Living

Something Else About Archetypes and Inevitability

ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT STEVE’S DEATH: A social molecule is a group of co-creators of a private but shared reality — a sort of living group-mythos inexplicable to those outside its specific bounds but real as air to those within. When one of the co-creators dies, he becomes a fixed element of, instead of a player in, the mythos: he belongs to it as memory, and ceases to belong to himself. (We all belong to each other that way already, but death makes this more obvious since the decedent can’t really do anything about it — he hasn’t a voice in the matter any longer.)

Like most reading this, I am not at all looking forward to how this dynamic plays itself out in real time. The only way my desperate naked brain can justify this unending and inevitable torment of gradual loss is that it shows how deeply we love, which although some comfort seems to doom those with big hearts to big pain; the atoms of my various social molecules have — are known for — their bigness of heart. But to refrain from love out of fear is only to swap the pain of loneliness for the pain of belonging, and while loneliness may be final belonging has more laughs. There’s no escaping the pain, but the laughter at least makes it bearable.

And it is something to know that, as the great shadow falls over us all, we will not be alone in our oblivion but wink out single file, a line of curious children holding hands as we dance ourselves into the darkness.

I hope there will be cake.

Living

Pithyism #99

WE ARE IN TROUBLE IF our need to be heard exceeds our need to understand — or to be understood.

Living

Of Archetypes and Inevitability

IF YOU BELIEVE IN AN afterlife, then one reason my friend Steve Territo died yesterday is to hold the good tables for the rest of us. And if you knew Steve, you know why that’s apt: I don’t have one memory of him where he’s not laughing, smiling or playfully conspiring. And few people I know, living or dead, are more qualified to slip the maitre d’ something for one with a view.

"A good friend has died. And he has earned a place among the honored dead. It is not a time to mourn." --Worf

Steve-Who-Is-Called-Talon

Steve is the first of my immediate Renaissance Faire tribe to die. Social groups are based on the unstated assumption that its members will remain so; when that proves, inevitably, not to be the case, it rattles everyone’s sense of propriety. Death is wrong, in our stubborn primate way of things; it makes us squint and fumble to adjust the picture. And when that picture is as uproariously life-loving as the Cardiff Rose — each of us as lusty an Elizabethan archetype as we can build for ourselves and each other — Steve’s passing takes on something of Biblical proportions. (Remember when God unmade the universe for forty days and nights? Sort of like that.) As one friend put it, “Steve defined ‘life.'”

But Steve is also the first of my friends to die P.F. — Post-Facebook — and in addition to saving our table he seems to be showing the way toward a new form, or manifestation, of mourning. Our tribe is scattered over most of Northern California and beyond; Steve married and moved to Tennessee a few years ago. Wherever he went, as good men do, he made solid friendships. Watching condolence messages begin to queue is like watching a holographic flower unfold: although we’re all in different rooms, it feels as though we’re all together, remembering and laughing and crying and just sitting in disbelief.

And I hope it feels that way for everyone, at least a little bit. When people die, they leave a soul-shaped hole in the world. Touching the edges through my keyboard doesn’t make the loss any easier. Nothing does. But the electronic handholding helps; at least a little bit.

Zecher tzaddik l’vracha — the remembrance of the righteous is a blessing.

Living

Pithyism #4x

YOU REALLY HAVE TO KNOW what you’re doing in order to sleep on the floor, comfortably.

Living

Refining Maslow

THE GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST ABRAHAM MASLOW proposed a pyramid paradigm of human needs, ranking their vitality and importance as physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. One must satisfy the first in order to be able to secure the second, then explore the third and so forth to self-actualization (or to put it more cryptically, I-am-I-ness).

This is all very well as far as it goes, which isn’t very far at all without one particular ingredient: humor.

I would argue that a sense of humor lies among our physiological needs. Our bodies crave laughter — it makes us feel good, for one thing, and promotes the rest of Maslow’s overstructure: safety, love, belonging, and certainly esteem and self-actualization. In fact, I would go so far as to say that our most basic needs are ordered by what we breathe, drink, eat, shelter under and laugh at (or with). The first chuckle may even have occurred when we saw each other naked, huddling in some cave away from the mid-Pleistocene rain. (Certainly humor makes nudity easier to cope with, which to me screams “prerequisite!” I can only assume it also helps with the random smilodon or mammoth.) Humor is so important in fact, that its lack can be attributed to every human war, skirmish, argument or bluster — especially the unresolved ones.

Many years ago, while preparing to hitchhike across the USA, I was describing my road gear to a seasoned friend. “Backpack (soft), spare clothes, paperback book, extra shoes, sleeping bag, boots (new), Swiss Army knife (new) …”

“Where’s your toilet paper?” he asked.

“What do I need that for?” I asked.

He fixed me with a gaze reserved for the feeble. “If you don’t have toilet paper, the rest just don’t matter,” he said.

Humor is like that too: it cleans out the head and refreshes it for the next challenge, which is always a moment away. And without humor, the rest just don’t matter.

Crit, Writing

How To Make Your Blog Sound Important

1. BEGIN EVERY PARAGRAPH WITH “I.”

2. Repost the same story as other blogs within your target demographic.

3. When commenting in other blogs, slip in the phrase “as I wrote” and flash your URL.

4. Call everyone by their first name whether celebrity, criminal or politician.

5. Make gratuitous jokes equating celebrities, criminals and politicians.

Read more →

Torah

My Plan For Jewish World Domination

(YOU MAY READ THAT TITLE as either “domination of the world by Jews,” or “domination of the Jewish world.” Either way, it may be better than what we have now, or at least more entertaining. Certainly more well-fed. But.)

The point is this: Build fewer Museums of Tolerance and Holocaust Memorials. In fact, stop building them altogether, and instead build more Jewish schools/centers, for both kids and adults to interact face-to-face with well-trained Jewish teachers. We cannot help but carry the past, of course; but with our hands full, who will build our future — or our present?