing what I enjoy. How that might factor into my life, I don’t know yet. I could start singing in a club, you know, build up some songs, see how it goes. In the words of the wise screenwriter, “remove the obstacle.” Just remove it.
That’s it.
REMOVE IT.
That’s what I’m doing. The point of The Oldest Storyteller as a story was to get in touch with my potential, what I could do. I’m not there yet, and I don’t know where I’ll be when I begin that one, but that’s the design, the idea, also. I saw that like a distant star, I wasn’t there yet, but I could get there. I had a place to put my journey, process some of the hardest questions, with a higher perspective in mind. Every story ever told, the human journey through time, what people have gone through, you know…it’s a psychological voyage out of repression, which I prefer as a fiction, quite frankly.
So now, I’m between two continents, coming into a new phase in my life. I continue to stretch my wings and I couldn’t be further from home but feeling more at home with myself, and that’s what I seemed to give off to everyone to begin with, so good, I’m glad I’m more grounded in that idea. I don’t care if some relationships didn’t work out, I’m not harboring negative viewpoints about myself. I had my reasons. I’m off, taking off, having fun with the person in the park who came a little closer to hear me sing under a flowering tree. I think that’s a good story.
I’ll go into a rehearsal space, I’ll go to the park, I’ll finish my book, take steps. At least, the world today enables me to share and put content out there no matter where I am. So I can’t knock it. Besides, who knows, maybe I’ll be good at making videos? Do you know what I mean? I don’t want to get in my own way anymore or have a fixed “it’s gotta be this way.”
Hopefully, I’ll get to a point where I’ll be able to support others…that’s why, depending, I like the idea of starting a Barbara Harris fund…if I sell that book, does well, etc., as one would, I think, hold a space that it goes well because you can dream in many directions in fact…she wasn’t really about money and I got so much out of it, even someone who is helping me write my book somehow, so that feels appropriate and very in line with who she was. Me too.
We’ll see.
As I was crossing the boulevard this morning, I am so young. I might not be twenty or thirty, even, but life is long, hopefully. I mean, sure, I can take the attitude that we’re old but I will take mine and see where it takes me. I have time. That’s what I mean about not creating problems that don’t need to be there. I could maybe do a one-woman show or at least write one since I have a few outrageous and amazing characters. Even going through these four years…with this Brazilian woman in a tennis skirt, giving you her perspective. Dr. J. So what if I’m not twenty? Lots and lots of things can happen. I was listening to Christoph Waltz, no, who got his break later, if I’m not mistaken, because Quentin Tarantino cast him.
Since the Oldest Storyteller is about healing, meaning, you know, it’s a heart journey, which I like even because there’s a lot of nonwestern philosophy in that, some of what I learned when I underwent some plant medicine therapy. Lots of learning there. My undercover investigations into the Catholic Church, as well. I made a decision, very vertical, that I would befriend this concept called death to investigate whatever was happening to my father…that’s just the thing about repression, you see, I’m having this thought process.
I guess I didn’t need to go on a healing journey, I’m not sure how to approach that. It’s what happened though. I had to un-program, come to some realizations that were not embodied, fix some tensions I had around reality itself, and I’m sure if I were to look up literature about children who come from mentally ill parents, I would find plenty of support. It was the feeling that I began to generate within myself, too, again, the idea is, “can’t change that it exists,” but what’s possible from here to there is another subject.
I can’t go back, I can’t change the past, but then, my experience and perspective seems to be deepening and even organizing itself around possibilities. Oh yeah, I let go of some things I picked up along the way, what I learned, and got so much back, if not ideas as what I could have done with the experience I had if I had been encouraged to find the power within it. Again, I made the choices that I did because of all that, but contribution is a solid word, getting in touch with that.
Oh, yeah, I know someone who went back to theater later on and did very well for herself, actually, so she did it. I could do that, do I want to do that? Hilarious, amazing, totally possible. So I’m here in Istanbul, I still don’t know exactly what’s next, but at least, I have a place to land and put myself into a motion that feels natural, taking off, generating feelings of clarity, abundance, love, even.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Have a splendid week.
“Splendido,” Vico says more than once, just like that.