. . . . the story that does not tell us
that we live happily ever after? But in-
stead leaves us
midsentence
midaction
midthought
mid deed (?)
(or even before the deed; think:
Raymond Carver,
that dear, dear man who many fiction writers today
love to hate, but, well,
I not only still like his writing,
I also still have great respect
for him.
I actually knew him, he and his wife,
Tess Gallagher,
were my neighbors
for a few years while
I lived and studied
in Syracuse.
Notably, I studied Creative Writing there,
which of course is what Ray taught -
I was in the graduate program
he was part of,
but, also notably,
the year I got there, Carver
got something like a MacArthur,
and well,
what self-respecting writer really wants to teach
when they don't really have to?
He stopped teaching the year I arrived.
Anyway, it didn't matter, I was so clueless:
I went to Syracuse because I wanted to be a writer,
and not
because I knew anything about the teachers there.
In fact, I didn't know who he was the first time I met him
at a party, and I think that may be why
he always sort of followed my work
for a few years (until they moved);
he would go to my readings, and talk to me
at parties, and give me all kinds of suggestion.
Looking back at it, I can see he
kind of took care of me,
in a very quiet way.
I paid him little heed; I was way
way
too in awe.
So anyway --
think Raymond Carver story. . .
OK,
back to my point about why
we take delight and more delight
in songs,
stories
movies
that end abruptly.
Well,
the Age we have been leaving has been
a Narrative Age,
and the age we have been entering,
rather haltingly and painfully,
but now we are absolutely in it,
is the Age
of Narrative Interruptus.
The Age of Narrative was an age
that sought and sometimes found
happiness in its endings.
The "Happy Ever After" marks
Satisfaction and/or
the Desire for Satisfaction coupled with
the Belief
that Satisfaction is possible.
Since this is the Age we are currently exiting
we have inherited a truckload
of Happy Ever After Tales
that promote and perpetuate
a rather stilted view of the world.
IE:
if you are good, Santa will bring you packages;
if you clean inside your ears, beans won't grow in them;
if you make a lot of money, you'll be happy;
(a subnarrative of this one is: money can buy happiness -- if you believe this, just think about how much money it takes to be happy all the time);
if you're a blonde, you're stupid and easily pleased
if you a marry a particular type of person just like you, you'll be happy
marriage and reproduction are the ONLY routes to happiness
The list goes on:
essentially,
they're all mini narratives, all with
happy endings built right into them,
and we grew up using them
to define our paths in life.
But Hot Damn!
Most of us who are my age (that's 425, remember)
and over have learned
through this rather miserable experience
called life
that those lovely stories, produced by people
whose time, circumstances & personal beliefs
allowed them to think in terms of happy endings,
are lies.
Lies.
Life happens like this:
(and then it's over)
As we have come to understand this
is the true structure of
life in our time,
our stories --
and the literal structure of all of the stories
that we use to help us understand life
has gradually changed.
We prefer
Narrative Interruptus,
because
that is more true to reality.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
It has taken art: aka:
reality's reproduction
a long time to catch up to reality itself.
Reality is this, this life
we lead, and
within this life we lead,
we Humans were produced by the Creative Force
(aka: Allah, God, Yahweh)
to be the chroniclers & recorders
of the Force's creation,
to be the ones
to show that fabulous creation S/He produced
to the Master
who produced us.
It is our job to mimic all that we encouter
for the enjoyment
of our Progenitor.
(Yes, we are advanced apes,
we are the ones
in all the animal species
to be given the task of
going forth and finding
a way to show the beauty of nature
to the Creative Force
we call God.
That's our job.
Period.
(and, by the way, every now and then God wants to see this creation,
and that, my friends, is Makropoulos' explanation
of Two Thousand And Twelve:
that year marks the juncture
at which God is able to view
The Creation in its entirety,
and,
well,
we'll see what S/He thinks.
In other words, 2012 marks the end moment of the period of time it takes
(when measured in our realm of time)
for the timeless to be able to perceive
of everything it has produced
for the soul purpose of being able to view Itself.
Eternity, then,
is best defined as a number, and it looks
like this:
After 2012 (which fundamentally marks
the end of the period of time as it is measured in the realm of time
that it takes the timeless to perceive
of the timed)
we'll know how long infinity is,
and we'll be able to use that #
in actual counting, because
at that point
we'll have experienced an eternity
and come out the other side of it.
I'm not kidding!
That's what
12/21/12
will be:
the realization of the year
of the palindrome,
and the realization of the Perfect Mirror Image.
But I should get back to my point, which is
we live currently at the Dawn of the
Age of Interruptus,
during which our primary mode
of representing ourselves to ourselves
will be
by fragmentation.
Life
is
not
one
long
thin
con
tin
u
a
l
thread, no
it is interruption.
We believe no more
in the Aristotelean narrative,
because we know it is no longer
a complete narrative that fits our time.
No.
Our current life narratives acknowledge the short
ness and the changability
of real lived life.
One of the most compelling stories to us
right now,
unfortunately,
is the one that shows how
if you hurt the one you love the most
you can absolutely destroy them,
thereby
robbing them of the possibility of their own happy ending,
when we know darned well we're not going to have a happy ending.
And so we kill,
and kill,
and kill,
and kill,
and lie
and lie,
then kill
and kill
and kill
again.
It is the acting out of our personal discovery
that not every one of life's stories
do not have happy endings, and
it brings happy endings to no one,
and death, painful death
to all.
But the fact is:
endings are often not happy;
endings
are often not even
"the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in influencing recent legislation in this state and across the country"
(please see the link above for his own
description of, again as he puts it,
"the strange circumstances in which [he] finds [him]self as a result."
Fundamentally, the State of Wisconsin
did not like was Dr. Cronan wrote,
and "request[ed] to view the contents of "Professor William Cronon's state email account from 1 January 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union [and 12 prominent Republican state senators who supported Walker's bill]". (this quote is from the Guardian article
from which I snagged the above picture. Please follow the link above.)
Now, all in all,
I find this to be tremendously
disturbing,
for a number of reasons:
First, of course, there is that good ol' constitutional right we supposedly have
This very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution is one of the many reasons
that for a long time historians and social critics called the United States of America
one of history's greatest social experiments.
My Second Reason for finding this Cronan case
to be absolutely disturbing is because of what it indicates
about the attitude towards Education and the Educated
in this great old United States of America.
Of course, Wisconsin's current place in national headlines began
when their governor, Scott Walker, managed to pass a legislation designed
to disrupt the collective bargaining power of unions for public employees, including teachers.
(This has been followed by the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich,
launching a similar attempt to "bust the unions,"
something that my family and friends in Ohio claim he never campaigned on.
The rationale for breaking the power of these unions
that serve public employees is that these individuals
are overpaid anyway, and hey we have to balance
those state budgets, which are,
pretty much like the United States government,
flirting with bankruptcy.
This attempt to dismantle the pay structure, which includes threatening the retirement
funds for thousands of individuals who have been sweating over our youth for decades
is being fueled by an anecdotal public claim that teachers don't do their jobs well,
and get their summers off, so why pay them
so much???? After all, look at the state of American education!
It's the teachers' fault our youth are doing so badly, right?
Well, I'll tell ya what:
some of my best friends are teachers
in public systems,
and those people work their hearts out:
facing increasing learning disabilities and disruptions in the classroom,
working in often poorly funded facilities,
up early to prepare and greet students who often come
from emotionally challenging family situations,
up until late, late hours doing assessment paperwork,
struggling to get students to pass tests on material that the students
rather rapidly forget . . . the list goes on. We don't need to take money and job security
away from most of these teachers,
we need to make them all saints.
Education is the sole most important industry in the United States right now,
if we are to produce intelligent, creative and open-minded global citizens for tomorrow,
and we are yanking money away from it,
and belittling those who do it,
and those who question the system
and want to make it better.
Sadly, those students who were impacted by the
No Child Left Behind Legislation,
which is largely responsible for the current emphasis
on assessment in our country, are now arriving in
colleges and universities, which of course,
is where I teach, and have taught,
since 1985.
The students themselves realize
rather rapidly
that their high school education did not prepare them.
(I have a student right now working on that topic
for the researched argument he is required to write.
His colleagues all agree with him.)
So if High School doesn't prepare you for college today, what does it do?
I asked him today.
It teaches you to take tests,
was his response. And, he added It's a zoo! Too much of a popularity contest. His classmates
all nodded in agreement.
The United States of America has, historically, housed the finest Higher Education system
in the world. This is why we have attracted scholars from all over the world.
This is also why, for a time, American scholars like myself got jobs in universities
in other countries. It was our job to import that unique brand of
"critical thinking" that has become the hallmark of the American system for over the past
thirty to forty years.
Recognizing that honing the ability to think critically and creatively
produces new thoughts and advancements in every branch
of thinking, scholars have come to our shores, and now
we are exporting our education, at a profit to our
But when the man you give your love to
is actually
the man deep inside
the mirror,
you have to realize
he
is constantly receding,
because in this world comprised
solely of representations
the mirror
dominates
over the
original
. . . and so
every other woman
who sees this man
also sees
herself the way
she would like
to see herself,
and she wants him for her very own;
and if he's living
continually
in his Mirror Stage,
well,
he's very rarely in contact
with the true he,
he's just continually infatuated
with the perfect he
that he thinks he can see whenever
a woman thinks she has fallen
head over heels in love
with him.
Still,
there has to be a man in the mirror,
a man who on this earthly domain
was given the deadly deed
of having to be the mirror-bearer,
he whose essence
is that mystical 3rd that God created
for the sole purpose
of being able to see
HimSelf.
OK,
honestly,
this is a pretty wild entry here,
but I'm going to ride it out
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So
how many women fall so
in love (as much in love as I did) with
their psychopath lover?
I'd say almost all of them;
or most of them
So what
is
the
big fucking deal?
There is no deal:
there never was:
for two years, I stood
in front of a
beautiful mirror
and learned to love myself.
Tomorrow
would be
my father's birthday,
had he lived,
but as we all know:
Makropoulos is 425 years old,
so her father,
has long since mingled
with the earth he loved,
with the water he loved,
with the trees he wouldn't cut down,
not even for Christmas:
My father,
the most beautiful man
I will ever know:
tall and slender
and blonde
and quiet; smart
and witty
(I was the one who always got his jokes)
subtle,
and kind,
and so misunderstood,
my
dear
dear
father,
I've only just passed the age
he was at when he died,
or so it seems,
as he's been gone
such a long
long
long
time.
It's been hundreds of years
since I saw him last,
and I was just really getting
to know him.
Yes,
I loved my father
very much,
and I do believe
he loved me too.
And then there was another man:
the man I was married to, many years ago,
he
was 20 years my senior,
I married him
when he was at the age my father was
when he died.
People said to me:
you married a father figure,
and I said: no! I did not!
He didn't look a think like my father, and he was shorter than him, and
he could see color
and play the piano.
My father
was tone deaf,
and could only see red.
But I will tell you something
which
I recently discovered
(or came to terms with)
:
Yes.
I did marry my husband
to replace my father, and I am here to tell you:
the biggest
mistake a woman could make
if in a position even vaguely similar
to the one I was in when I married
would be to marry a man
who is the opposite of her father. Women
make their men
in to the man
they want him to be.
And if the woman is lucky,
the man
is amenable to it.
If a woman feels
she met the perfect man
in her father, well, she tries
to make the man in her life
into her conception of her father.
That is why, quite frankly,
if a woman must marry,
and if she loved her father,
she should marry a man who is like her father,
in looks and temperment,
because if her father is really
a wonderful man (as my father was)
then the man you've chosen
to mold into him won't mind it at all,
and won't mind reflecting him back to you.
Does this mean I agree with Freud, when he said
that every girl and every boy
wants to have sex
with their father and/or mother?
No.
A girl can love her father without wanting to bed him,
and visa versa, just as a boy
can love his parent in the same way.
There is a true paternal love, a love
that adores the daughter
but does not cross that line;
and there is a true daughterly love,
a love that adores
her father, and adores
him all the more
because she knows she is safe with him.
But when it comes to a boyfriend,
a reproduction will suit her fine.
There's no sin in that;
there's not sin in wanting to love your mate
with the same excessive love that a child
once harbored for their parent who was their absolute world.
And if that man (or other mate of whatever gender)
is of like temper,
and seeks to love a woman
with the same adoration that he once
directed solely towards his mother,
well,
they're a match made in heaven.
Soulmates?
Maybe.
That's really another element all together.
Yes, there's no sin in that, because
if we could all find a partner
who we can love with the same love we felt
for the person we loved absolutely most in our lives,
well,
this would be a pretty happy planet,
and would spin
in an energy of
healing bliss.
But alas,
that's not the way the world turns, instead
we live in the tug of war of
users, abusers
used, abused,
passive-aggressive
active complacent
passive passive
active active
and every gradation in between.
Indeed
Indeed.
And we fight and we bicker,
and we flaunt flirt and hurt,
and we ignore the beautiful
simplicity of truth right before
our eyes.
Indeed
Indeed.
(Is it Armageddon yet?)
If it is,
well perhaps
we should
give up our
petty hatreds
now, and love
with a love that exceeds,
like a child loves his mother or her father,
or whomever it was
who once made that child
oh so glad, just to be
alive.
