Private Lessons

Listening to statements by local residents concerning recent newsworthy events, I guess it’s time to be brutally honest with each other about what we are secretly doing in the assumed privacy of a restroom, among other places and other things.

A few months ago, a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road found its way to my downstairs bathroom. That book was purchased for me a couple years ago but I hadn’t finished it until recently. And, honestly, I probably never would have finished it if the book had been languishing in the most expected spot, like in my office or on my bed stand.

The truth is I find reading in the potty to be a wonderful escape. I can’t control it. I sleep in the bedroom and mess around in the office with old tax forms and phone bills or whatever so there’s little time for serious reading in those places. Yes, I do often crap in the crapper, that is part of the honesty coming out here and, as Hitchens neatly pointed out recently, that blunt admission may be unusually notable for the adventurous minority who scurry hastily from one international airport to another.

But my forays into this private abyss have always had a literary and educational if not a pragmatically time-saving theme. Rather than in search of a risky rendezvous, instead I’ve been known to stoop for the advertisements on the back of a tissue box, routinely and thoroughly peruse the instructions on plastic bottles of household cleaners, and have been curiously consumed by the government warnings against improper use of lye and other specific chemical additives. In fact, if not for these sacred moments of solitude, I would have no earthly knowledge of something called FD&C Blue #2.

The Wife believes this practice may have dangerous, life threatening consequences but reading something, anything is a pleasant and necessary diversion for me while occupied in the facilities.

Fortunately for all of us, On The Road was near and available during the brilliant summer of 2007. Historically speaking, I can’t think of a more perfect time to read that book than over the course of natural events in the crapper this year.

In the end, as the dog days went by, I was not secretly surprised to detect certain similarities with A Moveable Feast. Paris can be Frisco for some. To others, the sloping countryside of the American Midwest might as well be the hills of northern Spain as the lazy tongues spoken in both forests seem so foreign to our patiently observing heroes. Beatniks and Flappers were surely born of the same wandering mother. Wild young men on urgent and pointless missions, brainlessly compliant women and strong drink or the powerful drug of choice typically make the perfect trail mix for a long and winding road. These timeless characteristics, not to mention the repetitive if not misplaced epiphanies of those attractive, wealthy few who have nothing worldly or unique to say, all add up to make an addictive story.

But there was one other common aspect that, honestly, I will never forget.

The next time some bonafide bozo tries to tell me that our words must form a clear pattern and that particular pattern must take proper sentences into a proscribed institutional style of paragraphs and meld themselves with identifiable transitions which leap from page to page, forcing the reader to want more and impressing the reader with tales of memorable drama and marketable excitement, rather than just relate ordinary things as they happen around us in all their instantaneous heat and blind misery of the numbing human moment, then I will tell that fool to take a short trip from Frisco to the New Jersey shoreline where the classic glimpse of a dim oceanfront sunrise may lead that person to think of Dean Moriarity, think of Father Dean Moriarity who we never knew, and to think of Dean Moriarity.

But, rather than aimlessly trotting around the countryside, denying our own previous admissions, I expect that simple yet brutally honest secret could be learned in the privacy of one’s own restroom and probably should be known by all.

Cheers,
Mb

Sunflower Obsessions

Another new year’s summary:

The word “depression” has such a familiar ring to my ear. It reminds me of all the words I’ve ever heard that hide more meaning than what is displayed up front in the sequence of those simple letters. The Germans and French may arrogantly believe they set the world standard for words which belie a face-value description but I am particularly blessed to understand to some degree how the Greek and Chinese civilizations humbly set the antique wheels of our western semantics in motion.

In easy Texas-Twang English, two truths were revealed to me in the last few years.

One, rational people agree that my personality is chronically passive-aggressive which I can’t deny. Two, now, they highlight my behavior which is somewhat typical of the clinically depressed. (I can read between the lines of the lower third of most letters, by the way. I’m rather good at weaving my confrontational points into a spot where nobody will find them, too, so I recognize those kinds of hidden verses quite easily.) But if I was a believer in the face-value of all words, then I’d definitely be in trouble.

I fortunately choose to debate such simple distinctions as well as the “goodness” or “badness” of them. I once spent a good day in Greece, as a matter of fact, arguing with a friend about the existence and meaning of any word which sounds like “surreality”. That mindless effort expended a lot of excellent local wine, I might add. My pal prefers that word though I do not. We agree to disagree.

But even if I don’t like that word, I admit I tend to try and project it as often as possible. In other words, don’t confuse a distressed Bamboo with a melancholy me. They are different monsters.

I once met up with a different old friend in Amsterdam and, after a night of routine carousing in the districts, we toured the Van Gogh museum together. I highly recommend that place, if you’ve never been.

Luckily, that week the Van Gogh had a special showing, a comparison of sorts between the forever-connected works of VG and Paul Gauguin.

It’s a lightly guarded secret that long after beloved cousins vacated the house across the street, somewhere later in High School I think, a freshly sullen I discovered Gauguin. His life story affected me deeply and in some ways I probably set out on a path to relive or capture at least a bit of what he sought. In that sense, I became a fan of his art. Not for its intrinsic face-value but more for his passions that inspired it all. So, you can probably imagine how excited I was to finally stand in front of his crude paintings.

If you one day read my true life story, you will most likely see a pattern of what appears to be scenes of escape, “The Run Away, Pt II”, and so on. There is a deceptive but calculated intent to that pattern, I think. I’ve always chose the opposite of any predicted path and I got especially nervous if the expectation implied any hint of success.

(While I was in the service, I knew people who would speak of routine military assignments, visible tasks destined for promotion and so on, and then describe unique underground positions that were cryptically described as “my” kinds of jobs. I didn’t always know what I was doing in all those cases but it is the way I went and most of it turned out well, I guess. It comes to mind that I would never want to be governor of a state but dutifully working behind the scenes as Lt Gov could be my dream job. I recall once thinking I might be pleased to be a professional butler, a humble man-servant serving tea and crumpets to the rich and powerful, warmly tucking the blissful elite into bed each night while murmuring, “Perhaps a little charity is in order, sir.” Maybe that’s just past lives speaking to me across the cosmos or something but, hey, the world needs people like me, too.)

In one favored speech that I save for young lads who are thinking of finding the perfect life partner, I promote the idea of listing out precisely what they believe men are searching for in women and then recommend marrying the first woman they meet who completely fails the test. That method may not lead to instant happiness, I tell them, but it is surely the recipe for eternal curiosity and satisfaction. Such advice is the True Gauguin coming out of me, I suppose.

Anyway, I recall two memorable displays at the Amsterdam museum.

The first display was a line up of the sunflower paintings. For a short while, Vince and Paul shacked up in France or Belgium, I think, and vainly attempted to perfect their art merely for art’s sake. (Another admirable concept, IMHO.) In that tight atmosphere, Paul agreed to Vince’s obsessive, insane game so the simple sunflower was chosen for painting and painting and re-painting. Vince would paint it his way, then Paul would do it his way, and then eventually they would do it all over again. There must have been a least a dozen sunflower creations by each master side by side on one wall of the museum.

Looking at the art side by side like that, it was very difficult to decide which style was better. I naturally gravitated toward Gauguin at first but each had their strengths and their weaknesses. The debate over who had actually perfected the depiction of a sunflower remains unresolved in my view. (Of course, I know that it was this kind of close confrontation among them that eventually drove them apart. Gauguin who saw little value in boring repetition would soon retreat to the South Pacific and Van Gogh would then return to the relative safety of his family’s stewardship. Sure, there’s more to the story. But who really cares?)

The second display, however, laid it out for everyone to see. On a far wall of the museum, over in a dim corner, one particular painting pulled me in. As I neared the painting, it magically changed in a way that forced me to stop my advance towards it. Curious, I recall I had to back up and approach it again.

Sure enough, I found that this enchanting scenic painting of a milk-green swampy everglade almost moved with me as I wandered around the room. It was not a barren still-life snapshot, not the same painting up close as it was far away or even when viewed side to side. It was then that I realized only Van Gogh’s obsession could come close to perfecting such timeless art. It was only through the light of his diseased eye that another person from a different generation could perceive such a dimension. I resolved that my hero Gauguin, in spite of an admirable attempt to be marketable, to use the cliché, was flat and pale in comparison.

So, to the point, both of these characters were obsessed. Their obsessions took different forms, as did their art, as did their methods of ultimate retreat and escape. When evaluating their genius, they may be characterized as chronic but not debilitated or even dysfunctional in any sense of those words. Their unrelenting pursuit of art’s attraction may define our fixation with a form of life-long Su Doku (a curse which I share with Cousin Charlie) as the mathematical gray area between a “love” and a “nuisance”. In fact, it is such shadowy obsession that drives men to recreate lasting beauty in their own remarkable style.

That is my take on all that, anyway. This is all about beauty, chased about in the naturally sad and contemplative way of human beings. And this is a story of beauty hidden in the simple, repetitive vision of a sunflower as a way of obtaining the perfected vision of a silent milk-green swamp. A vision that in some ways has the double-meaning word “I” written all through it while magically removing that word at the same time to the extent that the “I” in it looks different to everyone no matter from which direction they may approach.

As I’ve said before, I once believed my first book would have to be titled “The Most Often Used Word”. But recently, perhaps in memory of Van Gogh and Gauguin, I’ve begun to think that the depressed-action word “Denying” must preface the title in some unusual way.

Don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write 2,000 joined words without using the words “I” or “me” but I purposefully have and believe me it’s not easy.

(It is at this point in the speech that I typically recommend a classic book titled “A Soldier of the Great War” written by Mark Helprin, who is one of the finest writers of our time.)

I agree with you, though. Looking back over this past year, chances are good that Bamboo will take the aggressive path of Vincent. But maybe in silent tribute to Paul, “I” will still passively long for that tiny tropical island home away from home.

It remains very deceptive but please don’t use the word “fear” in any case. These sunflower obsessions are manageable, brought about by more philosophical and rational internal debates rather than any pointless faith in “surreality”, and in many ways positive adaptations with regards to the current “real” environment.

In other words, yeah, this year's production, meager as it may have been, was just as cathartic as the last...

Cheers,
Mb

Every Mother's Lesson

Some days it is hard to understand why we do things. Other days, it’s hard to understand why we don’t do much of anything at all. And on the Friday Afternoon of Life, as the crude indulgences of happy hour begin to have their unrelenting effect, the fact that few lasting resolutions ever unleash from most human inquisition can be a real pisser.

Over the past few months, a great deal of time was wasted while thinking about this little problem. This particularly irrational interlude slowly spun out of control as questions grew upon questions like the gradually emerging branches of a desperately clinging vine. The damning light of worldly existence alternately flashed on and off in its self-serving, self-contained corner but never gave more than a shadowy clue to the cosmic uncertainty hidden everywhere else. It was enough to make one curious son wonder what, exactly, did our mothers ever teach us about the give and take of our action and inaction, the yin-yang of our doing and undoing, our delicate tip-toe dance on the balancing beam of a brain limited only by its own innate blindness.

Yeah, that’s exactly what it was like this past summer. Whew! Man!

Naturally, this low period saw The Wife regularly shake her head with displeasure, The Man angrily demand his pint of blood, and The Weary Fool silently withdraw to safer, cooler confines. A cautious retreat was deemed necessary and we all know that story.

But from this momentary drought of thought a fragrant blossom did bloom. The idea was then finally settled upon that, when speaking generally of most things in the universe, of course, what it is and what it is about is not nearly as significant as why it is in the first place.

Well, it’s obvious to most old dogs that bold action is required in many scenarios where inaction is admittedly dangerous. Calculated intervention, smartly designed to thwart certain threats and quickly prepared when catastrophic omens are revealed, is the legendary stuff of human progress.

But, hopefully now you can see, it is comforting for many seasoned turkey hunters and cave dwellers alike to agree that pure, indifferent laziness has its time and place as well. Without such indolence, any uncontested agreement like this would be impossible.

Thus, the truth of “the why” is in the hardened, crusted pudding, so to speak.

What is described, then, is a lesson in heavy patience and slothful endurance stirred with not the least bit of tireless dedication. Only within a strict framework of painful lethargy does the mind finally clear itself for true enlightenment, anyway. To understand why, one must cease what it is and divorce from what it is about to really get to the heart of the matter.

But perhaps writing is not just a foolish pastime of the chronically idle as I once feared. Perhaps the codified methods of art, style and content of what is written are not nearly as critical as I was once led to believe. Perhaps, if I had read Dr. Maryanne Wolf’s words earlier in life, I would know that writing is simply a part of an intricate and evolutionary process. Perhaps, then I would have more quickly understood how the uneasy balance of writing and reading advances our miraculous development in ways that we can only dream about or view from a microscopic level.

In fact, after reading more of Dr. Wolf, perhaps I might lazily agree that writing is the magical fuel of our dreams, that the act of reading quenches our natural thirst for wisdom, and one day this unique give-and-take practice will be known as the original elixir of human awareness itself.

Without a book or two to support us, I might suggest, what would we really know to say about our own lonely, muted soul?

Maybe then I could say the ancient concept of human wisdom was inaccurate if not immature, that the fears of old Socrates were misplaced. Maybe then I could say that writing, no matter how bad, is truly good.

Some may claim “rationalization” but I prefer to name it a “deduction of inquiry” and I find that selective position incredibly, finally encouraging--especially since I’ve been happily out of work for the last few months.

Honestly, it may leave one to think that the universal answers are not nearly as important as the unending questions, not to mention the slowly unwinding or chaotic paths we may follow as a result. Such questions lead the laziest among us to agree that it is not the cold words in the book but the warm analysis which comes after it that counts. And preferably, in my case anyway, that profound analysis will come sneaking in on the heals of a decent afternoon nap.

So that Proust quote, “that which is the end of their wisdom is but the beginning of ours", may very well be the only reasonable and permanent lesson that every mother should teach her child in the beginning.

Cheers,

Mb