WRITING ABOUT WRITING

This spring I had to face the fact the decay of my physical body had reached a degree where I simply couldn’t do a big garden any more. As a man who refuses to age gracefully, I didn’t “go gentle into that good night,” but rather made a mess of things, starting a garden I could not complete. I was helped in this endeavor by rains that turned the garden into a swamp, and it is always soothing to the ego to have weather to blame, but deep down I faced a sad fact: I haven’t got what it takes, any more.

I was made aware this day would someday come long ago, when still a boy, when my father reached the limits of his athletic capacity as a surgeon. In his case the limit was highlighted by the fact he’d already pushed past a limitation many other men would have been defeated by: At age 34 he’d been cripple by polio, and was told he could never operate again. He refused to face this “fact”, fought his handicap, and came back so successfully that when he was 42, he was ready when a boy arrived at his hospital missing his arm; the arm lay in a separate ice-chest; my father, with fellow surgeons and nurses, successfully reattached the arm.

That example of superb teamwork was something he was most proud of, yet only a year later his world was crashing around him. He was like a great baseball pitcher who wins the World Series at the very end of his career, and yet during the next spring-training is dropped from the team, as he can’t throw a fastball by a single batter.

In a sense this created a conflict between a “never surrender” attitude and a “bow out gracefully” attitude. If my father had bowed out gracefully when crippled by polio, a boy would have lost his arm. However a decade later his refusal to quit seemed proof he had lost his mind.

One solution I came up with was to chose a career I wouldn’t need to quit, when I grew old. Fingers didn’t seem to give out as quickly as backbones and knees. If my brain still worked, I wanted to be able to work at age eighty-nine, like Rubinstein. (Perhaps I couldn’t play a piano with my fingers, but I could play a typewriter.)

A second reason to write was given to me by my grandfather. He bewailed the fact he hadn’t written. He was, I think, roughly 75 years old at the time, and had lived a fine life, but had little in the way of a written record of how fine it was. He had to rely on memory alone, when looking back, and apparently a fog had descended over certain details. “I wish I had kept a diary!” he exclaimed. I was impressed. The man was calm and mild mannered, and such a display of passion was unusual. So I kept a diary.

A third reason to write was because I read “The Real Diary of a Real Boy” (1906) during the winter of 1961-1962, and glimpsed something hard to speak.

What impressed me, as a boy, was that the boy-writer, (there is argument about how much of the book was an actual boy’s diary and how much was a forgery fabricated by a middle-aged man remembering boyhood), is often a fool, but steals your heart all the same. As the boy writes he himself has no idea why he feels the way he feels, but you as a reader do understand. Although the lad misbehaves and deserves his comeuppances, you are in sympathy with him every step of the way. Or, at least, I was.

I think my life lacked such understanding. I felt that perhaps, in some way I didn’t understand, I could gain such understanding if I kept a diary, like the “real boy” did a century earlier.

Well, here it is, sixty-one years later, and my garden is a mire full of towering weeds, so perhaps it is time to retire from physical work and to merely work my fingers like a Rubinstein, being “a writer.”

With these thoughts in mind I went to the attic, where I store my old writing, and was, to be honest, appalled. I have written an amazing amount in sixty-one years, and in some ways the prospect of rereading it all was (and is) not the slightest bit appealing. It is best described by the simple phrase, “I don’t want to go there.”

It is not the writing from times of stress that distresses. Usually the stress leaves little time to write, so there are but brief notes, and the most exciting parts of life are under-described. However afterwards a sort of PTSD sets in, and the writing is so tedious a stalactite seems more speedy, developing its point. In essence exciting times get ten pages, and boring times get a thousand.

I had a little talk with my grandfather, (who left this world nearly a half century ago), a few days ago, and I basically told him he doesn’t know how lucky he was that he did not keep a diary. There may be a very good reason for the amnesia that afflicts all.

However I am stuck with the reality I created, which involves keeping records. Considering I can’t garden, it seems I should make use of the capacity I still have to harvest some good from the records I kept, which very few other people have.

To be blunt, as I sat down in the attic and began to poke through the heaps of old diaries, I did not feel blessed to have what other’s lacked. I felt accursed.

To have been so arrogant as to collect such piles of yellowing paper seemed like taking “selfies”, hour after hour, week after week, year after year. Of what use is such a heap of photographs? In some respects is seems as cold as kissing a mirror. Where is the love of others, midst such a focus on self?

When I looked upon my life’s work, from that particular angle, it seemed devoid of goodness. The ego was seizing a crown it did not deserve, like Macbeth killing Duncan. The result of such gain is what Macbeth states at his end:

Tomorrow, and 
Tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace
From day to day
To the last syllable of
Recorded time,
And all our yesterdays 
Have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out! Out brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow;
A poor player that struts
And frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

To be honest, without God, my life’s work truly is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I am no different from creatures of the swamp in Washington DC, who have seized the crown of power like a bunch of Macbeths, and who increasingly look like idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

However a small voice spoke to me, as I sat in the attic in my dejection. It nudged me, reminding me I hadn’t been totally selfish. I craved the understanding I glimpsed reading “The Real Diary of a Real Boy.” And understanding is not a thing which can co-exist with selfishness. It requires two people, one understanding and another understood.

When one keeps a diary much that one writes may be nothing one wishes to share with fellow mankind. It may be a rant, a prolonged outpouring of PTSD, full of unfair blaming and even hate, and one may wish to burn it when one is done, however this denies a secret fact: The diary is written to someone. Even if no such mortal exists, the diary talks to Someone who understands, even when the person scribbling doesn’t.

At some point, when feeling very misunderstood, and even agreeing with those who misunderstood me, when they opined that my writing wasn’t intelligible, I asked myself, “Who am I talking to, as I write this gibberish?” The only answer I could come up with was, “God”. For God alone could understand such gibberish.

I immediately felt better. That happens, when you feel understood, even if you yourself don’t understand yourself. Even if you are all wet, you find yourself singing in the rain.

In other words, even if you haven’t come up with the intellectual answers to whatever perplexes you, you can still feel understood. This is a darn good thing, for we are not Einsteins and there is much we all have to learn, yet we still can feel understood. We can rejoice in the pleasure of such understanding, and sing in the rain.

This sense of “feeling understood” is therefore a power, though we call it a “mood”. Even if one is an Atheist, being uplifted from Macbeth’s despair to singing-in-the-rain cannot be ignored. It must be accepted as a “factor in life”, even if not as a “Shepherd”.

I confess that, looking backwards through sixty-one years of tedious notes, I am grateful to the “Shepherd”. However, due to my great respect for Atheists, I will try to pretend blessings are merely a “factor in life.”

Looking back through my own tedious writing I often laugh despite myself because, midst two thousand words of blather, some imp within me speaks twenty words of very funny common sense. I think that, if I’m to be some sort of editor of myself, I likely should focus on such snippets of humor. Even if it is only a small part of my dreary prose, I think it is likely what kept me alive. (Also it will spare the reader much blather.)

However early in my life such wit could not find words, and had a habit of appearing as doodles. In grade school I got in trouble, as did my naughty peers, for cartoons. As I got older, such cartoons tended to appear about the edges of what I wrote, not to illustrate what I was writing, but for no reason I could see (but perhaps a psychologist could guess at.)

An example of such an illustrated poem dates from January 28, 1970, when I was still sixteen. It is such a confused mess I think only God could fully understand it, though some mere mortals will laugh at it in a semi-understanding way, (and some psychologists will make guesses and be wrong.)

The poem itself is serious (for a sixteen-year-old) and has to do with whether it is worth the wait. (Likely a young woman was involved.) However the surrounding cartoons fascinate me for they represent sidetracks my mind branched off onto as I wrote the poem. In the future I would often find my writing wandered off onto such sidetracks and got lost in a wilderness of blather. Cartoons are better.

It is fun to play the psychologist, looking through the cartoons. They are actually remarkably organized, in the way only a creative subconscious can manage. There seems to be a lot of trinities. Clockwise, starting at the upper right, we see a person is falling, and a trinity of responses. Two are indifferent, with the first fishing the depths

And the second a picture of nonchalance

But the third is rushing to rescue, though one wonders if the rescuer is capable.

Moving on, the next trinity also involves falling. We see three skiers, the standing, the falling, and the fallen,

Moving right along, the next trinity is divided into a loner, naked and plunging to the depths

And partners scaling the heights

The trinity is then examined from another angle, in greater detail

And the trinity becomes the devilish, the saintly, and the…um…the undecided? There then seems to be some thought given to whether the undecided is a “puppit” or not.

The idea of being a puppet apparently leaves the loner brokenhearted

It is worth running away from

However the partners fare better

My manuscript may not rival William Blake’s illustrated poems

But there is something wonderfully cheerful about making a cartoon out of sorrow. It seems to involve feeling understood without needing to understand.

After all, at age sixteen I misunderstood many things, and was under the illusion that masculinity involved being as promiscuous as James Bond, and that virginity was shameful, and therefore a poem about “waiting” cannot be expected to be dripping with deep spiritual understanding. In fact I was cruising for a bruising, and heading for The School Of Hard Knocks at warp speed. I had many reasons to be depressed, which is what you get when you think wrong is right. Yet I managed to feel understood.

This brings me back to the subject of who you are writing to, when you write a diary you want no one to see. For that matter, who was Macbeth talking to, in his soliloquy of abject despair?

I think it must be God, due to the healing that comes from it. It is what is good about having “a good cry”. It is what makes self-expression so refreshing.

Not that we don’t require some restraint. An abusive person likely will say his or her self-expression feels good. However if God is not within, a hole corrodes at ones heart, and one ends up like Macbeth, and life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

In any case, I’m through a page one in my attic……. 20,000 to go.