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EXPLANATORY NOTE on when and why I wrote the play: The Pallid Sphere

From hindsight, I think I wrote the poetical drama, The Pallid Sphere, as a tangible externalization of an inner quandary I was grappling with as a youth, namely: where to go with my life?

Toward the end of my last year at New England University, in New South Wales, Australia, I was at a major crossroads. As I was completing my bachelor-of-science degree, I pondered more and more over the big question: what to do next? Should I plow ahead with my university studies toward a higher degree and perhaps a more respected, better paying job? Or should I strike out on something new, and truer to my heart? Should I pursue a conventional career? Or my dreams?

My professors – who had great expectations for me – urged me to go on with an “honours” degree in zoology. They foresaw me doing groundbreaking research on soil fauna (in line with their consignment to improve the pasture-land for sheep). They offered me a full scholarship and a promising future as an “agricultural eco-biologist.”

But I had misgivings. My eagerness, since adolescence, to study biology was born from my love of the wilderness and its creatures, not my love of the mutton industry – nor of any other money-grubbing, wilderness-consuming enterprise.

I recalled how my father, long before, had faced a similar decision. Since childhood he’d had a gift – indeed, a passion – for drawing and painting. But in his youth he’d been persuaded by his father (an attorney) to study law rather than art – in order to make more money and live more comfortably. So my father had sidelined his dream to become an artist and saddled himself to the legal profession – for life. As I remembered him over many years, he seldom looked happy, except in those stolen moments with brush and palate in hand. When he sketched a sunset, he too glowed.

The two previous years at New England University I had won the award as the most outstanding science student of the year. But now my grades no longer interested me that much. When I should have been sweating for my finals, often I found myself daydreaming, or wandering in the open woodlands.

A painting hung in my small student bedroom. I’d been enthralled by this painting since the first time I saw it in the home of a fellow laborer in blister-rust control, in the mountains of California, when I was 17. I’d raved over it every time I visited his home, until at last he simply gave it too me, saying, “It speaks so much more to you than it does to me.” The painting was in some ways quite ordinary. I have friends who would call it kitsch – or cute. I guess it depends on what you need or chose to see. The painting – in soft pastels – is of a boy reclining quietly on a grassy hillside, gazing out at the view. There is a look of happy self-containment on his face, yet also a touch of longing, even sadness – a whole gestalt of feeling and of joy and of yearning.

Once entrusted to me, the painting accompanied me wherever I went – from California to Ohio, back to California, and now down-under to Australia. It enlightened and energized me. Like the North Star or the Southern Cross, it was a compass that kept my spirit on track. Often during my first years at the university, absorbed into my studies as I was, my eyes came to rest on that gentle painting.

During the last year of my work toward my bachelor of science degree, I became more immersed in obligatory studies and neglectful of things I adored, and the painting on the wall slowly began to loose its spell. Little by little it became just a picture of a befuddled kid on a hill. It was the same painting. The change was in me. I was losing something. Perhaps my childhood. One evening, after taking a furtive glance at the painting, I sat on my bed and scribbled out a poem. It was poem about the loss of childhood. Does the child need to die to become a man? And if the child in him dies, what is the man?

It was a need to explore this question in greater depth that led to my writing The Pallid Sphere. This was a question that had practical importance to me at that turning point in my life.

The play is written in verse (iambic pentameter), up to the point where the protagonist gives up his dream to take the road less traveled, and returns to his conventional life. From then on the play proceeds in flat, lumbering prose – with a few exceptions. After graduation I did decide to take “the road less taken.” Rather than continue postgraduate studies in biology, I switched fields completely, studying literature and drama at the University of Cincinnati.

Although my undergraduate studies had been strictly in science, the head of the English department at the University of Cincinnati made an exception and allowed me to enter the graduate program in literature. His decision was largely based on reading a copy of The Pallid Sphere. Though he recognized my play as a juvenile effort, he thought it showed promise. And he was in tune with the soul-searching. He urged me to enter the play into a competition for budding playwrights in the eastern United States. To my amazement it won second prize! The University of Cincinnati drama department wanted to put The Pallid Sphere on stage (for which it was never really intended: too many words and too little action). However its production was postponed because I was about to leave on a trip to the Orient – which was to last two years. By the time I returned from the East, I had other things I wanted to do, and The Pallid Sphere was a bygone.

On many occasions in my life I have chosen the road less taken. Often it has not been easy. But unlike Roger in The Pallid Sphere, I did not run off to be a hermit. Rather, I took a stand with other misfits and dreamers, in the never-ending effort to build a kinder, more inclusive, more emancipating world for all.