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Greek to Me
by Michael Raysses
Social architecture is one of those topics of which I have little experience. Quite honestly, I don't know that I have even met a single social architect. They are a recessive bunch, because when I tried to contact the American Association of Social Architects, they weren't even listed in the phone book. I panicked. As I began to riff on the meaning of social architecture, I was reminded of Groucho Marx's statement that he never wanted to be in any group that would have him as a member. I instantly identified with that statement as it applies to groups and writing.
Most of us are born into our first group––family––life's version of five-card stud. You play the cards you're dealt. But with divorce, remarriage, and co-mingling of the family unit, life reshuffles those cards. You are constantly forced to re-examine them, hopefully coming to a deeper, more sophisticated understanding in the process.
Something of particular interest to me is how membership in one group oftentimes placed in you in another. My family, for instance, was big on church as a cultural hub. I'll never forget driving home from church on Sunday mornings, Greek music blaring from our car radio. Stopped at a traffic light, people in adjoining cars would crane their necks to see where that foreign sound was coming from, while I would shrink in my seat. I couldn't bear to see the bewildered look on their faces. My inability to be able to reconcile my tribe's music with the way it sounded to the uninitiated left me feeling acutely different, wishing I was more like everybody else.
Oddly enough, this desire to fit in prompted me to join groups as a kid. I reasoned that by joining these groups, I could study all the kids I wanted to be like, and then just mimic the way they acted. The first group I joined was the Y-Indian Guides, though, looking back, it should've been spelled “Why Indian Guides?” As in “Why would very young white boys dress like Indians, calling themselves by adoptive Indian-sounding names (I was “Spinach-In-His-Teeth”), all while reciting how they'd earned their wampum/allowance?” It was beyond me.
Because that wasn't surreal enough, though, I later joined another church-related group, the Sons of Pericles. It was a group for young Greek-American boys, ranging in age from their early teens into their early twenties.
Based on their activities, I figured Pericles loved to play basketball, pay lengthy tribute to the god of wine, and then play more basketball. It turns out he was a very wise ancient Greek statesman. But I wasn't a particularly athletic kid, and drinking didn't really have much allure for me at the time, so I was just thankful there weren't any togas involved.
I continued joining groups well into adulthood, never really feeling at one with any of them. Ironically, the one group I most readily identify with today is a group I unwittingly joined in the fourth grade. That's when I wrote my first play, “The Three Stooges in Valentine's Land.” (So much for my early influences.) I followed that up in the fifth grade by writing a short story about life in the frontier west. Inadvertently, I was joining a group I wasn't even aware of: writers.
It's taken forty-eight years to acknowledge my place within their ranks. When I started writing this column, for instance, I didn't see myself as a writer. I was an actor who intermittently had occasion to write. Then the column got into another paper. And another. Then a few years ago, I did something that went a long way to cementing the idea within my head that I was a member of the fraternity of scribes––I went to a convention for newspaper columnists. What is there about spending a weekend with a group of people, eating and drinking to excess, that really anchors your relationship? When I returned from the convention, I was so excited by rubbing elbows with my gifted newfound protégés, I was moved to get my writing to the next level, whatever that would be. That push resulted in me voicing the first audio version of this column, which aired on National Public Radio. I happened to be in the car when it debuted. Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic as the piece ended, the show's host said something that zung me like a lightning bolt: “Michael Raysses is a writer and actor living in Los Angeles.” As odd as this sounds, I was moved by the simple truth of that statement––I am a writer.
But being a member of the writer's fraternity is like being in a group dedicated to anarchy––there's a glaring sense of implied contradiction. It has to do with the strange place where writing and groups intersect: though they can both give life to ideas, they're both a lot like dying. No matter how many people you have around, when the moment of truth is at hand, you are essentially alone. As a writer, the group is nothing but a touchstone to hold for an instant so you can gird yourself for the inevitable isolation that writing requires. And as a person, the group functions as a vital part of understanding who you are as an individual by providing contrast, giving your life a context it wouldn't otherwise have.
On a deeper personal level, writing has taken me from being a kid who wanted to be like everyone else to being a man who wants to voice his individuality by illuminating the universal in us all, reconnecting with humanity in the process. Which is, of course, Greek to me. I'll bet Pericles would understand.
©2007 Michael Raysses. Michael Raysses, a contributor to National Public Radio has been recently published in The Right Words at the Right Time, Vol. 2: Your Turn! by Atria books. Email him at Greek2Me@ca.rr.com