Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 15

Thanksgiving…

—From CB—

Thursday we drove down to Santa Cruz for Thanksgiving. We, our son Eli and his wife and three in-laws. A good time was had by all, and a lot of food. Despite time taken to chew, conversation was non-stop: the trials of moving, calming the dog, Mark Twain and Tobias Wolff, circus skills, real estate, current cat behavior, Queen for a Day, Facebook gripes, the food, on and on. We crawled into bed, slept, got up this morning and ate more.

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I wasn’t celebrating the traditions of the day or the crimes of 10,000 years of worldwide madness. As a kid, of course I was taught the traditional story; that stood beside other things I was taught: the Trail of Tears, the displacements, the genocides—not in the detail I learned later, of course, but enough to make the Thanksgiving story stand out as one of the few holidays to celebrate something resembling peace. So what did I just celebrate? My thanks for the people around the table and for my life.

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I wonder if gratitude has become a four-letter word. Some time ago, I wrote “As soon as we’re prompted with ‘Now say thank you!’ we learn that it’s an obligation, a price to pay. So we learn to pay it with counterfeit bills.” It’s not something we’re good at. We learn to nurse as soon after birth as we can, and if we don’t get the nipple we raise hell. Much later, we try to remember Mothers Day and pick out a card to send. But we pay little mind to the nine months of pregnancy, the pangs of labor, the years of changing diapers, the worries of money, education, the times the kid got sick or in a fight, and on and on. We’re not instantly born with gratitude and it doesn’t seem teachable. so how does it come about?

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I don’t feel it often, except to specific people for specific stuff. Most often, it’s either something expressed to my mate or something I look at from memory, way long after I’m able to say express it directly. But even a post-mortem gratitude has its value. What’s the value? I think it’s in creating a bond. It’s in acknowledging that you needed Mama’s nipple to help construct you, and you needed lots of other folks along the way. Certainly that’s not all that’s needed. I don’t think Jeff Bezos would be wise to send a Hallmark card to his employees saying, “Thanks for making me rich.” Better working conditions might get a better reception. But the concept of the Self-Made Man has been a problem ever since Samson got a haircut.

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I can’t say that in sitting around the table I’m feeling “gratitude.” In fact, I’m just eating, and talking when my mouth isn’t full. I recall during my early teens when I went to church, that I discovered that if I shut my eyes and rolled my eyes upward, it made me feel very holy. In a way, I remember that fondly, though it didn’t last.

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It’s likely clear that I favor a celebration of Thanksgiving Day. I don’t connect with the argument that it hides or celebrates genocide, but certainly there’s no reason to celebrate anything unless you want to. For those who disagree, I would hope that you can establish a day of thanksgiving for what you have—even if it’s much less than what others have or what you deserve—and those who’ve helped you achieve it. And granted, that’s not easy. But Elizabeth and I each celebrate one another’s birthdays, though a birthday carries with it the certainty of a death.

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I recall once, with Elizabeth, being caught in a street celebration in the Trastevere section of Rome. Crowds roaming the streets, eating watermelon chunks and other street food, casting the debris over their shoulders—a crazy, messy evening. I had no idea what was being celebrated—maybe a saint or a war, and I’m glad I didn’t know—but I recall the joy of simple celebration, and that was sufficient.

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Release. . .

—From EF—

The little hybrid maple tree in our front yard has shed most of its leaves, and after each new session of raking I swear I’ve heard it giggle as it drops another spray of red and yellow and brown to cover the moss again. This year I’ve started collecting the fluffy leaves in a big mulch barrel to mix with the long needles from the whatever-it-is gnarly pine tree way down front. I used to get peeved at what I regarded as littering. Now that I’ve realized it’s a gift, I love watching the fluttering release.

On another note, we emptied our survival supplies from the old tour van so Conrad could pack it wall to wall with dead palm fronds for a dump run. Palm fronds do not flutter down gracefully. One that was clearly about to let go had second thoughts, and as the load was nearly complete I had to grab its tip and run around swinging from it like Tarzan to make it let go. While we were at it, we said goodbye to various ancient computer parts, dead hard disks, an old VCR, and a very heavy backup battery unit that had an irritatingly short life. Packing it in was not fun, but once the heavy tech was in its e-waste bin, we teamed up and threw palm fronds like baroque javelins onto the messy concrete floor of the processing shed, watching nervously as the roaring yellow dinosaurs shoved and crunched stuff from adjacent areas. It was a jubilant release. Then we treated ourselves to ice cream from Mimi’s.

Earlier in the week we tackled the baroque mess of our walk-in wardrobe room, the “his” pole and the “hers” pole of hanging items from what looked suspiciously like the 70’s. I mean, a sport jacket’s a sport jacket, and almost all of our clothes have come from thrift stores, but there are limits. I can’t bear to throw a usable garment in the garbage, and now that the resale places are accepting donations again, it was time for a purge. The carefully folded and stacked stuff filled a huge yard-waste black bag, and it felt immensely satisfying to heft it onto the loading dock.

I’ve found strange artifacts in our old archaeological cartons of papers, and given that the rest of the memoir is likely to take at least a year I’ve taken to scanning a lot of the stuff I’m likely to keep coming back to and then ditching the paper. We’re old enough to sense that we’d better haul ass in getting rid of stuff. I almost do a funny dance when opening old three-ring binders and flopping the contents into the recycle bin.

All this delight in release has made me recognize another thread, the release of old shopworn guilt and shame clinging to past blunders. As I’ve been writing, I’ve been forgiving, and it feels good. I look at that little maple tree and wonder if it’s having a good time.

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Thoughts on Death…

—From CB—

It’s important.

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It deserves being capitalized, since it always involves proper names.

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Being 80 years old, it becomes real, even though I can’t conceive it. It’s hard to think about not being. I can only recall my mid-afternoon Ph.D. seminar on Hegel, which was likely on a Tuesday.

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I have no concept of an afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead gives you formulas to turn it into a luxury cruise, but I’d need to remember my reading glasses. I can’t prove that there isn’t an afterlife, but I don’t depend on it. The most useful concept, to me, is that the state of your mind in its last years will be what you carry forever: that at least gives us a paradigm for trying, at long last, to make ourselves into decent human beings.

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My greatest worry is leaving a mess behind. I have recurring dreams of packing up crap in the van, and it never ends.

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Everything that can be said about death has been said, mostly by people who aren’t currently dying. Not a soul actually writes from experience. It’s like reading a travelogue about France by someone who’s never been there.

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The last days are a total crapshoot. I had a friend who received his diagnosis, arranged for hospice care, made his rounds of final visits while he could, approached the end with mindfulness, even a glow as we last saw him, and died a perfectly hideous death. No telling.

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Death clears the playing field. Granted, we’d prefer it just happen to bad guys. But that’s what movies are for.

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On the days I walk home from the gym, I walk through a cemetery. Some families regularly decorate their plots with flowers, whirligigs, maybe a plastic Smurf. On a flag day, there’s an outcrop of little flags. Sometimes a blue heron is seen parading in the grass, oblivious to whom he’s honoring with his tread. I like the heron.

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I would prefer cremation, despite its expenditure of fossil fuels, then the family dividing the ashes in small pots, with the rest tossed somewhere, though that requires caution. There are regulations, and I wouldn’t like to be a scoff-law, however deceased. And there can be surprises. A friend tried to fulfill her mother’s wishes to be cast into the sea; at the first fling, the ashes blew back in her face.

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Burial is okay, but only where people stay living where they were born. My dad is buried in Brownsville TX, my mom in Harlan IA. As I live in CA, and I doubt I’ll take a trip to either place any time soon.

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For a play, a cow’s skull was needed. A friend took on the responsibility, went to a slaughterhouse and obtained a head. She then had to boil it clean. More easily imagined than achieved.

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Knowing the fact of death instills diverse ambitions. Am I impelled to write in hopes of surviving post-mortem? Does the billionaire strive to make billions in hopes of immortality? Does the saint embrace the leper to earn a merit badge? Fame fades fast, but it has the utility of feeding our illusions.

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I’ve seen Kafka’s THE TRIAL dramatized as a story about political despotism. For me, it’s a story about the “injustice” of death. Perhaps it would be clearer if Josef K were played by a five-year-old who’s summoned to court and convicted of mortality. “I didn’t do it!” he cries.

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The whole deal sucks.

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The earworm running through my head in the minutes of writing this: “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout…” I looked up the full lyrics, since it’s been a long time. Gets much grosser and ends with “And your eyes fall out and your teeth decay, and that is the end of a perfect day.”

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I’m eighty.

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Garlic and Bach. . .

—From EF—

Last week I tucked the bedded garlic under a beautiful fluffy russet comforter of mulch, a mix of the lightweight little leaves from the Japanese maple tree by the house (first layer) and pine needles from the tree down by the street. Those are very long, so their layer knits together and holds the lightweight leaves in place. I managed that just before the huge soaking rain hit, so I could ruffle my hands in it and distribute it evenly before the drenching tamped it down. By now the garlic is very happy, poking green fingers up into the light, and it’s making little staccato comments against a perfect background color.

As usual we went to the ocean this afternoon and watched a very lively light show. No swells, just a whole lot of little sharp ripples under bright sunlight making an endless cascade of twinkles. Made me want to dance.

Home, then clearing the spent beds of pepper and lettuce, planting new starts of lettuce and chard in the wine barrels. I entertain myself by the geometry: for six plants it’s one in the center, and five in a star-circle. For twelve, two in the center and two concentric star-circles. They’re little now, so their dance patterns are clear. Later they’ll be an energetic mosh pit.

While napping after dinner, I got an earworm of one of the Bach pieces I’ve been earnestly recovering from my dim past. It’s been fascinating observing myself discovering a new intentional way of practice, and I don’t have any pressure on me so I can be patient and relentless. By now of course I know this piece note for note, but in the earworm version it suddenly became a lilting dance. When I got up I went out to the studio and let Bach lead me onto the dance floor. Normally my work time is in the morning, but this was in darkness and after some wine. My mental switch flipped and my hands followed.

When I was a teen I was gifted and anxious, a good technician but not a musician. As an adult composer, I learned to surrender to the will of the music that was flowing through me, but I wasn’t often manifesting it with the technique I first learned—most scores were layered electronic tracks assembled on the computer, improvised like a jazz soloist one voice at a time. Tonight the composer-mind took over and now the fingers have the chops to get on the field and run. It left me breathless.

I thank the garlic, I thank the ocean, I thank J. S. Bach, and I thank the generous family who gifted me with their old used piano, the first one I have had since I said goodbye to my Steinway upright in 1999. I’m back in the dance.      

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Reality. . .

—From CB—

Lately, I’ve been reading the Bible again. This is due to my sudden interest in King David—one of those waking brain-spasms that engender unlikely projects. Something dangles a worm, and abruptly I’m dangling from the hook. So I’ve started another goddam novel.

As an early teen, I went to the Presbyterian church, read the whole Bible, both swept up in the stories and stunned by the contradictions: like the bumper-car ride at the carnival, you’d zip ahead and get slammed in the side. Since then, my “spiritual” life has taken many paths: Unitarian, Quaker, pagan, atheist, but with no belief in a personal, anthropomorphic god. I see myths of “god” and “gods” as reflecting important mythic concepts but nothing I want to swallow whole.

For those who share my denial of a personal God with all the trimmings—or even committed religionists—who want some provocative reading, I suggest reading the Biblical text with the substitution of “Reality” for every statement regarding YHWH. Granted, we’ve had 3,000 years of ingenious explanations for the contradictory personae of the Main Character, but this allows an all-encompassing sense of “unity” in our worldview without the problem of a schizophrenic deity or the neopagan practices of doing a sex change on the Patriarch or chopping nature into discrete forces of wind, fire, or plumber.

Reality is unknowable, yet we’re born with an innate need to know it. It has an absolute will: if you jump off a cliff, you land on the rocks. It creates and destroys. It forgives and takes revenge. It offers hope while playing three-card monte with us fools who think we’ll beat the game.

Yet I’m drawn to the concept of a unified force of infinite, mysterious depth rather than to a garden-variety atheism, perhaps because I need to acknowledge our great lust to know and our need to comprehend the forces that shape our lives and within which we try to carve out some illusion of will.

Granted, Reality doesn’t have a good rep. It’s often linked with “grim” reality or “brutal” reality, as if it’s the opposite of idealism or hope—seen by some as those soft things to eat for folks with bad teeth. But that doesn’t have to be tattooed into our heads.

I see the Bible as a trove of extremely provocative stories. They tend to be flattened to plastic not only by believing fundamentalists but also by unbelievers who accept those literal interpretations for mockery. I’m not a philosopher—Hegel and Kant put me to sleep in grad school—only a storyteller, so I can’t sustain a defense of my worldview. I can only say that these readings enrich me.

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The Dance of Dark and Light. . .

—From EF—

A day ago I had a luscious sensual hour of hard work planting my next year’s crop of garlic. The cloves I was using as seed were round and smooth and firm, and it was so easy to find the resemblance to beautiful breasts and butts. I’d spent half an hour with Conrad’s help, disassembling the garlic heads I’d bought for this purpose, and then another half hour with the cloves spread all over the dining table, sorting out the 45 biggest loveliest ones to put down into the dark. In this process I held and snuggled and smoothed each and every one; I met them personally and individually. The chosen 45 went into an empty yogurt tub to wait for the planting, and the others went into a comely little wicker basket waiting to be used in the kitchen. They, too, are in the dark, a little under-stairs space with a three-foot door, complete with doorknob and latch, that we call the Dwarf Closet. I can duck-walk in, but Conrad just gets on his knees and fumes.

I’d fertilized and tilled the garlic bed the day before the rain started, and the overnight blessing left the soil dark and fragrant. The afternoon was clear and the air was mild when I started the planting, and I loved kneeling like a camel on the folded burlap bag that would cushion my knees. It’s a whole lotta up and down, setting my twelve-foot marked lath strips that let me make holes at nine-inch spacing, using a bulb-planter to make generous cups in the soil, then spooning in a good dollop of worm castings to supply a fertile boost under the seed-cloves. At last, picking each clove up by its pointed little cap, nestling it into its place, and covering it with darkness. I stood up, stretched my back, looked at the smooth even surface that showed no sign of disturbance, and could imagine them all looking up and saying, “Just wait.”

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Eighty. . .

—From CB—

Last week I turned eighty. Though I received many congratulations, this was not entirely of my doing. In part, it was due to the cursed medical establishment, who over the years ran interference for me. In part, it was due to my wife, who’s cooked my suppers for 60+ years. In large part, it was the achievement of my mother, who did the hard work of labor and many jobs to keep me alive, and even survived my adolescence. I did some work at it too.

Beyond that, what’s left to say? I’m in good health, beyond a couple of chronic complaints which might kill me if something else doesn’t do it first. I’m a compulsive worker, though I’m hardly an essential one. I’m immensely proud of my wife and my children, both. I enjoy food and sex and the ocean and blessed sleep. I wish I could travel more and talk with people and miss having more immediate friends. I’m obsessed with all the great mysteries. In a way I hate to read, because there’s so much to read that I’ll never read, and that occurs to me every time I look for my place.

I’ve been all over the United States and Europe, a bit in Canada and Mexico, a week in Israel before the first Intifada. I’ve been part of the theatre community on many levels, plus Boy Scouts, academia, public radio, puppetry, polyamory, Unitarians, Quakers, neo-pagan circles, and the social-services realm—though not all simultaneously. I’ve walked up and down the streets of Manhattan. I’ve done more stuff than I thought I would.

I’ve had a fellow traveler. We met when I was 19, she was 20, and it was a lightning-swift bonding. Like all my relatives (who were farmers), we found a common career, and we’ve nurtured each others’ growth into something reasonably humanoid. Many long nights, some ecstatic, some otherwise.

What’s the result?

I have two grown children, both creative, well partnered, and human. I have a mate who’s more than I’ve ever thought possible in a mate. I have two cats.

I vote, and I sometimes post screeds on Facebook, but I’m more critical of my own tribe, their tactics and vocabulary, than of the tribe the next valley down. Not that I’m more offended by bad spelling than genocide, but frankly I’m too chicken to man the barricades, and I don’t consider posts on Facebook more than a hobby.

I have no apparent career. I’ve spent my life in theatre, directed about a hundred shows, written 50+, sculpted 18 bins of puppets, but that’s pretty much dead and buried unless lightning strikes. We’ve done some very good radio work. We’ve renovated three spaces as theatres, though none are theatres now. We’ve written 8 novels and 40+ stories with very scant readership. Right now, in relation to these worlds, I feel much as I did in high school: out of the stir of things. Yet we’ve earned a living doing it, worked to the bone, and had fun.

Currently, I’m doing the final layouts on Seven Fabulist Comedies, an anthology of some of our plays that we’ll publish in November. I’m circulating three novels to small presses and just finished editing Elizabeth’s first volume of a three-part memoir, to be published in the spring. I’m in that turbulent mental state between projects but thinking about King David, that heroic shit—doubtful, as immersion in this topic might take years and do I really want to spend that much time in a world less appealing even than Las Vegas?

Getting past the age of fifteen, you start to think of death. At forty, it becomes real. At eighty, it’s a package you expect in the mail. They haven’t sent the tracking number, but the way things go these days, who can tell? I’m in good health, and other than groping for names and words, I’m ambulatory and sentient. Main worry is that no way can I leave my campsite cleaner than I found it—there’s way too much stored in the shop—but I don’t want to leave a mess.

Both my parents are dead, and many friends. Oddly, I’ve never felt grief, just a sense of fate—maybe a trait due to my farmer genes. I would hope to spare my loved ones pain, but I don’t know how, other than staying alive.

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Laughter. . .

—From EF—

When I was two years old, I was taught the capitals of all the states, and being only two, I must have sounded funny mispronouncing them. My mother liked to show me off as a party trick, and people would laugh and applaud. I don’t know why I thought I was being mocked, but I did, and I tried hard not to cry.

Later, when I was about four, I’d taught myself to read, and the party trick changed. Somebody would grab a book or a magazine, point to something, and ask me to read it out loud. One time it was a story about Psyche, and I’d never heard that name before. I took my best shot, and the crowd howled when I said “Pee-sick.” My insides shrank about five sizes.

When I went from the farm-country township elementary school to the town’s junior high, somebody found out I had a good memory, and I was asked to memorize a poem to recite for the Columbus Day assembly. It was Joaquin Miller’s “Columbus,” pretty long and bloated, and every verse ended with “Sail on! Sail on! and on!” and the kids were just about falling off their chairs. Laughter was not my friend.

Once I started acting, that began to change. A lot of what I did was serious stuff and my stock in trade was to cry real tears at the drop of a hat. It impressed people, and the cherry on top was that my mother wasn’t there to yell “Stop crying!”

Tears and laughter were no longer my nemesis, and in our years with Theatre X the short-skit format was great training in comic timing. I relished being able to make people laugh on purpose. Once we broke off and formed our own duo company, though, things changed. Now what I was doing was our own writing, and there was only one other person on stage. Vulnerable doesn’t begin to describe it, but it worked, and this time, when people laughed, I drank it like sweet wine.

Little by little I got funnier in real life and learned in my bones how laughter, like music, is its own bonding. When we did King Lear, my Fool character even hassled the audience as they came in, a strange cross-gender Don Rickles insult comedy. I had come full circle and was cracking people up with what had crumpled my kid-self.

Of course, nowadays it’s just the two of us, but the saving grace is that we make each other laugh. A lot. Laughter is my friend.

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God. . .

—From CB—

For some time, I’ve had the urge to write down what I believe, to see what it turns out to be. Not easy. First, because most of my writing is storytelling, not essay. Second, because posts here attract a swarm of hornets whose sniffers are out for fascists, sheeple, or driveling idiots. Third, because “belief” usually starts with “God.”

Among my friends, God isn’t popular. In some circles, He still has clout, and some friends feel He’d be OK with a sex change. But popularity is dimmed by (a) politicians who want to shove Him down our throats, (b) friends whose childhoods were steeped in guilt, and (c) evangelical entrepreneurs claiming a 5G line to Heaven.

Some see sacred myth as a worm bin of lies. On my feed, anyway, God is the subject of infinite jest or rage, second only to Mitch McConnell. God took His life in His hands when He authorized the birth of Mark Zuckerberg.

Personally, I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic God, that is, a God who hovers over us like a supernatural parent. But I see no sin in belief in God. Surely, history is replete with religious wars, burnings, genocides with “God” as the watchword. Yet Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Genghis Kahn did their deeds without heavenly assistance. In my view, God is a convenient flag to wave if you want to rile people up, but others will do.

We should have a different name for “God,” as we all bring a swirl of meanings to the word. There are those—both Fundamentalists and Atheists—who argue vehemently that “God” can mean only “Jehovah”—the Big Guy who kicked us out of Eden and let Job get fucked and gave His Son to be killed to placate Himself. That stuff brings out the comedian in all of us.

But to me, a literal reading of the Bible or any other “sacred” myth flattens it. I have an enormous respect for myth—it mirrors ourselves —but only when we see it with curious eyes. In the Bible, the expulsion from the garden, the exodus, the Akedah, the crucifixion, etc., are all enormously provocative, but for me conventional religion cheapens them (a) by insisting on their historicity and (b) interpreting them, like morals tacked onto Aesop’s fables, as having a single, established meaning.

I believe in the vast “commandments” of the Universe: the law of gravity, the speed of light, the forces our sciences have begun to comprehend, the astonishing processes of evolution and interdependence, all that. It all transcends my head. We’re a single flea on the elephant, the barnacle on a whale, managing only to chart a fragment of an ear. The more we comprehend, the deeper grows the mystery. To me, the mystery is way beyond knowing, deserving of the deepest reverence.

I’m no philosopher, so i wish others with more brainpower would (a) see what’s valuable and constructive in all religions (including Marxism and atheism), (b) address the dilemma of the remnants of tribalism (both positive aspects and negative) in a new world order of seven billion people, and (c) cool it. To those who’d like to impose primitive desert tribal law, sanctioned by their idea of God, on me, get out of my face. To those who feel all evil on Earth would be cured by purging religion, get out of my face.

I grew up Presbyterian though with utterly heterodox views; attended a Unitarian church, a Quaker meeting, and Neopagan festivals. We’ve performed for many religious communities who found our work relevant to ethical issues, and I have great respect for all who’ve given themselves in service to their fellow humans, whatever their beliefs. Perhaps the question to ask is that of the Existentialists: if there is no God, never was, never will be, how would you order your life? If the answer is, I’d kill my neighbor and steal his car, then whether you quote scripture or DAS KAPITAL, I don’t want to live next door.

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A Poet. . .

—From EF—

I have a friend in Philadelphia who is a poet. Best friend. Best poet. Her work is fierce, powerful, and cuts to the bone. Now she has a new book, laser-focused on war. Our endless war, pick your own name. These poems are not an anti-war demonstration, they’re a detonation. On Sunday I watched a Zoom reading from Larry Robin’s Moonstone Arts in Philly, and afterward sent a message of praise and thanks. I mentioned that I was sure I’d ordered the book as soon as I saw the publication announcement, but could find no actual evidence that I’d done so. I asked her to suggest how I might inquire.

This morning, wanting the book as soon as possible, I ordered it from the press. This afternoon I got a message from my friend saying that she’s gifting me with a signed copy and will mail it Tuesday. By 5 PM the mail had come and the book was in the mailbox: yes, I’d ordered it last week. Now I will have three copies. One for me, one for our daughter Johanna, and one in reserve as a gift. I feel there’s a message there.

J.C. Todd wrote Beyond Repair. Able Muse published it. If I had the wealth of our space cowboys I would put a copy in every mailbox in the country, packaged with a big bottle of aspirin and a fifth of single-malt Scotch.

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