Conrad Bishop's Blog, page 33

The Decalogue . . .

—From CB—

Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from the mountain, broke the tablets, went back up for the second draft. I just went to the dentist.

Any how-to list carved in stone 3000 years ago, proclaimed by the vengeful god of a desert tribe should be subject to critique. Times have changed a bit, and interpretations differ. Does “Don’t kill” refer to one’s own tribe or to cities that get in the way? Can we carve out exceptions?

Most significant, perhaps: Are these actually the deepest principles by which anyone lives? What about “Thou shalt make big bucks” or “Thou shalt be Number One” or “Thou shalt love thy neighbor if convenient”?

So, after three hours in the dentist’s chair, I started to try listing ten commandments by which I actually aspire to live—broader principles, hopefully, than “Floss better,” though that might be a start. I might call them a less coercive “Ten Suggestions,’ but in these blaring environs, they need a bit more oomph.

I. Stay alive.

II. Avoid pain.

III. Accept pleasure.

IV. Be kind.

V. Speak true.

VI. Fill Needs.

VII. Collaborate.

VIII. Learn.

IX. Think.

X. Say thanks.

And for sake of brevity, I offer these Talmudic elucidations:

I. Stay alive. That’s pretty basic, applicable even to roaches. Extreme pain, saving your child, love of country? Make your own exceptions: I’m not God. Just remember all the people—mom, teachers, spouses—who’ve worked hard to keep your sorry ass alive. And granted: we all violate this one eventually.

II. Avoid pain. Hard to think about any of the others if you’re screaming. Do what you can, look both directions, don’t smoke, do floss.

III. Accept pleasure. That doesn’t mean “Swipe it” or “Grab it.” Just accept the banquet when offered.

IV. Be kind. Very hard when filled with anger or pain. Try it with bunnies and work your way up the scale.

V. Speak true. Not only telling your mom who painted the neighbor’s dog, but a couple of other things. For every word you use (more generalized than “fireplug”), e.g. “love,” “freedom” “belief,” etc., know what it means. And don’t make promises retroactively into lies.

VI. Fill needs. A doctor fills needs. A novelist fills needs. A garbage collector fills needs. A barista fills needs. It makes a difference if their boss, their psyche, the way they frame their lives allow them to feel they’re doing a service.

VII. Collaborate. If a squad of Marines can do it, so can we in our own endeavors, including marriage. “Survival of the fittest,” in the Darwinian sense, means the fittest family, fittest village, fittest tribe, not the fittest Viking berserker.

VIII. Learn. For all kinds of reasons. Stop only when dead.

IX. Think. I’ve left out all reference to spiritual life—love God, seek Nirvana, honor Thor, dig Infinity, that stuff. If “Learn” and “Think” lead you to one of these, you’re blest. Without those commandments, you’re a bloody fool.

X. Say thanks. Out of politeness, for a start. And for the full taste of what you’re receiving from this gift of life.

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Connection . . .

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—From EF—

There are no words, but I’ll try. I had no blood family except for our kids, and now I have held my brother in an embrace, I have looked into his eyes and seen our mother, our grandmother, our grandfather. My brother’s wife has become my sister. There was a party and their friends came and celebrated my coming into the family. And through all of this I have felt the gentle hands of my birth mother on my shoulders, touching, reassuring, asking me to believe that the love has always been there. And I do believe it, completely.

Nearly twenty years ago I created a series of rituals, assisted by my mate, and did a pretty good job of integrating the fractured shards of my selves. The first one involved empathizing with my pregnant mother, alternately voicing her fright and anger at having her young life hijacked and voicing my right to exist. I did a good job of imagining what might have been her feelings of desperation, anger, and grief.

A few years ago, a wise friend suggested I imagine a different scenario, one in which I was loved and cherished, and in which our separation was the best gift she could give me. Now I have found the evidence of that, and I have been surrounded by an embrace of epic proportions. Healing is afoot.

Now there’s a new challenge. We have come together in a super-collider wham, and have had two days in the bliss of New Relationship Energy, and then I got on a very bumpy flight back to San Francisco. We are still raw-skinned. There are still multiple layers of history to be unearthed. And the most important thing is how to continue weaving.

I have seen these wonderful people, and I trust that we will create the best path. And I have seen myself in a new light, someone who is valued and welcomed and celebrated by people other than my mate and his beloved mother. I look forward to walking this new path.

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A Mother . . .

—From EF—

Mother’s Day, 2018. For me, this one is an entirely new ball game. After about 40 years of searching, I have found who my birth-mother was. Past tense, because she’s no longer living, but also present tense, because after I came and went, she made a marriage and a son. I have a brother, and he has a family.

The final DNA test is now in process, but so many other pieces of the puzzle fit so tightly that the report is a formality. I will take a journey this week to meet my people, and they are waiting with open arms. I have no words for this joy.

When all of us have shuffled through the memorabilia—photos, letters, clippings, cards—and the scientific blessings of the test results are in, I will know more and be more specific, but at this moment I just want to share my feelings.

My adoption was arranged before my birth, privately, through an attorney. The mom with whom I grew up was nearly fifty when I was born and had no experience with children. Our home was in Indiana farm country, and when I showed early musical talent and taught myself to read before I was four, nobody around me was remotely like me. My executive dad left for his commute at 6 am and returned twelve hours later. I was an alien, pretty much isolated, no near neighbors, no other kids.

So this Martian orphan suddenly discovers kin. Musicians. Vibrant people. I’ve been sent photos, and can see the echoes of my own face. I’ve already been told stories and can recognize some of my own tendencies to color outside the lines.

Conrad is my anchor, sweetly appreciative of my sudden giddy fits. I will go off on my journey to open doors, and come back to my soul-mate with a fuller soul. Literally.  

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Untrashed . . .

— From CB —

Yesterday after gym, I stopped at the coffee shop where I normally write for 90 minutes, walk to the library, write some more, then walk the mile or so home and start the day. Most times, this span is productive, sometimes not, but it’s from this routine that I try to chisel out the raw block of stone that we’ll eventually craft into our next Venus de Milo or Pieta. Creativity, for me, is sometimes thrilling, usually gnarly, and always enhanced by my flaxseed muffins.

Yesterday was a shock. I’m often victim to computer hijinks. Elizabeth hears many late-night exclamations from my direction: “What the f—!” and “What is it doing?!” and “This has never ever done this before!” My psychic extrusions seem to play havoc with cybernetics. I swear a bit, settle, and somehow find a workaround.

But yesterday at the coffee shop, my iPad gave a surprise. Into the second draft of a new novel, MASKS, I normally work on a single chapter at a time, then plug it into the full draft before Elizabeth takes a crack at it. The chapter doc is then deleted. Works fine. Only downside is that with the iPad I haven’t found a way to restore an accidental deletion—no trash bin from which you can recover lost dentures.

  Booting up, I found about 15 documents—old chapters—that I’d long ago trashed.

  Was this a computer glitch? A sign of impending senility? Was the iPad hinting that these chapters still had a long way to go? I already know that, dammit! This is only the second draft! Let me do it my way!

  I didn’t fling my instrument at the barista or crush my muffin into the keyboard. I methodically deleted the documents and continued my linguistic shuffles and my munching.

  But it stirs deeper questions. Is sin unforgiveable? What’s the root cause of acid reflux? When my turn came in third grade to erase the blackboard, could I have done a better job? Is subtraction only the addition of a negative? Is technology all fucked up?

  The jury is out.       

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Beltane . . .

—From EF—

Beltane. A beautiful celebration, with or without a Maypole. Halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, it celebrates the union of male and female, the union of earth and sun, and the general idea that fertility is a good thing, not to mention a lot of rowdy fun (local customs permitting.) Today the sun and clouds were playing peekaboo in Novato, but it all worked just right, and the feeling of holding ribbons taut while they were being thrummed by a puckish breeze was perfect.

I’ve seen three Maypole celebrations, each very different. The basic idea is the same: dig a deep hole to represent the receptive female earth, prepare a tall wooden pole as the prospective mate, and organize a ceremony to bring them together. The Maypole has a crown firmly attached to its top, sprouting a lot of anchored ribbons. Once the Maypole has achieved firm union with its socket, each dancer takes a coiled ribbon, faces clockwise or counterclockwise by twos, and the two circles move in an over/under alternation that weaves the colored ribbons into a tight diamond-patterned sheath around the pole. Simple, yes?

No. You have no idea how many ways it can go crazy. The two circles have to keep moving at about the same speed, and if you think too hard you can forget whether the next crossing is Over for you or Over for the other person. Trance is recommended but not always achieved. And what if you KNOW you’re right and the oncoming person is wrong? Answer: get over it. Today’s Maypole wrap looked gorgeous, even though there were a lot of errors.

An earlier Beltane I remember was deeply erotic, and deeply sacred. The women accompanied the May Queen to the socket site, where she stripped naked and sat astride the pit. Her women praised her, petted her, brushed her hair, gave her back-scratches, and came one at a time to request a boon. (That year I asked that a friend be blessed with a baby. Nine months later there was a baby.) When the men came singing up the hill, carrying John Thomas, they had to stop at the beflowered Yoni Gate and flirt and praise until the women consented. Sweet idea.

Yet another Beltane was a very large ritual circle, done with three dances, the Maypole having had its streamers stretched the previous day. The Youth and the Maiden did a ritual courtship/pursuit, culminating in their embrace at the foot of the Maypole. As they fell, the Mother rose: a naked painted woman who was only a few days short of delivering her baby. Attendants walked at her side for support, and she slowly walked the whole circumference of the circle as we wept at her beauty. She returned to the base and the Crone arose, a fiery red-headed dancer with a copper sickle. The Maypole ribbons had been prepared with magician’s devices, and as she cut our threads of life, each exploded with a burst of curly ribbon. During this whole ritual, not one word was spoken.

In this time of greed and pillage, where many regard the earth as an ATM, it is healing to repeat ancient celebrations that affirm a different path.

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Fiction . . .

—From CB—

One requirement for being a writer, you’d think, would be to love reading. And indeed for me that sometimes happens. Much more often, especially as I’ve been writing fiction, it becomes much more a learning experience. and I can’t say that’s always pleasant.

There are those writers who do something so superbly that I become painfully aware of my own deficiencies in that arena. A valuable learning experience, indeed, but more like the pangs of 5th period Trigonometry. At times, as with Dickens, I can suspend the critical faculty and just enjoy being a reader without analyzing the surgical technique. But it’s rare.

More often than I’d like, I find myself reading something (and actually finishing it) that’s sustained only by the “learning experience” paradigm. Immediate example: J.P. Donleavy’s 1955 novel THE GINGER MAN, a 300-page character sketch of a disgusting, predictable shit with a gift of gab—no plot except some insignificant affairs and perpetual scrounging for money and drink. With Holden Caulfield, you feel he might surmount his adolescence; with this guy, never. Someone prestigious called it one of the 100 best novels ever, so I endured it to the end.

What Donleavy does superbly—in company with Kerouac, Burroughs, or Celine, is to create a bizarre forward momentum—at its peak like a drunk reeling across the freeway or a teenager driving ahead of his headlights. I envy that. It’s more than avant-garde technique: it’s a muscularity in the telling, an immediacy in the voice’s presence, that makes many stream-of-consciousness attempts including—dare I say it?—Joyce’s seem self-consciously arty.

Technically, it’s mostly the choppiness: sentence fragments; jumps from first-person present to past to third-person past-present, sometimes within a single paragraph; flashes of brilliant metaphor side-by-side with doggy-doo. It carries a strong sense of intention while celebrating its own spontaneity. I wish I could do that.

But for me, while a play or a novel we’re writing always begins with the character, the ultimate goal is the story. Which means beginning-middle-end, imbalance or “the dramatic question” leading to resolution—blind Oedipus stumbling into exile; Odysseus coming home, leaving again; noble prince fomenting mass slaughter and foreign invasion; Sherlock cracking the case; Didi and Gogo arriving the second time back where they started. Need leads to action leading to what feels like an end.

I have only a vague impression of what’s happening today in the storytelling arts—I’m still mired in the 19th Century with some knowledge of the blurts of the 20th—but I’ve sensed a trend. More and more, in theatre and in fiction, I feel an urge toward static portraiture: the portrayal of a static condition, as opposed to an action that leads to a significant change. Not true in popular genres or in most film: the public still looks for a story with something at stake, and catching the crook or saving us from space aliens or reuniting the boy with his dog—those all qualify. But in “serious” work, not so much.

I hope I’m wrong, because to my mind it would suggest a gut disbelief in the possibility of action, a sense that whatever is, is, so let’s just immortalize the grieving Afghan or the bored Rhode Island professor in bravura prose and, like the Renaissance tableaux vivants, hope that somebody notices. I admit to having created a number of characters that you wouldn’t invite to dinner, and characters deeply conflicted in what the hell they’re trying to do. But I’ve always prodded them to do their best, and to do something. I’m stuck in the belief that storytelling has an ethical dimension, that it should be more than a trip to the monkey house.

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History Repeats . . .

—From EF—

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Depending on your source, this originates with Hegel, Engels, or Marx, although it appears to be Marx who cites both of the others. Whatever, they all have the same idea, and they are referring to events from the French revolution through the following century. Have things changed?

My own question is, have they ever changed? Brilliant as Hegel/Marx/Engels were, I doubt they were the first to wonder, in the words of Pete Seeger, “When will they ever learn?” History is taught less in high school now, but I’m sure I never learned critical thinking from what I was taught in the 50’s. Robert McNamara referred to “the fog of war,” and I would submit that the fog of war has always been with us. We either don’t see, or we don’t remember, or we can’t bear to face it.

As a species, are we defective? Individual members of all species appear to learn from experience, to avoid what is dangerous. Their survival depends on it. Human children learn these things too: that you can’t breathe under water, that fire burns, that if you’re hungry you have to eat, that if you’re thirsty you have to drink. Those are pure survival things.

Later, children learn that if Daddy says “no” you’d better not do it, and if the teacher says “no” you’d better hide it, and if the law says “no” you’d better run. On the other hand, if religion says you should you should love one another, you show up when someone has an emergency, you give whatever you can, be it loving support or shelter or money. When the fires roared through the Santa Rosa area, the community rose up to help.

That’s on the personal and immediate community level. When we look at the tribal level and the larger aggregations, all bets are off. This is where tragedy and farce take the stage. Globally, there is a huge upsurge in support of authoritarian leaders. There are individuals leading the movements, but there is huge popular support. Humans have seen, time and time again, where this leads, but where are the effective alarm bells? And if they’re heard, then what? At the tribal level, the lesson “fire burns” doesn’t carry enough weight.

On the web, it’s an everyday thing that a given YouTube “goes viral.” The time has come where nuclear criticality is on the table. Can our species see the farce and laugh it off the stage? Can that go viral? Today on our way to sit in peace at the ocean, to drink in its vastness and accept our place in the family of things, Bob Dylan’s words were on the radio:

I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest

Where the people are many and their hands are all empty

Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters

Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Where the executioner’s face is always well-hidden

Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten

Where black is the color, where none is the number

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

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Pint o’ Guinness, Please . . .

—From CB—

Who’s the best actor? That’s not a question, of course, that affects the future of the human race, nor can it even be answered. Film acting is radically different from stage acting, not only in distance but in selection—the film actor is subject to the director’s and editor’s determination of which moments get saved and which get scrapped. Nor can we go back and review the stage work of Olivier in relation to Edmund Kean the way we can compare Philip Seymour Hoffman with Rudolph Valentino or Meryl Streep with Marjorie Main—should we ever want to.

Still, what’s the Web for if not to make outlandish statements? So I’ll say, unequivocally: Alec Guinness. Or, more modestly, let’s just say he was an extraordinary actor.

We’ve just been on a toot of watching Alec Guinness movies: The Lady Killers, The Horse’s Mouth, Kind Hearts & Coronets, The Man in the White Suit, and last night Tunes of Glory. Of course I’d seen others—Bridge on the River Kwai, the Star Wars stuff, etc.—but there’s something immensely rewarding about watching one actor play radically different roles, from buck-toothed psychopath to buzz-cut Scots officer to eight outlandish murder victims.

What distinguishes him? First off, his transformations draw our interest the way that Dickens can sketch a character in half a dozen words. But it extends to much more than a good makeup job and a different vocal placement or accent. People have different rhythms of thought, different degrees and tempi of response. People have a consistency within their inconsistencies, but what’s interesting about a dramatic character are the surprises, the changes of direction or intent or emotion that we wouldn’t have expected. Even in a broad farce like The Ladykillers, he’s the only one of the quintet of hoodlums who allows a complexity of character within his cartoonish madness.

In an interview he once said that he doesn’t have the character solid until he finds his walk. That’s evident not only in the contrast between Gulley Jimson’s dog-trot and Jock Sinclair’s ramrod swagger, but in his overall physicality. All too often, even with stage actors who’ve had extensive conservatory movement training, we see people acting from the head up, as if on TV, unless the role allows them to flip and flop like Frankenstein’s Creature. I can’t recall as shocking/moving effect as at the climax of Tunes of Glory, after an officers’ rivalry has resulted in a suicide, when Guinness (the victor) has a sudden breakdown that flings him against the wall in a cramp of grief, as if a toy soldier is snapped in two.

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Auto mechanic, author, sheepherder, heart surgeon, actor—they come in all levels of skill. I have great appreciation of our craftsmen.

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Age Twelve . . .

—From EF—

Recently I saw a play that dealt with the difficult issue of a sexual relationship between a very young girl (12) and a much older man (40), fifteen years after their one consensual consummated evening of love. They both remember it as love. Then things go wrong, she finds herself alone in the middle of the night and goes for help, and he surrenders himself to the arms of the law and endures a prison sentence. When his sentence is completed, he changes his name, relocates, and begins a new life. She has found herself jailed by “reputation” in her home town, a sentence with no reprieve.

The performance was followed by a talk-back, with the majority of responses either believing that his offense was a one-off and he was not a predator, or that he will be a repeat offender and is a slick manipulative liar. Very little was said about the feelings and actions of the girl who was twelve years old at the time, although her adult self has been powerful and passionate in speaking of her brief heady experience of having her “crush” reciprocated.

I found myself jolted back in time. After five years in the local country elementary school (I went straight into the second grade), my parents somehow got me enrolled in the town’s junior high school, nine miles from where we lived. It was disorienting but exciting: there was actually a library (good place to hide), and different classrooms for each subject. Science was my favorite class, and at the age of twelve I developed a massive crush on the tall bony redheaded science teacher.

Massive. I was obsessed, frantic, and found really inventive ways to suggest individual projects that would require personal attention. I found out where he lived and on Sundays I skipped Sunday school and hung out in his neighborhood until I had to zip back to the church to meet my ride home. Nobody knew.

I had no girl friends who could clue me in, my (adoptive) mom was nearly fifty when I was born and wasn’t exactly a role model for beginning to understand sex. Remembering this, I am profoundly grateful that I was blessed with coke-bottle glasses, braces, and a generally homely appearance; I wanted to be a predator but just didn’t have the chops.

So I sat quietly through most of the talk-back, and then chimed in: “I could have been that girl. When I was twelve, I chased a teacher madly and wasn’t pretty enough to get anywhere, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.” I could feel the atmosphere in the theatre clabber, like dropping vinegar into milk. Nobody wanted to see a twelve-year-old girl that way, not the character in the play or the 78-year-old actress sitting in the second row. I was thanked for my candor, there were a few more comments, and then we all went home.

I still remember.

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Empathy . . .

—From CB—

Classical drama at its best traces the motives of vile or stupid deeds. Sometimes it’s stated straight out, as with Lear’s Edmund. Often it’s indirect or even self-contradictory, as with Iago. But it only works if you can believe that the writer has deep empathy with the character.

I have no political experience except often voting for losers, but I can’t help feeling that what’s needed today is the same degree of empathy. Right now I don’t mean empathy for the victims: we’ve got that by the ton, at least the rhetoric of it, and countless people are working like hell to deal with poverty, guns, war, brutality—name your poison.

No, right now I mean empathy for the perpetrators. Shooting unarmed blacks is the flavor-of-the-day, but I’m not convinced that every cop is just itching to get on the carnival ride and finds it a peak experience. Sure, there are psychopaths, power-mad assholes and racists in every profession, and those with guns in their hands make the headlines. But have we really grokked the complexity of the neural response that makes an adult male jump out of a squad car, put eight bullets in a kid holding a plastic gun, because instead of instantly dropping the toy when screamed at, the kid turned toward the direction of the scream? Can we ascribe that to a rational thought process?

We can speculate, we can orate, but nobody knows, and the cop’s lawyer won’t help us toward enlightenment. If I were a cop—well, not likely, but if I were playing a cop, I’d be scared shitless at the array of guns on the street and the possibility that 12-yr-old kid really did have an assault rifle and that five seconds’ hesitation could kill me. Can we get to the root causes of that guy’s terror, or terror masquerading as action hero?

To me and my fellow liberals, that guy is the enemy. It would serve my sense of justice if he were convicted of manslaughter at the very least. But will that actually prevent it happening again tomorrow? I have my doubts. Do longer sentences prevent crime? No. Will threatening police with retaliation prevent brutality or lethal stupidity? Only when those minds are rational. Under stress, they’re not.

 Why did people vote for Trump? Why do guys compete to set new records for killings? Why do people bright enough to rise to the status of CEO make decisions that may doom the human race? I don’t think we can be effective politically against these insanities by simply labeling them. insanities. We have to look at them as an actor would—an actor playing Chekhov, not playing cheap melodrama.

It’s not empathy for the sake of empathy. It’s empathy for the sake of strategy. It’s giving that nutcase the respect you’d give a friend, to walk a mile in his shoes, however deformed you think his feet must be, to see what it feels like. Then maybe you’ll win him over or maybe you’ll devise a strategy to crush him, but unless you have a spy in his psyche you’re dead.

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