SEE SAW FOR WRITERS

The social media venture called medium.com has two ends — one end is paid professional but pretending not to be, and the other end is wannabes who are not writers and not paid.  What the platform amounts to is a kind of grinding stone that entices people into producing content.  The covert point is not to make them writers.  The point is for the site owners to have grist for their mill — timely prompts for their own writing or possibly commissions for their own friends.  What happens to the writing and the writers is entirely beside the point.  It’s just stuff to fill the publication: reader bait.  Readers equal advertising equals income.  The useful thing about people who can’t write is they that are always reading in an attempt to figure out why.  

Most of the stuff published is arguing about what good writing might be and since writing is about as definable as porn, the argument never ends.  One person feels that only a cry from the heart counts, the next one values only steely conformity to a formula.  The third is so incoherent no one knows what it’s supposed to be.  Mostly all this stuff reveals that there are a lot of people out there who are seduced by the “idea” of writing, who fall for the juju of religious revelation, Gutenberg, and a thousand scribbling wretches in garrets who became famous after death.  The flip end of this — the repelling pole — is parents.  An abiding and terrifying prospect is the gray conformity of the Fifties, mediocrity, the middle class.  One of the appeals of writing is that it represents rebellion, even as it tries to conform to standards of previous writing by yesterday’s rebels.

Go to http://www.storygrid.com/got-live-if-you-want-it/  where a couple of guys dialogue over writing, a specific manuscript.  The story doesn’t interest me, but I am sometimes interested in the dialogue about it.  It goes to a meta-level that’s pretty useful.  Here are some quotes from Pressfield:

“. . . You constantly are at the edge of what you know and what that means . . ., it’s constantly scary and you’re constantly trying things you don’t know how to do. When you’re trying things that you don’t know how to do, you fail.

“So you constantly are in a place where you’re doing something that you are going to fail at. . .

“The second thing [is] deliberate practice, and this is where so many writers don’t have this.”

“If you’re feeling good all the time about your creativity, you’re doing it wrong. You’re . . . not pushing yourself into unknown territory, you’re doing something that’s safe, you’re not getting true feedback on things and so you need to put yourself in a position where that you can get that bad feedback. Because that’s the only way we can learn.”

Many people who think they are writing from deep within their soul are merely doing self-talk, that chatter in one’s head that is meant to reassure but often echoes old critics from the past.  As in Method acting, it’s important to be able to access moments from the past in order to draw on them for details and also to grasp intense moments of emotion.  But then the artist leaves the reality and uses that information, possibly reconfigured in quite a different way.  Presumably, one is a more secure and informed person that readers will be delighted to learn from.

Of course, part of the delight will be about the skill of the sentence, the jolt of vocabulary, the seduction by images.  One editor said she only wanted to acquire “beautiful” writing but that’s childish greeting-card level aesthetics.  Candy-minded.  It will rot your morals.  How many haiku moments can a reader absorb in the pursuit of plot and meaning?

Obversely, recitations of suffering — esp. minor passive misery — can lose us all in despair.  Surgical analysis, microscopic dissection, and the strong medicine of social reform are called for.  Uproar, outrage, are often vital.  But terrible shocking language is an antibiotic that is losing its power out of overuse.  When little kids walk by trailing Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, the epithets have been diluted beyond usefulness.  

Nevertheless, scientific and anatomical metaphors hold their power.  Consult Lakoff and his friends for an array of comparisons and reminders that come from close observation and causal relationships noted in those little journals writer-wannabes use in coffee houses.  I shouldn’t make fun.  It worked for Thoreau.  It’s more natural history than data-grid, but I like that.

Something inevitable but not always comfortable governs writing, so that most readers can deduce the outline of who the writer really is, even what sort of child is down at the center, despite all attempts as assuming a role, a disguise for the arsonist, the assassin, the cannibal we all are in the right circumstances.  Writing cannot help being self-revelation.

No matter how clever a fabulist a writer may be, to turn away from the shifting reality of other people on many levels is to ignore the powerful shaping of time and place.  Observers have noted that some writers can present the world they know best from an outpost where distance gives them a bit of clarity, like writing about America from England.  Maybe even a yearning for situations that were toxic and dismaying at the time, because toxins can cause extravagant drug visions and dismay can be the motor of change.  Well, motive anyway.

Sometimes the narrator steals the story, lining out a point of view that engages the reader even if the purported speaker is an animal or a slow thinker or unreliable.  We’re always curious about other people we don’t really know: the wicked, the traumatized, the addicted, the ones whose brains work differently than ours.  Everyone is fascinated by Einstein’s brain, to the point of thin-slicing it as though it were deli-meat, as though its dead molecules would show how they interacted in life.

The other end of that phenomenon is people who think they already know how things work and refuse to consider any other point of view, becoming so vehement that they will taboo, stigmatize, and even criminalize to the extreme of capital punishment whatever doesn’t conform to their ideas.  This is as true of people outside of any culture as those who kowtow to the neighbors.  Writing that can reach those people is at the level of religious conversion.  It is what keeps the human world alive and growing.

IS "FACTINESS" LIKE "TRUTHINESS"?

http://www.rockcellarmagazine.com/2012/01/12/director-oliver-stone-on-history-and-america-jim-morrison-ron-paul/#sthash.X9eoDNHq.dpbs

In the end (which might come rather soon) I may have a list of various histories of the world, the planet and the galaxy — each labeled with its entirely coherent bias, even though they flatly contradict each other and accumulate “facts” and “evidence” in quite different ways from different points of view.  This persistent difference is why the University of Chicago teaches students to announce their “method” at the beginning of an essay.  

Richard B. Spencer, whom I described as a white supremacist who defends the Nazi salute, is described in Wikipedia thus:

Wikipedia:  “Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 11, 1978) is an American white nationalist, known for promoting white supremacist views.  He is president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think-tank, and Washington Summit Publishers, an independent publishing firm. Spencer has stated that he rejects the description of white supremacist, and describes himself as an identitarian.  Spencer and others have said that he created the term "alt-right", a term he considers a movement about white identity.”  He lives in Whitefish, which is on the west side of the Rockies.  I don’t go over there.

(Although Montana is looking white at the moment -- a cold front coming through -- the only truly white continent is Antarctica.  Unfortunately it has no country or indigenous people.  The Americas are normally earth-colored, as are its true people.)

Spencer holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago while my MA from the University of Chicago is in Religious Studies.  It’s important for each of us to claim our “method” because we come out in very different places.  For instance, the Identitarian movement is in Europe.  Spencer has enormous attachment to Europe, though he doesn’t live there.

Wikipedia:  “The Identitarian movement is a pan-European socio-political movement that started in France in 2002 as a far-right youth movement deriving from the French Nouvelle Droite Génération Identitaire. Initially the youth wing of the anti-immigrant, far-right Bloc Identitaire, it has taken on its own identity and is largely classified as a separate entity altogether with the intent of spreading across Europe. The Identitarian movement advocates rights for members of specific European ethnocultural groups.”

Now I’ll stop picking on Spencer, whose problems are self-evident, and turn to Oliver Stone, whose newsreel version of history during my lifetime (1939 to the present) is streaming on Netflix.  There are ten episodes and I’m up to #4.  There was no warning about the presence of dead bodies.  

For those who are easily disturbed, Stone offers this alternative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9lNWM7lIOo  The cats in my household enjoyed it, but cats are natural triumphalists.  They’re also naturally suspicious.  There’s a lot of banter about “facts” and truth, but seeing is believing and that’s the principle of this photoshopped video.

I’m also watching Year Six of “Game of Thrones” which is sometimes a little hard to distinguish from Stone’s series, especially since they both happen in Europe except for parts in Asia.  (Eurasia is one landmass, but Japan is separated.)  I’m comforted by this essay on Aeon  (“Why Schools Should Not Teach General Critical-Thinking Skills” by Carl Hendrick) which argues that critical thinking/analysis is always dependent for success on its point of view, its context.  His example is that air traffic controllers are not exceptionally good at other tasks requiring intelligence.  

https://aeon.co/ideas/why-schools-should-not-teach-general-critical-thinking-skills?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c24f629288-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_12_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c24f629288-68600437

Isn't it true that the point of view for fiction has got to be different than the point of view of historical fact?  (Don’t ask Wikipedia, since they get all confused about it.  No one author per entry means no single point of view.)

Steve Pressfield, on his blog, stevenpressfield.org, which is meant to explain how to be a famous writer so you don’t have to write blogs, advises today “Don’t Be Afraid to Make Sh*t Up.”  Trump already knew that.  (I don’t know why Steve can’t spell shit.  The rest of us can.)

“What does that mean for you and me as we begin the novel that’s based on our real life?  It means  Don’t hesitate to go beyond the truth.  Identify its essence, in your character-in-the-story and in the story itself.  Then heighten that truth.  Make it pop, so that we the readers feel it and get it.  Make the internal external.”  (Formatting changed.)

I don’t know how well that works out for Pressfield, but it works great for Trump and probably works for the Clintons as well.  My problem is that in spite of piles and piles of facts, I can't settle on one way they they add up.  The problem might be in my method.

My file cabinets are full of archived letters, photos, media clippings, and other evidence, which I try to use to explain my life — even life in general.  Nothing has had as much impact on me as the newsreel clips that Oliver Stone has assembled into what he admits is a revisionist history.  I’m sympathetic.  When my grade school (Vernon in Portland, OR) turned out en masse to cheer when MacArthur made a victory parade out of being fired by Truman, I was there and I was on MacArthur’s side.

But I have to admit that I blinked when it turned out Eisenhower was as fond of his jeep driver as he was of Mamie.  It helped to know that when he was home, he and Mamie slept in a double bed.  The Trumans had twin beds, not that I blame Bess. (The contemporary point of view is that sex explains everything.)

Don’t blame me if I get confused about all this stuff.  The next episode in Stone’s history includes JFK and most people seem to agree that his life and death are unresolvable, even when you know about all the sex.  (How does a person with a notoriously bad back have so much sex?)

When neurology research suggests that identity is an assembled and varying phenomenon, much affected by context, sometimes needing to be reconciled between one side of the brain and the other, often chimerical if not kaleidoscopic, I know what they mean and I agree.  Why else would people insist that I change my attitude if it were not possible?  And yet, my abiding attempt is to “stay put,” to remain anchored as close to reality as I can get, unless the evidence persuades me otherwise.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

THE SEASONS FLIP IN FLAMES

Myself, 1945-'46

This time of year I’m always a little panicky.  It doesn’t help that the weather shifts now, so around here we are due for a cold spell and even some snow, but in the meantime fires are filling the air with smoke so that the nose-brain is signalling “fire,fire,fire. . . “  

But the real reason is the beginning of school.  From the very first day of kindergarten, which was my own personal first day because my mother had to fight to get me in late, because she said that I was overloading her ability to care for the three of us (me and “the boys” who at that point were like one person).  My b-day is late in October, so I was technically too young, but she made her plea stick.

The result was that I walked into a classroom where everyone had already formed their social patterns and there was no place for me.  Lesson learned.  Maybe OVER-learned.  I wouldn’t have known this had happened if my mother hadn’t told me.  Her position about me all my life was that I was unwilling to take the bullet for her and the boys, for the family.  (My father had a traveling job.  He was irrelevant but he was also the reason my mother felt so overwhelmed.)  She never mentioned a precipitating incident, but there must have been one.

A candle-making demonstration about 1953

She felt that my role as a daughter was to support hers as a mother.  She hoped I would be a do-over for every disappointment she’d had.  That meant she finished college while I was in high school as she could not at the proper age (the Depression), and then sent me through college.  But she was enraged that in middle age I went to Divinity School on scholarship.  Twice in life I really screwed up and got into the crosshairs of failure so that I had to ask to come back “home.”  The first time she assumed I was admitting she was right — now I would get a proper hairdo and learn how to play bridge.  The second time she almost didn’t let me return.  

So now at 77 I make my own place.  Ironically, it was my third of my mother’s estate that bought me this ramshackle house.  I’ve been on my own ever since and have managed the necessities — barely.  But the crucial nub of my real, if secret, life has since 1999 has been aflame with ideas and fulfillment.  Only one person really knows and that person was a gift beyond measurement.  

They say that in a sort of foreshadowing of coitus that bacterial one-celled creatures will sidle up next to each other and both will open a sort of port-hole in their cell walls.  Then they exchange some genetic information.  it’s a vivid image.  For me it brings to mind ranchers out on some rural road, traveling in opposite directions so that they can park with adjacent windows and talk for long enough to shut off the engines.  They used to smoke.  What they learn from each other can be vital.  So this writer and I pulled up our computers next to each other and the result was life-saving.

So many people are trying to resolve their life-issues by writing, that there is a parallel industry now that coaches and gives pep talks.  One of the best is steve@stevenpressfield.com.  Best because he really does know nuts and bolts and has sold books.  All these guys operate off pretty much the same assumption: that “writing” is linear, follows the same pattern of a compelling problem that causes rising action through increasingly tougher problems until finally there is a crisis/climax and then a resolution, hopefully one that leads to a higher plane of life.  

This is narrative fiction, but most of the non-fiction also follows this pattern.  The college educated pre-readers, editors, and agents look for it and endorse it.  If presented with a mass of print, they try to find the “narrative line” and develop it, prune it, espalier it onto the familiar wall.  Many times the most inspired but nonconforming writers are murdered by this.  Sometimes they reframe themselves as poets, which means they’re free but they’ll never make a living.

So what are the new patterns, the alternatives?  One has grown out of blogging, on-going sequences of individually composed writing — possibly chronological like a journal, but maybe only related by the writer having written them, like beads on a string.  Way down at the origin of at least one of my strands is kindergarten, and the dread of starting school again but being driven to take the bullet for the family.  A lot of other strands added since 1945, which is the origin of that bullet metaphor.

The formal philosophical underpinning of the three-part syllogism comes out of Greek drama and was both the origin and the exemplar for the Western world clear up through the Enlightenment.  Science and the scientific method is another version of it: define a problem, take evidence, form a hypothesis, make a triumphant discovery.  There were alternatives, but they were ignored.

Most recently I found “rhizome theory” which is the pattern of how sweetgrass grows: in clumps, then in long runners with a new clump forming at the end.  This is how blogs are.  This is how I think and write.  This how the world seems to be for a moment.  It’s a “Silk Roads” theory.  A town, a trail, another town.

Here on the high prairie the temp and the air quality are balancing, still late summer but predicted to flip over into a crisp fall in the night.  It’s hard to sleep and dreams are worrisome.  A repeated dream is that I’m at a conference in a strange town, not all that interested in the agenda and not knowing any of the other attendees.  I walk through the city and only half-realize they are cities from television, mixed and overlain with the cities I’ve known.  Rarely am I stepping over railroad tracks in a rotted industrial zone; usually I’m passing shop windows.  Often it’s all so real and familiar that I wonder whether I’m channeling someone.  There’s no Freudian symbolism nor even any Jungian tale.  I’m just new to kindergarten and wondering what the key might be.

Alan Deale and I at the tea after ML awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A few nights ago I had a telephone call from my original — and beloved — Unitarian minister, Alan Deale, because of writing about clergy misconduct misconstrued and suppressed, then dragged out of the past in vengeance.  We talked about his intern student ministers from the Seventies, who are involved.  I told him about driving by the church at 2AM after an event of some sort and seeing all the lights on, so I stopped out curiosity and the vague thought that help might be needed.  It was an intern in tears over not being able to write a sermon.  My efforts to help didn’t work.

When I went on, I had to cross what they call the “Pearl District” which used to be warehouses and therefore has railroad tracks in the streets.  Now it’s trendy boutiques and galleries, gentrified but with no residences.  I came to a car on fire — totally engulfed in high flames, just like television.  A man with a camera on a tripod was taking photos.  I stopped again.  

“Is there anyone in the car?”  Knowing if there was, they were dead.

“Yes.  In the back.”  He didn’t stop.  I heard sirens.

I left.  There was never anything in the news nor did I hear anything through the sheriff’s gossip.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream.  What is reality?  When can we intervene?  When is it right to call on others for help?  Are we ever entitled to guard our own interests?

WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF LEADERS?

One of my feeds is Steven Pressfield Online (stevenpressfield.com) who wrote a much praised book called “The War of Art.”  It’s meant to echo a first century Chinese treatise about actual military theory.  I didn’t catch on for a while.  The blog is encouragement and guidance for writers, like those struggling with Medium.com.

His first book, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was published in 1995, and made into a film of the same name, starring Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Matt Damon, and directed by Robert Redford.  His second novel, Gates of Fire, is about the Spartans and the battle at Thermopylae. It is taught at the U.S. Military Academy, the United States Naval Academy, and the Marine Corps Basic School at Quantico.  In 2012, he launched the publishing house Black Irish Books with his agent Shawn Coyne.

So he’s out of the Hemingway context, tough guy, focused on success.  he says “I am a writer. I write about war—external wars and internal wars, wars ancient and modern, real wars out of history and imagined wars that exist only in speculation. Why? I don’t even know myself.”  

He fits very well in a specific American culture, which is not so much about war as it is about money.  That is, he does write, he knows how and does it well, but he also is selling to wannabe writers, which is far more a “certainty” than selling another book about war.  He’s our idea of being a leader, right down to a best buddy who has his back.  Recently he recommended a movie, though he had only watched the first half.  It’s called “I Am Not Your Guru.”  Actually, that’s the title after the colon, the more primary one is the name of the not-guru, Tony Robbins.

Tony Robbins

Pressfield was impressed.  I was, too, but I didn’t even make watching it to half.  This guy is like Burt Lancaster on steroids.  (Actually, they say Robbins had a pituitary tumor during adolescence.)  Maybe you don’t remember Lancaster — Pressfield is only four years younger than I am, so he remembers.  Most of the people in his movie are maybe thirty — just about old enough to hit their first real crash in life.  They come eagerly, easily swept away by the profanity, overwhelming confrontation, and a mosh pit of a crowd.  The course costs thousands.  Where do they get that money?  You could get about the same “hit” from a skillfully done church retreat.  Maybe not quite that level of adrenaline since they would be constrained by taboos.  

It’s New Age stuff.  He presses all the pretty well-dressed girls until they exude every Oprah cliché they know, and indeed he has cohosted programs with Oprah.  He’s like a toy superhero who folds into being a bulldozer.  Realistically, he got into trouble over “fire walkers” who evidently had too little faith and were badly burned by the hot coals they crossed.  He was from a Croatian immigrant family and as a child took a lot of abuse, plus responsibility for his sibs.  I find that relevant.

So then I watched a very different movie — also a documentary streaming on Netflix — called “Even the Rain.”  It was dedicated to Howard Zinn.  The extraordinary figure here is Juan Carlos Aduviri, who has multiple roles:  indigenous amateur actor, a John the Baptist figure in an historical film about the early Spaniards oppressing the indigenous people, and himself.  Or is his movie contemporary role, as a leader of demonstrations and a father, not actually himself?  He studied cinematography in the Municipal School of Arts of El Alto, where he became a professor.  He’s a little guy (has alway lived at a high altitude with a limited diet) with an incredible face.

Juan Carlos Aduviri

This is the trailer for the film.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JKs8aSb7eo

I didn’t realize for a while that I knew some people who watched this revolution from an upstairs hotel window but also filmed some of it.  What was it about?  The diversion of water from the people by privatizing the government water sources.  Someone should force Missoula citizens to watch this over and over — they sold their water system and no one even noticed.  Now they're in court and lucky to be there.

The idea of this movie is simple: that people stay pretty much the same over the centuries; but the film is complexly layered as the actors and crew struggle to get their own project done on time and under budget while portraying the early Spanish taking cruel measures to get their gold. 

"Pocahontas" figure on the right.

There is a Pocahontas figure, a young girl who appeals to the producer.  A recent paper on H-Amerindian, the Humanities people, reflected on the enduring popularity of Pocahontas.  So the enlightened sophisticated people from the privileged world are there to “help”  the oppressed masses, who end up saving them instead.  

One of the most interesting passages is the attempt to recreate an historical event in which the mothers of the indigenous babies drowned them to keep them from the more cruel death of being torn apart by Spanish dogs.  The contemporary indigenous actors simply refuse.  No matter how much the director explains that they won’t really drown their babies, just wade into the water holding them, at which point the babies will be taken to safety, replaced by dolls.  The mothers explain that they won’t even depict such an atrocity.  And they make it stick. 

Later, in a scene where those opposing the Spanish invaders are crucified atop bonfires, it is so convincing that we are paralyzed in spite of knowing it’s a simulation — until the director calls “cut” and the victims step down.  But then, when we see rioting in the streets and soldiers shooting demonstrators, it’s hard not to half-expect someone to call “cut” so everyone can go home.  If reality, actual experience rather than theory, is a keystone of ethics, then no wonder we have a problem these days.  All is assumed to be trickery.

The privileged folks — who do have a conscience represented by a sympathetic woman with a videocam on her shoulder — operate on credentials, connections and bribery.  They work.  But the indigenous people are working for the survival of their children, a far more powerful motive.

It would be easy to displace this film onto our current Trump/Clinton fiasco.  Good guys on one side and bad guys on the other.  But the strength of the film is that it is packed with ironies, empathy that has no place to go.