Wraiths and Reality

 

wraith - noun - a ghost or ghostlike image of someone, especially one seen shortly before or after his/her/their death. (Google)

This past weekend, I drove down to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to attend an informal reunion of friends from college at the lovely Victorian home of one of the friends. "The Big Chill" it was not, however. It was more on the order of "Three's Company," comical, but not silly.

On Sunday evening toward sun down, we three treated ourselves to a two-hour, historically focused, walking tour of the downtown, which featured a ghost story about a man, murdered for monetary reasons, who has been haunting the movie theater for decades. One employee swore that she actually saw him limp into the men's room only to dissolve completely into thin air. Naturally, this initial, stranger-than-fiction anecdote incited a litany of personal experiences involving wraiths. My male friend went so far as to inform us that he has seen and communicated with multiple apparitions, friends and relations, either in his dreams or during dreamlike states. I don't doubt it, for I, too, received a visit from my father in a dream that I had shortly after his death. Whether or not you believe in this sort of supernatural, Macbethian/Dickensian thing is certainly up to you. If your life experience has not led you down this shadowy path, then most likely you don't think about the presence of spirits, and your reality is more or less normal as opposed to paranormal.

Or so you might think. Whether or not you'd like to admit it, most likely you are being haunted in some sense of the word. If wraiths are ghosts, they are transparent images of the pasts that they had once inhabited. If your memory serves you well, it has the ability to visit and spook you. What I am getting at is that the Past can be a wraith that stays with you and may or may not wreak havoc if you allow it to do so. The only way past an unpleasant, wraithlike Past is to walk through her/his/their vapors by way of the present. Translation? Stay in the present. Which is easier said than done. I admit to being haunted myself, both in the conscious and unconscious states of mind. I don't expect that I'll ever be quite free from the two insistent specters who played significant roles in my life, but to placate or just protect myself, I try to remain fixated on memories of them that are pleasant as opposed to unpleasant. Memory can be selective. You can simply make a choice, which is a theme that I tend to come back to repeatedly in this blog. You can choose to remember the good things about the Past as opposed to the bad. The Past won't evaporate, but it will be more tolerant. At least, you will be able to coexist with it.

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Illustrious Illeism

 

Illeism - noun - referring to the self in third person in order to separate oneself from the self.

Is it possible to separate oneself from the self for clarity?

One of my favorite television series has always been "Sex and the City." Although it saw its last episode a while ago, I still like to watch all six seasons via HBO Max. The latest installment, the sequel,"And Just Like That" just isn't the same, especially sans the controversial character of Samantha. Say what you will about the original. You can't argue that it isn't well written for what it is: risky, bawdy, yet groundbreaking cable TV. As I have been a writer since my twenties (a long time) and a high-school English teacher to boot, I can appreciate how the character of Carrie, a journalist, begins each episode with a question. (I might have stolen the idea a few times to use in my classroom, but don't quote me on that.) One show from the fourth season, I believe, features the theme of perception: how we can never quite perceive ourselves with an absolute degree of accuracy. Which is true. We can't. We are either too self-critical or too self-justifying or too self-somewhere-in-between. Not being able to judge oneself well, I think, may be one of the myriad flaws of human nature. However, if you are the exception (in the extreme minority) and tend to view yourself authentically, society considers you "cursed with self-awareness" as ironically, it can be a liability when you are flying solo 20/20 in a farsighted or blind community. So either way, I guess we caught in a Catch-22 and can't win.

Last week, I was scrolling through the BBC's World News' website and came across an article devoted to the concept of self-perception. Apparently, there are individuals out there who can dole out the advice, but when it comes to being able to self-direct, they can't, probably because they are too close to themselves; so when they look at themselves in a mirror, they have a tough time seeing themselves for who they are. In short, they can dish it out, but can't take it, meaning their own advice. But how can you advise yourself if you can't read yourself realistically? The BBC's answer? Illeism. According to the article, ostensibly, you have to provide yourself some distance from yourself by talking to yourself in the third person, which is known as Illeism. Here's an example: "You know, Gwyn, you really should try to stop coming across as a know-it-all and mind your own business when it comes to other people's lives." You get the idea. 

I suppose the idea isn't new since perfectly sane people (?) have been talking to themselves in third person since forever. I suppose it may make sense to try if you are indeed capable of separating yourself from your ego long enough to see that it could be the reason why you can't recognize your own shortcomings. 

Let's face it (if we can), being human isn't easy. Life isn't easy. It was never meant to be. A little bit of self-deception is probably not too self-destructive. For instance, if I look in the glass this morning and see a rock star, will the falsity kill me? Probably not. A boost of fake reality may just make me feel like I can tackle the actual day better. Is there anything wrong with that?

Speaking of rock stars, I'll leave you with a bit of sound advice borrowed from Pink Floyd albeit I might have quoted it before: "Shine on, you crazy diamonds." Be your best self, whomever you perceive yourself to be. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #philosophy, #truth #relationships   

Love and Marriage in Perpetuity

 

in perpetuity - forever

About a week ago, I came across the phrase "in perpetuity" as I was registering one of the singles off of my second, original album with BMI, a "performance rights" agency that distributes loyalties to composers/artists after their copyrighted music has been played publicly.  It definitely has a legal, contractual ring to it. Lucky for me, all I had to do was check off a box, agreeing that I am and will be the sole owner of the rights to the song forever. And as we know, forever is a very long time. 

In life, contracts abound. In fact, we can't get through reality as adults sans signing agreements. That being stated, few belong under the nomenclature of "in perpetuity." However, marriage does promise to be interminable albeit the divorce rate in reality tends to nullify the original arrangement and usually quite expeditiously at that. Still, there are exemplary couples that embrace the covenant for the long term. In March, I unveiled the ingredients necessary to perpetuate a loving relationship. The blog was called "Netflix and the Secret of Loving Longer." Which had all of two readers. (I'm going for at least three this time around.) Ever since I saw that documentary about the uber committed couple, living happily in perpetuity up in Vermont, I have been meeting real people who mirror that particular pair in at least one sense. 

Just today, as my musical partner and I were setting up to perform Sinatra and Motown tunes for about fifty residents in an assisted living facility, an elderly husband and wife were ensconced in the third row of the house, 30 minutes early, watching reruns of Seinfeld on the TV situated just above our heads. The gentleman just happened to mention that he and his bride had recently celebrated 70 years of marriage. Yes, 70. Most of us don't make it to ten, sadly enough. Of course, I didn't want to assume that what I had noted in the aforementioned blog could possibly apply to everyday reality, but surprisingly, it does. 

This ordinary human being verified a theory I had had even before I watched Netflix, perhaps even before there was a Netflix. The male (sorry, but this might only be true for straight couples) in a long-term relationship has to possess a stubborn choke hold on love. In clearer, less violently graphic terms, he has to be in love with his woman in perpetuity. The euphoric, somewhat seemingly nonviable emotional state has to last forever. Or the deal is off. My own father hung onto an unrequited love affair (or should I say, a marriage) with my mother in perpetuity in spite of her being an often difficult, imperious woman who had pretty much nothing in common with him. Since he was in love with her, it didn't much matter that she didn't return his variety of love because it made him blind to any and all imperfections she inhabited. Ergo the union lasted until the death-do-us-part clause of the agreement kicked in. He never remarried although he did date a woman only because she reminded him of my mother. (You see what I mean? In perpetuity is without a doubt forever.)

So there you have it, ladies. If you believe in marriage (or even a monogamous liaison) and want yours to last forever, just find a man who is head over heels in love with you. If you do, like the song "At Last" that I am learning for my next gig at a local nursing home, a spell will be cast, you'll feel like you're in heaven, and he will be yours in perpetuity "at last." 

#love #marriage #word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #philosophy, #truth #relationships #forever #monogamy  

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Literally and Figuratively

 

deleterious - adjective - causing harm or damage (Google)

Just in case you are unaware (or live under a rock), because of the seemingly preternatural abundance of wild fires burning in Canada and the southerly direction of the wind, the New York metropolitan area has been enveloped in smoke. The normally blue skies at this time of year appear to be burned a gray-orange, and the air is tinged with a corrosive musk, deleterious to the eyes and lungs of all creatures. Even with our advanced technology, there is little we humans can do but wait for the forces of nature to find us relief. Yet until that happens (it might take days for the patterns of wind to change), all of us in the path of the smoke will have to find suitable cover in order to prevent smoke from literally getting in our eyes and elsewhere. 

In the 1960s, my pianist grandmother (1888-1983) introduced an inchoate me to a song, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" written by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for a 1933 musical called Roberta. Since at the time, I was not even into my second decade of life, I couldn't distinguish between the literal and the figurative, so I just thought that the song's title underscored one of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, a popular pastime at the time, around non-smokers. How naive of me. It turned out that the lyrics contain tropes that have nothing to do with the superficial. The words denote the deleterious nature of romantic love. Passion, to be precise. In short, the heat of lovemaking tends to produce a wild fire, which in turn, exudes smoke, which in turn, gets in the lover's eyes, blinding him to any semblance of reality. "When your heart's on fire/you must realize smoke gets in your eyes."  In the tune, the female lover absconds with the heart of her partner, leaving him with tears as a consolation prize (the effect of the cause) and the thought that "when a lovely flame dies/smoke gets in your eyes." Which simply implies that he will remain blind to her faults even though he is enduring heartbreak. 

It pains me to think that in this natural crisis, there are individuals out there on the East Coast who ironically may be experiencing both the literal and the figurative meanings of "smoke gets in your eyes." If you are, then my heart goes out to you. All I can say is find a safe haven inside of a building possessing an interior that doesn't remind you of your ex and wear an N95 mask if you have to go outside :). After all, you just can't afford to have any more smoke getting in your eyes.

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Chris, Mick and the Fine Art of Artifice

 

artifice - noun - clever devices used to trick or deceive (Google).

Let's face the music and accept that for whatever reason(s), human beings embrace the concept of deception. And now that the Internet (via social media) has opened the backstage door for endless opportunities for a little or a lot of artifice, no one is safe from scammers, or in my case, ordinary people pretending to be rock stars. 

Because I am in the music business along with just about everyone else, I have to spend time on social media just advertise my original songs and get them circulating among listeners throughout the globe. Although I am a minuscule presence on TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, I try to post at least three times a week to generate a following, which isn't easy as there are 100,000 songs released on the music streaming channels daily and 100,000 artists promoting them. Apparently as FB is the medium of choice for celebrities, more grifters use it to impersonate them than any other platform. I am lucky because the con artists who hit on me generally do not want money; they just want to take me to bed. Case in point, one man, who just happens to have the name Christopher Cross like the musician (who is actually the real imposter since his surname isn't actually Cross) tried to impersonate him in order to trick me into meeting him. Fortunately, I was onto him right from the start. Just in case this should ever happen to you (maybe on YouTube in the comments section), an authentic celebrity would never ask you when you became his or her fan. And most likely as an icebreaker, he or she would never thank you for being his or her fan. I know from experience that unless they are extreme narcissists, celebrated people tend to want to step away from themselves for a few and come across as being average. So it was clear that Chris wasn't the celebrated Chris since he made the mistake of doing what all trolls do initially: he asked, "How long have you been my fan?" (I replied, "I've never been your fan." Oh, well. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.)

Of course, it is true that there are famous types out there who do interface with fans and do use artifice (such as different names) so that they don't attract attention. I am contending with someone right now who claims to be Micheal Philip Jagger, which is Mick Jagger's full name. Even though he has the blue checkmark verifying his identity, my daughter claims that he is in no way real, mainly because eighty-year-old men don't know how to navigate FB. Sensible, smart she contends that Mick no doubt has troops of well-paid assistants assigned to connect with the public on social media. The real Mick, romantically linked to a thirty-six-year-old dancer, would not have a second to reach out to me. Which all makes sense, yet this inchoate swindler is atypical so far. Like Macbeth and most politicians after him, Micheal could just be quite good at duplicity until some day, his artifice is exposed as such, and he is uncovered and cancelled (the beauty of social media). 

On the other hand, I did read an article on the web stating that you can never truly be sure whether or not you are being hoodwinked. It is possible that the person is indeed the person he or she says he or she is. Just make sure you don't wire any money to him or her and you don't friend him or her. As far as my Micheal, I am playing his game, pretending I don't realize that he is attempting to be Mick. And I am acting as though I am the bigger celeb whose privacy is kept private. In the end, the greater pretender will win, I suppose, if there can be a winner at shenanigans. Let's put it this way, if the actual Mick should die, and Micheal keeps liking my posts, I'll have my answer. (I hope it doesn't come down to that, though, because I am Mick's fan.)

The obvious paradoxical takeaway here is that sometimes you have to be deceptive in order to expose deception. Truth doesn't come easily. 

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The Age of Atavism

 

atavism - noun - recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity (Google)

Author William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun wrote "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Which is something that certainly holds true today. It seems atavism is a daily occurrence as humans tend to enjoy nostalgia, visiting and revisiting the past. 

Take for example the recent coronation of King Charles, III. According to Time, the British people gave up approximately $125 million of their tax dollars to shift their Aston Martins, Jaguars, Land Rovers, etc. into reverse so that they could experience a bit of what their proletariat predecessors had witnessed for hundreds of years. Apparently, the UK is the last country to induct their monarchs so lavishly. And with 58% of the population unwilling to take a leap of faith and shift into drive toward an authentic democracy (albeit on the lefthand side of the road), it seems that atavism is the transmission of choice. I did manage to drive a car in reverse down a thousand-foot, serpentine driveway once. It was uncomfortable, but I did get to the end of it safely :). 

Yet another example of the past in the present would be the current trend backwards in recent fiction. I am just about finished reading Bangles' Susanna Hoffs's realistic novel This Bird Has Flown, just published recently. The first-person narrator,  Jane Start, who is 33 and a jaded rock star take-off of Jane Eyre, behaves like she is 23 and thinks like she is 64 (the author's age). She has an annoying case of nostalgic Tourette's Syndrome in that she is addicted to spurting out allusions to the 1950s/1960s, something no thirty-three-year-old woman I have ever met, shy of my daughter, is capable of doing. Nor would anyone that age regardless of what kind of parents she had care to do so. (Right, Millennial ladies?) Why Hoffs would want to reference Don Ho and "Tiny Bubbles" for any reason is beyond me. Comic relief? Why didn't I laugh? Naturally, the New York Times gave Hoffs, most likely sans any undergraduate writing classes, a glowing review, which makes me think that each manuscript the major publishers send to the newspaper is accompanied by cash, something similar to payola, maybe? Payola? Oh, no! I suppose I am guilty of a trip down Memory Lane myself. Oh, the irony of it! 

Hypothetically, if William Faulkner, who wasn't a Buddhist as far as I know, were alive today, I'm sure he wouldn't have a problem with the current wave of atavism. In fact, he would probably use it to bolster the authenticity of his words. As much as we try to think we are living in the now, creating and perpetuating uniqueness, all we are doing is reinventing the past, adding our own twist to what once was. Author Christopher Booker claims that there are only seven original plot lines. If that is true, we may be in repeat mode indefinitely. Even with advanced technology (just say no to A.I.), perhaps the Age of Atavism will be sticking around for a long time to come. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #philosophy, #truth, #critique, #literary criticism 

Working for "Soul Cash"

 

"soul cash" - the gratification or "income" received when something is done voluntarily out of the goodness of the heart (Source: Jay, the electrician)

When it comes to everyday living, I have come to expect the unexpected. Philosophers can and will show up at the door on occasion. On Monday morning as I was frenetically trying to get organized for a recording session some fifty minutes south, I heard a knock at my front door. Upon opening it, I found a disheveled gnome of a man with wild, gun-metal gray hair and gaping, blue eyes, smiling intensely at me. I told him I had not made any appointments with any maintenance companies, but he insisted upon staying to give my full-house generator a tune-up. I figured that if I had dismissed him entirely, he might never come back, and I did need the machine serviced. So I told him he had 45 minutes and mentioned the session, which sparked commonality. Apparently, he was a composer experimenting with prog rock vibes, which is not surprising since just about everyone is these days. Always blatantly honest, I informed him that since 100,000 songs are released a day, there is no monetary success available in the music business and that I just put my original music out there for a few people who might get something out of it. "Oh, so you are in it for soul cash," he commented. "Soul cash?" I asked. "I made it up. It is when you do something out of the goodness of your heart, and the payback is greater than any monetary amount you could receive."

Wow! Soul cash! What a concept. Today, I started to take a mental inventory of all the soul cash I had received over the years and realized that it amounted to quite a bit. Which made me happy. How could it not? I am probably a millionaire when it comes to my soul-cash bank account. 

And the moral of the story?

If more people were intent on earning soul cash as opposed to authentic cash, the world just might be a better place. 

Enough said. 

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #optimism, #philosophy, #truth, #everyday-philosophy