FRANKLY SPEAKING

By Frank Crocitto

Chapter II
A Glance of Inward Regard

Suppose this were exactly what it says: Chapter Two—the second chapter of a book whose first chapter promised something. There are lots of books around, promising lots of things, from mastery of the two-step to the banishment of baldness. But suppose this were one of those promising books that beckoned to you about something that mattered to you and suppose it mattered enough for you to buy the book and—praise de Lawd—to read the book. Suppose the book promised to show you how to get a life … Supposin’ you wanted to get a life….
Someday there may be such a book. Till then this will have to be Chapter Two of a book that hasn’t yet seen the light of day. This book is aimed at those who want to have a life and don’t know how to begin. There is a way—to life. And there is a way to begin. The way is so obvious that people doubt that it exists or they imagine there must be another way. All that notwithstanding, there is a way and there is only one way. And there is only one way to begin.
Already this may be too much for some people to swallow. But for those who can take it:
“Where do I begin?”
“Where do I have to go?”
“Where does the way begin?”
Fortunately, the way begins where we are—wherever we are. Therefore, there seem to be many beginnings, as many as there are people wishing to begin. But it’s all the same beginning. We all begin from where we are. Now here’s the part that evokes an “alas”: we are never—rarely—where we are. Rather, we are mostly elsewhere. Which is why many of us don’t ever begin, and why we don’t make our way.
We’re not where we are because we are always in motion. We are a people in motion, outwardly and inwardly. We are ever on the move and the more dazzling our technology becomes, the more on the move we go. It’s in the speed of things—the speed of travel, of so-called communication, of reading, of getting to the point, of skipping the foreplay, of getting down to business. It’s in the spastic cutting that characterizes the movies coming off the Hollywood assembly line. It’s the accepted mode of television, in its commercials and in the increasingly smaller sequences between commercials. (At one time television emitted a steady blue light. Now it twitches like a doomed, epileptic rainbow trout.) We can’t stop moving. And we often proudly proclaim there’s no stopping us!
There’s something called motion sickness: and we’ve got it. When we glibly explain—in our scientific omniscience—that “mo-sic” comes about due to the effect of the vehicle on the passenger, we miss the relevant fact that motion itself is the sickness. To move when it is time to move is one thing; to move because we cannot help moving is a disease. Take a look at people when they are not looking at themselves: they scratch, they twitch, they drum their fingers, they shake their legs under the table, they bite the inside of their mouths.
We don’t know what to do with ourselves, so when things crescendo to a state of noisy desperation we jump into a car. We take a ride. We go somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. We just go. As long as we’re riding all’s well. Or if we want to go without going we move by watching moving pictures. We are people on the go, that’s who we are. So the more we do not know what to do with ourselves, the less of ourselves do we have to do anything with.
The trouble with our much-lauded “accelerated pace” is that it keeps us from being where we are. We can’t be where we are because we’re always plunging into the next moment, the next place, the next thought, the next feeling. And it takes us a while to catch up. Most of us never do and, alas, never will.
Begin then with this: the only way to catch up with yourself is to stop. Now there’s a word to conjure with: “STOP!” And I don’t mean Stop ’n’ Shop. I mean stop. I don’t mean a rolling stop either. I mean stop. The word stop means to stop so much that you stop having to stop. I don’t mean an imaginary stop either. I don’t mean the kind of stop that’s muttering under your breath “Yeah, yeah, but let’s get on with it.”
I mean stop.
Stopping is not the easiest thing to do, especially when you’re used to moving and don’t know what it’s going to be like if you stop and maybe you are even beginning to be afraid to stop because you’re safe when you’re moving (Right?) ‘cause whatever is trying to get you can’t get you. It’s different for everybody but it’s something like that.
If you think I’m excluding myself from this picture you’ve gone too fast. Here’s the way it was for me:
Years ago, when I was in my twenties and I thought I knew everything but in reality didn’t know which way was up, I fell in love with a girl. You may not think this is such an extraordinary thing, but this particular girl was special. She was divine. She was a sultry, dusky, exotic beauty whose aura was charged with the electric promise of palm trees and sugary dates and warm, kind suns and cool shade with deep wells and a stream tinkling by, with even, perhaps, a loaf of bread and a jug of wine. All of life and the seven seasons and my future as a playwright (for she was an actress, too) was bound up in her ineffable being. I loved her and I pursued her.
All was going well, and speedily, too. Until a certain day in her cozy studio apartment. I was falling all over myself trying to “express” myself to her. About what? About one thing and another—the way I felt, what I hoped for, where I was going, what I was going to accomplish, all interlaced with poems and stories and driven by the breathless hope that she would reach for me like I was reaching for her. I thought I was doing splendidly. So I kept on going and the faster I ran toward her the faster she back-pedaled from me.
Then came the moment. She looked at me with those deep, deep brown eyes as if I were the queerest cockroach of a person that she had ever met. And with her beautiful mouth moving in her unimaginably endearing way, that sweet way that had me captivated from the start, she said, “Frank …” She pronounced the name with such a cold and distant hollowness my heart and all my blood strained to flee rather than hear what was coming next.
How could I go? The door was closed. Probably locked. And there were five flights to the street. And she could have called out what she wanted to say to me and got me in the back with it before I’d gotten down the first flight. No, there was no exit. Instead I feigned intense interest and looked deeply into her deep eyes.
What Judy Rosenblatt said to me that hot, sweaty August afternoon in New York City sent me on a course that led eventually to my beginning. What the words were I can’t say exactly. But they were an insect lover’s pin-like, penetrating words. They struck me and stuck me to the wall. She referred, with breathy, amazed, rejecting sincerity, to the way my mind kept constantly running, helplessly running. Such motion sickness. Such a lack of being in the moment. Even if I remember the actual words you’d never get the full impact. They hit hard.
That was the last time I saw the exotic and perceptive Judy. Except, briefly, years later, one night as I was directing a movie on the damp streets of Greenwich Village I found her standing beside me. She was gazing up at me with amazed admiration that night, as if she had long forgotten her words, her definitive rejection, and was ready to pick up where we had left off. Ah, but I knew the past was in its casket and six feet under. And furthermore I saw a glint in her eyes, the kind that Manhattan actresses get when they think you can further their careers.
The words she said to me that fate-drenched afternoon threw me out of my mind. For the first time I saw my mind and its whirring from the outside. Like the photo of Earth from outer space, I got a glimpse of my own mind. It never turned off. It never stopped. Judy, dear, beautiful, Judy Rosenblatt, hit it on the head. And then, since this is how it goes, I saw this perpetual motion gripping my whole so-called life. And not just my mind—my emotions, my actions, my plans, my conversation, my playwrighting, my every activity, every expression of my being. I could not be still for the life of me.
Things don’t get better by themselves. This disease got worse and worse until I found myself stuffed in an ashcan of despair. This was before Samuel Beckett, too. I was running with everything I had and I was getting nowhere.
I didn’t know it at the time but I was headed for a rendezvous with a piece of furniture. It so happened, a year or so later, that in my crummy dump of an apartment on Spring Street, which was furnished with junk and things other New Yorkers had put out on the street, there was a chair. This chair was the only furniture I had paid real money for. It had captured my fancy. Cost was no obstacle. I bought it—a straw chair, very comfortable. My plan was, some fine day, to actually use it, sit in it, relax, stop.
Sometimes we acquire a thing long before we’re able to use it. That’s the way it was with the round straw chair with the black metal legs. I had gotten it and kept it, and it had waited patiently for me.
One fine day I came face to face with this chair. I had reached the bottom of the basement of despair. I realized I was obsessed with speed. I realized I was always running after something as if everything had value except me. I must have been afraid of just being. The world seemed to be swirling around me, a world of my own concocting, of course, and I was at its mercy. In the pits as I was, I unaccountably began to consider what if I just sat down, what would happen to this web of a world I was in, with its demands and threats and dashed hopes? More important, what would happen to me?
So I stopped. I sat down in the straw chair. I sat. I didn’t do a thing. I sat with myself in the chair. I sat. Time went by; the world went by. And I was still alive. I existed. It was pure and it was simple: I was. I was where I was, and I was myself.
That was my beginning. My first step to getting a life, the real life that has to grow in us in the midst of the hurly-burly of our outer life.
We can talk and talk and be philosophical forever and never contact ourselves, never know by direct experience the “who” that we are, out of which the real life grows. So, as an experiment, since you went through the trouble of buying this book, stop, get yourself a chair and see if you can experience yourself, that self which is, or rather, which could be your greatest possession.
Take a glance of inward regard. Then we can go on to Chapter Three.