Thursday, October 23, 2008

Personal is the political

Riveting television on the Public Television Channel early this morning. British documentary on the Chicago 7. What impacted me the most was the discussion by the defendants regarding how what they were doing would bring about change and an increase in activism in successive generations. Um, that’d have been my generation. What have I done to promote freedom and civil rights? In my mind precious little except vote in almost every election I’ve been eligible to vote in (I think I’ve missed one in the last 14 years). I’ve also exercised my right to marry my longtime sweetheart each time it’s been available (2003, invalidated. And now 2008).


Other than that? I go to work every day. I pay my taxes. I show up. I try to learn every day (doesn’t always work but it’s wonderful when it does.)


There are more things I can do like quit being a PUMA and start stumping for Obama. It’s time, it’s time.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Here's the thing...


Here’s the thing. Writers, authors, those who write fiction, there are many, hundreds, no hundreds of thousands that are good…very good. In my youth and young adulthood I was a compulsive reader…a regular at bookstores and libraries. I was the kind of kid that read under the covers, read at the breakfast table before school, in the bathroom, in the car. Who dreamt about becoming a writer, the sop who looked up words she didn’t know and had just one item on her birthday and Christmas lists (“Just BOOKS, please”).

I inhaled books, devoured them whole in marathon sittings. The silly bespectacled type who literally fell in love with the characters I read about…so much so that I was almost driven to steal one book (a Doctor Seuss book about a creature named Bartholomew) in 2nd grade because I didn’t want to stop my chaste unrequited tryst with the title character. In my teens and the threshold of my twenties, I dedicated myself to the spectacular heights of science fiction, consuming page after page of text on monsters real and imagined, soaring in speculative worlds, my mind and soul leaping from the heights of the fanciful alternate realities.


But not long after that, the life long love affair turned sour. I stopped reading fiction. I turned to magazines with their glossy therapeutic promise of retail therapy and newspaper stories, with a more controlled emotional core. I spent years getting no closer to fiction than the occasional feature-length piece, read on a plane or at a coffee house. I became a dedicated disciple of non-fiction if I read at all and turned to radio and it’s evil stepsister, television. I had to stop because the fictive slipstream had become the single note story of pathos. The negative narrative of most fiction I laid my hands was completely dispiriting.


But last night, two decades later, stuck for years in a job that had it’s own special brand of negative narrative, I tried to stoke that fire again. I went to the store determined to spend all my book card money and bought a couple of cheap, hard cover anthologies, “contemporary short stores of the late 20th century” or some such. I decided to start slowly and limited my reading to author’s whose names I recognized, of which there were quite a few. The pieces in both volumes were from writers born in the 40’s and 50’s mainly but there were a smattering born in the 60’s too.

You could tell which writer hailed from which decade by the way each story was assembled. The former were more conventionally constructed, careful, contained, polished to gleaming gloominess while the latter more stream of consciousness, with multiple sentence fragments and angst-ridden tangential passages tossed about.


None were without virtuosity, a striking brilliance that one just doesn’t get watching television. The expert technique to a person, male, female, older and younger, was intoxicating….I mean they were all very, very good. Inventive, descriptive, transcendent in their use of craft and structure. But they all shared that same fatal trait I’d tracked in my younger years… the stories to a greater or lesser extent were all depressing. One after the other, I flipped through very personally excruciating accounts of dead or dying loved ones, difficult marriages, abominable childhoods and crushing jobs. The terribly private news of mental depressives tumbled from the pages in beautiful, ripped language.

And then I remembered completely why I’d stopped writing in the first place and why I’d subsequently decided (how did I forget???) that writing wasn’t an appropriate career choice for me…because I was just as depressive as the folks who drove me to sneak not just one but two pieces of chocolate cake after I’d come off a reading bender. And I didn’t want to write or read that. I didn’t want to be talented kill-joy (Yes, in my heart, I know I have the potential to become a world-class fun-sucker).

I agree, stories must contain conflict but this was “discordapallooza”, this was mega-strife, a fracas in every paragraph, toxic anti-nourishment. Instantly I recalled one very bad year in my life when I knew in no uncertain terms that if I kept consuming this very cunningly crafted bile, there would no longer be a me. So cold turkey, I stopped. Amazing what we can forget.

But while the memory of why I left off being a reader and subsequently swore off writing was undergrounded, the urge to read and write--so primal-- never went away. It was never replaced by anything else though, so in my current career I am a nothing.

And now belatedly, I know rationally that fiction is not limited to the tragic and that one can start over at any age…although I pragmatically understand that only former doctors and lawyers, trust-fund babies and stay at home wives can painlessly realize this affirmation.

And now that I know…what do I do with this information?

What indeed? But it is a wonderful realization worthy of a Sacred Life Sunday. And no I don't have a picture yet that describes what I'm feeling but if i do find one I'll post it here.