THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

November 25, 2021

 

 

This is a theater piece I wrote a while back. I performed it once, at the First Unitarian Church of Portland. (J.S.)

 

 

Goldfinches!

a theatrical monologue

 

this is a story about stories

 

and about something that we might call “the storyless state”

 

joseph campbell wrote a book called the hero with a thousand faces about a kind of story that is found throughout history and all over the world that he called “the hero’s journey”

 

we can use the hero’s journey as a metaphor for our life

 

and i would like to use it as the structure for this evening’s entertainment

 

the hero’s journey begins with the call to adventure

 

we have all already answered the call to adventure by coming here tonight

 

we could have stayed home and watched tv

 

but instead we left the comfort and safety and security of our homes—for what?

 

we don’t know

 

and that is where the hero journeys: into the unknown

 

into a dark wood, or a cave, or to the bottom of the sea

 

one of the main things about the unknown is that you don’t know what you will find

 

i answered the call to adventure by deciding to write and perform a theatrical monologue

 

why would i want to undertake such a thing?

 

that brings me to a little story about my life…

 

when i graduated from high school, i went to college just like i was supposed to

 

but i had never liked school

 

it always felt like a prison to me

 

one day i realized that going to school was optional

 

and i could opt not to go

 

which i did

 

now that is the age when you are supposed to choose a career and get with the program

 

but i graduated from maui high school in 1969, during the hippie era

 

we are very prone to conformity at that age—maybe throughout life—and somehow i found myself conforming to the hippie form of “non-conformity”

 

with long hair and oddball clothing and bare feet and all that

 

that was how i wanted to present myself to the world

 

i felt more at home in this costume than in a white shirt, suit and tie

 

now, “hippie” is not really a career choice and in fact, i neglected to choose an occupation

 

i’ve held a variety of odd jobs—i once spent 18 months testing beet pulp pellets for hardness, durability and fine particle content

 

for many years i found the familiar question “what do you do?” to be difficult to answer

 

now that i’m old, i can look back on my life and ask: “what is my job?”

 

or, better yet, “what did i come here to do?”

 

and the answer, i think—or at least one answer is: to gather people together

 

and so that is why i had the hare-brained idea of writing and performing a theatrical monologue

 

it’s a trick to get people to gather together

 

and here we are

 

so, what happens after the hero answers the call to adventure?

 

he or she goes into the wilderness—the unknown—on a quest for something

 

and sometimes you know what you are seeking and sometimes you don’t

 

but in the unknown you always find something

 

and typically, the hero encounters obstacles or difficulties

 

and meets magic helpers

 

and finds a treasure—which is probably guarded by a dragon or something

 

and the hero kills the dragon or at least tricks it

 

and steals the treasure

 

and returns home with something of value—not just for himself or herself—but for everyone

 

now here’s an interesting thing: each one of us has treasure within

 

each one of us is the treasure

 

so, why do we have to go down into a cave or to the bottom of the sea to find it?

 

well, that’s a good question

 

here’s a story that is found in many cultures:

 

before we are born, we have a special gift

 

and in the process of being born, we lose the gift

 

and it is our task to find out what our gift is and then give it to everyone

 

for example, you might have a gift of music

 

and not know it

 

and you need to discover that you have it before you can share it with others

 

but if you do, your gift blesses everyone

 

another version of this story is:

 

when we are born, we forget who we are

 

and who we are is god

 

and we have to re-discover this

 

we have to remember what has been forgotten

 

the greek word for this is “anamnesis”—remembering what has been forgotten

 

so that is one version of our hero’s journey—we have to go to the bottom of the sea, or to the first unitarian church, or wherever, to remember who we are

 

and we have to do this every day

 

going to sleep every night is like dying

 

and every morning we wake up and it’s a new day

 

we have been reborn

 

and it’s great if we were happy yesterday, but it doesn’t really help us to be happy today

 

and we need to find happiness today

 

and what worked yesterday will not work today

 

we have to try something new

 

and where is the new found?

 

in the unknown

 

and so, in a way, we all may have thought we were coming here just to entertain or be entertained, but actually we came here because we have to save our own life

 

we have to be reborn

 

now, as the storyteller, or entertainer, i guess it’s supposed to be my job to come up with something really fantastic

 

you know, the greatest theatrical monologue you’ve ever heard, or whatever

 

but i’m not too worried about that, because, as far as i’m concerned, i’ve already done my job, which is to gather us together

 

and i don’t have to bring a great treasure, because you are, we are, the treasure

 

and i have a kind of foolproof method of creating a magical, fantastic, wonderful experience, which is: at the end of my monologue, we will have a dialogue

 

and a dialogue circle cannot fail to be a perfect thing

 

and so i’d like to reassure anyone who is worried that this evening will be something less than perfect—that is not gonna happen!

 

it’s gonna be perfect

 

because however lame or inadequate my “entertaining” monologue is, we will all have an opportunity to remedy that together in the dialogue circle

 

okay, back to our hero’s journey, which is our journey into story and storylessness

 

william butler yeats said that each person has their own myth and that one of your jobs as a poet, or just as a human being, is to find out what your myth is

 

that goes back to the idea of remembering what has been forgotten

 

i’d like to talk about a couple kinds of stories, which i call:

 

identity and mythos

 

identity refers to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are

 

and mythos refers to our stories about the world

 

now i am going to tell you a little story about my mythos

 

many years ago, when i was young, i read a story by fyodor dostoevsky called “the dream of a ridiculous man”

 

i loved the story

 

it really resonated with me, as they say

 

here’s the story:

 

there’s a guy who is depressed

 

life has no meaning for him

 

he feels that nothing makes any difference

 

he decides to kill himself

 

he buys a gun

 

he’s just waiting for the right moment to do the deed

 

and he’s walking home and he sees a star in the sky and decides: “tonight is the night”

 

but then a little girl comes up to him and wants his help

 

her mother is dying or is in some very bad situation and the little girl is crying and trying to get this guy to come with her

 

but he doesn’t help the little girl

 

he goes home so that he can commit suicide

 

but he can’t get the little girl out of his mind

 

and he feels like he has to figure something out before he dies

 

and while he’s sitting there, trying to figure it all out he falls asleep and dreams a dream

 

and this is his dream:

 

he dreams that he kills himself

 

and he goes to another planet, which is like earth, except that it is paradisal

 

there is no fear or war or hatred

 

it is a world where everyone lives in love

 

and in his dream he ruins everything in this perfect world

 

he brings about a fall, very much like what happens in the story of adam and eve

 

and the love planet gets worse and worse until it resembles our own

 

and then he wakes up

 

and he has a very strong feeling that he has seen the truth—that our life could be completely transformed, it could be perfect, if only we would love each other

 

so that’s dostoevsky’s story

 

and i liked it so much that i decided to perform it

 

but it seemed too short for an evening in the theater, so i added a piece that i had written called “columbus”

 

i wrote columbus in 1992, for the 500^th anniversary of columbus’ first voyage to the western hemisphere

 

i grew up with the story that columbus was a great hero who had discovered america

 

in my version there’s this guy who is drunk and he claims to be christopher columbus

 

and it isn’t explained whether this man is delusional, or if he is the spirit of christopher columbus, back from the dead, or whatever

 

anyhow, this christopher columbus is self-medicating with alcohol because he is in a lot of pain

 

in his version, he didn’t discover anything—people already lived here

 

and they were a beautiful people—the taino—and they lived without war, in a kind of paradise

 

and he brought about a fall

 

the taino are no more

 

and my blubbering drunken christopher columbus wanted everyone to know that he had seen and understood something—that people can be beautiful and innocent and loving

 

he had seen it with his own eyes

 

and it was only after i had put these two pieces together that i realized that they had the same theme:

 

paradise, fall, and a vision of a possible return to paradise

 

and i thought: “maybe this is my myth”

 

people tend to think of paradise as something that may have existed in the past, or which might exist in the future—maybe even after we die

 

but paradise is this world in which we live—just as it is

 

this gathering is paradise

 

and everyone sitting here is perfect

 

is paradise

 

so it seems to me

 

this is my mythos—the story i tell myself about the world

 

now it may be objected: “how can this world be paradise when it is obviously all screwed up?”

 

good question

 

instead of arguing whether the world is in fact perfect or whether it is all screwed up, i would like to explore the sense in which it seems to me that the world is perfect

 

imagine, for a moment, a goldfinch

 

a goldfinch is perfect

 

a goldfinch does not need to be improved

 

the very idea is absurd

 

everything is like the goldfinch

 

each one of us is a goldfinch

 

perfect

 

this is my thesis

 

my mythos

 

um, so where are we on our hero’s journey this evening?

 

okay, so you answered the call to adventure by coming here

 

and your guide, your magic helper, on this journey through the dark wood of this evening is me

 

an unreliable guide!

 

and now we’re lost!

 

but according to the unreliable guide, the trickster-helper, that’s okay

 

according to me, getting lost is a perfectly acceptable variant of the hero’s journey

 

let’s take an example from alice in wonderland

 

alice says that she feels like maybe she’s lost and wonders which path she should take

 

and the cheshire cat asks her where she is going

 

and she replies that she doesn’t know

 

and he says: “then it doesn’t matter which path you take”

 

and that’s kind of like us

 

except that we don’t need to get anywhere, because we are already here

 

that’s another common story theme

 

the bold adventurer travels the world and ends up returning home and finding the treasure under his or her own hearth

 

hearth equals heart

 

that’s where our treasure is

 

not far away

 

and what is the point of this theatrical monologue?

 

it is to go forth and return home

 

to the silence which preceded the story

 

the world is always larger than our picture of the world

 

our descriptions and explanations are like cartoons

 

it’s like the difference between looking at a postcard of multnomah falls and standing in front of multnomah falls

 

or as mark twain said: the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning

 

in this analogy, my “entertaining” theatrical monologue is the lightning bug

 

and what is the lightning?

 

you are the lightning

 

i am the lightning

 

the lightning is us—just as we are

 

words are useful in reminding us of the inadequacy of words

 

the gold that each of us came here to find, whether we knew it or not, is each other

 

we tend to believe that the stories we tell ourselves are true

 

the friendly person lives in a friendly world

 

the fearful person lives in a dangerous world

 

we imagine a world and then we live in that world

 

and who is the person who lives in this imagined world?

 

i think it works something like this:

 

when we are born, we cannot speak or understand what people are saying to us

 

but very quickly we get the hang of it, and by the time we are four—even earlier—we are quite fluent in speaking and understanding the language that our parents speak

 

as we grow up we learn whether we are a boy or a girl, whether we are smart or stupid, whether we are beautiful or unattractive, whether great things are expected of us, or whether we’ll never amount to much

 

by our early twenties we should have everything figured out:

 

we might be a beautiful republican woman

 

or an angry environmentalist

 

we could be a skater, a scientist, or a sinner

 

a buddhist, a baptist, an atheist, a plumber, a poet, or a certified public accountant

 

we might be fat, depressed, friendly, ambitious, lazy, sexy, shy, anxious, optimistic, pessimistic

 

but whatever we have become, whatever we believe, we are sort of stuck with it

 

it’s impressive and amazing that we can create an identity and a mythos

 

it’s absolutely necessary that we do this

 

but it becomes a kind of prison, from which it seems there is no escape

 

we are fictional characters, living in fictional worlds of our own creation

 

end of story?

 

well, sort of

 

because this is prelude to the storyless state

 

in addition to our very impressive ability to think and to speak, we have the wonderful ability to be still

 

to be awake and alert

 

each one of us is nourished by a silence that has no beginning or end

 

not confined within our descriptions, explanations, thoughts, memories, stories and imaginings

 

fearless, loving, carefree

 

not in the world, we are the world

 

a world beyond our ken

 

where everything and everyone is miraculous

 

perfect

 

like a raincloud, a stone

 

a goldfinch

 

thank you                                                                                                            

 

 

 

—Johnny Stallings