Friday, October 27, 2017

Unconditional Love?

I'm going to say something controversial. I don't believe in unconditional love.

The reason I say so, is that I'm talking about relationships.

Love, as a concept, or existential idea, can't have conditions, just like the concept of pride. We can talk about what pride or love or honor means to us, but we can't put conditions on a concept, so in as much as that is true, in my mind, I suppose those concepts are unconditional, but neither are they conditional.
So what else is love? It's one of those amazing words that has multiple definitions. Love as action. Love as feeling. Love as concept.
I'll deal with love as feeling quickly. I can feel love towards any number of things. A person, a place, an animal. Those feelings are generally involuntary, to large degree, though they can be fluid and changing with many factors. All that to say: feelings aren't beholden to condition, as in expectations or needs or desires. Aren't those the "conditions" in the popular sense of "conditional love"? That leads us to the third definition.

Love as action. Love as a verb, as the saying goes, popularized in song and sermon. So then the context becomes love within relationship where we practice this verb. That is generally where the term "unconditional love" has it's context. "We should love unconditionally." And that's exactly where it is impossible.
Conditions are ALWAYS present within relationship. And I would submit, they should be, in a healthy relationship. Conditions as boundaries, or as my good friend likes to call them, agreements. Conditions/boundaries/agreements help us define what we are and are not willing to do or not do within relationship. That, I submit, fosters trust and thus, vulnerability. Vulnerability, I would say, and have experienced, is the gravity that pulls the three definitions of love together.
Vulnerability is the Sun in who's gravitational pull the planets of love orbit.
I don't think true vulnerability is possible without boundaries/agreements - conditions.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Two Worlds - Drifting

This is a 200 word “YA” short story that I wrote for Carol Nissenson @nissenson for being my 50th follower on Twitter. She wanted something “YA, which I love. If not, something realistic and nonviolent.” Well, I hope you like this very short story. It’s the thoughts of a daughter and her father after she’s informed him she would rather stay at her mom’s for the night.

Two Worlds - Drifting

God my dad is such a jerk! I just want to go to mom’s and he’s got to make me feel guilty for that?? She’s MY MOM! It’s not like I don’t see him after school every day, I don’t know what the big deal is. Besides it’s not even fun over here, it’s like the whole house is dead now or something. I’m never good enough. “Turn off the lights” “Is your homework done?” “Why don’t you keep things here?” I swear I’m going to just go live with mom permanently and then see how he likes it. God!
                                                                --------------------------------------------------

Is it because we don’t have anything in common? She’s changed so much since this summer, missing her sister, obsessing about makeup, and never off her phone. I try my best to have the food she likes and let her be. I wish her mom would just make her stay, but she always says, “Ask Dad.” Then I’m the bad guy if I say no. Maybe I should say no. I want to. I want her here. It feels like her heart is fading to the distance and all I can do is stand at the line and wave goodbye.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Manifesto of History

What is history?

History is inspiration.
History is the feats of great people, the thoughts of the brilliant, and the triumphs of whole cultures, societies, and movements. We look to history to show us the capabilities of the human spirit. From those who overcame the seemingly impossible to those that did something wholly new to mankind, we look for proofs of what can be achieved. From spreading empires over large percentages of the globe to individual feats such as inventing something never before seen, we look to history to show us what we are capable of. Throughout time studying history has shown us that there are those whose greatness is without question. History tells us that being human is exceptional.

History is a lesson.
From the Crusades to the Hindenburg to Hitler, history shows us the darkest reaches of humanity’s capacity for folly and evil. It shows us the results of an insatiable ego and lust for power. It illuminates the basest parts of the soul; greed, ignorance, divisiveness. It sets these things up to the light for all to see and judge. It dissects the power structures and the trends that lend themselves to the devolution of character. It questions our very evolution past the most basic of human desires. It shows us the conquerors, the oppressors, the liars and the thieves. It shows us the enslaved and the persecuted. History tells us that being human is a struggle.

History is a mirror.
The present moment, once exhaled, becomes the past. That past is our history. When looking upon ourselves in a mirror, we look into the eyes of our present selves. And like the moment exhaled, in a mirror everything in the image beyond our own selves is behind. As far as the eye can see, stretching out as far as an endless horizon is this past. And so it is in this mirror, in this present moment that history touches the present, so then we see beyond into the face of who we have been, and of who we are. We become history. As such, in the eyes of history we see our true selves. We see in history our humanity and our link to all the experiences that are being human. We see our greatness and our shame. We see the moments when we feel nothing can stop us to the moments when we feel nothing. In essence, to look at history is to see our own selves. History tells us what being human is.

The historian holds the mirror.
            Once we have looked into the eyes of history and realized that what we have seen is ourselves, we as historians have met with our obligation to look for truth, for if anyone should look into their own selves and not seek the truth of what is there, then the life in which they live is fraudulent and thus worthless. So the charge of the historian is then to find the truth of humanity as if examining his or her own soul. If we truly look into history with this goal, what we will find is ourselves, and knowing ourselves, we will be equipped to move forward into the unknown future with confidence and purpose, with action and compassion.

Friday, May 16, 2014

I love college, and other boring crap.

This week I am going to post my Exit Essay for my Literature class this semester. I would encourage you to read all of the wonderful pieces that are cited. If you have comments on the works or the essay I encourage it, agree or disagree! I got an A and was very proud to see the professors encouraging comments. And those that are reading this blog, I thank you so much. It's not only a labor of love, it's a way to hone a craft I love and enjoy, and I would love feedback.





Clark Gillespie
Exit Essay
Eng 210 Intro to Lit
Heidi Naylor

 

William Faulkner’s Nobel Address

 

            William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature. It is safe to say that he earned the right to critique the state of his craft upon receiving this prestigious award, and critique he does. It was 1950 when he gave his acceptance speech for the prize. America, and the world, had just endured the greatest war in the history of man. We then transitioned almost directly into the Cold War, where fear and paranoia were staples of the every-day consciousness. Faulkner saw a kind of paralyzing fear settle over society in this protracted time of war and rumors of wars and challenged his contemporaries and those coming after him to not focusing on grief and fear and being afraid, the “basest of all things”(53), but to get back to writing about the “truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (53)

Are these qualities found in his own writings? Do those that follow heed his advice? I will look at his story Barn Burning from our readings. Albeit before the Cold War, it was written while Nazi Germany was rolling their tanks across Europe, certainly a time for, if not the sustained numbing fear he spoke of, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” (53), but certainly a time of a lingering nervousness . I will also look at some other writers after this time to see how they may have heeded his call.

            Barn Burning is a story set within a family that migrates from town to town, the father picking up farming jobs in each new place. But really, it’s the story of the youngest son and the conflicted relationship he has with his father and the reason they have had to move 12 times in his young life. That reason is that the father burns down the barns of the property owners he is sharecropping from, never in a way that can be proven in court because he asks his children to lie on the witness stand for him, but with enough of a knowing that the locals run them out of town. Faulkner sets this conflict up beautifully on the one side with the loyalty of family relations, of blood. “the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood. He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood…” (40) Juxtaposing against that desperate pull of blood on the boy is his own conscience. “His father, stiff in his black Sunday coat donned not for the trial but for the moving, did not even look at him. He aims for me to lie, he thought, again with that frantic grief and despair. And I will have to do hit.” (40) A brilliant move to show “the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing…” (53) The boy did eventually, after his father was finally shot, if not actually prevail, acquired the hope of prevailing, “and soon there would be the sun.” and finally, “He did not look back.” (52)

            These themes of blood versus conscience are also explored in John Cheever’s story Goodbye, My Brother, though the lines between who to root for in the story are blurred. In it we primarily see the conflict between the narrator and his younger brother, Lawrence. The narrator claims, “We are a family that has always been very close in spirit.”(54), yet throughout the book he highlights the battles of will and opinion between the family members, particularly Lawrence’s view of the family that show being “close in spirit” is a messy closeness indeed. “I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure.” (58) Ultimately in the end, the brooding younger brother, after the final blow, metaphorically and literally, to their bond, disowns the family when the narrator bludgeons him in the head with driftwood. This disowning is shown as a kind of victory, a fresh start and even a baptism for the family as illustrated in the vivid last lines: “The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw them come out and saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea.” (66) I was left with an empty place, where hope was, for this family to reconcile with this ending. I myself have had a falling out with a sibling, the reasons for which were deeply personal and life scarring, yet we have become close again, the pull of a shared upbringing, a mother’s love, and of blood too strong for even the harshest transgressions to not fade. Ultimately I feel this story falls short of Faulkner’s ideal of what the writer and poet should write about, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” (53) He feels a burden as a writer to not just document difficult truths, but to “help man endure by lifting his heart…” (53) While blood loses out in both stories, Faulkner’s boy sacrifices his blood for truth and we are left with an image of his following a path of higher calling, where Cheever’s narrator’s family bonds seem to be broken by nothing more than a difference in worldview, and yet we are given that powerful baptismal image in the end as if the brooding and melancholy brother was the weight that held the family under.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were divisive characters in the world of poetry. Their critics say they used the shock value of tortured minds to achieve acclaim secondary to poetic artistry, while supporters might point out that they expanded poetry to a new place of raw emotion and autobiographical self-observation, dubbing it “confessional poetry.”  This kind of poetry was new for the time and ground-breaking. It seems that all new things do breed a certain resistance from any establishment, but does their poetry lift the spirit as Faulkner would ask of our writers? It certainly does not. “I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil” (Sexton 70) “And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” (Sexton 71) The images of blackness and death are ever present in the poems “Her Kind” and “The Truth the Dead Know” by Sexton. Many similar images are found in Plath’s poetry, particularly “Daddy”, and ironically enough, even though it was 1962 and many years after WWII, her imagery evokes the time that Faulkner was imploring our writers to help society get past, Nazi oppression and the war. “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”, (72) “Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars.” (72) “I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.” (73)

            It seems that Faulkner could see the change happening in his contemporaries and the new crop of writers as they transitioned from the modern to the post-modern world. He saw and felt that inspiration was giving way to a raw emotionalism. An emotionalism that was, for some, also a realism that looked in a mirror, instead of looking at the horizon, and he did not like it. I do not think, for the most part, that his call for the poet’s voice to “not merely be the record of man”, but to “be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” (53) was heeded by the writers that followed. Faulkner held his craft to a higher call, a call to lift society from the dregs of the fear and uncertainty in life, to see inspiration and attain higher things. The writers that came after were more interested in showing a life that, to them, was real, whether or not there was anything higher to be hoped for.


Faulkner, William. “Acceptance Speech Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 53. Print.

Faulkner, William. “Barn Burner.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 40-52. Print.

Cheever, John. “Goodbye, My Brother.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 54-66. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 70. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “The Truth the Dead Know.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 71. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy.” Introduction to Literature. Ed. Heidi Naylor. Boise: University Readers, 2014. 72-74. Print.

Biography, Anne Sexton. The Poetry Foundation. Web. 10 May. 2014.

Biography of Sylvia Plath. Poemhunter.com Web. 10 May. 2014

Saturday, May 10, 2014

One Second.


A Very Short Story.


          Walking to the head of the stairs, I am paused-- stalled like a soft breath in cold stillness. A note floats from the record player in the corner and haltingly snaps and pops. It's an F-sharp and it draws across the room like a thin pencil line hanging in the air before disintegrating and floating to the floor. Tilting my head slightly I look out the window and see the sun as it's sliding down to a last glint of blinding red light. It glints through a gap in the leaves of a dying papaw tree.

'Why did they think that papaw would survive here? The summers are much too dry.'

The leaves look stressed, sapped of life. It is still a long time before they finally will let go and mercifully fall to the dusty ground.
I see the sun's now golden sliver shrinking as if in slow motion, before finally disappearing with a scintillant flash, the size of a pin head, then gone. It leaves a hot orange glow shimmering through the tree and a white pin in my forward vision. I blink and the pin is blue at first and fades through green, yellow, and red my consciousness focuses on it and seems to slide in deeper as if it were a gravitational worm hole compelling my mind slip inside.
          'Where is she? She is usually so punctual.' It’s a quality I have grown to admire in people: punctuality. It takes a caring and intent, two things she has always had an abundance of. I anticipate hearing her ritual of arrival at any moment. First the rusty shed door squeals in protest as she forces it open and again to curse her as she shuts and locks it after putting her bike away. Then the front door opens and the sigh of relief slowly escapes her lips as she feels the warm air of home wrap her cold bones.


          Dusk is a perilous time to ride a bike. Even with the frenetic strobe of LED lights. There is a certain chimerical affect in the graying fade of twilight that seems to make everything else succumb to its deviltry. Light fades. Attention fades. Memories fade.
          She feels her knee buckle, compressed between the aluminum and steel on one side and the painted plastic and glass on the other as they dig into her skin. Out of the corner of her eye she sees something. Despite the shock and pain and rush of blood and adrenaline, she sees it. It is blue-- opaque at first, then it starts to glisten as little ripples and waves manifest and begin to appear. Frozen drops of rain seem to fall from the sky, skittering along, then flowing down over the edge of the rippling blue. She finds that she is looking down through the crystalline waters of a tropical sea and she can see fish of every color. Blue, yellow, purple. Neon. So bright, they seem independent and free from the water they swim in, as if suspended in a frenetic dance above the beige and greenish sand that they hover and dart over.
          Lazily looking sideways, through a suspended animation, she sees me, and in my eyes, the future, as if compressed in an illustrated timeline from a history book. As she gazes she feels herself shrinking and falling. Falling forward towards that future. It is as if gravity tilts while at the same time she grows smaller and smaller in a horizontal free-fall to the depths within my eyes. She sees my eyes widen as she flies directly towards the iris. Deeper and deeper into these soul windows she flies. It becomes like a flight over a land and place that circles underneath her like that of endless lifetimes. She can see the colors in my eyes transform into the sheep covered hills of Ireland, the Grand Canyon, and Mayan temples. Places where God and man created hand in hand the miracles and wonder. She flies as if she were flying miles above, and yet walks barefoot, feeling earth press against her feet. She kneels down and pushes her hands against the soft damp earth, feeling them make deep impressions in the soil.
          Suddenly my hand is pressing against and enfolding hers. Hand in hand we fly and we walk through the air and upon the soils of this earth together. We see the wonders of providence and of man. We see the people and places that would become the portrait of our lives. The hues of their personalities cascading out from love and pain and sacrifice and grief and victory to paint our conjoined consciousness. Painting us from the inside until it spills out and we shine with both light and dark all that we will experience together in this life.



          The light waned. As it did, it was the faded memories of another time that held on to that second. That stretched it thin. Thin like a young mother’s patience with an unexpected layoff. As thin as a the line connecting a young mother’s budget for food and need for rent...or maintaining a car. As thin as the wire to the right headlight that loses the strength to carry the current to spark the halogen to warn of the cyclist coming in the hazy air of the impending night. It took less than a second to feel the tears come into her eyes, to shut them momentarily while wiping the salty despair from their lids. It took the rest of that second to see the flash of the strobe disappear with the sun in front of the car’s blue hood and the lightless, and now lifeless, vacuum of that right headlight.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Time Crunch

It turns out that starting a blog a month before ones destination wedding isn't the ideal time to expect to post weekly entries! Then again when is? I'm not a writer. I have a day job. I have a new wife, two daughters...family. I have two classes coming up next semester. I have lots of interests and hobbies. How do I find time to write a weekly blog? The answer is I don't. I have to make the time. I constantly shuffle this here and that there. I weigh sleep, quality time with loved ones and friends, exercise, errands, playing music, listening to music, cooking, watching 30 Rock, go to work 40-48 hours and numerous other things on a weekly basis. When do I write?? Who's brain here shuts off? Mine certainly doesn't. One of the things I find difficult is to take the time to stop and write or record an idea when it comes. I have so many during a given day and, sadly, I rarely stop to make a record of them. It's so easy to just daydream the best idea known to man, as it flows from the recesses of the cerebral cortex and when the process comes to fruition, it vanishes before it can be recalled. Often I also find that when I stop to start writing it down, the flow is interrupted and the idea is often left sitting there, looking like a broken hologram, with no body or depth. Because of this I often find myself half consciously NOT taking the time to record my thoughts because the uninterrupted process of inspiration FEELS so good. I'd rather have the

(the above entry was started, oh, sometime in the FALL of 2013. And I just laughed at the irony of the last full line.)

So here I am. Starting again, only this time. I have a plan, an idea, a germination.

For my birthday last year or the year before that, my beautiful wife got me a book. "642 Things to Write About"

I hear by resurrect this blog and will, by this weekend, write you all a story, using one of those prompts. There have been a lot of #100days blogs and Facebook posts lately, so I plan to write a hundred of those stories, poems, or memories using that book. It won't be in 100days, but maybe over a year or two. I hope you enjoy. I am excited to get started

Cheers!.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

One thing in common.

Aside from the same high school, there was only one thing that my mom
and dad had in common.

Goulash.

My mom, who raised us, would cook casseroles, meat loafs, boxed or meat & potatoes meals, and goulash. My dad, when we visited a month in the summer, cooked gourmet pizzas, pastas, prime beef cuts, salads, and goulash.
Working a full time job and raising 3 boys alone isn’t easy. On anyone. The oldest takes over as “dad”, the middle gets forgotten and the youngest, “spoiled.” Mom is constantly tired and looking for a diversion or a relief from stress. Any new men need to realize there is one looking to protect, one who wants left alone, and one that is starving for attention.

That last one was me. The youngest. The unexpected.

At this point I feel like I have (and struggle with) a choice in which way to take this initial post or even this blog. Do I play up the difficulties of growing up the youngest in a broken home, accentuating how much I have struggled to find a definition for my personhood apart from the void I felt in only having a solid father for the whole of 6 years of my adolescence and beyond? How I dealt with an age gap that had my older brothers 2 years apart, and me coming unexpectedly 4-and-a-half years later at the end of my parent’s marriage? Do I expose the patterns I developed to cope with a life colored by my incomplete and flawed understanding of family, relationships, the world in which we live or the heaven that our souls bend toward?
Maybe I tell the stories of youth. Being influenced and shaped by watching my brothers fail and succeed in mischief and folly. Learning what not to do but also emulating them in so many ways. Stories with BB guns, tree forts, horses and goats, ATV’s, Kick the Can, mud, dirt, and frogs. Or growing up in a town so small the population isn’t even posted and being blood related to at least one person in half of the households within 2 square miles.
Maybe I share my songs and poems or other artistic pursuits. The things that inspire me to create, to attempt ways to say or show things that my soul feels but my mind is too naive or ignorant to yet fully express. I find there is a constant struggle to keep myself in the headspace of the creative. Pulling me from that place are the ever present necessities of life; Family, the bills, job, friends, obligations and expectations. There is an ever-present desire for integration. How do you create a creative way of life? A way that attempts to ease the friction between the id and needs of this physical world.
Maybe it’s a way to sort out all of those things, to expose my ignorances and allow growth, to strive for growth. Like so many, a way to expose myself in a public way that can help others see who I am, and if we’re all lucky, who they are as well.

Parents! These most important people in a person’s life. The source of their creation: The taking of this gene and that trait and mixing them in the stew pot of life experiences and making us human.

Maybe it’s nothing special. Cheap, easily acquired ingredients cooked all together in the same pot. Their essences intertwining and mixing. Coloring and flavoring each other, to become one thing. But that one thing, that mixing of this from here and that from there; It’s comfort. It’s familiar. It’s life. It’s love. It’s goulash for the soul.


Maybe it’s just about one thing that my parents had in common.