ESCAPE
The wholeheartedness of Andre Gregory and avoiding the exhausting trap of the ingenuine.
In private conversation, I’ve narrated to fellow friends and artists the difficulties of juggling the overwhelming responsibilities of work, art and family, all while married to a fellow artist who is just as creative and busy as I. To this, my fellow poet friend John Berry provided a quote from David Whyte’s “Ten Questions That Have No Right to Go Away” of a monk stating, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”
All this coincided with watching the 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre. The shortness of an online post is too little to properly describe my reaction, but I found in Andre Gregory a path to entering deeper into vivacity and, by extension, wholeheartedness. Much of the movie is spent with Andre describing to his friend, Wallace Shawn, his adventures aiming towards feeling a deeper sense of living. He participates in revolutionary experimental theatrical ventures that strip away our conventions to try to get to the real and spontaneous human.
At a certain point he compares the grand artistic and bustling hive that is New York City to a sort of prison built by the prisoners, a monument to the "boring” but soul-sucking rat race, he himself quoting a 84-year old English tree expert he met in Findhorn Scotland. This tree expert’s guidance was direct:
“Then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree. And he said ‘This is a pine tree,’ put in my hand and he said, ‘escape before it's too late.’”
Some philosophers, like Socrates, have described the human condition as an attempt at remembering things we have forgotten, and this is the mark of a wise human. I say further that it is a remembering that breaks through the machinations of the day-to-day, machinations seeking our forgetfulness - the ones that encourage us to choose petty competition over wholeheartedness, material goods over spiritual art, and meaning over expediency.
This "escape" is never-ending, but it requires our consistent but gentle effort. Find and grow your tree, your life, your being - before it is too late.
(This post was heavily inspired by Akira the Don’s “ESCAPE.” Go listen today, right now, you owe it to yourself.)
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"Depth of Perception" - June 2023
Camera/Film - Fujifilm QuickSnap (400 ISO)