WORD
The Ass List
Yep. Every letter except X.
Ass
Badass
Crazyass
Dumbass
Ass End
Fatass
Great Ass
Ass Hat
Itchass
Jackass
Kickass
Lickass
My Ass
No Ass
Oddass
Pissass
Quickass
Assrub
Sadass
Tightass
Uglyass
Veinyass
Asswipe
Yer Ass
Zip Yer Ass
How I Met My True Love
My True Love (TL) and I have been together, in one form or another, since I was very young. TL sometimes visited my mother on the farm, and I flirted with her, in the innocent way that little girls flirt with their fathers, or strangers bearing gifts, or the gingerbread bricks and candy mortar of a delicious house that belongs to someone else.
We first met officially, and on our own terms, when I was in the fourth grade, in that glorious place called the bookmobile. The public library in town sent the bookmobile out to the country three times in the summer to supply books to farm children. To this day, her smell takes me back to that sweet encounter. I found her colorful, entrancing, and certainly too profound for the likes of me, a skinny farm girl with no socks inside her shoes. But she remembered me from my earlier dalliances. And isn’t that just the kind of attention we crave as children? To be noticed, to inspire awe at how much we have grown, how like an adult we have become? TL gave me A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The bookmobile rule was to return the book at the next visit, of course, but TL allowed me to keep it. That first gift inspired a lifelong interest in fiction, science, philosophy, foreign languages, and the struggle between Good and Evil.
My high school years with TL raced by, unimpeded by external disapproval. I was old enough to escape the concerns of my parents, and TL and I fell into an easy routine of spending every evening and weekend together. She, being older and wiser than I, insisted that I keep up with my school studies: Lord of the Flies, Farenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird. I offered no resistance. My aptitude for English pleased TL immeasurably. I, in turn, spent all my free time with her, yearning to know her better. She introduced me to authors I could not access at my rural high school: Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, Thomas Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Dante.
Our relationship grew more intense during my college years. As I gained a deeper knowledge of TL, I struggled to truly understand her. Intense studies of Faulkner, Austen, Fitzgerald, and Pirandello tried us. At the same time, I formed peripheral relationships with others, some unknown to her. Fiction and nonfiction by unknown authors found their way into my world, and I developed a fascination with neurology and the study of creativity itself. Books by physicists Richard Feynman and Jean Emile Charon began to appear in my library. I hooked up with my professors and fellow writers after class, and spent increasing stretches of time in bars reading their works, smoking cigars and lamenting my relationship with TL. How could I have let it come this far without question? Back in high school, when the English teacher had asked why Daisy cries when Gatsby tosses his beautiful colored shirts in the air, I had answered that it was out of happiness. I earned an A for that answer. Yet, there I sat, a cigar in one hand and a tequila in the other, knowing--absolutely knowing--that was the wrong answer. Daisy’s tears were of hopelessness. She would never be able to make a life with Gatsby. He didn’t even know enough to buy white shirts. Had TL let me down? Had she let down any of the friends who had come to know her almost as well as I?
I succumbed to the occasional brief fling with the opposite sex, which would temporarily draw me away from TL. She is not the jealous type, though I cannot say as much for the boyfriends. One particularly insecure lover “accidentally” shattered my marble bust of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was one of my most treasured gifts from TL. I always went back to her, and TL had no opinion on the subject whatsoever. She is a force, like water, or gravity. I can try to live without her, but my very existence depends on her sustenance and invisible attraction. Nothing and no one else gives so much, and asks so little in return—only that I read.
TL and I have been engaged for years now. Marriage is out of the question, being illegal, but I believe us to be irrevocably wed. I, for one, am totally committed, despite the fact that, ultimately, she can never really belong to just one person. I have tasted her gifts. I have eaten from the gingerbread house, tentatively at first, and then with abandon. I have consumed. And now I am consumed. This kind of love is not exactly forbidden, yet nor is it exactly common. Now, as then, others like us meet in specific places designed to encourage such relationships, most notably university campuses and the quiet corners of coffee houses. Out in the general public, unless both parties are ageless and famous, our kind of love is egregiously misunderstood. I hope the children we create will be beautiful and inspiring. And how will that impossible feat be accomplished, you may wonder. Actually, I intend to be the bearer of any progeny from our relationship. I would like to think that TL’s participation will be—if not literal—then literative.
Spheres
I walk my dog every day, on a residential street where the houses are set into a grand hillside. The lots are the same size and the houses fairly similar. The greatest difference I notice is in the attention and care given to the properties, ranging from overgrown and trashy yards to pristine, well-attended lawns and gardens. And, to a one, the more attention given to the surroundings, the bigger the lawn. At the well-tended properties, the owners have mowed the grass all the way up the hillside to the property line, expanding their yards to the fullest. To the extent properties are unkempt, they have allowed the weeds and scrub trees to encroach on what could have been their recreation and living space.
I know better than to make a sweeping judgment about these strangers and their yards. It’s tempting to conclude that the well-kept, expansive yards belong to happy, well-adjusted people and the scrubby yards to the depressed and anxious. That’s true, in general. But, a pretty yard may belie an ugly person, someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or one who cares way too much about appearances. An unkempt yard could belong to a happy, carefree person who puts his time and energy into other pursuits. These physical spheres can be deceiving, because some people seek validation from external sources and some find validation from within. Appearances can be faked.
A yard surrounding a house is one kind of sphere, but there’s another, one that can’t be faked. People have a space around them that ranges from positive and expansive to negative and choked. It is a sphere of what religions might call the Holy Spirit or an extension of the soul, new-age philosophy calls an aura, and scientists call electromagnetic energy. It can be photographed, measured, and felt by other human beings and animals. It effects all living things and even inanimate objects within its range of detection. Let’s call it a personal sphere.
While a physical sphere, like a yard around a house, can be deceiving, the personal sphere never lies. It’s more accurate than fingerprints, handwriting, or body language in identifying a person. At this point in time, however, the only way to measure it, without sophisticated equipment, is by its effects on other people and things.
This makes you the only effective barometer of other people’s spheres. You don’t need any other identifiers. Your intuition reads the spheres expertly, whether you are aware of it or not. And your intuition communicates to you with a “gut feeling.” It’s not the psychic or spiritual gift it seems to be to those who have not yet discovered it nor learned to trust it. It’s a skill everyone has and can hone. How do you hone this skill? You listen to those gut feelings, and follow them with action. Try a Google search for “How My Intuition Saved My Life” for endless examples of people who listened to and trusted their gut feelings.
A small percentage of the population have no sphere beyond their physical body at all, but a non-sphere, a negative sphere, something akin to a black hole. True to the metaphor, such non-spheres come from a very dark place, from terminal anguish and pathology. And they do what all black holes do—they suck in all light and energy that comes near them. Bring a non-sphere and a healthy sphere together and both people will end up with nothing. Energy and light extinguished. It is hell on earth. Avoid them at all costs. Listen to your gut feelings, and follow those feelings with action.
Not only can you expertly read other people’s spheres, but you have control over your own. Some combination of your conscious and subconscious thoughts, your beliefs and attitudes, your emotional state, and your state of health creates the electromagnetic energy in your personal sphere. And, just like the yards I walk past every day, your sphere expands to the extent that you tend to it. Look for an in-depth explanation of how to do such tending in my next book, Learn, Grow, Play: Why We’re Here.
The Truth About Rudolph
One generation from now, no living person will be able to remember a time when Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was not a part of Christmas. Yet Rudolph, at the time of this writing, is just under eighty years old—too old to be just a fad, and too young to claim folklore status. What place should The Red-Nosed Reindeer by Robert L. May, or, as we know it today, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, claim within the literary canon? May’s poem takes its form, meter, and most of its characters from a tradition that already exists. The story’s origins, though, show it to be a thoroughly modern American production, and by no means destined for greatness in the literary tradition. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Rudolph) can be read as a formulaic underdog tale inspired by cultural mythemes, or as a marketing scheme embedded in a period of economic and social depression. Literature geeks like me often take sides in a longstanding methodological argument: Is the story to be understood by the structure of the text? Or, does the author’s own life and intent make it what it is? In the case of Rudolph, to account for the whole of its literary value and meaning, we’re going to have to draw from both methodologies.
The original text reads as something quite familiar. Rudolph comprises a series of rhyming couplets, a structure bearing more than a little resemblance to Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, also known as The Night Before Christmas, which had first appeared in print over a hundred years before Rudolph, had solidified earlier legends of St. Nicholas, and was already the most popular Christmas book in America. Moore’s and May’s texts share both lore and language. The first and last couplets of each text are as follows:
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night (Moore 1-2, 55-56)
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills
The reindeer were playing . . . enjoying the spills
You may hear them call, as they drive out of sight,
“MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!” (May 1-2, 182-183)
Dispelling any question that this resemblance might be unintended, May’s Santa calls the reindeer by name, just as he does in Moore’s poem:
Come Dasher! Come Dancer! Come Prancer and Vixen!
Come Comet! Come Cupid! Come Donner and Blitzen! (May 43-44)
The imitation of Moore’s style is fitting, since Rudolph, rather than presenting a new fictional world, extends the myth of its predecessor. Rudolph himself is original, but May places him in the context of the worldwide Santa Claus mythos that can be traced back as far as the fourth century.
Features in Rudolph reaffirm themes common to myths and fairy tales handed down for generations. Whereas the reindeer in Moore’s poem are simply animals that can fly, May’s anthropomorphized deer read, write, and live in houses, much like the animal tales of folklore. Lord Raglan, in The Hero, asserts that mythic forms recur across all heroic narratives, and that from them we can distinguish between figures historical and mythical/traditional—“that which has really been handed down by word of mouth from time immemorial” (Raglan 45). Such patterns “suggest the existence of some fundamental grammar of narrative over a wide range of humanity,” according to Robert Scholes (Scholes 66). Vladimir Propp, in his study of Russian folktales, suggests this universality as well, when he says that “[f]unctions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale” (Propp 21). In the Rudolph tale, Rudolph is spirited away on an adventure, returning victorious and reigning uneventfully for the foreseeable future, thus meeting three of Raglan’s structural patterns. Of Propp’s 31 functions (because, for Propp, the function of action is more important than the pattern per se), Rudolph meets five: He leaves home, is tested by weather, uses a magical agent (be it his nose or the magic of Santa), finds objects sought, and returns. Among what Propp calls “spheres of action,” Rudolph features three: Santa as donor and dispatcher, and Rudolph as hero.
If we consider the 1964 Rankin/Bass television production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which adds to the form a villain—the Bumble, a love interest—Clarice, a contentious and powerful father—Donner, and helpers—Hermey the Elf and Yukon Cornelius, Rudolph rises to meet six of Propp’s seven spheres of action. Likewise, the more complex plot aligns Rudolph with even more of Raglan’s patterns and Propp’s functions, which should bestow on it a share of the universal and “fundamental grammar of narrative” that Scholes describes. But structure alone is of little use without meaning. We must know to what end these elements of the hero myth are featured. For that, we must examine the themes highlighted in Rudolph.
Several themes emerge from the Rudolph mythos. Service is contribution to the welfare of others, and in Rudolph, the hero serves at the request of Santa Claus, for the benefit of all the children of the world. Santa’s fundamental purpose is to serve, and most important, to serve in secrecy. Perils of the journey notwithstanding, Santa’s greatest fear is of the children awakening:
Just think how the boys’ and girls’ faith would be shaken,
If we didn’t reach ‘em before they awaken!
Because it might wake them, a match was denied him.
He really was worried, for what would he do
If folks started waking before he was through?
The horrible fear that some children might waken (May 41-42, 59, 63-64, 99)
The consequence of children waking before Santa’s task is finished is a loss of faith. In other words, Santa and Rudolph are in service to faith.
Rudolph displays valor in accepting Santa’s request, for the task is a perilous one. Santa has risked becoming lost, has become tangled in trees, and has narrowly missed colliding with an airplane. He has suffered a skinned knee and a fall that lands him on his back. That Rudolph displays “such a big grin” (May 109) shows he feels elation, rather than trepidation, toward the challenge. Twice the word proud is applied to Rudolph--when he takes “his proud place at the head of the sleigh” (May 116), before embarking on his task, for “no greater honor can come to a deer” (May 146), and as he alights, upon the journey’s end.
Though proud to have served, Rudolph accepts Santa’s praise with humility. And it is heavy praise, indeed:
When Santa said:--“Rudolph, I never have had
A deer quite so brave or so brilliant as you
At fighting back fog, and at guiding me through.
By YOU last night’s journey was actually bossed.
Without you, I’m certain, we’d all have been lost.
I hope you’ll continue to keep us from grief
On future dark trips as COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF!” (May 156-162)
Santa, the most famous and powerful icon of Christmas, relinquishes entirely his power to Rudolph, whose response is simply a bashful blush. When asked for a speech, again Rudolph is “bashful” and “brief” with “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night” (May 170). Perhaps Rudolph doesn’t realize that the words of his bashful and brief speech are taken directly from Santa at the end of Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. Or, perhaps, in relinquishing the power, Santa also relinquishes the words. Put another way, Rudolph’s use of Santa’s famous words, whether deliberate or unconscious, demonstrates a usurpation of power. Add one more feature from the Propp and Raglan lists: Rudolph displaces the king.
The most often repeated theme in Rudolph, though, is that of goodness. Whereas the Rankin/Bass production places Rudolph in the North Pole community of deer, May’s original poem likens Rudolph to the hopeful children who await Santa’s visit on Christmas Eve:
Although he was lonesome he always was good . . .
Obeying his parents, as good reindeer should
That’s why, on this day Rudolph almost felt playful:-
He hoped that from Santa (soon driving his sleighful
Of presents and candy dollies and toys
For good little animals, good girls and boys)
He’d get just as much . . . and this is what pleased him
As the happier, handsomer reindeer who teased him
As night, and a fog hid the world like a hood,
He went to bed hopeful; he knew he’d been good!
Old Santa knew always which children were good
And minded their parents and ate as they should (May 19-30, 129-130)
Thus May’s text reinforces the theme of goodness in the existing Santa Claus mythos. Part of Rudolph’s goodness is the fortitude he displays amidst the hurtful teasing of his peers and the politeness he affords his parents by leaving them a note before rushing off to help Santa. Santa himself shows tact and politeness in his exchange with Rudolph, referring to Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” because “[t]o call it a ‘big, shiny nose’ would sound horrid!” (May 105-106). While we have come to know a surlier Santa through the Rudolph television production, Rudolph’s goodness remains pure even as the myth exists today.
In the mythic tradition, and as an extension of the Santa Clause mythos, Rudolph features the qualities of service, valor, humility, and goodness. These features are widely paralleled in other myths and fairy tales of our culture: Belle steps up to serve when she offers herself in place of her father in “Beauty and the Beast.” Arthur’s valor is renowned in the Arthurian legends. Snow White is humble. Cinderella, despite banishment to the ashes, is good. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, says that in the study of myths and folk tales,
The parallels will be immediately apparent; and these will develop a vast and amazingly constant statement
of the basic truths by which man has lived throughout the millenniums of his residence on the planet (Campbell viii).
Structure, then, can reveal truth. Yet, there is another way to examine Rudolph, beyond the structure of May’s text.
Situating Rudolph in its social, economic, and historical context reveals even more meaning than we can extract from the text alone. Robert L. May was a copywriter for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, in 1939 when he was instructed by his employer to write a children’s book to promote Christmas sales. Ward’s had previously used coloring books and other giveaways for adult-accompanied children to attract customers for holiday shopping. Printing their own book would be cheaper than purchasing the novelty items from vendors, and even cheaper if all 620 Montgomery Ward stores placed a single, high-volume printing order. In the December, 1939 issue of Business Builder, a Ward’s in-house magazine,
Rudolph was featured on the cover, perhaps one of the first images of the red-nosed reindeer leading Santa’s team. Santa and the reindeer team are flying over a Montgomery Ward store, and four of the reindeer are labeled: Rudolph, Newspaper Ads, Circulars, and Displays. Interestingly, Santa is carrying huge bags of money, the results—no doubt—of a properly executed marketing campaign (Lankford 26-27).
Montgomery Ward comprised stores in all 48 states, and, through a concerted nationwide marketing effort, distributed just under 2.4 million copies of Rudolph, “dwarfing the printing of any children’s book by a publisher at the time” (Lankford 23). It was a much-needed push for Montgomery Ward stores in the economy of the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had moved the Thanksgiving holiday up by one week to make the Christmas season longer in an attempt to help the economy. At the time, Army and Navy goods stores outnumbered department stores and the number of men’s apparel stores doubled that of women’s (Perry). “Five and dime” stores sold cheaper merchandise in the five- to ten-cent price range, so Montgomery Ward was tasked with enticing potential customers to come into the store and examine what Ward’s touted as the superior durability of their goods. With their aggressive advertising and distribution of Rudolph, you might say, as Ronald D. Lankford, Jr. does, in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: An American Hero, that, rather than responding to consumer demand, Ward’s created it (Lankford 140, italics added).
Socially, the American lifestyle for most had changed from one of opportunity to one of survival. Need, rather than want, drove expenditures. The most popular films of 1939 were Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, grand, lengthy, Technicolor spectacles that allowed temporary respite from real-life turmoil. At the same time, hard work and fortitude were still ingredients of the American Dream, a spirit that would serve Americans well in the looming World War. To walk into a large retail store like Montgomery Ward, and be gifted with what was quickly becoming a beloved children’s book, must have seemed like a Christmas blessing. Like the best movies, Rudolph was produced in color amidst a world of mostly black and white images.
Robert May lived entrenched in this economic and social turmoil, and produced Rudolph from and within his own experience. But why? Rudolph was created as a work-for-hire at the request of May’s employer. That’s one answer. Another is that he saw himself as a loser, an underdog who triumphs in the end, a sort of Ugly Duckling, as in the Hans Christian Andersen tale. In a press release entitled “Rudolph and I Were Something Alike,” May writes:
Here I was, heavily in debt at age 35, still grinding out catalogue copy. Instead of writing the great American
novel, as I’d once hoped, I was describing men’s white shirt[s]. It seemed I’d always been a loser (Benlocker.com).
May’s family has described him in youth as small, unathletic, and mercilessly teased by his peers (Lankford 1). Perhaps his physical smallness came from the fact that he skipped a grade or two, attending Dartmouth College early, in 1922, and graduating Phi Beta Kappa. But, whether due to the economic downturn, or his ailing wife’s medical bills, May had not risen above the position of copywriter at the time he was asked to pen Rudolph. His four-year-old daughter happily served as a sounding board for May’s story ideas. According to May, she “loved the deer down at the zoo” (Benlocker.com). When May’s wife succumbed to cancer during the production of Rudolph, he “needed Rudolph now more than ever” and “buried [him]self in the writing” (Benlocker.com).
An author’s true intentions can only be guessed at. Perhaps May intended to wow his superiors at Ward’s, explore his own insecurities, write an American classic, simply pay the bills, or entertain and console his young daughter. Maybe, like me, he was a gifted, but lazy writer, roused only by the deadline. Nothing in Rudolph’s historical context allows us to know. Returning to the text itself fares no better in this regard. If, as Lankford concludes, “May’s literary choices [in Rudolph] define the target audience: young children” (Lankford 20), we cannot separate the text itself from the marketing plan. May could not step outside his circumstances in order to write Rudolph, just as he is a product of the children’s literature tradition at the same time he creates a work for children. And it’s not just the author who exists as both the source and product of the tradition—at some point those lines blurred for Rudolph, the myth, as well.
While, in a literary sense, Rudolph is hitched to Santa’s furry coat tails, the Santa Claus mythos also absorbs that of Rudolph, until they are parts of one cohesive myth. I have already shown how Rudolph scores on the Structuralism lists with Santa playing the role of dispatcher and donor. Santa Claus, himself a high-scoring hero on those lists within his own story, takes on Rudolph as one of his magical helpers on the hero’s journey. It’s a natural fit, though not the connecting vein from historical fact to mytheme that folklorists might prefer. Given his origins, Rudolph could function similarly to Ronald McDonald, the Afflack duck, or the Gyco Gecco—business mascots all. Except he doesn’t; and no one thinks of Montgomery Ward when they think of Rudolph, outside an essay like this one. Rudolph is a commercial, rather than organic, addition to the Santa story, much like the Coca-Cola image of Santa. Unlike the Coca-Cola Santa, however, Rudolph is not just an image, but a character in the story. And Rudolph is a company mascot whose ties to his company have dissolved. He seems to have found just the right niche.
Relegating Rudolph to the product of a marketing scheme does not explain its longevity, and mistakenly assumes that anything marketed in such a manner would be popular. If that were true, and given its enormous marketing power, Disney would surely be synonymous with Christmas by now. Neither does the structure of the Rudolph text alone account for its longevity, and inaccurately ascribes to it the purely organic nature of folklore without regard for its origin in commerce and in the pathos of one striving man. Seeking the truth about Rudolph must encompass both methodologies. The truth about Rudolph is that, although it can be circumscribed by Vladimir Propp’s “functions” and “spheres of action,” and Lord Raglan’s mythic patterns, it also confounds them. The historical and mythical have merged. The Rudolph lore and language have been baked into the batter of the Santa Claus mythos, and not baked in like easily-identifiable chocolate chips—but baked in like baking powder, a catalyst giving rise to the whole and inseparable from what is consumed. The truth about Rudolph is that initial demand for it was stirred by marketing—itself a rhetorical function of language—and that it does speak to certain values and truths that live in the language of literature. The truth about Rudolph, as ironic as it may be, is that, in the world of mythic literary tradition, Rudolph fits in.
Going Into the Closet
Like yours and mine, Ellen G.’s closet is full of stuff. She’s spent her whole life storing things in there. A lot of the oldest stuff, some of the first items she stored away, she doesn’t even remember. And, until now, it’s been a decent system. Not great, but decent. She pulls things out as she needs them. She can’t exactly go right to the item she seeks, because it’s messy in there, but she believes she knows everything it contains, and it’s not spilling into the hallway, so she is fairly satisfied. It’s not until a major event happens, say a home invasion or a devastating tornado, that Ellen realizes her closet isn’t serving her well. She can’t take refuge in the closet, because there just isn’t room to do so. It’s the basis of the house, the part that still stands after the tornado. It’s also the most enclosed and secret. The home invader doesn’t even look there. The closet has become a life-or-death situation requiring her immediate attention. Thus, unprotected by the very room that is for her protection, she must act. She must go into the closet and look—really look—at what’s in there.
Ellen is shocked that so much of what is in her closet is other people’s stuff. In fact, a great majority of its contents don’t belong to Ellen at all. She’s the nice type, Ellen is, so she has never said no when someone wanted to store something there. She realizes now that she has stored things people didn’t even ask her to store. She would have seen this right off the bat, had she ever given her closet this much attention. Why is she keeping all this for other people? She gets right to work. The first thing she does is to remove anything that does not belong to her. Ellen feels lighter and lighter the more stuff she removes from her closet. This is so easy, she thinks. I will have this clean in no time!
Returning other people’s stuff to them is not as easy as she expects. They don’t want it back. They are repulsed. They claim never to have owned such stuff. But it’s yours, not mine—here. She tries to hand it back. They don’t take it. And, on top of that, they seem quite angry at her for attempting to return their stuff. They like their stuff stored in Ellen’s closet. It is an affront to them that she dare to give them their belongings. Again she pushes their stuff in their direction. She explains that, due to the life-or-death closet situation, she can no longer store these things. Surely they understand that it’s a matter of her life. Tornado, home invasion, etc. True friends care about their friends’ lives. But it doesn’t happen that way. They slam their doors. Flabbergasted, she leaves their stuff on the curbs in front of their houses. It’s all she can do. As she walks away, they rush to cover their stuff with big tarps so no one can see it.
Back at her closet, Ellen addresses what is left. Though it’s only about a quarter of what was, it’s still a lot. And it’s still messy. But it’s brighter, and she can more easily see things. She lives with it this way for a while. Life is much better. This is the goal, right? A closet filled with only her own things. Each time she pulls a necessary item from the closet, though, that feeling of lightness seems to fade just a little. It’s not lessening so much as remaining the same while her desire for even more lightness increases. But why? Perhaps a closet filled with her own stuff is not the goal, but a milestone on the way to something greater. And where does a thought like that come from? She intuits so many more possibilities now that there is some space in the closet. She must go into the closet again.
Inside, Ellen sees that, even though everything in the closet belongs to her, some of it she no longer wishes to own. This round of cleaning is tougher than the first. With the heat of such labor, she strips naked. The closet has a lot of partitions she herself built and was quite proud of at one time. But now, it is obvious that they are in the way. Where they once helped (back when the closet was full of other people’s stuff), they are now a hindrance. The partitions must go! The items must set directly next to and on top of each other. Items that don’t fit into this arrangement must be examined carefully before being kept or discarded. Fully half of the remaining items are judgment, repeating itself over and over. All that has to go. And why take up space with all these decisions, when a person needs only one . . . And then something catches her eye.
Ellen has been wrong about knowing everything that’s in her closet. Why, here, leaning against the back wall, is something that’s been hidden in the darkness for a long time. It would have remained here forever, had that major event (the tornado or home invasion) not set this whole project in motion. And it’s blocking her view of a lot of other stuff, too. It’s really dusty, and her first thought is to toss it in the trash without looking at it, but she is shamefully drawn to it. But then she scrapes off the dirt and sees it for what it really is, in the newfound light of the closet. She weeps. Then she is silent.
This next part takes courage: Now that she has identified the item, she brings it out of the closet into the daylight. It loses all substance then, and all power. She is no longer attached to it. Now it’s just a thing, a thing that used to be in her closet. Forgetting that she is naked, she walks outside into the sunlight and down to the curb and sets it out with the garbage. And boy, doing that once makes it so much easier to do it again and again, which she does.
This is a huge but necessary undertaking, and Ellen does it well. She changes, right down to the very words she utters. For what are words, but a code, an index to what’s in the closet. She thinks she’s done, because she can’t imagine being any happier. She lives this way for a while. Life is so much better! A delight! She has become quite intuitive, so she recognizes right away when her wonderful feelings subside. She knows this is another jumping-off point. She recognizes the need for growth. Back to the closet, then.
This time, Ellen’s attention is drawn, not to the contents of the closet, but their disarray. She is certain that even more space can be created by a rearrangement of the items. She is full of good ideas now. What if she makes all her stuff face the same way, rather than every which way? She makes a decision as to which way to direct all the items in the closet, and then she moves them all to that position. Certain strong and indispensable things can stay at the bottom, like honesty, trust, love, independence, and respect, and other items can rest on top of them. Some items don’t even need to be labeled, like multiplication tables and how to cook and the driving route to work. Closer to the top she places items that are subject to come and go, like what to have for lunch and whether to attend a party. Easier for the coming and going if they are right on top. And she won’t have to wonder whether they fit, because if they face a different direction, they will stick out from the rest. So now the closet is arranged horizontally according to the direction she has chosen and from bottom to top in a hierarchy of importance. Everything fits together beautifully and nothing is hidden. Everything is touching. There is so much room now in the closet, that she could save her own life and that of several friends, if necessary. But what is this . . . ?
At the back of the closet, all the way at the back, in an area she has never seen before, Ellen finds an opening, big enough to walk through. Light pours in from this opening, and she is drawn to it with a mix of certainty and excitement. Like just before opening a gift, when you know what’s in the gift. And what’s in it is your greatest desire.
What Ellen G.’s closet connects to, through this opening, is beyond description. It has to do with light and mirrors and shiny metaphors like that. You won’t believe me if I tell you what it is. But if this intrigues you, maybe you could go into your own closet to see what’s there.
The Best Movie Ending
It seems that, as a culture, we are obsessed with battling evil. As I scroll through the current pay-per-view movies, about half of the titles show the lead character brandishing a weapon. Action films are all about people fighting the evil of other people or some existential evil. The horror genre depicts people fighting the evil of other people or, often, paranormal evil. Dramas show people battling the evil within themselves. There’s a lot of crossover, and even comedy can embody bits of the other genres. That’s an awful lot of evil fighting. Is it helpful, or even necessary?
We derive satisfaction from the best movie endings. The action hero, at the end, confronts the evil face to face and obliterates it in an explosion or a hail of gunfire. Evil has messed with the wrong guy. We’re satisfied because vicariously, through the hero, we carry out our own desire for revenge. Sometimes, in the crucial final moments, the hero has an epiphany, realizing that if he harms the person who has harmed him, he is no better than the evil he faces. When the hero drops his weapon, showing mercy to the opponent, he earns another kind of victory—a moral one. We’re satisfied because it reinforces our own moral superiority. From the ghosty, paranormal movies, we gain satisfaction through relief, when the inexplicable evil is vanquished, albeit often temporarily. Our own spiritual vigilance is justified.
What if we didn’t desire revenge, moral superiority, or relief? What if we didn’t need these things? I’m not talking about movies anymore (movies are not going away, and they provoke many more glorious and wonderful emotions than what I describe here). I’m talking about the movie of your life. What is the best ending?[1]
I believe that any forces and fates in the universe have about as much power as you ascribe to them—good and evil, love and fear, angels and demons, yourself and other people—and also time, space, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. I believe that the more we brace ourselves, lower a shoulder, and run into the battle, the more we perpetuate the battle. I believe that the more we take cover and fear the battle will befall us, the more we perpetuate the battle. Whether we fight for something or against something, we keep it alive with our energy. How about withdrawing instead of fighting? Anything from which we withdraw our energy withers and dies. Think about the space that would create for imagining and entertaining impossibilities. I LOVE impossibilities, which are just things nobody has given energy to yet. Living the impossible dream! That’s my best ending.
[1] When I say the ending of your life, I am referring not to its end in linear time, as in death. I mean the end, or goal, of your life.
Dear Johnny Depp
My heart goes out to you. You will never be as lonely as when you are with a narcissist. This poem is written from the female perspective, but just reverse the pronouns if you like. I wish you well.
If he leaves
How am I to raise this child?
An innocent heart, so beguiled
I’m only one person, I can’t do the job of two
But wait—I already do.
How am I to run this home?
And fix and pay and build, alone
I’m only one person, I can’t do the job of two
But wait—I already do.
It’s so convoluted, I don’t want to be
Depressed and empty and melancholy
Alone and lonely, and without a man
But wait—I already am.
And remember that time, when the gypsy tossed
I don’t know who he is but he is lost
And you are found
And then I was found
Or found myself
His only job was to love us, and that he couldn’t do
But wait—I can do that, too.
Gifted
{Text of a speech delivered at the Poetry & More event in Bellevue, Iowa on April 26, 2022. Each member of the audience was asked to write a question upon entering the room.}
What if I told you there was a realm—not a physical place, but some sort of source dimension—where every work of creative genius that is, ever has been, or ever will be, exists? It’s like a Christmas morning that never ends and you can have whatever you like. It sounds like magic. Or it sounds like the infinite potentialities of quantum physics. I believe it can be approached either way. Let’s walk between those approaches, together.
Anyone can go to this dimension, anytime, and get anything, and bring it back to this physical realm.
Who, here in this room, has ever dreamed music? Dreamed scientific symbols or mathematic equations? Been working on a new recipe or architectural drawings, or whatever it is you do, and the ideas seem to come of their own accord? Have you trusted your intuition in a situation and found it somehow knew what eluded your rational mind? Have you had an idea suddenly pop into your head while you were in the shower of a fix for something in your life that was broken? An answer that you could not find in your daily life, even if you exhausted your logical mind looking for it? All those times, you were in contact with this realm I’m talking about. You may not even be aware of it.
Contents of the realm are free. They do not have to be earned or worked for. It’s just there for you to have. It’s already yours. I’m not going to give it a name, because that will set your mind on a particular, limited notion, and I want your mind to expand for this, not contract.
Only three things bar your access to this realm:
1. You don’t know about it.
2. You don’t know how to travel there.
3. You don’t believe it’s yours.
Number 1: I have just taken care of number 1 for you. Now you know about it. You may be realizing that you’ve already visited there, through your subconscious.
Number 2: How to travel there. There are many ways. The scientific explanation would be to induce a certain brainwave state. I’ve been doing this for my whole life, without realizing that’s what I was doing. I open some imaginary receptors to whatever is out there. Your brain is a marvelous tool and it will do whatever you tell it to do and believe whatever you say. It is not the boss of you. It works for you. Einstein said that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. He also said that imagination is more important than knowledge. I believe that what he called his “thought experiments” were forages into the realm I’m talking about.
What you are interested in, what makes you happy, will shape what you return with. I could bring back a mathematical formula with tremendous implications for the world of science, but I wouldn’t recognize it as such, because I’m not a mathematician and not terribly interested in math. I do know what to do with a musical phrase or a string of words or sounds once I receive them. From a certain age, about 90% of all my songs have come through the channel of dreams.
To travel to the creative realm is easy, and that’s what makes it hard for people. We’ve been taught that we have to work hard for what we want. It’s just not true. It’s not an absolute and it doesn’t apply across the board. In this case, you do the opposite. You simply turn off the computer of your brain and make room for whatever is out there. Invite it in.
Prayer is a way to communicate with the realm. I would suggest you not beg for an idea, because when you do, what you are really saying is, “I have no ideas. Send me one.” And your smart brain, believing what you say, will follow your instructions and ensure that you have no ideas. Rather, if prayer is your method, then give thanks for being filled with wonderful ideas. Your brain will hear that you are filled with ideas and operate in harmony with that.
Dreams, as I mentioned, are another way to travel to the creative realm. The language of dreams is metaphor, and dreaming in metaphor is the most creative thing you do. No work is involved here. You can’t help but to be open to your dreams. They come unbidden from your subconscious. If you can’t remember them upon waking, then instruct your brain to remember. Your brain does everything you tell it to do.
A practice I call “drowsy meditation” is another way to travel to the creative realm. This is not the kind of meditation where you focus intently on your breathing. It might even be the opposite of that. It’s more of a self-hypnotic state. Open your imaginary receptors and allow all images and sounds to enter and float by. Put yourself into a comfortable, drowsy, almost-asleep state, while still being aware of what’s happening. I like to watch the movies on the backs of my eyelids.
The most common, and often taught method for traveling to the creative realm, is what you were asked to do when you entered tonight—ask a question. Because you open yourself up when you ask a question. I began this talk with a question, in order to open your mind. To ask a question, you have to stop believing, for a second, that you know. Asking a question admits that you don’t know and that’s a first-class ticket to the creative realm. I have to tell you, entertaining the thought that you might be wrong is one of the best things you can do for yourself. It opens doors you wouldn’t believe possible. (See also “What if I Was Wrong About Everything” by Penny Blue North).
Number 3: You don’t believe it’s yours. Now that you know about the realm and know some ways to travel there, the only thing left barring your entrance is a negative paradigm that only you can lift from yourself. If you believe that creativity is for others, but not for you. If you believe that work equals drudgery and fun equals laziness. If you believe that you have to work harder than everyone else for less reward. If you value other people’s opinions more than yourself . . . Hundreds, thousands of negative beliefs can block the entrance here. And remember, your brain believes exactly what you tell it. So tell it good news. Often. Ask questions. Appreciate being wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not hyperbole: This dimension I’ve been talking about--the creative realm—is where your subconscious meets itself and your soul meets its fulfillment on earth. If you’ve been wondering who the creator is, it’s you. It’s me. It’s all of us. Christmas morning is right here, right now. Open your gifts.
Lieology
Life requires that we sometimes become experts in areas we would rather not. I could by now hold a degree in Lieology, the study of lying. Lies take many forms—chicanery, concealment, deception, equivocation, fabrication, misinformation, misleading, omission, prevarication, subterfuge—to name a few. Each word generally describes an act of changing the perceived shape of what is. Omit bits of it. Add blobs of falseness. Add blobs of irrelevant truth to obfuscate the original shape. Divert attention from it. Set it in motion so that the shape constantly changes. Prepare a veritable word salad, so large and intimidating, and full of big words, that despite the greatest appetite for understanding, it cannot be consumed, but only held in a sort of icky awe and confusion. To be on the receiving end of lies places you anywhere on the scale between mildly entertained and dead, so my made-up Master of Lieology degree could prove useful.
So let’s begin with Lesson 1 – History of Lying. And I don’t mean the lies down through history. I mean our personal histories. We try out the practice of lying as toddlers in an attempt to restore our little universes to that prior, glorious state when we were the centers of them. When we had needs and they were somehow instantly satisfied. We’re excited to discover that we are separate people from our mothers and that we have some independent control. That’s fun. But the transition from baby to toddler also includes another element that’s not fun at all—delayed gratification. You’ve probably heard of the Stanford marshmallow experiment in 1972, a study on delayed gratification in preschoolers, led by psychologist Walter Mischel. Toddlers were left alone in a room with a treat and promised a reward (in some cases, double the treat) for delaying eating the treat until the experimenter returned. Decades later, higher SAT scores, likeliness to finish college, and higher incomes were correlated with the kids who were able to delay gratification. Experiments are ongoing, while accounting for factors not considered in the original design. But you can see how learned behaviors like self-control and executive function in the brain can be lifetime advantages. It’s probably harder to learn this the older you get, but it’s not exactly easy for toddlers either. So maybe, if a toddler lies, he can get what he wants. It’s worth a try.
Here’s Lesson 2 – Lie Anatomy. A toddler experiments with lying to get what he wants. I witnessed such an experiment at a swimming pool last summer, when a five-year-old boy attempted to hold his sister’s head under water. Their young mother was watching.
Mom: Obi, you are not allowed to hold your sister’s head under the water.
Obi: That didn’t happen.
Mom: I’m right here. I saw you. You are not allowed to do that.
Obi: I didn’t do it.
Mom: I saw you. You did it.
Obi: It wasn’t under the water.
Mom: It was. And you are not allowed to hold your sister’s head under the water.
Obi: We were just playing around. She likes it!
Mom: No. She feels upset. It’s a mean thing to do and you are not allowed to do it.
Obi: She made me do it!
Mom: You did it. You are the one responsible. And it’s not allowed.
Obi: You always take her side!
Mom: This is about you. You are not allowed to do that. Do you understand?
Obi: I want her out of here! I want to go home! I hate the pool!
The little boy worked himself into a temper tantrum, but after several minutes of the mother’s calm consistency, he admitted the truth and grudgingly took responsibility for it. His experiment in lying was unsuccessful. Encounters like this may happen several times a day, and maybe for a few years, until the youngster gains some self-control.
The standard anatomy of a lie, so aptly demonstrated by the toddler at the pool, is as follows:
1. It didn’t happen.
2. OK, it may have happened, but I didn’t do it.
3. OK, I may have had something to do with it, but it didn’t happen the way you think (you are probably crazy).
4. OK, it may have happened sort of like that, but it’s not the big deal you’re making it (see? more of your craziness).
5. OK, so it’s a big deal, but it’s someone else’s fault.
6. You sure do have some issues I don’t like.
7. This is unfair and I am angry about it. I demand justice in the form of the world conforming to my wishes.
Adults who did not successfully transition from lie-experimenting toddlers to truthful children remain right here—right at this methodology—for lying. Maybe they were “successful” with their lie experiments as preschoolers. Maybe it got them something. Maybe their parents weren’t paying attention. Maybe lying shielded them from some trauma that they then buried, but kept up the habit of lying. The whys are for psychologists and counselors, so go there for more. Right now, though, you are in my Lieology class, so listen up.
If you listen dispassionately, you can hear an adult lie like a preschooler. It’s comical.
Step 1, Deny reality.
Obi takes the direct route with “That didn’t happen.” A cleverer adult might say, “What?” or “What are you talking about?” That says, “I am sitting here in reality and you have brought up something unrelated to it. What is this non-reality that you’re talking about that has nothing to do with me or reality?” It immediately puts you on the defensive, having to explain or define whatever you asked about, or observed, and it buys time for the liar to formulate the rest of the lie.
Step 2, Deny responsibility.
Confronted with a simple, direct question or observation, the adult liar will accede to a piece of it, but not all of it. Obi is caught by the fact that his mother saw him do it. No way to get out of that. So he allows that it occurred, but says, “I didn’t do it.” Obi experiments with finding a way out. An adult liar knows this isn’t a way out, but another move in a very old game. It delays, again, having to answer the question. It demonstrates “logic” and “empathy” that your challenge is being considered, though logic and empathy are two things adult liars seem to have misplaced, along with their memory. It also reinforces the blameshifting to you that began in Step 1. First you made up what happened, and now you are showing signs of impairment.
Step 3, Deny perception.
This is a continuation of the trajectories already set. Obi is caught again. His mother not only witnessed the wrongful act, but witnessed him commit it. The next hole to squeeze out of is that she must have seen it wrong! With the adult liar, you will be treated to more “logic.” If (a) he/she is not wrong, and (b) you perceive him/her as wrong, then it follows that (c) you must be wrong. Adult liars hold faulty premises, to which they cling with their lives. So the liar was perhaps in the vicinity of this so-called transgression. You must be having some vision problems or suffer from faulty logic. The adult liar will, at all costs, deny what you saw and what you think about it.
Step 4, Minimize.
Obi has not been able to squeeze out of any of the holes he finds. He is left with acknowledging that the wrongful act happened, he was involved, and it was witnessed by someone who will not deny reality. Way to go, Mom. Well, then Mom’s conclusion must be wrong! Obi tries again, with reframing the incident. “We were just playing around. She likes it!” Obi knows that Mom doesn’t read his mind. It’s part of his newfound independence. Maybe Mom can be tricked. The adult liar doesn’t have to experiment with tricking people. His/her lifelong practice has shown that people can indeed be tricked. The more skilled liars can make a living at it. The adult liar will minimize what society considers some pretty maximum transgressions. I don’t need to list them. You watch TV. You’ve seen Dateline and Law and Order. The adult liar can check four boxes against you now.
-You make things up
-Your perception is impaired
-Your logic is faulty
-Your conclusion is exaggerated
Believe it or not, this makes perfect sense to the adult liar.
Step 5, Shift blame. If Obi could observe himself, he would be amazed at his ability to keep coming up with an out. Of course! It’s all his sister’s fault! The adult liar never runs out of other people upon whom to cast blame. Naturally, you are to blame in the end. The argument for that has been building from the beginning of the exchange. But in the meantime, everyone from the liar’s victims to innocent bystanders to the dog is fair game. Even inanimate objects are not off the hook. And would you just look at the time! We’re so far into the lie that the lesser invested challengers are ready to give up. But we’ve got to see how this ends . . .
Step 6, Deflect. Obi’s mother calmly redirects to reality at every turn. Damn, she’s good. And that’s bad. She is the last thing standing in the way between Obi and the story ending he wants. You know, the story that ends with Obi as the hero, allowed to gratify his every whim with no consequences. Obi likes that story. The adult liar not only likes that story, but is as addicted to it as any substance abuser. Indulge me for a moment, here. The mother in my example, the mother at the pool, the mother whom Obi now sees as the bad guy, is anything but. She is, in fact, his savior. Obi will grow up to become a well-adjusted adult who marks the clear difference between lies and reality. Against his better judgment, he may lie on occasion, but when he does, he will feel guilt and regret, as the well-adjusted do. He will make amends. And all of this purposeful living will result, in part, because his mother guided him through the transition from baby to child with a consistency she probably gave less thought to than I gave to this writing. Brava.
Step 6 moves the focus of the conversation away from the transgression entirely and aims it at the accuser or challenger. Obi says, “You always take her side!” Now he wants to talk about this new subject, Mom’s shortcomings. When you encounter an adult liar, be ready to hear a list of your own faults, real or imagined. Gosh, it’s irritating. If you are the kind of person who reacts to emotional button-pushing, the liar will succeed here, at this step. And by succeed, I mean the liar will get you to stop holding him/her accountable and start thinking about something else. A liar never really succeeds, in the end.
Step 7, Act Out. Ah, the toddler’s infamous weapon, the temper tantrum. It’s the only thing left for Obi to do—well, the only thing besides admit the truth and take responsibility for his actions. And this is the most remarkable thing of all. A toddler can, at this point, be guided round to the proper ending. It happens all over the world every day, between toddlers and their parents. In the adult liar, because change would come at such a high price, I don’t see the adult liar changing. That’s an awful lot of self-repeated hardwiring in the brain to overcome. But anything is possible. In the art of temper tantrums, adults far surpass anything a preschooler can think up. I direct you to those in law enforcement for examples. They arrest adult toddlers all the time. The temper tantrum accomplishes one thing—it makes everyone within earshot think of something other than the persistent, unrelenting reality that always and inevitably shows the liar to be what he/she truly is. A liar.
And finally, Lesson 3 — The Irony of the Liar. Turn your notebooks back to that list of arguments against you that the liar compiles in the midst of lying. Let’s take another look at it.
-You make things up
-Your perception is impaired
-Your logic is faulty
-Your conclusion is exaggerated
Write somewhere in the margin that this list, the twisted “defense” of the adult liar, is a list of his/her very qualities.
As the bell rings, I wish you a pleasant spring break! There is no assignment here, save that which you might give yourself. Choose your own grade for the course.
Further reading
Harris, Sam. Lying. Encino: Four Elephants Press, 2013.
Peterson, Jordan B, Norman Doidge, and Ethan Van Sciver. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. UK: Random House, 2018. Rule #8 is Tell the Truth. Thank you, Jack, for this recommendation.
Ruiz, Don Miguel and Janet Mills. The Four Agreements. San Rafael: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997. The first agreement is Be Impeccable with Your Word.
What is the most important thing in the world?
“Money,” said the poor man.
“Status,” said the rich man.
“Power,” said the politician.
“Freedom,” said his constituent.
“Home,” said the homeless.
“Beauty,” said the artist.
“Truth,” said the beautiful.
“Health,” said the cancer patient.
“Hope,” said the sympathetic.
“Happiness,” said the seeker
“Loss,” said the bereft.
“Loyalty,” said the poser.
“Control,” said the narcissist.
“Kindness,” said the abused.
“Justice,” said the accused.
“Water,” said the biologist.
“God,” said the priest.
“Family,” said the orphan.
“Mommy,” said the baby.
“Love,” said the child.
“My wife,” said the husband.
“My husband,” said the wife.
“How you treat other people,” said the stranger.
“This, now,” said the existentialist.
“Everything,” said the pragmatist.
“Nothing,” said the nihilist.
To anonymous victim’s inquiry
Dear Friend,
Being discarded by a narcissist is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to you. In response to your loving someone, your spirit has been stolen. Nobody who hasn’t experienced narcissistic abuse will understand, and likely your network of friends has disappeared. In the midst of this impossible situation, what I’m going to say will sound impossible, but it is a beautiful truth: Being free of a narcissist is also the best thing that could happen to you! This is the universe doing you a favor. This is the life force, or God, or whatever goodness you believe in, taking away from you the addictive poison you’ve been drinking. The withdrawal will be tough, but on the other side, after you grieve the loss of the love that never existed, when the mention of the narcissist’s name stirs no reaction in you whatsoever, you will find your best self.
Everything has been trying to tell you for some time that this relationship is toxic—your heart, your brain, your physical body, your subconscious, your dreams, your pets, your friends and family (if they knew), even the inanimate objects around you. You have been sending out desperate pleas to the universe for peace, happiness, and love. You can’t have those things with a narcissist, and deep down, you know it. The narcissist discarding you is the answer you seek. It sure doesn’t seem like it now, I know. But, many resources are available to you, including forums for the victims of narcissistic abuse. Acquaint yourself with them. They are full of people who do understand what you’re experiencing. Read as much as you can about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and have no contact with the narcissist so that you can heal. You will be surprised how amazing and fulfilling life can be. When you stop giving your time and energy to people who have no interest in you, you make room for those who are more like you—kind, generous, and loving. Don’t let the behavior of one disordered person douse your light! That behavior has nothing to do with you. I feel for you and wish you the best.
A Matter of Time
Imagine a reader of fiction as a child in a red wagon, being pulled by the writer of that fiction, for when we read, surely our childlike senses are central to the journey. We are neither strapped in, nor pushed. We can jump out and cease the journey at any time, simply by putting down the book. We might lie back in the wagon, trailing our fingers in the grass, taking in only the sky as the wheels churn beneath us. We might lean forward in anticipation, trying to make out shapes in the distance and taking as many photographs as possible. This is how I see the relationship between writer and reader, a flexible one.
A plot-driven narrative arc, as set forth in The Poetics (Aristotle 230-248) with stasis, rising action, climax, and denouement, is essential, but plastic. To further my wagon analogy, a writer may pull us up such an Aristotelean mountain. But a writer may also pull us across a plain, or even into the sea, where we drift away from the writer’s effort and find we cannot stay afloat. I could even imagine a journey across deadly spikes, while the writer pelts the reader with rocks, though this is not the type of journey I would enjoy. Readers necessarily absorb the landscape differently depending on the shape of the arc, and what enjoyment they take is subjective. The narrative arc in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins at the top of the mountain and pulls us down the flatter and much less interesting back side. When Pam says to Alvy, “You know, sex with you is a really Kafkaesque experience,” (Annie Hall), she implies not just that it is depressing, but also that it climaxes early. Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl and Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights traverse more pensive plains. Character transformation occurs not at the tops of mountains, but in the depths of the plains; not as single climactic scenes or events, but subtler, sustained, and experienced by the reader through a backward-looking glance in time. The wagon journey seems uneventful, yet when it is over, you realize how far you have come. This matter of time propels my reading and writing efforts. It is a defining perceptual factor in art, and also a theme in my novel, Fic-tio-nary. My Gram character believes, as I do, that art and its lover define each other, like the passenger and the puller of the wagon.
Human beings need art. We are the most brilliant intellects on the planet, yet our cognitive faculties do not allow us to hold consciously at once all the experiences, value judgments, education, and sensations of a lifetime. Through art, they can be isolated and magnified so that we experience them as a single integrated whole. For example, for Christians, the letters WWJD serve as mnemonic for instant grasp of every tenet of Christianity. It is because of the bible’s literary characterization of Jesus, and centuries of painting, sculpture, and music that Christians so readily hold What Would Jesus Do. We can define art, widely, as any purposeful human-made object that commands such power.
Further, human beings’ emotional faculties are even more limited than our cognitive ones. Our emotional responses to art, whether we understand them or not, say more about us than about the art. In that way, art defines us. We need the emotional satisfaction that our metaphysical and epistemological perspective, what Ayn Rand calls our sense of life, is correct (34). There is sweetness in such certainty, even if, ironically, one’s sense of life is chaos and uncertainty. Orhan Pamuk describes it as finding a novel’s center. In seeking this center, the reader is “seeking the center of his own life and that of the world . . . [O]ne of our main motivations is the need to reflect on that center and determine how close it is to our view of existence” (163-4).
Insofar as art is skill, many creative endeavors come into play, such as architecture, photography, filmmaking, journalism, printmaking, video, and design of all kinds. When I describe art, however, I mean the fine arts. Accepting the performing arts—dance and theatre—as dependent on music and literature, I ascribe the superhuman power of art to painting, sculpture, literature, and music. Painters use a medium of paint on a two-dimensional surface and sculptors create in three dimensions, both art forms appealing primarily to our sense of sight. Music affects us physiologically, through our sense of hearing. The medium of literature is words, which enter our brain visually when we read a book, or audibly, if we listen to it, or tactilely if we read in Braille.
I agree with Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto that art is a selective, stylized recreation of reality (36). If it’s good art, it can seem to us more real than reality. The realness makes people believe in things that don’t exist. They research degrees in Symbology at Harvard and write to Shirley Jackson asking for the time and date of the next Lottery. It makes Orhan Pamuk’s friend assume that Orhan resides at the same address as the hero of his novel (Pamuk 43). These are fictional demesnes mistaken as real by intelligent people. Think of how much history we visualize in our minds as art, forgetting that the beautiful paintings are not chronicles of fact, but an artist’s fiction, a visual abstraction. Because literature equals painting and sculpture in its power of abstraction, the three are often discussed together while music stands apart. The closer literature, painting, and sculpture approximate our metaphysics of the natural world, the better we find them, aesthetically speaking. Music works in reverse, there being no music, but only sound, in the natural world. Music meets our metaphysics and becomes art by purposefully distancing itself from the natural world. Designating music as cognitively special in this way makes sense to me, but I have come to believe it is literature that stands yet further apart.
The medium of literature is a deliberate chain of words which, unlike painting and sculpture, can only be experienced over time. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster defines the novel by time, saying that a story narrates in time and an author “must cling however lightly to the thread of his story” (29). A novel, no matter its other attributes, cannot be divorced from time. A work of literature or music changes from start to finish, evoking all the human senses, taking us on a journey. As temporal experiences, literature and music seem more widely accessible than the other arts, reaching our emotions before or at the same time as our conscious awareness. It is this timing, the span of the journey and the simultaneity of emotions and awareness in literary art, most notably fiction, that I want to explore.
The writer’s manipulation of time raises a story to the level of art:
“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot . . . “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king” . . . is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development (Forster 86).
Each of Forster’s examples retains the same story, but purposeful rearrangement of the timing in presentation allows for a great range of emotional response in the reader.
Joan Silber discusses in The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long As It Takes what she calls fabulous time, or the trope of time in conjunction with fantasy, citing Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example. Márquez uses repetition, exaggeration, and cosmic omniscient point of view as techniques “for handling time [to] hold up the tumultuous mass of his book” (Silber 76). Events that occur one hundred years apart also occur simultaneously in Márquez’s novel. And somehow, as readers, we believe it anyway. Márquez’s techniques are employed in service to this fantasy, this impossibility. His use of time as a fantasy element reminds us that everything may change, yet it is possible that nothing changes. Like that of Márquez, my writing has been described in workshops as Magic Realism, inclusion of mythical elements in an otherwise realistic narrative to explore the notion of what is real. While I think Fic-tio-nary holds up to that general definition, it is borne of an ordinary conflicted psyche rather than a Latin American quest to grapple with Colonialism, as this nascent genre suggests.
The writers of the Star Trek science fiction television and movie franchise love to stop time, rewind and replay it in a loop, send it off in parallel sequences, speed it up, and slow it down. While such time manipulation makes it convenient to extend the life of the franchise with new batches of actors and paradoxical story lines, it also serves to highlight the moral conflicts of its characters. If we have access to the future, does it change our decisions in the present? If we were endlessly repeating the same day, would we know it, and what would we do about it? If people with conflicting interests exist in the same space but at different rates of time, how would conflict be resolved? To me, the fantasy element of Star Trek is secondary to its philosophical themes. Time manipulation in the science fiction/fantasy genre supports that end. In Fic-tio-nary, I pose this moral conflict: If we could rewrite our lives with direct authorial control, wherein all the characters were different facets of ourselves, would those characters act as we predict? In other words, do we know ourselves as well as we think we do?
Of all genres, fantasy would seem to allow an author the most flexibility regarding time. Manuela Draeger’s In the Time of the Blue Ball, for example, dispenses with time as we measure it, and marks it by shapes and colors in a synesthesic, escapist reading experience. In Carole Maso’s Ava, events are realistic, but they proceed unhindered by and unhinged from the movement of time as we experience it in reality. Both leave me, as reader, adrift in the sea in the red wagon; in Draeger, a calm, whimsical sea, and in Maso, a deep, frightening one. In comparison, I hope that the fantasy of Fic-tio-nary is bracketed by realism. I want the reader to feel disoriented in wondering what is real, and thereby understand my protagonist’s perspective. Events in Fic-tio-nary cannot happen, except in the mind, but in reality our minds do play havoc with our sense of self. I believe our own human perceptions and experiences of time are diverse enough to encompass the fantastic, within a realistic story. We can remember events, reimagine them to meet our emotional needs, remember dreams we swear occurred in reality, envision the future, think about a future in which we remember the past, or a past in which we dreamed of the future, and sometimes we experience déjà vu or premonitions. We can carry on simultaneous relationships and harbor conflicting emotions and opinions--all remarkable ways that our consciousness deals with time. In other words, the stuff of our own heads can seem like fantasy. And it can provide fodder for realistic fiction. We cannot escape time, but as authors we can control the manner in which it drives our stories. In fact, these are the tropes I explore in Fic-tio-nary, which makes it a work of fiction about fiction, which I call metafiction, though scholars may disagree with me. I do not openly remind readers that the story is fiction, though my narrator does address the audience directly from time to time. To use the wagon journey analogy, I place a lot of mirrors in the landscape, which allow the passenger reflections of himself and, occasionally, of me.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic love story, The Great Gatsby, which Silber cites as an example of classic time, wherein “the span is short enough to be easily seen as a unity” and “the default mode in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction” (Silber 11), the past steps in to explain or compel the present. We don’t “go there,” as in a flashback, but it comes to us through past events as related by supporting characters. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead keeps us always in the present, a present that is driven by decisions made in the past. This style is sometimes termed “wooden,” I think because of the unadorned way it mirrors real life, and classic time is part of that realism. Economy of words gives more emotional weight to each word, and while Silber refers to classic time as “the default mode,” it is also the most demanding for the writer. I believe it is the highest form in the art of fiction. It requires the resolution of, if not a mastery over the writer’s own inner conflicts. I agree with Ayn Rand that “[t]he terrible inner conflicts from which artists suffer as much as (or, perhaps, more than) other men are magnified in their work” (41). Fic-tio-nary is, among all else, my attempt at personal resolution. At the same time that my protagonist rewrites her life, I am rewriting mine.
In switchback time and slowed time, the narrative stays in the present or switches between the present and the past, to varying effects. In switchback time, “[t]hen and now and further back are all partners with an investment in the outcome” and “one isn’t a footnote to the other” (Silber 45). The technique of shifting perspectives allows us to circle round the same events with increased knowledge, the backstory always changing and growing. Stephen King employs switchback time in his novel 11/22/63, wherein his protagonist switches between the present and 1963—a different version of 1963—each time the trip is made, depending on decisions the protagonist makes. Octavia Butler, too, uses switchback time to a similar end in Kindred, about a couple who are unwittingly removed from the present to the antebellum. Butler’s Dana character must ensure her very existence in the present by her actions in the past. In Fic-tio-nary, I use switchback time and flashbacks in equal measure. Sometimes I imply that the memory just described has been reminisced upon by the characters, so the reader is temporarily disoriented. Were we just there, or were we remembering having been there in the past? Other times I simply start a scene or conversation from a different time without transition. The juxtaposition of scenes in then and now and further back allow the reader to experience time the way my protagonist does.
In slowed time, “an often weighty past [gets] a glancing reference” and backstory is dispensed with, creating the effect of slowing the present (Silber 57). Hemingway, as Silber notes, is a master of slowed time. It is almost as if the time that is missing from a Hemingway story is its object, as in “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story about abortion wherein abortion is never mentioned, and “Winters in Schruns,” about the breakup of a marriage that is addressed directly only in the final paragraph of a narrative ostensibly about snow. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes how he achieves this time manipulation: “[Y]ou could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood (71). Hemingway’s description is one of reaching the reader’s emotional awareness before cognitive awareness. In Fic-tio-nary, I omit and I omit and it is deliberate, yet my propensity to do so in my writing has not yet been recognized as genius. Or, I am doing it wrong. Hemingway buries objects in the landscape of his narrative so that we feel them as we pass over in our wagon before we recognize their shapes. Perhaps I bury objects too deep to be found.
Virginia Woolf, in The Waves, collects moments of time, as on the crests of waves, perhaps leaving a foam or some objects for perusal, but the moments are ephemeral, and as we are drawn across the sand in our literary wagon, waves continue to crest and recede, similar in appearance, but comprising different elements. Separating my wagon journey analogy from that of the novel’s imagery is difficult. Metaphorically, Woolf reveals instability amidst a perennially stable action—the ceaseless tumbling of waves upon the shore. At various times in the narrative, six or seven friends gather. The group is basically the same each time, yet their changing external lives, self-reflections, and reflections off each other leave entirely different impressions. Woolf’s Bernard character says, “We have come together . . . to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—but seen by many eyes simultaneously” (127). The characters are brought into existence (133) for the space of an hour and then separated again. If meaning is to be found, it is in the moments Woolf stills for us. The wagon rider in my analogy must pay keen attention to Woolf’s landscape. If not, the waves will wash him out to sea indiscriminately. And perhaps that is one of the things The Waves asks us to explore. Are we “made and remade continually” (134)? If we are aloof, what endures? I agree with those who refer to this work as “experimental” for its preponderance of internal narrative over external plot. Yet it is not fantasy. Fantasy is as in Fi-ctio-nary, when my characters begin the spring day in a nondescript room of the mind and end it in an actual stone house in Iowa in winter, or when my characters embrace as three people and in so doing become one. Realism asks us to consider something that could have happened; fantasy asks us to consider something that could not happen. If The Waves hints of the fantastic, it is in the emotional response it evokes in the reader—the sense of self shaken. Like Hemingway, Woolf manipulates time to make the reader feel before he knows.
I am most fascinated by what I call metaphorical time in fiction. In metaphorical time, the span of time in the story is a metaphor for a different span of time, like the story of a life described in a single day. John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer” is the best example. Cheever’s Neddy character attempts to swim home from a party via the neighborhood’s backyard pools, a metaphor for “swimming” through alcohol addiction (he has a drink at every pool, which adds up to quite a few drinks). The action takes place in a defined span of the present, as in classic time, without switchback time. It is not exactly slowed time, as in Hemingway, either, because years are condensed into one afternoon. Neddy begins his swim in midsummer, the last hours of an afternoon, yet the seasons change and it is autumn by the story’s end. He seems to have lost a good deal of weight, and metal door handles have had a chance to rust in that amount of time. Neddy has a specious relationship with time. “Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?” (607). Cheever uses metaphor in this story to manipulate time, asking us to consider how and why time, and therefore truth, is lost.
Initially, I took the timing of events in “The Swimmer” at face value. Walking to my college English 101 class, carrying my carefully worded response essay, something astounding hit me. It was a matter of time. Neddy doesn’t swim anywhere, except, metaphorically, in alcohol. The professor who taught that class deserves credit for crowning what I call the moment I understood literature. Throwing my first essay aside, she said, “Write it right now” (because, time unrelenting, it was due that day).
In Fic-tio-nary, my Chime character, in the minute before she dies, relives her life as a deliberate rewrite, a work of art, in her mind. The rewrite is lived as one day, with characters she creates from facets of her own personality. In so doing, she gains new perspective on her experience and comes to know herself and others differently. Her vast imagination, of which in life she makes only marginal use, and which is often a source of melancholy, becomes the thing that saves her. My final aim in writing Fi-ctio-nary is to make the reader, upon finishing the story, want to read it again, to get back in the wagon and take the journey with greater awareness. Yet, if I am successful, the reader already will have felt the emotions of doing just that, through my protagonist. We are changed by the journey, the reader and I. It is a matter of time.
Works Cited
Allen, Woody. Annie Hall. Roberts, Tony, Diane Keaton, and Woody Allen. S1: United Artists, 1977. Film.
Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. Ingram Bywater. Random House, New York: 1954. Print.
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
Cheever, John. “The Swimmer.” The Stories of John Cheever. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1994. 603-612. Print.
Draeger, Manuela. In the Time of the Blue Ball. Trans. Brian Evenson. St. Louis: Dorothy, a publishing project,
2011. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York: 1925. Print.
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1927. Print.
Garcia Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Print.
Hardwick, Elizabeth. Sleepless Nights. New York: NYRB, 1979. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast, The Restored Edition. Scribner, New York: 1964. Print
---. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s Sons,
1993. 211-214. Print.
---. “Winters in Shruns.” A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Print.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Stanley Corngold. Bantam Books, New York: 1972. Print.
King, Stephen. 11/22/63. New York: Scribner, 2011. Print.
Maso, Carole. Ava. No City: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993. Print
Pamuk, Orhan. The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. Print.
---. The Romantic Manifesto. New York: New American Library, 1962. Print.
Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as it Takes. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009. Print.
“Star Trek.” Created by Gene Roddenberry. CBS Television Studios and Paramount Pictures. Television series and film franchise.
Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1931. Print.
Zambreno, Kate. Green Girl. New York: Emergency Press, Harper Collins, 2011. Print.
How I found love at an air supply concert
I went with some friends to see a concert featuring Air Supply, the duo of Graham Russell (songwriter and guitarist) and Russell Hitchcock (lead vocals). Their music was considered “pop” or “soft rock” back in their day, and they had a succession of hits worldwide, including eight top-ten hits in the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They have produced 17 albums of recorded music. Air Supply has been inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame (Hitchcock and Russell are Australian and English, respectively).
I expected to see some aged pop stars trying to hit the high notes like they used to, and maybe a couple of new, younger band members. Mostly, I went for the nostalgia and the great songs. Oh how I was surprised.
It was Russell and Hitchcock, alright, but the rest of the band were all 20-somethings and tremendous musicians, all. The drummer kicked a contemporary, more rock-like beat into all the songs without changing their essence. And everyone contributed to the lush vocal harmonies that made the band famous to begin with. This wasn’t nostalgia, though they played all the old songs. This was fresh and new and everyone on stage was humbled to be there, appreciative of the audience, and having a blast. I daresay these songs would be hits all over again if shopped today, just as they played them.
Russell Hitchcock’s vocal performance equaled that of his younger days. He didn’t cheat on the high notes or get help from a younger singer. About halfway into the concert, he took a short break and left the stage to Graham Russell, who announced a new song he was working on. This is normally the saddest part of a nostalgic rock tour, when older musicians try desperately to remain relevant. Usually, the new songs are just OK, not great, and not played with anything like gusto, as if the talent had peaked long ago and just fizzled out, and the band knows it. But Graham Russell’s talent has only improved.
He played and sang Is There Something Wrong With Me, a song from a musical he’s writing (though I did not know at the time that it was from a musical, nor that writing musicals is something he does—I even leaned over to my friend and whispered, “He needs to be on Broadway with this”). Not only is it a great song, but he played it with so much love and passion, it brought me to tears. I gave him a standing ovation. I think others may have done the same, I’m not sure. I was so wrapped up in the experience.
After that, I didn’t take my eyes off of Graham Russell. I was in love.
But I needed to know why. What was this, infatuation with a pop star? I didn’t think so. I don’t fall like that. I have been around the music business long enough not to believe the false fame image. Plus, he’s, like, 70. Am I just old? That didn’t sound right, either. It was definitely love, though. It took me a couple of days to take an emotional inventory. Why was this so profound? What was the Universe trying to show me? And you know what?
Graham Russell is still passionately in love with his songs. He adores them, performs with such reverence, as if he still cannot believe the beauty of his creation. I almost believe that if we, the audience, had not been present, he would have played the same way. I’ve never seen such a thing, except maybe in my own private and most divine moments of songwriting. And there it is.
Penny, you love your songs like that, my subconscious whispers. I do. I have not been allowing it to show. I’ve been holding back. I come away from the Air Supply concert with two goals: 1. Add modulations (key changes) as often as I like, and 2. Don’t hold back on the love for my songs. But there’s still more.
What if I were to love my clothes in the same way, simply adore them? What if I were to love my body like that? Maybe I wouldn’t put anything unhealthy in it. What if I were to love the furniture around me and the rug beneath my feet? What if I were to love the trees and grass in my yard? What if I were to treat with awe and reverence, not just the people in my life, but every last thing, alive or inanimate?
What kind of life do you suppose that would be?
What if i was wrong about everything
What if I hug my demons and tell them to relax, I’ve got it from here?
What if it’s not “I think, therefore I am,” but I Am, therefore I think?
What if intuition is a neutral third party to intellect and emotion?
What if it’s not “seeing is believing,” but believing is seeing?
What if forgiveness is acceptance rather than absolution?
What if I drop heavy yesterday and unknown tomorrow?
What if my running train of thought is irrelevant?
What if patience is not a limiter, but a liberator?
What if things don’t happen to me, but for me?
What if it’s not “God is Love,” but Love is God?
What if I really do receive everything I ask for?
What if there are more than two alternatives?
What if it was never necessary to be afraid?
What if nothing is the way people say it is?
What if every nightmare is a wakeup call?
What if my enemies are my teachers?
What if time and space are mutable?
What if I really don’t need anything?
What if I have been in my own way?
What if I’m already doing it right?
What if anything is possible?
What if I am eternal?
BARN BURNING
I came across this translation of a 17th-century Japanese Haiku by Mizuta Masahide:
My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon
It doesn’t resemble its original poetic form in English, but it’s still one of the best poems I’ve ever read. It is generally analyzed to mean that from everything bad comes something good. It is used to comfort the bereaved, to console the lost, to bring hope to those in despair. I would like to add that in these actions, this poem can mean so much more.
With the loss of material things, the spiritual remains. Focus not on earthbound gratification, but universal connection. The space where I stored my life’s clutter has been cleared for expanded perspective. Had I stood in a different spot, perhaps walked the way of the Tao, I could have enjoyed both my barn and the moon. Had I known the moon was there, perhaps I would not have needed the barn at all. I was not stupid, only innocent. I could not have protected myself from that which I did not know existed. From the ashes of my hopes and dreams rises the most beautiful vision of all. I am both barn and moon. I embrace. I allow. I am.
Other People’s Obsessions
Several of my loved ones, who are very good people, made some very big, bad choices. They destroyed families, friendships, and themselves. My philosophy could not encompass this. Believe me, my first reaction was to just cut them loose. Cut all ties. For the first time, my love for other persons came face to face with my own morality, and the two were not compatible. I had to choose between love and judgement. I had to decide who I was going to be—one who loves or one who judges. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
The Apostle Paul described love like this: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”[i] I had heard those words a hundred times, mostly at weddings, and nodded in agreement, but I had never been tested in real life. I am none of these things if I abandon people. If I respond to others’ desperate behavior with my own, I add to the darkness in the world. So now I choose to be one who loves.
What I had discounted in my prior thinking is that people don’t do what they want to do, necessarily, but what they have to. They create and feed their own demons, and it is not for us to decide whether it is warranted. People deal with catastrophic loss—death, illness, and destruction. They deal with unspeakable abuse, neglect, and violence. That doesn’t mean that lesser traumas are less traumatizing. The fear is real to the one who is afraid, regardless of our opinions about it. It doesn’t matter whether the person is three years old or ninety-three, or whether we find their suffering justified or not. We don’t even have to decide who’s right or wrong. We don’t have to judge other people’s issues. We only have to be willing to open our hearts in the face of them—to anything and everything.[ii] Whatever their obsession, it’s none of our business.
Read more in my book, The Message is Love.
[i] Corinthians 13:4-8a
[ii] Singer, Michael A. The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, Inc., 2007.
metamorphosis
A Poem
Should never have awakened this morning. Knew when blinding sun hit sky. Past four days fighting, little time to cry. Well, today tears are falling, but how. Funny that it happens now. What once collected, here disperses. Too many choruses, not enough verses. Where did we go wrong? Three years ago, or in our song?
Granted, time heals, yet also wounds. Unexamined souls move across rooms. So also hearts, from inattention. Prison isn’t God’s invention. Traveling along furniture, cheeks wetter. Eating? Can’t, until world fares better. Make up? Play on words. Face still streaming, comically absurd. Television mocks sensible folks. Off, sad box! Such terrible jokes. Melancholy music, falling, sinking. Suicidal, overthinking. Crouching corner, pillows there. Waiting, weeping, nobody cares.
Striking bottom, nothing left, lump of human flesh, bereft. Bloodless cold.
Dark.
Arc. Reverse bell curve. Rising nerve. Nascent courage, feeding things. Tiny drop turning wellspring. Noticing, realizing. Certain growing recognizing. Motion, exercise, stop sitting. Interacting, giving, finally admitting.
Cityscape with sudden surprise. Abruptly facing those steel eyes. Feeling. Two heartbeats later, steeling.
“Partner?”
“No. You?”
“She’s—Yes.”
“Best outcome ever, I guess.”
Nods. “Looking great . . .”
“Thanks. Trying.” Then separate. Expecting knife twisting, finding none. If formerly love, seems presently done. Spent. Enjoy wonderment, content.
Skip toward neighborhood park, river. Plunging right big toe, shiver. Kids’ laughter riding breeze. Wading deeper, covering knees. Thus committed, immerse completely. Forgive. Float sweetly. Seek self-knowledge, smile, court strange. Risk evolving. Embrace change. Washing clean, the broken mends. A new woman born, and old one ends.
Break the cycle
You’ve heard this: Hurt people hurt people. It is your choice whether to break that cycle. Suffering is optional. If someone has hurt you, the wound in your heart will hurt like hell when you address it, but only for a little while, until you let it go. Then it can heal. And scar tissue tends to be much stronger than the original flesh. But an untended wound will fester and infect every aspect of your life. It can do this without you being consciously aware of it. You will then become the hurt person who hurts people. So let it go. Identify it, feel it, then let it go. Whatever it was, whatever that cruel person did, has nothing to do with you, with anything you do or did. You were just close at hand, is all. If the person who hurt you had had someone else close at hand—someone not you—he would have done exactly the same thing. Because the thing that caused him to hurt you was not you. It was his own hurt. How you respond to it is entirely up to you. As soon as you know this in your heart—for real and not just as something you want to believe—you can let go. There are lots of professionals who can help you do this, along with family and friends you trust. But you can also do it by yourself. Yes, you are enough.
Loneliness is thirsty out at sea
And watching silent teardrops as they sink
With water for as far as eyes can see
But not a single drop that you can drink
Happiness is standing in the sun
With every new day drinking in the dew
And feeling as though life has just begun
And every single moment is for you
It doesn’t belong to you, personally
When those you love become lost, their behavior is not who they are. If they become enveloped in darkness, they may not be able to produce anything but darkness. They may try to draw you into it, using your love as the tether. They may direct life-or-death, world-ending statements at you, because their pain makes them believe their very life is at stake. Until they deal with their own pain, negativity will exude from them in all directions. See it for what it is, an outward expression of pain. It doesn’t belong to you, personally.
Saving Virtue
I dreamed that I made my way through a rainy, crowded city to the public bandstand, where I had previously placed piles of our (mine and my daughter’s) clean, folded laundry. Only the top layer of laundry was wet from the rain, so it wasn’t the total loss it could have been, but we had to figure out how to save the laundry and prevent the need to do it over. We knew we couldn’t balance the piles of laundry if we attempted to carry them. So we donned all of the clothes simultaneously and wore them away from the bandstand, toward dry quarters. If dirty laundry is a metaphor for vice, then clean, folded laundry is a metaphor for virtue. Virtue is not for public display, but to be worn like clothing. We can’t carry it around like a parcel; we have to take it on.