Jeez, Louise, 82 people looked in this morning. Thank you folks. Been awhile, I know, but I've been hard at work. Spent three days straightening out the file cards I keep on all my poetry. Things were in a mess, and I found I was sending out poems I'd self-published in my two poetry books, Gray House By Cold Mountain and Tenderfoot [available Amazon or AuthorHouse]. That's a no-no in the publishing world, even though the readership of those books is extremely small.
Just finished a few minutes ago writing another short story I love to pieces called "Lennie". I'm also rewriting the poetry ms about my prostate cancer, You Wake One Morning, Remembering. I'm altering it from second person singular to first person and it will have a new undecided title. The reason I began it second person was some sort of shame or shyness about using first person. Don't ask me why. I don't understand it myself. After all, it's my cancer, my dealing with it, the humor I find in my dealing with it. In fact, I wonder if it's not too humorous in places while in other places showing too much self-pity. It's a complicated book, unlike any other cancer poetry I've read. Lot's of references to movies and personalities in the news of my days.
I was innocently reading War and Peace when I came across the following:
It seemed to her [Natasha] that everybody knew about her disappointment, was laughing at her, and pitied her. With all the strength of her inner grief, this grief of vanity intensified her unhappiness.
[Natasha loves Prince Andrei and can't understand why he hasn't visited in
three weeks. Andrei is talking with his disapproving
father about proposing to Natasha.]
Tolstoy labels the poor girl's anguish as "grief of vanity". In that passage, he reveals why everything we know about human behavior and how we moralize about it is obsolete. Take away language, strip Natasha's feelings free of the moral epithet, vanity, place the poor girl in a troop of monkeys where we all came from and, then, understand the truth of her grief, or what Tolstoy labels as grief.
Natasha's feelings, her pain, and her imagination about what others think of her is the evolved process by which all animals in our human troop find our places in society, either low down or high up or somewhere in the middle. Emotions, beyond our control, are mechanisms which move us to find and accept our places in the human monkey troop. Nothing noble about her feelings or reprehensible. Emotions just are. Tolstoy's moralizing is his monkey brain justifying his own processes of finding where he belonged in the human troop, and, interestingly enough, look how his feelings of "shame" caused Tolstoy to free his peasants and to unsuccessfully try and be like them, but he couldn't escape his own genius. Fortunately for me, I've got no genius to deal with. Only endless shame. Good movie to watch about Tolstoy is The Last Station.
PPS: For all my understanding of the human condition, I continue to write as of old, too old to change my ways, all the while asking, "How will any of us write if we no longer mythologize our feelings?" Perhaps we won't.
Recently I submitted a piece of writing to a local paper. It was rejected. That's okay. Any writer gets used to that, but I had asked that if they used my piece would they please mention my blog and/or my publications at Amazon. The editor in an email said that the paper would not advertize my books or this blog if they ever did use a piece of writing by me. I have no argument with the editor, but a little recognition wouldn't hurt.
What really bothers me about all of this is how I now feel SHAME that I should even have asked someone to give me a little help in my effort to sell a book before I die. It's my problem, of course, not that particular editor's, but I don't know how people can shamelessly advertize themselves or their work whereas I am unable to do it. I picture shame as partly genetic and it's a mechanism by which some of us monkeys hold back while others climb to the top of the heap.
My shame is difficult to deal with. I'm sure it's at the root of my hard drinking in the past. Why should anyone feel shame just because he wants to become known and sell a book? It certainly doesn't hold back the silver-back gorillas among us who do become known or rise to power. I also believe that shame is what causes some celebrities to act out so badly when they do achieve recognition. They feel they don't deserve it.
Perhaps I need to change the title of this blog to THE SHAMEFUL BOOMER!
Jeez, Louise, 82 people looked in this morning. Thank you folks. Been awhile, I know, but I've been hard at work. Spent three days straightening out the file cards I keep on all my poetry. Things were in a mess, and I found I was sending out poems I'd self-published in my two poetry books, Gray House By Cold Mountain and Tenderfoot [available Amazon or AuthorHouse]. That's a no-no in the publishing world, even though the readership of those books is extremely small. 