I chose to write because I enjoyed it, even as a little child. I didn’t think much about why I enjoyed it. That came later. It was later that I became aware that what I enjoyed might not gain me praise, and might in fact earn rejection.
I can still clearly remember the morning I first became aware of a sort of schism between my self and my society. It was when I was still in grade school. I was working on a book I called “My Book Of Indians”, which basically was a regurgitation of pro-Native-American attitudes absorbed from Earnest Thompson Seton’s book “Two Little Savages“, (1903). It was springtime and I think the clocks had “sprung forward” into Daylight Savings Time, and abruptly there was an hour less daylight before school. This cramped the time I had to write.
How I came to be writing before school I can’t say; perhaps the sun simply awoke me earlier as the days lengthened; but I felt a sort of golden serenity when I wrote, and one morning the golden serenity blossomed into a powerful intuition, “This is what I was born to do.” It was either when I was in fourth or fifth grade, which would make me between nine and ten years old.
On this particular morning I went from my pleasant euphoria to the horrible realization I had missed the bus. I was late to school. Fortunately school was only a half mile away, and usually when I missed the bus I could simply grab my books and run like hell, and arrive before the first class started. This time I was especially late. As I ran to school it was with a sense of dread, and I was wildly formulating responses I might answer the teacher with, when she asked me why I was late.
The joke is, it never occurred to me that, “I got lost in my writing,” or, “I got too absorbed in my research,” might be a good and even pleasing excuse, an excuse a teacher would be delighted to hear. Instead I was desperately attempting to come up with something involving escaped lions or runaway trains.
This highlights an absurd dichotomy which existed (and I myself may have created) between the writing I did at home and the lack of writing I did at school. You might think that my interest and pleasure might have made me a good scholar, but in actual fact my love of writing was more like a secret, which I tried to keep the school from ever knowing about.
At school I got bad grades, was the class clown, and nowadays I likely would be diagnosed with some sort of “attention disorder” and drugged. In earlier times I would have been whipped. As it was I slipped through a loophole, during a permissive time when neither happened.
Anyway, on this particular day I ran like crazy to the school and was horrified to see no buses. I was so late the last bus had already disgorged its load of noise and driven off. A terrible silence filled the air, as I approached the door. Outside the spring sunshine was golden, but inside I could see nothing but a gloomy hallway. At that point I felt a tremendous reluctance to walk through that door. I knew I had to do it, but every fiber of my body loathed it.
Many can relate to how I felt, if they ever had horrible job they hated, yet had to push through the door and punch the time-clock. Just remember the day it was hardest to push through the door, and that is how I felt going to school that day. Just as I had the golden intuition, “This what I was born to do,” when writing, now I had the dreadful sense, “This is not a place I was born to be.”
The juxtaposition of the two strong impressions is what I most clearly remember. A schism was created.
Likely the fact it was springtime intensified the schism. What boy doesn’t want to play hooky from school on a golden spring morning?
(Back in my day a boy wanted to escape the lousy lights, stale air, cloying chalk dust, and dreary drill, and instead be walking in the woods like a free Native American. Modern youth may seem different, but just because the woods they walk are virtual doesn’t mean virtual woodlands aren’t far preferable to a classroom.)
However I believe that, opposed to this schism, is an urge to be understood, (or perhaps to share the beauty one has found and deemed worthy of playing hooky for). Therefore a boy has a divided heart, with one half wanting to flee society, as the other half wants to rejoin society.
Skip ahead a decade, and the young boy becomes a young writer, on one hand loathing professors, editors, agents and publishers, and on the other hand desiring education, correction, help and a way to make money doing what he loves.
Skip ahead five decades and the boy is seventy years old. If he still writes at all, and still derives great pleasure from writing, (as I do), then the intuition he had as a boy, “This is what I was born to do,” has proven correct.
Such a verification is easy for people whose persistence paid off, who became successful writers and who can now sit back and regard rows of published volumes on a bookshelf on a wall. But what about me? I was (for the most part) never “discovered”, and have written most of my life without the encouragement of recognition. Was I not in error, when intuition told me, “This is what I was born to do”??? For that boyhood intuition has not resulted in fame and fortune, and is not that our criterion???
Actually, I reject that criterion. I think I was lucky. Why? Because if an artist finds success in a specific area, he tends to focus in on that area, which has brought him success. If a Saturday Evening Post pays well, then he may spend decades painting covers for the Saturday Evening Post, even if he had great potential outside of that narrow window.
My single success involved being recognized by Anthony Watts on his website, “Watts Up With That” fifteen years ago, and publishing seven articles there. But to some degree this placed constraints on my freedom as a writer. If you look back through this website, at my posts over the past eleven years, you will often see my heart wrestling to subdue my boyish love of freedom in order to discipline my writing and produce what might look scientific enough to be published on that website (which I do admire).
In the end my boyish love of freedom seemingly won. It’s been over a decade since that website has published anything I’ve written, so it obviously did not have the power of a Saturday Evening Post to make a Norman Rockwell out of me.
Don’t get me wrong. The match between Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post was in some ways a marriage made in heaven. If a young writer meets a professor, editor, agent or publisher who treats them with dignity and honor, they should understand such people are few and far between. Honor them back. For I have met some delightful rascals in my time, but I have never met a professor, editor, agent or publisher who I felt was on my side of the schism. When push came to shove, if I expected money for my writing, they always seemed to want to make a whore or gigolo out of me, and I chose to prefer poverty. (WUWT was an exception to that rule; in that case I simply tired of talking about Truth in terms of arctic sea-ice.)
I likely should provide an example, though it will seem a lengthy digression to some.
When aged 25, when I still had some shreds of faith I might meet a good professor, editor, agent or publisher, I was told, “It isn’t what you know; it is who you know.” And so it was I approached a friend of the family, who happened to be the editor of a small newspaper, with my most recent manuscript, which I thought was truly great.
The editor was a jolly, pink-faced gentleman, with silver hair, married and with a handsome, full-grown son, and I had no reason to suspect he was homosexual. In any case he completely misunderstood the message in my manuscript.
The message was that, if you deeply love your father, but do not get enough of his fathering, you might seek to make up for that deficit by seeking out father figures. I should have added that healthy fathers do not have sex with their sons. I failed to add this, and this jolly soul assumed I was in some way “coming out of the closet”, and that I wanted him to be my next “father figure”.
After an exchange of several letters, (his short, handwritten and terse, and mine many pages of half-space typing, with a typewriter that had both a black and a red ribbon), a meeting was arranged.
He welcomed me into his office with open arms, which seemed innocent enough, but his further advances shocked me. After a somewhat humorous retreat, involving me back-peddling frantically several times around his office desk, he got tired and also seemed to conclude I was terribly naive. I concluded I understood how innocent actresses feel when they want roles in Hollywood movies and are confronted with “the casting couch.” When I explained to the merry man that he misunderstood what I meant by “father figure”, he looked at me with incredulity, and then remarked, “No writer has ever made it without either fucking somebody, or being fucked.” I reared up righteously and replied, “Well then, I’ll be the first.”
It may have been noble of me to say that, but time seems to have proven the fellow correct. Here I am, after decades of writing, and also after never fucking or being fucked to further my career, and I’ve never “made it.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not homophobic. I actually liked the guy. Considering I recall his words after 45 years, he may even qualify as a sort of minor “father figure”. I just had no desire to have sex with him. However I did appreciate him. After I had rebuffed his advances we spent a cordial afternoon together.
It began by us sitting back down in his office, and him being charitable enough to read my 265 page manuscript despite the fact I had no payment to offer.
He read with stunning and slightly offensive rapidity, for he had the gift of speed reading. I watched him go through my manuscript so quickly it seemed impossible he was thinking about the hour’s worth of thought I put into each page. It took him two seconds to glance down the page, and put an X across the page with his pen. 250 pages got the X. But 15 pages slowed him down. Most were the pages that skipped philosophy and actually involved my interactions with my father. They got no X, and on one page he wrote “touching” and on another he actually scribbled a paragraph, commenting that my assumption was not true, bringing in a rebutting proof from his own boyhood. But for the most part, at two seconds per page, he went through thirty pages in a minute, and two-hundred-sixty-five pages in less than fifteen minutes.
Then he had things to do, places to go, and people to meet, but he invited me along. He didn’t do so to demonstrate how amazingly packed the life of an editor can be, but rather because he found me odd, and was curious how I came to be so weird. He asked questions which proved to me he had actually absorbed some of my manuscript’s ideas, despite the fact he turned pages so rapidly it seemed impossible that he could be doing more than turning pages and putting an X on most of them. He asked these questions even as he dashed hither and thither, talking to printers and advertisers and reporters, and drove from here to there in a small blue car. Most of the questions were asked as he drove.
One thing that baffled him was how I could say I preferred the company of men to that of women, and not be homosexual. I felt inarticulate and mumbled some clumsy rhetoric about how a man needed to learn how to be a man before he’d be worthy of a woman, and he just laughed and called me a hopeless romantic.
Another thing he was curious about was my idealism regarding Truth. I stated honesty was the wellspring of morality, and if men were truly honest there would no need for laws. He rolled his eyes, stated I was proposing anarchy, and then shot me such a significant, eagle-fierce glance that I instinctively knew the glance meant that I should think hard about what he had just stated. And I did think hard about it. I had heard that I was a hopeless romantic before, but this was the first time I heard I was an anarchist.
Then, as irony would have it, he zipped his little, blue car to a lurching stop at a curb, hopped out, and proceeded to hurry up a wide, marble staircase to a wide, green lawn. He moved with surprising speed for a portly man with silver hair, his leather shoes pattering smartly on the marble. Apparently we were late to some sort of press conference.
Ahead was a mansion with a pillared front like a Greek temple, and, at the foot of the towering pillars, a fat, well-dressed man was speaking to four microphones, and also to a bunch of reporters who gathered humbly beneath him at the bottom of a second wide marble staircase. Obviously the man was a mayor, or perhaps even a governor, and the irony was that I had only just discovered I might be an anarchist.
As the editor arrived, the politician by the microphones interrupted some windbag explanation he was giving to gladly greet him, and all the other reporters also turned to welcome him. He was obviously well-liked. He delighted in the attention, making jokes I did not get, but which everyone laughed greatly at.
I was struck by how swiftly he changed from a person I could talk to into a person very different, an actor on a stage playing a part. He quite obviously liked playing his role, but it made me uncomfortable. It seemed fake, and I was big on Truth. My discomfort grew worse when I noticed eyes shifting from him to me, and the reporters seemingly going wink-wink, nudge-nudge. They were assuming something I didn’t like. To make matters worse, the editor seemed to encourage them, looking back at me and then back at them, and going wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
I could see how it looked. He was a jolly, happy character with the known foible of cultivating proteges who always seemed to be young, male writers, and there I stood, a big, floppy notebook in hand, obviously the next young, male writer. Abruptly I wanted to scream, “This is not how it looks.”
Instead I had the strong intuition, “This is not a place I was born to be.” So, shortly after the press conference, I left that “opportunity”, after politely thanking the editor for his kindness, and drove off in my tiny brown Toyota from that fiasco to my next one.
I hope you can see I hold no grudge against the man. I suppose he qualifies as being what is now called a “groomer” or even a “sexual predator”, but I just saw him as someone with desires I could not fulfill. And he likely saw me as someone with desires he could not fulfill. But this reality was no reason to be uncivil, and we did share ideas which I can recall even after 45 years.
But why did I have that sense, “This is not where I was born to be?” What propelled me to seek elsewhere?
With 20-20 hindsight, I think I sensed the beginning of what is now called “The Swamp”. But back then the rot had just started, and was a mere blemish on the skin of an otherwise wholesome fruit. The good Founding Fathers had gotten something rolling, and the politicians of 1978 were rolling along on the momentum of that goodness, forgiving of foibles, yet seemingly forgetful of the fact that good, without further good, stops rolling.
Yet I wonder if I ran away from a problem I should have attempted to solve. Maybe I could have kept the goodness rolling, and single-handedly kept The Swamp from becoming a swamp. I doubt it; most likely I would have been seduced and sucked down into the mire like everyone else, but that is something I shall never know. One cannot undo what has been done, and the fact of the matter is that I turned away from situations when intuition told me “This is not where I was born to be.”
This ends my long digression, and returns us to the question I originally digressed from.
Was it worth it?
Yes.
Why?
Because most people live their lives without fame and/or fortune, and are the better for it. They are, in fact, beautiful people living beautiful lives, and are what the Bible calls “the salt of the earth”. And this fact (that such humble people often are more worthy of respect than the fatheaded rich and fatheaded famous are) was something I saw, early on, from my side of the schism.
It is also not something one should expect the rich and famous to want to hear. Therefore, if you write about such reality, you are in a sense insulting the rich and famous, and shouldn’t expect to be showered with their favors.
However one will be showered by the favors of those who have no money to offer, and no fame. In some ways all they offer is hard work; they offer blood, sweat and tears, but, in the end, after fifty years, the young writer may find themselves in my shoes, the grandfather of fourteen, (soon [God willing] to be fifteen, and, in seven months [God willing] sixteen).
Now I will freely admit young writers are not aiming to create grandchildren when they write. But, if pressed, they do confess to hoping some people will still be reading their work in in fifty years, or at least that their work will have such a powerful effect that it will uplift the unborn, even if their actual works are burned and don’t survive. Me? I actually did think about future family, as I wrote.
It had to do with my being from a broken home. I wanted to mend the fracture, and my childlike prayers often included, “And please God, get Mom and Dad back together again.” However it was also fairly obvious such a reconciliation was not going to happen. Their divorce was downright flamboyant in the grandiose levels of discord it attained. In retrospect my parent’s overblown drama seems downright laughable, but at the time they seemed to feel a need to be secretive about what was blatantly obvious. You weren’t allowed to talk about it. But me? I wanted to write about it, on the sly. If I had to be secretive, I’d do it, but, on my side of the schism, I’d be open and honest.
Most young writers are in similar slippers. They want to be honest about something which needs to be addressed, but which it is taboo to talk about. Because it needs to be addressed, some will respond to their work by saying, “You know, I always thought that, but never dared say it.” However the gatekeepers of cancel culture may repress such agreeable encouragement with their insidiously disagreeable discouragement, and so the honesty is not rewarded, most of the time, though there are exceptions to the rule.
Young writers want to be the next exception to the rule. (Even old writers like me confess it might be fun). Imagine what it must have been like to be one of four young men in an obscure rock band called “The Beatles” in 1962. Or what it must be like to be Oliver Anthony, and to have a heart-felt song leap from the obscurity of twenty views a day on YouTube to over a million views in a single afternoon, to six million a few days later, and, four months later, to over a hundred million views. (YouTube pays creators a reasonable amount of money, for a hundred million views).
Lots of young writers yearn for a hundredth as much money, for their writing. If they only got paid, they could quit washing dishes and devote more time to the writing they love. Sadly, for every four Beatles or lone Oliver Anthony there are countless other singers and writers who escape recognition, and never get paid.
To young writers I say this: Consider ye the salt of the earth. Are there not many good, young mothers and fathers who wish they got paid for being good, because if they got paid they would have more time to spend with their children? But they don’t get paid for parenting, and in fact it is often bad mothers who get paid (welfare). But does the fact good mothers and fathers don’t get paid for being good stop them? No. Many of them don’t even expect acknowledgement for their gracious behavior. They just do what they do. Why? Because the alternative is loathsome.
In like manner, young artists should avoid alternatives when they start to look loathsome. Or that is what I told myself as a young man. But I was also told artists were wimps, were terribly wounded by rejection, and were so prone to wilting that one sign an artist was worthy was that he’d keel over and die young. That didn’t appeal to me.
Before very long I knew all about both the agony and ecstasy of art, but the general opinion seemed to be artists had no stamina and couldn’t take it, and, if no one would listen, they’d get crazy and cut an ear off and mail it to a woman they felt unheard by, like Van Gogh did. I did not feel this was a wise way to behave. Nor was it how the salt of the earth usually behaved. Therefore I decided to make a point. And the point was? It was that a writer didn’t have to be a lunatic. He didn’t have to die young. He could live to be over 70 and be the grandfather of 14 (going on16).
“Yes, but…” young writers will say. “How can you call yourself a writer when you have never been published”?
Actually one of the first poems I ever wrote was published in the Manchester Union Leader in 1968. I was fifteen. It didn’t make me a red penny, and in fact misled me to believe it was easy to be published.
Since then I’ve written all sorts of stuff, and I haven’t a clue whether a single sonnet of mine will reward me beyond the pleasure I got writing it. So why write it down?
Well, in many cases the writing was read, and the reader found great pleasure. (O.K., I confess, usually the reader was myself.) However there were a few, rare other cases where people besides myself surprised me by expressing pleasure over what I’d written. In fact, fifty years is such a long stretch of time that I’ve even written a song or two which were small town “hits”, sung in obscure bars, in living rooms at parties, or at church talent shows. There was even one time, midst fifty years of obscurity, when I experienced a glorious evening where I had an audience of over a hundred singing my song’s chorus. But no song ever “went viral”. As far as I know, not a single thing I’ve written will outlast me.
In some ways I hope my writing doesn’t. Why? Because it makes me more pure, if my writing has nothing to do with fortune or fame. It is purer still if it has nothing to do with acceptance or even, believe it or not, with talent.
At this point I imagine some young writers are sitting bolt upright and saying, “Stop right there. Nothing to do with talent? You had better explain that one, Bucko.”
To explain I like to use the following analogy:
Suppose you were lacking in talent, but loved music. Suppose you were tone deaf and knew for a fact your singing made people wince. Would that mean you were banned from ever singing? Or could you not, when no one was home, sneak into the shower and bellow your discordant heart out, and actually derive enjoyment from your singing? The answer to that question is a resounding, “Yes”, for lots of people, with voices less sweet than a donkey’s, get great joy from singing in the shower. Why? Are they not singing to an audience of zero?
Here my explanation drifts into mysticism, and gets a bit weird, for I assert the people in showers are not singing to an audience of zero, but of Infinity.
Most don’t think much about why singing in the shower feels so good. If they think at all, their singing seems selfish, and only done for one’s own well-being, like doing push-ups in a gym. Even if the sour singer imagines a vast crowd cheering, as he (or she) showers, entertaining warm and fuzzy delusions of grandeur, enjoying a flooding fantasy that waves of encouraging applause are giving him (or her) permission to bellow out the wrong notes all the louder, the singer seldom sees that what actually makes them feel so good, and makes such showers so strangely healing, is a mystic mystery.
Said the singer to the song,
“It is for your lips I long
But I cannot reach the charms
Of my creation.”
The song came singing back,
“You are everything I lack
And we need each others arms
For celebration.”
Even after fifty years, I can’t fathom the mystery. But I think it has something to do with creative people entertaining the Creator.
As a young writer this caused me problems. I didn’t want to be a bit religious. To be religious was to be a copycat. It was to recite by rote. It was to be stale, and never think. I would rather be original. I wanted to say the things that stale people didn’t. I wanted to be reinvigorating, to be fresh and new.
However there came a day when I was attempting to write about some element of Truth, in a fresh and new way, when, while rereading my first draft, I saw it was pathetic. It was like I was trying to trace the flickering movement of a flaring, crimson sunrise with tracing paper, using charcoal. Once the sunrise had faded, and was no longer there to inspire me, I was confronted with how I had portrayed it. It depressed me. My work was just charcoal on tracing paper, stagnant and stale, and such a bad representation of Truth that few could look on my work and even imagine a shade of red.
It was a humbling experience, for it showed me my “originality” was not so original as I thought. Yes, it was better than the religious, who mumbled words by rote and never bothered to think about the Truth their words mumbled about. I was only “original” because I did bother to think. But it did not make me the Maker. I might be what some called “creative”, but I could not create like the Creator did.
I did not create the sunrise, and therefore when I tried to artistically show how beautiful the sunrise was, I was just a copycat. I might produce a copy of a sunrise better than even a camera could, but still it would fall short. After years of failure it occurred to me my sunrise could never match the sunrise the Creator had created; my best attempts were my poor copy of a Genius far better.
At some point you need to tell your pride to shut up. Even if you are far better than most at seeing the beauty of life, you need to confess you are not the originator of that beauty. You are not original. You just copy better than other copycats.
I’m not sure why it was so hard for me to hear I was not original, but it was. I wish I had understood earlier. I urge young artists to understand what it took me so long to understand.
One way to look at it is: The Creator is the father, and artists are his adoring children. They want to be like Him. So they emulate Him.
At my childcare I often see children emulate their parents. It doesn’t matter if their mother is a seamstress or their father is a surgeon, the child will stitch with a make-believe needle made of straw. There is such child-like admiration involved I would never scold the child, though the simple fact of the matter is that the child is not capable of being either a seamstress or a surgeon. (Yet).
In like manner, no artist is capable of being the Creator. At best, they are just copycats. Even the most heroic and magnificent art, such as Beethoven’s ninth symphony, is but a joyful representation of what the Creator’s already made, but which most ordinarily don’t see (or hear). It takes a deaf Beethoven to open their eyes (or ears).
In terms of the issue of “originality”, there is no danger of stagnation when attempting portray Truth, for Truth is, by definition, the opposite of sameness; no two snowflakes or fingerprints are the same; even identical twins are not identical; even desert sunrises hold something new in their cloudless daybreaks. The only danger of stagnation arises when someone attempts to tie the Truth down, to limit it in the manner religion often does.
Perhaps that is why young artists so often become atheists. Goodhearted preachers, in their attempts to steer their flock away from evil towards good, have accidentally limited Infinity. Infinity laughs at limits. Young artists laugh at goodhearted preachers, unaware they themselves are limiting Infinity by saying it does not exist.
I could have saved myself from a great deal of trouble if, as a young artist, I had not wasted so much time being “original” in ways that denied the Truth which, in fact, I was trying to copy.
However I suppose it is part of a process. It does not occur to one that the father-figure one is looking for is Truth itself, and so one first works their way through a whole series of lesser, inferior father-figures, over and over sensing, “This is not where I was born to be.” Such incidents are part of learning, even when they are fiascos. An acorn does not become an oak all at once.
Even if one has the good fortune to draw a get-out-of-jail-free card, (which I suppose would be a father-figure who confessed he was inferior and pointed one towards Truth, as the only worthy Father), one retains doubts. Atheism lingers. Even saints have a devil on their shoulders.
Hardest to shake is the sense Truth has no heart. One prays, but hears only silence. One receives no instruction, so what is one to do? One sighs and turns away. But what does one then see?
One is looking at silent blankness, when one opens a notebook to an empty page. It is as blank as a crystal ball, but it does not stay blank. Lines of letters appear like the footprints of chickens. Then a line is scribbled out. Then the page is torn from the notebook, rumpled to a ball, and sails through the air to a wastepaper basket.
What just happened? You say you received no instruction, but in fact you just had a conversation with Truth.
These conversations can be quite a battle, because besides the Truth there are other voices, sometimes louder than the silence of Truth. There is the sneering of every bully who ever belittled and the snickers of every Karen who ever backbit. Onto the empty page can spill the gatekeepers of cancel-culture, repressing all agreeable encouragement with their insidiously disagreeable discouragement. Even when one consciously scribbles these snide voices out, they remain lurking in the subconscious, poisoning the very springs of creativity. The struggle seems so unequal one wants to go mad, die young, and cut off their ear like Van Gogh, but then one remembers Beethoven had his ears cut off by life itself, and it never stopped him. That is a truth so amazing that one’s faith in Truth revives.
My advice to young artists is to revive your faith in Truth. Not truth, but Truth, with a capital “T”. For, in its Infinity, Truth has a power few expect silence to have: The power of Love. All the other voices that spill onto the empty page twist truths with a small “T”, and in that swirling confusion of lesser father-figures one needs an Absolute they can cling to like a child clings to a father’s pants-leg on a crowded city street. And Truth, with a capital “T”, will respond.
Even if a young writer is sick of priests and preachers, (and communists are the most preachy of all), and any hint of religion (even a godless religion) makes them want to vomit, and they have been made allergic to the word “God”, they should be able to recognize they are repelled from some things because others are more attractive, and that they need a word for what attracts them. I suggest they use the word “Truth”. (This entire subject is absurd, when you understand our choosing this defining word is attempting to encapsulate Infinity. It would be easier to stuff an elephant into your shirt-pocket.) I furthermore suggest young writers give credit where credit is due, confess attraction where attraction is obvious, and investigate being adopted by an Ocean. An Ocean? Well, truth, with a small “T”, may be a cruel truth, But Truth, with a capital “T”, is a sea of Love.
Sunrise's Swansong 