I shoulda been an author (I coulda been a contender :) -- many of the people I most admire are or had been authors of fiction, aka stories that should have been true. Such people have the gift of entertaining you with a pack of lies. Alas, so many such authors that I cherish are dead, the flip side of the "long tail" of readership (people still read Homer); I feel homage & gratitude that they existed, that they left their gifts to us the (still) living.
Good authors' yarns aren't just entertaining but also didactic. They, both the authors and the stories, teach us something about themselves, about life, and about ourselves. As my blog subtitles (and I used to say in mentoring), "You learn from experience, yours or someone else's. And since there's not enough time to make all of the mistakes yourself...."; the rest of that I might express as "... and besides, some mistakes are fatal. So better that you learn from others' experiences, and as talking with people constrains you to this time, speaking only to very, very few of your living cohort, better still to also learn from the dead via books. That's why reading is so essential, so magical; books transcend time and space to unite humanity."
Recently I finished the eighteenth and latest-in-print "Walt Longmire" novel by living author Craig Johnson of Ucross WY; it would seen that my two favorite stories in his series, #7 and this #18, both begin with the word "Hell", and while both are rooted in the mundane reality of the fictional series, both go Somewhere Else entirely.
Hell and Back finds Longmire mired in a "Groundhog Day" Dantesque purgatory of the distant past, where events repeat but not exactly, where characters are always meeting him anew but only he remembers the previous encounters, and where the clocks agree that it's 8:17 p.m, always 8:17 p.m. He's lost situational awareness, has no clue, no history of how he got "here", wherever here is. And there's an unspoken urgency in all this timelessness; the plot & protagonist are going somewhere, but where?
Walt slowly comes to realize that he knows or knows of every person, and that most of them are dead by his own hand. His most powerful antagonist & arch-villain of the series, dead four books ago from a knife fight that he forced upon Walt, turns out to be the most helpful, the most insightful, warning him that things are not as they seem (Heh!) & don't trust anyone, and telling him that, as the author begins his Acknowledgements, "All haunting is regret". --"Boy Howdy" indeed-- At the end there's an "and then the boy woke up" windup, except that Johnson leaves an unsettling ambiguity, less cliffhanger than more promise of things to come. But that's unsurprisingly unimportant given the power of the experience. Thank you, Craig Johnson.
Hmmmm, #7, #18, 8:17 p.m., what the..., naw, this can't be planned, it must be some sort of coincidence. Craig doesn't know me or my favorites, or does he?
As I took ages to learn in the dating scene, we all have histories, we're all flawed. And now I'm seeing that we're all haunted by regret, some of us more than others (I'm so far unchallenged king of this realm). I've spent much of this decade, my Seventies, in regret over mistakes --so many mistakes-- that I made back in the middle Sixties to late Seventies. In my memory my never-aging Karen lives back there, but so does my "paradise lost" career pathway that might have led to me becoming a scientist. Now, I relish what I don't know, relish problems, and strive to find solutions to them. And sometimes I discover that my problem de jure doesn't have a solution; learning that can be high wisdom. Ursula K LeGuin quoted in her 1971 classic The Lathe of Heaven:
“Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. —Chuang Tse: XXIII”
Long ago I was afraid of the unknown, the undefined / ill-defined, and panicked when I had a golden opportunity to test myself against something not actually found in a book. I didn't then know that "science" isn't what you find in science textbooks; it's the discovery of new knowledge just beyond the edge of the known, where no one has gone before (thanks, Gene Roddenberry), the undiscovered country from whose bourn one traveler returns (thanks, Bill Shakespeare), the eureka moment (but you already know this reference... :) when one human learns for all of humanity.
My life is full of error, full of mistakes, and these two were among the biggest. But if there's a constant to this blog, it's..., wait for it..., Failure is the Great Teacher.
One of the strengths of Hell and Back, of the series, and I suspect of the author himself, is the great truth that we're all social creatures, all embedded in a network of relationships that strengthen and support us each every one, that "root" us in reality. I've known two suicides who forgot this profound yet simple truth:
- I had two friends from the 1980's. The husband died of heart failure from a rushed surgery, but mostly from being poor. The widow with two mortgages was financially underwater for years, and finally shot herself when her house was about to be repossessed. I didn't know that she was in trouble, and neither did her cousin living near her. We might have made a large difference, but she didn't reach out. Jerry & Phyllis, I remember you.
- In the same vein but much further back was a talented young man from my extended family. He'd reacted against his wire-monkey (see the vile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow if you're unfamiliar with this "evil scientist") but well-educated & worldly successful father by turning to the counter-culture movement. He even helped to start a family. But gradually it all fell apart because he couldn't make a living, and in the end he carefully set his only companion "Gracie" (a beloved cat) with food outside his car then killed himself with engine exhaust. He forgot that he had a family who cared about him. I could have learned much from you, Karl.
So what's your takeaway, reader, besides the truism that you're enmeshed in a supportive, sustaining web of friends & family? I'm hoping that it's to strive always, to expect to make mistakes, and to learn from them. The best you can hope for seems to be always making new mistakes. And that's not a bad thing, that hope; it means that you're always learning, ever the Student of Life. And if you come to see what I'm saying, what I believe, then my mission, my life will have "done good". I'll RIP fulfilled.
