Enlightenment

    Watched Martin Sheen on Inside the Actor's Studio. I have an infinite taste for that show. Despite being firmly planted on the 'viewer' side of the stage, the craft of acting fascinates me. I'm intrigued by the different approaches taken by actors whose results often seem to be quite similar.
     Martin Sheen, though, was enlightening beyond expectations. His use of personal experience in his work--to the point of deliberately focusing on the pain surrounding the death of his father in order to arrive at a level of anguish necessary for a difficult scene--reveals a dedication to truth that I'd thought unrealistic in "acting" as a "job". Sheen is also a very politically active person. That's something that I've been thinking about with increasing frequency and I suppose responsibility lately. This isn't a topic that I intentionally address ever, much less in this format, but I'm going to do it now, partly in response to a direct request from someone whose opinion I value highly, but mostly because it's something I believe is very important. Vote Kerry.

     OK, done. Moving on, or rather, back, Sheen quoted India's poet laureate from the 1920s, Rabindranath Tagore, during his interview. (Tagore is the one credited with giving Mohandas Ghandi the honorary name "Mahatma", meaning "great-souled".) The recitation of the poem was one of the most moving spontaneous things I've ever seen on television. The poem itself is lovely and powerful.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

(from Geetanjali)