Circadian Dysrhythmia

I have a headache hanging on for more than a week now.  I know what it is:  things are out of whack.  Time is out of joint.  Tomorrow begins the new school year and I am having dreams that I am not ready, that I will forget to do something, or no students will show up, or they are in a room somewhere and I cannot locate them to start class.  I barreled out of bed this morning in the dark like a man electrocuted only to realize this is Sunday.

In short, I am plagued by a circadian dysrhythmia.  Night and day have become twisted and tangled.  I cannot sleep, then become exhausted at midday.  I forget where I put things and do some activities over again, forgetting that I’ve already completed the task.  I will go to my desk to retrieve something, a piece of paper, my keys, and forget what I went there to get.  Names of people and places sit just outside my memory and I must try to remember by not thinking about them.  Too much attention and they flutter away; emptying my mind and closing my eyes, sometimes they return to me.  Yesterday, in mid-sentence, I could not pronounce a word.  I stood there trying to form the illusive syllables.  I was, momentarily, struck dumb.

The stress comes from this new paradigm of teaching and working and living.  It is cognitive overload, and the fuse box is full of tripped switches and blown fuses.  The normal is gone; the new normal has not been fully processed.  We are in this hanging garden of obstacles and mirrors.  Did I do this already?  Did I write this already?  Am I paying attention?

Failing to find the land of Nod late Friday night, I ventured out to a twenty-four hour news stand to pick up some reading material.  To go out after dark is to experience a strange netherworld.  I drove past a few bars and restaurants that have taken over the sidewalk and street outside to set up tables for diners.  People packed these places, but no one was wearing a mask or practicing social distancing.  Other places were still boarded up and desolate.  No traffic on the streets, although buses drove past with throngs of riders, mostly grim people on their way home from the late shift.

At the news stand, the proprietor greeted me and asked if he could help me find something.  I’ve been there a thousand times, but I do not think he recognized me with the mask.  I told him I was browsing, and then he offered for no apparent reason, “Sure, yeah, I’m counting out the drawer.”  I looked over and saw stacks of bills on the little podium behind which he stood.  Robbery, anyone?

I drove back through the streets.  “We’re open for in-person dining!” screamed many dark and shuttered places.  They did not seem open.  Cars thronged the supermarket parking lot, even at that late hour.  Homeless people in tents lined the sidewalk under the freeway overpasses.  Among the tarps and carts, blue squares of light floated in the night.  People living on the streets with smart phones.  Back home, a lone rat ran across the telephone wire, a superhighway for the rodent world linking backyard fruit tree to fruit tree.  A cat screamed in the distance arousing the sleeping dogs to bark.

The list of stressors seems endless:  the pandemic, the start of school, the current administration and its threat to every American, the uncertainty of what is to come.  The only defense is to take one day at a time, one moment even.

As a new week begins, one that will bring new challenges and the stubborn continuation of old problems, all we can do is live.  I keep repeating that to myself as things shift and break down.  Put one step forward, bravely, and keep going.

 

Viernes

 

And here we find ourselves on a Friday after another stressful week.  All too soon, Monday will come and we will start again.  At the end of days like these, I need a wisdom transfusion from Marcus Aurelius.

How do we make the ethical choice?  How do we make a just society?  What do we do in the face of suffering and loss?  And what about that eventual finality when we shuffle off this mortal coil?  The answers to these questions inspire our actions and behaviors.  The answers are not just lofty platitudes, but ways to live and be all the days we are granted.  Only the summation of life determines how we will be remembered.

I love the Stoics.  They believe life is best navigated with logic and rational thought; emotions only cloud our vision and manipulate our hearts.  They believe in logos, reason, the principles that power the universe.

Stoics broke the world down into three disciplines.  First, perception must be pure with absolute objectivity in all dilemmas.  We must learn to see things as they are.  The second discipline of action means in all dealings, we must be true to reason and purpose while rising above animalistic impulses.  We act for valid, moral, ethical purposes.  Third, will, covers those things we experience, those events that fall outside our control.  As Gregory Hays writes in his introduction to Meditations (Modern Library, 2002) by Marcus Aurelius, “Acts of nature such as fire, illness, or death can harm us only if we choose to see them as harmful.”  This is a difficult concept when one has lost everything in a raging fire or experienced the death of a loved one due to COVID-19, but it is the way to keep moving forward.  We must continue to live because that is all we can do.

Marcus Aurelius tells us the path is clear:  “Objective judgment…Unselfish action…willing acceptance…of all external events.”

I find his words particularly stinging and direct.  “You are an old man.  Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future,” he shouts at us.  Wisdom allegedly comes with age.  Instead, we act like children throwing a tantrum when life does not give us what we want.  It is time to grow up and act our age.

We are warned.  “…There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself, it will be gone and will never return.”  So, we must focus every moment and do every action with precise, genuine seriousness, “tenderly, willingly, with justice.”  We must free ourselves from distractions.  He tells us to “do everything as if it were the last thing you [are] doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.”

Of course, there will be days where we are frustrated, overburdened, anxious.  Marcus Aurelius says that “The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion…The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger.”  Are we in psychic and physical pain every day?  Does it make us short-tempered, agitated, too blunt and harsh with our words?  It helps to step back, take a deep breath, pause before speaking.  The consequences of a quick retort can last a lifetime.  Speaking less and listening more will awaken us to the path we share with our fellow human beings.  No one here gets out alive, as we are often reminded.  We share the same boat upon an ocean, and we have much in common.  “But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.”

In the end, we must remember this is our only life.  We are guaranteed no other.  Therefore, it is up to us to push on and be in the world.  We do not possess the past, nor can we change it.  We do not own the future, but we can poison its land before we arrive through negative actions and poor emotional choices.  We have the present, the only moment we can influence and live in, so therefore, we must make the most of it.

These are words of comfort after a long week.  Now, we must rest and embrace this moment to love and be loved.  The gift of a good life is peace of heart and mind.  Marcus Aurelius reminds us how to live.  I dip into his words from time to time to remind myself that there is another way to exist.

 

"Inadvertent" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgaard has been a prolific literary phenomenon, especially in the last decade, with his six-part mammoth autobiographical novel, My Struggle, and The Seasons Quartet.  Yale University Press published his 2017 Windham-Campbell lecture under the title, Inadvertent.  In an attempt to answer the common question thrown at most writers, Knausgaard has much to say about why he writes.

How much of our behavior is dictated by the reality of our death?  Knausgaard believes he writes because he will die, which is a realist mission statement for any artist.  One wishes to preserve the sacred, the fleeting moment of truth or beauty or melancholy.  Sometimes, all of the above spurs us to take up a brush or chisel or fountain pen.  Because he has made a life of studying the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Knausgaard believes he understands the painter’s motivation.  He can articulate Munch’s inspiration:  “I paint because I have lost trust in the world.”  What trust is broken for this artist?  The world betrays us because it will go on without us after we die.  We are given only this brief episode in an almost infinite history, and this is a source of human tragedy.  In a way, it is narcissistic because life is more of a relay race than an individual event.  We all play a part, but no one is the lead in this human comedy.  Knausgaard cites the deaths that shattered Munch’s life:  losing his mother when he was five, and his sister when he was thirteen.  So art is a defense against a finite world, and tragedy colors everything in the artist’s world.

Knausgaard sums this up in pure poetry:  “We live in an ocean of time, where events, things, and people are continually succeeding one another, but we cannot live with such boundless complexity, because we disappear in it, and therefore we organize it into categories, sequences, hierarchies.”  We name things; we identify ourselves with our country of birth; we define our existence by our occupations.  “All of us sum up our lives in this way,” he writes, “that is what we call identity.”

Formulating these identities as characters in his writing leads him to success.  “It wasn’t until I started breaking the rules, showing how something was and should be understood, very precisely and with no room for doubt, and describing people in psychological terms, that my writing came alive.”  In doing this, he moves far beyond another writing cliché:  show, don’t tell.  The book contains advice for writers that often cuts across the grain of what is taught in MFA classrooms.  He is also clear about what constitutes a foundation for a writer.  From childhood, he has always been a voracious reader.  He offers two salient observations about his reading-to-writing life.  “[T]he essential thing about books, I think, was that they constituted a place in the world where I could be, where nothing was demanded of me, where on the contrary I got what I wanted…the whole point of them being precisely that I read them alone, and yet it never felt like that, for while you were reading you were always together with someone else.”  He started out wanting to live in an author’s universe and then decided he wanted to create his own separate worlds with stories and characters.

Knausgaard offers some insight into the unique phenomenon of My Struggle, his epic.  He imagined the work as a fictional diary with all the intimacy that the genre conveys.  Writing it was a way to move through self-reflection in a step-by-step, realistic novel.  He is not a fan of heavy outlining and preparation.  The words must come to the writer, he argues, and they cannot be forced.  Often he does not know where he is going in a piece, a scary but necessary feeling.  This is the source of the book’s title.  The words and paragraphs arrive out of a cloud of unknowing; he comes to the finished piece inadvertently, making it fresh and new.  “For me all writing is blind and intuitive,” he writes, “it either works or it doesn’t…”

For him, what has not worked, is creative writing programs.  The one in which he participated shattered whatever confidence he had in his own abilities.  It left him “paralyzed by shame and low self-esteem.”  Instead, he focuses on writing the way he reads:  in a total state of self-absorption.  He realizes that he aspires “to a different ideal:  to one day be able to write something so essential and important that it speaks to all people, since it is true or relevant for everyone, irrespective of gender, class, or culture.”  This is the powerful message of this book and lecture, and a necessary mission for all writers and artists around the world.

 

"On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder

 Timothy Snyder wrote his book, On Tyranny:  Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), in the early days of the Trump administration.  If anything, Snyder’s dire predictions about the rise of tyranny are more apparent now.  The situation is more desperate, the threat to our democracy more precipitous.

Snyder, in 126 pages, meticulously documents the evil of tyrannical leadership.  He cites Aristotle, who warned us that inequality would bring instability, and Plato, who “believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.”  The ancients, as well as the Founding Fathers, called these threats tyranny.  Snyder writes, “They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.”  Fascism and communism are responses to globalization, Snyder tells us.  “Fascists rejected reason in the name of will, denying objective truth in favor of a glorious myth articulated by leaders who claimed to give voice to the people.”

We have become so violently partisan in this country that Congress and the White House are hopelessly gridlocked, clinging to their power and preventing anything from getting done while simultaneously attacking democratic institutions.  We must defend our democracy and its institutions from Americans “who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end,” Snyder writes.  No single party should have all the influence and power in a government.  Parties working together through philosophical differences to reach a consensus, that is democracy, not rule by any one party or person.

We must protect those who lack the power to defend themselves.  We have a responsibility to our country and our global community to work for justice and an end to oppression.  Snyder writes that “When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh.  When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.”  These militias are mercenaries paid to enact violence on behalf of the government.  Prisons are run by corporations.  The violence inherent in our nation is now privatized, a dangerous situation.  Trump and his security force often incite the crowd at his rallies to attack those who dissent, or to threaten journalists as an enemy of the people.  He instigates nothing less than mob violence against those who disagree with him and his message and he legitimizes such violence.  He has continued to do this even after he was sworn into office.

It is clear that the single greatest response to tyranny is the individual working in concert with other individuals to “form a more perfect union.”  We must be willing to act ethically, stand up and stand out, and as the great John Lewis said, get into good trouble for the sake of our democracy.  This means considering how we think, the words we use, the way we bear witness and offer shelter and support to others.  We must take ethical and moral action in the face of tyrannical evil.

Snyder strongly advises us to read books, especially the totalitarian fictions of the past like George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  These novels offer a blueprint for what our future will look like if we do not stand up and fight back against tyranny.  However, this does not mean to retreat into fiction.  These novels have a way of clarifying the situation and making real the ultimate outcome of the whittling away of our rights and freedoms.

Snyder breaks down Trump’s method of operation.  He is openly hostile to verifiable reality.  He repeats his lies and the infantile names he creates for his opponents which are often more appropriately assigned to himself.  He promotes magical thinking—the coronavirus will magically go away.  He claims to be the only one to solve problems, asking the American people to have faith in him even when he has no plan to right the ship of state, nor has he displayed concern for anyone else but himself.  He is the very definition of a demagogue.

Bottom line, our president is a nationalist, which, as Snyder writes, “is not at all the same thing as a patriot.  A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best.”  Just exactly when was the “again” in “Make America great again?”  Funny that the exact temporal location is never identified in all of Trump’s rhetoric.  The past was never as great as we think it was.  This is the reason we must know history and continue to teach it to our children.  “To understand one moment [in history] is to see the possibility of being the co-creator of another,” Snyder writes.  “History permits us to be responsible:  not for everything, but for something.”  That something is our future, which is very much at risk in the face of ubiquitous tyranny and oppression.