Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Three

NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...

But first, I must provide a warning of sorts. I am a great believer in the idea that all people are born with the capacity to express some talent and through this talent achieve “success.” Further that this success can be manifested in the most positive manner, by which I mean it can provide a lifelong fulfillment for said person and those the person cares about without manifesting any negatives in the form of physical, economic or spiritual damage to other lifeforms.
Now, I fully realize that such a belief, while shared by some, fully flies in the face of beliefs held by many others. Those who hold to a conviction that in order to achieve success in this life one has to play a certain zero-sum game; that in order to win, someone or something else must lose. Such people have had their say in various ways throughout recorded history, and one only need to look at the results. If you cannot see the results for some reason, I urge you to study the matter elsewhere. But I do not endeavor to discuss the zero-sum game further.
So, what have I achieved lately? What “success” have I seen? Let’s tote up on the boards: I allowed one of the greatest terrorists of all history to elude my grasp and go on to the Capitol of our great Nation, turning it into a pile of turds; then I afforded him the opportunity to commit suicide behind my back; then I lost a client’s dearly beloved pet; that while blowing up a fake factory and not capturing the evil meanie behind it, but killing the meaningless moron who helped him; then allowing one of the great criminal masterminds alive to escape after finally being the only one—apparently ever—to track him down, much by accident.
Therefore: my talent?
No, this about that. I shall tell you a story. A story which on its face may seem to feed into this nagging current conception among many that life sucks and then you die. However, I would beg those who feel this way to hang on a bit longer, not so much because the story has a happy ending but because I would like it to be understood that the ending may provide a certain level of inspiration despite whatever minor sadnesses may be encountered along the way. And anyway I want you to get to the end of my story.
When people give advice about success, they often introduce themselves by using well-worn homilies such as “success comes about through 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” Such things always have a tremendous amount of truth to them. Like the caveman thing hitting women over the head. This story hopefully will provide the same amount of truth. This story is going to be about something a bit more ephemeral, however. It is about luck, and we’ll often hear people talk about luck, saying success has a bit to do with luck, saying that it requires being in the right place at the right time, for example, or being prepared when the time or opportunity arises. Unfortunately, there are other factors involved in being lucky when it comes to success.
There is a famous song by the Police and people sometimes forget how intellectual the Police were. This song was influenced by the work of the Twentieth century philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung who investigated theories of coincidence and chance, matters we could call synchronicity. You may have heard me mention this before. Although scientists have yet to completely debunk Jung’s theories, they have gone a long way to replace them with theories of “chaos.” Yet unexplained coincidence, luck, synchronicity and chance remain inevitably and indelibly large parts of our lives. Throughout the course of our actual lives as we live them. Science may be science in the classroom and laboratory, but life is life. Lived experience is never what it seems to be in the lab. Luck doesn’t always exist in the lab, but it does exist in reality. And it does seem to have something to do with these matters of chance, synchronicity and coincidence.
Anyone born with any kind or amount of talent, has it. Luck. The talent will be raw. And has to be developed. Success on the basis of this talent will require “timing,” which is a form of luck. Also, the learning of basic skills that allow the expression of the talent to the public. Be it violin playing or plumbing.
Take successful screenwriting. The successful screenwriter most often does not write a successful screenplay. At least not at first and not for a long, long time. He or she writes a closetful and after years of having the right people read this closetful of screenplays, having them passed around, reader to reader, someone says, finally, “I remember that one, can I see it again?” One thing leads to another, and, “I don’t know if I like that one, but I like that person’s writing. Does he have anything else?” Then someone takes a look in that closet. Etcetera. But even that screenplay doesn’t necessarily get produced, nor do any of the others in that closet. Some do get passed around, though, and you get picked up by an agent, and the agent finds you a nice gig helping to fix a bad script somewhere. Are you getting the drift here? But she also starts marketing your talents, talking you up at parties and at meetings about other films and writers when she has the opportunity among her stable of fifty or so other screenwriters. At parties and meetings. Etcetera. Until one day, out of that closet, a screenplay is finally optioned. Not produced. Never produced. (You can find out more about how to become a successful screenwriter someplace else...). See what I’m saying?
But that is the genuine, fulfilling road to success in most places, for most talents. No Academy Award. Not tons of credit. Just steady work. Certainly not some hokum story about things falling into the lap. A closet filled with scripts and something happening because of timing. Coincidence, Luck, Chance, Synchronicity. Rent paid. Food on the table.
You had the talent, otherwise you would never have produced those scripts, or that one memorable enough that someone finally said, “Hey!” Do you have any idea at all how many scripts go around Hollywood for anyone to remember any one script?
So, that’s what it takes to achieve success as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Don’t take my word for it. It’s not my story. And there are innumerable success stories like that in all fields. But just imagine, for all those successes how many tens of thousands of failures. Why? Of those tens of thousands, consider how many of them have talent. And how many don’t. Perhaps how many of them have a closetful of scripts. Some of them memorable. What is the difference.?
Now, hear this: I have talent. I know this. I’ve known it since I was a small child, so I didn’t even have to guess. And I’ve had luck. Maybe you’ve heard. Here’s the unfortunate part and this happens to so many people. The luck and the talent did not meet in a synchronistic manner. In other words, they weren’t in the same place at the same time. My biggest stroke of luck came when I was fourteen, practically a juvenile delinquent, lying about almost everything, essentially a runaway. Talented though. Lucky as anything. My talent didn’t run out. My luck didn’t. But my lies got me in trouble, and I burned out before my luck did.
But I started straightening out. I got back on my feet just before my luck burned out.
Now, Terpil, he says it wasn’t luck. Not so much.
So. Coincidence? Luck? Talent? Some “invisible hand”?
This sort of thing happens to many people, as I said. Too raw a talent at too wrong a time. Too big headed. Too many lies. But whose lies? Too big a lifestyle. Too little work. Too little attention.
The luck goes out the window.
I had no idea what I was doing. I could lie about my age, say I was eighteen instead of fourteen, but I could not lie about the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. Talent only carries you so far. Sooner or later the fact that you don’t know what you are doing will stop you. Even though I cleaned up my act, even though I began to learn about what I was doing, my luck ran out before my talent began to catch up. I had been trying to resynchronize ever since. No pun intended here but no luck.
As Rod Stewart once said, you gotta move when you’re in that groove cause you don’t wanna disappear into that wall. Everybody suffers but only the people who enjoy that suffering sit around wallowing in it.
According to the late Don Cherry, the great jazz trombonist, style is something that ultimately stifles creativity. And if style is all you’ve got, or if that’s all you are relying on...
People sometimes tell stories about pickup lines. How good theirs are. The problem with pickup lines, standard ones, is that they represent style, regardless of who is using them or why. The people who are using them are losing their creativity and, in this instance, that creativity is causing a loss of passion. In a relationship, even one that lasts one night, the absence of passion, even the perceived lack of passion, is going to result in failure. No creative act likes failure. No one likes failure. Failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you know how to use it but sooner or later your creativity wants to see some success. So, if you follow Cherry’s logic you need to break away from style.
Allow me to move on to another example and here, as opposed to the question of pickup lines, where I know I will probably receive some support, here I know I will probably receive some hate mail. But I will take it as it comes. En garde.
Writing, and in particular literary writing, and in very particular the writing of poetry, is one of the most challenging fields, learning how to write poetry well, well enough to stand out among the millions who do so, requires an understanding and mastery of the traditional forms. In this case Cherry’s use of the word “style” equates roughly to the word “forms.” In this sense it is exactly as we refer to the forms in painting, music, sculpture, etc., although there are broader meanings, as well.
Over the centuries poets—some great, some not so much—have developed many forms—some relatively simple like the couplet, some relatively complex like the sestina. Learning how to master these forms is the best tool for the student of poetry, when their hearts desire is to break free of them, to become creative. These styles are classic. To free yourself of the classic forms is to become creative and modern. This is a natural progression. It is in many senses expected of a poet. If you go to art school, you are taught to master the fundamentals. You may wish to be an abstract expressionist, but you must first learn to paint the face of a dog so than anyone can recognize it as such. To learn to be a poet you much first learn to write a successful couplet and sestina, for example, so that a reader may recognize and enjoy them as such. For example.
Now take, for example, perhaps one of the most challenging and complex forms of poetry ever devised by a poet, the haiku. People misunderstand this form. And that, as they say, is an understatement. They see, they think, an implicit simplicity, but it is one derived from tremendous time and effort. Most people who write haiku only take a few minutes, which is why they are not haiku, but mere random thoughts, literally words filled in by counting syllables on a page.
The same could be said for much poetry. Personally, I would rather read any amount of badly constructed free verse instead of any single poorly written haiku any longer because as someone who has taught poetry, I’ve had a bellyful.
Again. Style kills creativity.
It is something of a conundrum then. One cannot live without style but at a certain point one has to jettison it. We have to understand what style is. We have to use it for ourselves, use that packet of it given to us until it is completely drained dry and then jettison it completely, and then move on.
Do some poets return to these same forms? Of course, all the time, it is an exercise, it is a sort of melancholy, it is a variation upon the work they normally do. Sometimes it is a type of honorarium, sometimes it is a passing on to their readers a type of lesson that, yes, it is possible to still do this. But for the most part, no, they are done with it. They have moved on. Today’s poets do this because those forms are done for them. They are experimenting with new forms, creating new forms.
The same is true in music. This is what Don Cherry was doing, hunting for new forms, learning new forms not just in western music, which is why he traveled the world, living with people around the world in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, learning their forms, incorporating their forms into his music, into his western music to create new forms. The plastic artists do the same, the good ones, and yes they all do return somehow to the old forms as a reminder, a touchstone, a lesson, a memorial, as a kind of melancholy, as an honorarium. But they push on because they are past it.
So, the question always remains, you must look at yourself: am I beyond this? Have I mastered this? before pushing on. Do you care? Do you want to be that good? You don’t have to be. You don’t have to be a Sharon Olds, a Nikki Giovanni, a Don Cherry, a Rauschenberg. You don’t have to be a Sean Penn or a Beyonce or a Bill Gates or a Barak Obama. You don’t even have to be noticed. You can spend your life being other things and have this stuff in your journal, hanging on your bathroom wall, recorded in some corner of your computer, something for your kids to listen to years later. Nothing wrong with that. Depends upon your priorities, always. But you always have to check yourself and ask what your priorities are.
Before you ask other people to take their time to look at your work. Before you send out your pickup line.
And there is a reason for this. And everyone in every field from plumbing to astrophysics ultimately goes through the same cycle, asking themselves the same questions if they have anything going for them, any grit, any guts, any real talent. It’s that bubble thing again, you see. Remember that. It becomes important. Somewhere. Maybe even here.
There is the potential for success, that success is always possible even though failure may be inevitable, or to put it another way, like at the mundane level, it is always a matter of achieving failure despite the potential for successes, or vice versa. Have I mentioned success?
We have had access to an astonishing work in this early part of the 21st century which has now, after six volumes, finally closed, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a semi-autobiographical novel running in excess of 3000 pages. A lengthy, detailed minutiae of life with extended philosophical and historical errata. We are indebted to this work, even though it may not be the most significant literary work. It is an astounding thing, has had or will have an astounding impact upon us. And even though it may not be singular in what it does, or what it has done, in combination of its effects it may well be singular. It drives home many of the most important elements of what has taken place in the 20th century, what has come to impact us now at the beginning of the 21st. For Western Civilization at least, perhaps for men, mostly, for Europeans, mostly (and possibly for those of us in America as a predominantly European culture) and for those of us who read and think upon such matters.
Specifically, when it comes to this matter of failure it has some great significance. This idea of struggle is at its core. Critics immediately began wondering why Knausgaard chose such a title. After all, it is the title of Hitler’s only known written work, and in the final volume Karl Ove does finally deal with the question of Hitler. No surprises, no revelations. He comes back to the old questions about the corporal. What would have happened if Hitler had succeeded as an artist? How would the world have been different? And why did Hitler become what he was? What creates people like Hitler?
The answer: Failure.
Hitler was not an entirely untalented artist, he was, shall we say, unlucky, out of synch. He had his problems as a human being. When he confronted failure and rejection, as we all do, then was thrust into one of the bloodiest battles of war, at a time when war exploded upon a community of Germans and Austrians who saw war as a way of compensating for life as they knew it; then confronted the defeat, the failure of that community, channeling his personality disorders and his personal failures, the product of his parents’ failures in the streets of the crumbling Weimar Republic, Hitler became Hitler. Had the Vienna Art Academy accepted him, things would have been different. Perhaps. We’ll never know.
But failure is inevitable for everyone. It is the nominal position of life. I spend day upon day opening up magazines reading, usually book reviews and other reviews, about millennials writing about other millennials who are publishing books—a success story, mind you, for which I am sometimes greatly envious—books about the failures of millennials. They win all sorts of awards for these things. An irony, you see, which I hope is educating them in some fashion about irony at least. For it does nothing to educate them about failure as I see it. While I sit here ruminating about my failures and theirs, knowing that failure is merely a fact of life. Certainly, the times the millennials have been brought into, like Hitler’s time, are such that failure is more likely. This is a misfortune for them and for us all.
Our great leader was a horrible, consistent failure. Just like Hitler. Which is not to compare them otherwise! And look at where that brought him. People, at least a significant percentage, enough to get him into the White House, admired him for his failures, apparently. Those and his lies. A shining example of what can be accomplished despite the odds.
The great Renaissance philosopher Vico told us about his Wheel. Sometimes it turns for the worst. And we are going through the worst of times. They will not get better soon. It is a matter of percentages. I read articles about how to perform better in meetings and at work. How to succeed better. It sends me chills. I should be reading more about how to fail better. So should you. More failure is coming. How to make life with parents, siblings and others more comfortable. Communal living, living with less. Living in the rough. Certainly not how to get along in meetings. There will be fewer meetings in a business setting. This I can assure you when there are fewer businesses. There will be fewer businesses in the coming years, in the next generation and the next after that.
It would be nice, perhaps if people were to write more about unionizing, today, for that would make working conditions better. Perhaps not more successful, but the failures will be better. The times they are changing, right under your feet, and faster than you might be seeing. Perhaps faster than the polar ice caps are melting. My father worked the counter in a Brooklyn deli and belonged to a union. It made his life better. He still didn’t like working the counter. More people working in offices today will be happy to get a job working a counter tomorrow. They might also be happy if that job were unionized, still. Someone should be writing about that. Someone might be. That could be a success. Short term, but success.
Does this mean we should not strive? Of course not. But it does mean we should remember always to draw a line between our Romantic notions and the realization of possibility. Possibility and probability. There will inevitably be the Michelangelos and the Dickens among us, famous in their own time. But there, too, will always be the Kafkas and the Van Goghs. People who will fail in life but were recognized after. Is this the type of success you wish to achieve? If so, have good friends and relatives to help carry your program through after you are gone. That’s a good Romantic dream.
Other dreams exist as well. Believe you are born with great talent that can be actualized in your lifetime. Believe in some great holy spirit that has imbued you. Believe in some mystical guidance that will lead you on some holy path towards X. Believe in anything. You might as well believe.
Napoleon Hill, the great master of “success” thinking, tells us confidence is all it takes in the end. He sold a lot of books that way. He had a lot of confidence. Pretty much created the entire self-help field. And the entire “confidence” field, too. That was pretty successful! And how did that work out for us?
Or simply be pragmatic. Pragmatism works just as well, perhaps even better for many. But, yes, whatever you do, follow through, make the effort, believe in whatever you actually DO, and believe in the possibility that you can DO something to accomplish something, whatever it might be, regardless of how you may define success. Even if it doesn’t turn into “success” as you have been taught to define it but is some reasonable facsimile of something that is not total failure, something that leaves you, and others more importantly, to the brink of annihilation and beyond.
Because that is what the absence of success truly is, and it is the absence of success that you wish to avoid, not failure. Failure is okay. Failure is normal. The constant absence of success, this constant drumbeat in your head of “you can’t you can’t you can’t” or “you won’t you won’t you won’t” has to not be present. It will be there from time to time. We all have our doubts. Those without doubts belong in an institution. If we had a better country, we would have some kindly institutions free of charge that put decent people to work rather than sickening pharmaceuticals which merely made rich people richer.