Or maybe, doctor, is it all about bullying...

I remember a long time ago, I was a kid, we went into Utica, maybe to go the big old public library or the Munson Williams art museum, or some errand, and anyway, we went in to this five and dime variety store.  And I sort of went off on my own wandering around, looking at the magazine racks or whatever when this little kid, sort of Eye-talian looking, shorter, comes up and pushes me.  With his two hands against my chest, pushes me.  Firmly enough that, taken by surprise, I step back.  The aisles brightly lit.  Maybe it was winter time.  I'm wearing a coat.  I look at the kid and just kind of stand there.  Kid pushes me again.  I'm just dumbfounded.  I look at him.  I see the look in his eye, as if this is a sort of game for him.  He gets pleasure out of it.  But I am caught off-guard, not understanding the meaning of it.  So I turn and walk away, over to some other aisle, of equal interest and disinterest.  And I'm pretending to look things over as an adult might, whatever kind of products on whatever kind of shelves, and there's this kid again, a push, looking up at me staring with a sort of smile on his face.  And again I just turn and look at him and stand there without saying anything.  I look at him, as if to ask, 'what do you want?  do you want something?  I don't understand.'  I walked away again.  I guess the kid got tired of me, this precious foreign looking fancy idiot, funny looking other kid from somewhere else on his little city hoodlum turf.  But I had no natural aggression against him.  There was no fight.  I just looked at him and walked away, the rational thing to do.

I think of that kid in the documentary.  It wasn't his fault he was born prematurely, that he had a breathing tube taped to his mouth to keep him alive in the incubating chamber for premature babies, or that he came out a little scrawny from the whole affair.  They were told he probably wouldn't last the first twenty four hours.  But the kid made it.  But now he's thirteen and somewhere in Iowa they're bullying him on the school bus as if they were a gang of prisoners in a cell block.  Cuffing him upside the head, poking him with pencils, calling him 'bitch.'  There's not much we can do, but let them work it out, an administrator says in response to an instance of bullying among juvenile females.

But I think this has something to do with my experience.  Of course you can rise above it, like I did, not comprehending it, not getting involved with it, not engaged with the ego.  No skin off my ass, not being able to hang out in aisle C of some shitty Utica variety store pre CVS sort of a thing.  I'm just passing the time while parents shop.  I have no idea what you're up to, kid.

I did not explain to the 'little Guido' that this was not the way to treat visiting foreign emissaries, nor tell him about the Arthurian legends where Sir Lancelot, most noble knight of all the Round Table would show up randomly in humble disguise.  Such pronouncements would have been wasted upon him.  But yet there are the Gospel stories, the rejection at Nazareth, where in the synagog they say, 'where did this men get all this,' his wisdom and references, and he quips that no prophet is regarded as such in his hometown, and they get mad at him for what he says and want to throw him off a cliff, but he passes in their midst and leaves the town.  It's simple, it's almost Chekhovian, in a literary way, simply that Jesus leaves the town, something like that.

Which reminds me of the book I wrote, and it's ending, simple like, "leaves the town."  The douchey reviewer from Kirkus Indie did not see the potential charm of such a plainly told story with such truth in it, remarking the clichés in the dialog, the various literary lackings...

But that's the story, one of bullying, and finding one's self surprised.  Like, how could you treat me like that, here in my home town?  Do we bully people for what they cannot help?  Do we bully those slightly different from the story the mainstream wants to tell, the story of the institution itself as those who currently think they they are the institution want to tell...  Amherst is this, Amherst is that, Amherst is equality, fairness, etc....  Which rubs against how the prophet, the clear-eyed individual, who has a broader view, a deeper view, sees it.  But people are nasty to him, to raise up themselves as much as anything else.

Would that institution even acknowledge a portrait of it that revealed it as imperfect, that revealed the bullying on the part of its specially protected, the tacit female bullying of the male it encounters, for example, the bullying of its very literary sensitivity type people ever protective of the underdog against the underdog it cannot see as an underdog...  The institution caught in its own stereotypes and ways of doing business and getting along with every other institution that it has no language to see, to honor its own people...

Does Amherst want to read my book for its book club?  No, and mine is not published conventionally, does not say the things that institutions in agreement agree to talk about, preferring to talk about the things they like to talk about, that bow to its ways of looking at things.

And what can the clear-eyed one, the prophetic one, what can he do but take his cold comfort refuge in the truth, out in the desert and the lonesome places where he meditates and finds his insights...  Yes, he leaves the town, left alone to ponder the patterns of hair on his naked body or whatever the poor weird bastard does in his vulnerable dream-life or whatever.  Where were the acts of kindness that he might have sought for, simple uncomplicated kindness, no, sorry, everyone goes about their own business to survive and thrive, mine, 'what I've fought for,' 'the choices I've made,' and all that smug shit.

How disappointed Jesus must have been back in Nazareth.  He took it in stride, left, more or less quietly.  And they for their part probably thought, 'oh, fuck him, Mr. Christ complex...'  That's how it goes.

There's Gary Cooper in High Noon.  There's everyone, so smart, so sophisticated, so well-spoken, but yet they can't get the main fact.  They hide, and they desert him.  They pledge help, and yet, they vanish when humanity has to take a stand against the bad guys.

Okay, I said, after we'd exchanged greetings and I'd sat down in the chair and been informed she would be relocating her office south of the Circle, and started talking.

I got home after the second of two busy nights, cold bike ride home, turn on the telly, flip around for a while, come across Gregory Peck as the gambler attempting to reform himself, and next up is Kurosawa's version of The Idiot (Dostoevsky, both of them.)  The premise, the man faces a firing squad, reprieved at the last minute, becomes an idiot, an epileptic.  A saintly sort of alter-ego, who sees deeply into people, who, although he is an idiot about the basic adult stuff of life has that rare quality of wisdom.  Wisdom beyond the everyday.  Like he compares what's in the eyes of this femme fatale/kept woman, whom three or four men are fighting over--Dostoevsky seems to have a particular vision of the dramatic torn woman character--with the eyes of a prisoner he saw executed in the very same firing squad episode.  (Eyes of deep pain.)  He sees far deeper than anyone else sees, or he's more sensitive, but, spot on in his observations.  People sense they can go to him for his opinion.

In the story, he's friends with the most fiery and passionate suitor, and in the meantime, though the femme fatale loves the idiot, he becomes involved with a younger woman.  And Kurosawa, in this setting where the snow is everywhere, piled on roofs, great drifts, snow banks, gives us the battle, the amazing back and forth in the younger women, taking all different sides, incredibly dismissive of him, and then a few minutes later admitting that she feels she's too hard on him.  And this, well, it's something I've seen in my own sort of artistic eye.  (I wink at my therapist when I begin to get pompous about my artiste qualities.)  The proud beautiful young woman who goes through things in her own mind letting interested parties know, the news flashes of how she feels about you.  A woman's prerogative.  Kurosawa is great at this, cuts of her talking, him silently looking at her, one after another.  Giving him total shit one minute, then from another angle, other thoughts...  Oh, that's right...  He had sent he a letter, humble, innocent, almost childlike, a realization of feelings for her...  She sees the sincerity of it.  But, it's a long process, and unfortunately at the end the horrible thing happens when the young beauty he's finally about to marry insists on going to see the femme fatale, as if she were the thing standing between them, when she doesn't seem to be, but...    Well, there's no happy ending, horrible to the point of almost becoming comical without being comical, very Russian, I guess.

One is left with a sense of vision, how the Idiot is able to compress the sensory and figure it out.  Like when he senses eyes watching him, the passionate suitor gone mad and out to kill him.  The Idiot knows things, sees things.   And of course Dostoevsky himself was spared from the firing squad at the very last minute, and also suffered from epilepsy ever after that and the Siberian prison camp.

But there's something in it which we recognize, the capability of vision when you are a sort of idiot in society's estimation.  Unable to make choices, child-like, innocent, even kinda dumb, but on the other hand getting the moral sense of things.  And from my own idiot experience, you know, which I've not been as good talking to you about as I should, out of shame, my own shame, I know how out of some stressful sort of passage you sort of awaken to your idiot savant condition.  Or maybe it's that there's a quality to this idiot condition that makes you oddly passive, as if something happened in a frontal lobe or something...  And maybe that passivity is part a sentimentality over the Christian message of turning the other cheek and Jesus' obvious suffering in the garden, a kitschy sentimental pretense of being "Christ-like."

But after being put through the usual well-deserved rigamarole with a fiery intelligent proud young lady, I don't know...  I became passive.  I didn't stand up for myself.  I didn't stand and make my intentions or my feelings better known, more obvious, more in plain English, or ask them to be treated with more respect.  And you also fall in with the rest of humanity and do stupid things like drink the shot your "old buddies who haven't seen you in a while" inflict upon you, or smoke a puff of weed on the sidelines of a football game when she's over there waiting for you to sit down next to her, but she hung up on you passionately enough the night before...  You're dumb and you kind of surrender, or go off sadly without a fight...

And what does it all mean, that you would be so, on the one hand, observational and sensitive and tuned in and aware, and on the other hand sad and passive and unable to make it happen even as you try, because different sides of you listen to different sides of her...

So what are you left with but to be some form of unhappy unsatisfied Buddhist trying to meditate away the fact you let everyone down, that passivity does not lead anywhere...

I got out my iPhone and did a quick Wikipedia.  "... first published serially in The Russian Messenger between 1868 and 1869...  considered one of the most brilliant literary achievements of the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature."  So that's this one hundred and fifty year old long winded flight of literary outburst speaking to what makes me feel badly about myself on a daily basis, no one's fault, but my own solely and exclusively, all my bad.  And if there were a condition, or a clear cause, or, say, oh, you've got "idiocy" then you could at least shrug and say, oh well, a physical brain condition, much like or part of epilepsy, when your brain freezes or overheats and you go shaking into a trance, as if struck by the heavy truth of reality as we might chose not to look at directly, and which leads you with your mind even less made up as far as what to do.  Jesus Christ.

This is why I feel like I'm sort of shocked, by reality, that I'm so stupid that I can't figure out what to do in life, that I can't make decisions, am not capable of knowing what's going on in that adult way of needing to make practical calculations.   Maybe I'm shocked by falling so low, from a well-read fairly privileged childhood son of a nobly engaged professor of plant biology and a thoughtful mom who then went and got her own good degree, and what the hell have I done with my life... nothing.  Nothing that would make me even remotely eligible for even going on a date.  The prospect of on-line dating, I don't know, just seems silly or wildly inappropriate for an idiot like me.  And my nerves, yes, I see reality clearly, I see faces and eyes and what goes on in them, and that makes me think of how Jesus was supposed to have been able to see the devils that resided in different people and shoo them away, begone.

I guess this is why Dostoevsky ended up with his typist, maybe because she could see all the poor bastard was enduring in his own mind--having to type it all out--and had to take pity on him lest he explode out of not being able to get the words of them down in a proper way, obviously something important to the man, a man sort of blown free of ego by what had happened to him, a woman being sensitive to that state of connecting with nature and feeling a part of it.

But you're probably as tired of my worthless literary fantasia tangents as I am, doc.

Or, on the other hand, is there something here that's a central human issue, one that, for the novelist at least, cuts down through all the layers of news events to the things going on within, as they used to say, the human soul.

(If we thought of the artist, a novelist, a cartoonist, a painter, a musician, as revealing the soul, yeah, people'd be less inclined to go shoot them?)

I've become, out of passivity, a hod carrier, or maybe those are the prospects that await the Idiot.  The film touches upon the subject.  "What's he going to be able to do to support her," they laugh at him early on.  "Shovel snow?"  Or tend bar.  Or write useless novels that seem to have nothing to do with the times, that aren't viewed as a form of gainful entertainment...  Or just sort of sit around wondering what to do with himself, realizing it's too late to do much along the lines of what were once perfectly reasonable and reachable goals and desires...

I can expose my shame to you, doctor, and that's helpful I suppose to get it off my chest, but it doesn't help me change from being an idiot who's overwhelmed by things, who doesn't know what to do with himself.  Most certainly am I an idiot, and every time I go out of the house it's clear I am one, and only through my being careful am I not greater taken advantage of than I already am.

I don't know how he wrote it, but maybe it was a flash of insight and intuition into his own self, a creative self, that his own literal epilepsy had this deeper quality basic in his nature, that looking at his life, back on it, presently, forward, he saw himself as an idiot, but with this incredible sensitivity, this sense of the value of everything and everyone you come across in daily life.  Shocking.  Overwhelming.  Dizzying.  But incredibly clear, once he'd matured enough to master it as a tool of insight, to grasp what's going on deep within people's hearts and stuff.  I would gather it's such a creative insight upon the self that would be the only thing to fuel a big wordy book like that.  I can't imagine any other force being strong enough.  Being as firm and fixed and undoubtable as everything else is doubtful or doubtable, stuck in the complicated instances of mixed outcome and intentions of human circumstances, nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so and we all think too much.  It's a horrible thing to be an idiot, but a true thing.  The certainty, the very realness of it sort of rings through life, however life is lived.  The idiot puts up with good and bad;  what can he do?



Ah, but what accounts for us?  I watched a PBS Independent Lens piece about bullying...  (Lee Hirsch's "Bully.")  Why do some kids get bullied?  I rode a pretty quiet school bus, a short one, with the rural farm kids, and it was a calm one.  I was lucky.  I did not get bullied.  I was a popular kid in high school, adaptable.  They put up with me.  I was student council, honor society...  I fit in.  I guess I grew more eccentric later on.  Maybe that's why I become a barman, to prove that I could get along with everyone.

Stand up, or everyone's going to use you as a punching bag, the lesson of a father to a bullied son.  And yet, one sees the dignity in the kid picked on.  Standing up, we all must do in our own way, I guess.


That's the first day off of the week for you.  Cold.  I did some laundry, some yoga.  I wondered if somewhere along the line I'd adopted a visible self less likely to be bullied than a truer self, the one interested in letters, poetry, the things that could happen when I wrote just for its own sake.  The presented self was a creation of college days, an attempt to fit in with the jocks and so forth, with the social tradition.  But even then I compensated, by allowing my truer self to come forward in the quiet time when I studied.  I was dedicated to the study of literature, to its inner workings.  One problem was that this self was not particularly successful despite his scrupulous behavior.  This self was rejected, even, by a professor or two, even as it had been fostered and encouraged, loved and cared for.  I fell in with the wrong people, it seems, those being not the most sensitive kind.

It could be said that I adopted a sort of schizophrenic mode.  Maybe you have to, as an artist without recognition.  A side that placates all the normal things you're supposed to attend to, the jobs and so forth.  If you rebel too much, following your self and your spiritual inclinations, well, what happens to you?

Where the upper classmen seemed to appreciate me and my various personas, the more ambitious underclassmen didn't see me as much of a role model or just plain didn't like me or took to subtly being down on me, like a very mild form of bullying, which I had too much dignity to respond to, I think anyway, though maybe that's not how they saw it.  When I walked across the stage to get my diploma I had the best round of applause, subdued, but from all corners, at least it seemed that way to me, and the President of the college said to me, 'you're a good man, good luck to you,' with a nice smile.  And I looked the part, scholarly in the rented gown.

Then, I don't know, I went home, not knowing what to do with myself.  I suppose I wouldn't have minded being a country poet over farmland, gone to the college library when my dad went up to his office, been a sort of Faulkner to the Mohawk Valley...  But, you know, the Reagan economy was just beginning to hit Central New York, not in a good way obviously.

I suppose I most wanted approbation from her, from my intelligent super sharp college princess, but in my attempt to be cool I shrugged her off when she was feeling sympathetic, I guess.  So I only got the rejection part of the female inner dialog, really as if I were a genius at it, getting only the negative, retreating when I could have received some positive.  You know, wavelength, that's how everything is...

So around that time, I gravitated to the literary aspect, the hidden, of life.  Like my mom's tell of taking a poetry class with Ted Hughes that winter when she was a freshman or a sophomore and he was in Amherst because Plath was teaching at Smith.  Or the context of a Milan Kundera, an exile who feels the need to stand up against the apparatchik regime, through, what else, literature, the form of the novel, the study of human reality, that sort of a thing.

And I was, let's see, a clerk with a job bussing tables at night, and then, in order to write, as I saw it, a bartender.  Staying active, running around, as a way to avoid the depression...

But this is the problem, the physical law, the Christian reality behind the story, inevitable, that we can only become, that we are the novel itself, that our own story is inseparable from us, from it.  You are who you are, and you have to show that to the world as a sort of truth, or a sort of lesson in humanity. It's the same as light.  Light has its properties, its wavelength, its speed.  The Christian story is the Christian story, Ernest Hemingway's story is Ernest Hemingway.  And maybe this is the sort of thing that is real, that keeps empires from running away with themselves, that keeps labor from being exploited, lined up as inconvenient.

Emily realizes herself in the poem.

A writer is a physicist, taking measurements of his reality, to show what a human being is made of.  Like Shakespeare, but without so much need of the dramatic form.  Perhaps he is unreadable to all but other scientists who get the basic issue.  The intuitive self-portrait's scientific quality...

That the norm might take you to be a jerk or an idiot, weird, odd, well, that's just another aspect of the thing.  But other philosophers, people like those who said 'that all men are created equal,' I guess they appreciate the science...

It's like the regulars see it marked on the calendar, the day of the Feast of the Epiphany, the day after the afternoon company holiday party (the holidays already spent with the company), a cold night in January of the first snow, the night of wine tasting, an over-oaked Rioja, a cloying Argentine malbec, the day you least want to talk to everyone, that they come early and steadily.  No busboy.  Wine rep a beautiful nice guy, but in the way.  Our good friend in local mayoral politics has a hot date, and the unfortunate tradition of some sort of digestive shot is hard to slip away from, and the gal picks a Calvados, VSOP.

At one point the brownnose server, after I've had no help at all, comes up proudly bearing the boss' dinner, trout.  She comes back behind the bar to lovingly cut him bread.  He already has bread, I say, wishing to grit my teeth.  Late, too, a man, an interesting guy, simpatico, and tells some major sailing stories experienced in June in a small boat between the Azores and Bermuda, showing us the weather system map of the day.  His wife, getting out of pediatric emergency shows late, another good spirit with good tales to tell.  The guy who's leaning in and talking about his project of opening a Polish restaurant in the neighborhood has finally left, accompanied by a woman who once worked at the strip club next to my old job up the street.  She's convinced us to have a round of Chopin lemon drops, and proclaims mine as excellent.  Worn thin, I succumb to the night, and somehow it gets to be three AM, and I almost feel set-up.  Or that is my mood sensing what World Bank people Jazz Night is going to bring with a twenty top overflowing from the back room.

After the staff holiday party, held at Fogo De Chao and the metro ride back to my own part of town away from the relative sky-scrapers on a cold day,  a nap to work off the small amount of wine ingested, I stare off into space.   Mom could not take the cat in because of a blizzard.  I didn't have much to say in therapy.  We talked about maybe trying on-line dating.

Work defines one more and more.  It is a practical world, and adults have made their choices.   Harder to meet people when you get older, and it wasn't ever easy, because I've never fully been my job in the way most people are.

I made it down to Bar Pilar after my shift, Sunday night.  There were industry people there, one an old friend back to Austin Grill days.  Bartenders, just about all male.  I have four glasses of wine, ride home into the wind, home by the time the depth charge takes effect, and I'm a bit bleary eyed before my kind therapist.  They'd replaced a 12.5% Chianti with a 14% Nero D'Avola.  I blend into the background.  What am I doing here, but exorcising some angst about the coming holiday party.  When I wake up there's evidence I've been on Facebook and eaten a hamburger, not clearly remembered.

The young prince has aged.  Maybe that's the essence of Hamlet.  You hit middle age.  You lose your father.  Not everyone is on your side, the teams of life having been picked.  Your old friendships carry on as legacies of earlier times.  You still can't make up your mind about things.  You bear your scars, that's all you can do.

By the end of the party and home, I felt little happiness.  The sense falls over me of a complete lack of accomplishment.  Nothing to show for twenty five years work.  Is there ever any thing as human happiness?  I go out into the night for some groceries, Chinese carry-out for dinner.  Feeling depressed, feeling alone.

I review something I've written, and it too is as untrue as it is true, a matter of relativity, of perspective, of standards, of incredibly complex issues, though still, one would praise the spirit of kindness in all things, even as that is impractical.  You can try to write something, but that it could offer the final word is not so solid an idea..  The wine...


They let them into Amherst, and they were, soon enough, the cop, the guard dog, the lawyer.  And then everyone was like that.  Out to be accusatory.  Say one more word to her...  Leave her alone...

I think of the competitive quality, men and women fighting over the same turf, the professions.  A trick played by a politician, Reagan perhaps, when he cut the support systems for the family and the poor, an ongoing spreading catastrophe of wrong-mindedness in the face of spirituality, and yet, Reagan is so revered, a substitute for God for a lot of people.


The wine at Pilar was slurped down for the wrong reasons.  A trying to justify the business, an attempt to placate it, to think I fit in with it, that it would offer true friendships in its guild.  Wine to let me slink my way, a weary soldier, down to the old staff luncheon with open wine and slices of meat.    I like my wine medicinally, when I'm home alone and need some energy to do the laundry and the dishes, take the trash out, sort paper on the desk, keep the recycling intentions.

I sit with the two chefs at the table.  I have a particular fondness for chefs.  They have good stories.  They work hard.  Soulful people, in a guarded way, who, in trust, express sharing of life's vicissitudes.  Drinking problems, business partners, travels various, good and sundry.

"Hostility is darkness," the Pope says.  He speaks of the light, of the kindness of Christ.

The psalms sung by the body of the church-goers of the live tape from Rome preceding the homily of Pope Francis, emphasizing the humbleness of Christ's love, strike one as not being all that far away from one of those early uncomplicated love songs of The Beatles, different tempo, but related in spirit.  Wake up the gentle nonjudgmental love of God.  EWTN television delivering a lecture.  To have the humility to ask the mother to show him to us.  Papal Mass for the Solemnity of the Epiphany, from St. Peter's Basilica.  The three magi, the searches with true faith, the conversion, the wisemen's experience.

Life is pain, causing humility.  The ignore the depths of such experience, that's what one should fight against in personal ways, to always know, the cup of suffering isn't' far away, and that kindness is golden.


"Come to terms quickly with your accuser," Jesus says, "you'll never get out until you have paid the last penny."  From Matthew's account of The Sermon on the Mount, the scenario might seem personally familiar, such things having played themselves out in a way.  But the homily of Pope Francis helps:

Led by the Spirit, they come to realize that God’s criteria are quite different from those of men, that God does not manifest himself in the power of this world, but speaks to us in the humbleness of his love.  The wise men are thus models of conversion to the true faith, since they believed more in the goodness of God than in the apparent splendour of power.

... yeah, there was that time of The Beatles.  A lyrical moment of humanity.  "Last night I saw you in the restaurant.   That's when I knew you were no debutant." Great guitar stuff, harmonies, you name it.  All done with great style,  purely natural.  Hey, they were The Beatles;  they could be as natural as they wanted to, they could be themselves.  And, recognizing the beauty of the bargain, they were nice, and not only nice but deep, touching, poetic.  Worth study.  An accomplishment of humanity, in a mode dating back to a bardic tradition.

And then came a time of contention, or rather, The Time of Contention.  Or that's what it always is.  People being contentious.  

But all my tangents about art, you know, Doctor, they could be viewed as little more than an attempt to rationalize a central condition.  A field of excuses, so that I wander and never address the issue.  And no matter what I read or practice about avoiding negative thoughts and dwelling on the past I...  well, I do.  Because when you make such a big mistake, a series of errors and bad choices and dumb actions one should be ashamed of, you see every day the moments of them, like they haunt you.  And because of my faults there was the perfect college love story that we all want to happen, and because it didn't happen, well, everyone becomes alienated.  People drop out of sight, hide, as if they too were shamed.  All the ironies add up, the particular talents you saw in another come forth, and there you are, there I am, being stupid, with little faith, without much courage, even though I stuck with it through a fair amount of persecution.

But because of, maybe, like what I experienced growing up, am I incapable of love, in believing in it enough to partake and receive?  Do I tend to question it, think that the woman is always going to blow up and scream at the guy?  Do I have this pattern in my head that says the guy will be, like, long suffering...  Is that what I internalized, saw, as they say about these childhood matters, saw as love?  Well, the girl would certainly blow up at me, or be dismissive...  Maybe that's what made me think, 'oh, surely this must be it, love, the parental relationship...'  And when she'd be harsh to me, as her part of the back & forth, an extension of the flirting into a deeper kind of teasing, right after that, when I had an opening, I would sort of nobly and sadly or sternly retreat, perhaps like my father would, like going to lie down and take a long nap when it was too much for him.   Her being high-handed.  Me with the legacy of pain.  That would be sort of recalled.  And I'd be silent and noble and long-suffering, but that, ha ha ha, doesn't really do it for an Upper West Side beauty on the way up into her own sophisticated life.  That's not engaging enough, not bold enough.

But the love was there, and I guess the ways I'd express it were subtle, or marked by that sort of passivity, like bringing her flowers at the very end of each year, as to say, you can do all you want but you can't change that, the way I...  you know, like, feel about you.   Again, the long-suffering.  I tried to engage, but she'd always reject the first time round in each episode, and then the door would be more open, because she could see the way I reacted, like the frog in my throat, the things that show deeper feelings in a way you can't fake...

Well, well.  Who could expect a young lady to go through such a disaster and want any more part of it?  Who would want to think of the light that failed, of the sweet things that should have happened in world of ideal and romantic love?  Who would want to recall that?  You'd rather want to block it all out, any reference, the recalling of an unhappy event, a car wreck.  Much in the way the book you gave me says.  "Okay, mind, thanks for reminding me, but I'm not going to go there as I have positive things to be doing."

So I seem to live in a world where love really isn't possible.  Not for me personally, no princess to come and save me.  And I give my kindness to the rest of the world, to strangers, to people who aren't family, as that too is part of the long-suffering quality.

If she'd been nice to me, and welcoming, I could have taken to that, I would have responded.  Maybe it all wouldn't have been such a problem.  As it was I saw too much of the rejection and not enough of the light of her truer self that came through.  I mean, I have enough emotional intelligence to be able to read people.

But if you don't have that kind of love it's really hard to do anything in the world.  What does it mean to go teach a bunch of someone else's teenagers?  What does it mean to go help people in hospitals so they don't get sicker and die, just puts off the loveless inevitable.  I've ended up a cold and sentimental observer.   Who waits on couples on Valentine's Day and Christmas, then goes home to... what?  A cat.  Except the cat's dead.


Yes, rejection hurts.  As Jesus says, no one is a prophet in his home town.  So is it written.

How do you rise above such a great existential joke, one you've brought about through your own faults?

I guess you can only find it in impersonal things, like Jesus, or Buddha, or mediation.  But how far can you rise above the basic frustrated need or the time in young life when everything went wrong?  That's why poor people turn to drugs and stuff, because they don't get enough love and affection, so they turn to artificial proximation.  Maybe art is a similar thing.  Like Van Gogh never had a girlfriend, and so he turned to this painting stuff, an animist in nature trying to evoke something out of the landscape, a process which wore him out, dried his heart out.  A maker of Japanese prints.

Yeah, turn to Jesus, do your yoga, awake your own Lazarus from the dead.  I guess there's all sort of things you can do.  Stay positive.  Count your blessings.  Be happy where you are.  Yeah.


But you know, I wonder, I mean, good to talk all these things out.  But you can over psychologize.  You can take the random things that happen in life, not all of them happy, and try to trace them back to something, make too much of a few things, a few proclivities.  Which leaves you more depressed than when you started.  What are you going to do?  You had parents and they loved you very much, and luckily one of them is still very much alive.

It's depression which makes you depressed.  So yeah, just try your best to avoid it.

And maybe, you know, maybe there is something about Jesus being right.  He has to bear all this stuff from the faithless parts of humanity, the cold loveless skeptic parts, the selfish parts, the got-it-all-made thank you very much types, the territorial sanctimonious types, the blame other people types, the people who don't give a damn about the fate of strangers...  The ones who don't see their own selves in the lives of others.


I left her office pondering how broad, how deep the spiritual life passed on in the Christian story and the like must be to fit in my own problems, my own sense of things of how life is, the things you must go through, the way you end up.  A man in a church gown might be largely psychologically clueless, belonging to a church out of some knee jerk reaction, but there deep deep reasons why such stories resonate with us.  Why they hold a transcendent truth, one that eases considerably our own individual pains.  And if you find within your own life the concurrent roots of the Christian story, or the Buddhist one, or what-have-you, if you find something sympathetic, well, that is very interesting work to be doing, as if attending to the leper within your own self, your own dead Lazarus.  Yes, faith is a good thing, and it happens out of such reasons, when you're broken down, not left with much else.  And to have faith is itself the ability to love, and as long as you have that you can't be too far down on yourself.

And again, I felt like I was a Huck who had a Jim, big and comforting and warm, a real live person, to accompany him in his long lonesome voyage down the big river.

And maybe the stupid of us, the seeming fools, who one should think would know better, like how to purport themselves as rational responsible adults are in a way the smartest, least full of guile and trickery, therefore open to the wisdom beyond human design.

Maybe it is that city life, that modern life, with all the choices we have open for us, with the habit that we must choose intelligently and carefully, maybe all that dampens down a life of faith, the sense of the spiritual.  Because if you're not happy, well, look somewhere else, do something else, go somewhere and buy something, rather than examining all things at a deeper level.

But I gather it all, all I'd been through, were a part a writer's struggle, if you'd call it that.  The long effort to work at it, maybe to get better at it.  A mix bag, mixed results, but on top of that you achieve something, namely the steady effort.  Maybe that effort lets you see things beyond what you might have initially saw as the top of the hill to climb.  A sense of a journey, of a climb beyond, especially when nothing in particular happened when you reached the summit of the first hill.  You wrote a book, or what you called a book, and people said, fine, okay, write another one.  That was more the point, the larger hill you now had to climb, both looking back and enduring the fact that you were a writer, looking for the meaning in that act of being one.   No great journey is ever easy, they say.  And there are sad lonesome parts of it, parts of being lost out in a desert way out of contact with people.  Searching for meaning.  Looking for a way.

I'm a writer.  My kingdom is not of this world.

The things we do, in the sense of doing them well, are the things we do intuitively.  That comes through to me on New Years Day playing old Beatles songs.  The songs themselves are intuitive, meaning that they can be played, at least in basic form, with some ease.  Hard to resist singing along with them, the inhibitions settling away.  They are not far away from Irish music, from the music of folk people, and indeed the songs roots in Skiffle music are undoubtably related.  Liverpool is not far away from Ireland, a major town--with a shipping trade--of the Irish diaspora.  Part of the joy of playing Beatles songs, indeed with lots of music, is the possibility of amplification, which takes the acoustic instrument and allows it a new dimension.

But one finds himself surprisingly capable over the old songs.  A study of chord changes, the chorus, the bridge...  all one needed was a bit of encouragement.  Like most things.  The creature innately good at it.

So there I was, playing, going through a little repertoire, having moved the amp upon to a TV stand, the old TV placed next to the new one, ready to wheel out.  The usual things people play, accessible songs, u2, a Pogues song, etc., etc., but when I had a glass of wine, the talent largely went away.  Interesting observation.  I'd thought a glass of wine helped an Irishman sing, and maybe it does in the sense of giving him some Dutch courage, but the ability and the desire immediately dampened.  Maybe I was just done playing, having tied in fifty years of musical history together.

And what are you left with the next day?  A bit of a headache, a dryness in the mouth, a thirst for water, a sense of having frittered away the night into a numbing of the alone time.  I mean, I did have a great chat with my aunt.  And really there's not much to do on New Year's Day but watch football on TV, if you're not invited somewhere...

But what would I have done if I hadn't had that first sip of wine to dumb all the intuitive stuff down.  Well, you cook dinner, yeah, I did suddenly find myself pretty hungry all of a sudden, and I'd played through a good part of the old repertoire, covered my fifty years of music history...

There's a Christian lesson in there somewhere, though, about using those intuitive talents.  Like, take making love--we're all pretty good at it it.  You start in one small place in one small way and that leads to the next step.  A hand, a kiss, a revealing of the body, the touch of skin...  We all know how to do that, and maybe that's the nice surprising thing about it, that you find, oh, someone else knows how to do this, to bring pleasure, and it all leaves you with a lot of faith in things.  Things do work out sometimes.  Stay positive, and they will.

And when you meet someone special and special things happen, well, that's a sign.  But I'm afraid I look at these things like happy relationships from the outside now, and maybe it serves me right, for my sins.  Because I drank too much, thinking that was the thing to do back in college, and without realizing it I was hampering my intuition for all things I really wanted, all the nice things...  My God what an idiot I was.  Not a day goes by I don't think of my stupidity, my mistakes, and sometimes I put a big effort into rationalizing my mistakes to take away the sting of my errs.

And when you're an artist you are so because you are intuitive sort of a person.  Meaning that just about everything you do you do out of intuition.  You write a paper, you enjoy the things another person writes, you get the stuff Jesus and Buddha were talking about.  You find a job that, yeah, is simple and intuitive, not complicated, just gotta do it.  That's how I ended up in the restaurant business.  It's simple and intuitive.  Well, everything is.  Standing in front of a classroom talking about the things that interest you--to me that's what education should be about, something simple like that, but now it's all too complicated.

And that's Jesus for you.  Incredibly intuitive.  The sort of person he was, or, rather, is, in the world.  No problem at all being Jesus.  Born into it.  Easy.  Best lecturer ever.

Yeah, you know, so you say your piece, and then you get tired, and then you take a nap, and then, move on to the next thing.

But when things happen to the intuition thing, oh, it's just the very worst sort of a thing that can happen, because then you don't know which end is up anymore, and people saying one thing but meaning another it's like, where's the truth?  Why would you lie to me?  Why would you make me call into doubt my own judgment?  And the artist is out there on the edge of intuition, so this is particularly painful for him.  It's like a shipwreck.  Dashed against the rocks.  The worst kind of fog comes over you and you don't know which way to go anymore, left or right...

It hurts quite badly, actually.  And this is why, I suppose, artists are alone sometimes, like, left alone, or sort of forced to go it alone.  Because they have this intuition where no one else does.  I guess this speaks of why we were created as unique separate entities.  That our intuitions would naturally bridge the gap between us all, such that we might even be shocked, "you were thinking that too? that's what I was thinking!'

Maybe that's the shock of Shakespeare.  Like, that's exactly what I was thinking, I just hadn't put it into such words...  Or not even thinking, but feeling, on some deep level.  Amazing stuff.

I guess that's my main battle, my main meaning in life.  That you can only really act on the deepest sort of intuition, that none of the rest can really matter so why bother with it.


But anyway, that's the real joy of life, discovering you can sing, hearing your voice through the amplifier with the guitar, playing, actually playing, a Beatles song.  And then the emotions take care of themselves, and I could get sad over a lot of them, but, I don't, I look at them as moving forward, more or less.  Great feeling.  Beats numbing yourself.  We all have talents to share.  Maybe that's the meaning I've been looking for, like, some tangible talent I had within me, that couldn't be cut short, you know, in the way writing can be, for whatever reason.

And that's why I love literature, the moment of poetry.  There's an intuitive understanding of something going on, deep in the words, maybe deeper than that, and the reader can only grasp at it through his own intuition, and that's why you have to mull these things over, to let your inner gears work, to dream over them, to drill down into the subconscious body of understanding things.

That's why I loved that girl so much.  There was this silent intuitive understanding going on between us.  I guess she got mad at me for not, like, as they say, acting, 'acting,' on it enough.  Sad thing.  And she was right to be angry at me.  But she told me so many outrageous things to my face, I, I don't know what happened, like I got mad at her for besmirching such a thing, for being so mainstream, so unmystical, as it seemed to me at the time.  I should have jumped on her whenever I could, but, yeah, you know people at that age...

But it's the same thing, like, with higher education.  You have your dreams, your ways of reaching an understanding of something, a process that should be praised, that Robert Frost would have praised, I think, knowing a bit about him and his college teaching method.  The modern academy is forced to think you're an idiot, like, if you take too long, or if you're like Hemingway's fisherman bringing something very big from way far out in the Stream, just out of some intuition that you are sensitive enough to hear.  A classroom should be like a council of poets all sitting around, and that's the way Benjamin DeMott ran his.  Each one has an access point, a reference, and a good teacher can kind of hypnotize people into reaching into their deeper understandings, and say, like when reading a moment in Updike, "yes, it's about sex!"  Young people are a little timid around such blunt realizations, I guess.  But when people come along, and you know, quickly respond, oh, I know what's going on here, I think they usually fall pretty short of the mark of a full understanding.  And Demott's point to us was that we were incredibly sensitive readers, capable of fined tuned understandings of, say, what Emily Dickinson is saying...  That's what I learned in college.  Not sure how it translates to the real world, Doctor, but I'm trying.

(Maybe the reason why we drink wine is to fit in with Caesar's empire and all the temple business guys.  When we have Jesus within, who is the wine himself, not in need of any.)


Yeah, the lyrical outburst of The Beatles, to me it represents the consciousness of the Universe able to look back at itself, a wonderful moment in the last century, an awakening.  Tunes you could keep with you, hum along with, in your head.