Tag: Ernest Hemingway

New Year, Old Me

Hope is a wondrous thing. I’d even go so far as to say it is lifesaving.

In the face of all challenges and heartbreak, hope can rise. Bidden sometimes. At other times, it just seems to pop up. The proverbial beacon of light and direction sitting off in the distance that appears to us, seemingly out of nowhere.

I sometimes wonder how often that very scenario played out for mariners of old. In the middle of being mercilessly tossed about on savage seas with death but a rogue wave away, off in the distance, the lookout spots a lighthouse.

Hope rises. Life continues. The sailors get to live another day.

As we mark this first day of a new year in our calendar, we are similarly touched by hope for the year to come. Hope for renewal. Hope for freedom from pain – emotional and/or physical. Hope for better news. Hope for sanity and peace of mind.

It is, of course, a false construct. Today is no different than yesterday in reality. We are not Cinderella who transforms into a princess and steps into a radically altered lifestyle. Of course, at her midnight, she reverted to her previous state. But altered.

The prince she had met and dazzled set out to find her again. That particular “New Year’s Eve” did not make the changes in her life that night. They foretold them.

Change happens like that for most of us, too. Whatever deficiencies we want to address in our life often have to be faced full-on in an instant. Then the slow process of change gets underway. The outcome we want may take weeks, months or years to accomplish. Then, one day, if we’re lucky and have worked hard enough, we are there.

I had this experience with both drinking and smoking. There was a time when I could not imagine my lifestyle would ever be other than what it was. I took some sense of satisfaction in cultivating the image of a hard-working, hard-living journalist for whom alcohol and nicotine were mandatory kit in the trade. An Ernest Hemingway-compatible type of broad.

Confirmation of a pregnancy stopped smoking in its tracks. I inherited my father’s Dutch will of iron. Ditching drink took a little longer. But with almost 24 years of sobriety behind me now, I can hardly remember how or why alcohol was ever part of my life at all.

Yet through it all, I am still me. For better or worse.

I have certainly changed from my younger self. But the essence of who I am is still there. I believe it is that way for most of us. Change does not always present with glaring neon signs in our day-to-day lives. I still have laundry to fold, beds to make, meals to make and dear friends to connect with. Life goes on.

This eventuality can be a hard learning during the egocentricity of youth phase. For some that phase lasts a lifetime. When I learned the phrase “hissy fit,” I recall how mortified and impressed I was by its’ resonance. “Boo.” “Hiss.” “I don’t wanna.” Ya. That sounded pretty similar to me having a temper tantrum.

I am beginning to find some solace in the immutable fact of my own humanity. That is allowing me to ease up on myself. The big ambitions I had for my life as a youth have been abandoned or pretty much dissipated.

And oddly, I find myself these days in the exact situation I always secretly craved. A happy home life. A wonderful and satisfying marriage to a man I think is the coolest dude on Planet Earth. I had similar feelings about my beloved Yorkie, Bailey. Not that I am drawing comparisons between the two, I only mean to say that when I love someone or something, I am all in.

So I did not create a long and unwieldy and unrealistic list of New Year’s resolutions meant to kick in today. There are a few things and unhelpful habits I want to discard. There are a few things I want to do more of. Others I want to do less of.

Like watching TV news as I said recently. That activity is like voluntarily setting yourself up to develop brain fungus. Ptooey. Don’t need it. Don’t want it.

I find myself drifting back to the homely arts and wishing to strengthen my connection to nature. I want to do more of nothing and less constant of the constant unending to-do lists and busywork. It is high time.

You see life goes on with or without us. That is a hard and fundamental learning we all must get eventually. In the face of that truism, we discover the parameters of own life and what we can realistically achieve for our own happiness and that of others around us.

Peggy Lee, the legendary lounge singer from the last century, sang a song called: “Is That All There Is?”

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
“If that’s the way she feels about it, why doesn’t she just end it all?”
Oh, no. Not me
I’m not ready for that final disappointment
Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you
When that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath,
I’ll be saying to myself … is that all there is?

https://genius.com/Peggy-lee-is-that-all-there-is-lyrics

I’m going to follow Peggy Lee’s advice. One day, you may discover all of your hopes and dreams and expectations may sit shattered on the sidewalk outside your house.

You may be left to wonder why you lived this life at all and what it was all about. That realization has finally hit me. I’m a grain of sand on a beach. A single star in the heavens.

No matter. I have friends and some family members who love me. I love them back. I plan to keep writing and, as Peggy advises, “hope to keep dancing and having a ball.”

Minus the booze, of course.

Fleet Footed Fame

I often wonder how a publicist would portray me if I ever became even a little bit famous.

They would dredge through my past accomplishments and elevate them as bona fides to justify my by then elevated station – me being famous and all.

I am curious about the fiction of it. I have done some pretty cool things in my life. I have a curriculum vitae of degrees and scholarships that I earned back in the day. But I have also done many bone stupid and horrible things which I pray never come to light. They diminish me and the person I feel I am and wish to keep striving toward.

I look at my life after it evolved from an ill-considered and ill-fated marriage. Interwoven with alcoholism and riddled with fear and anxiety, so many of my choices and actions in my life after that union evaporated was simply show. Most of the world simply doesn’t care.

Like an empty Waterford crystal vase, as long as I looked professional and presentable on the outside, the world need never know I was emotional hamburger inside.

There are many chapters in each of our lives. They often have dramatically different qualities to them. Those chapters are shaped by your particular pursuits of the time, the people you hang with and where you live. Each of these influences shapes your character. Each character handles life’s up and downs according to who they are and what they learned along the way.

Today is novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday. Famous, of course, for The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, The Last Tycoon and others. He didn’t live long. Dead at 44 from a heart attack exacerbated by the ravages of alcoholism, he became another of history’s legacy of troubled artists who died young.

So I am moved to ask what keeps us upright and moving forward when we are in agony inside? When life has let us down badly and we are a million miles from any of our goals. Depends on who you are and how those influences have shaped you.

It can be argued that “creative” types are more susceptible to life’s insults and can more easily be undone by them. They feel more and more deeply, it might be argued, so they have more difficulty keeping pain at bay.

Oddly, I harbor an unreasonable anger at Philip Seymour Hoffman for the heroin addiction that took him out. He seemed smart enough to “know better.” Yes, I know that is a ridiculous statement in the face of fighting an intransigent addiction. But I feel robbed that Hoffman checked out so early. He was brilliant and had so much more to offer. I needed him.

Then there is the infamous “27Club” which started with Jim Morrison’s death at the age of 27. Several prominent 27 year old rock stars died between 1969-71, solidifying the myth. Morrison was soon joined by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Brian Jones. Later, music legends Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse followed.

It is hard to pin down what this death predilection is. The pressures and expectations of fame foisted upon vulnerable and sensitive artistic personalities may be a partial explanation. Life is difficult enough. The emotional self-regulation that may have saved them from suicidally driven forces might be the very element that allows superstars to perform at the level they do.

Fitzgerald wasn’t alone in the realm of doomed literary luminaries. Ernest Hemingway took his own life at 61. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in a gas oven to check out. Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pocket to weigh her down as she elected death by drowning. For all of their creative output and fame, it didn’t mitigate whatever internal pain and emptiness they were dealing with.

For me managing emotional pain and mitigating emptiness has been a key marker of how well I am managing life. I keep pain at bay these days largely by not engaging in painful activities. Or actions that will invite negative consequences at any rate. Seems simple enough. But it wasn’t always that straightforward and some days, it still isn’t. It has been a tough learning and a discipline and a decision of the “don’t go there” variety.

In about two weeks, I will celebrate my 24th anniversary of sobriety. In its place, I engage in all of the “healthy” coping mechanisms that life offers: yoga, meditation, exercise, reading, writing, time in nature, “talk therapy” and if I’m completely honest, “retail therapy.” Except for the last one which causes its own distress, these modalities are pretty effective most of the time.

So I renew my commitment to writing for me, myself and I alone. I like putting my thoughts and feelings and opinions out there for no one but myself. If I attract and find fellow travelers to walk on this path with me for a while, that’s a bonus.

But I abhor the notion of fame for fame’s sake. I know marketing is essential in today’s brand-soaked social environment, but hey. There are thousands and thousands, maybe millions out there, who are happily seeking out and eating up the fame bandwidth. I hope they all know how fleeting and fickle fame will be to them when it matters. If they don’t know now, one day they will.

Fame doesn’t need me, nor I it. I plan (with God’s complicity) to live to a ripe and healthy and sober old age. I have made headlines and bylines in my short turn on this planet. That’s been plenty. It is important to know when is enough.

Artistic Long Game

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​—Glenn Gould, Concert Pianist

This quote says so much about what I believe. An artistic path is not necessarily the most financially lucrative pursuit. There has to be something else in it that makes people pursue their art. Or else not many people would pursue art in spite of painfully thin paychecks.

People usually start out in life with vague hopes and dreams. Finding out what they are and manifesting those hopes and dreams is a major preoccupation of young people. Along with learning the basics of what it means to be good citizens, young people set out to fill up their quiver of basic marketable skills.

I silently smirk when I see misleading ads promising would-be writers how to acquire the required skills to make thousands and thousands of dollars a year as a freelance writer. The so-called skills they are touting are misleading, to say the least.

Writing success is an alchemy of talent, opportunity, luck, and mostly hard work. But mostly it is stick-to-it-ism. Writers write. Every aspiring writer knows the sober adage to “put their bum in the seat” and stare down the blank page.

I am bemused by scads of advice currently circulating about developing your voice, setting tone in stories, and developing characters and plots. I have been in the writing business my whole life. I had never seen it treated as much like a “business” as it is today.

Writing was historically generated by people with a basic talent for writing. Producing copy for stories or novels or articles was a type of alchemy. The story was the thing. With the right storyline in the right context with great quotes and color commentary on where the story was based, under the skilled attention of a gifted writer, voila! a decent story would be born.

There was a hierarchy in the newsroom I worked in. We knew who the steady and reliable producers were. They could be counted on to bang out stories on cue and as needed.

Along with those steady producers were writers of varying talents with varying dependability. But if they had won jobs in a newsroom, you could at least assume they knew how to write.

Writing as art evolves. In my experience, the art of writing emerges when an individual begins to develop and use their own voice. So much writing is formulaic. It isn’t hard to teach someone how to write according to the standard inverse triangle required for newspaper articles. Broadcasting copy whether for TV or radio was much the same. Learn the formula and you can do the job.

Creative writing is another avocation. There is something that develops inside an individual when they dig deep to manifest the stories and insights they harbor inside their hearts and minds. It requires insight and curiosity and the ability to ask questions that needed to be asked. This is harder to define but most people recognize superior writing when they see it.

This can take a lifetime of repeated practice by working at their craft. As time passes and the craft is further developed, good writers start to abandon hyperbole. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking. And clear thinking comes from refining and exposing the essence of the stories writers want to tell.

Ernest Hemingway nailed this. His writing was delivered in short, staccato-like sentences that could sum up the beauty or ugliness of a situation in a few concise words. Hemingway started as a journalist and that style ultimately defined his novel writing style.

I have often been bemused by my own writing journey. After a few short years in a newspaper newsroom, I went to university. My first year of university generated many comments from professors about my “choppy, journalistic” writing style.

So I learned about “padding” in university. I would add as many high-sounding, convoluted words as possible to make my academic essays sound profound and knowledgeable. Mostly my essays were simply full of “fat writing.” Why say in ten words – the academic attitude seemed to be – what you can just as easily say in forty-five? No wonder academia is recognized as a game.

Success in academia was mostly guaranteed by the degree to which you could parrot exactly what the professor had doled out in lectures. Original thought and ideas were not as encouraged as one might think in the hallowed halls of education. Conformity was the bigger goal, not originality. Who were we to question the geniuses we were studying?

So I was happy to be reminded by Glenn Gould’s quote that pursuing an artistic path is a path to cultivating peace and serenity and wonder. It is a lifelong pursuit. It is also a very individual one.