Tennessee Williams

Let me again set this into perspective. In the largest strategy we've been lecturing here for six years on the shape of Western civilization. And the basic theme is that we do not know the shape of Western civilization. And the reason that we do not know it is because the ideational structures which are used to assess the shape are all contemporary. And that contemporary vision skews the past enormously. It's like the map that you see sometimes. The New Yorker's view of the United States. Manhattan Island is about a third of it. New Jersey is here. There's a little tower, that’s Chicago, and way out there is Hollywood and San Francisco, and that's about it. Well our contemporary ideational understanding of Western civilization is skewed somewhat like this. So that we cannot use the ideational structures which are available to us first off; we can use them later on. But in order to get the real terrain, the real geography of history as it were we have been moving from person to person from Homer up to the present day, patiently. We've done about four hundred lectures. And as we have moved from person to person keeping them in somewhat lumped groups, somewhat recognizable forms, we have discovered that almost all of the major figures - interesting significant figures - are now not appreciated, not understood in terms that would be appropriate for them. And we have found this to be the case over and over again. But we have also discovered that there are certain blind spots, certain errors, certain individuals, who are less understood or rather understood in a more skewed way than others.

Three different sets of figures fall into this category and discovering this is rather shocking because it's like Jung devising the word association test early in the 20th century and finding that by using an evenly spread language structure and applying it to a population of people that there are patterns of words for which there are no associations. The point of the word association test being everyone has associations for words but when you don't have what stops the reaction, what stops the association? And if those words that have no immediate association make a pattern then whatever has stopped the association of any particular word adds up to this gestalt, this pattern. And from this came the discovery that there are indeed empirically feeling-toned complexes that stop association and displace the natural association by something mental. And if the mental shape is strong enough it distorts reality, it distorts the personality, it distorts nature and one becomes clinically neurotic.

We have discovered that in our time late in the 20th century we are chronically neurotic in terms of history. We are in a real bind. As individuals when we are sensitive to this we think it's our problem. But actually the personal problems of our time are dwarfed by the civilized problems of our time. We are trying to breathe in an avalanche of undigested significance and the only way that we can do that is to shelter ourselves with bubbles of isolation. And so the alienation in our time is actually a very natural reaction to the real conditions that obtain now the three periods of history that show a suppression of free association of natural perspective. The first one, the deepest one, is the period from about 150 BC until about 50 AD. We have almost no clear understanding of that era of persons in that era completely blurred. And what is significant about this is that that era reformed all of the basic universal images which still operate within us. All of the great major world religions which still obtain were made at that time: Christianity, Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, religious Taoism. This was the most formative period in human history in terms of precipitating out new forms - especially religious forms - of understanding so that we have a block exactly where the largest outlooks, the largest views and envisioning of human nature and experience came together.

The second block is about six hundred years ago. Back in the 1200s, the late 1200s, the early 1300s is a complete blank for most people. And of course this period in Western history was the period where there was a shift from the first empirical scientific understanding to the mystical implications of what that reality turned out to be. The late 1200s was the first blossoming of empirical science: Roger Bacon. And the early 1300s are all the great Western mystics: Meister Eckhart, Ruysbroeck, the English mystics, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich. They're all there so that we do not have an appreciation of the most crucial transformation necessary for our times, the transformation from an empirical scientific envisioning of detail to the mystical apperception of the crowning shape of the whole. In view of the detail now these two periods of time correspond with the oldest with what we would call now colloquially almost the archetypal level; that the archetypal level of the collective unconscious though these are eternal images have a precipitated form that happened about twenty-one hundred years ago. And that the so-called stream of unconscious, the subconscious, has a lot of elements from about six hundred years ago. And the current time, the last hundred years, two hundred years, is almost a complete blank now, especially the period from about two hundred years ago up to say about seventy, seventy, or sixty years ago. We can remember the last fifty years somewhat but after that it becomes blurred.

And these three areas are absolutely crucial for understanding the future for understanding the 21st century because the 21st century will only happen if these three areas are brought into a synchronization. Because it's only by the synchronization that the human person can come into focus in terms of the real energy patterns and purposeful structures which are in us which are in the civilization that we have to really deal with. All this is prologue. It's necessary to say several times because I realize that it's such a large battlefield that it's easy to lose track.

Now in this development in Western history, the United States occupies the place of a crown jewel. It is not any particular tradition but it is the confluence of all the traditions so that the United States is a very peculiar entity. It has specifically for its content interrelationality. Rather than content per se, the interrelation between several or many traditions and contents. The first American to understand this was Benjamin Franklin. He is the first American, he is the first one to understand that he was not English, that he was very peculiar, and that in fact he was not a German Rosicrucian, he was not an English empiricist, he wasn't anything in particular. And so he did what Socrates did because Socrates very much the same kind of individual. He realized only by continually to grow and expand as a person could he discover what he was. And in doing so Franklin solved the problem in a dynamic fashion instead of coming to a belief about himself which would have been egotistical he came to a process of personal growth. Which as he grew more cosmic and older became almost the equivalent of what we would call selfless.

So that Benjamin Franklin is a very great universal citizen of a new world order. He was the first one. There just wasn't anyone else. The closest person to Benjamin Franklin was Leibniz. But Leibniz developed his mind, whereas Franklin developed his character. And Leibniz’s mind is gorgeous, but Franklin's life is beautiful. And the only person that Franklin could pass on his life quality to was Thomas Jefferson. When you read Franklin's writings and his letters towards the end of his life in France he had been handling. He was the Minister plenipotentiary for the United States all during the Revolutionary War. He's the one that held the colonies who were now independent together. Without Franklin getting money for the people without him sending Lafayette and sending various generals we would not have won the Revolutionary War. It was not won by battles on the battlefield. It was won because Franklin individually held together the idea and presented it as a human reality to the courts of Europe especially in France. And at the end of his stay he was worried who's going to replace me? He was getting on towards 80 and you start to notice the pride and the pleasure in his letter saying, “Soon Mr. Jefferson will be here and then I can go home.”

We have seen that that whole tradition fell. It went underground in the 1830s. That the United States began to suffer amnesia about its origins and its true nature in the 1830s, and that that has continued up to the present day. And that it is only a thin line of individuals, you could count them on a couple of hands, who have kept that tradition alive, who understood. People like Lincoln who just briefly as a beacon held that vision together. People like Whitman who were able to sense it and express it somewhat and put it out. But we have found that in our time in our lifetime there have been some tremendous Americans who have understood this most esoteric and delicate elegant relational matrix. The poets E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens; the novelist William Faulkner. But they paid a tremendous price because trying to become conscious of this trying to live this is full of precariousness and pressure. And tonight we have someone who almost got there and was broke under the pressure, who was smashed by the enormity of his realization. And this person is Tennessee Williams.

Tennessee Williams is THE playwright of the United States. His life is a miserable thing. It is a plunge into madness. But he left a legacy of plays which, if we can see in some kind of a cycle, give us a real insight into what is precarious about us, what is precarious now about the moving point of Western civilization. I'm going to try and look at five plays tonight. I was going to give you a little bit about William's life. Let me just say that it was miserable. And let's let it go at that. The five plays that I want to take into a cycle: the first one is A Streetcar Named Desire which came out in 1947; the second one is as Tennessee would have pronounced it Camino Real (Camino Real we say, Camino Real he said; let's pronounce it the American way, the Royal Road which came out in 1953); the third one is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which came out in 55; the fourth one is Orpheus Descending which came out in 57; and the fifth one is Night of the Iguana which came out in 61. From 1947 to 1961 Tennessee Williams struggled valiantly to try to save out of the vision of the agony of his life, dramatizations of what the central dynamic was. And he could do that because he could exteriorize it melodramatically but when it came to interiorize it humanly he broke. And it's a terrible thing to know that human beings break that badly. It just gives us the courage and the privilege to help each other better when we can realizing how fragile we really are when we try to become personal in this time, in this milieu.

Streetcar was [a] revolutionary play when it came out. It was received instantly as a classic. It was produced by Irene Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, presented at the Barrymore Theater in New York, December 3rd, 1947. Marlon Brando was Stanley Kowalski, Kim Hunter Stella, Karl Malden was Harold Mitchell, and Jessica Tandy was Blanche Dubois. Now, Streetcar does not have acts, it has scenes, It has eleven scenes. Tennessee takes a man and a woman who have established a human relationship between themselves but that there is a discrepancy. She is intelligent and he is passionate and they have found a way to live where her care for his passion and his respect for her intelligence have somehow been woven together so that they can live together, they can be together. And they have a child that's going to be coming. Into this scene moves the sister Blanche who is fading beauty, who is ex-schoolteacher, who comes into the scene almost mysteriously like an arrow shot from a negative cupid and it seems to sour the whole situation. Her presence there begins to split Stella away from Stanley. And Stanley being the masculine energy seeks to puncture through the tension, to penetrate through the armor that's being generated, and to find the cause. And the cause is something in Blanche.

Blanche in Scene five, talking to Stella. Blanche says, “I [was never] hard or self-sufficient enough. When people are soft – soft people have got to [court the favor of hard ones Stella, have got to be seductive] – put on soft colors, the colors of butterfly wings, and [glow make a little temporary magic just in order to pay for one night's shelter. That's why I've been not so awfully good lately. I've run for protection, Stella. From under one leaky roof to another leaky roof because it was storm, all storm, and I was caught in the center. People don't you see? Men don't, don't even admit your existence unless they're making love to you. And you've got to have your existence admitted by someone if you're going to have someone's protection. And so the] soft people have got to shimmer and glow – …put a – paper lantern over the light… [but I'm scared now, awfully scared.] I don't know how much longer I can turn the trick.” “It [wasn't] enough to be soft. You've got to be soft and attractive. And I – I'm fading now.” And in the play the directions are. “The afternoon has begun to fade to dusk” - as she says this, and, “Stella goes into the bedroom… turns on the light under the paper lantern. [and] She holds a bottled soft drink in her hand.” Blanche says, “Have you been listening to me?” And Stella says, “I don't listen to you when you're being morbid!” But she has heard, she has heard.

Later on in Scene Eight, the conversation now, the dynamic of the play has developed considerably, and now it's Blanche and Stanley. Blanche says, “Let me see, now… I must run through my repertoire! Oh, yes – I love parrot stories! Do you all like parrot stories? Well, this one's about the old maid and the parrot. This old maid, she had a parrot that cursed a blue streak and knew more vulgar expressions than Mr. Kowalski!” And Stanley says, “Huh.” Blanche says, “And the only way to hush the parrot up was to put the cover back on the cage so it would think it was night and go back to sleep. Well, one morning the old maid had just uncovered the parrot for the day – when who should she see coming up the front walk but the preacher! Well, she rushed back to the parrot and slipped the cover back on the cage and then she let in the preacher. And the parrot was perfectly still, just as quiet as a mouse, but just [when] she was asking the preacher how much sugar he wanted his coffee – the parrot broke the silence with a loud – (she whistles) – and [she] said ‘God damn, but that was a short day!’” So, “(She throws back her head and laughs. Stella also makes an ineffectual effort to seem amused. Stanley pays no attention to the story but reaches way over the table to spear his fork into the remaining chop which he then eats with his fingers.)” And Blanche needling, “Apparently Mr. Kowalski was not amused.” Stella says, “Mr. Kowalski is too busy making a pig of himself to think of anything else!”

He's no longer her man. He's Mr. Kowalski. So Stanley says, “That's right, baby.” Stella says, “Your face and fingers are disgustingly greasy. Go and wash up and then help me clear the table.” She shifted her stance to Blanche's view of her own husband. She's no longer married to him psychologically. “He hurls a plate to the floor.” No, I won't take it. Stanley says, “That's how I'll clear the table! (He seizes her arm) Don't ever talk that way to me! ‘Pig – Polack – disgusting – vulgar – greasy!’ – them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister’s too much around here! What do you two think you are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long said – ‘Every Man is a King!’ And I'm the king around here, so don't forget it! (He hurls a cup and saucer to the floor) My place is cleared! You want me to clear your places? (Stella begins to cry weakly…)”

She begins to cry because she is still human underneath and he has pierced her army armor but, “(...Stanley [then] stalks out on [to] the porch and lights a cigarette.)” Blanche cannot cry. Blanche has lived so long in her armor that it has backed up and created a world for her. She cannot be reached to cry. When she is reached it activates the fantasy world. She has already become a wraith in her neurotic world. She cannot be rescued from that world. Stella can still be rescued. She can still cry. Because the facade is just that, just a facade. But for Blanche it is no longer a facade, she has lived with it too long, and she has become a wraith in that neurotic world.

Stanley then goes into Stella and he says, “Stella, it's going to be all right after she goes and after you've had the baby. It's going to be all right again between you and me the way it was. You remember [the] way that it was? Them nights we had together? God, honey, it's going to be sweet when we can make noise in the night the way we used to and get the colored lights going with nobody's sister behind the curtains to hear us.”

So Stanley brings back the livingness. The quality of life and livingness and refuses to let his wife be co-opted into this fantasy world, this neurotic realm which Blanche carries around with her because she is no longer a person she is only a persona, she is only a mask which invites people to live in her fantasy world. That's the only way she can relate to them: if they live in her fantasy world. If they participate in her fantasy world she's not there. She's become only like an opening to that fantasy world. But Stella is still a person. And Stanley saves her for life in her own person before she can drift too far into that realm. The man must do this for the woman because it's the feminine that tends to create first of all that kind of fantasizing and the temptation for man is to enter that realm because this is her realm after all, isn't it? And not understanding that no one lives there that you cannot go in there out of love for that person or even out of desire for that person. No one lives there. So Streetcar has this as a theme.

This is Stanley talking to Blanche in Scene Ten. He says, “Swine, huh?” “Yes, swine! Swine! And I'm thinking not only of you but of your friend, Mr. Mitchell. He came to see me tonight. He dared to come in his work clothes! And to repeat slander to me, vicious stories that he had gotten from you! I gave him his walking papers…” “You did, huh?”

“But then he came back. He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness! He implored my forgiveness. But some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. [And] it is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty. So I told him, I said to him, ‘Thank you,’ but it was foolish of me to think that we could ever adapt ourselves to each other. Our ways of life are too different. Our attitudes and our backgrounds are incompatible. We have to be realistic about such things. So farewell, my friend! And let there be no hard feelings…”

This is what the neurotic realm always says to a human being. What else can it say to a human being? Only human beings can have a relationship. A neurotic realm cannot have a relationship to a human being. It can only be what it is and invite that person to be lost in it.

Stanley says, “Was this before or after the telegram that came from the Texas oil millionaire?” Blanche says, “What telegram? No! No, after! As a matter of fact, the wire came just as –”

Because one of the telltale signs of somebody who is already co-opted into a neurotic realm that they forget, can't remember. The telltale sign and the forgetfulness is not only forgetting where one was. What – What was I saying? Or, where – where where are we going? That kind of a thing. But also leaving out connectives so that elements that are articulate for human beings are jumbled together and seem incommensurate and then the person is to blame for being inarticulate. These are all classic symptoms.

Now in the Greek tragic view the only way to get rid of that is to take that mask off and show the person that there's no one there. Not only in Greek tragedy but this is the very essence in the Bhagavad Gita. The conversation between Krishna and Arjuna is exactly this. All the reasons that you give are very good reasons, none of them are true, they're all masks for a neurotic fearfulness. They have to all be taken off. But for Blanche it's too late.

Stanley says, “As a matter of fact there wasn’t no wire at all!”
Blanche says, “Oh, oh!”
“There isn't no millionaire! And Mitch didn't come back with roses ‘cause I know where he is–”
“Oh!”
“There isn't a goddam thing but imagination!”
“Oh!”
“And lies and conceit and tricks!”
“Oh!”
“And look at yourself! Take a look at yourself in this worn out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker! And with the crazy crown on! What queen do you think you are?” “Oh – God…”
“I've been down on you from the start! Not once did you pull any wool over this boy's eyes! You come in here and sprinkle the place with powder and spray perfume and cover the light-bulb with a paper lantern, and lo and behold the place has turned into Egypt and you are the Queen of the Nile! Sitting on your throne and swilling my liquor! I say – Ha! – Ha! Do you hear me? Ha–ha-ha!” And, “(he walks into the bedroom.)”

And of course she immediately has the fight or flight reaction. And because she is in the neurotic realm because her armor has been pierced she now flies and her flight is to the phone. She picks up the phone.

She says, “Don't come in here.” “(Lurid reflections appear in the walls around Blanche. The shadows are of a grotesque and menacing form. She catches her breath, crosses to the phone and jiggles the hook. Stanley goes into the bathroom and closes the door.)”
“Operator, operator! Give me long-distance, please… I want to get in touch with Mr. Shep Huntleigh of Dallas. He's so well known he doesn't require any address. Just ask anybody who – Wait!! – No, I couldn't find it right now… Please understand, I – No! No, wait! …One moment! [Please.] Someone is – Nothing! Hold on, please.”

“(She sets the phone down, crosses wearily into the kitchen. The night is filled with inhuman voices like cries in the jungle.)”
“(The shadows and lurid reflections move sinuously as flames along the wall spaces.)”
“(Through the back wall of the rooms, which have become transparent, can be seen the sidewalk. A prostitute has rolled a drunkard. He pursues her along the walk, overtakes her and there's a struggle. A policeman's whistle breaks it up. The figures disappear.)”
“(Some moments later the Negro woman appears around the corner with a sequined bag which the prostitute had dropped on the walk. She is rooting excitingly through it.)”
“(Blanche presses her knuckles to her lips and returns slowly to the phone. She speaks in a hoarse whisper.)”

“Operator! Operator! Never mind long-distance. Get Western Union. There isn't time to be – Western – Western Union.”
“(She waits anxiously.)”
“Western Union? Yes! I – want to – Take down this message! ‘In desperate, desperate circumstances! Help me! Caught in a trap. Caught in –’ Oh!”

“(The bathroom door is thrown open and Stanley comes out in the brilliant silk pajamas. He grins at her as he knots the tasseled sash about his waist. She gasps and backs away from the phone. He stares at her for a count of ten. Then a clicking becomes audible from the telephone, steady and rasping.)”
“You left th’ phone off th’ hook.”

So this is the kind of confrontation in Streetcar. It's a confrontation of human beings against fantasy, against being swallowed by the Typhon figure, the python figure of inner fantasy. That inner fantasy world can only happen when life is blocked. Its only source of energy is the imagination fed by regressed life. That block has to be dissolved humanely, or it has to be penetrated.

Blanche cannot be saved. At the end of the play. Scene 11, Stanley and his friends are playing cards. Stella is weeping because her sister is being taken off to an asylum. She's being told that she's going to go on a trip with this man. They're going out. Blanche says, “(to the men): Please don't get up. I'm only passing through.”
“(She crosses quickly to the outside door… The poker players stand awkwardly at the table – all except Mitch, who remain seated, looking down at the table. Blanche steps out on a small porch at the side of the door… catches her breath.)”
The doctor says, “How do you do?”
Blanche says, “You're not the gentleman I was expecting.”
“(She suddenly gasps and starts back up the steps. [She is stopped] by Stella, who stands just outside the door, and speaks in a frightening whisper.)”
“That man isn't Shep Huntleigh.”
“(Stella stares back at Blanche… There's a moment of silence – no sound but that of Stanley steadily shuffling the cards.)”

The masculine determination that life will go on. That the process and dynamic of life is not picayune. It seems picayune against the fantastic seductiveness of the imaginative neurotic world. Life seems so mundane and the neurotic world seems so incredibly filled with possibilities one might have Egypt, one might be a Queen of the Nile. But the fact is that none of it is true. And rather having twenty thousand years of nothing it's better to have one year of life. Stanley Kowalski is like an Odysseus. He is able to journey through the mythological fantasies of the negative feminine and reach home and stay there. And he is able to reject exactly what Odysseus is able to reject: immortality in an imaginative neurotic world that never was for a limited mortal lifespan in a life which is his own. That's how major it is.

So we have Streetcar which started Tennessee off and established him immediately as the playwright. Williams had patterned himself very largely on Anton Chekhov – loved Chekhov's writing, his stories as well as his plays. And with Streetcar he became the great figure in modern drama after Chekhov and Strindberg. His next play and we're going to take this after a short break – Camino Real – takes us inside the fantasy world. We're going to go inside that and we're going to see what it looks like. We're going to go into that mind, into that mentality. And in order to give it the proper setting Tennessee makes the play Camino Real happen in a dream of Don Quixote. But we'll come to that after the break.

Camino Real has particular flavor and favorite for me. I've seen a number of productions. I saw a production here in Los Angeles a long time ago where Earl Holliman played Kilroy and it was fabulous. It was just, it was great. I saw a production in Berkeley the night that the Apollo landed on the moon – the first Apollo that landed on the moon. And it was proof of dedication to self-advancement and inquiry to tear oneself away from the television shot of the moon landing on the moon and go see a production of Camino Real. So I have sacrificed greatly in my life for this play. And it's worth it, every bit of it.

We need to have spiritual courage. We need to know that we can go into the wildest junkyard of the mind and walk back out. We need to know that. We need to know that all of that terror, all of that horribleness, all of that ambiguity, the paranoia, the vagueness, all of it exists and we can leave it. And it doesn't have to stay with us. We can walk away clean. We can suffer it and we can walk away clean. That is a great message. That is as Milarepa would say “that's worth smiling about when you hear it.” Because that's true. That's the good news.

Camino Real is an excursion into a fantasy realm, the cultural fantasy realm that swims around us today constantly there. You know the schmaltz of the television set daily is a good crystal ball in which to see what's going on in the minds of people. And it's like that. But Camino Real is like taking the quintessential elements. The characters in here: Jacques Casanova is here, Kilroy is here, any number of people, Lord Byron is here, a gypsy, Esmeralda, Nursie, Don Quixote, and Sancho. Many many people here; they are all stuck here because they can't leave here. This is Grand Central Station of the imagination and all these characters are here waiting. There is only a flight out of there every so often and you have to have real permission to leave. And if you don't have real permission to leave to get on that plane and fly out of there you can't leave. The flight out of fantasy takes your own personal permission to go. And if you can't give it and make it stick you can't leave. You got to stay there and play those scenes over and over and over again. The only way to step out of the fantasies of the mind is to have the courage to say, “I'm going to go, so long” and go. That's the only way to do it.

At the beginning there is a prologue. There is a fountain and sort of like a village, a street juncture, with some Spanish buildings. And the old Hermetic Knight Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are there.

“Quixote (ranting above the wind in a voice which is nearly as old): ‘Blue is the color of distance!’ “
And, “Sancho (wearily behind him): ‘Yes, distance is blue.’
‘Blue is the color of nobility.’
‘Yes, nobility’s blue.’
‘Blue is the color of distance and nobility, and that's why an old knight should always have somewhere about him a bit of blue ribbon.’
(He jostles the elbow of an aisle-sitter as he staggers with fatigue; [and] mumbles an apology.)”

That is to say they move down the aisles of the audience towards the stage while this is going on because the entrance into this fantasy realm is from ourselves. Theater in the round. And Don Quixote as part of the wisdom of we as the audience moves onto the stage and in this declaration says,

“ ‘A bit of faded blue ribbon, tucked away in whatever remains of his armor, or borne on the tip of his lance, his – unconquerable lance! It serves to remind an old knight of distance that he has gone and distance [that] he has yet to go.’ ”

Don Quixote is free to come and go. He has no destination particularly in mind. No origin particularly in mind. And because of that he has no place where he is particularly in mind. He is where he is and then moves on. This is the Zen of Don Quixote as R. H. Blyth would say. Very very important. One can only be free to move in this way. But Don Quixote is tired. He's going to sleep and he says,

“(Arranging his blanket): ‘Yes, I'll sleep for a while, I'll sleep and dream for a while against the wall of this town…’
(A mandolin or a guitar plays The Nightingale of France.)
‘–And my dream will be a pageant, a masque in which old meanings will be remembered and possibly new ones discovered, and when I wake from this sleep and this disturbing pageant of a dream, I'll choose one among its shadows to take along with me in the place of Sancho…’
(He blows his nose between his fingers wipes them on his shirttail.)
‘–For new companions are not as familiar as old ones but all the same – they're old ones with only slight differences of face and figure, which may or may not be improvements, and it would be selfish of me to be lonely alone…’ ”

And then he falls asleep and the play proceeds and the play proceeds like Streetcar, not in acts and not in scenes this time, but in blocks – blocks. They're like scenes, only Tennessee is showing us here that they're not scenes from life but that they are blocks of eternal relations. These images always are good and always obtain.

Jacques Casanova is talking to Marguerite, and Marguerite hears Jacques say,

“Why does disappointment make people unkind to each other?”
Marguerite says, “Each of us is very much alone.”
Jacques: “Only if we distrust each other.”
Marguerite: “[But] We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
Jacques: “I think our defense is love.”
Marguerite: “Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love in this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real… What are we sure of? Not even of our existence, dear comforting friend! And whom can we ask the questions that torment us? ‘What is this place?’ ‘[What] are we?’ – a fat old man who gives sly hints that only bewilder us more, a fake of a Gypsy squinting at cards and tea leaves. What else are we offered? The never-broken procession of little events that assure us that we and strangers about us are still going on! Where? Why? and the perch that we hold is unstable! We're threatened with eviction, for this is a port of entry and departure, there are no permanent guests! And where else [are] we to go when we leave here? Bide-a-while? ‘Ritz Men Only’? Or under that ominous arch into Terra Incognita? We're lonely. We're frightened. We hear the Streetcleaners’ piping not far away. So now and then, although we've wounded each other time and time again – we stretch out hands to each other in the dark that we can't escape from – we huddle together for some dim-communal comfort – and that's what passes for love on this terminal stretch of the road that used to be royal. What is it, this feeling between us? When you feel my exhausted weight against your shoulder – when I clasp your anxious old hawk's head to my breast, what is it we feel in whatever is left of our hearts? Something, yes, something – delicate, unreal, bloodless! The sort of violets that could grow on the moon, or in the crevices of those faraway mountains, fertilized by the droppings of carrion birds. Those birds are familiar to us. Their shadows inhabit [this] plaza. I've heard them flapping their wings like old charwomen beating worn out carpets with gray brooms… But tenderness, the violets in the mountains – can't break the rocks!”

Jacques says to her in compassion for her: “The violets and the mountains can break the rocks if you believe in them and allow them to grow.”

Little scene from Camino Real. The companion that Don Quixote picks Kilroy the American hero when he wakes up and Kilroy is able to erase the saying ‘Kilroy is here’ which he wrote as soon as he came into the play and he changes the ‘is’ to ‘was’ and he's free to go. And Kilroy and Don Quixote, go, go on – they're free to go.

The third play – and I have to truncate everything because of time – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which had nearly 700 performances when it opened in New York 1955. And as soon as it was closed down, it was started back up again. And Ben Gazzara and Barbara Bel Geddes were in it, and Mildred Dunnock and Burl Ives. Of course, in the movie version Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor – Brick and Maggie. There is a difficulty. The cat is Maggie, Maggie the cat. She's one of Tennessee Williams most brilliant heroines. She is like Stanley Kowalski but she is the feminine. She knows that life must go on and that what allows life to go on is that love is real. Life is only safe when love is real and it has to be lived and that the two are indelibly a unity. That the completeness of the human being is that life and love are a unity. And she refuses to disbelieve that this is so. And so she stands outside of all of the dramatic tensions that are underneath in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and she floats like a white dove, beautiful sensuous woman above this melee constantly waiting for her chance to save her love. She saves her love by being there for him when he is able to come-to. She knows wisely that there is nothing she can say to him. Although she says many things during the play she knows that none of this is effective; that he has to come out of it himself. But she has to hold life there for him so when he comes out there's something to touch.

Two phases. One phase is that the armor has to be penetrated. The defenses have to be broached. And when they are, there's not immediate freedom, there's the limbo that one can no longer remain in the neurotic realm – one has to go back to life. And this is very precarious. One is on the edge. One is no longer at home in the neurotic realm. And one is not yet at home in life. And it's out of that limbo that we have to be touched and woken back up to life. The fairy tale of the thorn princess asleep needs the kiss. You have to penetrate through the thorn briers to get to her but you have to kiss her to wake her up. Well Maggie is the feminine of that. She has to find some way to be patient and wait until Brick can come-to. And then out of that limbo of exhaustion that he can no longer live in his private world,she has to touch him then and he comes out.

Brick is this – one of two sons of Big Daddy? Big daddy is suffering from the big C. And Big Daddy is really father to Brick. And he's the one that helps penetrate that armor and get through to him. Because he's willing to let Brick also penetrate through his armor. And the father and the son in a discussion downstairs among all the packed antiques that he's bought for Big Mama that still are unpacked and crated and everything and they have this toe to toe – masculine confrontation. For a woman usually it's a man who penetrates through that screen. For a man it's usually another man. It's usually a companion. It's usually a friend. Someone who can talk straight. And it's the masculine that is able to talk straight to get through. But it's only the feminine that can touch and awaken back to life.

Brick and Big Daddy. Brick says,

“ ‘She went on the road that fall with the Dixie Stars. Oh, she made a great show of being the world's [greatest] sport. She wore a – wore a – tall bearskin cap! A shako, [I think] they call it,a dyed moleskin coat, a moleskin coat dyed red! – [They're] Cut up crazy! Rented hotel ballrooms for victory celebrations, wouldn't cancel them when it – turned out – defeat…’

Maggie the Cat! ‘Ha ha! – But Skipper, he had some fever which came back on him which doctors couldn't explain and I got that injury – turned out to be just a shadow on the X-ray plate – and a touch of bursitis… I lay in the hospital bed, watched our games on TV, saw Maggie on the bench next to skipper when he was hauled out of a game for stumbles, [and] fumbles! – Burned me up the way she hung on his arm! – Y’know, I think that Maggie always felt sort of left out because she and me never got any closer together than two people just in bed, which is not much closer than two cats on a – fence humping… So! She took this time to work on poor dumb Skipper. He was a less than average student at Ole Miss, you know that, don't you?! – Poured in his mind the dirty, false idea that what we were, him and me, was just a frustrated case of that ole pair of sisters that lived in this room, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello! – [And] He, poor Skipper, went to bed with Maggie to prove it wasn't true, and when it didn't work out, he thought it was true! – [And] Skipper broke in two like a rotten stick – nobody ever turned so fast to a lush – or died of it so quick… [Are] you satisfied [now]?’
(Big daddy has listened to this story, dividing the grain from the chaff. [and] Now he looks at his son.)
‘Are you satisfied?’
‘With what?’
‘That half-ass story!’
‘What's half-ass about it?’
‘Something's left out of that story. What did you leave out?’
(The phone has started ringing in the hall. As if [reminding] him of something, Brick glances suddenly towards the sound and says:)
‘Yes! – I left out the long-distance call which I had from Skipper, in which he made a drunken confession to me and on which I hung up! – last time we spoke to each other in our lives.’
‘You hung up?’
‘Hung up. Jesus! Well –’
‘Anyhow now! – we've tracked down the lie with which you're disgusted and which you are drinking to kill your disgust with, Brick. You've been passing the buck. This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself. You! – dug the grave of your friend and kicked him in it! – before you'd face [the] truth with him!’
‘His truth not mine!’
‘His truth, okay! But you wouldn't face [him with it]!’
‘Who can face truth? Can you?’
‘Now don't start passin’ the rotten buck again, boy!’ ”

And they work their way out. And the situation resolves itself because of the ability to commit to a real personal relationship. The healing contact is person-to-person and it doesn't much matter what the particular mode of person it is - the race, the creed, the color, the sex - what is effective is that two human beings become humanly real to each other so that the contact of reality allows them to see what is fantasia, what is neurotic, what is imaginary, and what is real. That's the contact. That is the mythological, archetypal contact of the creation of reality. It's on the center of the Sistine Chapel where God reaches out his finger and man reaching up his finger - just that contact of reality - gives him all he needs to know of what is real and what is fantasy so that he may live and love and know that this is it. This is important. Nothing else is important until that happens.

Plato has Socrates say “until we become companions together we can't learn anything. We don't even know what a tree is,” says Socrates, “until we have learned to be companions together and inquire together legitimately and know what we know and know what we don't know and not fantasize about it.” That this is the life of the dialogue which is quintessentially human. And without that everything is speculation. And after that all the speculation has a ground on which to really base itself and man's consciousness fits in with nature and becomes empirically real. And without it he's in some kind of dreamy color healing world where just everything is beautiful or not so beautiful and nothing is personal. This is why the human being needs to be personal. A person.

Orpheus Descending gave Tennessee Williams the hardest time of all. He worked on the play for seventeen or eighteen years, went through many vicissitudes. Again, Orpheus, What – What an Orpheus, Orpheus descending. Where does Orpheus descend? He descends into the netherworld. That neurotic world is the netherworld. That inner world of fantasy is the netherworld. That's the mythological place that Odysseus has to traverse to get back home. Orpheus must go down and rescue his love and the crucial test of rescuing his love from the underworld is that he is able to walk out of there himself and she follows him. And if he looks back he loses her forever. He has to walk completely out of that world into the fresh light and sunlight and then she is saved because she can then follow him out.

This is archetypal truth of highest dharma. Pristine actual truthfulness. The soul can only be saved from the false realm of the imagination if the human character is able to show it the natural realm in which it is free. Because the mind is the vehicle for the soul cannot tell by itself what is natural, what is real. It takes the human heart to guide it and show it. And that human-heartedness is an intuitiveness which is very high called the ‘nous’. It’s not mental it’s noetic, says Plato, that is able to guide us out. And in Orpheus Descending. The guide is named Val Xavier – Valentine Savior, Love Savior – and he wears a snakeskin jacket, black and white and gray, mottled like python, snakeskin jacket, carries a guitar that has a lot of things carved on it, a lot of words and things. If you saw Black Orpheus, the film, what was carved on the guitar is “Orpheus is my master.” He who is able to speak the harmony, speak the music of truth in terms of the harmony. He is Orpheus. He is the one who is able to contact and charm the animal realm, the realm of nature. It is he who is able to take the plunge into the underworld and bring consciousness by love out and free it back into nature.

It's a little Southern town and there's a general store. And the man and the woman who owned this, the man is upstairs in bed and he's bitter. And unbeknownst to his wife he's the one that's burned her father out of business a long time ago and just took her on just to torment her and keeps her around. He's the bitter old man. It's like in the Arabian Nights story Sinbad in one of his adventures gets this old man on his shoulders with the knotted legs that rides him around. This man is like that old man around her neck. She's trying to live a life. She's trying to come back to life. And she feels wooden and she can't ‘til Val Xavier comes in. But the entrance of Val Xavier into her world, in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, happens with a transition pair who are quintessential there the magic pair. A man and a woman - an old black man and a young white woman. Old black man is kind of like a hoodoo voodoo man, conjure man it’s called. And the young woman is kind of wild, barefoot, footloose. And they’re the transition seal that allows for Val Xavier to come into her world. And they’re the transition that allows for him then to leave that world. Woman – girl's name is Carol, she comes in and somebody in the store says,

“ ‘What's she doing barefoot?’ ”
[The woman says,] ‘The last time she was arrested on the highway, they say she was naked under her coat.’
Carol ([is on the phone to the operator]): ‘I'm waiting.’ (Then to the women:) – ‘I caught the heel of my slipper in that rotten boardwalk out there and it broke right off. They say you can break the heel of your slipper in the morning it means that you’ll meet the love of your life before dark… [Maybe it’s] already dark when I broke the heel of my slipper. Maybe [that's what it means. That] I'll meet the love of my life before daybreak.’ (The quality of her voice is curiously clear and childlike. Sister Temple appears on [the] landing.)

And we skip over.

Act one, scene one, we're still there. In comes Val Xavier. And there's this old conjure man who is floating around. Carol says to Val Xavier, trying to tempt him, and Val says,

“ ‘Why are you so anxious to prove that I know you?’
‘Because I want to know you better and better! I'd like to go out jooking with you tonight.’
‘What's jooing?’
‘Oh, don't you know what that is? That's where you get in a car and drink a little and drive a little and stop and dance a little to a juke box and then you drink a little more and drive a little more and stop and dance a little more to a juke box and then you stop dancing and you just drink and drive and then you stop driving and just drink, and then, finally, you stop drinking…’
‘[And] What do you do, then?’
‘That depends on the weather and who you're jooking with. If it's a clear night you can spread a blanket among the memorial stones on Cypress Hill, which is a local bone orchard, but if it's not a fair night and this one certainly isn't, why, usually then you go to the Idlewild cabins between here and Sunset on the Dixie Highway…’
‘That's about what I figured. But I don't go that route. Heavy drinking and smoking the weed and shacking with strangers is okay for kids in their twenties but this is my thirtieth birthday and I'm all through with that route.’ ([He] looks up with dark eyes.) ‘I'm not [so] young anymore.’
‘You're young at thirty – I hope! I'm twenty-nine!’
‘Naw, you're not young at thirty if you've been on a goddam party since [you've been] fifteen!’

So he won't he won't play and he brings life back into this store. And of course the life comes back into the woman and she finds that she is pregnant. And the old man can't stand the fact that she's going to have a life. And he hobbles out of bed with his cane and a gun and he can't stand that she's happy.

“(Jabe – Jabe appears on the landing, by [an] artificial palm tree…)” They've redecorated the whole place, made it all, beautiful lanterns and it's just gorgeous. “(...a stained purple robe hangs loosely about his wasted yellowed frame. He is Death’s self, and malignancy, as he peers, crouching, down into the store's dimness to discover his quarry.)” In the movie Victor Jory played Jabe.

Jabe says, “ ‘Buzzards! Buzzards!’ (Clutching the trunk of the false palm tree, he raises the other hand holding a revolver and fires down into the store. Lady screams and rushes to cover Val's motionless figure with hers. Jabe scrambles down a few steps and fires again and the bullet strikes her, expelling her breath with a great ‘Hah!’ He fires again; the great ‘Hah!’ is repeated. She turns to face him, still covering Val with her body, her face with all the passions and secrets of life and death in it now…)”

She is both pregnant and dying at this moment. She knows the completeness of life and she offers this to protect Val Xavier. For he is the man for her. Not just the man, he is that real human being who confirmed her reality and that's all she needed to know. All the passions and secrets of life and death in it now.

“(...her fierce eyes blazing, knowing, defying and accepting. But the revolver is empty; it clicks impotently and Jabe hurls it toward them; he descends and passes them, shouting out hoarsely:) ‘I'll have you burned! I burned her father and I'll have you burned!’ (He opens the door rushes [into] the road, shouting hoarsely:) ‘The clerk is robbing the store, he shot my wife, the clerk is robbing the store, he killed my wife!’
Val: ‘Did it?’
Lady: ‘Yes! –it did…’
(A curious, almost formal, dignity appears in them both. She turns to him with the sort of smile that people offer in apology for an awkward speech, and he looks back at her gravely, raising one hand as if to stay her. But she shakes her head slightly and points to the ghostly radiance of her make-believe orchard and she begins to move a little unsteadily toward it. Music. Lady enters the confectionery and looks about it as people look for the last time at a loved place they are deserting.) ‘The show is over. The monkey is dead…’
(Music rises to cover whatever sound Death makes in the confectionery. It halts abruptly. Figures appear through the great front window of the store, pocket [lights] stare through the glass and someone begins to force the front door open. Val cries out:)
‘Which way!’
(He turns and runs through the dim radiance of the confectionery, out of our sight. Something slams. Something cracks open. Men are in the store and the dark is full of hoarse, [shouts and] voices.)”

In all this confusion, “(Motors start. Fade quickly. There is almost silence, a dog bays in the distance. Then – the Conjure Man appears with a bundle of garments which he examines, dropping them all except the snakeskin jacket which he holds up with a toothless mumble of excitement.)”

Carol, also there, eyes black-rimmed, blond hair, down barefooted. She says,

“ ‘What have you got there, Uncle? Come here and let me see.’
(He crosses to her.)
‘Oh yes, his snakeskin jacket. I'll give you a gold ring for it.’
(She slowly twists the ring off her finger. Somewhere there is a cry of anguish. She listens attentively till it fades out then nods with understanding.)
‘–Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind…’
(The cry is repeated more terribly than before. It expires again. She draws a jacket about her as if [it] were cold, nods to the old Negro, handing him the ring. Then she crosses toward the door, pausing halfway as Sheriff Talbot enters with his pocket [light].
‘[Don't move. Don't no one move!]
([But] She crosses directly past him as if she no longer saw him, and out the door.)
(The [old] Negro looks up with a secret smile as the curtain [fades].)”

Again, themes that some people can walk out. Some people have to come into that drama of freeing someone from the realms. The realms of neurotic preoccupation which are so endemic in our time that almost nobody knows that they're in it. Almost nobody knows that they're in it. They think that that's life. And they'll hear somebody hawking on a street corner saying awake! And they'll say those are crackpots. They're not crackpots. None of them are crackpots. They're all legitimate helpers but we can't hear them, we can't see them. We think they want a buck. They don't want no money. They want to just stay awake. That's what they want to say.

Tennessee's greatest play is Night of the Iguana. Greatest in the sense because it brings to a kind of a maturation in Tennessee's drama the story in its best form. That is to say, where Val Xavier and Lady live they discover that they can live. And it's not that they are an older woman and a younger man, but it's that they are now middle-aged men and women and they discover that it's never too late just to live. It's never too late to be human together. And if it took forty-five or fifty years or fifty-five years or sixty years, it's all right. Baby, times are so tough that it takes that long to get real with someone. So it's all right.

So, Night of the Iguana. Bette Davis was Maxine Faulk and Patrick O'Neal was the Reverend Shannon. In the movie it was Ava Gardner and Richard Burton. It takes place at the Costa Verde hotel, down on the west coast of Mexico before it got so fashionable. I think it's a Puerto Barrio – Puerto Barrio, somewhat more distant than Puerto Vallarta.

Act one.

“Maxine (calling out): ‘Shannon!’ (A man's voice from below answers: ‘Hi!’ ‘Hah!’ ” says Maxine.

Same word that lady says in Orpheus Descending only she says it when she is dying. Maxine in Night of the Iguana says it to open the play because this is a play about life. This is not a play about the tremendous energy needed just to get real. But this is about the great compassion that when one is getting real one is also making a living relationship. That a man and a woman help each other to get real. They're not just expiating karma from the past but they are creating a life for the future. This is American message; this is improvement. This is not a world negating Buddhism where you work out the karma to culminate the past and then you have extinction, nirvana. But the working out is a creative preparation for a life that then can be lived. That the working out of the karma is not an expiation but a creation, not an In expiation for the past that needed to be evened up, but for the future that is now there because one has made that creatively. And Night of the Iguana has this theme. It's a very great theme. Make somebody smile. They can hear that theme.
“(Maxine always laughs with a single [loud harsh] bark, opening her mouth like a seal expecting a fish to be thrown to it.) ‘My spies told me that you were back under the border! Anda, hombre, anda!’
(Maxine's delight expands and vibrates in her as Shannon [comes] up the hill.)”

He's a defrocked minister. They defrocked him. He had peculiar tandem problem. He was worried about God not really being there and he's worried about young girls that were. That's a very big problem and they go together. The elasticity of the young girl sort of makes up for the fragility of the man who ain't there. But difficulty is, is that all that is neurotic. None of that is true. That is to say all of the complications that come out of that haunt you if you believe that that self that you need that because that self or it can go the other way, that that the beauty of the young girl is nothing and the only reality is the God. One can make the monks mistake as well as the defrocked priest’s mistake. They're related. They're related. Neither is preferable to the other. Both of them are junk. Both are junk. Both are junk in terms of the wholeness of life because life can't be lived on either of those terms. Life can only be lived when the wholeness of that is brought together, where God is a mystery and the woman is real. When you just have to live that. And that can be lived but that can only be lived if one is willing to let life go on. And the Reverend Shannon can't let himself go on until he discovers in the play. And in the play of course they have tied him to the hammock as we'll see he gets himself loose and they tied him to the hammock to get through really bad. The spooks were after him and he sees the Mexican lovers of Maxine, the young boys had caught an iguana and tied it up. He goes down and lets that iguana loose because something in life has got to be free. And when he realizes that that it's not perilous to agree to be free in life; it seems perilous from the neurotic angle, but from the life angle it is beautiful. It is beautiful. But that freedom is all right. It isn't scary. You thought it was going to be scary; thought it was going to corral you. Because life actually does have to happen. One has to actually do something. One can't just daydream about ten thousand possibilities. One has to actually do something. But that narrowing down to reality just opens up the hourglass of life then. It isn't the death, the intuition, that one's going to die is the neurotic reaction to liberation. One's not going to be able to daydream anymore. One's not going to be able to have all of these if ands and the others. The ten thousand possibilities. One's going to have to do something for real. It's no death.

Shannon finds out that he has taken this busload of female tourists. Maxine says, “they're all females?” She says, “no wonder you look tired.” And he says, “No.” He says, “the spook has got me.” “Where's Fred–,” her husband. He's always come to talk to Fred, but Fred's dead; died a couple weeks ago. Fred's not there, Shannon. What am I going to do? She says, “Lie down and have a rum-coco.” Maxine's a woman not a girl. She's going to be there for that man. She's not going to be there for his fantasies. She's going to be there for that man. A girl is there for a man in his fantasies, or for a boy who is living his fantasies. But a woman is not there for the fantasy. She's there for that man. She tells him. She says, “What's – what you always after these young girls for? There are grown up women, Shannon.” She's talking that way to him. She says,

“ ‘You’re going to pieces, are you?’
‘No! [no!] Gone! Gone!’ (He rises and shouts down the hill again.) ‘Hank! Come up here! Come up here [just] a minute!’ ”

Hank's down there with the busload of ladies but Shannon's got the key. The ladies are headed by a tough Miss Fellows and they come up. Shannon says,

“ ‘[Well, I've got the spook.] …he's the only passenger that got off the bus with me, honey.
‘Is he here now?’
‘Not far.’
‘On the verandah?
‘He might be on the other side of the verandah. Oh, he's around somewhere, but he's like the Sioux Indians in the Wild West fiction, he doesn't attack before sundown, he's an after-sundown shadow…’
(Shannon wriggles out of the hammock as the bus horn gives [out] one [long last] protesting blast.)”

Maxine gives a little poem and this is a cue. Maxine's poem is not so poetic but it's true for life. And the resolution in Night of the Iguana is that man can poeticize his condition to the point of completion that consciousness and nature, feeling and intuition can all come together and can express what it is and when the reality is expressed, not only is the penetration affected, but the touch to bring one back is legitimate. This is why he who can speak the truth is the Savior. He who can speak the truth. Her poem:

I have a little shadow
That goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him
Is more than I can see.

He’s very, very like me,
From his heels up to his head,
And he always hops before me
When I hop into my bed.

And Shannon says,

“ ‘That's the truth. He sure hops in the bed with me’
‘When you're sleeping alone, or…?’
‘I haven't slept in three nights.’
‘Aw, you will tonight, baby.’
(The bus horn sounds again. Shannon rises and squints down the hill at the bus.)”

In the complications we skip over to Act Three coming up at just the time that Maxine goes inside, when Shannon is looking down, is a woman in the film played by Deborah Kerr and an old man, nonagenarian, Nonno. And he's a poet, he's a very famous poet and he's trying before he dies to write one last poem. He's been working on it and they have come off season walked all this way and Hannah and Nonno. Again that pair, the woman and the old man, that pair, they’re the transition just like the conjure man and Carol in Orpheus Descending and their transition. They allow for Shannon to get a perspective between them, between their relation. And so that he can find his way back to himself. And when he does he finds that Maxine is there, waiting for him just like Maggie is there for Brick.

The effectiveness of the salvation is that someone real is there for us when we come too. Without someone there we don't know that we came too and we can slide back in. This is why you can't do it yourself. There’s no way. Love is cooperative. Not multiple, it's a compliment, it takes two, exactly. It's that precise. Not one or three, it takes two. Exactly.

Hannah is talking with Shannon.
Shannon says, “Fiends out of hell with the… voices of… angels.”
Hannah says, “Yes, they call it ‘the logic of contradictions,’ Mr. Shannon.”
Shannon (lunging suddenly forward and [undoes] the loosened ropes) “Out! Free! Unassisted!”
Hannah says, “Yes, I never doubted you could get loose, Mr. Shannon.”
“Thanks for your help, anyhow.”
“Where are you going?”
(He has crossed [over] to the liquor cart.)
“Not far. To the liquor cart to make myself a rum-coco.”
“Oh…”

Their conversation goes on. And Hannah says, finally, “I think I'll think of something because I have to. I can't let Nonno be moved to the Casa de Huéspedes, Mr. Shannon. Not any more than I could let you take the long swim out to China. You know that. Not if I can prevent it, and when I have to be resourceful, I can be very resourceful.”
“How'd you get over your crack-up?”
Hannah says, “I never cracked up, I couldn't afford to. Of course, I nearly did once. I was young once, Mr. Shannon, but I was one of those people who can be young without really having their youth, and not to have your youth when you are young is naturally very disturbing. But I was lucky. My work, this occupational therapy that I gave myself – painting and doing quick character sketches – made me look out of myself, not in, and gradually, at the far end of the tunnel that I was struggling out of I began to see this faint, very faint gray light – the light of the world outside me – and I kept climbing toward it. I had to.”
“Did it stay a gray light?”
“No, no, it turned white.”
“Only white, never gold?”
“No, it stayed only white, but white is a very good light to see at the end of a long black tunnel you thought would be never-ending, that only God or death could put a stop to, especially when you… since I was… far from sure about God.”
“You're still unsure about him?”
“Not as unsure as I was. You see, in my profession I have to look hard and close at human faces in order to catch something in them before they get restless and call out, ‘Waiter, the check, we're leaving.’”

She has learned to see the human in person after person after person and this is the only alternative there is to finding one's reality with one other person is that one has to see the humanity in all of us - universal compassion - and she found that way. She found that way. And she is the proper companion for Nonno. And because it's getting on and getting too long I'll just read you Nonno’s poem that he finishes at the end of Night of the Iguana:

How calmly does the orange branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

Sometime while night obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever, and from thence
A second history will commence.

A chronicle no longer gold,
A bargaining with mist and mold,
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth; and then

An intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind.
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene, corrupting love.

And still the ripe fruit and the branch.
Observe the sky begin to blanch.
Without a cry, without a prayer,
With no betrayal of despair.

O Courage, could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?

And he turns to Hannah and says, “Have you got it?”
“Yes!”
“All of it?”
“Every word of it.”
“It is finished?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! God! Finally finished?”
“Yes, finally finished.” (She's crying. The singing voices flow up from the beach.)
“After waiting so long!”
“Yes, we waited so long.”
“And it's good! It is good?”
“It's – it's…”
“What?”
“Beautiful, Grandfather!” (She springs up, a fist to her mouth.) “Oh, Grandfather, I am so happy for you. Thank you for writing such a lovely poem! It was worth the long wait. Can you sleep now, Grandfather?”

And of course he goes in and he nods off in his sleep and dies. Shannon and Maxine have discovered together something.

Maxine says, tolerantly, after she sees that he's freed this iguana. She says,
“What’d you do that for, Shannon.”
“So that one of God's creatures could scramble home safe and free… A little act of grace, Maxine.”
Maxine, smiling a bit more definitely: “C’mon up here, Shannon. I want to talk to you.”
Shannon, starting to climb onto the verandah, as Maxine rattles the ice in the coconut shell: “What d’ya want to talk about, Widow Faulk?”
“Let's go down and swim in that liquid moonlight.”
“Where did you pick up that poetic expression?”
Maxine glances back at Pedro and dismisses him with “Vamos.” He lives there with. He leaves with a shrug, the harmonica fading out.
“Shannon, I want you to stay with me.”
Taking the rum-coco from her: “You want a drinking companion?”
“No, I just want you to stay here, because I'm alone now and I need somebody to help manage the place.”
Shannon, looking at her, sees Hannah.
“I want to remember that face. I won't see it again.”
Maxine says, “Let's go down to the beach.”
Shannon says, “I can make it down the hill, but not back up.”
Maxine says, “I'll get you back up the hill.” And they start off now, move toward the path down through the rain forest. “I've got five more years, maybe ten, to make this place attractive to the male clientele, the middle-aged ones at least. And you can take care of the women that are with them. That's what you can do, you know that, Shannon.”
He chuckles happily. They are now on the path, Maxine half leading half supporting him. Their voices fade as Hannah goes into Nonno’s cubicle and comes back with a shawl, her cigarette left inside.

And of course she discovers that he has passed on, and Shannon and Maxine have passed on to the beach, and the Night of the Iguana ends there.

We have seen five plays by Tennessee Williams and seeing the reoccurring themes of redemption, that's what we should call it in here. The redemption is not from a profane world to a heaven. It is from the fantasy world to life because only in that basis does man ever have an opportunity then to know what heaven might be until he comes back to the ground of livingness and lovingness. He has no idea because he can only see through his fantasy projections and has no idea of what divinity might be. He has to first recover his humanity, first. Then he can look up and see the stars. And they're not the stars of his imagination, they're not the spaceships of the UFOs of his imagination, they're the old familiar constellations that show us other human beings have been here and seen the same thing we've seen and that they make makes sense as stars and constellations and as a universe because anybody who's become real and human here has a chance to live under that same canopy and understand it. That's a way of being able to see heaven.

Well next week we're going to take two American poets, Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke, and I'm very glad to present them. I learned to write by Theodore Roethke's sister, June, so I'm very glad to bring a little of my past history out. Pay homage to dear Theodore Roethke, and of course great Robinson Jeffers. There will be no lecture on Thanksgiving. I'm going to take a break so I hope some of you can make it next week because then we're going to have a week off after that.