The lesson

I do not like when it snows…I have seen snow very often, I do not like it…It creates a false impression of purity all this immaculate white, like a virgin bragging to be a virgin, a false impression of peace, of surprising silence like a piece of white velvet thrown on the wounds. I walked often in the snow, I walked on it since the sky was vaguely glued by the years devoted to build what was inexistent. I walked often on the white cover on my wounds.

The sky has changed into a new sky…I looked at my youth and I forgive myself… I am not anymore this angry boy… I do not want anymore to assassinate the truth, I want to remake the truth. The truth? The truth of what? The truth of the lies of our imagination?

The truth of the unfinished phantasms?  Forty years are passed since the mirror with a corner of blue sky*…Forty years?

Am I wise now? I wonder if wisdom leaves some bitterness on the possible truth. It is probably the reason why some people like snow, snow covers the bitterness of the truth.

My youth is far from me now, lost in the blurry memories, in the memory of the lost senses, but I keep for it tenderness full of stupor. The stupor to see that it is not anymore, that I am somebody else built by life, designed by others’ vision…

My youth, you have disappeared in the mist of life, in the path of what we call existence. I have been recreated by the look of the others, I became another… Am I still capable or creating a new world like I believe I was? Am I still capable of reinventing myself? Or did I fall in the impossibility to be myself?

They always want to know talking about my novel*, is this all truth? Your life? Is it TRUE? TRUE? What does that mean TRUE?

Everything is true…everything is invented…

There is only one truth, the one we want…

You are a tormented soul…a tormented soul? Not at all… Only a mind searching for the meaning of all this, the lost purpose of the eternity of life…

My youth was not tormented, on the contrary, my youth was capable of taming adversity, capable of staying strong and whole.

I miss my youth, I admire my youth…I miss its strength, I miss its passion, and I miss its vision. Forty years have passed since my decision to start again, to turn the page, to go conquer a new world…Where all these years went, they went faster that the years of my youth lost to try to understand, lost to try to be alive.

Has the meaning of life changed since my youth? It seems that I do not really understand it anymore…all has to be acquired immediately, without real sacrifice. We deserve the best right away, the world has replaced knowledge of humanity by knowledge of pushing buttons… It is all right for anything, for the people behind a desk, but it is not all right for artists, for performers, for people who are the Porte parole of being a human being full of emotions to give to others.

Why are we so afraid to share emotions, to be vulnerable, to have feelings?

An artist should be delivering to others the human soul, the feelings and the weaknesses of being one…all this acquired by life experiences or by acquiring it thru the study of the ones who knew.

Yes, some people have this talent of knowing at birth, they are the lucky ones, they are the chosen, and they are a gift.

Others have difficult times and dramas and failures and tragedy to use for their art.

BUT MOST OF US, THE GREAT MAJORITY IS NOT AS LUCKY.

We have to acquire this, to find equivalents.

Does that mean we have to read Pascal, Shakespeare, Plato, Nietzsche, Joyce, Faulkner, Sartre, Camus, Arrabal, Chekov, Gogol, Pirandello, Beckett, Malaparte, Dante, Ovid, Diderot. ?

And Mozart, Brahms, Picasso, Da Vinci, the impressionists, Beethoven, Rodin etc…

(These names are given as an example, the list should be five hundreds or five thousands)

Yes, we have to…we have to acquire somewhere the necessary material and then we will be capable of giving it back to those who came to live an experience watching us and listening to us.

In 1968, I was performing in Paris Les caprices de Marianne by Musset… I was the part of Octave and sharing a dressing room with another young actor who was the character of Celio…we lived a great period of rehearsals and became friends.

One night before the performance, the sage manager knocked at our door to tell us that Jean Luis Barrault was in the audience.

I almost fainted, Jean Louis Barrault, the pope of theater in France, the reference for drama, the dream of each young actor to be invited to perform with his troupe. I was so nervous that my hand could not apply the make up necessary to have an acceptable face for a “Jeune premier”, my friend in the dressing room did not say a word, and was whistling as always before a performance.

After the performance, we hear a knock at the door of the dressing room; I open the door and Barrault in front of us. He is very short, very skinny, very wrinkled.

He enters the room and says:

-        Congratulations, both of you did well, I can see that both of you worked a lot on your characters, a few things to adjust, a few things to correct, but good, very good.

-        Monsieur Barrault, please tell us how to improve?

-        You believe there is a recipe? That I can give you in a few words how to become PERFECT? (The world perfect was almost screamed)

-        Where should we start?

-        Read all Musset, all Chateaubriand, all Alfred De Vigny, and may be you will understand what it is to be a romantic character… have a good evening.

He turned his back to us and went to the door, opened the door and was almost gone, he stopped, turned and said:

“ Yes, both of you did very well, but one of you has a lot of talent” and he left.

I was so angry by that last line that I threw a bottle of water against the door and screamed, “Go to hell, old fart”

My friend in the room, laughed of a real laugh for a long time, punctuating his laughing by words like “ fantastic, so funny, great, and I really love him”

For the next three weeks in the dressing room, I was quiet, and brooding, and uneasy… My colleague was chatting, telling jokes and in a great mood…

By the way his name was Gerard De Par…. 

It did not take me long to realize after that, who was the one with a lot of talent, while I was still performing in theaters in France, my friend became a big movie star.

But Barrault did not forget me, 2 years later, he hired me as an assistant director for his prestigious company, I stayed for 3 productions and that is the ONLY experience I had all my life as an assistant director.

But I tried to understand why he had more talent than me… or at least capable of using his talent better than me… after all, I certainly had had a more eventful life than he did…but nobody in the audience except a handful of people knows our life.

I had more degrees than him, and I was more cultured than him…so what was it?

I asked him once:

“Gerard, why are you better than me? Why are you totally Celio and I am approaching Octave?”

“ Bernard, I know that you had a difficult life and I know that you are very cultured, but when you act instead of using all your knowledge and your accumulated emotions to become the character, you sometimes let your knowledge and your emotions dictate your mood…Use them, do not let them dominate you.”

“ Gerard, before the rehearsals did you really prepare like Barrault told us?”

“ Oh yes, I read all Musset and all Chateaubriand and Alfred de Vigny, and I made some research about what it is to love without being loved and I worked on all the situations of the play in my real life…that was what Barrault called talent, it is only the use of accumulated knowledge.”

With years, I lost contact with my friend but still see him as a vivid image.

Have real experience or/and acquired knowledge, use it and do not let it dominate you…what a lesson that was, and even more for a director than a performer.

* This refers to my novel “the shattered sky “, If you have not read it, we will be happy to send you a copy free of charge.