New Poem: "House of Cards"

House of Cards

Tedious, the same old same old,

but exciting all the same, 5^th season

of House of Cards, political thriller

driven by a vortex of ambition, sex,

and power, unending plots of confusion

seeking resolution, same old same old,

and at the end of the day what remains

is what they are, one compromise

too many, anguished souls resigned

to the dying of the light.

New Short Story: "The Little Wife"

The Little Wife

Gordy was just over six feet and Sophie just under five and they were married an interminably long time. Both high initiates of an ancient spiritual path that was introduced to the modern world as a New Age Religion of the Light and Sound of God by a soft-spoken southern gentleman who once worked for the founder of Scientology, we met Gordy and Sophie again eight years later in the meeting room of the Simcoe Funeral Home in the still quaint but much larger community that Stephen Leacock made famous with his Sunset Sketches of a Little Town, but for reasons I could not fathom the little wife denied meeting us at the worship service in the funeral home after our eight year hiatus, like she denied many things that fed her repressed shadow personality and made her so insufferable that I finally stopped going to our worship services and workshops because it was counterintuitive.

 We first met at a spiritual retreat at Villa Loyola in Sudbury. I read my story The Queen and Me for our workshop on dreams. “I made love with the Queen of England,” I began my story, which shocked everyone; but I never got the warning message from my dream and got “screwed royally” when my contract to hang drywall and tape and paint seven new houses on a native reserve went sour on me.

“Let me tell you how I learned about karma,” I said to our small group in the meeting room of the funeral home that day that she had totally blocked out of her mind but which her husband remembered but did not insist upon because he knew her fragile mind and did not want to push her to that place that made his life more miserable than it already was. “You remember my story The Queen and Me that I read at Villa Loyola?” I said, looking at the little wife and her husband who were the only other people present besides Cathy and myself that had attended the retreat at Villa Loyola. Gordy and Sophie laughed because my story was so memorable; that’s why when we met for fellowship a year or so later at Starbucks in Southlake after our worship service I could not for the life of me fathom why Sophie would deny that we had met that day for the first time at the funeral home in Orillia since Villa Loyal, and she continued to deny it every time we met at one of our spiritual functions. It was like she couldn’t help herself and had to keep lying about meeting us that day in Orillia just to stay true to her lie. “Strange behavior for a high initiate,” I thought to myself, and stored it in the back of my mind.

“Karma is all about passing the buck,” I explained to our small group that day at the funeral home of the community that Leacock satirized with such devastating accuracy that descendants of the people he caricaturized still harbor resentment for him. It was our first worship service since we moved to Georgian Bay, which was another reason Cathy and I remembered meeting Gordy and Sophie at the funeral home that day. “Let’s say I hang drywall on a new house and don’t do a very good job,” I continued.” I make bad cuts which makes for extra work for the drywall taper, and the taper curses the drywall hanger for his shoddy workmanship; and then the taper cuts corners and does a shoddy job which makes extra work for the painter; and the painter curses the taper. The hanger passes the buck to the taper, and the taper passes the buck to the painter, and the painter is left holding the bag because the job stops with him. But what if YOU are the drywall hanger, the taper, and the painter? All you did was pass the buck on to yourself. That’s karma in a nutshell. We inherit our own deficiencies, and we do so from life to life to life.”

My contract cost me forty thousand dollars because of all the deficiencies that my hangers, tapers, and painters made because I was the contractor and responsible for the entire job; but it was a lesson I never forgot, and everyone in our group of worshippers loved how I had illustrated the spiritual law of accountability.

But still, the little wife denied being at the Simcoe Funeral Home that day and insisted on her version of the truth as obsessively as she wiped the table and two chairs with a wet-nap from her purse before taking out two sandwiches and placing them on the table for her and her husband at Starbucks after our service in Southlake one Sunday the previous month. Her husband returned with a large take-out coffee and a small empty paper cup and poured half of his coffee into the cup for his little wife, and they saw me smiling at what had obviously become a private ritual; but he justified their thrifty habit: “A large coffee is cheaper than two small coffees.”

“And the sandwiches?” I asked, just to be mischievous.

“Oh, we don’t like the bread here. We get our bread from the bakery. It’s got five grains, and it’s a lot better for your health,” the little wife justified; but over time I came to see that it had to do less with their health and more with their frugality. And then one day we saw a sign on the door to Starbucks where we gathered after our spiritual functions: NO OUTSIDE FOOD ALLOWED ON PREMISES.

But that didn’t curtail their mingy habit. After one of our services at the Carlton public library she took out their five-grain bread sandwiches in Tim Hortons after obsessively wiping the table and chairs as her husband returned with a large coffee and empty cup which provoked the little devil in me again, and I told them a little anecdote a la Mullah Nasruddin to make my point on impropriety—

“I was having coffee with a couple of friends one day in my hometown up north,” I began my cheeky story, with an ironic twinkle in my eye. “I knew the owner of the restaurant. He was Greek. He and his wife ran the restaurant. He was a housepainter before he got into the restaurant business, and he and his wife invested their money on old homes in the city which they renovated and then rented. He came over to our table and asked if he could borrow my equipment for texturing ceilings; my compressor, hopper, and texture gun. He needed to dress up a house he had just bought. I looked at him and said, “Nick, I don’t come into your restaurant with a big T-bone steak and ask if I can borrow your kitchen to cook my steak, do I? Your kitchen is for your business, and my equipment is for my business. If you want my equipment to dress your house up with textured ceilings, hire me. I have to pay for my T-bone steak here, don’t I?”

Nonetheless, Gordy and Sophie justified their gauche behavior by saying it wasn’t the same. They were being careful with their money because they still had seven more years to pay on their mortgage, and they also needed to save up for new windows and a new front door for their thirty-year-old house.

“I’ll bet the owner here still has a mortgage,” I replied, with a snicker; but this only aggrieved the little wife more, and over time her animus for me became so unsettling that she cringed whenever I showed up at our weekly service.

And their thirty-seven year old bachelor son with pony-tailed hair and unkempt beard and beady eyes also cringed like his mother in my presence, which puzzled me until I learned that he was living in a condominium that his parents had remortgaged their house to buy for him and who had been living off the system for years after his meltdown when he worked for the government in the Arctic region of Canada and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and never worked another day since (on the books, that is); but he was only running away from crazy until his family karma caught up to him, and he knew that I knew that he wasn’t true.

That’s why he lost it with me when we sang HU at one of our worship services in one of the meeting rooms in the Carlton Library. I was working on a new book of short stories and took notes as thoughts came to me while we sang the love song to God, but the click of my pen irritated him and he lashed out at me with a vitriolic anger that by far exceeded the scope of minor irritation.

His outburst shocked everyone, but it wasn’t the click of my pen that got to him as we sang the ancient name of God to raise our consciousness and reconcile our inner and outer self; it was my own family karma that I had resolved when I stopped running away from crazy, which made me too true for him and his shadow-afflicted little mother. I mirrored what they refused to see about their own inauthenticity, but I apologized for my note-taking while singing HU and left the room because the air had become too toxic for me to stay.

It was only a matter of time then, but I refused to see that I had outgrown the path of my spiritual community. I continued to attend our services, but the more I attended the more out of place I felt, and I couldn’t keep my tongue in check.

The little wife had a nasty habit of putting her husband down at our spiritual functions, little digs that belittled him in front of everyone, often making him look stupid because of his dyslexia which he covered up as best he could; and he refused to defend himself, which only diminished him more with every little dig that extended to his whole family, especially his younger brother from Nova Scotia whom his little wife refused to let him visit. This happened so often that I began to feel contempt for Gordy; and then I learned why he was so meek and pitiable.

Gordy had an intimate affair for three years with his widowed neighbor and finally built up the courage to leave his wife for his lover, but Sophie had such a frightening meltdown when he told her that he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her, and he was paying for it ever since. All she had to do was throw a neurotic little tantrum to keep him in his place, and he took the abuse like a dumb martyr and penitent fool; but I could no longer suffer his public humiliation.

“Look, Sophie,” I said to her after one particular vicious little dig at her hapless husband that insinuated his infidelity to publicly shame him; “you can say whatever you want to your husband at home, but not here. This is not the place to vent your venomous spleen.”

Our spiritual community was used to her nasty little barbs to her wretched husband, but on behalf of men everywhere I had to say my piece, which only added to her animus for me that fed the collective shadow of our community; and ours was supposed to be an enlightened spiritual path of love.

“Love is who we are” was the credo of our spiritual path, and the little wife’s inveterate refrain at all of our services and workshops; but the irony was too much for me to bear, and I knew that one day I would have to walk away.

***

New Poem: "The Artist"

`
The Artist

He boasted native blood

in the name of his art,

but the Spirit of Art went

out throughout the land

and awakened the Spirit

of the indigenous people

and set it free to retrieve

its soul from the man who

had stolen it to promote his

name and claim fame with

dubious heritage.

New Story: "The Light of Common Day"

The Light of Common Day

“He’s a spiritual master in disguise,” she whispered into my ear before I met the new man in her life; but the first thing Cathy felt when we dropped by Sue’s apartment unannounced and met her new man was, “He gives me the creeps.”

I trusted Cathy’s instincts, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I couldn’t accede that he was a spiritual master in disguise, though. I never saw that in his eyes, nor in his manner; and especially in his dog’s behavior that day.

He was surprised that we dropped by and had the most startled look on his goateed face, as though he had just been caught doing something truly wicked; but Sue was happy to see us. She had extended an open invitation, and we happened to be in town that day doing some shopping and sightseeing; so we dropped by.

Cathy doesn’t like to drop by on people unannounced. It may be a womanly thing, but I don’t mind. I love spontaneity, and if there was one gift that I would wish upon my children, if I had children, it would be the gift of spontaneity. “Shades of the prison house begin to close / Upon the growing boy,” said my favorite poet in “Intimations of Immortality,” and before we know it we become fixed in our ways and the freshness of the day begins to fade into the light of common day.

That’s what happened to Sue. Her days became fresh again when she met Don walking his dog in the park that day, but within two years of living together, first in her small apartment and then in the house he rented outside the town limits away from her family and friends and everything, she felt just as trapped as she felt with the last man in her life who became abusive and whom she finally had to leave; but she could not admit to herself that she had made another bad choice in men.

Don was her third man since her alcoholic husband’s untimely death, and although he wasn’t physically abusive he stopped talking to her; and he got into the habit of sleeping most of the day and watching TV and cruising the Internet most of the night, and she was lonely and miserable again and hated her life.

I saw the anger in her eyes, in her face, and in her manner. No one else saw it, but she couldn’t hide it from me; and I took her aside after a workshop one day and let her know that I knew what she was going through because I didn’t want her to suffer all of that anger alone because of what it would do to her.

“Sue, I want to give you a heads up. I’ve been where you are, and it’s not a nice place to be. You’re angry, and it’s souring your life. How are things with Don? Are they getting any better?”

“Worse,” she said, and she would have broken into tears had she not been so full of anger; but that’s what I wanted to talk to her about.

I knew she would tell me, but I couldn’t hint at it one way or the other; I could only hope that she would admit to herself that her first impressions of Don were deluded. He wasn’t a spiritual master, in disguise or otherwise; that was a fantasy that had taken hold of her vulnerable mind, a vain and foolish desire that coloured everything Don said and did until it was too late.

I knew what he was the day we dropped by when his German Shepherd came over and licked my hand and lay his head on my lap and lapped up all the loving I could give him as I caressed his head and neck, despite his master’s efforts to stop bothering me. “It’s no bother, Don. He loves the attention; don’t you, boy?”

Sue made tea and small talk, but no matter how hard I tried—and I have a gift honed over the years for eliciting information from people—I couldn’t get Don to open up to me; not one itsy-bitsy iota. It was like he had become defensive like his dog should have been, and his eyes betrayed his wary shadow.

Our visit was short because it wasn’t going anywhere, but all during our visit Don kept snapping his fingers for his dog to go to his side; but he didn’t. He stayed by me lapping up all the love as he could get. That’s how I knew that Don wasn’t a spiritual master in disguise. He wasn’t even master of his own dog.

A master is master of his “dogs of desire,” the Sufis say; and I knew that Don wasn’t when for no apparent reason a picture of a naked woman lying on her back with her knees bent and legs spread apart and her hairy vagina for all to see suddenly popped up on the computer screen as we sang the love song to God to begin our workshop in Sue’s apartment before they rented a house outside the town limits.

 Don wasn’t there. He walked his dog during our monthly workshops. Janice and Ann saw the naked woman on the screen also, and before Sue returned from the kitchen where she had gone to put on coffee for our after-workshop fellowship I got up and shut the porn sight down; but I knew that it was one of those signs from life confirming what Cathy had picked up on the moment we met Don.

That’s what Sue woke up to, and she was so angry at herself that she could hardly look me in the eye because I was the only person she had told that she thought Don was a spiritual master in disguise; and she was trying to build up the courage to tell me that she was wrong. I couldn’t help her, though. That’s why I wanted to give her a heads up. I had to let her know that her anger was only going to fester.

It did with me, but I had an outlet. I could write my anger out of my system, as all writers do. “Why were you so angry?” she asked me, when I told her how my anger had begun to sour my life like her anger was beginning to sour hers.

It was going to hurt, and I didn’t want to hurt her any more than she was already hurting; but it would be a good hurt, and I said, “I woke up to my own delusion, and it took a long time to forgive myself for losing my perspective.”

She knew what I was inferring, and I read approval in her eyes for me to continue. “We all do foolish things, Sue; and it’s not a shame to admit it. I was in love with a woman for a whole year before I realized that I was in love with an image in my mind that I had created of her; but that was a long time ago and I got over it, and so can you. My anger possessed me when I woke up to the shadow side of our spiritual community, and it began to sour my life. We’re on wonderful path, Sue; but I’ve studied many teachings in my life, and you can’t trust any one of them because every teaching will manifest its own opposite eventually. That’s a principle of life called enantiodromia. Our spiritual community has its dark side; that’s what I woke up to, and that’s where all my anger came from. I couldn’t forgive myself for getting sucked into the collective delusion that our spiritual teaching is the most direct path to God because we have the Inner Master to guide and protect us; it’s not, because all paths to God are equidistant. But I bought into our teaching lock, stock, and barrel; and when I woke up to the seductive elitism of our spiritual teaching I got angry at myself for being such a vain and arrogant fool. That’s why I’ve been so testy at our workshops and spiritual services these past couple of years.”

With a guilty look of sorrow and relief in her watery eyes, Sue said: “Don’s not a spiritual master. I don’t know what made me think he was.”

“He’s just a man, Sue. Just an ordinary, fallible man.”

“I know; and I don’t love him anymore.”

“When are you going to leave him?”

“I can’t now. In the spring.”

“Does he know?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t tell him.”

“I’m not going to”

“Good.”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Understanding.”

“You’re welcome. Should we join the others?”

As we drove home after the workshop I shared Sue’s dilemma with Cathy, and she said, “I’d get the hell out right now. I wouldn’t wait till spring!”

***

New Poem: "There Is One Sin"

There Is One Sin

There is one sin

that no one can speak of,

or even dare to think; a sin

so vile that even nature

shudders.

So deeply engrained is

this sin that no one can trace

where it came from, neither

scientist nor theologian.

Like a ghost, either male

or female, this sin imprisons

the soul and makes its new

body home;

And the body sins and sins

and sins without ceasing;

but all the guilt of sinning

kills soul’s love of self,

and God, —

And the rest is commentary.

Hemingway's Brain

Hemingway’s Brain

Journal entry: Sunday, April 30, 2017

I should have anticipated it. That’s why I wasn’t taken by surprise when I read the piece by Joseph Brean on Hemingway’s brain in yesterday’s paper (National Post, April 29, 2017): “Head trauma linked to Hemingway’s suicide.” Medical science to the rescue…

Andrew Farah, chief of psychiatry at High Point Regional Health System at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, wrote Hemingway’s Brain in which he argues that the Nobel laureate’s famous shotgun suicide in Ketchum, Idaho was the result of “chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head,” stating his case on his study of Hemingways’ medical records, biographies on his life, and comparing Hemingway’s early writing with his later writing, especially A Movable Feast which was the last thing he was working on before committing suicide shortly after being released from the Mayo Clinic where he had received electroshock therapy for manic depression.

Psychiatrist Farah focussed on Hemingway’s nine major head traumas that he received throughout his life, the first one sustained in Italy during the First World War and the others in different accidents—car crash in London, skylight in Paris accidently falling on his head when he pulled the wrong chord, a fall on a fishing boat in the Gulf Coast, a plane crash in East Africa, and others which Farah argues were responsible for Hemingway’s brain disease medically defined as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

 “We all think of the Hemingway persona, but what the CTE did, later in life, was it simply solidified and locked in the very worst aspects of that persona. It made him irritable, volatile, difficult, and challenging,” Farah said in an interview. “People talk about how, psychologically, he was trapped by the persona like a spy out too long, believing his own cover, or acting that way because people expected it of him. I think he was biologically incapable of breaking free from the nastier aspects of that persona, simply because of the CTE,” Farah added, convinced in his belief of Hemingway’s psychological condition.

Farah argues that the electroconvulsive therapy that Hemingway received at the Mayo Clinic for his severe depression and paranoid behavior made Hemingway’s condition worse instead of better and believes that Hemingway was misdiagnosed and should not have been given electroshock treatment, and he may be right; but it seems to me (I haven’t read his book yet, but I’ve put it on my Amazon wish list) that he’s trying to fit Hemingway’s very complex psychological condition into his medical theory, and it smells bad to me.

Hemingway played with the idea of suicide all his life, often threatening to take his life to get his way with his four wives, and he played out this theme of suicide in one of his earliest and most canonical stories, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and according to his official biographer Carlos Baker while still working on his first novel The Sun Also Rises Hemingway wrote in one of his meditations on suicide: “When I feel low, I like to think about death and the various ways of dying. And I think about probably the best way, unless you could arrange to die some way while asleep, would be to go off a liner at night.” But his love of life always overrode his death wish and he survived until he could no longer live life on his own terms; so I have grave doubts about Farah’s theory of Hemingway’s famous suicide. 

But what intrigues me about Farah’s theory is that he believes the dark side of Hemingway’s personality was “solidified” and “locked in” by Hemingway’s deteriorating brain disease caused by traumatic head injuries. Why the dark and ugly side of Hemingway’s personality and not the good and compassionate side? Curious, what?

Were the novelists Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Dostoevsky (The Double), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) wrong in their psychological take on the dual nature of the human personality? Why does medical science want to relegate the self of man to the brain and reduce man’s behavior to biology and the dustbin of medical waste when the body dies? Have we become this materialistic?

There’s so much more to Hemingway’s suicide than the good psychiatrist can see, and though there’s evidence to support the theory that traumatic brain injury can cause changes to one’s personality, it does not discount the ancient belief in the dual nature of human consciousness that poets have written about for centuries; and if I were to offer my opinion on Ernest "Papa" Hemingway's CTE, I’d be inclined to say that his behavior was more psychologically affected than neurologically induced. "That's the way we Hemingways are. We're nice guys one day and sons-of-bitches the next," said Hemingway's son Jack, who never suffered from CTE; but his model/actress daughter Margaux Hemingway committed suicide. It's probably in the genes, then; but that's another theory...

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