lickhaven

I’ve never had a career.

Throughout school and after leaving college, I never considered a coherent direction for my life. The concept simply wasn’t in me. I graduated Penn in the early ’60s, perhaps the only time in the country’s history when it was possible for a broad segment of muckabouts like me to drift through the world without having to worry about making a living or doing anything useful. I lived in group houses or really cheap apartments but gave no thought to a coherent future. 

It was all out there: If we ran out of money we could float it, just do without until something happened. I had written a daily column for the student newspaper at Penn, then used that “talent” not at all to find work for the next 20 years. Oh, I did stuff, took odd jobs (carpentry, office temping, stacking boxes in supermarkets), spent a few years doing part-time maintenance at my kids’ private school, Miquon.

Thing is, I’m still the same. Nearly everything I’ve earned from 1980 on has come from freelance writing and editing, but it was work picked up, again, without direction, without a reflection on “making a living.” Most of it fell in my lap, each job tacking onto the one before.

A lot of people like things I write, but I’m not a “writer” in any glorified or cohesive sense; I’m not anything I can point to. I’ve self-published three novels and a collection of short stories, am working on another novel, but have made no attempt to promote them. Now I’m verging on 82 (an 8-decade-old “vergin”!) with the sense of nothing coming except death – and not disturbed by that realization.

The novels are not only not part of a series, but consciously structured as different from each other as possible – what’s the point of writing a pile of words that isn’t personally unique? That’s the opposite approach of the current era, that can’t churn out a “life” article without the word “career.” (I don’t intend that as a snub to careerists. I don’t try to be different from other people, it just works out that way in the alleys that lace my head.)

What we do yesterday, today or tomorrow doesn’t have to lead anywhere, and in most cases doesn’t. I guess I see that as one of the few truisms of being alive; and if I’m right, then at least I’ve accidentally lived according to a personal truth.

Amazing. And somehow disconcerting.

*    *    *    *

Linda and I got talking about pattern-recognition the other night. The conversation started because of a plot element in the book I’m working on, but then it veered into illuminating an idea that’s been flitting through my head off and on. 

It started with Bush the Younger. The general consensus was that he was just plain dumb. I’m not saying he wasn’t or was, but watching his responses, what struck me as most likely was a learning disability. Maybe my response came from Linda having been a reading specialist who dealt with first-graders who had a rough time untangling written words.

One time Bush was pictured supposedly reading to a kindergarten class in Florida but holding the book upsidedown. I thought then (and still do) that it was just a really bad photo op, but it fit fit well with that stunned look of confusion that would cross his face when he was trying to make sense of something – less stupidity than, “Geez, what the hell?”

“I’m having difficulty comprehending written words” is not the kind of announcement a major country’s leader is going to broadcast, but such a condition must have created a hell of problem for those briefing him.

These days, massive amounts of time are spent focusing on Beloved Seditionist Stump’s bumbling, nonsensical pontifications, analyzing how they reflect stupidity, ignorance, a racist mental rash, and narcissistic self-glorification. I’d go with all that, but I think there are also important underlying neurological problems. I mean, what’s really going on back there? And what does it say about the man himself – a unique entity, as we each are?

When he mischaracterizes a fairly simple statement made to him, is it lying, deliberate misdirection, political gamesmanship, or a simple failure to understand what was said because he can’t form it into a coherent mental pattern? When he rants against anything that doesn’t mesh with his pre-conceived ideas, is it (only) bilious arrogance, or that when he can’t assimilate new information he has to throw it away, deny its existence?

He comes across as bad enough in person-to-person conversation and interviews, but his staff have made it clear that he never “likes” to read anything put in front of him. What if he just can’t? Oh, I’m sure he can recognize individual words, but what if sentences disentangle from their meaning, run off the page and fornicate in the undergrowth? What if he can’t see a coherent pattern in a paragraph? 

(Hell, I get that way with certain essayists. I was trying to read Francis Bacon yesterday and it was like somebody forcing my head under muddy water and yelling “Drink!” I think there are still scholars who want to credit him with writing Shakespeare’s plays; let me tell you, simply and flat out – NO!)

I’m making no apology for Lump’s behavior. I’m just trying to find explanations that could explain some parts of it: because if you don’t know the cause of a given problem, you’re not going to find a solution.

As for the larger issue of personal responsibility, many a soul with learning problems is fully decent. For any limiting mental condition – no matter what the details – some will be decent; others, by nature, rotten. Physically, morally, spiritually, Sump is a vile human being. 

*    *    *    *

Apropos of nothing… How do poets and songwriters “see” their rhymes?

In Blake’s “The Tyger,” we have this:

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In “The Ploughboy and the Cockney,” a song on Maddy Pryor and Tim Hart’s album, Summer Solstice, there’s this rhyme:

Oh, carry me to London and there let me die,

Don’t let me die here in a strange country.

And in Hank Williams “Jambalaya” we find:

Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-oh

Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou.

I each case, the written rhyme works as it is seen, though in recitation or as sung, the sound… does not rhyme:

“symmetry” is spoken as “sim-met-tree,” which doesn’t rhyme with “eye”

“country” is sung as “cun-tree,” which doesn’t rhyme with “die”

“bayou” is sung as “bye-oh,” which doesn’t rhyme with “gay-oh”

Makes me wonder – what would blind Homer have said about this?