John Swinburn

It’s twenty minutes after five o’clock and I’m tired of being awake. I woke up just before four and have been writing and thinking uncomfortably ever since.  I have posted my two requisite blog posts but still don’t feel like I’ve accomplished a bloody thing so far today.  A question posed in Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is on my mind: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”  Those are the words of someone who knows the answer, deep in his heart.  He may not want to know, but he knows.

Dark, cold, early mornings reveal things daylight can’t, or won’t.  Sitting alone with the night creeping along nearby, I can have thoughts that aren’t comfortable with the sun and its bravado.  Even hidden behind clouds, the sun suggests possibilities that don’t hold up at night, possibilities that disappear in darkness.  The pre-dawn darkness, even with a cup of hot coffee ready and waiting in front of me, speaks of things I don’t want to know, in voices I don’t want to hear.

Yesterday, I went outside to explore the snow around the house. I came across paw prints in the snow, prints I think belong to a fox.  And, then, I found prints that must belong to a raccoon.  And there was evidence of a deer wandering alongside the house.  They would not have been out in the daylight; they would be sneaking around in the dark, knowing people like me would be inside, wishing the elements were not so powerful as to hold us hostage.  But things in the night do hold us hostage.  The cold. The dark. The unseen. The misunderstood. The unknown. There’s so much out there that frightens us.

Even when we don’t admit our fears, they are our unwelcome companions, the permanent guests inside our heads that hold sway over almost everything we think and do.There is no one with whom we can talk about them, so we talk around them by writing, hoping some of the words we write become scalpels that excise the fears like the tumors they are.  But words must be sharpened; otherwise, like scalpels, they become dull and incapable of precisely cutting the ugliness. Instead, they behave like dull knives, ripping and not cutting, tearing instead of slicing.

What a strange and unpleasant mood I’m in this morning. Not angry, just full of an imprecise sadness that makes the world seem dull and grey.  Coffee hasn’t fixed it, even after the third cup.  Maybe the congee I put on to cook just after I got up will do the trick; it’s supposed to be comfort food.

I just looked back at what I’ve written and see that, thanks to sitting here and letting my mind drift, time has flown. It ‘s now 5:45.  What have I been doing the last twenty-five minutes? I’ve been writing this post for twenty-five minutes and this is all I’ve done? I suppose it doesn’t matter.  What I think and what I write are not the sort of stuff that changes lives or causes tectonic plates to dance beneath the earth’s surface.  Everything I’ve written suggests a perspective that proclaims, “the world revolves around me.” Why is it that we humans, at least this human, are so self-absorbed? Why can’t we look at the world beyond the tips of our noses and recognize that we, neither individually nor collectively, are in control of the future, any more than we are in control of the past?

My fingers are tired and my eyes are bleary and my mind stings like it has been bitten by something poisonous. I’d better stop this before I write something the world will regret.

Every once in a while I have this fantasy in which I simply disappear.  Not literally, but close to it.  One day I’m here, the next day there’s no trace of me; I’m just gone.  I don’t know just why it appeals to me, but it does.  Every time, I am conscious of wanting to control the emotions of people who might be worried about me; I don’t want them to worry, I don’t want them to even notice I’m gone.  But those things just happen, don’t they?  You can’t control the emotions of anyone but yourself.  Would that I could. But I can’t.

Anyway, something about disappearing has enormous appeal to me.  And let me clarify. By disappearing, I mean “without a trace.”  Like I never existed.  Like there’s a vacancy that no one notices, no one but me. Or, perhaps, not even me.

I know, people have written stories about this sort of thing.  There are lessons to be learned about how important one is in the real world; if you’re gone, all the good you’ve done, all the positive impacts you’ve had, disappear with you.  But this is not relevant to my story; my story is about just being gone without a blip on the screen. No “what if” moments, no “the world could have been different.” Just absence without notice.

Maybe that’s the story in itself. A guy disappears and the expected ripple in the fabric of the universe doesn’t take place, calling into question the  relevance of everyone.  And everything.

It’s the same as waiting for a response that never comes, an unmeasured emptiness in a hole that doesn’t exist.

I suppose I already know how it would be, in a way, because I can recall being ignored, or at least not noticed.  You’ve probably been there, too.  Someone looks past you or through you in the grocery store or in a bus; you are not there, as far as that person is concerned.  Your existence is as meaningless to someone else as a speck of dust on the bumper of a car on a remote hillside in Sri Lanka is to a guy who washes windows on Manhattan skyscrapers.

When I was asleep last night, words came to me, maybe in a dream.  Or maybe I was not asleep, maybe I was awake and wishing I were asleep. I don’t know what they mean, only that they create an image in my mind  too powerful to ignore.

“Weep and the world weeps with you, cry  and you cry alone.”

And that’s why, sometimes, I just want to disappear.

I met a woman last week who suggested I need to face, and overcome, my fear.  She knows virtually nothing about me, except that I write and that I do not call myself a writer. When she was told by someone who introduced us that I’m a writer, she said, “Oh, you’re a writer!” I responded with, “Well, I write.”

That’s what set her off. She immediately recommended I read a book entitled Art & Fear.  She said it would change my life. The book, written by David Bayles and Ted Orland, was written (as I understand it) for visual artists, but this woman (who is a painter) insisted it would force me to admit to, and celebrate, that I am an artist of the written word.

My fear, of course, is that I will read the book and take its lessons to heart, only to discover I am an imposter, a guy who writes but is not a writer, a man who imagines painting but who has no skills with a brush.  That’s the fear she wants me to confront, I suppose, but I’m not sure I’m ready for the disappointment.  I know some  people will laugh at my fear, they will say it doesn’t matter whether I’m an artist or a writer, only that I want to be one.  Those are the people who do not understand, even a little, what is tearing at the edges of my soul. These are the questions that mercilessly rip me to shred, offering no compassion.  I know I am not an artist, but I need to be one.  There’s nothing to be done when that dilemma is faced and accepted for its ugly reality.

Finally, I suppose, one must accept that not everyone is an artist, not even those who fervently wish to be.  That’s where the fear is greatest and that’s where acceptance of the fear has to start.

Words rarely fail me, but they have failed me miserably in expressing how I feel about all of this.  It’s far more oppressive and burdensome and painful than my words would suggest. Yet, maybe, the fact that my words are inadequate is a sign that it’s not that important, after all. And, perhaps most importantly of all, I will not allow myself to be defined by what I cannot do, nor by what I wish for but cannot achieve.  That’s madness on steroids.  I won’t have it.

I guess I should read the book.  But now I’m afraid to learn what it may have to teach. BS. I am able to take it in, all of it!  Let the war of the wills begin!

In spite of my efforts yesterday to find my phone, in my car where I thought I must have dropped it, I couldn’t find it.  But, this morning, I decided to have one last look.  Armed with a flashlight, I crawled into the back seat of the car and stood on my head so I could look up between the driver’s seat and the console.  There, almost invisible due to its location, wedged so tightly the normal vibrations made when calls or messages come in were dulled to almost nothing, was my phone.  Hallelujah! Fortunately, I had only suspended the account, so I was able to reinstate it.

I like the phone, but its large size makes a belt holster unwieldy.  If I had it to do over again, I’d buy a smaller version.  But, the issue of where to put it, coupled with the fact that I lost the thing inside my car, argues loudly that I need to put my creativity to work on a solution so I can avoid future panics like the one I had yesterday.

There’s a vast middle ground between brand-new and broken, between useful and useless. If we allow ourselves to reject the notion that new equals better, we open up a world of possibilities in every facet of our lives.  There is wonderful potential in scratched furniture and old cars and re-purposed plastic food containers.  This is on my mind because of abandonment of the recycling program where I live due to budget.  It was costing more to operate the program than it garnered in revenue.

We were happily carting old newspapers and junk mail and plastic bottles and tin cans and cardboard and so forth to the recycling center until the program ended.  But now, we’re faced with either treating the stuff as trash or making a much longer trip to a county recycling center.  We’ll adapt and figure out a convenient process to get our recyclables to the alternate site.

But as we think of it, it occurs to me that much of what people buy is a replacement for things that are perfectly usable. In fact, a lot of things that are “used” are, in my opinion, better than new.  Like jeans.  And t-shirts. And some ideas.

Maybe I should have held my tongue (or put my fingers back in their cases, as it were), but it struck a nerve with me.  So I responded to the email, which was the following message that was forwarded to me by a woman who is involved with a club to which I belong:

Tonight, on the Bill O’Reilly TV show, we heard Dr. Robert Jeffries (Pastor, First Baptist Church-Dallas), Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) and a Catholic Priest say: “It is time for a public outcry about the atrocities that are happening in many countries by Muslim terrorists”. Women and children are being buried alive; Whole families slaughtered; Many have been beheaded; Then this week, 21 men from Eygpt – -beheaded because they were CHRISTIAN; Yesterday we learned that 45 men were burned alive! These are only a few of the atrocities done in the name of Allah.
We are a moral nation! We are a Christian Nation! IT IS TIME WE LET THE WORLD KNOW, WE WILL NOT BE SILENT ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING.

Dr. Jeffries asked all who were listening to write or call President Obama; Write and call our Senators and Representatives; Contact our friends asking them to join in too; Call our Pastors, asking them to make their congregations aware that we will pray, and stand together. At the close of O’Reilly’s program, he said that we should each do something to let the world know we stand together. WE MUST STOP THIS EVIL THAT IS SPREADING.

Here are the Whitehouse phone numbers: Daytime only 202 456 1111
Whitehouse Switchboard 202 456 1414

Whitehouse email: www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments
You can ‘Google’ your Senators and Representatives for their emails and phone numbers.

My response to her, which follows, garnered a terse, ALL CAPS reply, essentially saying “Let’s just say everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” Yes, they are, as long as it doesn’t draw me into an idiotic religious war.  My reply:

“There already is a public outcry against the atrocities of fundamentalist Muslims who twist their ideologies into insanity. What this country does NOT need is a bunch of equally twisted Christian fundamentalists and religious zealots pounding their chests in an effort to create a holy war between Christians and Muslims.

Decent Muslims and decent Christians and decent agnostics and decent Buddhists and decent atheists and decent Hindus and decent Sikhs and many other decent people already condemn the atrocities committed by twisted fanatics. But public outcry will not persuade these religious fanatics to cease their butchery. I am convinced only a multinational response, like what is happening now, will ultimately win out. That, plus rational policies and actions by western countries that do not appear to be based on hatred of Muslim religious philosophies nor on oppression or control of large swaths of the world.

People who appear on Bill O’Reilly’s program tend to be people with personal agendas, often twisted religious agendas. Instead of rational conversations about solutions to problems, they seek to create emotional responses to world events. Instead of intelligent exchanges between thinking people, they seek to rant and rave and beat their chests in the hope they can generate irrational fervor about issues that deserve much deeper thought.

This nation is, and should be, a secular nation in which people have the right to choose whether to be Christian or Islam or Hindu or Sikh or atheist or agnostic or, if they like, devotees of pagan faierie worship, or any combination thereof. If public outcry continues to invoke the name of Christianity and continues to treat Islam as the enemy; if public figures like O’Reilly and those who appear on his show continue to fan the flames of hatred; if, instead, controlled conversations and reasonable debate are overwhelmed by fear and mass hysteria, then figures like O’Reilly and his guests can take the blame for a turning the atrocious religious zealotry of a tiny, twisted fraction of a world religious into a religious conflagration of epic proportions, a religion-based conflict that never should have erupted in the first place.”

Ach!  I must try to be a better person than I’m feeling I am at this moment.  I really  must.