Nice Description

Someone once called my work "beautiful but not important." What a perfect description of this world!

That's What the Simple Folk Do

This rain reminds me of the Northeast, an old-fashioned all-day soak with no lightning-and-thunder drama, no floods, no power outages. I’m letting cars pass me –- this is new –- and somehow through ignorance I end up in the thick traffic to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. But I smile, it’s a Saturday of no plans. Wet couples and small groups, mostly in their twenties and thirties, walk straggly-haired across the bridge over the Colorado, and it surprises me how many of the young women are wearing skirts or dresses; it reminds me of when we went back to Ann Arbor in 1976 and found that, during the three-year interval since graduation, coeds had started putting on makeup and wearing skirts again.

I’m going shopping –- strange. So this is how people spend their Saturdays! I’m buying gifts for my hosts for my forthcoming foreign stay: two children’s Texas Longhorns T-shirts in burnt orange, and two gospel CDs, one of black music and one of white. (That’s America.) Do they have a CD player at their home? I’m betting yes; after all, they’re not in the bush. Then I drive from bookstore to bookstore looking for a copy of the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment -– the Roman Polanski uproar has made me want to reread it, but I doubt if Roman’s going to find redemption in the arms of a saintly whore in the end –- and the third store I try has one used copy, with decent-size print no less.

Four o’clock and I haven’t eaten since breakfast -– this is new too -- so I swing by the Cajun saloon-restaurant, imagining fried oysters. The small parking lot is full as always but a space opens right at the front door, and I start toward it, but by the time I begin guiding my slow turn there’s a big beer-bellied man standing in the way, slurping from a 32-ounce Styrofoam of soda pop. I wait for him to see me -– he doesn’t move –- he’s standing smack between the white lines -- I extend my arm to show I want to get through -- he slurps, doesn’t move. He’s wearing a purple LSU T-shirt: this bar’s the Louisiana sports headquarters of Austin and today’s game day, the place is packed with his type. I wait, he slurps. Shaking my head, I go into reverse and, before pulling away, draw up beside him and roll down my window and say with a smile, “Thanks, you’re a prince.” How I’ve mellowed! As I’m driving away it dawns on me he’s not absolutely being a prick, he’s saving the space for a friend. I can identify, which makes it -- does it? -- all right.

To the fancy supermarket in the heavy rain -– plastic bags today, not paper! –- and I nosh on free samples to tide me over till home. I skip the pears and the avocados, they’re hard as rocks despite the loyal service workers slicing them into quarter-moons and the customers accepting them without a qualm -– I pick up a container of the house gumbo which is really good, and German bread to dip in it. And a large coconut macaroon half-draped in chocolate: “I think this is the best thing in the store!” the cashier says to me. One must remember they’re not flirting, they’re just being friendly.

After the gumbo I have coffee and take a nap, the perfect wakeup routine because when the nap’s over the coffee’s just taking effect, and start Philip K. Dick’s In Milton Lumky Territory -– how is it I’ve been reading him for thirty-five years and haven’t gotten to all his books yet? I’ve got two rental movies for this evening, and best of all, I’ve had time to write something of my own, even if it’s only this.

heavy bag, big word, O incomparable Shade

1. I bring the whole equipage to the café: laptop with power cord and mouse, notebook for observations, notebook for The Work of Byron Katie, two pens, three books to read during computer breaks (The Divine Invasion, by Philip K. Dick; You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Bringing Courageous Love to Intimate Relationships, by Richard C. Schwartz; The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, by Addison and Steele. Oh, and the alternative weekly, for the movie schedules. Now which the hell do I open first?

2. I want to say that my carrying bag is edematous, but I won’t. Leave that to the literary types.

3. I got the last shady parking space in the lot!

simple, small, maybe

1. I like simple things. Japanese brush painting. Early Hemingway. Three-chord songs. Art turned down so much it explodes. I suspect that not only will I never achieve it, but that given my personality, my history, my aptitudes and limitations and environment, my neural wiring, it’s exactly the wrong goal.

2. Or maybe I’m a born miniaturist.

3. Maybe.

I’ll notice, about the author, curse the door

1. Cleaning and trimming an old post, not because anyone will notice, but because I will.

2. I’ll never have one of those About the Authors that says I was a cab driver, a stevedore, a dog walker, a bond trader, and a numbers runner before I hit it big. Every dollar I’ve earned as an adult, I’ve earned with my pen.

3. Glancing at a book on Shakespeare, I read that when we today stub our toe on a door, we say, “Shit!”, but when the Elizabethans stubbed their toes on a door, they cursed the door, the wood it was made from, the sawyer who sawed the wood, the tree the wood came from, and the acorn that grew into the tree. That’s why they were them, and we’re us.

your friend the brain, it’s the arts, it’s all a conspiracy

1. The human brain has no delete function, yet there has never been a case of one running out of storage capacity.

2. Stories are an attempt to see the future. Music is an attempt to undo time. Painting is an attempt to unfold space.

3. Society is a vast conspiracy to miss the point. But that may be the only way we can get where we’re going.

African plans, macrobiotics, white bread

1. I look into flights and immunizations for my autumn trip to Africa.

2. After a long workout I take myself to dinner at the all-you-can-eat macrobiotic restaurant, Casa de Luz. Sweet potato soup, aduki beans and brown rice, steamed zucchini with walnut kombu miso sauce, blanched greens, daikon, beet-and-carrot cornmeal pie, urns of twig tea. You can eat an infinite amount of that stuff and not gain weight.

It’s in a little Central American-looking complex of meditation rooms and yoga rooms and a preschool. Tropical trees shield a narrow red-cobbled walk and an assortment of sitting nooks. A pomegranate tree; banana leaves; notice boards; a black stone statuette of an elephant god; an oak draped with tiny antiqued lampshades. A blond-haired little brother and sister –- her name, inevitably, is Zoe –- argue in the most reasonable polite tones about how to break a stalk from the carefully groomed stand of bamboo.

The dining room is like an audition hall for roles requiring tall, lean, healthy, pink people. A few tall gray stoop-shouldered ones lurk around hoping against hope for callbacks. Multigeneration families discuss meaningful issues; strangers venture conversation at communal tables; regulars rush to hug hello. The tall pink waiter with the unchanging minimal smile makes sure not to be accusable of impatience when I ask him to explain the food-ordering system. He has embraced silence but sometimes acknowledges a spiritual duty to interrupt it for a customer.

By the window sit a group of unrelated adults, a class in some meritorious subject. Two of them, a white-haired man and a sexy fortyish brunette, stand and bow repeatedly to the setting sun through the window, clap three times, and thank each other very much. Later everyone in the group sits with their right arm extended in midair.

The studenty foursome at my table wonder aloud about the arm-raisers, and reminisce about a convenience store in Lafayette, Louisiana that serves immense magnificent delicious po’boy sandwiches piled with oysters and dripping with mayonnaise. I could use one myself. The most memorable of the four, short and wiry, Appalachian-looking, visually out of place here, wearing a half-grown beard and a green gimme cap, talks about his travels with a landscape crew digging gardens for the wealthy. The inexplicable competitive lust to outdo one’s neighbor’s plants. He and his friends fantasize about a plot of land they’ve seen for sale, almost seven acres with an unlivable 1920s farmhouse, just outside the city, for $110,000, but who can get that kind of money?

I’m practicing taking surreptitious notes. I’ve got a science fiction novel open and am apparently recording my insights about it. I stare off at the ceiling with intense detachment while hanging onto the voices here beside me. I open and close my notebook at unpredictable intervals as if inspired by shuddering fancies all my own.

The fools! Little do they know I have captured their dreams.

3. Home, I allow myself to eat packaged white bread, which I keep only for my children. The sky doesn’t fall.

“I remember being born. I remember being in the womb, I remember being inside. Coming out was great.”

I have loved this man since I was twelve, and I always will.

Contrast with another aged idol of my teens, who has a different set of values.

Up From, or To, OCD

1. I’ve stopped pressing the trip odometer back to zero when I fill the gas tank.

2. I rearranged my silverware drawer. I used to have the large and small spoons in the same compartment and the large and small forks in two different compartments, but now I have the large and small spoons in two different compartments and the large and small forks in the same compartment. It’s more logical.

3. The usage “can’t help but” used to drive me up the wall, but yesterday I found it in Muriel Spark’s 1981 novel Loitering with Intent. I still don’t like it, but I no longer object: if it’s good enough for Muriel Spark, it’s good enough.

successful rootering, an Agents’ week, brainwave habit

1. My kitchen sink line has been cleaned of at least a decade’s worth of sludge.

2. The Agents are leaving for their mother’s house this afternoon after eight days with me. I’ll be able to emerge from my room soon.

3. I like my rest ritual when taking a break during work. In a state of tension, I lie face-up on the couch or bed, breathing evenly from my diaphragm, with my arms stretched past my head. Slowly my arms, of their own accord, make their way to my abdomen, by which point the tension is gone. My arms continue until they’re at my sides, the hands completely relaxed. I’m in a deep alpha state, and after a few more breaths I stand up and return to my desk. Unless I’ve gone as far as a theta state, in which I lie still, pressed into the mattress, sailing.

Clumsy Billboard, Porkpie Hat, Heroic Twig

A billboard advertising a local Catholic college says, "All good things which exist are the fruits of originality." I think, "'...which exist...fruits of'...clumsy." As I drive I spend half a minute rewriting it.

The teenage boy in the passenger seat wears a charcoal gray straw porkpie hat, its extra-wide headband printed with skulls and crossbones, tipped down over his eyes as he dozes on the drive to school.

An oak twig with two leaves is trying to cross the interstate highway, as car wind blows it back and forth. A little sedan pushes it half a lane toward its goal, but a pickup truck stirs it into confusion, blowing it into the air and shoving it back. It's like a falcon fighting a storm, the adventure of a lifetime. Come on, we can do it! And if not, so?

Stepping on the Toes of the Muse

I’ve taken more breaks than I expected to on this blog and now I’m stepping away again, but this time for a welcome reason. I’m putting most of my creative attention into a new project, something I’m writing for myself that I’m not telling anyone anything about.

I’ve been dancing with this blog when suddenly across the room I see another face, and rudely I break away and stride across the floor and when I get close enough I see that she's who brought me here at the beginning. I hold my arms out and we come together gliding and weaving, and I know I’ll step on her toes and breathe on her and lean on her too heavily and not know what to say. It’s always been like that; I’ll never learn properly. But somehow she wants to go home with me.

Stop by again, guys, we’ll put some music on. I don’t know when -– maybe tomorrow, maybe in a couple of months. Seeya. Love you guys.

In No Voice

Not to speak for one’s subject, but to let each thing speak for itself. The dirty white bubbles when you wash your hands after a day outside. The grateful sting of eyedrops after a long night’s reading. A dust-rimmed empty can of tea: pencils, a two-euro coin, ancient dried-up tea leaves.

Thinking of buying a photograph. A photograph of a hand adjusting the frame of a photograph. The stillness of angles, the quiet of black and white.

Now Showing at Qarrtsiluni

I've been trying to produce better stories, with the result that they may possibly come at longer intervals. Actually, I've been threatening to do this for some time, and now I finally feel ready to do it. (I've noticed a slowdown among many of my favorite blogs lately, with no loss of quality.)

Meanwhile, an old story of mine from April 2006, "Old Enough to Write It," has been republished by the notable online magazine Qarrtsiluni.

Go over there for a look, and make sure to read the many other fine stories, poems, and essays in this issue and past issues. This is an online publication with high standards, and they deserve lots of support.

Writer Without a Story: The End of Something

A man and a woman, or whatever combination you like, are sitting sipping mochas in the sleekest café in town. A conversation is in progress:

“My mother – “

“My father –“

“My ex-husband – “

“My ex-wife – “

“My childhood – “

“That’s so weird! My childhood too!”

“And those people I work with – “

“I know what you mean.”

“This is so great! We’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes and I feel like I know you.”

“I feel that too.”

This is known as making a connection. We sit knee to knee and validate each other’s stories. Each other’s myths, projections, illusions. And so we make a pact. We vow to love, honor, and cherish each other’s stories until we find a more rapt audience.

This is what I don’t want to do anymore. It’s particularly relevant for me at this point because I’m starting to date after a long marriage. Very fine people, too. I’m still playing the game, loving to swap stories, and more than ever, loving to listen.

You can’t banish your stories. We carry them – no, they carry us – through life. And maybe “I won’t settle for guarding the stories” is an additional story. But you can at least notice.

Notice how you can love someone whose story doesn’t fit yours. You can love them just for having a story, no matter what it is. And love them for starting to leave the story behind despite how long they’ve sheltered it. Together you might watch your stories pass through your minds, watch them jump from mind to mind, and smilingly wave to them as they move across the screen and into the wings.

What would a relationship look like if it wasn't based on the partners' validating each other's stories? Maybe two people listening closely to reality. Maybe deep silence.

One of the things I learned at the School was that I can love people without regard to how much I think they resemble or complement me. During partner work, I deliberately tried to find people I wouldn’t have chosen at first sight, people much older or younger than me, people I considered too beautiful or too plain, gays and lesbians, and people I had disliked at first sight for one shallow reason or another. Not only did I in every case find them to be wonderfully interesting and to make as much connection with me as anyone else did, but in many cases I found that the less like mine their life experiences had been the more I warmed to their souls, and in a strange way, the more I identified with them. I was finding what was underneath and what was constant. (I should make clear that I’m not ordinarily an opposites-attract kind of person. The people I’m attracted to, either sexually as friends, have been the ones I’ve felt were most like me.) They were me in other costumes.

There was a brief moment of remorse, even horror, in this: the remorse of seeing that all the things I disliked about others were projections of what I feared or disliked in myself. The horror of seeing that many of the people I had been friends with or fought with throughout my life had been hallucinations. The remorse was quickly drowned by joy – a novel experience in itself.

Yes, to spout a cliché, I found my joy at the School. For the past three weeks I’ve been going around grinning to myself, smiling at strangers, saying the extra thank you, carrying on the conversation for an extra moment, and importantly, doing the thing I want to: doing what my first impulse tells me, not overriding it with a second impulse.

There are beautiful parts of yourself you’ve kept hidden all your life simply because other people, who were hiding things of their own, belittled yours. Or only because you imagined they did. It wasn’t so bad for the things you knew you were hiding; they were a secret treasure, a glowing jewel in a cave, which you could retreat to and sit near for light and warmth. But some you hadn’t known were there at all, till you stumbled over them in the dark.

As you find them, the insincerity leaves your voice. Maybe because deep in the cave, the things you stumble into hurt more.

I’m a writer. If I don’t have stories, what can I write? If I don’t want to sustain others’ stories or my own, what characters can I write about? Who would I be if my writing weren’t a theater for the drama of grandiosity versus shame: How good is it, is it good enough, will they accept it, it’s great! I’m great!, it’s too good for them, oh no I was fooling myself and it’s terrible.…

Those characters of mine: just projections of me, a decades-long exercise in self-therapy of the most inefficient sort. Had I ever really created a character or a story? What would happen if I renounced the ratchety, whining machinery of “creative writing,” if I renounced characterization, the endless round of reincarnation of my culture’s types? What if I just waited for something to arise from the dark well?

As Katie says, Who knows? But here: as my characters become more unlike me, they need me more. If I’m writing a disguised version of myself, or a composite of two people I know, I’m not creating anything that doesn’t already exist more fully in real life. But if I’m truly creating a character, someone entirely new, then that person only exists in me. I am his birthplace, his native soil; I’m the only one who can bring him to life. Whether he ever makes it into the outside world or not, he exists as long as he’s in here. I watch him pass across the stage, and we wave, and he thanks me for the only life he’ll ever have. And I thank him for helping me be more people than I ever knew.

Writer Without a Story: The Man-Woman Thing

A middle-aged man wearing a conference nametag walks through the lobby of a hotel, a grateful smile on his face, tears flowing unrestrainedly down his cheeks in full view of airline pilots, flight attendants, bellhops, concierge, and arriving guests. What does he think he’s doing? What kind of New Age foolery have I gotten brainwashed into?

It could be that I’ve been working on my shame. Or my fear and terror. Or the accumulated pain of being a husband, an ex-husband, a father, a son, a brother. It doesn’t matter what has unlocked my tears. It doesn’t matter who I think I am or what particular hairpin turns and long straightaways have driven me here. I’m here, that’s all, I’m letting the tears flow in plain sight for the first time in my life. You look at me. Are you disgusted, worried, embarrassed, amused? Good. That’s what I want.

Let’s say we’ve been working on the man-woman thing. A lesbian has stood up and said that for the first time in her life, after doing one of our exercises, she has felt trust in men, and she invites any man to walk up and embrace her. A stunning woman in expensive clothes and perfect makeup has stood and told us what it has meant for her to be unapproachable, to be dependent on the armor of her face. A young man has stood and told us that when he was a child he molested younger boys. A man with an earring and a prim voice has told us he knows we think him effeminate, and he’s been thinking of himself that way all his life.

Or maybe sitting in morning meditation I felt hands clutching my arm and then a woman’s forehead leaning between those hands, and I put my free arm around her and held her, eyes closed, for half an hour as she shook and cried, my arm cramping, and I knew I would have stayed there till my arm fell off. And afterward she wrote me a letter and told me it was the first time in her life she understand what it felt like to be breathed by another human being.

Or I had sat on a lawn in the southern California springtime and shared worksheets with a woman who had been terribly hurt by a male relative as a preschooler, who told me that being with me was the first time she had ever felt free of her belief that men were shallow and harmful and untrustworthy, and then I’d watched as she stood in front of three hundred people and said so.

“It was like falling in love,” I told my roommate, and he said, “I would drop the ‘like.’” I didn’t know her last name or where she lived or what she did for a living. It wouldn’t have mattered if I hadn’t known her first name, either, or if we’d never exchanged a word. We worked together for an hour or two and shared a special meal. We looked into each other’s eyes and saw ourselves. Then we parted. And it didn’t matter if we never saw each other again, never spoke again during the school, although we did. We had gone through the entire course of a relationship, from first meeting to inevitable ending, in two hours.

Those women helped me as much as I them. The lesbian taught me that I am not suspect. The stunning woman taught me that I do not have to be either covetous or intimidated. The woman who leaned on me taught me that I am everyone and I don’t care who sees it. The woman I shared a meal with taught me that love arises and falls away and lasts forever at every moment.

And if I honor her and treasure her memory and wish her joy for all her life, how much more shall I do so for the woman who lived with me for sixteen years and bore my children and raised them with me and taught me and traveled with me and suffered from me, and who parted from me with the greatest honesty and kindness and wisdom?

Writer Without a Story: Prologue

I had a fantasy of what it would be like at The School for the Work of Byron Katie (which, as I found later, should have been called The School for the Work of Richard Cohen). About a hundred people would gather in a large meeting room and spend the day doing worksheet exercises using Katie’s method, as well as exercises going beyond the worksheets to challenge our limits, a sort of emotional and interpersonal Outward Bound. At the opening session Katie herself, the big guru, would give us a speech and after that most of our lessons would be given by the staff. We’d get a glimpse of Katie again now and then when she stopped by to give us a canned inspirational talk and make sure things were running smoothly.

Then the socializing! In the evenings I would hang out in the hotel bar, where, sneaking off for meat meals, I’d buy drinks for lustful, neurotic divorcees in my age range. One or more of them would come into focus as favorites of mine and we’d go to bed together, perhaps renting a separate room in order to eliminate the roommate problem. We would bare our souls by longingly telling every bit of personal information about ourselves. As a couple or in a group we’d explore Los Angeles by night and drive into the desert during free daytime hours. At school’s end we would exchange contact information, but I’d be wary of getting entangled with my former bedmates. Either I wouldn’t want to see them again and would have to fend off their emails and phone calls, or I’d want to turn my life over to one of them and would have to figure out how to persuade her to move to Austin.

This part of it was true: we gathered in a large meeting room and spent the day doing worksheet exercises using Katie’s method, as well as exercises going beyond the worksheets to challenge our limits, a sort of emotional and interpersonal Outward Bound. And at the end we exchanged contact information. That’s it. That’s how much of my fantasy life turned out to be real. Everything else was just a movie I produced to amuse myself. A feelgood movie, a feelbad movie –- who knows? Lots of talent went into it. Writing, acting, and directing all of professional quality.

Here’s a more realistic treatment:

It was more like three hundred people, and Katie sat in front of us in an easy chair for, oh, about ten or eleven hours a day, tirelessly answering our questions, hearing our stories and self-questionings and sometimes telling us hers. (I’m not counting mealtimes, which Katie took in private and students took in a large white tent on the hotel grounds. Meals were part of the work too, so I’m estimating that the average school day was fifteen hours long.)

Katie did all the group teaching herself sitting in the same easy chair in the same casual position, answering innumerable questions and unstintingly sharing what she knows, except that she took one evening off near the end the week. And except that every one of us was both teacher and student at every moment. (More about Katie’s apparent personality in a future installment.)

And the socializing? Well, most of what I saw and experienced was pairing up for after-hours work, students sitting in corners facilitating worksheets for each other, talking, crying, hugging, and in some instances screaming. Or sitting solitary, writing in notebooks and three-ring binders, staring into themselves, sipping the everpresent herbal tea, thinking, remembering, weeping.

I made dear friends I will either see again or not. I spent the entire time in love, breathing air saturated with it, the love of three hundred people who were all wildly, unpredictably, frighteningly different and all one lover loving itself. I met individual women, too, whom I embraced physically and mentally, and the thought of going to bed with any of them in that time and place scarcely occurred to me. The act would have been a betrayal of them, of Katie, and of myself. My luck was better than that.

I never hung out in the bar. I didn’t have a single alcoholic drink the whole time. (I’ve never had what’s called a drinking problem –- I average one drink per day or less-- but somehow this seems like a significant detail.) I didn’t taste meat for nine days (I’m a devout carnivore). I didn’t spend a cent, in cash or credit, except for tipping the chambermaid and buying some of Katie’s materials as gifts. I didn’t pay attention to the news. I didn’t touch a computer. I didn’t read the novel I’d brought for downtime. I didn’t even read it on the flight home.

Nor did I see LA, except for one outing that was very much part of the work. We were in the hotel the whole time, an undistinguished, adequate, midlevel, airline-crew hotel in walking distance of the airport. A beautiful neighborhood. It had everything we needed.

From what I observed, a culture of “didn’ts” held true for my classmates too. I saw one couple nuzzling after pairing up overnight, but I can’t be sure they weren’t spouses. I heard gay and straight people wryly joking about how good it would be to return to sex back home.

What could we possibly have been doing if not indulging our large and small vices, our one-size-fits-all vices, and sneaking off to kick away the day’s constraints? We were kicking away the constraints all right, not of school but of the rest of life.

One of the mottos of The Work is, “Who would you be without your story?” That’s what we were doing -– shedding our stories and, we hoped, not settling for a new story but instead doing without a story to whatever extent a human being can. Correction: not shedding our stories but simply looking at them, smiling to them, welcoming them as they came and went. Knowing that our stories are stories.

When I put it that way, a problem that’s been worrying me disappears. What is a writer without a story? Can a writer enlighten himself out of a job, like a policeman in a crimeless society or a doctor in a disease-free future? If I have loosened my stories’ grip on me, will it hurt me in my life’s calling?

Well, I guess I’m writing something now. And let’s face it, I’ll always have some story or other. If I welcome them rather than pushing them away –- oh, what stories I could tell!

Indeed the phrase “writer without a story” has a double meaning for me. In addition to fearing that I’d lose my creativity if I became too sane, I’ve feared that I didn’t have enough of a story to tell in the first place: that I hadn’t lived enough to gather material to work my gifts on. That I was a writer without a subject, whose story was so ordinary and uneventful that few would want to hear it.

That story, too, deliquesces in the very act of writing this.

There are things that cannot be said except sentimentally. The fault is in the words, not the things.

Driving, Joking, Growing

Yesterday I was sitting in the car waiting to make a left turn onto my street, watching the stream of traffic approach in the other direction. The traffic moved at a uniform pace except for one car that wove in and out in order to get to the front and pull away. What a fool, I thought, where is he rushing to? He had to be a skillful driver in order to use that style, and he probably enjoyed getting the better of the other drivers, whom he must have considered pathetically conformist, but didn’t he see that his style of driving was dangerous to himself and others?

Then I realized: that’s exactly how I drive.

I learned to drive in the Bronx and it shows. Many more people drive like that there than here. It’s a video game: you try to get to the finish line first, not by speeding but by superior handling in close quarters. Some people have joked about my driving, or even expressed concern. It’s puzzled me how they could mistake good driving for bad. Yesterday I understood when I saw my own actions from the viewpoint of an observer.

I have other patterns that have been more harmful to me than aggressive driving (no traffic accidents, thank God), and I learned them in the Bronx too. One is a practice I’ve been painfully unlearning over many years, the practice of yelling and cursing. I think I’ve finally got that one unlearned after it caused more damage than I want to tell you about.

But clear away a rock and you’ll stumble over a root. Over the past months several incidents have brought home to me an awareness of how I use words not only as a defense but as a weapon. I use wit to wound others, sometimes people I’m close to, sometimes strangers. I’m a witty, incisive, verbally adept guy, it’s my great strength, and I’ve resisted any effort to restrict my use of it. Undoubtedly it compensates for strengths I’ve felt I don’t have. (Whether I actually don’t have them is another issue.) Sometimes I’m with someone and I’m so taken with my own insight that I blurt out something hurtful. Or I write something and I’m so intoxicated with my clever inspiration that I don’t see the nastiness behind it. (Oh, I’m not completely blind to the nastiness, even as I’m indulging it, but I permit myself to be carried away in the rejoicing over power.) I throw a spear of criticism and try to shield myself with the fact that it’s comic. There was an incident twenty-odd years ago when I alienated a friend by amusingly telling him how ridiculous his profession was. A small case, but telling.

I’ve been agonizing because I haven’t known how to excise that malignant part of me without destroying who I am. Am I supposed to go the rest of my life without wit, without comic perceptiveness? It would feel like being lobotomized. Not to mention that I’m a writer. Witty insight is the scalpel I use on the world; should I turn it against myself?

This is something I’m in the middle of thinking about so I don’t have a final answer. All I understand at the moment is that I need to be more aware of the harmful effects on others of some of the things I say, and I have to be aware before I say them, not just after. The saving grace is that I don’t do it frequently. (But when I do, it undoes many good things.) If I can isolate my laser on those few occurrences and cut them away, I can be as witty and insightful as I want when it doesn’t hurt others.

They say you should become friends with your shadow. That’s a metaphor I’ve never understood how to put in practice in literal living. It sounds nice to say and hard to do. My idea now is that I need to use words and insight on a higher level to unlearn the misuse of them on a lower. At least I can feel secure that words and wit really are my friends in a way that yelling never was.

My solution has always been more thought, more thought. I have a feeling that’s only part right.

Leaving the Middle Way

I want to write some of these posts more carefully, taking more time for thought and revision, and also I want to toss some of them off more quickly, just seeing where my instantaneous thoughts lead my fingers over the keyboard -– a sort of literary ouija board exercise.

I want to do both. I want to leave the comfort of my usual way of working, which is a middle way, a way of doing enough to clean up the immediately painful failings but not enough to be a protractedly painful effort. Pain avoidance all around. The old one-draft-plus-a-whisk-through method.

I want to expand in both directions along the continuum.

What would my writing be like if I dug all the way down, unstintingly, without sparing myself, trusting that the way to refill the tank was to empty it with each use? What would it be like if I breezed along laughingly, tumbling past the obsessively surveyed, endlessly repaced and recalibrated border of what the map calls "me"?

My quick sketches often please me more than my careful layering. For a long time much of my best writing has been in personal letters (what your people call “emails”). I let loose in them, I feel a flash and sizzle in my prose and a fire in my perceptions. I like the twitchy, transitionless shifts from subject to subject; it makes me feel sparks –- makes me feel like I’m writing to someone. I like anacolutha, I like asyndeton. (And parentheses -- and dashes.)

This post, for instance… Well, I won’t tell you how hard I worked on it.

Wrong Turn

Just now coming back from driving the kids to school, it happened for the first time ever: I turned onto the block where I used to live rather than the bachelor rental a quarter-mile away where I'm living now. The lights were off, the shades were down, the car was in the driveway. Well, one time in almost four months, that's not bad. Anyway I was distracted by something else as I drove: I was writing. And as I reached the corner I started writing this.