• We are, to borrow a term from statistics, regressing toward the mean—by which I mean that this Atlantean Golden Age of the West, our postwar height, especially in the United States, is collapsing upon itself, retracting, so that the few sit above the many and the many are illiterate or semiliterate, being amused to death (in Neil Postman’s phrase), and couldn’t care less. Technically, regression toward the mean in statistics or mathematics would require random variables, and that is about as much as I understand about it. I am using the phrase imaginatively to say that I think human society has pretty much adhered to a central or median position of the few above the many, at least since we have moved out of the hunter-gatherer phase. I feel that this has been the default throughout human history; it is our settled space. We belong here. Those of us with the interest and brain power, with the talent and insight, with the imagination to continue challenging ourselves to seek wisdom or enlightenment or insight, will remain, but we have always been a small population. Why pretend otherwise? Literacy peaked when printing presses ran like crazy, most people got a fairly good education, and there was nothing or very little to compete with print. It’s over. We will stumble back into our beehives and cocoons of immediate gratification, ignorant even of our ignorance, and very pleased with ourselves, doing as we are told. That’s the best!
• Apropos of this thought, when I was writing Oron way back around 1973, 1974, I conceived it as a sort of mythic or legendary story that, in the far future, if somehow the gist of it survived, could be told around a fire in a small company of listeners, perhaps when the new Dark Age comes (it will), with sufficient ingredients to remind us of the fundamental storytelling elements that keep human beings going: kings and warriors, sorcery and demons and gods, travel and discovery, betrayal and desire and death and rebirth, just as when we started telling stories. Maybe my reach exceeded my grasp, but the notion was there.
• I hated working retail, which I did in the late 1970s when I needed a job upon discovering that it is impossible for a fiction writer to survive on writing alone unless you hit that small, lucrative, narrow sweet spot where mediocrity succeeds. So I worked in a series of hardware stores–sorry…home improvement stores! There were people all day long. I don’t care for crowds, and being around others drains the energy from me, but mainly, I’d have preferred being left alone so I could read and work on any story ideas I had, oddball stuff. However, on that job, I did learn a few practical skills—glass cutting, pipe threading. What I did not care for was being treated rudely by guys with IQs half the size of my waist, in inches, as if I were a numbskull and only they knew how to do a thing. But that’s the region in which I grew up, Youngstown, Ohio, a steel town whose edges are rough, whose everything down to its core is rough.
• Characterization, writing, storytelling. Robert E. Howard once wrote, regarding the sort of rough-and-tumble protagonists he created, “They’re simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug themselves into the clear.” Quite a few critics have used this statement to justify their dismissal of Howard and his adventure stories, but it occurs to me that this was Howard’s way of expressing his own dismissal, even contempt, for the machinations of more intricate or complicated story lines in the same way that he was suspicious of our modern intricate and complicated lives. He grew up when the Western frontier was just past, listening in on other forms of storytelling and appreciating historical incidents. Think of the scene in the first Indiana Jones movie in which Jones, confronted with a master sword-wielder, simply pulls out his revolver and shoots his attacker. Cut, shoot, or slug your way out. Why fumble finding the right key on the key chain when you can put your shoulder to the door and get through that way? Leave the other stuff to Sherlock Holmes.
• Using foreground as a verb. Just…don’t. Stop it. Use emphasize or focuses on. Is that so hard? Postmodernism, poststructuralism, metanarrative, metafiction, meta-friend-for-drinks…I get it. This is where we are at this moment. Everything has become air; poke it and you get the insubstantial nonsense of grand narratives, which deserve to be postmodernized and poked. I get it. Just stop using foreground as a verb. It hurts my ears. I suppose I am conservative in some way regarding this. I understand that foreground has been adopted for new or modern or postmodern usage to distinguish its being of service in postmodern conversation, and that that is important for the kids to devise something new to shock their elders (“Oooh, we’re so postmodern and Foucaultian, dressed in 1980s primary colors and listening to Bananarama, that we use foreground as verb.”), and that this is fun, but I find it more sensible to understand simply that things fall apart and then are put together in new ways, either magically or by us, that the old way was a grand fiction and the new way is a grand fiction, too, and what we all need to do, aside from shocking audiences and readers with interesting broken sentences and words and broken people and broken narratives and boxes within boxes or even Yeats’s gyring spiral, is to sit and watch. I know that it means I am not participating or contributing in a radical or avant garde postmodern way, but the avant garde becomes the norm, the postmodern dissolves into that air, we will always find interesting ways to communicate our perilous humanity anew every generation, whether it is making marks on bones or Byron or Ionesco or Shepard or Wicked, but they are all carriages on a train going in circles to wave hi, as it goes ’round, at Plato or Socrates or the Buddha or someone designated by the tribe to keep the fire burning in a pouch as they all follow a trail to the next place. Hi! And there is always a next place, even if it is the grave. Hi!
I like to sit and watch the wind blow through the trees—new buds, a flowering, leaves shining in the rain, then turning gold and red and finally falling to the ground to be buried under snowfall, the branches bare and quivering in the wind, everything still until the eternal return, ancient and modern and postmodern all at once, the eternal return. We are the buds, we are the leaves, we fall to the ground, et cetera.
But I may also be hypocritical appreciating the ways of storytelling or artists with their bold canvases and ceramics and displays, the shock of the new (Robert Hughes), music of all kinds, people spinning and dancing, excites the hell out of me. Throw everything overboard and start over. Break it apart and keep going. Do it. It feels as though we are moving forward when we do this. So I am also a hypocrite, although I still dislike the use of foreground as a verb.
• Journey. Another word we need to abandon. Life as a journey. “My cancer journey as I recover.” Journey as self-discovery. I want us all to disappear into a place before now when we simply lived lives and were not obsessed with our egos and our therapy and our journeys. Sit down on your journey and look around and get past yourself. Help others instead.
• Ultimately, intelligence means little. Cunning is everything.