WHY WRITERS WRITE -- ECLECTIC REFLECTIONS & REMINISCENCE!

WHY WRITERS WRITE – ECLECTIC REFLECTIONS & REMINISCENCE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 5, 2009

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

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Russian novelist


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IT IS GOOD COMPANY!

When I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, in my mid-twenties, in order to get a jump on the next day to make sales calls, I would conduct chemical engineering service calls as late as the customer would allow. I mapped out those so obliging and planned my work around them.

There was an engineer who dealt with automatic systems to my chemical systems who had a similar strategy, as we would constantly run into each other well after the dinner hour, still working. We laughed about it. He was about my age, a tall good-looking man, thick brown curly hair, trim build, and a casual manner. I said one time, “I’ve never seen you without a cigarette in your mouth.”

He took it out of his mouth, looked at it fondly, and said, “It’s good company!” Then he looked at me. “Can I make an observation?” I nodded. “I’ve never seen you without a book in your hands.”

I smiled. “Point taken.”

I thought, then, we weren’t so different. His company was his cigarette. This was his pacifier on this lonely journey across miles of geography in his consulting work. Since my work was about 80 percent consulting and 20 percent sales, I was guilty of using books as my company. He would see me sitting there in the recession area of security reading while waiting to me admitted into the plant, and I would see him breezing by with a cigarette in his mouth.

He’d always ask me what I was reading, and as I started to tell him he’d be off to check another system. My books may have been pacifiers but it seemed a natural leap to go from reading to writing. Yet, I’ve always stayed away from my most natural inclination, storytelling. My writing has focused on breaches in the workplace culture, but even then I lace these diatribes with personal stories. I sometimes wonder if readers bypass these tales seeing them as padding when they are meant to be integral to the text.

WHAT DOES YOUR FATHER DO? NOTHING EVERYTHING!

The other day I read an email in which a person confessed she adored a particular lady because she was an upper class woman. It offended me because I don’t like to see people placed in categories, leastwise myself.

My son, when he was seven years old, was asked by his teacher, “What does your father do?”

“Nothing everything,” he answered with a shrug.

So when the teacher and I met, she mentioned this as entrée into a discussion of my son. “Michael has a mystifying ways of describing his life. He says he has traveled throughout Europe and Africa, and has lived in South Africa. He has a whimsical imagination, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t” I said, “because he has lived in those places.”

“But he’s only seven.”

“Well, he and his father have been on a fast track.”

“By the way, what do you do?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, nothing, I’ve retired.”

“You’re not very old, are you?”

“I’ll be thirty-seven on my next birthday. I’m completing the second year of my retirement or sabbatical, whatever you want to call it, and plan to go back to school in the fall to work on a Ph.D. But before that, I was a chemist, engineer, salesman, manager, executive and international consultant.”

“All that?”

“Yes, all that.”

“No wonder your son doesn’t know what to call you. So how are you spending your sabbatical?”

“I’m attempting to learn how to write. I have a book coming out next year.”

“Just like that you’ve written a book and it’s being published?”

“Yes, just like that.”

“Who’s publishing it?”

“Prentice-Hall.”

“What’s it about?”

“Well, the title is about selling, but it is actually about being aware, accepting and understanding of ourselves as we are.”

“Then you’re a psychologist, too?”

“No.”

“Well, what right do you have to address these issues?”

“Oh, I suppose because I’m a human being with a mind and a certain backlog of experience.”

“You say that so levelly but I sense an impertinence in your voice.”

“That’s fair enough, but we’re getting away from the subject of my son, Michael.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, pausing. “Well, the reason I wanted to see you is because your son is the brightest child I’ve ever taught, but he’s lazy.”

“I see.”

“I wanted to find out what you plan to do about that.” She was interrupted then, as I had taken up much of her time and other parents were waiting to visit with her. So, I let it just pass. Once away from her, I reflected on the fact that no one jump-started my motor. When he’s ready to start his, I told myself, he will. It was bad counsel. I should have been more cognizant, more proactive in his life. I had taken Gibran too literally when he said,

‘Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you. And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls. For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.’

I did not prepare Michael for life. I am sorry, Michael, and wish to apologize here to you now and not wait until I’m on my dying bed.

THE DARK SIDE, THE WRITER’S PARADISE

There are two professions in which the occupant lives more on the dark side than on the light side. They are creative writers/philosophers, and comedians. They see what other people refuse to see and what they see they deal with as the tools of their trade. In the case of the comedian, the dark side is the mother lode of his humor, which he carefully extracts and polishes to lift his audience out of its darkness by dispelling it with calculated levity

With regard to the writer, he uses it to compose his novels, short stories, and poetry, even his philosophy because philosophy doesn’t come out of the light side but out of the dark side, as do most things in art and literature that last. It is the dark side denied that envelops us and controls us and keeps us in cages of our own making.

WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?

I once wrote a novel, which was never published. What follows is a scene in that novel, which appears as a story within a story. It is taken out of context here, but essentially carries the sense of this reflective and reminiscent piece here.

* * * * * *

There was this man in the corporation who could see things most clearly. He wrote about them, spoke about them, and even published them. He did this innocently, naively, even sending copies to those in authority positions in the corporation to familiarize them with the dark side of corporate life he had uncovered. He hoped they would acknowledge and act on this darkness to bring light into operations. Although they failed to respond to his entreaties, he continued to write, speak and publish.

Then one day one of the corporation’s principal stockholders dropped by his cubical, and invited him to visit him at his estate on the seacoast. He had heard of this place, which was described as 20,000 acres of paradise high on a promontory overlooking the bay with ragged cliffs dropping a thousand feet into the sea, breathtaking he was sure. So, he was at first stunned, then flattered, but finally suspicious. “Why me?”

“Why not you?” the cherubic gentleman said, “Why you are the most prolific man I’ve ever read. I wonder when you sleep.”

The gentleman said this as he tapped his huge cigar on a tiny cup sized container that was ludicrously laced in diamonds. The gentleman was so kind and so insistent that the writer eventually agreed to a brief visit.

Once through the ornate gates, and into the estate, he couldn’t take his eyes off the manicured lawns that seemingly stretched forever, stately fountains with sculptured sentinels saluted them as they past. He had never seen so many species of flowers, and all in bloom, and the trees that seemed to climb to heaven. Then it occurred to him that they were climbing, too, as the landscape was tilted upward to meet the sky, and then suddenly a mansion came into view white as snow and arched in triumph like a cathedral nestled naturally among the trees. He thought heaven must be like this.

A manservant resplendent in white stood at the door to greet them. He smiled graciously, but without a word, took his overnight bag, nodded to the gentleman and departed. A host of servants were busy preparing dinner, all dressed in uniforms of white with such intensity that it reminded him of a carpet of falling snow viewed through a noonday sun. Everyone was smiling and bowing as if he were royalty.

Fine dining was not his experience but he followed the gentlemen’s lead, and said to himself, I could get used to this. Seemingly reading his mind, the gentleman said,

“How would you like to live here? I have a beautiful cottage picked out for you overlooking the sea. It is yours as well as all the amenities of the estate.”

“But I have no money!”

“None needed. This is a gift for your diligence and conscientious service to the corporation.”

“But the corporation has not listened to me; it has done nothing with what I’ve said.”

“True, but it is all under advisement.”

“No one has ever told me that.”

“Trust me as a loyal stockholder, your works have not gone unnoticed.”

The writer smiled. “They haven’t?”

The gentleman didn’t answer but offered the writer a cigar. “I don’t smoke.”

“I noticed at dinner you also don’t drink, not even wine?”

“No.”

“The wine was from my 19th century cellar, what a pity!"

“Where am I staying? I’m a bit tired from the long trip.”

“Of course, how calloused of me. You are staying here tonight and tomorrow I have a surprise.”

The surprise was a beautiful cottage with a complete library, computer and all the writing aids that he had only seen in books. It was as if the gentleman had read his mind and materialized his deepest longings. “What do you think? Do you like it?”

The writer was completely confused. “What is this? I mean, why are you showing me this?”

“It is all yours, every bit of it, as far as the eye can see is yours.”

“This beautiful house, too?”

“Indeed.”

The writer rushed over to the computer and puts in his code and, voila! All his files, all his writings appeared, “But how could, can this be? I’ve never given my code to anyone.”

The gentleman drew on his cigar. “It must be a miracle.”

Days passed and the novelty of the place started to wear. He couldn’t get out of his mind that someone knew his code. He begun to look for listening devices, for bugs in his phone, lamps, curtains, drapery, books, blindly ripping them to pieces. He stripped away the carpet and looked for wiring in the floor board. He tore through the walls. Nothing. Then he went into the garden and dug it up destroying exotic plants, shrubs and the immaculate turf. He scaled the roof and removed shingles. Nothing. He hadn’t slept or eaten in 18 hours.

Morning came and he looked at his beautiful cottage, its rich furnishings, which he had ripped apart, its elegant paintings, which he has cut to pieces, its finely plastered and papered walls, which now lay naked and scarred with wires snaking to the floor, everything was in shreds.

As he surveyed the ruin, the gentleman appeared out of nowhere. The writer bowed his head in shame and humiliation. “I don’t know what to say, what got into me.”

“There’s no need to say anything.”

“But I’ve ruin this place.”

“It can all be restored have no doubt.”

“But?”

“No buts about it.” The gentleman put his arm around the writer. “Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening. I have a special surprise for you.”

“After what I’ve done?” The gentleman said nothing but walked away in a cape of cigar smoke.

That evening the gentleman drove over to the writer’s home, then they both strolled across the rising turf until the mansion appears on the horizon as if a beatific vision with the fading sun framing it in radiant burgundy. “That is awesome,” said the writer, “truly awesome.” The gentleman whispered, “Indeed.”

As they walked up the long driveway, the writer noticed a large flatbed truck with black tarpaulin covering a massive object. Once they reach the truck, the writer lifted one of the tarp's flaps and saw what threw a shock into him. “This looks like a cage.”

“It could be considered as such,” said the gentleman.

“But what is it doing here?”

“Let us leave that for after dinner. A crew will be setting it up while we enjoy our meal.” The writer now noticed a crew of at least thirty men in coveralls standing near a giant rig, and four trucks with no labeling but which appeared to be furniture haulers or moving vans.

After dinner, they retired into the study where the gentleman had an aperitif and the writer a coffee. If I didn’t know better, he thought, I’d think the gentleman was stalling, first for having such an early dinner, and then this boring ritual of after dinner formalities. He could never understand rich people and their constant dalliance. Take this gentleman. With all his composure, he has nothing to say about art, music, literature, or science, only business, and nothing is more boring to me than business. “I’m ready for a bit of exercise,” the gentleman said finally, lighting his fourth cigar in the writer’s presence, “how about you?”

“Yes,” the writer said wishing to escape the cloying aroma of the cigar for fresh air. They walked into the garden while the gentleman explained why the bronze sentinels were standing at attention around each fountain. “It is perhaps whimsical of me, but I find my silent sentinels consoling, don’t you know?” The writer said nothing.

Thinking they were walking aimlessly, the writer was at first confused when he thought he saw on the horizon the outline of the tip of a giant helmet. It was no mistake. It was a helmet that grew more prominent and visible as they approached. “My God,” he said, “it is magnificent!” Shining in the early evening light was this remarkable helmet about fourteen feet high with gleaming bars in the fading sun like the discarded helmet of a giant Praetorian Guard.

The gentleman asked, “What do you think of it?”

The writer’s heart was racing. He didn’t know what to think. It was fascinating beyond belief. The hair on the back of his head quivered to attention. He found himself walking into the helmet, a space of twenty by fifteen feet, but with all the amenities that were so precious to him including his computer, his library which reached high above his head on three walls, and all the incidentals with which he identified his person.

The helmet was a cage furnished with a comfortable bed, reading lamp, a sofa, reclining chair, desk, kitchen table and chair, a television, computer, a printer, and an armoire. It also had a shower and commode, heater and air conditioner, and state-of-the-arts sound system with a complete collection of his symphonic records and favorite operas, along with a library of CDs and DVDs that he had always dreamed of having but could never afford. Thousands of books were organized just as he had had them organized in his modest home back on the continent.

How could they know? The thought left his head as soon as it arrived. He noticed on the fourth wall a small window that gave him a limited view of the sea, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t much into nature anyway. His world was that of ideas. He found his chest swelling with excitement like a psychosexual thrill, and was embarrassed at the thought. What is happening to me? “I like this place,” he blurted out, “is this mine?”

“If you would have it be.”

“Could I live here?”

“If you like.”

“Let me think about it.” So they left with the door wide open.

The next morning as the sun was coming up the writer rushed to the mansion, climbed up the stairs to the gentleman’s bedroom, and pounded on the door. The sleepy gentleman looked at his clock. It was 5:30 a.m. He put on his robe, opened the door and saw the wild-eyed writer practically foaming at the mouth in excitement. “I want to live there. I want to live in my new home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely!”

“Excuse me while I dress,” said the gentleman. “Have you had breakfast?”

“No, but I could have breakfast there, could I not?”

“Indeed, I’ll make arrangements.”

So, the kitchen staff served breakfast there in elegant fashion bringing in a separate chair for the gentleman. When breakfast was completed, and the gentleman was about to leave the writer’s new home, he said, “There are certain rules to this residence.”

“Like what?”

“You will be able to write to your heart’s content, but not to publish a word. You will be able to listen to any kind of music you desire, but watch only select television mainly old movies even pornographic if you like and no one will interrupt your pleasure. You have the most sophisticated computer and software, but no access to the Internet. There is one other condition,” the gentleman paused. “Once we close this door, you shall remain here the rest of your life, is that clear?”

“Yes, yes, yes, now leave me alone.”

“Are you quite certain?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve been unhappy all of my life wherever I’ve been, men have never listened to me and I’m fed up with them, and life, so why not, I’m dead already anyway, okay? So, close the door and get on about your business.”

“You’re sure this is what you want?”

Impatiently, his voice a strident cry, the writer said, “How can I make myself any clearer?” He pushed the gentleman out and as he did so, he said, “I want to rest, read my books, write a little, and enjoy my new life. Please,” he pleaded as he closed the door.

Within a fortnight, he told the manservant when he brought his breakfast that he had had a change of heart. He would like to return to his first home on the estate, and if that was not possible, to his old position at the corporation. The manservant did not speak, but dropped his eyes in understanding as he left the cage.

Thereafter, meals were no longer brought by anyone but slid through a mechanized slot that the writer had not realized was there before. As the days turned into months, and the wind whistled through the trees and passed over the rocky cliffs to the sea, his wailing blended with the wind into a chilling harmony of inanimate sighs, until one day it stopped. On that same day, the wind stopped, too, as if it understood that life’s torment was over for the writer.

The flatbed truck returned, removed the cage into its sanctuary at far side of this oasis, waiting its next candidate, which the corporation said had not yet been selected as there were several candidates being considered.

EXTREME UNCTION, WHEN YOU GO FROM BAD TO WORSE

I thought of this story when I listened to Harry Markopolos testify on Capitol Hill last Wednesday (February 4, 2009) regarding the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. I was surprised the network television news that evening gave Markopolos’s testimony short shrift and that included PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” only the BBC gave substantial coverage to this private investigator’s remarks.

In print, this investigator has been described as a “geek” and a product of “central casting,” as the attention has been directed to his persona and not to the nine years of careful and accurate reporting that Madoff was dirty, and running a Ponzi scheme.

This whistle blower claims that when he first reported Madoff’s activity to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2000 the investment banker had only bilked his clients of about $3 – 7 billion. Later, reports to the SEC were made when it climbed to $10 billion, then $20 billion, and finally to $50 billion.

Unfortunately, each time he delivered his findings to the SEC he did so without signing his name. He contributed further to his incredulity by doing his investigations in cloak and dagger style accepting no compensation, claiming to have done it “for the flag.” He understood the math, and the intricacies of these transactions, as he once had been a hedge fund manager, but diminished his credibility by appearing something of a flake.

He reported on Capitol Hill, “I don’t know if it was ignorance, incompetence or fear of the clout of Madoff, or a combination of these that kept the SEC from investigating him.” Markopolos suggested Madoff had free reign to do his dirty work with too many powerful people in influential positions on his side that the SEC decided to look the other way, and hope for the best.

Whatever label you prefer, Markopolos has exposed another form of cage, another example of the dark side. Here in the Tampa Bay area an investment consultant has bilked investor out of $50 million; the credit manager of the Tampa Tribune used his job to steal more than a $1 million from the newspaper’s advertisers, and so it goes.

These things, which are on going, seem only to show up when times are bad. An economic recession is a kind of death, and exposes the bad and ugly in societal behavior, which is constantly festering under the surface in good times, but no one pays attention except isolated individuals such as Markopolos.

The corporation didn’t pay attention with the writer in the story, which is fiction, and the SEC didn’t pay attention with this financial investigator, which is not fiction.

In the Catholic religion, the last rites are called “Extreme Unction.” The soul is given its last absolution before it tarries from its earthly confines. In a way, our society operates in a similar fashion, only it doesn’t absolve or resolve, but buries its deceptions and builds edifices over them.

Society’s dark side is its sin for which there is no absolution as it is not only tolerated but also cultivated, why else would it flourish so? My wonder is if this will ever change. I doubt it. That is why there are writers writing about the dark side and will continue until the end of time.

Writers on the light side entertain us; help us forget about our darkness, the darkness that possesses us all, and the darkness that ultimately destroys us. It destroyed Rome, also the empires of the Dutch, British, Spanish, French, Austrians, and Greeks, it is destroying the Roman Catholic Church, and even Islam as it is about to reach new prominence. Will it ever change? Will human beings ever come to their senses?

I am a writer from the dark side and I’m not privy to such intelligence, but I have my suspicions.

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