Life is fractal happiness among the eddies of experience

<![CDATA[Julie Leung: “We are left with pieces of people, moments of memories that can return with the sight of a sweater or the sound of a song. Life is a collection of these bits, broken and strange-shaped, remnants of intersections, colorful and vivid, love and loss. Life is like a kaleidoscope: each day, every moment, brings another spin, another way to interpret what has happened, to see a pattern or purpose, an explanation in the pile of pieces. Birth and death, beginnings and endings, new and old are juxtaposed against each other in wonderful ways, even as we breathe.”
The other half of my response to Lenn’s posting about his sister’s death, to which Julie is responding in part, had to do with a recovery of friendship I’ve been fortunate enough to have recently. So, let me take a moment to talk about the immersive and emergent growth that makes the new colors appear in the kaleidoscope of life and memory.
Throughout my writing life, I’ve been largely on the outside of the mainstream, whatever that mainstream may be. I quit graduate school when a woman wearing a black spandex jumpsuit (who made a point of telling everyone in the room she was both gay and had bleached every hair on her body blonde as part of her critique of my story about losing my faith in God when I heard the pastor of our church had cancer and particularly how he found out he had cancer by looking in the toilet) that my story didn’t resonate for her; who needs that kind of distraction when you’re working on a craft? I was told I didn’t need to go to J-School and to just go get a job (my work was used as an example of the “right way to start a beat” for the next 10 years by the prof who told me that), so I don’t have any credentials but I’m good at that part of my work and tire of people who wave their credentials over their crappy work to bless it with the imprimatur “journalism.” I was in a writer’s group where every member has published a book, but we argued all the time, because every story and ever teller are different, unless you specialize in repeating Homeric odes, I suppose.
Yet I constantly find that when I reconnect with people there are moments of connection that defined us both, even in conflict, and almost always for the best. This happened again last week when a dear friend with whom I sat and worked on writing craft, but whose email address I lost with a hard drive six or seven years ago, contacted me and told me that he too was a writer and that I had something to do with it. As I have often come under attack for what I wrote, whether it was that the Y2K problem was going to be resolved successfully (for which I was excoriated by wingnuts and Y2K profiteers) or my recent writing about neocons (for which I have been excoriated by wingnuts and propagandists) or my contrary view of just about everything else, these moments when I learn that I had a positive impact on someone’s life in a way that really lasted, are manna from the sky, the essence of satisfaction in a few words.
My dear friend Bill, who found me last week, is a writer and television producer, exactly what he dreamed of and I remember those dreams and share the experience of his success as though it were my own, because it takes those memories and projects them into the now with a clear and profound pattern in the tumult of life.
Outside of writing, which is what I do here and elsewhere in a way that leaves me feeling raw and exhausted because of how much I put into it—what I was talking about with regards Thompson the other day—the look in my son’s eye when he learns something or when my daughter tells me she wants to be like me, when my wife tells me she loves me or a friend shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, these are the moments when the patterns of life begin to appear out of the fragments of memory and friendships and loves past and passing. Being in the stream, feeling the current carry me and using the current to project myself into places and lives, that’s the real thrill of existence, because it is the combination of accident and intent that propels us toward meaningful encounters and how we conduct ourselves is what we feel pride or regret about. Readers often demand perfection in a written artifact, but they get something flawed and human, which is what makes it true and artful or just plain mistaken, which is the beginning of another argument and another dispersal of patterns, and I’m struck by how profoundly lucky I am to be part of it all.]]>