This is how you do a rock concert right.
I've watched it twice now.
It's like going to church. But a church I've never been to: one that lifts you, truly lifts you, while, paradoxically, grounding you more firmly to the earth than ever before. Can art of any kind claim a higher goal than this? I don't think it can.
U2's announced a second leg of their US tour, visiting Anaheim, just 90 minutes from me, in June.
Maybe Val and I can make it.
We like church. At least church done the way U2 does church.
****
Last week's post was a major catharsis for me. For 22 months I did nothing but consider what I should do about a family and a mother who suddenly decided, because I'd written a novel whose name includes the first name of their daughter, to abandon me. I can't even begin to tell you how painful that was. Far from being a rash decision, their action was one that required that I wait and see, to judge from both time and distance, and then to consider any rational options that presented themselves to me. As time passed and my heartache only increased, it became clear to me that, indeed, I'd lost a major relationship (four actually), and to paranoid, ignorant, dishonest, disingenuous, knee-jerk reasons.
The post took twelve hours to write and edit. That's okay. That's half a day against 671 days. I can live with that kind of balance, because it represents great caution, foresight, and prudence on my part. Three qualities I'm not always known for.
The final words on that entire relationship come down to the final gift they ever gave me: a T-shirt, one that reads:
Careful, or you'll
end up in my novel.
end up in my novel.
I get lots of laughs every time I wear it. People think it's genuinely funny. But I don't wear it to elicit laughs: I wear it to remind me of what truly is important to me, and the sacrifices I've endured to see it--the novel--come to life. To sing along with U2:
And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if our way should falter
Along the stony pass
And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if your way should falter
Along the stony pass
It's just a moment
This time will pass
****
It's a true statement that when you become serious, truly serious about something, the universe seems to conspire to help you out. I have experienced this firsthand. But there's a caveat, one that can destroy you as an artist. Once you become genuine and authentic about your art, you also find out, by necessity, who your friends truly are. Want a definition of courage? Here it is: to look that number in the face and still want to get up and work your art the next morning, or any morning after that. Because I can tell you that number is either zero or very, very close to zero.
Frankly, I would be very surprised if it weren't zero. Count yourself infinitely lucky if it's anything but.
Val has been with me since the novel's inception. I am infinitely lucky to have her. So is the novel. But, truthfully, there is no one else. No one else has either stood the long test of time, or couldn't really care less about what it is I'm doing with my time and creative energies--and so, ipso facto, they couldn't care less about me. There's your acid tests. She's the only one to have passed them.
One of the reasons U2 has so many detractors is that they have stuck together as a band for nearly 35 years, and, obviously, care deeply about what each of their respective band mates are doing with their time and creative energies. It's as though they've forgotten that rock n' roll is about burnout, drugs, infighting, raunchy sex tapes, puking on stage, CPR, off-key performances, overdosing, suicide, various band members quitting, writing sold-out music that charts, the short term, partying, orgies, and arrests. As Def Leppard sings:
It's better to burn out
Than fade away!
****
Only it's not.
****
Both burnout and fading away can and do refer to different things: popularity and life. People confuse this, especially fans. Popularity is entirely fickle and out of the artist's control. Worse, it ultimately has nothing to do with him or his work. It is the herd's taste du jour, which will change overnight.
Burning out and fading away applied to life, however, is an entirely different matter. And here is where Def Leppard (and Gregory House) is wrong to the nth degree. Burning out isn't better than fading away; but fading away isn't better than burning out. Both belie the truth: that both are unacceptable and hide the fact that one does not have to choose or experience either of them. One can choose something else.
What can one choose? You can figure that out for yourself. I'm not your teacher. More to the point, I don't want to be your teacher. If you want a hint, read back in my blog. Or better yet, use the search utility at the top of it. Type in "Narrow Gate" and then start reading. Get a move on: it's later than you think.
****
Popular culture loathes longetivity and health. It craves shooting stars and crippling dysfunction. It salivates over a sobbing Lindsay Lohan or some dirty-laundry airing by some media and popular culture suck-up named Rihanna as she describes a beat-down she endured which was administered by another suck-up named Chris Brown. I don't know these folks, and don't want to start. I don't listen to their music or watch their dance moves or whatever else it is that makes them popular. I know as much as I need to know about them at this point. And certainly more than I want to know.
My mom used to tell me that if I want to get a good handle on another's character, all I need to do is to watch them, not listen to them. Just close the ol' ear holes and watch. Observe. I'll get a far more accurate reading on their character than by any other means.
She's right, of course. And so I've watched the popular culture icons. I've observed their endless and salivating attempts at the spotlight. There are no rules in the gaining of it, no morality, no loyalties which cannot be sundered for the opportunity to stand in it, no bodies that aren't sacrosanct enough to climb over in the eventual basking in it. Mr. Obama thinks that the progressive base that elected him into office isn't large enough or vocal enough to stop his inexorable march to the right and his continuing capitulation to corporate and plutocratic interests, all at the cost of the middle class and the working poor.* I've watched him carefully for a year now, and that's my judgment of him. His words, of course, say something else entirely. But his words have proven to this point, most discouragingly, to be half-truths and lies. And so he'll be a one-term president, brought low by an outraged, emboldened, and abandoned base, one he took advantage of and then tossed away like a five-dollar Bill Clinton hooker.
****
As much as people claim to uphold and cherish loyalty; as much as they claim to uphold and cherish hard work; as much as they claim to uphold and cherish consistency--in behavior, in living life, in career; as much as they claim to uphold and cherish honesty and good will and perseverance, they lie. How do I know they lie? Stories like Lindsay Lohan and Rihanna and Chris Brown always bring in the ratings, always are the ones that go "viral" on YouTube, always manage to drive yet more advertising dollars and campaigns and whatnot. That's how I know. Popular is as popular does. And what popular does is distasteful. But it's also loved by the herd. A herd that, when the lies have been revealed, upholds shooting stars and dysfunction and wants to be just like them. And so it is.
****
I read an author's blog a while back where she detailed the realities of the herd mentality with respect to writing. It goes like this:
Apparently the Disney corporation, you know--
It's a cog world, after all
It's a cog world, after all
It's a cog world, after all
It's a cog, cog world
--has decided that, in the publishing world, writers are "content providers," and that is all. So what Disney does is hire a bunch of them. Then what Disney does is take endless statistical samples of youth: their likes, dislikes, their choice of music, their favorite movie and literary characters; they sample the kids' various product favorites, of what's hip and what is not, of what is popular and "cool" and what is not. Then they come back, reams of statistical analyses on their hard drives, which are then fed to the "content providers," who are ordered to write a story that includes all these things. The stories are team-written and then hastily published.**
You'd think that such obvious corporate and societal pablum would be recognized for what it is, and then promptly trashed. You'd be wrong. The novels--and, apparently, there are many of them--typically make the bestsellers' lists.
Watch what people do, Shawn. Not what they say.
Do I need to know anything else about this ballyhooed pop culture so many claim to disdain but in truth can't get enough of? Do I need to know much else about the folks that prop it up?
Do I?
****
One of my tutoring clients is this 8th-grade girl who has repeatedly tested high for giftedness. But just this summer her 7th-grade principal tried to hold her back. The girl had flunked too many classes, and had very low grades in the rest. The parents hired me late in the summer ostensibly to see if in fact the girl should be held back.
But I don't believe in "holding back" any kid, regardless of grades. I don't believe in grades.
The girl had no interest in working with me, and our sessions proved it. We could barely complete a single sheet of material I'd created to review last year's curricula, her attention continually diverting to a thousand different things, her mind never in the present, her disdain for both me and the lessons obvious.
But then the parents found out that the 7th-grade principal couldn't hold her their little girl back.
I've seen her exactly twice since then, nearly three months later.
Watch what people do, Shawn. Not what they say.
I had been hired for the sake of appearances only.
In the end, the folks really couldn't care less about remediating this child's obvious difficulties, both social and academic, that are only bound to bloom over time.
Watch what people do, Shawn. Not what they say.
****
In the 22 months of hell in which I considered what I should do about Ruth and her family, that's exactly what I did. I watched and waited. And when they spoke, which was rarely, I discounted it utterly. I ignored it.
What I observed, however, was a family in flight from me, in flight due to ignorant fear and abject foolishness. A family which claims to uphold democratic values, but which, as time exposed, lives instead as a totalitarian matriarchy. A family that claims to love art and originality, but in truth disdains both completely. Sameness and triteness and paranoia prepare their dinner instead.
****
Melody and the Pier to Forever may or may not be a popular novel (or story: there are more novels of it coming). In the end, I can't control what is to become of it with respect to the herd. The herd is too fickle, too flighty, too shallow for me to concern myself with its likes and dislikes. What I want instead is what I've defined as the Quill. I want a:
- High-Quality readership
- High-intensity readership
- High-loyalty readership
- High-longetivity readership
U2 sells out stadiums, even despite the raging hatred their detractors aim at it every day. U2, with respect to music, has the Quill. It's why, in the end, their critics and haters can't win.
I'm going to have a Quill too. Whether it be one person or one million people.
And to hell with my critics, with any detractors I may pick up along the way, with those who abandon me, and with popular culture and the cattle who prop it up.
~~*~~
*His corporately inspired and written--and now passed by the House--insurance "reform" bill notwithstanding.
**I've tried accessing the relevant blog, but cannot seem to find it. It was on the HuffingtonPost, for those interested in researching the topic. If you find it, shoot me a link and I'll pop it in.
Fractal Image: Approaching the Summit by SM Montaigne
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