Planning and Other Dangers

The weird thing about being a human being, if you ask me, is this business about past and future. I doubt any species spends as much brain-power and energy as we do worrying about times that are not now. For me, and for several people I know and love, it comes down to occasionally being incapable of being in the moment.

The other day at lunch, for example, my close friend Mary (pictured above) and I were having a very leisurely discussion about what kinds of things we might want to do next week while we're in Copenhagen. Another member of our Seattle Opera contingent heading for Copenhagen--who will remain nameless now, but probably not for long--expected us to have the whole thing carefully spelled out, the schedule carefully arranged on a series of forms, charts, and graphs. We did our best to reassure this person that we wouldn't be wasting anyone's time while on the trip; but I still maintain that the easiest, most pernicious way to waste time is not to live it while it's happening, either because you're spending NOW thinking and planning about what's next, or because you already planned NOW so carefully, thought it through so completely, last week, that when it's happening it's no longer interesting to you.

Don't ask me when a blog is happening...is it now/then, as I write/wrote, or now/soon, as you read/will be reading? I gotta confess, I will have been curious to find out or to have found out.

And all that said, my great WagnerQuest is already planned out pretty darn carefully. The pieces of writing (non-blogs) which are supposed to be created are much more vague...but I've always found that if I've already written a piece very carefully in my head, I have zero interest in writing it down for real. It's all about discovery...about putting down words where once was blank paper. (Or internet space.) Just as travel, for most of us, is about putting down memories, lived human experiences, where once there were just dots on a map.

Almost Time To Go...

It's Friday afternoon now; I get on the plane on Sunday. But it feels like my adventure has already begun. It's inevitable, it's already happening, and I know it will pass by like a blur.

Briefly, then (if such a term is even applicable to someone as long-winded as me, thank you Polonius): Who am I? Why am I taking this trip? What is my goal?

I'm Jon Dean, 32 year old Seattlite, teacher/writer by trade and enthusiastic about cycling, presenting with PowerPoint, Wagner, and alternatives to everybody owning a car. If you are reading this blog, I'm guessing you already know me, so I'll spare myself the awkward and impossible task of introducing myself any further. (Or, as Austin Powers puts it: "Allow myself to introduce...myself. My name is Richie Cunningham and this is my lovely wife Oprah!")

Why am I taking this trip? A handful of reasons.

REBOOTING THE SYSTEM. It's been a long winter and spring here at Seattle Opera, where I'm on the education staff (we work with schools, host zillions of educational events, create publications in various media, and translate every opera into English), and tend to run myself ragged trying to make sure that everybody in the audience understands and appreciates what's going on on the stage. Since January we've produced five operas, and it's a lot of work. These last few weeks I've been feeling more than usually ragged, and thus am taking two months away from Seattle to "shut down" and "restart", as it were.

WRITING. I do so much writing as part of my job, in Seattle, I rarely get around to writing non-job-related material. Last fall I managed to write a sizeable chunk of a fiction piece I've been thinking about for years; I hope to create more of that while on this adventure. Similarly, I've been talking for a long time now about a screenplay loosely following the crazy life of Richard Wagner; hopefully that, too, will take shape as the journey unfolds.

FAMILY. We often produce Wagner's operas here in Seattle in the summer, and we Wagner fans live for that--but the shows are long and complicated, and before you know it the summer is over. My father built a cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan back in the 1950s, and although I spent most of my childhood "Up North", as we call it, I've never really been there in the summer as an adult. So taking off most of this summer will allow me to spend some time Up North, writing and enjoying my family (all of whom will turn up there in June and July).

SEEKING RICHARD. I knew I wanted to take this summer off when it was decided, for financial reasons, that Seattle Opera wouldn't be producing Wagner's Meistersinger this summer but instead another opera by a different composer. (And that's all I'll say on this blog about that other opera.) I'd been looking forward to Meistersinger for years, because it's his greatest libretto and thus lots of fun if you're the person doing the translation for English captions (who is me). I've translated 8 of Wagner's 10 'canonical' operas; the only two I have yet to work on are Tannhauser and Meistersinger. So this summer I'll be going to the locations of those remaining operas, and to lots of the places where Wagner lived and worked, as I SEEK RICHARD. One other thing I already know about this trip--the key to Meistersinger, I've always asserted, is Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm excited to begin and end my European WagnerQuest adventure with performances first (next week, in Copenhagen) of Wagner's Ring, and finally (in June, at Glyndebourne in the south of England) of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream.

So what is my goal? Ideally, the completed (and brilliant) manuscript of my "Soldier's Tale"; the fleshed-out screenplay for the Wagner-film project (untitled as yet, think of it as a cross between Amadeus, Topsy-Turvy, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings); memories of lots of wild and wacky adventures with the fun people who I'm already planning on being with and those whom I don't yet know; and (if nothing else) this blog.

I've recently been challenged to join the ranks of the bloggers, and this trip sounded like a good excuse. Usually when I travel I keep an illegible and, where legible, incomprehensible journal and take endless digital photos, later subjecting innocent passers-by to the long and torturous Power Point show that emerges. The blog seems as if it may offer a better place for me to set everything down and a more humane way for those who are interested to see what I've been up to. The real goal being to hang on to present experience; to prevent life from becoming what Demetrius says of his midsummer night's dream:

These things seem small and undistinguishable,
Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

Soon enough, I know, my great midsummer adventure will seem a distant memory of a dream...a great one, I hope!