December, 2012

The Shivering Beggar, by Robert Graves

Near Clapham village, where fields began,

Saint Edward met a beggar man.

It was Christmas morning, the church bells tolled,

The old man trembled for the fierce cold.

Saint Edward cried, “It is monstrous sin

A beggar to lie in rags so thin!

An old gray-beard and the frost so keen:

I shall give him my fur-lined gaberdine.”
He stripped off his gaberdine of scarlet

And wrapped it round the aged varlet,

Who clutched at the folds with a muttered curse,

Quaking and chattering seven times worse.
Said Edward, “Sir, it would seem you freeze

Most bitter at your extremities.

Here are gloves and shoes and stockings also,

That warm upon your way you may go.”
The man took stocking and shoe and glove,

Blaspheming Christ our Saviour’s love,

Yet seemed to find but little relief,

Shaking and shivering like a leaf.
Said the saint again, “I have no great riches,

Yet take this tunic, take these breeches,

My shirt and my vest, take everything,

And give due thanks to Jesus the King.”
The saint stood naked upon the snow

Long miles from where he was lodged at Bowe,

Praying, “O God! my faith, it grows faint!

This would try the temper of any saint.
“Make clean my heart, Almighty, I pray,

And drive these sinful thoughts away.

Make clean my heart if it be Thy will,

This damned old rascal’s shivering still!”
He stooped, he touched the beggar man’s shoulder;

He asked him did the frost nip colder?

“Frost!” said the beggar, “no, stupid lad!

’Tis the palsy makes me shiver so bad.”

I have been in internet hell for reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend, let alone explain. Apparently there was some glitch that had nothing to do with me or my computer, but it effectively prevented me from checking my web site e-mails. It took my friend, the sublime genius at Cal Poly, to fix it, and I am now back in business.

Along with the usual job opportunities, notices of great wealth that would be mine as soon as I sent my Social Security number, bank account, and mother’s maiden name to an address in Nigeria, and offers of discount drugs I hope I never have to use, I received a very nice e-mail from a gentleman who discussed, among other things, the fact that he had bi-polar depression. I don’t suffer from or know much about bi-polar disorder (other than that some of our most creative geniuses have suffered from it) but I do know a little about depression. It runs in my family, proving that there is, apparently, a genetic component to just about everything from hair color to cancer, and it is also a corollary of post traumatic stress disorder, which I also have.

What impressed me most about this man’s email—apart from the fact that it was clearly written by someone intelligent and educated—was that he discussed his bi-polar depression at all. I was raised in a family where any kind of illness was supposed to be grandly ignored. If you snubbed it, it would, like an ill-mannered guest, slink away and leave you alone. That was for physical illnesses. Anything that fell under the bailiwick of the mental or emotional was even more grandly ignored. It simply wasn’t discussed, and I even have a dim memory of my mother once dismissing psychiatry as a fraud. It was an odd belief, if she truly believed that (she was very prone to hyperbole for dramatic or comic effect), because she suffered from depression, her father had really suffered from it, and one of her uncles had such a tenuous grasp on reality that he ended his days in the elegant and distinguished Baltimorean institution of Sheppard-Pratt, now known as a “behavioral health provider,” but known in those coarser days as a loony bin.

But if there is one thing I do know from my own experience, it is that the enemy of health—of mental health in particular—is silence. There are so many therapies and treatments and medicines available now, and so much more knowledge than in my unfortunate great-uncle’s day, that there is no reason for anyone to have to suffer from or be discriminated against because of mental health issues. The proviso, of course, is that one is able to talk openly and freely about it, without stigma. The young soldiers coming back with PTSD, and the frankness of geniuses like Francis Ford Coppola, and the authors who have written about their own troubles such as William Manchester (Goodbye Darkness), William Styron (Darkness Visible), Susanna Kayson (Girl, Interrupted) and so many others, have all contributed to a much more open attitude to mental issues.

Now, in the wake of the appalling tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, mental illness is being discussed on every news and talk show. Unfortunately, I fear people are making little distinction between the kind of mental illness that leads to evil, and the kind of mental illness that leads people to judge themselves with unrealistic harshness, or the kind of mental illness that can be easily ameliorated with drugs, just as they are making little distinction between firearms in evil hands and millions of the same firearms in law-abiding hands. There is also some, though not as much, talk about movies and video games that glorify violence, particularly violence with firearms.

No one has or ever will have any practical solution to evil. It exists, just as good exists. But any action on the three issues being discussed and blamed, to one extent or another, for the tragedy that occurred, will have consequences on America’s legal system, and more importantly on our Constitution.

Practically everyone is howling for some kind of gun control, but that will have an impact on the second amendment. A much smaller group are calling for restrictions on the kind of violent games and movies Hollywood relies on to fill its coffers, but that will—and must, by definition—require that the first amendment be modified. And then there is the issue of mental illness.

There is no right to privacy in the Constitution (anything not specifically spelled out in the Constitution as something the government may do is intended to be something it may not do, an aspect of the Constitution the current administration, like some others before it, has chosen to ignore) but the amendment that probably comes closest to touching on the privacy issue is the fourth. It too would need to be modified to allow private medical records to be shared with law enforcement.

One of the newspapers recently ran an op-ed piece talking about the second amendment and advocating that the Constitution should be regarded as something flexible, something that should be changed and modified over time to reflect the changing needs of a constantly evolving society. I cannot conceive of anything more moronic. The Constitution upholds and affirms God-given rights and freedoms, and those things do not change. Freedom, the right to defend yourself, the right to express yourself, the right to privacy, all those are things that were in the best interest of mankind two thousand years ago, and will still be in the best interest of mankind two thousand years from now.

So how do we prevent another horrifying tragedy? I don’t think we can. The Bath, Michigan school murders of 1927 have been forgotten today, but they far surpassed anything we have seen in our time, even Virginia Tech. Evil existed then, exists now, and will, sadly, always exist, and I for one do not believe your rights or mine should be curtailed in a futile effort to chase something that cannot be. As Ben Franklin put it, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

On the other hand, it is very good and desirable that we are talking openly and frankly about these things. Without the Constitution we might not have that liberty.

I found a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend in my local bookstore and snapped it up. I’ve never read her first novel, The Secret History, that was so successful and critically acclaimed, but I have been an admirer of hers ever since I stumbled across an early short story called Tam-O’-Shanter in The New Yorker, while sitting in a doctor’s office many years ago. I was so impressed by the story that I stole the magazine, photo-copied the story, and sent it out to just about everyone I know who is capable of reading. That probably involves the breaking of multiple federal, state, and international copyright laws, but the story was worth it. It’s extraordinary. If I weren’t afraid of her lawyers showing up at my door with brass knuckles and cease-and-desist orders, I would post it here.

The Little Friend opens with a wonderful description of how family history morphs into family mythology, a theme that is repeated as the story progresses. I do much of my reading during bouts of insomnia, and last night, after I got so tired my eyes couldn’t decipher the hieroglyphics on the page any more, I drifted off into a memory of my own family mythology.

My father was in the Foreign Service, and during the years he was stationed in Europe my parents used to take my sister and me on long driving trips through different countries to historic cities, walled towns, glorious cathedrals, museums, and decaying medieval castles. (My parents had a genius for finding little-known out-of-the-way gems where one or the other of them would say wistfully, “Maybe if we drop a $10.00 bill on the doorstep they’ll sell the place to us,” and I would go off into fantasies of living in the Middle Ages.) On a civil servant’s salary there was very little money so we usually stayed jammed together in cheap little inns and picnicked by day regardless of the weather.

One spring we went to Austria where we spent a night in the medieval town of Kitzbühel, mercifully unscathed by two World Wars. It is a very posh ski resort in the winter, and an equally posh tourist destination in the summer, but during the awkward spring off-season prices are slashed and we were able to stay in a very elegant hotel where we were practically the only guests. The only other American was a woman we saw in the dining room but never spoke to.

As we were leaving, my father noticed a very fancy woman’s bicycle outside and he and I ambled over to look at it. It had a little plaque stating that it had been custom built for Mrs. Ruth Johnson of such and such an address in Grosse Point, Michigan. The lady in the dining room. As a former newspaperman, my father always carried a little notebook and pen and now, almost by force of habit, he made a note of the information.

We returned home from that jaunt to find one of those postcards everyone used to get back in the days before email and text messages, clearly written by someone who knew my parents well, and who was simply staying in touch in a cheery, chatty manner, but with an absolutely illegible signature at the bottom. I was aware of all this because—in their desperation—my parents enlisted both my sister and me in their efforts to figure out who the hell sent the damn thing.

This meaningless little incident set in motion a chain of events that culminated in a family mythology that endured—for me at least—almost half a century.

I forget now which one of them had the initial idea (they both had wicked senses of humor) but it was tailored along these lines: Most people’s lives are much too placid and mundane, so what might happen if you knew some things—personal, family things—about someone who didn’t know you at all? Just think how exciting you could make that person’s life!

And so began the great “un-rest cure,” for that was how my parents thought of it (taking their cue from the short story writer H. H. Munro). For the next three or four years Mr. and Mrs. Johnson of Grosse Point, Michigan were bombarded with cheery postcards and Christmas cards from all over the world, wishing them well, making references to things and people and places they knew—for my father did his homework—all of them signed with an absolutely unintelligible squiggle and no return address.

The first postcard, naturally enough, said something about how sorry they were to have missed Ruth in Kitzbühel, they hoped the snow that was still around hadn’t spoiled her bike trip, etc., etc. This was followed by a few more generic cards, and then my father started doing his research. It turned out that Mr. Johnson was a vice-president of the Ford Motor Company and had actually been in my father’s class at Harvard Law School, so references were made to class reunions, inquiries after their children, fervent hopes that they might get together, gradually evolving, over time, into plaintiff chiding that they never wrote back. And on and on.

My fiendish father even got friends of his who were traveling to exotic and disparate locations around the globe to carry cards with them and mail them locally from places like Conakry and Omsk and Cochabamba. (“Wish you could have joined us here…”) And every now and then, at the dinner table, one or the other of my parents would start the ball rolling with something like:

“Do you suppose they wake up in the night thinking, ‘Who is it? Where did I meet this person? What’s his name?’”

“Oh, maybe they’re divorced by now. The stress was just too great.”

“Or they could both be in Sheppard-Pratt, in adjoining padded cells, plucking at their lips and sticking straws in their hair.”

And off they’d go to compose yet another card.

This all ended abruptly one day when a card arrived in the mail, addressed to my father, and signed, clearly and legibly, “Ruth Johnson.” It wasn’t from her, of course. It was some friend of my father’s who had an equally wicked sense of humor, but Daddy, visions of his career ending in a shambles of headlines and lawsuits, called it off.

So, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, if you, or more likely your children or grandchildren, should ever read this, have compassion and, I hope, a sense of humor. My parents were eccentric, imaginative people with a love of life and a sense of the absurd. There was no malice in either of them.

But remember, all this took place in Germany during the height of the Cold War. The pre-unification capitol of Bonn in the fifties and sixties was a hotbed of intrigue and spying and counter-spying and surveillance. German workers in the American community were regularly rounded up and deported to East Germany; apartments were scanned for bugs and if none were found it was just assumed they had been missed; phones were tapped, offices searched, and mail was read. There is a reason why so many of John le Carré’s novels are set in Germany. There is a reason why so many of them take place at least partially in Bonn.

One of the routine ways of passing confidential information was by encrypted letter or postcard, where a casual reference to a place or a date might be a reference to the passage of top-secret information, or a meeting, or an assassination. And here were my completely unworldly parents having a high old time mailing off frightfully casual cards, even having cards mailed from other countries, all of them with references to all kinds of places and dates and events that might or might not actually have occurred. You can imagine what the unimaginative, but highly suspicious, bureaucratic mind made of all this.

And you can also imagine what I made of it. I became so convinced that my father had, in fact, had something to do with the CIA that almost a half century later, egged on by my almost-as-gullible sister, I contacted the CIA using the Freedom of Information Act, and…

And was very disappointed to find out my father had nothing at all to do with covert operations. In my own defense, I must add that my conviction was not entirely unjustified. There really was an incident in the early fifties in Washington, DC, that involved my father, a Russian spy, Francis Gary Powers and his U2 spy plane, Allen Dulles, the FBI, wiretapping, and a dog, all of which actually happened, and all of which also entered the log of family history/mythology.

I’ve been exploring ways to market my books, an endeavor that makes writing them look like child’s play. The only good news I could come up with is that apparently every other self-published author feels exactly the same way: the time and effort spent to create something one is proud of become dwarfed by the time and effort needed to let people know one has something out there in the marketplace.

Back when I wrote An Accidental Cowboy (on a typewriter, if anyone remembers what those were), marketing meant my publisher lined up a few readings-cum-book-signings and some interviews. Each of those represented a day out of my life with very little to show for it in terms of sales, so the amount of time and effort (not to mention money spent on travel) would have been overwhelming if my publisher had decided to spend big bucks promoting the book. With that in mind, I have to admit using the internet for self-promotion for self-published books is an improvement, but…

But that presupposes the happy author has some basic familiarity with the computer (She Who Must Be Obeyed) and with She Who Must Be Obeyed’s evil handmaiden, the Internet. I do not. I tremble in fear before my computer, and the internet appears to have a speech impediment that only allows it to use acronyms. The Evil Handmaiden also delights in leading me into intricate mazes where I get hopelessly lost.

I decided to take advantage of some of Amazon’s tools for their authors. They have something they call “Author Central” which is supposedly designed to help authors market their work. But the Evil Handmaiden’s speech impediment makes it almost impossible to use. There is a way to link my blog to my Author Page. Okie dokie, that certainly seems like a sensible thing to do. How hard can it be, I thought to myself?

She Who Must Be Obeyed and the Evil Handmaiden laughed so hard they had to support each other. Then SWMBO wiped the tears from her eyes and cracked her whip and EH informed me I had to have an RSS feed. Huh? I emailed my computer guru, a superhero born of a cross between Einstein and Merlin, and he informed me that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Oh, yeah? Really simple for whom? And why couldn’t EH simply have said that without an acronym designed to make me feel even more computer illiterate than I already do?

Think of all the damned acronyms you have to deal with every time you crawl, cowering, up to the keyboard. From ACL (which I thought was something in my knee that doesn’t work anymore, but turns out to mean access control list) to BLOB (binary large object, whatever the hell that is) to FLOPS (floating point operations per second) to GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) to MIPS (million instructions per second, which is just about how overwhelmed I feel) to PROM (not a dance you’ll enjoy going to, it means programmable read only memory) to SMART (oh, shut up; it means self-monitoring and analysis reporting technology) to TWAIN (Mark is turning in his grave, but it means toolkit without an informative name) to XML (not one of the classic Jaguars, but rather extensible markup language.)

I’ve decided to fight back against SWMBO and EH with my own acronym: FU.