EXTREME WRITING

This is from a time when several of us were writing hard and high.  There was a lot of hate flying around the world -- just like now.

7/31/10 

Extreme writing is like cage-fighting on roller-skates.  (Someone in the newspaper used that for a description of hockey and I like it as a metaphor.)

What I’m thinking about is yesterday when we were all impressed by the image of the giant invisible boy, which was legitimate and I hope released HIM from his cage.  But then I was in the bone cage of my head rolling around on second thoughts.  I was saying that it’s okay to hate.  Is it?  Every liberal would rise up to say,  “Oh NO!”   But why do we stigmatize emotional categories as though “hate” were all one thing.  I said it was okay to hate me, okay for me to hate others, but what KIND of hate?  I would argue hate demonstrates connection, maybe even love.  Apathy kills.

Extreme writing is facing such questions.  Some wiggle out of the cage by saying they are “hating” an act or a phenomenon but never a person.  Uh-huh.  Others label what they hate as “evil” and justify hating that way.

There’s got to be a “hate continuum.”  Hating washing the dishes is not the same as hating a murdering tyrant.  It’s different to “ cold hate” for dynamics unclaimed by anyone that nevertheless destroy.  Numbers.  Theories.  Hating is different when it’s frustration than it is from pure contempt.  I have NO contempt for anyone at Cinematheque.

Hatred can be a deal with the Devil, but sometimes the Devil is a better friend than God.  Since both are cage-fighting on rollerskates in your head. 

What makes writing extreme?  Brutal honesty.  Cutting accuracy.  Devastating exposure.  Can it be survived?  Dunno.  No limits on subject matter, even if it’s taboo.  Push the limits of the little abacus of a brain, make it do what a computer does even if you don’t really KNOW what a computer does.  Accept the loss of former friends (one left this week) and the acquisition of new friends (??)  Profanity and incoherence are OUT.  They just add bars. 

The hardest part might be not the body blows of loss, but the ringing in one’s ears of ambiguity, the eye-cuts of doubt, the broken nose of I-myself-might-be-absolutely-wrong.  Down for the count out of sheer unbearability.  There is always the possibility of death, I mean the actual death of the writer in a hail of reciprocated severity.  The only people who think writing is harmless are those who never read.

Beyond that there are the years of training, building muscle, trying to understand theory and methods, vocabulary beyond my experience or anyone else’s either because of being abstract, virtual, platonic -- irrelevant?   Eleven thousand dollars a year, four years, roughly fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment, about thirty years ago, mostly paid for by other people through scholarships and subsidies.  It amounted to an elegant can opener.  What’s in the can?  You gotta open it to find out.

A can of hate.  Sort the worms:  fear, grief, jealousy, thwarted love, helplessness.  Kids scream,  “I hate you!  I’ll never speak to you again!”  They DO mean it.  The worst is being caged with someone you love and don’t want to hurt, but it’s the only way to stay alive, even as you realize they can kill you.

Waitaminute.  You’re stuck on a metaphor.  We’re supposed to be discussing hate -- that was the subject.  

But hate IS about the cage.  You want what you hate to be outside and yourself to be inside where it’s safe.  

Waitaminute.  There’s something wrong with this idea.  What if I want to go somewhere.  Let’s get hate into the cage and I’ll be outside.

Can’t be done.  The hate is in you, not them.  It’s easy to hate an “out-group”, esp. if they’re “way out,” (add contempt) but hate is in your gut, your gut IS the worm.  The physiology of hate is that it eats on the lining of your tubing and bleeds your life right out of you.  “Shit for brains” is just code for “brains shit out.”  The vagus nerve goes straight from brain to stomach.  The intestine is netted with nerves and juiced with brain chemicals.  Hate is a physical phenomenon.  So are fear and grief.  They are braided in your gut.  Extreme writing is about blood and guts.  Not theirs -- your own.

I read a story the other day about people who are paid to sit and look at EVERY image posted to the Internet.  If a photo is outside certain boundaries, it is zapped.  They look at everything -- no filters.  They throw up: there is a sink in the room.  They develop post-traumatic stress syndrome.  You cannot imagine what they see.  That’s why they zap it.  For them it’s no longer imagined.  Of course, the same protocol can be used to zap things you WANT to see.  I used to think I wanted to see everything.  Now I’m not so sure.  But extreme writing requires that.  Anyway, who decides what is truly awful?  What if one person throws up at what makes another lick his lips?  How many days did the cream n’ sugar party last?  Three, four?  There’s a huge backlog from Afghanistan.

First you gotta name it

Then you will define it.

Never try to shame it.

Give us some examples,

Ones we recognize.

How much hate is really grief,

How much hate is fear.

All this shifter-shapin’ is kinda hard to bear.

Take the C away from Cage and it is Age.

Add a Place and there’s your Ace.

Mine is here.

Yours is there.

We are such a funny pair!

Where you goin’?

What you sowin’?

Wait for me!

Can’t you see

I’m in a cage?

For every bar there is a space.  

Turn sideways.

Break up in tiny pieces

Then reassemble on the other side.

You could write on paper if you were old-fashioned.

Pass a note.  Use a code.

Or XOXOXOXO  your way out with pixels of your face.

I’ll give it more thought later.

I’m not going anyplace.

I’m too old for skateboards.

You go on ahead.

Then double back, if you see a hater.

"FIGHT CHURCH": Comments on a movie

You want church porn?  I’ll give you church porn.  And it won’t be naked ladies pretending to be angels, either.  Carnal?  Oh, yeah.  Knowledge -- well, they say so but it’s only of a certain kind.  It works within a particular circle of people.  I suppose I can’t get off the hook -- I like rodeo.  I’d be interested to know how rodeo and cage-fighting compare in attendance in Great Falls -- both of them much promoted and popular.  The cowboys and football players are also claiming Jesus, mixing competition with Christianity.  It’s pervasive.  God, the coach.

Here’s the link for the movie:  “Fight Church.”  Not Brad Pitt stuff.  Documentary.

http://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=80005196&trkid=13641907&tctx=0%2C0%2C6985a579-783f-46b4-878f-cd6963ee0f79-106189961&evType=EV7

They have a little legal prob with the NY state legislature -- which was refusing to legalize MMA, the fight organization.  Therefore this problem is about Sin, not Evil.  Sociologically, they are NOT on the same wavelength as a bunch of legislators, who are likely to be lawyers.  Check out the fans.  I don’t think that anyone on the scene is really aware that the phenomenon of empathy means that when the combatants go after each other, a faint reproduction of the fight is happening in the nerves and muscles of every person there.  Watch them flinch and weave in their seats.  It’s more powerful than playing computer combat games.

Like boxing, MMA devolves into black against blonde.  

Racism IS Evil.

One pastor says,  “This gives a level of excitement beyond any other sport.”  Soon he’s wondering whether kicking someone in the face is, um, “spiritual.”  Isn’t it more like the Roman gladiators?  But we love the emotion of it -- Russell Crowe surviving tigers.  In fact, we love emotion in a pornographic way, feeling it secondhand. How is all this fighting different from jihad?  Consider just about the most addictive drug there is: adrenaline.  Nero knew.

I’m not out of touch with reality enough to think that boys don’t “grapple.”  But then these guys move on to big guns.  Do you really want a five-year-old, a twelve-year-old, trying to control an assault weapon?  Do you want him to think that if he can’t, he’s an (ick) girl, a coward?  A warrior ethic is taught by a huge dad who smacks a little kid for not being tough?  Brass casings from a gun pelting the kid in the face because his protective goggles are up?  What about his eyes?  Where’s dad?  If the kid goes blind, will he just throw the weeping boy out on the street?  Probably.  The kid believes that.

An accident.

What about the dynamics between a kid who’s traumatized and crying and the father who MUST have a winning kid?  What about small towns where local high school athletes are pushed to extreme fighting in back alleys so adult men can bet on the outcome?  And maybe a few drunks and certainly a lot of alcohol will be involved.  What they THINK they are doing is not at all what these “fighting pastors” are doing, though I don’t know what that really is either.  Esp. when it’s girls getting bloodied by girls -- domestic violence anyone? 

How does it go?  Let the little children suffer?

These guys are really into the porn of the Demon -- the Gates of Hell.  Here’s where the Devil comes "into" his own:  bedtime wrestling, tickling, controlling.  You’ve seen it, I’ve seen it.  It turns sexual so gradually that no one can quite believe that it has slid into rape.  That’s not love.  

Trash talk is trash talk, even if you mention Jesus.   “We don’t use trash talk,” says the fighting pastor wearing a windbreaker with an acronym on it:  “P.I.M.P.”  Using Peter as a justification for a sword completely ignores Peter as the guy who blunders, who can’t walk on water, who DENIES Jesus because he’s afraid.  These fight guys hop all around, picking up phrases.  They are ORAL thinkers, not print folks.  In fact, they are physical strategists, a useful skill but not for theology.

So then the movie turns to a conflict -- “disrespect,” “insulting my wife,” so one of these fighting pastors goes on crusade.  The difference from a street fight is that “I have trained responses.”  Privilege, status, “I’m better than you.”  It was the wife-insulter who won the fight.  Hmmmmm.

Both guys got kicked in the testicles in spite of wearing cups.

What about "go forth and multiply?"

Nice to see these families bring their little kids to see Daddy get beat up.  If the worst happens and Dad drops dead, at least they were there.  Oh, yeah, the kids will like the flashy near-naked ladies, too.  And seeing Daddy almost kill his opponent.  So the next day, the pastor says,  “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”  Right.

They’re doing it for the institution: the church, their pastorate.  It’s show-biz, a power base.  And an income.  And in the case of some of these guys, an inherited pass-along, Game of Thrones style.  (Hey, I’m the one who complains about denominations turning “pink,” not Commie pinko but mommie pink, girly pink.  Soft.)  Increasingly this is mocked in the larger culture, drowned in the constant stream of suffering so vivid on the media.

Jesus wept.

But hard can be mocked as well.  (Game of Thrones again.)  Sooner or later someone brings a knife to the fistfight, a gun to the knife fight, a dragon to the gunfight and the A-Bomb nukes the dragon.  And anyway, we’re all discovering that a tiny smoked bat on a stick can kill more efficiently and cost more than any guerrilla king in the jungle, all the while mixing sex with violence.  The blood oozes out your eyes without even a wound.

The people gathered into “fight churches” do not belong to mainstream denominations.  They’re rather pentecostal in the generic sense, a little like snake-handlers, hooked on adrenaline.  There are vulnerabilities built into every religious system and in Christianity many of them have to do with the old patriarchal impulse re-surfacing, displacing Jesus’  compassion, consolation, and healing.  They are “Old Testament” Christians.  What holds them together is the fact of family: the basic attached mom-and-dad pair plus child.  With this as its core, “Christianity” can travel anywhere there are traditional families.  Systems based on a landscape or a specific ecology can’t do that.

Pastor Paul is accused of sexual misbehavior.

That's a family buster.

No wonder they are so terrified of any departure from that Trinity of mom/dad/child: same sex marriage, childless marriage, single parent marriage, daughters instead of sons, people who never marry.  In a poverty-limited place the mother -- who is assigned the role of the family “Jesus” in terms of compassion and forgiveness -- may be a drunk or just gets into the car and drives off.  (Mama Absconditus.)  Or maybe it is the father who can’t earn money, beats his kids instead of using his strength to make things, and destroys even the saintly mother.  

I read something the other day that suggested in a world without fathers, it’s easy to imagine God is dead.  But then what do you do with the Mother, since she’s supposed to be the Mother of God.  Must she simply grieve forever?  There are places where that’s exactly what the mothers are doing -- grieving for the men and boys.  Are there Christian congregations for them?  Ask Pope Francis, who constantly confronts the women of South America who hold up photographs of their disappeared loved ones.

Plaza de Mayo

Congregations are open to the culture and draw like-to-like.  These tattooed, Mohawked, bleached, and belligerent men with guns tucked into the back of their belts were there already.  To draw them into a group that uses Christian metaphors for the Great Mystery is to at least give them a handhold in a whirling world.  But advocating rage and violence, even caged, is a deadend.  They are neither fish nor fowl.  Neither swim nor fly.

The larger culture will tolerate them until they begin to look like a threat, or the women among them say, “No more.”  Then they will either have to give up the Christianity or the combat because it threatens the family, which is Evil because it threatens the survival of the species.  Threatening one part of society or even threatening one religious system is merely sinful, maybe illegal.  But they did finally legalize MMA in New York.