Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 19

Who?

—From CB—

I’m reading an interesting book right now called Humankind—pop science, breezy, but well written—that explores the old question, whether man is inherently savage and in need of restraint (Hobbes) or only made so by so-called civilization (Rousseau). The writer draws historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, observers of apes, and novelists into the fray, in search of our core nature.

Does our undeniable penchant for violence, exploitation, etc., stem from a base animal nature that laws and police must hold in check, or have we constructed systems that induce it?

My own unscientific instinct is to disbelieve in original sin—that we are born evil and kept in line only by the whip or by being taught that it’s bad to hit our baby sister. It’s hard to believe that the species would survive without an intrinsic talent for cooperation, or that small killer bands evolved into million-man armies and thus survived by murder and rape. Guys sticking up convenience stores don’t often have long lives, and death tends to hamper reproduction. I can’t prove it: it’s just a hunch.

Nevertheless, there’s an element in the original-sin myth that I feel to be true. They ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge, it says. But what if they were expelled from the Garden not for disobedience but for getting too smart? Specifically, for acquiring a trait at the core of being human: symbolic thinking.

Animals eat when they’re hungry or when there’s food. We eat when it’s time for the meal. Animals have sex when they can. We do as well, but also build movies, ads for lipstick and automobiles, whole industries around it. Animals fight for survival. We fight for anything that symbolizes survival—be it flag, honor, or billions of bucks.

It’s natural, then, that we set up vast systems that require even yet vaster systems to protect them, leading usually to violence. Bullets are concrete.

In high school, in my depressed cynical year, I read a popular book on semantics. It suggested this: whenever you hear a speech, count the number of words or phrases for which there’s no defined referent—exactly what does “liberty” refer to? If you can’t understand it from the context, substitute the word “blah.”

Shortly after, we had a school assembly. I enjoyed assemblies, as a break of routine. Once we had a classical violinist, another time a magician, another time a woman who told the boys how to shave. This one was patriotism, and I counted the “blahs.” I made the mistake of announcing it in my subsequent class, and the teacher was not thrilled.

But I’ve persisted in counting the “blahs.” The downside is that the folks I agree with tend to score as high as the folks whose notions I hate. The upside is only to know that what you value has a solid referent: you want people to have a roof over their heads, to have food, to have a voice, to have respect.

In the long run, which is what we’re talking about, it makes little difference from what we’re evolved. I have many similarities to my dad, but I’ve lived my life in a very different way. The essential question is Who are we now?

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Liars…

 —From EF—

What is truth? And why does it matter?

I was a liar for the first 21 years of my life. At the age of 22 (I don’t count my first year, when I wasn’t talking yet) I ran so hard into the massive shit-pile of these lies that it knocked me flat and if I was going to survive, I had to learn another way of being. It took a while to feel and appreciate the lifting of that intolerable weight, to adjust to being free from that rat in the belly, having to weave the next lie to sustain the last one. So it affects me deeply to realize that we have become a country where, for millions of people, truth is an unknown quantity, and admiration is lavished on the most extravagant liars.

I think that what confounds and disturbs me most deeply is that they seem to have fun doing it. While I detest the idea, the game of “owning the libs” looks like any other game, it’s fun to win, and I can hate that but understand the kick. It’s the more elemental and profound lying that makes my gut hurt.

I didn’t have fun lying. When I was a toddler, I didn’t know anything about “lying.” I just did and said whatever I thought would keep me safe. I learned very early what would get approval and what would provoke flame-thrower rage, and I was smart.

I also had a psyche that was primed to interpret anything as criticism, denigration, even if that might not have been the intent. Those things were acid on thin skin, and I did whatever I could to bury them, shove them deep, and avoid running into them again. I dodged and weaved and lied and somehow always came up humiliated, but I kept trying. I lied for survival.

These folk are having what looks like a wonderful time doing this. They’re not lying for survival, they’re lying for power and they’re looking at the applause meter. I hate to say it, but they’re performers.

And I’m a performer. I stand on stage and embody someone who is not me but who lives through me and speaks to the audience. The character works through me to reveal truth, and I hope that those who see it can feel it resonate in their own beings. In the decade that I performed the child-abuse play Dessie, I heard from many who felt that resonance and reclaimed their own lives. That’s not lying.

Performers who seek to create a self-serving world that aggrandizes their own power are another thing, and it is far more seductive than I had thought possible. A cult attracts those who have a sad diminished center, those who need a strong assertive figure to be their leader-figure, to go boldly forth and tell them how to follow. We need to find ways to empower people, to make them comfortable in their own true skins. There is so much built into our own nation’s structure that prepetrates abuse; we need to see it and reject it and counter it.

The hurting people need community. We need to make it happen.

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Ah, Politics…

—From CB—

Okay, so here are my political thoughts in one big blurt, whatever the consequence. Be warned: there are NO positions taken on any vital issues.

Bipartisanship doesn’t meet in the middle. It just means both sides listen, with real ears, to the other’s concerns. That’s near impossible, but sometimes it happens.The Left, with whom I identify, doesn’t have any patent on logic: we can be just as crazy as them, and it behooves us to be very critical of our own rhetoric. Critics are seen as enemies. Some are; some are not.Finding a new insulting phrase on Facebook isn’t activism, nor is taking to the streets. Activism is only something you try that makes a difference. If the only difference it makes is that it makes you feel active, it’s a tiny piddle.A fundamental of strategy is “Know your opponent.” Ascribing horrific behavior to “white supremacy” or “toxic masculinity” is only useful insofar as it results in a strategy. If you can’t see the world from their perspective, you can’t remotely devise a strategy to oppose them.Lots of rightwing crazies look to the main chance. Lots of leftwing dedicated souls look to the main chance. The main chance: to attain power within your subgroup, to achieve notice, to get laid. We must always distrust those we would elevate to stardom—not their motives but our own penchant for crowning heroes.I hate CANNED CANT, whatever its source. We’re right to question the mainstream media. We’re also right to question the alternative media. Major corporations aren’t the only players in the game of “Follow the money.” Distrust the alpha males, but also distrust those who model themselves counter to the alpha males. The Flat-Earth Society doesn’t necessarily gain more credence by being counter to accepted science.There has always been a pro-fascist movement in the USA. It was very powerful until the Japanese did us the favor of attacking Pearl Harbor. We shouldn’t be surprised at its existence. And we shouldn’t give D. Trump the honor of producing it.The greatness of America isn’t in its history. That’s shot full of holes in every century. It’s in its ideals, the aspirations of many of its people. Jefferson’s words stand beside Jefferson’s status as a slaveholder and mistress-fucker: which are more to honor? Does one discredit the other? How much courage did it take to write those words in the Declaration? Faced with the might of the British Empire, I couldn’t have done it. There’s a strong “progressive” urge to discount all progress as being an excuse for laxity. I don’t think it works that way. I think we need, as one of our long-ago characters said, our tiny ecstasies.

  I don’t claim any more expertise than other bloviators. And someone who puts in hours with phone banks, writing postcards or daily blogs, should get more brownie points than I. I’ve spent my life writing and producing plays, now novels, that have tried, for the people who saw them or read them, to induce a way of seeing and feeling empathic. EMPATHIC. It’s been only a nudge in a direction, a breath in the biosphere. But I wouldn’t do otherwise.

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Brothers…

—From EF—

I have four brothers. Only my father’s sons knew each other. I only know the other two of them, and one of those is gone now.

This brother I lost twice. On this January 19, the adoptive brother I grew up with died, and it was only two weeks before that when I managed to call him to try to bridge the estrangement that had been the story of our adult lives. I give thanks that before the end came, we had a little time together, even though it was via cross-country phone calls. Hail the goer.

Through the magic of DNA testing, in May of 2018 I met another brother, my mother’s son, and we have built a strong and loving connection. Through him I have been given the gift of knowing our mother. “Our mother.” It’s taken a while to get used to those words.

In November of 2019 I met my sister (my father’s daughter) and I began to learn more about her two brothers, my other brothers. One of them had been my Facebook friend since May of 2018, and although we are on different lifestyle planes, we have managed an amicable connection. The eldest in that family is the brother I will never know, although he is the one to whom I feel the closest connection. His brilliance and his war experience made it necessary for him to shield himself from all external communication. I grieve him, though he is still living.

My adoptive brother was by nature the polar opposite of me. Five years younger, he was an extroverted charming force of nature, completely uninterested in the world of intellect to which I had been assigned by nature and nurture. We lived in the same household, but not in the same world. I’d already had a five-year track record of extravagent praise for my own intellectual gifts, and his unique wonderful attributes were jarringly different. The fact that he could be exuberant and immediate with anyone he met didn’t compete with tests and report cards, and the fact that I sorely lacked his gifts didn’t register. We never really became siblings.

My adoptive brother and I shared the same nurture, in clinical terms, but that isn’t accurate. He was always measured against me, and that damaged both of us. My mother’s son and I never met until 2018, and while we grew up in different families what we share is amazing: music, technical invention, and obsession, among others. And I know my father’s side now, with the dark current of depression that I inherited.

Blame and forgiveness, nature and nurture, all are valid concerns. All I know how to do, at this point, is to embrace it all.

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A Zoo in the Head…

—From CB—

The craft of writing, like all art forms, is a slippery pig. You get a grip, but it has lots of tricks up its sleeve (alas, mixed metaphor). Moving from nearly 50 years of playwriting to prose fiction, some skills stand firm, others are wobbly.

Among new challenges: point of view. Is your narrator imbued with godlike vision (It was the best of times…), is it first person (Call me Ishmael…) or “close third” (He thought, What have I done?) Lately, I’ve gravitated to close third, though each chapter is from a different person’s point of view—Roy’s POV in Chapter 11, Maggie’s in 12. Maybe it’s closer to the way you write a play.

Something struck me this week that I hadn’t fully realized in writing (in collaboration with Elizabeth) 40 plays, 200+ dramatic sketches, 23 stories and 8 novels: some characters come easier to me than others. In some cases, it’s because the life model is vividly before you. In others, it’s that you’re writing the role for an actor who lives inside you: that’s surely been true of Elizabeth, Camilla, Kevin. With others, you wonder.

In the current project, I wonder. Eleven characters, and each chapter shifts POV. It’s working well, I think, because it’s a story about these diverse souls intersecting—no single protagonist. What’s unsettling is how easy it was to write Roy, one of the more pathetic, despicable creatures we’ve ever created. Where did he come from?

I think of one of our comedy lines: My whole life flashed before me, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Sorta like that. Does he live inside me? I’ve surely written nasty characters before, but this one I seem to know like a brother. It’s a bit like those news articles you see now and then: a woman has a baby, though she didn’t know she was pregnant. The story opens a door, and Roy is standing there.

He brings to my mind Ray and Chuck. Ray had a used-car dealership, and Chuck was his mechanic, whose vital work was to get the cars at least to run around the block. I worked there two summers in high school, sweeping floors, polishing cars, some office work, but mostly sitting there listening to Ray expound on politics, the economy, the lesser races, and his wife—Ray and Chuck shared an obscene distaste for their wives. Ray subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and read it diligently through many customerless days. He aspired to wealth but wound up committing suicide on the verge of being indicted for fraud.

I’ve tried to use them in plays, but they’ve never managed to be more than supporting cast. Yet they were perhaps the first men with whom I felt intense empathy—not sympathy, but more what you’d feel with a yowling cat or a dripping radiator, an attunement, an intense unwanted connection.

That’s what I feel with Roy: I don’t want to be anywhere near him, but he’s inside me. It’s a shock, like discovering you have a zoo in your head and no one has cleaned the cages. All you can do is to reach for Ernie in Chapter 13.

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Stories…

—From EF—

“Mama, tell me a story.” Much as I wanted to, I usually found myself coming up blank. Then one time with our little daughter, as we were both on one of those old-fashioned playground merry-go-rounds where you had to kick the ground with your feet (remember?) somewhere in Belgium, I broke through. I think the spin and the rhythm helped me into an altered state, and I came up with a long tale of a little golden marmoset, a beautiful creature very reminiscent of my girl. That was probably in 1979, the first time the whole family went to Europe—a follow-up to having been invited to perform and do workshops in Jerusalem. Hell, we were already going to cross the Pond, so we made the most of it.

I still remember the buzz I got from telling that story. And I have warm memories of reading to the kids at bedtime, which went on for a comically long span of years. It was usually Conrad doing the reading, and I was an entranced member of the audience. Even now, if I’m overwhelmed by a big cooking prep, I’ll ask Conrad to read poetry to me and keep me company. He’s a very good sous-chef, but sometimes I’d just rather just listen to him read.

A lifetime of acting is a lifetime of story-telling, when you get right down to it, and our novels are a one-way continuation of that. We just got the hard-proof copy of our newest finished novel, “Masks”, and we’re about to order the first shipment. Much as I loved “Galahad’s Fool” and “Realists,” this is the one I hold in my heart. New-relationship energy, y’know? It’s the tale of a family of traveling players, but instead of a Dodge van they’re in a donkey cart, and instead of I-80 they’re touring their usual summer route from Greece up the east coast of Italy—in about the 8th century. The narrator is a 40-year-old writing his recollections of his six-year-old self. They play farces in village markets, and it’s been fun writing these rowdy scenes without having to actually stage and perform them.

So when our son let us know that he was going to do a live Facebook reading of a children’s story this weekend, we said, “Put us on the invitation list, please!” It was “The Brave Little Toaster” by Thomas Disch, and it touched me deeply. His reading was wonderful, yes, and thank you to Thomas Disch too, but being told the story was the sweetest thing of all.

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Malaise. . .

—From CB—

Shakespeare’s most perplexing villain is Iago. What’s his motive? He has too many. He’s passed over for promotion. He suspects Othello has tupped his wife. There’s the race thing, and a great British actor even proposed that Iago had the hots for Othello. When foiled, he refuses to speak of any motive—I think because he doesn’t know, and in 500 years we haven’t figured it out.

Grab any one of the Capitol rioters, and you’ll probably hear the same. They’ll surely have a laundry list of motives, and we promote that simplicity by calling them fascist knuckle-draggers or white supremacists. But I’m not sure that they know, nor am I sure that my fellow progressives know either.

My mother might have voted for Trump. She certainly disliked foreigners, government handouts, and she decried that North Omaha was overrun with all those Blacks—she was terrified when she had to go there. But the strongest political statements I heard repeatedly: (1) In the early 1930’s, the farmers down the road were “on relief;” the government gave them a bushel of oranges, and their kids were playing catch with the oranges. (2) We lived in a two-room, rat-infested shack with no running water, my dad had abandoned her, she worked but paid out a lot for daycare, and applied for welfare: that office told her she could only qualify if she quit her job. (She didn’t: she trusted me, at the age of six, to take care of myself.) I heard that endlessly in her diatribe against welfare. And she liked politicians who said what they thought. Though hard to tell about Trump: she also had a strong bullshit detector.

She hated the fact that others were getting welfare, oranges, and sympathy, and she wasn’t, even though she worked like a mule. She’d have hated it more—hated progressives more —if someone had charged her with “white privilege.” Even if it came with elaborate footnotes and statistics.

She was a decent woman. We had our fights but we loved one another. And yet I feel she had many characteristics of the folks who demeaned themselves at the Capitol. Above all: the desire to see something—anything—happen.

When I was a kid, we couldn’t get fireworks in Iowa. We had to go down to the Missouri border and bring them back. And I loved to blow up cans. It really meant a lot to blow up cans. Otherwise, I was amazingly well-behaved for my neighborhood, but I loved to blow up cans.

For the rioters, it’s beyond that childish joy. But I think that’s there. In my mind, Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech, though in fact he never used the word malaise, put the thumb square on the sore spot. We don’t know where it itches, but it itches like hell. Progressives itch one place, reactionaries another, but it’s utterly maddening.

To my mind, it’s being oversold on the American Dream, promising reward for exertion plus fabulous sex, and feeling someone’s getting something for nothing—not billionaires, as they’re the proof of the pudding, but the poor, who get pennies but tons of sympathy. Of course that’s debatable. To some, the bottom line is race or sex or cis-ness or age. For me, it’s mostly money. Is it more virtuous to speak up against “white supremacy” or to lobby to change the tax codes that make the rich richer and the poor very pissed off?

In any case, understanding your enemy is not the same as compromise on the issues. It’s looking for other passageways in the labyrinth. If we can’t somehow find a common ground with our adversaries, we would surely do well to start arming ourselves. They have a head start.

I don’t see “hate” as the starting point of madness. Of course it’s a virus that lurks in us all, but very few get a thrill from succumbing to the infection. There are reasons for “hate,” sometimes stupid ones, sometimes true, though often misplaced. It’s not born in the baby, nor do I think it’s effectively taught. It springs from reaction: where?

I feel we need to do a much better job of understanding our enemy.

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Joy . . .

—From EF—

I am mesmerized by things I see regularly that are never the same twice. The ocean is with us every Sunday, and today she was like the wonderful album cover from Tijuana Brass, “Whipped Cream.” (Remember vinyl?) And several times a week we end the day upstairs by our bedroom fireplace, and the flames invent a new ballet every time. Fire, water, air and earth, they are vast and timeless and we are tiny transient blips. And when I see a magnificent photo of a part of the universe, I fall down the rabbit hole of feeling like a fleck of dandruff.

I have a hard time creating reasons why we matter. If I create a really good dinner, what difference does that make on Alpha Centauri? Or if Conrad and I collaborate on a magnificent epic lovemaking, does that register on Saturn’s moons?

Well, maybe it does. If Gaia & Co are sentient, what feeds her? My private theory is that it’s joy. I mean, what other purpose can you propose for joy? Those who have not watched animals carefully think we have a corner on this, but those who have watched animals carefully think it’s part of all life. Why shouldn’t we chip in?

Conrad and I have been helping each other with soggy bouts of depression, as who hasn’t in these times? I said, as we were watching the gulls today, that I have had a few more blurts of joy this week and hope the trend continues. The Unmaker always lurks around the corner and nibbles the green shoots of the Joy Garden, but it’s up to me to tend what grows.

Not just for me. For all of us. I can’t accept that the only force that can gather strength is hate. The oldest texts celebrate dancing, celebrate singing, our ancient expresssions of joy. Connection is the best fertilizer for joy, and we need in these solitary times to find that fizz. Zoom is weird, but it’s better than nothing. I loved meeting a friend at HardCore Espresso this morning and yakking a delighted update and miming a simlulated hug. We’re creative critters. Find the ways. Feed the joy.    

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Community . . .

—From CB—

In a Facebook group I’m part of, an issue arose as to whether our community was infected with white supremacy. The discussion shifted from the original question to a more fundamental one: what is “our community”? What constitutes community?

We’re not in geographic proximity. We’re not one race. We’re generally pretty liberal, but that’s not a requirement. We share some very broad beliefs, but every topic that comes up raises differences. The one thing we agree on is that we’re all subscribed to this Facebook group.

There are communities interdependent for survival: that would include families, tribal economies, intentional communities, labor unions, dictatorial juntas, etc. That’s not us: I could unsubscribe and it would cost me nothing, in fact save me a half hour a day.

There are communities that define our identity through mutual action: political parties, sports fans, demonstrators, lynch mobs, etc. The Web is great for those of us who define ourselves as “activists” but don’t want to get off our asses.

And there are those defined by their opponents with pejorative intent: I qualify as Old White Man, shoving me into the same elevator with Jeff Bezos, Rush Limbaugh, Warren Buffett, etc. (I don’t mention Trump, as he’s a community in himself.)

Some of us don’t fit. Any tribe I’ve identified with (theatre artists, professors, pagans, Quakers, polyamorists, puppeteers, novelists), I’ve always stood just outside the circle: for me that’s more comfortable. Yet I share our hunger for community. We’re tribal animals, and yet we’re enculturated to prize individuality: I want to be part of things, but no one tells me what to do. A challenging juggle.

One corollary is that we tend to depend on establishing group bonds on the basis of what we’re not. In my long-ago Presbyterian Sunday School days, we learned a few things about what made us Presbyterians, but much more about why we weren’t Catholics or Jews. In neo-pagan circles, it’s hard to pursue a discussion thread that doesn’t spark fireworks about Christian evils. As a Democrat, I can rant—probably for days—on the atrocities of the current administration, but I still haven’t absorbed the specifics of the Green New Deal. This tendency, I think, cripples us.

In the discussion I mentioned at the outset, I opted out of stating any opinion. For me, the issue is whether or not any group promotes practices that have negative effects on others, not whether the group is free of Original Sin. But that’s just me. And it’s fine with me that the group defines itself as a “community” as long as it’s through shared values, not through shared disgruntlements.

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The Great Ascent . . .

—From EF—

Tonight is the winter solstice, the longest night, the pivot point where we begin to see longer days and shorter nights. But tonight is also that indrawn breath that is held, not doubting that the turn will begin, but not totally assured that the light will rise. We hope we’re past the worst, but cannot be sure, so we court the future with candles and lights and bonfires. It has ever been so, for millennia.

When we didn’t have Wikipedia to tell us that when it got darker and darker the time would come when the light began to rise, we had a collective need to do something, anything, to bring the light back. Everybody knows that. But 2020 has hit us hard, and we’re tired. We’ve had an election, and that’s supposed to mean something, but there are pundits and bloviators and, of course, that big braying voice from the top, all of them saying hold on, don’t bank on it.

Do the old-time thing. Light that bonfire, in whatever way moves you. I’m setting the alarm for 2 AM, and Conrad has wood laid ready in the bedroom fireplace. There will be a little thermos of hot toddy with a bit of our precious Armagnac and the iPod will have our ritual music for our Moon circles cued up. This isn’t a Moon, but Peter Gabriel is celebrating rising from the dark, and that will feel right.

Whatever works for you, do it. If not tonight, tomorrow night. Honor the dark, because it is a necessary thing, and reaffirm your bone-deep knowledge that the light will begin rising, slowly, little by little. Charlie Murphy got it right his beautiful Winter Solstice chant:

“Light is returning, even though this is the darkest hour, no one can hold back the dawn. Let’s keep it burning, let’s keep the flame of hope alive, make safe our journey through the storm.”

I can hear it in the voices of the many circles we have had through the years when we could gather together. Listen, in the safety of your own home, and you can hear it.  

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