Let’s do something right

I look at everything in our society twice. The first picture shows what media, industrial farming, big corporations, and on and on, are doing to our culture. And then I look at where people are doing good things and living with respect and satisfaction.

I can try to avoid adding my support to the former, but like they say, whaddya gonna do?

Way back in college days, we talked of the kernel growing in the husk of the old seed, new wine in old wineskins, the resurrection and the life.

A lot of talk has flowed down the river, but people are doing good and doing it well all along the way if you look at what is near at hand. Not solutions for the entire culture, perhaps, but people growing their own food, selling produce in local markets, people making solid things and working together for small progress for ourselves and a few others – that counts for something.

As far as I can tell, it has always been thus. Cottin’s Farmers Market was strong this year. That’s one picture I keep my eyes on. And others like it.

These things close to home are good sources for writing that encourages me, and, I hope, a few others. I’ve abandoned the talk of making everything better. Let’s do some things right – for now.

Life is real. Stories are made up.

I am not trying to recreate reality with my stories so that readers can vicariously relive the experience. Instead I think of much of the writing I do as art. Compared to painting – these stories fall in between representational and abstract works. Impressionistic, perhaps.

I start with observations of real people in real places doing real things. But then I select and shape with words, trying to express what interested me in the experience in the first place, highlighting certain elements, looking for hints about what it might mean.

I could break individual stories down for you – point out where the words describe fairly closely what happened, where I added thoughts and then bits of other experiences later. I should really reveal what I left out, which from the perspective of actual reality is almost everything. As the writer of the story, I know better than anyone how closely I have told what I experienced. Truth is another question entirely.

But to some degree, what happened is lost to me, too. The passing of time and the act of writing plays with my mind and my memories. So a story is really a new experience – one that the writer and the reader are having. The sense that you are looking in on something of life is part of it. A movie or historical novel based on true events is like that, but so are many stories that are imagined solely on the basis of fragments of the experiences of the writer or of others that are then shaped through the writer’s understanding of reality. Imagination can take humans far, but we tend to bring our selves and life as we know it along.

That’s what’s going on in my stories. You might ask what is fact and what is fiction, but don’t let those questions get in the way of wondering if the world is in some way like what I am writing and just what does that mean. Without a time machine, this book is the best way I know how to reveal to you something – whatever it was – that interested me enough to want to share it with you. If our minds connect that would be something.

For the record. Not only did I make up the family and the exchange over plugging parking meters, I believe I never told anyone not to plug the meter on a Saturday, thinking that it was Sunday. I might have done it. I might have, but I’m not sure. Does it matter very much?

I really drink egg creams at Aimee’s all the time. I could give you a thousand factual words about egg creams with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Or I could buy you one. Words aren’t everything.

Art books: In the eye of the beholder

I consider myself a street writer. With the modern technology of self-publishing, all I ask is that you to put about $4 in my guitar case – that is, you pay for the printing costs and a few incidentals so that I neither make money nor lose money while I get to do what I want to do – which is write. My time and creativity I’m happy to give away to anyone who will listen.

If I really wanted to get wider exposure and a paycheck to begin to cover my time, I would need an established publisher. But even talented musicians who go on tour and have their albums widely distributed often need real jobs or they finally go back to the real world when they ‘grow up.’ And for many published writers, they usually require day jobs in academia or something. The J. K. Rowlings and the Rolling Stones are the rare exceptions, although there are ways that some writers do make an ordinary living just writing. Think volume.

Doing the math, if I could sell my books at a reasonable market value, I might net about $10 each. That would mean I’d have to sell a book an hour for than 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year just to make about half the median income in the United States. And I’d better be married to get health insurance. As a writer moves into the publishing world, publishers and booksellers need to make their living, too, and the writer’s royalty per book drops drastically. Of course, I could sell a million books a year. Some do.

So as it goes financially, street writers basically work for nothing – tips. And even the bulk of writers work primarily for supplemental income – pin money.

So it is with great satisfaction that I spend my time and creativity writing and not selling books. Writing is a primary way that I express appreciation for what matters to me in life. It is work that I do with pleasure for no pay and, yes, it helps when readers pay most of the dollar costs. But since I can print one at a time, there’s no real financial risk. And it is also important to mention that self-publishing makes it possible for some few people to be able read my writing  –  for me to be read - at all. And the only real hitch is that my reach as a street writer is so limited. I would indeed love to have lots of people a year reading what I have to say. It would indicate to some degree that what I express is worth something to someone else.

But for now I’m a street writer. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t already think that it was worth doing for myself.

And I still keep looking for ways to make my writing available to people who might be interested.  I’m pretty sure some people will enjoy reading some of the stories in my next book titled, ‘Little Bird: Small tales and poetry.’ So if you don’t want to stand in a long line outside my house waiting for midnight to roll around when that book will be released to the public with unimagined fanfare, I suggest you pre-order. I’m considering asking $7 bucks. I’ve added some extra costs, especially with the cover, and I’ve been drinking more egg crèmes lately – expenses, you know.

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If you really want to add you your ‘Haverkate-Ens’ collection, there’s:

            Sidney Core’s Secret $4 (in stock)

            The Sky is Reflected in the River $4

            Cairns $4 (in stock)

            Bowersock $7

            Kaw River Bridge $15

            Little Bird $7

If you just want to borrow them and read them and look at the pictures, just ask. And remember, there’s a post on my blog every Thursday. But the reality is that however good my writing is, not that many people I know are as interested in reading what I want to write about as they are in reading the work of other writers. I have books on my shelf that I would recommend to you before recommending my own. But on any given day, something I wrote might mean something to you.

Sidney Core’s Secret is the one book at this point that I would like to see legitimately published, but no nibbles. You should see the so-so stuff in kid’s lit that has gotten published. Still, I haven’t tried very hard.

One of my biggest real difficulties as a writer is a lack of criticism. Because you know me, it’s hard for you to talk objectively about my writing without feeling like you are directing criticism at me. And, being human, it’s also tricky for me to separate out those things. That’s one reason published writers have gone through places like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It takes a village to raise a writer (apart from a few solitary geniuses). If you read something of mine and have a useful word to give, I would like to try to go from ‘pretty good’ to ‘better’ in my writing. So far I’m mostly guessing about how good my writing is.

But I’m having a pretty good time working at it.

Little big day for one writer

Little big day: I ‘click off’ on this year’s book. A tough click to make. The files will be locked in at CreateSpace; no more editing or proofing allowed; this is now what the book will be. Even though I expect distribution to be in the low tens, with actual readership well below that, my slightly anguished response to saying ‘it’s done’ is pretty irrational. Except for me, this is a virtual non-event.

The book is ‘Little Bird: Small tales and poems.’ I think more people might read more of these writings than I have produced in previous books. That is I think people are more inclined to read stories than poems. Don’t expect your copies right away, although turn around from order to print to doorstep is little more than a week.

I’m also one of four readers today at an assisted living facility reading from our individual ‘memoir writings,’ essays selected and essentially self-published. I was only briefly an active member of this local writing group and I have a piece in their second collection. Other members are quite active in trying to promote the book. I still have barely cracked my copy and it’s been out for a month. I see some chatter on the list serve. Still I am in print on some public bookshelves.

CreateSpace informed me that I have sold my third copy of the kid’s book, ‘Sidney Core’s

Secret,’ in October on Amazon. I also got my first official rejection from a literary agent last week on the same book. So far this is the only book that I think has a real chance for regular publication, although I’m not pushing very hard. Although I see kid’s books that are surely worse than mine when I look, the market remains flooded with good writing.

So I continue to I anticipate that I am years away from writing a book that someone else will want to publish, if then. One writer, a KU alum speaking here, who wrote ‘Winter’s Bone,’ which later became a significant movie, said that he wrote consistently for ten years before he got noticed, and he had come through the ‘writing program’ (MFA, and so on). My odds are long.

But I like ‘Little Bird.’ I’ve done some good work here. The end of the process is a real grind. But much of the writing is very satisfying. Putting fixed words to floating thoughts is a way of seeing the world. In a sense, I’m creating meaning for myself, but that’s what I’ve come to believe is a significant part of the human condition.

Now if anyone else will find worth in my words, that would be gravy.

Solipsism: Are we alone?

Solipsism, as an extreme philosophy, might not be true. In its simple characterizations, only I exist, and everyone else and everything else is a figment of my imagination.

But as a way of understanding life - the human condition in particular - solipsism isn’t entirely wrong. I don’t really feel your pain and you don’t feel mine. Joy works that way too. We as humans share many things. We are connected to each other in many ways. But it is a deep mystery that we each remain ourselves to a very significant degree.

And it seems to get weirder. The pain I feel might indeed exceed yours (if we could find a way to fully measure such things). A parent might feel a kind of pain I can’t begin to understand, watching a child struggling to breathe, wondering if I, in the middle of a major asthma attack might not make it till morning, for example. I was only the one mostly struggling to breathe. I did not feel what my parents felt.

Where all these feelings and sensations come from and where they all go has led a lot of people into religious realms I don’t care to tread. But new neurological and psychological understandings of the mind don’t erase – and in some ways they enhance - the mystery of my existence and yours.

Here’s a simpler way to start: I am apart. And I am together.

One doesn’t need the words to all fit precisely. They - the words - don’t really exist. At least, not in the same way that I do. Words are more correctly a figment of our imagination. But nevertheless, words are a primary way we express our thoughts and feelings, and so in part, they’ll have to do.

But distinctions should be noted and remembered, if only so that we can then momentarily forget that we don’t know everything and thus we can still imagine that we know something.

Faith is a word. But the act of believing something you can’t fully know – that is something more.

Again you shouldn’t get mired too deeply in the many constructed religious ideas that go along with words like faith and belief. The act of walking across the street takes a little faith. The light turns green and I don’t know if you will turn right, driving in your car, striking my body as it steps off the curb. I look quickly over my shoulder and I imagine your hesitation as a sign - and I walk.

Is that act of faith as big as it can get? As small? Nevertheless if you ask me if I have some faith, well, the answer is ‘yes.’ Descartes famously said, ‘I exist, therefore I am.’ I not so famously reply, I imagine, therefore I have faith.

These are all just words, I must remind you.

Here’s the thing: I am here. You are there. We could have something to eat and drink together. We could laugh at something that will be forgotten tomorrow. We could consider what it all means. And I suppose we will do all those things.

We should try to keep our words as close to our experience as we can manage. I don’t know as much as I would like to, but I think I know a few things. I imagine other things.

That bread we will eat came from wheat that grew from a seed that came from a plant that grew from another seed - and you can keep going farther back than any of us were born. You and I can imagine whatever we want about where and how it all came from. But today let’s give thanks for our daily bread. Would you like some butter on that bread? Or apricot jam?

When my parents had company, my mom would sometimes take the jam out of the jar and put it into a glass dish with a spoon in it. Can you believe that? And I can imagine my parents would be glad to see me still breathing if only they themselves were still here with us. Life moves on.

Would you like some beer or wine? Or would you prefer water? I don’t know that my dad ever even tried much besides water. He enjoyed knocking coffee as often as he could. I imagine he got some pleasure from his stale jokes because I, his progeny, also like to make a thing out of the joys of drinking ice water myself. But at this point, I believe more about my dad than I can know, I think.

I’m not only playing with words, here. And ‘playing’ is not quite the right word - and not quite the wrong word for what I am doing with this bit of writing. I am looking for ways that you and I can be together and not feel as apart as we sometimes feel.

It’s only a metaphor, but we can only imagine what will happen when we step off the curb.

So would you like something to eat or drink? I’ll tell you what I can remember. You tell me what you remember. Maybe we’ll share a laugh or a tear.

It’ll take some faith to imagine that some of what we think doesn’t matter as much as we think.

At least for now, we’re here - together.

Forget about Big ‘E’ Evolution for a Change

I’d like to somehow get past the primordial soup and monkeys for uncles and all those unimaginable millions of years and say something practical about evolution. I do think that science in the last few hundred years has come up with some explanations that can really help us understand who we are as a species. But how to get people to pay attention?

I realize that even that word, ‘species,’ seems to get some people’s hackles up, but I really would like to get outside of the mere controversy about people’s ultimate beliefs about ultimate things. Let me set aside, if I can, for a moment, all that vast expanse of time and space that came before or since ‘In the beginning …’ and state for the record that humans are astonishing beings. Our conscious awareness, our ability to calculate pi, all the beautiful and profound words and music we’ve produced, not to mention splitting atoms – we are indeed special. To say that we are created in the image of God might be one way of expressing that, I suppose.

And certainly God has been around for a long, long time. But whether God is the foundation of everything that now exists or a concept that has evolved alongside humanity is not my concern. And further, I don’t believe that resolving - or fighting over – which God is which is very useful. And I don’t see any good reason why my discussion of evolution needs to threaten anyone’s cherished metaphysical or theological ideas.

But there is a new worldview around that has something useful to say, some explanations that might help our self-understanding. I say ‘new’ in the sense that in all the thousands of years humans have written down our thoughts and ideas, these last few hundred years are something different. In a simplistic sense, humanity has gone from thinking about the world as a kerplunk! kind of place to a world that is in process. Kerplunk! may not be your first choice of words to describe the older view, but I think it is apt. And now the new view is one that says that with rigorous investigation we are now able to discover not just that something is what it is, but how it has become what it is. A ‘how’ worldview, if you will.

For me, it seems obvious that the material world operates according to natural laws over time. Whatever ideas about creation might mean to various people, I seriously doubt that God spread those layers upon layers of rock as if they were one flavor of icing on top of another with a cosmic spatula until they hardened – or that God simply blinked those rocks into existence just that way like I Dream of Jeanie. If nothing else – why would he?

I realize that it’s true that ‘process’ is something humans have recognized for a very long time, but we have in the last few hundred years only really begun putting the pieces more substantially together. I use the word ‘recently’ advisedly.

This scientific worldview has expanded thinking about many of the processes back millions of years – even billions. The only alternative I see to this massive time-frame shift is either to stay with a kerplunk! way of looking at things or to try to accept what the rocks and things are trying to tell us. If we stay with ‘blink’ as our answer, that pretty much means we now have to throw law and order out of the universe. Why should even gravity be a constant we can count on or water freeze solid enough to walk on at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit if we can constantly toss ‘blink’ in whenever we prefer?

To me, there seems to be no way around the ‘very long time’ idea. If we’re going to even say something as simple as that limestone is made out of the settled bodies of dead creatures with calcium in their skeletons who lived in very old seas that were then compressed into stone that’s as hard as rock it’s going to take calculable - but a lot - of time. Every physical thing in the universe becomes a willy-nilly proposition if we can’t even look at the Grand Canyon as a huge, complex example of the gradual small erosion that happens in a  bare field of soil after a series of thunderstorms.

I really think that it was a big mistake for some people to tie God’s hands to instants of time. But who or whatever God is, the linking of God to specific amounts of time is an idea that needs to be undone however unsettling that might be for some.

But I also think that with these newer ideas of evolution these shifts in thinking about time are not only unsettling for a few very religious folk. Although we are in a transition period in human thinking - and yes, some individuals have blithely stepped from one side to the other - we are, as a species, well entangled in kerplunk! kinds of thinking. Our individual lives are measured in decades. A million is not in anyone’s direct experience. The processes we actually see are not the same thing as all of that inexorable change over time. They’re only hints. It takes careful observation and inference before any human can imagine a coherent explanation for the present snapshot in front of us now. The universe exists in an almost unimaginable time-frame  for any of us – but that time is an essential concept if what we see around us to make sense.

Consider this: if evolution tells us nothing else, it’s that even scientists who don’t bat an eye at light-years and nanoseconds also share the same kind of mind with all of the rest of us. Whether it’s a creationist or an evolutionist walking alone on a dark night, when they hear a rustling in the bushes their brain will tell their heart to pick up its pace - the hackles on the back of their neck might stiffen.

The story of evolution is indeed that humans are directly related to all of the other species. We – for all of our rationality  –  we all are likely to act as if something might be there in the darkness -  something about to eat us. Even if it’s simply a dark night on a city street in which we are rationally likely to encounter a creature no more threatening than a wandering house cat and not a mountain lion – or even if you take a story, which some believe, in which they imagine it might be a spirit from a supernatural dimension in those bushes, I think that it makes sense that there is a reason that our human brain is the way that it is.

A process of becoming simply makes who we are now as this special species fit with our experiences. The simplest of common experiences shows that even in this modern millennium, our brain prepares our body to run for its life – for a reason. Unless, you’re determined to resorting to different kinds of supernatural magic that fill the world with false appearances of process – of processes that never actually were - it’s not that hard to trace that instinctive reaction to run back to something that is more complicated than kerplunk! thinking. But let’s let that one go, for a moment.

It is perhaps a little unsettling, if any of us thought hard about it,  for us to learn that it might be more than mere coincidence that we share DNA - chemical coding you can’t see with your naked eye, which determines so many of your physical characteristics - with a cat or an amoeba. That we might indeed be related to each other through long processes of change and long periods of time is not easily fathomable. Evolution is not a simple story although some parts can be told quite simply. And although I don’t think that religion needs to be entangled with these more basic scientific explanations, the human mind – as it has evolved, or as it was created to be, take your pick for now – our brain in fact tangles these kinds of things together quite naturally.

We are born, each of us, with a brain that has the instincts we see in other animals all around us. That should be unmistakable and it was to many people long before Darwin came along.

And we are each of us also born into a human culture that has come to imagine all sorts of ideas about how and why things are as they are. Some of those stories are simply wrong. But it takes conscious effort to sort through it all. Our brain is not a smooth crystal sphere the size of peach, nor is it a cube of metal and silicon that a kerplunk! creator could just as easily have decided upon. This folded, complicated, fleshy organism, with parts that do appear to come from here and there – that brain generally prefers taking things easy. Who has time for all that rational thought? Life goes on at the inexorable pace of time; we have a mate to find; children to beget; maybe we’d just like to go out for pizza and a movie; and now just look: human beings haven’t yet sorted everything out. But the problem becomes acute when I don’t like the way your tribe looks or thinks.

If we look around us, we will see that it is quite natural that human beings hold on to enough blurry or simply bad thinking that we miss out on some really interesting new stories - if only because we’ve been told that the new stories will undo some stories that we hold so dear.

And yes, science will in fact undo some stories – religious and otherwise – that have been around for a long time – because the new stories will turn out to be better stories – better explanations. I’m quite sure that many God stories will still stick around. And it’s also quite certain that religious stories and scientific stories will, on occasion, conflict.

But I’m pretty sure that reality won’t be undone by the different stories we humans tell. But however we got here, humans are prone to take their own tribe’s ideas much too seriously – even if they are right (although a definitive ruling eludes us). Furthermore, for being the most rational species on the planet, we frequently don’t use what reason we possess and instead simply call each other stupid – and then it gets worse.

Where does all this discord come from?

The God side broadly says our confusion comes from original sin. Evolution suggests that it’s something we inherited from our mother’s and our father’s side – from way, way, way back. There are some nuanced differences in the accounting, of course.

It’s not that I am simply saying that you should just listen to all sides. Some stories make more sense than others. Some tellers of stories have worked harder and more carefully at looking at life and the material world in the working out of their stories. That should count for something.  But at least you should be careful about excluding a story or parts of a story because of the way that it has gotten bundled in with certain other stories – that leave you naturally unsettled.

Whoever or whatever God turns out to be, the I Dream of Jeanie version – blink, kerplunk! - however you dress it up - when it comes to the natural universe, that part will turn out to be no more than a fairy tale.

And whatever else you think about that scientific hit, The Theory of Evolution, you’re going to want to pay attention to stories about long periods of time and processes that led to intricate relationships between a vast array of creatures through the many generations of life on the Earth.

There are some fascinating stories.  Whoever or whatever wrote the whole book of life and however far back it goes to marks the beginning, not everything can be rationally believed. That cuts several ways. Argue about ultimate origins if you want to, but look carefully at stories about processes and change over time. That’s the core of what evolution means. Start there, honestly, and see what you think.

History staring you in the face

You can’t blame the machines, the woman said, talking about one-ways and listers – plows - at Nerdy Dirty Thirties Night at Pachemamas. It was the practices.

Nerd Nite was packed with people, most of them perhaps around their thirties, talking back and forth, getting something to drink - and to hear presentations on the Dust Bowl. The startling photographs of clouds of roiling farmland about to engulf farmhouses and towns were on the screen. Equally startling was the fact, the woman said, that in fifteen short years, men walking behind horse-drawn, one bottom plows would be replaced by fossil fuel-powered multi-gang plows, although she pointed mostly to the gangs of plowshares on machines on the screen. And she was right, of course: thirty years into a new century, a wet period had turned to drought almost overnight – but, as she pointed out, anyone with an eye to history could have seen that cycle coming around, if the timing could not be not predicted precisely to coincide with the exposure of the land to the weather.

But If the plow wasn’t to blame, well then, what could they have been thinking? Another woman passed around a jar full of Dust Bowl dust, collected from buildings torn down from that long ago era. She mentioned water erosion in her talk about the art that followed those dirty thirties – and she had paintings and photographs to show. But none of them were scenes – not apparently startling or historical enough yet - of farmland flowing under the Kaw River bridge every minute, day after day, a few blocks from where we all coolly sat. She informed us that in Arabic there’s a word for dust storm, ‘haboob,’ and everybody laughed. What else can you do? The Dust Bowl is, after all, like water under the bridge.

But if John Deere gets the credit for innovating the moldboard plow – adding metal to the share so that it could cut deep into prairie soils - who does get the blame for the dust bowl? It was a relief to finally step into an unseasonably hot September night. The air-conditioning in Pachemamas had been set way too high. If there’s a Nerd Nite next century, will there be a woman showing photos of Carrier air-conditioners saying you couldn’t blame the machines, it was the practices. What could they have been thinking?

I walked home. I use best practices on my AC – 78 degrees, sometimes turned down to 76. What else am I going to do – sleep in a tent made from buffalo skins? I dreamt that there was a haboob on the horizon.