Red Carpet Trivia

Last Saturday evening I went to the monthly party of a loosely-organized group of gay men. Mostly nice folks. The group has the normal percentage of loud-mouths, gossips, and sarcastics, but they are basically a quite civilized bunch. It’s mostly old guys; some have belonged since the group began thirty or so years ago.

I’m a Johnny-come-lately. I’ve attended most of their monthly parties (pot luck dinners) for the last year. I have much in common with most of them: I’m old (67) but lively, I’m gay, I’m opinionated, I’m liberal-left politically.

I self-identify as a shy person.

I’m basically terrified (terrified? perhaps) to carry on a conversation with a stranger longer than how-are-you-I-am-fine-thank-you, but I was determined to get to know some of the old guys. I went with a couple, friends of mine, who were the only partiers I know well. I was determined not to hang with them for the entire evening.

Three times I mustered the courage to introduce myself to a stranger and strike up a conversation. Three times someone else rushed up in that excited way gay men greet each other. Each time the two kissed, and the second man positioned himself between me and the first, forcing me out of the conversation. I wanted to say, “Hey, what am I, chopped liver?”

When I told a good friend later I felt like saying that, he immediately said I was putting myself down by calling myself “chopped liver.” I may be wrong, but I think that phrase is a positive expression meaning, “Hey, don’t treat me like something as unimportant as chopped liver.” But there’s a whole lot in this world I misunderstand.

However, the same friend who misunderstood “chopped liver” helped me see these experiences in a new way. The problem was not with me. The problem was that the other two guys (especially the second) are rude. They have no manners, and I am lucky I discovered that before I had much of myself invested in becoming friends with either of them.

Perhaps my life-long self-identification as a shy person is wrong. Perhaps I am simply—not when I write, but in social situations—an overly-polite person with very little ability to rush in where angels fear to tread. Yes, I mean to imply that rude people are fools. I do not suffer fools lightly. (Once again, I need to explain: I am aware of my use of clichés, and I use them intentionally to indicate how trivial it seems to me that I feel the need to explain any of this.)

Well-meaning friends tell me that I must learn to make myself “vulnerable” to other people. Usually when I hear that, my eyes glaze over.

I am willing to be vulnerable, to take risks in relationships. Too willing. My terror at speaking to strangers is, in fact, rooted in my extreme vulnerability. (There, how’s that for self-justification?)

Going to parties and chit-chatting about the movies I’ve seen this week interests me for approximately three minutes. Then I want to know who you are. Going to department meetings at my university and talking over lunch about teaching methods or students’ foibles interests me for approximately four minutes. Then I want to know who you are. Going to organ concerts sponsored by the American Guild of Organists and listening to you talk about the size of your organ interests me for about one minute. Then I want to know who you are.

And, of course, in any of these situations I want to tell you who I am, too.

Fear of strangers is not my problem. An understanding of the value of time is my problem. I want to cut to the chase, to get right to the emotional connections that are possible between people, of the pain and the joy we all share that hides under our gay babble, our academic avoidance, and our professional grandiosity.

What am I?

I really do not have a clue how to respond to the stuff that keeps other people from admitting their loneliness, their pain, their need for true friendship. I understand the sadness of the condition in which

We tend to deny the very loneliness that is likely responsible for many of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. People seem to feel ashamed when they do admit to loneliness—which is socially stigmatized and is seen as a weakness in the western culture. As such, it is widely believed that loneliness should not affect normal, healthy, and strong people. We tend to identify it [with] those that are considered marginal to the mainstream of our society, namely the elderly, the poor. . . and the criminals. . .(1)

Now I’ve set myself up to fit another clichéd description: I am an ego-maniac suffering from an inferiority complex. Because I have (perceived) low self-esteem, I pretend to be better than everyone else so I have an excuse not to make friends and—pathologically—to be so often alone as to be psychologically unhealthy.

The psychological literature is replete with studies of the deleterious effects of loneliness. We have been taught to believe that the word

. . . solitude expresses the glory of being alone, whereas the word loneliness expresses the pain of feeling alone. Millions of people suffer daily from loneliness, a debilitating psychological condition characterized by a deep sense of emptiness, worthlessness, lack of control, and personal threat (2).

I’m not pretending to know more than psychologists who carefully study people who are alone to find ways to help those who miserable and socially deprived. And I understand there are millions of those folks who need care and help. This is not about them. It’s about me (see, I’m an egomaniac). Those who are not marginalized or pathological deny loneliness, and

Despite our denial. . . it is evidenced everywhere. All one needs to do is look around oneself, or inside oneself, to see the painful evidence of loneliness and alienation. . .  One can be alone . . . in a crowd and still not be lonely. . . being alone, as a state of being, is neither positive nor negative. . .  (3).

The height of self-deception and ego-centric baloney: I would rather be in solitude than figure out how to chit-chat about Newt Gingrich or Kim Kardashian, or the Super Bowl, or my next trip to the Riviera. That, of course, limits the number of people I can expect to be with. My loneliness is often painful. It most likely contributes to my depression.

But that’s better than having maxed-out credit cards and lots of socially acceptable stuff in my head to gossip about. It takes a long time to make a real friend. Or does it? Well, it might if what you have to talk about first is the gowns of the starlets on the next red carpet to deny your loneliness.
_____________________
(1) Rokach, Ami. “From Loneliness To Belonging: A Review.” Psychology Journal 8.2 (2011): 70-81.
(2) Cacioppo, John T., Louise C. Hawkley, and Ronald A. Thisted. “Perceived Social Isolation Makes Me Sad: 5-Year Cross-Lagged Analyses Of Loneliness And Depressive Symptomatology In The Chicago Health, Aging, And Social Relations Study.” Psychology & Aging 25.2 (2010): 453-463.
(3) Rokach, op. cit.

Savasana - The Corpse

                                                YOGA
From death, some say,
we shall rise incorruptible.
I once held that belief in my mind
when I could not hold it in my body.
Now I lie still, feel my breathing in,
my breathing out, if not for my breath,
a corpse—Savasana.
The rage from my core—base, brutish,
mindless, out of control,
howling itself alive without thought–
melds into my stillness,
absorbed into my breath,
and my body believes
my self.

A SIGN
The plain gold sign of my father’s constancy
fits on the intermediate phalanx of the third digit
of my right hand.
My father’s hands were more delicate than mine
and his bond with my mother stronger than any
I have yet to sustain.
I slipped the valuable metal from his hand—
an intimacy reserved for a son—bound in gratitude,
standing by his bed a lifelong moment after
he died.

Signs reveal more than symbols. Red octagons
conjure no abstract ideas of coming to rest
and express no feelings in memory of approaching danger.
The shape is “Stop!”
Knocks at my door excite no thought of visitors past
or pleasant reveries on the hope of community
or deliberations on the importance of friendship.
They mean “come.”

My father’s gold band raises no debate of family values
or blustery rhetoric on the defence of marriage
or condemnation of the manners of anyone’s life
or pride of place in the communion of mystery.
His ring reveals only the essence of his life.
It was his and now—even on my clumsy hand—
it is mine.
It is love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEIZURE
I walk–a street, a sidewalk–alone.
For a moment I look, intent—staring
at rocks covering the parking strip of a front yard,
rocks of uniform size, round, some with sharp edges
like arrowheads we picked up a childhood ago
from the dry grassy sand hills at Ft. Robinson in Nebraska,
many states away but looming now close in my mind.
The rocks, deep gray with erratic white lines,
placed with care side by side in one layer,
I see as earth’s crust laid bare
here in this one small patch.

In this uncanny clarity of vision I see
the rocks in turn—
not together, but each one alone—
the shapes the same
but the edges distinct, chiseled
as Lakotas chiseled their arrowheads,
one chip at a time until their points
were right for the kill.

The sidewalk rises up to meet my feet,
and I see each grain of sand embedded in the fly ash.
The concrete mixture hardened flat when it was poured—
solid, straight-edged, brown beside the gray rocks.
And the clear thought of my own death
rises up to meet my mind. I say,
not
now.

DEAD HAND CONTROL
(In the Law: “A future interest that allows the grantor to retain the right to use that property until the specified transfer date.”)

Shelves of books and papers—-
mementos begging the question,
reasoning in circles,
circling back on themselves to find meaning-—
commemorate the meaning
of the books and papers I love,
I keep them to touch, to see-—perhaps to read.
The shelves at first were his,
now memorials of love abandoned in death,
not in betrayal, anger, or indifference.
The shelves became ours,
used together while he was here,
superstructures embracing our minds.
To remember is imperative,
to remember that long ago we established
control together of the structures of our lives
while he was here, and my right when he was gone,
not to commemorate him-—I now know-—
but to give me comfort,
to insure my security for awhile
in the circle of memory.

What good IS sitting alone in your room?

OK. I’ll take the bait.

Texts in moral psychology again insist that we examine “responsibility for character,” and psychiatrists have renewed their interest in the role of religions and various forms of spirituality in the development of personality and of psychiatric conditions. It is therefore timely to re–examine a tradition in the West which viewed phenomena akin to depression as “a spiritual disease” (1).

So depression is a spiritual disease?

There are, I suppose, lots of phenomena akin to depression. Certain of my friends and counselors believe I have the strange malady “social anorexia.” That means, of course, I’d rather you leave me alone. But then, the song in my head much of the time is

What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret (2).

Professor Daly lists characteristics of depression as “diminished interest or pleasure in most or any activities, weight loss, insomnia or hypersomnia. . . fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt. . . recurrent thoughts of death, and suicidal ideation” (3). I’m not admitting to any of these although my unwillingness to do so is, of course, disingenuous. Daly quotes the American Psychiatric Association guidelines saying these symptoms “cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” Social anorexia?

In the Middle Ages these symptoms, according to Daly were, “apprehended as evidence of a vice, the vice of acedia. Persons suffering from this vice were, in various senses and degrees, responsible for their state and required spiritual remedies.”

Let me put a couple of these symptoms in their proper perspective. Insomnia and hypersomnia can be manifestations of aging. Recurrent thoughts of death can be philosophical and/or theological ponderings born of the acute realization that all of us are mortal. That kind of theological and/or philosophical pondering can lead one to have little intereste in Kindle Fire, reality TV, electronic games, cocktail parties—or the Republican primaries. I suppose those disinterests are manifestations of “a spiritual disease,” or at least a social disease, not unlike juvenile delinquency (4).

We depressives may be “responsible for [our] state and [require] spiritual remedies.” The most interesting facet of Professor Daly’s argument for me is that he bases his first support for his thesis on the writings of a 4th-century Christian monk Evagrius Pontus who

fled Constantinople in his thirties for Jerusalem after he “fell in love with the wife of a prominent member of the highest society in the capital.” In Jerusalem he attached himself to the monasteries of Melania the Elder and of Rufinus. For the last seventeen years of his life (382–399), he lived as a member of a community of hermit monks (5).

Ah! The hermit monks. Social anorexia? So Daly begins his argument about depression as a spiritual disorder with a writer suffering from one symptom of depression, social anorexia.

Now the complete break in my logic, the cracks of which are already apparent.

Shame is . . . an egocentric response to wrong-doing. . . a pervasive sense that the offender is bad, rather than . . . that the offender has done something bad. Persons dealing with shame feel . . . they are unable to change their behavior because that behavior simply flows from who they are. This emotional experience often leads to hiding behaviors, procrastination, blaming others, and anger. Shame is predictive of low self-esteem and depression (6).

Evagrius Pontus must have felt himself bad, not that he had done something bad. If shame is a response to wrong-doing, it is not a neurological condition. It is not part of Bipolar II Disorder or any other clinical presentation. If one wants to use such language, shame is a spiritual disease. And it is, according to Grimm, et al, predictive of depression. It also often leads to anger.

Non sequitur: Shame is likely to be a constant in the feeling life of LGBT persons because

the awareness of stigma that surrounds homosexuality leads the experience to become an extremely negative one; shame and secrecy, silence and self-awareness, a strong sense of differentness—and of peculiarity—pervades the consciousness (7).

I grew up gay in the ‘50s in a small Nebraska city, a member of a Baptist Church of which my father was pastor. Shame and secrecy and a sense of peculiarity were my daily companions from about third grade on. Is it surprising there’s a possibility I’m an angry depressive living (still somewhat) in shame?

Lest anyone think I’m saying being gay is the cause of my shame, my depression, and my anger [and my social anorexia], I point out that not all LGBT persons feel shame or are depressed or deal with anger issues. Most do not have the struggle I’ve had with those characteristics. I know a gay couple who grew up in essentially the same circumstances as mine in Nebraska (neither of their fathers was a Baptist preacher) neither of whom has ever been treated for depression or any of its manifestations.

My work for most of my life has been to try to sort all of these things out and to make a life for myself. I have succeeded pretty well in the latter. And I’m finally beginning either to succeed at the former or to come to some sort of peace with it. I guess I’m writing this because I am living this moment in the wake of an extraordinarily difficult time that has helped me sort, and I have new insight.

Being gay was (is) one source of my shame and anger. But I am also Temporal Lobe Epileptic—which may or may not have neurological connection to those realities, but it certainly disrupted my functioning (I was not diagnosed until I was 35 years old). I may or may not have Bipolar II Disorder (most of the time I doubt it). However, I understand that

The struggle to understand and to be in contact with oneself means a life in chaos, experiencing shame, confusion, anguish, horror, anger, wrath, self-contempt, powerlessness and violence. There is also much happiness, joy, gratefulness and satisfaction in life . . . [But the] struggle can appear through worry whether the peace and happiness will last or if a new period of unreality lurks round the corner (8).

I know shame, confusion, wrath, self-contempt, and even violence. (The violent episodes in my life are, I’m sure, the result of shame—and/or manic behavior—but they then have fed the shame in a cycle.) I also know happiness, gratefulness and some satisfaction.

It is a wonder to me that never have my family, my colleagues, and my friends left me to struggle with my chaos, shame, confusion, or anger alone. I live in gratitude that for 67 years I have always had someone to give me assurance. Gratitude may be a form of spiritual remedy.
__________________________
(1) Daly, Robert W. “Before Depression: The Medieval Vice Of Acedia.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal & Biological Processes 70.1 (2007): 30-51.
(2) Cabaret. Harold Prince, director. Music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb. New York: Broadhurst Theater, 1966.
(3) Daly, op. cit.
(4) As long as I’m in the musical theater mode, I might as well quote “Gee, Officer Krupke” from WestSide Story.
(5) Daly quoting: Evagrius. Cistercian Studies Series: Number Four. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer. J. Bamberger, Trans. Spencer, MA: Cistercian Press, 1970.
(6) Grimm, Julia P. Grimm, et al. “Feeling Bad: The Different Colors Of Remorse.” Journal Of Psychology & Christianity 30.1 (2011): 51-69.
(7) Kelley, Thomas M., and Richard A. Robertson. “Relational Aggression And Victimization In Gay Male Relationships: The Role Of Internalized Homophobia.” Aggressive Behavior 34.5 (2008): 475-485.
(8) Maria Nyström, et al. “Extra Dimensions In All Aspects Of Life—The Meaning Of Life With Bipolar Disorder.” International Journal Of Qualitative Studies On Health & Well-Being 4.3 (2009): 159-169.

William Cowper

What’s on your mind today? Permanently. Obstinately.

I’ve been reading poetry by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, William Cowper, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, and John Gould Fletcher. Their names are on a long list of poets sharing one distinction. I chose them somewhat randomly to determine if the list has validity. Teasdale and Lindsay I read in high school; Fletcher is the only one of the five I will bother to read again (imagist, poetry to challenge).

Fletcher may be the only one I will choose to read again, but poems by William Cowper are permanently etched in my mind, stuck there. Obstinate. Church hymnals include poems that most of us would not turn a page to read were they not set to memorable (if not well-crafted) tunes. One poem by Cowper is

O for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame,
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lamb!

Where is the blessedness I knew,
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul refreshing view
Of Jesus and His Word?

What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill (1).

As a kid playing the piano for Wednesday night prayer meetings in the Baptist Church, I memorized both tunes and words of hymns. We used The American Hymnal (2) for those services. This hymn is number 106. I have my mother’s well-worn copy from sixty years ago. To this day I can recite the first and third stanzas. That “aching void the world can never fill” has followed me around for sixty years.

The void has long since ceased to have any relationship to the divine, or even the “spiritual” in my mind, or to Cowper’s poetry. But those words had power to affect the thinking, the self-understanding, the feeling life of a junior high school kid earnestly trying to prove himself to his parents (his father, the preacher) and to the community to which they belonged.

John Gould Fletcher

Never fear, however. The path to filling the void is outlined in another Thomas Cowper hymn.

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
Lose all their guilty stains, lose all their guilty stains;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

Then in a nobler, sweeter song, I’ll sing Thy power to save,
When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave.
Lies silent in the grave, lies silent in the grave;
When this poor lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave (3).

I cannot begin to explain the monumental effect hymns like this had (have?) on the evolution of my self-understanding. My father usually avoided this sort of hymn, the most blatant expressions of the saving power of the blood of Jesus. For some reason, however, we did sing this one enough that I can play it from memory on the piano and sing these two of its six stanzas. I shouldn’t need to explain the effect of imagining myself being plunged beneath a fountain of blood because I was a sinner. Add to that the certainty that my “song” would never be noble or sweet until I lay silent in the grave.

Referring specifically to this hymn, Benjamin Pugh attempts to place the Christian doctrine of “the blood” in a historical context asserting that
. . . such hyperbolic language about the blood of Christ is largely a thing of the past. Hymns, testimonies and sermons about ‘the Blood’ are the legacy of some remarkable movements such as the Salvation Army and some equally remarkable individuals such as Andrew Murray (4).

My guess is that Pugh’s assertion may be somewhat premature (5— evidence of Pugh’s inaccurate commentary). I have no interest in discussing the theology of all of this. Frankly, my agnosticism finds the topic repulsive.

At this point my argument becomes dicey because it may seem I’m saying something I’m not. I will continue and then explain what I do not mean.

Sara Teasdale

William Cowper wrote “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” shortly after a well-documented suicide attempt brought on by a devastating depression. When the hymn was first published in the US, the story of his suicide attempt was published.

. . .  he took his penknife and lay with his weight upon it, the point toward his heart. It was broken and would not penetrate. . .  he [tied a strong rope around his neck]. . .  on securing it to the door, he . . .  remained suspended till he had lost all consciousness of existence. . . [but the rope] broke and he fell to the floor, so that his life was saved; but the conflict had been greater than his reason could endure. He felt for himself a contempt not to be expressed or imagined. . . he felt as if he had offended God so deeply that. . .  his whole heart was filled with tumultuous pangs of despair. Madness was not far off, or rather madness was already come (6).

I do not mean to imply that people who believe in what Pugh calls “Blood Mysticism” are suicidal or dangerously depressed. Nor do I mean to imply that William Cowper is in any way responsible for others’ depression (including mine). The language of “Blood Mysticism” was part of the theology, teleology, and epistemology of the milieu in which he lived and I grew up.

What I mean to say is that Cowper had his poetry. My guess is that writing poetry, irrespective of what I think of its content, was a saving grace for him.

The list of poets I mentioned at the outset comes from an article by Professor Kay Jamison of Johns Hopkins University. It is a list of poets who suffer(ed) from bipolar disorder, some of whom committed suicide. Other than Cowper, those on my short list did (7). Aside from not being a poet or possessed of any other great creative power, I understand what little I know of each of these people. Anyone who has come to a place so dark that dying seems to be the only way out understands without question Cowper’s “aching void the world can never fill.” Why some poets survive and others don’t is a mystery.

At the risk of sounding self-contradictory (again? always?), I will finally assert my thesis. Some of us who know the despair of Cowper’s aching void, the darkness of bipolar disorder, are fortunate (and I am today eminently grateful) that the total of all of the ideas, experiences, creative impulses, and spiritual resources we are given—even those that we may eventually come to find distasteful—can work together to save us. I was not sure of that last Friday. Today I am.

Vachel Lindsay

Cowper had his poetry, I had the piano. Even though I was playing hymns with ghastly words when I was a kid, I was playing the piano. This past weekend music saved me again. I was in that “aching void the world can never fill,” but I had a job substituting at the organ for a church. Irrespective of the words the congregation sang, I was making music.
_____________
(1) Cowper, Thomas. “O for a Closer Walk with God.” The Hymnal 1940 (Episcopal Church). First published in Conyers’ Collection of Psalms and Hymns. London, 1772. The hymn is in the most recent hymnal of the Episcopal Church (1982), as well is in almost every American hymnal influenced by the hymns of the Anglican communion.
(2) The American Hymnal. Robert H. Coleman, ed. Dallas, Texas: Robert H. Coleman, 1933. Mr. Coleman must have made a bundle on this hymnal. It was, in the ‘50s, ubiquitous, the “American” hymnal.
(3) Cowper, Thomas. “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” The American Hymnal. Number 58.
(4) Pugh, Benjamin A. “A Brief History of The Blood: The Story of The Blood Of Christ in Transatlantic Evangelical Devotion.” Evangelical Review of Theology 31.3 (2007): 239-255.
(5) The Baptist Hymnal. Nashville: Convention Press, 1991, the current approved hymnal of the Southern Baptist Convention (the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the US), has one following the other, hymns titled: “There Is Power in the Blood,” “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” (written in 1966), “Are You Washed in the Blood,” and “There Is a Fountain.”
(6) North American Review, January, 1834. Quoted at: “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood.” The Cyber Hymnal. 2012. Web. 3 Jan. 2012. http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/t/f/o/tfountfb.htm
(7) Jamison, Kay Redfield. “Manic Depressive Illness and Creativity.” Scientific American Special Issue 7.1 (1997): 44.)

Hildegard's migraines

The end of each year of my shuffle through this mortal coil (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, scene 1) nearly coincides with the end of the calendar year. I’m two days the other side of a “New Year’s Baby.” New Year’s, 1945. The Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration do not consider me a “Baby Boomer,” but my SS benefits are calculated as if I were; they are lower than if I had been born four days earlier.

Obviously my inability to hurry up and get things done (things like getting born) is a lifelong problem for me. The disorder of my life grows in direct proportion to my inability to understand the financial implications of my actions. I still lose money daily by not taking care of business when it would be most beneficial.

“Shuffl[ing] off this mortal coil,” is the human propensity to die amid the hubbub and disorder of life (the “coil”). I like to add another meaning of “coil;” that is, to “wind up,” as in a rattle snake’s coiling before striking.

This mortal coil is not only confusing, but it is also dangerous.

Taking stock of my progress through this mortal coil, therefore, is probably unwise. What I find will likely befuddle and frighten me. As Hamlet says, “what dreams may come. . . must give us pause.”

In a cheap plastic picture holder (my possessions and my home do not appear to have been designed and arranged by Nate Berkus) above my desk are photographs of eight people dear to me: my parents, my partner, two of my father’s siblings and their spouses, and my uncle by marriage (should I not refer to my uncle’s partner of 60 years as my uncle?). All are deceased. Two—my father and my uncle—died this year. Taking stock is, if not frightening, at least disquieting.

The source of that disquietude should be obvious.

I am disquieted by thinking about the deaths of these people I’ve loved. Apparently thinking about death is socially unacceptable among my friends. For that I have three possible explanations: some friends are too young to have yet discovered the reality of death’s inevitability; some are old enough but have no intention to dwell on reality; and some have a religious view of the world that does not allow for thinking about death in any realistic way.

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:|
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming (1).

Allowing myself to be disquieted by—or even to ponder too closely—the deaths of those I love is perhaps unwise. Pondering their deaths inevitably leads to thoughts of my own mortality. Free-floating thoughts of death are more dangerous than confusing.  In most circumstances I will do almost anything to avoid danger. I do not, however, avoid the danger of thinking about death (2).

The beginning shall remind us of the end.

In his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks proposes the (now widely accepted) possibility that the mystical experiences of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) were associated with migraine headaches. That she suffered migraines is apparent from her drawings which many migraine sufferers affirm are representations of what they see during one of those headaches. (I showed some to a migraine sufferer last week, and he agreed instantly.) Sacks finds even more important evidence of her migraines in her descriptions of her mystical experience as consistent with the

. . .  most intense symptoms of migraine aura, and the most difficult of description and analysis, [the] occurrences of feelings of sudden familiarity and certitude… or [their] opposite. Such states are experienced, momentarily and occasionally, by everyone; their occurrence in migraine auras is marked by their overwhelming intensity and relatively long duration (3).

Let me now compare myself favorably (the nerve!) with the beloved mystic. I know well “the occurrences of feelings of sudden familiarity and certitude… or [their] opposite.” I assume Dr. Sacks is correct in asserting that everyone has these experiences. For me they are induced by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy seizures. These experiences have, for most of my life, terrified me.

No more.

In my seizures, the world appears as it might peering through the wrong end of a telescope. However, what I see does not appear small; I have a sense of distorted reality—a sense that objects are nearby and far away at the same time, that is, feelings of sudden familiarity and certitude… or [their] opposite.

For those of us with these brain “disorders” this mortal coil is more snake-like than confusing. Or not. Perhaps we have clearly experienced the possibility that

We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes . . . like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg. And we sort of understand that halfway. . . Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And it tends to grow. That’s the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy goes up with time, things become more disorderly. . . Entropy goes up as it becomes messier (4).

As I shuffle off this mortal coil, the entropy of my life increases. That one little lapse of entering the world three days late has mushroomed into a life of (nearly total) confusion. However, Sean Carroll may have misunderstood. He’s not old enough to know we do remember more of the future than of the past. I remember the future of my deceased loved ones, the future that I, as they have done, will die. I do not mean some sort of heavenly reward. I remember being dead. We all remember that future, but we don’t want to think or talk about it. We remember because once we did not exist.

FEAR death? — to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place [. . . .]
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall, [. . . .]
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old  [. . . .] (5)

The barriers fall and we do remember the future.  The “occurrences of feelings of sudden familiarity and certitude. . . are experienced, momentarily and occasionally, by everyone.” We are suddenly familiar with our death because we remember our birth.

Eliot has cause and effect confused. The beginning does not remind us of the end. The end reminds us of the beginning. We remember the future.
___________________________
(1) From “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” one of the five “Ariel Poems” published in 1962. One of these is the more famous, “The Journey of the Magi.” For a discussion of these poems, see: Sylvia, Richard A. “T. S. Eliot’s ARIEL POEMS.” Explicator 45.1 (1986): 41.
(2) A cursory search through my 319 postings here would probably yield 150 that mention death. Most prominent recently are: 11—18—2011, 11—11—2011, 11—03—2011, 09—19—2011, and my last birthday, 01—02—2011.
(3) Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York : Perennial Library, 1987.
(4) Biba, Erin. “What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory” (Interview with physicist Sean Carroll). Wired Science. wired.com. February 26, 2010. Web. 30 Dec. 2011.
(5) Browning, Robert. “Prospice.” Asolando–Fancies and Facts. 1889. The full text below.

PROSPICE (Latin for “look to the future”)

by: Robert Browning (1812-1889) The collection published the day he died.

FEAR death? — to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute’s at end,
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

This has been a weird weird weird time.

Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), speaking of the Republican agenda in Congress said, “This entire session of Congress has felt to many of us like a trip into Alice’s Wonderland,” said DeGette. “To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat, ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. … You must be mad or you wouldn’t have come here.’ Sadly for the American people, H.R. 1633 simply underscores the ‘madness’ of this body right now” (1)

And I’m fitting right in. The other side of hypergraphia is writer’s block. I’ve had it big time since Thanksgiving. Fortunately I other things to do at 4:30 in the morning when I try to write. Here are some of them:

I’ll be back writing soon. Until then, let’s all enjoy being mad here.

 

______________
(1)  McAuliff, Micahel. “Imaginary Farm Dust Regulation Banned By House.” Huffington Post. 12/8/2011. Web. 9 Nov. 2011.

 

valued activity

On November 22, on a flight from Houston to New Orleans, I met a woman whose conversation over Thanksgiving dinner I wish I could hear. She is a lively, gregarious, self-assured but in no way overbearing grandmother—about my age, I’d guess—from Kansas City (I know about grandmothers from Kansas City, having had two of them myself).

The results from the current study add to the mounting evidence which suggests that feelings of gratitude may help people deal more effectively with the pernicious effects of stress (1).

She was travelling to New Orleans via Houston with her husband (a dapper grandfatherly type, equally pleasantly self-assured) to visit their grandchildren for Thanksgiving. They were having a good time both in the moment and in anticipation of being with their grandchildren.

November is the cruelest month (sorry, T.S., it’s not April). First, there’s the whole JFK thing on November 22nd —the day I (and all of my friends) first knew for sure society cannot be trusted. Three years after that, also on the 22nd, I proposed to the woman who eventually became my wife, one of the grandest missteps of both of our lives. Twenty years later on November 15, I reached the nadir of my alcoholism and began the now-25-year process of learning to live sober. Seventeen years later on November 12th, my partner died.  Three years later I spent ten November days in a mental hospital, not quite on a suicide watch, but never—even in my sleep—being left alone.

Unless you are a well-adjusted grandmother heading to spend a few days with her grandchildren over the holidays, November is a cruel month.

The one hitch in the Kansas City Grandmother’s travel plans was that she was not seated with her husband. They were each in a middle seat on the 737, one row apart. I know that was odd because the seat next to her was available an hour before departure time, and they gave it to someone else.

I don't want your elbow in my ribs

Their less-than-ideal seating arrangement on the plane didn’t seem to bother them. It was, after all, a mere 70-minute trip. However, the man occupying the aisle seat next to her, almost immediately when he sat down turned to her and berated her for having her elbow too far over the armrest between them, finally saying much too loudly, “I don’t want your elbow in my ribs.” She answered with not a hint of anger in her voice, “I’m sure there is enough room for both of us,” and moved her elbow so she was not touching him.

. . . valued activities that seem to be unrelated to the primary difficulties of life, especially activities that are self-initiated, may in fact serve the indirect function of augmenting a sense of control, placing those difficulties in a broader perspective, and offsetting the distress occasioned by them with positive experiences and emotional states (2).

On Sunday, November 20, I substituted for the organist of the large Episcopal Church I joined a year ago because I love the music—especially the organist’s playing. I am not being disingenuously modest when I say that substituting for him is both daunting and a great honor. When I arrived in New Orleans, I checked my email and discovered a message from one of the church’s clergy.

. . . I wanted to tell you what a great job I thought you did on Sunday. The organ and piano sounded great and your timing and tempo were perfect. Thank you for substituting for James. It’s so great to have a sub that knows what they’re doing! Have a blessed Thanksgiving.

The (perhaps) obvious connection between the Kansas City Grandmother and my playing the organ on Sunday is my being given the opportunity to participate in a “valued activit[y] that seem[s]to be unrelated to the primary difficulties of life.”

My first difficulty getting from Dallas to New Orleans was that I went to the wrong airport. (DAL) on an itinerary confirmation means Love Field (where JFK was headed on November 22, 1963), not Dallas-Ft. Worth airport (DFW). How was I to know, having flown in and out of Dallas airports for only 17 years? That I was on the plane at all was a generous gift of Continental Airlines. It wasn’t easy for them. Weather had delayed all flights in and out of Houston, and the flight with the Kansas Grandmother was the third they assigned me to.

My second primary difficulty was that all airports freak me out. I always have seizures caused by the idiotic lighting, the noise, and the general hubbub. So what, one might ask. I know what’s happening, no one else does, and my seizures are in no way dangerous.

After the airline gave me the first ticket—without the normal surcharge they could have demanded for changing my ticket—because I was so upset, I called a friend whose advice I often rely on. He told me that, rather than being upset, I should look at the experience as an opportunity to practice gratitude—I was going to get to my family Thanksgiving in spite of going to the wrong airport.

I tried. I honestly did.

[Roman Emperor] Marcus Aurelius. . . in his recommendation on how to live life said, “Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end the journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew”(3).

Awaiting the family

When I remembered my friend’s advice, I apologized to the Kansas City Grandmother. She accepted my apology, and we chatted enough for me to find out the little I know about her.

Emotion may be studied as an immediate feeling state, as a more enduring climate of mood, or as affective trait. The term affective trait refers to how likely a given individual is to experience a particular emotion. Thus, the affective trait of gratitude may be thought of as a predisposition to experience gratitude [emphasis in original] (4).

I am somewhat perplexed by George Washington’s proclamation saying the 26th day of the cruelest month in 1789 should

. . . be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection. . .

Here I will wax more sentimental than I ever want to be. I don’t know about the “beneficent author;” however, I hope some day I may be possessed of “the affective trait of gratitude [that] may be thought of as a predisposition to experience gratitude.” I don’t think it has anything to do with turkeys. But I know I would feel better if didn’t berate Kansas City Grandmothers—or anyone else. Especially so soon after receiving the gift of participating in a valued activity that has nothing to do with the (perceived) difficulties of my life—and being given an almost-free plane ticket.
_________________
(1) Krause, Neal. “Religious Involvement, Gratitude, And Change In Depressive Symptoms Over Time.” International Journal For The Psychology Of Religion 19.3 (2009): 155-172.
(2) Gottlieb, B. H. “Conceptual and measurement issues in the study of coping with chronic stress.” In B. H. Gottlieb (Ed.), Coping with chronic strain (pp. 3–40). New York: Plenum, 1997. Quoted in Krause.
(3) Eliot, C. W. The Apology, Phaedo and Crito of Plato; Golden Sayings of Epictetus; Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: Part 2 Harvard classics. New York: Collier 1909. Also quoted in Krause.
(4) Russell L. Kolts, et al. “Gratitude And Happiness: Development Of A Measure Of Gratitude, And Relationships With Subjective Well-Being.” Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal 31.5 (2003): 431.

 

Mary is not alone

The pursuit of happiness? At what cost? Anyone with any sense will see instantly that this is a self-absorbed little purge by a rueful loner, a misanthrope. Or perhaps I’m saying stuff everyone feels but most people are afraid (because being “up” is the name of our game, happiness is our pursuit no matter at what spiritual cost) to think, much less say.

At sixty-six, asking what one wants to be when one grows up is ridiculous. Surely one knows by now, and surely one is grown up by now.

I want to be a concert organist. Composer. Great novelist. Triathlete. It’s clear. I want to be extraordinary, if not rich at least famous. But not a Kardashian.

Grandiosity aside, one of my fondest dreams is to be is socially adept. I’m invited to a party this weekend with people I barely know. We take classes together.  I’ve had one fifteen minute conversation with one of them.

My friends assure me when I mention it that I am socially adept. Most of my friends became friends because we were involved in some activity together that required at least pleasant acquaintanceship.

I can barely imagine going to a party for the purpose of making friends. Or meeting interesting people.

To explain. I’ll jump right into the middle of my thinking, without preparation.

I’m at the stage in life when almost everything that happens seems to be a major life change. Nothing I experience these days seems to revert to, oh say, the ‘70s. Just why I think that might be a good idea, I’m not sure. I’d rather forget Richard Nixon altogether. But in the ‘70s it never occurred to me there was anything I wanted that I could not have or accomplish. Of course, I was young and thin and a full-blown practicing alcoholic. So my grasp on reality was anyone’s guess.

And then a friend—older, wiser and more intelligent than I—gave me a copy of The Denial of Death by Earnest Becker. I read it, and it added a dimension to my thinking, a dimension that eventually changed everything about my view of the world. OK, so I thrive on hyperbole. I AM a drama queen.

When Pat gave me the Becker book, I was recently divorced because I had finally come to grips with the fact that I was living a lie—come to grips not because I was in any way noble, but because I am not smart enough to keep two lives straight (pun intended). The gay one kept interfering with the straight one, and it was just too complicated.

The problem with the sea-change I experienced was that I changed but gave up none of my ideas about myself. I was too damned stubborn to do that. Or too young. I had no concept that

to successfully negotiate a major life change—to come out on the other side of a traumatic life event—one must recommit to goals in order to restore positive functioning. Important life changes require a change in one’s goals, but disengaging from previously valued goals is a difficult process that involves recognizing that one’s abilities, opportunities, and life circumstances will never lead to one’s hoped-for future (1).

I was determined to carry into the vast and infinite future of my unfettered  life the hopes and desires I’d always had—in no particular order: an important job as an organist with attendant fame and fortune; a rich, famous, and handsome husband; the O’Henry prize for a short story—you get the picture. The kind of dreams every narcissistic, alcoholic, egomaniac has with no concept of the discipline it might take to achieve.

And then Pat gave me that book. (It was, by the way, a very popular book.)

The title of the article quoted above is the topic of this writing. “Lost And Found Possible Selves: Goals, Development, and Well-Being.” I like the idea of “lost and found possible selves.” It would have been a great idea to hold onto in the ‘70s. Possible selves, according to King and Hicks

are personalized representations of the important life goals. Possible selves encompass not only the goals we are seeking but all of the imaginable futures we might occupy. Possible selves serve as cognitive resources that motivate the self throughout adult development (2).

I don’t know why I want to be socially adept. Something to do with depression. I’m seeing a new therapist (a PhD psychologist this time). Last session he told me I had described to him in five minutes five of the characteristics of depression: lack of sleep, lack of pleasure in normal activities, hyper irritability, inability to focus or make decisions, recurrent thoughts of death.

So feeling like this I’m supposed to go to a party with a bunch of virtual strangers? Nope. Not me.

But I’ll bet most people who go to such parties feel exactly as I do. Becker was right, of course. We will deny death right up to the moment of dying. We’ll go to parties and concerts and make a million dollars a year and buy a new house and Occupy Wall Street. We hope to avoid

. . . the central dilemmas of emerging identity: sorting out our own values from those we have inherited . . .  negotiating a life path within the frameworks of the families, communities, society, and culture in which we live. [We deny that] Identity development requires that an individual negotiate the difficult balance that must be struck between the imperative of being true to oneself and the desire to belong (3).

It’s negotiating that life path that’s the kicker. My fear is that my desire to belong is an exact negation of being true to myself. I don’t belong. I’m not only clinically depressed. I stopped denying death a long time ago—and not because I read it in a book.

I’ve written before about one of my favorite plays, The Insanity of Mary Girard, by Lanie Robertson. Mary is a sane woman (based on a true story) committed to an insane asylum by her husband in order to steal her sizeable fortune.

We’re all Mary Girard. Committed to asylums not for our money, but for our lives. We go to parties to meet the other inmates. And the parties deny death. They are the milieus in which we look for our “possible selves,” those possible selves that “serve as cognitive resources that motivate the self throughout adult development.” Those possible selves that “will never lead to our hoped-for future.” That hoped-for future without death. We have to deny death because

The difficulty with imagining our own mortality. . . is due . . . to a certain proclivity toward two common tendencies: on the one hand is the predilection to habituate and routinize death by associating it exclusively with others and, on the other, is a misplaced confidence in ourselves, particularly in our youth or good health (4).

So it’s no longer off to the party. It’s staying home finally to “[disengage] from previously valued goals.”

To find out what I want to be when I grow up.
__________________
(1) King, Laura A., and Joshua A. Hicks. “Lost And Found Possible Selves: Goals, Development, and Well-Being.” New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education 114 (2007): 27-37.
(2) King and Hicks, op. cit.
(3) King, Laura A., and Nathan Grant Smith. “Gay and Straight Possible Selves: Goals, Identity, Subjective Well-Being, And Personality Development.” Journal of Personality 72.5 (2004): 967-994.
(4) Perreira, Todd LeRoy. ““Die Before You Die”: Death Meditation As Spiritual Technology Of The Self In Islam And Buddhism.” Muslim World 100.2/3 (2010): 247-267.

 

 

Yesterday I asked here why I write  this stuff. The answer was vaguely, “to find out who I am.” In one respect I know too clearly who I am. Or I at least know too clearly some of what has happened to make me who I am. Psychotherapy, counseling, and neurological care for the last 45 years have given me a fairly clear picture.

In other respects I will never know who I am. I have a perplexity that will go with me to my grave.

One of the primary symptoms of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy is a sense of dissociation coupled with strange and often bewildering déjà vu experiences. Fortunately I have other symptoms of TLE so my diagnosis as TLEptic makes perfect sense.

One of the primary symptoms of childhood sexual abuse is a sense of dissociation couple with strange and often bewildering body memories for which there seems to be no cause. Not exactly the same as symptoms of TLE, but so close as to create a bewildering perplexity of neurological/mental/physical phenomena that one who experiences can never sort out.

I am that one.

I’m not going to go into detail about either reality of my brain’s existence (I must also add Bipolar II disorder—or at least what looks like that but may, in fact, be simply the confusing result of the combination of the other two realities).  The details are none of anyone’s business except persons I know to be trustworthy.

I’ll just say I understand more completely than I wish I did that when

precious bonds of love and attachment are torn apart by the physical or sexual abuse of a child by one or more caretakers or relatives, the impact on development is rather like what is left after a train leaves its tracks and plows through a flower garden (1).

The assistant coach in the Penn State football program was a surrogate caretaker for young boys through a foundation he apparently set up especially to make possible his being a surrogate caretaker for young boys. He tore apart the precious bond of love and attachment at least eight of those boys had developed with him.

I must say, of course, the indictment alleges he tore apart that precious bond. He is innocent until proven guilty, but it hardly seems likely the Penn State Board of Trustees would have terminated the legendary career of its most famous personality over mere allegations.

President Obama said of the sordid affair, “Obviously what happened was heartbreaking, especially for the victims, the young people who got affected by these alleged assaults.”

He is so wrong. So very, very wrong.  What happened is not in any way “heartbreaking.” For the adults involved—all of them, coaches, athletic director, provost, president, all of them—what happened is simply that they violated the law; more significantly, they violated our basic codes of decency and morality. Breaking the law is not heartbreak.

For the boys involved, what happened to them is not “heartbreaking,” either. It is devastating. It is horrific. It is a terror against which they will have to strive, to struggle, to defend themselves for the rest of their lives.

Writer Heather Kirn has described the devastation these boys are likely to experience. She writes about her sexual abuse by her father. A universal schoolyard joke is for her a constant terror. She says in school her friends asked, as a joke

why the chicken crossed the road. [But] at night I couldn’t make it to the other side. And now in my adulthood, when I try to write [about my father] all I recall are shadows. Shadows creeping down corridors, shadows lingering at the top of stairwells and standing in doorways. Shadows indicating terror but shedding no light. He’s the vague evildoer. I’m the kid who can’t get to the other side (2).

Shall I say this here? I don’t want to. But you have to know that I know what I am talking about. One of my earliest memories, from age three or four, is waking up in the middle of the night in the embrace of an adult relative, smeared with his semen.

Yes, I have to be graphic. Otherwise you might go right on thinking “what happened was heartbreaking.”

I have been in psychological treatment of one sort or another my entire adult life. I’m not writing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. I’m not saying my sexual abuse was the only reason for therapy. But one of my psychiatrists told me that “childhood sexual abuse is the only trauma I know that the victim never can get over.”

The sordid Penn State affair is not some indiscretion on the part of a coach. It is abuse—monstrous abuse by a pedophile. It is abuse on the part of those who could have but didn’t stop it in its tracks and bring the pedophile to justice.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but you are dead wrong.
___________________
(1) Lyon, Emily. “The Spiritual Implications Of Interpersonal Abuse: Speaking Of The Soul.” Pastoral Psychology 59.2 (2010): 233-247.
(2) Kirn, Heather. “The Evildoer and the God Who Made Him.” Southern Review 47.1 (2011): 125-140.

College writing students often plaintively comment about assignments, “I don’t know what you want us to write.”  I used answer, “I write to find out what I think.” This is a pretty common understanding of writers about writing.

These days I write to find out who I am. What I think is ultimately of little importance. Of course, one should find out who one is in private, not in the most public venue in history. I started writing here when I believed what I think is important. One side effect is that several people who thought they were my friends have rejected me (unfriended me on Facebook, where I post this stuff) because they discovered what I think to be distasteful.

Yesterday I spent most of the day with members of the football team with which I am, by virtue of my employment as a teacher of writing, associated. I won’t write what I think about that. My understanding of the relationship of my employer to them athletes would not be helpful to them. They already have an impossible “row to hoe.” Abuse does not have to involve sex.

I want to write about (to find out who I am in relation to) the presumptuousness of “teaching” writing. Each of those guys is more intelligent than I am. They have one of the types of intelligence I cannot imagine having—athletic ability that translates to an understanding of the game—it’s “Just Gaming” (look up Jean-François Lyotard if you don’t understand)—that  I can’t comprehend when I watch it, much less were I to play. But even more than physical/athletic intelligence they have an internal gut-level intelligence that is necessary for their survival. They are caught up in a deadly game of the survival of the fittest. On more levels than I can comprehend.

The topic I’ve thrown out for my classes to wrestle with grew from our reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (1). I’ve challenged them to ponder the possible grotesquery of scientific medical experimentation run amok. My athletic friends have discovered such subjects as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, performance enhancing drug use by athletes (especially Barry Bonds—they aren’t the least bit interested in Lance Armstrong), and Sickle Cell Anemia research.

One of the students—after we talked about it for half an hour—asked me with apparent trepidation if he could focus his research on the possibility that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study  was racist. All I said was, “It looks racist to me.” I wish I had some objective corroboration of my observation that the atmosphere in the room changed completely.

But since my writing has nothing to do with objectivity, I will dismiss that wish with a shrug.  I will say that, after ten weeks in class, after having had one-one-one conferences about the two papers they have written previously, after hearing my irreverent and, I’m afraid, sarcastic attempts at humor about everything from Rick Perry to the Green Party and back again, after watching me fail absolutely to keep order in the classroom, their (apparent) uncertainty whether or not I would allow them—in this “color-blind” society at this university that congratulates itself on its cultural “diversity”—to write about racism shocked me. I have no hard evidence that these students have struggled through their entire educational careers against a system that demands

that the student [see] the error of his ways, for, inevitably, he [will] find that the more effective ethos would be one that aligned with the values, morals, and codes of conduct deemed acceptable by an audience of [the institution] (2).

I’d guess they have struggled against that system. Ethos—the moral authority to approach one’s audience—comes not from who the student is but from who the institution wants her to be, from the assumption that the student will “conform to institutionally accepted values.” There would be no problem

if those values only involved what makes writing good. But, let’s not kid ourselves: The production of “good writing” is often intimately intertwined with, if not dependent on, the demonstration of the values of what makes a good person (3).

Surely I don’t need to point out that the institutional idea of what makes a good person may have nothing to do with what these students think will make a good person. My friends who have unfriended me on Facebook cannot comprehend—or accept—that while what I really think about any given topic may not [demonstrate their] values of what makes a good person, it’s more important to understand that what I think has nothing to do with what makes me a good person. Or that I care if anyone thinks I am a good person.
This is not a liberal rant about the vestiges of racism in this country (at least in Dallas, Texas). It is not a petulant rant born of anti-social immaturity (although I am immature and somewhat anti-social).

I want to learn to die before I die.

I want to learn to die before I die because I’ve had a glimpse or two that

learning how to die while living constitutes one of the essential skills in the art of living. . . indispensable for rendering absurd the glamour of vanity: “Meditate again and again” on death, insists the renowned Tibetan scholar Tsong-kha-pa (1357–1419), “until you have turned your mind away from the activities of this life, which are like adorning yourself while being led to the execution ground” (4).

I don’t write to find out what I think. These days I write with the fragile hope of learning who I am. I take the concept of learning to die before I die as a

spiritual technology human beings have utilized throughout the ages, and across a variety of cultural and

religious contexts, as a means for understanding, defining, experiencing, and, ultimately, transforming the self in relation to the dominant culture that otherwise shapes one’s personal and social identity (5).
For me, part of that technology is writing. Most of my writing is, in fact, private. Today, however, I am thinking about how to be in existence, in relationship with college football players. I think—though I do not know for sure and have no idea of convincing anyone else this is true—that “one who practices mindfulness of death is ‘not stingy . . . does not cling to things, is endowed with the perception of impermanence . . . and the perception of not-self’” (6).

I’m not exactly sure what is meant by learning to die before I die. However, a tiny, endangered part of myself understands that I want to “decipher the true nature of [my] being and, by so doing, undergo a process of self-transformation that is decisive” (7). A transformation of myself that will not stand in the way of a young man who needs to write without [alignment] with the values, morals, and codes of conduct deemed acceptable by [the institution] in order to find his own “process of self-transformation that is decisive.”
_________________
(1) Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.
(2) Allen, Sarah. “The Cultivated Self: Self Writing, Subjectivity, And Debate.” Rhetoric Review 29.4 (2010): 364-378.
(3) Allen, loc. cit.
(4) Perreira, Todd LeRoy. ““Die Before You Die”: Death Meditation As Spiritual Technology Of The Self In Islam And Buddhism.” Muslim World 100.2/3 (2010): 247-267. Quoting: The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, Vol. One: The Lamrim Chenmo. Joshua W. C. Cutler, Editor-in-Chief, Guy Newland, ed.  Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2000 (160).
(5) Perreira, op. cit.
(6) Perreira, quoting Arahant Upatissa. The Path of Freedom (Vimuttimagga), The Rev. N. R. M. Ehara, Soma Thera, and Kheminda Thera, trans. Colombo: The Saman Press, 1961.
(7) Perreira, op.cit.