Tag Archives: work

Rediscovering the original wound

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"Old House on the Rocks" by David Jewell.

“What you wanted, you still want.” ~ Robert Bly

1. Wound

I’ve been blessed during the last couple of months with another very fruitful phase of deep and intense creativity, soon to end when I return to the world of “real” work, i.e., work that is “real” in the sense that it’s perceived by others as having financial value. I love doing my creative work and know that it has tremendous value, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into any sort of income, at least not so far.

It is, as always, terribly difficult for me to accept the hard reality that the work I love so much, that moves me so deeply and comes so naturally to me, doesn’t provide me with any material support. I know that there are many other writers, artists, guides, healers, and teachers out there (some of whom, quite frankly, have less to offer than I do) who are successfully supporting themselves doing their work. I don’t know why I’m not one of them, and it eats at me all the time.

The work I do, my real work, is a birthright once lost that I’ve fought long and hard to reclaim for about a quarter century now, nearly half my life. The battle has not been without its rewards, but I’ve also made some unexpected discoveries that have left me with painful questions I can’t answer, as expressed in the poem below.

original wound

many years ago
I heard a man say
	your gift to the world
	is in your wound
I found this idea very appealing
I ran with it
and I've been running with it
ever since.

in the last twenty-five years
I've discovered many gifts
	most long forgotten
	or never known to me at all
in many wounds.

many of the wounds had been
	forgotten as well
or not so much forgotten as buried
	deep in my dreams
beneath my skin
	in muscle and bone
under a series of identities
	I'd been forced to assume
	throughout my life
in order to survive.

so what I was told
	was not wrong
there truly is treasure to be found
	under the scars
but I've also learned something else.

my gifts
much like my wounds
are for the most part
unseen and unwanted by the world.

needed they may be
wanted they are not.

I wasn't prepared for such a discovery
and I also wasn't prepared for the fact
that the land of wounds seems to stretch out
into infinity
in every direction.

every wound I tend and heal
seems to be an entry point into several more
they cover one another like bandages
they're nested inside one another like
	a set of chinese boxes
	each of which contains
	another set of chinese boxes
and every wound I tend and heal
yields yet more gifts
that the world does not want.

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

if I could talk to the man who sent me
down this path twenty-five years ago
I'd love to ask him
	how am I to live
	and what am I to do
	with so many gifts
	the world does not want.

2. Reflection

I sat with this poem for several days after writing it. One of the core themes, that “the world” does not want my gifts, felt a little off to me. I know of many people who value my work and there are probably many others who do so of whom I’m unaware, so it struck me as an overstatement of the facts to say that “the world” does not want my gifts. And yet it still felt true to me at some fundamental level.

In terms of dollars and cents, I could still make the argument that a world that associates no financial value with my work doesn’t want it, and I think that was a lot of what was motivating what I was feeling when I wrote the poem, at least on the surface. But as I sat with what I’d written, I was reminded of something I’d heard someone (I can’t recall who) say years ago: When we speak in absolutes (always, never, etc.) about things that are upsetting us, there’s a good possibility that we’re actually expressing the pain of a wound that goes all the way back to childhood, when we were so very little, our needs were so very big, and everything that affected us deeply felt so very absolute.

I was then reminded of the following comments made by Robert Bly to Bill Moyers during the excellent but now largely forgotten documentary A Gathering of Men, first televised over twenty years ago:

Alice Miller says a wonderful thing. She says, “When you were young you needed something you did not receive. And you will never receive it. And the proper attitude is mourning.” Mourning is the proper attitude, not blame, mourning. And she says another thing that’s so wonderful. She says, “You know, when you came into the world, you brought this fantastic thing with you, coming from centuries, and eons, and you brought this amazing energy in from animal life, reptile life, other planets, everything. And this incredible energy you brought in … your parents didn’t want it. They wanted a nice boy. They wanted a nice girl.”

You couldn’t believe it. That’s your first rejection. It’s pre-verbal. That’s why encounter groups won’t get to that. That’s your first rejection. It’s profound. They didn’t want the energy you brought. They wanted a nice boy or a nice girl.

So when you’re small, you realize you can’t fight against that stuff your parents want … so you make up a kind of a false personality … You invent a false personality, and you survive.

And then Alice Miller says, “Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

I’ve watched A Gathering of Men many, many times over the years. Bly’s comments above, while they’ve always made complete sense to me, have never resonated more strongly with me than they do now, and I believe that’s the core truth I express near the end of my poem:

perhaps that is the original wound
the mother of them all
the point of origin
the first and deepest cut
and the ultimate rejection:

	the world does not want me
	and it does not want
	what I have to offer.

“The world”, especially when we are very young children, is home and family, and we construct our internal model of the world, the one we will carry forward into adulthood, accordingly. A large chunk of that model is developed in response to interactions with our parents. My mother wanted me to be someone else and did her best to make me into what she needed until I was no longer young enough, malleable enough, and helpless enough to be controlled and manipulated. My father didn’t want me at all and did his best to destroy and, ultimately, to eliminate me. I formed my identity living in the shadow of two giants too blinded by their own damage and their own unmet needs to see who I was. I wanted to fix both of them, even if it meant sacrificing and forgetting myself, and I tried for many years. Tried, failed, and lost myself in the process.

That was the world, as I experienced it, not only from the moment I was born, but from the moment I was conceived. That was, and is, my original wound: I was not wanted as I was, what I had to offer had no value, and I had to make myself into what “the world” wanted me to be in order to survive.

Now I’m about to do it again.

3. Process

I’m good for about ten hours of productive work on an average day, assuming I’m feeling well. I need about eight hours of sleep nightly. That leaves six hours for everything else: self-care, social activities, exercising, shopping, preparing and eating meals, etc. And down time.

Down time, doing nothing in all its forms (resting, daydreaming, allowing my thoughts to wander, etc.), is incredibly important for me, and not only because it’s the source of so much of my creative insight. It’s also vital, as I am a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), to my health and well-being. Additional down time is necessary for HSPs because of the high amount of information we perceive and receive, and the depth and thoroughness with which we need to process it. Without at least two to three hours of down time every day, my edges begin to fray and I can lose my center pretty quickly.

Any so-called “9 to 5″ job I get is going to consume my ten productive hours a day (at least) leaving me with nothing for my deep creative work, my real work, the work that gives my life meaning and keeps me alive: the work of my soul. Even worse, it’ll consume my mornings, which are the keystone of my entire process.

For almost eight months now, I’ve been off the chain. A lot of people might assume that not having a job would equate to not working. Not so. I’ve been working about ten hours a day most days, sometimes more. No one has been making me do it. It’s natural. I wake up every morning with ideas. The process begins while I’m sleeping, in my dreams. My most productive hours, as a writer, generally come before noon. What happens in the morning determines the creative course of my day, and it happens every day, of its own accord, provided that I’m available to it.

There’s a wonderful sequence in the movie Pollock (one of my absolute favorite films). It begins with painter Jackson Pollock waking up in the morning. He dresses and stumbles half-asleep into the kitchen, where his wife hands him a cup of coffee as he lights his first cigarette of the day. She helps him put on his heavy coat, hat, and scarf and sends him off with a wordless pat. He steps outside into a cold winter day and trudges the short path through the snow to his studio in the barn. Once inside, he stokes the wood stove, gets a fire going, and starts his work for the day, which will last into the evening.

It’s clear from the presentation of this sequence in the film that this is his daily pattern, and I resonate with it so strongly because it is, in my own way, my daily pattern as well, that is, when financial circumstances allow it. I’ve often wondered how Jackson Pollock would’ve tolerated losing his mornings five days a week in exchange for sitting in a cubicle somewhere. My guess is: not well.

Doing creative work, in the way I do it, requires a certain amount of open time and space. In a lot of ways, I’m a channeler. Most of what I write (and all of what I draw) comes to me without any specific conscious intention. I never “try” to write a poem or an essay about anything. Words and ideas simply start coming. Sometimes, as in the case of most of my poetry, the bulk of the thing comes to me quickly and it’s all I can do to keep up. Essays can take a bit longer to germinate, beginning with a general idea or feeling that then develops in the background of my mind over a period of days, weeks, or even months until suddenly, one day, it’s time to write.

Whatever the case, whether it’s a poem that started as I was waking up or an essay that’s been incubating for a couple of weeks, when it’s time to write, I have to be there for it because, if I’m not, that transient energy that’s attempting to coalesce into something more solid will be lost, and lost forever.

I never know where a poem or an essay is going when it begins, and I never know how long it’s going to take for the process to complete itself. My most recently finished poem (“shelter”) began when the first several lines came to me completely unplanned (as usual) as I was sitting in my truck in the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store. I was supposed to be on my way to be drug tested for my upcoming job, but took the time to follow the thread those first lines offered as far as I could before hitting the road. After a short drive, I sat outside in the parking lot of the drug testing facility and worked on the poem until the place was about to close, at which point I set down my pen and pad and went in.

By then, the poem was nearly complete, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the ending. The last three lines finally came to me (again, unexpectedly) about half a mile into my evening walk. I didn’t have anything with me to write them down, so I had to repeat them to myself for a mile like an ad hoc mantra so I wouldn’t forget them before I made it home. I continued to poke at what I’d written for several hours though the evening until I felt satisfied, more or less. I never know if anything’s really done until I’ve slept on it.

All in all, from the moment the first couple of lines came to me until I felt comfortable enough with what I had to call the poem done, the process took about five hours. Five hours. Nineteen lines. Ninety-five words (including the one-word title, which also had to be dug out of the word stream). That’s what I mean when I say open time and space is required to do this work. If I’m unable to give those five hours to that poem when I did, there is no poem, period.

4. Survival

I start the new job in a couple of days, and I can already feel my creative engines shutting down. The same part of me that generates all the ideas and insights also knows when the required window of open time and space is closing. Shutting the process down, as bad as it feels (and it feels like death itself), is a necessary and largely involuntary form of protection for me. Not being able to roll out of bed, trudge out to my workshop, fire up the stove, and get to my work every morning means that insights and ideas, if they come, will have no opportunity for development, realization, and expression.

Imagine that if every time you started having sex you were forced to stop before you were finished. Imagine having that experience every morning, day after day, week after week. Before long you wouldn’t even want to start having sex, or even want to feel sexual at all, but that underlying, undeniable life energy would still be there in you nonetheless, looking for a way out, and you’d feel it. That’s how I’m going to be feeling when the circumstances of making a living force my most vital energies underground once again.

As a result, I would expect this to be my last blog post for a while. Maybe a long while. It’s hard to say. Sometimes my creative energy is powerful enough to push its way through constraining circumstances somehow, but if I’m not available to do something with it, I’ll only wind up frustrated and there’s a part of me that would rather feel nothing at all than feel that.

Money is an unfortunate necessity, and from that standpoint, I’m grateful to have this new job. Grateful, but not happy. It’s possible to feel one without feeling the other; gratitude and happiness are not the same thing. I’ll go forward, mindful of my original wound and its influence on how I see and experience “the world”, and I’ll try to keep Robert Bly’s comments paraphrasing Alice Miller in mind:

“Now, please, you’ve got to forgive yourself for that, because you did it to survive, and you did the right thing. You did the right thing.” And the proof of it is that you’re alive right now.

What I wanted, I still want. But once again, I’ll do what I have to do to survive, and I’ll forgive myself, as best I can, for doing it.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Caught between the road and the sky

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When we come to the place where the road and the sky collide
Throw me over the edge and let my spirit glide
They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is ride …

~ “The Road and the Sky”, Jackson Browne

I was seventeen when I first heard the song that began with these lyrics, but I wasn’t hearing what I thought I was hearing. I was close, but one word made all the difference for me:

They told me I was going to have to work for a living
But all I want to do is write …

There was much I didn’t know, and had forgotten, about myself at age seventeen, but one thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to write. Another thing I knew for certain, given my broken blue collar family origins, was that I was going to have to work for a living. And I didn’t see how I’d ever be able to reconcile the two. I still can’t.

Now I find myself once again at “the place where the road and the sky collide,” the road being the very real earthbound necessities of working for a living and the sky being the equally real work of actualizing my creative and expressive aspirations as a writer.

These two realities have collided in my life many times before and I’ve made numerous attempts for nearly 25 years now to merge them into a single, unified path, but without success. The time I spend in the sky always comes at the price of far more time on the road. And now the road, the necessity to work for a living, is calling me back once more.

I don’t know how much writing I’ll be doing going forward. The road always takes a big toll on that part of my life. I could write something every day, given the opportunity, but my writing process is typically far more time and labor intensive, and far more dependent on relatively short-lived little windows of inspiration, than the average work week can accommodate.

I often think, sometimes quite seriously, about giving up the writing. The costs of keeping at it, both financial and personal, seem far too great for me to continue to bear at times, especially as the years pile on. Then I hear from someone like Steve Spitzer. Steve is a Professor of Sociology at Suffolk University and founder of the Jericho Circle Project, a non-profit organization that runs men’s support groups in correctional facilities in Massachusetts. Steve sent me a message last week to tell me that he’s been using my poem “little iron man” in his course at Suffolk University as well as in some of the Jericho Circle prison groups.

Or I see a comment here on the blog like this one, posted yesterday:

I can’t thank you enough for the joy I just felt reading your kind words :) I had fallen into a bad place again, and your encouragement and your writings have helped to remind me how to get out of that place. I really love how your writing gets behind my barriers and makes me ‘feel’. Words can’t describe how comforting it is to connect with someone who can relate to these emotions. Much love x

Or I get a phone call like the one I received recently from a young man in Florida who wanted to thank me personally for my first book, Iron Man Family Outing.

And then I think: How can I quit?

Those are just a few examples from recent experience right off the top of my head. There are many others, and probably still others of which I’m not even aware. This tells me that I’ve been right all along: that I really am on to something, that what I’ve been doing has value, and that people need it.

If I could only find some way to make a living doing this work, I’d never even think about quitting. Ever. I love it more than anything. But the road is what pays the bills, and now it’s time for me to come down out of the sky again.

On days like this, I am torn between the desire, the need, to keep moving forward with the work that moves me (and others) and the absolute necessity to provide for myself and for my well-being. This is the place where the road and the sky collide in my life, the place where I have spent so much of my adult life trapped, like some ancient cursed mythological figure, in tormented suspension between the one and the other.

Empty promises

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When I was younger, I used to spend this time of the year making all sorts of commitments and promises to myself about what my life would be like a year later. Every year I’d promise myself that I wouldn’t spend another whole year of my life without love and that I’d finally find a way to support myself with truly meaningful work. I dutifully identified goals and objectives, and wrote them all down. I prayed and visualized. I applied myself in every way I knew how. But the things that mattered most to me, love and work, have never changed.

My last relationship ended over sixteen years ago, and it wasn’t even all that good. The one before it was even worse. Sometimes I feel incredibly sad, irritable, angry, and dissatisfied and I’m not sure why. Then I remind myself that I’ve been without love for nearly two decades. What was for many years an open, gaping wound in me that was always at the forefront of my consciousness is now so buried under years of coping, pattern, habit, and routine that I’m barely aware it’s still with me, but it’s there. It doesn’t howl as loudly and as often as it used to, but it makes itself known to me in other ways if I pay attention.

The holidays have been difficult for me this year in ways they hadn’t been in several years. I’ve felt that familiar wolf bite of loneliness, that old cold emptiness in my chest, more acutely in the last couple of weeks than I have in some time, and familiar questions about how I could ever possibly do anything about it have been trying to seep into my thoughts. I learned a long time ago how to push them away, to keep myself pointed forward and living with what I’ve got, but like that gaping wound of lovelessness, they slip into the background of my psyche, but never really go away.

As for work … work never really changes. The work that matters to me is what I share here, on my website, and in my books. The work I do for money matters only for money. I do it because I have to. Up until recently, I still had illusions of somehow translating what I do because I love it into what I do for money. That seems increasingly unlikely to me now. I’ve been working non-stop for the last 5+ years to make that change and I’m no closer to it today than I was when I started.

My first book, Iron Man Family Outing, will be going out of print soon, probably within the year, and without some help from who knows where, there’s no reprint coming. It’s also looking less and less likely to me that my second book, Scapegoat’s Cross, will ever see the light of day. I completed the manuscript in September 2009 (right before I broke my right wrist and shoulder in a fall) and I’ve made absolutely zero progress since then in developing either the art needed to finish the book or any sort of satisfactory scenario with regard to publication.

Sometime within the next few months, I’ll undoubtedly (and hopefully, if I want to keep eating) return to my standard anonymous schmuck in a cubicle routine, and the luxury of autonomy and devoting my days to what truly moves me will once again be a memory, maybe for several years. Maybe for good, given my age and finances.

I used to feel like I could change anything in my life if I really wanted to do it and really applied myself. That used to work, too. It’s a good thing it did because that’s how I survived a pretty bad childhood and made a life for myself as an adult without the kind of help a lot of kids receive when starting out. The conviction that “I deserve better and I can get it” has been the fuel that’s kept me going time after time when I’ve found myself abandoned, betrayed, disappointed, and pressed to the edge of oblivion by people and circumstances.

That conviction is still there in me, but it’s been muted by years of learning, very reluctantly, that commitment, desire, will power, and the willingness to go all in don’t necessarily get me what I want and deserve. Maybe this is yet another unwanted lesson that comes with being an involuntary passenger on that sinking ship known as aging. It would probably be a good topic of conversation with a trusted older mentor who’s some years down the road from me in time, but I’ve never had anyone like that in my life either.

So here I am at the beginning of another new year, wanting to make the same old promises to myself: “I won’t spend another year alone. I won’t spend another year wasting my life doing meaningless work.” It all has the vague feel of some fairy tale I can’t quite recall, something about someone who’s been entranced and is doomed to repeat the same promises and patterns year after year after year. Every year he returns to the mirror, sees himself another year older, and repeats the same promises. Promises he once meant and believed with all his being that are now nothing but dim remnants of fading hope. Promises, once held high like torches on a dark path, that now slip through graying heart and hands like the last fraying strands of a life, however deeply felt, that never was.

I wish I could remember how that fairy tale ends, if it even exists at all. I don’t want another year of empty promises. They may be all I have, but promises I can’t keep are promises not worth making to anyone, least of all to myself.

Angry like Dad

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When I was a child, one of the inviolable rules of the household, as articulated over and over again to my younger brother and me by my mother, was this:

“Do not, under any circumstances, talk to your father when he comes home from work.”

This was, of course, the precise opposite of what I wanted. I adored my father when I was a boy. I was just about shaking with excitement to see him every afternoon when he came home from his job in the factory. I had so much to tell him about my day, whether I’d spent it inside at school or outside playing during the summer. More than anything, I missed him terribly every day and wanted to be near him, to be close to him, to hear his voice, and to know that he was interested in me.

We did our best, my brother and me, to obey Mom’s rule to the letter. I recall many a late afternoon sitting quietly on the couch, waiting as patiently as I could for the signal from my mom that it was finally okay to pass from the living room into the kitchen, where my father would be sitting at the dinette table, as he did every day upon his re-entry into the family home, still dressed in his greasy work clothes and finishing a cup of coffee.

As I sat on the couch and waited, I would listen carefully to my parents talking for any clues I might gather about my dad’s day at work and his mood. Sometimes I would sneak over to the doorway between living room and kitchen, that invisible boundary I was not to cross, to try to hear the conversation a little better. If I was feeling unusually eager, I might try to crook my head around the door jamb to sneak a peek at the two of them. If feeling exceptionally brave, I might even attempt to catch my mother’s eye to remind her that I was still waiting, which, if I succeeded, invariably resulted in a very stern “Back on the couch right now!” look from Mom.

It was hard to wait, and as I said we did our best, but being kids, we were sometimes overtaken by our natural excitement and spontaneity, approaching Dad immediately as he walked in the door after work (or shortly thereafter) in spite of the prohibition against doing so. The result was inevitably a quick and dramatic reminder of why the rule was in place, generally some variation of my dad reacting angrily at our presence, glaring at my mom, and growling something like “Get those goddam kids away from me!”

It was no surprise to see my father angry. It seemed to me, as a boy, that he was angry almost all the time, but he was especially angry at the end of the workday. This was something I could not understand. I knew that he had a hard, dirty job, but I’d only seen the building where he worked from the outside, so I could only imagine what a day there might be like for him. Nothing I could come up with, given my very limited experience as a child, was sufficiently horrible to make him not want to see me right away when he got home every day, so I began to wonder if it was something I’d done, or something about me, that would make him crazy if I approached him too soon.

Even after the necessary time to sit at the table talking with my mom and settle himself, my father was hardly what I’d call enthusiastic to see his boys. It seemed more like seeing us at the end of the day was something he tolerated, a duty he was required to perform. He was still, on most days, irritable, like he had to make a big effort to deal with us in a civil manner.

This was always a huge letdown, a big disappointment for me. I’d waited, I’d followed the rule, and I’d been patient, hard as it was to do so, and there was no real payoff. It was like talking to a surly statue, or maybe an asocial robot. I wanted so badly to interact with him, to engage with him, but there was no engagement to be had, just distracted silence on his part as I poured my heart out to him, punctuated by an occasional monotone “Okay” or “That’s good” or a non-verbal grunt.

The visit typically ended with me dejected, hopes crushed, feeling like I’d failed with him yet again, and the rest of the evening felt blue. Then I’d start the whole cycle again the next day, and the next, and the next, in the optimistic expectation that one day things would be different, or that maybe I could figure out how to be better somehow so my dad would want to see me and would be interested in me at the end of his day.

As time passed and I got older, I became more independent and developed friends and other interests outside the home that ended my “waiting for Dad to come home from work” ritual. But even as a teen, I knew better than to go anywhere near him as he was pulling into the driveway at the end of his shift because that was just asking for trouble.

As a boy, I idealized my father. His anger when he arrived home every day mystified me. I knew, or had some sense, that his job was difficult, and that he was tired, but I couldn’t understand why that would make him so hateful toward his own boys. In the absence of any reason or explanation that made sense to me, I came to the conclusion that he was reacting to some failure or deficiency on my part, and devoted myself to doing better.

By the time I’d reached my late teens, years of relentlessly abusive behavior toward me on my father’s part had stripped away my boyhood idealization, and I was left with the view that he was just a mean-spirited old bastard I could never satisfy, no matter what I did. That wasn’t far from the truth, either. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

Many years down the road and having done an enormous amount of personal work to come to terms with my history with this man, I’m able to see him more fully as what he was and is: another human being with his own pain and disappointments, trials and tribulations. This doesn’t excuse or absolve him of any of his bad behavior, but what it does do is help me understand him a little better, bit by bit, which is something I’ve been driven to do for as long as I can remember, ever since I was a child. Understanding him, in turn, lets me off the hook, bit by bit, because it allows me to correct the belief I’d taken on as a child that I was somehow responsible for his moods and behavior, a view youngsters develop all too often when their parents act out their unhappiness as openly and dramatically as my father did.

This process of coming into a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of my father and his behavior during my childhood (and after) has not been a strictly intellectual, analytical experience. Far from it. There’s been a lot of gut-wrenching emotional work to do, a lot of anger and a lot of grief to be felt, acknowledged, and expressed. I’ve also had to look at myself, at my own behavior, failures, and flaws, as unflinchingly as I’ve looked at his, and there have been many times when I didn’t like what I saw.

I, too, have been an angry man, although I haven’t expressed that anger in my life the way my father did. Where he tended to direct his anger outward toward others (mostly in the home: wife, children, pets), I’ve tended to direct my anger toward myself, with relentless expectations of achievement and perfectionism and, as a younger man, a brazen recklessness with alcohol and other risk-taking behaviors that could’ve easily put me on a slab.

I’m long past the worst of that now, although I still tend to drive myself too hard and expect too much, to the point of paralyzing myself with doubt at times. I remember my mom rationalizing my dad’s brutal behavior toward me many times by telling me, “You know, he’s actually much harder on himself than he is on anyone else.” I received, accepted, and internalized this information as a fundamental lesson in how to be a man. It became one of my unconscious operating principles of manhood: a man is much harder on himself than he is on anyone else.

In practice, this creates all sorts of rather obvious problems, not the least of which is an ongoing state of self-imposed martyrdom/victimhood and its equally pernicious twin, resentment. Life is experienced as a series of traps within traps: I can never be hard enough on myself and no one else can ever appreciate it enough. If someone does me wrong, it must really be my fault somehow, even when I really know it’s not. And so on.

I operated this way for years and, not surprisingly, it wreaked all sorts of havoc on my life. I’m far more conscious of the pattern now, and far more aware of the way it was conditioned into me, so I’m far less likely to fall into that way of thinking, seeing, and relating to myself and others than before. It takes time, sometimes the better part of a life, to unwind these snakes that coil around our psyches when we are so very young and so very open to everything.

There are still areas of my life in which anger is a persistent companion. Probably the most obvious and problematic of these is that, much like my father was, I am frequently angry as hell at the end of the workday. I’ve written many times over the years about my unhappiness with the work I do for a living, as well as my ongoing struggle to move myself into a work life that’s meaningful and satisfying to me. It’s my failure to make such a move that prompted me to ask myself this question a few months back: “What can I learn from doing work that feels like such a waste of my life and my energy that I’m furious at the end of every day?” And that’s when it hit me: maybe I’ve needed to relive a part of my dad’s life so I can understand him a bit more.

Like me, my father had an enormous amount of creative, expressive energy, but for him, the mode of expression was manual (building and fixing things) rather than verbal as in my case. He loved being outside, doing projects, making things, taking things apart and putting them back together. He always had a long list of projects in mind and never enough time to do them. Every holiday and vacation was his opportunity to do the work he really wanted and needed to do, the work his interests and energy naturally drove him to do. He was, in his way, an artist, and brilliant one at that: an artist with a hammer, a wrench, a shovel, and a welding torch.

I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him to wake up every morning and put his ideas and his natural motivations aside to go into a dark, noisy, dirty, dangerous factory for eight hours, then come home exhausted with only a few hours left, at best, to do what he really wanted and needed to do. I don’t know if he hated me or not, or whether or how much he blamed me for his situation (I think he often did, given that I was the first-born child), but I do think he hated his life, and more than that, hated himself for sacrificing it every day to do someone else’s work under someone else’s thumb for a paycheck.

There’s no way for me to know if I’m actually right about any of this. I may be projecting. Maybe I’m still trying to explain his behavior on my own terms. But it does give me pause, as it did the first time I made the connection, to observe that I am, after all the years and everything I’ve seen, experienced, and learned, still living out my father’s legacy of anger at the end of the workday.

Maybe by making this connection, by making what had been unconscious conscious, I’m taking a step toward changing things for myself. Maybe, as I said, I needed to experience all this frustration for all these years in order to understand my father a little better. Maybe, in my desire as a kid to emulate him, I unconsciously took on his experience as my own, perhaps as a way to feel closer to him, perhaps as a way to share his burden, or perhaps as a task to finish for him. Maybe all of this. Maybe more.

Robert Bly has said, “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.” Carl Jung once wrote, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” My father, the flesh and blood man, has been out of my life for many years, but he is still with me, in his temperament and in his unlived life, at the end of every workday.

Writing this now, I’m realizing for the first time how much this pattern and experience of feeling angry like Dad at the end of the workday has been a way for me to continue to feel close to him. I’m surprisingly sad at the prospect of letting go of one of the few experiences I feel I’ve ever shared with him. I feel as if I’m betraying him somehow if I leave him, that young father who now exists only in my own childhood and psyche, to his own frustration and misery. So strange how these silent deals, these unspoken bargains we make as kids with our parents in an effort to be close with them (often without their knowledge), continue to hold so much psychic and emotional power over our lives.

There’s deep grief here for me, grief for the frustrated young father in his greasy blue overalls, a man I loved so much and for whom I wanted so much. Grief for the child who tried so hard and waited so long for the father who never really came home from work. Grief for a grown man so desperate to maintain any semblance of a connection with his father that he’s been willing to carry the man’s misery, anger, and frustration as his own for years and years.

It’s hard to know to what extent (if any) having this knowledge, and processing the grief that comes with it, will impact my own working life. This is but one of many factors with a bearing on that situation. It’s only one root of the tree, but one of the oldest and the deepest, and I will follow it to see where it leads.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

a good worker

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another man in a box
another empty boat
	oars up
	all alone
in the middle of a bone-dry lakebed.

walking endless circles in
	false personality wonderland
so used to saying I'm okay
	when I'm not
	that I don't even know
who's saying it
anymore.

rotten fruit hanging from a
	dying tree
heart-smashed free-for-all
headaches at 4 AM
fallen off the path again
	into another pile of
	funhouse mirrors.

a good worker
a team player
a shit shoveler
money in the bank.

a draft animal
	yoked and lashed
	blind and bloated
poor dumb beast pulling a wagon
	from here to there
	all its life
barely conscious
	trudging along
	one foot in front of the other.

dreaming of freedom
	knee deep
	in a field of mud
watching my clock
	wind down.

(PDF version)

Twilight in present time

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My struggle with a prolonged and nasty writer’s block continues. At times like this, my mind swirls with doubts about who I am and what I’m doing. The hard realities imposed by living in a system that places very little value on what I do, on what I must do because it is who I am, are never far from my awareness and my experience. When my expressive energy is so horribly constrained, those realities feel even more amplified and oppressive in my consciousness. It’s one thing to make sacrifices for an active process; it’s quite another to make them for a process that is, based on all outward appearances, inert, at least temporarily.

This period of creative barrenness and loss of voice comes at a time when I’m feeling as if I’ve exhausted every idea I’ve ever had about how to live my life. It’s not as if I’ve never been in this place before. The difference now is time. Time, once a wild card in my life with its seemingly unlimited series of branches of infinite possibility, is now the trump in the deck, the card that will, soon enough, end the game. Time may heal, but it also kills, and I’m long past the point in my life where time is on my side.

There is a certain inevitable hopelessness that comes with the work I do as a writer, in the sense that there’s virtually no possibility I can ever support myself financially doing it, no matter how good I might be, how creative I am, or how hard I try. I still don’t want to believe this, but it’s getting harder and harder to deny it, and there are many times now, too many, when I fear I’ve doomed myself to a lonely, impoverished old age because I would not give up what I could not have.

I told someone recently, “I wouldn’t wish being a poet on my worst enemy,” and I wasn’t kidding. Not in this culture anyway. I’d have a better shot at making a living as a blacksmith or a barrel maker. The big money machine does not need truth, it doesn’t need feelings, and it most certainly does not need poetry or poets. My friend David Jewell likes to say, “Crime doesn’t pay and neither does poetry,” but criminals, by and large, make a far better living than poets, especially in the increasingly opportunistic, militaristic, authoritarian, predatory “might makes right” / “winner take all” system of lying, fear-making vulture capitalism that dominates our world today.

I’ve spent most of the last thirty years in unfulfilling jobs that pay the bills but use me up and I don’t know what to do about it. My first book is going out of print in about six months and I don’t know what to do about it. My second book remains unpublished after three years and I don’t know what to do about it. I’m going to be 55 in a little over a month, with no pension and no prospects for ever retiring, and I don’t know what to do about it. Lately I feel like I don’t know what to do about anything.

Robert Christgau once said, “Work too long toward a future that never arrives and you lose your hold on what comes naturally.” I wonder how much of this writer’s block I’m experiencing is due to my sinking, ever-deepening realization that my life is, in all likelihood, never going to be more than what it already is: that there is no key and no door, no path to transformation, and no breakthrough to be had, just more lousy soul-sucking jobs to pay the bills (if I’m lucky), and maybe (if I’m lucky) more writing and more poetry.

I’ve tried for years (oh, how I’ve tried) to convince myself that getting paid to sit in a cage all day doing high-end monkey work to keep the technoconsumer culture humming along on its hyper-accelerating path to oblivion ought to be good enough for me. But for whatever reason, for better or worse, doing meaningful work that moves me is not just important to me, but essential to my well-being. Some of this urgent necessity for purposeful work is an inherent aspect of who I am at my core. Some of it is, I’m sure, fueled by a deep need to prove my worth that’s rooted in growing up with a father whose approval I desperately wanted and needed, but never received. Some of it is cultural: men establish, assert, and maintain their identities and their value in my culture by way of their work.

And some, I suspect, is my lineage. My father, my grandfathers, all of my uncles, and all of their forefathers were working class men: farmers, factory workers, mechanics, welders, truck drivers, power linemen, canal workers. Builders, growers, makers, diggers, movers, and fixers. Hard work in the service of producing something tangible and useful was an intrinsic element of their nature, at one and inseparable from their character. It is part of my masculine heritage, one of the long strands of my family DNA.

I did my best to follow the masculine path of work in my family. I spent several years in blue collar jobs (restaurant, sawmill, construction, warehouse, factory) before graduating to a desk in a plastic box. Many of the jobs I took early on were physically demanding and quite dangerous, in part because I had so few choices and in part because I was determined to prove my manhood to myself, to my father, and to any number of other people who saw me as timid, weak, and lazy. Looking back, I can now see that this was an essential step in my rite of passage into manhood, a critically important experience I gave myself because I knew (consciously or not) that I had to have it.

The down side was that, in order to pursue that path, I turned away from other opportunities that would never come my way again. I was very damaged and very confused as a young man. There was virtually no one older in my life to whom I could turn for guidance and assistance, and I trusted no one but my peers, who were struggling in the dark just as I was. I made several critical life decisions early on, before I really knew who I was, that made my life harder then and continue to do so now. Lacking an accurate appreciation of both my capabilities and my options, and not knowing any better, I consistently aimed low. And I hit what I aimed for.

Lately I feel like I’ve spent most of my life blindfolded, and that I’ve finally begun to remove the blindfold just as the sun is setting, much as it’s sinking into the horizon outside my window right now. Better late than never, sure, but how late is too late? To what extent does a greater awareness of one’s capabilities compensate for a fading physicality, a merciless chronometer, and an ever-shortening runway? And how many cards are really left for me to play this late in the game?

Twilight is sometimes still and lovely, sometimes spooky and surreal, but today it feels like a big kick in the chest.

Lost my words

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At my last job, there was a fridge in the break room covered with those little word magnets known as poetry magnets. During my first couple of months, I’d wander in there most every day, usually late in the afternoon, and construct some little ad hoc one-line poems on the front of the fridge like:

Shadow language is black lake.

Seeing your forest may take years.

Look up: power of sky like symphony.

Recall each day as a life.

Leave in peace, as if about to whisper.

It was fun and it gave me a way to connect with my deeper, truer self and my identity as a writer and a creative person, an identity that was being crushed out of me rapidly by the severe demands of the job. That fridge with the little word magnets was a lifeline for me, a lifeline to myself and to who I really was in an environment that required me to disown myself to survive.

One night, after I’d been on the job seven or eight weeks, I had the following dream:

I walk into the break room at work and see that all of the words I’ve arranged on the fridge, all of my words, are gone. I’m horrified. I’ve lost my words.

Every so often, I have a terse, tight, concise little dream that tells me precisely what I need to know in a completely unambiguous way. This was one of those dreams. I knew exactly what it meant and what it said about what the job was doing to me, and it scared the hell out of me. Twenty years ago, I would’ve walked away immediately from any job that was sufficiently toxic to who I am to provoke a dream like that one. But this wasn’t twenty years ago, and I stayed.

Now the job has ended, as they all do eventually, and I’m still waiting for my lost words to come back to me. The last new poem I wrote (“time is burning me down”) came to me a little over five weeks ago, on the Monday immediately after the job ended. I haven’t written a line, a phrase, not a word of poetry since then. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

I’ve always been at the mercy of forces beyond myself (my conscious self) when it comes to writing poetry. It’s essentially an autonomous process, one that I don’t initiate or control, at least not consciously. Once it begins, I have some choices, but that’s more a matter of facilitation than of willing or deciding something into existence. Conversely, if I try to write a poem, the result is inevitably a disastrous, frustrating waste of time.

Every poem that comes through me feels, at some level, like a matter of life and death, and at some level, it is. It’s a matter of life and death for a very fleeting state of mind, body, heart, soul, word, image, and energy that is trying to coalesce itself into something more permanent. It’s a moment trying to give birth to itself in form, and if it fails to do so, it’s gone forever.

Every poem I write also feels like it might be my last. I never know if there will be another, so when something comes, I give it everything I’ve got. When nothing comes for a while, I begin to wonder if maybe the last poem I wrote really was the last one. Maybe there’s nothing left for me to say. Maybe I’ve said enough. Or maybe I’ve simply run out of ways to say it.

The whole process is a mystery. The only time I ever feel like I understand it at all is when something is coming through me. It’s kind of merciless in that way, to live in the service of something so fickle, so mercurial, and so demanding. Most of the poems I’ve written have come fairly quickly, but that doesn’t account for the amount of time and space I have to make for them to come, and all the time (like now) when nothing comes. It doesn’t account for all of the time alone, waiting waiting waiting, in the dark, in silence, with no assurance of anything, for a feeling, an impression, a surge of life energy to form itself into a previously unheard, unspoken stream of words.

When that stream stops, I am lost. This is the double bind of it all. As demanding and unpredictable as the process is, as much as it takes from me, I need it. I need it even when what comes out of me sounds dark and hopeless. Being able to express my hopelessness gives me hope. Being able to express my darkness generates light.

And now … nothing comes. I’ve lost my words and I don’t know what to do about it. Classic cosmic joke, right? I finally have some time and space, a little oasis between the horrible jobs that drain me and interrupt my creative flow, and nothing comes. I have ideas but they go nowhere. I have feelings but have no words for them. I’ve been burning for months now to write about some very specific things, just waiting for the time and space to do it, but I wind up writing this instead, because this is what comes when nothing comes.

Even writing this post has been insanely difficult. The first version, posted three days ago and removed several hours later, was a half-baked, ill-focused, rambling wreck. It’s not just poetry I’m having trouble writing. It’s everything.

In an audio interview recorded in 2000, the late musician Warren Zevon said, “I can’t write more songs than I get ideas for, so it doesn’t do any good to have better work habits.” It’s true. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t force writing out of myself any more than a farmer can make rain come down on his fields by staring at the sky.

In the same interview, Zevon also said, “But you just keep doing it if you’re a writer. Even if you try not to, you’ll keep doing it.” Also true. I couldn’t stop writing if I wanted to. I just have to wait this out. I’ve gone as long as sixteen years before without writing a poem. Twice. I doubt it’ll be that long this time, but it’s not my call.

Maybe some time spent staring at the sky while waiting for my lost words to return wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.

Coming back to myself

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A little over four weeks ago, I finally completed a contract job that just about did me in. I wrote about it a few months ago (“Being what I’m not”) and there’s no need to rehash the entire saga now. Suffice it to say that things got a lot worse before it was over. This wasn’t the first meat grinder mindfuck I’ve ever been run through on the job, but it was one of the worst.

I was probably more relieved than excited to punch out of that situation back in early September, but I also knew that I was emerging from it pretty damaged. For several months, I’d been telling friends that I knew I was just about gone, but I don’t think anyone really understood what I was saying. I didn’t really know myself until it was over.

My re-entry into my own native time and space has been a rough ride. In the absence of the furious daily insanity to which I’d become accustomed at work, I found myself experiencing what I can only describe as a form of withdrawal. I felt like I was trying to come down off of some form of psychic smack. Being alone and quiet, which is nourishment for me, felt disorienting and sometimes even terrifying. Not being “productive” at the speed of light all the time made me feel extremely anxious. Not being engaged in frantic activity non-stop made me feel like I was going to jump out of my skin.

This anxiety, this junkie energy, was almost more than I could handle. For the first couple of weeks, I was all over Twitter, trying to push up my follower count and get more eyes on my work as a writer. Some of that activity was productive, but most of it was fueled by a powerful feeling of desperation that nothing could satisfy. I was wired and unhappy all the time. Nothing was enough. I felt like a black hole on legs, and I finally began to realize just how far away from myself I’d gone (or been pushed) to survive that job.

I’ve settled down a lot in the last few weeks. At a friend’s recommendation, I left the Austin metropolis for a couple of days and stayed in a small town about an hour away. No computer, no social media, no Internet. I won’t say it was easy. I felt anxious most of the time being alone in an unfamiliar environment where very little was going on, and I had some whopper terror attacks that really shook me up, especially the ones that came in the dead dark of the early morning hours.

Uncomfortable as I was much of the time, being out of my usual environment was still good for me. The best part of the whole trip was spending about 45 minutes on the afternoon of the second day sitting on a porch quietly scraping dried mud out the soles of my shoes with a key. That, I realized, was the level of activity that I needed to restore myself to sanity again.

I’ve been doing and feeling better since having that experience and the realization that came with it. I’ve made a lot of changes since my return home from that trip to support my return to myself. Letting myself sleep and dream as much as needed. Allowing myself to feel bored. Sitting with hunger. Resting when tired. Allowing my body and feelings to “interrupt” what I’m doing. Feeling and sensing the energy of the moment, within and without.

None of these changes have come to fruition for me immediately. It’s not like flipping a switch. This is not an act of will, but a commitment to an intention and a posture of openness to myself in the raw vulnerability of each moment. It is also a function of time. I’d turned off much of my sensory perception, and I’ve had to bring it back into my awareness gently. Doing so all at once, even if I could, would simply be too overwhelming.

I’m still scared a lot. My future is uncertain (absence of income is always a concern), but this is the work I have to do right now. I’d become little more than a collection of autonomous patterns, an angry sleepwalker, a hyperactive mesmerized maze rat. Coming out of that state of mind, thought, and body is hard to do and it’s not pretty. Most of it has to be done alone and I doubt there are many people around me who’d understand what I’m doing even if I tried to explain. It can be gut-wrenchingly lonely, frightening, and difficult at times, but I’m doing it, minute by minute and day by day.

The other day, I almost … almost … spontaneously cried a little. I can’t even remember the last time I cried. For me, going months and months without being moved to tears by anything is a sure sign that I’m in trouble, so even the hint of a tear in my eyes is an indication that I’m coming back to myself again.

I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there.

The poetry slaves

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"Dear Poet" by David Jewell.

One day at work, I daydreamed an alternate reality in which techno skills were considered valueless and everyone had to write poetry to make a living.

The techno people in my alternate reality were not pleased. Every day felt like a final exam in a class they never wanted to take.

Every morning they woke up remembering exactly who they were, what they loved, and what they wanted to do with their lives.

Then they had to forget all about it for another day so they could live and have a home and something to eat for a while longer.

Every evening they dragged themselves home exhausted and discouraged, knowing that another precious day of their lives had been wasted.

They found it frustrating and unacceptable that they could not support themselves doing what they did best and loved most.

They couldn’t believe that they lived in a world in which their most unique and valuable gifts were considered worthless.

Forcing themselves to do something they didn’t like day after day used them up. It took everything they had to get through every day.

They had almost no time or energy left over for what they loved. Their best ideas rotted on the vine as the years went by and their lives slipped away.

They were angry and frustrated all the time. They kept trying to find another way to live, but nothing changed except that they just got older and older.

I know that life. Getting better and better every day at being what you’re not. Hollowing yourself out with “positive attitude” until you feel like a human jack-o’-lantern. Hope and humanity shedding away day by day like sheets of ice sliding down the side of a melting glacier.

I’ve been living that way for thirty years now and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

In my alternate reality, I’d be the one who was happy to start another day, but in this, the all too real world, I’m just one more monkey doing tricks in a cage.

Photo credit: David Jewell. Used by permission.

Being what I’m not

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I don’t feel very strong these days and I’m having a hard time convincing myself that I actually know who I am and what I’m doing. A few months ago, I wrote:

Every day I’m getting better and better at being what I’m not.

And so I am. The current corporate gig, like every one before it, forces me to abandon the best parts of who I am on a daily basis, to substitute someone else’s agenda for my own. Over time, I become what I must become in order to function in an environment that is hostile to my soul and my psyche. I repress what I know, what I feel, and who I am. Anyone who does that over a long enough period of time becomes someone else. It’s inevitable. People often tell me “you are not your job” but we are what we spend most of our time doing. It forms us like a mold and fires us like a kiln.

I’ve barely written anything for months now. I still get ideas, but I don’t have blocks of open time and space that are sufficient to develop anything to completion. Two weeks ago, three new poems suddenly popped out, my first since this one written in January at the end of my first week on the current job. The new poems came on the heels of an epic meltdown during which I shouted obscenities into the sky until my voice was almost gone. I was hoarse for close to a week afterward. I nearly lost one voice but regained another, at least for a few days.

That’s what it took for the best and most essential part of me to focus and express itself in my current circumstances. It didn’t last long. Now that part of me has gone underground again, or I suppose it’s more accurate to say that I’ve forced it back down so I can “make a living” (as the expression goes) as one more anonymous drone in the omnipresent corporate culture that increasingly and systemically defines and dominates the life of the typical American worker.

There is no ebb and flow in corporate culture; there is only surge and consume. Corporate culture is inherently ruthless and mechanical. The only integrity that is recognized and valued is the integrity of the machine. Patience, compassion, generosity, and truthfulness are anathema to the corporate model, not virtues to be cultivated but liabilities to be eliminated. Those who ascend the corporate hierarchy must be willing to exploit and sacrifice anyone and everyone on the altar of ambition and self-interest. The entire corporate model is deeply flawed at its core. It’s a rotten system that requires the people who run it to act rotten.

Most employees in corporate culture (the ones who aren’t part of the elite circle at or near the top of the pyramid) are required to surrender their personal autonomy, individual authority, and inner knowing on a daily basis to keep their jobs. It’s no wonder that so many Americans spend their days feeling dazed, dumb, hungry, confused, passive, powerless, depressed, and desperate for escapism. People who’ve been forced to forego and forget their own power are going to feel that way.

I hate myself after work nearly every day. I hate myself for wasting yet another day of my precious life sitting in a cubicle grinding through one meaningless task after another. I hate myself for being too stupid, after more than twenty years of trying, to find another way. And then I spend the evening trying to recover so I can do it again the next day.

People are often mystified that I’m mostly unable to write under these conditions and they’re quick to offer advice. Get up an hour earlier. Write in the evening. Write on the weekends. Maybe some of those tactics work for others. They don’t work for me. My writing doesn’t come to me on command. It comes when it comes, and if I’m not available to it when it comes, it’s gone. I’ve written about this before (here, here, and here).

This idea that I can’t coerce what is an inherently organic, self-directed process with its own life and its own energy into a mechanical schedule by sheer force of will seems to be hard for a lot of folks to understand. Lately I’ve been likening my writing process to a wild animal or plant species that requires a minimum amount of territory to survive. It can only adapt to and tolerate a reduction in that territory up to a certain point, after which survival becomes impossible, not because it isn’t trying hard enough or isn’t sufficiently creative or committed or resilient, but because its very nature is incompatible with the constraints and impingements on its environment.

There’s still stuff I’m burning to write, but I know myself and I know my process. If I don’t have the time and the space to follow the direction I get from within to its natural conclusion, I needn’t bother. Some things take hours and some things take days. Whatever the time required, I have to give myself to what’s moving through me and immerse myself in it until it’s done with me. Anything less than that is pointless, and the results will be without integrity, quality, or value.

I’m only writing now because I woke up at 3:00 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I certainly wouldn’t say this is my best work. I’m not even sure it’s worth reading. But I guess I needed to write it, and maybe now I can get an hour or two of sweet, blissful sleep before the next forgettable day begins.