Introduction: On Writing Who Put You In The Cage?

INTRODUCTION: On Writing

Who Put You In The Cage?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure
in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
Russian aesthetic philosopher, moralist, and mystic


Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must
work out his own salvation.

George Horace Lorimer (1868 – 1937)
American editor

Cage we all share – denial of death

I know of the cage as I write out of experience and observation. Whatever the genre, an author’s words emanate from life. Writers mirror the pain, struggles, and triumphs of their subjects. If they write perceptively, it is because they identify with their material. Novelist William Faulkner said upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1950 these often repeated words:
I believe that man will not merely endure. He will survive. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.1

The poignancy of these remarks was brought to my attention with a recent email. The writer states he is dying, but is ready for death, although not in the sense that he wants to die. He claims his house in order, leaving two well-educated children, both of whom have yet to marry, and who have a slim extended family for support. His wife died when they were young and he has never remarried. “I am providing them with my strength to live with nobility as I plan to die with dignity.” Then he adds, “I have had a wonderful life.”

Six months earlier, he was in robust health and was told he looked ten years younger than his seventy years, claiming it was “part of my genetic pool.” He was number one in his age group at the club in tennis, a position that he has maintained through several decades.

From 1997 to 2002, he volunteered at the University of Denver to be part of an experimental group monitoring cancer detection and prevention. During that period, no cancer was detected. The doctors constantly remarked about his superior health for his age, and then one-day, six months ago, he fell off a ladder at home, and his whole world suddenly changed.

I thought about his concession to death long after reading this email. Life is, at best, such a short visit that I wondered if anyone is ever ready to die. Ernest Becker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death (1973), was interviewed by a reporter shortly before he died at the age of 50. His wife recalls that when a reporter rang the doorbell, during his final days, Becker quickly moved from the sofa to his study, and made as if the intrusion interrupted his work. He confessed later he couldn’t allow a stranger to think him lazy. What is it about life that inclines us to be self-conscious deniers of death to the end?

Poets and, indeed, philosophers have written volumes about life, but seldom about death. It is as if death is separate from life, when death is all about life. We exist before we come, stay but a little while, and return again to the magnificent hereafter. Between short happenings or life, eternity embraces each of us with the same equality and without a shred of distinction. In the end as in the beginning, we are all feebly the same.

No one escapes death, so why are we so afraid of life? Why do we construct cages around us? Pondering that puzzle is why I have written this book. I have no solutions to this puzzle, if there are any, but I do hope to bring some clarity to the business of living.

Learning of the Cage from Readers
As I do my daily walk, I reflect on my correspondents with readers as I did this one. I call myself the peripatetic philosopher, discovering as Aristotle did that my muse visits me as I walk. I never know what will surface in my mind as I walk. I make no demands upon it, allowing it to master my consciousness, as it will, and when it will. Sometimes my muse doesn’t disturb my walk. With my trusty recorder in one hand and a bottle of water and handkerchief in the other, I move to the rhythm of my mind.

When I listen to my words later, I hear the syncopating cadence of my feet against the pavement beating to the rhythm of my heart. Gurdjieff called this “the dance of the soul.”

The emailer in sharing his soul with me made him more in charge of it. While I reflected on his many wrenching encounters in life, and how he dispatched them, I realized I was witness to the courage of an authentic person. He displayed no bitterness about his fate; no sense of being shortchanged by life, but thrilled in what life has brought him.2 He experienced the resilience of love because he chose it over regret.

Life has been his teacher, and a wonderful teacher at that. His situation is not a cage. It is life. Life has exacted a series of tests of which this is one, tests he grappled with, and passed with distinction. In doing so, he has demonstrated a depth few of us experience. He has endured life and profundity is his. It is holy and cannot be taken from him. The poet Lord Bryron claims that adversity is the first path to truth, while Buddha says that truth is found through the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. He knows this path well.

The cage of which I write here is not one of test takers and life engagers. It is the cage of test and life avoiders. People construct cages around themselves to deny and avoid reality checks, yet everyone receives a report card every day of their lives. These report cards are a measure of awareness, acceptance, and resilience. Herein is the brutal paradox: no one can take another person’s tests or engage in another person’s life challenges without compromising both. No one.

The Cage of “No” and the Open Road of “Yes!”
For many, life is a journey not taken, but a road less traveled. Such people exist; they do not live. They wait for retirement when all passion is spent. They hide in obsessions or look for answers in all the wrong places, which are always outside themselves.

The most critical test in life is the ability to say “no” when pressured to say “yes.” To say, “yes” because it pleases others when it would be better to say “no” is a hundred times more stressful to the spirit than any other conceivable activity, barring none. We want to be liked so that we can approve of ourselves. It seldom occurs to us that to be liked at the expense of accepting ourselves as we are exacts a heavy toll. It is we that suffer in the end.

Our passions and interests provide the direction of our spirit. They require our freedom, and the open road to expression. I enjoy an immeasurable freedom to write. I work harder at writing than I have at any job, and I have always worked those jobs with industry. I write because I want to, not because I have to. I am connected to my passion and interest.

A better question than asking how I came to have such freedom is what sacrifices or choices have I had to make to realize this freedom.

The cages we enter are about choices not made, where we have allowed others to impinge upon our freedoms. Often, choices not made are reflected in letting others dictate what we are and should be, as well as what we should and should not do with little or no input from the center of our being, from which passions and interests spring. We see this when children are not made to appreciate their parents’ space, and likewise, when parents become slaves to their children’s activities. They neutralize each other’s respective possibilities, as it is unlikely that such choices are fueled by either passion or interest, but rather to social convention and assumed roles. There is no greater cage than the absence of “no” in social interaction.

One can never do for others what they could better do for themselves. Codependency is the vicious cage of our times. Children need to experience the pain of growing up so that they may eventually become adults and go their own way, and live and survive by their own wits. There are too many parachutes and too many umbrellas for individuals when they foul up, and thus there have been a proliferation of cages as never before.

As the per capita income of the individual increases, freedom shrinks and the cage beacons with the Siren’s bewitching sweetness. This was a Western phenomenon in the twentieth century. Now it is becoming an Eastern phenomenon as well in the twenty-first century.

Carrying other people’s burdens as our own weakens their resolve and frustrates us, as we can never satisfy their demands. It is a vicious circle of which there is no escape.

When Colin Wilson was young, he found he enjoyed his own company and had little inclination to yield to peer pressure. He saw how the world was constructed, and realized his only place in that world was as an outsider. There he could experience the delicious freedom and daunting perspective only an outsider enjoys.3 As a writer, he observed the homeless mind of the modern world from this perspective:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.4

Wilson’s words resonated with his generation. His book became an international best seller over night. It resonated because he stepped outside convention and looked back with love, not hate, with courage, not contempt. It was his open road of truth, as he perceived it. Creative reflection came naturally to him, but I suspect his parents had a hand in it. We all need help to become the person we become. It commences with a supportive climate where the early choices we make come to haunt or liberate us.

Leaving the Cage: A Celebration of Choices
We live in a corporate society. People have become caged in that society. Many have lost the power of knowing and accepting themselves as they are, and others as they find them. Instead, they have taken on the corporate identity of the cage.

When the corporation made no sense to me, I didn’t hesitate to resign. I was young, 35, with a family of four small children, and had long ago decided I could never be as poor as I had been as a youth. In an inverted way, it turned my natural insecurity on its head.

So, when my boss said -- “How can you do this to us when the company has done so much for you?” – I responded, “If I wasn’t doing my job, the company would fire me. I’m firing the company. It’s not meeting my needs.” I made the company redundant to my life. My boss had to have the last word. He warned me that I would never do as well. He was right, but for the wrong reason.

Now, with time on my hands, and with family and friends wondering if I had turned hippie – it was 1969 -- I pondered my decision. What surfaced was the matter of tolerance. I decided tolerance starts with self-acceptance. This begins with accepting or liking oneself, warts and all, without excuses or recriminations. I had no sense of guilt despite it being drummed into my character. Nor did I have a particular concern what others might think of my actions. It never took. I did wonder why it didn’t.

It was then that I discovered that I wasn’t inclined to own other people’s problems. I would listen to people complain about how others dressed, talked, walked, cut their hair, or a million other incidental things and marvel at the attention. The strain would show on their faces, as they would try to convince me to feel the same. I couldn’t, but didn’t understand why. It took writing a book to find the answer.

A publisher, upon receiving the manuscript, asked for a paragraph to describe the premise of my book. I did it in one sentence:
Accept yourself as you are and you will accept others as you find them.

Trained as a bench chemist, finding myself in chemical sales without training, it was the critical key I found to confidence in dealing with prospects. The book was Confident Selling (Prentice-Hall 1970), an attempt to explain why I had been successful in selling when I failed to employ conventional sales tool. The book was a best seller and remained in print for twenty years.

Now, these many years later, I am again writing about self-acceptance, a journey that requires discarding all the misguided directions one encounters in a life determined by the choices we make, or allow others to make for us. It is now up to the individual as never before to rediscover the passions and interests of that road less traveled.

Discovering and Appreciating an Authentic Life

Each of us walks the walk, talks the talk, thinks the thoughts, believes the beliefs, and displays the behaviors of our programming. Yet, if we have eyes to see, and brains to discern, we can reprogram ourselves to an authentic life. It is not enough to criticize our programming, or to point out that many promoters of goodness and light are hypocrites and lead duplicitous lives.

In corporate society, there will always be people caught up in its nonsense. We need not live an inauthentic life because others do.

The aim here is not to make readers comfortable in their cages; nor is a formula provided for their escape. Just as I cannot own the readers’ problems, I cannot design the readers’ escape routes. Certain thinking and behavior put them in their cages, and only rethinking and recasting those behaviors provide ways out.

Gurus typically solve their own problems using readers and audiences to validate their solutions. Germans love Freud, not for his psychoanalytical theories, but for the beauty of his German prose. Were it not for the United States, which is solution driven to didactic simplistic formulas, chances are Freud would best be remembered as a literary figure. There is a novelist’s panache to his writing that even he conceded. More importantly, none of his theories can be proved or disproved, and therefore invalid from a scientific point of view.5

Whatever the problem, we are inevitably drawn to those who ease our conscience with simplistic solutions, formulas that would change our lives without changing them at all. An authentic person cannot be duped by such promises.

And what, dare we ask, is the “Ultimate Cage”?
An emailer read my novel In the Shadow of the Courthouse: Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003), and felt pangs of nostalgia for a less complicated, more quiet, less demanding and distracting world that the book illustrated.

He has grown to maturity in a time when the small town and simpler lifestyle can be found only in books. Rivers you could once swim in are now polluted streams endangering our health. Open country that once filled our lungs with fresh air and a breathtaking visage is now covered with pastel colored little boxes as houses. Dense forests that once penciled the sky are now naked eroding hills. Train stations that once bustled with activity are now abandoned as freight trains whistle by without stopping. Passenger trains that once connected the smallest community with the outside world no longer exist. All this saddens him. There is no way to make him feel better. It is the way it is because of the way we are.

Environmental degradation is not a twentieth century phenomenon, nor is it a nineteenth or eighteenth century affair. It is a progressive development since the dawn of Western Civilization. The Romans had a hand in it that is still felt. Recently, geologists discovered that mining for iron ore in the mountains of Italy with pick ax and shovel, long before the time of Christ, polluted streams and created deep fissures in the mountain landscape. Mudslides and avalanches have always occurred in this mountainous terrain only now it is more critical due to heavy population in their midst.

It didn’t get any better when the Roman Empire became Christian. Genesis reads:

Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.

There couldn’t have been a better prescription for progress than this. The conquest of Nature is nearly complete. Now there is little left of Nature to support our species. We have conquered the planet, and now the planet is about to conquer us. It is our final cage.

So, as I walk thinking of these things, I’m reminded that there is little chance in my lifetime of much correction. My son’s wife had twin boys in 2005. I’m writing for Keaton Michael and Killian James, and their generation. They will come to maturity in the middle of the century. My sense is that they will be forced to be less indulgent, more responsible, more sensitive, and more authentically consistent with the rhythm of this planet. They must resist the cage to realize that authenticity.

Nietzsche once said that he loved only what people wrote with their blood. There is no other way.

Winners and Losers, or How do you see your friends?
In 1974, after the CEO of Bristol-Myers read my book, Confident Selling (1970), I was invited to interview for a job with its Dracket Division (makers of Drano). I had retired from Nalco Chemical Company in 1969 only in my 30s, and was pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, while consulting and struggling to be a writer on the side.

My world was pretty well defined: school, traveling (to consult), writing (creating mounting journals of my scribbling), and readings of the likes of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Krisnamurti and Eckhart. I lived in a world of ideas and of writers whose feet rarely touched the ground of my reality.

So, it was with some curiosity that I journeyed to Cincinnati, Ohio, and interviewed with this CEO, who was in town, and his local cadre of executives. In the course of these interviews, the CEO asked me if I liked football. I had played high school football, and was even recruited to play in college, including my alma mater, Iowa, but truthfully I was not a huge fan of the sport, and could still feel the bruises incurred those several years before every time the weather changed. The job appeared most attractive, one I could work for a few years, and retire, this time permanently, with a nice economic cushion, and write to my heart's content.

"Oh, yes," I lied, "I'm a big fan," hoping he would not ask me any specific questions about players or team standings. He didn't. Instead, he went into a soliloquy I remember to this day.

"I'm part owner of the Cincinnati Bengals," he began. "Paul Brown (the coach and principal owner) is a friend of mine. I still remember that time he invited me to rookie camp in the middle of the summer. It was early August and hot as blazes. The practice field was full of new recruits and recycled guys who wanted to get a slot on the roaster. There I was, suit and tie, which I had to ditch, and still felt faint from the heat. I couldn't imagine how those guys could stand to be in pads.

"There must have been fifty or sixty guys out there. I walked over to coach Brown, and said, 'How in the devil do you decide who stays and who goes?'

"The coach smiled at me in that knowing Irish twinkle of his, grinning from ear-to-ear. 'John,' he said, 'I don't decide at all. They do.'

"Then he pointed to the players on the field in various stages of working out. 'See those guys over there,' he pointed to the sidelines. I nodded my head. There was a cluster of guys joking and talking to people on the sidelines. 'None of those guys are going to make it and they know it. You see those guys near the end zone, doing wind sprints, and working on their cuts?' Again, I nodded. 'Those guys are going to make it, and know they well, but are still working hard to stay.'

'My job,' he continued, 'isn't all that hard. I'm not only the coach, but also the general manager, and owner, too, and you'd think my job would be impossible. But I've learned in my time in this game that winners stick together, but so do losers. They know who they are, and where they are, and when I give them the nod that they are being cut or staying, it is never that big a surprise.'

Once he finished, he looked at me hard, took out a brown cigarette and lighted it, took a deep drag, and said, "So, what do you think?"

Halfway through his soliloquy I knew the question was coming, so I answered with a question, "Is that how you see it in your company?"

"That’s how I see it in life," he said waving his cigarette like a sword, and challenging me with his eyes to differ.

Instead, I said, "How do you see me helping you?"

This seemed to surprise him, expecting some other response. Once he recovered, he said, "I read your book, did I tell you that?" He had. "Told the coach about it, thought his people should read it. It's a motivator."

The hardest thing in an interview is to know when to talk and when to ride the silence. He waited for me to respond. When nothing was coming after a full minute, he shook my hand, and said, “You’ll be hearing from us.”

It reminds me now, these many years later, of watching the Nature channel, and hearing the narrator say, "Determine who is the leader of the pack is of any animal and you can control the group." He was the leader of the pack, and I knew I was in.

I made demands when offered the job, but they weren't salary demands, or the expected perks. I wanted to teach at Xavier University as an adjunct -- no problem; to finish off my semester at the University of South Florida before moving to Cincinnati -- no problem; and to continue to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati -- well, we'll talk about that.

Arrangements were made to have someone come down to Tampa from Cincinnati weekly to brief me on my new job and bring me up to speed. This went on for six weeks, and then OPEC placed an embargo on oil, and gasoline dried up at the pumps. Long lines sometimes wrapped around the block at gas stations. This also meant no petrochemicals for Drano's products, and they were all petroleum based.

The result was that all Dracket positions were frozen. So, I was hired and fired before I even started.

Fate is a strange customer. The Bristol-Myers's CEO took a liking to me on the basis of a book I had written. This was an arbitrary standard to say the least. The written word and the person behind the written words are not always the same. He waxed euphoric saying he could see us working together in New York in a few years. I listened and smiled and nodded, thinking only of how this job would contribute to my writing career.

After that interview, I found myself stranded at the Cincinnati airport with all the flights backed up because of bad weather. There across from me as big as life was Paul Brown, resplendent in a auburn soft felt hat tilted at an angel, an Irish brown tweed suit with a red and brown tie, and polished brown brogues sitting cross-legged on some football equipment bags. His football players who looked as big as small houses and dressed for a parade surrounded him. I am naturally shy, and not much of a small talker, but I had to mention my meeting of his friend. I walked over, and he smiled when I mentioned his name. Then his eyes sparkled with knowing as I said, "He told me about your philosophy of winners, and losers." I wanted to mention my book, and that his friend planned to recommend it to his players, but thought better of it. To this day, I don't know if any of them ever read it.
So, if you find it difficult seeing yourself in the following pages, can you see your friends?