Let's Speak The Same Language

Monday, August 29, 2016

THE ROOTS OF THE SILENT BOOMER'S "THE PORN WRITER"

The following paragraphs remain to this day as relevant to me as they did when I first read them decades ago. All my discoveries came from understanding our painful human experiences in those terms. I can't remember from which of many books I took it. I see the influence of Alice Miller in it, but I'm certain it's not her writing. These paragraphs are at the root of my novel, The Porn Writer


"Those who think they can will themselves back to health with the trick of forgetting only trick themselves. The trick of forgetting is the denial which kills them. We think we’ve come to terms with our pasts when we learn not to feel the feelings associated with our memories. Our feelings, specially if they’re rooted in severe childhood abuse, seem overpowering and too huge to face. So we refuse to feel them and pretend they don’t affect us.

"But hidden memories take a secret toll on us because we hide them under addictions. We control them by not acknowledging their powerfulness in our lives. We control them by getting drunk or getting laid or getting high or getting power in high places, or by working seven days a week or by losing ourselves in another person, by watching seven hours of TV a day. On and on. Control is addiction.

"Then we lie to ourselves and to others, thinking we’ve put our memories behind us because we are not able to feel them anymore, except in little flashes. We say to ourselves and we tell others, ‘A person’s got to get on with their life. You can’t dwell in the past forever.’ Yet everything we do, everything we speak, everything we are is influenced by the secret we try to keep.

"Of course we’re never aware that our whole present is but a reflection of our past. We think we’ve neatly escaped our memories, but it’s plain as day they haven’t gone away once you make the breakthrough from addiction to acceptance.

"The secret is, was always, a big billboard on the top of our heads which blinks the truth to everyone around us while only we are unaware of it. It’s like that card game in which each player places a playing card, face outward, to his forehead so that everyone but himself can see the card, then tries to evaluate the strength of his card by the cards he sees that the others are holding to their foreheads. We don’t know what card we’re showing, but to the others, it’s obvious.

"However, there is better though more uncomfortable way. We can choose to dwell from time to time in the past, to face the awful truths, to grieve our losses and accept them and, specially, to accept and embrace the wounded person inside us who needs our love and acceptance rather than our denial. We have a choice to be courageous and admit our pain or to spend the rest of our lives running from the truth in every deed we do and every thought we think.

"Sadly, if we deny the painful truths of our pasts, we deny ourselves and team up with the abusers of this world. We become self-abusers and, finally, abusers of others too. Abusive people are often the ones who most want us all “to quit crying and get on with our lives!” Then he or she can go on about their business of abuse without interruption.

"In the end, you have to lose control to get control. Eventually, you must give up and surrender to the pain. This surrender is no easy task. Re-feeling the pain, you become, for a time, helpless as the child you once were, the child who is being traumatized. All your defenses come down, and you are as vulnerable and naked as you were at the time when the wounds were inflicted on you. It’s a frightening and painful experience, but only then can you experience the magnitude of the damage done to you and begin to grieve and relieve your loses.

"Though recovery is actually practical and sane, the path back to a moderately-successful, healthy frame of mind feels frighteningly irrational and painfully emotional as you walk it. The way back is through pain and darkness and, at times, does not feel like the way to light. You may think you will drown in darkness, alone and unloved, but let me assure you, you won’t. You only think you will. However, it does take real courage to do this work, to walk this path. It’s not a job for the weak. It is the weak who scream out, ‘Forget it and get on with your lives!’

"So we do have choices to make. We can shut down and never feel any true feelings, except terror or nothingness, or we can dive right into them and experience our true feelings, our true selves, swim through them and come out on the other side. There is hope. Every time we honestly get in touch with our childhood experiences, we cry and take pity on ourselves and get a little stronger. The feelings get a little less blind control over us and we become a little more conscious in our choices.

"The process isn’t a clean, neat scientific work. It’s a magical work in a wonderland of seeming monsters and heroes, with princesses and princes, villains and good guys. It’s all within you. Many things are inexplicable, things happen as a result of re-experiencing them that are completely magical and very real. Reason will never get us there but fearlessness and feeling will."

Thursday, August 25, 2016

BEATNIK SILENT BOOMER CAN STILL WRITE 'EM

I caught me one good poem for my book Up Your Ass. So all my creative juices haven't dried up yet. I'm experimenting with this long line form. Sometimes it works. Some of the lines don't break correctly because of the format of the blog. I just corrected them so now they do.

YOU WAKE ONE MORNING

You wake one morning when the alarm sounds in the middle of your life and cancer battle,
and you begin to toddle about the house with an aging mind, trying to formulate a beginning
when you suddenly miss your wife so much that tears rush into your eyes and a hole opens 
in your belly. For a moment you don’t know what it is you have to do to keep yourself alive,
then you imagine yourself as an even much older man, alone and missing a woman’s touch,
and you remember the old man they brought into the nursing home where you were working
in that small town of long ago because you’d just broken up with wife number three. You had
to make a living, the same way you always had to make a living no matter how or where.
You recall they found him in his farmhouse out in the boonies alone in shit stained undies.
He’d lost his wife of 60 years and couldn’t cook for himself and hadn’t cared for himself.
His sons found him that way, more dead than alive among the pines, delusional with grief.
You recall how you saw him as an example of the pampered male, so dependent on a spouse
that he couldn’t live without her and how his dilemma was smugly humorous to you back then
when you were contemptuous of all the members of your own pampered gender, the idiot male.
That was before counseling where you learned to have compassion for the male you were and
where you wondered how you’d come to hate your manhood so much you didn’t want to be one.
Maybe that’s why at puberty a few times you stood before the mirror in your stepmom’s undies
to give yourself a thrill. In counseling Bob asked why you’d stopped doing it, and you told him,
“I don’t know. I just stopped.” That was before counseling with ex-priest Bob who left his order
because his succubus was so beautiful that the sap rose up in him like honey and blinded him,
and you saw how, for guessed at reasons, you’d taken the women’s side in the battle of the sexes
in the turmoil of the 60s that busted up all the John Wayne foundations of American existence, 
and you sank into a quagmire of self loathing, booze and woman needing you called your self,
and you heard Pete Seeger singing, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” one morning 
like this morning when the tears wash up out of your silent interior into your eyes, remembering.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

BEATNIK BOOMER SILENTLY EXPOSES SELF

Short and sweet. Six more radiation treatments. They will end next Wednesday, the 31st of August 2016. Got back two more rejections. One for a set of three poems. The other for a short story. Bright spot? Both invited me to send more material. The task of rewriting The Porn Writer leaves me cold. Have I rewritten it to death?

Picture is of one of three marks on my body. One on each side and one in the middle of my body. They align these marks with laser beams for first rough alignment of my body to the radiation device. 

That's all folks. For now.

Monday, August 15, 2016

BEATNICK BOOMER INSIDE THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

This is me in the external beam irradiation machine at PeaceHealth. I got Deana one of the techs to snap the photo. The big round head looking down on me is the piece that shoots me with radiation. To its left on the diagonal is one of the arms that takes x-rays. The other x-ray arm, a square, is peeking out below the table. The x-ray arms are retracted at the moment. The techs go into another room and extend those x-ray arms. The entire unit circles my body, then the x-ray readings of the location of my prostate with the implanted fiducials is fed into the computer and the table I lie on makes the final adjustments, then I'm zapped. The process takes about 20 minutes. Compared to the 40 minute Cyberknife treatments, it's fast. I tell the techs with a laugh it's a "zip... zap... zoom..." process. I'm hopeful and tranquil enough about everything. 

Mertie and I went into Portland to see Cafe Society, Woody Allen's latest. We weren't as impressed as by Paris Nights. We aren't alone in our judgment, but the film was interesting enough. 

The rewrite on The Porn Writer still moves along nicely, but as I said in an earlier entry, I'm giving myself permission to let the writing go hang if I feel stressed. Mainly I need to stay rested and get in some exercise and run necessary errands and prepare or serve [already made meals] when Mertie comes home from work. Nine more treatments. Will be done a week from this coming Friday. Though I haven't been sending out many things, I still have about 15 items out being looked at. The queries for my novels are falling behind because they require more work. I try to make my query letters fit the agent I'm sending them to. I imagine I sense things about them from looking them up on Google and from the presentations on their websites.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

BOOMING BEATNIK'S MIND COMES AND GOES

Twelve more days of radiation treatments under this machine to go. Dr. Siddiqui tells me we'll wait three more months [time for the prostate to normalize] to take a PSA test and find out where we stand, i.e. did we get it in time before the cancer spread elsewhere in my body? A PSA of zero would be great, a 2 is not so bad. 

I wrote a new cancer poem yesterday, "Tabled Memories", and I've had three good days of work on the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer. From time to time the fatigue caused by the radiation treatments make my mind feel like a pool full of slugs. Everything I write during those times seems awful, then a light comes on, the slugs slip away, and I know I write as well as many others who have been published. This morning I'm awfully tired again and uninspired, but I want to finish this last rewrite of The Porn Writer so I can get queries about it into circulation once more among the agents. Of course, it's been some time since I sent any of my novels out on query status. I'm starting to feel guilty again when I walk into the office where file cards are strewn about on a card table next to the outdated 2013 Writers' Markets book. 


Lastly I had a moment of self awareness yesterday while lying on that narrow table above, waiting for my irradiation to begin. The kind of moment when you see beneath the obvious and get a glimpse of some synaptic setting that underpins your personality at a fundamental level. The techs had stopped the process because one of the computers fell asleep and had to be reawakened. They requested, as they always do, that I lie very still. As I lay there clutching the ring they give us to hold so that our elbows don't fall off the table edge and ruin the process, I caught myself feeling quite proud to be lying so still and proper for them, the obedient little boy part of me. Smug it was and proud as proud can be. I didn't necessarily like what I saw, but our deepest selves, our un-mirrored selves, are just the sort of things that trip us up. I was watching a documentary tonight about Richard Nixon. I just realized he was like me too in his deepest self.

Monday, August 1, 2016

BEAT BOOMER'S BUCKET LIST BOGGED DOWN

In the last seven days I crapped my pants twice. Fortunately the accidents occurred at home as I rushed from my living room recliner to the bathroom. The accidents were distressing, and I've bought adult diapers. Aside from painful urination which I tolerate pretty well, the second side effect that troubles me most is fatigue, so much so as to soften my acuity and make writing nearly impossible at times. As a writer I tell myself I ought to be able to describe how these occurrences distress me, how they play on my mind and emotions. I finally summarized it to myself this afternoon as I drove to my radiation treatment. A month ago, I felt like a virile youthfulfor 78attractive male who still enjoyed sex with his wife and thought of himself as funny and comparably confident, happier than at any time in his life while looking forward to achieving his single bucket item. Yesterday, after the 2nd accident, I was badly deflated and imagined a much decreased enjoyment of my final years, however long that might be. It was a gloomy appraisal, one which I don't like and one I'm trying to resist. Just writing it down helps me a great deal.

The upshot of what I'm getting at is that until treatment is over on August 31, I will not push myself to write but will concentrate on limited exercise, diet and pampering myself, plus meeting my responsibilities at home. I will be drifting sideways and making little progress on my goal to get someone other than myself to publish a novel of mine before I kick the bucket. I'll write only when strongly moved and in a fairly alert state of mind. Following is a list of potential side effects of radiation treatment. Ain't they a kick in the pants?

  • Frequent urination
  • Difficult or painful urination
  • Blood in the urine
  • Urinary leakage
  • Abdominal cramping
  • Diarrhea
  • Painful bowel movements
  • Rectal bleeding
  • Rectal leaking
  • Fatigue
  • Sexual dysfunction, including diminished erectile function or decrease in the volume of semen
  • Skin reactions (similar to a sunburn)
  • Secondary cancers in the region of the radiation