Welcome
This Website will be devoted to essays and insights related to diversity, addiction/recovery, psychological growth issues, global perspectives, the disenfranchised, aesthetics, and cultural values. The core value streaming throughout the essays I write will be about returning to our innocence, which sometimes requires a trauma, a jolt, an invasion of the “other,” or a paradigm shift.
Many of my comments will sometimes reflect a more radically progressive approach to an idea. At other times, I may very well see some healthy alternatives in a more reactionary, conservative approach. There will be few areas, if any, that I hold sacred, taboo territory. In that sense, everything will be up for grabs.
I am also interested in international film narratives, stories whose voices are too often left out of the more powerful voices of the international film industry. They have much to teach us about aesthetics, cultural values, and morality.
For those wishing to participate, enjoy the ride!
John T. Marohn
Modernism and Religious Orthodoxy
Heliocentrism, Evolution, and the Bible
Modernity does not have a good track record with some religious enthusiasts. In the eyes of many religious conservatives, modernism is associated with a godless secularism and a culture of excess, sexual libertarianism, and moral relativism.
Although scientific inquiry has been around a very long time, it has often had to stand its ground against Christian Biblical literalists who, at one time, claimed that the earth was the center of the universe, contrary to the heliocentric mathematical model of the Polish cleric, Copernicus, in the 16th century.
In the next century, Kepler was to have discovered elliptical orbits and Galileo, with his telescope, confirmed the evidence for heliocentrism with the added scientific information that ours was not the only universe. Continue reading
Obsolescence and the Upgrade
“You are what you eat,” they say. If you believe advertisers, we are what we drive, what home we live in, what rental car agency we use, how manicured our lawns are. And, if ads are getting it right, a clean, sanitized bathroom becomes the wished-for goal of every woman (clean bathrooms appear to be the exclusive domains of women in America).
On a more personal level, a friend and I were discussing used cars. She is at a point in her life when she can’t afford a new car in spite of the “Only-$250-a month-and-$2,000-down” high-decibel ads blaring from the television every fifteen minutes. My friend painfully tells me that she sometimes feels embarrassed about her tired, thirteen year old Camry with its 190k odometer miles. And God knows what the suburban neighbors think about the small gravey-like oil pools in the driveway.
I shared my own concerns with her about driving my 2005 Corolla, which only has 61,000 miles. This from a guy who traded his cars in every three years. I still feel the draw of those bright, shiny new BMWs, gas-pedal to the floor, as I speed into the Interstate from my usual entry lane, not quite from 0 to 60mph in 20 seconds. After all, I blithely think to myself, I am still the thirty-year old metrosexual stud with a walkup fourth-floor apartment in Greenwich Village. Not. Continue reading
Mystery and the Sacredness of Life
Roman Catholicism and the Marian Miracles
I grew up in a 1950s Roman Catholic culture in which I was taught that a virgin gave birth to Christ. I was later told that, several centuries later, the same virgin, Mary, appeared to a select group of barely literate, impoverished Portuguese children at a place called Fatima. Secrets were to have been revealed to these children, the specifics of which, to the best of my recollection, neither my elementary school teachers, nor my pastor ever revealed.
The dogma of the virgin birth was complemented by the infallible ruling of a nineteenth century pope that Mary was taken to heaven, body and soul. This dogma is celebrated in the church as the feast of the Assumption.
The Catholic Church, an untiring supporter of these Marian miracles, added to the repository of these mysterious events by claiming that Mary was to have been conceived without sin (the Immaculate Conception) and that she was to have received a visit by an angel announcing to her that she would be the mother of Christ, the Messiah (the Annunciation). Continue reading
Or Not To Be
I have been designed for death,
Cordially aligned to destiny,
Tempering my heated wanderings,
These lungs still full of fresh air,
The treads of my pumping heart
Firm against your warm back.
One lane still open
To a slumbering apple,
An unweeded garden,
A tired August rose
An ample sun
Dipping its spotted arms
Into the sleeves of the
Cool, patient night.
The Institutionalization of Religion
Religion’s Dependence on Leaders, Credentializing Insiders, Myths
Throughout our 200,000 year existence on this planet, humans have never suffered from a lack of gurus, priests, imams, ministers, rabbis, popes, bishops, monsignors, and rinpoches. Or even, if I may be so bold, spiritual motivational speakers.
If history tells us anything, most faith-believers seem to have a need for religious leaders. They want to feel secure in a religious institution that has someone at the head of the class.
Love
I have learned
To parcel out affections
By degrees, in smaller doses
Exhaled tenderly;
Surrendering to the whole lot
Leaves me no surplus
To draw from,
When I am restless
To pursue
A single passion
Avoiding the slow spring rain
That creeps into fields
Of summer’s full bounty.
Magdalene (21)
I married you, my lovely,
Because I knew
You would be lured
By those who would
Camp unabashed
On the edges
Of your calm
Pretense of responsibility.
You would have your furtive bees
Circling another limpid flower,
These wily squatters
Claiming spaces
Foreclosed, too often,
By the cautious
Flashes of your tedium.
God’s Imaginings
In the arched beams
Of sacramental wood,
God feels
The steady stream of the willing,
Not the rubber-band
Figures, bent, slouched
Along urine-smelling corridors,
Frail doilies
Of their former selves,
Curled in their dumb memories
Of medicine cabinet
Doors aching in
Their hesitancy
To speak of cures,
Doubtful anodynes
Against the curse
Of what He
Forgets to mend.
A Narrative Version of Matthew Arnold’s Classic, “Dover Beach”
So, here we are in a five-star hotel room overlooking the English Channel. I’m looking out the window. I see the calm Channel waters at full tide, an unblemished moon casting its blanching rays upon the beach, the glimmering and vast cliffs of Dover standing in all their silent majesty on a seemingly tranquil night.
I ask you to climb out of bed and look out the window with me to smell the sweet night air. You accommodate me. And I love you for that.
We are content. But things change. Continue reading
“Trishna,” A Film Review
India: The Sacred and the Sensual
India, as I have said in another Blog Post, is a land of many contradictions.
On the one hand, India is deeply rooted in its Vedic/Hindu sacred culture, a culture of inward-journey paths, self-knowledge journeys, enlightenment/liberation rituals and transformations, and a monistic view of the universe that tells us all is “one.”
Some scholars claim that the Vedic tradition is steeped in mysticism, giving the tradition an aura of otherworldliness and the inexplicable.
Islam and Buddhism have also had many followers in India. And both religious traditions include spiritual paths and codes of moral behavior. Continue reading
Magdalene (20)
On yet another night,
She waited for George
To come home.
He didn’t.
Looking up at the solid sky.
She heard the bustle
Of separate voices,
Whispering their pallid secrets
Of other women, who,
In their nakedness,
Hummed muted tunes
To her sprinter husband,
As brief, in his fidelity,
As a toll booth’s hand.
Getting Ready: It’s All In The Preparation
Growing Up in the 1950s: Be Vigilant, “Watch Your Step”
I was a teenager when I first saw and heard the adage, Semper Paratus (“Always Prepared”), the official Coast Guard motto. My two brothers joined the Guard back in the 1950s, and the motto became a kind of meme of the 50s culture.
Of course, those were the times of the Red scare and the Cold War. It was a time when school kids were trained to duck under the chairs during a nuclear air raid drill, and Catholics prayed every day to “save Russia.”
I was taught early in life that I had to be vigilant. I had to “watch my step.” I had to avoid temptation or, as the Catholics of my generation used to say, “the near occasion of sin” (Over time, I desperately searched out those near occasions as an antidote to my increasing repression).
And I was always told to “look both ways” before crossing a street. Continue reading
The Gentle Indifference of the World
The Christian Soul and American Culture
In my Christian tradition, I was told that every human being has a soul. That soul, I was led to believe, is created by God and is comprised of a mind and a free will. And that soul, I was also taught by my church, would live on after I died. (I was not taught that, since I have a free will, I could choose the after-life habitat I wanted. That decision would be made for me based on my earthly track record and an omniscient God’s foreknowledge—a very tricky combination.)
Using that philosophical and theological model, Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer also had souls. According to that same paradigm, they also had minds and free wills and therefore were to be held accountable for their actions (Christian theologians, to my knowledge, do not accept paranoid schizophrenia, psychosis, or bi-polar disorders as viable excuses for getting off the hook on the final day of judgment). Continue reading
Thy Kingdom Come
Mystery and the Legacy of Christianity
I continue to be grateful for my Christian heritage. If I can thank that heritage for nothing else, it has deepened my affection for mystery and my need for the transcendent. Granted, I still may be experiencing the collateral damage of that heritage by holding on to a need for the inexplicable and the otherworldly. Perhaps I was conditioned all to well.
And yet, I truly believe that mystery and the transcendent can be experienced without the access to a panoply of myths and rituals that feed into what can’t be explained as natural phenomena. Continue reading
Cleaning Church Pews
Dove, we were told,
Would be the best
Detergent for the
Wooden pews, blackened
From sturdy congregants,
Their winter coats
Pressing against the backs
Of streaked dark wood,
Dampening the luster,
The fragile weight of forgetfulness,
Eraced solace.
Sturdy stains, we thought,
The loosened black grains
Mustering no stamina
To fight back
Against the drenched arc
Of the steady cloths,
The arms of the fervent
Ignorance is Bliss
Something to be said
For not knowing.
Intricacies,
Like the hesitant curls of your hair,
Or the disgruntled knees
That don’t plead
For less weight,
Or the child whose angled glance
Looks into your eyes
Hoping to cure
Your chronic silences,
Which abate slowly,
Like a Sunday hangover
Or the half-deck of your life
Smiling reluctantly
At the uncertain sun.
The Father
(In writing this Blog Post, I fully realize that the Marriage Equality movement in the United States has radicalized, and will continue to radicalize our traditional notions of fatherhood and motherhood. And I believe this is a good thing. This Blog Post deals exclusively with the heterosexual model of fatherhood I grew up with, even though the Roman Catholic male clergy did affect many of my notions of masculinity and my own role as a father. I would hope that my gay readers will understand that this post is not meant to exclude them from the conversation; it is only meant to express the fatherhood roles I experienced in my youth)
Growing Up in the 1950s
I grew up in the nineteen fifties in a section of projects outside of Buffalo, New York.
In my neighborhood, fathers went to work and brought home a paycheck. They loved to carry thick wads of singles. They liked to play cards, smoke cigars, and drink beer. They knew about carburetors, fuel pumps, mufflers, and battery cables. They sometimes hunted. They seldom explained anything.
They often had girlfriends. And they followed their wives to the communion rail but avoided confession (I grew up Catholic and never remember any adult males standing in the Confessional line).
Fathers talked politics. They loved hardware stores. They complained about sales taxes. They read the headlines. They frequented pawn shops. They swore a lot. They loved misogynist, racist, off-color jokes. They often liked a good brawl. Continue reading
The Silences
On this Veterans Day, November 11, 2012, I dedicate this poem, “The Silences,” to the brave persons who stand every Saturday on a beautiful section of Bidwell Parkway in Buffalo, New York. For one hour, between twelve and one o’clock, they stand in silent protest against war.
I also dedicate the poem to all the brave soldiers who continue to keep our country safe.
In the end, I believe we need both groups. We need those who protest wars, for they are the ones who remind us that peace is possible, that war does not have to be the default mode of a nation. On the other hand, we also need the warriors, for they are the protectors, the defenders, the ones who make it possible to be free of the horrors of war, although, too often, at a very heavy price.
“The Silences” does not take sides; it is an existential statement about the horrors of war, “Where bodies,” in mass graves, are often, “clumped/Together like rubber dolls.” And, of course, where the banal things of our lives—questions about lost keys and wallets—are completely out of place. It is a poem about the stillness in the air before a hanging or a lethal injection, “That lethal space between/I am here and/I am no more.”
It is a poem, I sincerely hope, about all of our sometimes languishing dreams for peace. Namasté
The Silences
I see
The tips of green grass
When the lazy moon
Yawns.
This waiting in silence
Is not peace.
For in your
Solemn quiet,
You are firm in your fear
Of unhallowed ground,
Where bodies are clumped
Together like rubber dolls,
When earth-questions seem
Out of place:
“Did you see my keys?”
“Where’s my wallet?”
“Where were you last night?”
“Why did you leave me?”
And then I wonder
What fills the air
At that moment
Right before the hanging,
Or the content of the unstirred silence
After the needle is injected,
The lethal space between
I am here and
I am no more.
Does wondering replace
Their lives,
Or our stale, exhaled breaths?
Magdalene (19)
Eric, my dear,
When I held you in my arms,
Looking at your blank eyes,
I knew that you would drift,
Into your own shoals,
Forever tilting away
From the weight
Of voiceless bruises,
Clutching, as always,
To the fragrance of possibility.
You would sit, my lovely son,
On bar stools,
Postmarking your sweet tales
Of a hunter’s conquests—-
Regal deers, coiled snakes,
Forgetful salmon.
Magdalene (18)
This ragged foolishness, George,
To what end?
I’m thinking tonight
Of being unfaithful,
As I flirt with the dull night
To end the silence of familiarity:
A refrigerator light,
The morning newspaper,
The smell of toast,
The bent metal ribbing
Of my favorite umbrella,
Your veined hand
Between my unwilling thighs.
Magdalene (17)
I remember you, George,
Tired as a rain-sotted leaf,
Flat against the pavement,
Gold in its surrender
To the dazed snow
Of your hospice days.
“Worn out,” you said,
The day before
Relinquishing the final gift
You thought you had in me.
I could not forgive your letting go
To leave me hanging in my guilt,
Forgetting you so quickly
In those brittle days
After whispering your last breath .
Magdalene (16)
You could not run from me, George,
Into the storm of another secret
Unless you thought
That carelessness
Would tip the scales
Of my apathy.
But I would profit
From your rushes
Into the endless
Stock of your diversions,
Winning, of course,
The right to my own havoc.
Our Search For Causes
Evangelism, Psychology, Neurology, and Buddhism
It must be in the genetic code of humans to try to find out the “causes” of human behavior. Everyone seems to be in on it—from television evangelists to modern cognitive psychologists.
And neurologists are getting into the act by having us face up to the reality that our behaviors are linked to certain parts of the brain. The neurological school is closely allied to the empirically proven conviction that pharmaceuticals can mediate and alter many neurologically based dysfunctions from anxiety to bi-polar disorders.
Buddhists remind us that all human behavior is about karma, the somewhat inexorable, but, we are told, “ripening” law of “cause and effect.” Whether that cause happened in another life, of course, is another matter. (The skeptic, Alan Watts, once remarked that he had no Buddhist friends who actually believed in reincarnation, the notion that we had or will have another life as an animal, a plant, or even another human.)
In any event, one of the commonly repeated clichés of Buddhism is that a “good cause” leads to “good effects”; a “bad cause” leads to “bad effects.” Continue reading
“You Know He’s Gay,” Gossip’s Little Corner
“You know he’s gay.”
That was a response of a friend of mine. His remark came after a young man walked out of his restaurant job as a waiter, leaving the staff stranded and several customers still waiting to be served.
Although the waiter may very well have been the object of some anti-gay comments by the chef, I was convinced that the original remark of my friend was a way of distancing himself from the young man by commenting on his sexual orientation. Continue reading
Individualism, The Dream Realized
Let’s just imagine a group of Americans who have chosen to create and follow their own individual paths of self-fulfillment by separating themselves from traditional careers, institutionalized churches, political parties, and the American obsession with consumption.
Continuing on this narrative, imagine this group forming a very viable sub-culture of renters, musicians, writers, part-timers, sweat-lodge devotees, meditators, campers, vegetarians, used-car owners, and consignment-store buyers.
They don’t save. They have no pensions. They don’t have a mortgage. They don’t have cable. They only accept cash for their labor. They hate malls. They keep their shopping moments to a minimum. And they don’t have any health insurance. Continue reading
Magdalene (15)
Anne was her second,
Conceived in sultry lust,
A sly accident in July,
When forgetting
Was the new habit,
Spring having had its way
With bold promises
And anxious rain.
She would be remembered
As a casual glance,
The slim afterthought,
A hidden footnote
To her mother’s stories
Of life’s hoarse curses.
Magdalene (14)
George, her husband,
Loved his silence
Like a cold beer
On a humid August night
Or a coiled snake
Content in the silent brush,
Its arctic mood unmoved
Even by two robin’s eggs
Falling from a tipped nest.
Too easy to accept arbitrary gifts,
The pursuit diminished by chance,
The trophy soiled by repetition,
George would wait
Until the particles of dust
Would settle from every argument
Then return to the void
Tasking his way into anonymity.
Enough Said
Enough said.
I did not love you
At the moment
When the question
Was posed
To which I answered,
“Yes”
Inevitable as the
Unquestioning dusk
Lingering through
Its given time,
Tenderly brief,
Ignorant in its caution
To leave the day
And bleed empty-handed
Into the night
Review of “Canada”
Canada
Richard Ford
Harper Collins, 2012
403 pages
The Larger View
Richard Ford’s “Canada” is a novel about memory. It is about failed relationships. It is about rites of passage. It is about compromises. It is about mortality. It is about defeat. It is about survival. It is about our need for psychological purges by performing acts of self-destructive daring or, if we are desperate, killing ourselves or others to wipe our slates clean of the mistakes of our past.
It is a novel about missed chances, individual choices, and the landscapes we end up in, not always by choice. It is a story about running away and, finally, about settling down. At the core of all our journeys, according to Dell Parsons, the sixty-three year old narrator, are the attempts: “We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try.” Continue reading
Feelings Do Matter
“Feelings,” I have been told by many of the old timers in the AA rooms, “don’t matter.”
Emotional Detachment
I have always struggled with that notion because, as a kid, I learned very early in the game that I needed to be a silent observer in my family. If I weren’t, if I decided to confront my siblings or my parents, I would pay the consequences—a smack across the face, a sarcastic remark, or worse, just indifference.
In this early family environment, it would be safe to say that I had learned to shut down, not just as a defense against negative reactions from my family, particularly from my emotionally unpredictable mother, but as my way of surviving.
I thought for a long time that being detached from my emotions was, of course, a far more superior form of living than those in the muck of emotional tantrums. (I might add here, that I used to think that any strong emotional reaction related to joy, grief, or rage was a reaction “out of control.”) Continue reading
Magdalene (13)
What is this pace called Life?
She would ask.
Two children too many,
Her sweet burdens,
Carried delicately,
With the cold resentments
She lugged,
Restless in the torpor of finality
She had pledged
To George, her trophy,
Gathering the tight-lipped dust
Of her indifference.
Transcendence, the “God of My Understanding”
Theism as a Cultural Heirloom
As a non-theist, it is often difficult to talk about the God of Western culture without offending someone. Even if individuals aren’t theologians, there is a tendency to fall back into a default mode with any discussion about God.
In that mode, some go on the defensive trying to protect what is considered sacred and allegedly timeless, not because they are necessarily connected to a specific sky-god theology, but because the culture has committed itself to a belief in an exterior anthropomorphic deity.
Inside of this mind-set, any discussion of God can descend into a defense of a Western cultural norm, a societal commitment that must be protected because traditionalists often believe that a culture will lose its integrity if it gives up its theocentric beliefs. Continue reading
Magdalene (12)
Eric, her first child,
Was tall
Like the pine tree
In their back yard.
He reached for the sun,
But settled for a half-lit moon
Behind scattered clouds.
In his twenties,
Eric wandered into many
New England towns
Which quietly took him in
As just another farm hand
With no plans.
After four beers,
Eric recounted two memories:
His bedroom full of
Unopened Christman gifts.
“Never like surprises,” he said.
And another dust-ridden story
About reading War and Peace
In his Ford pickup,
After playing miniature golf,
When he was nineteen.
Magdalene (11)
Men,
She loved their dull eyes,
All purpose scalded
From their fleeting lives.
Nothing to lose,
Their old aims
Welded into solid
Junctures of brevity,
Their callous destinies
Resting on the warm breasts
Of fawning women
Who will themselves
Into damaged smiles
And stained motel sheets.
Gods and Graven Images
Every so often, I return to thinking about the Ten Commandments.
In those revisits, I continue to discover how far removed I am from those ancient Christian tenets I grew up with as a child.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” says the first commandment. This is the I-am-the-leader-of-the-pack commandment telling humanity that there is only one God and, as my grandchildren would say, “He’s it.” Continue reading
“Moneyball,” A Review
Baseball, says one sports commentator, has to be won “on the field.” He goes on to comment: “You have to steal. You have to punt. You have to sacrifice. You have to have men in a scoring position. You gotta bring ‘em in.”
“You don’t do that with a bunch of statistics,” he continues. Later on in the film, another sports pundit repeats a variation on that same theme: “You don’t put a team together with a computer.”
Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, thought otherwise in 2002. In Bennet Miller’s film, “Moneyball,” Beane would become American baseball’s game changer when he hires a Yale economics graduate, Peter Brand, a young, overweight self-deferential-to-a-fault geek. Brand specializes in “player analysis.” Continue reading
Retirement
Bartering for more time,
Slow, disgruntled goat
Among the sprinters.
A weeping clock,
Refusing,
In your own time,
To be the last
Creeping wrinkle
Of defeat.
In the scorched land
Of stained notes,
Ragged files,
Bruised finger-tips,
Your aching bones
Limp into
The coffee room,
Listening to your
Taut Monologues of
Sweet revenge
Against the
Arctic wind
Of old age.
Filthy Lucre
This blog-post is a kind of no-brainer. It is about money. But it is also about all the things that many of us encounter in our relationship with money: financial insecurity, freedom, autonomy, gratification, ownership, deferring payments, borrowing, owing anonymous institutions—unless we’re out on the street, we, in America, are all in on it
Money, it was once said, is the root of all evil. “Filthy lucre,” the medievalists called it. On the other hand, I was reminded many times in my youth that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” That was a statement that usually came out of the mouths of parents to remind their kids to give up even thinking about another handout from good ol’ mom and dad.
I think I first became aware of money when I was a Catholic elementary school student. “Second collections” were part of the Sunday-service ritual. I learned from that ritual that there were “needy causes” out there (usually in the Catholic Missions or in the Catholic Charities movement), that, no matter how poor my own church was, there was always some pocket change we could come up with to send to those we just assumed were more in need. Continue reading
To My Dear Occasion
“Discipline,” my partner said,
“Is the necessary content
Of a full life.”
Like the raw sun
Bored by the earth’s
Dazed circling?
Or the summer’s knuckles
Chafed against
The walls of Fall?
Or low-hanging fruit,
Without a second chance
Against indifference?
I will remind you,
My dear occasion,
That love has no
Routines.
Departure
November is memory for me
When I see a flock of birds
Moving, en masse,
Towards the tired South,
Disarmed of their certain solitude,
An ensemble act, wide in its swath,
Buffetted by resistant winds,
Cradling their lazy departures
From frozen nests
And breadless sidewalks.
The Controlling Caretaker
“No problem. How much do you need to borrow?”
This is not an atypical response of a caretaker. Someone asks the caretaker for money. The caretaker responds simply and to the point. And the response is positive. Caretakers are like that.
Suspend your disbelief for a few seconds, however, and listen to how another type of caretaker, the self-aware, over-the-top caretaker, might describe themselves: Continue reading
Sin Nombre, A Film Review
Making a fictional film about a social issue is not easy.
If it’s a dark satire like “Dr Strangelove,” or “Catch 22,” or even “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the viewer always gets the feeling in the pit of their stomach that there is something not right with the world, that some impending dark force is going to place the world in a state of implosion.
In these hard-edged satires, that dark force often exists in the possibility that a nuclear holocaust could be started by a bunch of crazies; that our revered institutions could be run by psychopaths; that maybe we all have the potential for evil. Continue reading
Magdalene (10)
Her wedding happened,
Formality dimming
The brazen light
Of her floating world.
Now, decisions
Would be made,
Finality descending,
Like a rabid eagle,
Upon weightless chance.
Escorted to the
Resting place
Of unbending oaths
And exit-proof promises,
She would learn
To wander
Into the craggy patches
Of her restless mind.
Magdalene (9)
She would not
Talk of fathers,
For they were
All dodgers,
Hoaxes,
Accidental lovers
With golf carts,
Their thumbs
Numbed from
Channel surfing.
Magdalene (8)
Casual goodness
Was all she could manage,
Steeped as she was
In forgetting
The hard-core gifts
Of kindness
She performed
With bee-sting
Reluctance,
Carefully carved
On the belt
Of her demon mother’s
Notched obligations.
Magdalene (7): Menses
She felt
The pool of blood,
Because the moon blinked,
She thought,
Or the stars
Rubbing against the sky
Like needy cats
Around her legs,
Timed with the
Spring’s release
Of its tight buds
And green sprouts
From the wet,
Fresh mud.
That’s Just “The Way” it is
Insanity, some tell us, is doing the same things, over and over, expecting different results.
But what about expecting different results from other people, situations, or events—a brother-in-law saying something kind; a Verizon tech person avoiding jargon; an American movie not bleeding into sentimentality; morning commuters driving with less rage; a politician not speaking from an ideology; a cable news show understating a news flash; a doctor faxing a prescription on the same day; a bank mortgage department answering the phone with a real person; a muffler replacement being under three-hundred dollars; a teen-age son not saying “whatever.”
The Eyes Have It
Several weeks ago, I was informed by my ophthalmologist that the cataract in my left eye had reached London-fog level. “We’ll remove the other cataract in a month,” he said.
I knew I was at a critical point with my vision. I could read most of the large signs as long as they had polar-bear-size white letters and arrows on dark green backgrounds. When the city decided that small flower-lined islands would beautify one of our major streets, I found myself cursing at their invisibility when I made left turns at night, barely shaving the blunt edges of the raised islands as I turned into the right lanes.
On rainy nights, I would squint at the front windshield trying to see through the patches of unstreaked clarity. The wipers would do their bump and grind, making vain attempts to clear away the glaze of film built up from the oil vapors unobtrusively spewing out of exhaust pipes at urban intersections. Continue reading
Magdalene (6)
She dated men she disliked
Dragging her trained fingers
Along their fertile thighs,
As she thought of ways
To disembark
From their lives.
Magdalene (5)
Her first love,
She knew,
Would be her last.
Dashboard odor,
Red leather seats,
The cackle of
Drive-In speakers,
Cemetery walks
Among the murmurless,
The eye-watching moon.
Even when she married,
There would be no rivals
To her first surrender,
Who stormed his way
Into her deaf heart.
Religion and AA
Some of us in twelve-step recovery programs have never belonged to a religious institution. Some once belonged but have left. Some are still emotionally connected to their religious heritages, even though they do not practice their religions.
There are a minority in recovery programs who have chosen Buddhism, a non-theistic sect. If they are practicing Buddhists they participate in daily rituals: chanting; silent, sitting meditation; or walking meditation.
Others in twelve-step programs have developed a very eclectic collage of practices, values, and beliefs they have gleaned from Pema Chödrön, Osho, Krishnamurti, Andrew Cohen, Deepak Chopra, Gurdjieff, among others
There is a vast number in recovery programs who remain attached to their Judeo-Christian heritages and continue to practice their faiths of choice.
Magdalene (4)
When I was horse-drawn young
On a careless summer night,
Promises slipped from my tongue,
Like random, drenched branches
On hurricane streams,
Fidelity waiting patiently
On the arid shore.
For you demanded symmetry,
I, in the angled shadow
Of your sun-bleached certainty.
This artifice of order,
Sapping my desire,
Jostled me to turbulence
And humid winds,
Breathing life into
My canvassed heart.
Magdalene (3)
In her sunrise bed
She could
Reinvent the
Deft possibilities
Of her birth,
Searching for
Friendly apertures
Along a fluid canal
To be exhaled
Into the welcoming world.
How shall she appear?
Brief-case ready?
Pedestrian-cautious?
Starled as a stray cat?
Or be what
She would be–
Her mother’s
Resented gift,
The slow-faucet-drip
Of nine months,
Dawdling with her
Stretched-stomach’s burden
In front of daily television
Weather reports
And news alerts.
Magdalene (2)
Her memory,
Like a maimed horse,
Was put down,
Itself, a faint recollection
Of things forgotten,
Misplaced, a frayed pocket
Beyond repair.
Tubes of frozen toothpaste
In the freezer,
Dusty combs
Under the hot-water heater,
A letter from a
Teen-age boyfriend
Under her mattress,
A wristwatch
On a windowsill,
Catching the precision
Of the sun’s lazy arch.
Fear
I look out my window
After the tornado–
A bent tricycle,
A refrigerator handle,
A stained mattress,
A Coca Cola can,
A rusted sled,
Slabs of cardboard,
A confused cat.
Like all the contents
Of my fears,
In disarray,
Always something new
To surrender.
Epiphany
A woman on the train
Told me she had found Jesus.
He arrives, I am told,
In the middle of things,
Unfolding the silences
Of our apathy.
An excuse, really,
For paying that attention
Denied by relatives
Too busy
Handing out checks
In tiny cards
And ribboned presents
On familiar birthdays.
Magdalene (1)
She was too frail
To live by herself.
Stairs eluded her;
Stoves became
Fireplaces;
Shadows on the
Bedroom wall,
Fragments of
Ancient lovers;
Headlines, wind-swept
Streamers,
Pulled by blimps
Across her kitchen table;
Voice-mail messages,
The whispering gossip
Of foreign doctors
In surgery.
“Last Train Home”
“Who doesn’t want to see their kids prosperous?” says the mother of Qin and Yang in the documentary, Last Train Home. This is a refrain begun earlier by the grandmother: “But who doesn’t want their children to live a good life?”
If we are to believe the mother and the grandmother, prosperity and the good life are the two goals of all families. China appears to be no exception to this rule in Lixin Fan’s brilliant documentary of one family’s attempts to achieve some form of prosperity in the new hypercapitalist China.
But it is a prosperity that has a profound emotional price tag. Over a period of thirteen years, the Zhang family becomes fractured when the mother and father leave their two children home with the grandmother as the parents pursue the Chinese dream to succeed.
And they don’t just leave home to go to a nearby city. They travel a little over 1300 miles to work in a makeshift factory in the city of Guangzhou in Guandong Province. Like the other 130 million migrant workers working in cities all over China, the Zhang couple returns only once a year to their small village. Continue reading
Multiculturalism in the United States
In the first part of this two-part essay on the anti-multiculturalism movement in Europe and United States, I attempted to carefully note that the backlash against multiculturalism was far more niched against specific groups—the Muslims in Europe and the UK and the Hispanics in the United States.
I did not mean to suggest, however, that there aren't other groups that are singled out in those cultures. For example, ever since 9/11, Muslim communities in the US have certainly experienced bigotry in their many attempts to purchase buildings or to obtain zoning rights to build mosques. And the historic persecution of the Roma (Gypsies) in Europe recently prompted a strong list of specific recommendations from a European Commission to counter that prejudice.
In the second part of this two-part blog post, I will focus entirely on multiculturalism in the United States.
America has consistently had tensions around immigration and foreign-culture issues. Ben Franklin complained about the “swarthy” Germans and expressed his fear that Pennsylvania would become a haven for a “stream of their importation” into Pennsylvania. Franklin's ethnocentrism would eventually match the intensity of prejudice against those of German heritage during World War I and World War II. This, in spite of the fact, Germans, at one time in American history, were the largest reported ancestral group in the United States.
The Irish also experienced extreme prejudice, particularly after their arrival in the United States during the great Irish Famine of the 1840s. They were often stereotyped as “shanty Irish” or “Lace-Curtain Irish”;were consistently harassed as papists; and stereotyped as criminals and paupers as they were in this famous passage from a Chicago Post editorial: “The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses…Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic.” Such prejudice, of course, led to their ostracism from many urban business communities that often put “No-Irish-Need-Apply” signs in their windows. Continue reading
The Anti-Multiculturalism Movement–Part I
This Blog Post is the first of a two-part article on anti-multiculturalism in Europe and the United States.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that multiculturalism is under severe attack throughout many Western countries, including the United States.
UK's Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave an impassioned speech in Munich advocating what he called, “muscular liberalism.” It is a concept deeply troubling to minorities in England, particularly among Muslims.
Cameron's call for a kind of testosterone-driven toughness on foreigners to assimilate into a homogenized English culture speaks to the fears of many other Europeans that their Caucasian, secular, mono-language base will be diluted by non-Western cultures and values.
Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in a 2010 speech, claimed that the attempts at multiculturalism in Germany have, in her words, “utterly failed.” There is no doubt that she was aiming her comments at the 4 million Turkish and Kurdish Muslims in Germany. Continue reading
The Tearless Stars
In all this vastness,
We are the ones who weep,
Salted fragments among
Colliding stars where
Nothing is missed,
No god who cries
For his lover's return,
A memory of former days,
When the angle
Of the afternoon sun
On your unbruised neck,
Or the touch of
Your damp hair
Reminds me
Of lounging books
On a summer porch.
The Commodification of America
“Business—that’s easily defined: it’s other people’s money” (Peter Drucker); “The social responsibility of Business is to increase profits” (Milton Friedman); “First amendment never shows why freedom of speech….did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form” (Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission).
There it is folks. The American way: Profits. Corporate free speech. Other people’s money.
There is little doubt that America has become the global symbol for upward mobility, profits, and economic success. But we have also become the global capital of commodification in all of its forms, including prisons, education, health care, and, more cruelly, in our political arenas.
There are few institutional venues in the United States that aren’t, in some way, touched—some would say tainted—by the profit motive. Politicians curry favor with the wealthy who contribute to their campaigns. The health care system continues to be driven by ever increasing profits. The national defense budget has become so entrenched with defense contracts that it would be safe to say that United States Defense is an industry in and of itself.
And some of the top universities are run as corporations with heavy endowments, investments in the stock market, and huge government grants. Not to mention the sports industry that dominates the budgets of many very wealthy universities and colleges throughout the United States. Continue reading
Egalitarianism
I recently became a member of a group (three's a group, right?) that has been having an online discussion about issues brought up in a video-taped dialogue about egalitarianism.
The taped conversation had its bright moments when one of the philosophers stated that she knew a colleague who had left Southern California because, according to her male colleague, the area did not value intellectual competence. Apparently, Southern California culture is more into acquisitions and does not put a premium on academic achievement.
Equality is often based on commonly-held values. If a community values owning things over intellectual ability, it's going to be very difficult to gain equal stature in that culture if you're an ABD history major working as a part-time faculty in a local community college and shop at Wall Mart. Continue reading
Homo Faber
I am reckless in
My daily acts to
Undo nature,
Cutting flowers,
Trimming silent hedges,
Leveling grass.
Unable to mold
The clouds
To my liking,
I wait
For your mistakes,
Rare as they are,
To test the metal
Of my moral symmetry,
Bound only by the
Covenant of
Your words to me
That things close
Are not always what
They seem.
Domestic Domains
I tried to love you
In ways that moved
With the unrushed wind
Of the open air,
Void of interferences
And tales of other
Men's conquests.
Plainly, I thought,
No mystery,
No surprises,
Meeting you
On the hills of
What we thought
Would never end.
Here we are,
Long dead to our
Faint desires,
Alive in our loyalties,
Domestic as two
Used brooms.
Saints Don’t Get Angry
I grew up in a family of screamers, duckers, fighters, and scramblers. If that didn't work, my family withdrew into icy silence. That's what we thought bedrooms were for: our little caves of isolation where we could get our way in frozen-lake invisibility.
If that didn't work, we could always go to plan B: smart-ass sarcasm.
At the same time I was watching the pro-active survival skills of my siblings, I was being taught in Catholic elementary school that saints suffered quietly. They accepted their lots in life with passive surrender. And many quietly walked the gauntlet of martyrdom with angelic resignation, assured of a first-class room in the heavenly kingdom.
In my little elementary school mind, Christ was the icon of emotional stability. He may have thrown the gambling rabble out of the synagogue in a fit of rage, but his life seemed more about waiting his turn in the queue of acceptance and surrender. He was the gentle fisherman, the quiet shepherd. Not the raging truck driver or the sweaty faced hockey player, fists thrashing the air.
In my childhood, adolescence, and throughout my adulthood, I constantly pursued the “key” to sanctity. At one time, I thought all I had to do was go to mass, receive holy communion, confess my sins, and read spiritual books. The world, over time, I thought, would adapt to all the higher spiritual goals I had set out for myself. Or, on my journey to sainthood, I would be above it all. Continue reading
The Shroud of Fatalism
This is the second in a series of blog posts in which I expand upon key concepts from my e-book, “A Recovery Journey: The Beginnings”
So, you have a great day at school. Your teachers laugh at your jokes. You get a 95 on your math exam. You talk to one of your teachers during lunch. They tell you are a remarkable young man. You leave the school at three and walk home. You’re in high gear. The world is your oyster.
Then you walk through the front door of your home. Your mother is screaming at your father. You duck as a frying pan comes flying across the kitchen. She’s yelling at your dad, “you took Janet to the drive in, didn’t you? I saw the popcorn in the back seat of the car. You’ve been sleeping with her again.” Janet was my red-headed Brenda Star look-alike aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law.
That was the daily routine: Great day at school. The Inferno at home. Kids, of course, learn to make connections, as irrational as they may be. When they are nurtured in one place and are dragged into the emotional muck in another, they begin to believe that, not only are there no guarantees in life, but that life cannot be trusted to offer any permanent security. They will always ask themselves, “when is the other shoe going to fall off?” And they view happiness as an occasional blip on the machine of life, more often than not, set on disappointment. Continue reading
A Wish
Unblemished by the
Morning fog,
My wish moves through
The bullet's unblocked path.
Like the certain snap
Of hurried lightening
Across a numb sky,
This daunting wish, unafraid,
For the bruised past
To disappear.
Your Mind and Your Job Won’t Do It
This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I expand upon key concepts from my e-book, “A Recovery Journey: The Beginnings”
Knowledge has always been important to me. I grew up believing that if I knew things, I wouldn’t be invisible, especially in a family where high drama and chronic volatility were more the rule than the exception.
Knowing things gave me the kind of security I could not depend on my family to supply. If I had intellectual competence, I knew, at the very least, that my worth would be valued, that I would not be another cog in the machine of my family’s dysfunctionalism.
Little did I realize that, over the years, I often used knowledge as a substitute for living. I came to believe that my identity was exclusively defined by my ability to acquire information, know historical time periods, pass a college test, get a good grade on a paper, give a convincing presentation in a speech class, shape a college lecture. Continue reading
Coitus Interruptus
Now that I’ve got your attention.
It took me a long time to discover that I had learned, from early childhood, to be a detached observer. I was the youngest of five children. My family was in constant turmoil. My parents argued all the time. My two older brothers were always fighting. And my mother’s volatile and often violent mood swings continued to keep the family on pins and needles.
So, kids do what kids do. They protect themselves. They go to their rooms. They stay away from the chaos as much as they can. And when they are in the midst of the family tornadoes, they often withdraw into silent observers. They become recorders, television cameras, quiet witnesses. They learn, very early in the game to passively take in what’s happening and not to participate. It is the only recourse they have; it gives them some kind of order and safety in their lives.
Then they become adolescents and adults. They can’t figure out why others tell them they are “too analytical.” They find themselves observing again as they did when they were children. But the observation mode begins to implode when a friend breaks down after his girlfriend tells him the relationship is over.
The first instinct of the grand observer is to look around for the nearest exit. Continue reading
You Will Not Know Me
Saddled by my hard secrets,
Like roving balls of dust
Under a firm bed,
I try to hide myself
Before the rising sun,
Avoiding others who will
Notice my angular walk,
Arms hanging like tired branches,
My eyes
Sighting the city’s
Empty arched bridges
Above the rippling sheets
Of slow-moving rivers.
I will not be known.
Poverty in America
Will You Still Love Me When I'm Broke
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” These words, we are told, were spoken by Christ and comprise only one of the eight beatitudes.
Some linguists and theologians claim that “poor in spirit” refers to spiritual emptiness, pride, the absence of humility. Others tell us that “poor in spirit” means detachment, a kind of relinquishing of all attachments, earthly and otherwise.
And there are some, I am sure, who would claim that Christ was giving poverty a higher moral status than wealth, a deterrent to a spiritual life, if we are to believe the famous “eye of the needle” passage in which Christ was to have said that it would be easier for a “camel” to pass through “the eye of a needle,” than for a rich man “to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Another teacher of great moral authority, Gandhi, has often been criticized for being an advocate of poverty. Although he tried to rough the caste system up, the iconic photo of the great teacher, at his spinning wheel, has often been interpreted as a symbol of his profound reverence for austerity and the simple life.
The next logical jump for many supporting this philosophy is to view poverty as a way of life freeing humanity from the samsaric wheel of acquisitiveness, materialism, avarice, and greed. Continue reading
Hoarders
I recently read a local newspaper story about an eccentric mother and son who were hoarders, midnight garbage rummagers, and isolationists. The mother was eventually admitted to a hospital’s nursing home. She died not long after the remains of her 79 year-old son’s body were found in the basement rubble of their home, two years after he had been reported missing.
They were harmless hoarders,
Midnight garbage rummagers,
Mother and son magicians
Lifting startled rabbits
From top hats,
Unable to slide them
Into memory.
Phone books, used cue-tips,
Jars of minced garlic,
Basement shelves of tuna fish
And winter-weight oil,
Like pieces of cardboard
On top of candy wrappers,
In the backyard’s melting sludge
Of stained snow.
A car trunk full of
Damp novels,
Desk drawers with
Unearned pennies and
Broken 2h pencils
Magnified by a hoarder’s
Cry to vacancy:
“Nothing will be emptied,
No orphaned space unused,
Infinity, impotent against clutter;
There will be room for everything.”
“Lunch Widows”
They had banded together
As lunch widows every
Second Sunday afternoon.
Miffed by empty wills
And a husband’s
Slim legacy,
Some sat silent
In their thinning possibilities.
Others, portfolio-strong,
Bought annuities
And shiny calculators
Morphing themselves into
Math Maenads
And genteel moats
Against an avalanche
Of loss and shy memories
Of their very, very dead
Mates.
Poem, “A Drunk’s Promise”
I’ve heard it all before,
The flaccid promises
To change.
Repeated regrets
Are a child’s oaths,
As you dangle permanence
And fidelity’s long-haul
In front of my drained face,
Fox-holing yourself into
Short-lived fears,
Daily purges of remorse,
Like used concert tickets,
An amnesiac’s memories,
The false covenants
To refugees
Of better times to come.
3 Poems, “The Trinity”
I buy things
To defeat austerity,
Too sparse
For my itching hands
That require gifts,
Some return on my
Desires.
____
Attics are homes
For domestic indigents
Who find food
Among old diaries
And signed Bibles.
_____
Basements are for bicycles
And tedious tools
When there’s nothing
On cable
Poem, “Voluntary Servitude”
Against my will,
I wandered into love
And your frail breasts,
My limbs leaning into
The April rain,
As I kissed the
Mat of your pliant stomach,
Pulling the sun’s faint rays
Into the melting rings
Of my surrender
Poem, “Who We Are”
Something in the bramble
Of who we are
Says, “leave.”
But, curling up
Against each other,
We choose, rather,
To curdle our venom
And false starts
Into slow amnesia,
Domestic chores
And tender rituals
Of coffee breaks,
The evening news,
And late-night snacks.
Poem, “Blessed Fault”
I often fool myself into sanctity,
The credo of the stainless,
That whistles tenderly in the morning,
Hastening my giant strides of will.
But I am less inclined to virtue
When I am presented a complete score
Of innocence, every instrument allocated
Its brief moment of holy affirmation
In old, familiar bowdlerized tunes.
Perfection will just not do,
No matter how lovely the rose’s odor
Or the fresh lips of my last lover,
For catastrophes draw me more into
The ragged corner of my undoing,
Where the tilted ground
Of my uncertain heart
Is scorched a tender shade,
Bruised back into possibility.
It is there among the culpable
That I pray to live out my days.
Poem, “My Heart Will Not Rest”
I have chosen
To wander in silence
Tonight,
Listening to the
Sweet drone of the
Spaces
Where you once
Sat,
Defenseless against
The pruning
Laughter and my
Lean suspicions
That you would not
Dock
In the harbor of all my
Doubts.
Psychobabble and AA Principles
I was at an AA meeting recently when someone criticized what he considered to be the psychobabble at meetings.
For some of us in the rooms, such criticism is often a back-door way of hiding behind the literature of AA in order to avoid being honest about our our motives, our rationalizations, our hidden agendas, our imperfections, and, of course, our strengths and virtues.
Accusing others in the room of “psychobabble” can be a convenient way of avoiding any journey that might take us deeper into ourselves. It can also be a way of remaining stuck, safe, even smug. Continue reading
Conservatism, a Liberal’s Take (Part II)
It is one of the beautiful peculiarities of writing, if you do it often enough, that content often unfolds in ways you had not expected.
As I was writing about conservatism, for example, I would discover the need conservatives have for “order”; that they need a chain of command; that a golden-age past looms very large in conservative thinking; that their obsession with “states rights” is an extension of their belief in “rugged individualism”; and that religious conservatives depend heavily on “sacred texts” for their values.
I am still discovering more about conservatives. Continue reading
Conservatism, A Liberal’s Take (Part I)
When I was growing up, every adult I knew seemed to be conservative. They watched Lawrence Welk. They dreamed of having a family like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. They feared blacks. They played pinochle and drank lots of beer.
They all had dinner around five in the afternoon. They loved roast beef. They huddled around their televisions at night. They smoked cigarettes or cigars in the house.
The conservative adults I knew complained about the teenagers “going to hell in a hand basket” after watching Elvis gyrate. Some conservatives even read “Peyton Place” or saw the movie as one of their few radical ventures into the forbidden. Or they secretly sneaked off to a movie theater to watch Marilyn Monroe sleaze her way through “Niagara.” Continue reading
Donc, Je Suis Seul
I have been alone before,
Nothing strident, for now,
In the thinning air
Of your absence,
But I am mellow
As an autumn oak,
Or a discarded penny
Hugging a sewer grate—
A black crow,
Spare in its grief,
On a low-hanging wire,
Or the solitary cat
On a window sill,
Startled back to
Its indifference
After a fleeting hailstorm.
Impermanence
The reality of impermanence has always seemed a no-brainer to me. People and animals come into existence; they live out their lives; and then they die. Or, in the words of the bumper-sticker, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”
More importantly, my own experiences with memorial services, funerals, hospice, suicides, emergency rooms, psych wards, and drug and alcohol rehabs have helped me to understand the fragility of life.
On the other hand, I was recently confronted with someone’s concern that, in being aware of life’s impermanence, there may be a hidden agenda to “glorify” it as a license for moral relativism, an excuse to bow out of commitments and responsibilities. After all, if nothing in this world is permanent, why bother to be loyal, to love, to be grounded in anything?
The ancient carpe diem (“seize-the-day”) philosophy was certainly based on the notion that, since the world and its pleasures are finite, we should wring from life every moment of pleasure we can get. Continue reading
C’est Fini
I feel obligated to give some background to the poem, “C’est Fini.”
As some of you know, I am sympathetic to those who choose assisted suicide because of the finality and severe chronic pain of their illness or disease. In such cases, I believe any rational person has that right. I wrote a blog post, Assisted Suicide defending that right.
“C’est Fini” was jump-started after a recovery meeting in which one of the members revealed that his alcoholic brother had committed suicide. It brought back many memories for me in my journey through alcohol recovery.
About twenty years ago, one of my close friends, cross-addicted and a compulsive sex addict, asked me early in our program if I would help him to commit suicide when the time came for him to make that decision. I told him that I would not. Many years after he was diagnosed HIV, his body was found by a group of hunters not far from a porn video store.
Another friend had hanged himself from a garage rafter two days after asking me about therapy. And one of my sponsees, a cocaine addict, had died from an overdose.
My only experience with a suicide impulse happened about a year into my alcohol recovery. About twenty-five years ago when I was teaching at a community college, an older student, a Cuban immigrant, had become despondent over having lost everything when he came to this country. His body was found in the gorge not far from Niagara Falls.
At the time, I did not realize that I was profoundly affected by his death. Within a couple of days after the older student’s body was discovered, I became compulsively drawn to jumping over the Falls. I called my alcohol counselor who agreed to meet me at a local hospital, even though he was off that day. I asked my office-mate to follow me in her car to his office.
I wrote “C’est fini” as a kind of metaphorical transcription of what it must be like to withdraw into that dark cave of isolation and secrecy before actually committing suicide. I chose the inanimate “pallbearers” (the furnace, the lawn chair, the three unmatched socks) to suggest the devastatingly silent witnesses to that final act of desperation. And the charcoal portrait of the father, to me, is the final sad affirmation that the young man wanted from his father in the same way that a loving parent would show grief and love watching their death-row son or daughter being given a final injection.
Finally, I now realize that for so much of my adult life, I lived in a very dark world of low-level depression. I may not have wanted to literally commit suicide, but I was drawn to all kinds of real and virtual self-destructive behaviors. It wasn’t until many years into my recovery program that I began to feel this wonderful surge to live.
So, for those of you who may have thought I was going off the deep end in “C’est Fini,” I am here, today, to assure you that I love being alive. And thank you for your loving concern…John
C’est Fini
You chose tonight
To end your gaunt battle
Against oblivion,
Deciding, as you did,
To have your neck
Bear the burden
Of your solitude,
In a quiet cellar,
Your pallbearers,
A silent furnace,
A tool box,
A folded lawn chair,
Three unmatched socks,
Your father’s charcoaled
Portrait against the humid wall,
Gazing at your dangling body,
His tired affirmation
That all things end.
Wednesday’s Purpose
On Wednesday,
In her simple
Red dress,
Scalloped below
Her long
Dark neck,
She had forgotten
To erase
Her lover’s
Voice-mail message
With her word-
Deleting thumb
As the sun set
Below the clear
Edge of this
Certain night.
The Other Woman
Concubined into silent lunches
And ardent price tags,
I come to you
As I always do,
In the dying heat
Of one more fall,
Summer-tired from
Our anxious spring.
I am, as they say,
The new addition to your house,
The extra winter scarf,
The second pair of
Comfortable shoes.
You, my sweet occasion,
The odor of vacuumed rugs
In air-conditioned motel rooms,
Still lingering on my bald feet.
You, the choice I made
Never to commit
To another fatality.
The Holy, Another Grand Illusion
“Abandon holiness,” says Lao Tsu. and “See with original purity.”
Although these lines are just fragments of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, they are typical of the ancient thinker’s radical take on reality.
Who, for example, would “abandon holiness”? After all, Western culture prides itself on Christian values, especially those values gleaned from the Old and New Testament, saintly teachings, and church pronouncements. And, for those who believe in an afterlife, heaven, the “holiest” of places, is the ultimate goal of those on a Christian journey of virtue and sinlessness.
Lao Tsu challenges us, however, to give up the pursuit of the holy, for it is a goal fraught with other people’s notion of what holiness is. It is also a journey that can be riddled with self-righteousness and arrogance. And it can be a path that will often distract us from paying attention to what is in front of us. Continue reading
Poem, “The Unmowed Grass”
The unmowed grass,
In its drowsy gathering
On numb summer days,
Is tethered to the same earth
As the clipped sprig
Reticent in its symmetry
And matted certainty,
But envious of the
Belly-dancing waves
Of green
That freely chant
Under the nickel-plated
Sun.
To My Son, “Back Rub Before Sleep”
I remember rubbing
Your sweet back,
Soft against
My steady hand,
Child innocent
As an unspent day,
Warm rhythms
Against the grainless
Folds of your
Soft-leathered skin.
Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and Self-Interest
Ayn Rand once wrote that a butcher, a brewer, and a baker do not make a dinner a success because of their “benevolence”; they are motivated by their own “self-interest.” She also believed that humans should participate in the world as heroic beings pursuing their own happiness and their own “productive achievement(s),” limited only by what she calls the facts of “reality.”
Rand refers to her reason-based philosophy as objectivism, a hard-edged ism that focuses on objective reality as the only rational plain on which humans can, and ought to live. All other forms—faith, religion, theism—are nothing more than subjective, irrational, even delusional venues that humans have devised for any of a number of subjective motives. Continue reading
Poem, “A Dead Man’s Soliloquy”
I will return
In the wily spring
Of your memories,
Delayed, for a time,
By shuffling tasks
And the patient murmur
Of my still-pulsing heart.
It is the sleeping lilac
That defines me now,
Leading me gently
From the dull crowds
Of forgetting
To the plains of
Your fevered dream
That I am here
Dressed in my own
Lover’s stubbornness,
Unwilling, now,
To let you go.
(Writing, as many of you know, is an art. It is also a profession, a career that, because of the internet, may give the impression of being more of a lite-weight hobby than a serious pursuit. If you believe, as I do, that good writing is hard work and deserves to be compensated, please consider donating to this site. Thanks.)
To Norman Farmer
You were here once
And then gone.
Some sinister plot,
I had assumed,
To keep me guessing
About the proper quest
To leave
Before the hostile
Bedroom light
Was dimmed
Or the tireless
Porch lamp,
In its summer languor,
Mumbling for sleep
Against the feathered clutter
Of anxious moths.
May 14, 2011
Owning Up, Part II
This is the second part of a two part series on “Owning Up, Emotional Honesty.” In the first part, I discussed the confessional-box tradition I grew up in and my many years of therapy.
In this part, I discuss the importance of what twelve-steppers refer to as the “rooms,” the meeting places where we go to “share,” as they say, “our experience, strength, and hope.”
Those of us in peer-group recovery programs like AA, NA,
OEA, and SA know very well the importance of hanging out in “the rooms.”
They are often cold, damp church basements with concrete walls that have been painted over so many times they begin to look like melting taffy. But they are the rooms where I go three or four times a week, if not more, to learn how to live in the real world.
As a recovering alcoholic of over twenty-six years, I take great consolation in knowing that others in these church basements are struggling with all the issues that normal, earth-people deal with every day: money, relationships, anger, a boss, an adolescent child, a new job, or Verizon tech support. Continue reading
Poem, “Just Passing Through”
Annoying, this brief life,
All angry tulips deluged
By fast-forwarding Spring,
Making our quick glances
At the instant sky,
Guest visits and overnight stays,
Too brief to grieve
The missed mornings
When I once looked at
Your certain face.
Owning Up: Emotional Honesty
This is a two-part series on owning up, honesty, and emotional transparency. In the first part, I discuss my confessional-box heritage growing up as a Roman Catholic. I then go on to cover the contrasting role of therapy in helping me to be more honest about myself.
In the second part of this two-part series, I will discuss the significance of recovery meetings in opening me up to my daily emotions and behaviors and my on going relationships in sobriety. As they say in the rooms, “it ain’t over until it’s really over.”
Governments will often hide its dirty little secrets behind the mantel of “national security.” Corporations and large institutions (including churches) seem to like silence because they fear a customer backlash, a class-action suit, or media exposure. Or they often cover up a questionable ethical policy with public relations departments which have mastered the art of linguistic subterfuge.
And, in the world of advertising, truth is often enhanced with glowing images of a product or service in order to dull the minds and senses of a potential customer.
Closer to home, families often hold on to their own white-elephant-in-the-living-room secrets to protect a family member or to defend their we’re-just-a-happy-little-family public image.
So, when do we learn to “own up” to our own truths? I’m not talking about a factual transcription of a mortgage transaction or a detailed “and-then-we-did-this-and-then-we-did-that” description of a cruise to the Caribbean. Or a lengthy machine-gun rant about how a husband “ripped me off of my alimony.”
I grew up in a Roman Catholic confessional-box culture. I was taught, as a child, to “own up” to my sins, to tell on myself in a dark box of a room with only a punctured out plastic window divider between me and the priest. And I was always in the kneeling position, my hands held in prayer resting on a small shelf as I weekly went through the “bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned” Saturday afternoon ritual. Continue reading
Slavoj Zizek and Moral Relativism
Mind you, I have my own ongoing battles with academic theorists in the Humanities, Communications, Social Sciences, and the Arts.
Many of these tenure-track theorists continue to live in the realm of abstraction that has become elitist, exclusionary, and so far removed from primary sources that their journal-driven monographs have morphed into theoretical meta-narratives about themselves, not about the works or events they are supposedly critiquing.
Having said that, however, I do not sympathize with Slavoj Zizek’s not-so-subtle contempt for what he sees as the moral relativism of the academic left. Continue reading
Generosity
In the first part of this two part series about where we learn our attitudes about good and bad, I discussed the “interventionist school” of Christianity, a narrative that teaches the followers of Christianity that all of our notions of good and evil are created or altered by an interventionist deity through grace, epiphanies, miracles, the handing down of the “ten commandments,” the incarnation of Christ, and a divinely inspired Biblical text.
The interventionist school of Christianity has been the guiding model of Western Christian morality for centuries. It is a model that relies heavily on a Church hierarchy and ancient texts (the Old and New Testament) as the icons of moral authority.
The Catholic Church goes even further in portraying itself as the recipient of powers to round out all of the intricacies of sin, morality, and faith-beliefs through a clerical hierarchy, which, according to the church’s narrative, is a direct descendent of St. Peter, the alleged first appointed leader of Christ’s followers.
There are many of us, however, who believe that morality can be gleaned from many sources other than a theistic or religious institutional model. Although most religions seem to adhere to some version of the do-unto-others golden rule, I believe that generosity is often at the root of all of our optimal behavior patterns. Continue reading
Grief and Addiction Recovery
Grief and Addiction Recovery by Glynis Sherwood MEd, CCC, CSAC
A while ago I received this email from a woman experiencing the opposite of the positive emotions she had hoped to find in recovery.
“I’m in recovery from alcoholism and should feel happy, but I feel sad and angry and empty – almost like I’m grieving. But not only has nobody has died, in fact I got my life back. I’m worried that if I keep this up I’m going to start drinking again. How do I make sense of my emotions and hold onto my recovery?”
As you can see from the desperation of her tone, this woman feels confused, fearful of relapsing and maybe a little guilty about feeling grief rather than joy in the midst of her recovery. But not only are feelings of grief common in recovery, mixed feelings ranging from joy and sorrow can be present too, adding to the confusion. It’s hard to deal with such emotions, but that does not mean that these feelings are wrong. Our emotions are there to tell us what we need, and if our legitimate needs are being satisfied or thwarted. It’s the same way with grief. But how do we understand the role of grief in addiction recovery? Continue reading
The Interventionist School of Christianity
I never liked contact sports. Whenever I worked out, it was always a single-player engagement like jogging, swimming, or running frantically on a tread mill. Even today, I continue to exercise by myself, even though I am sometimes in a gym or in a park walking with others.
During my college teaching years, committees were, for me, the most difficult arenas to get anything done. Discussions were often endless, tangents seemed to be the norm, and listening levels almost non-existent.
Even my experiences with institutional religion, growing up Catholic and attending Catholic institutions right up to my Masters Degree, my notion of community was limited to Sunday services or singing in a choir. Continue reading
Poem, “Memento Mori”
I will die on this side
Of my silenced breath,
Not the other side,
Where stories scramble
In traffic-stopping
Marathons of panting
Joggers, frantic,
In their drenched bodies,
To win my dazed
Mind over
To the simple truth of
What will happen next,
When I close my questioning
Eyes for the very last time.
Poem, “Je me souviens”
I remember you once,
Your nut-flavored hair,
Jostled by my hands
Sliding to your
Bare shoulders,
Straps falling like
Patient rain,
Rumpled silk and lace
Descending to the willing floor,
The sweet summer melon
And hive-dripping honey
In the soundless flesh
Of my one desire.
(Writing, as many of you know, is an art. It is also a profession, a career that, because of the internet, may give the impression of being more of a lite-weight hobby than a serious pursuit. If you believe, as I do, that good writing is hard work and deserves to be compensated, please consider donating to this site. Thanks.)
Poem, “The Goddess”
She had raised the bar,
Or so she thought,
Hands moving above
The restless table,
Weaving through her
Tidy argument like
A sly dolphin,
Self-assured, in the end,
Against the rabble
Of our inquisitions.
But our pliant concessions
Would not hold,
For she had decided,
Like a street preacher,
To strip us of our assents,
Unworthy, as we were,
To hear her gilded message.
Poem, “Memory”
Before her last breath,
She made her case
For falling gently
Into the nimble space
Of her forgotten image,
Redeemed from
The family photo album
By a careless hand
Looking for an old
Love letter promising
A quick return from
An ancient war
Psychological Meltdowns
Your Netflix movies have been setting on the coffee table for two months. The bank called Friday to tell you you’re two months behind on the mortgage and three months on your equity loan. The dry cleaners left a message on your answering machine saying that you had fourteen shirts that they’ve been holding for a month. The second message was from the hospital. You had missed your scheduled colonoscopy. And last Wednesday your daughter from St. Louis called and asked why you had forgotten her birthday and is there “something wrong.” Continue reading
Poem, “Just Between Us”
He was caught again
Staring into the beaded
Spaces of
His airbrushed mind,
Solitude playing on him
Like a fingered harp,
Neither blunt nor loud,
Like city traffic,
But plucked, cordial,
Hesitant at times,
Escaping the prickly
Gadfly of a
Stinging response
March 22, 2011
Poem, “Look Surprised”
I suppose I could want
You more than I do,
But I’ll drift for a while,
If you don’t mind,
Shop among the tourists,
Walk with stray cats,
Look surprised,
When you walk
Through the door
March 22, 2011
Book Review, “Night Train to Lisbon”
Night Train to Lisbon
by Pascal Mercier
Translated by Barbara Harshav
Grove Press, 2008
392 pp
“Last Train to Lisbon” was going to be read in a book club a friend of mine belonged to. The club started it, then decided to drop it. Another friend started reading it and has yet to complete it.
The criticisms were consistent: it was too long; it was too windy; it was too dense; the memoir writing was too tedious and philosophical; there were too many characters; there were too many scene shifts.
Well, I’m here to say. I finished the novel. In fact, I read it twice. What can I say? I was an English teacher. I love a challenge.
On the surface, the story is really quite simple: an aging philology teacher finds a book of memoirs in a book store. He starts to read them. The author of the memoirs was a Portuguese doctor and a resistance fighter during the Salazar dictatorship.
Gregorius, the teacher, has found his fantasized soul mate in this resistance fighter, Amadeu Prado, a brooding and tortured aristocrat, a “goldsmith of words” who destines himself “to rescue the silent experiences of human life from their muteness.” Continue reading
Poem, “Play it again, Sam”
So, if I get it right
The first time,
I’m not required
By any dusty law
To do it again.
Repetition doesn’t always
Work like fearless
Branches stuttering
In chatty unison
From an aging trunk,
Some curling
Towards the sun,
Others, insecure
In their laziness,
Weighted with memory
Of last April’s
Freezing rain.
They’ve all been
Somewhere before,
Some yearn for the sky,
Others for the
Grumbling earth,
As they did
Last year.
If I repeat the right thing,
I become the surly branch
Scanning the wrinkled trunk,
Defeated by the
Crusty chance of
Being too common
In my frantic mimes,
Just another water-logged
Dog paddling its way
Back with the same
Haggard stick in his mouth
He had twenty minutes ago
Poem, “Texting Iphigenia”
A text-message was discovered on an ancient Blackberry found in a dumpster behind a Greek restaurant outside Athens by a group of roving teenage scavengers. The message was sent by a girl named Hermione to Iphigenia, the classic heroine, who was sacrificed so that the winds would begin in Aulis harbor, allowing the Greek ships to set sail for Troy.
Although Hermione was believed to have been illiterate, Anthropologists and Linguists both agree that the message contained some brief poetic possibilities. Upton Simpson, a philologist from Greenland, has even suggested that Hermione’s text message “most assuredly, contained a tone of formality and high seriousness.” Continue reading
Poem, “Change”
You will, of course, change.
We all know it.
From ragged-edged coat,
Smelling of beer and car oil,
Tested every day
In the blustery wind, near
Old, dank harbors,
To rose-odored concert-goer,
Your main of hair
Waving with each breath
Of lush spring air,
Not wild as the wolf,
But tenderly, as the pliant,
Nipple-sated child.
Poem, “Another One-Night Stand”
Meeting, as we do,
Under the shoals of
Silent blankets,
We hear a simmering
Gideon from a motel drawer,
Whispering warnings
Of ancient avatars
Descending to the earth,
Their rights unearned,
To play among the herds.
We, after all,
Are no different,
Disloyal to a fault,
Staggering in the rinks
Of our desires,
Welded to our transience,
Baffled, at times,
At the world’s indifference.
Poem, “Morning Chatter”
Some marching-band cadence
In your voice this morning,
Candied, like
A fresh apple,
Jaunting talk, really,
Of tasks to be done
From scraps of
Stainless papers
On a refrigerator door,
Or jobs completed,
Not curfewed, but
Cashiered, coffined,
Into the glazed silence
Of a dead grandfather's
Gray eyes
A Writer’s Blues
Some of you know that I am a freelance writer. Some of you also know that I have been struggling for months to decide what would be the appropriate way of supporting my career on the Internet.
The choices have not been easy.
Google ads was my first attempt at trying to be gainfully employed as a writer in cyberspace. It turned out to be a total blowout. Continue reading
Poem, “Sturdy as the Kitchen Stove”
I am, today, steady as a
Mushroom rain,
Even regal, I think,
Holding court
To sibilant rumors
Of my demise,
And feeling sturdy
As the kitchen stove
In its unburnished
Solitude,
But weary as the old oak,
Or the aging Labrador
Attacked by children
With lightening-rod
Fists against their
Favorite punching bag.
February 20, 2011
Poem, “I am here”
Je suis ici
I am present
Like a confused cat
Circling its
Full water bowl,
Rejecting the
Unscrambled obvious
Of what is given,
Not like a wrapped gift,
But as the raw,
Naked sun
Opening its glazed eyes
To an ungrateful earth
And then lumbering,
As I do,
Across the slow
arch of another day.
February 20, 2011
Another School of Thought
“You know, John, there’s another school of thought.”
I always loved that phrase, “another school of thought.” It seems less hostile, less likely to deteriorate into a conflict-driven debate. Especially, if the sentence comes from a close friend. It is even more poignant when the discussion is about religion.
I grew up in a very Catholic environment. In fact, my entire education was in Catholic schools—elementary, high school, and college. Unlike some of my friends, the experience, in general, I found rewarding and nurturing. I truly admired the clergy-in-the-trenches who taught me what it meant to live in the world of “service.” It has made a marked difference in my life. Continue reading
Poem, “My Right Hand’s Response”
I am, you know,
The elder child,
Having refused
A long time ago,
To abdicate my duty
To protect my sweet
Owner’s assets
Against the lithe advances
Of the puerile sibling
Who would own
Father’s prickly advances
When he stole a
Luscious red apple
Or touched Mrs Garrison’s
Unattended breasts
On any day in August
When she floated naked
On her supple back
In the blue-tiled
Condo pool.
1st poem of 2010
Poem, “Always a Bridesmaid”
I was told by the orthopedist
That I would eventually
(Read inevitably)
Favor my left hand
If I didn’t have surgery.
I never knew enough
About my left hand
To give it a monarch’s
Supremacy or even
A gilded moment.
Nor could I say
That I would have doubts
About its latent competence
Against a hearty sibling,
The self-assured strutter
Among the unelect,
Not ill-favored, exactly,
But just not chosen,
Over weary time,
To lift the lids
Of the hottest
Teeming pots
Poem, “Last Call”
It was four in the morning
When he called his friend.
Bending over the phone booth
With five quarters in his hand,
He wanted to be rescued
One more time, to hold his hand
Pouring the scotch down the drain.
For one brief moment
He remembered his mother
Talking about the first night
They brought him home
When he was born.
She had stayed up all night
Listening to every spastic gasp,
Every rustle and creak of the crib
The chiming hours of the clock.
Mortality followed him
Again,
In the languor of women’s hips
The slow ticking of the cabs,
Pigeon feet on city sidewalks
The wet air of the August night,
And the sour
smell of levis
Clinging
to
his
thighs
Poem, “I wait”
I’ve been told to be patient
Among the shards
Of my quick pulses
And galloping thoughts.
Not having been trained
To covet silences,
I am drawn to
To wistful spectacles,
And unbridled words
That leap into the grainy
Alleys of snoring dogs
And uncluttered nurseries
As I uncork the raving chaos
Of all my loud urgings
Wanting to dazzle,
But fearing, after all,
The ancient reprisals
From those who would
Grudgingly prefer
To sit turtle-still
Poem, “Fear”
Can’t say I’ve
Sequestered myself
In more than three
Or maybe four
Caves of fear.
But lately, outwardly mute,
I’ve been mind-pacing
In my bed like
A frenzied rabbit
Hemorrhaging all kinds
Strained possibilities,
As I hang from a cliff,
Naked to the burly,
Hissing caps of
Wind-driven waves
Waiting carelessly to
Swallow me whole.
Poem, “I am Old”
I am old
In my brief certainties,
Destined to short debates
And blemished toilets,
Once brazenly clean.
I am a one-pair-of-shoes guy
With lazy underwear,
Two missing combs,
Ivy-growing nose hairs,
Mounds of pills in orange tubes,
Toe nails hard as turtle shells.
My ties are too wide.
I cough at movies.
My body slides out of chairs,
Reluctantly. My pen hesitates.
Headlines will do for today.
Television shadows invade
My bedroom.
My mind wanders
Into my father’s garden
Or into the basement
As I hear his fingers
Rattling through
His tool box.
Poem, “A Boy with Huntington’s”
I was afraid for you
As you twisted your face
With your cupped hands,
Your right foot jabbing
The unsuspecting wall.
Arguing with the opposing day,
You said your dervish prayers
To Shiva of the dancing arms
To stay your frantic legs
And thighs buzzing like bees
In a lidded jar
How would I hold you
In sweet contentment?
After, in your feathery calm,
You were like a lazy lizard
Sleeping on drift wood
Or a string snapped from a shoe
Laying limp on a wood floor
Too tired to talk
As you gazed into the
Summer glaze of daffodils
And castles along the Hudson River,
Watching impish, howling cats
And two spastic squirrels
Darting across telephone lines,
One running from love.
Our Descents into Hell
During my active alcoholic/addiction days, I vividly remember believing that if I descended into the booze enough, I would somehow come out car-wash clean. My repressions would be lifted. I could be my real self. I wouldn’t have to hide. I would be diamond-cut perfect. And, of course, I would have a winning style and personality.
What is it about this “descent” thing? Dante certainly believed it. Buddha had to go through his moments with his demons. Christ had his Gethsemane and his desert temptations. And soldiers have their foxholes.
No pain, no gain, as the saying goes. Continue reading
Multiculturalism
In his recent controversial Munich Multiculturalism speech, UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, called for a “muscular liberalism” in the face of what he refers to as state-supported multiculturalism.
According to the Prime Minister, multiculturalism, as it exists in what he considers to be its segregated form, is the disease; complete assimilation, of course, is the cure. Continue reading
Male Role Models
I grew up in the 1950s. Men were considered “real men” if they were either the strong silent type or the tough, “you-talkin’-to-me?” street type with their ducks-ass hair style and pack of Lucky Strikes rolled up inside their short t-shirt sleeve.
These “real men” played sports and avoided the arts; loved manual labor and hated desk jobs; were hard drinkers; drove stick shift; and dodged commitments, especially marriage (“tying the noose,” we called it), until the 11th hour, after a brief courtship of prom night, drive-ins, street dances, roller rinks, a summer at the beach, and making out in the balcony back row at a movie theater.
A “man in a uniform,” fresh from active duty, always had the upper hand on the street. Women, of my generation, loved a guy in a uniform.
Television, of course, had another narrative of the male ideal. Ozzie Nelson, of “Ozzie and Harriet” fame, was presented to us as the classic suburban husband and father in his button-down white shirts and tie-clipped thin ties. Reticent to a fault, even in his wry humor, he was always pathetically even tempered. Continue reading
Teaching History and Culture through Film
When I retired from college teaching many years ago, I had become radicalized by my experiences with teaching International film and culture and African-American Literature.
Both courses led me to my belief that “story” is an essential ingredient in teaching students how to understand another culture. Once a student can identify with a person in a story, once they can follow a fictional narrative of a person’s life and conflicts, they are more apt to “identify”with that person, to humanize them. Continue reading
South Beach, Mannikins and 20% off
I recently went to South Beach, Florida, to escape the gray, wintry skies of Buffalo, New York, my home town (I am reminded of those skies, as I sit here today, listening to a neighbor frantically scraping the ice off his car windows).
South Beach. I had no clue what to expect, other than a few friends who hesitated when I told them I was going there. Apparently, they knew more about the place than I did. I should have listened. Continue reading
Senior-Citizen Fear, the Center Cannot Hold
I have these recurring variations of the same dream. I am running down a school corridor, desperately trying to find my next class or I am in front of a class that is paying no attention to me. In yet another panic-dream, I am a substitute teacher in a Chemistry class (I was an English teacher).
And then there’s the dream where I constantly punch in the wrong phone number of someone I am frantically trying to call or I am darting through mazes of streets trying to find a relative’s apartment. Continue reading
“Mademoiselle Chambon” The Isolated Drifter
I grew up in the 50s when the average man was traditionally stereotyped as the guy who was always running away from the gal who wanted to lasso him into the corral of a home, a basement, a lawn, a mortgage, two kids, a picket fence, a garage with an electric garage-door opener.
The “ball-and-chain” metaphor often drove the narrative of male fears that they would be “tied-down” for life, that their “salad days” of wine, women, and song would come to a swift and inevitable end at the marriage altar. (The culture I grew up in just assumed, by the way, that, except for nuns who were the virginal “brides of Christ,”all women wanted to be married; the men, on the other hand, were often seen as the great “procrastinators.”) Continue reading
“Eat, Pray, Love” and the Company of Men
The central character in the movie, “Eat, Pray, Love,” is a thirty-something woman who breaks up with her husband and goes on a global journey in order to rediscover her passion for living.
She travels to Italy and has an orgiastic love affair with pasta and pizza while bonding with what we can only assume is a typical community of Italians who love their food and wine and lead rich, full extended-family lives with their significant others.
On the more spiritual side, she connects with a shaman and eventually does a retreat at an ashram in India.
On the final leg of her self-awareness voyage, she ends up on the island of Bali and finds the love-of-her-life, a Brazilian expatriate.
The message in all of these wanderings is that no woman can be complete without a man. The movie is replete with men who seem to hover around the central character like stray animals looking for a place to crash—a husband who can’t decide what he wants to be when he grows up; a young new-age, sexually pliant actor whose cuteness would make any adult woman’s teeth ache; an Italian teacher looking more like a forlorn Gucci model, five-o’clock-shadow-and-all; a disgruntled Texan and father-figure who exposes his vulnerability to the central character by telling her his story of coming home drunk and almost running over his child; and, finally, an emotionally wounded widower now ready and willing to settle down into a happily-ever-after relationship (the movie makes it quite clear that both he and the central character have gone through their own baptisms of fire—he, as a widower, and she, as a rite-of-passage world traveler sufficiently enriched by pasta and a short-lived stay in an ashram).
I realize that the central character in “Eat, Pray, Love” has no grand pretensions to make her mark on the world. Her psychological cosmos is quite small in spite of traveling to Italy, India, and Bali to reignite her passion for living.
However, the self-awareness journey she takes feels more like a mix of a bourgeois global tour and a prom-queen’s fast-forward speed-dating exercise.
And the film is quite blatant in its didactic message that men, all men, are essential ingredients to her journey—a dreamy, irresponsible husband; a care-taking divorcé; a parody-of-himself shaman; a hunky Italian teacher; and a widower who has had his own life’s tragedies. As the old song goes, “It’s raining men” all the time in her life, and I mean all the time.
Some of the men may be in the shadows as she tries to reorient herself to being single, but Hollywood is not about to let the ghosts of male availability out of the central character’s reach, even though she is supposed to be on a self-awareness journey without any intimate entanglements.
The company of men, in itself, doesn’t necessarily have to be a deterrent to her journey. However, the constant potential they have to either have an intimate relationship with her or to be a permanent codependent caretaker for her spiritual and grown-up needs tends to diminish her own strength as a character in the movie.
Her final surrender to Mr Right, the Brazilian expatriate, is not so much an agonizing acquiescence after a hard-fought soul-searching battle to find herself; it is more an adolescent girl’s surrender to the guy who just happens to be at the end of the queue, the default guy after Hollywood ran out of available male options.
“Black Swan,” Images and Prototypes of Women
This is Part I of a two-part series on Images of Women in Western Culture. This first blog post will look at the current movie, “Black Swan,” through the lens of women’s many images and prototypes in Western Culture. Part II will continue the same theme but focusing on the movie, “Eat, Pray, Love” and the image of a woman on a spiritual/self-knowledge journey).
In two recent Hollywood movies, “Black Swan” and “Eat, Pray, Love,” moviegoers have been presented with two more celluloid peaks at different images and prototypes of women.
In “Black Swan,” we have a shy, self-conscience, self-deprecating, and certainly virginal ballerina who yearns to be the “perfect” swan in a performance of “Swan Lake.” In her own personal life, Nina, the central character and wanna-be prima ballerina, lacks even a vicarious connection to the seductive wiles required of her as the black swan in the same narrative. Continue reading
The Chronic Expert and Advice-Giver
“My ten year-old spends too much time on computer games.”
“Well, what you need to do is to ration his time. If he goes over the limit, you reduce the appropriate time on his next session. That’s what I do.”
Now, keep in mind, this might be the advice of your best friend, someone you have known for most of your adult life. You want to keep the friendship, but you know that your friend loves to give advice, to seep into the quagmires of your marital problems, to find just the right herb or vitamin for your rash, to come up with “just the recipe” for your Thanksgiving dinner. Continue reading
Book Review: Let The Great World Spin
Let The Great World Spin
Colum McCann
Random House, 2009
368pp
Except for a brief time in Dublin, McCann’s setting for this novel is in New York City during the Vietnam/Nixon-resignation years. And what a city it is: artists, clergy, prostitutes, judges, black/white/latino/Irish, computer geeks and hackers, street magicians—a veritable urban dream world.
McCann uses the famous event of the French tightroper walker and brilliantly fictionalizes it back into existence. It is the event that often grounds the novel (I would have to say that that event loses its force in the last two chapters when Tillie and Jaslyn narrate). Continue reading
Desire
Buddhists tell us that desire and craving keep the wheel of samsara (suffering, the threat of mortality, the cycle of fight/flight, emotional/physical pain) in constant motion.
And desire can be both the cause and effect of suffering. As a cause, it can lead us into more suffering. As an effect, it can drive us away from suffering in the same way that we can dive into momentary pleasure to avoid pain. Continue reading
Time, the Measure of Our Days
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that Americans love instant solutions. Chris Prentiss, in a television ad promoting his book, The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure, does not claim outright that a cure for alcoholism can be acquired immediately. But there is no doubt that he views recovery as much less than a life-time endeavor. And there is little doubt that he views recovery within some kind of time-frame in which all the recovery/cure process will take place.
For all intents and purposes, once the cure process begins and the client surrenders to Prentiss’s approach, there will come a time when the addiction will be in complete remission (make no mistake about Prentiss’s model here; his time-frame for a cure is quite finite).
Prentiss’s how-to-reach-the-finish line approach is very similar to the world of television ads about instantaneous cures from headaches to menstrual cramps. The entire subtext of these pharmaceutical ads is all about the finishing line, the immediate conquest. Continue reading
Liberalism, Alive and Well
Conservatives like to malign liberals as naïve adolescents, big spenders, pot-smoking pacifists, tree-huggers, moral relativists, Marxists, and worshipers of big government. They also like to think that liberals would rather write to a criminal in Attica than offer public sympathy to a rape victim.
There you have it folks. We're the bad-guy liberals. We are profligate. We are undisciplined. We love to be taxed. We don't like guns. We hate religion. We would rather date a Mexican. We love to run other people's lives from some Kafkaesque, bureaucratic big-government agency. We want every home in America to have solar panels. We despise war. We want to have an equal number of non-Caucasians and Caucasians in all of our elementary schools and high schools. We think men should stop being gynecologists. We want to annihilate all embryos. We love to fantasize about just when fish started growing the two legs Adam and Eve eventually sprouted. Continue reading
A Christian by Heritage
I grew up in a Christian tradition. My education, all the way up to my Master’s Degree, was at Catholic institutions. I was steeped in Catholic liturgy, studied for the priesthood, wanted to become a Trappist monk.
Even though I have formally left the Catholic Church and its theistic tradition, I still think of myself as a cultural Christian—I discuss Christianity, I participate in dialogues about Catholicism, I make references to classical Christian music, I often refer to the role of Christianity in Western history. I do all of this with the inherited legitimacy of an insider.
I say all of this by way of an introduction to prepare my readers for the voice I purposely take on in this essay. It is the voice of a very secular “Mother Jones” writer who sees himself as a guerilla-journalist camping out in the hills of a very foreign institution.
I must also make it very clear that, when I question some of the outdated theology and dogmas of the Catholic Church, I do so as someone still culturally and intellectually connected to my Catholic heritage, even though I have officially left the Church. I also think it is important for my readers to know that I continue to be positively affected by so many of the nurturing and loving clerical servants within the Catholic Church who taught me so much about the need for self-examination and service. These humble and poorly-paid servants will always be in my heart. Continue reading
Soldiers Returning From Iraq
They had learned
From desert stars
That nothing matters.
Now they are asked
By ancient mothers
Trained in doubt,
To turn their heads
From the arbitrary dark,
Once dripping in shadows
And fresh blood,
To turn towards
Unsuspecting love,
The dusty marriage-vow world,
Before the clanking war
Danced its death-beats
Against the sifted ground
Of mangled bodies
Like slim, pale puppets.
September 13, 2010
Infinities by John Banville
Infinities
John Banville
Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
273 pp
“….the gods love to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others.” So says the novel’s narrator and mythological character, Hermes, son of Zeus and Maia, the cave woman.
If we’ve forgotten our mythology 101, Hermes is also the messenger. And does he have a story to tell, a very modern story about ordinary human interactions and relationships and a story in the ancient classical tradition about love, larger-than-life genius, death, destiny, unrequited love. Continue reading
Resentments
A few days ago, I was tail-gated by a woman in an SUV. As I looked at her face through the rear-view mirror, I could see the I-wanna-get-there-now look—squinting deep-set brown eyes glaring straight ahead, fingers of both hands gripping the left and right curves of the wheel, jaw jutting forward like the prow of a racing yacht, her entire face angled to the right as she appeared to bite off a thin slice of skin from the inside corner of her lower lip.
In that jet-stream moment, as I approached the red light, I was ready. My thoughts shifted into first, the power gear. She’s gonna slide into the inside lane. She’s gonna rev her monster tank-of-a-gas-guzzler. She’s gonna roll down her window for the duel, pin her hair back, tighten her seat belt, light a cigarette. Continue reading
Anti-Big-Government Movement in America
(I would ask my readers to please keep in mind that my analysis of the anti-big-government movement in the U.S. is only an analysis. In general, I do not reach the same conclusions that many of these sometimes disparate anti-big-government groups come to).
In a densely-packed essay in The Nation, Eric Alterman outlined his reasons why Obama and the Dems will never be able to get an untainted progressive agenda through the hollowed halls of Congress.
Alterman sees the problem as structurally rigged against such any progressive agenda: the media-controlled narratives; the filibuster threat; the supermajority rule; the ability of any one Senator to put a “hold” on legislation; the corporate/lobbyist money running Washington and now the media with a recent Supreme Court decision. Continue reading
Trust
I remember the day. It was fifteen years ago. I was standing outside my father’s apartment. We were engaged in a conversation about Mary, my stepmother, who had just been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
My dad made a vain attempt at telling me that he wasn’t bothered by my stepmother’s inability to travel. I didn’t believe him. Continue reading
One Man’s Odyssey
Many of my friends are believers. They have faith in a personal, creationist God. They go to Church regularly. They have families who wed and die in these churches. And they see this life as a preparation for an eternal one. Some believe that only a select few will reap the benefits of their good lives. Others believe that everybody will have a shot at it.
Their deep faiths continue to nurture me, even though I have gently moved away from all theistic traditions. Continue reading
“Big Machine” by Victor LaValle
Big Machine
Victor LaValle
Spiegel & Grau Trade Paperbacks
New York, 2010
370 pp
In all of the reviewing I have done over the years, I don’t ever recall using a statement from an author’s acknowledgment page.
When I read the last paragraph and then went back to look at the last page of the narrative itself, there appeared to be some covert, even tendentious wrapping up, some moral statement LaValle seemed to be making in this part allegory, part fantasy, part gothic, part magic-realism, part gruesome, grim-reality novel. Continue reading
Addiction, Another World
(This is another blog post on addiction and may help non-addicts understand the many-layered world of addiction, a world I once inhabited and continue to recover from. Because addiction is an equal-opportunity emotional and physical derailment, I purposely shift between the pronouns, “he” and “she” to avoid the impression that men have a monopoly on the world of addiction).
My drug of choice was booze. But the behavior and emotional patterns I exhibited could apply to all addicts. Each addiction obviously has its own uniqueness, but, in working with cross-addicted individuals, I have found many of the emotional and psychological traits to be the same. Continue reading
Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke’s films are never easy to watch. I believe it would be safe to say the Haneke tends to assault his viewers out of their complacencies.
If you like your films to have a soft-edged, feel-good resolution, you should definitely save your ten bucks—twenty-five with popcorn and a beverage– and wait for Hollywood’s romantic-comedy summer fare.
Haneke is not your man.
That said, let me begin by saying that “The White Ribbon,” Haneke’s latest, is a tour de force. It is no wonder that Cannes gave the film its prestigious Palme d’Or award. It was well-deserved Continue reading
Overconfidence
Imagine, for a moment, that you are overhearing a male neurotic narrator talking about his steamroller overconfidence. You are the listener and observer. Feel free at any time to interrupt him, to offer him advice, or, if you are willing, to identify with him. Be patient with him; he does manage to offer himself some gentle alternatives.
When I am overconfident and manically attached to an idea, a process, a value, or an opinion, I often don’t expend any time on allowing myself to settle back and let the world in. I am on a mission. I know what I’m about. I am convinced that a mere stream of ideas will purge the demons, settle the dust of my confusion. Continue reading
Book Review: The White Tiger
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
HarperCollins, 2009
321 pp
“Sweet-maker…that’s my caste, my destiny,” says the protagonist, Balram Halwai, in Aravind Adiga’s novel, “White Tiger.” Another character in the novel asks the question, “Do you think sweet-makers can manage fourth gear?”
Western readers are not used to reading about castes, an historically rigid class system in India for centuries. Historians tell us, however, that in urban India, the caste system is breaking down, even though it remains entrenched in rural India. Continue reading
India, Land of Contradictions
Before I began reading “White Tiger” and V.S. Naipul’s “India: A Wounded Civilization,” I had developed several stark stereotypes of the country.
As Buddha’s birthplace, India had become mythologized for me as a culture steeped in self-examination, the interior life, meditation, and the renunciation of the material world.
Gandhi was the other part of the jig-saw puzzle; he fit quite naturally into my notion of India as the golden land of serenity, inner peace, and wise teachers. Although he raised consciousness to more political, social-justice levels, I continue to imagine Gandhi as this austere, simple, reflective man who never raised his voice, meditated daily, and led quiet passive-resistance demonstrations for social equality, Indian independence, the end of English colonial rule, and reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims. Continue reading
Man of My Dreams
The mottled crowd
Had refused to interrupt
My slowly raised head,
Feeling, as I did,
Like a dazed bird
Rushing from an
Aging falcon.
I crawled up the stairs,
Stopping to rest
My right arm on
The damp concrete
As I lifted the strands
Of my hair,
Imagining, for a moment,
A daffodil-of-an-Austrian
Prince leaning over
My shoulder with his
Soft cottony breath,
Mint-green eyes,
And long fingers.
“Sorry,” I paused,
“I’m not here.”
He left without
A word.
Addiction’s Curse: Not Being Present
Woody Allen once said that whenever he was somewhere, he always wanted to be somewhere else.
We are never satisfied, it seems, to be where we are. There is always some other goal to attain, some other fantasy to fulfill, some other dessert we haven’t tried.
I say that to all my twitter friends because right now I would rather be conversing with all of you. But today I must engage myself in the beautiful discipline of expression, to dip my feet into the pool of some thoughts I have been having about my own addiction (alcohol was the addiction of my choice). Continue reading
Patriotism
I am not willing to go far as to say freedom is the last refuge of the scoundrel. But Tea Party patriots often make me feel as if my own patriotism can never possibly match the depths of their own brand of flag-waving and highly demonstrative calls for pledges of allegiance. I am not and have never been a flag-waving patriot constantly in need of some kind of pre-game national anthem ringing in my ears. And, in all honesty, I have never liked parades ushered in by all of our veterans, an iconic display that continues to narrow the frame of patriotism to war and a physical defense of our country.
My love of this country, however, comes from a different source—its artists, its writers, its musicians, its thinkers. When our country was attacked on September 11, 2001, my soul sank. Here was a country of Walt Whitman, August Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and Aaron Copland that had been knocked on its ass by a group of religious fanatics who had no clue of the range and depth of America’s soul. Continue reading
Louise Erdrich’s Novel, Shadow Tag
Shadow Tag
Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins, 2010
255 pp
Reading theorists have told us many times that readers take an active part in creating the very narratives they’re reading. A text is not static, no matter what the intention of the writer. Once the story goes out there, we, as readers, begin a kind of paint-by-numbers process of reinventing the narrative to fit our psyches. The broad outline of the story is there, but we color in the personal textures to suit ourselves.
Louise Erdrich’s novel, Shadow Tag, certainly opened up my own politically-correct notions of what I want to read or see in a fictional work about another culture. It continues to be difficult for me to shift out of a rather rigid belief that indigenous cultures should exist in this rarified world of innocence, that they should not accomodate themselves, in any way, to a dominant, sometimes oppressive culture—Japanese art should be pure “Japanese”; Chinese literature should be untainted by Western values; Indian film should always be driven by the country’s Hindu heritage.
Although I have evolved to having made my own accomodations, I find myself sometimes becoming a kind of politically-correct tourist who doesn’t want any ancient culture to change. I am sometimes particularly hard on writers and artists who produce assimilationist works, hybrids that have their sensibilities in two cultures. Continue reading
Christianity and Mammon
I grew up in a religion that preached “poverty of spirit.” It was a high-church Christian religion with lots of rituals, pomp, icons, and incense. As a child and an adolescent, I was told that poverty existed on a higher, more spiritual plain than wealth because, if I were poor, I would not be distracted by the material world.
I was taught, in no uncertain terms, that just as it would be impossible for a camel to thread its way through the eye of a needle, that it would be a cold day in hell before a wealthy person would ever enjoy eternal bliss. From that small kernel of a moral presumption, I learned to be suspicious of wealth and to pursue “higher,” more spiritual goals. I saw no contradiction between the poverty message and the comfortable, sometimes extravagant lives of the male messengers. Continue reading
Bliss, Honor Killing, and Turkish Cinema
Those of us who are cultural-diversity followers continue to be intrigued by the global verbal battle going on between the conservatives on both sides of the “which-culture-is-superior”topic.
In the West, the Berlusconi followers continue to rant and rave about the superiority of Western Civilization. On the other hand, Islamic fundamentalists and militant jihadists believe that the infidel West is going to hell in a hand basket. Both sides have reduced their enemies to demonized objects. Continue reading
Alice Munro, “Too Much Happiness”
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
304pp
Alice Munro is one of those rare literary icons who has the distinct reputation as a crossover writer. She is admired by academics for her literary sensibilities, the mainstream for her easy-to-identify-with characters, and fiction writers who continue to be amazed at her ability to construct a strong story out of what Hollywood would consider to be the uneventful and ordinary—an impossible judgment to be made after reading “Free Radicals” and “Dimensions” in Munro’s latest collection, Too Much Happiness. Continue reading
Tea Party Patriots, Part II
In my last blog essay, I attempted to unravel the many complaints of the Tea Party followers. Three issues, however, seem to stick in the craw of those who believe in their heart of hearts that America is on the road to self-destruction: (1) The continuing loss of freedom because of big government and what appears to the Tea Party followers as a move towards socialism, the inevitable political paradigm that will only exacerbate that continuing loss of freedom (2) The desire to return to a golden age of a true America (3) The end of Patriotism in America Continue reading
Tea-Party Patriots (Part I)
Patriotic fervor takes many roads these days. Now there is a new highway entrance for the disgruntled and the angry in America. They are the new-and-allegedly-improved original tea-party patriots of America’s legendary Boston Tea Party.
If there is a bonding message among the Tea Party followers, it is simply that they are not being heard by their politicians.
And their messages are seamless streams of rage that have become the sound-bites of this new generation of discontented: “it’s up to the people to take back the government”; “we rule the government”; “people are fed up with the government that won’t listen to them anymore”; “government crap”; “I just want my government back”; “people should keep as much of their own taxes as possible”; “government should stay out of the car and banking business”; “pull the plug on Wall Street”; “screaming at my tv”; “I had to do something out of frustration”; “they don’t have a clue.” Continue reading
Teenager’s First Date
Showing up on time
Is the easy part.
The dashboard of
My rented car
Free of dust,
Wax-clean,
Vacuumed carpets
And a lemon smelling
Tag dangling from
The rear view mirror.
One more look
In the sun-visor
Mirror, an angled glance
At the straggly sideburns.
Fly firmly zipped.
Spitting on my closed
Index fingers,
I drag them along
The creases of
My black pants.
I pull out a hanky,
And shoe-shine the tips
Of my eager shoes.
Gently tugging
The bottom of my red tie,
I firmly wrestle
With the knot
To shield the
Top button from
Strangers looking
For flaws.
I open my sport coat,
Lowering my head
Into the dark corners
Of both arm pits.
I turn off the
Impatient ignition,
Open the door,
And look up at
The scoop of a moon
Glancing down at
Familiarity.
Forgiveness
I grew up in a religion in which confession was a weekly ritual. As I child, I remember standing in line outside the confessional waiting anxiously for my turn to go into a dark private room and begin with the words, “bless me father, for I have sinned.” Then I would recite my litany of sins, both venial (minor-league stuff) and mortal (big time, major-league material that could land you in Hell for all eternity).
For an eight-year-old, mortal sins were deliciously angst-ridden. I remember agonizing over these epic sins that went beyond the vague, clumsy and occasional “impure thoughts” into the realm of a touch or two, or those times when I would just linger in the corridors of fantasy (I was the youngest of four boys and the inevitable “girly” magazines would end up under somebody’s mattress).
Health Insurance, a Crapshoot
Nothing in life is certain, as the saying goes, except death and taxes. We live in a world of profound arbitrariness. No one has any control of where they’re going to be born, what kind of parents they’re going to have, and what economic and social status they’re going to born into. We don’t come into our lives with a warranty even if our parents are wealthy and live in the Hamptons. Life, in general, has an arbitrariness that few teleologists are comfortable with.
When it comes to Health Insurance in America, the crapshoot world of arbitrariness becomes even more transparent. If you just happen to be employed by an employer who pays 60% of your premiums, you’re one of the chosen. If your employer pays the deductible, then you’re one among the few. If you just happen to have a health-insurance policy that has dental, you are definitely in a minority, unless you’re willing and can afford to add dental to your basic coverage. And if you can afford a gold-plated policy with all of the medical amenities,including face-lifts, then you are, indeed, among the rich-and-famous.
Health Insurance and the Profit Motive
(The next two blog entries I will be posting consist of a two-part series about the American Health Insurance crisis. In the first essay, I discuss the Health Care industry in the U.S. as a profit-driven corporation. In the second essay, I will be looking at privatized Health Insurance as a crap-shoot)
Before I begin this attempt at getting my mind around the issue of Health Care in America, let me preface my remarks by thanking Ann from Baltimore who has promised to intervene on my twitter messages when I become too obsessed and frantic about the state of private Health Insurance in America.
To those who have not heard of Ann from @annq, check her twitter venue out. She’s my steady force of calmness in the sometimes frenetic world of cyberspace. Love you, my dear.
Now, Let’s play ball.
Surrender
Before I started to write an essay on surrender, I went to my twitter page and tried to send another one of my many “What are you doing” twitter messages. Up popped a mysteriously serious black-and-white message, “HTTP Server Error 503.” I was back in Kafka land, the world of high-tech jargon, a cosmos that leaves old-timers like me speechless and cantankerous.
By doing some google research, I found out that my provider (whatever that means) is allegedly “working on the problem,” but that I should expect a delay. Given the fact that I have no clue about providers, I was forced to surrender to the land of technological obscurity (And, by the way, I’m from New England: I’m a guy who doesn’t like to be “beholdin’,” especially to some invisible “provider”).
After experiencing this mixed curse of temporary high-tech impotence, I felt gently nudged to start writing my essay for a twitter-friend in Vancouver. So here I am, my initial procrastination morphing into foxhole surrender.
Senior Citizens
In economic hard times and an ever changing economy, older Americans are becoming increasingly paranoid about being let go or bought out by their employers—for the sake of raising the bar, let’s just call it the Willy Loman syndrome
Older full-time employees are often a high needs group in spite of the experience they bring to a workplace. Our salaries are often at the prime-rib level, our equity loans more numerous to pay for children’s colleges, our medical needs more extensive and expensive than they were when we were in our twenties.
Self-Discovery Journeys
Because I was well into my adulthood before I began to figure out who I am, it is difficult for me to see where the desire to know about myself could ever be a bad thing. The self-knowledge journey continues and, I hope, will be with me for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, there are those who would probably stereotype me as an effete, self-indulgent dilettante wandering around the ring of shamans and spiritual teachers, decadently immersed in questions rather than answers.
Lorrie Moore, “A Gate at the Stairs”
It is difficult to write a review of a novel that has significant events that cannot be revealed without destroying the tension of those events. In the same vein, Internet film reviews often caution their readers that the review contains spoiler information that gives away key plot information.
Socialism, Capitalism, Capitalocialism
In the recent controversy over Health Insurance, it occurred to me that I remain an incorrigible Jekyll-and-Hyde when it comes to public services. On the one hand, I want my roads to be fixed, my DMV to have short lines, my Social Security Office to answer its phone. On the other hand, I complain every time an interstate highway toll is increased or when my real estate taxes go up.
In the same way, now that I’m on Medicare, I want to be assured that my doctors (for the most part, specialists required for old birds like me) will give me the same care I had when my private insurance was my primary insurance. As one of the lucky ones who got under the wire because of my age, being born at the right time, and choosing the right career, my drug copays are chump change in contrast to what I would have had to pay out of my pocket—$7,000-a-year—if I didn’t have my private insurance drug plan. Medicare Plan D? No thank you.
Friendship, A Transformational Narrative
Sociologists have given us pretty accurate stats about the majority of us marrying or having intimate relationships, endogamously—that is, inside of our class, race, religion, and/or economic status. Exogamy is the exception, not the rule. Even if we know someone from another culture in the workplace, most of us still go home to our homogeneous and segregated communities.
The notion of marrying or living inside one’s own heritage and culture was constantly reinforced when I was growing up in the 1950s, an era that was in denial about how deep the racial and ethnic divides actually were.
Alcoholism and Free Choice
I was listening to an NPR program, “On Point,” the other day and a writer was being interviewed about his book in which he claims that alcoholism is not a disease but an ism of choice.
I don’t believe there are too many recovering addicts or alcoholics who would give themselves over to the generalized assertion that all you have to do is “will” yourself into sobriety. Those of us who have been in the rooms for a while would not deceive ourselves into the naïve belief that one’s individual will can unilaterally “conquer” or defeat the enemy of addiction.
Roberto Bolaño, “By Night in Chile”
I jokingly made the comment to a friend of mine that English majors, like myself, seem to revel in literature that’s hard to get the first time round. That doesn’t mean second readings don’t enhance our understanding of a work. It’s just that we sometimes distrust our I-get-it reactions as being superficial because they’re too immediate. For some reason, we seem to require wallowing around in the miasma of linguistic challenges.
Maybe it’s masochism or maybe we just have to prove to the world that we have some kind of secret knowledge of texts that are just beyond the ken of most mortals. And “stream of consciousness” writing is often one of our favorite genres. Similar to academic art theorists commenting on abstract painting, it leaves us ample room to show others just how brilliant we are when the rest of the world doesn’t have a clue what the hell we’re talking about.
Assisted Suicide
I recently read a very touching story of an English couple who had gone to an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland to end their lives together. The wife, in her seventies, was a television producer, choreographer, and former ballerina. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her ailing, eighty-five year old husband, was a former BBC conductor and Verdi specialist.
Sir Edward Downes and his wife, Joan, both agreed to terminate their lives at the Dignitas clinic outside of Zurich. Members of their family were at the bedside of the couple and watched the elderly couple eventually die.
Che Guevara, Hero or Villain?
A biopic, a non-documentary film that dramatizes the life of a real, historical person, presents a challenge not only to film-makers but to audiences as well. Accuracy issues are always at stake when a director decides to do a dramatic narrative about a famous person, particularly about someone who carries a lot of mythological baggage.
If movie audiences have even a faint knowledge of the historical character, they will come armed with predisposed beliefs about how a character should be portrayed. Hagiographers and groupies are going to be particularly difficult to convince if a film’s portrayal violates their own notions of their heroes.
Alcohol Rehabs versus Peer-Group Recovery
Over the many years that I have been in alcohol recovery, I still remain grateful that alcohol rehabs were available when I first chose to stop drinking. During the first year of my sobriety, I continued to go to an out-patient counselor whose professional experience proved to be invaluable.
However, around the last month of my first year as an out-patient, I began to sense a need for closure. My counselor also seemed to have run out of material, and I had sensed that his usefulness was beginning to become more frayed. It wasn’t that he had suddenly become an incompetent counselor; it was just that recovery issues for him were limited to the more immediate, day-to-day behaviors and relationships during that first year. He was not trained to deal with deeper, more chronic psychological/psychiatric issues.
The Bicycle Thief
Vittoria de Sica’s classic 1947 film, The Bicycle Thief, has probably been written about more than any other film in history. At one time, film audiences considered it to be the best film ever made; unfortunately, it has slipped off the charts in recent times.
I have longed maintained that films consistently use visual and auditory images as stories in and of themselves. They often become complementary social plots replete with cultural values and world-view perceptions. The central story line in many classic films becomes more than just ornamented with these visual and auditory images, it often becomes a kind of call-and-response complement to the less evident images of a film.
John Wray, “Lowboy”
Insanity as a literary theme has always had an audience—those ardent peeping-Toms who love to wallow around in somebody else’s mania. And there is something about the draw of a house fire or a mangled car on the Interstate that seeps into our indifference with the power of a jackhammer.
William Gass, Bards and Storytellers
In a recent Harper’s Magazine essay, “Go Forth and Falsify,” William Gass made the comment that a “storyteller’s assignment…was to glorify the past and its daring, protect the family tree, justify male ownership of land…” among other obligations.
It appeared at first glance that Gass had no aesthetic sympathy with the classic role of the “bard” telling what Gass calls “the first stories.” Nor did he seem to support the classic “storyteller’s assignment” in his laundry list of the teller’s obligations. In this sense, he was merely the messenger telling us what the old bard’s role and obligations used to be.
