Mind on Autopilot

I have no idea how many others have it, but my mind came equipped with an autopilot feature. When I've had to deal with some task that used up a lot of thinking and figuring, long after the problem has been resolved, or the deadline has passed, or whatever, my mind will keep right on working on the problem, as if nothing at all has been settled, and instead other ways still badly need to be cooked up and considered.

It has been several days since I stumbled at K.'s party, trying to recite a bunch of lines from Whittier's "Snowbound" by heart. Yet, ever since, my mind has been busily filling in the spots where I drew an embarrassed blank, and also it has driven me into memorizing still more of the poem, even parts that I had never packed in before. And, miracle of miracles, it actually seems to be working, and now, instead of 114 lines, I may be up to 150 or more.

Luckily my activities allow me to do that while doing other things, and meanwhile I think there's no better exercise for the mind -- especially an aging one that's consequently getting more and more brittle and curling up at the edges -- than memorizing a long poem that one likes. Why, with any luck, if I can keep this up, I could end up packing in all the 600 and some lines (17 printed pages) of the poem, including the central parts about the Whittier family and their friends that had never before much interested me -- in just the same way that I feel the Book of Job as drama starts going downhill as soon as the Comforters appear.

The fact that "Snowbound" is in a definite meter and a simple rhyme scheme helps, as does my isolation, which allows me to recite as loud and as often as I want, anywhere on the property or in the house. (After a week's return, my wife is again in Florida, seeing to her hopefully recovering mother.) Those things help greatly with the memorization, though I can't make up my mind what to do about Whittier's frequent off-rhymes. In 1865 in Vermont could "on" really have rhymed with "sun" or "miracle" with "fell?" These things barely look okay on paper, and they're on the jarring side when spoken aloud.

My only concern is that as I get deeper into the poem, the parts "behind" will start dropping away again. The only solution seems to be to keep reciting much of the beginning of the poem over and over again, which is not a comfortable thing to do.

All the while, I keep thinking of the pert little English actress, Helena Bonham Carter, in "Conversations with Other Women." It is a two-person film but she has the most lines, and I continue to be amazed that she was able to memorize them so thoroughly, along with all the accompanying intonations, facial expressions, and body actions. I realize that "Conversations" is a movie, and that most likely it took some weeks to make, but I'm certain that if it was a play instead, she could do exactly the same thing, and I'm endlessly impressed. She had a LOT of lines!

But I'm amazed that plays can be done at all.

I never thought that I could be an actor. I'm sure that I would start thinking too much and mess up. Also I have long thought that if I was ever in a play, something perverse in me would definitely drive me to drop some lines and lose my cool on purpose.

I was in a play once, in college. It was Ayn Rand's "The Night of January 16." I was on the jury. I didn't have any lines at all. But later someone did compliment me on being the only one up there in the box who looked really interested in all that was going on.