Lost at Sea, Found at Sea

                       A man is never lost at sea.

                                           Ernest Hemingway,  The Old Man and the Sea

 

Yeah, well. Romantically said, not so romantically done. Just ask the families and loved ones of the crew of the "Pineapple," a 38-ft. catamaran that went missing at sea for more than ten days. I am one of those "friends and loved ones" and you could have cut my poor heart out with a spoon while all this lost-at-sea drama was coming down. 

 

You may have been following their adventures on the news the last couple of weeks. It was all over the place: CNN, NBC, ABC, etc. They left Guam with all intentions of reaching Cebu in the Philippines in maybe ten days or so. Were confident enough to have already made their flight reservations back home. Then they seemed to fallk off the planet. Went missing. Gone without a trace.

 

Or so it seemed to anxious families and friends. Seems though, they were doing okay but had rudder problems and couldn't steer, but how were we to know? They had decided not to bring a way to communicate long distance--HF radio, SAT phone. What the hell, hey? We'll be fine. The voyage from Guam to the P.I. is a downhill cakewalk and the weather looks great.

 

Did they capsize and go down? Any boat can do that, but catamarans have a reputation. Did the boat break up and sink? That happens, too. Were they attacked by pirates? Someone asked me that. The answer is, not probable. Not many pirates have set up shop between Guam and the P.I.

 

A huge search and rescue operation was launched. C-130s from Hawaii joined planes from the P.I. Coast Guard vessels followed their assumed track, commercial shipping in the area were notified. Back home, on Guam and in the States, we held our breaths and crossed our fingers and shared hopeful messages with one another. Then, the husband of the lone woman on board, receive a phone call: "Hi, honey, it's me!"

 

And so, the drama ended. They were 150 miles from their destination, sailing again after making repairs. For some reason, her cell phone coverage extended out that far. (Go figure. Whose her carrier?).

 

All's well that ends well, but they got some 'splaining to do.

 

 

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! (And get your belly buttons ready for contemplation!)

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment. Dogen

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.
                                                                                        Bodhidharma

Do you remember that book? No, not The Moor's Last Sigh. That's my book shelf back there.  I mean If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him which is not on my book shelf but will be soon.  It was written by psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp and published back in the 1970s when we hippies were all examining our navels for the profound meaning of life, i.e. enlightenment. (I found it just behind a piece of dark cotton lint.)

At the time, I was too busy being a hippie and then serving in the Army and then being a hippie again (a college student with two kids) so I didn't read the book. But it's reputed to be a classic so I just ordered it this morning. Better late than never and I'm looking forward to some old, hippie, meaning-of-life-type life words of advice. When I went to Amazon to buy it, I found the list I copied below. It's billed as an eschatological list, and eschatology is the study of the end of the world. Lovely stuff. Nevertheless,  I love this common sense approach to psychotherapy and to life which basically says, "The way you think life is really pretty much the way it really is, so get over it. Here it is, so stare into your belly button and get thinking (that's called omphaloskepsis by the way):

1. This is it!
2. There are no hidden meanings
3. You can't get there from here, and besides, there's no place else to go
4. We are all already dying and we'll be dead for a long time. 
5. Nothing lasts!
6. There is no way of getting all you want.
7. You can't have anything unless you let go of it.
8. You only get to keep what you give away.
9. There is no particular reason why you lost out on some things.
10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.
11. You have the responsibility to do your best nonetheless.
12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.
13. You don't really control anything.
14. You can't make someone love you.
And I want to add a number 15 to this list apropos of number 14:
15. You CAN make people hate you.

Afterthoughts: Apparently, according to the Buddhist chatter on the Internet, killing the Buddha if you meet him on the road is not to be taken literally. It's all symbolic stuff, you see. The "road" is the path to enlightenment, and meeting the Buddha on that road would mean that you thought you found the illusive goal of reaching enlightenment, but hold on now, if you think you achieved enlightenment, it means you DID NOT! Get it? It's like, just searching for enlightenment IS enlightenment but if you are searching for enlightenment and think that makes you enlightened, you're not. Now do you get it? Really, it's pretty easy.

Next, we writer's usually feel that we know something other people don't. That is, compared to the average schmo, we are enlightened. But, my dear fellow scribblers, we don't know shat, and so, KILL THAT THOUGHT. There, now you are enlightened. You're welcome.

Clean and Well Lighted, The Writer And His Winter

"I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
                                         - "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway


Ah, Hemingway. He gets it just right for a winter's struggle against the bitter, terrifying fading of the light. And here I am in this somewhat blurry picture, sitting out a winter evening with a glass of wine in my home space, a clean, well-lighted place where a man can feel easy about things that are cold and frozen and dark.

Yet, another way to get through the profound depths of winter, wherein we now find ourselves, is to dedicate oneself to work, to production, to focused effort. And I am. My work days recently look something like this:

Up at dawn (this is not difficult as dawn comes blessedly late this time of year).

Coffee (decaf--too bad; how I used to love a caffeine buzz), some kind of quick breakfast while I read an article from one of my magazines: The New Yorker, Skeptic, Scientific American, Newsweek or whatever grabs my eye at the bookstore.

A quick scan of the world and national news (murder most foul most days, and deceit and buggery and tomfoolery galore, too.).

Into my cave where books and the Internet await. This morning I had business emails from my website designer who is busy getting something spiffy ready for me by way of completely revamping my site (douglasarvidson.com) and turning me on to some schemes for selling books which I'll investigate.

 I also had an email from my publisher who is getting Book III of the Eye of the Stallion fantasy series ready for publication as well as a new edition of Book I with a new cover and some editorial changes. We are also going to enter Book II in an alleged "Book-of-the-Year" contest that costs 75  bucks--Both of these deals are put together by nice, thoughtful folks who make money giving you advice on how to make money.

This afternoon, I'm going to read for a couple of hours (David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest), and then out into the cold for a four-mile walk. (I crave exercise, always have. Yesterday was YMCA workout day.) After that, a glass of something strong, another news summary, dinner with wife and wine, an hour making love to my guitar, and then up to bed to read myself to sleep.

Note: Hemingway had his demons, as do we all, and his short story quoted above is one of his best. An old man comes into a cafe and just hangs out until all hours while the waiters talk about him behind his back. Seems he's seen too much of war and life and death and is afraid of the darkness of his own thoughts. As we all know, though, you gotta face them eventually. Preferably, and if you're very lucky, you can face them with a glass of wine and someone you love nearby.

The image below I took a the Green Parrot Bar in Key West. The Green Parrot is not necessarily a clean or well-lighted place, but one can certainly get well lit there.

A Winter Death

End of the Road, Beginning of the Sea: Onancock Harbor in Winter

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ~Andrew Wyeth

Winter has been, since the days when writers scratched symbols with berry ink on papyrus scrolls, a great symbol of dying and death. Nature collapses on herself, retreats, sinks away and leaves us poor contemplative creatures to stare out windows into bitterness.

Our family lost a patriarch this month. As the winter descended, it took with it Albin J. Voit, my father-in-law, who passed away after a brief struggle with an aggressive cancer. Al was, of course, a member of what we are now calling the greatest generation. During WWII, as an 18-year-old sailor, (Mine Man, 2nd Class, Underwater Demolition), he fought on Guam and Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, too. And survived. He was a physics major in college but the war interfered and he never went back. Instead, he managed an auto parts warehouse in Philadelphia and settled in to raise six kids. I thank him for that.

I'll bet he was a damned good UDT guy. He was a quiet man, smart and steady and fearless, and a strict disciplinarian who worked hard at a job he did not necessarily relish. When he was sixty-two, he did what many men only dream of doing: he bought a sailboat and, for the next ten years or so, spent as much time as he could sailing the Caribbean. Being married to one of his four daughters, I was lucky enough to sail with him for three summers and I became a better man and a better sailor for it. I thank him for that, too.

It was a horrific thing, a terrible and sad thing, to watch a man you knew well and liked and admired a lot take his last breaths. But it was winter, after all, and things were descending, cold and dark, into that frigid abyss, an abyss we shall all someday slip away into. 

We loved you, Al, and now we must deal with the rest of it, a long winter of mourning. But, as Andrew Wyeth said, something waits down deep beneath the lonely, dead feeling of this season. We all know that. It is a certainty. The whole story doesn't show.

Attack of the Cowardly Anonymite: "Mommy! He called me a schmuck!"

I've just coined a term I hope will catch on: anonymite.

Anonymites are infesting the Internet with their vileness. They're every where! They're every where! But what is one? An anonymite person who makes ugly, thoughtless, hurtful, nasty, non-productive comments or attacks on people on the Internet while hiding behind the security of the signature, "Anonymous." This is definitely a breakdown in the civil discourse. Batman would not put up with it, and neither will I.

I just had it happen to me. I was called a schmuck (me!!! Mr. Nice Guy! a schmuck!!!) because I goofed in a previous blog and referred to a 1,000-hour rule (the time necessary to become good at something difficult--like writing) when it is actually referred to as the 10,000-hour rule.

Now, schmuck is a pretty strong stuff for something like that. I mean, for a mere 9,000 hours I get called a schmuck? If I had done something intentionally hurtful like say, called someone a schmuck for no real reason, then, sure, call me a schmuck (Schmuck, by the way, is a Yiddish word with meanings that run from the relatively mild "stupid," to more damaging connotations like "jerk" or "bastard." At its worst, it implies intentionally mean, thoughtless, hurtful behavior.).

But, you know what I mean. The real reason I'm addressing this is to voice a grievance. Being called a schmuck by someone who doesn't know that you're really an okay guy who just made a mistake isn't all that tough to take if you possess normal, healthy ego strength. But you see these cowardly anonymites  really dishing it out in Comment sections on the Internet. Some schmuckly, cowardly anonymite calls another person something foul--really foul--just, I think, for the thrill of getting away with it. An small act of cruelty that must give a small, perverse thrill to the true schmuck who writes them. In this case, it's writing something you wouldn't have the courage to say to the person face to face. Or even to write it and sign your real name. Go figure.

So, there it is--a new word: anonymite. I hope it gets to be paired in general usage with the word cowardly. They're all big bunch of schmucks.

The Never-Ending, Skull-Crunching Search for Brain Candy: Scanning the Internet and Reading, Reading, Reading

Where I now read and surf, looking for the elusive cognitive jolt that will inform what I write. I feed on the offerings of both good books and the infinite--if ofttimes sketchy--resources of the Internet. How did I ever have time for a day job? Anyway, here are this morning's gleanings with some personal thoughts attached:

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.- - - H. L. Mencken

Ah, the Sage of Baltimore, the acerbic journalist and critic of American life (don't worry, he's dead as of 1956) peeled back a filmy coating and revealed a pithy truth: Some people are so well read they are idiots. Avoiding the dirty, desperate real world--they fancy themselves above it all--by keeping the up-turned schnoz in a book, they then lean out and peer down at the rest of filthy humanity and pass unctuous judgement. Still, there's something unsettling about the dark, slithery habits of bookworms. Could they be right?

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.- - - Denton Welch

Who the hell is Denton Welch? A nearly forgotten English literary genius (there are a few of these left, apparently, whose reputations hang in closets in dusty bedrooms in drafty English country homes) who died at age 33 in 1948 (yeah, he's dead, too). In this quote, he gets the human longing for love just about right. He was born into one of those "privileged" lives wherein the attempt was made my mummsy and daddy to curmudgeon him into shape to fit upper-class British sensibilities. He rebelled against it with all his poor soul, and was miserable and desperate and tragic before the auto accident that damaged him irreparably.

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart.
                                   - - - Fred Allen, CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter, 1977

Fred Allen was an ol' time radio comedian back in the '30s. You know, you've heard them--the scratchy quality, the nasal voices, the live band in the studio. He was famous, and is now dead. But he was funny and saw the truth and told us about it and got us through the depression and then some. And he saw the scurrilous bread-and-circus effect of television on the public mind. What the hell would he have thought of the Internet? I shudder to think.


But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; In the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.- - - Major Sullivan Ballou, to his wife, a week before his death in 1861, during the Civil War

Major Ballou was one of the 700,000 soldiers, on both sides, killed during the American Civil War. That figure is, again, 700 freakin' thousand. All Americans, too. T'was ever thus, and when will we ever learn?If you've never had to leave anyone you loved very much to go to war, you'll never understand Major Ballou's romantic agony.

I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.- - - Heinrich Heine

This from Wikipedia about Heinrich: Among the thousands of books burned on Berlin's Opernplatz in 1933, following the Nazi raid on the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, were works by Heinrich Heine. To commemorate the terrible event, one of the most famous lines of Heine's 1821 play Almansor was engraved in the ground at the site: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." ("That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.") This long-dead German poet had the sublime and perfect poet's understanding of human nature. A little bitter brain candy, anyone?

A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a coffee is a match for twenty blue devils, and will exorcise them all.
                                                       - - - Henry Ward Beecher "Eyes and Ears"

Henry was a liberal clergyman and abolitionist back when the good people of our South still thought slavery was a damned good idea and nothing less than God's will. They were willing to die by the hundreds of thousands rather then let it go. Apparently Reverend Beecher fueled his abolitionist rhetoric--and was able to even take on the great slavery-loving Christian God of the South himself--by drinking enough really good coffee.

Existentialism and the Daily Struggle for Mindfullness: Right Brain, Left Brain, a Tragic Writer's Brain

Discovery in my backyard: A pine needle fell from on high and managed to go through a hole that an insect had made in this leaf.

The world/universe/time/space continuum is filled, chuck full of the improbable--miracles, if you will. But I won't. A closer look, a thoughtful examination, will reveal that improbable events are, given enough time, certainties--absolutely. The royal flush, the existence of life, the pine needle dropping perfectly through a hole in a leaf--all are going to happen, eventually--no intervention or Grand Plan necessary. So, you hawkers of the miraculous, be careful as you sell your snake -oil nostrums to the gullibles on their travels. You are accountable to yourselves.

Take David Foster Wallace for example. I've really just discovered this brilliant, infinitely jesting, tragic, philosopher-writer. It's a very fine thing to discover such improbable people because they have much to teach us. Wallace was bonafide brilliant. The real thing. He graduated from Amherst summa cum laude, received a McArthur Foundation genius award, wrote stuff that no one else had ever thought of, and so changed the world--at least a little bit. And that's what geniuses do. It's part of the genius package. You gotta change the world. He thought and wrote and taught and loved and celebrated and then he hanged himself. He was forty six.

My take on David Foster Wallace goes like this: His whole deal, all that long-shot, creative-cognitive hyper-power, was attempting to do one thing: Boil things down to some small, hard, indivisible kernel that we could get a grip on and so live better, happier lives. Here's a quote:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

Pity us in our daily struggle to maintain that illusive state of mindfulness. If you are very lucky and discover what mindfulness is all about and how wonderful it is, you are many steps ahead of the most of humanity. If you can employ mindfulness in your daily life, and if it makes you happy and relieves much of the mad burden of being alive, you are light years ahead of most people.

I think the bottom line for Wallace, as he battled the hellish demon of the depression that finally killed him, was that mindfulness helped him and he figured it could help all of us. He was trying to understand what mindfulness really was and how to get a handle on it; how to keep it right there, up front in your mind, so that you didn't have to stop what you were doing and take the time to get a grip on it every time you needed it.

Existentialism proposes that we are all responsible for giving our own lives meaning as we navigate the anguish and accumulating miseries of existence. And we should not forget the joyous stuff in life, too, I suppose. That pesky joy stuff. We have to fit that in somewhere and you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to choose, in other words, to be happy or unhappy. It's up to you. So, practice mindfulness by moving slowly, breathing deeply, and smiling ("Look, there he goes again, moving slowly, breathing deeply, and--worst of all--smiling. He must be a serial killer).

In the end, though, none of that cognitive therapy could fix the biological imbalance that set David Foster Wallace off on his tortured path to self destruction. But it was his search for a cure for his own existential terror that gave us such a wonderful gift--an improbable gift that, nonetheless, was bound to happen--and, like the pine needle and the leaf, had to happen--eventually.