the tangled web we weave
(and after the humans are gone?)
i'm really having trouble being optimistic about the future of human beings. october doesn't help, a cold wind blowing out of the east, fire season coming to a close. soon i'll be plunged into the world of traffic sounds, students, death, disease. in fact the ebola epidemic just spreading out of africa. o boy, lots to look forward to!
"drive one mile straight up for an hour and you leave the atmosphere" i read this somewhere awhile back and suddenly this put everything in perspective. we (i) exist under a very shallow envelope of oxygen and filters calming down the heat of the sun. think: driving sixty miles on the ground, it goes by in a flash. and if we're in outer-space, no breathing without a suit.
common knowledge, common knowledge, so sue me! i do wonder what will happen to humanity after i'm gone. will the survivors reach the other planets, settle down to lives under artificial domes, eat regenerated, 3d printed food? if we're lucky. and at this point that's be best i can hope for. humans multiply like rabbits, every increase leads to a war for territory, not to mention the effluvia thrown into the air. yes, i'm banging my head on the wall of the future, not even knowing what it will be.
until yesterday. i bought an e-book.
voila', this guy, helton, is way ahead of me, thinking about the re-population of earth by the diaspora into the solar system. what might the conditions be? how could the idiots who fled into space still not be idiots on returning to earth? his hero, an immune survivor, Gibbous Moon, decides he'll end his days walking out into the wilderness. for better or worse, he runs into the aliens, who are now returned homo-sapiens, especially the religious fanatics who decide the earth belongs to them.
if this sounds both adventurous and philosophical - Tokien meets Ray Bradbury - it is, and often the misunderstandings very funny.I'm kind of blown away, actually, thinking of the complexities and how he got them across. someone said nietzsche made ideas emotional, and I think all the characters impacted by them, in the midst of everything else. in a sense it's a philosophical novel, and certainly addresses the issues important to conservationists. there's a bit of warfare and sex, and very appealing characters from the moon, mars, and titan, among other celestial bodies. they make any ideas discussed come alive, and there is a victory of sorts...it cries out for a sequel. what happens to the wonderful folks he's created? i'm dying to know, left suspended in space like them.
of course, nobody's settled off our planet yet and at the rate we're exploiting the planet and each other, we may not. i like having what's to come have something in it for our ancestors. hope isn't exactly what i'm after, but i'd like to see the kids get a chance
"I began my comedy as it's only actor, and I came
to the end of it as it's only spectator."
Antonio Porchia
this is something i know very well. (i should be sleeping. and here i am talking in my sleep. maybe my shadow side can come out only then.) when at sixteen, i started to be a writer, i thought of myself as a clown tumbling through the universe. an adequate image of a bumbler and improviser, never truly at home anywhere, with shoes too big always tripping him up, a crooked nose broken three times in childhood. i always wanted to make fun of what others loved, particularly love itself.
and there's the essence of evil, if you need a definition. somehow the passions of people, the coupling, never worked for me, though god knows, i tried, list of attempts embarrassing. i realized my urge was to conquer, not to be a true mate. no wonder i ended up defeated. i fought the wrong battle. the performer in me, the clown, the one who could be the trickster, in life as well as in writing.
what makes the clown so evil? anger, anger at whatever stood in his way. rage at being beaten with a belt, made fun of in the boy scouts, the jester in class, always embarrassing the teacher whenever he could, the preacher's kid squirming in the front row: he wanted to be the one giving the sermon, not the father. how bizarre it was to see him after his term in korea. i'd been the man of the family for a year. and now as king i'd been deposed.
the joker hides behind a mask of laughter, a smile too big, eyes too bright. what he wants is attention and revenge. his comic turns, like those of hopi katchina clowns, meant to be scathing. no wonder they scared the little kids into being good. no one really likes to be the butt of a practical joke. and trickster coyote couldn't help getting himself in trouble, sometime winning, sometimes losing.
and i always want to solve the world's problems with violence, especially by dropping an atomic bomb on a well-chosen target. or rubbing out an enemy, getting paddled by the principal in front of the whole fifth grade class. after that i learned to disguise myself better. unfortunately, the outrage hidden in the comedy runs through my writing like lightning. here's a quote from myself:
NICE GUYS DON'T WRITE POETRY.
yes, in the circus world everything is topsy-turvey. i always knew i should not be a leader, especially president. i'd trick the populace into thinking i served them when i only served myself. best to stay in the shadows. yell fire when i had to, and pretend i didn't want sometimes the burn the world down.
once a hypochondriac, always a hypochondriac, they say. CG Jung maintains it's the result of being a mother's boy. alas, plenty of truth in that. i've never separated from the umbilical chord, an oedipus complexee for life. sometimes when feeling down and out, i yearn for the safety of the womb. except, it wasn't safe. my mother had an appendectomy even as i was growing ears and penis. yes, interrupted development, no doubt.
so when i developed a pain in my throat, 1979, i traipsed around california to nine doctors. one finally said, 'oh yes, i read about that recently in the literature. acid coming up from the stomach.' i used antacids and psychic healing techniques. the ulcer disappeared in no time. now they call it GERD and everybody knows about it.
my faith in doctors shaken once again recently. i'd developed what are called 'trigger fingers', once that catch at the joint and may get so bad the fingers won't open at all. first i consulted a plastic surgeon. this big mistake led to another one. he said i needed the whole arm tourniqueted and i'd have to be knocked out. EKG check of the heart needed first. and with that, the administering nurse said i had A FIB, short for an uneven heartbeat.
oh boy, something bigger to worry about: a bad heart. a month later visited the cardiologist, took a tress test where they shot me up with adrenalin and took 3d pics. an echo-cardiogram. both showed i need help. a cardio-conversion scheduled, an electric-shock to put my proper rhythm back. in the meantime i consulted friends and the web. half my friends have the condition, some worse than others. beware of getting over seventy.
the day came. i drove down from the lookout and arranged with a friend to drive me to the hospital. the nurses most kind. the main lady said, 'we'll do another EKG.' o come on, i'd already had five of them. they all showed the danger of clots and i'd been taking a blood thinner. she stuck the electrodes all over my body. once again i felt like frankenstein. only this time, she said, 'your heartbeat is normal. forget the IV and come back to the doctor in two weeks."
this is getting to be, i thought, a shaggy dog story. i told the doctor i thought i might be going in and out of A FIB. he said i could take another medicine to steady my heart. i said i didn't want to unless i knew it a problem for sure. (yes, it can give you strokes.) so they taped a monitor over my heart. i wore it for two weeks and sent it back. i haven't heard the result. who was it said, 'sometimes there's a good reason for paranoia?'
okay, what about the trigger fingers. my brother told me on him they used a local anaesthetic and nipped the tendon without more ado. i visited the expert hand orthopedic surgeon. sure enough, that's all i needed. no knocking me out. i'll be damned, the plastic surgeon will never know if he saved my life by going overboard. without him i'd never known about my jumpy heart, or i would have had a very painful unnecessary procedure.
yes, back at the lookout, trying not to check my pulse to see if it's skipping beats. so far when i have, everything's been normal. i cut way back on caffeine and suger. and i realized i'd been starving myself of water for years, not wanting to pee more than five times a night. evidently, that could have been the cause of A FIB. now i drink water everytime i get up under the stars. so far so good. i no longer feel listless and without energy when i get up.
for me the body is way to complicated!
after reading an essay by dennis palumbo on writers and their struggles with envy, i thought to myself, "Not my problem." yes, i don't envy shakespeare or rilke, jackson pollock or matisse, not even the great photographers: brandt and brassai. smugly, i said to myself, "i've done something as well as they." not in total, rather with my shotgun, hit and miss method. somewhere hidden in my mass of material lies a shakespearean phrase, a rembrandt portrait. true, i'd have to dig a bit.
unfortunately, the endless processions of pride didn't last. i started watching lectures on classical composers, and listening to my old modern favorites: phillip glass, steve reich, and terry riley. i could feel something like pain, nausea, a feeling of lack, of failure. not because the sonata by scriabin not wildly inventive, the seascape of debussey not swooning and magical. no, rather due to their overwhelming sonorities, the fact they surrounded me, pouring music and feeling into every pore of my body, not just into my ears.
i remember a rehearsal of the new york philarmonic, shostakovitch's 5th symphony, the chills running up and down my spine. or many years ago as an advanced teen-ager, sitting in hthe living room and watching the darkening sky as tchaikovsky's symphony pathetique carried me on a magic carpet into an ethereal rhealm with no name. yes, i did listen to lots of other 78's: porgy and bess, oklahoma, brigadoon. the delights of broadway musicals were not beneath me.
that said, it was the monumental sounds of the great composers which turned me into a lightning rod. they took me over totally as the clouds flew by outside. and when i listen to their biographies, despite some pretty miserable lives, say the end of prokofiev's life or the struggles of a deaf and love distraught beethoven, i still envy them, probably due to the fact i'd have to have started a musical career at age five. no, i tried piano lessons and couldn't stand practicing. the same with the trumpet. maybe if i'd have had a guitar.
in the end i like to improvise too much. i noodle now with a ukelele and a recorder, i dream of mastering a digital program and making my own symphonies. even then i don't have the confidence i could rival a scriabin piano sonata, or a chopin prelude. the task feels too monumental, like climbing everest buck naked.
ah, i assumed i'd escaped the green-eyed monster, reading books of wise sayings, toning myself down - no puns please - restraining myself to poetry, travel, theater, photography. hadn't i tried to cover all the creative bases and not think too highly of myself, willing to laugh when i tripped and fell? when i visited the apartments of beethoven, schubert, and rimsky-korsakov, did it cross my mind they might be greater than i? even in the rooms of strindberg and dostoyevsky, this didn't occur to me.
