Chrysalis, Part I

Back in the mid-90s, I hit hard times.  A job disappeared suddenly, and I found myself having to break the lease on my apartment and stay with some friends because I could no longer pay the rent.  Things had been hardscrabble for some time, and I had suffered some bad luck and made some bad choices, endured heartache and once again tasted of disappointment.  The night before I was going to shove my belongings into a U-Haul and end a chapter of my life, I lay on my futon in the bedroom dark and tried to sleep.  Anxiety, however, trumped sleep, and I struggled for a way to quiet my brain and calm my nerves.   As I lay there, I formed the image of me hanging from a rope over a gaping abyss.  And then some words of Joseph Campbell’s came to me from his interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth:  “You know the rule.  If you’re falling, dive.”

And in my mind, I let go of the rope.

In the years since, I have gotten more jobs, paid rent again, gotten married, and fathered a son.  I’ve grown, deepened, and learned.  I have been slandered and praised, been wronged and wronged others.  I’m a different person than I was then, older and wiser in the sense that I now understand a smidgen of how much I don’t understand.  I’m wiser because I now know that I am not wise.

Like everyone else, I have been on a journey, part of which has been artistic.  In fact a huge part of it has.  I suppose that this makes me, in these years at least, a journeyman.  That’s fine.  I can accept that.  Perhaps it’s all just a journey, and most artists are only ever journeymen.  The further along I’ve gotten, the less that mastery seems possible, which is not to say that I think that I’m a lousy artist who produces lousy works.  I have no idea how good I am or what the value of the works I create are.  I don’t think that’s my function.  I just put the pieces together as best I can and hope it works out.

Munkeh

My wife and I have become fans of the British tea PG Tips.  Really good stuff and reasonably priced when you can find it.  (Try Cost Plus World Market.)

Well, last night, I accidentally came across the ad campaign in the UK for PG Tips, which features an offbeat Liverpudlian who calls himself Johnny Vegas (real name Michael Pennington) as Al and a large sock puppet called Monkey.  The following is the first ad in their new campaign, resumed after some time apart:

Aftermath

So perhaps the veil is lifting.  The silence that I imposed on myself a couple of weeks ago–somewhat unsuccessfully–may be lifting.  Good signs are emerging.  I worked on Such Is Life a little bit this morning.  An email I wrote to Ken Silverstein at Harper’s was posted on their website.  A great ice sheet of words breaks up a bit and a couple of icebergs of writing drop into the Arctic Ocean of my soul.  Ah!  There is nothing quite like an overwrought metaphor to make me feel like I’m back and just as terrible as ever.

What has really happened is that my mind is now more free, more able to roam from topic-to-topic and to occassionally land on some creative pursuit and not just muddle through the tarpit of politics.  In an ideal world I would stop my occasional bloviating (which wins the award as the Most Overused Word of the Year), but we all know in our hearts that that is not likely.  But the creative urge is returning, and the tangents into the temporal will be, I hope, less frequent and less strident.  Being a blowhard is less satisfying as one ages, and middle age is an unflattering mirror to look in while delivering an opinion.  I understand, at last, my own fallibility and the limits of certainty.

And so I shall try to scuttle my way back to fiction, where seeing all sides is a blessing.

Election Day

Voting in my precinct in Atlanta this morning was a breeze.  My wife and I got in line at 7:15 and were in the car by 8:11.  The voters were civil and friendly and the volunteers were exceptional.  Everything was orderly and easy.  I saw a nun, her straight, white hair mostly covered by the simple and modest blue wimple adopted in my childhood, passing the time by praying a novina.  The clear beads of her rosary passed quietly through the bony fingers of her cupped hands.

As we approached the portal to the café-gyma-torium where the machines were, a young couple emerged, the man toting an infant.  The elderly woman who stood sentry at the portal asked the father if the baby had gotten a sticker.  Both the father and the mother just shook their heads.  “Go back and get him one! “ the woman chirped, and the father trotted back, son in his arms, to fetch one.

The white-haired sentinel then noticed an elderly man behind us who was using a walker and who had tubes clipped to his nose for oxygen.  She asked us and a few others if we would mind him cutting ahead.  All of us cheerfully gave our assent., and she fluttered past us and offered the old man and his wife frontsies.  “No, no.  We don’t need that,” the man intoned as he waved her away with his large graying hands.

The overwhelming feeling was one not of partisanship or rancor, but one of the quiet satisfaction that comes from participating as a citizen.  It sounds mawkish and sentimental, but it’s true.  We walked from the polls feeling great, which I always do, not just from the prospects of one candidate or another, but because we had just finished participating in the central right of any republic.

It seems to me that Election Day should be a national holiday, especially every fourth year when the greatest number of citizens participate.  I think this not only to free up more people’s time so that they can go to the polls, but I think that it is a day on which we should celebrate our citizenship and our patriotic duty to vote.