Thomas Sullivan

Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, has kicked off another January.  True, he is two-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time (you can’t sneak up on him!), but I like that.  It sort of shows the circularity of things.

By extension, he gets called the god of beginnings and endings, but I think that’s either sloppy semantics or sloppy thinking.  Just as space can’t begin or end (because you would need a “where” in some other space to mark the beginning and ending), and time can’t begin or end (because you would need a “when” in some other time to mark that beginning and ending), Janus can’t be said to start or finish anything.  That’s the whole point.  His gift is to see the past and future at the same time.  He is a continuum, a bridge, a filter, a redirect, alpha and Omega in a circle, the Yin and Yang, a snake eating its tail. 

Writers – creative people – too often see themselves as on hold, caught in a matrix of beginnings and endings – fresh resolves and familiar rejections – when what they need is to see that they are a continuum in full flight, already underway, leaving indelible footprints whether the world chooses to follow them or not.  Life doesn’t hang around the starting line, and babies don’t wait to be delivered.  If you expect to be announced or sanctioned or heralded or loved before you take yourself and your dreams seriously, you will lose a lot of living.

This is especially true if you let feelings of worthlessness or rejection rule over you.  Who said you have to start at the finish line?  You only have to set out from the starting line and then not quit.  You have to act on your dreams.  Whatever you are at any given moment is quite good enough – but only if you have all your skin in the game!  Not trying, risking nothing, sitting on the bench or in the stands – that’s what you should fear.  That’s the killer, the waste of life, the no-show.  You don’t have to manage failure.  Failure doesn’t need your help.  It will be there by default if you don’t manage success.  And you can always manage success.  On your worst day you can make progress.  Even if success is just getting out of bed or refusing to wallow in self-pity or not succumbing to self-annihilating guilt or not fearing the next rejection or what others think of you.  Do not feel worthless over what you cannot control.  Write the damn book.  Send the manuscript to an editor.  Take your shots!  You are a good and righteous person when you put your honest heart on the line, and to hell with the consequences!  The world, for all its trumped up piety, isn’t your judge.  You are.

And you will succeed!  When you follow through and finish that book, then you will have succeeded.  Not because the book is finished, but because you will have given it your all and in the process become the best YOU you can be.  And that’s not just faint praise, because the thing of it is, THERE’S NO UPPER LIMIT ON THE BEST YOU, and quite likely (and magically) you will be astonished at what comes out of you when you stop giving up on your dreams and instead let the effort to fulfill them build relentlessly day by day.  The only limit on your potential is the amount of time or opportunity you lose by NOT reaching for your dreams.

To be sure, you need to be receptive to true opportunities that come from outside yourself.  It is simply tragic to miss the wild cards life gives us, the cues, and especially the rare connections.  They can form and fulfill you.  But they seldom fit a safe and convenient life, and they are easy to reject for all kinds of seemingly practical, responsible or even “noble” reasons.  Because what if we take a chance and still fail?  So there is always the danger that we may reject taking a chance out of misplaced fear or guilt.  Our dreams don’t fail or reject us…we reject our dreams.  And that’s real failure.  I think the answer is to strive for total honesty with yourself.  If you act on that, there is no reason for guilt, even if the chance doesn’t pan out.  But act you must.  Else you live by fear, and that can never be worthy of a dream.

If you are unique, then BE unique.  Rejection can’t keep you from living.  Well, it can, but you shouldn’t let it.  Trust me.  I learned the hard way.  Forever waiting.  Forever faithful to a cause or a person or a hope, as if they/it would then reward me.  I’m still that way… sort of terminal in my romantic view of life and still faithful to those same entities.  But the reality is I have no control over externals.  I have control over me.  And that’s what’s ultimately important: not robbing yourself.  I have not robbed myself.  I am living, loving, learning, evolving, giving…CREATING!  Not as a series of false starts, dead ends, rewinds and rejections, but as a continuum.  It is all a growth medium.  Nothing really dies as long as I keep what I control alive.  What decays outside me simply nourishes more knowledge and resolve.  If I give up, the real me ceases to exist.  How many people have that backwards?  Their inner selves never get to exist in the real world, because they give up – they let the external world define them and smother their uniqueness.  They usually do this passively by degrees, simply defaulting out of resignation into the circumstances life metes out to them.  Which, I suppose, is why there are relatively few writers, and maybe why there seems to be so much disillusionment and so little fulfillment generally.  Every month I am dismayed by the e-mails I get from writers, published and otherwise, who feel absolutely dead-ended.  Hey, it’s always about the journey.  Don’t end it prematurely.  Do you expect to die, or strike a permanent pose like a statue, after you achieve something?  Keep reaching and take your joy in that.  Believe me, that’s all there ultimately is.

There is only one person with whom you always have to live, and you know who that is.  You can be alone in a crowd, a career, a family, a marriage, a relationship, but you cannot escape yourself.  Might as well have good company then.  The indomitable, inspired, energized, fearless you wants free rein/reign.  Let yourself have it.  Surround yourself with what you need in order to survive and thrive.  Or if you cannot surround yourself, create an inner sanctum, a sanctuary.  Fill it with the right people, places and things.  It’s 2011!  Listen!  Hear that?  It’s your song.  Come out of the audience and up on the stage…

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram (a kind of newsletter with stories and photos) once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326      

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

There are people who are batteries and people who are drains.  Make sure you are compatible when you connect.

Old years are memories, new ones are dreams.

Picture a carrara marble room whose fire pit blazes silver in its reflection on a curved glass wall which overlooks the Grand Canyon by day and tilts upward to magnify the universe at night.  The jaws of the black granite Sphinx in the center of the room open in a kind of Savonarola throne made of solid gold.  Against another wall there are nine cages, each containing a Muse.  This is where I write…

Or maybe not.  (Actually I’m in one of the cages.)

I’ve never been particularly curious about where creative people work, but maybe that’s because I don’t associate the act of inventing or being inspired with a single setting.  Imagination is homeless and inspiration goes comatose whenever it’s confined.  So, when anyone asks where I work, they generally get an elusive answer.  Not sure I can do better here.  I’ve decided to try, though, as much to see if I can find some meaningful pattern for myself as to answer what others ask. 

When I was married I wrote in restaurants, parked cars and bathrooms.  When I taught school I wrote furiously for 2 min. in the library loft each day before first bell – having thought out scenes or narration on the drive in.  I’ve written at weddings and funerals, in a cemetery, in trees, in a phone booth, left key phrases in the snow and with a paint brush while painting flats for a play, left a memory tag in my own blood on a cash receipt, left episodic notes through serial phone calls to an answering machine, and when the plot for my first novel attacked my brain like a case of mental indigestion while jogging I borrowed a pencil and paper from a lady hanging clothes.  You get the idea.  The point is that it’s difficult to pin down the externals that accompany a free-flowing process within.  Sort of like trying to predict the next eruption of a volcano.  But like the scene of the crime certain settings beckon my return.  For what it’s worth, here are some of the current locales w/photos where I corner a Muse.

[NOTE:  I am so toast if these pictures don't post!]

Trees turn me on.  Especially when they’re naked and you can see which way their legs and arms (so many limbs) contort.  It’s like a blueprint or an x-ray of their lives, each turn showing where they made a free choice to grow in another direction.  And yet, ultimately there is structure and form and balance and symmetry and total logic in where they went.  They do it their way and weather the storms.  No clichés in a forest.  Highly unique individuals.   Trees know the nuances of freedom.  I think that’s why I want to look at them when I write.  I wrote a book about a tree once (BORN BURNING), I have a tree in my living room, and I even talk to a certain tree out at Elm Creek.  Am I out of my tree?  In this picture you are looking at my Creatorium (no “m” in the middle, please) where I put down roots in a computer.  The print you see is one of four on the walls.  The other three are stoic oaks in b/w against the Mexicali rose of my inner sanctum.

And the flick Avatar may have a cliché of a plot, but its magic forests (remember the mega tree) and romantically ideal culture make it my fav film (yeah…Jake Sully – irony).  Thing of it is, I go to Pandora every day/night to gather inspiration.  I’ve stood steaming on skis in a violet forest clearing many a magic midnight, listening to the silence of the universe and daring dreams as real as the surreal elements my senses are actually taking in.  You cannot write less than “romantic reality” after that.

Rarely someone will deliberately inspire me to write.  Shared dreams are hard to come by – which makes them all the more potent – but I count visions sent by a soulmate as inspiration.  Here are a couple of triggers that worked on me – photos of Tintern Abbey and of interacting galaxies.  The first photo followed a gift book of the Tintern Abbey poem containing a bookmark that reads “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air,” and the galaxies photo followed a CD of Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Such communication puts poetry in my head, as in “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”  Wordsworth’s poem was all about how he lost the inspiration nature provided him and recovered it again and searched for a way to keep it in his life.

And then there are my nightly drives to points of light and darkness, like stations of the cross.  Writing fairly roars out of passion and perspective.  I do not want to forget anything meaningful that has happened to me, to lose high points or low, to revise history or heal hope with scar tissue that would forever dull the potential to feel and soar.  Night focuses memory, perception and anticipation.  I would rather bleed fresh than turn my heart into stone, rather gasp in anguish than breathe the sterile air of amnesia.  A writer cannot afford to go numb.  Motion and proximity are essential to keep track of who I was, am and will be.  Driving at night does that for me, particularly if I am right there in the presence of a memory.

No, I don’t hibernate in the summertime.  Contrare, contrare!  And this gazebo at a place called Noerenberg Gardens always seems to inspire possibilities for me.

 

 

 

Okay, whether it’s got a tub or just purposeful plumbing, I still write in the bathroom.  I’ve just finished putting down black granite tile with matching fixtures and a chair rail in one of my four baths.  AND…there are three prints of TREES on the walls.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…well, at least there’s a Christmas Eve.  You might not believe it, but on most Christmas Eves there is absolutely no one out late at Elm Creek.  So that’s where I go, and it never fails to inform my writing for a while thereafter.  It is a most summary hour or two, bittersweet yet somehow affirming.  And this year I will ski to the highest point and shout out to the crystal universe my warmest regards and gratitude for all the kindnesses that have been given me.  So, if you are suddenly wondering whether or not you heard a faint call in the distance…

Hmmm.  Guess the only pattern this reveals is that I might write anywhere anytime.  In fact, the only place I can think of where I don’t sometimes write is my bedroom.  Now why is that?  Sanctuary?  Timelessness?  Nothing has changed in my bedroom in four years.  Same bed, same furniture, same snowscapes on the walls, cinnamon and vanilla candles, red and white feathers – there had to be something around which the carousel revolves.  Whatever anchors YOUR life, may it never drag you down or keep you from reaching your horizons in 2011.

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan   Recent Tweets:

 

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

 

Guess I’m a miser with my emotions, but when I spend them, they are non-refundable.

 

 

If this column was a character in a novel, he/she/they/it would be schizophrenic.  Begin with the fact that a month after writing the first two paragraphs, I no longer remember where they were going.  Here they are:

This is for women.  Okay, men can peek.  I mean men like to peek at women, right?  But I’d like to address something that has historically been genderless, and in the nearer term has become more relevant to women – at least in “developed” Western societies.  Call it…um, boredom.

Historically there wasn’t any.  Boredom, I mean.  People were too busy.  Except for the aristocracy.  And the educated class.  And the idle rich.  And the clergy.  And, uh…I guess we could include the working class caught up in the Industrial Revolution doing cog-like things in the big machine.  And the uneducated class scrounging for a living in any old itinerant way – yeah, those too.  Pretty dull when you’re just sweeping, digging, lifting.  And farmers – can’t forget them.  Shooing birds, watching bean sprouts grow, squashing bugs, gathering, picking, more digging.  Borrr-ing.  …okay, maybe I need to call this thing I’m addressing something other than boredom.

See what I mean?  I know I was going to title the column PUSHING BABIES & DRAGGING DOGS, but I don’t know why.  Something to do with exceptional women who dumb down their lives, I think.  Should I turn this orphan beginning into a contest for the best reader-submitted theme?  Feel free to take a shot at where you want it to go…

So now this November’s column takes on a second identity.  Call it DRAGON BURPS, and let’s go with the following list of caveats for writers who dare to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software.  I love version 11 of Dragon, but it still hasn’t figured out my jangly way of speaking or what to make of rogue metaphors.  Some of Dragon’s interpretations are amusing, some are lethal.  I live in mortal fear of alienating God-fearing people everywhere with what slips through.  Here are examples of dictation that Dragon has mangled:

siren mermaid = Syrian mermaid

cheers and best = Cheers and deaths

simpaticos = some tacos

Momma duck baited me = Mama duck dated me

my daughter lives in Oregon = my daughter is an organ

logistics = lard of just six

canoed = nude

Turkey in the Straw [rendered as an anagram] = TITS

whacking my head = lacking my head [so what’s the problem, right?]

your very friends = your fairy friends

bright eyes = bright lies

magic stuff = magic stud

elfin face = elephant face

T-sax = tee sex [I recommend Dragon to Tiger Woods]

that giddy = dead kitty [and on a second try it came out: fat deity]

balmy = ball me

compadre = go potty [second try: cephalopod]

a peace feeler = appeased Hitler

put funny marks on the pulp = put funny marks on the Pope

experimental mode = ass for a medal but

lone swallows = Mona swallows 

musicians = mutations [so…?]

putting my soul through brass = putting my soul through breasts

big thought here = Dick thought here

brassiness = brass anus

sax video = sex video

finely prepared food = finally prepared food

grab a weekend = grab a weak end

So that’s the second identity in this multi-personality column, and I’ll close with a third theme by elaborating – as promised two months ago – on an answer I gave to a comment posted by Janet Berliner.  That column [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/09/16/thomas-sullivan-zen-pot-throwing-combat-boots-128-squirrels/   ] was about respecting your characters, and I was using an example from my recent trip to the Dominican Republic.  I promised to reprise a tale that explains why I fix the line between psychological and practical necessities in the human soul where I do.  Here it is:

“I was a young man in Washington D.C., just entering a government building – I think it was the National Gallery – and there was one of those still lifes, a ragged black man perched on the top step while crowds flowed up and down.  Rail thin, burning eyes in a body that was ashes, he didn’t have his hand out, nor did I read a con in those eyes.  He just looked like he was taking a break from life, from caring, from trying.  Maybe that’s why I stuck out a bill as I reached the top step.  No big show, I just wanted him to take it.  But he didn’t.  And when we made eye contact, I got the challenge.  What the hell, I thought, I ain’t whitey trying to humiliate you, man.  Looking back, I can see how stupid the thing I did next was, but I knew damn well he was desperately hungry, and there was a wire trash basket next to him with McDonald’s bags and plastic cups to the brim.  It occurred to me that he might have been picking through it, or waiting for someone to lob a half-eaten quarter-pounder onto the pile.  So I tucked the bill into the mouth of a bag sitting on top.  That was all.  He saw me do it, but I didn’t look directly at him again.

“When I came out maybe half an hour later my glance caught the empty step and I remembered.  There was the wire basket.  Whether it was to prove I had understood his pride and knew it limits, or perhaps a disquieting suspicion that I had not, I had to look.  Well, you already know what I’m going to tell you.  Because the bill was right where I had left it and the ragged man was gone.

“I’ve never doubted the desire for dignity and independence in another human being since, however oppressed, beaten down, corrupted, or enslaved by false notions that desire for respect may be.  And I see no reason to downscale that universal human need in fictional characters.  Searching out the unexpected contrasting elements in characters can only bring them to life and deepen their authenticity.”

I really appreciate the feedback, most of which seems aimed at my newsletters (Sullygrams) and the photos therein.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

Snow, my element! Pure & perfect, filling the midnight air like white feathers whirling on a carousel.

Writers are like optometrists.  They put their writing on the wall and try to get you to read the bottom line.  If they are good writers, they shift lenses before your eyes, sharpening the focus until you can see what they want you to see with 20-20 vision.  Life goes from blur to blaze, and you find interest and meaning where before you saw only the mundane and the vague.

As a writer, I think you have to do the same thing.  You have to shift lenses until you see deeply enough to find interest and meaning.  You do it by noticing the small and the large and the relationship between the two.  You don’t do it by reveling in your own internal world with the windows and doors shut tight.  The external world is trying to come to you.  Let it.  Read the writing on the wall.  I still catch myself blocking input, blind to all but my own inner vision.  Let me use a recent personal experience and some verbal lenses to show you what I mean.  Here’s the eye chart:

BLURRY     BLURRY

I am sitting in a cold park, playing T-sax under a gazebo this past Labor Day weekend.  A tall thin man holding a toddler by the hand approaches slowly down the hill.  I lean away, trying not to notice them, hoping they won’t interrupt.

 

LESS BLURRY    LESS BLURRY

Despite my negative body language, they are still coming.  The man is wearing a dashiki.  He is Somali – maybe Nigerian – and probably doesn’t speak English.  The toddler is stumbling.  Something is wrong with him.  Sometimes I play for mentally challenged children in wheelchairs in this park, but right now I don’t want to lose my focus.  My world seems more meaningful to me.  I do not want this connection.  This could be awkward.  Please don’t stop…

 

CLEAR     CLEAR

They stop.  The toddler cannot be more than three or four years old.  Hard to tell because he has sunglasses on and his face has something unique about it, ghostly.  He has black features but his skin is white.  The man, who I take to be his father, is almost holding him up, yet the child tries to squat and jump to the rhythm, clearly enchanted by the music.  I stop playing and ask the boy if he wants to be a sax player, telling him that with his sunglasses he already looks the part. 

 

RIVETING                    RIVETING

In soft graceful English, the father says something about eyes and removes the boy’s sunglasses, revealing a lack of pigmentation.  Suddenly I get it.  Albinism and maybe something more.  The father is here on a holiday from his job, using the music to share something with this fragile child who perhaps has no other language.  I keep my sunglasses on, a little choked up by the child’s infirmities coupled with his shy enthusiasm for the music.  And I play and play and play for him.  At one point in his squirming to the music, he falls back off the picnic table where he is sitting and his father’s hand shoots out and grabs him just before his head can hit the cement.  Even that scare doesn’t dampen the boy’s glee.  So simple to give him pleasure, so very simple.  We are communicating in the world’s most basic language – music – and I am privileged to share for an hour the lives of two other travelers with all that affords of insight and passion and the humanness I say that as a writer I want to discover.  Sometimes putting your soul through tarnished brass touches other souls made of pure glass.

 

I could’ve missed this.  The writer’s window opened for me just in time.  If you want to capture the world in words, you have to know it.  And the first thing you must know is:  It Isn’t About You.  If you only tell your story, you will miss everyone else’s.

 

Last month I included a tale from a recent trip to the Dominican Republic to make a point in my column (Zen Pot Throwing, Combat Boots, & 128 Squirrels), and Janet Berliner made a comment that I promised to answer more fully in this column.  Going to put that off until December, if I may.  I really do appreciate all the feedback.  Much of that seems aimed at my newsletter (Sullygram), which always has photos as well.  I’ll be happy to send it to you once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  And I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (that’s sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample trick-or-treat:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic   .  You can also hit the Subscribe button in there to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

“It’s one thing to get what you want, and it’s another to know what to do with it.”

“You can’t make a dead duck fly…a dead phoenix maybe.”

“Quiet onstage, please!  Go live with the mics.  Cue Aretha Franklin.  R-E-S-P-E-C-T…find out what it means to me!”

Oh, that haunts me.  See, I done a bad thing once…um, more than once.  And it seriously disrespected Aretha.  Can’t tell you the details because – well, I just can’t.  But it has to do with 128 squirrels, and a pink Cadillac, and a roofer I met – on a roof – in the remnants of a hurricane, and a house in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and midnight sojourns, and a G.I. Joe doll.  And Aretha Franklin.  So I listen up whenever she sings her mega-hit song, as if she is staring down her nose at me and wagging a finger in my face.

What RESPECT means to me when I’m inventing characters is: do not underestimate a human being.  I have to believe it’s the same for any writer trying to breathe life into meaningful characters.  After all, you become The Creator when you manufacture mortals, and even though you’re doing it with paper, would God make paper dolls? 

This has nothing necessarily to do with virtue.  Not that kind of respect.  The capacity for evil can still be there in these characters you’re respecting.  Evil as greed.  As self-centeredness.  Megalomania, lust, pride – count the deadly sins, and when you get to seven, keep on going.  Respect the range in people, is what I mean.  It doesn’t even have to be their depth.  If superficiality, or aimlessness, or innocence, or ignorance, are what you are illustrating, a shallow person makes a spiffy character (e.g. Candide, Billy Budd, Mishkin, Huck Finn, Casper Milquetoast, Walter Mitty, Oblomov).  But most people are genuinely complex.  They are worthy of sustained examination as they evolve through life or the chapters of a book.  As authors, or just students of human nature studying erect bipeds with hair, it is one thing to delineate a truly simple subject and quite another to simplify a person because of our own lack of insight. 

But that’s what we tend to do as observers of people, isn’t it?  Simplify them.  Rob them of dimensions so that we can fit our minds around who we want them to be, or because that’s as much as we see.  Our limitations become the authors of their limitations.  Sometimes we do this because we want the world to be black and white, sometimes we do it to rationalize our relationships, but most of the time we are just modifying individuals to fit the collection of stereotypes in our minds.  Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t want a collection of (borrr-ring!) stereotypes, no matter how much simpler it makes sizing up life.  Sure, you need familiar patterns in order to make sense of people or put them in context.  But what you don’t need are so few patterns that you end up distorting the people you know to fit them.

A writer may have a natural bent for uncovering layer upon layer of meaningful characterization.  Or not.  The people I know who I consider have the most insight into their fellow humans are not writers.  What they have is enough objectivity to eliminate their personal motives in sizing up others.  You can learn a lot if you consciously and objectively slip out of your own combat boots and stand in the shoes of whoever you meet. 

That said, I love it when I’m caught ignoring my own advice.  The aftermath of underestimating someone or taking something for granted is when I learn the most.  Last month I promised that if there was enough interest I’d go one more column mentioning things from the Dominican adventure (there was), so that’s where I’ll turn here for an example of really stepping in it.

Recall, if you will, the richly peopled textures of Villa Esfuerzo, an impoverished and crime-blighted village in the Dominican where I spent 8 days in June.  I told you about the people who sit ankle-deep in water in their living rooms, and about the songs and dances at the worksite, about the children with luminous eyes, and the handbags woven from bread wrappers, and the tarantula badlands.  This time I want to take you to downtown Santo Domingo, population 2+ million people.  Welcome to The Mercado (Market).

Alas, I ain’t proud of the fact that some of my companions wanted me to negotiate their purchases in the barter atmosphere of this collection of stalls.  Yeah, nice to be thought of as having the gift of gab, but then too there is the recognition that I would be uncompromising in an atmosphere where poor vendors are cutting pretty close to the bone to sell their wares.  How do you tell a landscape painter with huge talent and marginal circumstances that he is worth half of what he’s asking when he’s just come down a third?  But I did that and worse.  I should have just nodded and walked away, leaving him his dignity.  To be fair to myself, I took a break from the hard dealing, wandering behind the scenes to a loft where I discovered painters cranking out canvases and a Zen pot thrower in an off-shoulder robe spinning his clay at warp speed.  I resisted offering up my cement-encrusted work shoes as a joke to a shoe shiner, realizing he might actually try to polish them.  But there were no twinges of conscience holding me back when I got to the final stall and asked for postcards.  A child shouted to a woman, who called to a man, who ran off to acquire the sought for merchandise while everyone held up their hands in a communal plea for me to wait.

I waited.  And when the man returned puffing and glistening with exertion, I low-balled his modest price for a few postcards.  Yes, I did that, but believe me it was pure reflex.  When I realized what I was doing, I deliberately overpaid him – not with rounded up bills but in coins.  And that was my real sin.  Because he saw through it.  He knew that I expected he would say nothing and keep the extra change.  How patronizing of me, how cynical and condescending.  I, who believe in human excellence, in motivating people to fulfill the highest expectations possible, had slipped into the crippling philosophy of misguided charity that I detest.  More to the point, I had reduced him to a stereotype that must have been lurking in the laziest part of my mind.  You RESPECT people by holding them to account for what you should respect them for, not by underestimating them.  What a thin price I put on his integrity.  It is an old lesson I should have remembered, namely what I wrote above about limiting people to fit your expectations.  I took the change, but I will be a long time forgetting the indignation in his eyes…

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the September Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  The July and August Sullygrams have cool pictures from the Dominican as well as full accounts [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/   and http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/08/16/thomas-sullivan-a-red-shirt-molasses-in-a-feathered-world-the-other-side-of-the-wall/  ].   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “Trying to undo who you have become is like trying to make a warped record flat again by pressing it under an encyclopedia.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

“Don’t worry.  I forgot your name too.”  That’s what my red T-shirt proclaims.  I don’t wear it to be funny.  I wear it out of fear.  Names zip into and out of my ears like grease through a goose.  I’m dense as a box of rocks when it comes to retaining that most basic of labels.  Given that I’ve mingled in mobs most of my life, this is a major problem.  I use the term “mobs” lovingly – referring to coaching, teaching, a stint as city commissioner, writing & public speaking, and just generally rolling along like a drop of misplaced molasses in a feathered world.  Used to beat up on myself over my inability to remember names.  Sheer arrogance, I thought.  Which is what the nameless victims of my selective amnesia had a right to feel about me.  But I’ve come to believe it is anything but arrogance.  Moreover, I think it underlies a critical author skill.

Mmm.   Skill.  Maybe that’s wishful thinking.  Okay, an author focus.  But critical.  Definitely that.  Because the reason I don’t catch names is that I am intensely focused on whatever is coming at me below the verbal level.  When I first meet someone my attention is like an iceberg, 7/8ths beneath the surface of what they are saying.  I will notice minute psychological details, mannerisms, gestures, expressions, verbal clues behind spoken words — tone, repetitions, hesitations, any pattern — the choices the person makes as indicated by their appearance, where their attention drifts, their responses, fears, wants, ad infinitum.  I am overwhelmed with information to process.  But I am unlikely to remember their name.  Whether I do the below-ground noticing with any particular insight, or even accurately, does not really matter, I suppose, as far as being an author.  The relevant thing is that I am engaged in perceiving people, and whether I’m spot-on in what I see or simply inventing stuff it all goes into the bit bucket of my imagination and mental filing cabinet for new characters.

It does matter, however, that I do this without being threatening or judgmental.  After all, if I’m going to learn anything, I need to be trusted and accepted as capable of understanding.  Moreover, what I personally want is to know truth.  In human relations it is very hard not to unconsciously cue people as to what you want or expect.  And so we end up with anything but truth, namely lip service, false testimonials, and illusions presented to us by those with whom we interact.  The deepest human passions and the darkest secrets reveal themselves best when they come at you without being bidden in any way.  Create an expectation for them and you will likely get what you wanted rather than truth.  So dialing back on your persuasiveness and repressing your subtle expectations as best you can makes learning truths possible.  Authors need to have that objective mode, if only so they can give back truth in their writings.  

Permit me to double down here.  Last month I received a large amount of e-mail pertaining to that column about my stay in a Dominican slum (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/07/16/thomas-sullivan-skinny-dogs-skinny-chickens-skinny-people-or-how-to-blow-the-cap-on-your-own-deep-water-well-and-free-your-imagination/  ).  I promised to follow through with more info about that, and I’ll do it here by way of illustrating the above points – it was a time of truth-gathering for me. 

Poverty wracked Villa Esfuerzo, where people may sit ankle-deep in water in their one-room shotgun shacks as slashing rains come through, has its outposts of security behind razor wire and iron bars.  There was a wall and iron bars around where we slept.  Beyond the wall roosters crowed all night and local children gathered in silent packs to watch us through the bars as we talked of profound things or sang the evenings away.  This mute audience bothered me greatly.  Children shout, children move and make noise, children laugh.  Not these.  They stood barefoot in their worn shirts and shorts and watched and watched and watched in total stillness as we moved and laughed.  They stood as if they were watching an irresistible movie.  It haunted me.  It still haunts me.  The first time I saw them I was reminded of a home-made movie I saw years ago taken of some stone-age hunters in Borneo who had never visited civilization but were taken to a modern airport where they stood in silence outside a chain link fence watching giant airplanes land and take-off.  During WWII these same hunters had aided marines who had come in planes and given them chocolate.  When the war ended the natives built a crude narrow runway and erected a model plane lure and lit the sides of the runway with torches at night while they watched the skies for a return.  They watched and waited for decades.  And here they stood in their feathered finery and fierce face paint, looking very small before the soaring airliners on the other side of the chain link.  What were they thinking?  What did these children here now in the Dominican think?   

Every night that they came I went to the iron bars and in broken Spanish tried to talk to them.  I asked them their names.  And, of course, I don’t remember any of them.  Well…one.  I remember one.  Juanita.  All the same I was searching for answers, for clues as to what they felt and how they would remember our presence in their world and what that might tell them about the rest of the planet.  My concentration was as fierce as the Borneo hunters’ faces, but I could glean nothing.  Nada.  They watched expressionlessly through the bars or smiled shyly when I talked to them — the older boys hanging back a little warily — and that was it.  Not a clue.  They came each night by climbing a second stone wall into a kind of garden that I had jokingly dubbed “the tarantula badlands” because we had hunted down the giant hairy spiders there one night.  They seemed so transitory – these watchers.  Impossible in eternity.  I wanted to open those gates and bring them in.  Did they sense that?  Have they forgiven me for not finding a way to include them?  Ah, vanity.  I want to be forgiven.  That’s the kind of liberal guilt I can’t stand.  Love is what you give, not what you get.

Lots more to tell, but no space to tell it.  Well.  Actually I’ve been saying it a lot lately face to face with people.  So, I’ll tell you what.  If there’s enough interest in this, as there was last month, I’ll go one more column with something else from the Dominican adventure.  Maybe that’s how I’ll take some of the bars down and exorcise my vanity of conscience.

There are new photos from the DR adventure in the August Sullygram (newsletter) being released today — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you along with July’s Dominican photos.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.   

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Kill your so-called foolish dreams and you become the person everyone expected you to be.”  …and  “I wish I didn’t know all the things that have been lost or thrown away, and I wish I could forget the time wasted in the wrong life.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost something till you find it again.  Inspiration, adventure, laughter, love, honesty, idealism.  The best things are like that.  Unscripted, nebulous, ill-defined, ephemeral.  It’s their nonconformist free nature.  After all, how can you define magic?  If you could, it wouldn’t be magic.  And writers depend on magic.

Want to borrow some?

I’m just back from the Dominican Republic and a massive transfusion of the kind of magic I search out 24/7.  People magic.  Nature magic.  And it re-silvered the mirror I hold up to life in my writing every day.  Here.  Take my place.  Hop on the bus or the pickup truck that will take you down the roads, lurching around rubble, flat tires inclusive.  This is your first religious experience.  Because if U-turns into on-coming traffic don’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.

You have to travel 45 minutes to get to the work site each day, but little Manuel with his chirpy voice and luminous eyes shining with hope, and his thin arms reaching out to you in desperation for love, will be waiting no matter what time you arrive.  And a hundred others like him.  But before that, gaze hard out the window.  Skinny dogs, skinny chickens, skinny people.  70% live in poverty — not the kind of poverty defined in the US that includes color TV and a second car, but sweep-the-dirt poverty, shotgun shack poverty, one room of tin and cinder block with curtains for walls same-clothes-every-day sit ankle deep in water in your “living room” when the slashing rain rolls through every few hours poverty.  Over the next eight days you will not see a toilet seat that is attached, or uninterrupted electricity if any electricity at all, or potable water if uninterrupted water at all, or plumbing that can flush paper, or hot water. 

Welcome to Villa Esfuerzo, or as I call it (because I can’t pronounce it), Villa Espresso.

See the man who was playing dominos when a gang fight broke out, killing two and costing him his leg.  See the razor wire on the church school where you are working.  Yeah, lots of violence, and screaming poverty, BUT… also angels.  Angels everywhere.

The people are not time oriented here.  They are event oriented.  And you are an event.  Even though they have seen you before.  You came and went.  Thousands of times.  So forgive the guardedness in the faces of the adults, especially the women.  Especially the poorest women, who by their early 20s so often have five children and no prospects.  Yeah, you can sneer at that.  But in this depressed neighborhood where children raise children there is very little else, and maybe someone told them they were wonderful at age 15 and so there was the first baby.  I do not know why there were four more in quick succession.  You’d think after the hardship of the first one became acute they would…what?  Stop escaping?  Hey, what do I know?  But the women and dogs seem terrified sometimes, as if to step from the figurative and literal narrow margin between doorstep and road is to invite being run over.  Driving is, in fact, creative.  A car horn is indispensable, and you may see five people on a motorbike, including that 15-year-old girl with her first baby in her arms.

But there is great love here.  Huge love.  You see it in the children first.  They shine with it, and if you look at them a second time, or remember their name, you might as well adopt them, because they will follow you like the crocodile shadowing Captain Hook.  They want so desperately to be held and hugged.  I remember embracing a frail old woman in a church when I felt something clinging to my right leg.  Looking down, there was an angelic little girl about three years of age.  Usually I am the dry rot, the mold, the rust that brings things down, but at that moment I was Sully the bridge.  Quite unforgettable.

Yeah, you can find resentment if you look for it, but those walls collapse pretty quickly.  One can only live on indignation so long, however painful one’s awareness.  And these are not uninformed people.  They get it.  Who they are, who you are.  Most of them have seized the courage to live life with honest pride.  When you own nothing, nothing owns you.  So go ahead.  Walk through the winding streets.  Accept one of the invitations to come inside.  Sit in the cool darkness on a tropical day and drink their tea.  Look hard in the gloom and you’ll notice that medal on the wall for a child who graduated from the church school.  Do you see the elegant purse on the table with its vibrant patterns that looks like a Birkin bag original?  The matriarch of this single-room dwelling weaved that handbag out of bread wrappers.  They throw nothing away.  Pull tabs become chainlink jewelry.  A mason’s level is a string between two cinder blocks.  When you are done working at the end of the week, and decide to throw your skuzzy cement-encrusted clothes away, they will collect them, wash them, sell them, buy medicine for the children.  The kids are so often sick…

I speak a little Spanish, and there were translators, but that wasn’t the lingua franca that broke through with the adults, if you want to know.  It happens like this.  You are pouring third-floor cement when some women bring food.  They form a circle and start clapping.  Then they call out someone’s name and that person is obliged to dance a few steps in the circle amidst much laughter and encouragement.  Everyone knows someone, and so all the names get called, including yours.  Maybe you grab someone up and make them dance with you.  The more outrageous your signature moves the better.  Walls.  You are pouring a floor but walls are falling down.   It happens differently with the men.  The day after the circle dance, you are shoveling cement in the dizzying heat and sweat and you suddenly sing out a line of “La Bomba.”  To your surprise, men you’ve worked with elbow to elbow for three days without exchanging a word spontaneously answer in chorus.  It is impossible not to throw out another line, and in any case, they won’t let you stop.  Like a brush fire in the heat of the day, it keeps flaring up until you’ve lined out “Day-O” and every song you thought you’d forgotten.  Music.  The universal language.

But that music is nothing compared to the haunting rhythms that flow out of the church on the last afternoon.  Choral voices that stab the soul and heal the heart.  Keyboard, drum kit, guitar.  Interpretive dancers.  My kingdom for even just a grainy cell phone recording of that!  I’d give up lemon pie for life for a video.  Not gonna happen.  It’s gone now.  Some things are too perfect for anything but memory.  When it’s your turn to speak, you try to tell them.  You try to say that this simple open room they call a church, with its open wooden shutters and open iron gates and the breath of life flowing in and out and fans whirring overhead like hovering angels, is more alive, more impressive than the cathedral in Santo Domingo with its vaulted domes and cold saints in stone coffins.  You try to say that you came here to this place of contrasts to find the sameness between people.  You try to say that you came to build rooms but together with them have built bridges.  Ruben – my 17-year old translator – is golden and a close friend now, but Lord knows how it all came across the mic we shared.  Doesn’t matter.  We didn’t have to say anything.  Those people knew.

Going to leave off the last million pages here because, well…you just had to be there.  But you see what I mean about finding the magic every day, don’t you?  Easy to discover in the Dominican.  Tougher in your own backyard.  But absolutely do-able (see last month’s column).  There is more about the DR experience in the July Sullygram (newsletter) being released today along with many photos — e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send it to you.  You’ll also find archived copies of Sullygams w/pictures on my author’s web site, though the latest one is always slightly delayed so that it can include a Permalink to this column.  And please feel free to follow me on http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  As always, your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Used to be that my muse had to put a bullet in my brain to get my attention.  Now I can hear the gun cock.  Hell, sometimes I hear the barrel clearing leather.  All by way of saying that recognizing where stories come from is an acquired skill.

Yes, you can take the shortcut just by living on the edge, thus making your life full of ready-made dynamic tales.  Climb Mount Everest.  Smuggle exotic pets across borders in your underwear.  Absolutely.  But if you open your eyes, mind, heart and soul to the every-day poetry and the magic all around you, you’ll find fragments of stories by the long ton that need only imagination to come together with sweeping wisdom and consummate beauty.  That’s only the circumstantial part of it, of course.  You still have to see the meanings, the patterns, the connections to larger life before a story will emerge.  By any name this is insight.  We all know people who have insight and people who don’t — those who can travel all around the world but go nowhere, and those who travel nowhere but still seem to grasp the world as seen through a microscope and the universe as seen through a telescope, plus the hidden stuff as it might be exposed by an MRI and a digital x-ray.  Making yourself into the latter is the ultimate enhancement to a writer and the ultimate enrichment to life.

It starts with getting outside of yourself.  That’s because the world wants ever so much to put on appearances for you.  And because when we take everything as a reflection on ourselves, we become blind to most of what is out there.  It isn’t about you.  It’s about what is really there.  So if you want to see the world in all its vignettes and sagas, you have to step beyond your own limitations.  That’s trickier than what you might think.  But there are three things you can will yourself to bring to the table that will help in your quest.  COURAGE will get you off the dime and out the door.  If you’re afraid of losing your comfort zone or are paralyzed by doubt, you need this.  BELIEF has the power to motivate as well as to deliver a positive outcome from the sheer force of its charisma.  If you don’t believe there is magic all around you, you’ll never see it.  And ENERGY is simply your guarantee against giving up before you do see it.  Energy never accepts failure and never stops connecting the dots. 

This is mind control.  Yours.  You can condition yourself to almost anything — believing something, feeling something (or not believing and not feeling something) — so will your self through the early stages until habit makes it easier.  Yeah, that’s dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty of method not of reality, like stowing away in an empty freight car to get to a very real destination.  If what you discover doesn’t make you a true “believer,” you can always ride the cattle car back.  When you become that relatively free and objective person you want to be, you will have the insight and empathy to be the writer you want to be as well.

Okay, insert example.  Cannibal Essay time.  For newer readers, cannibal essays are peeks at the conversion of facts into fiction, that process or method by which one learns to put frames around every-day reality, i.e. recognizing stories as stated above.  Here’s how it worked for me last week:

Tuesday evening and I’m shrinking.  What’s my motivation, what’s my motivation?  I am pissed.  Trying to train for 13 days of sea kayaking in Tonga, but it’s been so windy all week that all I see are little dogs named Toto flying out of Kansas on the way to Duluth.  And now a genuine storm is threatening.  The weather has me under siege, trapped in my own little world of narrow perceptions and expectations.  Then I remember, open your eyes, mind, heart and soul, Sully – courage…belief…energy.  Overcome the obstacles.  Seize the minus and make it a plus.  The best roads are always detours. 

The impulse becomes a resolve, and I’m out the door, carrying my canoe to the lake shore.  My neighbor, who is battening down a patio umbrella, hollers a warning, to which I reply that I’m going after Somali pirates.  He has his own little world of preparation — his own story worthy of note.  And so does every other living thing I encounter.  The sky is dead calm — like the eye of a hurricane — but even the least reasoning creature around me knows what is coming.  White herons settle like snowflakes in the distant lees of larger trees, turtles slip into the water, a lone swallow arrows for the sanctuary of a bridge, a fish, oblivious to it all, takes a last foolish insect that has not headed for the underside of a leaf or tall grass on the banks.  What is my strategy for survival?  Why am I not following some predictable pattern?  I am odd man out.  A little adrenaline rush comes out of that, some minor risk, but also perspective.  An irresistible force, deeper than instinct, is driving all populations in a single direction, countermanding all routines, usurping evening rituals, unifying unlike things to an overriding purpose — survival! 

Excitement spikes my heart, and I can taste the iron in my blood.  Yes, I could have hunkered down in my sterile bunker , but I am out here, moving with the herds and flocks and swarms, taking my chances, believing in mortal things again and in imminent adventure.  More importantly, I am privy to life and death dramas large and small.  The stench of rotting fish belly-up in virulent blue-green algae seems to decree a warning and the first lightning glares at me — an impossibly long flash — as I paddle hard for the end of the lake where the creek begins. 

The next 20 minutes are a pointless race in the wrong direction through the curves of a creek that widens to 80 yards or shrinks to 10, ending at a small waterfall whose edge I tease with the bow of the canoe as I turn back.  And now, as if it has been waiting to stare me in the face, the wind rushes at me beneath a blackened sky, like the rank breath of a bruised boxer on the assault.  As a writer, I have all I need of seeing stories and feeling them.  Time to make shore, haul the canoe out, take shelter.  Feel free to jump out on the bank and make for the gazebo at the foot the bridge, if you like.  But — and this is optional — I want the adventure. 

This is it.  The main event.  The limit to be tested.  So now the lightning goes crazy, winking like flash bulbs capturing the “you want it, you got it” moment.  I dig the paddle into the chop with long J strokes side to side, trying to knife the heart of the wind and still negotiate the bends of the creek.  The excitement, the uncertainty, the burn as muscles fill with lead — this is what I work out for.  It is impossible not to laugh with exhilaration, just as it is impossible not to be afraid.

What is probably hundreds of strokes seems like thousands, but then I am under the last bridge and around the final curve onto the lake where the wind catches me and spins me completely around.  BIG chop.  Lightning is spidering all over the place now.  I am obliged to sweep back into the creek to try again.  This time I round the turn, but I can barely make progress along the banks.  The canoe is driven under every leaning trunk held above the lake surface by dead branches.  And here comes this tent caterpillar-webbed thing that threatens to engulf my head, and the wind is pushing me into it, so I swing the paddle to snap off the branches, only I swing too hard and the branches snap easily and the canoe is going over.  I grab onto what is left of the trunk sticking out of the lake shore bank.  Hardly matters, as a slashing rain erupts now, and the wind and lightning take charge, and I am hanging onto twisted branches to keep from being blasted back to the creek. 

A gamut of boat docks separates me from my house half a mile away, and I’ll never be able to paddle around them.  Something similar happened to me a few years back, only it was just wind then, and I was in a sailboat (the SS Plastic), so now — thoroughly soaked — I do what I did then: I jump out and drag the hull home through the shallows African Queen style.  

Yeah, totally unnecessary mini-odyssey.  But a hoot.  And the best part is stripping down in the garage, throwing my clothes in the dryer, and sitting in a hot bath to savor the impressions.  The ready-made adventure is obvious, but the elements of story are more subtle than that.  From my neighbor’s warning, which could be an element of foretelling in any tale, to the indelible sensory imprint of a rising storm, and the contagion of wing, fin and claw scurrying in primal panic for survival, I have been in touch with what life is all about.  It didn’t have to be that dramatic.  But it did have to engage me – my body, my mind, my spirit.  I had to interact. 

If you got out of the canoe back at the gazebo on the creek, you got all you needed in the way of insights.  Light and air infused your body, you touched palpable reality, and life paraded its truisms past your eyes.  Fragments of dramas, romances and comedies entered your experience, paralleling, confirming and inspiring what you already know.  They joined thousands of other fragments available to you which collectively may stir the poetry and wisdom that is in your soul.  They are the fuel of your creative process, the Cliff Notes, the cheat sheet, the Rolodex, the cribbed prompts written on the palm of your imagination.  Search for just that much every day and you will never lack for a metaphor, simile, thing & event, or insight to express your deepest passions. 

Now all you need is an audience – be it a soulmate or the world.

Finally, a very special notice: editor Denise Wydra – daughter of our beloved and illustrious colleague Frank Wydra who passed away in 2008 – has collected his Gonquin Table essays and other material in a professional book available here at http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=Frank+Wydra   True to his wishes, at his final services Flamingo Frank was propped up in his casket with a silver dollar and a glass of Jack in his hands.  Do you get a sense of legacy from that?  The man can never die, and I am honored that my funeral oration for him and a column are also included in the book. 

May I also invite you to receive my Sullygrams free?  Email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll add you to the list.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

You guys are really good.  What a smokin’ hot month you dropped on me through e-mails and posted comments.  Seems there is no one on the planet who has not already thought through the gender issues I raised in April’s column, like it was their right of passage.  So I guess a summary is in order here. 

The questions were meant to stimulate fictional character relationships in a novel-in-progress on contemporary marriage, after I ‘fessed up to having zero perspective about normal relationships on account of I’ve only met one woman whose instincts/thinking on “luv” were the same as mine.  Fact is, when it comes to communication I am gender reversed, very much given to talk about mental and emotional things in a supportive way.  You’d think that would lead to a marriage made in heaven, but, of course, the only long-term relationship I’ve had was with someone gender reversed the opposite way and all but autistic (God has a sense of humor).  So I lack a frame of reference for what’s normal.

But guess what!  I’m left wondering if anyone else has one either, because the variety of views was flat out astonishing and yet almost everyone felt they have sorted out definitive truths about gender relationships.  That was the most revealing thing: that everyone has a definite and detailed take on sexual dynamics.  No uncertainties.  The communication biz, for instance…I dunno, it seems to me most women seek emotionally meaningful communication in order to feel safe, respected and cherished.  And it would follow that a marriage could be no more successful than its ongoing meaningful communication, and that it only takes one unwilling or unable party to kill that – which is what I see in most marriages.  So I posed statement #3, expecting to have it accepted or challenged directly.  But of the 40 or so responses that came in, the divide wasn’t over communication skills, rather it was over what is meaningful communication.  Most respondents either lamented the lack of emotional focus in male-female communication or discredited the need for it.  And that’s how responders generally got around one side or the other of an issue.

The infidelity question (#1) brought another sweeping array of interpretations.  Most (but not all) saw women as more concerned about emotional fidelity and men more concerned about physical fidelity.  But some saw those as indistinguishable, and I have to confess, that’s where I was coming from in posing the question.  I was looking to see if I was alone in that view, i.e. male response to physical infidelity is itself a hardwired reflex to emotional infidelity as well.  Why?  Because a man recognizes that emotional connections and security are what drive a woman to give sexual access in a relationship, and therefore her emotional fidelity is his best assurance that his sperm and DNA will win and be proliferated.  In other words, his anger and jealousy over her emotional infidelity is a hard-wired response to the whole emotional aura of sexuality that leads to sexual access.  If that wasn’t true — if what drove him was simply an intellectual and factual guarantee that his sperm would win — then he wouldn’t care about physical fidelity after the woman’s tubes were tied or if she practiced effective birth control or was willing to have an abortion or if her other male lovers were sterile.  Of course, you have to believe in the premise that the mandate of evolution for a male is that his sperm must win exclusively.  All his emotions are then conditioned by that.  It isn’t conscious logic that drives men at the reflex level; it’s feelings – hard-wired emotions.  (Hey, guys, please inform me if at the moment of passion any of you actually think, “Hot diggety, for the sake of my biological imperative, here’s a chance to make sure this woman doesn’t get pregnant with any man’s sperm but mine!”) 

But the premise for a woman’s mandate in evolutionary history seemed to be taken for granted, and that surprised me.  I thought some would regard the “emotion” tag as a sexist Victorian attitude that somehow denied the reality of a woman’s physical appetites.  For the sake of clarity, I’m talking about an evolutionary premise something like: women are more concerned about emotional fidelity because securing safety and support for themselves and their children was their strategy for survival over millions of years before the rule of law and standing armies lessened the practical (but not necessarily the emotional) need for a specific provider/protector.  Hmmm.  No bullet holes in me yet.  Well, we’ve come a long way baby, haven’t we?  So I’ve learned something about those “normal” attitudes I was seeking in order to shape my fictional characters.  I think a few years ago I would’ve been swarmed by Women’s Studies Ninjas for even alluding to evolution’s basic training…and now I’m going to put on my running shoes and tiptoe out of Dodge.

Wish I could include examples of your wonderful responses to the questions, but privacy/anonymity is a must.  Suffice it to say that what came in was feisty, funny, emotional or reasoned.  Much of it was profound.  And I very much appreciate the rending honesties that some people shared.  I’m creating a half dozen marriages in the new novel, and your responses will deepen the nuances.   The original questions and the answers that were posted rather than e-mailed are here: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2010/04/16/thomas-sullivan-would-you-write-a-book-for-me-or-what-do-you-really-know-about-sex-love-and-terror/

Doc Foto’s latest picture satire struck me as a kind of relationship inkblot test, so I used it to head up this gender article.  The evil doctor’s true identity is folk-singer Mark Manrique, a life-long friend who is much-loved by readers of Sullygrams (newsletters) for his outrageous photo caricatures.  You can link to his original music here:  http://www.youtube.com/user/manriq47#p/a/u/0/iYXd2GAOwkA    Another link to one of his original haunting songs is in this month’s Sullygram.  You can get that and future Sullygrams sent to you once a month for free by emailing me at mn333mn@earthlink.net . 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at anonymously.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow, though they won’t see you.  Or simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  Sample of recent Tweets:  “Stubbornness is how you prove things to others; honesty is how you prove things to yourself.”  …and  “I am now a full-blooded Indian. Turtles no longer slide off logs when I canoe past.”  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Yoo hoo!  Attention everyone who has been broomed out of a job by Donald Trump.  And you uncounted millions over and above the counted millions who all are out of work — gotta minute?  Also to the rejected, the downtrodden, day dreamers, spurned lovers, adventurers, searchers, fantasizers, philosophers, natural-born psychologists, sob sister, questers, trapped housewives, romantics, gigolos, Delilahs, or otherwise unfulfilled souls with holes in their lives, I’ve got a job for you.  You’re hired!  If you want to be. 

Here’s the standard contract:

On call 24/7.  Report to shift muse.  Irregular hours, no days off.  Weekly pay = 0.  Monthly pay = 0.  Guaranteed annual income = 0.  Retirement = 0.  Health insurance = 0 (think of the “0” as the first letter of Obamacare, as in your first free brain surgery is a frontal Obama-ty).  Paid vacation  = 0.  Additional employee benefits = 0.  In case of actual sale and publisher eventually coming across with the green scratch, subtract Federal tax, State tax, Local tax, both ends of FICA, 15% agent fee, additional agent fee if sub-agenting, business expenses, and all fees, penalties and taxes yet to be invented hereafter in the known and unknown Universe.    

Agreeable?  Good.  Congratulations, you are now a fully functioning writer.  Take a pen with you the next time you go into the bathroom (hopefully you’ll find paper already there).  Here’s your first project:

See, I’ve got some questions and the research is murder.  No, no, not murder as in research for a mystery (though there’s some spooky stuff I’d like help with too); actually, my questions go more toward character relationships, emotional stuff –you know, whathcamacallits…gender relationships, sexual romance and whatever.

Like I said, the research is a killer, on account of my approach to romance is a little out of the mainstream.  Actually, I’ve only met one woman whose instincts/thinking about “luv” were the same as mine, so what do I know about normalcy?  I have two requirements for falling in love with a woman.  One, she must be totally insane and two, she must be utterly intransigent.  The insanity is necessary so that she will fall in love with me in the first place, and stone solid stubbornness ensures that communication will be blocked at some point, effectively annihilating all that I am and leaving me free and independent once again.  Yeah, it’s partly theory, but that’s because of my extremely limited experience, having kept myself off the market 99% of the time (why are you applauding?).  Hello?  Ah…still there and semi-conscious?  Good.  So I figure I can shortcut the research by getting the benefit of your experience and insight.  Here are six questions, five of which you’ll see could underwrite relationships:

If a woman HAD to choose, would she rather have a man be emotionally faithful to her or physically faithful?  And if a man HAD to choose, would he rather have a woman be physically faithful to him or emotionally faithful?

Fear, guilt, love.  Which one drives the bus?  Which one motivates the strongest?  Which one trumps?  And especially I’d like to hear views on which one(s) win if they go head to head against each other.

Which of the following two nightmares would be the scariest: just as you are about to awaken you 1) feel cool air all around you and know that when you open your eyes you will find yourself on a two-foot wide rock ledge jutting out from the side of a cliff, staring into a steaming abyss 9,000 feet below, or 2) you sense that a person who has been dead for a long time and that you miss the most in your life is lying conscious in the bed beside you, though they don’t seem to be breathing.

React to this statement: men are great dumb beasts when it comes to communication and love, but women train in those skills from early ages and are far more practical about emotions over time.

React to this statement: a man is less likely to fall romantically in love with a woman than a woman is with a man, but if he does, he falls hopelessly and idealistically in love whereas most women are more realistic.

React to this statement: living fully and loving fully (romantically) are mutually exclusive.

Feel free to e-mail me your responses at mn333mn@earthlink.net or just chunk something in below where it asks for Comments.  I rather suspect that writing a novel this way is going to be the ol’ making-sausage method.  Not pretty, but if it fries up nice in the pan, well, the proof is in the . . . uh, pudding (no), putting (no), sausage (no), blood pudding (no), eating (no) – you see why I’m hiring this out?  Hiring being euphemistic.  I mean, I hope the phrase “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply here, ‘cause this ship sails empty.  Think of it as a balloon payment on your future as a writer.  And you know what balloons are filled with.  Floating off now…

Please use your newly hired imagination to pretend the photo above is relevant (floating…empty ship = empty canoe floating on ice pack).  It’s from my monthly newsletter which you can get free just by emailing mn333mn@earthlink.net .  The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has a large and growing global readership.  Past newsletters are at this author’s website under Sullygrams & Columns (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/sullygrams.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out. 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow, though they won’t see you.  Or simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan.  Sample of a recent Tweet:  The Easter Bunny just saw his shadow. Which means we’ll have 6 more weeks of basketball…    Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan