Tag Archives: friendship

The infinite sorrow of humanity

This evening, at sundown, all over the world Jews will begin their Yom Kippur fast, which is broken tomorrow night, after a long, mournful bleat on a ram’s horn, when it is dark enough for stars to be visible in the sky.

Most don’t have any real sense of why they are fasting, but it is a sacred tradition that even many secular Jews follow every year. I do it myself, though not because I feel like I’m impressing an all-loving, all-merciful, all-seeing Creator with this penitent act of self-denial. If I can’t be slightly hungry one day a year, when billions of our fellow humans live with painful hunger regularly, am I even human?

The sorrow comes in for me because everybody, with the exception of a few gleeful sociopaths, I suppose, wants to feel they are decent people, doing the right thing, living a life that helps others more than it hurts them. We want this feeling always, no matter how badly we may act, no matter what hurt we may cause others, we all need to believe in our own righteousness. We all like to imagine we’d jump into a river to save a drowning child. We admire those who do, and wish we could be like them if we realize we aren’t brave enough (or good enough swimmers). We have high ideals and believe that we always live by them.

Most people, I think, have known people we can no longer have in our lives. Conflicts arise, and if only one person has the desire and the ability to calmly discuss and resolve conflict, the conflict inevitably becomes final, fatal to love and friendship. It is possible to remain in a conflict-plagued relationship, without hope of improvement, but I’ve learned it is much better to move past that particular heartache and learn an important life lesson from it.

There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you, that you cannot unsee. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, usually with an insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.

Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog.  The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.

I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He calls periodically and we speak calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper. We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friend every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.

I urged him several times over the years, if you hear me start to get upset, raise my voice, you see my muscles tense, my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine. So, in the end I did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.

He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity.  To him we are still friends, somehow, because I take his calls and we talk on the phone once in a while.  I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.  I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives.  He listens as I recite hard lessons I’ve had to learn.  This makes him feel close to me, that I am always honest with him, and talk in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way.  I don’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.

Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are. Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.

If I tell you a sad story of death, with a hard lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?

Copy for the book jacket

I visited the website for Jeanne Safer’s literary agent.   Safer writes insightful, useful books on difficult subjects, how to deal with a toxic sibling, what there is to celebrate at the death of a difficult parent, when not to forgive.   I admire her writing on these taboo subjects and figured her agent might be a good place to start my search for an agent for the difficult book I am wrestling with.   The agency has a query page that reads, in pertinent part: 

We love discovering new talent and welcome your query.

If your project is in keeping with the kinds of books we take on, we want to hear from you. In non-fiction, we represent narrative, popular science, memoir, history, psychology, business, biography, food, and travel.

So far, so good.  But they don’t want me to send them my svelte 1,700 word evocation of the book I’m writing, they have a better idea.

Synopsis (up to two paragraphs).   Briefly pitch your project, indicating what makes it unique and compelling. Imagine writing the jacket copy for your book.

I wrote one the other day, 319 words, two paragraphs (the second actually two paragraphs)  pretty good, but not really the jacket copy they were looking for.   I will try again now.

The Book of Irv is a son’s memoir of his father’s life, a life that ended with terrible regrets.   It is a meditation on anger and the power of reconciliation, even when it arrives tragically late.   Irv Widaen triumphed over a childhood of grinding poverty during the Great Depression to live the American Dream.  He was an idealist with a deep commitment to bending the moral arc of history toward justice.  A specialist in Human Relations, he brought warring gang leaders together.    A man of great empathy and a quick, irreverent wit, he quickly won people over.  His own children referred to him as the Dreaded Unit, or the D.U..

The D.U. saw the world as a battlefield.   He fought his children to the death over dinner every night.  Almost his entire family was massacred back in Europe during World War Two; there were other unspeakable, inescapable terrors in his earlier life.   Heartbroken and desperate, he viewed life as a zero sum game.   He did harm to both of his children by constantly denying their feelings, while imbuing them with the highest ideals about fairness, identification with the oppressed and kindness to animals.  The Book of Irv interweaves his personal story with the turbulent history of his times.  His pessimistic insistence that people cannot fundamentally change is set against his realization, as he was dying, that he should have had more insight.  At the heart of the book is the dialogue the difficult father and troubled son should have been having all along.   The D.U.’s skeleton smiles in his grave to finally have this chance to be heard.

264 words

A Blank Slate

It’s got a cool sound in Latin:  tabula rasa, the writing tablet scraped clean.    They used to theorize that the newborn human was a tabula rasa. The sensory world begins making marks on that blank slate and it matures accordingly.   The Hindus, I was told by American devotees of an Indian guru named Baba Hari Dass, a man who had not spoken for decades, call some of these impressions on the tabula rasa samskaras.   These were like fingerprints in clay, as I was made to understand it.   Samskaras are dispositions, characteristics and themes left over from past lives, as I recall.

Somebody came up with the clever “wherever you go, there you are.” There are some clever bastards out there, really.   Writing in the darkness of night, intent on the words you are putting down, you will find no time to imagine the blank looks.   I speak only for myself, of course.  

I get angry.  At things like brutality, the random fuckings we are all subjected to, fuckings out of the blue, with absolutely no pleasure for ourself, no possibility of pleasure.   We are done this way, at random, for the pleasure of people who, like pedophile priests,  say “fuck mutuality, fuck decency, I see my fellow humans as base coin with which to gratify my passions.   My passions!”   These things are uttered by people who imagine themselves winners, and they do what they do to the rest of us losers feeling wholly justified.   Because they can, you understand.

My grandmother flew into rages, the grandmother I never met.   Her older brother was known to be a rough customer, a man with a formidable temper.   Her nephew was a tough guy with a bad temper too.   You did what they said or you paid the price.   What was the price?   How about I fucking whip you in the face, you like that price, asshole?

My father, a man whose poignant tenderness to animals was always in evidence, often flew into rages.   His mother, I learned very late in his life, whipped him in the face from the time he could stand.   Basic unfairness scalded him all throughout his life and he would cry out.  There was nothing I could do for him, when I was a tabula rasa.   Nothing but stare at him accusingly, with my big, black eyes.  He would look over from his pillow, with his glasses off and his 20/400 vision, and I would be staring at him through the bars of my crib.   A blank slate, staring without mercy at his own father.    

How insane is this arrangement?   It is hard to put it into words.   It is also good to try to put it into words, speaking only for myself, of course.    I heard that David Foster Wallace believed a good book made you feel less alone, less lonely.   There is a certain pain, familiar to most people, of feeling isolated, apart, removed from the community.   This pain is big business, a huge driver of our highly competitive economy.  

The anodyne business itself, huge, vast mountains of money.  People die behind that stuff every day, take enough of it and you will no longer need any pain killer.  The entertainment business, which lets us forget, while moved by an artfully told tale, that we are essentially, blank slates or slates scribbled with a hundred layers of glyphs, here in the darkness by ourselves, destined each of us to our own end.    A good book connects us with another mind, helps us forget all that.   The same can be said of music that stirs us, transports us, or visual art that evokes feelings that leave us in some kind of awe.

You will meet a few people in your life who are familiar, become more familiar. They put their fingerprints on you in the right way.   You learn things you need to know from such people.   They are rare, and precious.   Not everyone has the luck to meet them, and if they do meet them, not every two of us have the ability to hit it off.  Not every two notes make good music.   Where there is noise only, there is no soothing of the savage beast [1].

I’m thinking about this blank slate because of the empty page, the white screen.   Some people look at that expanse and say “shit…”    I always have a certain excitement when I see that empty canvas.   It can become literally anything you can imagine, speaking only for myself, of course.

 

[1] OK, fine, “savage breast”.

The phrase was coined by William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697: Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.