Adding to One's Life Story (part 2)

Last week, with the help of several literary references, I wrote about the ideas of life achievements, mediocrity, and living out one’s life as epilogue rather than story (kudos to Vonnegut, Jr. for coming up with this one). The concluding question was this: if you haven’t achieved the goals you set out for yourself early in life, does that mean you’re living a life of mediocrity? I answered by saying that while you’re life might in fact be mediocre, it needn’t be.

In the film Manchester by the Sea, the lead character played by Casey Affleck is living an epilogue. His life story is over, and now it’s merely a waiting game until the finish line. Though his case might be an overly drastic one, I do occasionally observe people living out their epilogues and doing little to further their life story.

But more often I see the opposite: people doing extraordinary things that might not exactly constitute the lives of grandeur they’d envisioned for themselves decades ago, but are still impressive achievements, significant contributions, or interesting pursuits that give their lives meaning. Hell, on my block alone, we’ve got a man who opened up a toy museum, plays in excess of 100 gigs a year, wrote a book about the Chicago music scene in the 60s and 70s, and collects and sells antique toys worldwide. His life story is far from epilogue even if he isn’t gracing the cover of Rolling Stone.

Four years ago I met a man who learned a trade as a teenager, started his own business in his 20s, raced cars in his 30s, competed in Ironman Triathlons in his 40s, and THEN, at the age of 50, decided that he’d like to learn an instrument. He learned two. I now play keyboards for his classic rock band of 15 years. Oh, and last year he opened up a restaurant in suburban Chicago. Tell me his life is epilogue. Or mediocre. Or anything other than amazing.

Another friend of mine has been called a Renaissance Man. He built his own brick oven in the backyard, brews his own beer, quilts, cooks, plays the flute, builds his own drones, and runs triathlons.

Another buddy memorizes Shakespearean sonnets, studies philosophy in his spare time, plays a wicked violin, taught his daughters their respective instruments (one of whom is going pro), teaches Sunday school, serves on the synagogue Board and runs marathons.

(question: what is it with high achievers running marathons and competing in triathlons. I don’t get it)

The list of people whose lives I admire goes on and on. Average people publishing books, raising money for charity, driving political change, helping those in need, writing songs, building furniture, embarking on amazing home improvement project, traveling to interesting places. There is no shortage of impressive people in our midst. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

As someone who dreamed big as a child, I’ve done a fair bit of analyzing and rationalizing my current state of affairs. Like George Bailey, I haven’t quite achieved what I set out to back in my early 20s. About a decade ago I wrote the following lyric, supposedly for a friend of mine, but in retrospect aimed squarely at me:

(from “Grounded” off of Pause)

The truth be known, my friend
There lies a noble end
But it’s a million miles away from where you’ve been
You’ve been on cruise control
Without a lofty goal
And every day begins and ends and ends where it begins
I believe there is something grand you’re ready to achieve
It’s not so out of reach
After all
There are lesser souls than you to heed the call

My youngest child was about to start Kindergarten, and it was time for me to explore other aspects of my life more fully. I wouldn’t classify my life as anything exceptional, but when I’m feeling a little down about things I recognize that while my life story may not be a bestselling page-turner, it isn’t a dull textbook either. It certainly isn’t epilogue. I’ve accomplished much since writing that self-inspiring lyric.

The reality is epilogue never has to happen, even if you live to be a hundred. And the converse is true as well. The characters of Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road were already living epilogue in their 20s.

Learn. Explore. Volunteer. Start a hobby. Help others. Learn an instrument. Love, and experience joy with the ones you love. Learn a craft. Grow something. Learn a language. Have fun with friends. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the little miracles around you every day.  As James Taylor wrote, “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”

Which leads me to the ending of the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life. Michael Palin says, “Now here’s the meaning of life,” is handed an envelope as if announcing the winner of an award, and says: “Well, it’s nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

It degrades quickly from there in inimitable Monty Python fashion, but it starts out nice enough!

Conformity, Greatness, Mediocrity and George Bailey

In college I had a roommate who facetiously claimed that the Frank Capra Christmastime classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, had been commissioned by the U.S. Government as a way to dampen expectations of the post-war population. Soldiers returning from the war wanted not just a piece of the American Dream, they wanted to achieve, to aspire, to conquer life the way they had conquered death on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific islands. In short, they wanted it all. The Feds, fearful of a potential uprising of unsatisfied citizens, hoped to quell their desire, and what better way to do so than to make a movie about a man with big dreams who by the film’s end learns life’s most valuable lesson: that no man is a failure who has friends? A wonderful theory, and one that made the twenty-something me laugh and take note, as I sure as hell wasn’t going to settle for the simple life. No fricking way.

Fast forward just a short decade or so, and I was an at-home dad taking care of twin daughters in a three-bedroom ranch in suburban Pennsylvania. So much for conquering the world, though there were days – say, on a sunny weekday when my kids and I successfully tackled a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo with no spousal lifeboat – that I did indeed feel like The King Of The World.

Government conspiracy or not, the idea of conformity did seem to take hold in post-war United States, so much so that author Richard Yates devoted his 1961 debut novel Revolutionary Road to the concept. In a 1972 interview, Yates says of his novel: “During the fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price…”  He also says his book is about “…a series of abortions, of all kinds—an aborted play, several aborted careers, any number of aborted ambitions and aborted plans and aborted dreams.”

George Bailey, right?

Not so fast. 

As I was reading the book last month, I noticed that Yates’s protagonists, Frank and April Wheeler, were living out the second part of a life cycle that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes in his novel, Deadeye Dick:

“If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is…I suppose that’s really what so many American women are complaining about these days: They find their lives short on story and overburdened with epilogue.”

Overburdened with epilogue.  The unhappiness of Yates’s characters really had nothing to do with marriage, suburbia, careers or lack thereof, hobbies, home projects or friends. The Wheelers were going to be miserable whatever their life circumstances. Their stories were over, and they were living out their epilogues. They experienced no joy from their children. They didn’t do interesting things on the weekends. They didn’t enjoy the company of others. They did nothing to help people. They were largely sleeping walking through life.

George Bailey lived a life that – while perhaps not the one he’d envisioned as a youth – was quite rich in comparison, though one could argue that this conclusion is the result of rationalizing. He didn’t achieve greatness, and therefore had no choice but to find solace in mediocrity. But are those the only alternatives?  Is the alternative to greatness – to achieving one’s dreams at any cost – mere mediocrity?  Is George Bailey anything special in the end? John Steinbeck might not think so. In his novel East of Eden, the character Sam Hamilton says, “When the Lord God did not call my name, I might have called His name – but I did not. There you have the difference between greatness and mediocrity. It’s not an uncommon disease…I’m glad I chose mediocrity, but how am I to say what reward might have come with the other?”

How, indeed. In the current movie, La La Land, the final segment offers a glimpse into alternative lives for the two leads had they chosen difference courses, and I suppose we all play out these parallel universes in our imaginations from time to time and wonder what would have been like had we taken a different turn, said yes instead of no or vice versa, or taken a risk we weren’t prepared to take. But does mean that the life we live – perhaps a rather common life – is mediocre? 

I argue that it might be, but it definitely needn’t be.

More on this point next week.

A Lost Song: State of Independence

It’s been a full two months since my last entry, so it’s high time to get back into the swing of things. As such, I’ll start with something light: a lost song that found its way back after two decades of being MIA.

Songs from long ago have a way of creeping back into conscious thought if I sit still and sit silently long enough. Enter the road trip. A perfect opportunity to turn off and tune in, as it were. Last month it was twelve hours to D.C. and twelve hours back, and while podcasts by Marc Maron and Terry Gross are my favorite way to kill time on the highway, I find that after three or four hours I need a respite. No music. No interviews. No dialogue with the family. Just silence. 

During these moments I find that can do a number of things. One, create. I’ve written many songs when I allow myself to just…be. Two, plan and worry. I go through lists of things I need to do, should have done, ought to do. Three, completely zone out. When I do this, the subconscious seeps through the little crevices of conscious thought, and all of the sudden I’m mentally singing a song I haven’t thought of in twenty-two years. 

Chrissie Hynde begins singing a phrase of unintelligible lyrics and then more forcefully sings the line:

“The state of independence shall be.”

I think, what the hell is that? I recall hearing it regularly on The Cities 97 in Minneapolis back in 1993, right around the time I started dating my future wife, and it sounded similar to another song from around that period: “Protection” from Massive Attack, which my subconscious happily resurrected a few years back. 

PV

Enter the Internet search. And this is where things get kind of interesting if you’re a music geek.

The song in the form I remember is by a duo called Moodswings, who in 1992 released their debut album featuring a song sung by Chrissie Hynde called “Spiritual High (State of Independence)”. I’ve since learned that this song is actually included on The Pretenders’ Greatest Hits album (which is kind of lame, if you ask me), but I knew nothing about this.

But the song’s origins go back to 1981, when former lead singer of Yes, Jon Anderson, teamed up with Vangelis (the same year that Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire theme became an unexpected and ubiquitous radio hit) to release their second album, The Friends of Mr. Cairo. I was familiar with the title track, as on a Sunday night in September of 1982 I listened to Jon Anderson’s solo concert on the King Biscuit Flower Hour on WQFM, Milwaukee. Hell, I still have the recording I made of the show on cassette! The show featured several tracks from his very solid album, Animation, a bunch of Yes songs, and the one tune from his collaboration with Vangelis.

I never purchased any Jon and Vangelis record, but on the aforementioned album is a tune called “State of Independence,” a lengthy piece that somehow got to the desk of Quincy Jones, who in 1982 produced a version of the song for Donna Summer’s eponymous album. And lo and behold, it was a modest hit in Europe. How the hell did Quincy Jones come upon a song by a couple of prog-rockers? No clue.

Full version of song from the 1981 Jon & Vangelis album "The Friends of Mr. Cairo."

Love This!! 1982.. :p

An open and empty mind can do amazing things, and I suspect a good portion of my latter years will be me sitting in a comfy chair and my mind playing a crazy shuffle of songs I lost track of long ago.

Or maybe I’ll just worry.  Could go either way.

Yard: Just Die Already

This fall, as temperatures have continued to ride high into the 70s, I've occasionally peered from my back window into a yard of still flourishing foliage, blooming impatiens and lush grass, and been reminded of something Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes once said while stuck in a theater showing an interminable movie:

I second this sentiment, not about The English Patient – a film I actually like (I have a thing for Juliette Binoche, so…) – but to my thriving yard.

Just die already. Die. 

Curse you, global warming. I live in the upper Midwest for a reason. I don’t want an endless summer when every day looks the same. The Albert Hammond song is not a picture of paradise for me. It’s a picture of monotony: mowing and watering, trimming and edging, pruning and planting, spraying and harvesting. The whole point of winter is to put a stop to all this nonsense, so we can instead head toward the Great Indoors and focus our attention on other things, like patching and painting, washing and dusting, organizing and decluttering, or – if you’re like me and put off til tomorrow what you could just as easily do today – watching marathon sessions of obscure music documentaries.

Come spring, when the last patches of snow recede into the dark earth, then I’ll be ready to begin again. Like baseball season, I need a four month hiatus to reinvigorate the desire to dirty up the hands and cultivate the gift of growing something, of fostering new life from dormant dirt.

Until that time, give it a rest. If temperatures continue to rise and Chicago’s growing season extends into November every year, I’ll be forced to abort my Illinoisan residence and head north. 

And if Trump wins next Tuesday, further north still (if Canada will take me).

Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle"

When Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was released two years ago, I had the good fortune of reading a Time magazine piece that compared the film to a book by a Norwegian author named Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Not just a book, but a 3600-page, six-volume autobiography called – oddly enough – My Struggle, (you gotta wonder if they came up with a different title for the German translation).  I socked away this little bit of information for future use, and lo and behold, while at a used bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin in July, I happened upon the first volume of Knausgaard’s opus and thought that for nine dollars I should give it a go.  I’m glad I did, and though I likely won’t be reading volumes two through six, I enjoyed the first volume (or the first 300 pages or so, anyhow) not only for what the author illuminates about his life, but for the way his words inspired me to consider my own life journey.  If you’re ever in want of stopping the routine of daily living, of taking a moment to self-reflect, to remember and to wonder – in the words of David Byrne – “Well, how did I get here?”, My Struggle would be a good place to start, as it holds back nothing: not a sentiment, not a doubt or desire, not a transgression or dejection, and likely not a single conceivable detail about the physical surroundings of the author's childhood.

Arthur Miller once wrote: “The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

It seems Knausgaard has no qualms whatsoever of walking on the beam of embarrassment and revealing the seedy underbelly that is his life (and is all of our lives if we’re ever to be truthful).  He writes about his daughter, “(She) can be so cheeky that I completely lose my head and sometimes shout at her or shake her until she starts crying…”  This is not something most people would admit to unless they’re discussing a past that they’ve now recovered from.  My Struggle is not one of those books.  It reveals the gory details of living.

Have you ever closed your eyes and tried to conjure up a detailed mental image of the home where you grew up?  The colors.  The texture.  The scents.  The layout.  Was the toilet of the first floor bathroom on left or on the right?  Was that the room with flowered wallpaper or the little green design that always reminded you of a military seal?  Was the floor linoleum, wood or tile? 

Knausgaard has thought through all this and more, and so much of his reminisces brought to life my own childhood.  His crush for a girl named Hanne and the desires she summoned (“There was nothing between us…but I loved her.  I didn’t think of anything else…I saw her all the time, not in a scrutinizing or probing way; that wasn’t how it was, no, it was a glimpse here, a glimpse there, that was enough”) recalls my own childhood crushes to a “T”.

Or this!  Knausgaard writes about two childhood memories that may as well have been describing my own:  “At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream” and “Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past.”  Holy crap.  That was me.

Knausgaard was born the same year I was, and though from a different country and with a very different family makeup, his life has so many similarities to mine, and – if the half a million sales are any indication – to many other people’s lives as well, that reading it is both externally engrossing and internally revealing.

The difficult relationship Knausgaard has with his father and brother and the distance between them (“We never touched, we didn’t even shake hands when we met, and we rarely looked each other in the eye”) could be describing my own complicated kinships.  His intense desire to warrant his father’s approval is palpable: “I had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was.  That I was bigger than he was.  Or was it just that I wanted him to be proud of me? To acknowledge me?”

Then there’s his description of alcohol, the substance that had killed his father: “This was a magic potion we were drinking.  The shiny liquid…changed the conditions of our presence there, by shutting out our awareness of recent events and thus opening the way for the people we normally were, what we normally thought, as if illuminated from below, for what we were and thought suddenly shone through with a luster and warmth and no longer stood in our way.”

My Struggle is an autobiography, but novelized so that details are described and words are spoken that the author assuredly couldn’t testify transpired exactly as he recounts.  But he puts them in there, sometimes with excruciating detail:

               “Here’s your Coke,” I said.  “I’ll put it on the table.”

               “Fine,” he said.

               “What have you got in that bag?” Grandma said, eyeing the paper bag from the pharmacy.

               “It’s for you,” I said.

Most authors would have summarized this exchange: “I returned home with the Coke and gave Grandma her medication” or something along those lines.  Many editors – me included – would have told the author to back off from the dialogue that does nothing to move the story forward.  Knausgaard must have a very special editor indeed to have let things stand as he wrote them, and I wonder if much editing was done at all.

It’s the mundane stuff of life – the same “stuff” that I’ve mentioned in previous posts such as my review of the play “The Flick,” of the documentary series “Seven Up” or of Joe Swanberg’s movies – and the mundane stuff is actually very interesting.  Living is interesting.  And if captured by a skilled writer, it can even be a page-turner. 

I did lose patience with the second half of the book, much of it devoted to Knausgaard and his brother cleaning up their grandmother’s home in the wake of their father’s death, but up until about three-quarters of the way through, I was sold.  Volume two may not make it into my itinerary, but it clearly has for others.  The book has been translated into at least fifteen languages and has been uniformly praised.