I guess it had just been something I'd gotten use to, the idea of the artist as worthless in society...  something easily felt in a personal way.

Of course I had another job from the writing of whatever I was trying to write.  The published bildungsroman ended up costing more than it was worth after having to file the taxes for the piddling royalties.  (I did not intend it as a moneymaker anyway.)  And other jobs, you can get lost in them, forgetting your mandate to write.  You lose a bit of faith in what to write, why do it, why bother, in the effort to survive.  Hey, that's life, right.  And I guess to make life simpler, when you work your shift you see yourself as that individual doing that job professionally.

Fortunately, a good part of me could deal with the hospitality business, and I could keep a tight enough ship that bosses liked me and my relationship with the customers.  A fortunate state of affairs., in fact.  I got something out of them, I enjoyed being present with them.

But it took me sometime to realize rationally why I did it, or was able to carry on with it, as sometimes it could get a bit bleak and lonely and dark.  Maybe some sort of troubadour I wanted to be, or follow the tradition of Irish folk musicians, an oral tradition, part of being a poet, a bard, the ideal writer behind the acts of writing.  Yes, I liked the soundtrack, good for the muscles, good for the digestion.  I was shy about getting up and singing, and never had voice lessons like I should have in the formative years of self-cultivation.

I guess it began to happen in the course of my college education.  I cared a lot for written things of value, and the papers I wrote in assignments began to take longer and delving deeper into a subconscious realm.  Certain faculty members didn't understand that, and wished to keep me confined to the lines of academic production and credential which then would lead to more academic credential and production and all that.  My heart was not into that.  Or, I guess, with some informative period, and family observations internalized, I had to rebel.  Not that I wished to rebel.  Rebelling was ironic for me, as if it went against the very values my father had instilled in me, that deep clerical response drive to pursue the spiritual parameters at the core of education.  In the way my father referred to Julian Benda's concept of The Treason of the Clerics, a take on that period before, and I suppose after, WWI, in which professional institutional scholars fell into nationalistic habit, politicizing that which should remain most a part of the spiritual realm.  My father saw that the academic world of successful publishing thoroughbreds and loudly direct commentators involved with the political matters of the day, perhaps made inevitable for whatever reason of style or employment in the current atmosphere, was in large part a betrayal of the priestly class ever expanding the examinations concerned with the deeper realities that fall into spiritual learnings and metaphor.  It was more important for him, as a teacher, to declare, "Thou art that which is," than play the game.  And he had his own magnificent style, from those well-rounded days...

That's part of it, certainly.

But pretty much immediately I felt the effects of Cs and Ds, grades which I did not completely deserve.  Someone should have listened a bit better.  Sure, their focus was highly liberal, but it was also politicized, without much room for a wayward college professor's son.

An act of rebellion leads, I suppose, to marginalization, and so it was.

I kept a marvelous ache within, and I found something right and true in it.  Something beautiful, something with some integrity.  Staying above the fray, that of that politicized involvement.  To express that, I guess that would take some definition.  I don't wish to condemn scholars who note that the very language we use is charged with the directions of power and status quo.

In my studies, oddly as he himself had predicted, something slipped in.  A little bit of light, that must have been touched upon by my own inner sense of light and the things I responded to.  Somewhere, sophomore or junior year I found a double record of JFK speeches in the music library.  (I ended up paying the overdue fees on it, meaning to keep it for reference for a thesis that they chose not let me write.)  And on the record was that last speech, the one from, appropriately, Amherst, the Robert Frost library dedication speech.  "Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses."  "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence."  And while coming from a politician, a consummate one, but also an educated man, a reader, there was that which I was looking for, that spiritual part of education, he's telling us about, or wanted to say.  (As if he knew somehow...)

But anyway, your own work is good.  It takes an effort to sustain.  And I gather, that with the sense of rejection I received there at what was supposed to me a shining moment, leading to other shining moments, things went, well, in their own direction.  I was laid a bit low.  Lost.

Well, you pick yourself up, and keep at it.  Came to Washington, D.C, worked as a miserable clerk, temp agency stuff, began whatever career I might be construed to have as a busboy.  It kept me active, running around, amongst people.

I had really wanted to do something akin to perceptions, albeit boyish, about Robert F. Kennedy.  His graceful sorrow, his eloquence, his reaching out into the spiritual realm of the Gospels, poor folk, Mississippi, West Virginia, migrant farm workers, yes, and his funeral train leaves a lasting impression.   A melancholic Irish man, with good reason, with an incomprehensible depth of soul searchers under his belt...

But when you're feeling low, and the world does not care much about this now embarrassing matter of the book you wrote, which touches painfully on things like being treated like a deviant or a low-life, exiled, besmudged and besmirched, such that one felt too ashamed of himself to be a fledgling prep school teacher or one of those routes...  And you get cast out of the spiritual forests and the literary light of New England and its transcendental waters...  exile.

How do you reinforce feeling good about the work that you do?  As a writer, it seems it happens and exists in secret.  Few notice, few have time, no compensation of any sort.  A professional review of the book, to the cost of paying Kirkus Indie Reviews, four hundred bucks, for a gross misreading, a misreading of a central passage, yeah, the obscurity of Amazon.

So, what do you do?  You go to a therapist.  You end up taking Lexapro, as recommended to you.  You take it once, nah, doesn't seem to do anything, and then, reluctantly, you try it again, wintertime, darkness, night shifts, holidays eating at you, old age of loved ones and distance, and no seeming way out back into the light and the sort of recognition as being a decent person that such an education (on the back's of immigrant's labors) might call for, you just try to get better.

A better mood.  More exercise.  Meditation, bike rides, walks, yoga.  And finally, less of a drive to medicate yourself from the pain.

But really, this must come hand in hand with the spiritual observations.

Such as:  the world of the city and commerce, beyond trying to collect the trends and the styles and that which is currently in fashion aping whatever else is fashion, will not recognize as important the efforts of the poet, the artist, the monastic.  The value is on consumption.   Why would people remove themselves from such Protestant work ethic successes as are so readily available, power, money, real estate, good looking competent spouses, the shared kitty, self-protecting itself against any weirdness and unnecessary and unprofitable pursuits.

I strive now to feel better about myself, to feel justified, at least somewhat, given the state of the bridges I might have burned, accidentally, without intention, in the attempt to listen to and heed something coming from within, as the strange and separate of us are sometimes better able and employed to hear.  And anyway, it would not behoove a mentality to stand against itself.  Better to seek the depths of bedrock for a foundation, as was once said and wisely repeated, if we are to have character as human beings, and the strength to carry on with what we see as a fit pursuit, one which a person might feel a special affinity for, a sense of personal tradition to carry through on, to not hide the light within.

Celibacy allows for a greater expression of hospitality, I read, in The Cloister Walk.  Yes, I suppose this is true, a correlation that at least made me feel a bit better.  Perhaps hospitality actually reinforced that which allows you and pushes you against your desire to be closer to that which is in the field of things in which celibacy exists, a weird part of spirituality that really was the last and least of one's intentions.  In fact, I hoped, and continue to hold out such hope, that it is within the context of the sacred and the spiritual that liberation from celibacy would allow.  Yoga, Tantra, chakras, the replenishing of the spiritual waters through the light of sexual contact between man and woman, the engagement of flow and polarity.

But I guess I was a damn fool with regard to the achievements of such, as if I were almost out to undermine all the nice relationship things I wanted to have happen, monogamously.

Yeah, I'd made some bad choices, thinking that sensual pleasures would fall into alignment, that wine is spiritual, that serving it is additionally so, and that this clear standing-up-for-what-you-believe-in would result in some beneficial ends and not the usual awkwardness and insincerity.

But if you're not valuing yourself for who you are, then you're not comfortable in your own skin.  If you're trying to cohere to social expectations that lie beyond your ken, that lie within a mainstream majority that you find either too challenging or not challenging or simply not engaging.  You can't fool yourself forever, you can't lie, you cannot be other than yourself.  In these matters.

And I was faking it.  I thought a bottle of wine, you know, that liberation was part of it, the dance.  That's when I seemed to feel more at ease, or when I would able to pick up the guitar and sing, that sort of thing.  And there is a precedent for it.  Like, take Shane MacGowan, who'd admit that when he got nervous--as you might when having to perform--you drink a bit.  "And I'm not apologizing," quote him being interviewed in the context of Ronnie Drew's passing, or maybe in a documentary of Fairytale of New York.  It was kind of how my brother worked, as I saw it, entering into the latter part of growing up.  It would be wrong not to enjoy a good beverage in a social setting, indeed!  Look at all his successful friends, enjoying the same.

Except I was too much a pensive type naturally, a bit of an Irishman, melancholic, quiet, feeling inhibited around certain crowds and people.  A drink was a relief from that, into a more free state of action and engagement.  And over the long haul, I found out, just by the nature of my psyche, my moodiness, that I had to be a person of moderation, exercise, aerobic activity.  Social venues put my into uncontrolled situations I felt vulnerable in, acting on my heart, not as rational or controlled, and as an adult, trying to be productive in the world, well, you have to be mindful.  As fun as the ride might be.  You still have to wake up the next day...

You have to stop from time to time and go back to the owner's manual.  And exposed as a bartender is, unfortunately, Christ, you get caught out sometimes, a late hit, running on fumes, having to deal with the loud, the intoxicated telling their stories and commenting about the music on the sound system, etc.  No, the kitchen closed an hour ago.


Yes, I remember my father once, telling me of his childhood, a teacher reaching out to him as his mother was laying in her deathbed dying of tuberculosis.   "Life can be pretty grim sometimes," he said.  A lesson he learned young.  And yeah, life can be lonely.  It can be difficult and unprofitable, lonely, bleak.  There were some times I felt very frustrated, for years.   But you can hope, you can hope that you'll learn something from that, that you'll be given some wherewithal, some strength, some endurance, enough to get you out of, who knows, maybe your own bad habits... to, anyway, a better place, a ledge of understanding and some perspective upon the 'why' of the climb.  There's literature for that, biblical enough, and not in some shallow sanctimonious self-satisfied way, a place blank from all that self regard, something free crawling out from the rocks that have fallen your way. Where you can honestly say, to yourself, look, I guess this was what I was after, all along.



There's a passage in The Brothers Karamazov.  I think it's when Alyosha is praying over the body of his mentor the old monk, and he rises in a trance, awake with some knew knowledge, and the other attendant monk gets it enough to just back up and let him pass, to not interfere with the spinning of someone else's wheels.  Perhaps it's one of few self-portrait touches we get from Dostoevsky, I'd like to think, anyway.  It's a picture of when you don't have a lot of back-up, not a wide public approval rating, so to speak, not a lot of popularity, nor recognition, or people being there to say, "I get you," but you have that crucial back-up, that support that's tailor-made and meant for you, just the right thing, probably too subtle for anyone--like anyone outside a monastery--to get, such as they are, involved with this and that.  Yes, you've put up a show, but this is who you really are, and certain animals, people, can sense it, smell it, get it, know vaguely how to guide you.  But honestly, it doesn't come very open.   It wouldn't be a realistic piece of 'fiction' if you received wide and unanimous recognition;  there would only be a tiny smidge of it, and you'd have to be paying attention to catch it, a kind of harmony, a tuning of notes agreeing, no waves of being off.

In the end you are like the light is, ultimately unquantifiable, impossible to explain except through the admission that there exists no clear understanding but that of being.


As I say, it had been difficult for me to accept, in a lot of conscious ways, doing the work I did, the odd peculiarities of a life working in the hospitality business with all the details that pertain to that particular job, geography and circumstances.  Very hard.  But you can lot live in fear and anxiety and paranoia completely for any longer than you must.  Yes, one life, a good profitable, enjoyable productive one, you missed out on, looking at potential and opportunity.  You fall where you fall, what can you do, and you have to accept that which you have to accept, and then, finally, we hope, come to some peace with it.  And that can take a lot of perspective, a very high one, even, sometimes.

I would offer, or I might guess, that in the acceptance on the part of Jesus towards the odds and ends of humanity, the fisherman, the Samaritans, the poor, the blind, the leper, the dying, the infirm, we see that most odd form of acceptance, that of one's own nature, call it true nature, reality, identity.  Rather than struggle with it, be forever a questioner, is not easier to accept easier to say, thy sins are forgiven, go in peace, first and foremost and primarily to one's own self, letting the chips lay/lie where they have fallen.  Faith, that last thing, that makes you capable of the work you need to do.

And perhaps Jesus had to get over the fact of being somewhat like the nagging essayist, the rabbi teacher without so much credential.  He had to get over that, that unique form of being his own kind of story-teller, in his own vein of the traditional oral culture with a long long history of stories and tales of uncertain and unclear meanings.  He shrugged.  They almost succeeded in throwing him off a cliff at the edge of the town he first lectured in, the crowd angered, without real reason, at what he'd said.  They ask his family to restrain him, this crazy man, before they do it themselves.  All of which he takes in stride and to peaceful ends.  Something made the individuals comprising a crowd look at him and stop in their tracks, at least at the beginning of his career, before he gained momentum and the popular tales we still attribute to him today, in no small reason because the stories of his miracles and his sermons and his steadying of his fellows protect him still to this day, keep him safe, let him be himself.  To let him be himself, the real guy, Jesus, to allow that truth forward, to such ends perhaps a little hyperbole, a few tall tales, a few liberties to make a story better or truer, you can't really argue with.  Those stories passed down serve to tame our own skeptical response, 'well, who the hell re you to claim such authority.'  An artist of any sort has to claim such a natural authority at that which they particularly do, Picasso being Picasso, and so on.

Was he an odd duck, heretofore?  Regular, but strange, unpredicted his eloquence.  He must have had a few odd habits, like that of taking forty days away in the desert for his vision to coalesce.  That he might have been regarded simply as "the carpenter's son" betrays a little mystification at the guy familiarly held.  Yeah, he's... well, he's...  He seems to fall into some form of the son of a scholarly man, as a carpenter must have knows a lot of, if you will, lore and knowledge and knowhow, not just making and doing things, but being able to explain his engineering and the solidity of his principles toward making solid lasting things out of lumber.  And the son seemed to have the same gift and aplomb for that which is a profession and a trade but which is more personal, like the individual touch and the depth of a person if you are intelligent, skilled, human, wise, likable, identifiable.  Jacks of many trades they must have been back then, skilled and resourceful, versatile, broadly confident at work of various sorts, who better, what better model of that than the carpenter scholar shrewd father Joseph with the lady Mary as his wife and foremost believer-in, and she too was no slouch.

And lastly, one gathers that they must have been fun people, friendly, easy to get along with, these characters from the stories of the Gospels and good natured Paul and so forth.  Politically likable. Good friends to have, in an enjoyable way, not oppressive or personally tyrannical or selfish and manipulative or just plain hard to get along with.


The wearing of any personality, though, might get tiresome after a certain point.  What you might have thought once was you, immutable, unchangeable, can turn out to be an illusion to be gotten ride of and put aside.  A problem of being a public persona, if you aren't grounded, and trying to get back to the deeper...