Masks and Salt and Simultaneity.
People are talking about masks a lot these days. Do we have enough masks? Where can we get some masks? Can we make some masks? Is that a good mask? Is that a bad mask? I need a mask!
I have been interested in and talking about masks for years. I have always felt that there were two basic types. The mask that conceals and the mask that reveals. Some masks, the good ones, do both. Simultaneously.
Now our interest is mainly in the mask that protects. But these masks too are double sided. They protect you from others and protect others from you. Simultaneously.
My experience has mainly been with the theatrical application of masks. In 2009 I received a grant from Theatre Communications Group to study masks all over the world. In Japan, Italy, Scotland, Bali and Greece. I studied, made and performed in a great many of them. I played Don Quixote under a mask. I write blogs about masks. (In Search of the Mask of Satori) I teach mask. And simultaneously I try to let masks teach me.
One of the places I came face to face with masks was on a Summer residency on the island of Hydra, one of the Saronic islands of Greece. I was making masks by day and performing Greek tragedies by night in a 4,000 year old out door amphitheater. When I died I looked up at the stage lights and I looked up at the stars. Simultaneously.
I wish my memory was better. I wish I could remember all the moments, stories, laughs, hikes, swims and discoveries I made that summer on Hydra. I can’t. But when memory fails, there’s poetry. Poetry lets us feel now what we felt then. Simultaneously.
Hydra is also the island that Leonard Cohen called home for many years. I was reading his collection Stranger Music a stones throw from where he originally composed many of the poems in it. I was reading it now as he was composing it then. The writer and the reader in different times but in the same place. Simultaneously.
Leonard Cohen said “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”
And now I find myself playing with masks again. Only this time it’s a pandemic. And the mask is not connecting me with the audience. It’s protecting me from the audience. and protecting the audience from me. Simultaneously.
Depressing. But it wasn’t always this way. And I have evidence. Maybe not the kind of evidence Leonard Cohen is talking about, but evidence enough for me. You see I can’t quite remember the details of my masked idyll on the isle of Hydra but there’s a poem I wrote the night before I left that takes me back to there, then even as I read it here, now. And for a few moments I can be the writer and the reader at different times, in different places in the same body. Simultaneously.
Poseidon
I hear your Neptune.
The sea murmurs its sweet Saronic song.
A fishing boat cuts a soft V in the iridescent plain.
A donkey brays.
The wine glass sweats.
There is a conspiracy afoot.
It is carried on the dry evening breeze and whispered to my skin.
Where is your toga? it asks.
You look ridiculous in modern clothes, It says.
I swim in your elixir where the time smoothed rocks- each one separate, perfect, holy- spiced with the black star bursts of those spiny sea urchins that are so ready to turn the errant toe into a speckled pin cushion.
A flag flutters your code words.
A plot is afoot.
Rock.
Sky.
Sea.
And Salt, the messenger.
Your evidence is everywhere.
In the calloused hands of the ferry boat captain you can read the palm of Odysseus.
In the watery eyes of the widow shuffling down a white washed alley sound the echoes of Medea’s silence, watching Jason flirt.
O Poseidon.
It’s the salt that speaks your name.
I feel you like I feel the salt drying on my skin.
That tightness against my pores.
That’s you.
I feel you like the sea salt on my food that stings so lovingly.
How did you get so perfectly sprinkled on this french fry?
Were you waiting all day in that shaker?
Just for me?
I tasted you earlier today when I dove off the cliff into your turquoise. You filled my mouth with the sharp tang of countless sunsets.
You burn a message to my lips in the cracks the wind has made.
You cauterize my wounds and heal my longing.
I feel you in my sweat.
A drop of you crawls between my shoulder blades.
The wind cools its trail.
You pool in the small of my back.
Your salt , Poseidon, is the residue of time.
It is the stain of the seaman’s toil.
The memory of hardship.
The remnant of the sun.
It is the remains of tears.
The last thing we’ll feel.
The first thing we’ll grieve.
I taste the salt of your Myth, Poseidon.
It is the dust of the sea.
-Ron Campbell, Summer 2009 and Spring 2020 simultaneously.
