Category Archives: musing

Hanging By A Spider Web

True, the string a spider shoots out is plenty strong, still, it’s a little bracing to be suspended in this life by something as thin and almost invisible as that.   Cornell West, a man with a penchant for cadence and rhyme, called his recent book Hope on A Tightrope.   Similar image– we are, for an hour or a hundred years, by grace, moving forward, or backwards, or quivering in place, or asleep– but in a precarious situation where a single false step might be our last.

Unlike others I know, I never wake up sweating, my heart pounding in my throat, thinking of ending it all before the pounding can kill me.   I don’t recall the last time I felt so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed.   That said, going forward cheerfully and confidently in every moment is not always possible.

I saw an interview by Bill Moyers yesterday with the author of a book describing the real-life zombie apocalypse we are living through now in our thoroughly marketized culture, a world where obscene wealth is seen as victory and everything else the work of fungible parasitic takers.  If obscene wealth is the only crown of victory in a competitive market society, and everyone else is a loser, and if losers are despicable in their craving for ‘entitlements’ when the only people actually entitled to entitlements are the super wealthy, and if the media hammers this destructive narrative home around the clock– you have one option, if you buy all that (and virtually everyone must on some level, since it is the dominant story shouted over and over): walk the streets with your arms out going “nyahhhh– nghhhh— nnnnnnnn…..” and looking for a live human to bite into.

I have to get to work now, but I hesitate, semi-paralyzed, questioning my judgment.  Yes, I have dreamed, planned, designed and am carrying out a program that works largely as I designed it.   But a series of larger and more formidable yeses stands in my way:   yes, I have no marketing plan, yes, I have not branded or packaged the program, yes, I have not created a winning ad to sell it, yes, I have not made of it an easily scalable commodity that can be sold over and over, yes, I have not funded it, yes, I have not recruited a single brilliant person to help in any meaningful way, etc.

Fortunately for me, since I don’t live in an actual democracy but in a cynical marketplace filled with false idols, since I am surrounded mainly by stressed out, distracted, treadmill thumping zombies, I can sojourn in my own head where my beliefs, as they must, sustain me while I hang from this almost invisible thread, thinner than a spider’s.  Now, to let out a yell like Tarzan and swing into action!

Only Human

We mess up, our plans go awry, comments meant to be light and funny sometimes fall badly, shattering into sharp pieces in the awkwardness they produce.  Our best plans, our smartest theories, turn out to be less brilliant than we thought.

When angry at someone it is easy to reduce them to the sum of their aggravating faults, forget that they are frail humans to whom a certain degree of self-blindness and hypocrisy is as natural as walking on two legs.   If they hurt us once, shame on them.   If they hurt us again and again, in extreme cases we are driven to become the leader of our nation and unleash a vast coordinated killing campaign.  Bombs, missiles, machine guns, flame throwers, burning chemicals dropped from the sky, torture and endless detention, relentless pursuit of enemy and friend of enemy alike, collateral damage be damned.  A slightly less insane approach is to accumulate billions of dollars and build beautiful houses for ourselves every place that we like, and to scream that we are victims of a holocaust if anyone speaks of taxing us fairly.  And there are less and less insane ways to deal with hurt all the way down to the saintly one of quickly forgiving all who mistreat us.  If someone hurts you and apologizes, it is a good practice to accept the apology and move on.  If someone hurts you and steadfastly refuses to allow that they’ve behaved badly, that’s a trickier situation.

Outside, in raging winter winds bringing single digit wind-chill, if the radio is to be believed, overly loud speakers somewhere nearby, perhaps on the campus of the college a few hundred feet from here, blared an auto-tuned hip hop number that was mildly annoying.  As I tried to gather my thoughts with the recorded drum pounding, “I Love Music” by the O’Jays made a cameo and I thought of the irony, the random, unintended ingenuity, of using one of a person’s favorite songs as a bludgeon upside the head.  Now it is just a kick drum, bap! BAP! bap! bap!, and a small voice wailing like a baby who’s been punched by an insane parent or guardian.  Somebody’s idea of a groovy time over there, no doubt.

Where the line is between overlooking a friend’s occasional bad mood and swallowing abusive behavior is sometimes hard to say in the individual case.   The case can always be made that the other person is only human, and sometimes humans slip up, do hurtful things.  Hell, humans organize lynch mobs, scream with veins popping on their necks and faces and are not satisfied until someone is mutilated.  Humans, it must be said, also rush into burning buildings to rescue small frightened animals.

One of the great personal dilemmas is to stay in a posture of forgiveness toward friends and family, while not tolerating abusive patterns that are sometimes subtle and dangerous.  They are dangerous precisely because they are subtle, easily denied and made to appear as figments of your oversensitive imagination rather than concrete hurtful actions done in a thoughtless or cruel way.  The subtle hurtful behaviors are easily justified, satisfyingly employed as small, sharp whips, to lash sensitive places on the face while telling the injured party that they are insane.   The beauty part?  Insane people often do believe innocent behaviors to be subtle, dangerous, hurtful, used as small, sharp whips to lash sensitive places on the face while the whipper puts on the most innocent of faces and tells them they are insane to feel that way.

Accepting Criticism

An emotionally intelligent person, concerned with effectively communicating with others, is interested in people’s reactions and takes them into consideration.  

What is clear to the person speaking, or writing, or pitching, or drawing, or singing, may not be clear to the people she is directing it to.  A person who would communicate well must be attuned to intelligent comments, as well as cluelessness, and the opinions of people who may be saying what they are out of an undigested mixture of helpfulness, envy, anger, confusion, ambivalence, distraction and so forth.  Many of these comments will be useful in helping to refine communication.

Even those who blurt out, ten seconds into a thirty second rough sketch, why the thing fails as a whole, may have a good point.  The only thing, it is sometimes hard, even for the person who graciously accepts suggestions and easily revises accordingly, not to snarl when this helpful approach is the only approach encountered.

How To Crush An Idealist

There are many ways, but this one is elegant in its simplicity.  It may be more fun to find one niggling detail, (detail unimportant, in fact, the pettier the better), grip it tightly in bulldog jaws and keep pulling at the idealist, but I think this one is better.  Less is more.  

Do nothing, say nothing.  No matter what the idealist says or accomplishes, remain quiet.

This way the idealist is left to wonder if anybody is home, and the sneaking feeling that nobody’s home will crush that sucker faster than a steamroller flattening the coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

There’s no place like home

I’ve got to be quick, because there is not enough air in here and I’m told it’s beautiful outside and I need to stretch the legs and breathe.  I am just thinking about the games we learn as kids and how much deliberate and focused attention and hard work it takes to unlearn the bad ones.

It’s a tiring story, but my father was a tormented soul.   Great, dark sense of humor, but essentially a well-defended fortress against all potential invaders.  Everyone was included in this category.   If I had a problem being raised by someone like this, it was not something he was obliged to concern himself with.   That was his position for our long, difficult relationship, his answer to every attempt on my part to have him lower the bridge so I could cross the moat: I was the one with the problem, not him.  A position he apologized for quite sincerely hours before he died.

He gave me the gift of belatedly acknowledging that my painful childhood was largely the fault of an adult incapable of being a better parent.   He acknowledged that I was right to be hurt and saluted, for the first time, my many attempts over the years to improve the relationship.

While he was alive and on his feet, however, he’d fight to the death any suggestion that on his deathbed he’d have the regrets that could be so easily seen by anyone who wasn’t him.

Neutrality as kick in the pants

Though there are circumstances where neutrality is a virtue, such as when a person in a black robe is applying the blunt instrument of the law to a vicious conflict, there are many others where neutrality is a hard sidekick to the crotch.

One need only think of Switzerland’s puckish neutrality– we are fair, we are decent, we don’t take sides– standing suavely and stoically aside as Mr. Hitler did his very best to wipe out millions of people he hated.

The neutrality I’m thinking of is on a more personal level.   When seeking comfort from a friend, say the confirmation that you are right to feel aggrieved, for example, if you receive a neutral response, it will not comfort you.  It will ring, in the way these things do, and leave the unpleasant melody hideously repeating, never to be resolved — maybe I really am a jerk to feel hurt by that?   The confirmation from a loved one that you are right to be hurt is worth 1,000 Switzerlands brokering deals with scrupulous fairness between Nazis and those who hate Nazis.

Plus, sixty years later, you won’t likely learn of the neutral party’s complicity in war crimes, stolen art treasures and the laundering of loot plundered from people sent to their deaths by a regime that, arguably, by the logic of neutrality, is no different from the one fighting it.

The enduring injuries of childhood

Some, I imagine, did not receive traumatizing injuries during their upbringing.  I would like to meet and talk to someone who didn’t some day.   Most people I know, in a candid moment, will describe self-hatred, shame, rage, humiliation, terror, depression and several other shades of pain they don’t deserve   My father, at 80, on his death bed, admitted for the first time how the brutality he’d endured as a child had doomed him to live in a black and white world, holding off rooms full of potential abusers wherever he went, instead of using his great gifts to bring more color into the world.

No tears for us, please.  Like the fact that we all die, that injuries we suffered as young children endure is no mystery, nor anything to get tearful about.  How do we face the fact of our eventual deaths?  Outside of not thinking about it, by living as well as we can.   How do we endure the enduring hurts of childhood, even as adults, even as tough people who would rather kick somebody’s ass than admit how much we hurt?  That is hard work and does not yield to a simple answer.

We pay careful attention, think unhurriedly, use our words to describe things as clearly as we can.  We model the way we want others to treat us.  We do not do to others what we hate done to ourselves.  We consciously work to do better, to replace an angry reflex with a kind gesture.   It’s not easy, or, even, it must be admitted, in some cases, even  possible.  People may be too damaged, too bitter, crazy, anxious, desperate, invested in the needs of their egos or their justifiable rage to even imagine another way to live their lives.  Imagining a better way to live is the first step, like imagining anything is the first step to anything different.

No time at the moment to do anything but the best I can.  And wish strength to you to do the same.

Bigfooted By A Billionaire

Imagine getting to sit down with a magnate in your field, someone who can open any door, introduce you to the people you need to meet.   A man who loves ideas tells you he likes your idea very much and wants to help.  Only trouble is, there’s a stretch limo waiting for him downstairs, you may have seen it on your way in.   It was sent for him by his former intern, now, at age 26, about to become a very, very wealthy man.  Touching that the kid would send the limo for his old mentor, he was a teenager when he worked for the magnate for free.  A brilliant kid, a great kid.  Anyway, not to waste time– and I promise you a full meeting at a later date– but in four minutes or so, fill me in.

So you fill him in.  And as it’s your idea, and you know every detail of it intimately, and you’re a bright kid yourself, you are able to bring it to life to this guy who loves a great idea.  His eyes shine like the eyes of a kid in a candy store as you talk.  He asks an intelligent question, you give a snappy, succinct answer.  A few laughs are laughed.  It is with regret he stands, on the fourth intrusion by his secretary, and shakes your hand. “We’ll do the full meeting soon,” he says with warmth, and then is on his way down to the limo.

You later read about the sale, it’s all over the news.  The young man, David Karp, 26, has sold Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. Sitting next to him on the dais, the man you were just talking to.  It’s an amazing world.  

But that all happened in April, why are you thinking about it now?

Sending a Severed Head by email

Honestly (not really), I wonder what’s wrong with me sometimes.  

I ponder the lack of response I often get and never stop to consider that what I think of as a delightful six second animated snapshot of true friendship and whimsy may actually be a grisly severed head.  

Errors in judgment and misguided thinking happen all the time.  Look at the otherwise highly intelligent people who believe barbaric, destructive things and spend millions to convince others of these repugnant beliefs.  

So I suppose I should be philosophical at the virtually unanimous aghast silence that met this latest emailed monstrosity.  One brings it on oneself when one appoints oneself a spokesman for friendship and creativity in a world that commodifies everything, most especially time.

You be the judge:  http://vinebox.co/u/wsEcbPUF5lE/wdsh1bQVTUo

Maren's monster

 

On Picking the Right Side

Many years ago my old friend’s father, a practical and even in some ways heroic man, caught me in a vestibule we were both passing through and told me something I will never forget.  He congratulated me on my (misguided in hindsight) decision to become a lawyer.   He told me he thought it was terrific that I was finally going to use my intelligence to its fullest.  He encouraged me, telling me I’d be a great lawyer.  Then he cautioned me with words that will live as long as I do:  “One thing; don’t be a poor lawyer.  Don’t let your ideals stand in the way of making a good living.” 

My friend later described the kind of lawyers his father had in mind.  These were sour-faced men in worn sports jackets, men who drank in the morning on their way to the dingiest agencies and hearing rooms in the world, doing the work that respectable lawyers would not touch.  These were the kind of lawyer I indeed became, standing in the cracked shoes of the underdog, except that I never drank much, especially when making my way to these dungeon-like rooms where bureaucracies ground life into bad-smelling dust.

My father encouraged me to go to law school, even gave me most of my living expenses while I was reading an endless stream of cases, researching and writing a huge, unwieldy tome on the betrayal of 1877 and the ninety year sleep of the Civil War Amendments that I’d hoped to publish in the scholarly journal I was editor of.  The law school tuition, however, was up to me, and so I took a loan and incurred the kind of debt I had avoided all my life.  This is the kind of endless debt that crushes perhaps millions of young graduates, though I was forty when I graduated law school.  

Had I not become a poor lawyer it would not have been very crushing to me.  The amount I borrowed seemed manageable (before the interest on the long repayment plan kicked in) and the plan was to dispose of the debt in a few years.   That plan didn’t work out.  I am not crushed by the debt for my law school loan, but I’m angry every time I think about how I locked in the historic low 3.85% interest on the loan and watched the interest my bank pays go from 3% to 2.85% to 2.70% and all the way down below 1% now.  This happened while the greediest and least ethical among us dragged the economy into the toilet bowl for their own obscenely large profits.  In the years since, they and the rest of the richest 1% made 95% of the economic gains in the years that followed. (FN1)  In terms of paying the mortgage on a house full of snakes and scorpions that I will never live in, I am better off than many.  

That being said, the outrage of the interest government loans to college students being several times what banks pay in interest burns me every time I think about.   The government, who owns the debts, could easily cut the rate in half, or tie it to the rate banks pay, or to the prime rate, or the rate of inflation.  But nobody is going to do much about it, either; when you screw a class of powerless people there’s rarely any kind of accounting that needs to be made.

I am now self-employed, CEO of a phantom non-profit whose goal is to get into the worst schools in NYC and demonstrate how much creativity and expression there is in the doomed children in those schools.  To shine a light on the true capabilities and aspirations of these children of the poor.  

Most businesses, I understand now, get seed money for operating expenses before they begin.  It is kind of a basic business principle, even in the world of charity:  you figure out how to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the kid next to you into his mask.  Most businesses also sell a product much more tangible, and easier to put a price on, than the one I am selling.   No matter how much I understand, value and cherish the product.

When picking sides, and I will try to remember this in my next life, there is a side that wins and another side that loses.  “Slaughter sides!”, as the kids protest when all the best players wind up on one team and the uncoordinated and slow moving kids are on the other.   The best player on the team that’s about to be slaughtered usually calls out “slaughter sides!” and a few of his teammates join in, as the team about to do the slaughtering shrugs it off and walks to the other side of the field, smiling good-naturedly.  Then the game begins, if we can call slaughter a game.

And of course, slaughter is a game, as old as life itself.  If you align yourself with the team who is about to be mashed, you’d better have your philosophy in order.  Rationales are one thing, and we tell ourselves many stories, some completely absurd, to justify our actions and get through the day.  But a nourishing philosophy based on deeply held values must be called upon to sustain you if you play for the team that is fated to be destroyed.  A constant challenge, but one must do it when playing for the losers.  The only alternative is despair.

FN1:

ROBERT REICH: Yes. Since the film, actually we put the film together, there are new results that came out just within the last week or so show that in the year 2012 inequality reached a new peak in the United States. The previous peak, we thought was the peak, that is 2007 actually has been superseded by this new peak of inequality, concentrated income in 2012 that almost all the gains of economic growth have been going to a very small number of people at the very top.

BILL MOYERS: The figures are so startling, I had to shake my head in disbelief when I first saw them, showing that in the first three years of the recovery from the recession brought on by the financial collapse in 2008, the top one percent of Americans took home 95 percent of the income gains. Ninety-five percent?

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-inequality-for-all/