Sunday, September 12, 2021

Sunday, September 12, 2021

 

     For some unknown reason, I was disturbed by thoughts of an unresolved conflict with someone in the middle of the night. I believe that some of these thoughts were triggered by the other person, also struggling with their problems with me. If they’re exclusively self-generated, they slip back into the unconscious quickly. If they stay on the surface of my mind, reoccurring obsessively, I have found out later that person was also thinking of me. Someone may even be thinking different thoughts.

   I had an experience where a woman I thought was a dear friend announced she never really liked me. She just wanted to ensure a relationship between her husband and Mike. Wow! I hung on for a while and then let the relationship go. She came to mind periodically. My thoughts were not pleasant. I saw me running into her, surrounded by her friends, and putting me down. It hurt.

    Then out of the blue, over ten years later, I got an email from her. She said she had been thinking of me over the years. It didn’t sound as if her thoughts of me had been negative. I was happy to hear from her. I asked her why she hadn’t gotten hold of me sooner. She wondered why I hadn’t reached out. I quoted all the things she had said to me, making it perfectly plain that not only didn’t she like me, and she never had. She said she must have had a psychotic break. All the bad feelings slipped away. I enjoyed the renewed relationship for a while, and then it slipped away again. 

    It’s interesting. I have found that people heavily invested in language learning, like learning foreign languages, consistently have adverse reactions to me. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened. The woman mentioned above won a Spanish contest in high school. There’s only one exception I can think of: my colleague at Licking Heights, Debra Lynd.

    I have developed a theory on why this is. People who are into learning languages are into learning rules. I’m a walking, talking rule breaker. I don’t mean I break civil laws. I play with concepts and patterns, taking them apart and putting them back together with something from a different pile. Mike found it somewhat crazy-making. 

  I have also noticed another pattern. People who are into language learning are more into form than content. I have seen examples that left me wondering if they even see language as a form of interpersonal communication. I don’t have enough samples to know if there is any validity to my theory.

    While I’m a content-over-form person, it is only in learning to control form that I can produce something to share with the world. As a child, I was full of original ideas but had no way to actualize them. I was about twelve at the time. Then at twenty-six, I was in despair because I couldn’t formalize my ideas. I was in grad school and had passing grades- for the most part, but it was a struggle. 

   I had an insight when I read Max Weber’s introduction to Marx’s Das Capital. He described the difference between the English and the Germans. In response to the problem of poverty, the English poured in money. The Germans started by discerning the nature of being. (I’m a first-generation American of direct German descent.) I recognized myself. That was freeing. I committed to learning to fill out application forms with ease. I was proud of my ability to maintain my attendance and grade book in school. I worked at it.  

     Mike was a form man. He hadn’t been a good writer when he entered college. He had a teacher who took him by the ears, sat him down, went over each line in each paper, and taught him how to write. Mike, in turn, helped many others as he had been helped. I don’t know if he was prepared to take charge of me as he was his students. But his thinking helped me organize and contain my ideas. Mike was a gift in so many ways.

   I have fallen into a pattern of watching documentaries about people in the music business, David Geffen, Clive Davis, Linda Ronstadt, Adam Lambert, and the new Queen, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and now Dolly Parton. Of the musicians, the only ones that weren’t outright self-destructive were the two women—every interesting.  

        From the picture of Jerry Garcia, one can only feel sorry for him. He loved to play his instrument and was good at it. He couldn’t handle the fame, the adoration. He was a diabetic and a drug addict. The two girls had control over themselves and their lives. The boys were dysfunctional in many ways, as adolescents and later as adults. It’s like they threw themselves into the flames. I’m hearing their stories and trying to get my head around who and what they were. It’s not just that they went out to the edge; they were downright self-destructive. 

      I heard several interviews with Bela Fleck, the banjo player. He also became possessed by a muse that subsequently dominated his life, but he wasn’t self-destructive. At least not that I’ve read or heard about so far. These guys who go to extremes with partying, drugs, and women are annoying.