Niceness never made a lively kitty

Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

LATELY I’VE BEEN HAUNTED that I’ll have a tombstone that reads, “he was a nice chap; you know, a good sort.” I probably will never have a tombstone because I’ve decided to donate my organs–I’m even thinking of composting the rest. But if I do have some kind of memorial–say a bench in the park–I do not want the epitaph to have anything to do with niceness. I was nice for a long time and ended up worshiping the opinions of other people.

Niceness is the enemy of greatness

The more I look at lives that transcend the cul-de-sacs of our imagination–world changing lives–I have become aware of three characteristics: obedience (!), integrity, and a kind of deliberate recklessness.

I’d like to have three cups of tea with Desmond Tutu. He is probably kind. This has nothing to do with niceness. His life is marked by obedience to his Hoy Orders; people who transcend “niceness” are obedient to a higher calling.

This is counterintuitive: we associate obedience with weakness. I couldn’t agree less: “The hottest places in hell,” writes Dante, “are reserved for those who neither loved nor rebelled against God.” In other words, perhaps, they are nice chaps–the good sort–always careful, cautious and innocuous. They never worry about making people angry, and aim to please people, before all else.

This isn’t a call to “get religion”; it’s a reminder that as humans we are primally given to worship. When we choose a higher calling we are more likely to change the world.

Character marks an adult. We know people with character from a mile a way. Wrinkles from grinning and gritting are marks of greatness, and should never be botox’d off.

People of strong character do not define their lives by things; they define the nature of things by their lives. People with character both suffer and succeed peacefully; they are unmoved by the modulations of popular opinion.

Again, in reference to Tutu, we tend to think of him as a kind of saintly, sweet older man. That said, he has openly worked against apartheid, tuberculosis, homophobia, xenophobia, and all matter of oppression. According to the mores of South Africa in the 1990s, this wasn’t “nice”; he was perfectly dangerous.

When we are young, many of us are told to “be careful,” “watch out,” “don’t touch,” “that’s hot.” “Do not touch, do not taste, do not drink”–this is the stuff of bad religion–theistic and atheistic. (A trip through the magazine aisle at Whole Foods reminds me that believers don’t have the market cornered on bad religion). This makes mice of men; ego foragers in the graylight of the dusky mind.

Sometimes I feel the optimist’s creed is nihilism with a sundress.

World changers like Tutu have kind of re-learned recklessness. “Relearned,” because it inborn. A child is born in a state of nearly constant abandon and learning and growth. Sylvia Plath didn’t write poetry because it was pretty, or cute. Plath wrote poetry to assault and obliterate and speak true (“Daddy I have to kill you”).

With Tutu, I’d say that “we’ll be surprised by the people we see in heaven.”

“God,” he continues “has a soft spot for sinners.”
–
Quote by W Blake
Photo by Nessa

Studio City

I am writing this as I descend into the zombie-filled San Fernando Valley, literally, in the backseat of a Honda SUV. This place used to torture me, and now it has no power. This is a place of haunted beauty and mythical broken lives. I feel calm and content.

This afternoon, as the shadows lengthen in the magnolias, pines, and inauthentic palms of Laurel Canyon, I feel peace, clarity and freedom from the mysto-smog that rises beneath the Verdugo Mountains.

I’ve been back in the States for 14 days after a year without touching US soil. I’ve been working abroad for four years, but this was with intermittent returns to San Diego and Los Angeles.

The “reverse culture shock” is more potent this time. I like “RCS.” I don’t know why I diagnose opportunities to evolve. “Reverse culture shock,” is disorientation that leads to new orientation. There is some torture, like in the dental chair—and like in the dental chair, the smile is renewed and deepened.

America is free, but there is also an iron maiden-machine that utilizes the “slings and arrows” of psychological torture. We live in a world that promotes communal and corporate vampirism. This is most clear in the smoggy Valley billboards shamelessly advertising our fascination with vampirism (True Blood, New Moon, Split et al). We celebrate our independence, our enlightenment, our augmentation. But we’re tortured by vampirism within and without. We consume and are left desire more to consume.

We are tortured by the guy/gal we cannot have and possess; the privileged guy/gal is tortured by the inadequacy of the opposite sex to satiate his/her lust or kill the Big Lonely. We are tortured in our jobs; we are tortured in our unemployment.

We receive a kind or flirtatious look from a stranger, we witness a peerless sunset, we achieve something and our accomplishment echoes through the cubical canyons. We are tortured because we’d have that moment spread out over all eternity, and it is just as soon gone.

But I’ve also noticed that it is only my clawing, lurching, lusting zombie-self that is being tortured. It is only the zombie that needs death, and that death is torture. If there is something that I’ve achieved—a kind of mythic purpose to living abroad–it is to recognize the value of torture and the way to suffer peacefully.

This near where I lived four years ago, but traveling and detachment has brought me this wonderful new internal operating software that allows me to enjoy without possessing.

In South America, I’ve seen the suffering of legless people on the streets, but at the risk of sounding melodramatic, most are not tortured. I know they suffer, sure, but the zombie is dead and the fine refined human remains. Only the living zombie needs death. I have learned to welcome torture and so experience the death.

The zombie continues to die, and only the human remains. I will “keep rockin’ in the free world” (until July 29), but I know better than to think a democratic society has the market cornered on freedom. Freedom is in the realm Crystal Street calls “The Third Place.”

This is where my zombie self is dead and I have no desire to possess.  I can walk through Nordies and see the sorrow in all the well-dressed, manicured and tortured zombies in search of “The Third Place.” I feel sorrow, but I am no longer tortured. And there is a humanizing sweetness in all sorrow.

This is not my home, and I do not desire it. It’s beautiful, true. The human can enjoy without possessing; and this place is filled with the intimations of childhood and eternity.

So while we were gone most of our friends had babies. The ones that had babies before had more babies. And, as I could have guessed, the former babies are now children.

There is something that is torturous and clarifying about children. They require massive amounts of adult time, energy and attention. But they teach you, through rigorous and authentic neediness, that life is primally other-centered.
We have one friend with a child named “C” who smiles with his whole face. He also contorts his face into a warp-spasm when he is about to lovingly attack an adult.

Money is irrelevant in conversations with infants. Toddlers begin to understand the morality of sharing. This, still, is a far more relevant moral question. Money has always just been a middleman (that turns into a boogeyman); whether-and-how-much to share is far a more meaningful and complicated question.

Infants have a few needs: air, food, water, pee, poo, and sleep. And love. In 13 years sex is thrown in, and everything else becomes complicated.

Toddlers remind me that love is more important than money, success or accomplishments. The primary currency of the infant is love; the child’s primary trauma is the absence of love. This reminds me that if I focus on money, success or accomplishments, I will be eviscerated against the sawtooth rocks of reality.

Babies use things and love people intuitively; adults tend to use people and love things. The child that doesn’t listen to these adults becomes a leader and a hero.

Babies often throw out the toy, and find an imaginative use for the packaging.

Babies have personalities. They are at ease with the fact of themselves, without the need to rationalize the unity in the bond of love.

Babies have a stronger sense of the unity in diversity of all living things.

Babies get high by spinning. They like natural highs, and they don’t talk about how prude they are. Either (a), they don’t have access to drugs, or (b), the natural highs are enough.

Potty-training toddlers are not ashamed of potty-stuff. Toddlers are often proud–like puppies–about the way they eat and defecate. One child (“C” again), ran out of the bathroom proud and cheering. What makes us wince is due to our awkward feelings about body functions, is something that toddlers help us to unlearn.

I read Curious George (again, with “C”) and realize that like George, toddlers in contrary desire for structure and primal freedom. Curiosity is more important than knowledge; what we know from children’s stories is true, and since has merely been ratified by the mere facts.

Some infants die–many die everyday of malnutrition, lack of water, gruesome social habits, and the everyday tragic gliches. A baby’s death is tragic. Perhaps to the unknowing child, I think it is a shortcut to the final rite-of-passage in which we no longer feel the absence of love. An infant’s death is something to avoid. Every child has the potential to enjoy love and renovate the earth; the child, like our deaths, should be mourned.

But I will not have any mourning that does not follow dancing.

Dancing, which is also intuitive for an infant that has any semblance of motor control, is the movement of one with another. Like a magnet rotating around a charge, a field is created. This creates a field of love. And it is a deep, wordless, and wonderful infection.

“Bye-bye, Wee-Wee,
Bye-bye, Poo-poo,” said Joshua
["Once Upon a Potty," Alona Frankel]