Survival Writing by Markus W. N.

So much for survival writing.  Inspiration has hit a bit of a lull and time has closed some key windows.  The ideas come and go, but I have been on creative hiatus.  It is time to rev it all back up, get those submissions going.  Yesterday I gave a prose poem to an old friend as I dropped him off at an AA meeting.  I gave him a bit of cash so he could make it to a 45 day rehab facility a couple of hours away.  The prose poem was about him.  It was honest and I can only hope it may serve as a reminder of purpose.  He has wanted me to help him write some stories about the crazy things he has experienced over the relapsing years.  His own version of "A Millions Little Pieces", but all true. 

I told him that I didn't want to write those stories.  I want to write the one that has him living a full, healthy life free of enslavement.  Sometimes we have to put distance between the stories and the life we are presently living.  Once he does that, maybe I will help him.  He has done all the research he needs and more.  I pray he gets what he needs over the next 45 days.  I pray he can find a way to make the healing exponential...45 days to 2025 days to 4,100,625 days to eternity.  If we were to ever write a book together, I could see us calling it "Life in the Distance: A Case Study of Friendship and Addiction".  It is all about standing before a wall of stories.  Massive concrete and wire letters woven together to reveal an insanity and depravity that is stranger than fiction.  Somewhere along this wall there is a man-shaped hole, the rocky crumble of past words strewn about it.  And if you look through that hole you can barely make out someone running strong toward the horizon.  Every stride takes him farther and farther away from the wall of stories.  He is running for his life toward the light of meaning.  Eventually he will be so far away from his past he won't be able to see the wall at all, and he will survive.  He will find life in the distance.

By southern standards any temperature in the teens or below is beyond cold and more toward some hellish cocytus.  And in February people complain about it the same way they complain when it tops 100° in August.  And I have been guilty of it just as much as the next yokel, but I have to say I like the ice of February more than the asphault melt of August.  I have a jacket for every condition just in case.  It's one of my vices, too many jackets.  But I wear them all and the colder and longer the winter, the more options I have to specialize my winter-wear.  In August it comes down to involuntary sweating no matter what you're wearing or what you're doing if it's outside.  I think maybe Eve ate the apple because she was just sick of being cold when winter came around.  Of course Adam would've wanted her to stay naked all the time, but she was probably thinking that it was about time he killed her one of those now extinct animals so she could wrap up in some furs.  Right now I am wearing fleece "comfy" pants and a fleece pullover inside and the central heat is blowing mightily and I'm kind of hot.  In a little bit I'll be walking out into the frozen day and going to work.  I will be nicely bundled and loving it.  Keep the cold in February!

It came to me while listening to a song by Muse called "MK Ultra".  For anyone who doesn't know, MK Ultra was the codename for the CIA's top secret mind control program that was active in the mid 20th century.  It involved a lot of experimental use of hypnosis, psychedelic dosing, etc. in an effort to find ways to "undermind" (made that word up right there!) the enemy.  It was a real program, but also one that conspiracy theorists have taken as an "aha!" event.  The lead singer of Muse is a conspiracy theory buff who peppers his music with everything from Orwellian references to mentions of H.A.A.R.P. (just google this one.)  This led me to think about Jared Lee Loughner and his interest in mind-control.  Considering the days of media-heads snarking back and forth their accusations of nefarious influence, I thought to myself that Muse could be the influence just as easily as Rush Limbaugh. 

Creative people have attempted to use their art as social influence for centuries.  More often than not, it was the only option for someone who wanted to speak out against the current state of affairs.  Songs, poems, canvases, plays, and then movies have always been venues for griping in favor of social change, or simply put, methods of creative rhetoric.  But is there ever a difference between a dramatic monologue poem and an A.M. radio tirade! Between Picasso's Guernica and Glenn Beck's chalkboard stick figures.  Or between the rich stories of Rabbi Loew's Golem and Sarah Palin's dropping "blood libel" like a coin in a slot machine hoping to hit the political jackpot. 

Perhaps that is the curse of free speech.  People who think they have something to say no longer have to worry about creative delivery.  They don't have to imagine a work that can stand alone on its aesthetic merit so that they won't get into trouble for the message behind it.  A novel can speak to the eternity of the moment because it is veiled in metaphors.  How different this is from the ghost-written profit-motivated rants of modern day pundits that use plain speech to capitalize on the current times, and how quickly do these volumes end up among the irrelevancy of the bargain tables in bookstores!

Throughout history true artists have risked their very lives to create with purpose.  Today the pathetically uncreative have free reign and pummel us with their message point blank to the face, unapologetically, without even the option of "not getting" the symbolism because there are no symbols. 

So on the surface, artists and pundits often have the same agenda and the same opportunity of influence.  But the pundits cheat.  They replace imagery with scowl, metaphor with shrill inflection, irony with stupid little "gotcha" giggles.  And sadly the modern man swallows it whole. 

Thankfully, there are still truly creative folks out there who still feel the need to write a song or poem, pick up a brush, consider the emotive influence of lighting and camera angle.  I just get the sinking feeling that they are losing ground to the plain talkers.

There is a lot of love that goes into crafting the perfect metaphor.  And as another Muse song delcares, "love is our resistance".  I'd much rather have a poet show me that our country is an abscessed tooth growing darker with the putrifying stench of slow decay, moaning under the painful throb of its dying roots than hear and see a slightly doughy face with it's "nanny-nanny-boo-boo" lips and twinkling dollar sign eyes tell me that our country is really, really bad, definitely on the downward path to ungood.

Two thoughts have annexed my brainspace.  One caught me off guard, crept in as I fell asleep.  The other staked its claim forcefully like a persistent Savage Stevian delivery boy in search of money owed.  So random they are, separate ideas that I will try to intertwine.

As boring as it may seem to some, I strive for balance.  I seek the even places, level footing for my emotions.  I seek satisfaction in the moment.  A by-product of this is steadiness, a stoic lens through which to see this life.  Like I said, a sort of boring satisfaction with the way things are, but not so much that I am resistant to necessary change.  I just don't pine for things, or for people or places for that matter.  I appreciate, but I don't yearn.  On the flip-side, I don't settle either.  I embrace.  Yearning is pointless.  It robs us of our happiness.  Right now I have much, why yearn for more?  If I get more it is a choice, but not one that evolved from a place of yearning.  It is usually spontaneous.  How often have we yearned for some thing only to realize it wasn't worth all the fuss once we possessed it.  Yearning leads to false expectation.  It is a human weakness that our consumer culture has so expertly exploited.  We are led to believe things like, "Life is short, why deprive yourself of what you most want?  Succumb to the yearning."   Then yearning leads on to yearning, and we move forward into this way of being with a collection of things, people, places we used to want, now forgotten, trailing behind us.

What if instead we yearned for more of what we already have.  Not more in number, but more in understanding, in appreciation.  Imagine how powerful this might be when it comes to relationships.  Instead of yearning for things, appreciate more of the people we already have.  Do we claim to fully know them to the deepest core of their being?  Do we dare admit that we have hit the bottom of the well of our love for them?  Do we realize that each bucket of this love adds something new to them....the deeper the well, the fresher the love?

This is hard to do.  But it is not an impossibility.  But what does schadenfreude, the joy we feel from the misery of others, have to do with yearning?  Perhaps yearning for more for ourselves is the same as yearning for less for others.  If others suddenly have less, it makes our less seem more.  How many times have we heard people talk of realizing how blessed they are in the wake of someone else's tragedy?  What if the tragedy was more like simple misfortune?  How easy it is to just "tsk, tsk" and feel that sense of satisfaction at their loss.  That is schadenfreude.  Schadenfreude has been shown through research to have a more powerful effect in groups than individuals.  It doesn't take much imagination to relate this fact to catastrophic historical evils perpetrated by humans.  There have been entire countries who have yearned for more and in the process created so much less through destruction.  Whether they realize it or not, balance always seeks restoration.  Upset it, and it will come back in unexpected ways.  If only we could always keep the balance and explore its depths.  Balance is not sameness, it opens wide the door to everything that we already have.  Think of it as a frame of viewing.  Tilt the frame one way or the other (not up/down or left/right... but forward/back) and the view becomes slanted, the field of vision incomplete.  But hold the frame steady and level, stare head on into it and you can see it all.  Yearning is like tilting the frame.  If only we could always remember to step back, center ourselves, and look at the big picture, and carry our vision as individuals steady and sturdy into any group.  Then maybe we could understand how great the view is from where we already are.  Every view has its merits and secrets yet revealed.  Otherwise they wouldn't exist.

The eleventh year of the century, the millenium even.  Eleven has a lot of symbolic meaning.  I read a whole webpage about it.  You can too, ELEVEN! It is quite lengthy.  Time to start a new routine.  Perhaps a fast is in order.  Definitely need to lose some LB's.  Could use a little self-discipline.  I've got a list.  Kind of like Gatsby, I wrote some things down long ago that I might should work on from time to time.  A sort of self-actualization manifesto.  It has its ups and downs.  Just like parenting or the weather, consistency is always nice but oh so hard to realize.  So here in the south we have 80 degree December days that make my mustache sweat so much I have to shave it off.  Then a couple days later it is 27 degrees and we forget to turn the heater on in the greenhouse.  And then I read to my daughter like a good father should, and later get absorbed in something oh so insignificant (is it facebook?) in the grand scheme of the relationship and she has to call my name more than a couple times to get my attention.  I guess at worst I can resolve to be inconsistently good in all areas of living.  And at best?  I've imagined it, just hope I can get it down on paper.

The lamentable lack of time so frequently expressed here is about to morph into something else.  The semester comes to a close.  A monthish window cracks open.  Old premises start to creak in their waking.  They sniff the air of freedom, have new hope in their becoming.  A father, former shark attack victim grudgingly takes his son to a beachside  baptism.  A young boy fleshes out, groping for new experiences and meaning, a more satisfying narrative among angry snakes.  Somewhere the onion man lurks in darkness, afraid of himself and everything he is capable of doing.  Youth on the verge of adulthood and cynical white-haired old men bond together somewhere, dangling transparenly from a title as Codgers and Whippersnappers.  Elsewhere, bigger ones groan for completion.  A teacher and his most difficult class work together  to finish the journey of a young girl from the ghetto.  She runs from the gangsters, ducking bullets and loving her family and friends.  A young man has barely taken the first steps into the narcissistic world conspiracy that lay before him.  Then there is Salvational, the new drug that made religion obsolete...or did it?  A kid goes on a road trip to see his porn-star mother's grave, and Phil Lynott dances in the moonlight waiting, and waiting, and waiting to see the stage where his songs will trip along to the snapping broadway beat of vagabond legend. 

I promise I will give you life...but please, one at a time.

I finally saw The Road, the film based on Cormac McCarthy's novel.  It was just as bleak.  I honestly found myself wondering if the ending would be an emotional experience for me, but I had already read the book so I knew what was going to happen.  I knew that in spite of the real power of love that flickered bravely in the hearts of the man and his boy, it would never be enough to light up the world around them.  Gray overwhelms.  Even though the final scenes were somewhat cathartic when I read them, they were just there when I saw them.  But then I found myself, pulling the hardback from the shlef, thumbing toward the back to rediscover that catharsis.  And I found it, but not where I expected.  I did not find it in the last conversation between the man and boy, nor in the boy's brave resignation in accepting his new familly.  I found it in the last paragraph.  McCarthy's warning to us all.  It was clearly there in his description of brook trout with their "maps of the world in its becoming" on their backs.  It was there in the glens that existed long before man where "everything hummed with mystery."  In the admonition that things can't be "undone".  Man did he ever nail it!  

McCarthy's The Road should be required reading for any man or woman who holds a political position that offers nuclear weapons related decision power.  McCarthy's speculative vision is the colorless horror of nuclear winter.  What the world would look like if mankind was all that was left in it.  The next time NASA shoots some record of human civilization into space, they should inscribe Cormac's last paragraph on the gold disks.  If some other intelligent life did come across it beyond the stars, they'd likely weep for us, for the fact that we would create a world where burning the pages of our existence was a real possibility.  For now, God bless the brook trout. 

After a little bit of heavy, I need to make it light.  Dwelling on the biggest things leads to brain cramps.  They can't be stretched out.  Rest is best.  Thank God for sitcoms!  God bless youtube!

Put on the music and fall back!  Fall back!  At times procrastination and mindless diversion are my best friends, but the kind of friends who eventually lead me astray.  I feel like I am waiting for too much.  And right now when all this action, this stuff to do lay out in front of me like beached whales.  I have to push them where they are supposed to be, but the whole thought of it makes me gag a little.  But damn wouldn't it be worse if they were dead whales, deadlines missed, then I'd just have to let them fish rot until I could hose them back into the formless gulf from whence they came. 

As of now they're still living, breathing, looking at me with those too soulful eyes and beckoning me to do something.  It's hard for them to achieve a purpose in all this sand.  Heavy doesn't do well in sand.  Now I'm waiting for the tide to come in so I can float them.   I need to get these big blubbery beasts back in the bay of be time.  

But first I think I might search for a cool looking seashell, or maybe just stare at the waves until I forget what I was supposed to do. 

Not sure how to begin on this topic, so here's a ramble.  Belief, faith, religion may or may not be synonymous.  It depends on who as much as what.  Any two individuals may claim the same faith and beliefs, but in essence different religion.  Or any two can claim the same religion, but actually have different levels of faith or different beliefs.  Still two more may claim stark differences in all three areas, yet somehow still find oodles of common ground.

This is not some paean to ecumenicism.  Nor am I trying to support or refute any sinlge faith, belief, or religion.  What I do believe, however, is that when it comes to faith, I can only truly know my own.  And when it comes to religion, I don't bother with it.  Isn't the presence of doubt a pre-requisite for faith?  I do not profess to know the faith of others nor do I care about their religion.  I also hope I do my best not to project my own faith onto others.  How am I to know anything about this most personal, most individual aspect of their existence?  Even an atheistic set of beliefs involves a faith in things like science and humanism.  Everyone is a man or woman of some faith.  Their own faith.  

I must admit that I still bristle a little when one projects their faith onto others.  I am all for the love and unity of humanity in a golden rule sense, but how can anyone believe that their individual system of beliefs, faith, religion, whatever, are the right ones for someone else?  I am in favor of knowledge and information and welcome it being passed on in situations where it is asked for.

What I don't like is when someone else feigns compassion, disguises judgement as concern, condemnation as support.  There is an air of superiority that actually betrays a deeper sense of insecure doubt.  That perhaps by getting as many people to agree with every dogmatic detail as possible, it will strengthen their faith.  Or by pointing out, and lovingly so, how wrong-beliefed others are in comparison, that they will somehow convert and "save" them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with praying for others.  But by all means pray from a place of doubt and faith because no one truly knows how any other individual experiences their existence.  Don't pray from a place of dogmatic certainty.

According to scripture, God knows every hair on every head.  Yet we often forget to even notice when someone has had a haircut.  And all too often we flee from the scary responsibilty of individualized existence toward the safety of collective sameness.  And we coddle ourselves to feel secure in the insecurity of certainty.  Reaffirmation in the form of groupthink becomes a drug because the doubt that drives an individual faith scares us.  We need others to validate us, to keep us on track.  Then we want to hook new others because the more people we get on our side the more right it seems.  Eventually acts of individuality become dangerous, acts of rebellion, self-serving.  Evil?  Unity becomes a set of agreed upon rules.  A singularity of interpretation.  We are driven to believe out loud because speaking it makes it more real.  If everyone knows it, they'll hold us to it.  We inject our unintentional irony into the world around us.  We proclaim it all because we are not ashamed, yet in doing so we shame others for not doing the same.  The loudness is merely the worm on our hook, the "look at me and see true belief" lure of the collective.  Here, with us, is where you will find what you are looking for.  With us you will grow.  Please, please believe with us.  We will show you how to believe.

But maybe there is another way.  Maybe we can take the leap of faith into individual responsibility, refuse to judge our strength of belief by how well we fit into a group.  Avoid the insistence that our experience is valid for everyone.  Reject sameness and embrace the differences.  Authenticize the variety.  Take ownership of the only thing we rightfully can.  Our self.  Own the gift of life until we might have to choose to give it back.  Treat it as a precious commodity, a creative tool to be individualized.  An existence where rules need not be written or spoken for they are communicated by simply being.  An individual serving other individuals where a group, a collective is simply a certain number of individuals in close proximity.  Just a bunch of fellow travellers.  And it doesn't matter where everyone else is going or if we all have the same destination.  It just matters that we're all moving along the journey.  Bid wellness and comfort along the way, be ready to help as needed, or even walk side by side for a little while.  Ultimately there will be forks in the road that are only meant for one.  There may we all embrace the doubt of not knowing where it leads, and summon the faith-filled courage to keep going forward in lovely solitude.