Actually, it’s the last MFA in a Box weekly blog.  Waltz sounds better than blog.  In fact blog joins frack and spam as slightly obscene words that I might have enjoyed using as verbs in junior high school, but at this late stage of my life find irritating.  If what I’ve been doing every Monday or so for a year now had been called something other than blogging, I still might be doing it.  I should have been delivering a weekly waltz to all of you out there in cyberland. You’d be happier and I’d be Johann Strauss.

I’d like to thank my publisher, Mike O’Mary, and the Dream of Things Team for setting up this space and getting the initial word out through the Dream of Things website.  For those of you who don’t know him, Mike is a genuine good guy, whose picture is in the dictionary right next to Generosity and again right next to Kindness. He’s been a good friend to me since long before he became a publisher. My first memory of him is from my first MFA workshop at the University of Montana, back in 1986, when I realized that our professor, Earl Ganz, was making subtle but really dark existential jokes and that someone else in the class besides me was laughing at them.  Of such moments are friendships born—dark existential friendships, which are the best and most durable kind.

I’d like to thank all of you who took the time to comment.  I read what you wrote carefully and tried to respond to it in the next blog, however obliquely. You gave me a vision of the people I was writing for, an essential external for any writer.

Of all the people who responded, I would like to especially thank Joan L. Cannon, who gives me hope that I’ll make it into my eighties still embracing the world, still trying out new skills, and not falling victim to thinking I already know all that I need to know. Joan L. Cannon, you’re an inspiration to me and to many others, and I hope you keep writing forever. You’re a better writer than you think you are, and you’re going to be better yet. May your path get ever smoother as you go.

To all of the craven Gollum-like sub-humans who spammed my site, I’d like to point out that the Universe will see to it that jackals will gnaw on the spavined bones of your syphilitic grandchildren.  That’s not me being vindictive. That’s just the way the Universe deals with spammers, and you should have thought of that before you became one.  It probably doesn’t make you feel any better that your grandchildren will die cursing your name, but it can’t be helped now.  If any of you lie awake at 3 a.m., regretting your twisted little lives, think of how much better things would have been if you’d all become waltzers instead.

To those of you who wrote unkind comments about my grammar and were denied approval of your comments, I apologize. I should have let you have your say, even if you were being grammar fascists. Most of you were quibbling about typos, claiming I shouldn’t be writing a blog on writing if I was going to make grammar mistakes.  I did, as a result of your efforts, start proofreading before I sent a blog off, and I even learned how to edit my own blog once it had been published, which is why some of the most egregious mistakes disappeared over time.  So in spite of what looked like malicious intentions, you made the world a better place. Tombstones have recorded worse contributions.

Speaking of tombstones, you may have intuited that I’ve become worried about the survival of our civilization.  For many years I was a kindly professor who helped students to learn how to write and sent them off into what I thought was a benign world.  These days, of course, the world doesn’t appear to be so benign, especially to twenty-somethings with a degree, college loans to pay off, and no job.  So I’ve had a crisis of faith about the reasons I had a teaching career—fortunately I’m not in the middle of that career—and have come up hard against the questions I should have answered differently years ago: Why be a serious writer? Why not just mess around with words and tell funny little stories to make people happy? Why not make money with your God-given talent?

Readers of last week’s blog will know that you can only answer such questions one essay or poem or story at a time, but here’s what is beginning to look like one answer:  You write to wake people to the condition of their world, which doesn’t look too good.  Climate change and the crisis of capitalism [the 4Cs] make me glad that I’m old enough to have seen The Doors in concert and paid off college loans and had a brief stint where I was a tenured full professor before I moved on to better things.

I really did move on to better things.  When I left academe, it was a voluntary plunge into poverty, physical exercise, and blue-collar work that didn’t require me to be particularly articulate. It was also a sudden lack of institutional identity, committee meetings, and faculty politics. It caused a sudden awareness of how limited and limiting the academic world was.  The existential questions that an academic job insulated me from suddenly got a lot more urgent, which was okay, as I had a decade or two to consider them rather than having them all gang up on me on my deathbed.

I can’t say I’ve made a lot of progress with those questions, but I’ve started writing a book called A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, which are small meditations on our current cultural situation.  As I said, things don’t look good, but I have decided it’s better to be an honest observer of a dark world than to make up cheery lies for people who want to spend their lives in various degrees of illusion. If I wanted to make up cheery lies I would have gone into advertising and made a lot more money and had a secretary who looked like Christina Hendricks.

So, piece by piece, meditation by meditation, I’m exploring the end of this dark world as I know it.  I don’t know who will read my writing in a hundred years, or if anyone will be able to read in a hundred years. I don’t even know if anyone will be alive in a hundred years, unless it’s bacteria hanging out in hydrothermal reservoirs a mile beneath the surface of the earth.  But if bacteria can read, I’d like them to understand that in the last few decades of human existence, one of those humans looked around himself, observed carefully and thought about what he observed, and wrote down the results of that thinking—existential jokes, mostly, which I’m pretty sure bacteria prefer above all other forms of humor.  Other than the jokes, there’s a certain last will and testament quality to what I’m writing these days, not because I’m planning on dying anytime soon, but because there’s a lot to elegize these days.

Yesterday I wrote these words:  “It’s hard to believe that the species that created Opus 35 in D Major also created Koch Industries, but it’s happened.”

It’s happened, and we’re looking at a world that is being destroyed by greed and corruption.  Formerly honest men become dishonest creeps when they get elected to public office. Newspapers tap the phones of bereaved families.  Financial services companies manipulate governments when they’re not running those governments. Even if you don’t believe in global warming, you can believe that we’re destroying what’s left of a wild and beautiful world in our haste to turn it all into habitat for humanity. Seven billion of us are crowding the planet, and anyone with a pocket calculator can figure out that we haven’t got the room to do what we’ve been doing for yet another generation.

I’ll stop, but I hope it’s clear that there’s plenty to write about in this world, flawed as it is, especially if you can keep existentially funny and honestly grief-stricken about it.

I’ll leave you with a couple of book recommendations.  They are books that place contemporary life in perspective.  The first is Jim Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, a discussion—more like a rant, but a steely-eyed rant—about the devastating economic and social consequences that will accompany the end of cheap petroleum. It’s a prescient book, in that it was written some years ago and describes the present rather well.  I’d rather not have the future it describes, but it looks as if we could, given our present trajectory.

The other is Guy R. McPherson’s Walking Away From Empire, a new book about to be available on Amazon.  McPherson is a tenured professor who resigned and moved to a self-sustaining mud hut in a rural area not far from the pampered halls of academe, and he did it out of the realization that contemporary civilization is morally and economically rotten. I admire his writing, which is plainspoken and full of the truth, and his thinking, which grasps bad news and comes up with pragmatic ways of dealing with it, and his moral courage, which I wish I could transfer directly to Congress and our president.

Both these books will change your life if you let them.  They won’t let you live comfortably in suburban comfort, and they won’t let you assume you’ll ever see your 401(k) or take Social Security for granted, but they will peel the distorting veneer off the world we live in.  For a writer, that’s a good thing.

One last note: watch this space. Mike and I will keep it open for awhile in case you want to download some of the entries and I’ll occasionally drop a piece of the 100 Little Pieces book into it.  But it won’t be a blog on writing any more—you who have read it every week know more than enough about writing to go on from here.  As I always say, writing isn’t rocket surgery.

What I will be doing is throwing new stuff out to an audience I’ve come to value. Any feedback will be welcome.

Thank you all.

John

Audience is everything. That’s what I’ve told my writing students.  In the best tradition of gnomic utterances, I was cleaving to the truth in all senses of the word.

Content counts for something. Technical excellence counts for something. The writer probably counts for something, although you run into a variation of the Heisenberg Principle with writers: you can either know what a writer is writing or if he or she counts for something, but not both at once. A writer writing is a work in progress as much as an unfinished sentence on the screen.

In a life as well as in writing, a good last paragraph always shoots back through the whole of a piece, finalizing its context, and, if it’s really good, its audience. But without audience, none of these things means anything.

The 2008 class of the Pacific University MFA program asked me to deliver the faculty address at their graduation. These were not high school students on the brink of a new world full of new adventures. These were people who had sacrificed time and treasure and in some cases jobs and relationships to learn to write over the previous two years. They knew their future as writers and as human beings was uncertain. Life on the other side of an MFA is unknowable and unpredictable and good luck can turn bad in an instant. I wasn’t going to tell them that—graduation, after all, is supposed to be a happy occasion. But I wanted to give them the ability to stand outside their educations for a moment and look for a way to navigate the potholed road ahead.

So for my fifty-first blog, more baccalaureatana:

Commencement Address

Pacific University MFA Program

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Graduates, colleagues, and friends and family of graduates:

This ceremony marks a happy and hopeful occasion, but also a solemn one, and one that can be tinged by fear.

Receiving a terminal degree is a real rite of passage, one of the few we have left. You can get married—and unmarried. You can get a driver’s license but it can be taken away. You can vote but your vote can be taken away if you don’t have a driver’s license. Losing your virginity is reversible if you join a fundamentalist youth group. People currently trying to upload their brains into hard drives tell us that death is a minor matter involving the transfer of ones and zeroes, hardly worth a ceremony. Of course you can be born-again, which is a big rite of passage, but being born-again doesn’t always mean you stay born-again.

However, graduating with an MFA from Pacific University is permanent. Your degree means you are a recognized master of your craft. The font of wisdom, which you once may have located in this faculty, is now located in you.

That’s where fear comes in. Because probably you don’t feel like you contain a font of wisdom. It’s likely that your wisdom feels barely adequate to get you to the second page of your next story, or to the second stanza of your next poem.

I know that if I had been told I contained a font of wisdom at my MFA graduation, I would have applied to the University of Utah’s PhD program in creative writing, hoping that in another three years I would have enough wisdom for a font.

But my problem was not too little wisdom. It was too much. During the few short semesters of my MFA I had been hit with wisdom from all angles, most of it contradictory, and a good part of it obvious fabrication. I had read too much, learned too much, been told too much, and thought too much. No way could I put it all together. I felt like I’d been locked inside a kaleidoscope for two years. On drugs. With a bunch of monkeys.

Fortunately our MFA commencement speaker was my old girlfriend LaDawna Spiegle-Fenster, the best-selling author of I Think I Can, I Think I Can: How a Benign Universe Makes Writing Painless and Fun. LaDawna stood at the lectern in a chartreuse duster and bright pink cowboy boots and a sky blue cowboy hat—she was not in academic garb because she didn’t have an MFA—and told us that, no problem, we could take all the chaos of our new knowledge and make sense of it, poem by poem, book by book. Just like that.

And she was right. That’s the way it happened for me. Story by story, article by article, book by book, I figured it out. Except it was never painless. And the contradictions never resolved themselves. It was fun, but that was because early on I had learned to love pain.

I should tell you I didn’t really go to my MFA graduation. I spent graduation day trying to finish an article I had foolishly promised the editor of an airline magazine. It had gone so badly that I had called him up on the day it was due and told him I couldn’t do it. He told me to get it in by midnight or Luigi and Nunzio would be around to break every appendage I could possibly use to type with. So when Pomp and Circumstancewas playing, I was keeping cadence by pounding my head on my keyboard. Over the years, I have written a lot of articles that way, just so I’d have something to hand to Luigi and Nunzio when they came to the door.

You should also know I made up what LaDawna Spiegel-Fenster was wearing that day, and the title of her book. I got a real kick out of writing the phrase Benign Universe.

For that matter, I made up LaDawna.  I have no idea who spoke at my MFA graduation.

But you know how little kids have imaginary playmates? LaDawna was my imaginary girlfriend. We started dating my sophomore year in high school, but we broke up when I was twenty-four. I wanted to get married but she said she needed space to write. Then she went and married a hedge-fund manager and broke my heart. She got divorced and with the two million dollars she got from that breakup, she bought a little island off the coast of British Columbia where she writes her books.

I’ve kept track of her. She writes a book in an established genre, gets it published, and it sells well. She writes another book. Sometimes if I drink too much I call her up at 3 a.m. and ask her how she can waste her talent writing genre stuff. She asks me how much moneyI’ve ever made on writing. Then she says it’s late and she isn’t alone, she’s got a new boyfriend, he’s a plastic surgeon, he’s going to do over her whole body, bit by bit—how creepy is that?—and she tells me to renew my Zoloft prescription, and hangs up.

I’ve given up on LaDawna. But when I go to Barnes and Noble and look in the staff’s picks section, a couple of her books are always there.

You might intuit that when LaDawna left me, I lost a part of myself that would have made it easier for me to write. That’s true. She’s much more in tune with the publishing world than I am, much more at ease with the words she puts on the page, much more sure that her stories, books, and articles are her own creations rather than scary entities that are demanding to be born into this world.

That’s the biggest difference between us. My work scares the hell out of me and is never in control. She’s always in perfect control of hers and isn’t afraid of it, and has no reason to be.

I said earlier that graduating with an MFA from Pacific University cannot be reversed. That’s a good thing, because there will come times when you will be trying to help a book into this world, and you will be in agony, and you won’t know if that book—if it ever makes it—will bless you or curse you. You will wish then that you could be back before your MFA, before you learned how difficult and delicate and frightening writing could be.

But you can’t go back. You can only go forward, and chase words over a horizon full of mist and smoke and blood and fading light.

Here’s what Thomas Stearns Eliot has to say on the matter:

So here I am
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.  And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

If I only could have said that to LaDawna at 3 a.m., she might have said, “You’ve changed since you got that MFA. I like you now.  Maybe we could meet for a weekend and you could tell me more about these raids on the inarticulate.”

But here’s all I could have said back to her: “Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, you’ll figure out how to raid the inarticulate. But the inarticulate is well defended. You will take casualties.  Your mantra will be I don’t think I can I don’t think I can, and there will be times when you stop loving the pain. And the universe isn’t benign, and the things that you think can be reconciled are irreconcilable.”

And LaDawna would have decided she was right to leave me in the first place.

Along these lines, maybe you’ve thought that now that you have an MFA, nothing will ever be fun again. It’s partly true. The world will never be as simple or as easy as it was before you learned to write. But trying to write something great and failing at it is more fun than writing something you know you can succeed with, and your MFA will come in handy when you try to write something great.

Eliot didn’t have an MFA—he worked as a bank clerk, which was what MFA students did before MFAs were invented. But he took writing and failing just as seriously as if he had had an MFA, and he had his own definition of what was fun for serious writers. For us, he said, it’s not a matter of gaining or losing, winning or being defeated. For us, there is only the trying.

That’s what I’ll leave you with. There is only the trying. What you try is up to you, but if it involves increasing what is humanly possible in a less-than-benign universe, all the while telling the truth—even if you don’t do it perfectly, even if you screw up, even if you fail, it will still be good. And fun. So be good and have fun.

I began my teaching career at a small start-up school in Sun Valley, Idaho. I ended up wearing a lot of hats there, eventually teaching 7^th, 8^th, 9^th,10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grade English, and being the school’s college counselor, assistant soccer coach and outdoors program director in the seven years I was there. In June of 2010 I was asked to return and give a graduation speech to a class of seniors who were about to go out into a world that seemed a lot more frightening to me than the world I had graduated into in 1968.

They did have youth, intelligence, and enthusiasm, all of which count for something. I crafted a speech that I thought would help them to use these assets to their best advantage, a matter of life and death in the future they faced.  If you have a seventeen-year-old in the house, you can read this speech aloud and see what he or she has to say about it.  Put it away for five or ten years and read it to the same person again.  Let me know how it turns out.

Community School Graduation Speech, June 6, 2010

Graduates, headmaster, trustees, faculty and staff of the Community School, and friends and family of graduates:

Thirty-five years ago, when I agreed to teach English and science at the newborn Ketchum-Sun Valley Community School, I did not know I would spend my life as a teacher, nor did I realize I would see my life-work as a source of joy.  So I wish to thank the Community School for setting me on a path that I continue to love.

Today we are here to graduate some wonderful people. I’m going speak to them, but the rest of you can listen in.

I can say with confidence that you’re wonderful people, because I’ve met you and I’ve seen the way you treat each other and I’ve talked to a few of your teachers.  Without much prompting, your teachers have described you as a hard-working group, deeply interested in learning new things, considerate of others, and humble in the face of your accomplishments.

That is extraordinary praise, and it reminded me of what an admissions director at Harvard told me when I was the college counselor for the Community School.  He was dishing some gossip about another school in the neighborhood.

“Down at M.I.T.,” he said, “They could fill every class with applicants who have perfect SAT scores.  They tried that, and got brilliant students who quit math and physics and engineering and were unemployed dropouts by the time they were twenty-four.  Now they’re looking for applicants who will peak out at fifty-five.”

M.I.T. learned to stop depending on standardized test scores to pick their applicants.  They began to look for people who were deeply interested in learning new things, who were considerate of others, and who were humble in the face of their accomplishments.

M.I.T. started searching for people who were going to become smarter and better educated and more involved throughout their lives. They learned to look for people like you.

The only thing that worries me is that you’ll peak out at fifty-five, and not sixty-five or seventy-five. Fifty-five seems a little young to me these days.

Here’s how the great science fiction author Alice Sheldon described her ambition to write better and with more intensity until the day she died:  “I want to burn right down to the waterline.”

That’s an unfortunate metaphor in a world that contains both oil platforms and the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s the privilege of writers to use unfortunate metaphors.

It’s not the privilege of anyone, writer or not, to peak out or burn out or drop out before he or she has given back to this world.  So I’ll say right now that you will not fulfill your life until you find out what it is you have to give to the people around you, and have given it, and they’ve accepted it in some way.

It may take years to find out what you have to give, and more years to turn it into something acceptable, but if you’re making the lives of the people around you better and happier, you’re going in the right direction.  If you’re making their lives worse and more miserable, stop and turn around.

For the past year I’ve been writing a book for people who want to become writers. At the end of every chapter I’ve listed rules for making good stories into great ones. I began to like writing down rules so much that I’ve come up with some for you.

A list of rules is probably not what you want to hear right now, but these are rules designed to improve the life stories of the people you will be when you’re fifty-five or sixty-five or seventy-five.  You owe those old people a good life, and you can imagine them sitting on the edge of their rocking chairs, thinking about how uncertain life is, and hoping you’ll get some good, solid rules to follow today. They like the idea that you might be able to change unhappy endings to happy ones, boring dialogue to exciting conversation, and scenes where nothing happens into action-packed triumphs of excellence over mediocrity.

So here we go:

1. If it’s the wrong thing, don’t do it. I borrowed this rule from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. The people who have followed it have improved their own lives and the lives of the people around them for centuries.  When people complain about how hard it can be to know the right thing to do, they’re usually planning on doing the wrong thing and don’t want to deal with the guilt.
2. If it’s not the truth, don’t say it. Marcus Aurelius again. In college, you’ll hear from your fellow students and even from some professors that truth is relative, but that’s generally when they’re about to lie to you.
3. Buy yourself a pocket calculator. Use it to add up what it’s cost your family to get you to this point in your life.  Your family will be happy to supply you with the raw data. You can also use the calculator to figure out the true cost of loans before you sign on the dotted line.
4. If possible, don’t go into debt for college. Families, credit card companies, and financial aid officers will be offering you what looks like free money for a while.  The key words here are for a while.
5. Get a job. The best way to keep your debt at its lowest is to get a job during college and during your summer and winter vacations. The biggest gap in quality between college students is not between rich and poor, smart or not so smart, private-schooled or from inner-city high schools.  It’s between those students who have a job during college and the ones who don’t. If you fight fire all summer and turn all the money you’ve earned over to the college business office at the start of fall semester, you’ll get more from your economics class than if you’d sat around all summer playing Grand Theft Auto.  If you tell your roommate you can’t go to the party because you’ve got the graveyard shift at the local 7-11, you’ll be a step ahead of everyone else when you study feudalism in your Medieval History class.
6. Don’t Make Unconscious Life Decisions. What your major will be, the type of person you fall in love with, and your after-college plans are the first draft of a story.  Like most first drafts, it’s got some missing scenes and tedious sentences.  You’ve got some rewriting to do, and the more consciously you can do a rewrite, the better the final draft is going to be.
7. Don’t start anything you can’t finish. Today, you’re finishing a story. You know what a mixture of joy and sadness that is, and how a mixture of joy and sadness makes a story better than if it were completely happy or completely sad.  When you say, “Of course I’ll pay you back,” or “I’ll love you forever,” or, “Let’s raise a kid,” you’re starting a story you need to finish. If you don’t finish it, you’ll deprive yourself of the joy part of the mixture.
8. Pay attention. Woody Allen famously said that half of life is just showing up.  That’s the easy half.  The harder half is being a careful witness to what’s going on.  A few details are often the difference between what you think is going on and what’s really going on.  Scientific revolutions have come from a single small detail that didn’t fit the story people were telling about the world.
9. Don’t limit your plans to what you’re sure you can do. Plan things too carefully, and you’ll exile Mr. Dumb Luck from your life. Not a good idea. Mr. Dumb Luck is your friend even though he’s a big old goofy guy who dresses funny and tells people that you have no imagination.
10. The toughest rule of all. Embrace grief when it comes. If you can’t embrace grief when it comes, you won’t be able to embrace happiness when it comes.

I’m going to end with a short parable.

An ordinary grown-up is working at an ordinary job, living in an ordinary small town, a town full of quiet streets lined by summer trees and flower gardens and small houses reflecting modest incomes.  But in the town a child has been abandoned, a tiny child only a few months old, and this quite ordinary grown-up takes on the responsibility of raising that child.

Here the ordinary ceases to be ordinary.  The grown-up makes extraordinary sacrifices for the child, and assembles extraordinary resources to protect and nourish it.  Yet the grown-up doesn’t see the effort or the sacrifice—it’s simply what has to be done. There’s no wonder in this great task, except in the eyes of the other people in the town, who see that a once-ordinary person’s love for a child is so powerful and so freely given that there is a soft and golden glow around them both.

The child’s contribution to that glow is a mixture of happiness and openness toward the bright beauty of the world and the joyful awareness of being protected and well cared for. Whatever caused the abandonment in the first place doesn’t matter any more.

That grown-up is you. That child is you.

Take care of yourself.

Thank you for letting me share this day with you.

John Rember

My title this week is taken from H.G. Wells’ 1933 novel, which purported to be a chronicle of world history from 1933 to 2106. Wells got some things right, notably submarine-based ballistic missiles and the World Encyclopedia, but missed the shape and outcome of World War II, the continued strength of religion (he suggested that religion would be stamped out and replaced with rationalist scientific materialism), and the triumph of corporate capitalism over socialism. He said nothing about resource depletion, climate chaos, human population growth, and the fact that the World Encyclopedia would be called the Internet. These days, people read the book to see what he got wrong rather than what he got right. If they want to see what he got right, they read The Time Machine – all of which suggests that if you want to be a prophet, you should write as many books about the future as possible. One of them may be right, and when the time comes, you can throw the rest in the bushes.

That said, predicting specific events is risky. My work-in-progress these days is a small book tentatively called 100 Little Pieces About the End of the World. It consists of ten ten-item essays. I’m working on item number 65 right now, and most of what I’ve been writing has been about how history doesn’t offer us much help when we try to figure out what’s coming next. Futurists make this point when they talk about the singularity – the point where computers will become so advanced that scientific progress will accelerate beyond the human.

They’re late to the party, which is what sin looks like for futurists. I think the singularity came in 1915, when industrial warfare destroyed conventional notions of what human beings were and how they should behave.

In 1915, men became machine-men. In subsequent years, civilian populations became both hostages and enemy combatants. Notions of honor and justice and nobility faded before technological might, which gained its own moral advocates. Capitalism proved to be uniquely suited to eternal war, and triumphed as a system when the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism became permanent features of our consciousness. Security, if you were a human being sharing a world with chemical or biological or nuclear weapons, became something that might have existed once, in a past made irrelevant by new machines and new ways of communicating, and by a world culture that wiped out local cultures and histories.

In trying to imagine the world of 2015, I’ve been focusing on human population, resource depletion, the difficulties capitalism has when confronted with limits to economic growth. I’m looking at climate change as a byproduct of human activity, figuring that when you dump a bunch of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere of a planet that has a history of climate oscillation, you’re going to set the climate oscillating. I’m focusing on the breakdown of old cultural stories, and on the failure of new stories to do the job the old ones did. I’m looking at biological class warfare, starting with the anti-vaccination memes now circulating among the scientifically illiterate, and the de facto denial of medical services to the poor. I’m trying to imagine my neighbors without access to internal combustion engines or television or the Internet. I’m trying to understand how a population raised on consumption as a patriotic activity will react to a world where food and energy are scarce. I worry in print that ethics and altruism will not prevail over narcissism and hunger.

I haven’t written about a rogue planet coming in from the Oort Cloud to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, or the Yellowstone Supervolcano going off next July 4, or lizard-like aliens imposing a world government, because I think humans breeding like bunnies will be adequate to end the world as we know it. I don’t worry about the JFK assassination or 9/11 being a false-flag operation or the Bilderberger Conspiracy, because the official accounts of such matters are just as depressing and just as full of deadly implications for the future.

It may sound as if I’m a pessimist, but I’m not. I’m a person with very little power and influence who has nonetheless had a good life and continues to wake each day in a beautiful world—one that for all its faults and frailties, continues to provide love and joy in appreciable quantities. I hope it lasts for another 30 years, and, of course, I hope I do too. Even thought I have other reasons for wanting to live that long, I’d still like to find out if I’m any better at prophecy than H.G. Wells was.

Some years ago Julie and I sold one of the two houses we owned and moved into the smaller house of the two.  We went from having three thousand square feet of space for our stuff to having less than a thousand.  So we had a potlatch of sorts, giving away bulky items and things that we hadn’t used for several years. Even so we ended up with much too much in the way of material objects.

We’ve adopted rules that have gradually made things better:

1. If you buy something, you have to get rid of two similar somethings. 
2. Obsolete computers must be recycled ASAP.
3. If something hasn’t been used for a year, an unsentimental storage-benefit analysis must be conducted. 
4. Don’t buy anything you don’t need. Ever.

We haven’t complied with these rules as well as we should have, but economist friends have pointed out that if everyone in consumer culture behaved the way we’ve been behaving, Western Civilization would fall by October.  We’ve replied that by the time you hit middle age, you don’t own things, things own you, and we don’t want to be owned.

Emerson said it better:  “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Lately I’ve been looking at old computer files—fiction, essays, early drafts of articles, my attempts at poetry, query letters, ideas for novels—and have realized that cluttered cyberspace can fester just as badly as real space, and it’s just as important to clean it out. Cyber-stuff can own you just as completely as the tangible stuff.

I’ve been going through old files and getting rid of the embarrassing or ill-conceived writing.  Last month, before sending an old Power Mac off to the recyclers, I smashed its hard drive with a hammer and tossed it in my landscaping slash pile that will be torched some snowy morning in November.

Trust me when I say that what I’m doing isn’t anything like burning the Library at Alexandria.  I’m getting rid of knowledge, it’s true, but it’s the knowledge that I’m a slow learner.  After several decades of teaching writing, I can recognize false starts and approaching pitfalls when I see them, and when I go through my old files, there are lots of both.  There are moments of excruciating naiveté, moments of cloying self-indulgence, moments when my author’s persona spilled wetly out onto the page, pleased with itself only because it was itself, which in retrospect wasn’t anything to be pleased about.

What is evident now is that most of the good work I did in my early career got published.  Books and articles that didn’t get published didn’t get published for a reason, and I’ve been deleting them right and left, sometimes saving a paragraph or two because they contain a good idea, an idea whose value I couldn’t see when it occurred to me.  If there’s one characteristic that separates my published material from the stuff I’ve been deleting, it’s that I had an audience in mind for the former, and myself in mind for the latter.  Writing is sometimes seen as an act of selfishness, and sometimes it is, but I think that the best writing is always conceived as a gift to someone else.

However. 

There are exceptions.  A few months ago I came across a piece of writing that I completed circa 1985, and never published.  I read it to an audience this summer and it went over well.  It’s the product of an adolescent and self-indulgent sensibility, and only escapes disaster because I was willing to plunge the audience toward depth at the end.  Audiences don’t always like it when you change the rules mid-piece, but occasionally they do, and perhaps the times have changed enough since 1985 that I can get away with it.  In any event, here it is for you to read, and after you’ve read it I’ll have a few comments on it. Enjoy.

Texas

I am in Prachuap Khiri Khan, a small town on the Gulf of Siam, two hundred miles south of Bangkok.  I’ve been here three days, and have walked three times along the mile-long curve of beach below the town’s seawall.  A storm is sitting out in the Gulf, halfway between Thailand and Viet Nam, and interesting things have been washing up on the beach—shells, sandals, small dead fish, odd bits of nets and floats.  Prachuap, as the locals call it, is a fishing town.

The people who live here have grinned down at me from the docks and from the top of the seawall.  I’ve waved.  They’ve waved back, and laughed among themselves at this large and pale farang (non-Asian foreigner) who stops to study seaweed and hermit crabs.

“Where do you go?” they’ve called to me in English.

“To the bungalow,” I’ve said.  Or to the restaurant. Or to the market.  Any answer has given rise to much laughter.  The Thais are a happy people.

“Where you come from?” they’ve asked.

“America,” I’ve answered.

“Ahh,” they’ve said.  “America.” They’ve smiled and nodded.  America is approved of in Thailand, mostly.

Our conversations haven’t gone much beyond that, because Prachuap is off the tourist circuit. It has no big white hotel on its beach, no street signs in English, no English-fluent fake Rolex vendors, no taxi drivers offering tours to temples or waterfalls. The seafood restaurants down on the docks have menus with English subtitles, but you don’t always get what you think you ordered.

My Thai is limited to the essentials. Besides being able to count, I can say No Thank You and My Name Is and Where and Thank You Very Much and A Little Tiny Bit. A Little Tiny Bit comes in handy when you’re asked if you can speak Thai. 

“Nit noi,” I say. “Nit noi Thai.” 

Whenever I say nit noi Thai, I generate much laughter, many smiles, much shrugging of shoulders. You realize again and again that you can go to a country, eat its food, walk its beaches, and yet not be there at all because you don’t know the language.

Yesterday, however, wandering the back streets of town, I found a place that contained a tiny bit of home.  A sign out front spelled out the word TEXAS.  Beside it were the doors of a western saloon, swinging back and forth under the nailed-up skull of a water buffalo. Willie Nelson was whining over a stereo inside, and as I walked up to the doors, I could see pictures of cowboys and cattle drives, cactus and Cadillacs.  I pushed my way into the dim interior, sat down at a table and ordered a shot of Mekong rice whiskey.

The woman who served it didn’t look anything like Miss Kitty.  She was a beautiful Thai woman, dressed in flowing silk instead of ruffles and gingham.

She was, it turned out, the saloon’s owner.

“How’d this place get to be named Texas?” I asked her.

“My husband’s from Texas,” she said.

“Ahh,” I said. “Texas.”

“You like my saloon?” she asked. She pointed to the pictures on the walls, at a Marlboro Man poster above the back bar, and at a western saddle hanging in one corner.

I nodded. “Khaap,” I said. (Yes, thank you very much.)

“You come with me,” she said.

She took me by the hand back through the swinging doors, along a hard-packed dirt path that led to the rear of the building and up a steep flight of stairs that led to the second floor.

At the top of the stairs, a second question occurred to me.

“Where’s your husband now?” I asked.

“Texas,” she said.

“Ahh,” I said.

She led me into a room that contained a shrine.  Almost all Thai homes have shrines, small places where a Buddha image, decorated with flowers and yellow ribbons, smiles out on the house and its inhabitants.  Some shrines give space to many-armed Hindu deities, or figures of elephants or monkeys.  Small offerings of food and Coca-Cola and incense are placed in front of the images, on the floor.

But this shrine was not dedicated to Buddha. It was dedicated to James Dean.  Underneath an American flag were photos of James Dean with a motorcycle, James Dean with his Porsche, James Dean looking forever young in an East of Eden still.  A pair of cowboy boots and a fifth of Jack Daniels lay in front of the photos, along with chrome insignia from American cars, a Levi jacket, and a switchblade knife.

“James Dean,” said my hostess. “America.”

We stood in silence for a moment.  Then she motioned me back down the stairs. On my table in the bar was a bucket of ice, a Coke, and a pint bottle of Mekong. I sat back down, alone now, and started toasting dead American heroes.

By the time I had worked my way down to Jim Morrison it had grown dark outside.  A warm sea-laden wind was coming in through the windows from the shore. The pint was half-empty and I was thinking of home.  Thailand is not usually a place that inspires homesickness, but there I was, wanting the desert spaces and wide empty highways and the silver winter sunrise that even then was brightening Idaho skies. I was feeling a little melancholy about my own country, and it seemed that it, like James Dean, combined equal parts of youth and promise and death. Americans are a happy people, but they have tragedy in their makeup, and all it takes to bring it out is a glossy photo of home.

I paid my bill and put the bottle in my hip pocket.

“Where is he going? (P’naii? P’naii?)” one of the bar-girls asked my hostess.

“Texas,” she said.

Looking at this piece now, I like its word-play and its gentle ironies, but I would still be happier if I had written it when I was twenty-five instead of thirty-five.  If a student had sent it to me, I would advise him not to get his narrator—and thus his credibility—drunk and maudlin.  I would also say that the only way to rescue such a narrator is to plunge toward the darkness and death in an attempt to justify the drunkenness and sentimentality.  It’s helped—the piece, anyway—that events have made America and death-wishes a credible juxtaposition.

Which brings up another even more disturbing point. Now, when I read my early fiction, it’s scary how prophetic it was–not so much with events but with character, perspective, and moral outlook.  I used to invent these grotesques just to see what they would do on the page.  Now, of course, I realize I wasn’t inventing them at all. They were in the process of inventing me.  In some instances, that’s reason enough to hit the delete button.

When Mike O’Mary, my esteemed publisher and eternal friend, asked me to write a blog to accompany the first year of MFA in a Box, it was easy enough to say, “Sure. Why not?”  Over the past forty-seven weeks, I’ve discovered a few reasons why not—mainly having to do with Monday night deadlines—but overall it’s been a pleasant and lucid experience.  Now, of course, the year is getting close to its end. It’s been wonderful to write for such an audience, and I thank you for all your responses, public and private.  I’m ending with a few entries that can be developed into something longer, but this week’s blog is the first of a series of valedictories that will end with Blog #52.

Reasons for not continuing the blog into 2012 and beyond:

1. The world will end in 2012, according to the seers who work in the print publishing world.  The Amazon Calendar foretells the end of the Gutenberg World on December 21, after which humanity will communicate by icon and Whispernet, and its collected wisdom will be available for $1.99, or free if you accept the accompanying ads.
2. MFA in a Box, which contains a good portion of the world’s wisdom, at least as it pertains to writing, continues to trudge along in the hundred-thousands in Amazon’s ranking, which means that this blog hasn’t had the impact that Mike O’Mary and I had hoped it would.  I don’t mean to complain, but if everyone who reads this blog had told ten people to buy my book, and those ten people had told ten people, and those ten…you get the idea.  Pretty soon I’d be thinking that Bernie Madoff wasn’t dishonest, just misunderstood.
3. The blog takes energy that could be used to make up the stories I should have been writing the past 47 weeks.  I don’t know if I wrote a blog entry about my writerly ambition, but it’s to become a posthumously famous writer, and thus far my oeuvre isn’t going to fill the moldy trunk that some PhD student will discover and make herself and me famous.  If nothing else, I’m going to have to use blog-writing time to start printing stuff out, so that my collected works will fill something more than a jump drive.
4. If you were to follow the implications of what I’ve said on this blog in the past year, you would face the raw truth that writing puts you in a different and deeper reality.  There is the little matter of having the courage to go there and stay there and face its imperatives, and there’s the other little matter that different and deeper realities are often places where magical thinking doesn’t work. I don’t know if you’ve seen a progression in these blog entries, but I have, and it’s toward the shadows, and I’m not sure I want to drag all you fine people into them.   
5. I’m going ahead this time. It’s your turn to wait here for the cops.
6. The 2012 election is coming up.  I suppose that means that I’m going to have to write about Obama and the Republican nominee and send something into the Huffington Post about the difference between selling one’s soul and just giving it away for the hell of it. I have always urged my students to stay away from pure nihilism—mainly because prison tats look pretty silly on the undergraduate offspring of doctors and lawyers—but the way the election is shaping up, I’m going to do something nihilistic like vote for Ralph Nader again. Either that or join Dick Cheney’s ghostwriting team.
7. I keep getting letters and emails from people who have read  MFA in a Box. Thus far, they’ve been the kind of letters I dreamed about when I first thought of becoming a writer, letters full of compliments and good cheer and invitations to masked weekends at secluded chateaux. What they don’t contain is book orders for family and friends.  People, especially those in writing programs, seem to want to keep their copy and its contents to themselves. I’ve had people tell me they bought the book as a gift for the writer in the family and then kept it for themselves because they wanted to be the writer in the family.  How perverse is that?
8. As a reasonably well-educated human being, one who has access to the Internet and libraries, and one who reads history and philosophy, I’ve become worried that injustice and inequality are increasing in this world.  So I’ve begun to wonder about how you invent a discourse that will get through to oppressed people in this world.  I also wonder if the same discourse can get through to their oppressors.
9. I’ve taken this year off from teaching and kept my writing to a minimum. I’ve spent a lot of time reading and researching, just to see if I would see things differently.  I do see things differently.  I’ve also realized I know a lot less than I thought I did. So I’m thinking of taking another year off and just reading Gibbon and Schopenhauer.  Can you imagine reading the blog of a man who only reads Gibbon and Schopenhauer?
10. The new marketing initiatives for MFA in a Box—the cross-country tour in the Bugatti, the new MFA sandwich at McDonald’s, the MFA Blimp at the NFL games, the free Foucault action figures, the GPS treasure hunt for an inscribed copy of the book at Angkor Wat, the writing date with Laura Dern’s character in Blue Velvet—are all about to be launched.  I’m sure you understand that I have to be there at all of them.

Julie and I spent three days in the Sawtooth Mountains last week, and while the trip wasn’t a Pilgrim’s Progress, it had moments where we were tempted toward allegory.

We got lost in a swamp when I insisted on getting off the beaten path. 

We climbed nearly to the top of a peak, but it was a peak whose vertical spires were disintegrating into loose rock and sand before our eyes, and we decided that arriving at the summit would be more a matter of luck than of skill, and getting back down would be purely a matter of luck.  We stopped a few hundred feet from the top, ate our lunch, and walked back down. 

We dove headfirst into lakes that still had the remains of last winter’s snow lining their banks.

The mosquitoes were thick and aggressive. They drove us into the tent while it was still light, causing us to wake up a four a.m. to a sky bright with stars. It was cold and the bugs weren’t moving, so we could wander around on the lakeside tundra, naked and shivering, and stare out into space. At 9000’, the air is clear and cold. The Milky Way was a drifting glowing cloud on a scale somewhat larger and colder than the human.

We avoided trails, but still ran into other people. We walked up on a group of ten with their guide, who had just told them that they were in a place where they wouldn’t see anybody else. Three college kids on a climbing expedition showed up just as we were pitching our tent the second evening, wondering if we’d seen the stove and food they’d stashed near our campsite the week before. We hadn’t.

On the last day we got back on a trail and ran into 73 people, one of whom was a young man sitting on a huge foam pad at the end of the trail. He was reading The World Without Us, a book of speculative nonfiction about what Earth would look like if humans suddenly disappeared.  He was an environmental studies major, and it was an assigned text.

I’ve already mentioned Pilgrim’s Progress.  I could have mentioned Mount Analogue, A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing.  It’s an unfinished work, because its author, the French Surrealist Rene Daumal, died in the middle of writing it.  But he did write this passage:

“You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again… So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up.”

A passage like this makes you think it’s almost impossible to write about a journey or a mountain ascent and not let your writing slip toward the expression of grand but incoherent truths.  Any of the experiences of Julie’s and my trip could have inspired a meditation on life’s journey, and that meditation might have created the illusion of meaning. That’s not always a good thing on a camping trip.

I was repeating Frost’s “Road Less Traveled,” as justification for taking a new route just before we get lost in the swamp, and I suppose it’s not for nothing that most people who study literature retreat from the literal world to their study, their dissertation, or their tenured professorship.  A literary education is just too dangerous if you start exploring its literal applications.

It’s much safer to go the other way, from the literal to the literary. Metaphors are seldom lethal on the page.  It’s easier to read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” than to realize someone has stolen your food cache. It’s easier to reach the heavens by climbing Mount Analogue than it is by having your last best handhold break off in your hand as you slip toward a thousand foot fall. It’s easier to read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” than it is to dive into water with ice floating in it. It’s easier to imagine the end of civilization than to wander around naked in cold starlight, which is what people did before there was civilization.

This sort of thing can become a game, and it’s a good game for writers, because metaphorical writing can get old and goofy long before the end of a book or poem.

It’s possible, if you work at it, to reduce the metaphorical content in your writing.  You wouldn’t think that reducing the amount of metaphor would increase the amount of truth in a sentence, but it does work that way.  Sometimes the amount of truth is increased so much that it’s possible to see the metaphors you’ve eliminated from your writing make up a habit of mind indistinguishable from compulsive lying. Make of that what you will, but you should make something of it if you’re going to be a writer who increases the amount of truth in the world.

So after three days Julie and I came out of the mountains, were shocked by the amount of people and noise in the world, had a compensatory margarita in a lakeside bar, went home, cleaned up, went out to a compensatory dinner, came back home again and slept for ten hours on a compensatory real mattress.  Did not check email. Did not even turn on a computer.  Did not find out that the stock market was falling. Did not know that Libya was having a revolution. Did not know that American politics had gotten three days more ridiculous and the world economy three days more in debt. 

What sort of meaning is safe to make on a camping trip?

A decade and a half ago Julie and I came out of the Sawtooths after a solid week. The first thing I did was to turn on the car radio for the news. Julie made fun of me and said, “I’m sure that the world hasn’t ended in one week.”  Then the news came on and we found out Jerry Garcia had died.

“The world has ended,” I said.

“No it hasn’t,” said Julie.

“It has for Jerry Garcia,” I said.

It’s been reunion week at my old high school.  The class of 1971 invited the classes on either side of them to join them for their 40^th, and though I was going to show up, when the time came I decided not to.  I worried that some of my schoolmates were going to bring their children, and that those children would be depressingly middle-aged.  I worried that the beautiful young men and women who had entered high school just as I was leaving it would be old, obese, wrinkled, bald or grey, and that they might not recognize me.  I worried that the in memoriam page on the reunion website would finally deliver its burden of suicide and malignancy and inconsolable grief to my consciousness.  Such are the hazards of an open bar matched with a suddenly open past.

My high school was a small one—classes averaged seventy people or so—but that didn’t keep us from forming a rigid class system based on family wealth, team sports, car ownership, and physical and social attractiveness.  My family was relatively poor, my sports long-distance running and skiing, my social skills nonexistent, my sexuality repressed. When I did go out on a date, it was usually because well-meaning friends were trying to get two losers together—at least that’s what I thought at the time, and I was at least half right.  Adolescence was not kind to me. 

It would have been a great comfort to me to know that adolescence wasn’t kind to anyone else, either.  But I couldn’t see beyond the boundaries of the self.  I ignored the evidence that I wasn’t suffering alone and concentrated on my own misery.

So you would think that after forty years of mostly deliberate self-improvement I would have ignored my fears and grabbed Julie, a few of my books, my English professor’s tweed coat, and headed for the reunion, there to erase as much of my high-school’s class system and social shame as possible.  I’m not as poor as I was in high school. I have a car, rudimentary social skills, and I weigh the same as I did in 1971.   My hair is gray but it still covers my head.  Julie is an attractive woman who could have found someone else to marry, but our dates turned out well enough that she married me. I’ve memorized some jokes.  And some of the people I thought were gods and goddesses back then have turned out to be ordinary mortals, subject to the same human foibles and infirmities as I have been.

But as I’ve gotten older, I keep coming down on the avoidance side of approach-avoidance conflicts. It’s easier to stay home, with familiar books and websites and projects, than it is to go into an arena where you have to deal with other people and their triumphs and tragedies. It’s easier to think things through than act them out.

It’s occurred to me that writing is the ultimate solitary sport, the ultimate form of thinking things through, and the ultimate form of avoidance, and that even though my life has gone better than it appeared to be going when I was in high school, it hasn’t changed all that much. I’m still standing on the outside of things, half-wishing to get involved but aware that it’s likely to be more trouble than joy.  It’s easier to write about people than talk to them, easier to imagine doing something than to do it, easier to write dialog than engage in it, easier to go on an assignment from an editor than on intuition or impulse.

These thoughts and inactions describe a pitfall of writing, not a benefit.  If you use your writing to cut off the outside world, you end up in solipsism, your interior life moving in smaller and smaller circles, your writing finally focusing on what Hannah Arendt called “the gruesome silence of a completely imaginary world.” 

So it’s going to be important for me to go to next reunion that comes along.  There will be some people I want to see, and some memories I’d like to compare notes on. Odd as it may seem, there are probably people who want to see me as well.  It’s useful to plow the compacted earth of memory, even if it does bring up moments you’d rather forget, and it’s comforting to have company when you do. 

If I’m still kicking, I won’t let the mori—or even inertia— get in the way of the memento, when my 50^th reunion comes around.

I’ve been talking to people who supervise young people, and many of them complain about a lack of initiative and a sense of entitlement in their charges.  Some of them go so far as to suggest that there has been a sea-change in humanity, and you really can’t trust anyone under thirty because they don’t think like we do. They’re not even of the same species. They’re going to take over the world and then everything’s really going to go to hell.

I hesitate to bring this idea up, because it’s a marginalization of an entire class of human beings, and we all know that’s a time-tested recipe for a wide-ranging misery.  Also, someone is bound to quote Socrates: “The youth of today love luxury; they have bad manners and contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Youth are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up food at the table, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Ameliorists love to pull quotes from ancient Greece to prove that things aren’t getting worse because they haven’t changed in 2500 years.  They note that there’s a clinical condition—ephebiphobia, “fear of teen-agers”—that has been present throughout history.  

Amelioration aside, ephebiphobia is probably reasonable.  Young people are scary, if I remember my adolescent years correctly.  They’re dangerous and self-destructive, and they don’t take direction well, and they’re touchy about their independence, and they think they know more than they do.  It’s probably a mistake to give them weapons or let them have access to internal combustion engines. When they combine a lack of initiative and a sense of entitlement, it’s time to start wondering if our civilization might be going the way of ancient Greece.

But that’s not what I worry about when somebody complains about kids these days.  I worry instead that we’re seeing the first generation that has been surrounded by the screens of TVs, computers, and mobile phones since birth. Their brains have been rewired by reducing their active participation in the world to taps on a keyboard or a touchscreen.

Robert Bly, in The Sibling Society (1996), explores the developmental implications of such a screen-fed existence. He suggests that growing up in a socially-networked virtual world instead of in the natural world prevents people from growing all the way up. They get stuck in a permanent adolescence, seeing everyone else in their lives as siblings rather than seeing them as separate adults.  Personal encounters are marked by rivalry rather than cooperation, and the biggest complaint becomes, “It isn’t fair.”

Bly’s book should be in every writer’s library.  The biggest job a writer has to face is to see things as an adult, and The Sibling Society is an instruction book for adulthood, drawing on myth, story, sociological observation, and brain research to make its case.

Bly builds on the insights of an earlier and more obscure book, Michael Ventura’s 1985 essay collection, Shadow Dancing in the USA, which explores the effect that TV, 24-hour convenience stores, and videogames have had on American culture.  Even before there were Predator-equipped drones, Ventura pointed out that videogamers were training for their deployment.  In retrospect, it’s possible to wonder if videogames didn’t create drones, instead of drones creating new videogames—and of course, that makes you wonder what videogames will create next.

Shadow Dancing in the USA is a dated book now. In a world that contains Moore’s Law, a couple of decades is a long time.  But Ventura’s style remains as fresh and inspiring as ever, and I can recommend his book for every writer’s library as well. It shows how a tough, blunt writer dares to think the forbidden thought and to write the forbidden sentence, and arrive at the forbidden conclusion, Moore’s Law be damned.  He seldom talks about young people, but he describes the implications of the world they would and will inherit, and he points out that it’s not just the children who have had their world transformed by technology.

One more book for your library:  Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a 1953 science-fiction novel about an alien invasion.  The aliens are peaceful but authoritarian.  They establish a world government and stop war, but they take human children away from their parents and train them to join the Overmind, a cosmic entity that rules the universe.  The last real humans witness the exodus of these transformed children from Earth.

I’ve been thinking of Childhood’s End since the technology gap has appeared between generations in this country.  The term cybernative applies to most people under 30 these days, and it’s possible to imagine them closer to machines—and to the Internet Overmind—than they are to their parents.

I doubt that such relationships create an attitude of entitlement and a lack of initiative in anyone, but they are probably hard on observable social skills or measurable activity, at least as an older generation defines them.  Cybernatives live in an entirely different world, one that treats virtual reality as equal or better to the reality you walk through when you go outside without your iPod.

Techno-futurists like Ray Kurzweil talk about post-humans.  Who knew that they would show up as waitpersons that forget to refill your coffee, interns that expect managerial positions, or new employees that demand detailed lists of instructions—algorithms—to get through the day?

You can only hope that when they take over the world, and they will, that they treat their elders as human beings, ones that need kindness, touch, and understanding in their marginalized obsolescence. Even if it isn’t fair.

I spent many years as a college professor and advisor, and one of the bigger parts of my job was talking to students who lined up outside my office door.  I’d look up from a stack of composition papers, and someone would be standing in my doorway.  Behind her would be another student, and another.

It didn’t matter whether it was during my scheduled office hours or not, and it became hard to grade papers anywhere but home. But over time I realized that sitting down and talking with a professor was what my students needed, and listening to what they had to say was the most important part of my job. 

Writing students didn’t come to see a professor to clear up points of fact or problems they didn’t understand.  They wanted to talk about big decisions in their lives—whether or not to become doctors or lawyers, whether or not to marry, whether or not to have children, whether or not to go deeply in debt to finish their education, and so on.  My colleagues, being PhDs and specialists, did not advise on these matters.

As an MFA and a generalist, I didn’t hesitate a minute.  Here’s what I told them: If you want to keep writing, don’t go to med or law school, don’t get married, don’t have children, don’t go into debt to pay for college.  My students would nod, smile, and thank me for my advice, but explain that writing was only one of their hopes and dreams for their lives. They wanted to become doctors or lawyers who finished college, married, and gave their parents grandchildren. Even though many of them already considered themselves to be writers, they had other priorities.

Sure enough, several years later, I’d get e-mails talking about spouses, children, life as an ICU physician or a junior partner, and their struggles to pay off their college loans. “You told me I would be working seventy hours a week,” one of them said.  “I didn’t believe you.  I would love to be working just seventy hours a week.”

Hiatus: Several weeks ago I called an entry “Truth, Beauty, and Justice,” and then wrote something that had little to do with any of those things, except in a vague cosmic sense.  What had happened was I couldn’t think of a title, so I wrote down those words as a space filler until I could see where the piece was going.  Then I sent it in without deciding what it was about and putting a relevant title on it. 

I did get at least one seeker of truth, beauty, and justice to read it.  So if next week’s blog is titled “I was Jennifer Aniston’s High School Hookup,” and it doesn’t have anything to do with Jennifer Aniston or hooking up, you’ll know that the Dream of Thingsmarketing division has adopted the technique. So a shout-out to Laurent Marbacher for advancing the commercial juggernaut that is MFA in a Box.

Okay.  Where the unconscious comes into this discussion is that none of these students facing life decisions were going to make them consciously.  Marrying somebody was an unconscious decision.  Taking out an unserviceable student loan was an unconscious decision.  Having kids, often as not, was an alcohol-fueled accident.  Going to a particular grad school, with a particular set of destiny-setting mentors, was a matter of an admission committee’s caprice.

So I came to believe that writers need to have a working understanding of their own unconscious if they are going to give their craft the time and resources that it demands. 

Students of psychoanalysis, who don’t believe in accidents—even alcohol-fueled ones—come easily to the idea that our unconscious seldom wants what we want. The unconscious is good at coming up with distractions that keep us from our avowed goals.  Such distractions keep us from wondering if what the unconscious wants is really worthy of our time. 

The unconscious is clever, but it’s not particularly noble. Writing, being both noble and a path to awareness, is the unconscious’s natural enemy.

Hence my advice.  And some of my students who became writers later in life found that they usually had to undo unconscious decisions to get to the point where they could become writers and artists.  Marriages were broken, positions resigned, children ignored or estranged, and loans left unpaid, even after education loans were exempted from bankruptcy laws. That doesn’t mean that some of them didn’t stay in successful marriages and careers. But a crucial difference for those writers is that their spouses and children and jobs augmented their artistic energy rather than demanded it.  In other words, the successful artists had a willing support group that included colleagues and family.

As a college professor, I learned that some students were like black holes—they could suck up all the energy that you could give them and more.  What is interesting to me now is that a high percentage of those same students became successful writers and artists. It sounds a little creepy, but they were feeding the beast and part of my job was to help them feed it.

The difference between being an authorial genius and a royal pain in the ass is tangible success at writing.  My advice to young writers to stay single and free of a professional career was not so much for their benefit as it was for the people they might marry, their kids, or their colleagues.

In Carl Jung’s The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, he states that artists can’t have a normal life because they’re grappling with the unconscious and that takes all the energy that their normal human relationships would require.  Later in his long career, he changed his mind on artists, and said that having an artistic sensibility was the one way not be submerged by unconscious forces and go through life both trapped in and oblivious to fate.  He considered that a bad thing, but he also considered it the condition of the vast majority of humanity.

It was the condition of plenty of my colleagues, at least the ones who had given up on being artists. Most of them avoided talking to students about anything but their specialty. One of them told me that when a student wanted to talk about life issues, he would reach for his pistol. But he had given up in his struggle to become conscious by that time.

I found that taking students seriously and listening to them, even as I knew they were going to ignore my response, was worthwhile.  I was communicating to them that writing was a commitment that would compete with their other commitments, and that it was okay to make the hard choices between them. My words no doubt came back to them later in life, when they had discovered that if they did one thing they couldn’t do another, and that the unconscious occupies territory that rightfully belongs to those who write.