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This is a brief column because graduation is upon me, the end-of-semester "T"-crossing and "I"-dotting that must be done to pass my MFA muster. So these are my graduation thoughts.
The May 2004 issue of Harper's contains an article by Nicholas Fraser on the recent dressing-down of the BBC over it's reporting about the "sexed-up" documentation Tony Blair used to dupe Britain into spending blood and treasure in Iraq. The article ends with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan's prediction that television (and, by extension, all media) would destroy literacy "and, consequently, history." Fraser goes on to say that McLuhan believed that "successive generations would acquire skills from television, but they wouldn't be skills capable of encouraging the notion of citizenship."
Against that onslaught, says Fraser, we have the BBC -- to be sure, "arrogant, pompous, sometimes less than fully comprehending" -- but, in the end, the "last bastion of intelligent speech and therefore of mass intelligence." It is "one of the free reliable maps of consciousness still available to us."
I would like to offer another "map," though, like the BBC, is, too, is often arrogant, pompous, and sometimes less than fully comprehending: theatre. Theatre is the only art form that has the capacity to break through the fog of media present-tense-ness that dims our minds and to insert us back into history, time, consciousness, constraint. Most theatre doesn't do this because it is mired in schematics that make it difficult to create a vital mass appeal out of it. But the machinery is there, the history is there, the beauty of it lies waiting for release -- we now need the cartographers that will make the map.
When it comes time to tip the tassel on May 13, I will have my protractor and ruler and vade mecum ready for my morning writing on May 14.
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