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mfinley.com
A young man I know is going through a
rough patch right now. Nothing seems to make him happy. He is down on everyone
and everything and himself. It's hard to him to mobilize to perform everyday
tasks. I have long since given him The Speech:
"You are in charge of your life. No one can determine your attitude but
you. Stop wanting things so badly, and your chances of attaining them will
improve." It's not a bad speech, but it sure
rings hollow to a person in pain. And it sounds a whole lot better the first
time than the second, third, fourth or fifth. How odd that I keep saying the
words to him, as if they are magic, and his stubbornness is preventing the magic
from working. But when I see his look of pain, I am
reminded of the times in my life other people's wisdom failed for me, too. Who
am I to be dispensing this high-test wisdom? Who made me the official dispeller
of sorrows? That got me thinking. Yesterday I tried another tack.
"Did I ever tell you," I ask him, "about becoming a born-again
Christian in the 70s?" The young man flashed me a look of frightened
disgust. I too winced at the phrase. The young man may have known I had
attended a Catholic seminary when I was 13, then quickly lost my faith in my
teens, as cynicism, grief, and personal ambition crowded out childhood devotion.
I was religionless for about 15 years,
replacing it with an ism of my own devising, comprised of surrealist
poetry, Li Po's jug of red wine, and the breast of the rising moon. By the
mid-70s I was doing low-grade journalism for the university by day, while by
night I wrote ecstatic odes for an invisible audience. At 28 I was at peak
performance, headstrong and cocky. Wunderkind, poet, and translator (I
translated the Spanish shepherd poet Miguel Hernandez's eerie sonnets "The
Lightning that Never Stops" into English), I ambled the slipstream, high
above the mundane games other people were trapped in. Though I was full of
myself, the time was empty. How vain was I? Here's an example. I
always liked the Doors generally, because they were shamans and poets, which
were good in my pantheon. But one Doors song called "Touch Me," bugged
me, because Jim Morrison, supposedly a wordsmith, sang: I'm going to
love you till the moon falls from the sky, for you and I. How hard
would it have been to make that line grammatical: I'm
going to love you till the moon falls in the sea, for you and me. A small thing, you say, but it summed up the universe I dwelt in, a place noted for the cool Gnostic superiority of myself. Little judgments like being disappointed in the Doors helped keep me from dwelling on the issues everyone else had to deal with. They protected me from the boring life everyone else was consigned to live. I was imperious. I was dark. I could be
intimidating. I was also decent enough and real enough to be able to flag down
my future bride Rachel. But it was easy to be nice to her because she was
adorable from the get-go. And once I loved her it was difficult to ever be quite
so solipsistic again. But even she didn’t change me deep down. For that I
needed a major disruption, a lightning bolt to the head. The disruption occurred when I was
invited to move to the country and take a job putting out a daily newspaper. It
was unusual to ask a surrealist poet to edit a small town paper. I don't think
the managing editor realized just how weird I was. The reporters working
alongside me, however, picked up on it right quick. In my first six months with
them, I received barely a morpheme of reassurance from any of them. My
confidence, which was really all I had, began to ebb. I even began to experience
hypoglycemic episodes, wherein I would get faint and disoriented every morning
about 11:15 AM -- the peak hour of editorial decision-making. I didn’t know
how to ward off the lost feeling that overcame me then. I was scared. Driving the 14 miles from my farmstead
to work every day, I would tune the dial to the radio preachers that you can
only get out in the country. When the weather on the sun was especially
turbulent, you could pick up tiny, crazy religious stations in west Texas 1200
miles away. They sounded like they were chained to rocks, and wailing out their
anguish to the stars, like they were being stung over and over by ants, their
message of redemption and torment cracking across the ether like a bloodied
whip. It was like tuning your FM dial to Purgatory. One morning before sunup, in a dark fog
coming in across the soybean fields, listening to some fellow in Oklahoma
shrieking about his dissolute past, drinking and whoring and playing cards, I
pulled my Chevy Nova off onto the gravel shoulder and joined him in sobbing
uncontrollably for about ten minutes. Now, in those miserable moments
alongside the rural route, I knew I needed to change. I called out to God, whom
I neither believed nor disbelieved in (thinking both positions were signally
obvious) to say I couldn’t do
this any more, sallying out each day of my life as a knight-troubador-errant,
slaying dada dragons only I could see. It was grand, impressive work, in its
way. But I felt like an imposter, solitary and unlovable. All the energy that went into
impressing people -- if I could reroute it, maybe my blood-sugar would stop
plummeting every day at paste-up time? Somehow I had messed everything up.
Most of the energy of my work went into maintaining appearances. I never
solicited other people's opinions for the day's edition, I just dropped bombs on
them. The newspaper was my magic wand -- I could put anything in it I liked. I
published some things that were horribly inappropriate for that rural county,
wire stories of gang murders and incest. The people who read the paper --
farmers and grain elevator managers, mainly -- let us know the paper was getting
to be a little strange. They were right. I took a deep breath
and decided to climb down off the horse for a while. If God was God, then I
didn’t have to be. In fact, if God was God, there was a definite conflict if I
was, too. In the new religion, Jesus was the
Boddhisatva proclaiming the beauty of the Kingdom of Heaven -- a place so
marvelous all other delights pale beside it, and so commonplace it's within your
grasp right at this moment, if you will only go there, if you will only
be there right now. My Christianity was not about the afterlife, it was about
this here, right now. The rules were so simple -- love God
with all your heart, and treat other people no less than yourself. You didn’t
have to do much of anything -- just obey the most general rules of being a good
husband and neighbor. This was a radical departure from having to wow everyone
from sunup to dusk, from dotting every exclamation point in the thoughts of
everyone you met. Thus began one of the most excruciating
periods of my life. It was excruciating to reassure Rachel, whose relatives had
been pogrommed to death by good Christians. I promised not to do that, and not
to flip out and act like a complete idiot. Then I had to resolve to pay more
attention to other people and less to myself -- without stapling a halo to my
head. When you’re stuck on yourself by nature, humility gets messy in a hurry.
Lightly pat yourself on the back for being good and you’re right back on the
griddle. I was a mainline Presbyterian for a
while, attending with my elderly neighbors on the farm. I was your basic
shiny-eyed convert, finding marvelous the things the regular parish was bored
with -- communion, hymns, sermons. And sure enough, their jaded company soon
softened my ardor. People told me the parish gossip, and what happened to the
last minister. I quit the church just before I became Presbyterian. I batted around for a couple of years
after we left our country home, attending Episcopal and Trinitarian services in
various cities, before going all the way back to my childhood Catholic faith.
But I never really joined. The Catholic church I attended pre-Vatican II was
gone, replaced by something less mysterious. It wasn't home any more, at least
not for me. I never quite made it with any
congregation. My experience -- which may reflect my inner vanity -- has been
that faith communities are great for community but they can be murder on the
faith. After a while I drifted away. In
born-again circles this is known as backsliding. And while in my heart I still
see myself as a proto-Christian, with Jesus as the buddha-poet who wrapped his
arms around the world, I must admit I do not light a candle there very often. I
notice I do not pray except when my car is stolen, or my dog gets into a fight
with a Rottweiler. In little ways, one day at a time, I took Jesus down off the
cross and re-installed myself on it in his place. Until I wrote this just now,
it was not clear to me how far I had slid. But now I'm thinking, I have this young
man in my charge who needs a change in his life as dramatic as the one I
experienced in that old green Chevy '71 Nova. He needs to reorient himself so
someone is on the cross instead of him. He needs to learn humility as a survival
skill. He needs to lighten up. I still like The Speech, but I see now
that the words are only magical for me, because I was there when I first
understood them. To the young man, they are as mysterious and presumptuous as a
poem. Instead of making The Speech, talking
the talk, and dumping all those grand nostrums on him, I need to walk the walk,
to get back to my own proper orientation. And it hits me how hollow and
pointless my anxieties have been in recent years, for both the young man and
other people in my care. Did I think I could save them with a well-chosen phrase
or timely utterance? Lightning will strike them when they
are ready to be struck, and it won’t let up until they are jolted to a new
life. I can’t hasten the moment, or replace it with a vivid description. And now it's time for me to shut up and
get to work. Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley Like the essay? Click
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Comments on the site(especially interested in opinions on PayPal, the Amazon tip jar, and Microsoft Reader e-books.)
reader feedbackmike,your appraisal of [the young man] is very similar to the one you pasted [about someone else] a few years ago. unfortunately --or fortunately-- for mankind, it is an experience we all must go through at that pubescent period of our lives. i have always believed that a man celebrates a year of learning for every year he lives between one and twelve. At twelve a strange thing happens: aging slows. We progress. We get taller. Our voices get deeper. But change in our "selves" seems to morph into some slo-mo time warp where our souls, trapped inside of a transluscent wall, screams in terror. Yesterday, I stood on Franklin and Chicago and watched a black man --maybe in his mid-twenties; maybe in his late twenties-- cross the street, "cat-walking" the whole way. Cat-walking is jive put into motion. Your walk becomes a caricature of movement; knees slightly buckling, hips rocking, arms flopping up and down to some unheard drum. It is a walk you perfect at twelve years old. It is a walk that says "Look at me", or "I am special" or "Hey, I am a man!" There he was, a child trapped in a man's body. Twelve year olders are so sure of what it means to be a man. So certain of their answers and grotesque in their emulation of adulthood. There is a leap in time where men go from being twelve years old to being twenty-one or thirty-five or sixty or never. How long a man stays twelve is dependent upon what he learns to move forward. If fear and convention prevents him from moving from the spot, only the most cathartic jostling from life will allow him to move. It all seems to me like a divine comedy where some slapstick hand of fate reaches out and grabs us by our drawers. We continue to run forward, our draws stretched to a cartoonish length, and then ***SNAP!!*** it lets us go. We get free, we "get it", and go hurtling into adulthood. That period of breaking free of the hand which once stroked us and reassured us and going out into a world beyond its reach, comfort, and control is what frees of from an lifelong childhood. BREAKING THE HOLD! [The young man's] woes seem like mountains to him. In reality, his problems amount to choosing white bread or rye. We Americans are so fortunate to be able to deal with demons that don't gnaw at our bellies or tear at our lungs. Not that I am diminishing the pain of [the young man], I am not. I know it is real. But there is a cure for this pain that we rarely administer. When there is such pain, introduce it to real pain. There is something about being brought face to face with people whose miseries are unbearable and whose fates are dismal that not only allows us to put our own lives into a global perspective, but calls upon us to dig deep within, past the twelve year-old, to muster civility and compassion beyond the ken of any child. Have him feed bread to the lepers and from their plates will fall crumbs for his salvation. God bless him, Michael. And God bless you, too. Ed. E.
Stimulate the economy, give a writer a buck.I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did it for free. But I am a few clients lighter right now than I need to be, and a bit of revenue never hurts. If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike Total tips, year to date: $203.00 - MANY THANKS!
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