Healthy Poverty

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.”
―Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I read Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about twelve years ago. I was in my mid 30s, and my life had not turned out the way I wanted or expected it would. I spent my 20s battling severe depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation, and when I was 31, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I didn’t have a job. I was on disability. I had never dated or had a boyfriend. I had gained a lot of weight. And I was living with my parents in southern West Virginia even though I spent my teen years dreaming of escape and finding a homo promised land somewhere over the rainbow. I felt prematurely old, stuck, useless. I felt like a failure. I felt like I had nothing to look forward to. I feared I would never have a home of my own, or economic security, or friends. I feared I would never travel or get published. I had all these visions in my head of me living an elegant life. A good life. But non of it was coming true. The quote above—nestled in a book full of observations about nature, some of which are extremely harsh and ugly—helped me put things into perspective.

I hate it when you tell people your problems and they spit platitudes at you as if that’s going to make everything okay. We all have a right to our pain, and some things are truly intolerable…even if we are “lucky” things aren’t worse. But I think it helps, at least a little bit, to face facts. In my mid 30s, I knew my youth was fading fast, and I knew it was unlikely that I was ever going to be an object of desire. It wasn’t my destiny to be the blond, lithe golden boy that had been my ideal since high school. I knew it was possible that I’d never have a partner. I knew it was hard for me to make friends and it might not ever get easier. I knew that I could die poor, unknown, unpublished and unloved. I knew I might never see the Great Pyramid, the Great Wall, the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, the Grand Canal, the Tower of London, Petra, Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat.

However, once I faced the hard truths, it was time to take stock of the good stuff. I was still alive, and that was amazing. Even though I didn’t have long term security, and I wasn’t living in my own place, I wasn’t homeless, at least not yet. I did, in fact, have a nice, comfortable place to stay. I had a little yard, so I taught myself how to garden, which gave me immense pleasure and satisfaction. I lived less than a mile from a network of wooded trails leading down into the beautiful New River Gorge, and I started walking on those trails regularly. Doing that gave me a profound sense of calm and wellbeing. I was, at last, home in the woods. I began writing. I didn’t know if what I was producing was any good or if anyone would ever read what I wrote, but if you’re going to be a writer, you have to write, and so I did it. I had been socially isolated for years, so I used fiction to express all of my fears, anxieties, desires and longings. I ended up with a creepy, complex, labyrinthian tale. I’m proud of it, and I’ve written other things since then. I got a computer, too, and I found I could find out all kinds of things about the world and see all kinds of beautiful images of it even if I couldn’t travel. The best part is I discovered that I could use the computer to connect with others in a way that didn’t cause me to panic. I made friends. I often wished they lived closer, but they are now part of my life even if they are far away.

My honest assessment led me to conclude that life wasn’t all bad. The things that weighed me down were real, and they might not ever go away or be resolved. And that’s not okay, but it’s not the whole story. In Dillard’s words, I began to cultivate a healthy poverty, and in doing that, I began appreciating the pennies.

The Hypocrisy of the Self-Righteous

I remember this hideous asshole coming into our house via the television when I was a teenager. He was an arrogant, self-righteous thug who pretended he was the most morally upstanding person to ever to walk the planet. He often went after LGBTs. I can vividly recollect him hissing the word “homosexsheeals” with the utmost hostility and disgust.

I suppose I would have done my best to ignore him as just another creep in the world if it weren’t for the fact my parents paid attention to him and seemed to hold him in high esteem. There admiration made his condemnation seem all the more palpable and threatening to me. I felt frightened and cornered when he was on the television in the living room in our little house. My skin was cold and clammy. I was flooded with a sense of dread, and I half expected him to point to me and proclaim I was one these detestable “homosexsheeals.”

When it was discovered that he had been with a prostitute in the late 1980s, he refused to talk about it, and after a couple of months, he returned to his TV broadcast and tearfully proclaimed, "I have sinned against You, my Lord, and I would ask that Your Precious Blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, not to be remembered against me anymore."

When he was caught with a prostitute again in the early ‘90s, he once again refused to talk about it. He said, "The Lord told me it's flat none of your business."

Funny how he has a perfect right to judge the hell out of everyone else, but what he does is none of our business.

The Duggars’ hypocrisy reminded me of Swaggart’s.

A few thoughts about tedious book reviews and White's A Farewell Symphony

I often dislike and sometimes detest movie and book reviews written for magazines and news papers. The writers have a way of dropping arcane bits of information into their reviews that are almost completely irrelevant, and they will use unnecessary five dollar words. They also tend to cultivate a condescending attitude giving you the impression that they’re bored to the point of suicide but they will review this one last work because they must. They are supper smart, so it is their right and duty to judge.

I’ve been reading Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, and out of curiosity, I looked up a couple of reviews. It is White’s last autobiographical novel in a series of three. The first, A Boy’s Own Story, focused on his teen years. The next, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, was about his college days and his life as a young adult in New York. In The Farewell Symphony, the unnamed narrator who, more or less, represents White, talks about his life as a mature gay man in the ’70s and ’80s. Many of the men he meets in his thirties ends up dying of AIDS.

I read two reviews from two well known publications and became disgusted. Both reviewers showed considerable writing skills. Both wore their education on their sleeves. Neither seemed particularly interested in trying to understand what this novel was really about or why White might spend years writing this nearly 600 page book.

One reviewer devoted nearly his entire review to revealing who the characters were based on. (As I said, the novel is autobiographical, so many of the characters are real people, but White sometimes gave them fictional names.) The other went on for two paragraphs about the number of sex partners White’s protagonist, and presumably White himself, had in his youth. The reviewer seems to think White was bragging or lying or both. He even calculated how many lovers White would have had if he truly had an average of three lovers a week between 1962 and 1982...as if White intended to give a painfully correct and honest to God tally. The point was that he tricked a lot. He wasn’t bragging or lying in order to shock the reviewer. White was describing what life was like for him, a gay man who had been brought up to believe he was a mentally ill criminal. He was trying to reject that mentality, as many were, by the late ’60s, and when the fight for gay rights got underway, gay sex was billed as liberating and defiant. But White still didn’t take his sexuality seriously. He saw homosexuality as somehow counterfeit and beneath heterosexuality. White took straight couples seriously, but his attempts at gay romance were, in his eyes, a shallow and childish imitation of the “real thing.”

The reviewers understood that the novel was to a significant degree a response to the AIDS crisis—maybe because the title strongly hints at that—but it seemed to go over their heads that White was attempting to describe a perfect storm. The ’50s were repressive, but the ’60s brought liberation. However, it wasn’t a complete liberation. Gay men couldn’t simply forget what they were taught about themselves in the ’50s, and it’s not like society was ready to accept LGBTs simply because the police stopped raiding gay bars. So if you lived in a gay Mecca like NYC in those years, and you were young and widely considered at least relatively attractive, fucks were readily available, and fucking was celebrated among the gay tribe. You were not only satisfying a basic need by fucking, you were also sticking it the system that harmed you as a kid, the system that told you that wanting to do it with other boys was dirty, sinful and sick. But partners… You still couldn’t take a partner home to meet the parents on Thanksgiving, and taking a partner to the office Christmas party would have been risky. And did gay men really want to live like heterosexuals? The reviewers didn’t touch on any of that. Maybe they’re not quite as smart as they think they are. Maybe they should drop the bored pose and actually pay attention to what they’re reading.

A few words about The Beautiful Room is Empty

Last month, I read Edmund White’s autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story, and I wrote about my impressions. I loved the novel, but it seemed to me that White didn’t take his unnamed protagonist very seriously, and he often wrote about him and his sexual awakening in a comical way. The boy in his novel was unusually frank and experienced considering the events described took place in the mid 1950s.

The Beautiful Room is Empty is White’s next autobiographical novel in a series of three. I’ve been reading it for the last week or so, and it is about the same unnamed young gay man. The story picks up where A Boy’s Own Story leaves off. The upper middle class boy is in his last year of prep school. He soon goes on to college, and after college, he moves to New York.

This novel is a bit darker than the first. The parents are no longer merely annoyed and perplexed by the boy’s homosexuality. They have become judgmental and alarmed. They believe he is sick, and so does the boy. His attempt to change via psychoanalysis intensifies, but he continues to experiment sexually and he desperately wants to find a community, a place where he belongs. He compartmentalizes everything. He behaves a certain way when he’s around his frat brothers, and he’s someone else when he’s with his bohemian artistic friends. He is studying Chinese, so he has yet another identity when he’s around his Chinese friends.

What none of these various groups know about the boy is that he frequents the college tea room, and sometimes he cruises the streets looking for anonymous encounters. Eventually, he becomes acquainted with other LGBTs, and he is often shocked by them even as he is drawn to them. Many of these people have obviously been warped by strong societal disapproval and fear of punishment. They think of themselves as sick criminals, just as the boy does.

A turning point is when the college tea room is raided and several of his fellow bathroom blowjob aficionados are arrested. Their names are printed in the paper for all to see, and they’re forced to accept years of probation and treatment in order to avoid prison. The boy was lucky enough to be out of town when the raid took place.

Another turning point is when the boy realizes that he must end his association with the psychoanalyst he began seeing when he was 15. He concludes that the therapy is pointless and that he isn’t going to change, but dropping out of therapy feels like he’s betraying his crazy doctor because the doctor was the only adult the boy could talk to about his attractions and urges. Surprisingly, the doctor has grown up a bit himself and agrees with the boy, who is by then in his early 20s, that it’s time to call it quits and accept reality.

The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White gives us a poignant and painfully honest glimpse back at what it was like to be young and queer in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Wild is a film about Cheryl Strayed.

After her mother dies and her marriage ends, Cheryl sets out to hike the long and challenging Pacific Crest Trail. I believe she did this for the same reason Henry David Thoreau went to the woods—to learn what life has to teach. The adventure was difficult from the start. It was often lonely, and scary and painful. She encountered rattlesnakes and creepy men. She also crossed paths with a number of gentle souls, and she was surrounded by beauty every day. I love this film, and I plan to read the memoir on which it is based soon.