March 2003

NMIs [new monastic individuals], says [Paul] Fussell, make up the class of people that belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of “unmonied aristocracy” free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called “work.” – Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

Yes, at least until they have a serious illness and need medical insurance. I wonder if Berman, a writer and professor, understands the practical difficulties in being an NMI.

By the way, hate the acronym.

Berman’s NMI is socially invisible, unattached to any group or “ism,” free-floating. Society cannot co-opt “nomadic” ideas because it doesn’t know they exist. Nomadic thoughts are not stored in a library or on the Internet, but “embodied,” like the book people in Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, personally transmitted. As a way of getting through what Berman sees as the next Dark Ages.

I guess I would just rather put it on the Internet. I think I’m getting too old, tired and cranky to embody much of anything. Actually I prefer to be disembodied, which is more the style of the Internet. I want to put my ideas out there and let the reader deal with the ideas, not me. It’s not personal.

I am, in the words of an old song about old soldiers, “gradually, fading away.”  Like the grin on the Cheshire cat in Alice In Wonderland.

The main problem I have with Berman is that the culture he wants to preserve is academic culture. I think it should be preserved, but not by me.

If you have to “preserve” something, doesn’t that imply it’s dead?

It’s hard to tell if I’m getting any wiser with age because everything goes by so fast. I think wisdom works better in a slower society.

Romance: I’ve heard women say they don’t want to “settle.” I suspect the man who would meet their standards either doesn’t exist or is married.

There are probably many suitable mates available for each of us, if we made the effort to look around. I don’t think that’s the problem. The problem is finding a love response, to anyone, in ourselves.

For older men the problem may be that we always linked the love response to the physical response, and now that is fading.

As I get older physical attraction seems to follow emotional closeness, rather than precede it.

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect, everybody’s little display of genius. – Michael Cunningham, The Hours

A therapist friend has spent her life trying to improve people. I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from trying, but I doubt our individual perfectibility. Maybe because I’ve spent my life trying to survive and keep my head on straight, compensating for shifting brain chemistry and a toxic society. So I have lower expectations. I look around me and see people going through ups and downs, but I don’t see any of us changing much.

I would rather work on improving the community. We can be better, as a group, if we work together. Make a better garden and more of us will bloom.

She has learned over the years that sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation…. – Cunningham

I wonder if anyone has quantified what it would take to bring the U.S. working class up to a middle-class economic level. How much wealth would we have to redistribute?

There are people in Portland rebuilding used computers and distributing them to poor kids.

The old middle class had some useful values: practicality, order, control, planning, thrift. Order and control can be stifling, but chaos is scary. But these values have become perverted in the new middle class, which abandoned thrift for conspicuous consumption, relies on corporations for control, and has abdicated its role in controlling government, handing that over to business people, the wealthy. In every way, the middle class is overextended.

The middle class is usually polite. Yes that is sometimes phony and covers up real problems, but it also allows very different people to get along. On a superficial level. Hard on marriages. Fatal for politics.

Sometimes their politeness shades into condescension.

Drinking: applying a local anesthetic to the brain.

I’ve read that we sometimes confuse thirst with hunger. I suspect we also confuse loneliness with depression.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy’s other half. – Cunningham

The fear, I guess, that joy may be taken away.

What causes madness is, perhaps, the discovery that there is no way to get there from here.

Who said, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer?”

It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live. – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the movie

What makes us love people is seeing flashes of their true spirit.

Find someone who doesn’t need to be any better.

Romance is like waiting around on hilltops to be struck by lightening and saying, “You know, I think I’ve finally figured out this lightening business.”

Do you remember “slack?” Slack was what we needed about 20 years ago. That’s also about the time we started hearing about “stress.”  Drift is the modern version of slack.

Marched for peace in downtown Portland, along with tens of thousands of people. Everyone was there, from babies to old people. I most admired the naked young man holding the sign over his genitals. Most of us only do that in our dreams.

I read someone’s column about the march in the paper, and tried to figure out what she was saying.  The column had, as far as I could tell, no point, only implications. Apparently she thinks peace marches are repetitive and superficial in their imagery. Thousands are about to die in Iraq and she’s concerned about our style?

I love it, the imagination and street theater, all those lively, beautiful people who care enough to take a public stand.

There’s got to be a higher level of magic than computers.

Activism: I wonder what the odds are, how many times in your life you could expect to win? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. You try to move the ball enough inches in the right direction – left.

I made the mistake of watching the 11:00 news to see how our peace parade played on TV. They had a few decent quotes, then a section where they asked protestors to point to Iraq on a map. Most could not. And this, of course, is supposed to prove how dumb, or at least uninformed we are.

I might be able to find Iraq on a map; I might not. But I know “thou shalt not kill” unless you have a damn good reason, which in this case we don’t. I don’t need to support the corporate effort to make money off Iraq’s oil.

Some reporter tried that on Oregon senator Ron Wyden a while back, asked him to locate some country on the map and tell them the current price of a loaf of bread, neither of which he could do. Neither could I, or probably most Americans. Who has that kind of memory?

Oh all right, Americans are ignorant. I don’t like it either, but don’t expect us to memorize the price of a loaf of bread.

And if you’re going to ask protestors to point out Iraq on a map, shouldn’t you also ask some prowar folks to do that?

Also they missed the naked guy. He should have been on TV. He deserved it.

I don’t need nice people representing me in Salem. I need nasty people who are willing to see state government crash instead of voting for cuts in human services.

I’ve seen two movies where people turn out to be dead, and don’t know it. Social commentary?

I wonder what a truly lively life would be like.

I always try to stop in time.

I would like to see something like Portland’s Saturday Market, only for writers. We could sit there at card tables and sell our self-published works. I could put mine on a CD. Publish for less than a dollar a book.

I’ve gotten a lot more class conscious in the last few years. The screws got tighter. A serious illness plus an early retirement left me dependant on medical treatment to survive. This is the part where you find out what your place is in society.

Reading Elmore Leonard’s Tishomingo Blues, I’m struck by the rhythm of his dialogue.

When I hear writers read, someone always asks, how do you do it? We would like to know.

Middle-class people believe that being financially uncomfortable is a sign of irresponsibility. You didn’t do what you were supposed to do.

I’ll just keep picking at the scab.

We all have a hunger to absorb more of reality. We try to live other people’s lives vicariously, through stories.

It’s circular, the relationship of the individual to society, like two mirrors facing each other.

The classes in America get along mainly by not talking to each other.

… the best combat unit works like a dysfunctional family, and the ways and means of dysfunction are also the ways and means of survival. – Anthony Swofford, Jarhead

A friend who describes herself as an introvert says she is sociable, but if she’s around people too much it drains her energy.  Me too.

I’m standing beside a community garden in my southeast Portland neighborhood, watching insects dance in air.

A kite climbs, glittering, out of a schoolyard. In the background, clouds flying off Mt. Hood. An old tree in someone’s front yard, the color of cement, bolted to the ground.

I try to deal with the horror of living in a state that is cutting off medical care people need to survive by walking around looking at ordinary things. Plain reality. There is a Gestalt exercise to reduce anxiety where you simply describe what you see and hear around you. Takes you out of the inner nightmare.

Cats calmly look at me with their jack-o-lantern eyes.

Two young men walk by, pulling a cart with a small potted tree on it. One is saying, “I can’t even absorb it, what I read in the book.”

Oregon is going through one of those periodic societal convulsions where it shakes off the “unproductive” by letting them die. I badly want to find a way to hit back.

Meanwhile the ornamental fruit trees are in gorgeous bloom.

Two worlds, not speaking to each other.

On Division, a Spanish flower and fancy clothing store next to a Thai tea shop.

This time of year, sunlight is like a fluid we drink.

The little market at 87^th and Division sells knives and stun guns.

Wave patterns in the clouds.

The middle class has been a sacred cow in this country. Everyone panders to them. I don’t see why we should continue doing that. They need to be challenged.

What I want to know is, what did I know and when did I know it?

If one does not have an intimate conversation with another human being the world becomes unreal.

Drifting is caused by curiosity and the inability to find a comfortable place to light.

I’m pursuing truth through silence. Monastic. If I reduce my sensory input overload it’s easier to see what is real.

Not much.

The inevitable fallout from a corporate consumer society includes loneliness, alienation, boredom and sterility of the environment. – Berman

I’ve wondered what values we take in from our culture that lead us to reject most prospective mates as not being good enough. I don’t think this is an example of “high standards.” I think it’s more like a consumerist approach to love.

The best cure for “high standards” is loneliness. When you get sufficiently tired of staring at your TV, your computer, the stack of unread books, reality starts to set in.

By then, unfortunately, you may be so lonely as to grab the first person who is willing, usually someone who has even bigger problems than you do.

So start looking early.

We put it off because none of us really know how to do it. And we hate to feel stupid. Plus the large potential for rejection.

So let’s see, anything good on TV?

I can’t really say that getting old is painful, so far. It’s unsettling.

Today my free association was unremarkable, everything connected to everything else, like a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle.

In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. – Don DeLillo, quoted by Berman

Oregon has been a national leader in political innovation. As the state disintegrates  we are once again a leader, just a little ahead of the rest of the country.

I write to remind myself.

Words are good but they always fall short. Meaning comes mainly from touch.

Berman has six references to science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in his book. I wonder what Berman would think of Bradbury’s opinion, expressed years ago, that we should immerse ourselves in junk culture until we’re so sick of it we have to move on to something better? I’ve read tons of crime novels and watched a great many movies about people running around shooting at each other, but now all that seems more like punishment than entertainment.

Literary fiction, on the other hand, can be painfully slow and plotless. Tell me a story.

Trying to change people sends a message that they’re not good enough the way they are. Encouraging them to make the same judgment about you. Not conducive to romance.

I’m always thinking about something. Can’t remember what.

I have this fantasy that we could start a crime school – to teach people how to be better criminals. Wouldn’t that be cool?

It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character…. – Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Far From Heaven: people get really lonely when they can’t be themselves, especially rich people.

Relating is like writing: you just have to do a lot of it to get the good stuff. Moments when one or both of you are being yourselves. Times when you can really see who someone is.

I don’t think we can understand current events without noting the deep changes taking place in us at the cellular level: Americans have become pigs.

Transitional periods … are ones in which individual action can have a much larger impact on historical developments than would normally obtain. – Berman

If the system is already wildly unstable it doesn’t take as much of a push to move it. Also, people’s eyes and ears are open.  On the other hand, instability can lead to fear and rigidity.

… this country seems to be very good at crisis management…. It tends to deal with serious problems at the eleventh hour, thereby staving off disaster, although not accomplishing much else. – Berman

I think we’ve been so worn out by change in this country, mostly job instability, that we refuse to change anything unless we’re forced to. “No we won’t change, and you can’t make us.” Until all the problems pile up so high they cause a crash, like the one we’re having in Oregon right now. State government is collapsing.

History moves much more slowly than a human life. – Berman

Life is mostly composed of routine suffering.

George Bush is an evil man, doing all the wrong things for the wrong reasons. He is also a much stronger president than Bill Clinton ever was. Democrats should watch and learn.

This is my Last Will & Testament.

Is this what it’s like to go crazy? She’d never imagined it like this – when she’d thought of someone (a woman like herself) losing her mind, she’d imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief. – Cunningham

Oregon’s per capital tax load is 46^th among the 50 states, yet Oregonians scream about high taxes.

Many Oregonians are upset about the state social services cuts. There are op-ed columns and news articles in The Oregonian. Everyone who reads knows it’s happening. But hardly anyone is doing anything about it. People seem to be surrounded by an invisible shell, some kind of moral insulation that allows them to go on about their daily lives as if this weren’t happening. They’re busy. Thinking about it too much makes them depressed. I feel I’m burdening them if I compulsively blurt out the latest horrible news. But it is potentially my life at stake here. People are already dying.

If we live in a society that makes it impossible for us to be good, then we should be evil. Hell is the midrange, a moral nothingness, a vacuum. Where people spend their lives hiding, hoping not to be noticed.

I intend to keep sharpening my point.

The main symptom of our time, our social disease, is a personal encapsulation that makes it possible to ignore the pain of others, a state of mind that could not be sustained in a village.

We don’t react until the pain comes home to us, by which time it’s too late.

The present state of affairs – waiting for the war to start, for Oregon to collapse, reminds me of nausea, and trying to make it worse, trying to push myself over the top and throw up, so it will go away. My job as a writer is to push you over the top.

No wonder you’re not reading this.

I’ve always depended on the meanness of strangers.

Sometimes the more fictional a writer becomes, the closer he actually gets to dead center. – Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightening

Another book on writing.

I know, I’ll take my “old” style from the elderly wizards in the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies. If only I could fly!

Smirk gave his ultimatum speech today. Looks like we’re on the Eve of Destruction. I don’t know about you, but I believe we need an all out effort to supply small countries with weapons of mass destruction. So they can defend themselves against us.

It’s so important to stay in character.

Not literature, but rebellion.

I remember one of the Beat writers making the same claim: rather than create culture, they were trying to assassinate it. So they might start over.

I suspect the Beats were a result of working-class people going to college, part of a great influx after WWII, and not staying long. What I should have done. So you get a literate working-class culture, rather than an academic one.

In U.S. electoral politics … the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans make 80 percent of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend labor by a margin of 10-1. – Robert W. McChesney, in Noam Chomsky’s Profit Over People

The war: It’s like we’ve all got an illness. “How are you feeling?”

Walking around the neighborhood, I can smell the green growing.