Write to Say It (or to Sing It)

Inner Elves is up and running, my "other voices" blogsite offering about 80 posts so far, although I still have about 35 stories, poems, and miscellaneous items I'll probably post, including some I like the best. I have to do them a few at a time so the servers don't have a hissy fit and make me validate myself with "qzieh" or "foziyuts" in order to publish my own post. Actually, it's a good feature in helping to keep out machine spam.

I want to especially thank Rhononymous for suggesting I indicate when I wrote each piece. I've put the year at the end of each and grouped them above the archives. Good idea, R!

So I've syndicated through all the search engines, who will in time now send their little arachnids to crawl inside my head--they enter through the ear, you know--and index the elves' works. I've chosen a serviceable template for starting up, and configured in some pingers and statkeepers and other feedback widgets, so I am quickly approaching the end of the startup.

Now I just hope somebody reads some of these. In any case, I'm glad I put them out there where anyone who wishes can access them instead of letting them continue languishing unread in computer files and mss on my stack, or stuck away in ringbinders.

Creative writings are meant to be read. Maybe nonfiction thoughts can benefit from being set down in journals and diaries and kept private, or blogged about, if the writer wants to communicate them; but creative writings--stories, poems, sketches and other forms from the imagination--definitely are meant to be read. It's a shame when they are kept hidden, for whatever reason.

So now I have this blog for my rant and the other for my rave. I'm looking forward to writing in each mode, expository and creative, and being able to share on both venues. But I still have my journal, and that's just for talking to myself. Its pages are legion. I'll never stop journaling, above all. It keeps me sane. (?)

One new blog, One refurbished blog, and Two dead blogs

I'm making some big changes in my blogs overall: a new look here, with updated links, and a whole new Blogger blog I'm really excited about: inner elves I call it, and invite everyone to check it out. It's where I've decided to post my more creative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from most of my manuscripts going back over fifty years but just gathering dust. I decided I never was going to try to market them and they'd just get tossed if I didn't do a vanity collection (which would also gather dust in the copies I would spend a lot to publish and I wouldn't sell anyway). The more I thought about it, putting them out to the world in their own new blog here made a lot of sense. And I'm having a lot of fun putting it together.

Furthermore, it also makes a lot of sense to me that I didn't need two other blogs I've posted to in the past besides this one: nbknotes and nbk2. Those were languishing without new posts for many moons, so I deleted them today. Two blogs will be fine, because I basically have two selves in my writing : my creative side and my expository side, each looking for expression. In the past, I've found they don't mix very well for me in the same venue, so now each has its own.

Good Lord, what have I done! each screams at me. Oh well, too late now. (Besides, I saved all the stuff from the other now-defunct blogs as .xml's and will edit them into the one or the other new ones. There. I think that's going to work just fine.

On the brighter side

I just noticed my recent blogs are pretty intense. Think I got caught up in the war, the shootings, bad student (and other) behavior in the schools, and the horrible things in the news generally and was trying to make sense of them in my mind. But not to be negative, I want to sign on to my blog and see something a little more positive, without being Pollyanna about it.

So here goes. It's a beautiful day, just great. And I just finished classes for the spring semester and have the grades all ready to submit. The students overall did themselves proud on the papers and last test, and for the first semester in a while I was pretty impressed with their efforts. It's good to feel like I made a difference in their lives and learning. I'm teaching summer session and already have nine or ten enrolled, so it will "make," and we'll get a nice start on our vacation budget.

And things seem to be falling into place. Our youngest sons are touring Europe in June, and it looks like Barb will get the foot surgery she needs by early June and be ambulatory by the time we can head out. We've mitigated some of the big doubling of our property insurance by taking higher non-hurricance deductible and getting a very favorable insurance inspection that should bring us closer to a mortgage payment we can live with, and if it doesn't, we've gotten an alternative quote lined up that will.

Everyone is busy and healthy, I already have my classes lined up for fall teaching, and if we can just get some rain to fall down here before we all have to ride camels in the South Florida Desert, we should be in good shape for a rewarding and full summer.

Cynicism's Dark Quicksand

President John F. Kennedy hated cynicism and frequently chided the complainers in his administration. His mother, Rose, had read to him as a child of knights and heroes and brave deeds in the face of adversity. He grew to manhood believing that if one didn't like the way things were, he should try to do something about them rather than just complain. As a public servant he wrote the Pulitzer-winning Profiles in Courage to inspire others to act for change, not to simply accept the slings and arrows life's outrageous fortunes fling at everyone.

And it struck me today as amazing what one individual can do when one takes hold of almost any issue. I admit that much in our lives seems to visit things upon us we'd rather not face, and sometimes it's tempting to feel we really don't have much control over events and outcomes. But it's very rare that something happens that we really can't do anything about at all. When those things do happen, St. Francis of Assissi had the best response in his famous prayer, "Give us the courage to change what we can, and the strength to accept what we cannot."

The psychologist Robert Butler wrote that the human mind is programmed to think toward one goal, and that is to act. "The end of all thought is action," I read from him as an undergraduate, and it rings still in my ear today. Every thought tries to move toward a response, not just an acceptance of a status quo. It is ingrained in the species and is an imperative for survival. The mind of man is not given its intelligence, its reasoning abilities, its many faculties of memory and imagination, insight and intuition simply to mull things over and over and never conclude anything, or to wallow in self-pity, bitterness, or a sense of despair or helplessness. To do so, to harbor and cultivate resentments against others instead of trying to take positive steps to correct perceived wrongs, to the point of delusion and paranoia, is the quiet prelude to tragedy, as happened at Virginia Tech, Columbine, and countless other sad events of our times.

No one should allow himself to feel helpless in the face of life's challenges or victimized by circumstances, because no one can control what will challenge him each day. What we can do, however, is control how we respond to those challenges, and in those choices become not victims of fate but the masters of our own destinies. Someone once said, if you believe you can do something, you may be right; but if you believe you cannot, you are right. So long as you choose to feel that way, you are a victim. But it is your choice whether you accept it and remain so. As JFK said, if you don't like something, try to change it.

The Killer Within

Cho Seung-Hui, the South Korean senior English major who methodically and calmly executed thirty-two of his fellow students and teachers at Virginia Tech University Monday morning before killing himself, is a compelling study in evil hatred, depression, depravity, and horror of the human mind utterly disintegrated. Some students trapped in his killing rooms described his icy calm and coldblooded silence. Others spoke of his maniacal laughter as he fed upon the slaughter, returning again and again. His obscene and violent writings scared his instructors into warning others who might have intervened earlier in his silent rage, but their hands were tied because he made no overt threats, spoke to no one. He hated so many so blindly that he was convinced all hated him, and he became so paranoid that he acted out the rage within. In hindsight, his bloodbath was probably predictable, but perhaps not as preventable, for the killer in Cho Seung-Hui is, frighteningly, in each of us.

Nearly all of us control our killer rage all our lives, but some do not, and the killers capture and destroy the names of the individuals they feed upon, and blight their names and memories in infamy: the road ragers who pull their guns from their glove compartments and fire into another car, the suicide bombers whose killers within surrender their hosts to fanatic, senseless, indiscriminate murder of as many innocents as possible in the name of some misguided cause or movement, and all the rampaging, sick killers who have come to hate this world and its people beyond endurance, including themselves, and have determined to quit their human participation and break the social contract that binds us all: to live, to somehow live together, and always to respect human life.

So abhorent was Cho's hatred and so terrifying to contemplate Monday, that it was an uplifting, beautiful thing to find, as that day went on into Tuesday and into today, that Cho's legacy of hatred and death was more than matched and completely overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and healing at the candlelight vigil, at the memorial convocation, at the arrival of thousands of messages of sympathy and comfort. His infliction of pain and suffering for moments of a few dozen and of a lifetime of pain and loss for many hundreds more was more than matched by the heroism of so many at the scene and in the hospitals, the law enforcement communities, the entire campus and town which came together as one to grieve and support each other, by the shock of an entire nation who responded with messages of support and offers of help. I first felt Cho's hatred and the horror of evil, then felt the surging power of love and the healing peace and joy of goodness. It is the way humans are. In tragedy, grief and despair, we comfort and reach out to one another.

What I did not feel, I was amazed to realize, was hatred for Cho Seung-Hui. Not in the victim's friends and families' remarks, not in the officials' and authorities' remarks, not in the remarks of fellow students and professors he sought to destroy. It was so ironic that he felt everyone hated him, because he hated them. That they wanted to kill him, because he wanted to kill them. And that instead of destroying others, he could not destroy who they were in the hearts of those who knew them, could not sully their memories or recast them as the villains he saw in his sick mind and wrote of in his obscene, violent plays, but rather elevated their memories to the status of heroes cut down by senseless evil, to be remembered and honored as are fallen warriors and the victims of 9/11 and others.

Cho Seung-Hui sought to weaken and destroy his world. Instead he only brought it closer together and made it stronger. I have sensed that instead of a desire by anyone to destroy him, there is and will remain simply a profound sadness for him, a profound regret that no one could act to save him from his killer within. I think we realize that he, as the others who died, are in some way in us as well.