Writer's Block in a Glass Bubble

Here are the first two entries in the "Kaleidoscope" train of thought:

Glass Bubble

For a while, earlier this year, Kirk, Simon, Nelly and Josiah and I were playing an online game called Legends of Elveron. As happens when geeks gather in one place, we got to storytelling about old D&D campaigns. In telling the story of my favorite gaming character, Max Forger, I started talking about living in Seattle at the turn of the millennium. This is what I wrote:

I've promised myself that if I ever manage to teach myself to write again and graduate, I'm going to write an Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush. I owe him and his men so much of what I learned about the limits of democracy, rationality and, indeed, how under the right circumstances how an adroit politician may shape, no—virtually sculpt public opinion like so much clay. There was so much to talk about then. We were not yet desensitized to horror, as we are now. Truly these were the last days of my youth.

We drank a good deal together and had a lot of fun. One of the greatest blessings in my life was that Simon lived very close to me. He and his girlfriend Nelly, with whom I also became very good friends, hardly passed a day when we didn't bump into one another, if we hadn't planned on meeting. While I've never smoked tobacco, Nelly and Simon did, and we all drank coffee in the upstairs room at Cafe Allegro. We'd drink coffee and play cards and philosophize. We played this delightful Russian card game Nelly taught us called Durak, which Simon dubbed "Russian Ratfuck." It's the perfect salon game. As it was the game of nobility, Nelly and I decided that everyone should have a title. As Nelly was my courtly lover, we ripped off Les Liasons Dangereuses and she became the Marquise and I became the Vicomte. Simon became the Duke. I forget what title we gave Peter Hovde. Ru became the Pirate King (despite the fact that in my mind, Simon has always been the Pirate King). We talked and talked and talked. We lived in a glass bubble in the storm that engulfed the nation. Outside, the storm raged on and we were hardly senseless to it, after all, the bubble was made of glass. But I never realized until now how safe the bubble was and how beautiful. I was too stupid to realize it at the time, but it was one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Nelly and Simon were here over the past view days. We had such a good time just talking. I miss them both so dearly. Seattle lost much of its charm for me when they left. But whether or not they were here to lend it charm, Seattle has been a safe, glass bubble for me. There is virtually no place else in America in which it is easier to be an out queer than Seattle. This town has been good to me.

We’ve had a heat wave in Seattle (90+ degrees for several days—we aren’t designed to weather this sort of thing here). Nelly needed to buy a summer dress, as she had no idea that she’d need one here. So Simon and I left her to shop at Alderwood mall and we browsed through different geek-oriented stores. We came to a knife shop and Simon wanted to go in, so we did. I saw a particularly lethal looking knife blade there. This is the closest image I could find, but it’s a good deal scarier that this one:

Looking at this knife in the store’s cut-up, a thought that has been growing in my mind began to crystallize. I’m not going to live in a glass bubble forever. Looking at the knife, so clearly designed to disembowel upon exit, I could see human hatred. It takes a certain mind to objectify a person enough to create a knife like that. That person is out there. Odds are that person hates queers. Well, I’m a loudmouth queer. And I’m not going shut up either. I need to learn to defend myself and my partner. I can’t live in a glass bubble for the rest of my life. I’m going to graduate and probably have to leave Seattle. I need to start getting real. I believe in democratic political order, but there are plenty of people involved in creating democratic political order who don’t believe in me or mine.

I think I want to take a karate class when Craig and I get back from Tel Aviv.

Writer’s Block

In a recent e-mail, one of you guys asked:

It's curious in your blog you talk about how you have difficulty writing but then you write these very long thoughtful emails to me.

I could say that it’s a very different type of writing. That is technically true. It is totally different to spew at someone in a conversation (hockey again) then to write an intellectual argumentative essay (football). The differences between the structural demands of both types of writing couldn’t be more stark. The difficulty with that claim is that it is emotionally dishonest. I think I have, after many years now, figured out how to break the job into parts and conquer it. There remain technical challenges, of course, but I know that this is something I can handle. Something else is wrong.

The something else is that I have writer’s block, because I know that I will never again experience writing as euphoria. A while ago, I did a blog entry on a piece I read by Talal Amin (the other Talal in the social sciences, the one whose name some other social scientist might actually recognize). This was the passage that set me off:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

Before I got sick, writing was always that way for me. I’ve always had a powerful imagination. Before the fateful autumn of ’99 when I had the really nasty attack that gave me optic neuritis, my frontal lobes were capable of processing many, many steps at the same time and I could keep up with the flood of images coming into my brain. I loved writing because it was the highest experience of creative power I knew. I loved it even more than singing. That’s why I became a scholar, not a tenor. The reason I have writer’s block is because I know that I will never feel that power again and my heart and soul hates that fact. Like a child, I refuse to accept what is hateful.

When my niece Valerie was very young, she would often refuse to come along with me when the appointed hour for leaving the McDonald’s playland to go home or leaving the television to go to her bath or her sleep. I would look down at her (as my niece at the age of four was much shorter than me) and say, “Niece. You have two options. You can come along with dignity or without dignity. But you’re coming along. So which will it be?”

At this point Valerie would usually stare up at me in resignation and sigh, “Dignity” and come along. On occasion, however, she would clench her jaw, stare up angrily and say, “NO DIGNITY!” This was boundlessly entertaining and I would laugh, scoop her off the floor and carry her to the next exotic port of call.

I am not a four year-old niece. I am a nearly forty year-old uncle. As much as my subconscious has been screaming “NO DIGNITY!” lately, it is not charming or entertaining. It is unacceptable. I must accept that writing will be plodding and not euphoria. This isn’t cooking. I can punt cooking. I have things I want to say, damn it. I can’t punt writing. Damn it, I’m a scholar. Scholars produce scholarship. This is not negotiable.

I need to make tables, lay out tasks, make check marks and I need to do write everyday, just like I work out every day. I need to accept that change will happen slowly, that I’ll never be directly satisfied with a day’s work, that I cannot measure my life in immediately visible results. Writing will never again be ecstasy, because it will never happen quickly enough to overload my senses. Of all the limitations, this hurts the most, for I wrote once with divine inspiration and will not write that way again. But I have to write every day from now on. This won’t work otherwise.

Shift in Consciousness

The brain is a fucked-up and funny thing. A couple of weeks ago, I felt I was getting on track. I was even working out again. Then I got sick. A really nasty stomach flu. I spent a lot of time running back and forth to the toilet. Naturally, I got off track. But I’m okay with that. That’s who I am now. I’m not efficient. I’m not a machine. I’m not a force of nature. I’m just a geeky guy with low focus and low energy. The most important part of my life is that I’m married to Craig and that we live each day together. And that’s fine. That’s more than fine. I’m happy. I don’t need to be more.

I’ve been playing an on-line strategy game with Kirk, Simon and Nelly. Josiah is joining in the next round. What’s funny is that it’s making me feel really upbeat. I didn’t realize that it would. I miss teamwork. I miss the common struggle toward a goal, the camaraderie, the humor. I feel so much better about life. It’s strange. It reminds me of the good parts of working at USAID without the evil parts. So strange that something that seems so silly can make me feel so upbeat.

I really want to write. I miss writing. I was good at it before and I want to be good at it again. I know I won’t be what I intended to be—a publishing machine. That’s okay. But I want to write again, anyway. I’ve learned how to be a good teacher with this illness. Now I want to learn about how to be a good writer.

Little things change. I’ve changed. I can quite put a finger on it. But I feel a little excited.

The Last Episode of The Sopranos

Craig and I saw the last episode of The Sopranos tonight. If you haven’t seen it, Wikipedia has a pretty decent synopsis to help you catch up. I was pretty disappointed. I’ve been trying to sort out why. I can hear the whiny bitches now. “It’s true to life. Real life doesn’t resolve itself neatly. Real life is ambiguous.” My instinctive response is, “Fuck real life. This is art. An ending is not running out of film in the middle of the scene and does not leave you wondering of the damned DVD player has just hit a smudge on the disk again.” The ending is sensationalist shit and the writer should be shot.

I’m bothered by my response. I’m the first to demand realism from art. On the surface, I ought not to be bothered by this ending. Where I am disturbed is that this argument has no emotional impact on me other than to cause this confusion. I feel strongly that art should emulate reality convincingly and I still feel contempt for this ending. When I was younger, I would take that emotional contradiction and explain it away. I’m older now, and I want to do something different. I want to understand what has made me feel this way and figure out if it tells me something that I feel about the art of storytelling that I don’t consciously know. I’m afraid I don’t know where, if anywhere this is going.

It’s strange, but I guess I feel that there is a bond that exists between read, writer and character, and I feel that the writer betrayed the bond. Odd that I should feel that, especially as one of these three persons does not actually exist, at least not as a person. I don’t know what the rules of that relationship are, but I feel in my gut that they’ve been violated.

An Associated Press article about the last episode (yes, I followed the link from Wikipedia—I didn’t work for it) quotes an interview with the show’s creator, David Chase and his response to his viewers’ response. This is a passage from the article:

The interview, included in “‘The Sopranos’: The Complete Book,” published this week, finds Chase exasperated by viewers who were upset that Tony didn’t meet explicit doom.

Chase says the New Jersey mob boss “had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ’justice’...

“The pathetic thing—to me—was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”

Tony’s death or lack thereof isn’t even interesting to me. The writer owed the character something, but I don’t think it was life or death. Moreover, the show didn’t seem to promise anything remotely like justice. If Tony had been killed, it would have been realistic. For the last nine episodes he had been getting sloppy. If he hadn’t been killed, it would also be realistic. Life has random elements in it. Sometimes we’re sloppy and get away with it and, sometimes we’re careful and are still fucked. None of that really mattered to me. I didn’t watch Tony kill as a way to work out my dark side and I didn’t need him to be killed in order to see validation of my choices not to act on my dark side.

What I resented was the denial of the moment. It was a hopeful and, for this series, weird moment. This money obsessed family had chosen to do something simple: meet for a meal. Tony doesn’t work in a gilded world (think about the Bada Bing—it’s not even upscale for a strip club), but his family lives in a gilded world pretty exclusively. They meet in a diner—a plain old diner. Nowhere fancy. Tony plays a song on the jukebox, talks to his wife, has a moment with his son. For this family, that’s huge. His daughter is outside trying to parallel park her ridiculously nice car. You feel the suspense. But here’s the thing. I needed to see one of two things. I needed to see Tony get shot just as she finally walked in, or I needed to see her walk in and sit down. If that moment, perhaps this family’s only moment with a soul, their fleeting moment needed to be sacrificed, it should have been sacrificed to some sort of message.

Clearly Chase doesn’t have a message of that sort, and I don’t ask him to. I would have been great with Meadow walking in, sitting down, and them talking and end it there. Their future was far from certain. Tony might be killed or thrown in the clink. There were plenty of opportunities for him to die right in the restaurant. AJ is a wussy, spineless spoiled brat who ultimately can be bought off by his parents. Carmella sold her soul for the upscale real estate and a snazzy wardrobe and she’s learned to accept it. Meadow, at least, treats people more kindly than she did in college. They’re not much of a family. But they would have had their one moment. It wasn’t much of one, but it was all they had. They deserved that much. We shared so much with them.

To care for a character isn’t the same thing as loving a character. You care for the ones you hate, too. The more you care for a character, the more you will for them to have a full story. None of the Sopranos are favorite characters of mine. But I cared for them enough as engrossing characters that I felt that they deserved an ending. I was disappointed that Chase apparently did not care enough for them that he would simply sell them out to sensationalism. I also felt he sold me out.

But he’s rich. What the fuck does he give a shit?

I care too much about stories. That’s the only reason that I do.

Fog, Part I

I promised Sean that I’d explain what I meant by “fog.” He asked, “How problematic is it? As someone who is absent-minded naturally how different is it? One article said you forget why you went to a store. You forget people’s names etc. This happens to me often, so I write everything down. I am assuming there is something much more serious and sinister.”

Yes and no, Sean. It is a very natural response to trying to use empathy to understand the problem (indeed, that act is the very foundation of social science). Moreover, you are right in believing that you have experienced what I experience—indeed everyone does experience absent-mindedness. The practical difference is not qualitative. It’s quantitative. A healthy person does not experience absent-mindedness as many as twenty to thirty times a day. For me, this is quite normal.

Recall not memory

You are right, however, that this is a problem that normal people have. We all experience small recall problems. We search for a word that is on the tip of our tongues. We forget someone’s name. We got to the refrigerator only to forget what it was that we were getting. These are recall problems—the memory is still imprinted in the cerebral cortex, it can still be accessed. If you have a memory problem (an illness such as Alzheimer’s, for example), the memory itself is being destroyed and, as personality is a direct product of memory, your identity is destroyed with it. You know less and less that you have a problem and everyone you love suffers as your personality and every memory you have of them are destroyed and they get to watch the walking corpse.

A recall problem is nowhere near as cataclysmic. You can remind me of what I’m forgetting and, almost without exception, I’ll remember it. While you are out of sight, I may forget that I was supposed to do something with you, but my memory of you and what we were supposed to do is still there. If I have a list of things to buy at the store, it will jog my memory. Someone with Alzheimer’s will not even recall the context of the list or know what to do with it.

I think a good analogy is to think of a computer. A computer has a processor, memory and a hard-drive. My processor is fine. I think pretty quickly and accurately. My hard-drive is fine. People with Alzheimer’s essentially have a bad hard-drive that is destroying all the data on the disk. My problem is that I have shit for memory. Just like a computer that’s running the latest software with low memory, I can still do the task. It’s just slow. I can still do virtually all the things I did before. I simply cannot do them efficiently.

Some of the tricks a normal person uses will work for me too. Writing things down is key. But unlike a normal person, I need to make sure that I get things written down where I can see it when I can actually do something about it. For example, my mom can call me earlier in the day twice to remind me that it’s my father’s birthday. But unless I write it where I can see it in the early evening, I’ll completely space. It doesn’t matter that my mother called me twice to remind me. And it doesn’t matter how important the person involved is or how much I love them. I’ve spaced on Craig’s AA birthday, my mom’s birthday and most of my friends can attest that it’s been years since I remembered their birthday, if indeed, they ever knew me before MS. Plus, recall that multiple sclerosis is a nerve conduction problem. There are good days and bad days. Some days I remember without a reminder. Some days twenty reminders won’t be enough. There’s no way of telling which kind of day tomorrow will be.

Concrete Object fields

Coordinating between different times and spaces is very difficult for me. This is hard to explain. I had to develop a vocabulary to even explain the problem for myself. So that’s how I have to explain it to you. In order to relate to a set of discrete objects or ideas, we construct what I’ll call “object fields.”

Object field: a cognitive “space” delineated by networks of associations that lead the mind to group certain objects together as an interrelated and discrete whole.

Meta-object field: a cognitive object field that contains other object-fields and that is constructed to coordinate between them

The object fields that are the simplest for me to deal with are those that are based on real physical locations where I happen to be. The advantage in this case is obvious—I can see the space and that sensory stimulus is a constant reminder. It’s hard to forget something that you’re looking at. But even when dealing with physical object fields, I have problems, particularly in complex work areas such as the kitchen.

Say I’m making a salad. I leave my cutting board and the knife on the counter and go the refrigerator to get some vegetables. When I open the refrigerator, I’ve entered a new object field. Often, when I move from one object field to another, I forget what I’m doing. So I’ll be standing there looking at the refrigerator trying to remember what I was doing. So I’ll have to look away from the refrigerator and look back at the counter. When I see the cutting board and knife, they jog my memory. So far, so good, right? That happens to everyone.

What doesn’t happen to everyone it that when I look away again, I’ll forget again. Lather, rinse, repeat. On a bad day, it may take three or four repetitions before I get it right. Imagine accruing all of those time losses every time you change object field (if you open a desk drawer, you’ve just changed object field—we change object fields just that often). The time losses rack up. Bottom line: I can still make a great salad, but you can do it faster, especially since you don’t have the recall problem and are likely to be faster with a knife than me. Being slow with a knife, however, has nothing to do with MS. I’ve always been a klutz.

Object Fields and the World of My Imagination

Now, I’m allegedly an intellectual. Lots of what I do happens solely in the mind. There are no physical objects to glance back at to remind you. Yes, there is a physical bunch of people who are the Congress of the United States, but no one who studies them has them all seated in a room. Moreover, certain things like “institutionalization” are rather abstract. Fortunately, most of those object fields are part of my long-term memory. But you see, it’s my job to invent new concepts. Now my imagination still works just fine and that was my real academic asset, as not everyone has one. So I can still do this job. But now, I’m way slower.

In my imagination, there are all sorts of connections. One thing hooks up with another and another. There’s always this huge, amorphous incoherent “structure” that feels like it’s the Theory of Life, the Universe and Everything. Well, back when we were first-year grad students my buddy Peter said (and he had a point), “Talal, you can’t write the Theory of Life, the Universe and Everything. You have to pick one. So what’s it going to be: life, the universe, or everything?”

Well, what I would have done before MS was to loosely define the contours of the whole pseudo-structure in my mind, find the general boundaries of the part I wanted to write up and distill that bit into a coherent, well-crafted theory. But my short-term recall is shot. Trying to cut out the bit in my mind that I want is virtually impossible. I don't know the pseudo-structure very well, so it exists only in short-term memory. I have to do two things at once: recall the whole structure and then step away from it and criticize it. That's too much brain-power at one time. I keep losing focus on the outline of the large structure as I explore it to criticize it. In the seconds in which I lose track of the process, I start following all the luminous connections that my imagination has generated and, as a result, keep losing track of the task.

What I’ve discovered that I have to do is do my best to spend a few months writing a sixty-page document that is a rambling mess but contains a great deal of the amorphous pseudo-structure in my head. Then I can see the pseudo-structure and don’t need to hold it in my head and criticize it at the same time. Yes, I'll still get distracted, but my eyes will still be resting on the same shitty passage I was critizing before and that will pull me back on task. I don't get as lost that way.

After doing the write-up of the pseudo-structure, I need to wait a while before proceeding to criticism, because trying to force that much material out of one’s imagination into the daylight at one time is exhausting and really fucks with your emotions. So a few months later (yes, that long) I can pick up the rambling mess and use all my brain power just for criticism. I don’t need to recall anything, because it’s right there on paper in front of me. Plus, having given birth to far more of the pseudo-structure than I needed, I can probably distill a few papers out of the mess.

But it’s slow. Worse, it looks like you’re not really working most of the time, especially to people who are not writers. That’s pretty humiliating, because I’m trying really hard the whole time. And you burn out several times on the road and wind up playing Civ 3 or Spider Solitaire just to get you mind off of it and let stuff work at the back of your head. That doesn’t build other people’s external confidence either. But you’ve got to take those sort of breaks if you’re to get the job done.

This is quite a mouthful. I’ll start with meta-object fields next time.