Becoming Human

Nowadays, I am a miserable reader. Reading online serves as an excuse, but an insufficient one. The truth is poor discipline on my part.

Nor have I been diligent with my blog posts. Maybe I have spent too much time watching videos; catching up with lost time and missed opportunities is another weak excuse.

So, this morning, having gotten a start on the last project I had planned for these past weeks, the new blog, I am trying something different. I am drafting this post in Google Docs. The Edge browser lets me split the screen with Netflix in a way that Zen does not.

I finished perhaps two books last year. The other has been sitting on my desk, awaiting me to comment upon it. That is John Behr’s Becoming Human: Mediations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press). From the SVS page:

This book reflects upon various dimensions and implications of the astounding fact that Christ shows us what it is to be God by the way he dies as a human being. In so doing, he simultaneously shows us what it is to be a human being. Connecting the end - "It is finished" - with the beginning - "Let us make a human being," Fr John Behr challenges us to think again about who we are, as male and female, what we are called to become, and the relation between life and death in this journey.

Presented in a poetic and meditative manner, adorned by images and offset quotations, this book inclines the reader towards a meditative reading, weighing, rather than skimming, each word and image.

A bit of the old soft sell there. It is a short book (121 pages, including notes) that is actually shorter—the format is a very small book, one that can fit into a jacket pocket. This is also a beautiful book with its reproductions of icons and other religious art. Its formatting is both stylish and purposeful. This is an essay meant to be meditated over.

And that stylishness makes quotation difficult—the formatting conveys a sense of movement for the text.

Human nature is fragile; death teaches us to understand the strength of God.

That we only become truly human by saying to Christ, Let it be.

There is another point, too subtle for me to accurately draw out of context, that becoming human does reject the world for Christ, but that is to live as a better human being.

Even more subtle is the discussion of marriage as being for our embracing of the Other. The Other is not an enemy; no human being deserves that title. The Other enhances our understanding of humanity.

Quite a lot of hard punches made in such a short book. It deserves to be read and thought about. 

 

sch 3/7 

Retirement should be easy

This month has not been.

It is dumb little things, all health-related. Sleep and concentration have been off this past week. Which may be me explaining away a lack of imagination and a load of idleness.

Walking has been a help. The weather has improved. Sitting too long has its deleterious side effects.

I have been having too much fun on Netflix: The Tourist, The Night Agent, Department Q, and now Furies. Not so much FUBAR. The writing (and the direction) of the others has given much to think about.

It is now the second week of Lent, but I have not attended any services but Sunday. I meant to attend Matins today but overslept because I watched Furies for too long last night. There is that lack of discipline.

I made my third writer’s group meeting on Wednesday. This is turning into a highlight of my week. These are good people, earnest about what they are doing in a place that does not conduce with the writing life. I read “Lessons Learned On A Green Meadow.” I can see further refinements.

I have beans in the crockpot. Its broth was last night’s dinner. Eating less is necessary. 

That was why I went to Payless yesterday to get a few more items for that mess. 

Otherwise, it has been trips to the convenience store and to the writer’s meeting. I will take the bus to group, have lunch at The Dumpling House, and drop in on Payless again. Then laundry. There was an accident yesterday that needs tending to. It is also why I have not traveled much this week.

And so I will break for now.

 

The break took longer than expected. I am now writing on Sunday.

 

Friday turned out both more and less than I expected. I made it to the group session, but not the laundry. My medical issues flared, and the pain was such that I did not get to sleep until around dawn on Saturday morning.

 

 When I last saw my PO, he asked about group therapy. I was honest with him about it being pretty useless. The person running the session told us months ago it was not officially therapy since it was not tax deductible. What is that the federal government expects from this program? Why do they not know how it functions, its purposes? OTOH, it does teach me some psychological jargon and gives me some ideas. I need to catch up on my notes. At this point in time, it appears that I am condemned to cycling through the SOMS program (INSomms explains its program here for state offenders; Seventh Circuit Holds Indiana’s Sex Offender Treatment Program Unconstitutional, Best Practices in Sex Offender Treatment, Evaluating community sex offender treatment programs: A 12-Year follow-up of 724 offenders, Guiding Principles of Risk-Based Sex Offender Management, The National Reentry Resource Center, and Sex Offender Programs from the Bureau of Prisons) until I die. The federal PD told me the lifetime supervision could be modified; last year the PD office told me there was no way to modify to my supervision, even though the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2014 that lifetime supervision was not available for a first-time offender; therefore, I am stuck until death does part us. Every psychology evaluation has not found me fitting into a pathological category. When I was interviewed for this program, the woman stopped taking down my history; she had difficulty organizing it - she could not cope that I dated several women at a time for the last 20 years of freedom. Maybe that makes me a sexual offender with a risky future to her. It could be they just needed another paying customer. It does get me out of the apartment for 90 minutes on Fridays.

 

(For explaining supervised release, check out Supervision.)

 

I picked up a few more items at Payless, but not what I would need later that day.

 

Frankly, I was tired when I got back here around 3 pm and I wasted time on Netflix. Then came the trouble. Maybe it was the Coke Zero and maybe it was eating too much, but it comes down to me not sticking to my plans, again. The pain arrived in the early evening and did not stop until until around 7 AM.

 

I was still hurting when I got up and went to Payless around 2:15. Epsom salts, some ointments, and I was functional. Not that I accomplished much. No going to the laundry - I did not want to be too far from home. I spent the night reading and listening to stuff on Netflix.

 

I got an idea from Up from Darkness: Humanism in a Posthumanist Age (The Hedgehog Review), which I think I can marry with the jargon from the group sessions into a play. Anyway, I spent a lot of time researching the idea over the wee hours of Saturday morning and then last night.

 

 I went off to Payless for over-the-counter meds. That was around 3 pm. I cleaned a little, but mostly I spent Saturday night recuperating.

 

I woke this morning for church feeling drained, even a little dehydrated. Liturgy put me in a better frame of mind. 

 

I got home four hours ago, trimmed back the email, and worked on finishing this post. Now, I need to get my laundry done. It is a shiny, bright day, and I need a short walk.

 

 

 

sch 

Muncie: Decline and Falling Down The Elevator Shaft

 Offering a grab bag of items collected over the past few weeks.

 Muncie Mall to be fully demolished (IPR)

And for me, wow: After a quarter-century, Vera Mae's Bistro closes its doors.

sch 3/2 

Writers: Literary Stuff

 Hey, It’s OK to Ask Questions When Submitting to Lit Mags (Sometimes) (The Forever Workshop) may be behind a paywall. Being as ignorant as I am, it was both educational and also left me thinking some of this is just plain common sense (and good manners).

The Prayer - Ryan M.B. Munroe (Litro) - a short story that quite blew me away with its subtlety and its punchline. Then, too, I am prone to thinking we all have ghosts in our heads. 

From The Mirror Moment in Fiction: A Midpoint Method for Plotters and Pantsers (Helping Writers Become Authors), I learned a technical point unknown to me and one that my stories may lack.

In fiction, the mirror moment is a point—often at or near the story’s Midpoint—when characters are forced into a moment of self-recognition. It is not merely a plot beat, but a reckoning: a pause in the forward motion of the story in which characters must confront who they are, what they have become, and what the cost of continuing forward will be.

I have been working on shorter pieces lately, except for “One Dead Blonde,” and I do not think I clearly have any characters confront what they are. One character is meant to lack this quality altogether.  I approached it with two other characters, but it seems more in terms of what they are not. I will need to keep this in mind with “Chasing Ashes,” and if I ever get back to “Love Stinks.” The latter pretty much seems to lack this moment. I have not considered it with “Chasing Ashes.”

Pacing issues keep coming up in the few rejections with comments, so Manipulating the Shape of a Story by Emily Nemens (Poets & Writers) has me thinking about what I might be doing wrong.

 Whether it’s mapping the main character’s energy or doing something so old-fashioned as tracing Freytag’s pyramid to map the arc of the plot, if a story has movement, there are going to be peaks and valleys as you chart its shape. There are going to be slopes rising up, and hopefully some coming down, too, because even a happy ending rarely results from a straight line. There might be a cliff—drops nearly straight down are an accepted storytelling convention; sudden ascents are often a sign you’re missing an intermediate scene, or at least an indication you might need to explain the elevator that popped your character right to the top. And an extended flat line? Finding one of those typically means there’s not enough change in a story, whether in plot, character, or emotional tenor. 

At a certain point in the revision process, whether coaching my students or staring at my own manuscript, I often encourage these lines to be pushed and pulled and nudged. Most of the time it’s to increase the amplitude. Remember that term from math class? Per Merriam-Webster: “the maximum departure of the value of an alternating current or wave from the average value.” I ask, “Can we push up that peak to something closer to euphoria? What about when something bad happens: Might it be even worse, more devastating? What if your character doesn’t let cooler heads prevail but instead goes fully off the rails?” I’ll admit that when I dispense this kind of advice, I can feel a bit hackish. It’s a Hollywood cliché to ask, “What is at stake?” But it’s also fundamental, because what I’m often really asking is, “Have you made the story consequential enough?” 

Mapping while advising is something I just tried out on a recent revision of “Going for the Kid,” but it was more in reaction to K.M. Weiland's The Four-Act Structure and the Circular Shape of Story.

Although we may impose a sense of linear escalation—a straight line beginning at one fixed point and ending definitively at another—this is not an accurate representation of the larger pattern of life. Perhaps most importantly, taken in isolation, this linear approach does not represent a generative pattern of life. It is beginning and ending; it is birth and death. It is not birth-life-death-rebirth.

The circle aspect of a cycle is a more natural fit for any conversation about human development, psychological change, or meaning-making. We understand our history in cycles (indeed, we even refer to some of the ancient stories as Cycles). We understand the natural seasons in cycles. We think of the stages of life as cycles. All life as we know it is a pattern of growth, decline, death, and renewal.

When viewed like this, story becomes less about “getting to the end” and more about participating in a repeating pattern and understanding where one is within the cycle. While linear story models tend to emphasize progress, arrival, and completion; cyclical models emphasize seasonality, renewal, and return. Viewing story as a cycle reduces the pressure for us to “solve” everything, while simultaneously increasing our awareness of the depth and resonance of the larger patterns that hold us.

Although I might have aligned things according to the following:

When the Midpoint is de-emphasized, we get Three Acts. When the Midpoint is considered an equal player, we’re more likely to think of the story in terms of four quarters or Four Acts:

• First Act: 1-25% (ending with First Plot Point)
• Second Act: 25%–50% (ending with Midpoint or Second Plot Point)
• Third Act: 50%–75% (ending with the Third Plot Point)
• Fourth Act: 75%–100% (ending with the Climactic Moment and Resolution)

“Going for the Kid” misses the mark by 73 words in the first act, by 12 in the second; the third just confuses me by not being where I thought it would end (it might go over where I think the third act should end), but that ends the fourth act with two words too many. But it does match with a long comment I received that there is too much front-loaded.

 This does not work with “Pieces from a Small Indiana Factory Town,” and neither does a three-act structure. That raises all kinds of issues with revision. Of which I am too tired to deal with now.

I think I have found an explanation of a problem I am having with my writing, particularly my revisions: Embodied Writing: How to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Story (K.M. Weiland).

The second problem is that the less oriented we are in the physical, the more oriented we are in the mental. This lends itself to over-intellectualization and hyper-consciousness. Instead of embodied responsiveness, we are more likely to lean into mind-based reactivity. As artists, we can begin to focus more on message than theme—on agenda instead of archetype. Instead of asking questions, stories are more likely to shout answers. And these answers—whatever their flavor—are inherently limited by their detachment from the rhythms of life and of creativity. 

I have usually described this as my not being able to see the forest for the trees. More feelings, less intellect seems like a great idea for me. 

Lessons about the limits of literary fame: Bygone bestsellers (Literary Yard).

sch 3/2 

21 Do-It-Yourself Editing Tips by Melissa Donovan made me wince by things that should have been obvious to me and which I have not done.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Mechanical Imagination (JSTOR) reviews another essay and left me thinking that if the following is accurate, then Poe remains the writer for all technological ages.

Tresch quotes Poe’s reflection that “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward…We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused.” He described himself as a “magazinist,” and worked as a writer, editor, and typesetter.

To many poets at the time, writing could be natural or mechanical, literary or scientific. Poe broke down those distinctions. “Poe’s work took the machine as its subject,” Tresch argues, to “exploit unsettled anxieties about human progress and mechanization.”

What would he make of smartphones and AI?

sch 3/5 

 

Sentences, Challenged Readers

A post draft from almost a month ago (2/11) that I am only now getting around to posting.

 The Long Breath of the World; On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us.by Nyuol Lueth Tong (LARB)

 In a Yale Review interview published early last year, Hari Kunzru recalled Krasznahorkai’s mischievous claim that the full stop “belongs to God,” a remark that can sound like a throwaway bit of literary theology until one recognizes the seriousness tucked inside it: the recognition that experience—especially experience distilled from courage, sorrow, or prolonged witness—does not arrive in neat verbal parcels. The flow of his syntax, Kunzru argues, conveys a “profound humanism,” though not the jagged interiority of canonical stream of consciousness. It is, rather than introspection, a widening orbit around perception—curiosity unbound.

Our misunderstanding of him, such as it is, reflects a broader anxiety that treats reading as an athletic contest of instant comprehension. We prize the quick “take”—we want to “get it”—and turn aggrieved when a text refuses to conform. Krasznahorkai, with the amused obstinacy that marks his best work, doesn’t write against this clock so much as beneath its notice. His art replaces velocity with attention. One follows his sentences as one watches weather: fronts forming at the horizon, pressure accumulating by degrees, fluctuations that announce, in aggregate, the approach of something unavoidable.

 When I was younger, I was told to clip my sentences. What I was trying to do was to capture everything. Reading the above tells me there is a way to do what I tried to do back then. Now, it is my grammar checker telling me not to write a sentence of more than 40 words.

sch 3/1

For Midwest Writers

The Hedgehog Review popped out On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality from its archives. Being right up my alley, I had to read it. I found it enlightening and helpful.

It surprised me by my having hit some of the marks without having read while working on “Chasing Ashes” and “The Dead and the Dying.” Or so I hope.

But even used and battered landscapes have their particularity. Detroit’s blight isn’t Cleveland’s blight, any more than Manchester’s is Birmingham’s. Nor are any two cornfields truly exactly alike, despite Monsanto’s best efforts. The British cultural imagination has been formed by writers such as Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence who are perfectly capable of distinguishing among bleaknesses; there’s no reason the American imagination should not pay the Midwest the same tribute. Especially in a period when some of the more interesting art and music consists of similar procedures repeated on a massive canvas, when cultured people are trained to find meaning in the tiny variations of a Philip Glass symphony or an early John Adams tape piece, you’d think we could learn to truly see Midwestern flatness as something richer than mindless repetition. (Willa Cather again: “No one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry.”)5

I have made a little more progress with Lingering Inland. The pieces on Cather made this same point about specificity. Others make the same point. 

And it gives me some other ideas to think about. Tropes to avoid. I like the idea of confronting the idea of No-Place with our specific weirdness. There is plenty enough of that.

When, looking in your own mind for a sense of your own experiences in a region, you find only clichés and evasions—well, that is a clue worth following. So I began, here and there, collecting tidbits, hoarding anecdotes, savoring every chance piece of evidence that the Midwest was a distinctive region with its own history. In doing so I noticed yet another paradox: If the Midwest is a particular place that instead thinks of itself as an anyplace or no-place, it is likewise both present and not present in the national conversation. The Midwest is, in fact, fairly frequently written about, but almost always in a way that weirdly disclaims the possibility that it has ever been written or thought about before. The trope of featurelessness is matched by a trope of neglect (for what can one do with what is featureless but neglect it?). Katy Rossing, a poet and essayist, has described the formula:

1. Begin with a loquacious description of the Euclidean-flat homogeneity of the landscape. This place looks boring. It looks like there’s nothing here worth thinking about. Example: “The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?” (Stewart O’Nan, Songs for the Missing)

2. In fact, it seems no one has really thought about it before, they all write. What IS the Midwest? The West, South, and East all have clear stories, stories that are told and retold in regionally interested textbooks, novels, movies. The Midwest? It’s a humorously ingenuous, blank foil for another region. Example: Fargo, Annie Hall.

3. But wait a minute, the writers tell you, it turns out this place isn’t empty at all! They spend the remainder of the article crouched in a defensive posture.10

Rossing misses one or two tricks—there must also be a resentful invocation of the term flyover country (“a stereotype,” as one lexicographer points out, “about other people’s stereotypes”).11 And one must end self-refutingly, by pointing out a number of example of Midwestern distinctiveness or high achievement, all of which—the frontier, Abraham Lincoln, populism, the Great Migration, Chicago, the growth and decline of manufacturing—are so thoroughly discussed as to bring the article’s initial premise into question.12 The density of these evocations of let’s-stop-ignoring-the-Midwest only increased after the 2016 election,13 as national newspapers, ignoring the dozens of articles they had already published on the region, pledged themselves to the Rust Belt as though to a strict Lenten discipline.14

But this is what resonated most with me, a point that I knew when it was pointed out to me:

We Midwesterners talk about ourselves, and we are talked about by others, but in terms either universal or local: Abe Lincoln of the log cabin, or Abe Lincoln of world history, but not, despite the movie, Abe Lincoln of Illinois, who was formed in part by that “great interior region” he lauded in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress.16 A Midwesterner may be a human, an American, a Detroiter, at most a Michigander, but a “Midwesterner” only when reminded of the fact. Cayton blames this lack of “regional consciousness” in part on geography: “Regional identity—the creation of an imagined community—requires a strong sense of isolation. And the Midwest is not, strictly speaking, isolated. It is in the middle.” More important, however, is the intensity of local attachment: “But it is less regional rootlessness than local rootedness that makes the construction of a regional identity so difficult in the Midwest.… Localism, this pride in family, town, and state, leaves little room for interest in a coherent regional identity. In general, Midwesterners want to be left alone in worlds of their own making.”17

 And therein is the point I have been missing in “Chasing Ashes.”

There is point about repression that needs serious consideration.

Critiques of emotional repression always risk imposing a single model for the Healthy Expression of the Emotions on a healthy range of variations. But anyone who has lived in the Midwest will recognize the mode Bly describes, and if you’ve lived there long enough, you’ll have seen some of the consequences she describes:

You repress your innate right to evaluate events and people, but…energy comes from making your own evaluations and then acting on them, so…therefore your natural energy must be replaced by indifferent violence.30

Donald Trump won the Midwestern states in part because he bothered to contest them at all, while his opponent did not. But we cannot forget the way he contested them: raucous rallies that promised, and in some views incited, random violence against a laundry list of enemies. Since his victory, the Three Percent Militia has become a recurring, and unwelcome, character in Michigan politics.

About that repressed violence - Indiana did love its lynchings. Indiana was the site of the first successful train robbery, but the Reno Gang had a shorter run than the James Gang. Hoosier hospitality has its limits.

Another Rejection

 This has been hanging in my drafts since 2/23:

Thank you for sending "Coming Home" to Gulf Coast. While we didn't feel it was the right fit for our pages at this time, we appreciated having the chance to consider it.

Best wishes to you and your writing.

Sincerely,

The Editors
Gulf Coast Journal
https://gulfcoastmag.org/ 

sch 3/2