Hungry Gorge

"That's what you think." A disapproval stated
As indirect as it can be equated
With secret failure and a secret sorrow
We know and don't; tomorrow and tomorrow,
A parent oddly states a contradiction
When you expected accolades, prediction
Of something more, a history unspoken
Of expectations, and great promise broken.
It says directly you have missed your place
But indirectly you're a great disgrace.
Context abandoned, this is straight emotion
From some strange and familiar devotion
Missed in the moment of reactions of
Mystification with the ones we love.

KLK
9/13/19

Russian Dolls and Mirrors Facing Mirrors

  I used to live in an apartment with one bathroom that had two mirrors opposite each other. A friend pointed out how this created an infinity of mirror images. I had not noticed it until he pointed it out to me. He was a refugee from Latvia, from the former Soviet Union, and had come to the United States under the asylum process with his family. Some other time perhaps I could write about him, his daughter, his wife, either as straight reporting or as a fictionalized version. Maybe I could do both. Both or either would have a rhetorical purpose.

  I have this set of ideas. I could write a story about a person who writes a story about a person who has tools for detecting radioactivity and, in the wake of a nuclear war, warns others not to eat the canned food because of high levels of strontium ninety. The others ignore the warning and eat the canned food and die. The one who warned them takes bitter satisfaction, having been right and having been ignored, having tools that go beyond what others can detect, and the person in my story who wrote the story would be supremely satisfied, thinking about the others in the world who ignore insights, who lack the tools so to speak.

  I have written a description of story and about an actual situation. It is about an aspect of actual story. I am not satisfied with it or with its echoes of ideas because I lack confidence that anyone including myself has the tools for measuring the levels. Think of stories with unreliable narrators. What is really going on with those? For instance, that story by Thomas Mann about the train wreck. Does it really work on reflection? Who really writes a story? Who is the author of meanings and interpretations? Is the writer hiding behind a conceived author? Are the readers putting up an author of their own imagining between themselves and the author’s idea of the writer, between themselves and the text, between themselves and themselves reading the text?

 

I have this set of ideas which reminded me of many other things. If only I had more face to shave. That place with the mirrors is not remote. It is just down the street and owned by the same partnership that owns the building I now live in and have lived in for eighteen years. What is strontium ninety? Why did I include that specificity? Is that detail a source of satisfaction to the imagined author, the writer you imagine?

Let No One Put Asunder

Years, decades ago, when the board of Santa Monica schools and the college split, my father considered running for the college board. My mom had been on the combined boards for some time. My dad had attended meetings because even after working a full day he loved to spend time with my mom, driving all the way into Santa Monica with her. He learned what the boards did and thought he could do a good job.

He went to one forum about running for the college board. At that meeting, a woman said to him, "Why don't you go back where you came from?" He was stunned. He replied he lived here now and his wife was on the board and running for re-election on the school board. The woman said it was good about my mom being on the board. She was going to vote for her.

After that my dad decided not to run. It wasn't worth it, dealing with someone like that. Dealing with that kind of obvious bigotry and subhuman hatred just takes the humanity out of everyone. My emotional response even now, as I talked to my dad on the phone about it, dehumanizes that woman. I'd kill her. I'd kill her children and put them in a cage. Right? No. I wouldn't. But that's the emotional response. And some weak-minded people, as well as the demagogues like Trump, fall victim to their own unexamined emotions and imaginary scenarios of difference and division.

That's not America. If we can claim any kind of greatness it is this: The value of all human beings is what we stand for and, in the immortal words of our founders, yes, for all their flaws and failings, We the people hold these truths to be self-evident, that all of us are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There was no footnote with exceptions. There was no appendix with a hierarchy or a table with relative valuation of life and rights based on country of origin, sex, or religion, sexual orientation or any other false delineation used to dehumanize one group or individual. All of us created equal with equal rights is what the founders established in order to create a more perfect union.

E Pluribus Unum. From the many one is the familiar Latin phrase in our national parlance. Let us now add this: From Difference, Community. From Diversity, UNITY. Like the thin straws easily broken if separated but when held together unbreakable let us understand once and for all time that what has made this country exceptional is inclusiveness, and what makes us stronger is understanding of what we share matters more than what divides. That is our great common heritage, regardless of our origins and, yes, even of our differences. The differences are small when we understand them in the light of what share, what we have in common. We are all dedicated to the aspiration that our founders set forth on this continent. Let us continue in that common endeavor together. What our founders and their successors down to us have brought together let no one put asunder.

KLK
7/15/19

The Secret Life of Emotional Response

Walter Mitty Revisited

The original short story by Thurber does not lead to actual adventures in the main character's life. His fictional life remains ordinary. Unlike either the Danny Kaye or the Ben Stiller films, the story ends quite poignantly and defiantly delineating a permanent difference between the character's daydreams and his mundane days, filled with routine errands and awareness of his own short-comings; but his submissiveness to his wife and knowledge of his own lack of practical heroism or heroic capability are offset by his fantasies and a capacity to imagine himself heroic. His ultimate lapse shows he is a hero. His imagined defiance to the imaginary firing squad, as all his daydreams, is an emotional response. His final daydream is a metaphor for his defiance to his ineffectual and ordinary life.

This is the psychology most of us live with to some degree. Although we may not imagine ourselves doing grandiose things in battle, in the operating room, overcoming mechanical and natural challenges with aplomb while others watch in open admiration, we like to believe we are better than we are at what we do, and thought of more highly than we may actually be from moment to moment by our peers. We create these pockets of notions about ourselves moment to moment, and how we would like to be seen, in order to fend off the slights and errors of our ordinary life which seem outrageous to the ego and cause the id to writhe eloquent in emotional soliloquy.

On a further consideration, this psychological perspective is adolescent. That is, the desire to impress and be admired, the need to prove oneself and gain approval of others, ought to wane in adulthood and be eclipsed by a growing acceptance of actual limitations. As we age and mature, we learn to take satisfaction in what we can do. A mature person takes pleasure in the ordinary events of his or her life, and does not see them as something less than acts of physical bravery or publicly acknowledged excellence. Indeed, mediocrity replaces excellence easily in our minds, analogous to our pleasure with bad food over fine cuisine when we are truly hungry and happy to have something to eat at all. In the story, however, his wife's dominance and his submissiveness differentiate the character from most of us. The marital relationship indicates why the character has stagnated. He has a conflict in his choices, and his daydreams are paradoxically both a cause and a result.

Similar conflicts show up for most of us in how we respond to fiction. What stories grab our attention indicate what lapses into fantasy we use to contrast with our own limitations in order to bolster identity and stave off what we may believe subconsciously to be our short-comings. Movies, TV shows, books, songs, news reports, viral videos, and even a passing joke, can reveal what's going on under the surface. We all have a submissive marriage with reality and a secret life that keeps us going.  

This then is perhaps my secret life. As much made up of illusion as allusions, and of self-image imagined as of ideas expressed, I find satisfaction and comfort in putting words together in a way unique to me. This is a persona none may ever know or admire, but in my own mind I become the hero of my story. Whether it is good or bad does not matter in the end because I know the simple act of thinking makes it so.

MICHAEL CLAYTON | The Tortured Path to Redemption

Still Life in a Changing Seen

Lyft lost $911.3 million in 2018. Lyft's IPO last week was very successful in terms of an IPO. Something else is always going on. I think of Van Gogh. Others think of him, too. There are artists who imagine they Like Emily Dickinson are Doing something different that will someday be Appreciated, and there are artists who do Paintings for hotels and believe they are Contemporary Rembrandt Van R's. There are educated, discerning persons who Adore some little band playing a derivative Sort of music and then who also turn around and Hold forth in conversations about how the current Political situation parallels another time of empire. Then they are abruptly upset because their Omelet was not what they expected, all of them At once in different places, all having omelets. Perhaps their omelets differ, and their Expectations differ, and their omelets somehow Got mixed up when in a perfect world they would have Got matched perfectly with the omelet-eater’s Expectations for eggs. Do we know What Emily and Vincent thought of Voltaire, or how They liked their eggs? All kinds of things continue As previously happened and no one is Apparently the wiser or more aware than An unclothed creature rooting for Grubs and tubers as a pride of Lions stalked its illiterate tribe. The oral records now only are An imaginary memory. Can you see The wormhole in a sunflower? KLK 3/31/19

STUFFED ANIMALS AND DOLLS

Originally a bunny, ears long lost,
Looking more like a tailless squirrel by
High school, she put it on her face and tossed
Her pillow, using it to cover an eye.
Others have Teddy bears, stuffed animals,
Raggedy dolls, they held onto for years,
But something changes and one day annuls
The deep attachment to those souvenirs.

Where do the touchstones of a childhood go?
One grows to understand they never were
Things held in hand and cuddled close in bed.
More as ideas toys and dolls still show 
The way a life evolved as they recur
Replete with feelings stuffed into one's head.


KLK
10/17/17

Money Matters

Years ago, when I had changed careers and settled into a more or less stable job, I began to consider what options were available for a meaningful way to make a living. I was asking questions. How do people get into a career and get to do something they enjoy? Is that even possible? Does anyone pay you to do what you like, really? I was looking around at other people doing things that seemed interesting to me, creative work. When I found out more, almost always the actual work was not very interesting. Who wants to be a writer if you’re being told not only what to write about but more or less how to write it, down to the punctuation? Who wants to be a musician if you can’t be a rock star from day one? Who pays for what and why, and what are the sources of funding and revenue which create a job you can enjoy?

Not everyone has the urge or the moment to figure out what’s actually going on and how career paths work. The same impulse is easily distracted from thinking about jobs, careers, hierarchy, institutions, turning instead to a hobby, current events, cooking, TV shows, music. These days a new smartphone can take up most of your time, let alone social media you can access with it. Human curiosity and intellect would seem to have unlimited subjects to get into and away from the question of what the heck is going on and what am I going to do in this place.

I was making about $22,000 a year. Believe it or not, my rent was about $400 a month, yes, in Los Angeles, and so my situation was working out. Housing should be about a third of one’s income, or so I’m told. I was getting by and lived simply. But I wanted to do something else. I worked for doctors doing Workers’ Compensation reports. In retrospect I learned a great deal about a range of subjects, medical, legal, how insurance companies operate, how businesses can grow too fast, about myself. The incidental things we pick up seldom impress us as much as they should at the time. I wanted something else. I had followed TV and radio news and listened to talk radio for years. I discovered Pacifica. I loved to read newspapers and magazines and had only started to understand there were other ways of interpreting events outside the “mainstream media.” This is all tangential to where I’m going with this. I was looking for a career, defined as a job that I loved. I still believed against all experience that somewhere someone was going to pay me at least a living wage to do something I enjoyed.

Since I liked to read and analyze the news, and I also had been writing letters to journalists and the editors of publications since high school, when I found out there were organizations that did this kind of work professionally, I thought maybe that was it, my dream job at a think tank. I liked what academics were doing in these areas, too. When FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, advertised a fund raiser featuring Noam Chomsky at Kasey Kasem’s house, I thought this could be my chance to get in with the people who could provide assistance in a new career direction. I called and spoke to Holly, I can’t recall her last name, who was the coordinator for FAIR. Actually I think I first left a message on an answering machine, and she called me back. My message was likely clueless, “Hi, I heard about this event. I’m interested in participating.” When she called back, I’m sure I was equally callow but I asked what kind of donation they were looking for, $200, $250, $500? That got her attention.

I showed up at this thing in my suit from work. I wore suits to this weird little job. I wore ties. I did when I was a teacher too. I still do. Skipping the anecdotes about meeting Chomsky, Kasem, his wife, the guy who a week or so prior had shattered the glass eagle statue Ronald Reagan had just received at some awards show, and Jeff Cohen, executive director at FAIR, what I got was an opportunity to volunteer. They also appreciated my money. I’m not sure I even needed to donate so much. The volunteer work also got me in touch with others interested in politics and activism. I quickly noticed, however, that most of the people were doing the work for free. They were also volunteers. The organizations that did have paying jobs had only a few, and those persons were mostly engaged in finding ways to get funding and get others to volunteer. Their writing and media work were more like an advertisement than analysis, not the stuff I would have liked to do.

As volunteers we did some work that contributed to the reports and books, such as counting column inches dedicated to certain stories, counting the number of times and minutes certain experts appeared on news shows, the diversity of opinion or lack of it. But none of this was going to lead to a paying job. As a career track, I would have to start my own organization, which was about as interesting to me as opening a coffee shop and charging $2 for a cup of fancy joe and founding my own think tank was statistically less likely to succeed than opening a coffee shop.

In today’s Internet-enabled world, self-promotion is much easier. Still, time and money matter, and if all you’re about is working a hustle to get funding, regardless of what worthwhile insights you may churn out, it is not quite the same as discovering Relativity. Even producing your own independent online show that goes viral has that need to appeal to a market, “to go viral,” and depends on digital ad revenues. So the questions remain. What do people pay for and why? What are the sources of funding? What generates the sufficient revenues? Is the work really something you can enjoy? Not everyone has the urge or the time.

Ultimately, that’s why we end up doing what we do and contribute more to someone else’s thing by browsing for viral videos. Our talents and the skills acquired along the way get applied to jobs not exactly what we love but that have a source of funding or means of revenue generation to cover our material costs. But at what cost to ourselves? When do we stop believing we can do what we love and make a living at it? Who pays for that in the end?