"Summer of ‘48" -- from THE BLACK MOUNTAIN BOOK

Ray Spillenger – Tuesday, July 10, in conversation said he had graduated from Pratt in 1948 and, seeing the little ad in The Nation, that Mark Tobey would be teaching at Black Mountain that summer, decided to go down.  So, he took the train, we agreed it was a beautiful ride, and the closer it got, people got off until there was no one in the car Ray was in, except himself and two fellas in the back.

Rose from his seat, went back to them.  Introductions –

John Cage, Merce Cunningham.  Ray said he was going to study with Mark Tobey, no, Cage said, he’s sick, another artist is taking his place.  Who is that? Ray asked.  DeKooning.  Cage knew DeKooning.  Ray had heard of DeKooning.  So typical of the school’s hiring policies.  I discovered Pat Passloff was there, too, that summer, where she and Ray and Bill (DeK) became such close friends.

I should check this with Joe, but Ray also said that was the summer Joe Fiore decided to continue studies as an artist, rather than musician.  His dad, violinist for the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell ... Joe talked with Bill ...

A play by Satie produced.  Ray and Bill with others worked on the sets – details available elsewhere – and because there were no curtains it was done in the Dining Hall, newspapers were placed over the stage objects, and just before action began, newspapers whisked away.  Albers, who sat beside Ray in the audience – keep in mind Albers’ interest in textural collage (cardboard egg crates, etc.) – said to Ray, that he liked it better with the newspapers.

Ray leaned close, telling me.  In his kitchen, as I sipped Scotch and water over ice, Ray cried – and I agreed.  I knew.

“He was right!  It did look better!”

Adding, in his hallway before I left, that stage set Bill made would go for a million.

Said Petter Grippe was there that summer, and I recalled meeting him, in the Fifties, at the Cedar?  But Pat Passloff remains a mystery to me.  Always liked her, and her work.  I have the feeling she’s a source person, so far untapped.  With an original or only touched-on point of view, still but in regards to Milton Resnick.  But that she was at school that summer, and met Ray and Bill, gives the matter an added dimension.

            - Fielding Dawson, The Black Mountain Book (1970)

A Translation from Sandro Penna

They'd left me alone

in the countryside under

fine rain alone.

Bare poplars

watched me

silent

and amazed: my own trouble

they bore, the pain

of not knowing clearly...

And the wet ground

and the black mountains so high

kept silent, vanquished.  It was

as though some wicked god

had with just a nod

made all stone.

And the rain was washing those stones.

            Translated by P. Spillenger, Rome, October 1980

No Ideas But in Things

I came late to the world of driving automobiles.  I grew up in New York, where it was a point of massive pride not to own one.  Of course, I drove other people’s cars in college, and never thought about getting a license.  Every now and then I’d hurtle down the Hutchinson Parkway in a rusted-out pink beetle with a broken 8-track that belonged to a girl named “Meat.”  But mostly I putted around safely in surrounding neighborhoods.

But when I moved to Louisiana in 1985 to take a job teaching Hamlet and Tacitus at a small Methodist college, I knew I needed my own wheels.  So having been tutored more tolerantly than I deserved by a young Russian graduate student, I got my license and ended up buying a Bicentennial Cutlass Supreme in Shreveport with a monster V8 engine and a Confederate flag decal on the rear window.

Over the years, as I’ve gotten older and stodgier, I’ve noticed myself getting angry from time to time at people who do stupid shit in their little metal rolling boxes.  You know who I mean: the people on their cell phones who forget there are other people on the road; the people who race down the highway shoulder and then push into the legal lane at the last minute; who don’t use their turn signal when it would be convenient for others to know What They Are Going to Do; who tailgate for no reason at all except to wave their member at you, allegorically speaking, like a college football pennant; and yes, the ones who sit passive-aggressively at the green light waiting to make a left turn and never move out into the intersection, until there’s only just time for them to make the turn when the light finally does turn red.

Understandably, I would devise deft little ways to wreak revenge on these turds.  But mostly they were in my mind and stayed there; my hypertrophied superego would keep me from returning fire.  I was a civilized person, an ethical person, an easygoing person – not an angry old man.

At one point my frustration with drivers grew to the point that it became a recurring subject of my weekly psychotherapy sessions.  Together my therapist and I would explore the various narratives that coursed through me in a split second while I raged outwardly against the thoughtlessness, narcissism and just plain knuckleheadedness of the American people.

I eventually came to understand (actually it took about three seconds) that I was taking their behavior “personally,” and that it was both illogical and self-destructive to do so.  Etcetera; etcetera.

This therapeutic paradigm of how to think about my interactions with shitty drivers held sway for a few years.  Every time other people drove like maniacs or imbeciles, I would try not to take it personally.  I would try to be at peace with it.  I would try to Zen it out.  Sometime I succeeded; I far more often failed.  But the therapeutic model had a lasting impact: guilt.  Every time I felt anger toward another driver, I would think: I have failed to be well-adjusted.  I have failed to live with compassion.  I have failed to evolve.  Guilt – at least I got something out of it.

Then one day a strumpet red Ford Focus turned a corner like it was the Batmobile, drove up to within a foot of my rear bumper and stayed there.  I was doing 35 in a 30 mile per hour zone.  I did not enjoy the driver’s behavior.  I did not approve of it.  And I took it personally.

So I hatched a plan.  I happened to know, since this was my turf,  that about a quarter-mile ahead there was a spot where cars would be parked on the right-hand side of the road – aka, the right-hand lane.  My nemesis was driving in the right-hand lane, and I in the left.  What he didn’t know was that he would be unable to stay in the right lane because of the parked cars.  And there was a line of about 15 cars behind me that would make it difficult for him to change lanes.  So I drove at a speed that would lure him into thinking he could pass me on the right, but then I sped up so that he couldn’t.  He met up with the parked cars, had to slam on the brakes, and was unable to get into the left lane for another minute, by which time I was long gone.

Petty, you say?  Absolutely.  But incredibly satisfying.  (Imagine me pumping my fist privately as I whizzed down the road.)  Things don’t always go as planned, and it’s really sweet when a plan comes together.  And yet, of course, elation was quickly followed, and swallowed, by guilt.  How could I do such a thing?  It was so unBuddhist.  So unevolved.  So childish.

As it happens, I’ve been making natural history documentaries for a few years now, and so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at animals.  It won’t surprise you to learn that there’s a lot of aggression in the animal world.  Some of it is over food, some over territory, a lot over mating rights.  Some of it, though, is … just because.  There’s no food, space or nooky at issue; there isn’t even a question of dominance within the group.  It’s just because … that’s one of the things animals do.  They wrestle, they compete.  They jockey for position.  I don’t know for sure that what animals do can be called “fun,” but let’s do it anyway:  They have fun; they play.

So as I was mulling over this fact, I suddenly stopped feeling guilty.  I realized that this primate’s long effort to keep from being upset by other drivers had been totally misguided.  Mutual aggression was natural; keeping the peace was not.  I had won a battle against another alpha, and I hadn’t had to shed a drop of blood to do it.  There was something primordially familiar about the feeling.  For a second there, it felt like my very chromosomes were cheering madly.

There’s no way out of it: Evolution carries a price tag. 

We’ve all seen the part of the movie where the hero finally has the villain dead to rights and in his sights and is on the verge of blowing him away because of the distasteful things he’s done.  The villain is egging him on, usually saying something like “Do it!  Do it!  Finish it!  You can’t, can you?  You don’t have what it takes!”  His partner is saying something like “Karl, don’t.  If you pull that trigger, that’s just what he wants.  Revenge doesn’t accomplish anything.  You’ll be no better than him.  Just give me the weapon, Karl.”

And Karl, a bead of righteous sweat glistening on his brow, face twisted in rage, does the right thing: he gives his partner the weapon and walks away.  Meanwhile, the villain screams in agony at not having gotten Karl to give in to his baser urges.

The moral of the story is: We all want to get back at those who have done wrong, especially when the wrong takes the shape of in-your-face aggression, whether it’s chopping up the co-eds or obnoxious tailgating.  But we need to bottle that impulse up.  Because, after all, where will it end?

We’re allowed to fantasize about revenge, but we’re not allowed to act it out.  Evolution carries a price tag.  Just ask the Eloi.

Now the wall between thought and action is a barrier close to the heart of modern psychotherapeutic man.  It’s fine to imagine raping and pillaging if you don’t actually put on your Attila the Hun hat and do some.  It’s acceptable to be shaking with rage if you don’t stuff Herbert in the wood-chipper.  The corollary to this is the oft-repeated chestnut that our inner feelings are immune from criticism.  We cannot be blamed, or indicted, for having a feeling, only for doing something.

This distinction has done a lot to save marriages, I’m sure, as husbands across the land say to their wives, “I didn’t say you looked like a 10-dollar whore; I said, I felt as though you looked like a 10-dollar whore.”

Oh boy.  The subjectivization of humanity.  It’s like playing freeze tag and having your foot on “base.”  You’re safe for the moment because you have created a space where the usual rules don’t apply – where you can’t be tagged.  Many modern marriages sink or swim depending on whether they can utilize this linguistic safe zone to keep conflicts from escalating into bare-fanged frenzy.

We do this kind of thing in order not to offend, in order to keep the peace, to stay married.  To dull the pain that comes when two actual people go to war.  It grows from the conviction that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”  We are weak, we are vulnerable and sensitive.  Unprocessed exposure to other people is unbearable, especially those whom we have invested with some power over us by identifying them with a person important in our early lives, like a parent.  The rage we would feel at a spouse who told us what they really thought could only end in physical violence, or at the very least divorce.

That’s the implicit argument for “processed reality,” a softening of a person in order to accommodate the other’s fragility.  But this is at best only a finger in the dike, because its deeper effect is to erode mutual respect.   It devours our manhood and womanhood.  It eats a marriage like termites would, from the inside.

Prefacing our statements and actions with “I feel that” places an iron wall between us and reality.  It is pusillanimous of us.  It trivializes us all.  We become someone not to contend with.  If I am someone who believes your behavior is dishonorable, and I say, I feel you have behaved dishonorably, then I do not embody my mind, my character, my life.  I do not live in my life any longer.

“I feel” is a flabby version of “I think.”  All it means is: Don’t get mad at me for saying this.

A difference that relies entirely on the grammatical subordination of what should have been an independent clause is, as Mr. Spock might observe, really no difference at all.  It’s a trick, a con, at best a euphemism.

So I was back to square one.  I could no longer defend my thoughts and feelings as walled off from action and therefore insusceptible to ethical judgment.  If I wanted to cut off that car and send it tumbling into a ravine, I might as well do it.  Okay, this is an exaggeration, but you get the point.

Marcus Aurelius said we should live our lives as though in a glass house through whose walls everyone could see.  Everything we do should be something we wouldn’t mind others knowing about.  That alone is integrity.  I’d shift that somewhat to say that in many cases if we truly think something we should do it.  If we don’t, we are digging our spiritual grave.  I’m aware of the obvious moral exceptions.  But morality is a slippery fish, precisely because it is based on ideas.   We are not the idea we have of what we should be.  We never will be.  We are more than that.  Whatever we can conceive is smaller than what we are.

The idea of who we should be can, under certain limited circumstances, offer us a goal toward we can strive.  But far more often it is simply a whip whose effect (I won’t say purpose)  seems to be to keep us inauthentic.  We beat ourselves silly over the ways we fail to embody our ideals, but the truth is that we fail to understand the nature of ideals.  Ideals such as “I will make myself thin,” “I will write every day,” “I will be more environmentally responsible,” “I will be less loud,” etc., put all the focus on what our minds can create and not on the unyielding thusness of what is.  Think of the huge number of self-help books on the market.  The seminars.  The DVDs.  The web sites.  The Oprah segments.  There is a gigantic industry dedicated to the notion that we can change what we are and do so that they will conform better to an idea of what we should be and do.  Think of every person you’ve had a conversation with lately.  Think of how much time, money and effort are put into making our actual lives more similar to an idea we have of ourselves.  The person we want to be.  The person that, if we can just be him, will make us happy.  Maybe we even call this our “true” self.  But the very idea of a “true self” is just … an idea!  The actuality of who we are – that we barely know.  What we think we know most clearly about ourselves is how far we fall short of the idea.  The therapeutic paradigm guarantees that the thing we are the most intimate with is our failures.  But these are only failures when compared with our idea of success.  Without the duality, there is no failure.

Diaries used to be filled with accounts of things that happened.  Now they chronicle the history of our painful dissatisfaction with ourselves and our progress in reshaping our lives.  A significant shift.

For this reason, we are a nation of “cases.”  Each of us has his own “problem,” and it is our life’s work to solve it.  This rips us from the world, and the world from us.  It makes a healthy relationship with work impossible.  Like Stein’s Oakland, there is no there there.  There is only here, which is to say “not there.”

Integrity is the opposite of an ideas-based philosophy of living.  Integrity, as old-fashioned as it sounds, means that there is a wholeness of identity and action.  We are what we do.  To have integrity in this modern world is actually to be a kind of hero.  In past eras, it may not have been, but every age defines heroism differently, and ours requires a hero who rejects the pervasive gulf between thought and action.  To do so requires courage, because no one really wants to hear another’s truth.  No one wants someone to distinguish clearly between negotiable and non-negotiable opinions and be unwilling to preface the latter with the words “I feel.”  Because that forces us to behold a stark reality:  Some chasms there are no bridges for; some words can’t be taken back; some differences can’t be talked away; and as a result, we may have to be entirely alone in the world.

The truth is that we are alone in the world, and we’re not.  But to be not alone in the world, we must be alone in it.  Thus Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet:

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

The essay, as its name suggests, is the hound chasing the fox.  Montaigne, the father of essayists, writes, “I do not depict being, but rather passing.”  This piece, with all its ideas, depicts the movement from ideas to something else.  It is a kind of memory, which is to say a caress or hint of perfume from something absent.  All of me is still in that car, wanting to crush my opponent.  All of me is here at my desk, yearning for wholeness.

On Being Nominated for an Emmy

About a year ago, my friend and colleague Susan Winslow called me up and asked me if I wanted to write and post-produce the U.S. version of a Discovery/BBC co-production called LIFE.  I thought the title was catchy, so I said sure.  I didn’t have any sense at the time that it was going to be a popular series, let alone the highest-rated show in Discovery history, surpassing even PLANET EARTH’s amazing numbers.  I just looked at some of the footage and thought, “This is cool.” 

Eight months and eleven episodes later, I had a better sense of what I had gotten involved in.  Suddenly there were posters with frogs and Komodo dragons and cheetahs everywhere in the Discovery building – even in the men’s rooms.  The company cafeteria came up with a LIFE menu, with items like “Stalk-Eyed Fly Soufflé.”  Okay, I made that name up, but that was the kind of thing they did.  It was, in other words, big.  Oprah was narrating.  The marketing was unbelievable.  And people watched.  Lots of people.  It was kind of exciting.  Even for me. 

So I’m en route to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where my wife and I go every summer to recuperate from what can be a stressful and exhausting work year, and I get an email telling me I’ve been nominated for an Emmy – two, actually: one for writing the series, and the other for producing it. It’s a kind of a strange feeling – or rather, a strange mingling of many feelings.  It seems to be in part about the ambivalence one feels at growing older.  As they say, it’s better than the alternative, of course.  But one also sees in whatever one accomplishes a fleeting glimpse of the road not taken, of the certainty that I will never be a successful rock and roll guitarist, probably never a published poet, perhaps never a produced screenwriter.  At least I still have my set shot, deadly from within 15 feet. 

And I’m not oblivious to the fact that awards of almost any kind are never exclusively about the quality of the work.  I’ve written other scripts that I think are as good or better than what I did with LIFE, but they weren’t for shows as big as LIFE.  This is a series that has attracted a lot of attention.  And we might as well acknowledge the obvious: that this show swings mainly because of the amazing cinematography and the amazing animal behavior it reveals.  The writer’s job with a series like this is to quietly support the images – to set the various vignettes within a narrative arc so one feels there is a real story there.  Beyond that, it is to stay out of the way.  When documentary writing fails, it’s often because the writer wants to be the star of the show.  The art of this kind of work lies in providing just enough counterpoint – information and narrative connective tissue and the occasional sprinkling of humor  – to support what we’re seeing. 

Is it a good thing to write television documentaries?  I guess I think it is.  This is how I look at it:  There are so many bad ones.  There are so many shows that make you cringe.  So it does feel worthwhile to try to make better ones, films that teach and entertain and even exhort to action.  If I had become a filmmaker at a younger age, I would probably have gravitated to a verité style with no writing at all.  But that isn’t what I do for a living.  These shows need words, and as long as TV documentaries need words, they might as well be good ones, or at least as good as I can make them.  If I do my job well, perhaps I’m helping raise the bar just a little, and that is surely a good thing.

 So, I am going to LA in a week and I am going to dress up in a tuxedo and go the awards ceremony and have a big old time.  I’m going to pretend I’m Dean Martin or Sean Connery and stand around with a martini and give out business cards to other people standing around with martinis.  And winning would be nice, but I’m not counting on it – the competition is really strong, and they are all shows that are raising the bar too, and if they win, that too is a good thing.  It’s a cliché, but I am sincerely happy just to be nominated.  I will go in that spirit, with an unavoidable sense of the irony of it all, but also with a feeling that it will be fun to be feted (but hopefully not fetid) for a night.  I will not send a Native American to decline the award should I get it.  I will go up and accept it with a smile on my face. 

Now all I have to do is finish writing my acceptance speech.  I’m trying to work in a joke about marine invertebrates, but I haven’t quite nailed it yet.

Goodbye and Good Luck

After his recent show at the Birchmere, David Wilcox (“the nicest singer-songwriter in the known universe”) signed my CD and I said thanks.  Then, not knowing what to say as I left, and feeling that “goodbye” was a little dramatic, and “see ya” a little familiar, I said “good luck.”  The enraged glare he fixed upon me was as unexpected as it was scary.  What’s so bad about “good luck”?  But I guess it’s kind of an honor to be the only human on the planet that Wilcox wasn’t able to be nice to.  Well, at least I’m taking it that way.  Because of course, it’s all about me.  Always is.

It must be hard to be a star, even a modest star like David Wilcox.  It's probably much harder when your persona is based on an illusion of intimacy and accessibility, embodied in a voice that seems to be speaking to you.  Thousands of fans must just assume that this professional fiction is the actual truth.  Some must walk up to him and talk as though they were old friends.  It must be awful, really.  Because when you come right down to it, David Wilcox is in the same business as Sammy Davis Jr.  He's selling entertainment -- it's just that his style of entertainment is one that's based on the illusion that he and the audience know each other.

Well, it's not a complete illusion.  In the sense that Wilcox writes about the world and interpersonal relationships in ways that imply we have those things in common somehow, we do know each other -- at least to the extent that we share a culture and would like to understand it better and maybe share a laugh about it.  He is a far more intimate and available presence on stage and on his albums than, say, Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Leon Russell, all of whom let you see very little of their "true selves."  He's even more "there" in a sense than the Bruce Springsteen of today, who actually seems to rehearse his ad libs, to the point where, if you saw two Springsteen shows on back-to-back nights (which I did), the apparently spontaneous outbursts of the first night were reproduced on cue, pretty much identically, the second night.  And I was bummed.  But what did I expect?  That a 60-year-old man would be entirely in the moment, walking the high wire without a net, like he did when he was 20?

On the other hand, in some ways, seeing Leon was a little more satisfying because he didn't even try to simulate spontaneity or relating to the crowd.  He was doing his thing, pretty much like he always has, without a lot of patter and without pretending he was doing anything beyond playing the music and letting us listen.

Still, when I think back on that awkward encounter with David Wilcox, I can't help wondering what resonance "good luck" might have had for him that would make him go stone-cold dark in that way.  Had he been having a run of bad luck recently?  Had his wife stepped out on him with someone else?  Had he lost a loved one?  Had his record label canceled his contract?  Did he feel I might have been implying that he needed some good luck?  Or was it much, much simpler -- that "good luck" may have sounded a little familiar, a phrase that implied we had a connection?

Hmm.  Really hard to say.  And the truth is, he may have just been having a hemorrhoid flare-up or something completely unrelated to what I said.

So, maybe we should just leave it at that.  And so I shall.

Becoming Bread

"Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully.  Once you know how the dough becomes bread, you will understand enlightenment.  So how this physical body becomes a sage is our main interest.  We are not so concerned about what flour is, or what dough is, or what a sage is.  A sage is a sage.  Metaphysical explanations of human nature are not the point.

"So the kind of practice we stress thus cannot become too idealistic.  If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap.  Because there is no bridge long enough to go across the gap, he will begin to despair.  That is the usual spiritual way.  But our spiritual way is not so idealistic.  In some sense we should be idealistic; at least we should be interested in making bread which tastes and looks good!  Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread.  There is no secret in our way.  Just to practice zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way."  – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

My mother was a mystic from Brooklyn, who scattered koans among us, along with innumerable moral allegories and pithy synopses of her conversations with the Deity.  A lifetime of thwarted ambitions had taken an already introspective mind and gradually turned it even more deeply inward, away from the disappointing concreteness of the world.  My brother and I became accustomed to hearing this life described as a vale of tears, even as we learned to expect that we would be judged by lofty, not to say transcendent, standards.

We were, in other words, meant for "great things."  And the greatness to which she prayed we would aspire was the service of ideas, wisdom, and art.  To this subject she brought all the philosophical openness that one might expect of a Friedrich Schiller.  Which is to say, none at all.  She was Manichean in her sense of right and wrong, and in her certainty about which kind of life was worth living, and which was not.  She had no use for the William Carlos Williams precept, "No ideas but in things."  In fact, for my mother it was pretty much the reverse. 

My father, on the other hand, was no mystic.  He wasn't even particularly introspective.  Not that he didn't spend a lot of time alone, but whatever he was doing in the long spasms of withdrawal,  it wasn't wondering much about who he was and why he was here and who were these people in his house and why should he care.  No, his nature was different from his wife's, but for him Big Ideas were important too.  If my mother's Ideas were the sacred purities of intellect, morality and poetry, my father's were the grim mysteries of art -- not so much the idea of it as the unspeakable secret of it.   Which is itself a Big Idea.

My father became himself among the community of painters, sculptors and writers that came together just after the war in New York.  These were his real family (though I doubt he would ever have put it this way), one where he fit in, where he could drink and carouse and have fun and talk about things that interested him.  And most of what interested him had to do with painting.  Everything else was a distraction; it threatened to bring him back to where he'd been before he found a home in the art world.  Those who were not a part of that world wouldn't understand what it meant to him – he scarcely understood it himself – and he was not about to talk about it with them.  It was his.  And thus it became his Secret.

The inevitable consequence of all this, for a child growing up in its shadow, was to feel that art, or rather, Art, was a dark and dangerous mystery to which you had no access, and never could have.  It probably isn't too much of a stretch to say that, in this, it was a lot like sex.  Something out there that other people do, that is unbearably fascinating and alluring to you, but which you can hardly even imagine and which you feel in your bones you will never be any good at.  Art was not a thing you did, but something to fear, a ritual you performed right or wrong, and only in secret.  If you did it wrong, you deserved only contempt; if right, you had somehow been welcomed into the Eleusinian mysteries.  But that was unlikely.  Possible, but unlikely. 

So, my brother and I grew up in a strangely idealistic family.  One where there were Big Ideas flying around as a matter of course, in the same way that in other families they might talk about sports or grades or how to repair a light switch.  And we both emerged from childhood with a sense that there was a right way to do anything worth doing at all in life, and of course a wrong way.  And that it was very, very important that we do it the right way.  That could mean embodying an unwavering devotion to "the life of the mind" (mother) or a single-minded focus on being an artist (father), but in either case, to falter was to conjure scorn. 

The missing piece here, as I'm sure you've already guessed, is the process itself.  Children want to be privy to the doing. When the act is shrouded in mystery and secrecy, when the Word is never made Flesh, the Idea becomes a scourge, and no more than that.  And until you figure this out, it's the scourge that keeps on scourging. 

Parents are, of course, our first teachers.  But the emphasis on ideas – of success, of beauty, of accomplishment – at the expense of what’s involved in actually doing these things is a regular feature of the variety show we call modern culture.  There’s no need for me to list the steady flow of “ideals” we’re deluged with every day.  It’s truly endless.  But the reality of what it takes to achieve these results – even assuming we want to – hasn’t quite kept pace with the exhortations to achieve them.  The best we can hope for is more ideas about how to realize our ideas. 

It’s true that there are whole sections in the chain bookstores dedicated to telling us how to do this or that.  But while these books and tapes and videos are flying off the shelves as fast as the publishers can churn them out, none of it really seems to help.  We’re not losing weight; we’re getting fatter.  We’re not rescuing our marriages; there are more divorces than ever.  We’re not writing our novels, we’re not getting those tomato plants to bear fruit, no matter how many instruction manuals we buy.

And that, I believe, is because there’s only one way to learn how to do something.  It’s not being told you have to.  Or that it’s holy, cool and wonderful.  And it’s not being told how it should be done.  It’s by doing it.  Doing it badly.  Doing it every day.  Doing it whether you feel like it or not.  Doing it whether or not you can muster the faith that you’re getting better.  In fact, it’s by abandoning the dream of getting better that you have some hope of getting better.  This is the great mystery that is no mystery at all. 

There’s a phrase that seems to be in some circulation these days: “Dare to be mediocre.”  I looked it up on the Web to see if it was a phrase that people were using, and I found that it is.  But most of the people using it don’t understand what it means.  Or they don’t understand what I mean by it. 

When I open up a blank word-processing document and begin to write, I am not alone.  With me is a presence that says, “This must be great, it must be perfect, it must be what you imagine it could be.  You must achieve and accomplish what your idea of achievement and accomplishment tells you in this instance.  Your performance must embody your idea.”  But this presence is not my friend, it is not a friend to writing.  It’s not a friend to any art.

We can’t have an idea and then expect to just make it a reality when we don’t really know how.  No one can tell us how.  We have to give ourselves time to learn how dough becomes bread.  We have to watch it, really closely, for a long time.  The only way to do that is to pay attention and not be so afraid.  We think having an idea will make us safe, but it never really does.

I once studied poetry with a writer named Ted Berrigan.  He used to tell me that I had a lot of shit writing inside me, and the only way to get it out was to write it out.  “Write out the shit!  Write out the shit!,” he’d chant, as cigarette ash dropped on his sweater.  In other words, dare to be mediocre.  If you are full of shit, don’t pretend you’re not.  Write the shit, and by writing it, be rid of it.  Then all that good stuff that was stuck back there behind the shit can come out. 

I’ve been writing for more than forty years, but I feel like I truly know nothing about it.  My efforts have always fallen short of my ideas.  The more powerful projects, the ones that could truly engage me – those I’ve never done.  I’ve felt unequal to the task.  Because the task is immense, if you imagine it and then think you’re supposed to be able to just make it happen.  I can’t make it happen, because I don’t know how.  And the only way to learn how is to do it, without expectation of acclaim or even a personal sense of success.  As Shunryu Suzuki says, “There is no bridge long enough to go across the gap.”  So the only answer is to eliminate the gap altogether, eliminate the dualism.  Eliminate the idea.  Because there is no realization of an idea; there is simply writing.  Or painting, or baking, or loving.  Every day, a little at a time.  By doing it, we come to know it.  By accepting our ignorance or incapacity, we transcend it.  There's no way around it.  You have to go through it.

All my life I wanted to be brilliant.  But that's just another idea.  Now what I want to be is patient.  And that, like anything else, I hope I’ll come to know – by doing it.

My Health Care Story

I am not a minority.  I am not poor.  I am not uneducated.  In fact, I have the highest degree we give in this country.  By many people’s standards, I am, if not wealthy, privileged.  I have a job, even a career of sorts.  I am white.  It is true that for all intents and purposes I live paycheck to paycheck.  But it is a decent paycheck, and I live fairly well.  Better, I’m sure, than I deserve.

This is my health care reform story.  Pay attention.  It’s true, it happened just like this, it’s unencumbered by rhetoric or ideology.  (Until the end, maybe.)

About six weeks ago, towards the end of my stint writing the Discovery series LIFE, I began getting chest pains.  It had been a long haul, and the pressure was intense.  There were many 14-hour days, and many working weekends.  The pain began on February 13th.  As is my habit with such things, I ignored it.  The next day, it was worse, and was harder to ignore.  I also noticed tingling in my left arm, which was disturbing, to say the least.  My wife was in Tanzania for a shoot, and since I am the sort of person who is uncomfortable burdening others with his problems, I realized fairly quickly that I had to deal with this new development on my own.

So I dealt with it by breathing deeply, meditating, and going for soothing walks.  None of this helped.  In fact, the symptoms got worse.  I was, as they say, shitting a brick.

Quite apart from my real fear of what might be happening with my body was an attendant fear, which had to do with being uninsured.  Why was I uninsured, you might ask.  A reasonable question.

I am a freelancer.  In my world, which is television documentary, there are few staff positions for writer/post-producers.  Most of us move, if we’re lucky, from one gig to the next.  We don’t have an employer offering us benefits of any kind, let alone the extremely costly benefit of health insurance.  We have to buy it ourselves, which is extraordinarily expensive.  As it happens, I've been very lucky in my genetic inheritance: I don’t get sick.  I don’t get colds or flus, I don’t break bones, I don’t have allergies.  I have low cholesterol, very healthy blood pressure and a fasting blood sugar level to die for.  I rarely go the doctor, never get hospitalized, and yet pay many hundreds of net income dollars every month for a service I never use.  My son just started college, my father requires regular financial upkeep, and we had this thing called a recession.  I got fed up.  I made a stupid mistake.  I asked myself what I was paying this money for.  I canceled my coverage, enjoyed the extra money for three months and then started getting chest pains.  The universe, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

So as I stood there, alone in my house, with chest pains and left arm tingling, with no insurance coverage, I heard the voice of Clint Eastwood emanating from the walls: I had to ask myself: Did I feel lucky, punk?  Well, did I?

And the answer was no, I didn’t at that moment feel particularly lucky.  So, against my every instinct, and stepping way out of my comfort zone, I got into my car and drove myself to the nearest emergency room.

I did this because I had become enmeshed in the thought that, as distasteful as the whole idea of going to a hospital appeared to me, it would be a major drag for my son and wife if I died of a heart attack and all they could think of to put on my tomb stone was “He preferred not to go to the hospital.”

So, I drove to the ER of Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Md., and walked into the waiting room.  That was where the nightmare began.

The woman behind the bulletproof glass was, not surprisingly, far more interested in my insurance coverage (or lack thereof) than in my physical condition.  But as there were few people in the waiting room, I was pretty quickly ushered into an examination room, where a nurse took a bunch of blood, administered an EKG and made me undress and get into one of those infamous hospital “gowns” that I’d managed so artfully to avoid for 53 years.

I won’t spill more ink on that gown than has already been lavishly doled out.  But it did tend to set the tone of the entire experience.  In the gown I was led down many halls until I came to the X-ray room, where a nervous young tech took pictures of my lungs and heart to make sure the former hadn’t been punctured and the latter wasn’t the size of a soccer ball.  Then I was escorted back to the exam room to wait.

And when I say wait, I mean really wait.  I had arrived at around three in the afternoon.  It wasn’t until 6 that someone actually came to visit, and that was just to get me to sign forms that essentially absolved the hospital of all legal responsibility for me.  Then before I could ask for someone to come and tell me what the tests had revealed, she was gone.

Another hour went by, and then two.  There was nothing to read, and my phone was almost out of juice. I read the wall charts, the one on kidneys and the one on how to rate the level of pain you were experiencing.  Another hour went by.  It was 9 pm.  I’d been there six hours.  In the next bed, separated from me by a yellowed curtain that in its salad days had probably been white, was a crazy and extremely talkative person who had come to the hospital complaining of a bleeding asshole, but was really just trying to get prescription pain medication, to which she was undoubtedly addicted.  My only entertainment during that time was listening in on the enraged shouting match between her and the doctor who came to deal with her.

Finally, at 10, a young resident came in and told me that all my tests were negative, but that they wanted to keep me overnight for observation.  At this point, my frustration with the endless wait had made me bold, even in my pathetic little hospital gown.  I said that I was uninsured and so I wanted to know why I had to stay the night if my tests were all negative; I also wanted to know how much a stay in the hospital would cost.  With all the arrogance of which a medical doctor is capable, he told me that I shouldn’t be making this decision based on money but on my health.  I said, okay, fine, but that is my decision, and I can’t make it intelligently if I don’t have the necessary information.  He said that because I presented with chest pain and tingling in the arm, it was a good idea to take blood and do EKGs 2 more times over the course of the night just to see if anything changed.  That sounded reasonable to me, but I still wanted to know what the price tag was.  He said he had no idea.  I said, fine, could he please talk to someone in the hospital who did have an idea.  He said he wasn’t sure if anyone would know.

I said, Pretend you’re buying a car, and the salesman says buy this car but he won’t tell you how much it costs.  He said, right.  I said, how is it that no one in the entire hospital knows what the going rate is for staying a night?  He said he’d try to find out.

Another hour went by.  I saw no one.  My phone was dead.  I reread the kidney poster.  The doctor came back and said that the accounts payable department wouldn’t tell him.

This is what people go through all the time in hospitals.  They are demeaned, ignored, patronized, given no useful information, left alone for hours with no consideration demonstrated for the fact that they might be just a little anxious about what’s happening to them.  It happens more to poor people, to people who don’t speak English well, to people of color.  It happened to be happening to me, but it was a fluke, an aberration, and most likely it would never happen again.  And even if it did, I would have resources that many others wouldn’t.  I don’t think most well-heeled white people really have a feel for this.

90 more minutes passed.  It was around midnight now, and I’d spent about nine hours in this depressing little exam room.  The crazy drug addict had long since been carted off somewhere.  Suddenly the curtain parted and a very small Asian man appeared with a wheelchair.  He was there, I deduced, to take me to my room.  I was not allowed to walk.  Down many corridors and through many heavy metal doors we wheeled, with no conversation, as his English was not so fluent.  Finally we arrived at the elevator, which took us to the 5th floor.  When the doors opened, I immediately heard the screaming.

I mean screaming.  Loud, desperate, agonized screaming.  Like I had suddenly arrived in Bedlam.  As we wheeled down the hall, the screaming got louder until we stopped at the room from which the cries emanated.  My room.

I was allowed at that point to step from the wheelchair and walk in.  This is what I saw.  I saw a black man writhing in a bed, soaked in sweat, shrieking for all he was worth.  It was clear why, from the word he was able to articulate every fourth scream or so: Morphine.  The man was clearly in unbearable pain, and his cries were being completely ignored by the nursing staff.  At the nursing station I could clearly see three or four nurses standing round joking, gossiping, shooting the breeze.  They didn’t even seem to hear the screaming.

There was another sound in the room as well, competing with the noise of the screaming man.  It was the television, which had been tuned to the Kids Network, where they were running a Hannah Montana marathon.  At full volume.  I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Hannah Montana – I never had till that night – but the thing you immediately notice is that what the characters are saying isn’t all that funny but the laugh track is unrelenting, hysterical and loud.  So to understand what this was all like, you have to imagine the sounds of this poor guy begging and pleading for painkillers, followed immediately by uproarious laughter.  To say that it was surreal would not begin to describe it.

The man never got his morphine until the morning.  This minuet of agony and buffoonish laughter never stopped all night long.  I hit the nurse call button many times to get them to turn the TV off, but they didn’t come for hours, and when they finally came, the woman said that the program soothed the man.  Soothed!!  My god.  All it did was slightly mute the horror of his pain so that they didn’t have to hear it quite so clearly.

The nurses came in from time to time to take blood and my vitals and to give me medications just in case I might need them.  Their blood-taking skills were pathetic and primitive.  More blood went on my gown than into the tube.  Their demeanor was one of indifference and contempt.  They treated me and my cell mate like children … or criminals.  They were unable or unwilling to give me any information, for example what my test results indicated, whether I was going to have an echocardiogram, or when a doctor might actually put in an appearance.  They could give a shit.

Finally, at around 5:30 in the morning, I gave up trying to get any sleep.  I had lines inserted into my hand and on both arms from botched blood-taking.  I was covered in EKG and monitor patches, I was wearing a heavy piece of equipment for transmitting the heart data to the machines.  A nurse came in and I asked if she could give me any information on what was coming up.  Nothing.  But nothing in a supercilious tone of voice, as though I was bothering her.  My cell mate was now conscious and medicated, and when a nurse came in to check on him, she yelled at him angrily for taking out his arterial line, which he hadn’t.  I was there when a tech had come in and removed it.  But her assumption was that he was some kind of criminal, some recalcitrant child.  He said to her in a voice weak from pain, “Are you my punishment?”  I’ll never forget that.  “Are you my punishment?”  In a hospital.  Where they are supposed to take care of you.  Where you are desperately afraid and completely powerless.

At 8:00 a.m., a resident sauntered in with a clipboard and called out to no one in particular, “Spillenger?”  It was clear that to her I was a burden, an irritation.  She read off my lab results in a monotone, numbers that meant nothing to me.  I asked her to please interpret.  She sighed.  Reluctantly she told me that all my numbers were normal and that there was no sign of a heart attack or any other heart abnormality.  I said, okay, that means I can go home now?  She said, No, she wanted me to be seen by a cardiologist.  I asked when that might be.  She said, whenever he got to me.  I asked if there was any chance she could be more specific, if she could check to make sure that he knew he was supposed to look in on me, because I didn’t want to pay for another night.  She said, it’s irrelevant whether I wanted to stay the night or not because they had to decide when that happened.  I asked her if this was why she became a doctor, so she could talk disrespectfully and dismissively to people who were in her care.  She turned on her heel and walked out.

As she did so, I saw the nurse pull shut the curtain separating me from my brother in the other bed.  I said, “Don’t do that, please.  We’d like to talk a bit.”  She ignored me and kept closing it.  I got up, stepped past her, and pulled it back open.  I said, “Maybe you didn’t hear me.  I want it open.”  We had a staring contest for a few seconds, and then she left, muttering to herself.

My cell mate turned out to be Ethiopian, a man named Yohannes.  He was a muralist who had designed countless paintings that now grace the New York Public Library, Grand Central Station and other public spaces in cities around the country.  An intelligent, educated, thoughtful man who had a neurological condition that had made his arms and legs feel like they were in a massive vise that was crushing them.  No wonder he was screaming all night.  We commiserated at length on the horror of the place in which we found ourselves, the dehumanizing power of the madhouse, where all human feeling seemed to have been outlawed.  After a little while his family arrived – his brother and sister-in-law.  She had the warmest, most soulful smile I’d ever seen.  She came up to me and took my hand and said, “I very much hope you are well very soon.”  After only a day in this lunatic asylum, I wept with gratitude at this moment of human contact.  Whatever people go to a hospital like this for, it is clearly made much worse by having to be there.

Soon after that, Yohannes was discharged and he got out as soon as he could.  It was what I imagine leaving prison after a long stretch must be like.  We embraced as though we had known each other all our lives.

I remained in the room for hours, not knowing whether they were going to try to keep me there for another night, whether the cardiologist was ever going to appear, or even whether he knew he was supposed to.  My regular calls to the nurse’s station were ignored.  Finally, a man appeared at the door and looked me in the eye and asked, “Are you Paul?”

I said I was, and we exchanged a smile, though I can’t be sure we were smiling for the same reason.  I think he could feel my gratitude that he was there.  He asked me to tell him everything, tell him how I felt, and what he could do for me.  Imagine that!  He proceeded to examine me with a stethoscope for 15 full minutes, listening to my heart in every conceivable way, until finally he pulled back took the stethoscope out of his ears and said, “Your heart is absolutely strong, there’s no trace of anything wrong with it.  It’s time for you to go home.”

I looked at him for a moment, almost in disbelief, and asked, “So … you’re good at this, right?”  That’s how difficult it was to believe that I was actually getting out of Bedlam.  He paused briefly, not sure where I was coming from, and then suddenly got it, and burst out in this enormous laugh.  “Yes, I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and I am pretty sure I know what I’m doing.”  We shared that laugh for a good long time.  It was a great moment.

After it was over, I asked what he thought was causing my symptoms if it wasn’t my heart.  He didn’t know but he wondered if I’d had any big stress in my life recently.  As it happened, I had.  He said that stress can mimic any number of conditions, and chest pain was a very common one.  He said the arm tingling could easily be caused by a mild inflammation, and that the two happening at the same time was probably a coincidence.  So I’m fine, I asked.  He said, yes, but you need to take care of your stress problem … or it will take care of you.

He left, and two hours later, I was officially discharged.  As I got up from the wheelchair and walked out the automatic doors, I felt I was entering a world I feared I might never see again.  It had been little more than a day, and so you might think this is all an overreaction.  But it’s not, and I suspect people have experiences like this every single day.  It really doesn’t take much to throw your whole sense of who you are into doubt.  As I walked to my car, I felt I had had a taste of hell, of what prison must be like, and of how fragile our grip on normalcy is.

But I also knew that it didn’t have to be this way, that this was not a prison but was supposed to be a place of healing.  And I knew that while I had a get-out-of-jail-free card, by virtue of being white and being relatively prosperous, great numbers of people live with this kind of experience on a regular basis.  For them, being sick is traumatic in ways that have nothing to do with the serious of the illness.  It is to be sucked into a corrupt and broken system, soulless and lacking in the most basic human empathy.  It is to be made utterly powerless.  It is to place one’s fate in the hands of petty bureaucrats and minor Hitlers.  And it’s made all the worse when one is uninsured, because this, as we all know by now, is not Canada.  It is not the UK, and it is not France.  It is not any of the many developed nations that have single payer health care systems.  In Canada, I wouldn’t have had to worry about whether I could afford a night of observation in the hospital.  I wouldn’t have worried about whether I could afford an echocardiogram.

I later learned that emergency rooms are where many people get their health care, and that Washington Adventist is known as “a poor people’s hospital.”  I find this notion despicable.  Why does this country, as rich as it is, allow there to be “poor people’s hospitals” and “rich people’s hospitals”?  When I listen to the hate-filled rhetoric of congressional Republicans on why we need to leave matters like health care to the free market, it makes my blood boil.  If there is any place where we need to be protected from the predations of the so-called free market, it is in tending to our heath.  Where profit is the underlying motive force, why is it such a surprise that a class system develops underneath the surface of our supposedly egalitarian society?

So this is my story.  Far too many others will be able to tell a similar one.  The health care reform bill that got passed is a faint and vague echo of what we really needed.  It is a major disappointment, and will do little to address the serious problems that stem from the power that the insurance companies wield in this country.  It is in fact a free-marketer’s wet dream, no matter what the pundits and flacks tell us. Because it leaves in place a system that makes getting sick a crime and going to a hospital a sentence.

Left Alone

I am hearing more and more about people whose political philosophy seems to sprout fully armed from a single, simple principle: Leave Me Alone.

Such people often identify themselves as libertarians, a nice-sounding word – I mean, it has most of the word “liberty” in it.  How could that be bad?

Leave Me Alone is the battle cry of the tea baggers, of the militias, of the survivalists and of the forlorn and confused heartland.  Leave Me Alone is what the beaten dog of a kid whimpers to the schoolyard bullies.  Leave Me Alone is the moan of the beleaguered, the put-upon, the fucked-with.  It’s the impotent rage of those who hurt but don’t know why, like a bull tortured by thrusts from all sides in the blinding sunlight of the ring.

It’s Jeffersonian distrust of government – without the Jefferson part.

It’s anarchism without the intelligence.

It’s radical free-marketism and unfettered corporate license masquerading as something noble.

“I just want the government to leave me alone.”  Please leave me alone.  It’s a sentiment with a venerable pedigree.  This nation was indeed founded by people who came here to be left alone.

Europe was a pretty hard place to take in the late 17th and 18th centuries if you didn’t happen to belong to the right club.  Wrong social class, and you were dirt.  Wrong political party, and your future was bleak.  Wrong religion, and you and your family could be beaten and even killed.  There were many sources of power in the Old World, and it was easy to have no access whatsoever to any of them.  One’s life was very much in the hands of the church, the government, the moneybags, and the crown.  Murder, excommunication, prison, torture ... all quite common, especially for people with no “juice.”  The first American colonists could be forgiven for wanting to be left alone.

And then there’s the health care reform bill.

It must be conceded that at first blush it doesn’t seem quite as evil as murder, prison and torture.  Granted, it’s pretty bland, not the across-the-board reform of a corrupt institution that some of us were hoping for.  It’s mediocre, diluted, cowardly even.  But evil?  Is there really no good in it at all, compared with what we have now?  Is it really government messing with us in some deep-in-the-bone way that offends our every impulse toward freedom and individual autonomy?  

“I want to be left alone.” Garbo-esque, this.

First, do you really want to be left alone?  Really?  Have you thought through the actual consequences of being left alone in the way you describe?  Or are you just venting about your own feelings of powerlessness and fear in the face of a world changing around you?  If it’s the latter, then I’m with you, brother.  I’m not that good with change, either.  I’m still listening to Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.  Change makes me nervous, and sometimes it makes me cranky.  So, I get it.   But when you sound like you want to build a philosophy out of Leave Me Alone, when the rhetoric and rage get all fired up and the pontification starts up in earnest, then I start to have my doubts.

Because all the Leave Me Alone shit isn’t so consistent across the board, is it?  When the county construction crews come out and repair the roads and snow plows clear the driveways, I don’t hear much Leave Me Alone.  When the EPA didn’t do shit during the Bush years to enforce Superfund cleanup mandates, and children died from cancer from the toxic runoff of unregulated polluters, I didn’t hear their parents say, “You know, it’s sad that our kid is dead, but I’m really glad the government left us alone.”  When a murderer is apprehended, when a child abuser is arrested, when corporate scumbags are led away by U.S. Marshalls, only the crackpots among us say, “God, I just wish those nasty government people would leave everyone alone.”

The truth is that having a government is constantly disappointing.  And the reason is that government is really just a bunch of people we hired to do the shit we didn’t want to do ourselves.  Do you want to build roads, and predict the weather, and fool with the interest rates and negotiate with North Korea?  Well. no one does, so we hired some people to do it, and then we got lazy and stopped keeping an eye on them, and they took over, like the machines in the Terminator movies.  It’s our fault; there’s no use being pissed off about it and blaming the government.  They do what we tell them to and what we let them do.  If we weren’t so drugged by TV and Rush Limbaugh and hate and anger, we might actually start thinking some serious thoughts about how to change things.  Not by holing up in compounds with automatic weapons and explosives – which is more or less how an 8-year-old would respond to a problem – and not by spitting on blacks and gay people and whoever else happens to be handy, but by actually changing the way we live, changing our own behavior and the way we relate to government.

No matter how you may feel about it, America was never supposed to be a poster child for social Darwinism.  We’re supposed to try to take care of people who are in trouble.  And as much as the mean-spirited paranoiac in our black little hearts may tell us otherwise, most of the people who need our help aren’t shiftless, lazy bastards who brought their woes on themselves.  No money for social programs, you chant?  But if you don’t care about the fact that our tax dollars have gone for napalm and Star Wars, CIA assassins, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders, and supplying weapons to Al-Qaeda for years, then how can you justify complaining about paying for environmental regulations and health care reform?  It’s a whine with a hollow ring to it.

Over 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq since 2003, and over 1,000 in Afghanistan since 2001.  About 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since 2003.  100,000 people!  And for nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  No weapons of mass destruction, no reasonable justification for invading another country pre-emptively.  All lies, all just a hateful ideology on the part of people who would never have to fight in the war, and neither would their children.

Where was all the rage then?  You have these spitting, sputtering, apoplectic white people foaming at the mouth over the health care reform bill, which has yet to take a single life, and promises to actually save quite a few.  And the grand philosophical position trotted out to justify this rude, unintelligent and ignorant behavior?  

They need to leave us alone.

I have a news flash for you, buddy.  You are not alone, and you never will be.  You're a citizen of this country, and you are bound together with other citizens in a common enterprise.  You profit from your membership in this community, in ways you probably don't even realize.  You're a part of this, whether you like it or not.

If you want to get yourself with a mob and chug some Bud and shriek, no one’s stopping you.  Not me, not the government you claim is determined to mess with you, nobody.  But please.  Spare the rest of the us this embarrassingly hypocritical attempt at justifying your bile and violence with a philosophy.  You weren’t there when government was really messing with real people’s lives.  You haven’t gotten off your couch and turned off the reality TV shows long enough to think up a way to make a positive contribution to real change in this country.  So please: sit down, and shut the fuck up.

Seven, Again

 

Two nights ago, I watched David Fincher's Seven again.  I had forgotten what a good movie it is.  I shouldn't have forgotten, since this is the same guy who brought us Fight Club and Benjamin Button.  But there's something different about Seven, and I wanted to know what it was.

More than these other two movies, Seven embraces the conventions of the genre.  It presents itself as the kind of thriller we've seen before, it tries to seem familiar.  It has the world-weary cop (Morgan Freeman).  It has the arrogant but charming boy-man (Brad Pitt).  It has the psycho killer (qu'est-ce que c'est?) in the weird Kaiser Soze form of Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects was actually released the same year as Seven.)  It even has the irascible, barking police captain, played by the inimitable R. Lee Ermey.

The stage is perfectly set, in other words, for, well ... the usual suspects.  The geometry of cliché in this film is perfectly realized.  Cops go after ritualistic serial killer.  Cops apprehend said serial killer, after much fooling around.  Cop has to decide whether to blow the motherfucker away.  Partner says, Don't do it!  It's what he wants!  Etc., etc.

And if that were all there was to this movie, we could pack up and go home.  But the thing is, something else is happening here.  Something interesting.

And it all kind of has to do with David Mills, the young cop played by Brad Pitt.  The guy married to Gwyneth Paltrow.  The first question the film raises is: What are we to do with David Mills?  He's Brad Pitt, so he's charismatic.  He's funny.  He's cute.  You want to like him, and you do.  But he's also cruisin’ for a bruisin’.  He’s painfully unaware of himself, exquisitely clueless.  His very character is an irresistible temptation to Fate.  Like Oedipus, the most famous detective of Greek legend, he is putty in the hands of his emotions.  He says he “feeds off” of his feelings.  More like they feed off him.  He believes his anger makes him strong.  And of course, Oedipus’ anger makes him strong at the crossroads, where he kills his father, the king, and all his retinue.  But in the long run, things don’t really work out all that well for Oedipus.  He bulls ahead in his quest to solve the riddle of the plague, and in the end he doesn’t much like what he finds.

And things are not going to work out all that well for Mills, either.  Mills’ foil – the film is really about Mills – is William Somerset, the grizzled veteran, who’s seen too much, has lost his faith, is getting out of the game while the getting is good.  Morgan Freeman is always worth watching, but this isn’t his movie.  The game is Brad’s to lose.  Somerset is something of the Chorus in this story – articulating for us what we vaguely suspect, which is that distasteful things are waiting for Mills if he doesn’t wise up. 

But of course, he doesn’t wise up, because as the Greeks knew all too well, character is fate.  Mills does the only thing he can do, being the person he is: he brings a curse down on himself.  His hubris, his high school football hero confidence in his own point of view, is ultimately what makes him tragic.  And he is tragic.  He goes to meet his doom, completely oblivious of what is about to happen to him, and how much it is the natural consequence of his own character.  Even when it is happening to him, he doesn’t comprehend it.  And when he starts to appreciate what John Doe – the Kevin Spacey maniac – has done to him, and the extent to which he has conspired in his own undoing, he still cannot resist the power of his rage.

There comes a moment in tragedy when the pitiful protagonist suddenly sees something he can’t process.  For Oedipus, it was “seeing” that he had slept with his mother and murdered his father.  It was that act of seeing, finally, that drove him to put out his eyes.  For Mills, the realization is that John Doe has cut off Gwyneth Paltrow’s head and put it in a UPS box.  And although he doesn’t actually see it literally – he and the audience both “see” it through Somerset -- he begins to “see” something so horrible in the train of events that led to this moment that he can’t keep from annihilating Kevin Spacey, not with one bullet, but with an entire clip.  The Mills that fires the first bullet is a very different Mills from the one who fires the others.

The first bullet was the result of an inability to control his emotions.  It is fueled by the delusion that has plagued Mills for the entire film: that someone else is responsible for the evil in the world.  That "nut jobs" like John Doe commit evil acts, and it is his job to bring them to account.

But the flurry of bullets that he fires a few seconds after came from a different man; they were Mills' total surrender to the necessity of what he was doing.  A necessity created not by John Doe's actions, but by his own character.  They were a statement: This is who I am.  I see it now.

In another movie, or rather in many, many other movies, a person in Mills’ position would be forced by his partner or some other sympathetic soul to see that revenge is not worth it.  That he is a lawman and has to uphold the law and not take it into his own hands.  This, of course, is a classic scenario in the genre, and, of course, it is total bullshit.  In such moments, the audience is rightly screaming for the guy to pop a cap in the heinous evildoer.  This is because the heinous evildoer’s actions have created a rift in the time-space continuum.  In other words, they have upset some kind of cosmic balance.  Things have fallen apart and the center is not holding.  To restore balance to the universe requires that the bad guy be killed.  Sometimes his behavior has been so unacceptable that even death isn’t enough to right the cosmic ship.  He’s got to be torn apart by horses or eaten alive by piranha, or forced to undergo something so nauseatingly awful that we feel that justice has been served in a satisfying way.

In Seven, however, the shoe is really on the other foot.  We don’t need for Kevin Spacey to be killed, tortured, or blown to smithereens.  That’s not what we need, and when he is killed, we don’t really care about it as something that happened to him.  Our attention is fixed on Mills.  And there’s a reason for that.

It’s Mills who must be punished in order for the cosmic balance to be restored.  Not John Doe.  His pride, his obliviousness, his sentimental and facile idealism, his ignorance, of both the world and himself, were so unacceptable, that only one outcome could satisfy the body politic, which is to say Us: and that was to have the most precious thing in his life taken from him – his wife.  He needed to feel the Furies’ lash.  If he was to go on living, he had to be educated in the ways of the world.

And that is why the ending of Seven is satisfying.  We may not give a shit about Kevin Spacey.  But we are very happy indeed to see Brad Pitt driven mad by the sudden realization of his role in his wife’s decapitation.  He is the one who needed to be taught a lesson, and in his case, this was the only way to teach that lesson.  Now the universe is at peace again.  And we can go on. 

All this would have been impossible to accomplish if the film hadn’t been so disciplined in keeping to the time-honored traditions of the crap cop-psycho killer genre.  Mills’ punishment has to slip into our awareness sideways, via peripheral vision, not head-on.  We need to be distracted enough by the predictable story arc that when Gwyneth’s head in the box shows up, the realization dawns on us at around the same time as it’s dawning on Mills and Somerset.  Not the realization that John Doe has done away with the fair Mrs. M. and her unborn child – we may have had a glimmer of this earlier – but that the movie has all along been about Mills and the lesson he needs to learn from John Doe.  Somerset has been trying all along to teach it to him, but this isn't a lesson words alone can deliver.

Sometimes it takes a serial killer.  Pathos mathos.

Bluegrass

About 6 or 7 years ago, I got bit by the bluegrass bug, spent ridiculous amounts of time listening to bluegrass and learning the music -- learned to play the banjo a bit and formed a bad, which gigged around the DC area for a while: The Rock Creek Ramblers.  I've since dropped the banjo and the bluegrass thing for a while, but I'm starting to fill the itch again.  Anyway, this is a recording of a song we were rehearsing in my living room one day -- it's actually the second incarnation of RCR, two of our members having left for grad school, leaving the remaining people to try to find replacements for them.  It didn't work.  But this doesn't sound so bad for a rehearsal recorded on minidisc.