Writing for Pay

Writing for pay, like doing anything for pay, is not a job for the squeamish. Squeamish, we are informed by a wonderful dictionary I have somewhere, means “exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated.” Such prudish readiness is not a desirable quality for a person entering the marketplace. You want to do business in the marketplace and never be nauseated? Good luck, pal. That’s why you write here on WordPress, after all. Here on a blahg read by a small handful, nobody will ever randomly change your words in exchange for a check. On the other hand, no check for $250, or even $5, will ever be mailed to your home to pay for your single malt scotch. So get over it.

I mean, really, isn’t it churlish, childish and even a bit arbitrary to be upset when a sentence that you wrote:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man with my father’s many great qualities could be such an intractable asshole.

is rendered:

It was always hard for me to understand how a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.

There is meaning, there are shades of meaning, and things that simply mean what they mean, if you know what I mean. I can easily understand that many people love other people who are intractable assholes. It may be another thing to recognize the lovable qualities myself, even as I also see the intractable asshole. But that, I suppose, is simply nuance. And nuance, as we all know…. fuck nuance. You want nuance or a check? Your choice, it’s a free country.

Cliches are another thing. Just because I avoid them like the plague doesn’t mean some editor will be able to resist quickly swapping in the familiar rather than yielding to the more precise description I’ve put together.

But I am a whiner by nature, as should be clear to anyone who has read even a couple of these posts. In fact, instead of writing my next pay day, a generous fee for not a lot of work, something I sat down to do, I am whinging here about how hard it is to see even the most innocent and well-meaning violence done to my inviolable prose.

Wee wee wee. Or as the editor might style it: oui, oui, oui.

Reprieve for Thanksgiving

I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey. They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years. I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects) and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat. Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.

The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds. The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse. Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm. Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.

Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for? They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime? Then it hit me. They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat. Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.

There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind. There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged: when cooked skillfully we are delicious. We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid. Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners. No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.

I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed. They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over. No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side. Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.

Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned. It was the right thing to do, Mr. President. Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour. On the other hand, sir, what the fuck? I mean, seriously, what the fuck?

A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it. I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness. I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.

He looked at me like “this surprises you? That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way? You look surprised. Pathetic. How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”

Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives. Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.

“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man. I got two words for you: Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”

Yeah, I know. The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life. A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed. Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with. Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple. Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.

“OK, don’t change the subject. What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat? Less sentient than the ones who live on land? Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”

Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere. God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Ten Minute Drill

On your mark, get set….

wait a second. I forgot my timer.

OK, here we go.

Wait, wait. OK. Ah, it’s no use. The mind is like a molasses pond. Hands like spoons. Nothing good will come of this.

“There you go, again,” comes an uncanny Reagan in my ear.

“Some boys are not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally,” says the Boy Scout manual, in the years before one spoke openly of masturbation. “While this may cause no real harm, any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be shared with a scout master or priest.”

“Father, I don’t know what it is, but I am not content to let these nocturnal emissions come naturally to me,” says the boy.

“Oh boy,” says the reader, eyes rolled heavenwards, tired of this frog march already.

“Have no fear, gentle reader, less than five minutes left,” writes the blahgger reassuringly.

“We are not reassured….” says Meryl Streep, in her uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt voice. It was her, the credits revealed, who read Eleanor’s part so perfectly in the brilliant Ken Burns documentary on the Roosevelts.

“THIS is what you are doing today?” asks a disembodied voice incredulously.

We could use a class traitor like FDR in the White House today. Is nobody inspired by his example any more?

“That’s it,” says the guitar in the stand, “you will pick me up and play some standard in C. How about the intro to Stardust? There, that’s a good boy. Leave everyone alone now.”

When she’s right she’s right, I think wearily, either that or a short nap, or both.

Still 50 seconds left. Are you concerned about that? I am not, just waiting for the beep. Turns out I don’t have pneumonia, something much more vague.

BEEP!

De gustibus

The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction. He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing. He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.

Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music. Any music.”

She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”

A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment. In another wink, the old man was gone.

Collateral Damage, yawn

This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut. There is never a good time to bring things like this up. Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up? It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes? Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals? The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question. Candidates lie. Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts. Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney. If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it. If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?

An excellent question, sir. You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it. Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here. End of story.

Any other questions, jerk-off?

Walking Pneumonia

I got up with the sun several days in a row, the reverse of my usual practice of retreating to a darkened room as the sun begins prying open the blinds here. I walked many miles every day, seeing cool things, noticing and photographing great signs, calligraphy, sights. Walking with others, I did not stop when tired, although I often wanted to.

I did notice the extraordinary heaviness in my lungs while climbing a steep hill. I thought I might have suddenly aged forty years. What the fuck? I stood there gasping like a fish on the floor of the rowboat. It took me a startlingly long moment to regain my breath. My lungs were full of phlegm, green at first, lighter as time went on. Was this the result of ten hours in the lung ward on the back of an international flight? Sitting next to a robustly hacking man who also used my right side as a kind of body pillow?

I was sleepless on the plane coming back, looked with envy at the blissfully snoring Sekhnet across the aisle. Afterwards she told me she’d felt my hand on her arm, periodically trying to get her attention so I could express my misery. Wise of her, not a facial muscle twitched as I prodded her.

On arriving home I immediately crawled under the covers for a nap. I slept five hours without turning over. Glanced at the clock, it was already afternoon. Next time I saw the clock it was the evening.

“Why am I so tired?” I asked Sekhnet, stumbling downstairs after a ten hour nap.

“Maybe you have walking pneumonia,” she said, helpfully.

The next few days passed in a kind of fog. Shoot. Maybe I do have walking pneumonia. Glad my free Obamacare physical is coming up in a few days. The last trip to that office, to see a clueless physician’s assistant, cost me almost $500.

Truculence in Human Affairs

I had originally thought of “vehemence”, but truculence, which has none of the better associations of vehemence and contains all the violence, cruelty, heartlessness and unyieldingness, conveys it better. Once you see truculence on someone’s face, it cannot be unseen.

I think of my father, whose mother affectionately called him “Sonny”. I picture looking at her through his indescribably colored eyes– hazel, maybe, a diffuse, pale greenish color like the sea in a certain stormy light, but always guarded so it was hard to make out any color at all. Those eyes, as an infant, had seen, too many times to forget, this little red-haired woman rising suddenly from her chair as a savage, whip-brandishing maniac. Not only did she brandish the whip, her face turned merciless as she vehemently brought the whip down on his babyish face, grunting and cursing and acting out an insane and unslakable rage. The pain of the whipping was only half of the pain, the other was that the mother who was supposed to be protecting and nurturing you was, instead, attacking you violently and as only an insane person could.

How could my father ever unsee this when he looked at his mother? He could not.

The role this kind of savagery plays in human life, it seems to me, cannot be overstated. How does a person kill another person (excluding self-defense situations) without having experienced this overwhelming feeling of betrayal, abuse, humiliation? It’s hard to imagine. Having seen the truculence of someone determined to do you harm, it’s easy to imagine why people buy weapons, insist on their right to carry them around, have no moral problems with war, torture, or any policy designed to kill, injure, starve or weaken potentially truculent enemies.

I was reminded of this truly vicious cycle by a dream I had the other night. In the dream a former friend was resolutely determined not to apologize, too niggardly, he admitted, though he also allowed that he owed me an apology. He told me that, considering he was being such an unyielding jerk about it, it would not be wrong of me to punch him in the face. I was unable to do so, each time I tried my fist would stop right before the moment of impact and just touch his jaw lightly.

Seeing me unable to punish him he laughed, mockingly, and began over-acting, the way a weak man goes about demonstrating what he thinks of as superiority. He may have said something unkind about me trying to be fucking Ahimsa-Boy, but whatever he said, that and the satisfied, sadistic expression on his face finally did the trick. I saw that merciless, unrepentant, provocative face and no thought or effort was involved– I punched it. Hard. The moment of impact was satisfying, but the moment after, quite bad.

It wasn’t so much that I had departed from my vow to remain mild, or that I’d given vent to a violent impulse. I saw I’d given him a black eye, and he was glaring at me, afraid and enraged. I pictured a likely outcome– an assault complaint, being fingerprinted at the police station, fees to lawyers, a long bureaucratic hassle for doing something I’d felt completely entitled to, had, in fact, been invited to do. I was angry at myself for letting my anger put me in this vulnerable position.

Think of human history. It is, as often as not, the story of armed bands of men attacking, starving, brutalizing other groups of people, taking their land, their livestock, raping, pillaging. How do people do this? It’s easy, it turns out.

We took a walk to a beautiful nature preserve built on the site of an ancient city and a fortress. The signs told the story eloquently. People lived here, built these walls to live in peace within them. In 490 BCE a violent group came, besieged the place for 36 days, sacked it, killed everyone they didn’t enslave and renamed it after their glorious leader. Next to indications of the year, perhaps a dozen or more times over the centuries, descriptions of the who and how the place had been besieged, sacked, inhabitants killed or enslaved, the name changed: glory to the victors. Romans, Crusaders, Muslim warriors, men of God killing for peace, paving the road to heaven with the bones of their faceless enemies, painting the signposts with their blood.

Hard to understand, any of it, unless we make it personal. Picture the implacable face of someone who has hurt you. Picture it trying to stare you down, make you turn your eyes away. It is a face you will not forget soon and, among all the faces you can imagine, probably the most likely to make you forget your vow to do no harm.

Snapshots

These tiny images of frozen moments, the way we remember life. I am often reminded how great my memory is, which makes me feel like a fraud. In my mind, I remember almost nothing. Less than a millionth, I’d suspect, of what I have lived, remains in my memory. There are odd bits, sometimes, that I remember in great detail. They are like snapshots.

I have a few new ones now. An old friend, wrapped in his prayer shawl, praying in the remote Jordanian desert at dawn. The radiant face of a young beauty in the ancient tourist shrine Petra, posing irresistibly near a desert weed I was photographing. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a magical mountain. The fisherman’s expressive face as he held court in his little open fronted restaurant, a hundred meters from the sea. There are other photos in there, those baby ibexes, no bigger than small dogs, looking for food from smiling humans under the “Do Not Feed The Ibexes” sign. A small fox leaping across the road near the national park called Appolonia over the beach at Herzliya. The skinny dog in Petra who accompanied us for miles, seemingly just for the companionship as he went about his rounds, looking for good garbage to eat.

Some cannot be unseen. The little Jordanians firing rocks at our dog escort, cursing him, as he yowled piteously and took off. Thankfully Sekhnet missed that one. She cried when I told her about it. I did not need to tell her of the one we all saw the next day, the large pale ass of the man, squatting directly in front of his car (instead of on the side where he would have been out of sight) poised to take a shit on the shoulder of the road up from the Arava desert to Mitzpeh Ramon. I was praying as we passed that I would not see the turd dropping from the grotesque vertical smile. My prayer in that case was answered.

There was that great moment with the woman we were visiting, her head thrown back in a great laugh, I don’t remember over what, though I recall laughing too. That one was caught by the ever ready Sekhnet, whose phone is a better camera than most cameras.

These snapshots remain, along with some beautiful views. I think they will be in there for a long time now, along with some of the actual photos we snapped.

A Way With Words

You have a way with words.

Away with words! Speak little, do much.

Nicely said, Ned!

I’ll pretend you didn’t say that, Fred.

Now, why you want to be like that, Ed? I was trying to tender you a kind word.

Yet you rendered me a mind turd, dittn’t you, Ted?

I just said you have your way with words.

You sayin’ I don’t respect ’em, just have my way with ’em, is that what you’re saying, Zed?

I’m not saying that. I’m not saying anything.

You sure have a funny way of not saying anything, Red.

You said it.

Specific Excellence

There is a notion I recall from my absurd study of Philosophy at City College in the 1970s. Most of what I read and heard as a young truth seeker in those classes has fled from memory like so much impenetrably dense, badly translated, unhelpful bullshit, fascinating though a small fraction of it was to a youth searching for meaning in a world like our’s. But this notion stays in my head and I think of it today, many years after encountering it. That concept is arete which I recall noting as “the specific excellence of a thing”. I’d have to consult google to see which of the famous Greeks of antiquity it was who set forth this concept, though it was one of the Big Three. The smart money says “Play Dough”.

Speaking of City College in the 1970s, he said, discursively, philosophy classes were held in a dark, oddly narrow, drafty hall on South Campus that would have made an excellent set for most Kafka stories. The long ago demolished hall, an ancient, cramped, soot covered, two or three story tower-like structure, was reached by a second story passageway from another, larger, building, also very venerable and long gone. It’s almost like trying to remember a long ago dream, piecing together these lost halls, one was called Wagner Hall, I’m pretty sure. Was the other Mott Hall? Shephard? Was Wagner the philosophy tower? There’s nobody to call to puzzle out and clarify any of it too easily. I had no real friends at City College, I commuted there, attended classes, met with professors, interacted with classmates in class, said hi on the rare occasions I went to the cafeteria, but I recall making no friends during the years I was there, on and off, dropping in and out. I was surprised to learn, when I returned at the end for one last nine credit semester, that I had spent most of those semesters on the Dean’s List.

This was a different Dean’s List than the one kept in the bowels of the high school I went to. I appeared on that list by dint of approximately two hundred days turning up late for class. I’d found that not being in homeroom to check in first thing in the morning (I’ve always hated the early hours of the day, except for sleeping) made it much easier to slip out of classes without causing a fuss, since, technically, I was already absent, until retroactively marked present at the end of the day after I’d shown up in a few classes. If a friend was doing something interesting, or a brilliant guitar player from, say, Evander Childs High School, was cutting school that day and had turned up at my school, I’d skip some drag of a class to take part in something more nourishing to my soul.

Which brings us back to what google confirms is Plato’s concept of arete. My memory of it may have changed the meaning slightly, but possibly not. Wikipedia is impersonally coy on this matter, though the third sentence suggests an original meaning close to what I’m talking about. Each of us is born with certain specific virtues that mark us as unique individuals. When our “potential” is spoken of, it is the potential to do what we are born best suited to do. Arete is manifest when we are actually doing what fulfills best our specific virtues.

A dog has a different arete than a cat– the perfect expression of one is no less perfect than the perfect expression of the other though a perfect dog is as different from a perfect cat as a perfect entrepreneur is different from a perfect painter, a perfect songwriter. A dog and a cat can be good friends, play, sleep and eat together, but they are different animals. A perfect painter had better also be, or know, an excellent entrepreneur, because that’s business in the arete of capitalism, if you want to paint and eat, because your specific excellence is painting (and you also need to eat) if you get the point. Do you get the point?

I may not be making much sense with this, there is much to do today and little enough time, or will, to tackle it, but tackle it I shall. Or think hard about tackling it anyway, there is a lot to tackle. I am thinking, above all the other thoughts at the moment, how close I may have come to my own arete, fulfilling my own specific excellence. It is something that has occupied my mind many times over the years, occupies it now. Doing a thing as well as it can be done is a virtue.

Art needs hard work more than hard work needs art, quoth Kafka, raven-like as a besooted NYC pigeon on the windowsill of that almost forgotten philosophy hall in Harlem forty years back. Something more to think about, if that thing was needed.