June 2006 Archives

When I was back there in the hole under my parents’ house, I didn’t just sit around on my butt.  Well, I did sit around on my butt, but I did so while reading a great deal.  I couldn’t say I had learned a whole lot in college—excepting one class—the History of Civilization (sic)—that went on for two years, but I had managed to compile a pretty decent list of must-do reading.  They had assigned us a bit of Nietzsche, for example, though from that wretched “Thus Spake…” but enough to wet my whistle, so I read more of him. 

And I continued existentialism with background reading in Kierkegaard, and Heidegger’s Being and Time, and on phenomenology in general, especially Merleau Ponti.  And, of course, more and more Sartre.  I am probably one of the few people in the world who read Being and Nothing “just for fun.”  Sartre says that the self arises from or rather is “anxiety.”  I sat around worrying about whether I was authentic or not, and concluded I probably wasn’t or even if I were, I wouldn’t know it.

But Sartre, along with Camus, gave me a ready supply of rationalizations for my depression.  Now, I was not fucked up precisely.  Well, I was fucked up precisely, but that was because the world in general was fucked up. Not the world precisely, but the very nature of being qua being and as such.  So during my first couple of years in college Camus afforded me a ready formulation for my state with his claim that the first and most important philosophical question—the asking of and by which one might claim to be a philosopher, however ephemerally—was whether or not to cap yourself. 

People would ask me how I was doing and I would say, “I feel like fucking killing myself today.”  I said it just like that too, flat out.  No wonder I was not Joe-popular, and after a while 98% of the people around stopped asking me how I was doing, and I found myself relating with the 2% that like myself, deep down, were also thinking about killing themselves.  This was not a happy group and being able to relate only to people who were thinking about killing themselves tended to reinforce my perception that existence was pretty shitty. 

Had I been born in another time I might have made a pretty good monk.  I could have gone around reminding people that they could die at any second and that the yearnings of the flesh were the path to nothingness in an official capacity and they would have had to listen to me whether they wanted to or not.  As Saint Augustine said, something like, the yearnings of the flesh lead us “to lick after shadows.”  And Buddha said, the worst thing that can happen to a human being is to be born.  

But since I don’t believe in reincarnation, I would have to say that it’s not the worst thing; it’s the only fucking thing.

During those seven years that I lived in the hole under my parents’ house, I had three sort of metaphors for my existence.  First, I called myself a “walking abortion.”  Maybe I felt, having been graduated from college and then having a “nervous breakdown” that the arch of my life had been aborted.  Like sort of when they shot up a rocket and it starts to go crazy and they abort it.  Or maybe like I had been aborted, thrown into a trashcan, not yet dead and somehow I had crawled out and lived.  Which may have come from the sense that I wasn’t really wanted.

But I also thought of myself as a rocket that had not been aborted.  I had been launched off, out of control, and souring into the void.  The void is a particular place.  You can visit it though why the hell anybody would want to go there, I don’t know.  Artaud went there and did some good writing about the void—especially when he was in the lunatic asylum.  The void is beyond emptiness; rather it is the perpetual ache of emptiness or emptiness aware of itself as such.  The void is like a vortex that draws you more and more deeply in.  Or maybe like Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, it stares into you.  But the void is hard to put into words.

I met a cook who had been raised in South Carolina and had done some heavy duty drugs in the 60s.  We were talking about something, and she said, “You know about the void?”  Which she said—“void”—dragging it out with a soft southern drawl.  Sure, I said.  She had been to the void too.  Whenever we bumped into each other, we asked how the “void” was that day because once you step into the void you can’t ever get rid of it completely.

Artaud said, “Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.”  My kind of guy.

But he’s right of course.  Because my other metaphor was that I was a walking “biochemical experiment.”  The more I read about brain science and the more drugs I took of both the under and over kind, the more I felt I was a body and no more than that at all.  Just a bunch of biochemicals, an interweaving of genetics, aging, and whatever the hell was going on in the immediate environment.  If I wasn’t dead yet or hadn’t committed suicide, that had nothing to do with me—my body just wanted to live was all, and I was along for the ride.

So one day you feel better and you want to take credit for that, like you had done something to make yourself feel better, so you think maybe it was a movie you saw or doing yoga or something, and you try to repeat it but nothing happens.  Because what you felt had nothing at all to do with the puny conscious mind but was he result of some weird-assed shift in your biochemical being—some sort of interconnection between the cells of the brain and the particular light of the sun, on that particular evening, as it arrived at a precise and unrepeatable angle.

 So while I was working on Henry James I bumped into a woman who had gone to my college.  I said, hey aren’t you…and then I couldn’t remember her last name, but that didn’t make any difference because in the four or five year interim she had married and had a child and so her last name was different.  I don’t think I had said even two words to her at college.  She was not in my crowd, though I didn’t have a crowd exactly.  She had been heavy duty into the sorority-fraternity scene that dominated the campus, and she was very popular and home coming queen material.  I say that because she was like the runner-up to the home coming queen one year or something like that.

We hung out some and had coffee and I was a year or so ahead of her with the TA gig and showed her the ropes.  One day, she asked me who I thought she had been back in college and I said, I really didn’t know though I thought she had been part of the fraternity and sorority crowd.  And then she asked me who I thought I had been, and I said, a hippy, I guess.  And she said, crap, because she was pretty direct.  I had been, she said, a “turkey.”  

Turkey was a sort of pre-cursor term for nerd.  It meant I was a “gobbler,” or studying kind of person, and as usual the study type person, the person who goes to college to learn something, is cast in the negative maybe because they make it rough for the people who don’t study.  I had to allow though that she was right.  The beard and long hair hadn’t fooled anybody. I mean Rasputin had a beard and long hair and he wasn’t a hippy.  I wasn’t either though I didn’t think I was a turkey as much as I was fucking troubled.

We struck up a sort of friendship.  A couple of times she called me, and nobody called me, and I would come up from the basement and she would read something and say, Now, guess who wrote that.  And I would say Henry James since that was who it was and you knew it was Henry James even if you hadn’t read it before.  We would chat a bit and I began to figure that a person, even though she was a sorority person and her husband was making good money, who would call a guy living in the basement of his parents’ house to cheer him up a bit couldn’t be all bad.  So once I even called her and I don’t call anybody, unless my battery is dead or something like that, and got her husband, who didn’t seem too friendly, and read a bit to her:

 “The dream of acquisition at Weatherend would have had to be wild indeed, and John Marcher found himself, among such suggestions, disconcerted almost equally by the presence of those who knew too much and by that of those who knew nothing. The great rooms caused so much poetry and history to press upon him that he needed some straying apart to feel in a proper relation with them, though this impulse was not, as happened, like the gloating of some of his companions, to be compared to the movements of a dog sniffing a cupboard. It had an issue promptly enough in a direction that was not to have been calculated.”

Henry James, she said laughing.  Now how did you know that?  I said.

Hamlet says, “For Hecuba!/ What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/
That he should weep for her?”  That’s a good question. I have asked it in different ways in different contexts.  What, for example, was Henry James to me or me to Henry James that I should have spent so much time reading and trying to make sense of his stuff?  But nothing at all but contingency.  A desire to understand what I hadn’t understood, a teacher who liked what I wrote, being unemployed and having the time to write it. Or was there some elective affinity.

 But that’s what I wrote my Master’s Dissertation on.  Of course I had to do it the hard way and wrote about a hundred and 120 pages of ill-organized philosophical rumination and turned that in and the Professor, god bless his heart, just said, go to the library, check out a dissertation, and see how they organize these things.  So I did that and found that usually people would write a chapter on this novel and a chapter on that novel and so forth with an introduction and conclusion.  I was a bit relieved; I was making it out to be harder than it was, and so threw away my 120 pages and started over.

 But what was I doing with James and his hyper-refined, super-subtle fry, as he called them.  Suffocating and suffocating people.  I got the feeling that if one of them could just curse, or yell fuck, or hit somebody, or maybe even a wall or just plain fart or have an attack of gas that James' whole fucking novelistic universe would deflate like a balloon.  But maybe that was the point and one not unrelated to myself, his people lacked bodies, horribly repressed one might say, but more epistemologically to be one of his detached observers one has got to pretend one is not there and has no influence on what one is seeing.

So the hero of the Ambassadors is shocked to find his nephew, I believe it was, and this super-suble French woman are having an actual physical liaison.  It’s not that he is horrified by that but that his actual being there himself, in the flesh, may have caused them to change their movements, to go out of town, as it were to get it on.  His just being there got in the way, and had they really known him, they would not have hidden, but lacking any sense of his influence on people, he didn’t know how his “innocence” would affect them or, to add insult to injury, even that they saw him as innocent and tiptoed around trying to protect him from himself.

So maybe that’s the elective affinity since I too have always had trouble understanding my influence, if any, upon other people.  Maybe that’s why I like to make people laugh because when they laugh I do know, but other than that I mostly don’t and never have, mostly because I didn’t have room just to be or maybe became I pretended not to be, like a fly on the wall, to stay out of range of the yelling and screaming and general psycho-violence of the family.  Sometimes when the mood really comes over me, I will tiptoe around my own house because I am afraid the neighbors will hear and know I am there.

When you build a fortress around yourself sometimes you can’t see over the walls.

In Charleston, we had a bit of talk with our server person.  Turns out she had been in teacher somewhere in Charleston.  She made 22 k to start and after four years of teaching was way up to 24k, and she had a child too.  So she quit teaching because she could make more money as a server person.

That wasn’t the only reason she quit.  The whole system was horribly backwards.  For example, they didn’t have time to teach all of history so they decided just to drop all the stuff about pre-history so as to avoid any talk of cave men and monkeys.  Also they mixed the special ed kids with learning and emotional problems in with the regular kids and she had no special support.  Sometimes, she said, they would just sit there and cuss her out.  And she concluded, they lived in a “welfare state.”

That was a funny use, I thought, of the term “welfare state.”  Me, I think the US could use more of a welfare state, but not one as she described it, where people live for a generation and more on welfare, get no education, have no prospects and just repeat the cycle.  In Swainsboro, Georgia, the sister of our black friend drove us through their “projects.”  Little brick houses all in a row, people sitting out on their porches, in the heat, infested with drugs, I was told, and drug dealers.  People living in narcoticized poverty and one hundred percent black.

Up in Carolina with my relatives and down in Georgia with our black friend, people talked about jobs, needing them, getting them, moving here and there to get them, and holding onto them.  People moving in with other family while looking for one, and moving out when they found one, and back again when they lost it.  Our black friend’s sister, Paula, has a son who had ambition and joined the army and served in Iraq and came back and couldn’t find work in Swainsboro.  So now he has gone to Florida where Paula’s new husband who has retired and has 13 of his own kids has a house so he can find work.

This is family values territory, and maybe there’s a reason for it.  Because when push comes to shove, all you have is family.  These are the people who might put you up in bad times, or loan you a car, or give you an old one, and when you are in deep trouble give a you a little money, and more important than that really, these are the people you can talk to, who know you and might have a little interest in you, and who you are and what you did that day.

Because nobody else in Swainsboro Georgia could give a flying fuck.

Some confusion surrounded the digging of the hole and where the memorial service should be held.  At least I was confused. But things get done.  Maxi Hunter’s son ventured out in the heat with a posthole digger and chopped out of the hard red clay a hole about three feet across all ways and maybe a bit more than that down.  Very sufficient for the old man’s box.  A bit of outdoor carpet covered the mound of excavated dirt and a doormat was placed to the side of the hole to protect the knees of the person who put the box into the hole. 

People had spoken of having the memorial service hole-side ; but wiser heads prevailed and the service was done in the chapel of the little church.  Thank goodness, for given the length of the service, one justified by the weight of the occasion and dictated by the rules of the ritual, we all would have completely wilted away, most especially the Reverend who upon our meeting apologized for his inclination towards prespiring.

The chapel of the tiny church build in the late 1800s was overall as I remembered it, though the pews had been replaced with thicker, stronger ones, the floor had been carpeted, and up front, looking completely and metallically out of place were some stereo speakers.  I was happy to see that the bulletin boards announcing the readings and songs for a particular Sunday service had not changed at all.  Just boards with wooden slots in which one might slip plastic letters and numbers, like the way they used to announce movies though much smaller.  The Reverend had asked the congregation about updating those, but was told not to touch them.  I always as a kid looked at them first to see what songs were up for the day, my favorites being “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Rock of Ages.”

After the service proper and the reception organized by the Ladies of the Church the many Tingles and ken present gathered hole-side for some very brief words by the good Reverend, who had previously been an insurance salesman.  Those done, I was prompted by a nod from the Reverend to announce that was all unless people wanted to dare sun stroke.  As the others drifted off, my brother and I lingered by the hole and the box of ashes sitting atop a bit of furniture, an end-table perhaps.  My brother said he wanted to put the old man in the hole as I had expected he might, and so he went off and fetched a shovel from the parsonage.

 My brother knelt on the doormat and settled the box firmly in place, and then we took turns, my brother, his son, another nephew, and me, shoveling the earth back into the hole.  Mostly the youngest, my brother’s son, did it.  My one shovel full was purely symbolic.

Wordsworth said something about poetry being the expression of emotion recollected in tranquility.  That may explain why I am no good at poetry since I am never tranquil.  But the notion of recollection does suggest some distance in time between the emotion and its expression.  I don’t think I have that recollected distance yet between the placement of my father’s ashes and the events surrounding it and my present moment still in Charleston sufficient to offer a crafted expression of emotion.

 Still as I drove away a few days ago from the Atlanta airport and off into the Georgia country side I can say I felt a double sadness—like 2 rivers perhaps as they merged into one. Or perhaps two sides to the same coin.  First, at sixty, I felt the passage of the years, the 50 that separate me from my first 10 childhood years growing up in the middle of nowhere in the South Carolina country side.  The nature of my errand itself, with my father’s ashes bouncing around in the trunk, was guaranteed to awaken intimations of mortality. 

Second was the sense registered in the countryside itself of the passing of years.  The place where I grew up, excepting of course the dirt, the trees, and the birds, has gone.  Even in the 10 years since my last visit much more of what I knew has gone missing.  Mr. Byrd’s country store was at least visible beneath a mound of brush, but now the store and Mr. Byrd’s house as well as the old and gnarly oak, upon which I ruminated one day as a child, are just not there having been replaced by a storage area for large tanker trucks.

Other great houses that once stood by the road have also disappeared.  Miss Lizzie and Bell’s house was torn down.  The community center, where I had my fierce earache, looks clearly abandoned and falling into disrepair.  The nurse, whom I visited on my last trip and who administered by first ever enema, now lies in the cemetery of the ARP church.  Miss Cannon, who said I might benefit from piano lessons, is also gone.  The sense of time was accentuated too by my meeting however briefly two people who were childhood friends. 

One, who collected far more bottles from the roadside than I ever did, now owns an Ace Hardware store and has two sons.  Another with whom I rode the bus and who had terrible baby teeth is now a handsome woman with an unblemished smile.  When I noticed she had left the “reception” following the service, I ran out to her car as she and her husband were departing to say how good it had been to see her however briefly.  I think I was a bit inarticulate and that was the only moment I felt “choked up.”

Part of getting old I suspect must involve in varying degrees of intensity a constant grieving.

I cannot speak for the locals but the southern diet does not appear particularly suited to the promotion of regularity.  I won’t say they do not recognize the existence of green foods but lettuce seems hard to come by.  My first southern meal, for example, down in Georgia consisted of a pork chop, rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, and a little bowl of turnip greens.  The greens were quite tasty their having been cooked mostly in fat; the one other green food, beans, came sprinkled liberally with bits of bacon.  For desert I had a piece of fried chicken followed by another order of macaroni and cheese.

Breakfasts consist generally of eggs, plus grits sometimes with cheese, plus some meat, bacon or sausage, with biscuits sometimes with gravy, sometimes not.  Indeed, your southerner appears an aggressive meat eater.  A poster for sale read, “There is a place for all God’s creatures great and small—right beside the rice and gravy.”  If theology can be injected into something southerners will do it; the same can of course be said of vegetarians, though they are perhaps more spiritual and less scripturally oriented.

 This diet had the effect of stopping me up.  Though I must say the heat probably had something too to do with this.  One can say properly that the sun “beats down”.  Out walking I have sweated clean through my under garment. I am inclined genetically to be a fierce sweater being of Anglo Saxon extraction and fair skinned.  I did not during the first days properly lubricate.  I cannot, without becoming indelicate, go into detail on this point, but once in an effort to relieve myself of my stoppage, I remembered, this is how Elvis died, and so kept myself from blacking out from my exertions.

 Heat contributed in additional ways.  My bowels tend to be excited by exercise and in this heat exercise is impossible and perhaps unnatural.  The very occasional jogger must be masochistic and were he to jog in the more rural areas he is asking to be taunted or run over.  But I am happy to report that in the more cosmopolitan Charleston, I located a salad, strewn with strips of an excellent fried chicken and that, along with a brisk walk in the cooler evening, has restored me to my natural balance. 

I became obsessed with the possibility that I would not be able to get the old man’s remains through airport security.  The box they put him in was very heavy and I had been told that sometimes they put the ashes in a metal box and put that in the wooden box and if there was a metal box in the wooden box that security might think I was carrying a bomb.  That freaked me out.  Showing up at the memorial service without the remains of the man of the hour struck me as being like showing up at a wedding without the bride or groom.

So the next time I was flying somewhere I asked airport security about the matter.  And the IQ-less young man there said he could not guarantee that they would go through the security check.  I said I had heard that you could put a quarter under the box and if you could see the quarter with the machine then it would go through.  The IQ-loess young man looked stern and said I was not supposed to know that.

This was not reassuring.  So I phoned the mortuary and they referred me to the crematorium; everybody specializes these days.  They assured me the box was just wood with ashes in it.  But still I didn’t trust anybody by this point.  We had my wife’s father’s ashes too, in a smaller box; and it weighed half of what my father’s box weighed and they were about the same height and weight at the point of expiration.  How could that be.  While talking with the crematorium people, I had my father’s box in my lap and turning it over happened to notice four screws.

 If you want something done right, you have got to do it yourself.  So I unscrewed the screws and took out my father’s ashes that were contained in heavy plastic.  The ashes looked very much like ashes; and I was reassured to see no metal in the box.  But sure enough at the airport, they pulled aside the suitcase with the old man in it and asked me what was in there.  I said it was my father’s ashes and what was the matter and they said they couldn’t see through it.  I said there was no metal in it.

A security guy walked over and took the bag to another security machine.  I saw him slip a quarter under the box which he had taken out of the bag and put in through the machine, and then he put it back in the bag and said I could take it with me.  Thank God.  The problem all along had not been metal, but the simple density of human ashes.

As I have said more dead Tingles reside in Georgia than living.  But the living population just increased by 1 since my arrival in Atlanta yesterday.  We, my wife and I—she is a Tingle neither by blood—thank god—or by name—are taking my father’s ashes to be deposited in the grave yard of the Ora ARP church in South Carolina.

The old man didn’t talk much about anything, but when he did talk he tended to tell incoherent stories about his childhood.  In a futile attempt to bond with him, I sent him a tape recorder and asked him to talk some of his stories into the machine.  But even on tape they were mostly incoherent hopping from one name or place to another and sliding up and down in time.  But from the tapes clearly life for the old man and his family had not been easy in Georgia.

After the War—the one and only—the Tingles had a considerable establishment near Blount Georgia on the way down to Macon.  Indeed they had a road named after them.  The road now is just red dirt heading into the piney woods.  Back in the woods if you dare go in with all the ticks seven smokestacks can be located, all that’s left of the old place, that served in the late 19^th century as home and, if rumors are true, the site for a country store.

But over the years, the law of primogenitor having been set aside,  the family land was progressively divided among the males until by the time my Grandfather came along there wasn’t any left to go around. Consequently, Grandfather Tingle rented land and a house.  I don’t know that he was a sharecropper or if he hired himself out.  But they moved around a lot; one of the places they lived, near Indian Springs, is now under water.  At another, the old man recollects, to keep the rain, wind and cold out, they had to plaster the walls with newspaper stuck up with a mix of flour and water.  One of the places they lived, though, the Asbery House, was preserved, picked up, and moved to a park near Atlanta.  I walked through that house and it was funny to see it just as my father had described.

 Grandpa must have made some money from saw milling because he was able to buy a  few acres. He threw up a house fast, but out of green, uncured wood, so that when the wood did dry out cracks and gaps appeared in the walls and flooring, the latter being particularly useful for cleaning since all you had to do was to sweep the dirt and dust into one of the cracks where over the years it piled up into a fine whitish powder. Little bugs lived in that powder.  They made little holes like a volcano crater or vortex and other bugs would come along and slide down the sides and the little bug would be waiting right down at the bottom to eat them up. Folks in Georgia call them “ant lions,” though I don’t know if that is what they are called in SC in the dust under the crumbling remains of Grandpa’s house.

Sometime in the summer of 72, I guess it must have been, I got a call from the State College asking if I wanted to be a Teaching Assistant.  The pay was freaking pathetic.  But who was I to complain.  I was maybe 26 years old and had never had a credit card, though they weren’t around as much back then.  But I didn’t have a checking account either.  I had a savings account.  I would put money in it, and when I needed some I would go to the bank and check out some hard cash.

I would put this money in a Prince Albert can and dole it out to myself.  I got pissed when the bank started charging me for withdrawing cash more than a couple of times a month from my savings account.  So I doubled the amount I took out and stashed the money in the Prince Albert can.

The most money I had made at that point had been working as a brick mason tender.  I got about a 1000 a month for that; only about 650 for being an Assistant Manager at a Newberry’s Department.  They would actually hand me a little pay envelope with cash in it down to the penny.  When I worked the punch press I would go to the bank on Friday and cash the check.  One day I got upset; that was hard work and it didn’t feel like I was getting paid enough.  So I asked the woman at the window if it was maybe possible to get paid in gold.  I wanted something heavy, not this light as air paper stuff.  But she said no that was not possible though she could give me a roll of quarters if I wanted something heavier.  I said no because I didn’t what use I would have for a fucking roll of quarters.

Still, even though the pay was piss poor, being a TA at the State College would give me enough to fill my minimal needs.  While I kicked in some money time to time for food, I wasn’t paying rent for the room in my parents’ basement.  So all I needed was money for some clothes now and then, for gas, for car insurance, for an occasional cup of coffee, a very occasional movie, and cigarettes.  Now I would have to buy books, but I could check most of those out of the library and gas would be less since I would be TA-ing only three days a week.  And to top it off, as long as I was TA-ing, I would get my graduate student fees paid for me. Right before fall quarter I quit my job on the loading docks of the Broadway Department store.

 I figured I should dress up to teach, so I bought a couple of new pairs of jeans and some new blue work shirts that I wore all the time but not tucked in, and a new pair of work boots of the kind I had been wearing for years.  Thankfully, when we had our first meeting, I saw the other TA's must have been about as broke as I was because I didn’t feel out of place sartorially. 

Our supervisor came in wearing an embroidered blue work shirt, jeans and cowboy boots.  He put his feet up on the table, kicked back, and said mostly, “The students here are politically alienated, intellectually stunted, and emotionally damaged.  Don’t make matters worse.”  That was our orientation to the teaching part.  After that we learned where to get our parking stickers and where our offices were.

I didn’t have exactly what’s called an office.  I didn’t have a desk either but a table located in the kitchen of what had formerly been an aparment building.  I could dig it.

While I was living for those 7 years in my parents’ basement, I took evening classes off and on at the local state college.  I had heard that, if you could get an MA, you could teach in community college, so that’s what I was aiming for in the long run.  I took a class on Henry James because my favorite teacher in college had lectured on The Ambassadors, and while I had just the weekend before read the book (or tried to), the book she lectured on didn’t seem like the book I had read at all. 

That wasn’t the first time that had happened.  Sometimes I thought maybe they were just pulling this stuff out of a hat.  In my attempt to read all of the 101 greatest books of the western world, I had set myself to getting through James Joyce’s Ulysses the summer before I went off to college.  I could not make heads or tails of that thing.  Some parts were interesting.  For example, the main character, Bloom, at one point fries up a kidney.  That was interesting because I didn’t know people ate kidneys or even that they were eatable for that matter.

When I heard a lecture on the book in my first year of college, I thought maybe the Professor was on acid (some of them were on acid) because I swear and be damned if I could figure out how Bloom walking up the steps of the Dublin Library was passing through the straits of Scylla’s and Crebedis.  I guess it might have helped had I read the Odyssey, but I hadn’t at that point. 

I figured Joyce must have written the book for your worst kind of English major, the kind who thinks they are smart because they know what something “really means.”   Who else would read such a thing?  Like that poem, the Waste Land, that had like 5 foreign languages in it including Sanskrit.  I couldn’t see any reason for writing this stuff unless you were trying to prove how smart you were or to make other people feel stupid.

But The Ambassadors was different.  Stuff wasn’t hidden in it; I just hadn’t got it.  Also, at UCLA, my good buddy, who was drafted later and became catatonic, had made an observation about The Ambassadors in one of the classes, and the fucking Professor had gone out of his way to insult the guy.  I could still see him blushing.  So I signed up for a class on James at the State college to rectify my ignorance and to get some sort of metaphysical revenge on the guy who insulted my buddy.

I took my one and only ever incomplete for that class.  I don’t know why but I wasn’t working for a while and while I wasn’t I read that damn book over and over, and drew like diagrams and charts and all sorts of visual aids to figure out what this guy was going on about.  Finally, I turned in like a 50 page paper and the Professor said, should I wish to get an MA he would happy to work with me since I had already written most of a dissertation.

Life is just fucking contingency like Sartre says.  There’s this, then that, and so on.  Fate has nothing to do with it.  When you are walking through shit, you are just walking through shit, and there’s no hidden meaning to it.

Five years or so ago, I called a buddy that I had roomed with for a year in college.  I don’t know what came over me, but I knew he was an iron worker in San Francisco.  So I went to the union web page and there he was working for the union.  They gave me his number and I reached him on his cell as he was driving to check out a job.  We exchanged notes, and when I told him I was married, he laughed and said, “So you finally got over your woman problem?” 

 35 years later, he still remembered my “woman problem.”  Maybe that was because whenever the subject came up, I said I had a “woman problem.”  People only know what you tell them about yourself.  The “woman problem” was code for a whole bunch of issues, possibly pathological “shyness,” a “complete lack of self-esteem,” a stunted “emotional development,” an utter lack of experience, upon entering college, in the whole general area.  

I was not aware of the full extent of the problem until I was attracted at the end of my first year or maybe the start of my second year in college to Elsa.  First, I had never known anybody named Elsa and second she was exotic looking being a generation removed from one of those little countries near Russia, Estonia maybe or Latvia.  For a while I pretended that the attraction was not really there or that it was not mutual.  But one evening I am studying in the stacks, and I look down the long row of books and there she is sitting at the other end.  

So I go down and ask her what’s up, and she says she is there to see me.  Oh, yea, I say, and sit cross legged on the floor, and we talk a bit, and somewhere in there, she asks me what qualities I look for in a woman.  I was dumbfounded; I had never gotten to know a woman well enough to know they had particular qualities.  But off the top of my head, I said, intelligence.  That would be number one? She said.  I didn’t know about that but I couldn’t imagine myself being with a woman that wasn’t smart.

Whereupon, she starts to document how intelligent she is.  Her SAT scores were higher than mine; her high school GPA had been higher than mine.  Her IQ, if you could believe those tests, was higher than mine.  OK, so she was intelligent, but that for me was of secondary importance since I was wondering if maybe I had not acquired, while sitting there, a permanent boner and would never be able to stand up again without embarrassing myself. 

In a way that boner might stand symbolically for the very backboner of my “woman problem.”  A) I was not comfortable with the natural process of the boner, and B) the fact that she could look at me and I would get one meant she was in control.  A meant I could not relieve myself of the boner by moving deeper as it were into the relationship, and B meant I could not risk moving deeper into the relationship without possibly losing my mind and flunking out of school.

At the time, I didn’t have an inkling of how much my woman problem was related to my mother and my fear of completely disappearing into that place where boners go.

1968 proved a veritable avalanche of confusion.  Martin Luther King was murdered.  McCarthy knocked off LBJ in the Primaries; then LBJ resigned.   Robert Kennedy knocked off McCarthy in the California Primaries and was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.

By that time my good buddy and I had an apartment over a garage and a little black and white TV hooked up to an outdoor antenna—not just rabbit ears—and so being in the LA basin we could pick up a number of channels.  We got into watching late night horror movies—mostly vampires, and Frankenstein stuff, but especially Mummies—Return of the Mummy; the Mummy’s Return; Mummy Rising; Mummy’s Revenge—there were an unbelievable number of bad black and white mummy movies.  They were all sponsored by this Ralph Williams who had a car dealership and did his own advertisements.

The Mummy movies were all alike.  These stupid people would unearth the Mummy, and wrapped up usually in big bandages, he would start to pursue the Avatar of his long lost love who had been buried with him.  The poor guy must have been as horney as hell and figured that, given his decayed condition, the only person who would accept him was his own true love.  The poor fuck hadn’t learned that you simply can’t repeat the past; especially when the past is like 3000 years ago.  But there he would be on his dumb journey just like all the rest of us in search of true love and looking to get laid.

 I must have identified with the Mummy.  As I said, at first losing the stigma of my virginity was uplifting but then things got as confusing as ever.  At what point did quantity lead to quality; when did repeated copulation convert to the higher state of marriage.  Or did it?  I just didn’t the fuck know.  In the past, getting the girl knocked up had taken care of the decision for a lot of people, but the pill had taken care of that as a sort of inevitability.  And there was this “free love” stuff in the air, though love is never free.  I was as dumb and stupid as the mummy.

So the Mummy rises again, like a long defunct phallus, and wants to possess his Avatar, his female co-conspirator, but one must asked, who here is possessed really?  One must conclude I believe that the Mummy is possessed by the memory of his true love.  He is in the hands of the compulsion to repeat.  But I unlike the mummy did not wish to possess because that meant being possessed.  I felt something breaking up in my chest and felt rising to my lips, like the Mummy, not words but a grim howl.

 So I turn on the TV to see Kennedy gloat about his victory over McCarthy, whom I had wanted to win.  I scorn him in my heart as an craven opportunist and I start to turn the TV off as he left the podium.  But they are talking about something and then they are screaming, “Kennedy has been shot.”

It was like the Mummy was rising again.

Let’s see.  About 45 years ago I was in 9^th grade.  We were bussed to a school called Mount Miguel, named after a nearby mountain called Mount Miguel because the high school I later went to had not been built yet.  I have no idea who Miguel was or why they named a mountain after him.  Coming from the south, we didn’t know anything about California’s Spanish heritage.  For a long time we pronounced El Cajon like L Ca-John and La Jolla like La Jolly.

About that time I became upset by the death penalty maybe because of my own murderous inclinations towards my PU’s (or parental units, as my brothers and I call our mother and father).  Also in the news then was this guy Ceryl Chessman; I must have read an article or something about him and how he had “reformed” in prison and written books and things like that.  Of course, I didn’t know if he had reformed or not; he was probably still the creep he had always been.

But that didn’t make any difference.  If the government was supposed to represent the people, then when the government executed somebody it was doing so as my representative, although I couldn’t vote, of course.  And it just didn’t seem right to me that, if the government was my representative, that I should be implicated in the killing of somebody I didn’t know or really didn’t give a shit about. I mean not only was the government doing something I didn’t want it to do in my name, it was doing so in a very impersonal way. 

 I felt that if you were going to go about murdering somebody in that way that they should be allowed the dignity of it being personal.  I figured the governor should come in and shoot the guy.  How could a guy sit at his desk and know that somebody else was killing a guy that he could have saved?  Or maybe they should hold a lottery and some average Joe could be picked to shoot the guy in the head.  Or maybe one of the family members of one of the victims could do the job and afterwards they could jump up and down with joy, or whatever.

I think I started thinking about the impersonal stuff when I saw an episode of  “The Defenders.”  This had E.G. Marshall in it, who is now dead; and the guy who went on to be the father in the Brady Bunch—though I never watched that and may be wrong—who I think is also now dead.  They did an episode on capital punishment and they showed you the whole business right down to the final moment.  I mean the guy being executed did not have a chance at all.  He couldn’t run; he couldn’t fight back; there was not a fucking thing he could do, but sit there while they strapped him down and maybe pee on himself out of fear.  This was a human being and he was as helpless as a fucking dog.

So I got pretty scared because my PU’s really didn’t have positive expectations for me and my brothers.  It seemed to me that mostly they were worried that we would end up in prison or as sexual perverts.  So I guess I was thinking there but for the grace….

Hard to remember even that for a few years there in the 60’s capital punishment was illegal. 

I was read those books on the list of the 101 Greatest Books of the Western World by myself.  I didn’t have any teacher trying to teach me.  It was just me and the book, and because at the time these were the 101 Greatest Books of the Western World and not an ethnocentric list of works by dead white men, I just assumed these books were worth reading and might help me to understand what the hell was going on since I lived in a perpetual state of anxiety and confusion.

When I just couldn’t understand a book, I would just put it down and think, “I will get back to that later.”  Since I was reading on my own, I didn’t feel any pressure, except as that arose from the desire to understand, to get it down as one might when preparing for a test or writing a paper for a class. And sometimes when I couldn’t understand, I would try to noodle through what I was reading by thinking about what I did know and had experienced or thought myself and was occasionally rewarded by having the author of whatever I was reading give me words to think something that had been floating around unarticulated on the edges of my consciousness.  Yea, that’s it, I would think.

I also learned pretty quickly that when it came to the business of thinking and/or philosophizing, I was really a latecomer on the scene, and that most of the big thoughts I had were not new at all, but had been around for some time.  Over all, I approached these works humbly.  If I couldn’t understand something that was not the author’s fault; he was not too difficult or hard or depressing, as students like to say today when they are confronted with something that might exercise their brains a little.  No, the problem, if any, was with me.  I needed to try harder, to read again and again, until I had grasped the basic assumptions of the author.  Maybe that’s why I liked the classic philosophers because usually their assumptions were there in the book and once you grasped them you could follow along.

I carried this attitude of non-judgmental reading—I suppose now people would say non-critical—at least into my first quarter of college.  I remember well having been blown away by the Greeks, especially in the visual arts that I had not studied much on my own.  So in my first in class essay for college, I wrote mostly about how I could feel at least that I didn’t really understand the Greeks.  I knew I was taking a bit of a risk fessing up to my ignorance, but I had studied and to say why I felt I didn’t understand I had to write a bit about what I did.  I wrote what I honestly felt and in this case was rewarded for my honesty; the professor gave me an A and said that with my enthusiasm and willingness to learn, I surely would. 

Studying as I did on my own before college and later on my own when I was out of college and living in my parents’ basement, I developed the habits of an autodidact.  This really didn’t help me much in college; because college is about being schooled so that one comes out speaking the lingo appropriate to a particular discipline.  I remember a professor telling me when I was starting on my PhD dissertation, “Nick, you have got to decide whether you are in literature, political science, philosophy or psychology.”

And even at that late date in my “schooling,” I still asked myself, “Why, why must I decide.”  I was clueless.

My particular branch of the Tingles arrived in the colonies in the 1720s or possibly 1680s.  I equivocate out of honesty because the tie to 1680 is not wholly documented although it seems logical to me that the Solomon Tingle that arrived in the 1680s was related to the Solomon Tingle of the 1720s to whom I am sure I am related. In any case, the Tingles have been in North America for a long time.

My particular branch arrived in Virginia and then went even further south to North Carolina.  They would have been there, by my calculations, about the time a certain Colonel Byrd from England rode through and later recorded his observations in his “History of the Dividing Line.”  I guess he thought he was hot shit because his observations of the people of North Carolina are not favorable.

 He seems to think they had all gone native.  They let their slaves eat with them for God’s sakes, says Byrd the Yankee hypocrite.  The men hung out smoking their pipes, leaning against trees, or fence posts, conversing and shooting the breeze, while their women folk worked their butts off.  Occasionally one of them would go off in the woods and shoot something to eat.  There was plenty of stuff to shoot and the soil was fertile. Also they drank.

Sounds like Eden to me, if you are a male.  Sounds like this is what being an American really is.  Doing nothing, being lazy, smoking, drinking, killing stuff and lording it over women.

 After North Carolina, my branch moved to Georgia because of some religious difficulties.  That was the day of 40 acres and a mule and the clan acquired a good number of acres in the early 1800s.  Most of them stayed in what is now called historic Georgia; currently there are more dead Tingles in Georgia than living ones. 

 Six Tingle brothers fought in the Civil War, on the wrong side of course, in what was called the Florida Campaign.  You don’t hear much about the Florida Campaign, but apparently there was one.  All the brothers came back but one was not right in the head.  One of those brothers was married twice.  He had 8 children by his first wife, which probably killed her; and then he married a younger woman and had another 8.

All this is by way of saying that when I got to college in 1964 I was not prepared for it by way of background.  My people were farmers, and when the family land ran out in the 1920s sometimes not even that.  Unless I have missed some distant relative who went to Bible College, I was the first Tingle in my immediate line to get a BA, and to my knowledge, at this moment, I am the only one with a PhD.  I had no guidance or role model stuff from anybody in my family.

We were the kind of folks that when you went to a doctor that meant you were probably dying and, as for lawyers, if one of those came to see you, that meant they were coming to take your land.

For whatever reason, I had not read in my list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western World much stuff that rhymed.  This wouldn’t have made any difference but for the fact that after I got a D+ on my first paper ever for an English major class the stuff I had to write on was poetry.  Aside from Shakespeare I had not read poetry in high school; and really I didn’t consider Shakespeare poetry just hard English. 

Shakespeare has a plot too, but the poetry I had to write on didn’t have any plot.  It was more like that stuff by Robert Frost that people have to read in high school, especially the one about having taken the road less traveled by.  Like it was supposed to mean something and on top of that, at least in the class I was in, the way the poem was put together was supposed to be tied into that meaning.  So I not only had to figure out the meaning; I had to figure out how the way the thing was put together went along with the meaning.  

Fuck me, if I could understand it. The teacher wasn’t any help.  So I went to the library, partly to figure out how people wrote in the 20^th century since he had said I should try to write as if I lived in the 20^th century.  He gave us some poems to write on that were not discussed in class, and for some unknown reason I chose a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Maybe I chose it because the poem seemed to have all sorts of special effects that I might talk about as things that went along with the meaning whatever that was. 

Excuse me, please.  Here’s the poem I tried to write on.  You don’t have to try to figure out what it means:

 Look at this fucker.  Written up by some sort of overwrought religious fanatic.  I mean he dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ for God’s sake. Now that takes some gall.  I am pretty sure it’s about a bird, like that white tailed kite that lived by the Japanese truck farm.  So we have a religious fanatic who dedicates his poetry to Jesus H. Christ, for God’s sake, writing about a bird taking a nose dive after its prey.  Though you wouldn’t know it form lines like:  brute, beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle!  I thought maybe this guy was was beating off in his brain and about to come. But I wasn't about to write that in my paper.

And dig it, but “stirred for a bird,” has got to be one of the worst lines in the English language.

I had to wade through shit like this to get a B+ in that fucking class, and I almost killed myself trying to do it.

I declared myself an English major because I did well on the verbal part of my SATS and had lousy math teachers.  I played it safe because I didn’t want to flunk out, and I figured I would get to read novels and other books on the list of the 101 Greatest Books of the Western World.  So in the last quarter of my first year in college, I took a special introductory English class for English Majors only.

Needless to say, I was thrown into a state of shock, even panic, when I got my first paper ever that I had written as an English major with a D + on it.  What the plus was for I am not sure.  I had tried hard on it, probably overly hard; but was somewhat hampered by the fact that I had no idea what I was supposed to say or not to say about C.P. Snow’s little essay—much read in those days by English majors—called “The Two Cultures” or something like that.  This article said something like the humanity’s way of looking at things—whatever that was; and the scientific way of looking at things—whatever that was, were not opposed or had more in common than they thought they had.

For my part, I had no idea that these two points of view were in some sort of conflict to begin with.  I liked science for my part.  Once, for some unknown reason, I had read a number of books on ghosts and ghostly phenomena in high school.  I was really impressed by the way poltergeists could bite a person and leave actual teeth marks along WITH SILIVA.  That saliva part suggested I should take poltergeists more seriously than I had. 

Then I read a book that analyzed different stories on poltergeists and showed the scientific basis for many ghostly phenomenon in unconscious mental processes.  Take for example those guys in India who could do all sorts of amazing things with their bodies, or those cases of hysterical blindness and such.  I found these scientific explanations about as amazing as the supernatural ones.

I read another book that like “proved” people had past lives by the use of regressive hypnosis.  I thought, if this is true, why the hell haven’t I heard anything about this book before? So I went back to the library and checked out a book right next to the one I had read, and it was a whole book, with different articles by different scientists, refuting the book I had read which had been apparently pretty notorious in its day.  This one was also about unconscious processes and the great power of suggestion.

Where’s the conflict here?  I don’t see any conflict.  Had I been a Hindu maybe I would have been upset with the refutation of the idea of past lives.  But I wasn’t a Hindu.  As for ghosts, whether they existed or not really wouldn’t and didn’t get in the way of my enjoying a good ghost story.  Where’s the conflict?  

So lacking anything to say really, I tried to impress the teacher by writing humungous Latinate sentences that went on forever.  He wrote a lot of stuff on that paper, but the thing I remember is: “Write as if you lived in the 20^th century.” 

 I thought that was gratuitous really; and fuck me! In any case I thought I was doomed.