I imagine greenery glinting. And a soft breeze against my skin. Or maybe, leaves falling. Yes, later than Summer, actually. It could be early Autumn. The sun, in any case, should be stationed overhead, and her golden rays filtering kindly down upon all. Maybe a strong ray of it lighting up your jaw, and arm.
Will we have tea in our hands? Or water? Maybe rain just finished falling…the day is yet warm, and the sun is splintering off the stones in shivering diamond rainbows.
Is that right?
Of course, on this project, we inevitably run into manufacturing problems. One after another. It’s colder than you thought, and you have to scramble to find a shirt. You break the tea cup, or you are out of tea. It’s not Autumn, or if it is, it’s the cold, grey, kind.
Hunger rarely shows through in these gorgeous mind-paintings, but it’s always there in life. Too much of it. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t yet figured out how to be less hungry, yet.
∞
WRITING A MEMOIR SEEMED INEVITABLE TO ME as a younger person. Perhaps it was due to the nature of many of my childhood and adolescent environments, where people spoke of their experience to a rapt brotherhood of listeners. In the beginning, it was the Satsang rooms, and the festival halls; the heart-fueled sharing of higher consciousness, and experiences with inner awakenings. When I was in my teens, it was the therapy groups and meeting rooms of chemical dependency recovery; the confessional-based healing of the soul through personal narrative. But whatever the cause, environmental or inherent, I’ve always been a story teller. This seems to be a motion that my mind makes on its own.
When I was younger and had the impulse to write a book in the format, I refrained. I felt I was simply not old enough—and as brash and cocky as you might imagine me (and as I can be), I did not subscribe to the notion that I had Something to Say, Anyway. I knew in my bones that I needed more living to do before I could write such a book. I think today I was right. I was a wordsmith and a clever speaker…perhaps even a deep feeler and thinker, whatever that means. But I was callow, reactionary, and immature in my thinking. I certainly had things to share, and say, and my feelings and thoughts were valid. I just didn’t think a string of memoirs made sense…and I’d wait to have a go at mine, if there’s only one to be written. I’d wait until I had more sense to make from the senselessness…and for a happy ending to the struggle.
Today I think I have lived enough years and stories, and have met enough people, and played enough scenes that I could write a memoir. I’ve written a few fiction novels…I see most of that as practice. Thought and word thickets. Training in hewing, and clearing, and seeing. I could write a memoir with three times the ease a fiction novel takes. Five times, maybe. Maybe ten. Crafting a captivating and coherent story structure, and imagining characters who are interesting and organic, in a world that holds together….this is very hard work! But telling my stories, and sharing my thoughts? That is no work at all.
Still, the moment I imagine my memoirs in a book form, I know it would be a long one. Which is not bad…I could keep your interest, I’d like to think. But the book would need a reason to exist. And what would be the reason? Why would I ask people to do the work of reading such a book? What would be the Message? I don’t have a happy ending to my trials…and I may never have one. I have learned to live with the damage that life has dealt me…but what’s the alternative? I have learned to survive the fires I start in my sleep, and I suppose there is some worth to sharing how. I have learned to make do with little, and find joy where it exists (which is almost everywhere), and surely that’s valuable. Nonetheless, I think life is a cruel thing, and people often, no less cruel and very often, unbelievably stupid. Sure, I see beauty, and in fact it’s where I like to rest my attention. But there is no great Solomon in the Sky, life will finish us all with no care, we will eventually be forgotten by everyone, the good will be ground down, and the devils celebrated. And I don’t know that people need a book to remind them of this.
But I’m unfairly judging an entire work before it’s written. Who knows what writing the book would show me? Or if attempting to do so would change me? Who knows anything, indeed. It’s a mistake to think we know where the story leads…if there is anything my craft (and my life) has taught me, it’s this.
∞
MAYBE ONE PART OF THE PROBLEM is how many damn stories I have by now! My stories inevitably reflect my thinking, and turn fractal. Stories within stories, and shapes within larger shapes. I must cut some off now and then. Clear the wild growth of the garden, so a path can be seen, and walked.
At some point in the recent past (Summer?) I decided to put a book together in order to move past a certain era of my life, to GIVE IT CLOSURE, as goes the saying. It will not be MY MEMOIRS, per se…but some may feel like it. Half of the book is in poem format, and half is in chapters, each exploring a relationship with a single character/person. I will label it now as Creative Non-Fiction. Where people may be amalgams or loosely based on a real person, but certainly no kind of “tell-all” book. And while each chapter will seem to center around another person, obviously, the journey toward truth is all about me. I’m telling on myself.
I write about people with the intention of understanding them, and myself, through knowing them. Not even one sentence has been written in the spirit of exacting any kind of vengeance. That would lead to no understanding. And in all the time of my chaotic past love-life, what any women involved know (if they’ve paid attention at all) is I do not go online and drag people, or air out my romantic grievances. Not during any argument, or even after any parting of the ways. Some (one) has done that to me, even on a list-serv which was mildly traumatic, but it’s not something I do. Not even to people who anger me. Not to feel or appear noble, it’s just not my way. I will deal with my feelings off-line. And I will shape my story later, when it can possess more truth and self-reflection than any knee-jerk screed might.
This will be a book about love…and missed love. About loving women. Maybe. Or about not being able to love them. (Or myself?) And maybe it is about more than any of that. How could it not be. But it will center on my experiences with women, sex, and love. And while it will definitely address the time period leading up to and after my separation with my ex [wife], it will cover a span of time going all the way back to my childhood. Because my exploration of love did not begin a few years ago. And the shapes that came later are conjoined to those that appeared early on.
Though I have other books I think are worth the trouble of publishing through an agent, I will self-publish the book when it is all done. This one I do just to move past a phase of life. Of course, I could be completely wrong about how publish-worthy it will be. Being John Malkovich was written as a throwaway script, so to speak, while the author was waiting for TV work. Letting go of grand plans for any piece of work is often the relaxed pose that allows us to create something of worth. So I will share the text with my agent, when I get another one (a 2017 plan). And let them advise me after reading it.
I don’t want to confuse anyone by invoking the phrase “throwaway script,” even with caveat. I think the topic really does deserve care and attention. The search for love, often surrounded by great sorrow and even disaster, has been a constant in my life since I can remember.
Meanwhile, I’ve been collecting my thoughts over time. And putting pages together as time passes. One of the great things aging has brought me is patience.
∞
TRANSFORMING INTO A SOMEWHAT QUIETER PERSON after having spent my youth as a know-it-all big mouth has been an interesting experience. Through that lens, I could write an entire book. Just on that one angle.
(That’s what I mean about having “too many” stories. You could write ten books about a ten year period of your life, depending on where you shifted the driving narrative or theme. Each time, it could say different things about the same amount of time simply by focusing on a different thread. Writing any such book, then, becomes about what not to tell…)
There really was a time I think I had no vocal restraint at all. Of course, this began as a reaction in my childhood, to being bullied in different ways; to the world telling me I was small and worthless. I chose to become adept at using language; to come back with blades. And when defending myself as a child was no longer required, I defended my ego and for a long time, thought it was the same thing.
I will always remember the night in the Seaport district when I first consciously exercised vocal restraint in a meaningful way. I was 29 years old and at a party in someone’s loft in Manhattan. The change did not manifest in some huge dramatic event or anything. Just another night out partying with some friends, and some strangers. But in one instant, when an opportunity arose to be the Same Ole Me, it was as if my soul just took a breath, and a tension was released from my body by a minuscule yet profound amount. I didn’t have to be witty every moment, I didn’t have to have something to say at every turn, I didn’t have to have a damn opinion on what people were talking about, I didn’t have to be concerned with the image a person might be growing of me in their mind, I didn’t have to prove my worth to anyone.
And we were all doing cocaine, too! If you have been high on blow, or around people that were, you know such an inner state and accompanied outer behavior is directly and chemically antithetical to the mood cocaine brings you. But perhaps the shift was somehow instigated in strong reaction against the typical urge the drug invokes in a person’s body—which I reiterate: is Trumpian to its core. (Cocaine turns otherwise pleasant people into braggarts, surface intellectuals, planners of the un-doable, and endless bloviators on any topic at all—though they prefer the subject be themselves.)
If so…the reaction stayed around long after the night ended and my body metabolized the chemicals. Something, at that point in my life, just shifted inside of me. And I had no idea it was only the start.
When a drop of that peace hits your heart, it’s thrilling. Especially because what isn’t said often is that being an insecure know-it-all, braggart, or just an overly-loquacious sort is absolutely exhausting.
Over time, I learned to cultivate those moments of clarity. Or they collected all on their own. I suppose I made an effort to practice at the new set of behaviors I had stumbled upon. Honestly, though, I can’t give credit to much more than getting older. If I did work to get to that point, I don’t know about it. I had a hell of a lot of issues at the time, and was acting out in various ways. But I was also learning and changing for the better.
But that’s how life is. It’s rarely the simple, linear, instructive picture we yearn to make of it. It’s all things at once; it’s our soul dancing with everything, and then…it’s about whatever we want to make of the union.
I THINK YOU CAN EXPERIENCE A LOT OF GROWTH JUST BY PAYING ATTENTION. Even if you draw the wrong conclusions from time to time. (And why it’s a good idea to hold on to your conclusions lightly.) Just pay attention, think, and remember. There is a magical grease in the gears where the universe clasps our consciousness. There is a gravity to truth that can align you toward home, if you only loosen your grip.
∞
I GREW TO ENJOY MY NEW BEHAVIORS through the ego’s looking glass like a drug high, themselves—dwelling in a place where my opinions or thoughts are not utterly important. And in fact, are so unimportant, it bothers me little whether they venture out there or not. I watch conversations and days pass by, and enjoy observing. I think and learn about what I read and see. I look at my own thought reactions, too, as part of the process of learning. I don’t talk about any of it, but I am engaged in my way, with everyone. I identify with people on many levels. The ones whose words provoke pleasant emotions in me, as well as ones who bring me unpleasant feelings. But overall, I feel unattached, in the sense of being driven by an ego that must declare itself and fight to protect its existence. It is like floating on your back in water, and feeling sun on your skin. The thoughts and feelings of others—and your own—like clouds above you…drifting….
Is this a masochistic thing? I chuckle, marveling at the un-me like behaviors of denying myself societal ego-seeking. It is at least practicing some degree of selflessness.
It has been my entrance to a new world.
IF YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER, you need to have an ego that feels its product is important enough to be seen and felt by others. You cannot completely submerge your “I” voice, or you will never share work. Why bother, after all? Why revere this collection of thoughts? What do you hope for? To change others? To convince? To declare a position valid? But if it is valid, it is. It does not need your book.
This is true. But people need stories. We need each other’s stories. There is no need to even write with any intention of changing anyone, or converting anyone, or convincing anyone, or declaring any one reality unassailable or superior. Just let go of any of that. If you just tell your story, as truthfully as you know how, it will be a story people understand. It may even be a story that helps people understand.