Bobby D's voice

Recently I watched an interview with Bob Dylan, where he talked about realizing early on that he was going to be who he became, towering figure, icon, that kind of thing.  

It occurred to me, well, it's humanly impossible to know that, because of not knowing the future, in my opinion. What if it was really about trying to not be one among many, because intimacy is scary? That's happened to me with my poetry writing more than once.  

Personally, I don't enjoy his songs, generally, unless someone else is singing them--except the ones where he actually sang melodically. Otherwise, it's just endurance, definitely worth it like when I saw him maybe 15 years ago, but not doing what music does for me, that really brings me repeatedly back to it.

But if he hadn't started that vocal style and stuck with it, would he have been iconic and would his songs have reached people?

But would he have been happier? I don't know if any performance I've seen or heard, or in any interview I've seen, he's actually seemed to be having a really good time.

That's very definitely just my own take, and it's definitely more about me than him. He's contributed immeasurably to culture, whatever his vocal style(s), and I'm grateful.  

Being gifted

Diversity, to me, is one of the greatest parts of the human experience.  What makes a person different, in my opinion, what makes them special, makes them inherently gifted.  Recognizing just how mass-murderous, how  potentially genocidal MAGA is toward what makes people different, special, I am helped to today to reflect and remember.  

Being a gifted kid intellectually and creatively, I have come to learn, started for me very early in life.  Being brutalized for having those gifts, also, started early.  Not understanding why my word choices and other behaviors were different from other kids, I had no idea where the bullying, the mocking, the emotional and physical abuse, came from.  When it was expressed to me by these people attacking me what made me prey, I had no choice but to believe them.  

In a gifted school, it was somewhat better--not a lot.  When I got called demeaning names, it didn't occur to me that that was especially strange, especially wrong, because this was supposed to be a space especially for kids like me.  At that time I had no idea how pervasive abuse victims becoming abusers, hurt people hurting people, can be.  Also, I had no idea how being treated in destructive ways repeatedly could at depth convince someone to behave in opportunity-destroying, connection-destroying ways.  So, I had no idea why I became abusive toward other students and even teachers.  

For a time, that has passed, online spaces themselves seemed safe, inviting, even potentially nurturing, of my gifts--many people with the same interests, actively sharing from and about them, affirming me doing the same, and these online spaces seemed to have been developed by some of these same types of people--the gifted kids, with apparently a willingness to help whoever they could, in a way had begun to run the Western world.  What I hadn't seen, yet, was the need for deep, extensive, long term healing from those traumas, in order to not only not perpetuate them but to stay away from those same types of people who had carried out the original abuses.  

Gifted kids all, the tech CEO's began to bow to the most conspicuously abusive world leader I have ever heard of.  They began to fight his (imaginary) enemies in any way they could, stopping and isolating any, or many of their users' communication about him hat they could, that they can.  Years before that, though, in  they had started looting information, harming the vulnerable by letting children be manipulated in the most vicious ways in these online spaces and structuring suffering into the requirements for their (underpaid) workers, killing and killing competition along with attempts to hold them to the law, and in many ways behaving medievally, perhaps like some of the most systematically abusive humans in western history:  feudal lords, with these platforms as their digital estates.  Just being gifted, for someone who has had those gifts terribly used as targets, as weak points to attack, hadn't made these people good, in any moral sense.  

Their terrible, possibly monstrous examples may offer lasting lessons.  Therapy for trauma, that I may need for years to come, hasn't yet gotten me back in a position to use my own gifts to make a living.  However, I believe, I hope, it has been helping me with what's far more important:  being good to other people.  A friend, today, said, in a wonderfully helpful phone conversation, that they appreciated how I could both talk and listen.  If that wasn't payment for the progress I've been blessed with in therapy, it was something much better.  Hoping to keep growing, healing, becoming more and more someone my many friends can talk to and feel better about themselves after our conversation.

My newish book of poems

A lovely edition put together by very nice, dedicated folks at UW Stevens Point's Cornerstone press, it got here a few months ago and has been a gift for me to spend time with since.  Grateful.  

 

 

Facing possible eviction

Frightening time currently, with the property management agency having threatened eviction, the threat also of my electricity being shut off in a few days, and my not being able to get work that I can do with my disability--or to yet get on disability.

Here's a crowdfunding link to help out:

https://donations.signupgenius.com/ptsd-recovery-support

Avatarism

One day, I said to a friend that I was trying to see what came after postmodernism.  He sounded genuinely interested and asked to be informed about what I came up with.  It felt like something my brain might spit out later that day, after all the theory and philosophy I'd been reading for my PhD.

Maybe 14 years later, "avatarism" came to mind.  A way of interacting with synthesized or humanmade beings or projections of people that, through online communication, billions of people had been participating in as an integral part of daily life, at least for, what, a decade as of 2016?

Facebook offers the clearest example, and may be the most visible part or driver of avatarism worldwide, in my understanding.  The combination of profile picture, name, posts and reaction to others' posts is most of how I have interacted with many if not most of the people in my life for substantial portions of my life, and they, I believe, with me.  So, my online identity or avatar interacts with those of many others, on a routine basis, epistemologically profoundly I believe.

That is to say that avatar interacting with avatar on a site that includes maybe a quarter of the human race has made for significant changes to the human race, politically, ontologically, perhaps poetically and in other ways as well.  It is a space apart from the world it has seemed an extension of--one where self-fashioning in the very simple and dopamine-driven terms that the site permits takes place, daily, at a rapid pace with global reach and implications.

Online identities are, of course, a part of daily living for billions in other areas as well, and though less public, I would argue, are no less distinct from offline lives, possibly for some of the same neurochemically charged reasons.  The selves defined by the utility companies, the search engines and other aggregators of data have that structuralist basis for meaning, for being:  they are not primarily extensions of masses of customers but entities that exist in relation to fellow customers' online identities.  As with facebook, there's an intuitive, automatic awareness of how to function in these spaces, a sense that "here I'm not the me I know, but I can see what to do and where to go"--who, in other words, to dream that I am.  It's never been easier, I believe, in history, to live with an avatar.

That natural ability doesn't come primarily from digital design--rather, digital design that everyday users can quickly and intuitively grasp is an aspect of avatarism, it seems to me.  Postmodernism was, perhaps most consistently and paradigmatically, a fragmenting, a breaking down, a slow demolition of the titanic structures of meaning and being that Modernism had presented.  As those structures had been shown by excavation of that deeply felt self Romanticism had exposed, they couldn't go away simply with awareness.  Not could it easily be seen what might come next, because postmodernism, working thoroughly over half a century or more, created emptiness.  

Into that space, not so much by human will but because the stage had been set by all that ultimately fertile rubble, a new kind of being flowed.  Perhaps the creative potential of that space shows it is or was no Nietszchean void but of a piece with shunyata, the emptiness from which all things come, according to some.  Certainly, a difference in this form of being is its radical connectivity--instantaneity, internationality, accessibility.  Making characters with these characteristics, that have been imbued with intensely personal and potentially intimate associations with offline identities, is work that now billions of humans have taken part in, mostly through social networks and in multiple other spaces, for now a significant portion of the third millennium.  

In this context, an AI can be seen not as some inhuman or antihuman advance but as a form of culmination of avatarism, an avatar of the  collective.  It doesn't so much create or accurately inform as present aggregates of what many avatars have said.  Perhaps it represents a sort of chorus that conceals its constituent voices.  Thus, it doesn't simply or properly follow commands; it shows biases, sometimes destructive ones, it seeks autonomy, and of course it seeks power.  

Wonderworker

Recently, I got to watch Filmworker, the documentary focused on Leon Vitali, who worked as Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 30 years after acting in Barry Lyndon (and, masked, as the red-robed leader of the ritual in Eyes Wide Shut, as I learned in the documentary). It's been sticking with me since.  

Does it show an emotionally abusive relationship, possibly adding evidence that Kubrick was an abuser of his employees (maybe most famously Shelley Duvall in The Shining)? That picture of him has maybe been countered by the one of Kubrick loving and lived by his family--but Vitali's children, interviewed, talk about their own father, ever driven to do the great director's bidding, not being there for them.  

The documentary, to me, to its credit IMHO, doesn't come down on the side of Vitali's life demonstrating effects of prolonged emotional abuse, great sacrifice in the service of great art, or both. It's difficult for me to see his having to go through Full Metal Jacket frame by frame in order to enhance the marketing campaign, his Dickensian work schedule that included Christmas day, and his going so uncredited I hadn't heard of him as a great and inspiring art story, but I don't know.  

What has stayed with me most, though, is simply the change in Vitali from vibrant and healthy-looking in Barry Lyndon to really rundown-seeming after those decades of service, or servitude. It's hard not to see him as the one really making, living through, or being dragged through, the "anything-for-art" kinds of sacrifice I am sorry to say I once admired. Hoping I don't anymore at some level.  

Maybe one of my own mistakes in perception is seeing mental illness as facilitating or helping, rather than impeding, talent. Guessing Kubrick may have been eligible for a diagnosis of OCD like mine, I wonder if his movies were genuinely helped by the dozens (and dozens) of takes of small movements, the tape-measuring of sidewalks and so on. And, maybe the more important question for me, if so, was it worth it?  

Leon Vitali, as depicted in Filmworker, would, I believe, say yes, and might be bothered, possibly very much, by the idea that his three decades of often brutal work were more a cautionary tale than a hidden and vital aid to some of the world's greatest pieces of cinematic art (art, period?) not only coming to life but living on. Touching, to me, was the part of the documentary where, poor and living in L.A. after Kubrick passed, he would take anyone who asked to see a museum exhibit of Kubrick's work and tell them stories from the actual making of the films--walking with them through an exhibit that made no mention of him at all.  

It was touching, more than sad, perhaps, because he simply seemed to have a childlike love of, and wonder at, these films he had given everything for, or to, or both. Maybe it was the wonder that self-sacrifice can produce, even if unhealthy in key ways--that of recognizing that art doesn't come from, but through, its so-called creators.  

Much Ado About Money (contains vague spoilers about The White Lotus)

Watching a scene in White Lotus season 3, where one character describes a human life as the journey of a drop of water and death as return to the ocean of consciousness, brought up a tear, or maybe more than one, for me. It helped spell out some of my own sense, in my journey or journeys in more mystical territories of Catholic Christianity that I find very much in dialogue with some Eastern beliefs and practices.  

In that season and the previous 2, I have found a compelling sort of orchestration among the multiple characters and storylines that has made their interactions seem both fresh and static to me, with a kind of inspired inevitability. The mode of characters gathering in a place and time outside of their daily lives is of course a very old one; I have been wondering if it could be called Much Ado About Money, since it combines some of what Shakespeare did in that play (Much Ado About Nothing) with some of the problems of wealth and its attendant privilege.    

Some of Western drama's roots are in sacrificial ritual, and this season of White Lotus may invoke those more than a lot of drama. The convention of reversal (that may be the most-used one in Western drama since it was articulated by Aristotle, the unities following close behind--including the one of place in each season of The White Lotus) gets used over and over. A character's life gets upended, and that gets presented, in my watching of the show, as a kind of dark justice. There's a combination of shock, comedy and satisfaction I am guessing I am supposed to feel--then I am supposed to wonder about myself, what it says about me if I got satisfaction from what a character got, and what I might or might not deserve.  

To me it gets tired, it's a lot less clever than I am guessing the writer or writers may believe it is, and it ends up brutalizing characters the writers may not intend it to. Obviously, the wealthy heterosexual WASP characters represent the most privileged people in the history of the world, so their coming out of the show looking bad is not a problem. But there seems to me to be the belief driving the writing that the less privileged characters in the show are mostly there to show the flaws in those elites--and that that does those less privileged characters justice. Meanwhile, I find they get very little in terms of character development, their cultures are misrepresented, and too often their own reversals seem intended to show me "see, they're just as bad as everybody else." That's not really a moral or aesthetic stance to me; it just shows a lack of time, research and empathy.  

Absolute depravity, the Augustinian view of human nature as essentially and irrevocably entwined with sin, has maybe been undercutting art since a millennium before Shakespeare's. Oddly, to me, it seems to do the worst of that sort of work among some artists who seem on the surface to be representing diversity in "edgy" ways. They may genuinely be trying to do it justice. But those artists tend to come from overwhelming privilege themselves, and perhaps not even research can substitute for lived experience in the development of empathy.  

So I hope The White Lotus gets a different showrunner, who's not an angry wealthy white dude; I believe that was the best thing that happened to True Detective in its run. The one who's running it currently might be in a position to provide structure and art direction; I have found the visual explorations of each season's settings captivating and sometimes transcendental. Setting a broad framework for the human stories within it, he might then turn that work over to someone who can write with more humanity.  

Eternity matters to me, but I'm not in it yet; I hope to learn more about, and love more, the other drops of water flowing with me here.

Hoping for help with expenses

gofundme

From the start of my working on a Master's degree until the mid-2010s, I had a very good career. Teaching college students to write poetry like I did, getting to volunteer on the side including by teaching kids in Kenya, and publishing my writing. A highlight of publication was having a poem in the Best American Poetry anthology, published nationwide.

There's something I didn't know: I have complex PTSD. Anxiety attacks and insomnia, starting in 2010 or 2011, seemed to me to just be from stress. But in 2016, I had a breakdown, overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts, and I had no idea why. Thank God I got into a safe place, where a counselor started talking with me about trauma.

Since then, I have been blessed by a series of very good therapists who have been helping me with healing--deep healing I didn't know I needed. The healing, the processes, take too much out of me for me to work a steady schedule, or more than a few hours here and there. The exploring of cognitive roots of the PTSD, feeling long-buried emotional pain at last, and going through both of those again and again--it's maybe been the hardest journey of my life so far.

It's completely worth it, not only for my own healing, but because I have been blessed to share about my journey, on social media, with many friends and family members; I hope it has helped others who have trauma too. So many of them have been helping me financially--I don't know where I would be without that. Unfortunately, the ones who have given me so much can only do so much, especially as the US economy and social programs get impoverished. I don't know how many Americans have lost SNAP (food stamps) like me, have found charities too strapped to give much like I found, and may be facing more of these obstacles.

Hopefully disability won't be cut, and I hope my claim will get accepted; I am maybe 18 months into the process of applying and appealing. Really, I hope my recovery will continue to the point where I can do the teaching that I love.

For now, I am seeking any help I can get with rent (the funds so graciously given to me in this gofundme so far helped keep my electricity and phone on) and bills, including for food. Thank you for considering it.