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Greek to Me
Phantom Limbs
by Michael Raysses
One of my favorite writers is Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek and the infamous Last Temptation of Christ. Both books raised towering questions, flinging their characters into the bottomless maw those questions posed. Kazantzakis tried to reconcile the sacred as it collided with the profane, glancing off grace, bouncing furiously between sanity, delirium and malignant resignation in the process. In short, he searched for the nexus that connected heaven and earth.
His words laid me open, fueling my desire to actively live my life as a byproduct of reading about how others had led theirs. And life never felt more vital than when I was onstage.
Though all the world may be a stage, that maxim isn’t readily apparent when you’re young. That’s especially true if you’re physically small—everything feels outsized; you feel dwarfed by the world. And if you don’t elevate yourself, you’ll somehow be swallowed by it all. So you seek higher ground. You search for a stage.
Very early on, I learned the value of laughter. I literally remember the first time I heard my extended family laughing hysterically at a story told by one of my uncles as we all sat around the Sunday dinner table, transporting them in the process. That was the first time I realized that maybe I wanted to be the one to move people to that place.
In that moment, a seed was planted. An idea took root and my love affair with performing was born.
My baptism came by way of the Greek school play I was conscripted into. The play was set in a barnyard; I was cast in the role of a piglet. My monologue, loosely translated, went like this: “Today I am a piglet. Tomorrow, with the grace of God, I might be sausage.” That brought the house down. What struck me most sharply though was how people’s responses informed my future efforts. Performing was a lot more interactive than I knew, which only made it even more seductive.
Now, branches that were once muted were fully extended, with new buds constantly forming.
Greek school plays gave way to high school musicals, which led to making some short films. The stages morphed and multiplied, but the underlying joy was always there, waiting to be tapped into.
In college, my focus on performing dimmed. Distracted by school and being free of family ties, I wanted to see who I was without accommodating the formal desire to perform. And who I was became manifest: the Class Clown/Village Idiot, a role that still paid homage to the art of laughter.
But after law school and practicing law for a year in Chicago, I refocused on the obvious.
Stand-up comedy, improvisation, Non-Equity Theater—all became tributaries that fed into the white-water of performing. It was a heady time that culminated in acting in a play based on a book written by Oliver Sacks, the world-famous neurologist. Dr. Sacks was at the premiere and was generous enough to single me out for praise. That experience upped the performance stakes, prompting my move to Los Angeles.
But L.A. proved to be the ultimate mirage, shimmering with the palpable prospect. That is, until I actually got here, when the fantasy drained into the ground without a trace. Despite minor inroads into TV and feature films, the only experience I had that meant anything came in an extraordinary original play in an obscure theater. This bit of dramaturgy was full of moments that hooked the audience in ever-increasing degrees and circles, so that by the play’s denouement, they were lifted then dropped unceremoniously, by the playwright’s deft hand. I was onstage for the scene that executed an exquisite veronica in which the playwright’s words formed a cape that she used to divert the charging audience’s collective hope into a shared grief. Every disappointment, every indignity suffered while pursuing an acting career was washed away in the surge of emotion that poured from the house onto the stage those nights.
It’s now been ten years since that time; I ask myself what I have to replace that feeling. The closest thing I can find is something I discovered recently when I heard some live music at a small obscure venue not unlike the theater I performed in way back when. The artists who played aren’t household names, but their talent and zeal flopped off them like the sweat that was visible from the back of the room. As I listened, I felt parts of me inexplicably tingle, appendages that had either fallen away from disuse or that I had inadvertently lopped off, were now resonant with a profound sense-memory. All I could do was be grateful for the sensation.
Driving home that night, Kazantzakis’ quest for that which reconciled the inscrutable mystery of life finally took form for me. That which links the heavens with the earthly is a simple tree: with roots that bore deep into the earth, a trunk that dares to house a heart that strains to beat, and branches that caress the heavens above. We are those trees, phantom limbs and all.
Michael Raysses is a writer/actor/National Public Radio commentator living in Los Angeles. E-mail him at MichaelRaysses@hotmail.com.