Fitting into the Mainstream

There is much to be said for being average. You don't get hassled as much i.e. you get hassled the average amount in grade school and high school, certainly not in college unless you opt for a fraternity, and never to the point of getting PTSD unless you join the military. Everything works out seamlessly, from babyhood to toddler to grade schooler to dating in high school and the first summer jobs, graduating from high school and becoming old enough to smoke, to drink and to vote. For many there's college then the first post-college job and you're on the conveyor belt thereafter with little time to look around you and notice if this is where you want to be. You get married, raise kids, get promoted, retire and move to Florida.

John Waters is not average. His interview with Terry Gross on June 3 hooked me like a drug addict to heroin. His story is pebbled with so many similarities to my own story except that he seems to have moved from "hysterical misery into common unhappiness" and I have not. But that's not true either. I still fall into deep misery as I used to as a teenager but now misery is accompanied by a kind of awareness. I am not altogether alone when I'm miserable. If nothing else misery keeps me company. I'm there and so is he.

In real life few people are average. We're all neurotics, as Waters's hero Freud concluded in the 19th century. Some have more dramatic or flamboyant neuroses but theirs are not the worst. I think the worst off are those who are buried in the past, those who bought into the trauma of their young, growing selves, that they are trapped there the rest of their lives. We're all victims of our egos, trapped forever in how we view ourselves and through those glasses view the world around us. Society is itself like opera glasses that we don't take away from our eyes. To discover that we have eyes that can see without benefit of those glasses is life-transforming.
The only hope I've encountered is described by mystics, especially the Asian sages like the Buddha. I date a rebirth of my own neurosis from the nine days I spent in April 1986 when I attended a retreat with Ruth Denison. Sometime around the fourth day I found those primordial eyes. For moments I detached from the stream of compulsive thoughts, urges, memories and desires and realized there was more to experience beyond the stream. Henceforth, while not all the time, I saw me and saw that it was not all there was. I can pat myself on the back or shake my finger at myself. It's quite a feat. It's my sort of miracle.

Culture is awesome. It's where we come to affix meaning to what our physical senses and minds feed us. From culture comes the wonderful creations of humans from the dawn of time. From culture and in culture we create literature, art, politics, morality, religion, the whole shebang! But culture and ego are not all there is. Alongside them, silent but more potent than them, walks something other. Some may call this God. I don't know. All I know is that I am not alone.

Having established this, instead of suffering in misery I can learn to play. Waters made his living from his being different. Instead of hiding the unsavory pieces of his neurosis, he turned them into movies and now a book, Role Models. He is a role model. We can turn our unhealthy lives into something grand. All it takes is a certain disidentification from it all, learning to soar while immersed in the mud. Mud is beautiful!

Posted via email from The Pursuit of Duende

Singapore April 18, 2010 Marina Bay/Singapore Flyer

The group in front of Sakura International Buffet Restaurant. This is whole gang, right?

Singapore April 14-15, 2010-Tour Around Singapore

The Ga family at the Singapore Harbour. Stunning picture!

Gerald Brenan on how art should be judged

I'm meeting with the Pen2Paper Meetup group at seven tonight. At lunch I brought along my folder of short stories. I was newly impressed with how thick the file was and how many stories I wrote between 1988 and 1989. I had always remembered those stories as being overwrought, prose too flowery, plot limited to self-indulgent, self-fulfilling stories. I read three stories this afternoon. Two brought tears to my eyes. Hmmm...

Gerald Brenan in his preface to  his 1951 survey, The Literature of the Spanish People (as opposed to literature written in Spanish), summed up his philosophy on art criticism. Every work, he wrote, whether a poem, novel or painting "can be anything—that is to say, can have any form or content—so long as it evokes feeling." That's a to-the-point as anything I've read about what art should be. He writes further, "I believe that one of the principal functions of art and literature, second only to the immediate delight and elevation of mind they give, is the manner in which they display the range and diversity of mind and experience open to human nature—thus putting us into the skin of persons very remote and different from ourselves and so mitigating our chronic state of self-imprisonmennt..." Works of art are to be valued "by the depth and quality of the experience they convey, rather than by their moral or ideological rightness. Ethical considerations only come in when they affect that experience by extending or diminishing it.

I've started so many prose works—I call them "text products" which hints at how I feel about what I have been doing—since 1989 but have not finished a single piece, not even a paragraph-long work. The bug for writing apparently came to life then as quickly went away. In a similar way, I wrote poems in 1972 filling a steno notebook then the flourish ended. These past two years I've trained what creativity I have to shooting images. I have been most successful shooting models. After processing three images from the four-hour shoot with Austin yesterday I hazard to think yesterday's shoot was my best so far. Both Austin and his girlfriend, Jacqueline, whom I shot in April, were so into the shoot. I was tired when we finished but felt we'd done something worthwhile. Austin too felt it. He told me he'll recommend me to the clients at the gym where he works as trainer.

Rereading my short stories reiterated a truism that I've found time and again. Memories are unreliable. What little we remember of the vast amount of sensory and mental events that stream through consciousness 60 seconds a minute, 24 hours a day, 24/7 has been edited into what Asian meditation teachers call ego. What fits our idea of who we are might stay to validate ego but even what remains often is misperception. Ego reshapes events. Art is reshaping events into something meaningful. Both art and ego are constructions of the mind. Why not go for art since ego or "reality" is just as perniciously false?

Posted via email from The Pursuit of Duende