Why Me?

There is not much that is asking to be said today, but there is something in me which only desires to write. I am not sure what this part of myself is but I take it for a good one. Oftentimes my writing comes into being as informal emails or Facebook posts, or recording my dreams, but if I am lucky I am sometimes driven to do some academic writing as well. One of the unfortunate handicaps I am facing in my writing lately is an apparent shortage of time. Working, training, and commuting leaves me with only about two or three hours of free time left at the end of the day. The first hour of that time is usually spent doing a short secondary workout while Yuka cooks dinner and then dining together. The hour before bed, it is my desire to sit down with a work of fiction or something else that massages my weary soul in order to free up imagination from the process of solidification that it undergoes throughout the day. It is in the last hour between arriving home and going to sleep that I have time to study, take notes, and write.

 

My mom often jokes that she does not know where I got my academic tendencies from and for many years none of us were quite sure how to answer that question, but now as I am possessed by the demon that is the written word yearning to be heard I will attempt to provide an introspective answer to that question.

 

I think there were three key events/figures that drove me to become an inquiring sort of man. I write “events/figures” to establish that the person and the particular memories are not two separate and distinct things, they exist together as one thing. One image the supra-ordinate system that is the totality of my person saw fit to constellate a bit of its character around.

 

The first and perhaps most powerful of these figures/events are two dim memories connected to my mother. I can remember being a little boy, and making a game of creeping into my parent’s bedroom to pester my mom while she was quietly reading a novel in her pajamas. She would always tell me to go play for a few minutes and that she would tend to me when she was finished. I would wander in the other room to find my dad watching TV, a noisy and stimulating experience for a young boy with eyes fresh to the world. An experience easy to understand and enjoy. The contrast between the noisy electric box in the living room and the perfectly silent serene atmosphere created during my mother’s nightly reading sessions evoked a sense of sacredness in the later for me. I always felt like I was intruding on something very important if I bothered my mom while she was reading (though I did it anyway). At that young age before my own words were fully formed, I couldn’t really grasp what it was that so captivated her attention. But the numinous memory of the sanctified feeling that came with witnessing my mom getting lost in a book still lives on in my mind today. In fact, I suppose I internalized my mother’s reading habit (which sadly she seems to have lost over the years) because I cannot go to sleep at night without a book in hand and I get quite irritable should that precious time be kept from me.

 

Another experience in my early years that contributed to my bookish nature is when in fifth grade, my homeroom teacher assigned us all the weekend homework of getting our parents to write a short essay about us. Initially when I brought that assignment home to my mother, she was very upset. She carried on about being told she had to do homework on top of her full-time job and also grew irritated about being evaluated by an elementary school teacher. Her being my mom, I just assumed that she was right and I immediately came to think that it was unfair for my teacher to insist my busy parents do school work. Like any young person, I believed that my parents would always do the right thing and in this case, I just assumed that the right thing was for my mom to refuse to write the essay. I didn’t think much more of it and the weekend carried on as usual until I awoke on Sunday morning I found my mom at the kitchen table with a pencil and several sheets of lined paper writing away. She was very carefully writing a thoughtful and humorous essay about her habitually late son. I couldn’t understand why she was doing the assignment for all its injustices but it seemed to be very important to her and I took pride in the fact that my mom could so easily tackle the monumental task of writing an essay.

 

Looking back on these early memories I think that those events gave me the sense that some sort of magic dwelt within the written word. For those who know my mom, I think they would all agree that she is not a quiet soul. She is always busy cleaning, cooking, or trading off color jokes with her friends on the telephone. There is rarely a moment that I have seen my mom not hustling about or engaged in some form of social banter. I suppose her inherent motion was simply a phenomenological fact for me in my early years. A mom who was not always busy somehow didn’t exist in my frame of reality. But in those moments when she was caught up in Words she was somehow different. She was more than my mom, she was different being caught in a different world. I saw that words had somehow dramatically changed my mom if only for brief moments of time. Those early events were like seeds planted in my gently unfolding personality.

 

Another factor which has contributed to my inquiring nature is perhaps one that my family would rather be left unsaid, but for a time before I really arrived on the scene my family was quite caught up playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. By the time I was old enough to walk and talk they’d long past cast their last spell, killed their final troll, and packed their books away. Somehow though, I stumbled upon my dad’s copy of Deities and Demigods a collection of chapters with images and statistics of deities from a variety of real world mythologies. It was there that I first saw the mighty Thor crashing his hammer down upon the skull of the Midgard Serpent.

 

Those images drove my young mind to new heights of imagination. I wanted nothing more that to know who each and everyone of these brilliant looking bearded heroes of old were. I would dig out my dad’s old gaming books and sit for an hour or more just letting my eyes roll over their covers as stories congregated to tell themselves in my pre-pubescent head. Though I could not understand them at the time, I was also intrigued by the endless tables, maps and figures found within the pages of those books.

 

When my dad took me hunting, I would show no interest in guns, tree stands, or tracking skills and instead constantly pestered him about how to play the mysterious game contained within those old yellowed books tucked away in the attic. He would give me bits and pieces of information but never really go into much detail. Probably just to get me to focus on the task at hand, in the end he would always tell me that if I wanted to know about it I would have to read the books myself.

 

Now I don’t believe that a person who has never played a role-playing game can understand how captivating it can be especially at a young age, so it may be hard for the casual reader to imagine the fervor with which I would spend my afternoons and evenings pouring through those books trying to get a handle on the mechanics of the game so that I would be able to tell my own stories. I don’t need to detail my long running relationship with RPGs here for it is enough to say that if I could get my hands on a set of dice and a few buddies right now I would probably drop everything to spend a few hours cracking jokes and telling stories around a table.

 

Though my father probably had no idea what he was getting himself into by suggesting I go read those core rules manuals all those years ago; he did—if accidentally—instill something important in me by doing so. He planted in me a seed that would later in life cause me to seek out answers to any questions that puzzled me in a very rigorous and disciplined way. Superficial, meme-based, collective knowledge has never been up my alley. I have always best enjoyed the knowledge that must be worked for. No matter how much I pestered my father as a boy to teach me rules of that damned game he never would. He forced me to answer them for myself.

 

The last seed of inquiry planted in me was likely put there during my early teens by my grandmother Joyce who, after attending church on Sundays, would often stop by our house and sit down to talk with me about my own spiritual investigations. The ways that she has impacted me over the years are numerous and complex so I cannot hope to detail them all at this moment, so suffice it to say she taught me to ask the questions that I thought were important and to never be ashamed for doing so.

 

During this period of my life I was very much in the first nigredo phase of my personal development. Everything I saw was tinted with blackness in some way or another. I was dark on the inside and outside, but my grandmother was—and has always been in my view—perfectly light. When my emotions were pinned down under the rigid morose exterior that I had built for myself, she would find a way to shine her light in my direction so subtly so as to remain undetectable (for if I had noticed it I likely would have rejected it). She would sit with me on Sunday mornings and conduct her own sort of church services over coffee with me and my mom. Her sermons were never spoken out any book every written, they were sung through her perfectly authentic self.

It is difficult for adults to hear the brazen, pig-headed, ranting narcissistic teen-age fantasies of power and knowledge espoused by young people coming into adult hood as such, engagements between teens and adults often just resort in redundant misunderstandings: the adult writes off the youth as going through a phase, and the youth walks away thinking that the adult is a know nothing. Its funny really because it is an archetypal drama that all families must face at one point or another. The thing about my grandmother during this period of my life is that she would always actually hear me when I spoke. She never persecuted though she did question, and she even allowed me to think that I was teaching more often than once. Ever open, ever humble my mother’s mother showed me the sort of compassionate inquirer that I desired to be.

I close the latch upon this evening’s sketchbook hoping that in some small way I have been able to answer that rhetorically postured question that I have heard my mother utter so many times in my life.