John Milton and ME: A new play in progess

I've been working on a new play. Looks like it will be a one act, two person play. It is about John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and many other poems and essays. Paradise Lost is perhaps the most famous English epic poem read by almost nobody anymore. I began to read it a few years ago and was struck by how some of it resonated with me. So I began to read more about the man who wrote it and found he was a rebel with many causes, some political, some religious and others social.

His bride, half his age and a Royalist, left him and moved back with her parents, stimulating him to write a defense of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. He criticized the Church of England for its bishops and its dissimilarity to the early church of Biblical times. He wrote an impassioned plea for the right to express opinions and argued for freedom of the press. He supported the English revolution and wrote a justification for the trial and execution of the king if he were tyrannical and unjust. All of this in the 17th century when there was no freedom of speech and once could have his ears cut off and worse for saying such things.

He was fluent in all the European languages as welas in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He supported Oliver Cromwell who made him his secretary of foreign affairs..

After the death of Cromwell, and the restoration of the monarchy many of the supporters of Cromwell and advocates of the regicide were arrested, imprisoned, and often hung, drawn and quartered by the Royalists. Somehow John Milton simply spent some time in prison.

So my play finds Milton, old and blind, in prison, writing Paradise Lost. A younger poet and friend, Andrew Marvell visited him daily to record Milton's words on paper. Marvell had connections in high places and was advocating Milton be spared and released from prison so he could continue to write.

But even while in prison for doing so, Milton continued to write his radical ideas. Marvell tried to reason with John in order to get his old friend to tone it down if he ever hoped to get out of jail. He thought what John was writing would be seen as blasphemous and critical of the governement. This may seem odd to you because Paradise Lost was John Milton's retelling the Bible's story about Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Ah, there's the rub. Who the hero of Paradise Lost is unclear. Many have thought John Milton's protagonist is Satan himself. Certainly, there has been no more engaging and intelligent fictional character in all of literature. Milton's Lucifer even rivals the "villains" of the Batman stories.

Milton most often calls Satan by his other name: Lucifer. Lucifer, literally the bringer of light, or the enlightened one. Lucifer was also the ancient name of the planet Venus, the harbinger of light, the brightest star in the pre-dawn sky, announcing the Suns' arrival.

Although Angels are occasionally mentioned in the old testament, they are not mentioned in Genesis. It seems they were not part of the initial creation, and yet Satan must have preexisted or how could he tempt Eve with the apple? To Milton, he and other angels existed before the creation of the world. Much of what contemporary believers in angels think about angels may very well come from Milton's own pen and not from the Bible itself. At any rate, Milton wrote an account of a tremendous celestial war between Lucifer with his multitude of followers one the one hand and the angels that were loyal to God on the other. I found myself identifying with and rooting for Lucifer while reading Milton's description of this sky-shaking battle.

So, here we have a man who rebelled against the powers that be and justified a regicide, a killing of a king, writing about a rebellious angelic army attempting a Deicide, the killing of a god. Hardly a coincidence, is it?

learning to blog

My daughter Lauren is my teacher and tech adviser. Sometimes I feel I am too old a dog to learn new tricks. She is only 51, and an excellent teacher. But I am a slow learner.

I had to name my blog. Ever name I could come up with was "not available." I wanted the name to indicate my interest in theater, but also relate to my age, my past, my limited future. After many attempts, my son Greg, an actor turned math teacher, suggested exuentstageleft, and it was not only available but almost perfect – a stage direction: "everybody off the stage to the left" and by extension, a suggestion of leaving the "world's a stage" in my old age. LEFT seemed most appropriate considering my politics.

Lauren showed me her own blog: www.MathMakesSense.blogspot.com which has bells and whistles including a translator which can translate her text into many different languages, and a gadget that when activated reads her blog to you. Both of htese are free downloads. Isnt the internet wonderful?

In only one day I find myself hooked, line and sinker.

Why am I blogging?

Hi. I have been writing most of my life and I write something every day, so my daughter Lauren told me I ought to blog, I am about to have my 77th birthday, so you might imagine I hate the word "blog" but here I am nevertheless blogging. What have been writing all these years?

Well, lots of school work to start with. I spent six years in graduate school, so lots of term papers and theses. I have graduate majors in English, history and philosophy. A master's thesis was on David Hume's Theory of Criticism. All of the school papers have long been lost, thankfully.

So fast forward to my first (and only) novel, Time To Murder and Create. From the time I was 12 I wanted to be a novelist. I made numerous attempts in my late teens and twenties and never got beyond the first chapter. Seemed I labored over first chapters forever, wanting to write the Great American Novel. My early writing attempts were all stuffy, florid, pompous and strained. At the University of Chicago I had a great teacher, the novelist Richard Sterne. He suggested I write as I spoke. I have been doing that ever since. I wrote Murder and Create as an experiment. I told myself to forget about writing the Great American Novel and write a mystery novel. I gave myself an assignment: write 10 or more pages every day, whether I felt like it or not, and at the end of 3o days I should have a mystery novel. I think it was well written. A New York agent liked it and had a few suggestions. I followed her advice and resubmitted it. Then she had a few more suggestions, and then a few more. However, I one told her that a few of the characters in the story were based on actual people, and they had read the manuscript and were happy to be in it. But I guess this may have worried her, as she dropped me. And I dropped further attempts to publish it. Later I thought what she wanted me to do was to write a number of other mysteries with the same "detective" character. However, my character was myself.

You see, the thesis of the novel was this: A murder of a TV art critic was discovered in an art galery during an exhibition of an artist's sculpture. This critic had given a thumbs down review or the art on display. So the main suspect was the artist whose work was criticized.

Another critic, the main character in my novel, who liked the work on display very much, thought the murder was "created" as a "work of art." At the time, there was a lot of art being made which was extensions of artists bodies. Some of it was almost self destructive. Thinking like an art historian, he thought if he could attribute the art to an particular artist, he could thereby identify the murderer.

Well, you see I was the art critic/sleuth. I wrote art criticism for major art journals for several decades. Almost all of my published writings have been feature articles in Art International, artscanada, At New England and other art journals. I also wrote monographs and exhibition catalogs. My critical writings opened up opportunities to work in museums and art institutions, so as chief curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and subsequently director of other art galleries and venues, I continued to write about artists whose works I exhibited. So, you see, following the usual advice to young writers, when I wrote Murder and Create, I was writing "about what I knew."