Is it that you have to be incredibly tolerant, overly generous, treat the creative self with a kindness bordering on irresponsibility in order to write…  Why, what are you working on, even?  What's the point?  A million skeptical voices, the buzz of an entire city…  and yet, you persist.

Some are born to family lineage, taught at an early age, possessing obvious talent, a rare enough human being like an Andrew Wyeth who's going to paint his entire life, possessing with confidence a tolerance for  humoring the creative mode.  And for some the mode itself is instinctive enough, a way of being, such that fitting in is not high on the list of considerations, a Ted Hughes realizing he cannot write papers but must write poetry.  Like Jesus, teaching with authority, in a way blasphemous to the cultural expectation.  A kind of rebellion.

Sometimes you'll just write cliché, hoary platitude, embarrassing common obvious observations a clever person would laugh at.  You never know.  It's just part of the deal.  It's not all going to be brilliant.  But you have to save that kindness with respect for your efforts.


Is there such a thing as self knowledge?  Is that something gained?  Do you follow the urge to join in with outer things?  Is there a tension between the worldly, the seekers of that kind of knowledge, those kinds of luxury, with that of the simple, those things like lilies of the field, the raiment of sparrows… Always hard to figure.  You're left to use your gut instinct:  was the night out (to which I was susceptible) all that useful, or was it another exercise in worldliness.  And worldliness is very important to us, the source of pleasures…  How could you avoid the night out, the real pleasure of company.

Viewed on tv after a long shift:  PBS--why a Nova piece on luxury sky scraper 57 something, near the Essex House?  Is that what they did with my hundred bucks?  I liked the workers, I felt for the other people involved with the promotional, but, is that what we need to talk about in today's world, the high luxury end, the $19 million condo?  Did I really see this on public educational television?  A bathtub being cut out of Italian marble?  This is not educational.  Anyone can do that.  Does it make a bathtub better?  Where's the old claw foot?  When PBS starts preaching vanity, then you know.  And it was a preaching, a subtle lesson, why not, go for the big bucks and the spending of big bucks.  I watched it, stomached it, didn't want to take it out on anyone in particular, but, this is exactly what a new good religious figure, Francis, is telling us about, the economy coming before man and woman.  Blindsiding material bandwagon, trickle down jobs, bold entrepreneurship…

Rant rant rant.  I'm provoked into such thoughts as I shake off dealing with the drunk hyper guy who feels like the bar where I work is his personal playhouse.  Is that Zeppelin?  Is that Floyd?  Each and every song, the guy has to talk about it.  You need a haircut, he says, trying to push a way into my wall of ignoring him.  A few minutes later, I come back from bringing the singer's PA system downstairs, load it in the back of her SUV--she strained her back recently--and K has plugged his iPhone music into the bar's sound system.  I quickly unplug it, which garners another comment, whoa…  and a chuckle from the man quietly finishing a small dinner after a long day.

I found it more interesting to read what I'd written the day before than the news on the web, after a quick scan.  There were faults in what I'd written, but it felt vital and necessary to track the thoughts as they came and went out of whatever frame or state of mind they came out of.  Before work I felt the despair of disorganization, of finding my job an evil one getting me nowhere closer to a good life, but that seemed like as good a point as any to think about larger issues.  Did I want to go back to school, yes.  Did I want to try physician's assistant program, maybe… Or did I feel there was some overarching reason, as if true literary education was more important for health than any particular medical procedure, thus an interest in Christian healing, in a general way.  What was it about good health that drew me, even as the night shifts were hard to deal with, as depression over thinking one had taken the wrong path in life, fallen in with bad things, was hard to deal with, but by taking a positive step forward each day and writing as honestly as one could, for no better reason than to sort things out.

No literary critic would in their right mind discuss healing by faith in a personal way, truly entertaining the concept in its vastness, Gopnik in The New Yorker far more suited to a piece in the rise of disbelief, an intellectual history to delight and entertain.  What I wrote would only be craziness highlighted by more craziness.

Great Author:

It felt sometimes like my getting closer to the verge of the battle lines between good and evil.  You work as a writer, you work at finding your way to deeper reality.  And when I scratched the surface it looked more and more like a Christian battle with the devil.  Demons could enter you and mess up your health.  And I saw a good amount of that working at night, being around wine and alcohol.  Night shifts, when you were tempted away, when people's demons came out.  I regretted ever getting into such a business, but it was as if I knew that this was a place to encounter the spiritual poor who needed help.

Demons had entered me, when I was young and susceptible, when I was not wary enough, the same demons that haunted my grandfather, who had his battles.  Shift work in restaurants.

If good makes a stand, evil is rebuked, goes away in angst.  And when good comes around in your life, you feel like Simon Peter, "depart from me, Master, for I am a sinful man."  You know good, you know where to find it, but it just seems the light of it dims sometimes and you get lost in things without thinking, yes, without thinking, along for a ride, as if you had no power.  Where, how to fight evil but by reading the Gospels, so you have a kind of dry run, a plan, a schematic…  And if you can, then maybe you're helping out humanity in a crucial battle.

It does feel strange to stand up, to expel the demons from your own self, if you can, of course with higher help, and I would hope, that just as the stories say, you are returned to health, mental, physical, otherwise.

To read from Luke, say, it's really all quite common, the number of people with evil spirits, unclean spirits, a fever in them that the Holy One of God can rebuke.  How many people does Jesus cure?  There's the demon talking back to him, throwing its inhabitant down on the floor, but departing without harming the man.  There's the girl, the leper, the man lowered down through the roof, Simon's mother.  And really, they are restored, made whole again, returned to alignment with God's heavenly order.

Jesus didn't go around like a doctor with a great variety of illnesses, fever, high cholesterol, joint inflammation, blood pressure, each on a separate basis, clinically….  Makes you wonder.  I know, that would be a thought easy to laugh at, bitterly, particularly by those who've had to grimly face real illnesses.  But the miracles are a representation, of an order beyond us, beyond our science.  The miracles show that good prevails, or something like that.

As the poor know, it would be too terrifying to live in a world without that power of Jesus Christ to know the difference between good and evil and stand rightly.  Yes, the poor and the sinful and the possessed, they would know a bit better than the rich person sealed off in their wealth with modern medicine and modern science at their call.  You'd be far more feeling the need to believe, or find the Christian healing accessible.  And I wonder, if you have succumbed to the notion that the only way to go through life is to amass riches and securities and protections, well, you're susceptible to not seeing the demons when they come to tempt, influence, enter…  Sophistication doesn't do much good when there's some basic evil spirit gnawing away at you.  Even an exercise program, even a career.  The high place of the mountain, the pedestal of the Temple…

It takes being humbled to want to see it, or to know that you have to read, just to be able to fight through the day, to not lose your mind as you try to attend to things it seems you have to do if you want to eat and half the roof over your head.  Maybe you just have to be humbled down to that poor reality for you to really wake up, for your belief to wake and then experience the joy you so badly need.  How to put it into words, into a story, into language, into the thoughts in your own mind?  Will some event come, like passing the man possessed with demons as you walk to work, whereby you pull out some faith and power, something dramatic like that?  No, probably not.  Probably you'll just find yourself clinging to that bit of sanity it all allows you, just taking along your own limping hurt Christian body through another day, as you wonder, what to do with life, what to do with faith even, wonder if you have enough faith, of if you just aren't weak.  Well, you can only admit the truth.  The truth will always help, a step that allows other steps forward, to know what's good from what isn't.  And maybe your health recovers as you take up such good things.

I stood with him on the deck, on the bridge of the night, when he came by to order his dinner through a touch of the computer screen with an extended finger.  I heard a soft, deep-voiced, hey, how you doing man…  We watched the water of the evening flowing, running out now, the last waves, as we always dealt with upstairs.  We spoke quietly for the night.  "Yeah, I'm fine when I get here, just during the daytime… Don't look forward to it."   He chuckled, louder than I'd heard him chuckle over anything I'd said for a long time.  Our most substantive conversations were about the exercise and the yoga we did during the day.  He'd get up earlier than I would.  He wasted far less time.  And what do you do when you get home, take the time to unwind, finally get to bed having processed it all, then sleep as the body deserves, get up late, don't do much, you get ashamed.

Later he came back from the office up the hall where he disappeared with a finished dinner plate, a napkin and a plastic wire bread basket.  Excellent, he said.  We had an eight top and I hoped they wouldn't want dessert and that no one else would want to come and want to linger over a glass of wine.

It was an interesting moment of candor between us, and perhaps he had more time, more a chance to exchange a word, on a weekend night, a Saturday, moreso than other nights I worked.  He had up 'til a few years ago regularly gone to karate practice early on weekend mornings.  "Gets the aggressions out."  Now he was really into the yoga, and swimming and biking.

Then later on I came home finally after spending some time with a  coworker.  He'd come up at the end of the night for a sip of wine.  It was the eight year anniversary of his father's death to brain cancer.  I wasted time plucking a banjo, putting a capo on it, adding to my understanding of Irish music.  But the wasting of time, the odd hours, how the wine was always soothing, the time completely alone, it was all beginning to gnaw on me, my life style of twenty five years of night shifts.  Cooking something, a hamburger for myself, in the wee hours.  Something creepy about it, knowing it would have to end someday and not feeling prepared for such circumstances.


Yeah, I was a country boy as far as the whole thing was concerned.  And as a country boy, I don't know, it's just that you have a set of morals.   Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew, in the way of rugged quiet poetic suffering of the sort a country boy feels normal with.  You're use to a lot of silence.  You listen to trees and brooks and creeks and grasses and all that sort of thing… cattails, snow.  But sometimes you bite off like thirty years of daily…  I don't know… should haves?  Or, that 'you were cool, and deserved it,'  to which you have to add, 'as if anyone would have known…'  but then, people are supposed to know.  Be discerning, right...

So when I said, okay, I won't write you, even if I do find a piece of paper and a pencil in the dust, and then didn't write that summer, that was just me being me.  Stupid, I know.  Because time is not infinite, at least you come to realize.  And it was all totally stupid.  Of course I wanted to write her.  What else did I want to do with my summer, but, just because I had my fool standards.  I could say I did a lot of things wrong that year, like when I picked out a place to live up on a hill away from campus a bit.  Incredibly stupid.  I had a great bunch of friends down in a dorm on campus.  But no, I had to go walking out past Emily Dickinson's house every day and night.

I think I tried to write a sketch of a story, like I went back to where I was from after, and there was a girl I could talk to, metaphorically, maybe she was big, maybe she was little, maybe she was old, maybe she was young, maybe she sat in fields all day and milked cows, and knitted sweaters by hand, cooked for her brothers, or maybe she played music.  Maybe she stood somewhere outside a mythical farm house and knew the ridges the way I did, knew where the next bend in the road, 12B, was, or how a road from the ridge dropped down into Deansboro, and old Indian trading road that came from Munnsville and Knoxboro, crossing 26.  Did I find her in rain?  Was I the one lost in the rain, and then saw someone far away who was comfortable with the rain and the cold…  I got the impression sometimes that was what I was dealing with in other people, that they were able to live like that, bare in a way, or that maybe I could.

I realized quickly on that I didn't have a sketch, or more than a sketch.  What I needed was to talk to people, to find a place to find them and talk to them, and sort of conduct interviews about what sort of nature they knew, what elements, what experiences.  They were too busy, really.  They knew something I didn't. But I was looking for authenticity, I guess, and you found it if you stood there long enough as a bartender.  Though, Jesus, the repetitive shows I've seen, acted out, time and time again….

Books are ghosts, or have ghosts…  I don't think I really read them anymore.  I just keep them, and there they are on the shelf, containing what they contain.  An interesting hodgepodge, as all libraries are.  Wine books mixed with art books, some book of Kerouac's you found supportive once, now distanced, but still reachable.  Like I remember the guys I worked with at McDonald's behind the line back in my hometown.  Kundera, Twain, Cheever, Chekhov, old yearbooks, American Library works of Lincoln, I & II, texts, poems, anthologies, letters, biographies, epics, classics, Faerie Queen.  A few shelves of Ireland related things.  Madam Korbonski's Encyclopedia B., saved from the rain.

I don't want to obsess, I don't mean to obsess, I try not to, and I don't, but, it's just that there is in everything some kind of a lesson.  Like when Samuel Clemens finds himself out of work and has to slink around in shame, avoiding his landlord, when he had failed at some 'real job.'  He snuck off, slinked around I mean, or hid, and that's when, through the awful grace of God, his career as a journalist started.  I'll just write well about something, he told himself.  And that's what Twain and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, that's where they call come from  and what they're like.  They are creatures of good free writing, true stuff, stuff that made the author feel things, remember, summon scenes emotionally out of his own stuff, like we all have stuff.  He just started writing real, and after a while, you stop looking over you shoulder and just keep doing it.

Maybe it's more like cooking than anything else.  Cook something you sear it on both sides, then give it heat, but not too much, then you let it rest, to let the juices redistribute and become the sauce.  Twain didn't give a shit, he just wanted to write how he really felt, and goddamn, after all those jobs and all that real life experience--did they have the term then?--he just wrote.  The Dauphine, hell, I'm going to write about the Dolphin, or someone talking about him…  Fundamental way to write something, just by being real about it, not creepy, joyful, accepting, forgiving…  That's the great thing about Chekhov… It's like no one ever needed to say, oh, this guy is fucking great, absolutely awesome, and even shy about how fantastic, absolutely, he is, like he was hiding something like an ikon...

Great Author:

Yes, Luke 4…  So why does Jesus get offended, as he comes home and preaches, reads from Isiah in the synagogue, when they look at themselves and say, 'is that not the son of Joseph?'  Is Jesus simply highlighting that his time, and the time to believe faithfully, has come, that it's time to get with it?  Is he making some subtle point, observing that people are so what we might call today ego-driven, so rooted in the illusion of 'who a person is,' so attached to seeing a person as someone they already know, already defined, that they cannot open themselves to the the possibilities, the possibilities of seeing the deeper wisdom of someone else, which is surprising to them, but then also able to in their own lives respond to that wisdom…

Does that sound a little bit Buddhist, or a little bit Eckhardt Tolle?  Does the state of being free of one's ego, thus not judgmental, open spiritual potential?  Would that turn the world on its head, that the person we, through our egos and judgments, normally would not even think have the potential to teach great things might have as much value as that person whom we have already a professional expectation of being in that realm…  Where does the carpenter's son get the authority when he's not a rabbi…  Is that not radical…

But then, to temper our fears that we have turned into radicals, about to tip over the sacred, what do we have but these sketches of Jesus?  Is this enough to go on?  Do we not have a tendency to feel a little creepy even about reading Luke, I mean, if you haven't bought into the Catholic party line…  Is thinking about this stuff, meditating alone upon it, is that a bit creepy?  Shouldn't you focus on your job, or at least having some sort of feeling of envy to those who do have careers of note and societal worth… the television producer, the judge, the expert?  Do we feel a little sad ruminating over all the possibilities alone on a Friday evening, considering our reaction to Jesus here in Luke when they almost want to throw him off the edge for insulting their piety anyway…  Do we think that perhaps in some small metaphoric way that we might at least be wise like Jesus was, to make good sound judgments about what to do on a daily moral basis, even if we obviously have no power of miracles, which we wouldn't want anyway given how you'd end up being hounded to death by fame.

It's all theater, of the Christian sort, yes, but really not so different from reading Shakespeare, in a certain sense, who himself came out of the morality play, juicing it up.  So it's okay for us to read the Gospels, I mean, if you have to be apologetic about it.  And who is not at least in the beginning of a thing of two minds about it, not sure what to think…  Yes, if you stop too, to think about your own sins, do you not want to have some model before you, to help you make better decisions…  And hopefully, in the long run, Jesus is such a role model, though of course, given what happens to him, we don't want to be too much like him.  Will one cause a stir by even mentioning him, provoke a reaction, knowing that this can be a violent world when beliefs and religious systems are involved, yet another consideration, but one that points back to that strange thing, the ego in people, the defined sense of self or identity or whatever you want to call that fixedness.   When even our atoms aren't fixed…

I feel sad talking about these things, lonely in a way.  But in a way, also calm and stilled, I hope.  Time flies by, and here I am thinking about these things.  Is that the way being in the Garden of Gethsemane, tinged with a hopelessness, would have felt, I don't know, can't pretend to know, that feeling of being an amateur.   Isn't that the son of that guy we know...

A day off, and feebly I do laundry.  A warmer day in a cold winter, a bit of spring cleaning, enough light to see the dust on a dry hard wood floor, evidence of the dryness of heat.  Things in the fridge to toss.  The night before, after coming home from a long shift, in the night, looking up the intellectual world of an old professor of mine, a great democrat, small d, I discover a line, a piece to look over.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/dec/26/the-fate-of-the-union-kennedy-and-after-7/?pagination=false


The Fate of the Union:  Kennedy and After, by Benjamin DeMott, December 26, 1963, The New York Review of Books.

Shrewd observer, keen eye, stimulating prose, that's my old professor, sterling and revered, cutting through the illusions, challenging the mind.

Within the article, a summoning of Oswald's world, the imaginary, the fantasy, and through it also the possibilities of someone like President Kennedy allowed.

In a world in which work is the only “socialization” and socialization the only salvation, he had no mastered technique, no low number slot on the plant bowling team, no lunch hour appointments with a personally interested aide in the department of human engineering, hence no on-the-job redemption.


The look at Oswald/A. Hydell brings forward a common social problem, young people, caught in fantasy, not belonging anywhere, the difficulty of finding the support for higher education, professional development.

It does cut close to the writer's world, the necessity of work, just for that social life, that acceptance as a member of society.  It tweaks at the writer's propensity for the numerous fantasies of life that suggest that one is doing okay.  Where did the dishonesty begin?

That insight, one might say, was itself allowed by the G.I. Bill, the great post war social program that allowed DeMott, my father as well, an entire generation, the chance of higher education, resources invested in the individual.  Given the opportunity, DeMott received an education, turned it into a job as an English professor, went on for a Ph.D, was able to engage in the sort of writing from which this article comes from, a platform meeting a gift.  (Is that related to my own fantasy:  you work, hard enough, and one day, you get to go to school free;  that you are recognized as enough of a writer and artist to receive some form of employment, as the WPA allowed.)

I should be happy enough to be employed at something, to have some modicum of skill, a bit of wine knowledge, a cultural base to participate in conversation.  And one day, maybe I'll have the sense to know the elements of a fantasy when I encounter them.

So, what work can one find, so far out of school?  Where does one buckle down, with some sense of satisfaction and professional development?  Where to find redemption?  Parsing through difficult passages of Luke 4, Jesus speaking of the heavens closed to an undeserving Israel?  Or wouldn't even that be fantasy, a gospel's offer of a form of personal development…

Okay, obviously, it seems, there is a good possibility in Oswald, who spent long hours alone as a truant child, that there were grounds for the psychological ills that would lead him to do violence upon a stranger.  In summoning both the world of Oswald and the social problems that we would have woken to and addressed post-Kennedy's leadership, a sketch of Kennedy as well, perhaps that freakish cold blood killer genie was kept apart from the author's main point.

But in reading a great thinker, a great writer, the reader finds, as if by sheer coincidence, an addressing of the problems he might himself be sensing, not quite present enough to begin without a teacher's eye. There it is, right in front of you all along.  It just had to be revealed to you.

For a moment, reflecting on the act of writing this, I might appreciate a particular quality of the "greatest generation," the G.I. Bill guys who'd learned Latin in school, enlisted, survived, how from our lens now they might represent a feel of 19th Century, the classicism, the belief in education, humanities, learning, sciences, poetry, a belief in articles and Science journals, the spiritual intertwine that made their work in whatever they did devout as that of Amish farmers.  The children of slaves and immigrants integrated with them…

So yes, what would they be able to make of an Oswald, in their sadness, but to think of a lost child, a man let down for lack of help, left completely adrift, no structure, school or church to, well, maybe yes, provide him a meaning to his struggles, a subtle support system to the ways in which he, an individual, might want to say things, a forgiveness.  And with forgiveness, maybe some kind fatherly hand, perhaps things would have turned out differently.

But without credential or platform, stuck in a kind of unreality, not matching anywhere to anything, not in Russia, not in Texas, an Oswald drifts…  And for us even to touch upon the subject of him so doing is eery and weird.

Benjamin DeMott, cultural critic, democrat, created a form, a place to be honest and candid, brought forth something really vital, a style, a way, fresh, creative, and for this he deserves a huge amount of credit.  And right now, from somewhere, he's giving me a C plus, perhaps worse, and showing me I'm doing things the wrong way.