P.P.P.P.P.

Poetry, Prose, Photos, Partners, People

Memory is a convenient fiction, reflections are by definition distorting, or as I wrote somewhere, Hindsight is shifty-fifty.

You have arrived at the more personal, cogitating section. Through the years of this journey, I kept (and still keep) notebooks, sketches, essays and poems as a way of reflecting, questioning…allowing thoughts, feelings, I do not know I have, to reveal themselves. I have been married three times, and had at least four ‘significant other’ relationships. I was, for the most part, a serial monogamist, with a period in the late ‘80s of an incoherently consensual polyamory. Inevitably a difficult, at times gut-wrenching but blessed journey into the unknown. I wrote through the years to capture the joy, the turmoil, the pain, the questioning, the guilt and the regrets that come with second guessing.

These five separate chapters attempt to reflect an inner landscape of the path taken, tripping and sliding, not always chronologically, through the potholes and over the black ice of this personal journey.

Poetry is a piñata of emotional snapshots, significant personal relationships, fixed in moments of time. Highly subjective, but worth a gander.

Prose is a handful of essays, exploiting the presumed liberty of fiction, to explore, in a different medium, questions and choices.

Photos is a risibly perfunctory collection of snapshots over time.

Partners, again, with no pretence to objectivity, talks in various ways about love and, too often the hate that it can engender.

People is a collection of short character sketches of individuals who have had a significant impact on my life. Not puff pieces.

To the left is a portrait painted by celebrated Montreal artist, Silvia Ary, circa 1981…the matching portrait of actress Kate Trotter, both painted at the time she and I were living together in a third floor, 7 ½ Plateau Montreal apartment, (rent was $130, heated!), I gave to our daughter, Kathleen Trotter.

I love the portrait, it exposes a mad Russian artist streak in my soul. Kate never liked the portrait, for exactly that reason. A significant marker that our time together would be finite.

Ahhh, Silvia Ary, (née Berkovitch), dear Silvia, …I was privileged to be asked by her daughter Malka, to read Prospero’s farewell speech at Silvia’s funeral celebration. “Our revels now have ended…”

Remember the early NFB documentary on Leonard Cohen? He played himself, playing himself, playing the version of himself he was selling to the world at the time. A sublime obfuscation of his true self. At one point, as he is reclining naked in a bathtub, he writes, “caveat emptor” on the bathroom tiles. ”Buyer beware!” To you dear reader, I offer the same cautionary admonition. I believe, and why would I not, that I am being ruthlessly candid in my depiction of myself, and objective and somewhat less ruthless in characterizing those with whom I have crossed paths with on my journey… but that is highly likely only an illusion, the self-deception I needed to get on with writing this simulacrum of an autobiography.

I recently read Layne Coleman’s account of his life in Canadian theatre. Layne is one of the more decent, one of the more principled human beings in our theatre world. He writes beautifully, and his detail recall is astonishing, in fact rendered me envious. But when I closed the book I was left wanting for a serious analysis of our craft, of our theatre, of the ups and downs of Theatre Passe Mureille. His understanding of Hamlet the play and the role (which he played) was embarrassingly superficial. He confessed to needing the services of sex workers at times to survive his personal tribulations. Although he was overtly hard on himself throughout, yet, I came away with the suspicion his bio was merely an exercise in seeking forgiveness for having stolen his best friend’s girlfriend and rendering her into the love of his (Layne’s) life. Call me cynical. So what is the underlying agenda of my autobiography as splayed out over this web site? Yours to discern, beyond me to figure out.