Tag: writing

Persuasion (get over it)

I have been thinking about feelings. Which means, of course, that I have been having them, or rather, overwhelmed by them of late. I wouldn’t bother to write about them if they were good feelings. When I am in love, I tend to write less about that feeling, in part because my need to communicate to the world is being so generously satisfied by the person I love.  The feeling of being so thoroughly understood (she gets me!) is like putty in the gaps through which the words drift out (or in). The feeling of being misunderstood blows all the putty out.

I wonder what it would be like to write about love. I should try.

When there is anger, which almost always proceeds from misunderstanding, I don’t know how to speak to anyone I love. One former lover suggested that I should just “let her be” when she was angry.  I should know to do that, or something like that.  Active listening is an approach I have been trained to use by countless leadership and communications trainings. Yet, it is hard to apply my professional approaches to my personal life, because my personal life is so much more consequential than my professional life, and because my personal life is so, forgive me, personal.

When a congregant, a colleague, or a student is angry, it matters, but not in any kind of existential way. I can pull aside a student several days later, ask what was going on, and suggest what their angry display had the possibility of doing (how it might impact the relationship he has with adults or classmates). Because students are young and impulsive, most do not hold onto their impulsive anger in a lasting way, and most can offer a genuine “My bad” after the fact. They do it days later, and sometimes hours later. Adults hold their feelings longer. With adults, some formulation of “I hear you” and “I hear that you feel strongly about that” is my trained response. And is usually answered with “You’re damn right I feel strongly about that” followed by a lengthy restatement of what the person just said. In my professional capacity I have listened to many explanations. Accords follow later, if they follow at all.

I wonder why adults hold their feelings more dearly.  I think, and I could be wrong, that we live in an age in which the truth of our feelings is valorized. We pick facts that confirm our feelings and change the facts when needed. We organize the world to suit our feelings, and when the two don’t jibe, we seek to change the world and not to change our feelings. I don’t know why this is.  I hold with Rilke, who advises the young poet not to focus on his feelings, but to pay attention to things.  I think today we take our feelings to be as immutable as chairs, or oceans, or stars.

In Rhetoric Aristotle argues that “modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art [of rhetoric]: everything else is merely accessory.” (He also states, “things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites.” Oh, for that simple time.)  Aristotle divides the approach into three: the character of the speaker, the state of mind of the audience, and the proof of “a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.” These days it seems that the state of minds of the audience has taken precedence over truth or character.  I think this is true in our political rhetoric, but it is also true in our professional and personal lives. What matters most is neither your character, nor the validity of your argument; it is how the people or person you are speaking to feels.

However, the feeling of being misunderstood, especially by a person I love most (most intimately, most personally, most romantically), completely upends me.  And so, I try to persuade or explain, which is a fool’s errand, mainly because I am angry at being misunderstood: “How can you NOT understand me, oh person I love?” All that person can hear is the anger, and all I can hear back is more misunderstanding. So, like the tourist who cannot make himself understood in a foreign land, I increase the volume, either the number of proofs (See?) or the protestations with regards to my character (I am a good person). And I fail.

Anger over being misunderstood is my Achilles heel, and should immediately disqualify me from being a teacher, a writer, or a lover because misunderstanding is the common currency of an expressive life. I could say “Yanni” and someone will hear “Laurel” or something else that no one has imagined as a possibility yet: “Bluebird,” “Sarsaparilla,” “I hate you,” or even “I love you.” And yet, here I go, plunging into another teaching job, trying to write this down, and remaining open to the possibility of being misunderstood by someone I love. A cynic would tell me that therapy can help break this cycle, but really, all a therapist will do is help me make peace with the fact that this is my cycle.  I better learn to love it.

Summer Time

Summer unsettles me. For the last three weeks I walked through my days drunk with free time, having gone from the manic pace of the end of the school year (exams and graduation) and the beginning of the summer Sunday School program, to a single (part time) job. The manic pace is the pace of the week from September through June. I put in six and seven day work weeks as a matter of course. I am fortunate that some of those days last only a few hours, but there is always something work-related on my schedule. That is the wonder of working what amounts to three part-time jobs, none of which is really part-time. When I add my daughter, who stays with me three days out of seven, into the mix, I really have no trouble getting from waking up to falling asleep with more than an hour here or there to sit idle.

As busy as I am, my schedule gives the day a durable structure. It does not feel so much like a limit on my time, as much as something that opens specific spaces that are “not work” in each day. During the school year, I sip my idle time, and cherish it as something special. I fit in an hour of writing, and it serves as a counterweight to the all the rest of the day’s efforts.

Then comes summer. My schedule opens up, and idle time drinks me down in one single swallow. I can watch six hours of news at the drop of a hat, or nap while old, favorite movies play on Turner Classic Movies, or stand in the kitchen and pet the cat who likes to eat on the windowsill while being petted. The three hours it takes for the dishwasher to sanitize bottles passes while I walk for gelato; I could eat gelato for days. Work, work of any sort, gets in the way of lazy naps. Licking a postage stamp would take too much effort. Small balls of cat fur collect on the carpet; I give them names.

What happened to the grand plans? Wasn’t there a romance I was going to undertake? Don’t I have the outline of a novel festering somewhere? When will I install a properly working garbage disposal? I have scads of miles built up on Southwest, aren’t there friends I haven’t visited in years?

Nothing. Inertia wraps its warm comfortable fingers around my wrists, and holds me tight with the insistence of a dirty secret: I love to be idle. Nothing to do is my idea of heaven, and I can do it with sluggish zeal. Do less! Do less! Forsake your obligations and practice closing your eyes! This is not “genius at work” time, unless I am the genius of laggardly living.

But then I do this, I write about it, and the spell is broken. How did I forget words, the deeper determined secret that I tried to deny, and which surface from even this short (and all too long) dormant time and claim me? I may not be the self-ascribed martinet of the school year and yet I feel compelled by word and dream to get back to it. And so I do.

Loss and Connection

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is a tart response to the steady procession out the door.  First she loses keys, then houses, then cities, two rivers, and a continent.  She writes, “Practice losing farther, losing faster.” And finally, “you (the joking voice, a gesture I love).” And that seems about the right order: keys, houses, cities, rivers, continents, you.

I have to admit that I’ve lost my fair share of people along the way. I have no friends from elementary school. I have a few acquaintances (thanks Facebook), but no profoundly important bonds from high school.  I keep in intermittent touch with a couple of professors from college, but all the people I played bridge with at lunch or in the evening, my swimming compatriots, or my more fiery friends from that rich time of awakening have gone. I retain only a single connection from the lost years while I worked in restaurants. Until the age of 28, the only people who remained constant in my life were my father, my mother, and my brothers, and I could no more lose them than I could lose my opposable thumbs, my kidneys, or my hair. Oops.

Somewhere along the way all that changed.  And it wasn’t the people I was meeting.  I figured out a few things about myself, and started on my life’s work. I am happy, overjoyed really, that I have friends who I met on the first day I started graduate school at Binghamton, and that in the thirty years since then, I have built, and been built into webs that extend across the country and onto other continents. Even if I disappeared today, if sudden tragedy erased me, those webs would remain, and my juncture would remain too, if only as a bright memory.

Still there are losses, certain “you’s” who spin away someplace else, who collided with my life, briefly or for longer times, and then left.  In the ramshackle castle of my heart, I have a dozen rooms of voices and gestures belonging to this you or that you who received and returned “I love you” from me and to me.

I can imagine rekindling almost any old friendship.  Bruce, Steve, Kevin? Trevor, Barry, Pete? Beth, Paul, Wendy, Cliff, Neil, Jean, Miriam, Ted? Sure. I would be delighted to hear about their lives, to listen to their stories, and discover where they have been, what they have learned, the best meals they have eaten.  I would sit them all around a table and cook a stew of memory.  But those women with whom I have shared at least a glimpse of my most intimate self, for whom I carved hearts into scallops (and filled those hearts with pesto), or alongside whom I have sat quietly on glacial erractic boulders, or who kissed me until days turned into into weeks, and weeks turned into years?  I think I have lost them.

Maybe it’s because break ups are just that—a break, a tear in the web of connections.  If a declaration of love is tantamount to an assertion of meaning in the universe: there are stars! there is hydrogen! the miracle of leaves! radio waves! elephants! cellos! then the end of love threatens to cast all of creation into some alternate universe where everything delicious tastes like burning tires.  Of course it doesn’t. Of course that is overly romantic. It is just turning a page.

What universe do you live in that anything can be set aside so blithely? I cannot.

And so it is with special joy that one star flickered back onto the horizon.  After nearly twenty five years, I sent this old friend a message “Went on a date with someone who so fabulously reminded me of you.” We chatted back and forth and she sent me a draft of the book she has been running away from for as long as I knew her. Finally running into it, she has uncovered connection after connection, and as she does, she bounced between them amazed and perplexed, delighted as a child who has discovered the art of skipping. At some penultimate revelation she declared that she had uncovered a miracle, to which I responded that she is, was, and always would be a miracle. She answered, “Well that made me cry. We had something so special. And for you to still be in my in my life is another miracle.” Thank you, my now distant friend, for helping put the universe back into order.  Keep writing.

We are all miracles. Loss only makes me feel that more keenly now than I ever had before.  But not just loss: my daughter, my students, my friends, a Sondheim song, everything, everyone.  Once I felt unequal to the task of acknowledging and praising the miracles that were all around me.  I kept them at a distance and felt flustered, off-balance, and awestruck when they accepted me into their orbits.  When they drifted away, I accepted the loss, almost as glibly as Bishop does in her poem. After all, what was I but some strange satellite from some strange universe?  Even Bishop’s advice, “Write it,” seemed to make the world and the process of loving and losing little more than the material for writing (which, I am half ashamed to say, it can be).

Loss is a disaster and no disaster, because it casts me back out of myself, and so deeply reminds me that I am not the center of a weird universe, but part of something larger. In his poem, “The Cleaving, “ Li-Young Lee calls us “a many-membered body of love.”  So I am reminded, and so I write, part of the miracle and a miracle. A contradiction and a multitude. Brian Brennan for the moment and in perpetuity. My heart fixed here, back in the web, part of this and every other universe, spinning in every direction, and open.

Something about memory

Once you can imagine how images and sounds get turned into bits of binary code, which you can then play back on a cell phone, you can begin to conceive of memory. Brains experience the world as a pattern of firing neurons—small chemical explosions in our heads that can be reignited over and over again. When Yeats writes, “I went out to the hazel wood because a fire was in my head”—it’s memory that inspires him on the journey that ends with him picking the “silver apples of the moon… [and] the golden apples of the sun. Memory of what? Who knows.

Memories aren’t just about things—they are about all the thoughts and feelings we had when we encountered those things. I talk to my students about making memories “sticky”: giving them more purchase in their brains. A memory will take greater hold if there is a feeling associated with it. For instance, my emotions (happiness, sadness, everything else) run close to the surface and deeply too—they are whales and not minnows—and when I see a new thing, or learn a new thing, I attach, without even intending to do so, an emotion to the thing. Go figure. I was happy about learning the constitution when I was in high school, or the great chain of being when I was in junior high school (or, or, or), and those emotions made those things more “sticky.” At the very least, learning has made me feel happy, and I am blessed with plenty of sticky happiness.

For Yeats, the odd transformative associations: a hazel wand that becomes a fishing pole; a little silver trout that becomes and glimmering girl; the moth-like stars; the hollow lands and hilly lands; are ways back to memory and to inspiration.  We tend to think of inspiration as a vision of something yet to be made, something that exists primarily in the future, but our future vision relies on what we already have seen.  The inspired poet turns the past into future with protean grace.

When memories fade, it isn’t so much that the patterns dull, so much as the ways back to those patterns fade. Maybe think about it like this… Imagine that you have a room in your house in which you have a beautiful painting. The door to the room has a lock. You lose the key to the locked door. The painting is still in the room, but you cannot see it. You haven’t lost the painting, just the key to the door in which the painting waits for you, still bright and beautiful, still reminding you (but no longer) of the day on which you first saw it, the weather, the person you were with, and what you had done all morning on that day. If only you had the key!

The mnemonic device called the “memory palace” is a means of making memories “sticky” and organizing where and how they are stuck. The stickiness is not simply an emotion, which can be an incredibly random and unpredictable placemarker (we don’t tend to organize our emotions in a clearly coherent pattern so much as ride on them like waves), but a familiar place, in fact some place which we are already memorized, whose dimensions, smells, colors, and secrets are so deeply ingrained that we can call them back instantly and without effort.  Yes, we bind new memories to older established ones.  We put them on coffee tables and window ledges, in drawers of dressers, at the bottoms of garment bags in our parents’ bedroom closet (where they sometimes hid Christmas presents).

I will admit that I like the idea of this device more than the one I use.  My memories are bound to map like structures, to roads and routes, airport terminals and the backs of buses. Sometimes they lead to places, even palaces, but mainly they are blue lines on yellowing maps. “Why do you need to know where we are going?” a friend once asked, “I can tell you where to go.” “Because,” I wish I had answered, “Every road leads to a new memory, and if I don’t know them, not only will I be lost, so will these memories.”  The trick for me is that since the atlas of my memory is fairly large, adding a few new maps, even if they are revisions of older ones, is not particularly onerous or difficult.  Of course, the trick is to revisit those maps, to crack the binding of my memory, head down old roads, and re-visit places.  And new places?  The placement of puddles, the spread of trees across streets, and colors of cars in driveways—all these inscribe themselves on a map, illustrate a chart, and add themselves to me.

 

Unstuck

For those of you who know, you know that my work has been stuck for years. Serious years. Either I was too afraid of failure to write, or too (easily) distracted by the charms of the life of struggle and success, joy and sadness. In large part, writing these posts has been about that life. And surely, I have found other and certainly valuable things to do with my time and energy. But in the background of my thoughts, no matter what else I was doing, no matter where I was traveling, or who I was with, there was a story percolating. Something  about art and fire and theft and identity and… Well, as usual, about everything. And not.

Waiting for inspiration or signs, or for enough weight and gravity to accrue around a character or two will only do for so long. I’m getting older. I’m hearing the footfalls of cats’ feet in the hallways. I can’t wait for love or hope or generous fate to take a hand. It’s back to work. As a friend has called her project over the past few months, “Write or die.” And so I’ve been practicing. Seven to nine hundred words every two or three days. It’s been good. And it feels like the pump is actually bringing worthwhile stuff to the surface.

So, here’s how it starts. I’m laying down a marker. Give me a few months. With any luck more than a puddle, but not enough to put a fire out. As Willi says, “Everything is fuel.” So then…
Provenance

Chapter 1

 “A little fire will solve all our your troubles,” said Carlo.

 “Or cause them,” amended Benjamin.

 “Cause or solve? What’s the difference?” asked Carlo. “Either way, you have to figure out what you are going to do after the fire.”

 “That is true,” answered Benjamin. He looked at me and winked. “Still, I’m happy that Willi is starting our fires, especially tonight.”

 “What’s so special about tonight?” asked Carlo. Then he looked at me, cocked his head, and gave me the half-bemused, half-annoyed glare that I had been receiving for the past two months.

 I averted my gaze and looked around the room. There is nothing wrong with a clean room, and given the fact that people had sent their prized possessions to be kept safe while they were in the middle of a move, a remodel, or a remarriage, I was always surprised by how many storage facilities looked like a restaurant at 11:37 at night. This was a storage room like any of the others in which we had worked. It was climate controlled: dry and cool. On one side of the room were a set of safes in which people kept documents they never wanted to age. There were shelves from floor to ceiling in which delicate hangings: small tapestries, quilts, fifteenth century circus posters; were rested flat on their backs. Fine art was stored vertically, on edge, in a wall-length series of slender slots. There was a clean yellow mechanical lift in one corner. The lighting, even with all the bulbs lit, was reserved and respectful. Still, even without a bright fluorescent glare, I could tell that there was not a mote of dust anywhere. Everything was immaculate.

 “Did we get everything we came for?” Carlo asked me. I was responsible for knowing what we would find in storage so that Carlo could put together what he glibly called our “shopping list.” When the date for our job neared, he gave me the list so I could alert him if anything was coming out of storage early, or if anything particularly interesting was being added to the facility he had targeted. He already had clients ready to purchase everything we took.

 I took one last look at the list and double checked the labels on all the long cardboard tubes gathered near the mechanical lift.

 “Yes,” I answered.

 “And yours?”

 “Yes.”

 “All right. Ben! Time to pack.”

 Benjamin got right to it, and put all the tubes into two oblong grey canvas duffel bags. Benjamin had been born to pack and carry. On occasions, I had caught him lifting chairs, or tables, or desks. “You never know,” he said sheepishly, “It may come in handy sometime, you know, just to know the balance.” Secretly, I think he just enjoyed grabbing oddly shaped things with his catcher’s mitt hands and gauging how much, or little, effort, he needed to lift them. Of the four of us, Benjamin was the only one who anyone would stop to stare at in the street. He was six and a half feet tall and looked like he should weigh as much as a bull. “Sarah,” he once told me, “cows weigh nearly a ton. I’m more like a tiger.” I guess we all can dream.

Willi waited for us at the entrance to the warehouse. He and Carlo stepped aside for a moment. Carlo listened and Willi pointed to several places along the walls and ceiling, indicating how the fire would start and where it would spread. Carlo, Benjamin, and I left the warehouse. Willi joined us at the van ten minutes later. The warehouse looked perfectly normal, a huge brown sepulcher of stone and brick. The fire was already alive inside it.

We sat and waited to watch the fire in the van. It was my last night.

I can understand why fires draw such big crowds. Even at three in the morning, a crowd that would fill four concert halls gathered outside the police barricades. This was the biggest fire most of them have ever seen—bigger than a campfire, less spread out than a brush fire. All that flame in one place was like looking into part of the sun. They saw an impossible furnace that could consume anything. On the sun, even water is fuel. As horrible as it is, fire is the source of light, heat, and life.

 People will stop whatever else they are doing to watch a fire. Madly in love and in the throes of devotion? Wait, there’s a fire. Furious and on the verge of murderous intent? It can wait; there’s a fire. On the way to work, or a birthday party, or grandmother’s funeral. Can’t you see there’s a fire? Let’s stop and watch. Just set a warehouse ablaze to conceal the theft of forty seven million dollars of art? Even we stopped for a moment and joined the crowd.

 To be honest, Willi’s handiwork was worthy of admiration. While Carlo, Ben, and I broke into the storage lockers, Willi turned the building against itself. By the time we had collected what we came for, the first tongues of flame had converted wood, wire, and plaster from innocent structure to experienced fuel. Willie said, “After a minute anything is possible. After five minutes, everything is inevitable.” He pointed to an unignited corner of the building and quietly said, “Watch.” And so we watched. It was better than a Zambelli show.

 The flames poured up the side of the building between Main Street and the Schuylkill River in Manayunk. Under the cloudless night sky the conflagration looked like a negative image of the day. The worn stone of the warehouse that years of sun and soot and car exhaust had worn to a dull brown was nearly ebony. The shadows cast by afternoon clouds were now bright patches of flame.

 The streets brimmed with noise. Super-amplified emergency radios blared garbled commands. Diesel engines of the fire trucks churned fuel into the electricity that powered a hundred spotlights and the pumps that redirect the flow of water to the net of hoses surrounding the burning building. Klaxons sounded as new men joined the fight. The building grunted and groaned as its guts shifted, resettled, and gave way.

 Worse than the noise was the stink. It smelled like the worst barbecue ever. Imagine your idiot uncle inviting you to an evening of recycled tire briquettes and cretonne-soaked shoe steaks. For days after the fire no flavor of good food will penetrate the residue left in your nose or on the back of your throat. I would rather kiss a fly.

 Willi once asked, “How would you do it?” I told him that I would probably slosh gasoline all over the place, throw a match and run. He shook his head and laughed. “Everything is fuel,” he said; this was his mantra. Willi could walk into a building with nothing—no matches, no tools—and leave it smoldering. Of course, while we were worrying about where the art was kept, and how long it would be in storage, Willi went over building plans with an inspector’s nervous eye for details. Old sprinkler systems, termite damage, air conditioning that only cooled the office spaces, little escaped Willi’s attention. In spite of the obvious damage, no one ever died in one of Willi’s fires.

 “It’ll be out in 20 minutes, half hour tops,” he said. When was he wrong?

Carlo gestured toward the van, to nudge us away. Benjamin wasn’t having any of it, “I like watching the fire.” Sure, Carlo was the boss, Benjamin could pick up a car—in a previous life he probably had been a car. So Carlo just shrugged and walked to the van by himself. After five minutes Willi touched Benjamin on the arm, and gently led him away. It wouldn’t do to keep Carlo waiting.

As we walked to the van, Willi asked, “Can you give this up?”

What did I know? I was twenty-eight years old, and I had never had what anyone could call a steady job. After graduating from college my resume was a Swiss cheese of retail and food service jobs. It was work that I could leave at a moment’s notice and work that I could find again just as easily. I knew more about art and appraisal and conservation than anyone with an MFA or PhD would ever have. One night in Boston, I had my cheek pushed into the impasto of a Rubens. Carlo thought he heard someone walking behind us and pressed us both up against the yellowing bosom of some semi-deity. Sure, put that in a résumé.

I didn’t want to grow into an old thief. Every so often we would meet men that had worked with Carlo in the past, and Carlo never introduced them, and the men always slinked away like sinners from a church. And I did not want to become like the men whose lives were defined by theft. The truth is that we met plenty of thieves and almost all of them were young and stupid. They sat at bars and tables at restaurants talking too loudly about what they have done. At least half of what they said was lies, which only made the truth seem worse. Even Benjamin, whose size and strength were his simple dual assets, looked at these buffoons and said, “Maybe I’m too dumb to know better, but those guys should shut up.”

They had grown numb to the rest of the world. They had forgotten that the rules that all the so-called rubes and suckers followed made our lives possible. Without limits anyone could be a thief, and what we did would be neither prized nor profitable. All they could think of was how different they were, how free. But they weren’t. They could only live in the shadowy other world they, we, created. They would never see themselves as part of the larger world.

Even the men I worked with and admired lived this way. When Willi looked at buildings, all he saw was fires. Benjamin gauged the world in weights and balances. And even though Carlo managed to be charming about what he did, he was like Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley. And like Stanton Carlisle, the fall was coming; it was just a matter of time. It could happen in a year, or in twenty. Carlo wasn’t like one of Willi’s fires. No one knew when his time would end.

I wasn’t sure how I was becoming like them, but I did feel sure, after only a few years, that I had lost some sense of a happy vision of the world that was unencumbered by dark possibility. I loved what I did. I was thrilled by illicit acquisition and by the secrets of my life, and I knew I would miss it. I told Willi the only truth I could remember, “Yes.”

I wasn’t ready for the moment when we got to the van and Carlo waited outside, holding a long cardboard tube. “These, I believe, are yours,” he said. He got back into the van with Willi and Benjamin, and rolled down the window. “Go home, Sarah Proctor. Go home and never come back.” The van headed into the city and I stood on the curb with two paintings worth millions of dollars in my hands. I could never sell them, I already knew I would be too scared to show them to anyone, and the life that had christened my adulthood was over.

A little advice

I hate giving advice, or being in a position to even begin to seem like an authority. This is due, in large part, to the fact that every vestige of what little wisdom I may have is either so narrowly circumscribed by my experience as to be entirely personal and inapplicable to anyone else, or it is bound into volumes or displayed on walls or growing in plain sight, that it all could just as easily be read or seen or visited by anyone, and therefore I am just repeating what already exists. I mean, really, I can’t tell you anything about the Grand Canyon, or Jackson Pollock’s Number One, or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves that you couldn’t get on your own. And all the business about sailing, or my divorce, or the way my heart was broken or buoyed by human contact, well, that’s all extravagant navel gazing. Or, if it’s any good, it’s good because it praises the world I have experienced.

A friend of mine once told me (and granted, we were in the middle of a disagreement that threatened to end our friendship, so like all things spoken in heat, I try (and fail) to take it in that light) that I needed people to agree with me. The truth is that 90% of the time when I make what seems like a definitive statement about anything, my shock-proof shit detector blares a secret (oh, I hope it’s secret) claxon. It’s going off right now. Whenever I write, I write through the deafening din. I already know that what I say, or what I write is so riddled with exceptions that each word would take a page, or a tome of footnotes and commentary.

I reread David Foster Wallace’s 2005 “This Is Water” commencement address from Kenyon, and what I notice most is his reluctance to declare.  It’s not this platitude, or this story, or that cliché, which is what all advice feels like it about to disintegrate into—just another fragment of bullshit masquerading as wisdom.  Welcome to the world of Polonious, sending Laertes off with the skin and no pith. Go ahead and utter, “To thy own self be true” without knowing the source and the final awful result. Say good bye to Denmark. Say good bye to the best and brightest.  Here comes history.

I once told my friend, Brian Clements, that the only point of criticism—and what, after all is criticism than a kind of advice, either to the artist (do this, don’t do that), or to the audience (see this, avoid seeing that)—was to praise, that everything else was ego masquerading as wit. Did I really say that? Maybe.  I still believe this. (Quick, check the reams of footnotes). The only art that I ever feel called on to lambaste, is art that fails to find some piece of life and hold it up for glory. And I will go to stunning lengths to find that one moment in any work of art that meets Rilke’s charge: “Praise this world.”  And when I say “art,” I’ll admit it, I mean the intentional product of a life lived with purpose to produce something that praises the world.  And that could be a poem, a sculpture, a taco, a roadbed, a length of  rope. A free throw. A beautifully struck return in tennis. An incisively spoken line in a play. A carefully chosen word to comfort a child, or anyone.  Anything done with intention to praise this world and raise it up.

And if anything, these little slices of my mind, are not so much advice, as reminders, and I think we need reminding, to pay attention to all that is praiseworthy and to hold it high. “Pay attention” is what DFW told the graduates at Kenyon in 2005, and I wish that someone had reminded him every day about the impossible and sometimes ineffable worthiness of praise. Pay attention to that too, big fella. And I know when I write these, I am, in fact, reminding myself as well as you, because it is not easy.  It’s just worth it.

 

 

 

Failure

I bear failure hard. Oh, I have failed. I was, in my youth, an indifferent student, charging at subjects without a plan, relying on passion and interest in lieu of anything like a well documented approach. I memorized the rules for genetics in a single bound, and then wrote rambling half-baked essays about stained glass. I did half well, bouncing between A’s and B’s, some C’s (and that fail in Astronomy—learning a new (to me) science takes a plan). I didn’t care, not a whit. I just kept at it—this is what students are supposed to do.

And the failures that struck me weren’t moral failings either. I stole chocolate bars at the local A&P as a child. I lurked near the registers, pilfered, and then hid beneath tables topped with produce to eat my plunder: Hershey Bars with Almonds. I broke speed limits with teenage abandon. There were indiscretions. Mistakes were made.

What haunted me, what haunts me, and what will always haunt me with stinging clarity, are failings of kindness: cruelties small and large. There was an occasion on the steps to a building at school when I jeered at a young man to hurry up, that he was holding all of us other bright young men up. Turns out he was handicapped and struggling up the stairs with crutches. I never forget that. I have shouted “I hate you” or “I fucking hate you” in a fight with someone I love. I can barely tolerate my myriad failures as a father. The failings for which I pillory myself most are moored entirely in the realm of personal relationships.

Only later in life, in my twenties, when my work became a significant aspect of my personal life, when I stopped trying on the clothes of being a writer and admitted to myself that no matter what I wore, the wild seed hadn’t drifted in from someplace else, but had grown within me as I grew, down in my mitochondria and through each of my stupid and recalcitrant cells, did failure take its most pernicious and debilitating effects on me. Suddenly failure—and by this I mean anything from red pencil marks in the margins to more general criticisms—became not simply a matter of getting the words right, or getting the tone right, or getting the story right, but of getting my bones right, getting my mind right, or worse, getting my relationship with the world right. I, misfit first born child, whose experiences indicated that I had what could only be a terminal relationship with the human race, now had irrevocable proof that the condition was as I had always suspected. Not only was I broken, I was bad. And so I retreated from the site of failure.

For years—nearly twenty—after the first formal flowering of my craft, and first awful awareness of my failure, I struggled to write. I began things in fits and starts. Nothing felt good enough or smart enough or resonant enough to continue. And because of this I struggled to feel good enough to continue at anything. Failure, genuine existential failure, was now something that lurked in the water with razor teeth and insatiable hunger. I was more often sad and isolated than ebullient. I felt guilty and impoverished. I threw myself into and out of jobs. I overburdened and under-burdened my personal relationships—both equal paths to doom. All the while I remembered that I was not doing what I should be doing: should be—the great unwritten scourge, the single invisible flail.

So I was wrong. You who are wiser than me know this already. As I thrashed about, I found other places to succeed. I am a fair teacher. I am an enthusiastic advocate for faith development in children and adults at my church. I Pied-Piper pretty well. I learned, and learn to be a better father. I have accepted the mantle of divorced dad, and do a decent job as a co-parent. I have accepted the hard lessons of knowing my limitations as a person and as a man, and have acknowledged (to myself at least, and now, begrudgingly, but perhaps not begrudgingly enough, to you) that I have needs to which I must attend, and that I ignore at my own peril.

I learned to fail, and in failing, to succeed. The lessons were always there, I just did not see them. I can blame my eyes, blame my genes, blame my upbringing, but what is the point of that? Do some therapy, figure it out, and get on with the work ahead, because there is always work ahead. I forgot and forgave—myself and others. I welcomed a bright presence into my life. And I remembered that I loved stories, true stories, made up stories. I told them—other people’s stories at first, then, slowly my stories. And I found my way.

And I write these short notes. I started them when I felt that I had a story to tell, when I went to China to bring a daughter home. And I continued—and continue—them as I pace my back to the work. I share them with a small and generous audience, shaking off the Cerberus of fear: ego (what right do I have to say these things?); failure (what if I get it all wrong?); and doubt (what difference will this make to anyone?). I write them for you and I write them for me. Finding my way back and setting out lights. This way. Now.

On Being Known

IMG_2982Is there anything worse than being mis-known? Than someone making a claim about how you feel or think that has almost nothing to do with your actual thoughts or feelings? I remember an occasion after one of our Thursday night poker games in Binghamton when some poor soul ventured that no matter what I said, he knew that what I felt in my heart was different. I don’t even remember what we were discussing—maybe Moby Dick. My friend Brian looked at me at that moment, acknowledging the serious breach that had been made.

And of course, there are worse things—1,000 worse things involving the obliteration of the physical being. However, our ability to say, “This is who I am”—to define our mental and spiritual being (which exists fully in concert with our physical selves), is of tantamount importance, especially in a world in which our physical beings are fairly secure. We are privileged to be able to assert this side of our being. But even when chained, we need this self. Both must be unbound.

For the most part, and it almost hurts to admit this, I do not expect to be known in the world. I rarely put the full force of who I am and what I think and how I feel on display. My writing, and these blog posts over the past few years are a first step. But, whether it is a function of the way people know each other, or the fact that, over the years, I have learned to restrain myself in order to fulfill specific tasks in the world, I no longer expect to be fully known. I feel sometimes caught between the poles of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the bounty of Whitman’s Song of Myself—either worrying about being misapprehended, or standing in a field of grass beckoning “Here I am! Here we are!”

The Eliot pole—and he is not holding Prufrock out as an exemplar, but as a warning—burdens me with the sagging weight of doubt that any connection is ever possible. Even the sirens will pass me by. I feel, at times, profoundly sad that anyone, really, ever knows another. This suspicion is tied up in the gnawing Weltschmerz that descends upon me and sends me reeling into the worst and most stupid kind of isolation. When so gripped, I guard myself with cynicism or sarcasm. But those moments are my worst, never my best. They are too easy.

The Whitman pole buoys me. The contradictions don’t matter; in fact, they are an essential part of me, and the world, the great breathing, aching, loving, ecstatic, terrible world surges through me and restores me. My “I” ceases to matter. I become a vessel for a song made up of all the voices of all the things and all the people. I tend toward those voices with ferocity and devotion. Bring it on! “The dancing wagon has come! here is the dancing wagon!”

However, and here is the rub–I am too full of contradictions, too connected to a world outside myself. I feel afloat in a world that values certainty and consistency. Most people seem to seek firmer ground, to limit voices of dissent. I don’t know why, not exactly, not when we are beings of such profoundly possible connection. I have “everything” tattooed around my right ankle. Then I remember Prufrock. Do people live with such doubt? Do they never explore and expand to meet the world like lovers, ready to be torn to shreds and remade by love. Damnit all. Go!

Maybe we are never sure, never sure enough, and especially not in the presence of love. I know that my greatest struggles with being known have come in the presence of more singular love, when there is one person who must bear the shaking I experience between the poles, and then must love the contradictory, magnanimous, possible heart I carry deep inside. And perhaps this is asking too much of one person to be the secret sharer of this heart. I feel difficult, even to myself, and am not sure whether I am knowable or lovable on my own terms, not in a one-on-one kind of way. Maybe the way I am precludes this. Maybe I am best known facet by facet, and not all at once. I am fifty five years old; time passes, slowly and quickly.

Still, I hear the voices, and sing the songs, and cherish the world that is always there, no matter how great the hardship, no matter how awful or wonderful. And I chose, for better or for worse, to write, to scribble down thoughts and ideas and images and characters and stories all in the hope that they would come alive in some stranger’s mind. I do not sing this world to the angel, unless the angel is you, unless we are all, already, angels.

And in some small and not small way, the hope of being known—asserting myself—seems almost like a betrayal of my charge. Sing the world, you man. Give it up! Disappear! You will never disappear! Keep singing. Keep telling stories. Keep connecting. Know the world and love the world.  Find yourself there.

 

Villains and Stories

 

In a certain kind of writing, picking out villains is simple.  Whether they wear an iconic black hat, or kick small animals, they make themselves known in a way eases the reader into a comfortable understanding of the world.  These days lesser writing simply overturns the conventions: white hat—bad guy! (Surpirse!).  Better writing muddies that understanding: the villain acts out of sincerely felt good intentions (hence the road to hell), and in such a way that we can sympathize (if fleetingly, or longer) with their motivations.  When we pillory these bad actors we do so gently; after all, we could just as easily be in their spot.

Real life is the sticking point.  I’ll admit that I read to find out about and reflect on life.  Writing, after all, is easier to understand than life.  Life, with all its fits and starts, resists narrative cohesion. Beginnings do not always lead to middles or ends.  The setting often has nothing to do with the plot.  And the plot is repetitive and makes no sense. I hazard to suggest that we build stories as a bulwark against the confusion and chaos of life.  Stories narrow our focus and create a framework for understanding the world.

As we meet people, we turn them into characters that either fit or do not fit into the long standing master plots of our lives.  Someone who disrupts that story risks becoming a villain—or in rare occasions, a hero—but chances are that our daily heroes are those people we encounter who affirm the story we have told ourselves, who give us comfort in what we already know.

And in all this, I wonder whether we are ever the actual authors of our life stories, or whether they simply accrue around us in response to the life that happens. Most of us inherit a story  before we even begin our own.  When Fitzgerald wrote, “there are no second acts in American lives,” I think he was pointing to this phenomenon.  We (privileged) Americans hold the truth of our freedom so closely, that we fail to grapple with the fundamental lack of self-determination in our most essential stories.  We swallow those stories whole and they become an inexorable and unexamined part of who we see ourselves to be. Without a chance to address, let alone to change that story, we get stuck in a first act that repeats and repeats and repeats.  The second act is the place for a turn and a change; resolution comes in the third.

When I think about the villains in my work, my writing, I know I need them to maintain some kind of conflict.  They are the “B” to the protagonists’ “A.”  But in the need to create something like verisimilitude, such easy binary relationships seem false.  I can’t help but think about how the stories of “A” and the stories of “B” surround them like straitjackets, and how they either wriggle free or remain obstinately stuck inside.  And for me, that is the true definition of a villain—a character who refuses to escape the boundaries of one story, even if it’s a really good story.

I think of David Copperfield, who begins the narration of his story with, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”  Spoiler alert, David becomes the villain, but is entirely unaware of this horrible fact—or almost, he leaves a trail of bodies and breadcrumbs obvious enough to belie his eventual rise.  His story is powerful and uplifting, and not a little inspiring.  But the “upward” at the end of the novel speaks as much to his class aspirations and a justification of all that has happened around him on his road to success.

Of course this also has something to do with my life.  How can it not?  I have wrestled with the stories that surrounded me since I was young.  I have tried on one story after another like the ficklest of shoppers at an all-day sale.  Some I have worn long and others dismissed quickly. I am drawn to those who have deeply certain stories and devastated by their lack of room for my uncertainty.

I am a tailor of stories, and an escape artist, busily making one while I wriggle out of another.  The contradiction makes me and destroys me. And then makes me again and again and again.

 

The Flags of Memory

Facebook politely reminds me that I have memories.  On April 28th last year I posted #FUCO, inspired by the Daily Show’s effort to get the Democrats and Republicans to F#$%ing Cooperate. Two years ago I celebrated being a scant three days from traveling to China to meet my daughter. Three years ago I posted Tom Waits’ cover of “Somewhere.”  Four years ago, two articles from the New York Times’ caught enough of my eye that I reposted them. Day after day, another batch of the past is just a click away. But all I have to do is turn my head, and I can glimpse the shades of things past.

I am surrounded by memories.  Even the most ordinary thing in my household triggers one or a dozen memories.  The computer speakers on my desk top are the speakers that I had in my attic office, are the speakers that I had in my apartment by the beach, are the speakers that were in my apartment in Roland Park, are the speakers I bought when I lived on Fair Oaks Avenue.  I can see them on a desk in each place, and around that desk old rooms organize themselves, and around those rooms entire buildings take shape, and around those buildings, streets spread out into cities populated by people whose faces are just a turn to the left or right from the chair in which I sit. I feel as if I could start a conversation with these memories just as easily as I begin one with the people who walk just outside my office window just this very moment.

I am not sure if other people experience memories in this same way.  It’s not as if I have an excellent memory; the rules of German grammar eluded me when I was in high school.  But I knew the Constitution by Section and Article almost at first glance.  And I drove all over the suburbs of Philadelphia without getting lost as soon as I had a driver’s license—all based on my childhood memories of being in cars. Years later, when I traveled to Maine after a twenty year absence, I did the same there.  I cannot dredge a memory up, but feel wrapped in a thousand wispy scarves each one peeling away to reveal some past me surrounded by a past world, which is also the present me surrounded by the present world.

Some people must be able to store their memories in boxes in an attic, and that out of sight and out of mind, their memories don’t regularly come crashing down off the shelves.  Or they put one or two—or more—on the mantle in the living room, or on a hidden altar in their homes. And those memories take precedence over the ones in the attic. Maybe I am unable to select, maybe I need them all, maybe I do not know which memory will hold the key to some unforeseen puzzle.

I guess that someone who felt more melancholic would feel ensnared by all these connections. I have moments when I would like to be cut free from them, when the sadness of a particular skein feels overwhelming, and the sadness overpowers all the other threads. At different times of my life I have combated those feelings either by playing a simple solitaire game that I learned from a college friend, or by getting in my car and driving until the roads became strange, or by playing a video game for the seventh or eighth time.

Repetition dulls the brightness of the connections, and I have simple repeated rituals (peanut butter and jelly for lunch nearly every day) that offer some respite from the densely colored warp and weave of the past.  Just this, for now, before the return. And then the glorious return of how many days—twenty thousand?—and how many moments?  This, writing, also limits the connections—the focus required to write narrows my vision to this word, this letter, this comma.  And yet the inspirations to write are all the peripheral visions that are always just a distracted head turn away.

I also turn to the new.  I remember those late night drives—in a brown Volkswagen Rabbit with the stereo turned up beyond reason, listening to John Adams’ Shaker Loops, or Laurie Anderson’s United States, or the Talking Heads’ Remain in Light—which became longer and later in my twenties as I drove farther and farther west, traveling on back roads from Philadelphia all the way to Harrisburg.  I came home, because as far as I went I never forgot my cat.  I returned home to my apartment on City Line Avenue more to tend him than to prepare for a job.  Now, with four cats and a daughter, the journeys away must be curtailed.  I must drive in.

And so in I go, trailing a billowing cloud of memories like flags from countries that I have not claimed, but have claimed me. Turn this way, they insist.  This is where to go.  This is the key.