April 1, 2014

April 1, 2014

What is it about nature that we trust so much into that world that is not of our making?   I hanker back to the days of Edmond Rostand, who sees nature as an inspiration to adapt and change, but not to be governed by the four seasons.  Emotionally speaking he was the most honest playwright of his time.  When everyone else at the time was going through a naturalistic phrase, Rostand was going for the imagination.  He based his play “Cyrano de Bergerac” on a real character, but alas, even his imagination doesn’t really hold up to the real Cyrano.

Since the play is in verse, it takes one away from everyday life into another world.  After all this peculiar play introduced the word “panache.” The grand gesture of a theater piece with even grander characters within the work, can make one dizzy.  The real Cyrano, besides being famous for having a large nose, even though that is very much over empathized in the play, was very much a dramatist as well as a duelist, which come to think of it, is a grand gesture in itself.  He also wrote science fiction, where men go to the moon and meet up with the citizens of that fine planet.  Like Rostand, he let his imagination take him to places that couldn’t be obtained then and not even now.

What is interesting to me is that here is a writer, Rostand, writing about another writer, Cyrano, and yet he’s a fictional character, but the fiction part is only in the narrative.  The character is correct, but the key point is Cyrano’s nose, which sets off the only weak link in his personality.   Nature would accept a natural physical mistake, but the artistic or aesthetic fellow or girl, must change that nature to make it work for them.  Art to me does not want to acknowledge nature, but to change it for our purposes, whatever that may be.

My one driving goal in life is to be a writer like Edgar Wallace, where I turn out one book after another, and sort of disappear in my own work.  If Lon Chaney is the man with a thousand faces, then I want to the man with a thousand books, totally disguising the nature I live in, but presenting my life as a grand gesture.   Therefore I’m seriously considering to add a middle-name to my full name.  “Tosh Panache Berman. ”