That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you.
Robinson Jeffers, Be Angry At The Sun, 1941
The stone holds everything, every failed marriage, every dead child, every moment Jeffers stared at the Pacific and decided humanity was small change. This house, Tor House, was built by a man who wanted to physically touch permanence, who hauled granite because words weren’t enough of a monument to his misanthropy.
Playing Robinson Jeffers in this film means inhabiting the contradiction: the guy loved humanity enough to mourn its stupidity. He built this fortress on a bluff in Carmel not to hide but to witness, to watch the hawks and the waves and know they’d outlast every Senate hearing and stock ticker and love affair. This tower isn’t quaint. It’s a middle finger to comfort, to ease, to the lie that progress means anything at all.
And I’m here, walking through rooms where he wrote Shine, Perishing Republic, and the Pacific is doing its thing, indifferent, gorgeous, and I realize the performance isn’t about mimicry. It’s about standing in this space and letting the stones recalibrate my frequency. Jeffers didn’t perform hope. He performed clarity. The kind that makes people uncomfortable at dinner parties.
The crew’s setting up lights, checking sound, the David Schendel the director is giving notes, and meanwhile the cypress trees are twisting in that wind that never stops, the same wind that bent them when Robinson Jeffers mixed mortar with his bare hands. I’m supposed to be “acting,” but really I’m just trying not to flinch from the truth he built this place to announce: that beauty and brutality are the same currency, and the ocean spends it without sentiment.