Movin’ On

Image by Dynamic Wang

Dedicated to Mr. Tom Tyrell, Dr. Clarence A. Miller, and Richard Russell Ramos

Movin’ on. It means exactly what it says: movement: a change of direction from one place to another, from here to there. The movin’ part’s easy, but that’s not on. Nothing definite about on!  Nothing explicit about on! On demands.

Finished a four-year major in three years. You didn’t want to be a Spanish teacher, you didn’t want to be a company man in South America; you had studied music, couldn’t be a musician, you loved Platonic philosophy, detested empirical syllogisms.  You sat, at the end of your third year, on the bench in front of the Creative Arts Building, sitting in that state of non-being in that existential void, neither here nor there – no one nowhere.

You stand because the abyss is opening beneath your feet and you walk away from it down the corridor between the Music Department and the Drama Department, and you hear the pianos and the cellos and the orchestras and the singers all practicing on your left, and on your right you hear actors’ voices saying words of other people of other places of other times, and the sun above the eighty-six foot-high stage house that forms the back of the miniature Greek theater on the other side of glass, places its light upon the corridor floor as though upon an altar, accentuating the light-tan of its wood, and you stop, slammed against an impenetrable, invisible wall and a voice from the depths of your soul chokes on your tears saying, “I have to do something here!”

And so you do, and every time those lights come up they illuminate epiphany:  Theater!  Theater!  Theater!  The quintessence of on, on, ON!