A macho scrivener once said to me that the difference between a professional writer and an an amateur is that the amateur writes when he’s in the mood, the professional writes every day.

And yet, no matter what you do, the writing happens.

One of my favorite inspirational quotes comes from Morton Feldman, a composer whose work I heard during a concert at Oberlin: “For years, I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

How long have I looked for such a comfy chair! The one in which I sit isn’t bad, in that I don’t think about it that much.

What I get from that quote is a sour reflection on the years when I grumbled, groaned, despaired and just gave up on ever finding the equivalent of that chair. I never thought I’d rival the great writers. I just wanted to join the club. I imagined that, some day, if I just kept writing, I would.

Now I’m coming back to the understanding that there is never a “good” time to write. That is, you’re never going to do all the research, indulge all the preparatory exercises, gain all the education or the experience, read all the great books, have a “room of one’s own” that is quiet, clean, well-lighted, warm in the winter, cool in the summer, with just the right music and, maybe, a computer that doesn’t crash.

You have to start from incompleteness, imperfection, inexperience, ignorance. You go forward.

The writing brings completion, perfection, experience and, if you’re lucky, that special bit of wisdom that reminds you why you were born.

I’ve been doing karate katas for more than thirty years, in all kinds of places.

For those who don’t know the martial arts, a kata, a.k.a. form, is a series of movements that contain offensive and defensive techniques. You move about a bit–the performance space is roughly twelve feet square. The rarely take more than a minute.

Because I have had surgery on both knees, I leave out the dramatic jumps, unless I’m on sand or a floor that absorbs heavy landings. I made a small change (putting my foot with the instep down, instead of on my big toe) to accommodate arthritis.

For the last few years I would do them outside, on the lawn, which, in summer, meant being eaten alive by  bugs on days when the wind didn’t blow. I did them on a cruise ship, adjusting comically to the rocking of the ship. I’ve done them on a soggy lawn in England, on a beaches up and down the east coast, on the sides of mountains and in odd places in hotels that people don’t visit.

When the weather was hostile, I’d go to a gym and wait for the exercise classes to leave. This, of course, wasn’t as easy as it should be. Like most people, I have to force myself to go to the gym, and it’s just too easy to find things to do at home.

Last summer we rearranged the downstairs room that used to be my “office.” Furniture went up and down the stairs. A couch went against a wall and we had to go shopping for end tables.

This movement was inspired by a visit of son Brandon and daughter-in-law Charron. They came and went and the room became a refuge, where my wife could go to read magazines, do laundry or sit outside under the deck and fret about the garden.

Why did it take me so long to do the katas down there? I don’t know. Yesterday I was determined to teach myself a new kata, Junro Godan (the Fifth Way), and didn’t want to go to the gym.

The room was nearly perfect for it. I had to allow for a post, a nearness of furniture, the lip of a rug on top of carpet (where I could snag my toes when sliding forward).

But it worked! I got the kata “down,” and did others with it, feeling that familiar blend of confusion and familiarity a new kata brings.

I felt as if I’d found a new room in a house that I thought I knew completely.

I’ve often likened education to the discovery of such “rooms,” in your mind, in your memory, in your work and your relations with others. It isn’t as intense as the thunderclap of revelation, but it feels very, very good.

May you find a new room of your own, soon.

Another pop culture element goes the way of memory: the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus–the only entertainment company that had the audacity to call itself “the greatest show on earth”– will close this year.

It’s not that the circus has in anyway died. Cirque du Soleil of Montreal reinvented the circus in the 1980s and now calls itself the world’s largest theatrical production company. Though I’ve only seen one Cique du Soleil show live, and watched a few on video. They are fabulous, and I’d probably see more if ticket prices weren’t so high.

Ringling Bros.’ prices were always low enough for families. I guess they made their money back on the food and souvenirs. Circuses also profited on the midway and the freaky, sometimes sleazy, “side-shows” that the crowds would pass on their way to big top. With montebanks elevating the dissimulation to an art, so many people were aware that they were tempted, taunted and tricked. But, as long as the trick was satisfying in some way, you felt you got your money’s worth.

I remember my first circus well. The elephants were just too big to believe. I was scared of the lion tamer, who proudly put his head in a lion’s open mouth. The high-wire and trapeze performers were so far above my head that I couldn’t quite figure out what they were doing, but, from the cymbal crashes, I guessed that it was rather important to stay up there as they pranced, hopped and tumbled through the air.

The performers I adored were the clowns. I was close enough to the center ring to see Emmet Kelly and loved everything he did. Most clowns I saw were on television, starting with Claude Kershner’s Super Circus. I made the connection between Kelly’s sad pratfalls and the physical comedy of Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. Later, when reading Lahr’s biography, I saw how so many of the moves, and the “gnong, gnong!” he shouted when afraid, came from an old vaudeville act Lahr did, in which he pretended he was a German immigrant fresh off the boat.

Another clown who thrilled me was Harpo Marx. His brother’s had a nasty edge. Harpo could be mischievous, but his antics came from a childish desire to delight.

When my family moved from Hackensack to Willingboro, New Jersey, the Clyde Beaty & Cole Brothers Circus filled an open field that, for reasons that remain mysterious to this day, Abraham Levitt did not fill with prefabricated, assembly-line constructed houses. I saw some shows there, though they seemed long and not as exciting as Ringling Bros. Greatest Show.

The Beaty and Cole Bros. Circus had its home base in New Jersey, on a patch of land off Route 130 near a stretch of farm stores.  As a child, I’d wait for the moment when we’d drive past, hoping to glimpse something amazing among the trucks and empty cages parked beside the road.

Later, when I had to cross this field to visit the house of the girl who became my wife, I recalled that, on this dusty, forlorn spot, elephants and acrobats worked magic on hot summer nights.

In college I presumptuously signed up for a course in “Illegitimate Theater” that featured a one week Arena Performance Workshop taught by Bill Irwin, an Oberlin undergrad who went on to the Ringling Bros.’ Clown College in Sarasota, Florida. I learned how important rhythm and timing were to getting a laugh, and I never forgot the advice of Lou Jacobs, one of Ringling’s most famous clowns, as transmitted by Irwin: “When you fall, make a lot of noise, boys.” I made an instant cultural connection with the Jewish kvetch–the verbal complaint that, when done just right, turns solitary suffering into family and community sympathy, or, better yet, laughter that can shake a theater and conquer unreasonable tragedy with joy.

I also learned that clowns had to master acrobatics so that they would survive injury from so many pratfalls. These same acrobatics–shoulder rolls and breakfalls–were part of ukeme, the “art of falling” that is so essential in the Japanese martial aikido.

Later, as I scrambled for journalism to write to pay the bills, I was given the typical cub reporter Ringling Brothers assignment. I decided to write about the guys that clean up after the elephants. The story was a hit, and it came with a reward–a free ticket. By now the circus was in a Philadelphia hockey arena, but, having read the biography of P.T. Barnum, I appreciated how the three ring circus, which began as a way of increasing the performance area to pack more people into a tent, was one of the first pop cultural sensory overloads.

The book review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer heard of my enthusiasm for the circus and gave me books to review about the circus’s history and famous performers. I visited a sacred spot in the city at 12th and Market Streets, where Rickett’s Circus–the first in the American colonies–had its roofless arena. Though the city’s Quakers despised it, President George Washington attended a performance in 1793! I

When my son was born, the circus wasn’t for me, or for him, what I expected. We went back to that big hockey arena, but, because I wasn’t making much money (or writing an article about it), the only tickets I could afford were far enough away so that even the extravagant gestures of the clowns seemed small and, sadly, aimed at the people who could afford the front row seats. Ringling Bros. had so many flashy costumes, numerous animal and acrobatic acts, and many, many overpriced snacks and souvenirs that I felt as if I were at DisneyWorld, where so much, and so many experiences boil down to an effort to remove money from your pocket. Yes, the entertainment industry must make money to survive (I remember watching Penn & Teller pass the hat in Philadelphia’s South Street), but the experiences should be sufficiently surprising and uplifting so you don’t feel like one of those suckers that (as P.T. Barnum did NOT say) were born every minute.

When I saw my one and only Cirque du Soleil show (at DisneyWorld, of all places!) my faith in live performance was restored. Everything about the show was wonderful, and if the tickets were the highest I had spent up to that time, I felt the experience was more than worth my while.

As a journalist covering Atlantic City, I reviewed several shows the casinos brought in that were supposed to capture and communicate the delight of circuses. I even saw a Cirque du Soleil knock-off called Cirque Dreams that, like most knock-offs, is an “almost” that makes you wonder what the “real thing” might be like.

I’ll never forget Penn Jillette’s famous monologue about the fire eater, which so marvelously shows the cost and mania of acrobatic performance. The fire eater works in semi-darkness. You only see his face when the fire is lit. He is doing a stunt that he has practiced obsessively for years. When other people were letting life blow them about as a leaf, when they were going out on Saturday nights with friends, the fire eater was practing and practicing until he got the act down. Every times he performs, he is exposing himself to genuine danger: you get burned frequently. You must concentrate. And you must forget about the fact that chemicals that make the fire that you swallow leave a residue on your skin and in your throat. This residue will slowly poison and maybe kill you one day. But, while you’re performing, while you’re literally playing with fire, you have the attention of everyone around you. You are the center of the universe until…you blow the fire out.

The circus, I came to understand, is like that. You have people who dedicate their lives to a series of stunts that are done live, without much to save them if, and when, things go wrong. I learned that many clowns were once acrobats who fell or injured themselves so badly they could no longer do what they loved, and so they changed their act, just to stay in the extended family of the circus. I know that there is a town in Florida where circus performers retire. I know that that PETA and others did not see the style and mastery of a lion tamer’s art, or the majesty of a parade of elephants: they saw animals abused and coerced into doing undignified things.

Were the animals abused? I asked tamers and trainers. They insisted they weren’t, but they admitted of knowing some animal performers who were.

In the articles that follow Ken Feld’s announcement that end of Ringling’s run, many reasons are offered for the circus’s demise, including the problems with PETA and other animal rights groups. Attendance went down when the elephants were taken out of the show.

The cost of moving the show throughout the country also went up. And, for some kids, watching the most incredible feats of skill, and comic pratfalls, is not as much fun as what you get from your tablet or cell phone screen. As a child, my son enjoyed watching monster trucks spit flames and squash cars more (Feld also has a touring monster truck show). So far, none of the articles about the end of the Ringling Bros. mention the fact that Cirque du Soleil is now, for want of a greater superlative, the best circus on earth.

And what of those people who, for whatever reason, obsessively practice fire eating, street mime, acrobatics and other physical performance arts for that one moment when they can be at the center of the universe? Where will they go?

As one who has marveled at them and, in ways big and small, aspired to be like them, I want to thank them, for showing me that life may not be wonderful most of the time, but when it is, all questions are answered.

In 1588, Galileo Galilee, at the brash age of 24, delivered a snarky lecture at the Florentine Academy using mathematics and rudimentary physics to determine that Dante’s Inferno–described in the poem as having a circumference of twenty-two miles, was just about the size of the Academy’s host city, and that the baddest of the bad, Satan, could not possibly be all that he appears.

His lectures, which you can read in translation at

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/mpeterso/galileo/inferno.html

Mark Peterson, a the Mount Holyoke physics professor who translated the lectures, writes in his book, Galileo’s Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts, that speaker’s aim was not merely to entertain his audience concerning the work the city’s famed poet wrote two centuries previously. Nor was it an attempt (that would anticipate his challenge of Papal doctrine regarding astronomy) to use science to discredit Catholic orthodoxy, because Dante’s fictional Hell has never been adopted as accurate by any religious authority, not the least because its author put three popes (including Clementine V, who was later made a saint) in the pit.

Rather, it but to show how the arts inspire us to pay closer attention to the physical world. Peterson shows how Galileo was drawn to mathematics from his appreciation of music. He goes on to suggest that the application of physics to structural mechanics implied rather strongly that Satan, as Dante perceives him, could not exist as a giant, winged figure frozen in Hell’s icy center. Peterson feels that this lecture may have marked the first recorded use of theoretical physics in the history of science.

Though Galileo infamously was forced to recant his astronomical pronouncements and compelled to end his life under house arrest, I can’t imagine any parents who wouldn’t want their brilliant sons or daughters to attain similar scientific fame. I’d argue that more would rather have a Galileo, or a Newton, or an Einstein or a Marie Curie in the family than a Dante Aligieri, who turned to poetry after his diplomatic career ended in ignominious banishment.

If you haven’t noticed, arts education of just about every kind is under attack as an impractical waste of time. Across the country, high school arts classes are being cut back. In colleges, the “liberal arts” used to be about a body of knowledge that was supposed to help you understand the kind of truth that would set you free (the Latin “liber” in liberal means free). Some of this knowledge was in literature, the visual and performance arts, music, philosophy and history. Others were in the sciences themselves, though most liberal arts majors tended to fuzz out when they hit higher mathematics.

What happened? It’s not just that there are too many actors, artists, musicians and writers (!) in the world, but that some aren’t getting the greatest jobs upon graduation and are defaulting on their student loans.

Where did all these liberal artists come from? For the generation of Baby Boomers (of which I am a member), it was a belief in the democratic necessity of individual expression. Science and technology were important–I’ll never forget watching Neil Armstrong put his foot down on the Lunar surface–but also fearful. Computers were big, blinky things that wanted to take over the world. So many of us grew up in the Cold War, when we had to crouch against the walls of our public schools in preparation for a nuclear warhead strike.

The arts were thought to be inherently human and, even when they were angry and troubling, humane. Toward the end of the 20th century, urban school systems built arts high schools modeled on New York’s High School of the Performing Arts, on which the movie musical “Fame” was based. The hope was that specializing in the arts give young people an expressive edge and, possibly, save them from the pitfalls of urban life.

Technical academies were also built, but, as far as I know, none had movies made about how great they are. “Good Will Hunting,” set on the MIT campus in Cambridge, comes close, but, in imagining a Caucasian janitor who also happens to be a mathematical savant, it is really about the failure of society to identify and educate those who would have the most to contribute. Philadelphia’s Masterman High School, an elite public school that for the city’s best and brightest, DID have a movie shot in its halls by M. Night Shyalaman, a thoroughly ludicrous film called “The Happening” about trees that emit pollen that cause humans to kill themselves.

Sports programs remain strong. The budgets for high school and college sports continue to soar and students who win athletic scholarships are treated like young gods.

What’s hot in academia right now is STEM (not to be confused with stem cells): Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Major in these subjects in high school and college and, not only will every major corporation build an Information Superhighway to your door, but you’ll get a great salary so you can pay off your student loans on time, and maybe you’ll be that snarky Galileo (Steve Jobs?) your parents want you to be. In Northern Virginia, attending Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson for Science and Technology is seen as a Yellow Brick Road for kids who want to be the next Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg (why aren’t seeing biopics about FEMALE computer scientists?). In my county, a STEM school is under construction a few miles away.

In STEM schools, the liberal arts are not eliminated, but they are diminished, for the dubious “advanced placement” courses that are supposed to duplicate (and thus save the student from paying for) introductory undergraduate science courses. They are turning out people with good backgrounds in math and the sciences who want to take advantage of accelerated college degree programs. They probably aren’t reading much Hemingway and Emily Dickinson; seeing much Picasso, Rothko and DuChamp, writing bad poetry to those they love, trying to see the world like Georgia O’Keefe, learning how to sing and dance (at the same time!) or develop that special relationship with a musical instrument that can take you, and all who listen, into another world.

Why should they? A career in technology can take you places where, if you need any of that, you can buy it, or hire someone to do it for you.

The defenses I’ve heard of the liberal arts sound noble (part of a liberal arts education is supposed to teach you what nobility truly is–funny that so many who achieve real power either don’t know it, forget about or consciously repress the ideals that drove them to the top) but don’t quite hold up to the demand that young people get their moneys’ worth from an educational system that has always been too expensive, too exclusive, too elitist and too eager to make assurances that, at best, are based on an erudite understanding of the past. Do we still live in the world of Homer, Virgil, Malory, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Fitzgerald and Harper Lee? The liberally educated would say yes. The STEMs would not care: the future is coming and, if you can’t use what you’ve learned to make it happen, someone else will. To them, even Harry Potter’s is a distant era, and that the only resounding stories being told today are “rebooted” comic book superhero adventures that we really don’t have to know because, good always triumphs over evil, pride bends to humility, and the sequel, or the “next installment,” is only a few months away.

We can’t be certain that Prof. Peterson’s understanding of Galileo is definitive, but it is compelling. A notion in neo-Platonic philosophy was that, in order to learn, one must first develop a “love” for knowledge of that thing. For Galileo, that love seemed to be a love of the truth you find when you test what you know, and apply that experience, to what you don’t know.

Would he have become the Renaissance Man if he had turned his back on music and poetry? We can’t be sure.

But the world that has made STEM an acronym is filled with people whose scientific careers were born when they read the science fiction of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, or watched space ships fly in Star Trek and Star Wars. Some of them may have given lectures have already been given about how some of the stuff in popular science fiction just won’t happen.

But what about the stuff that just might?

My favorite Tarot card is The Fool, which shows a wanderer, sometimes dressed in motley. He carries a long stick on his shoulder. He gazes upward, a blissful smile on his face, as she strolls toward the edge of a cliff.

Is the Fool a pathetic character. like a clown who eats a banana, tosses away the peel and then struts about pompously, building up suspense to the moment when he slips and falls flat on his bum?

Or is The Fool a brave adventurer who is aware of the cliff and, presumably, other risks inherent in any journey, and isn’t letting them distract him from the pleasure of the quest?

I was told by Tarot aficionados that the position of the card as it is dealt influences the interpretation. Dealt face up, the Fool represents a person setting out on a major quest or undertaking without knowing all that may lie ahead. The Fool reversed is a klutz, schlemiel, idiot, clown.

When I think of how my numerous adventures have turned out, I see myself playing the Fool in both ways. I’ve made too many mistakes born from a passionate urge to do what others haven’t. I’ve rushed in. In the words of Paul Anka, sung by Frank Sinatra, I’ve taken the blows, I “ate it up, and spit it out” and not because I wanted to do it my way. I simply wanted things to be good, enjoyable, beneficial, wonderful.

Now I have a different interpretation of the image, based on adventures that are much smaller and far less consequential. When I go for a walk, with or without the dog, I may occasionally wear the Fool’s blissful grin, not because I’m ignoring, or denying the turmoil and travail that lurks just outside my neighborhood. I read the newspapers every morning. I look at news–real news, as far as I can tell–on the Internet. I see many things far beyond the life’s pratfalls on which I could brood and fester.

The grin arrives just because I recall that every time I walk, be it in the familiar neighborhood, some distant place to which I’ve traveled, I have a moment when I understand that I’ve been given a gift. Sometimes that gift is in the colors of the sky (made much more dramatic by my polarized sunglasses), the shape of clouds, the hovering lights of jets waiting to land in the nearby airport. Or I’ll hear I the sound of water gurgling in a stream, the sigh of wind moving through the trees.

And then the dog turns to me, after making her unique contribution to the environment, and her eyes say proudly, What do you think of that?
My answer: you get little gifts when you go for a walk. You can’t demand them. You can anticipate them. And you can’t feel bad if you’re too preoccupied with cares and worries–the gifts are there for you alone, and if you ignore them, there will be others.

You’d be foolish to think otherwise.

“When I’m good I’m pretty good. When I’m bad, I’m better.” — Mae West

I invented a writers group call The Writers Circle because I had read about the great salons of Paris and imagined that a small, focused, creative community based on compassion would make it easier for me to write.

Some of the members have found the Circle helpful. They’ve won awards and published books.

But it hasn’t made it any easier for me, because, fortunately or not, I care deeply about writing. I like to think that, when the author cares about the characters in a story, that affection mysteriously leaches though the prose so that readers care, too. This caring leads to that vital, pleasurable panic called suspense, when we, as readers, are more concerned with fictional beings than our own lives.

Like all cherished beliefs, caring about your characters doesn’t always work. It fails in biography, especially when the biographer manipulates facts to defend, redeem, condemn  and otherwise revise his subject’s reputation, or when the biographer has a distinct philosophy about the subject and imposes it relentlessly, regardless of what the subject’s life suggests. A person’s life is not the same as a person’s history. A life can have moments of utter monotony, shameful indulgence, innocent ineptitude and the kind of silliness that doesn’t draw a smile. A written history must make sense of all this, so that the author disappears and the reader better understands herself by experiencing the text.

It can also fail in fiction. As a reviewer for Kirkus, I endured a many creaky novels whose authors were so intensely involved in their characters that the story collapsed into embarrassing wish fulfillment. This can be most obvious in scenes of revenge, consumption and sexual fulfillment. I can’t tell you how often I threw the book down (but picked it up again–reviewers MUST finish the text), irked by what the author clearly believed was his character’s perfectly justified take-down of a thinly fictionalized former boss, a great day of shopping on Rodeo Drive, or a mattress-denting tumble in bed.

Herein lies the peculiar autobiographical paradox: what can be most appealing to an individual can be a big turn-off to an audience. Though some writers may try focus groups and market research, none of us can be sure how our work will “go over” with agents, editors, critics and the vast “reading public” until the work is in the marketplace and beyond our power to improve.

Thus the biggest question in the Writers Circle–no manner how many times I try to discourage it–is “is this any good”? The most common answer is the equivalent of a “yes, but…” followed by a several recommendations (some of them coming from me!) on how the work may be improved.

Though no one in the Circle is obligated to follow any recommendations, or give them any credence, is difficulty to resist them. Why? Because we want our work to be better than good. We want it to be GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREAT!

Why? For me, it’s the hope that, with enough polishing, I’ll come up with writing that everyone will like, or, at least, “get.” More than that, the work will NEVER suffer rejection, that it will ignite enthusiasm as it burns through every obstacle on its way to a grateful reader.

The Buddhists say that it isn’t really perfection that I want, but the urge to avoid the psychological suffering that comes from rejection, the fear of failure, going broke when things don’t sell, censure from my peers and I’m-a-bad-writer-because… vibe. I am “attached” to being good. I may have got this from my childhood, or maybe it got stuck in my DNA from so many centuries of equating the satisfaction of others to survival.

The need-to-be-good makes me strive for the better. While this is a tenet of civilized global society, and a generally decent thing to do, it can burn up the energy necessary to accomplish anything. It can inspire me to look for flaws in a work instead of strengths. It can, like so many things I write about in this blog, stop us in our tracks.

The alternative is to lighten up, or down–to either not worry about being good, or try to be a little bit bad.

And see what happens….

I discovered the writing of Jorge Luis Borges when unpacking a box filled with books. I had been an employee of the Plaza Book Shoppe (the owners loved the Olde English spelling) for only a few months. It was my first job ever, in a our town’s only bookstore.

As one of a handful of clerks, I had to unpack books and figure out where to put them. Where would be put “The Aleph & Other Stories,” Borges’ collection of odd, surrealistic, intellectually paradoxical tales that would eventually be categorized as “magical realism”?

I didn’t know, and I couldn’t take the book home and read it. Nor did I have an Internet available where I could get the gist of just about anything, including an author’s reputation, in seconds. No one else at the bookstore had heard of Borges and the stuff on the cover was ambiguous, to say the most.

Another clerk exiled it in New Age/Occult for a while. Then I took another look at the cover and put it on the “author wall,” alphabetically, but, spine-out, which those who have worked in book stores know is death to a book, because most people really do judge books by their covers, and this one was a “puzzlement.”

Finally it came time to return books that hadn’t sold. This was done by tearing off the front cover and mailing it back for a refund. The book itself was supposed to be destroyed. I took the book home and encountered some of the most wonderfully strange stories ever. As a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, the only other author I know who was so imaginative was R.A. Lafferty, an electrician who lived in the midwest. As joyously surreal as Lafferty could be, he still held on to the science fiction’s core structure, that the fantastic elements of the story had to sprout from a contemporary scientific, historical or, in the case of the “New Wave” writers of the 1960s and ’70s, mythic or folklore sensibility.

Borges, with his infinite library, his mysterious places that were neither real or imaginary because they had been excised from the texts that had told how they could be found, began with paradoxes and never tried to resolve them. He was an astonishing source of wonder and, to this day, I hold the Nobel Prize committee culpable for never rewarding him the world’s top literary honor.

Borges was an extraordinarily well-read, and brilliantly educated polyglot. He was part of a group of snarky Buenos Aires literary types celebrating their differences under the dark shadow of Argentinian Fascism. He wrote the short stories for which he is famous in only a few short years. He lived on their reputation, as well as comments made in numerous interviews, for the rest of his life.

I came across this quote from an interview:

“Why would anyone want to read this?”

I’ve spent too much of my creative life answering what I now call the stupidest question in publishing. The plaint above seems innocent, practical and reasonable, and it is, in many ways, a feature of journalism and commercial publishing genres.

But it can stop a writer from writing, kill off innovative ideas and–worst–make a creative individual feel that he does not have the right to bring something new into the world unless he can sell it–before it is fully realized–to talentless, reductive trolls and gatekeepers who spend most of their time saying “no.”

Before I defend what some will dismiss as a rant, I want to give the only acceptable answer: that everyone likes a good story. We need stories in order to learn, remember (which is never the same as learning), understand ourselves (which is rarely the same as learning), and make sense out of the sorrowful messiness of life. Stories aren’t things we tell others, or narratives we indulge to fill an empty moment. They are necessities that connect us, place us, justify and redeem us.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, think of a joke that made you laugh and, thus, rendered a despairing situation a little less serious. Imagine a myth, parable or fairy tale that imparted a kernel of wisdom that you need to take you through a difficult task.

When I spent a summer doing archaeology, I saw how a tumbled-down mound of mud, stones and garbage could yielded astonishing stories of how human beings lived three thousand years ago. A friend who understood botany took me for a short walk in the woods, showing how trees weren’t just accidents sprung from seeds, but that a forest has a history, a character, a way of living that isn’t so different from my own.

Where these stories hiding in the stones and trees? Of course not. They are in us. They emerge from us. And they are new, each and every time.

Some of the best stories aren’t “true,” in that they can’t be verified with scientific certainty (not that science is so certain–in the last century, some of the most concrete scientists have discovered uncertainties, indeterminacies, limits and boundaries where what was thought to be forever true begins to fade into mystery). Why is it that sacred text maintain their interest, even if some of us profess not to “believe” in what the texts claim?

Good stories do all of the above, and more.

They can also hide the truth, make things worse and, in our brazen era of fake-news, inspire some of us to revive superstitious fear, xenophobia and bigotry, and call such things rational, logical, sensible. Every tale we tell has the potential to change our world in ways we cannot predict. Should such responsibility stop us from telling stories? It can’t and it won’t.

But what does stop us is that stupid question, which I have heard from editors, literary agents, critics, teachers, and, worst of all, fellow writers who mean well and believe they’re helping. They assume that by asking this question, a writer shifts the focus from the writing, to that mythical, eminently reasonable, low-attention-span, questionably educated, possibly semi-literate entity, The Reader.

The Reader is a brainless fish that must be baited with with some bright, flashy, sensational blurt at the beginning, and then hooked so that he has to gobble everything put before him. The Reader wants to keep turning the pages until the very end. The Reader wants an ending that ties up all loose ends. The Reader wants…

What about the person who has to knit the words together, without any certain knowledge of how the piece will come out?

When an editor or publishing gatekeeper asks the stupid question, his goal may be to categorize your writing, determine if it is commercially viable within the ethos of the publication, and, if it is, how it may enhance the editor’s reputation with his superiors.

The question becomes toxic to a writer who has the flicker of an idea that isn’t fully formed. The tastes of the Readers Who Would Want to Consume This (because answering the question ultimately turns art into a consumer item) are difficult to determine: we can only look at what has worked in the past and given that this piece is uniquely new, its relation to the past is unknown. Unless the troll asking the question has some enthusiasm for the project (rare these days, when the only creative outlet open to agents, editors and publishers is putting a fresh spin on how the industry is changing for the worst), the writer is made to feel that the idea’s worth (and, by implication, the writer’s art) has more to do with how easily it can be sold to those in the editorial pipeline. This process is inherently risky: those to whom agents and editors report rely on their underlings to reject everything but sure winners.

Again, this sounds reasonable–businesses need to sell things at a profit. But the reasoning dies if you look at stories as creative necessities.

We can never know fully the value of what we do, and we cannot predict, much less determine why anyone would want to read the stories we create.

But we can be sure of what we like in stories, and we can be certain that we may not be alone in having the interests, compulsions, torments or itches that become ideas that turn into scenes and characters that inhabit the stories we tell.

It may seem that we have too many stories in the world, until you notice that we never run out.

During an interview, a well-known science fiction writer (who won’t be identified–nobody likes being called out as wrong, even in a singular blog post) told me that cancer was a new disease in human history that was probably due to yet another thoughtless environmental violation of technological life.

I argued against this. I mentioned the fossil record, which shows that many species suffered from runaway cell growth. I cited some well known historical personalities who died of it, adding that though we must always be careful of “backward diagnoses”–even symptoms observed by medical professionals are not always indicative.

He insisted that before the 20th century, cancer didn’t exist. I let it go. The writer’s father had died of cancer, and, like many children who find themselves abandoned by loss, he believed that, in a different world, filled with more caring people, death would not have visited in such a horrible way.

My wife has had skin cancer for several years. Every three months she goes to a dermatologist, who zaps it with a laser, thus keeping it in check.

Then a small growth appeared on her vocal chord. It was barely larger than the period that ends this sentence. A biopsy revealed that it was cancer and, after several surgeries, it, too was removed.

Now another scan has revealed something–we don’t know what–on a lymph node. It’s time for another scan, and, perhaps, a biopsy. If it isn’t cancer…

Another person close to me thought that her breast cancer surgery had eliminated the disease. Five years later, it came back, in her bones. She was given less than a year to live.

She is still with us, on a therapeutic regimen that brings her good days, and bad ones. Exactly why she has bad days is not important. She’s here, for her husband and her grandchildren.

One of the most misunderstood obligations of growing old is showing the younger generation “how it’s done.” That doesn’t mean spreading the blues around, talking incessantly about medical procedures, being fussy about food and reminding “the kids” that what goes around, comes around.

It is more about reacting to the most terrifying of life’s challenges with grace and poise. Though some cures have been found for a very limited number of cancers, most of what the medical profession offers is, at best, an astonishingly expensive, disfiguring respite.

I don’t know anyone with cancer who “earned it.” Neither my wife nor this woman smoked cigarettes or lived near sources of radioactivity.  Perhaps we will find a cause for cancer’s effect, but, from my knowledge of the subject, it appears that causes are not limited to diet or environmental exposure. We have in our cells a series of genes that monitor growth and trigger biochemical denizens that limit or destroy potentially dangerous mutations.

As we grow older, these monitors either stop monitoring, or, just break down.

And we’re stuck with result.

What can we do? Pray? The younger people tend to look at prayer as one of a number of dubiously effective reactions to uncertainty. They eye us from a distance, assuming that, somehow, what we suffer is our fault.

So it becomes the obligation of the aging–in whose ranks I include myself–to show them how to suffer. And that is, as best as we’re able, to behave with calm dignity, a sense of purpose, a liberal display of gratitude for pleasures big and small, a gentle kindness, patience toward crying babies (I’m really not good at that!) and a civility toward those who would mock us, or just roll their eyes. If possible, we shouldn’t let them see how scared we are, how much we wish for a sudden miracle–a cure, or, at least, a person in a white physician’s coat to tell us that we’re okay, especially when we know that, even if we duck this one, sooner or later, we won’t be able to duck.

When I consider how I’ve behaved with my various illnesses–allergies, depression, knee and wrist surgeries and, most recently, two heart attacks–I find I’m not that good at holding back my anger, despair, whining, and urge to say BAD WORDS. I become blisteringly sarcastic, and bitter. None of this, I groan to myself  (though typically loud enough for others to hear), should be happening.

And yet it does, frequently without explanation, excuse or remedy. It is as much a part of life as all those goals we hope to achieve, and the sudden, happy surprises that are supposed to lurk around the bend.

How do we face the most irrational thing there is, rationally? How can we look at cancer, the gift that keeps on taking, as anything other than a monster?

I don’t know. But some people have shown me a way. It may not be THE way, and they may have far more bad days than good. But it was their choice to behave this way, and they made the right one.

Now it’s my turn.

When I learned about medieval Japanese history, I imagined I would become one of those samurais who would solve all problems, meet all challenges and win all battles–not to mention write novels– with a single, decisive sword cut.

It never happened. When problems came, most of the time, I didn’t have a sword and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I had one. I was like that hopeless wanderer adrift in the aisles of Home Depot, searching for the part, the piece, the blister-pack tube of goo, the great-grand-and-glorious TOOL that would MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE! I’d find something, rush home, do this, do that, do it all over again because I screwed it up the first time, get dirty, ruin clothes and finally, at the very end, figure out what direction you turn your wrist to tighten the screws. The toilet would flush and I’d rejoice for a few seconds and then realize that the sink was still clogged.

Why not? Beneath the pylons of literary excellence is the scrubby, Grub-Street necessity of hack writing. Some of the beloved writers of my youth were hacks–they ground out novels quickly and, only when they became popular and wealthy did they slow down and agonize over plot details and turns of phrase. Even those who had literary pretensions would tell interviewers and, perhaps, biographers, of great works that wrote themselves. Yes, folks, the secret of great art is to “get out of the way” and let magnificence squeeze out of the cosmic toothpaste tube.

When I was on deadline with journalism, I could drink that extra cup of coffee and settle for a beginning, middle and an end. I’d almost never look at my work in print–it was too much of a disappointment to see what editors did (or failed to do).

With fiction, I’d start with a scene, or a character, and go back in time to find out how things happened that way, or who this imaginary person may be. Then I’d try to move forward and immediately hit a wall when I found out I didn’t know what should happen next. It wasn’t that I was completely ignorant of how things should end up. I just wanted a flickering of the light ahead and, when I didn’t get it, I fell into despair. I didn’t drink or make coffee because, for whatever loose prolixity those substances inspired, they made me feel worse afterward. I’d just turn on the computer and play so much computer solitaire that I even came up with a novel about a solitaire fanatic who….

Then I’d get an idea of the road ahead and whatever exhilaration followed with sputter as soon as I realized that what I wanted to happen was impossible, or, at best, so unlikely as to be unbelievable. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: people turn to fiction precisely because it isn’t real life. They want to meet people who might normally scare or intimidate them. They hope to experience vicariously situations that would otherwise send them running for Mama. And they want their heroes to fix the toilet and unclog the sink, or, if it’s a tragedy, they want to gain some cautionary insight into why things didn’t turn out.”Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” Albany proclaims at the end of King Lear.

As if it were that simple. “Uh, Officer, I just saw this play by Shakespeare and I feel that you were just sitting there waiting for me to drive by so you could pull me over and write this ticket and make your monthly quota.”

Creativity is about bringing new things into the world, so I’d go back and bless my character with peculiar experiences or latent abilities, or I’d litter the fictional landscape with the unusual items my hero would use to escape perdition and go after the bad guys. The scene would work and then I’d hit the next wall, and the process would begin again until all these bits and fragments, some of them reworked uncounted times and none of them exemplars of the perfection that only English professors find long after their beloved authors have died.

Like I’m plowing a field filled with rocks and weeds that would really rather not have me on their pied-a-terre.

Thinking back, I equated the sword cut with that elusive, illusory quality of the Enlightenment (I’m talking about a period in European history, not what happened in Benares to the Buddah when he sat with his back to a Bodhi tree), where coffee-guzzling cafe types believed that rational scientific inquiry–and not an inbred monarch, or an overweening institutional religion–would one day deliver certainty to you and me and Bobby McGee, about everything, little and big, here and there, and everywhere.

Didn’t happen as much as I would have liked. Oh, we have rational, scientific explanations that grope for defectiveness, but…they change. What we were certain of a century ago, or last week, is not what we’re sure about now.

So maybe the Japanese ideal (and, if one watches a Star Wars movie, justifiable use of the Force) may be prescriptive: something we hope will happen, or we feel should happen, precisely because we think the world would be better if it did (or certainly our own lives would be easier), but…it just doesn’t.

How many of us tried to “use the Force” when, after seeing the Empire Strikes Back and watching Luke Skywalker psychokinetically move his light saber from a snow drift, we dropped our car keys down a street grate and stood there, our hand outstretched, so honest and open and certain of the Force that was Great in Us…

And the keys just stood there until we unbent a metal clothes hanger, or purchased the Tool of Destiny at Home Depot, and awkwardly, hesitantly, frustratingly wiggled, waggled, hooked the keys, watched them fall off the hook once, twice, TOO MANY TIMES, until it came closer, closer and closer still and you finally grabbed your keys, asking yourself why you had to be so stupid to drop them and waste all this time pulling them out when somewhere, somebody is using the Force to unclog a drain.

As for me, pass the plumber’s helper.