The Immortals, Part 3

"If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed."

There's some Biblo-reasoning coming from one of America's greatest playwrights. His plays speak from the gurgling pipelines of misfortune, our eternal battle of emotions (Or, for a more literal image, please turn to the mythical river Styx, where tormented souls whirl round and round like they’re stuck in a giant toilet flush without ever going anywhere.).

Although early critics demeaned his works as being depressing, The Glass Managerie opened on Broadway in 1945 to instant success, shortly followed by his Pulitzer Prize winning A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others.

Because we’re suckers for broken things; we maim and are maimed, we mourn and all will meet the inevitable ‘Christmas-Yet-to-Come’ Scrooge hides under the covers for.

Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams III (1911 – 1983) wrote from the muddle of a dysfunctional upbringing in Columbus, Mississippi.

His father, a businessman, was abusive while his mother, a ‘Southern belle’ was the basis for many of his play’s female characters: hard-nosed and hysterical. His sister, Rose, was institutionalized for schizophrenia and Tennessee himself underwent psychological meltdowns, diphtheria, and drug abuse.

The sunny side up is that we don’t all have to dig up the crazy gene that often seems to be the side effect of geniuses.

Flecks of Tennessee’s voice is heard, as Blanche DuBois famously quotes in A Streetcar Named Desire: “Show me a person who hasn't known any sorrow and I’ll show you a superficial.”

After everything, it is Tennessee’s own handfuls of pain that spill into his works--the old cry of humankind--that rifts through crowded streets and sings along with loneliness like the ‘blue piano’. It is what magnetized audiences back then and, decades later, continues to speak our secrets for us.

Here’s We Have Not Long to Love, a poem from when Tennessee wasn't too busy tearing up the (stage) floor.

We have not long to love.

Light does not stay.

The tender things are those

we fold away.

Coarse fabrics are the ones

for common wear.

In silence I have watched you

comb your hair.

Intimate the silence,

dim and warm.

I could but did not, reach

to touch your arm.

I could, but do not, break

that which is still.

(Almost the faintest whisper

would be shrill.)

So moments pass as though

they wished to stay.

We have not long to love.

A night. A day....