John Swinburn

Skimming old stories I wrote, and even ones I started and abandoned, is a little like sorting through old photos. Photos are two dimensional triggers that may, if given enough attention, draw memories out of the tangled gauze of dim recollections. But stories are laden with emotional meat on the bones; they paint full-scale portraits of experience the way photos don’t. I suppose photographs evoke memories, while stories preserve them.

The lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s poem/song, Sisters of Mercy, are among the most powerful I have ever heard uttered. This morning, some of them are on my mind.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

And then, in a later verse, he strikes at the heart of everything that constitutes humanity:

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

This explains, as clearly as anything I’ve ever read or heard, the reason people turn to religion. Religion provides answers, on close inspection, for questions that have no answers. Yet we insist on answers, whether right or wrong, logical or illogical, true or false. And that’s all right, I suppose. We all see the answers, and the questions, from a different perspective.

I read this morning of the death of Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut who was one of only twelve humans to have walked on the moon. Apollo 14 launched on January 31, 1971; the lunar landing took place on February 5; Mitchell became the sixth person to walk on the surface of the moon.

Mitchell, and others like him, define the spirit of adventure. I am overcome with profound sadness as I reflect on what he and the thousands of physicists and engineers and other scientists accomplished less than a lifetime ago—accomplishments that stand in stark contrast to so many more mundane advances today.

Our society seemed to have possessed a remarkable sense of adventure and a willingness to take enormous risks during the period of lunar exploration; it seems to me that admirable characteristic has slipped from all but the precious few.

Mitchell had some unusual perspectives on the universe, but I’d say a man with a willingness to explore beyond the boundaries of the sky has every right to them. Regardless of how I might feel about them, I hold him in high esteem and I weep for the loss of someone who taught us a thing or two about what is possible with enough passion and drive.

It’s not that I can’t write. It’s not writer’s block. Nothing like that at all. No, it’s that I’m simply not in a frame of mind suitable for writing the sort of material I usually enjoy writing. Until recently, when this sort of mood struck me, I felt pressure to find a way around it or through it. But I don’t feel that pressure now. My attitude is that I’ll write when I feel like writing. Yes, I know; I’m writing now. But this isn’t really writing, at least it’s not writing in the sense of producing creative fiction; that’s what I consider writing. That, and poetry.

I could write poetry now, and in fact I have written a bit of poetry within the last day or so, but not poetry I feel comfortable posting here. Sometime, poetry is so purely personal that it has no place outside its producer; even if I chose to share it, I’m confident people would misread meanings and emotions that I don’t intend to convey. So it will remain hidden from all eyes but mine unless and until I decide to share it.

When I decided to drop out of my sculpture class recently, I coincidentally opted out of my commitment to myself to write something every day. So, some days I am shirking my self-imposed obligation to be creative. That isn’t entirely true; I have been attempting to be creative in other realms, but until I have evidence of modest success or abject failure, I’ll keep those endeavors to myself, as well.

I suspect I may just need a break. A break from myself, in some ways, and perhaps a break from what has become a routine that’s a little too predictable and insufficiently interesting or exciting. Perhaps a little road trip would do the trick. Perhaps not. Maybe a road trip without my computer and with my smart phone dumbed down so that all it can do is place and receive calls; no emails, no texts, no Facebook, no Internet, period.

I wonder whether, if I were to drive into a small town and seek work, I would be able to quickly find a job of some sort? Aside from wondering about my success in such an endeavor, I wonder whether I would really want to do that. Is my sanity in question in the same way that my motivation is of debatable strength?

You probably didn’t want to read this today, did you? Actually, you didn’t read this today, at last not this far down, did you? I know I probably wouldn’t have done, except that I wrote it and I feel a certain sense of obligation.

In recent months, I have become fascinated with (or, perhaps, fixated on) what I wrote years ago on my first blog. I’m sure I’ve recently mentioned, here, my obsession with my earlier writings. Reading what I wrote reveals to me the personality of someone with whom I no longer share a brain and body. Well, that may be a stretch; we may share both, but we’ve ‘grown apart,’ if you will.

On the one hand, I find that firebrand appealing and wish I could resurrect his passion for matters that, today, seem unworthy of getting all worked up about. On the other, I look back and wonder why he spent such extraordinary amounts of mental energy ranting about such stuff. In either case, the fire in his belly seems to have been a case of arson; that inferno could not have erupted spontaneously. For example, here’s the text of a tongue-in-cheek rant from September 2007:

I’m considering changing my company name and line of business. It would be Associated Hatred & Malevolence, Inc., which will specialize in euthanizing nasty and unruly clients of professional service firms, after first doing to them what they tend to do to my company when the mood strikes. My title in the rebranded firm will be Supreme Incubus. I will employ an Executive Vice Succubus to deal with the clients for which my nature may not be appropriate.

If you’d like to apply for a position with the firm, submit your resume, along with references which will attest to your experience with gallows humor, jocular homicidal rages, and facetious torture. Must be facile with all manner of weaponry, including explosives, knives, guns, nuclear arms, and flamethrowers.

A year before that vituperative outburst, I posted a recipe I had not yet tried (and still, to this day, have not done) for green tomato soup. I ended that post with:

It goes without saying, but say it I will, that anyone who prepares, longs for, or has ever had, green tomato soup should behave responsibly. Part of that responsible behavior involves making sure to vote in all meaningful elections—voting for people with progressive ideas and attitudes—and doing all within their power to defeat the fascist machine that is tearing away at the heart of this country.

There. I’ve combined my two passions: food and progressive politics.

A month after the initial vituperation, I wrote about a road trip my wife and I took to Arkansas and beyond, during which we visited Little Rock. While there, we visited the Clinton Presidential Library and had lunch at Loca Luna, a place we visited again not long ago; the food continues to be exquisite.

With all the adjustments in my self and in my life during the eleven years since I first started blogging, there remains a few of the embers that ignite the flames of passion in me. The passions have changed, and the propellant that ignites those embers is a higher grade fuel, but they remain there, somewhere beneath the surface; and sometimes in full view.

I look back at what I wrote during my early years of blogging and think there was an authenticity in my spontaneous expressions that is sometimes missing now. I over think what I write, what I say. I tend to be more conscious that what I write may be misinterpreted. In the ‘old days’ of my blogs, I knew there was almost no one watching what I wrote but me. And, even if someone happened upon what I wrote, they would not know who wrote it (save for the few with whom I shared my pseudonym). So I felt a freedom to expose who I was, what I felt; even venting rage was less of an ordeal, because I knew I, the real I, would not be judged. While a reader might take issue with what I wrote and might even consider the writer a monstrous beast, it didn’t matter; because I was hidden behind a veil. Now, I’m not.

I can’t feel comfortable being myself because being myself would reveal who I am. And that’s an uncomfortable person to be. And, so, I read old blog posts to get a glimpse of who I was.

Mistakes become larger than life, taking on more power and greater significance than they deserve. It’s as if a person assumes a single mistake is part of a lengthy pattern of blunders firmly nestled in a concrete case, even before the cement has time to set. He tends to treat himself, after just one gaffe, like he’s irreparably broken. Perfection, after all, requires perfection; there’s no room for deviation from purity. One either makes the grade or he doesn’t.

Exposing oneself to such rough, unforgiving treatment is unnecessary and reprehensible. But the indefensible act of extending that characterization to others cuts even deeper and causes even more damage. I wonder whether the tendency to assign blame  to someone else and to classify a person’s single misstep as indicative of a pattern is simply a reflexive attempt to avoid that unforgiving treatment of oneself? Is it so important to deflect pain from oneself that it becomes acceptable to redirect it outward?

This is the sort of psychological exploration that can produce intriguing fictional characters. Absent the safe distance of fantasy, the same inquiry is far less appealing.

I dropped off a pair of my jeans with a local embroidery/sewing/alterations shop yesterday. The jeans need a repair; my predilection for pulling on a belt loop to hike up my jeans before they slip over my hips and fall to the floor caused injury to the fabric. It wasn’t that the threads attaching the belt loop to the jeans fabric had broken or frayed. Rather, my habit of pulling up on the belt loop tore a hole in the underlying denim. The belt loop remained firmly affixed to the piece of cloth torn from the jeans. The cost will be only a couple of dollars; I thought to myself as I was leaving the shop, “if you knew how to sew and had a sewing machine, you could have fixed this without paying someone else.”  And it’s true.

But it’s also true that, if I had the requisite equipment and knew how to use it, I could repair the weld on the metal potting table I’ve been trying to refurbish. And if I had the necessary supplies, and could boast the expertise to use them, I could weave my over-used and badly abused belts into works of art. I could, if properly equipped and trained, do all the maintenance work on our cars and could diagnose and treat diseases and injuries that might befall either my wife or me.

So, the questions bubble to the surface. At what point does the “what if” question become ludicrous? At what stage of the process of deciding whether to “do it yourself” or hire someone else to do it for you does the scale tilt? And what mechanism triggers the decision either way?

I tried to put the matter in another context by asking myself: at what point would I hire someone else to write this blog or write short stories? I couldn’t conceive of asking anyone to do this work for me. I asked: when might I commission someone else to create masks for me, instead of making them myself? That was a more difficult question to answer. I don’t have a kiln, so the question involved assessing whether I would hire someone for the entire process, or just to fire the pieces. And that question remains unanswered. Incidentally, I won’t be making masks (or at least firing them) for awhile; I opted to withdraw from the fifth sculpture/pottery class in which I had enrolled (my reasons have nothing to do with the topic of this rambling diatribe).

The answers to these and a thousand other questions are not as simple and straightforward as I might have thought. There’s a lot involved in deciding whether the investment in time, practice, equipment, education, etc., etc., etc. required to become self-sufficient in any sphere of endeavor is worthwhile. It’s an organic process that, I think, is unique to each of us.

Ultimately, I suppose the answers for each of us arise from a complex, and possibly convoluted, assessment of the costs versus benefits involved in such spheres. Here, I refer to costs and benefits not merely in the concrete, material sense; instead, the assessment also involves estimating the value of satisfaction against the various costs of attaining it.

What an odd set of concepts to give myself over to this morning. I wonder if I have enough to do. I wonder if I have enough to think. I wonder if I am occupying my mind with drivel to avoid dwelling on something painful and important…or something painful and meaningless.

Yesterday, as I mindlessly wandered through postings on Facebook, I came across a notice telling me that an acquaintance had made a comment on the Facebook page of another person, a person I do not know and had never heard of. The person’s page announced that the poster was diagnosed, the day before, with terminal bone cancer and was told he could expect the cancer to claim his life within six months. I clicked on the public post and read many of the more than one hundred ‘supportive’ comments made in response to it.

The thing that struck me most about all of the responses was this: every single one of them proclaimed they prayed for him. Many, if not most, of them suggested their prayers would be answered and that the six-month death sentence, therefore, would not be carried out. Perhaps the well-wishers actually believed what they wrote. But I suspect that most anticipate that they will have lost a friend within six months. If that’s so, why do they offer up platitudes? Why pretend a miracle will somehow save this man’s life?

In my view, there’s something decidedly cruel about making such bold assertions about someone’s future, assertions that contrast with a doctor’s diagnosis. I understand, of course, that doctors are just as fallible as the rest of us and that the course of even aggressive, murderous diseases can unexpectedly change. But to essentially promise that prayer will alter the course of a disease seems arrogant and cruel. If the recipient of those delusional platitudes is a rational person, I suspect he will dismiss them as the ramblings of incoherent, deluded idiots and will proceed with plans as if there were no guarantees beyond the immediate future.

While the promises may have been genuine expressions of hope, I see them as far more harmful than helpful. I’ll admit to a strong bias against willing self-delusion, though. Regardless, I feel for the poor guy who received the heartbreaking, earth-shattering diagnosis; what a stark, ugly reminder of one’s mortality.