"Embracing the Positive"

I recently read a letter in The New Yorker referencing Erik Erikson, a “brilliant neo-Freudian thinker from the past century,” who, according to the letter writer, posits that as we get older we either embrace what was positive in our lives or wallow in feelings of failure. Can’t be more polarized than that, but as one who levitates between the two poles, I decided I better look into exactly what Erikson had to say to maybe find out how to embrace the positive.

Erikson sees this choice as a process, a series of stages, in which one develops a personality based on social experience and relationships. In each stage people experience a conflict that determines whether one meets that conflict with a quality that allows for growth or fails to meet that conflict or develop essential skills needed for a strong sense of self. Mastery of the skills needed to grow equips one with “ego strength” or “ego quality.”

That’s all well and good, but how do you deal with ego strength in a society that emphasizes competition and comparison that is exacerbated by unlimited access to information about everyone with whom you can possible compete or compare?

I’m almost 70 years old. I can easily “wallow” when I think about all the incredible things that other 70 year olds like Louise Erdrich and Bill Frisell have provided for me. I’ve also lived through many “stages” that are life affirming. So how do I refrain from the competition and comparison to focus on the positive? I decided to make a list, starting with my early adult life, of the experiences and relationships that have made an impression.

1.     I went to a crazy college—Antioch—where I learned all about love and politics and expanding the mind and met lots of crazy people.

2.     I got a co-op job at the Central Clearing House in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I never left—New Mexico, that is.

3.     I invented a career as journalist for alternative newspapers like Seer’s Catalogue that floated around the Albuquerque underground.

4.     I found my dog Judge, my dearest companion, in an Oregon forest while doing shit work one summer for the Forest Service.

5.     I got to spend two summers as a fire lookout on Mount Taylor while acting as a spy for environmental groups fighting uranium exploration in the forest.

6.     I fell in love with Mark, my partner of 34 years, in the fire lookout.

7.     Mark and I built a house in Placitas from scratch.

8.     We traveled all over Mexico, having all sorts of adventures, from Yucatan to Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and Mexico City, where Mark got his pocket picked and we had to go to the US Embassy to get enough money to pay for a hotel until we could get money wired from his parents for a bus ride home.

9.     I got to earn money hiking around the Sandia Mountains (again, the Forest Service).

10. I parleyed those hikes into classes—hiking and cross-country skiing—and guidebooks under my own imprint: Acequia Madre Press.

11. I gave birth to Jakob Matthews Schiller in 1981.

12.  I fought the Forest Service—Cibola Forest Plan—and the Forest Service won. I fought the developers—building Placitas fake adobe haciendas—and the developers won.

13. I gave birth to Max Matthews Schiller in 1988.

14. Mark and John Kennedy and I wrote the UnReal Estate news to parody the developers Real Estate News and nobody knew it was us.

15. Mark and I wanted out of Placitas so we traded houses with a woman who lived in Llano San Juan but she wanted us to exorcise our house in Placitas so we kicked her out.

16. Mark and I did get out of Placitas, but to El Valle, where we finished a house, restored a hay field, planted a garden, and started an orchard.

17. Mark and I became norteño activists and got to hang out with Ike DeVargas, Max Cordova, and Chellis Glendinning.

18. Mark and I went after Forest Guardians and Sam Hitt, those absolutist, urban environmentalists, in our radical rag newspaper, La Jicarita News.

19. We went backcountry skiing and backpacking all over northern New Mexico. We taught our kids to downhill ski. Climbed a few Colorado peaks as well.

20. We went to demonstrations where environmentalists were hung in effigy.

21. We went dancing with Tomás, the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle, and his girlfriend, in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoons.

22. We went to Spain—the Prado, the Alhambra, the Pyrenees— to visit Jakob who was there for his senior year.

23. I wrote a couple of children’s’ books.

24. We sent both kids off to college.

25. I hiked the Grand Canyon, backpacked in Big Bend, and skied to the yurts with the “girls,” who became my boon companions on many outdoor adventures.

26.  I published a couple of books with Sunstone Press: Culture Clash; Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, and Stories From Life’s Other Side.

27. Jakob married Casey in 2010; 10 months later Mark died of pancreatic cancer.

28. David Correia, Eric Shultz and I pounded out La Jicarita online, extending coverage to police violence in Albuquerque and fascism at the Santa Fe Opera.

29. Jakob and Casey gave me two grandchildren, Lulu and Marcos.

30. I published two more books under Acequia Madre Press: Unf*#!ing Believable and ¡No Se Vende! Water as a Right of the Commons.

31. John Nichols wrote me a 60 page letter in response to Unf*#!ing Believable and we became fast friends.

32. Jakob and I taught the grandkids to downhill ski. I won’t be able to keep up with them in a few more years.

33. I volunteered at the Mexican border with shelters harboring Latin American refugees seeking asylum in the United States as Trump separated children from their parents and put them in cages.

34. After years of lambasting Forest Service policy I helped start the Rio de Las Trampas Forest Council to develop a forest restoration program on the Camino Real Ranger District.

35. I helped John publish what he says will be his last book, Goodbye Monique: Requiem for a Brief Marriage, about the death of his mother when he was just two years old.

36. I’m piddling around with my novel. I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not writing something.

It turns out Fred Rogers was also heavily influenced by Erikson in developing his much beloved series for children. Supposedly his favorite quote was from “The Little Prince:” “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” He took that to mean that what is essential to life isn’t the “honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. . . . It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff . . . What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye.”

As my life becomes more circumscribed and my body declines, I hope “what is essential” about me remains.

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Am I a Literary Luddite or do I Just Have Good Taste?

I read two books in British writer Rachael Cusk's much acclaimed trilogy and I have to tell you I don't get it—meaning I don't get what all the fuss is about. She's been quoted as saying that a novel's traditional make-up—characters, plot, description—is "fake and embarrassing," that because one has sufficiently suffered personally one only has to tell one's own story. I barely made it through the first book, Outline, where a writer in a first person narrative—has to be first person, remember, as there are no made up characters—gets on a plane and travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. It's neither autobiography, novel, or memoir, but is what is now called autofiction, like the unbelievably long books by Karl Ove Knausgaard that might not be so boring if they weren't so long. Is it because it has a new name that all the literary critics think it's so wonderful?

I skipped the second in the series, Transit, and made it through the third, Kudos, in which a writer gets on a plane, travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. This time I found the people she encounters a little more interesting than those in Outline, and their stories a little more emotionally engaging, but their suffering is not contextualized, their stories are fragmented and existential, and if there is something in this structure that is supposed to supplant the lack of theme and cohesiveness supplied by character, plot, and description, it's lost on me.

To not appear a literary luddite I have to say that I read another relatively new book that the critics loved called 10:04 by Ben Lerner, who is also a poet. If anyone had told me, you should read this book by someone who is a white Gen X guy who lives in hipster Brooklyn I would have said, not interested, but the book is beautiful and brilliant and I read it twice. Lerner's book could also be classified as autofiction, I suppose, but the difference between his conception of the genre and Cusk's is night and day: the warmth and breadth of the interplay between his muddled personal life and the neoliberal streets of New York or the art/fart of Marfa challenge the reader's imagination with humor and intelligence. In a passage in which he falls into the third person, Lerner summarizes the book: “His narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.” This is expressed in numerous ways throughout. While dealing with his own serious illness the author agrees to become a sperm donor for his best friend Alex, scrupulously maintaining a Platonic relationship with her and trying to figure out what parenting might mean. He tries to establish community with an Occupy activist by allowing him to shower in his apartment and mentoring an eight-year-old boy while questioning the sincerity of his efforts. He volunteers at a food co-op as an ironic statement of capitalist consumerism while listening to a riveting story of a fellow worker's life. Ironies, contradictions, politics, personal dilemmas, humor, fear, and anxiety: the mixed bag of who we and what we confront explored by someone who's razor sharp intelligence makes every page a delight.

But then I had a conversation with my friend Terri, who I loaned Lerner's book to, and while she also thought it was an intelligent, funny book, especially the part about Marfa (she's a visual artist), as a working class lesbian she had more trouble with the white Gen X hipster Brooklyn genesis than I did. "Am I really all that interested in hearing the perspective of the dominant voice in literature again?" as she put it, even if he's smart and witty and entertaining?

I suppose what this all reveals is that I'm a white privileged secular humanist and that the literary trends that are correlative will resonate, and those that aren't, won't. That's why I never read Derrida, struggled with Foucault, could only read Pynchon and Burroughs in my twenties, gave up on Foster Wallace, am very picky with DeLillo, and am embarrassed that I've hardly read Borges.

But even within these boundaries there's something else at work, what you just have to admit is taste, or more presumptively, discretion. Just as when I thought the movie that won the Oscar year before last, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was a racist piece of crap (eventually a number of other critics finally expressed this opinion as well) or Crash, which won a few years ago, was a contrived piece of crap. This may never happen with Rachel Cusk, but I'll stick to my opinion that her deadpan look at suffering doesn't do much to enlighten, entertain, or delight.