Someone wrote some time ago, "I am trying to understand your writing. Do you know you repeat yourself a lot? I read you and somehow feel you are attempting to play the universal parent."
I am trying to do nothing of the kind. You are however right about me being repetitive. Novelists sometimes write scores of novels telling the same story. I tell the story of my life wondering if it makes any connection.
Being the son of Irish American Catholic parents, born in the early 1930s of a da whose mother died when he was born and a father who took off never to be seen again, raised by mainly Irish immigrant relatives, and a mother whose mother died when she was twelve left to play mother to six brothers escaping to marry my da when she was 17 and having me when she was 18 in the heart of the Great Depression, I knew only their love and the instruction and discipline of the Irish Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church has changed but I have not. The church is but part of the once dying matrix of corporate society only to be raised from its Spinx's ashes with WWII. Corporate ugliness is not confined to Russia but to the entire globe demonstrating its nonsense from the handling of the pandemic to the world's current economic crises. I am not trying to play the parent but to find mature adults again emerging into our midst.
From an early age, I wanted to be a writer, not a successful writer, not a writer who would collect an adoring flock but a writer who would write what he saw, experienced, and felt, irrespective of how a reader might gauge such efforts.
Few have read WHO PUT YOU IN A CAGE. That said it is about all of us as no one escapes some kind of a cage. In my informative years, the cage was simpler and more manageable. This is no longer true. The cage today is complex and many-tiered and stultifies ordinary life and behavior. World madness is a result of the inability of individuals, families, communities, and nations to first acknowledge this colossal problem and retreat from the madness by letting a little love surface. Love and kindness are the keys to everything. I have experienced a lot of both, and now I am moving off stage. My writing, however, will still be there. That is why I write.
Best wishes, reader,
Jim
Are You
Passionate?
There is in most passions a
shrinking away from ourselves. The
passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive. Passions usually have their roots in that
which is blemished, crippled, incomplete, and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to
stimuli from without than an emanation of inner dissatisfaction.
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1955)
The commerce of passion
Before
answering, you may want to consider what passion means to you. Passion could find you on the horns of a dilemma moving away from one
cage only to find yourself in another.
This may ring counterintuitive to what you imagine passion to be, but on
closer examination, it might surprise you.
We tend to associate passion with intense feelings swayed by
emotions. We don’t think of passion as
something moving away as well as towards us.
We don’t think of passion as conflicting.
A passionate state of mind is associated
with deficiency, not efficiency, with a lack of skill, not a surfeit of
it. The true nature of passion has been
cleverly masked in the modern era by technological wonders. Passion is all about dissatisfaction.
Dissatisfaction,
whatever its cause, is dissatisfaction with self. The fact that we pursue something with great
passion does not always mean we want it or have a special aptitude for it. Often it is a substitute for something we
want and cannot have. Intense desire is
perhaps a desire to be different from what we are.
Passion
as an escape can be habit-forming. Many
attitudes induced by discontent may also be induced by desire. Intensity heartened by inner inadequacy
initiates a release of energy, which can work itself out in discontent, desire,
sheer action, or creativity.
Exploring Passion
Passionate
intensity can serve as a substitute for confidence otherwise born of
talent. The talented do not need to orchestrate
their skills in a histrionic fashion as they can accomplish their tasks with
the insouciance of play. Equating
passion with efficiency is missing the point.
Robinson
Cano, formerly of the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball, now of the
Seattle Mariners, a perennial All-Star, has been accused of being nonchalant in
his style of play for the effortless way he goes about his business at the
plate and in the field. Cano epitomizes
the confusion when passion and talent are treated as synonymous.
The
irony is that we have more affection for the hard worker than the effective
worker and a kind of resentment when a person is incredibly effective, as in
the case of Robinson Cano, and seemingly without effort.
In
sport, when an athlete attempts to compensate for a lack of skill with passion,
we call it “pressing,” meaning trying too hard or thinking too much about what
should flow naturally.
Alan
W. Watts says Westerners have gotten it all wrong when they consider thinking
to be hard work. “There is no work to it at all,” he advises, then goes on to quote
Zen:
Only when you have
no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty
and marvelous. That is why meditation or
prayers are so compelling. A quiet mind
empty of thought is in touch with itself and nature. It is free of intensity and therefore free of
the cage of self-doubt, conflict, and self.
Passion
displays itself most prominently during periods of pervasive social change and
chaos. In the midst of this, innovators
distract us from our sense of dissatisfaction by canalizing our attention to
new cars, gadgets, movies, TV programs, business strategies, health issues,
sports celebrity gossip, and medical “magic bullets.” It is the lure of the scam in the cage of
insatiable hedonistic yearning.
Eric
Hoffer sees us as a society of misfits who can transmute dissatisfaction into a
creative impulse. The artist is as much
a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet one creates while the other
destroys. He writes:
The times of drastic
change are times of passion. We can
never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every
radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test; we have to
prove ourselves. A population subjected
to drastic change is thus a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe
in an atmosphere of passion.
Colin
Wilson sees the misfit as the outsider in quest of truth. According to him, the outsider finds himself
living in a country of the blind and a world without values. The outsider feels caught in a moral vacuum
with the outsider at its center. Wilson
explains:
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.
What
the misfit and outsider have in common is a compelling drive to go against the
grain; to think outside the box; to go it alone. Not belonging, they try to find their way
amongst the rubble. They have eerily come
to the forefront and are now setting the table.
Some
of the attributes of the passionate misfit are discernible:
To
be running ahead is to have something to be running from.
Desire
creates its own talent.
Longing
becomes a habit that dominates all activities.
Self-esteem
is at its root passion.
A
gauge of passion is its unfulfilled desire for toys.
The
drive of the revolutionary is to stir those to action who no longer know.
Unfulfilled
desire is destiny.
To be in balance is to be at
rest. Passion is never at rest.
The self-sufficient straddles
the fault line between the achiever and the deceiver.
The social disturbance is at the
root of a crisis in self-esteem.
True believers gravitate to the
promised land of pride.
With a lack of talent, keeping
busy gives a sense of worth.
The passion of the dreamer is either an urge to build or destroy.
Mass fervor emasculates passion which kills creativity.
In a
universe of change, something is dying as rapidly as something is being
born. Since we are never ready, we are
always surprised. Forced to adjust,
which is a radical departure from the status quo, self-esteem is
threatened. To convince ourselves that
we are all right, we submit to tests created by those who believe themselves to
be all right, and scoff at the legitimacy of the tests, but keep taking them
nonetheless. Let us look at this
phenomenon from several perspectives.
Ambient deficiency Motivation
Sociologist
Billy G. Gunter sees us being habitually attracted to what we are not. Gunter calls his theory, ambient deficiency motivation.
The theory gives the reader another gauge of passion.
Since
passion is moving away as well as toward us, it could be said it involves
dissatisfaction with the person we are and a desire to be what we are not. These conflicting desires of the dichotomous self are known to play
tricks on self-identity.
The synthetic self is observed in teenagers
who dress in a way to define themselves separate from their elders but in
league with other teenagers.
Entertainers Madonna and Michael Jackson set new trends in dress and
style when they came on the scene. Their
synthetic self on display drew
attention to a desired group and scorn from a despised one.
Passion
is not on display but its deficiency with rings in ears, nose, lips, tongues,
eyelashes, navels, nipples, and genitalia, which is to exasperate and attract,
as exhibitionism departs from the conformist status quo to a new social norm that is equally conforming.
We
are young so short a time, and styles and fads change even faster. A point has been reached where ritualistic
and primitive mutilation of the body has become so common as to be boring.
Take
the phenomenon of tattooing. This art
form has been around as long as man has endured. Now, it no longer has subtle implications or
recognizable limits.
Tattooing
was once the domain of the rebel, but now tattooing has become mainstream. People, from the very young to the very old,
proudly display their tattoos as the human body has become a personal billboard
with a public display of an instinctual search for the identity of self.
In the past, people who mutilated or painted their bodies with
needle artwork were peripheral to society.
Radical change has made the misfit an ideal type. Now, the
eccentric is someone without tattoos or an aversion to them. Conformity has become comic imitation.
Not
only celebrities but the dregs of society sports bodies of artwork in common
universal identity. Gone primitive are
CEOs, professors, college students, middle-class professionals as well as those
in the upper echelons of society, as being branded has been elevated to being distinctive.
The
crowd mentality personifies the times in a passionate quest for authenticity. Outsiders have become insiders without
choosing to be so, as others are looking for a true connection with the
mystique and identity of a cynical world.
This passion to emulate, imitate, and replicate the mechanistic heart and
electronic longings of billions of souls is now called home in our caged
society.
As
technology becomes more precise, people become less so; as the postmodern world
becomes more surreal, society becomes less real.
Biker
gangs once considered “outlaws” are now adored and copied. We see professional athletes not subjected to
law, forgiven for their transgressions as long as they win. We see parents adoring their children but not
managing them.
Growing
up is no longer an option because it would admit to growing old, as that would,
in turn, admit to dying, and denial of
death is the new mantra.
Psychologist James Hillman, author of “The Soul’s Code” (1996), might see this identity crisis and new tribal
norm as our collective search for the real parents of our soul.
Gunter’s
ambient deficiency motivation fits an
impressive collection:
Walter Kennedy was physically impaired but rose to the Commissioner
of the National Basketball Association
(1963-1975).
Pete Rozelle created
the Super Bowl but was too small to play football. He transformed the fledgling National Football League (1960-1989)
into the national pastime taking that distinction from Major League Baseball.
Bowie Kuhn, totally
inept as an athlete, but with a burning love of sport, especially baseball,
became MLB’s commissioner (1969-1984) during its contentious years when
expansion was also new and controversial.
Howard Stern
couldn’t buy a date in high school and was known as “the stork” or “Dracula”
for his long six-foot six-inch slender frame.
He would become a $500 million a year “shock jock” on the radio.
Rush Limbaugh has
always had a weight problem and resembles the dumpy physique of the “Pillsbury
Doughboy.” The intellectual climate of
college academics didn’t work for him, but intellectual neo-conservative talk
radio did. He would become an
influential voice for the Republican
Party, and a multimillionaire in a class with Howard Stern. Limbaugh and
Stern were born on the same day and year, Limbaugh in the Midwest, and Stern in
the East.
A cadre of television evangelists who preach “Hell’s fire and
damnation” with unbridled passion are frequently trapped in that same fire, and
fall on their own petards as adulterers, pornographers, and embezzlers, some
are ultimately confined to the hell of a real prison.
We
see ambient deficiency motivation in
parents who punish their children for behavior commonly practiced by them, then
wonder why their children are a problem.
We
saw Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), once a drug dealer and petty criminal,
convert to Islam and joined the Nation of
Islam to become a strong voice for Civil
Rights, only to be gunned down by three members of the Nation of Islam.
In a frantic drive to escape the cage, many dream of another
self: the profligate spender a banker;
the prostitute a nun; the common criminal a police officer, the pedophile a
priest; the failed athlete a coach; the wallflower an actress; and the poor
student a professor.
Ambient deficiency motivation fits a
person running from himself only to run into himself with a burst of passion.
Passion: as a Negative & Positive
History
is replete with examples of ambient
deficiency motivation. St. Augustine
of Hippo was born to a Christian mother and pagan father. He rejected his mother’s religion when he
went off to school in his early teens and was attracted with a passion for hedonism,
sin, and a wastrel lifestyle fathering an illegitimate son.
He
became a devoted student of the dualistic philosophy of Manichaeism, then was
rescued from this by St. Ambrose who baptized him on Easter Sunday, 387 AD. Next to St. Paul, it can be argued that
Augustine has exerted the greatest influence on Christianity, both for
Catholics and Protestants through his sermons, letters, and his 22-book volume
called The City of God (413 AD).
There
is also St. Thomas Aquinas to consider, who also fits into ambient deficiency motivation as he was thought to be a slow
learner, possibly retarded because of his stuttering and reticence to respond
quickly to his teachers. Some historians
reference him being characterized as “the dumb ox.”
It
was St. Thomas Aquinas who rescued the Church at its most critical juncture.
The Christian faith seemed to be collapsing as reason threatened its dominance
and relevance in the 14th century.
In
his Summa Theologiae, St. Aquinas argued:
Philosophy examined the supernatural order in
the light of reason, while theology did so in the light of revelation. Although
reason used theology, revelation did not fall into the province of
philosophy. It followed that philosophy
could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth. Faith and knowledge were not mutually
exclusive.
Thus,
there would be two kinds of knowledge in the future: that which related to
revelations, which would be the province of theology; and that which would deal
with the natural world, which reason and philosophy could handle. The result of this new understanding would
one day be known as science.
Passion
can be, at once, a negative and positive force.
It can be expressed as a force for good, but equally as a force for
evil. We know Adolf Hitler, an Austrian
citizen, and corporal in the German army in WWI blamed the Jewish selection
committee after the war for his failure to win admission to the Vienna School of Fine Arts. His twisted passion took this rejection as
the logic for a lifelong hatred of Jews.
It led to his extermination policy of the Jews and the Holocaust, an example of passion in the
hands of evil.
How
passion plays out has much to do with how we resolve conflict in our life.
Self-demands & Role demands
Passion
is subtle, multidimensional, and can be self-realizing or self-defeating,
manifestly good or patently evil.
Passion has been known to induce company sabotage. Take the wildcat oil dweller of a major oil
company who failed to receive the dollar per hour raise that he expected. When drilling was nearly complete, he threw
his wrench down the drilling shaft, destroying the diamond-headed drill and
causing more than $100,000 in damages to the rig, and hundreds of thousand
dollars more in delayed operations.
Less apparent but ultimately discernible are passionate
passive behaviors described elsewhere as “six
silent killers.” Thwarted passion as passive behavior may be less
spectacular, but far more common and therefore consequential.
What
happens is that the ideal self (how a
person is expected to behave) and the real
self (how he behaves) clash within the individual confusing self-demands and role demands resulting in the situation being poorly defined.
The ideal self is an expression of the inner
voice programmed into the individual by parents, teachers and priests, and
other authority figures. The real self is how the individual
encounters and deals with life.
A victim complex can easily develop from
wounded pride and self-demands. Role
demands are driven by the nature of the roles we assume.
A victim complex can easily develop from
wounded pride and self-demands. Role
demands are driven by the nature of the roles we assume.
Self-demands reflect immaturity with the
individual fixated on an adolescent disposition. Role
demands reflect maturity and an adult orientation.
When
something goes wrong on a job the voice of self-demands
shouts, “Not my job. Can’t blame
me!” With role demands, the response is, “We missed the deadline. Let’s figure out what we have to do now to
minimize the damage.”
Self-demands relate to comparing and
competing, jealousy, envy, and spite for something, say failure to win an
expected promotion. Role demands relate to the job you’re getting paid to do. If it isn’t working out, then the mature
person decides to move on. [1]
Self-demands see the company at fault
when things go awry. Role demands take the position of being
paid to do a job and does it to the best of the worker’s ability.
Self-demands feed on paranoia, distrust,
innuendo, anxiety, stress, chaos, conflict, confusion, and ultimately
self-doubt. Role demands focus on what is expected and what can be done.
Self-demands push the person deeper into
the cage of victimization. Role demands bypass the cage to focus on
how to fix the problem.
Self-demands play on
pride, “Do you know who I am? What makes
you think you can treat me like that?” Role demands admit failure, “Yeah, I
screwed up. What would you like me to
do?” [2]
The Mortality Dance
The
passion to live on the horns of a dilemma
is powerful. Born with the fear of
dying, temperance is thrown to the wind in false bravado: “I work hard and play
hard,” as if hard is the operational word to passion.
By
the same token, passion can consume so much energy there is none left for contributing. The passionate want a career but they’re not
into changing jobs, going back to school, learning new skills, or starting
afresh. They want what they are doing
now to be resurrected to career status like Lazarus rising from the dead. In truth, all passion is spent. It can happen to anyone at any time and does
consistently to the passionate.
Consequently, it takes all the effort in the world to get out of bed in
the morning.
The
title of John O’Hara’s first novel,
“Appointment in Samarra” (1934) illustrates this anxiety.
The
title is a reference to an old story of a merchant in Baghdad who sends his
servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home
white and trembling and tells his employer that in the marketplace he was
jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death,
and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at
top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles, where he believes Death will not find him.
The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the
threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it
was only a shock of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had
an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."
Metaphorically
speaking, those afraid to live and are running from Death are sure to find it waiting for them in that cage of theirs
75 miles away. Existing is not living,
and for those waiting to live, chances are they will run out of life before
they find time to live.
Those
of such dispositions justify their lethargy and self-indulgence in the
pantheistic philosophy of hedonism in mocking tribute to Hugh Hefner of the
Playboy Empire.
Not
long ago Playboy celebrated its 50th anniversary. Television showed Hefner and his confederates,
a group of septuagenarians, men of ample frame sitting around a long table
smoking cigars and drinking brandy after scooting their beautiful female
companions off, ingénues the age of granddaughters or younger, smiling in the
camera and congratulating themselves on their bon vivant lifestyle, as if to say, “Don’t you (in television land)
envy us?”
This
personifies self-demands in a culture
in which role demands have been
reduced to “making it,” with “making it” an end in itself. This displays the “narrow self” as opposed to the “generous
self,” where the focus is on getting rather than giving, on self-absorption
rather than generosity.
There
was no apparent sense of the incongruity sending these demoiselles off to other
quarters to have coffee and smoke cigarettes while they engaged in worldly “man
talk,” as if this were a 19th century den of iniquity.
This
misogynic time warp of 100 years past indicates a dislocation without appearing
to be so with the atavistic misfit wearing the mask of death as a celebrity. I have written elsewhere:
Death is
always beckoning from beyond. The
undertaker contemplates his funeral; the rich man his destitution, the jailer
his imprisonment, the debaucher his impotence, the priest his fall from grace,
the actor an empty theater, the writer the blank page, the dying man the
absence of mourners. What are these but
premature visions of dying? [3]
Hedonism
is a Requiem High Mass without the
purple robes or incense. To accept death
as inevitable is the first step to living.
That said you cannot deny the tort of spiraling pressure in everyday
life in a climate of drastic change between need and want, pain and pleasure,
as misfits and outsiders stir the cultural drink.
A
natural high has been augmented by Iron
Man and Iron Woman Contests to release endorphins as a natural narcotic to
the spirit. Endorphins are
neurotransmitters, chemicals that pass along signals from one neuron to the
next. Neurotransmitters play a key role in the function of the central nervous
system and can either prompt or suppress the further signaling of nearby
neurons.
Endorphins
are produced as a response to certain stimuli, especially stress, fear, or
pain. They originate in various parts of the body -- the pituitary gland, the
spinal cord, and throughout other parts of the brain and nervous system -- and
interact mainly with receptors in cells found in regions of the brain
responsible for blocking pain and controlling emotion. Endorphins can lead to a better self or the
explosive discord of self-destruction.
This
Mortality Dance is real for we are
dying as we are living. There is a
desire in us to shed our unwanted self, the self that can’t keep up with
change, can’t hold on to a relationship or job, the self that has become our
enemy. This unconscious drive of the blind
striving to escape the cage, only forces us deeper into the cage unaware as we
might be.
In
the name of passion, we go from self-disgust to self-love and then back
again. The unwanted self is always there
even if not acknowledged. We are
fortunate that it’s a vital part of us.
We may assume a new self that is the opposite of the old self, but it is
only looking at the same self as if from the other end of the telescope.
We have a passion to change everything consistent with our new
selves. In religion, this is called
being “born again!” Becoming an outsider
to our insides is not becoming born again but self-estranged.
Persons
“born again” often become crusaders out to rescue alcoholics, drug addicts,
spouse abusers, petty criminals, and so on.
Addiction is a choice, so the best medicine is not pontification but
patient tolerance with attention to the possible cause or causes of the
addiction. Then it is up to the addict
to do the rest.
Gunter’s
ambient deficiency motivation,
Hoffer’s misfit, and Wilson’s outsider know this well. Hoffer writes:
If what
we do and feel today is not in harmony with what we want to be tomorrow, the
meeting with our hope at the end of the trail is likely to be embarrassing or
even hostile. Thus it often happens that
a man slays his hope even as he battles for it.
So,
when you are attempting to govern your coefficient of passion, remember it is
subjective and qualitative and something you want to do, not something you have
to do. We, alone, decide whether to be
self-creators or self-destroyers. You
get a pretty good reading of where you stand on this continuum. To wit:
Look
at the time – how do you spend your time?
Do
you measure the joy or burden of it in chronological
or psychological time? Do you see time in terms of instant joy or
delayed gratification? Do you invest
time in something today for its benefit tomorrow?
Look
at rewards – why do you need rewards anyway?
What
is more important to you, being recognized by others or knowing you have done
your best and feel good about yourself?
Do you consider risks part of rewards or do you avoid risks and still
expect rewards?
Look
at status – why do you do what you do?
Is it for pleasure or recognition?
Are you a puppet on the string of status, or do you do what you do and
let the chips fall where they may?
Look
at focus – are you a jack-of-all-trades and master of none? Do you want to excel at something or are you
afraid if you do others will think you are arrogant?
Look
at values and priorities. Are they yours
or others? Who creates your agenda? Are you driven by security or
challenge? Are you running toward or
away from your passions?
This
checklist could have been placed first, but passion is not an easy street to
walk much less cross. We are constantly
at the crossroads of helping and hindering ourselves and others. It sometimes feels as if we are walking a
plank above an angry sea, but that is only in our minds. Our life, good, bad, or indifferent is mainly
our affair, and it is as easy or as difficult as we choose to make it. Passion notwithstanding, the race to get
ahead is not relevant, not relevant at all!
Notes
[1] Six Silent Killers, 2nd edition, Chapter
10.
[2] Ibid,
Fisher Model of Conflict Resolution.
[3] In the Shadow of the Courthouse, 2nd
edition (2014)
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