Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Bullying

    I’ve been hesitant to write about this, because the tendency to indulge self pity creeps in around the edges.  But in the past year we’ve seen a rise in attention being paid to a great human tradition—bullying.

    A gay youth outed by his peers committed suicide.  Other gays under a microscope all over the country have found themselves driven to the edge.  National “movements” to deal with this problem have sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain.  The last time we witnessed this level of discussion about bullying was after a couple of disaffected youths murdered several of their peers at their high school and then took their own lives, leaving behind ample testaments that what had driven them to do this had been years of bullying.

    A recent episode of Glee dealt with the subject, the lone out gay boy in the school having come under the daily assault by an oversized pituitary case who, for no apparent reason, had decided to make life hell for the outsider.

    I suppose it was this episode that prompted me to write about this.  Because it indulged some pop psychology, which I stress is not baseless, to explain the bully’s behavior—he, too, was a closeted gay who hated himself for it.  The idea being that we hate that which we are which we cannot accept in ourselves.  Rather than deal with it  in ourselves, we direct the anger outward and target the reviled trait in others.  This, of course, has much to back it up.  Some of the most rabid Nazis in the Third Reich turned out to be deeply closeted Jews.

    In the most extreme cases, this passes as an explanation for bullying, and it has the charm of comforting most of us that, really, it is aberrant behavior, that the majority of us aren’t like that.

    Well.  Bullshit.

    Bullying is a set of behaviors a great many kids do indulge at some point.  Most grow out of it, some never do it, but to suggest that it is tied in all cases to some deep-rooted self-loathing overlooks the psychology of the playground at a fundamental level.  To see why this is true, you have only to ask two questions:

    One—if the vast majority of kids are not so afflicted and are not bullies, why doesn’t the majority stop the behavior in the one or two who indulge it?  It’s not like kids don’t come together in groups to control aberrant behavior in other ways.

    Two—if the vast majority of kids are not themselves bullies or at least in sympathy with the bully, why is the victim the one scorned and blamed for his or her state by everyone in the group?

    There’s an old term which seems to have fallen into disuse when applied to school yard behavior—pecking order.  Humans fall into hierarchical relations naturally.  One’s position in the group is determined by a wide range of traits and behaviors, but one thing is clear—no one wants to be on the bottom of the pecking order.  Those who are receive the fewest opportunities for positive interaction with the group.  To determine who the low-rung members are, tests are performed, and one of them has to do with ones ability to deal with the rough and tumble of school yard physical confrontations.  Bullies actually perform the function of policing the group to weed out the—to use a once-common term used in these situations—wusses.  The majority will allow the behavior to see how individuals cope and whether or not their reactions merit any kind of respect.  In this sense, bullying is a function of group dynamics.

    That’s the most value-free way I can describe it.  While the majority doesn’t actively encourage bullying, it does nothing to actively discourage it within the boundaries of a self-defined group.  If the behavior itself were utterly unacceptable, it could be quashed by numbers.  No bully is going to stand up five, six, or ten others banding together to end his (or her) behavior.  How can I say this?  Because bullies who cross from one group into another often are met with precisely this group response.

    I’ve seen this.

    Now, here’s the part where I have to be careful not get weepy about water long gone under several bridges.

    I was at the bottom of the hierarchy almost from the day I entered school until I went to high school.  Eight years of being bullied—consistently, spontaneously, at one time or another by just about every member of my class.  Why?  Because they could.

    Here is what the psychoanalysis seems always to miss, what perhaps we don’t want to acknowledge about Our Children.  Bullying is in its most common forms a power issue.  It’s kids flexing their muscles, lording it over others, testing boundaries, asserting dominance.  It doesn’t always appear to be bullying, because often it doesn’t take physical form, at least not the form of punching and kicking.  Often it can just be labeling and subsequent ostracization.  But the pay-off is in terms of power.  The bully gets off on it.  It is fun for them.  They are not doing this out of some hidden self-loathing—they like watching the victim cringe or cry, they like hearing the laughter of others who are watching, and they like the momentary mantle of superiority knocking someone down confers.

    The good news is, this is a phase that most grow out of.  The bad news is, because we don’t want to recognize the potential for any one of our kids to indulge this behavior, it doesn’t get dealt with except on the extreme level of pathological bullies, budding sociopaths who do have other issues.

    I was passed from one bully to another for eight years.  There were a couple who were consistent in their treatment of me, but in truth most of my classmates took a turn at teasing, taunting, and torturing that Tiedemann Kid who cried at the merest slap and couldn’t fight back.  Most of them only engaged in the mistreatment for a semester or even one entire school year, then it got old and they quit—but they never apologized and they never acknowledged they were wrong and they never did anything to stop it when someone else started in.

    I was a perpetual outsider all through school.  In high school I stayed aloof and developed an early reputation of someone who punched back, so it simply never started, but I was rarely part of the major groups.  In grade school, however, it was eight years of misery, knowing each day I was likely to be someone’s punching bag or the brunt of a joke everyone was in on.  I could catalogue the abuses, but I won’t.  Suffice it to say that none of my peers saw me as anything other than weird and because I was physically unable at the time to defend myself effectively I was the class target.  They enjoyed it.

    This is the salient fact of bullying that requires acknowledgment, because it plays into so much else that is simply accepted behavior in our society.    Let me give you one rather extreme example.

    President Obama recently award the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Salvadore Giunta, who risked his life to save others.  He is, in fact, the first survivor of the action for which he is receiving the medal in recent history—most MOH winners are deceased at the time of the award.  Brian Fischer, who is “director of issue analysis” for the American Family Association, has publicly condemned the award, claiming “We have feminized the Medal of Honor.”

    “So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?”

    The only way in which this makes sense to me, coming from a so-called Christian, is in the context of the school yard, where hierarchy is everything and status is based on the willingness to hurt and inflict damage in order to keep the identity of the group consistent and outsiders consistently out.  Mr. Fischer, whatever else he may be, is a bully, and those who agree with his sentiments are the rest of the class passively approving his behavior because no one wants to be associated with the wimp.

    Perhaps a stretch, but until we acknowledge that we reward and even expect such behavior even in our children—adults who tell their crying, hurt kids to “shrug it off” or “man up” and exhibit loss of respect for any child who can’t hold his or her own against arbitrary cruelty—we have little chance at dealing effectively with bullying and will have to live with “adult” manifestations of that mindset.  While there may well be some Darwinian advantage in the test of mettle involved, within the context of a society of laws it becomes a pressure cooker in which broken spirits and twisted psyches stew, waiting for a trigger that will unleash unexpected and unwanted reactions.

    So while I appreciate the attempt at the public level to rationalize the phenomenon of bullying,  I believe such depictions are beside the point.  The self-loathing-as-motive has traction with certain people, there is much to be said for it, but it side-steps the broader problem, which is that bullying is a normal part of the group dynamic through which we all move.  And understanding goes only so far.

    It is an unfortunate fact that bullying is most often stopped, at least on the individual level, with violence.  The day I finally belted a bully and knocked him to the floor was the day it all stopped.  All of it.  It was dramatic.  It was as if I had finally proven myself.  No one picked on me after that.

    Want to talk about self-loathing?

  • Artistic Purity and the Real World

    The writing world is a-buzz of late with the story about James Frey’s “new” marketing idea to rope writers into a contractual arrangement that makes indentured servitude look like an intern program over a summer between semesters.  The fact that some writers have actually signed these contracts is both telling and sad.  John Scalzi, over on Whatever, made the (radical!) suggestion that MFA programs (because the lion’s share of these hapless dupes come directly from them) teach a semester in the business of writing for part of the egregious sums colleges and universities charge for degrees.  This is a sensible suggestion.  In my experience, talking to writers from high school on up, one usually finds the attitude that writing is a holy calling and the business end of it is either not recognized or disdained as somehow sullying of the noble act.

    A rebuttal to Scalzi was published here by Elise Blackwell, director of the MFA program at the University of South Carolina, who claims that MFA programs are there to protect young writers, to give them breathing space so they can write without worrying about anything else.  That, in fact, MFA programs are about “literature” and not business.

    My personal reaction to this is: bullshit.  If you’re that concerned to coddle delicate artistic sensibilities, put the business semester in their last year, presumably when they’ve got what chops they’re going to get.  I can appreciate and sympathize with the belief that concerns over money can be deadly to creativity.  While working on the book, outside concerns not directly related to the art can distract and sometimes destroy the flow.  Desperation can be hugely debilitating.

    But sending someone out into the world of publishing unarmed almost guarantees years of exactly that kind of desperation.  The reason to be savvy about the business is so you can protect yourself over time, learn how to not be raped by people without MFAs but rather with MBAs whose job it is to get the work from you without paying you what it’s worth.  As they say, knowledge is power, and to defend a refusal to teach what is necessary at the place where such things naturally ought to be taught is questionable ethics at best, criminal neglect at worst.

    A lot of this comes down to the old dichotomy between Art (capital A) and Commerce.  Frankly, I think it’s a false dichotomy.  It’s a nonsense wall erected between two fields that are inextricably linked in the real world.  You want your art to be widely distributed, recognized, appreciate by many and, more importantly, survive your death?  Then you had better sell a lot of it.  Plant your meme in the social consciousness like a stake in the heart of a vampire (which is a more pertinent metaphor than you might at first imagine) and work that network for all it’s worth.  Nothing is guaranteed, so becoming a bestselling author does not automatically bring immortality (whatever that means), but it does mean you can continue to do what you presumably love to do.

    (Not even oblivion is guaranteed for not working the system.  The famous example—and, I think, a fatal one to bring up to young writers—is Moby Dick, which sold abominably by any standards and resulted in Herman Melville eventually giving up and working the rest of his life in a customs house, but the book somehow refused to die and is now heralded as a Great American Classic.  True, this can happen, but it didn’t get Melville anything he could use during his lifetime.)

    I sympathize with writers who turn their noses up at the business.  I hate it myself.  I want to write stories, not worry over spreadsheets and marketing campaigns.  I am not good at that end of it and we all play to our strengths when allowed.  But I have paid for my negligence.  Like it or not, the writers who do consistently well are those who promote, who understand contracts, who know how to say No to a bad deal, who work hard to get their books the best exposure, which means dealing with the business.  Many of them, true, have signed with agents or lawyers who dine regularly on the livers of publishers and distributors and who walk into the fray as part of their 15%.  But that doesn’t mean the writer shouldn’t know some of what’s going on.

    From time to time I have had conversation with students in MFA programs or who have been through them.  To be fair, most of them really had no long term desire to be a writer.  It faded.  One of the benefits of something like Clarion is that in short order you can find out if this is really what you want to do.  Not always, but it helps.  No doubt most people who enter MFA programs are sincere in their love of their chosen art, but that doesn’t always translate into career ambitions once the actual slog begins.  Still, you would think certain basic ideas would be common coin in environments purporting to teach a life skill.  I have always been dismayed by what these folks have not been taught, not least being the business end of the writing life.

    However, part of what I wanted to talk about here is this notion that somehow there is a vast chasm between true art and commercial fiction.  This is a post-Marxist critique of economics that has badly infected the academy.  In high school once I got into a heady argument with my art teacher (I only took one year of art) who extolled the brilliance of Van Gogh.  Now, I admit here I’m in a tiny minority in this, but frankly I’ve never seen that brilliance.  To me Van Gogh is on par with a…well, I find nothing to love in his work.  It strikes my eye as ugly.  Learning that his brother was unable to sell his canvasses during his lifetime leads me to believe that his contemporaries displayed more honest reactions than our hagiographic reappraisals of someone whose present fame did him no good while he was alive.  So, being the bigmouth I was (and still often am), I challenged that notion.  He asked who I considered a great artist.  “Norman Rockwell,” I said.  He sneered.  Of all the things he might have said that would have been educational on the topic of art itself, what he did say dismayed me then and angers me now.  “Rockwell is a capitalist.”

    Huh?  What does that have to do with his ability?

    I see now what he meant—that Rockwell’s concern with money led him to paint what the market wanted and not, possibly, what he wanted.  And by contrast that Van Gogh’s singular vision ignored what the market wanted so he produced only what his “singular vision” dictated.

    I think Van Gogh would have loved to have had half the popular success Norman Rockwell enjoyed.

    Either way, it’s a bullshit answer.  While we make the art in our heads, alone, in garret, hovel, basement, office, or studio, the other part, the thing that makes it whole, is its dissemination.  People have to see it, read it, hear it for it to complete itself.  The greatest artist in history may be a hermit on a mountain in central Asia, but no will ever know, nor will he/she because the Other Half doesn’t happen.

    Like it or not, we all do art with the public in mind, because it is the public—that vast country of human interaction and creation that we come from and live in—that feeds us the ideas, the inspirations, the causes, consequences, and catastrophes against which or with which we react.  That reaction prompts the impulse and the work of interpretation begins and we shape our vision of the stuff that world out there gives us.  If we do it well and true, it speaks back to that world.  To condemn that world in terms of commercialism is to miss the whole connection, ignore the cycle.

    It is also true that works wholly tailored to some momentary notion of What The Public Wants are almost always doomed to be ephemeral, often crass, betrayals of any higher value that might transcend trend and fad.

    So you work at it.  That what you do.  Find the truth in the thing and tell it (but tell it slant…)

    That in no way means you have to be ignorant of contracts.  On the contrary, if you want it Out There in the best way possible, you better know contracts very well.

    So to the MFA programs that insist on putting up that wall between the real world and the artist’s tender psyche—-get over it.  You’re handicapping your students, sending them out to be victims of the James Freys of the world.  Believe me, they are not ignorant.

  • Rubble

    There are several things in politics that I could write about.  I did post a screed yesterday over on Dangerous Intersection, so I think I’ll do something a bit more personal and, um, artistic here.  Of course, metaphorically, the theme sort of carries.  Ruin, rubble, the crumbling of ancient temples.  The overturned and broken remnants of an Aztec pyramid perhaps?

    aztec-rubble-copy.jpg

    It was fun to play with some of the values in this image, make it more epic than it already was.  Of course, this is nowhere near Mexico.  It’s an old, abandoned mine down in Bon Terre.  A Kodachrome original, though, and I must admit I’m still getting some of the best transfers from those.

    Back to rabid political screelings on another day.

  • Something More On The Bright Side

    All the negative crap will collect on the psyche after a while and bury you under cynicism, despair, anger, pessimism.  You just can’t let the beauty slip by, though.  Sometimes it’s the only thing that will keep you getting up in the morning.  Like this morning.

    morning-glory-2.jpg

  • Hallowe’en Is Over…Time To Clean Up

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  • Soulard Past

    Was a time I wandered around with a camera around my neck and acted like the “cool photojournalist” type.  Another aspect of “career” I never acted on in any serious way.

    Except the work.  I loved the work.  The images were all.  (I’d read about Alfred Eisenstadt walking away from his position at LIFE Magazine when a new batch of editors started cropping his photographs with scissors.  He told them it was in his contract that they run his work as he gave it to them, but they said “Pop, it’s just not done that way anymore, you gotta get with the times” and he said “No, I don’t” and quit.  Part of me thought I’d gotten the jump on that kind of scene by not even taking the job in the first place, but at the end of the day I was just a stupid kid who didn’t do the work to find out how to do the work.)  I was very serious about the work itself.  I’d stay up late in my darkroom, music playing, working in oversized trays.

    I didn’t pay nearly as much attention to the color side as maybe I should.  I did a lot of it, but I never took the same time to learn how to print color as I did black & white.  Now I’m going through these old transparencies and thinking, hmm, not terrible.

    Example, from Soulard’s Market.

    soulard-vegetable-girl-copy-2.jpg

    Antoine Soulard was a refugee from the French Revolution who settled in St. Louis and became the first “official” surveyor for the village and surrounding lands.  The section of the city now occupied by this open farmer’s market was once owned by him.  Later his widow “gifted” it to the city when they tried to make her fix the streets in her area.  She didn’t want to pay for that, so she turned it over the the town, who then had to do the repairs out of general revenue.  (Republican thinking even before the city was even part of the country!)

    Soulard’s Market is on Broadway and part of the heritage of old St. Louis, even though it is still some distance beyond the borders of the original 1763 village.

    I’ve worked this image over a bit to make it more, oh, photojournalistic.

  • Why I Am (Partly) Not A Conservative

    I try to ignore Glenn Beck.  I think he’s pathetic.  All he can do is whine about things he quite often doesn’t understand.  For instance, his latest peeve has to do with being bumped out of line by science fiction.  Yeah, that’s right.  Glenn Beck’s book Broke has been number 1 on Amazon for a while and it apparently got beat out finally by a science fiction anthology.

    His complaint that this is from “the left” is telling.  First off he’s trying to make it sound like some profound philosophical issue, that a science fiction collection outsold his book on Amazon.  (He also noted that the Keith Richards autobiography bumped him as well and please note the twist he gives that.)

    Why the Left?  Is science fiction a left-wing thing?  I know a lot of SF writers who style themselves right-wing, libertarian, conservative, etc.  Some of them are very good, too, and I have read some of their work with pleasure.  Unless they were writing from an overtly political stance, I found no reason to call them on their “rightishness” because they outsold another writer’s work that might have been a bit leftish.  This is just a silly complaint and displays an obsession with partisan politics or just immaturity.  This is, of course, Glenn Beck we’re talking about, who seems to find more reasons to evoke Nazi similes than any other pundit I know of and has occasionally shed tears over the abuse he sees our great country enduring from the left.

    But this is ridiculous.  Because isn’t this…I mean, Glenn, isn’t this just the free market making itself heard?  Your book can’t stay number one because that would belie the whole principle of competition you claim to believe in.  Everybody who works hard and honestly should have their shot at being number one for a little while and this anthology is a poster-child for hard work and perseverance because, well, it’s self-published!  It doesn’t even have a major (or minor) publishing house behind it!  It got there all on its own, man!  This is the flower of the free market!  David whupping Goliath’s ass!  This should make you proud!

    No, he berates it because it has to do with death or the culture of death, which he equates with left-wing politics somehow.  And for good measure drags Keith Richards into the whole death equation.

    If the Right wants to know why people on the Left or even in the Center have no patience for them, this is ample explanation.  The expression  “Get a life” comes to mind.

    I recall listening to Rush Limbaugh once trying to trash U2 on the air and managing to demonstrate his utter cluelessness and inability to deal in metaphor.  Is hyper-literalism symptomatic of right-wing thinking?  It must be, because literalism is where they get all caught up and their incompetence shows.  I listened once in complete dismay to Pat Robertson condemning the film Trainspotting for its “glorification of drugs” and I sat there dumbfounded wondering how on earth anyone could see that film as a glorification of drugs.  I remained baffled until I realized, based on a couple of other articles from fundamentalists and right-wing pundits, that in their view the mere mention of drugs, regardless of context, is glorification.  Somehow they could not see a film that takes a serious, unvarnished look at drug abuse as perhaps critical of the lifestyle.  I suppose because there was no father-figure character preaching in the film.

    But it showed me another problem.  The possibility that an audience might empathize with the characters—not approve, because clearly in the case of Trainspotting approval is virtually impossible, but understand.  These are human beings, with a problem, certainly, but human beings all the same and maybe they deserve some sympathy, some help, some understanding.

    Because understanding is not what they’re about.  They don’t want to understand —they only want to condemn that of which they disapprove.

    Upon Obama’s election and his early attempts to reach across the aisle and his calls to work together, Rush Limbaugh made a broadcast in which he declared that he did not want to understand, to cooperate, to reach across the aisle, to work together.  He flatly refused the idea that common ground could be found.  While I’m sure there are some far Left ideologues who feel the same way, I hear very little of that from most of the Left.

    Let me be clear, I’m talking about the mouthpieces here, and by extension those who fawn over them.  I’m talking about the Hannitys, the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Robertsons, the Savages.

    They have no depth.  No perspective.  They in fact seem to have no sense of proportion and certainly no grasp of anything but the plainest equations of Us versus Them.  Their comparisons are absurd and frightening, their intransigence at times borderline obscene, and the culture they would see dominant is inarticulate, graceless, and vapid.  Like their last president, W., they “don’t do nuance” and it shows.

    I can deal with conservatism.  I can even sympathize with some of it and agree with certain aims.  We spend too much, often regulations seem arbitrary and ill-conceived, and the tax structure is a Rube Goldberg agglomeration of bad compromises, loopholes, and penalties badly in need of revision.

    I cannot deal with humorless, puddle-deep, anti-intellectual, squeamish petulance masking as political philosophy.  The Tea Party candidate for congress in Texas who declared that armed insurrection in the case that the midterm elections don’t go their way is not “off the table” does not impress me as mature patriotism—which I’m sure it was designed to look like, the moronic conflation of the willingness to do violence with a twisted idea of “adult”—but as the posturing of a ten-year-old in a schoolyard showdown ala the Duke facing down the bad guy.

    It is possible that these folks have been there all along, but when we had a Soviet Union and a global communist conspiracy to fix their attention we didn’t notice them so much.  Since the Soviet Union collapsed and the only thing responsible government should have done was go around cleaning up the messes left over by all the proxy wars we’d fought with them since the end of World War II, these folks have had really nothing to vent their conspiracy-obsessed, uptight, puritanical faux-patriotism on.  It took a while for them to build an empire of disinformation and fear-fostering on the multitude of petty gripes and cultural shifts they rigorously and doggedly label Liberal or Left, even when those labels have nothing to do with the subject being so condemned.  9/11 was a gift to them, finally something to fix their attention on and get people stirred up to a rousing level of hyper-adrenalized nationalism—the politics of aversion carried to almost virtuoso heights.

    At the end of the day, in all honesty, I have to admit that I cannot join with these people not so much because I disagree with their politics—I do, but not completely, and I find much that could feed a useful dialogue in some of their saner examples—but because I dislike them as human beings.  I don’t know if their deep conservatism has made them such feckless mooks or if their culture blind puritanism has made them conservatives, but however it worked, the result is, to me, repulsive.  They seem compelled to slot people all the time, in this category or that; even when something goes the way they think it should, if it does so for the “wrong people” they’re unhappy; and they have no sense of irony.

    Really, Glenn.  You got bumped out the number one spot on Amazon and it’s because of the Left?  Get a life.

  • 56

    It has been my practice to, as best as I can, as much as I’m allowed, ignore birthdays.  My birthdays.  I love the attention, don’t get me wrong, but I have always been a bit nervous about attention, especially undeserved attention.  I mean, what the hell, it’s just another day of the week, a point in the arbitrary cycle of time humans impose on nature, and I’m just passing through.  What’s so special about that?

    Birthdays are markers, to be used by people to order their universes.  It matters little to me that I am now 56 years old (fifty-six!  shit, how did that happen?  I was just…) but it matters to me how long I’ve had the life I have, the friends I have, have done the things I’ve done, and know the world as I do, and in that respect birthdays are just as important as any other marker.  It’s an anniversary and if people want an excuse to say to each other “Hey, I’m glad you’re in the world and that I know you” then by all means, birthdays are a good one.  The anniversary of one’s advent into the world.

    But fifty-six?  Seriously?  Damn.

    Middle-aged.

    At this point, I have to say, I’ve had a hell of a good time.  It didn’t always seem so while I lived it, but in retrospect there is very little to complain about.  Most people have a list—you know, A LIST—detailing all the things they want to do.  Probably a goodly part of anyone’s list never happens.  That trip to the Antarctic, hiking the Swiss Alps, seeing Europe, lounging on a beach in the Mediterranean…or more mundane things like, building your own house, learning to fence, owning a really frivolous car (just because), or playing in a band…lists contain a lot of wishes, some dreams, a lot of stuff that once we reach a certain age we realize we didn’t really want to do after all.

    I have a list.  There are things still on it that I want to do that I haven’t and may never do.

    But the number of things that I have done…

    It’s been a pretty good life to this point.  It would have been nice if this or that had gone differently and produced a better result, but the fact is I have done much of what I wanted to do.  I’ve photographed mountains, played in that band, met a lot of very cool people (and some not so cool).  I grew up blue collar not-quite-poor (and my parents worked their way out of that into a comfortable gentility) and managed to sabotage my own educational opportunities—which only means that where others went to college, I went to the local library—and yet I can count as friends a few of the best writers on the planet, a couple of top drawer philosophy professors, fine artists, and, most importantly, the best kind of friends anyone could hope for who are, regardless of any other merit, simply wonderful, decent people.

    I’ve published books.  That’s something that figured large on my list.  I’ve done it.  (I’d like to keep doing it, which is a problem right now to be solved, but hey…)

    One thing on my list that I actually believed would never happen because I was such a screwed up kid, was falling in love with a woman who would be my best friend and staying with her for life.

    I did that and there was a time I thought I didn’t want that.

    Kids are messed up.  They draw their images of potential selves from the world around them because, often, it’s easier than sorting through the mass of conflicting impulses that passes for a psyche at that age.  So they end up “trying things on” and pretending to be various things at various times.  If they’re lucky, they don’t get stuck with something that doesn’t work for them and grow out of it to find out who they really are.

    (When I was a kid, that phrase was a prominent source of bitter discussion in my home.  “I don’t even know who I am” was not a statement that got a lot of sympathy from my parents.  Firstly, they thought it was ridiculous—how could you not know who you are?  You live with you!  Secondly, they were Depression babies, and for many of them the necessity to grow up fast and deal with a world intent on crushing them materially allowed little time for esoteric self-contemplation.  Who you were was whatever you did to survive.  The luxury of taking the time to go on a discovery tour of your own self seemed absurd to them.  And yet, the fact is they often benefited from not having the time to toy with options—the crucible of life, as it were, burned away the unnecessary and left them only with what worked.  It resulted in a kind of admirable self-confidence if not the most sympathetic of personalities.)

    I had a list as a teenager of all the things I thought it would be cool to be.  I’ve joked from time to time that, basically, I wanted to be James Bond.  (My teen years were the first periods of my life when I felt a little personal power.  I’d been a small, weakly child with what later would be termed Nerdy interests and it got me bullied, a lot.  Power was important to me and once I tasted it I wanted more.  James Bond was the dude, man.  Nobody screwed with him, he knew all the right lines, slept with all the finest women, and went wherever the hell he wanted to go.  Despite working for MI6, he was no one’s tool, and that appealed powerfully to me.)

    But I also wanted to be an artist.

    So by the age of 21 I was a conflicted mess, pretty much worthless for anything long-term.  I was living a kind of life that seemed to be what I wanted.  I won’t bother to go into details, but superficially it was almost everything I thought I wanted.

    And I was lonely.

    But I’d finally begun to write.  Interestingly enough, a pattern emerged from my early stories.  I had a number of sympathetic characters who were craving stability and opted for the security of life-long commitments.  Of course being adventure fiction I stacked the odds against their achieving it—and then having them triumph.  I still had no idea what I actually wanted, but clues were appearing.

    There was a period of almost nine months when I totally overturned everything I thought till then I’d wanted.  I fell in love—deeply, so powerfully—and within weeks realized that I’d been doing everything wrong.

    One of my annoying personal habits has always been to ignore the instruction book when learning a new thing and tackling the most complicated aspect of it first.  Headlong dives into top-level stuff, which leads to a lot of flailing, near-drowning.  Never walk when you can run and never play scales when Rachmaninov’s Preludes are in front of you yearning to be played.  (The fourth print I ever made in my home photolab was a multiple collage ala  Jerry N. Uelsemann.)  So I tackled this the same way.  Overnight I walked away from the life I’d been living, made a commitment, and then tried to make it work.

    It blew up, leaving a crater the size of my heart (at the risk of being a bit melodramatic) and I drifted back into a ghost-image of what I’d been before.

    Then I met Donna.

    Come spring, we’ll celebrate 31 years together.  (Thirty-one?  31.  How’d that happen?)

    She has backed me in everything I’ve ever tried to do.  I cannot ask for a better partner, and while many times things haven’t been exactly pleasant, they have always been meaningful and suffused with the dream-stuff of reality at its best.

    Turn around three times and now I’m 56.  I’m frustrated by many things right now.  But that is a direct result of being engaged in complicated, difficult, worthwhile stuff.

    I’m in my last year with the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come March, per our by-laws, I leave the board (for a year, technically).  They elected me president in 2005.  Taking office, I found I had responsibility for an organization that was crippled, reeling, and about to lose its place in the world.  Now we manage the state Poet Laureate program, we’ve been conducting our annual Celebrations again, and we have direction.  We’re about to become a membership organization and expand our outreach to various institutions and organizations around the state.  We’re doing Cool Things.  When I leave, I trust the organization will be humming along nicely, all by itself.

    I’m still looking for a new publisher.  My agent and I have just selected a pseudonym to market me under, since apparently my name is a negative in the marketplace due to some, er, problems with my previous career choices.  But I’m writing short fiction again.

    Best of all, though, I have great friends.  My dad once told me that in life I’d have many acquaintances, but I’d be lucky to have one real friend.  Well, by that metric, I’m wealthy, because I have several real friends.  Starting with Donna, I can off-hand name Jim, Tom, Greg, Kelley, Nicola, Tim, Bernadette, Lucy, Terry, Lloyd, Carol, Carolyn, John, Nathan, Peter…

    That’s the short list.  Really good friends.

    And on this day, I wish them all well, wish them the best, and thank them for being part of what has to date been a damn good life.  Thank you all.

    (But, really…56?)

  • A Plague On Both Houses…With A Pastoral Addendum

    Listening to election news lately is like keeping track of a Roller Derby game.  They keep going around the same circle, bumping into each other, occasionally shouting unsubstiated things—at each other and the audience—and by and large just getting in each others’ ways.  If you like that kind of sport, it can be entertaining.  Otherwise…

    So I’ve been working on new fiction and playing with photoshop and basically tuning it all out.  As much as I hate to say it, I already know that I’m not going to vote for any Republicans, and most of the Independents are seemingly farther right.  As much as I agree that spending is out of control, voting for the Republicans right now also brings a whole bunch of other nonsense into play that I just can’t tolerate.  (I know, I should be tolerant, but after a while, stupidity is unsupportable, in the name of anything.)

    What we seem to be seeing a lot of right now is some kind of principle that should have a name, basically a principle that half-measures are worse than leaving something alone.  The health care “overhaul” is unpopular.  Some of it deservedly so, but polls are showing that people are cherrypicking it—there is a lot that they like, but the total package sucks.  So they think.  Of course, premiums were heading no where but up, so most of us are about to end up without health insurance anyway, so you would think the cry would be for more controls, not less.  (Is anyone still so naive as to think that deregulation is a good idea?  Don’t most people understand that the current economic fiasco is the direct result of NO REGULATIONS on key parts of the financial sector?  How is it they can come up with a thesis that says less will work any better?)  But it is fair to say that the compromises that resulted in the current law hamstrung it so badly that it may well be worse than nothing.  If Obama had forcefully backed single payer…

    Of course, that scares people of a certain mindset even more.  Single payer!  That’s Socialism!  Well, somewhat.  And so what?  If the end result is to provide good health care for as many of our people as possible…

    But there’s no point going over this again.  People may not say it, but they act as if they would rather die bleeding in the street than have the government in any way involved in their (nonexistant) medical care.  If we got the way the Republicans want to, that’s pretty much what will happen.

    Mind you, if people in general were willing to say “Let them die” if they can’t pay for their own health care, then there would be some spine to the Republican position.  But we’re not.  We take of people when we find them in serious straits.  And pass the cost on to those who can.  Increased premiums.  Why isn’t this seen as a form of Socialism, only privately funded?  Why do we think Big Business has more moral authority in this than our elected officials?

    Be that as it may, I don’t much care right now.  I’m listening to all the campaigns and feeling more and more like Mercutio.  They either haven’t the brains, haven’t the guts, or haven’t the ethics to represent me.  But I will vote.  Oh, yes.  I believe that if you don’t vote you don’t get to bitch.  And I intend to bitch.

    Meantime, I’m playing with fiction and photographs.  After such a bit of spleen, here’s something more pleasant to contemplate.  Enjoy.

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  • On The Way Home…

    Stopped in the middle of one bridge to do this shot of another, early morning Monday on the way home.

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