Category Archives: musing

Creativity, you say?

“No,” she said, “that’s what you say.  Imagining all-consuming creative collaboration that is all in your head.”  

“That is what I say,” he said, “its own reward.   And all-consuming creative collaboration has not always been in my own head.”  

“That’s what you say,” she said.  

“You keep saying that,” he said.  

“As you say,” said she.  

“Listen, I’ve been in rooms many times, people get swept up into working together, given the chance to be part of a creative team.  I’ve taken part, I’ve seen it, experienced it many, many times.”  

“You are a dreamer.  Nobody but you gives a rat’s creatively shaved buttock about creativity for its own sake.  Creativity that leads to more tangible things, OK.  But even there, it’s more a buzzword or catchphrase — creativity– than something anyone cares about for its own sake.  Anyone but a person like you.”  

“A person like me….” he said.  

“Show me the money, I’ll do something creative for you right now,” she said, “pay to play.  I’ll collaborate with you all day, if you got the green to make it worth my while, I’ll riff with you til the cows stop farting up into the ozone.  You know what I’m saying?   If your idea is so valuable why is nobody paying you for it?”  

“I really don’t see the point…” he said.  

“My point exactly,” she said. “it’s nothing to talk about excitement, you have to make me excited about it.”  

“Oh,” he said, reluctant to take her deeper point, “you’re the one I have to make excited about the excitement of my exciting idea.”  

“I am,” she said, “and I am but one of hundreds you need to excite.”   She was right, goddamn it, he thought.   She’s just the first hurdle in this two thousand hurdle race.  

“You have no idea how many more hurdles than that it is,” she said, reading his thoughts with an ease that struck him as supernatural.  

“Supernatural my ass,” she thought, “all I had to do was read the words off the screen.  This guy doesn’t even realize all this is just writing on a screen.”

“I know that,” he said, his bottom lip coming up to cover the upper one.

You’ve Got to Appreciate Perfection, in any form

I have to admit, maddening as it may also be, the details of some of my current annoyances  have a certain mad perfection to them.  The devilish invention and sometime symmetry must be admired.

One reason I had such poor sleep the last few nights was that it was probably close to 90 degrees in my apartment.  I need to buy a thermometer, it might surprise me to learn that only 77 or 81 degrees feels like ninety.  Friends had suggestions: call the landlord (it’s 11 pm…) complain to the City (too much heat?  huh?)  put a tray of ice in front of the fan blowing hot air (uh… nah.)

I opened the windows, slept in front of a blowing fan, without blankets or sheets over me, without a shirt, with no socks (my usual winter sleeping accessory) and still it was uncomfortably hot.  The valve on my radiator?  Too hot to handle, and stuck in place anyway.

Last night I fell into a deep, blessed sleep that was interrupted when, three hours before my appointed wake-up, hammering, banging, drilling and stomping began directly over my head.  It persisted vigorously for exactly three hours.  It stopped abruptly right at the time I’d planned to wake up, literally at the time my alarm had been set for.

I noticed it was quiet, as I tried to go about my business, as I waited for a call back about lunch plans.   After learning the lunch appointment was cancelled, and realizing the quiet had gone on long after any lunch break the workers upstairs may have taken, and since even after two cups of coffee I could hardly keep my eyes open, I stretched out to sleep for an hour’s nap.

I fell asleep at once, but less than a minute into my nap, Sekhnet, checking up on me, woke me with a phone call.  

I began to fall asleep again when the sound of a pneumatic drill, or that machine the mechanics use in a garage to remove lug nuts, gave a short burst from the air shaft below my window.   Literally two seconds of very loud mechanical rattattattattat!!!! noise, followed by perhaps three minutes of complete silence.  

Then four or five seconds of the lug nut removal (can’t imagine there are lug nuts down there anywhere) followed by perhaps ninety seconds of silence.  

“What the devil?” I wondered, when a hammering began.  But the hammerer was as fickle and tentative as the guy with the heavy machine.  Three blows, a fourth, then silence.  Maybe it was the same guy?  Words were exchanged in a foreign language.  Perhaps there were two of them?  What the hell were they doing down there?

I began to drift off when “BRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!!!!” sounded again, then two hammer blows.  More consultation in the unknown language.  Silence as they pondered some unknowable mystery.   Hammer, hammer.  Silence, almost asleep again….BRRRRR!!! BRRRRR!!!! BRRRRRRR!  BRR!!! BRRRRR!!!!”

Silence.  Sudden very loud hammer blow, once!  Silence.

My eyes are crossing as I type these words.  I wonder why I am typing at all.  I am too tired to wonder very hard.  I am thinking about what’s next, what infernally ingenious, fiendishly customized and ridiculous petty annoyance will the universe come up with for me?   It’s sure to be a cool one, and perfect for me.  Stay tuned.

Does the thought of anger make you mad?

Is the subject of anger so infuriating, threatening, hideous in itself that virtually any mention of it will, sooner or later, stop conversation?

Likewise, the subjects of apology, repentance, forgiveness.   Do these of necessity, except, among a small, select, wounded population, induce squeamishness and avoidance?

“May I play Devil’s Advocate?” she asks, and without waiting for so much as a nod says “Here’s another either/or.   Either your intensity, self-righteousness and over-sensitivity on any subject go beyond the boundaries most people consider decent, made worse by a relentless demand for response, stated or strongly implied, put people to silence, just to make it stop.  Or, if what you write is like… oh, never mind.”

What?

“You freak people out, and piss them off, when you… you know, when you act like yourself.”

Hmmmm.  Good to know.  I’ll try not to act like myself so much.

“That’s not what I mean,” she says.

Corporations are people, with feelings too, sniff, sniff, you judgmental, insensitive bastard.   Is that what you mean?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.  “I mean that you might like to think you are not an angry person any more, that you have made great progress in that area, gained important insights you’ve had the courage and persistence to act on and are just currently frustrated, discouraged and trying not to wake up and smell the napalm, but that doesn’t mean….”

Hold it right there, girlfriend.  I was in the middle of a long discussion over the roles of genetic predisposition, nurture and  conscious effort to change innate personality traits one is unhappy with.  The correspondence reached a certain point and then abruptly stopped on the other end.  Silence as loud as the other person yelling “Silence! Enough!” [1]  

I stumbled on this line in my notes last night:  “the most insidious enemy of death benefits [taking positive lessons from the lives of even difficult departed loved ones–ed.] is the pervasive assumption that personality is fixed by midlife.” source

“Maybe your correspondent believes this pervasive assumption fervently, or hopelessly, as you might say, and has proven to his own satisfaction that struggling for any kind of positive personality change is futile and is just tired of your 2,000 word meditations, your opinionated self-regarding back and forth about the importance of doing things he feels are futile at best– particularly in light of your objectively depressing circumstances and lack of prospects for changing them any time soon.  Maybe he’s doing you the kindness of not telling you he finds these attempts to justify your life particularly distasteful.   Maybe he’s protecting you by not calling you on what bullshit virtually everything you say is.”

Dad?  Is that you, you rascal?

“You will find, son, when times get tough, that I am everywhere.  But let me assure you of this: you have made progress, and if I was still alive, still enlightened by the regrets I expressed on my death bed and my wishes to have lived differently, been, in fact, more like you, I’d be very proud of you.   Proud that you continue to believe in what you feel is right, in spite of the difficulty of it, despite the deliberate and inadvertent deafness of virtually everyone you encounter these days.”  

Must be easier for you these days, to say things like that, being a skeleton.  

“Oh, I can’t tell you how much easier it is, now that I’m just bones with dirt between my smiling jaws.”

[1]  Of course, another obvious reason for the gap in this particular case is the present lack of time required to thoughtfully reply in a life I know to be particularly emotionally complicated at this moment.   This goes as well for each of the other several cases where the subject of anger has been unveiled and then left to languish a bit.  –ed

Clear Your Desk Top

There may come a time when your mind, worn tired by struggle, will sit and refuse to move forward, even an inch.

At such a time there is no harm to turning your attention away from the computer, and thoughts of inspired action, and clearing the chaos on your desk.

A Foolish Belief in Democracy?

The young Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he married the widow of Bathurst Skelton, three years before becoming the Author of Liberty, increased his wealth threefold.  He became the master of Bathurst’s 135 slaves [1]  (Jefferson had inherited only 50 from his parents) and added 11,000 acres of property formerly held by Bathurst [2] to the 5,000 he had previously inherited.   To say that young Thomas Jefferson was born booted and spurred to ride the backs of his saddled countrymen would not be entirely unfair.  His marriage to the wealthy young widow added luster to both boot and spur.

With all this inherited wealth, and in spite of an eloquently expressed life long hatred of tyranny,  which compelled him to risk being hanged as a revolutionary, and his deep moral opposition to slavery, the Author of Liberty should have had the luxury, more than fifty years later, of freeing his remaining 130 slaves in his will, as the Father of our Country had done.  Sadly, that luxury was denied to him.  John Adams, who comes down to us far less heroically than Washington and Jefferson, and not nearly the moral equal of either (in the simplistic popular imagination), never owned a slave.  But that is another rant for someone else to go on about some other time.

Fictional, aspirational president Josiah Bartlet, of  The West Wing TV series, is fond of learned quotes.   He quoted Jefferson some time toward the end of season six.   “A man’s management of his own purse speaks volumes about character,” he said.   And it struck me anew: motherfucker!  

The reason Jefferson could not free his slaves, as he heartbrokenly regretted he could not do toward the end of his life, is that in spite of his great inherited wealth, his management of his own purse was less than perfect.  His love of luxury far exceeded his  ability to pay for shipments of the most expensive French wine, the finest Italian furnishings, the clothes made for him by the greatest tailors in Europe, the magnificent horses he rode, the no expense spared constant remodeling of his gracious and beautiful home, Monticello.

He had racked up impressive debts over the years of his long, luxurious life as a philosopher king.  If he had freed his slaves, instead of bequeathing them as property to his daughters, he would have left his progeny penniless.  The shame of that outweighed any other qualms he might have had.  Even leaving aside the several slave children he fathered with the illegitimate half-sister of his late wife, his long-time slave mistress Sally, (unacknowledged during his life and indignantly denied on his legacy’s behalf for a century and a half after his death) let us say, in unison: motherfucker.   History is kinder to him, by far, than I am.  No doubt.

My meditation on the man who bravely declared the self-evident truth of human equality leads me to wonder about my ongoing belief in the idealistic democracy he played such a large role in shaping.  I continue to believe in the importance of our public institutions.  Most large steps forward as a People were the product of principled government initiative in response to overwhelming events and popular agitation. Think about the use of the Interstate Commerce Clause and the courage and determination of both activists and jurists in the federal courts to end centuries of racism at law.  (Much work remains to be done there, but that’s not the point.  The laws needed to be changed, the government acted to change and, in some cases, even enforce the laws.  A triumph of democracy.)

The importance of principled government action is confirmed for me over and over as I watch the ongoing failure of profit-driven business, our so-called Free Market, to solve any of the pressing problems of our society.  Exponentially increasing the wealth of a few makes the country’s wealth look good on paper, but human lives, like baseball games, are not played on paper. Wall Street’s health in most cases has little to do with healthy lives on Main Street.  

Without a pragmatic and honest government to unite and inspire us we have no hope of solving the biggest challenges we face as a nation, as a species, as a planet.  I am probably even in the majority in this opinion, of those with the leisure to consider the question seriously, and who do not stand to lose wealth by taking this position.  Not that it makes much difference, if my belief in democracy is a silly as other fond beliefs of childhood.

Leave aside the damning fact that our highest court has decided that, Constitutionally speaking, and as intended by the Framers, money is speech in a land where 97% of all political campaigns are won by the side that spends the most money speaking.  Has there ever been anything like democracy for most of the history of this nation, the world’s first modern experiment in government of the People, by the People and for the People?   At isolated moments, perhaps, the best aspirations and highest motives of our citizens have become enshrined in our laws.  Sometimes these isolated moments are decades or centuries in the making.

Slavery and lynching, two practices long protected by American law, the former embedded, obscurely but robustly, in our Constitution, the latter winkingly left up to the states to, er … uh, regulate, are now universally reviled.  Today nobody but the hybrid of a moral cretin and a talking jackass would make an argument in favor of slavery or lynching, though both were the law of the land for generations.  Medicare, once unthinkably controversial, is now something even the Tea Baggers want the government to keep their hands off of.  Social Security too, at one time renounced as part of a Socialist plot, has become something most retired people rely on, at least in part, and value as part of a decent society’s social safety net. Not long ago homosexuals were hunted down and locked up, today they legally marry in many states. Millions are in jail today for preferring marijuana to alcohol as their drug of choice. [OK, I know, an exaggeration, please see note… 3]  Democracy does over time move forward, although more often than not only after excruciatingly long struggles against powerful, organized, determined, well-funded forces. 

In light of all this, can I really be angry at a president who campaigned by appealing to the highest ideals and hopes of many of our citizens and continues to talk the talk, though often obliged to speak less than the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while ruling in slavish obedience to the corporate bottom line?  Sure I can, but I don’t know how fair it is.  He is not the only “sell-out” to find life much more complicated as the indebted to campaign donors leader of the free world than he may have wished it to be.  Bill Clinton is often considered the greatest Republican president of the last fifty years, though he was relentlessly attacked as a liberal.  Heck of a liberal Bill was, really.

If Jefferson could have freed his slaves, you just know he would have done the right thing, even as the management of his purse showed most of what we need to know about the actual content of his character.

It bears repeating, as was done a few times on The West Wing:  we campaign in poetry but govern in prose.  Call me strict, but I believe  the Author of Liberty should be judged by his own formulation– ditto this well-spoken idealist we have in there now.  

When someone who talks like a psychopath, or a slave holder, acts like one, I know how to react.  I am mobilized, adrenaline flows.  I’m angry, maybe, but not hurt.   I certainly feel no surprise, no betrayal of principle or trust.  When someone talks like a true and compassionate friend, and acts exactly like the guy who talks like a psychopath, and people around me act like he’s still our true friend — it robs me of hope.  It crushes my soul just a little bit more.   Makes me feel something I strongly resist believing:  that my faith in democracy, in the power of the  People to see the truth and walk toward the light, may be entirely foolish.

I don’t believe that, deep down, but, damn, these complicatedly nuanced idealist motherfuckers who eloquently speak our fondest hopes make it hård.

 

 

[1] These 135 slaves were inherited from Martha’s father John Wayles, not Bathurst Skelton, and in 1773.  Among the slaves was Betty Hemings and her last daughter by John Wayles (she had six of his children), the baby Sally.

[2] He inherited the 11,000 acres from Wayles, too.  I just like writing Bathurst Skelton and didn’t have my copy of Fawn M. Brodie’s excellent, groundbreaking 1974 Thomas Jefferson; An Intimate Biography at hand when I wrote the post earlier today.  (see W.W. Norton softcover, pp. 80-87)

[3] Fine, not millions locked up for pot.  But read these shameful statistics.   Could a democracy spend the more than $51,000,000,000 annually that goes to the endless, senseless “War On Drugs” any more wisely?  How about 10% of it to make sure no old Americans are ever forced to be cold, or homeless, or eat cat food?

On Forgiveness and Sincere Apology

 
On Forgiveness and apology, their interaction and the relative power of each, I often think of an experience from decades ago as one of the best illustrations of the amazing healing power of a complete apology. 
 
It began with a comment a friend dashed off back in the age of snail mail, in response to a badly recorded guitar solo on an early Ray Charles tune (that later was retooled with new lyrics and became the gem “Hard Times”) I’d sent him on a cassette.  I’d pointed out the solo and commented that the blues solo in the jazzy setting was something I admired, was trying to learn from, or something to that effect.  My friend wrote, a phrase I remember being greatly stung by, although it has no sting anymore: “no offense, pal, but that solo was so amateurish, I thought it was you.”
 
I called him, mightily peeved, and when I read him the offending line he sounded truly aghast (might have been a good act, but it worked) and it became clear at once that he’d had no intention of saying what he appeared to have said (or at least he skillfully and immediately conveyed that impression).  He told me he understood how terrible the words sounded, that he would have taken it the same way I did.  He agreed the words as written were hurtful, told me he hadn’t intended the offense, said he was sorry.  
 
The relief was instant, and I think the empathy– that he would have felt as I did, that it wasn’t crazy of me to have been a little offended — was a key to that.   I did not have to weigh for a second whether to forgive him or not.  The insult had not been intended, or so I was convinced by his clarification, and the hurt of it disappeared immediately.  As hurt as I’d been by the artlessly phrased line, I was grateful for and instantly relieved by the apology.  I recall the immediate effect of the apology clearly to this day, decades later. 
 
It is a rare experience, the one I’ve just described, not just for me but for anyone.  People rarely apologize for anything in our In-Your-Fucking-Face, Asshole, Culture, the most common facsimile being the annoying “if-pology” (a tip of the chapeau to Harry Shearer, who may have coined the useful term): if you were offended (why not let the passive voice be used for further distance from responsibility?) then I’m sorry.   Sorry if you were pathetic enough to need my stinking apology, in other words.
 
In the case of someone who has done terrible, objectively abusive things — and waits until hours before his death more than 40 years later to utter his first acknowledgment that he probably shouldn’t have acted that way, and apologizes for the first and last time– we’re presented with a different scenario. 
 
For my own mental health I had to figure out a way not to be angry at a father who, in a fundamental way, was close to insane.  My many attempts to have a dialogue with him over the decades were roughly rebuffed.  He was so damaged that he couldn’t help but inflict the damage he did.  He was unlikely to ever acknowledge it, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to on his death bed either, if I’d stood there angry at him as he was dying.
 
Fortunately for both of us, in intensive therapy not many months earlier I’d finally put the connections together to realize that, given the atrocious abuse he’d endured, he was not capable of being a more compassionate person, that his life was a tragedy, and very painful to him and that my only play was letting go of my own anger to the extent that I could.  
 
As I stood there talking to him those last couple of days of his life I was aware only of doing what I could to make his passing as easy as I could help to make it.  I repeated the phrase “if you could have done things differently you would have” every time he raised the whip over himself for what a monster he’d so often been.
 
So I’ve lived those two sides of apology/forgiveness.  A sincere apology definitely helps a person to forgive:  I hurt you, I understand why you were hurt, I didn’t mean it, I was wrong, I’m sorry, I’ll try my best not to do it again.  Please forgive me.  Easiest case.  I try my best to quickly apologize every time I’m aware I did something hurtful to someone I care about.   
 
Forgiving when the person is unrepentant– I think it can only be done when there is a strong psychic reason, like the person is a parent, or sibling, or if not forgiving will drive you mad, something like that.   And in that case one has to go through something like the same process of ‘apology’ on behalf of the other before you can forgive: he underwent traumas that made him a monster, he didn’t intend to become a monster, if he could have not been a monster he would have done it, he tortures himself for his monstrousness, etc.  Only after that series of understandings is reached can one let go of some of the pain by forgiving, it seems to me.  And forgiveness is for ourselves, primarily, if we are carrying anger in our hearts.
 
Jack Kornfield, Zen teacher, tells the one about two former prisoners of war who meet years later.    “Do you often think about our captivity?” asks one. “I think about it every day, and whenever I do I think of going back and slaughtering them all,” says the other.   “Well,” says the first,”then you are still their prisoner.”  
 
Without the acknowledgment of injury, and a sincere attempt to make it right, there is only hurt and anger in the injured party most of the time.  In the case of rough characters who are not my father, I toss them aside if they repeatedly dismiss as neurotic over-sensitivity my hurt reactions to hurtful things they do.  Don’t want to talk about it?  Fine.  Have a nice day.
 
I can really relate to the anger of people living in a fifth or tenth generation of inherited poverty that goes back to slavery and the 40 acres and a mule they were promised but never got.   This immensely wealthy nation has never really given any sort of meaningful apology to its former slaves for the obscenely profitable monstrosity of the “Peculiar Institution”.  The shameful subject is most often daintily dismissed as unfortunate ancient history, though in my lifetime lynching was still a matter of “states’ rights”.  Those who call for reparations for centuries of slave labor are thought of by most whites as grand-standing polemicists, even though economists have calculated the almost incalculable wealth created here by slave labor, on behalf of the genteel “Planters”, some of our wealthiest and most powerful families.
 
“You … er, uh, n-words, are so fucking over-sensitive, we built housing projects for you, we give you money for nothing, let you get into college with lower SAT scores, still give affirmative action to a few of you, we even conduct investigations when a police department shows a pattern of racist harassment, brutality and murder against you — what the devil more do you want from us?”  only goes so far.  And how far it goes is nowhere.
 
Sorry.

Salient Point Left Out of Previous Post

I left an important detail out of the account I just posted.

The thing that left the whip marks on me was not recalling a difficult childhood and the sad details appurtenant to it.   Many have had it much worse than I did, than my sister did, or my parents, though each of us had it bad enough.  The siblings of three of my grandparents and their families, for example, thirteen years before I was born: I can’t think of a worse childhood than you and everyone you’ve ever known being massacred by organized gangs of drunken haters backed by a powerful occupying army whose commander is determined to wipe out every trace of your ancestors.

The whip marks I felt after yesterday’s session came a moment after I was asked if I had experienced any traumas.   At first I answered no, then I put my finger on an ongoing one, with roots in my earliest life, the moment that has always stopped me in my tracks:

when an angry bully, usually with an arbitrary hierarchic advantage of some kind, steps up and tells me to put my eyes to the ground.  

I recalled a few instances of this as an adult, how the rising feeling of unfairness, and powerless to do anything but fight, enflamed nerve endings seared repeatedly when I was a boy, how needy bullies have always had an easy time locating me in a crowded room.  I’m not hard to find, I’m the one who hasn’t learned to put my eyes to the ground at the key moment so someone else can take the blows.

“Your therapist can work with you on that,” the grad student told me sympathetically.

Getting to the Part That Hurts

During the first screening interview to get into the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy research study most of the yes/no questions seemed designed to rule out people with serious psychological handicaps.  These people had larger problems than waking up exhausted every day and would be no more useful to the study than the study would be to them.  Changing how they think about their life would not likely help them very much, if at all.  Trying to reason their way to more productive pursuits would probably only take them so far.

“Do you sometimes hear celebrities on TV talking directly to you, acknowledging your secret connection?”  

“Do you feel that, as soon as you leave a room, everyone heaves a sigh of relief and begins unloading about what a complete jerk you are?”  

“Do the commands you get when wearing your tin foil hat seem more reasonable to you than the ones you get from the neighbor’s dog?”

“Do you believe that Dick Cheney would kill thousands of people to get what he wants?”  (a few were trick questions, I noticed)

This interview was at times a little tedious, but there was nothing unpleasant or challenging about it.  After the session I spent about 20 minutes filling out a written questionnaire with many of the same questions, or questions of their ilk.  

“Do you believe a health insurance industry insider and lobbyist was deliberately placed in charge of drafting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to ensure that no violence would be done to the fabulous profitability of that industry by those with ‘noble’ ideals about human dignity?”  

I was also given a longer form to take home and fill out with questions about people who had influenced me, family dynamics growing up, the death of loved ones, traumas I may have experienced, my happiest moments, most significant events at various times of my life, what my main goals in seeking treatment are.  

The second interview was free-ranging and surprisingly enjoyable.  It was like an interview on a talk show conducted by an open-minded host who was intent on showcasing what I could do.  There were a few laughs along the way and the time felt very much like the time I spend writing here– following my thoughts where they go, retracing my steps to make a connection, clarifying something, adding an aside, noting that the aside was not strictly relevant perhaps, a laugh line, pause for ironic irony, back to a serious point, etc.

At the end of that interview I was asked to tell ten stories, five minutes or less each, about ten specific incidents in my life.  In the end, probably because I had told so many little stories in the course of the previous hour, the interviewer was satisfied with five or so stories.  Since all of these sessions are videotaped, I called afterwards to find out if I could have a copy of the interconnected stories.  They seemed to put my life and moral progress in a certain nutshell.

The stories are being kindly transcribed for me now by an assistant who works at the research study.  I was told by Conan they’d make the narrative skeleton of a novella with excellent bone structure.   He told me so the other night, transmitting the thought directly to me from my neighbor’s TV.  

I emerged from that second interview feeling like a wholly integrated person whose life made a certain organic sense.  Having the good fortune to be able to dedicate myself to a worthwhile but unlikely plan that could potentially shine a little light into a dark and angry world, having designed it based on insights gained from the often painful events of my life, seemed like a great blessing, in spite of the difficulty of struggling alone to do the impossible.  I’d work on reframing my daily struggles, get some help moving forward and, y’allah.

I had a call to say I was good to go for the therapy, they’d be charging me the low end of the sliding scale ($20 less than my co-pay for limited treatment under Obamacare, plus no $1,750 out-of-pocket), that the therapist would contact me (she did) and that the third interview would take place at such and such a time (yesterday at 3).  This was all good news, since I’d been pursuing a study like this since early December and yesterday was March 4th.

Then, yesterday, the third interview.  “How are you?” the young graduate student asked with a smile.  I nodded and said “OK” with only the faintest note of cautiousness in my voice.  I noticed, even then, that I didn’t do the polite thing and ask the same of her.  What harm could the meaningless pleasantry have done?   Asking how she was would have been a decent bit of human reciprocity  requiring perhaps two seconds to do.  I thought about that afterward, not sure if there was deeper meaning to assign to my failure to do the social thing.  I decided it wasn’t worth thinking about too much, that I hadn’t been there for polite chat, after all.

Her pleasant greeting soon took on a different cast as she began to probe with the final set of questions.  “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she might have said as she paused with the oversized needle only partially hidden.  The questions seemed innocent enough, but they were boring down into the answers, each ten words or so filled in on small blanks (do not use extra paper), that I’d provided on the questionnaire I’d done at home after the first session.   She was working from what looked like a typed and annotated transcript of my answers.

This is the beginning of the hard part, I realized at some point during that hour.   These are not softball questions teed up to me while a buzzed studio audience laughs and enjoys the show.  They’d set the speed on the pitching machine to ‘high’ and these pitches were being thrown with purpose.  A few came in right under my chin.  “Provide five adjectives to describe your relationship to your mother.”  The fifth of these, I recall, was ‘complicated’.  My arms were too tired to take a better hack at that fifth one.  

Then I had to describe why I’d chosen each adjective.  Complicated, and the thing that connected all the moving parts was the pain behind each adjective.   My mother’s limitations, the sorrows she’d lived with, the humiliations she’d undergone, all overshadowing her talents, work ethic, great intelligence and sense of humor.  My childhood had been lived on a battlefield, surrounded by mine fields and beyond them barbed wire and dark, muddy trenches, and my only escape was into the world of my imagination.  That world held hope and terror in almost equal proportion.  I felt by the end of the session as though I’d made almost no progress from that imagined world of hope and nightmare that was my foundation in life.  It seemed to me I live there still, in that war zone.   The insights I’d gained?  Butterflies of the imagination losing color and substance as I tried to remember them.

We were done in exactly one hour, the shortest time the exercise could be done in.  I told the young woman that I’d take 41 more seconds to show her something, she was agreeable.  A moment before I left the room a shuddering nine year-old wondering why the world remained such an evil place I handed her the iPad and she watched this, which elicited a few chuckles from her as she watched.  She asked if I’d seen the Lego movie, I hadn’t.  I gave her a wehearyou.net Idea Book, which she accepted gracefully (she’d admired Sekhnet’s label at the end of the previous session when I’d made a note in my own worn Idea Book).  I put my coat on as I thanked her and said goodbye over my shoulder turning toward the lobby while she went into the office in the opposite direction.  I didn’t pause or turn to make final eye contact with her.  

What’s up with that running out of there like a whipped dog, I thought a moment later, feeling a bit like a whipped dog.  I continued feeling that way as I walked the streets near the original school where I’d gotten the program up and running.  I was aware of a strong desire not to run into anyone I knew from that school.  “How you doing?” they’d ask.  “Good!” I’d say, wincing out a smile and turning slightly to avoid showing the whip marks on my dog back.

The hard part is why few people succeed at doing things that are hard.   There are many things leading up to the hard part that most people can do well enough.   Then comes the hard part and, as George Dubya Bush said, with visible peevishness, about good people in his administration who had botched the rescue of poverty-stricken hurricane victims  (the wealthier ones did OK, thank God), the delivery of democracy to Iraq and anything else they touched, “it’s hard work!”  

“Which of your parents were you closer to?”  And, in spite of the complicatedness of the relationship, I had no hesitation choosing my mother.  “My father was a total asshole,” I said by way of summary, like a petulant eight year-old,  before clarifying, rephrasing, reminding us both that considering where he came from, the unimaginably painful abuse he’d suffered as a young kid, and all through his childhood, he deserved to have it clarified– yes, he was a verbally violent man, but, as I’ve described, it’s more complicated than that, and I don’t say asshole in a dismissively judgmental way.  

I thought afterwards of my friend quickly walking back his understandable frustration with the demanding mother who was driving him crazy during his annual visit to her.  He began talking about how manipulative she is, caught himself and began to talk about what a basically good person she is, how lonely she is, how much she loves him.

The hard work of that third interview left me feeling my wounds for the next couple of hours.  I realized, walking away, that there would be no more getting-to-know-you sessions in the green room, no more canned laughs.  If this therapy was going to help me move myself and this program forward, the hard work would be beginning toot sweet (comme un dit).

I thought of the Temptations, Cloud Nine – “The childhood part of my life wasn’t very pretty, I was born and raised in the slums of the city.”  My identification with those born and raised in the slums of the city is something I can’t shake.   My disconnection from those who lead comfortable lives and accept the inevitability of slums, the viciousness of the cycles of inherited poverty and inherited wealth, the routinized murder of children the New York Times refers to as “collateral damage”, the ongoing evil of wars fought only to make the rich richer, a status quo that accepts as an externality of corporate wealth that the vast majority of the world, and the earth itself, will suffer whatever is necessary to maximize profits… all these things in the category of things I cannot change and that I ask an indifferent, or wholly absent, God to grant me the serenity to know I must simply bear…  

“You’re getting yourself worked up, calm yourself.  Why do you do this to yourself?” 

Who the fuck are you?  The hard part, in a word, is anger.  We have a damned good right to it sometimes, yes.  Now what are we going to do with it?

How It Made Me Feel Today

Hitting the “publish” button here completes the illusion of instant connection to everybody, and I can see from the world map on my wordpress stats page that someone in Taiwan read my latest post, two people in India clicked by, or one person there, twice.  I can see when my friend in Poland has had a chance to visit and I nod, anticipating  the intelligent comment my note will sometimes inspire.  When I saw I’d had a visitor from Yemen a few weeks ago I involuntarily pictured the face of that little Yemeni girl, confronted by the camera, after the rest of her family was blown apart by an American missile launched from a menacing American robot plane.   Hearts and minds, Brother O, way to go, sir.   But if we look at this phenomenon of maintaining a blahg for what it actually is, what causes the fingers to tap and one of them to press “publish” at the end, it’s hard to say what it actually is.  

Like everything in the world we have multiple explanations, theories, half-assed (or full-assed) opinions, proposed answers.   Each of these illuminates the matter from a slightly different angle, each contains some bit of truth, each convinces us a bit more or a little less according to our tastes.  In the case of why people post things to the internet, Occam’s Razor doesn’t quite cut it.

Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing: making oneself known to another, strikes me as a huge reason people post things they create on the internet.   The impulse to connect with others in our increasingly connected, increasingly isolated culture is no doubt part of the heart of any complete explanation.  Sharing information, trying to unite with others, giving a take on news that seems vital to understanding but does not seem to get reported, except by the brilliant author of a book that sells well, wins an award, ignites a small discussion that is quickly spun into oblivion as the news media churns the cycle.   Celebrity culture and 24/7 media blaring and flashing in infinite forms makes almost everyone who partakes of it just a little bit thirsty for  Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fabulousness.  In our narcissistic age, why not tell everybody how that makes us feel?   And we have the technology now, and talent or no talent is no longer such an important distinction, we say fuck the corporate gatekeepers.  Everyone is a star, no?  Or if not a star, everyone is someone with something to say. Or with nothing to say, but a cool place to say it and WTF, LOL, ROTFLMAO.  My new boobs are nice, admit it.

I try to write well, and I write about things that get to me one way or another.   That puts me in the same boat with millions of other bloggers.   Democracy at work, yo.  “What is it you want from people?” my sister once asked me pointedly during a calm period in an argument that would soon turn ugly.   I told her I want a conversation, a back and forth where people speak openly about things they care about.  Ideally it’s like a catch, throwing the thing gently back and forth.  They listen carefully to each other, interrupt only for clarification and respond intelligently to what the other person is trying to communicate.  

My sister and I grew up in a war zone and my answer wearied her considerably at the time.   She and I have good talks these days, but back then my answer really annoyed her.   It seemed so much to want, I think, like someone insisting on clean water to drink every time they are thirsty in a land where people are keeling over from dehydration all around.  We had little experience of respectful conversation as kids, though both of our parents were otherwise quite intelligent.  Being funny was something we were used to, and my sister has a quick wit, as did the rest of the war party around our dinner table.  

“A joke is the epitaph on the tombstone of a feeling,” said a dime store philosopher named Nietzsche.  True dat, Fredrich, as was “without music, life would be a mistake”, which goes without saying, and really, except for its indisputable truth, has no place here.   

I am not one to be coy about my feelings or opinions here, or anywhere, really, but this post is going to be a bit more personal than usual because it’s about how something made me feel about my own life today.  I was surprised at how acutely I felt it, under my skin, in my blood and cells.  

Which, by way of semi-amusing digression, calls to mind this email I had blind cc’d to me recently from a guy I was friends with years back, a great improviser on trumpet who really listened, as all great improvisers must, a brilliant photographer, a man of many talents:

Probably one of the most “in-depth” interviews I ever have given to anyone.

Talking about my photography, my movie documentary work, but also about aspects of my personal life and experiences I never shared with anyone before, not even my close friends.
Possibly an interesting read, especially if you are, like me, here in NYC, stuck indoors due to bad weather !
He provided a link, and a recent photo of himself looking darkly pensive, and the charming rascal signed it Much Love, which gave me a dry little chuckle.   I sent this email on to a few others who had known this chap, likely with a cynical comment in the subject line I couldn’t quite resist.  Epitaph on the tombstone, you know.  None of us were going to click on that shit, though we all enjoyed the Much Love.
Having set the table a little too fastidiously, and with that last digression, my strength to continue with what I intended to write tonight drains away.  I will be back at it again soon, because this experience today, at the final of three pre-interviews before I begin what I like to think of as my ECT, was not like the first two, which I enjoyed, and it brought up some deeper things than I was expecting, beginning with the inexperienced nurse smiling and greeting me, a little too solicitously,  “how are you today?  Uhm, you’re not squeamish about the sight of your own viscera, right?”
I was surprised at how prudish my readiness to be nauseated actually turned out to be.

On second thought

My friend who asked me yesterday how I continue to write in the face of indifference emailed to clarify what he actually meant, a much worse question, to wit:

I meant, how do you maintain the focus and motivation to write, given the discouraging features of your life in general as you’ve described them to me over the last few months?

And my answer to this more pointed question remains basically the same as yesterday’s. 

The moment of grace, musical in a way, the tap of the keys clacking, a bit hypnotic, reminds me of the best of myself, no matter what discouragements lurk.  It is a relief to see my thoughts making themselves plain in black on this white screen.

His clarification does remind me of something though.  I had a dear old friend, very old, she died at almost 93 a year ago next week, who loved my project, the student-run animation workshop.  She had good reason to love it, she was the inspiration for it.  After the death of her youngest daughter on an icy road in Vermont she heeded the advice of good friends and opened the Elinor Beth Music and Art Workshop for local children.   I was one of the workers in this shop, though, as it was spring and we were kids, we spent more time in the backyard kicking a ball around among the budding trees and shrubs than we did at the easels painting.   

The inspirational thing about Florence was how much she loved to be on hand quietly encouraging us to be creative.  I’d ask her to show me things, she always told me she loved my way of doing them better than the ‘academic’ way she’d learned to do it.  She assured me there’d be time to learn whatever I wanted to about technique and the “correct” way to do things but that the most important thing now was to love what I was doing for its own sake.  And to keep doing it, in the way only a creative kid could.  I’d go back to the easel, slap another painting up there, hang it on clothes pins to dry, grab some cookies, suck down a little apple juice and dash back into the intoxicating back yard.

Florence and I remained lifelong friends.  At one point, two or three years ago, telling her about the great potential and probable impossibility of actually accomplishing what I’d devoted my life to– getting the animation workshop up and running–  she told me she didn’t know how I could sleep at night.  She said it was a great idea, but how I could face the discouraging obstacles I was facing was beyond her powers, seemed superhuman.  “I love what you’re doing and it’s a fantastic idea.  I just don’t know how you can sleep at night,” she said with characteristic love and concern.  

I laughed, brushing her worry aside with bravado.  “I don’t know either, but I sleep fine.  Don’t worry about me,” I told her.

Not long after that I began to have trouble sleeping.

So if this blahg goes suddenly silent, you’ll understand what happened.