NEW ORLEANS - 30 October, 2002: There are so many things I have missed. The deaths in the theatre in Russia, for example, have passed without a word in this space. Likewise the deaths of the Wellstones. A woman I know told me this week that you cannot watch or read the news any longer without feeling overwhelmed, that your world is spinning out of orbit.
How can one respond?
I would suggest that the only reasoned response is to remember that your own street is not part of the chaos projected toward you from the multiple screens (including this one). The job of any medium is to insist upon holding your attention. Those of us working these vineyards are a demanding lot, in that respect.
If we were your lovers, you'd call us "needy".
One analysis of the New World Order, an oxymoron of the highest order, is that frustrations of every ilk must come to the fore as there is no actual dialectic conflict with which governments can now define themselves. The amorphous threat of a disorderly world must thus be raised as a justification for the continued ratification of new and "better" laws. These laws, we are told, will restore the peace and tranquility we all desire.
But how can any government restore something which never existed?
Put another way, nostalgia and memory are tricky things. It is easier to believe there was a period of peace and tranquility than to accept that the world has always been as troubling as it is right now.
The musician and performance artist Lori Anderson penned the wonderful line, "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now - only much, much better."
ONE MORE THING ABOUT THE WELLSTONE TRAGEDY has to be said: the immensity of the loss, socially and politically, will be felt only in our lack of future progress. We, as a nation, don't deal with death. We deny it. Robert Kennedy was castigated in some circles for seeming, in that view, to mourn the loss of a second brother to tragedy for too long.
We are the nation of "Get over it and get on with your life." The imperative after 9/11 was to "get back to normal" ASAP. We tell each other that the "dear departed" would have wanted it that way.
What a crock! I would prefer, when I pass, that someone, somewhere sincerely and genuinely feels the loss and wants a reasonable time for wretched mourning. That they valued my life enough to be deeply hurt that it has ended.
I am being accused of waxing both poetic and philosophical in these Glass Houses of late. I find myself being both flattered and troubled by that.
Does the response mean that I was tawdry and prosaic before? How can I maintain par?
THE CENTRAL PROBLEM of sharing my thinking with you each week, my little love, is that of remaining true to myself while being highly self-conscious about not disappointing you.
What I have been trying to do most recently is reconcile the bad habit of old age (remembering who I was) with living in the here and now (attempting to appreciate who I am.) It's not exactly midlife crisis, since I feel I underwent that prematurely fourteen years ago, but I have not yet reconciled myself to being fifty.
Don't worry. I have no plans to buy a red sports car. I hate automobiles.
The problem is exacerbated by my own eccentricity, I accept, and this overlong enforced period of self-denial. Navel-gazing 'R' us.
A secondary difficulty, when trying to appreciate the present, in my particular case, is that I have been living in "borrowed" space and on borrowed time for so many months. There is nothing definite and secure in a life dependent on what kindness can be found in strangers. (Thus my obsession with finding the proverbial "garret".)
The only stable elements in the present I'm attempting to appreciate are producing this journal for you each week and tending bar every weekend. One is ephemeral, in that it takes place on a medium that is little more than sand and electricity, the other confronts me with humanity too often at its worse and most tragic.
THE BARTENDERS CURSE is that you can only succeed if given the opportunity to push a legal drug (alcohol) which can lead to both joy and tragedy. Even in a town where there is an unspoken "law" (of Tip Karma) that says one should tip a dollar (or more) per drink, to make any sort of a living a bartender must encourage you to have another and another. Even while taking on a benign motto, as I have, of " ... Putting the 'fun' back into dysfunctional", all too often the knowledge is there of what a hollow promise that actually is.
How many times have a heard the phrase, "So-and-so is a great person. I love him/her to death, but his/her drinking is starting to get out of hand"? It's like a French Quarter mantra.
The dramatis personae of this city's tragedies settle before me every single shift I work:
- the middle-aged wino who cares for her aging grandmother in the suburbs but can't wait to get away from her nagging and into a bar to carry on cloying conversations with anyone within earshot about her former carefree life on the West Coast;
- the building contractor who dreams of making a major reputation for his wonderful work between bouts of maudlin drinking he blames on the one who got away, knocking over his cocktail as he sinks into the newest night of successive oblivions;
- the college professor who gets increasingly abusive to anyone at hand as he drinks himself into back-breaking credit card debt in order to keep up appearances;
- the bon vivant who has built of reputation, while drunk, of getting naked in front of live bands, throwing barstools out into the street and being fired from more jobs than he can any longer count;
- the has-been musician who makes the rounds of his favorite bars to chat up local musicians, spread gossip like an old biddy, and maybe cajole his way into offering a song with a sympathetic group of players.
These and too many others pass before me like ghost ships of the afternoon and evening; doctors, lawyers, waitresses, cooks, Indian chiefs. I encourage them to have another until they are sodden enough to pass on. Then I wait for other ghost ships to drift into my Sargasso.
31 October, 2002: LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS ON-GOING TOPIC OF GUILT, SHALL WE?
It has been a constant in this column and one which I feel this week I should take a moment to explore with you so that you might better understand my thinking.
When I was studying the history of world religions, during my undergraduate years, I was presented by religious thinker Richard Horsley - if memory serves - with the proposition that there are two kinds of structures for handling opprobrium. Some religions believe that it's a personal dilemma and thus use the mechanism of personal guilt. Other religions place more emphasis on it as a social problem and so use the mechanism of shame.
Viewed this way, we can see that the divide encompasses the old argument of whether behavior enforced from without or within is most effective. A shame society would make you wear a scarlet A on your breast because you are so essentially evil that you cannot be depended upon to exact a penance of yourself. A guilt society believes that the tortures of your own good conscience will exact the highest price.
I have tended to agree more with the latter, excepting cases of extreme sociopathology, because I have always believed that people are essentially good.
Since I hold myself to a much higher standard than you would ever hold me, I am constantly racked by guilt.
The problem of course with being a member of guilt culture is that your torturer never knows when to relent. Unlike shame cultures, where a new and more egregious sinner will always eventually emerge to take everyone's attention, guilt never goes away until I let it.
Which leads us to the question of penance. How much is enough? How many Hail Marys or mitzvahs are required until I have washed away the stain of my wrongdoing? I don't know. So I am constantly in a state of self-denial and self-flagellation. It is most unpleasant.
And, of course, there is always some new omission or commission to feel newly or more guilty about.
It is popular to say that we must all learn to forgive ourselves. I have certainly heard it more than enough and would not begrudge the saying dropping from the lexicon. It seems too facile to me and minimizes both the function of conscience and the meaning of offence. If one simply need only forgive oneself, then there is no reason to either make amends to injured parties or fear that they will exact retribution. It's too much "I'm okay, you're okay." Well, we just aren't.
On a larger scale, you see, America is too ready to embrace that "forgive yourself" mentality. That is why we repudiate U.N. tribunals, et alia. We demand to remain the arbiters of our own justice and the offended be damned. That is a system without a conscience at the highest level.
There is a direct corollary for you to employ as to my thinking about personal and social justice.
THIS LINE OF THOUGHT leads to the admission that I have not adequately addressed the former of my two stable situations, that of "living" most primarily here on the Web. I've certainly made off-handed jokes about this circumstance, but never seriously discussed it with you.
The troubling dynamic of this ethereal existence is that its dynamic is one of mutual rejection and disappointment.
I actively reject (and disappoint) the world of "meatspace" as a reaction to my own sense of its rejecting and disappointing me. This thinking is indicative of a quite maudlin weldanschaaung, I accept, but that does not change that it is essentially my own. I was an unhappy child who grew up to be an unhappy adult.
While endeavoring over the last two years to engage the social whirl more than I did, say, five years ago, the rewards of this re-engagement seem meagre. There is so little appreciation of the life of the mind, in most circles I've encountered, as to be frustrating to someone (like myself) who values that life.
As this journal indicates, I find a wealth of people with whom to discuss, dispute or trade ideas on this medium. The "action", for want of a better term, is seductively here in the realm of sand and electricity.
The rewards - while not often enough financial - tend to outweigh the liabilities. Even the most lucrative employment(s) I've had over the last few years have come from here, as opposed to "meatspace." One would be deluded not to take that as a sign of appreciation.
Nonetheless, I am and likely shall continue to wrestle with this circumstance. Life is too short.
I REACH THE CONCLUSION of this epistle recognizing that I have been rather a "downer" this week. I had nothing amusing to say. I have actually completed this effort on time, for a change, rather than at the eleventh hour. I should feel pleased, but I don't.
I'm in a somber mood this week, on my "Day of Nonexistence", because I have so much on my plate and so much around me is uncertain (again) and unsettling. I suggested to Scott, whose opinion I do very much respect, that I'd appreciate some time alone with him to converse and sort out my priorities.
I have some more Web design work in the pipeline, things at the bar seemed to have settled into a less than lucrative pattern - not many tourists making it down to Frenchmen Street these days and those who do pretend not to have heard about tipping, construction jobs I'm still willing to work are on the wane. I need to find the garret and divide my time equally between what is going on here and the opportunities presenting themselves for me to move my reporting abroad again. There are a few grant applications for the latter that I need to bring to completion.
The (non-existent) Love Life? I spoke candidly with the woman-of-substance this week about my disappointment and she has begun to e-mail me a series of jokes. She's trying to cheer me up, I suppose.
I have been so focused on savoring this time alone, in quiet (for the most part) that I have for now that I've effectively shut down the radar screen. There might be shoals ahead, so it would be foolish to lose this moment. My own enthusiasm to make any effort, even of the meagre type for which I'm notorious, seems to be receding. This may not be the place or time. Perhaps I'll start again in Mexico.
Things I'll Likely Say This Week
1. "I said garret, not garote."
2. "Do you remember what you did/said the other night at (insert name of bar here)?"
3. "Care for another?"
Thanks for coming back this week.
"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod
"The cruelest thing you can do to someone is make a promise upon which you cannot deliver. It is better to leave a person hopeless than to proffer a false hope that will leave them shattered...." -- Rod Amis, 1996
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