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Aug
09
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A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”
My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”
“Huh?”
“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”
I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.
You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”
You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”
You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But you would be no less honest to say, “I just might win.”
The statements you make about yourself might seem to you to be statements of fact at the time you are making them. But whatever truth there might be in those expressions right now, you are also writing the script for your future. Saying “I’ll probably lose” is functionally equivalent to saying “I’ll never win.” If you don’t mean to say that you can never, ever get anything right, then stop telling these brutal lies about yourself.
If you invert those expressions instead — concentrating on everything you get right, not everything you get wrong — by that one simple change of habit you will rewrite the script of your future. There’s no telling how high you can rise, once you stop putting yourself down, but, at a minimum, you will write yourself a much happier ending.
Here’s what I say: I’m working very hard to change the world for the better — for myself, for my family and friends, and for everyone. Here is how you can help: Stop telling those awful lies about your life, and start telling beautiful truths instead.
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
23
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Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.
One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.
For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.
Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.
Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!
This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.
Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.
Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.
The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.
Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:
If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.
If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to admire collectivism. If you thrive by continuous innovation, stop enshrining tradition. If you govern your behavior by reason and conciliation, stop praising vengeance and retribution. If you want to live free from coercion by other people, stop pushing other people around by force.
You know your way of life is better. Dare to share that secret with the victims of Abel. You are wrong to let Abel’s High Priests make you feel guilty about your wealth, but you are also wrong to hoard this civilization — this incomparable gift from Cain — to yourself. Innocents the world over are starving — in terror, in squalor — because you don’t have the courage to say that Abel was evil and Cain was good.
Make that one small change in your life, and the rest will come of its own…
December 6, 2006
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
22
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That’s a lot to take in, so indulge me as we summarize what we’ve talked about so far:
- You are a sovereign soul. Your purposive behavior is exclusively controlled by your self.
- You cannot be governed. Other people cannot control your behavior, nor you theirs.
- To the extent that other people — your religion, the government, your family or friends — might seem to control you, this is a consequence of your own freely-tendered consent, your own explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation.
- Because other people’s seeming control over you originates in your own sovereignty, you can recover your freedom at any time you want, simply by withdrawing your consent.
- If you have surrendered any of your sovereignty in the past, your life will be better — for you — once you have regained full control over yourself.
If you have made the mental effort to recover your sovereignty in full, your life will already be better. This is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, wouldn’t you say?
In other essays, I take up the mental, physical and moral benefits of a full commitment to self-adoration, but this is simple enough to see in summary: If you devote your life to doing everything you can think of to make your life better, more perfect — more perfectly, more abundantly rich in every kind splendor — your life will be immeasurably improved.
Now reflect that we’re talking about what might happen if the shit really does hit the fan. If the government of the United States does not collapse under its own vast weight, so much the better. But even if it does, your own unique life will still be better than it might have been had you not made this change, won’t it?
There is no downside to self-love. You’ve been poisoned on the idea, for your whole life, by people who know they cannot rule free minds. But just by daring to let your mind run free, by daring to be the uniquely beautiful specimen of humanity you have been all along, your life will be everything you’ve always known it could be.
Yes, the world outside your mind can be better or worse — perhaps truly awful. But once you have broken all those chains that bind you, your own life can be everything you can make of it, and you will be better-equipped to deal with any challenges you might face from thugs, priests, politicians, pushy relatives and snoopy neighbors. I am not minimizing how bad things might get, but once you resolve to maximize your own in-born and cultivated capabilities, your own life will come to be progressively better, even if your external circumstance get progressively worse.
There’s more. If you learn to live the way I am talking about, you will be impossible to push around. Thugs of all flavors live and die by your fear of what they might do to you. If you learn to love your self more than anything else on earth, you will be indomitable — as a matter of practical reality, not as some comic book fantasy.
Do you see why? When the thug says, “Do it or die!” he doesn’t want you dead. He wants you to do his bidding. If you respond, “Go ahead and kill me, asshole!” you’ve taken away his — imaginary — power over you. He might kill you, anyway, but he will not have achieved his objective. And you will not have soiled your self by groveling before a brute.
That might seem like a poor strategy, when the game is being played one-on-one. But suppose everyone around you shares our ideas about the supreme value of self-adoration? Now you have an entire community of people who would rather die than be slaves, and, in consequence none of them can be enslaved — and all of them are constantly on watch for opportunities to kill the thug. This is how free people stay free — by understanding that human sovereignty should never be traded for any other value.
[To be continued in Part 3.0.4.]
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
21
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You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. If you’ve read this far, you must know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.
This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.
But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of splendor, within our own minds and in the world around us, is an artifact not just of selfishness but of the most profound and most profoundly-beautiful self-love. If there is any normal state for human beings — normal as a matter of ontology, not statistics — this is it: To be so much in love with the things you make with the time of your life and the effort of your mind and your body that you cannot bear for those things to be less than perfect.
Think of that: Whether you’re looking at a skyscraper or listening to a symphony or simply teaching a child to read, the source of the splendor you experience is self-adoration and nothing else — not just your own delight at being alive, or the child’s, but also the architect’s, the composer’s, the author’s and all of the people who worked on those creations. And then consider that it is self-love — the self-love that leads you to seek the best values you can obtain for yourself and for your family — that every dogma you have ever heard of, religious or political, denounces to the depths of every imaginary hell.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s all too real. The people in this world who would dominate and enslave you have only one way of achieving that objective: By conning you into cheating yourself not just of your self and of your sovereignty, but of everything you might have known of splendor in your life. It might seem poetic to say that they rob you of everything and leave you with nothing, but this is false. In fact, they rob you of everything you might have been in your life, and every splendor you might have known, and then deliver to you a life of infinite squalor instead.
How rich might you be, if you had devoted your life to making everything you could of your time, instead of feeling guilty about every self-loving thought you have ever had?
How deep might your love for your spouse be — how enthralling might your love-life together be — if you had concentrated on making your marriage perfect, instead of worrying that seeking your own happiness might be a betrayal of your beliefs?
How much more completely could you be a parent to your children and a worthy companion to your friends, if you had been willing, for all the years of your life, to put your own values first in your life, not the goals dictated to you by your doctrine?
How much more might you have achieved, had you been willing, for all your life, to live up to your self, to be that hero of your own life that you imagined in such loving detail when first you abstracted the idea your self?
I’m not trying to take anything from you. But I am trying to point out how much has already been taken from you by other people’s attempts to dominate you — and by your own attempts to dominate them.
I like to talk about the cost of government this way: If we say that the first great betrayal of American freedom came about with the 1789 Constitution, then we can make an effort to calculate the cost-to-date of this hellhound we have unleashed on ourselves.
So we start with the idea that every action of government occasions some loss of wealth. Taxes, obviously, take wealth from the productive, deploying it toward unproductive ends. Regulation increases costs without increasing the economic value of the regulated good. Tariffs, duties and fees all raise prices. Labor laws increase costs and decrease productivity. Deficit spending impairs the credit markets. In short, there is nothing that government does that does not result in a drag on the economy.
Now consider that each one of those costs carries with it a corresponding opportunity cost in the marketplace: If my money has been stolen by taxation, I cannot invest it in pursuit of profit. So the drag occasioned by government is actually doubled: Introducing force into the market not only destroys wealth at first-hand, it also destroys the opportunity the producer of that that wealth had to put it to further use, and thus to produce even more wealth.
It gets worse. Each one of those opportunity costs has an interest value, going forward. And since we can expect successive profits to be reinvested, the fact is that each one of those opportunity costs has a compound interest value.
So here is an interesting question: What is the compound interest value of all of the government we have afflicted ourselves with in the United States since 1789? What might we have achieved with that wealth, had we not wasted it on the vain pretense that people’s behavior can be governed from the outside?
Now let’s take that all one giant step further: If we acknowledge that every human being who has ever lived has inhibited his or her self to greater and lesser degrees in response to attempts by other people to govern our behavior — how much have we lost?
What is the compound interest value of all of that lost human potential? How much incredible wealth are we still throwing away, every day? How much richer could we all be, if some of us were to decide to stop pretending that other people can be governed from the outside?
How much better could your own life be, if you stopped worrying about what other people have the power to do to you, and what you have the power to do to them, and instead devoted your whole mind to making your own life better in every way you can think of?
[To be continued in Part 3.0.3.]
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
20
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Let’s start with this idea: You are a sovereign soul. I have a lot more to say about the nature of the self, within this series of posts and throughout my writing, but, in a political context, this is the most important fact of your life: You cannot be governed.
All of human history, ultimately, is an attempt to contravene and negate and obviate this simple fact, and it is for this reason that every human civilization — so far — must be rated a failure. Some have been better than others, of course, and I sing the praises of the Greeks not just for what they did in the Hellas of old, but for what they are still doing all over the world. The Greek idea — each man has the right and power to own and control his own life and property — undergirds the best approaches we have seen — so far — to truly human civilizations.
And the United States — for a while — was the best-ever expression of that Greek ideal, the freest civilization ever yet seen on the earth. But like the polities of the Greeks before us, American society carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the horrors visited upon you every day in the news are those seeds bearing their full fruit at last.
Here is the problem, for the government of the United States and for any would-be governor of human behavior: There is nothing I can do to cause or prevent your purposive actions. I can threaten you or beat you or tax you or imprison you or kill you, but I cannot cause you to do anything I want you to do, nor can I prevent you from doing anything I want for you not to do. You are a moral free agent as a manifestation of your nature as a human being, and there is nothing I can do to contravene or negate or obviate your sovereign freedom.
But wait. Isn’t it true, as Rousseau had it, that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”? Indeed it is. So how do we resolve the conundrum? Humans cannot be enslaved, and yet everywhere we look, humans are slaves — most of them bound by terms much worse than those we suffer under.
Emerson gives us the answer: “We forge the chains that bind us.” Human beings cannot be enslaved against their will. In the case of bondage slavery, your choice might come down to work or die, but you still have a choice. In modern America, your self-initiated betrayal of your own inviolable sovereignty is much easier to take: Just pay your taxes and affect to obey thousands upon thousands of idiotic laws, and you won’t be sent to prison. Doesn’t seem like much of a price to pay, does it?
I can’t speak for you, but that price is much too high for me. And the course of recent events argues that more and more people are waking up to the idea that they don’t want government, at least, controlling so much of their lives.
But the war on your sovereignty did not start with government. Dig into any religion and you’ll find a profound hatred for your life, for your self and for its autonomy. As with governments, some religions are worse, in this respect, than others, but what every religion seeks is your voluntary submission of your own inviolable sovereignty — your free will — to the object of worship. You are called upon to deny your own mind and to accept apocrypha, divination and received doctrine as substitutes for reason. And you are called upon to denounce and renounce your life as you actually live it in praise and reverence for attested virtues that would result in your immediate demise, should you try to live as you are commanded by your faith to live. This is the political power religions have held over innocent people forever: If you accept the doctrine, you must condemn your own life. To stay alive, you must commit sins by your own standards, and yet the only life you yourself regard as being worthy of your love, honor, devotion, adoration — the only life you can worship unashamedly — is the one that allegedly commences after you are dead.
Governments have always envied the near-perfect power religions have over faithful people, but they came up with their own secret sauce in the form of altruism. People use that word to mean behaving kindly or charitably, but, at the same time, everyone understands its true meaning: Selflessness. In this respect, altruism is the exact opposite of egoism. Considered as ontology, selflessness is impossible, of course. To be alive as a human being is to be a self, this before anything else. It is not possible to remain alive while behaving — even as a matter of pretense — as if you have no self. And that’s the source of altruism’s power: You cannot live a life of virtue, by the moral standard you have set for yourself, and so you come to be self-imprisoned by your own failure to live up to your ideals.
In either of these cases — and in thousands of other variations on this theme — it is your own mind you must renounce, denounce and enslave, this as the price of your own on-going survival. An ordinary thug threatens only your body and your property. You might comply, for now, but there is always the chance that you will rebel. But the high priests of religion and of the welfare state have nothing to fear from the truly faithful. Once you’ve adopted a doctrine that insists that you yourself are fundamentally evil — this for committing the crime of remaining alive, even though, by your own moral convictions, you can only be truly good by engaging in behavior that would result in your death — once the price of your on-going life is your own damnation of that life — then you are well and truly enslaved, and by your own hand.
Here’s the good news about every cult of self-annihilation: There’s always an escape hatch. Only the very pious feel themselves obliged to ruin their lives in pursuit of a self-induced religious ecstasy. Normal people can toss some cash into the offering plate and express a ritualized regret for their latest sins. And only the very guilt-ridden actually give up the lives they might have had in pursuit of a life in the service of others. Normal people manage to get along by writing checks and expressing politically-correct sentiments at politically-correct moments.
But here’s the bad news about every cult of self-annihilation: The more you fail to live up to the doctrine you profess to believe in, the more do the purveyors of that doctrine have power over you. You forged the chains that bind you, and however loosely you think you might bear those chains, you are still enslaved.
But here’s the best news of all about every victim of every cult of self-annihilation: The chains you bear are yours to break, whenever you want to. Not easily, I will avow, and I am not entreating you to abandon any belief you cherish. But if you want to be free, all you have to do is say “No” and your chains will be broken. Other people have power over you only to the extent that you yourself have conceded that power to them. Withdraw your consent and other people will be forevermore powerless over you.
A thug can push your body in the same way he can push a barrel or a mannequin. If he is strong enough, or if he has confederates, he can bind your limbs or gag or blindfold you. He can tie you to a tree or lock you in a cage. But without your consent, without your explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation, no thug, no priest, no politician can ever cause you to take any purposive action.
Anything a thug can do to you without your cooperation, he could do just as easily and just as productively with your corpse or with a mannequin. The only thing that thug actually wants — the only thing your church and your government actually want — is the one thing than none of them can ever have: To control your behavior.
Only you control your behavior, only your self controls your behavior, only within the silence and solitude of your mind, which no other person can ever enter or even experience at first hand, and which no other person can ever take control of by any sort of direct manipulation. You are a sovereign soul, completely ungovernable by anyone or anything but your self.
This is why the thugs and the priests and the politicians have to hustle you into surrendering your sovereignty to them — because that’s the only way they can have it, as a gift from you. A gift, very probably, that you didn’t even know you were extending to them, and which you might have an urge to snatch back.
[To be continued in Part 3.0.2.]
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
19
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So: Let’s drop the shit-hammer, shall we?
Greece is broke. So is England, and so is most of the rest of Europe.
California is broke, Illinois is broke, and, if you count unfunded pension liabilities, not only are all the rest of the states, counties and cities broke, so are all of the surlier labor unions.
Social Security is broke, as is the metamorphosing medical scam to be known, soon enough, as no-healthcare-for-you!
The United States government is broke, of course, limping along, for now, on funds borrowed against the promise of future confiscatory currency inflation, future crippling taxation — or both.
Socialism is a Ponzi scheme, and, before you know it, you run out of suckers to milk. Sooner or later, welfare-state socialism has to collapse. As I’ve argued, I don’t think that time is now. Despite our talent, as a species, for forecasting apocalyptic, pandemic doom, in reality the sky hardly ever falls more than once or twice a day.
Moreover, even though we are enmired in a deep recession — and even though our puerile president is making that recession much worse with every boneheaded error at his command — even so, it is very likely that we are out-producing welfare-state socialism in the long run. That might stick in your craw, but it remains that — even despite the drag on the economy caused by taxes, regulation, deficit spending and waste — the trajectory of the standard of living of every American — and virtually everyone on earth — is steadily upward.
But, but, but! Government is impoverishing us! I saw it on the big-screen HD-TV in the bedroom, and also on the even-bigger-screen HD-TV in the living room, and, just to be sure, I followed-up on the high-speed internet connection on my 27″ quad-core iMac! Don’t try to tell me the world’s not going to hell in a hand-basket! I’ve got the best hardware and software in the world to tell me how terrible my life is!
That much is funny to me, but, even so, these circumstances can’t last forever. At some point the parasites will overwhelm the host, and, when that happens, the shit-hammer will come crashing down on all of us — virtuous or vicious, wise or foolish, ready or not.
And no matter how virtuous we might be, no matter how wise, it seems probable to me that most of us will be unprepared for life in a world where government has collapsed. We’ve seen this happen in other places, generally very poor places, but few of us have ever lived through a state of chaos.
So what happens? Looting and shooting, at first, with the amount of that kind of behavior being a reflection of how well-armed and how well-prepared owners of stuff attractive to looters turn out to be. Ordinary people will pull into their shells with a pronounced vigor, making lists and inventories and peeking out windows to see if there are any looters around.
The inventory will not be inspiriting, very probably. You may be lucky enough to have two weeks’ worth of meals on hand — less if the electrical power has failed. Still worse, if the water supply has failed, you may have next to nothing to drink in your home. And no matter how confident you feel about your ability to defend your home from marauders, I’m betting you have fewer than two hundred rounds of ammunition to your name — or is it zero rounds, and zero firearms, as well?
So you have no food, no water and no firepower. The nicer name for your status is prisoner-of-war. The not-so-nice name? Corpse.
But here’s some good news: If you are healthy, and if there is food enough to keep you healthy, you might just get to live. There will be a need for people to clean up all of those corpses, after all.
Thousands of corpses, maybe millions. Welfare-state socialism rewards thoughtless people for being thoughtless — for being stupid and lazy and completely incompetent to provide for their own survival. As bare as your own larder might seem, the victims of the welfare-state will have it much worse. They will die in droves, by the thousands, as soon as Big Mother’s massive teats dry up.
It gets worse. No water, no sewage treatment, no reliable supply-line for food — and corpse after corpse in one house after the next. In a circumstance like that, you have to expect some nasty epidemics. Too bad there is no pharmaceutical resupply chain. Too bad your doctor is afraid to open his door — assuming he’s still alive.
If you get very lucky, the people who will have formed a gang big enough to make you their prisoner-of-war will be imbued with the Spirit of Seventy Six — the idea that all men are created equal and have the right to live in freedom. If you’re that lucky, your time living under martial law might be fairly brief, and life could return to something like normal within just a few years.
What if you’re not so lucky? Whether your overlords are socialists or theocrats or just thugs, your true name will either be slave or corpse. The freedom you grew up with — the freedom you have always taken for granted — will be gone. For years? For centuries? Forever? Gone from your life, at least, for all the future you can see — all the future you can bear to look at.
Now here’s an interesting question:
Doesn’t that seem like a fate worth avoiding?
Please keep in mind that I don’t think this is going to happen. It could, but I’m betting my money — and your life! — on happier fates.
But stipulate that it could happen — everything I’ve described and things still worse. Your children haven’t been stolen from you, conscripted into genocidal armies. Your daughters haven’t been raped and gutted. You haven’t had to choose between starving to death or eating the rotting flesh of one of those thousands of corpses you see everywhere. You haven’t been invited either to guard a deathcamp or to perish there instead. All of these things have happened — and recently — and there is no basis for arguing that they can’t happen here.
But if you want to avoid the collapse of civilization, what’s the one thing that could swing the balance?
[To be continued in Part 3.0.1.]
Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.Manifest your own destiny: You say you want a revolution? Yeah, well anyone can piss and moan about how bad everything is. If you want things to change, I’m making a stout effort to show you how to achieve revolutionary change — from the inside out. But your own efforts at self-improvement will bear sweeter fruit sooner if you share what you’re learning with other people who love to live. You’ve never heard anything like this before. Why would you hoard it to yourself?
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Jul
16
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You can’t remember being born but I watched, awestruck and amazed with your determination, yes, and your beauty of course, but also of the things you did naturally. Things like learning, absorbing, growing, striving to enter the world on your own terms- as a baby you did that. You did it in part because of your own individual stubborn need to assert yourself into the world but more because we are born with a healthy and completely natural need to assert our selves into the world. These are survival skills that we cannot deny and to try to deny them is wholly unhealthy.
There are things we need in this life: Food, clothing, shelter in the physical, but there are also things we need that are baked into the cake of our DNA. Things like being productive, that is, productive problem solving. We need to produce, create, find solutions. That is us as healthy human beings and we cannot ignore this fact. Healthy humans are driven to be productive for themselves, to create their own lives and solve their own problems. We love doing this because it is what drives us. Perhaps it drives many animals on some level or another, but we can create solutions to our own problems and share them with others. That’s uniquely human and we see it in infants and young children who not only absorb tremendous amounts of information every single moment, but even babies insist on sharing most of what they’ve learned with the rest of the world. Fed, feedback. Fed information, feedback information, problems solved and production and creation accomplished: Be fruitful and multiply. When we are healthy, this is the process we each use to become both more wholly human and social, and more uniquely individual and independent. It’s obvious and delightful in children and necessary to growth as adults.
You are still that awesomely strong individual bursting with grit and determination. You still have those complex skills of information processing and sharing. You are as capable of success as any successful person before you, but, you are the only person who can know the best way for you to fulfill your own need to produce, create, share, propel your own beautiful self forward, and to focus on this is a gift. Be fruitful and multiply. Knowing and honoring your self is a gift to the world, of course, but it’s the one thing you can do to remain happy and healthy and is paramount to celebrating being alive and human.
The synergy of your self demands you fulfill this very basic need before you can fulfill any other. To produce and process and learn and create you must meet your own needs. Self-denial or self-submission is unhealthy and completely unnatural as we know from watching even newborns, who refuse to participate in such unnatural behavior. Revel in your own unique life as you did when you were born. Create a world for yourself, and your self, where you can be most happy and comfortable in your own skin and you can continue to blossom regardless of what is going on around you. That’s where you will find the place at which you can share your self with the rest of the world- fed and feedback; information in and creative growth out, that’s what we do: Be fruitful and multiply.
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Jul
13
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 A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
The very first thing she said to me was, “I’m Anastasia.”
She had pronounced the name ‘Anna-stay-juh’ but I took care to be more formal. I nodded gravely and said, “‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’. I’m honored.”
She giggled delightedly. “Why’d you say it that way?”
“To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To embroider the air, to perfect it with the perfect sound: ‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’.”
She giggled again and that was answer enough.
She was four-and-a-half on the day we met. Not awfully, terribly short, but at no risk of scraping her head on anything. She had a round little face that had borrowed too much mischief to be cherubic but was angelic nevertheless. Her hair was brown and it was almost always almost everywhere; it was obviously brushed and tied and obviously instantly disarrayed by her mischievous wanderings. She was a beautiful child, beautiful inside and out, but her eyes were the crowning glory of her nobility. They were bluer than blue, deep and dark and purple, as purple as the crest of a dynasty. They were clearer than any gemstone, and they seemed not to reap the light but to sow it. For all the days I knew her, I could never see enough of those purple gemstone eyes.
“What’re you doing there?” she asked. I was sitting in the shade of a little olive grove reading a book. She was standing on something behind the block wall of the property next door, just her head and shoulders above the wall.
“House-sitting. You know what that means?” She shook her head and her hair flew into a more advanced state of disarray. “It’s like baby-sitting only easier.”
“Why’re you doing it?”
I shrugged. “The official answer is, I’m helping out a friend. The unofficial answer is, TV, refrigerator, hot and cold running everything. Does that make any sense to you?”
It might have or it might not, but we’ll never know, because she changed the subject. “I have a kitten. His name is ‘Sputin.”
I said, “Rasputin. Somebody likes Russian names. Say it: ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
“Why?”
“Just say it. ‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.”
She said, “‘Ra-spyoo-tin’.” Her voice was high and sweet. And breathless of course. Her speech was good, but she had a tendency to thrust her words soundly through her upper lip. The tongue is a fearsome sword, but it takes time to master.
I said, “Children must learn to enunciate. Can you say that word? ‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
She said, “‘Ih-nun-sate’.”
“‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
“‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
“That’s it. Say it again.”
“‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
“Bravo! Well done. First you crawl, then you walk, then you run. If you work at it, you can master anything.”
“Why?”
‘Why?’ is a dangerous question from a four-year-old. It may be a sincere request for more information and it may be nothing more than a doorstop to keep the conversation open. I said, “The purpose of mastery is mastery. The purpose of excellence is excellence. Can you say ‘excellence’?”
“Sure I can!”
“Well say it.”
“Excellence.”
I said, “Excellent!” and she giggled.
“I have to go,” she confided. “I’m s’posed to clean up.”
“‘Suh-posed’.”
“‘Suh-posed’,” she replied.
I said, “‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
She scrunched her face up in a scowl.
“Say it.”
“What for?”
“To lilt, to laugh, to dance, to dream. To fly, to sigh, to sing, to speak. To spin like a ballerina on the tip of your tongue, to glide across the universe and embroider the air with breathtaking sound.”
She laughed from her belly. “You’re silly!”
“You just figured that out?”
The next afternoon she announced her presence at the top of the wall by declaiming, “‘Ih-nun-cee-ate’.”
I nodded. “How do you fare, fair Empress?”
“You said the same word twice.”
“Homonyms. Words that sound the same but mean different things. ‘Hah-mow-nim’. Say it.”
“‘Hah-mow-nim’.”
“That was homonimble of you.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s a made-up word. When you master the words, you get to make up words of your own. It’s called wit, deservedly or not.”
I’m pretty sure that flew past her, but it didn’t matter because all she wanted to do was chat; comprehension wasn’t a grave necessity. And that kind of chatting about words set the pattern of our days, me in the olive grove and Anastasia at the top of the wall. The afternoons were never very hot and the evenings were never very cold and, even though the pollen from the trees made my eyes water, the air smelled so green and pure and that little girl’s eyes were so alive with the light of life that I couldn’t think of any more enjoyable way to spend my time.
And you might think it odd that a little girl should tolerate so much word play, but the simple truth is that the prize children prize is a grown-up’s full attention, and they don’t care how it comes wrapped. For an adult, play requires a site, a uniform, equipment and a long list of rules. But a child needs no more than the sword of her tongue and the shield of her smile to conquer the vast empires of the imagination, to plunder abundance and always leave behind her more treasure than she could ever haul away.
“‘Ah-nah-STAH-ziuh’,” I said one afternoon. “Do you know the story of the first Anastasia, the little girl who had your name first?”
“I get to see the movie when I’m bigger.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of scary. There’s a mean old man named Rasputin, like your cat, and he makes people think he’s a sorcerer. But the little girl isn’t scary, even though a lot of scary things happen to her.”
“What things?”
“What really matters is that she gets lost, and she’s so young that she forgets all about her family. She’s a princess, an empress, and a lot of people hope that someday she’ll claim her empire.”
“Does she?”
I shrugged. “It’s just a story. The real Anastasia died in 1918 with the rest of her family. But people like to tell that story because it makes them think that the most remarkable, wonderful things can happen anywhere.”
She gazed upon me with a regal certainty. “They can.”
“I agree completely. It’s the difference between royalty and nobility. Royalty is just a pose, just a costume. But nobility shines through everything, through the most wretched squalor ever known.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Every man a king, my Empress. Every fair maiden a fair princess in disguise. I never met an ignoble baby. Can you say ‘igg-no-bel’?”
“No.”
“Hardly anyone can. But all the babies are noble, as noble as a kitten, as noble as a wolf cub. Warriors in their way and champions of justice, if only of their own. Sovereigns who cannot conceive of an alternative to sovereignty and masters of all they survey. But somehow the crowns and the crests of nobility erode away and all that’s left are scared little people chasing after the costumery of royalty, begging for something to kneel to. Do you want me to teach you something very noble to say?”
She nodded solemnly.
“This is the most noble thing I can think of for any human being to say: ‘Do your worst. I will not kneel.’”
She said, “Do your worst. I will not kneel.”
“That’s right. Just the words, no special emphasis. Nobility triumphs when it fearlessly faces tragedy. And that, my Empress, is the most remarkable, wonderful thing that can ever happen…”
Late one afternoon I said, “I know a very hard word. You want to try it?”
“Sure.”
I said, “Chiaroscuro. ‘Key-are-es-kyoor-oh’. Say it.”
“‘Key-are-es-kyoor-oh’.”
“Excellent!”
“‘Key-are-es-kyoor-oh’,” she said again.
“What are you teaching my daughter?” a woman’s voice asked from the other side of the wall.
“It’s just words, mama.”
“Whatever for?”
Very primly, very clearly, very precisely, Anastasia said, “The purpose of mastery is mastery.” To me she said, “What’s it mean?”
“What?”
“‘Key-are-es-kyoor-oh’.”
“It’s the interplay of light and shadow. In pictures, in paintings — but sometimes I think it means the conflict between good and evil, right and wrong. We have pictures and we have words and we have songs and poems and stories, and that’s a testament to the triumph of the light, don’t you think?”
She shrugged and that was answer enough.
One day when the fall had come to pay a call upon the olive trees Anastasia climbed to the top of the wall to tell me she was moving away.
I bit my lower lip and blinked very fast, surprised at myself.
“What’s the matter?”
I smiled a tight little smile, a smile for keeping things in. “This never happened before. It’s always me who goes away, not the other way around.”
“Aren’t you leaving soon?”
“Couple of weeks. You’re right, of course you’re right. It’s just new, that’s all.”
And of course it took forever. I can bug-out in three minutes flat, but it took Anastasia’s family days and days to pack up and go. She came to the wall to talk to me every day and it was so nice and so awful, sweet words embroidered around a black crepe deadline.
I said good-bye to her at the curb in front of her house and I felt wretched and I tried very hard not to show it. Just a little kid, right? Just the most remarkable, wonderful thing there is, a young sovereign, wild and free.
I held her tiny little hands in mine and said, “Ingenuous. Can you say it? ‘In-jen-you-us’.”
“‘In-jen-you-us’. What does it mean?”
“It means a lot of things — open and honest and artless and innocent. But what it really means is to be born free. It means to be born without being required to kneel. That’s what you are, Anastasia of the purple gemstone eyes. Born free. The hard job is to stay free.”
“Do your worst,” she intoned with a regal delight. “I will not kneel.”
I kissed her on the forehead and she climbed into the back seat of the waiting car and sailed forth to claim her empire.
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Jul
11
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[This was written for genuine Bloodhounds. Please check your chip!]
I always start simple. Then I try to stay there. This post is no exception. I even cut it in half, to keep it as simple as possible. The main question I seek to answer here is, “What is owing?”
You see, I owe Greg Swann. No, not for anything he sold me, nor because of anything he expects, let alone demands. He did do some software work back in the ’90s, but I paid for that. BTW his code is used to this day, making one part of our company’s website much better than any of our competitors’. And since that part is about the price, and since I offer (what once was!) a commoditized item, it means the whole website is better, from the customer’s POV. And in business, as is no secret here, there’s no other relevant POV.
Greg Swann has inspired me, as he’s inspired so many people, but lots of people inspire lots of other people. We don’t go around keeping track of who inspired us how much, and how much we ought to pay for each. So surely there’s no debt in that, right? Well, I guess it all depends on what you consider a debt.
And that’s the point…a debt is something you consider a debt. Never mind contracts and mortgages for a moment, for this is about owing. And this is about the fact of the matter. You cannot be in any volitional state, with or without others, save by your own…well, your own volition. This is not a comment on money debts or their resolution in cases of dispute; this is a comment on the existential state of owing.
I know this is important because of a six-month discussion on the net. A chap, once affectionately known as “Police-State Jim,” has the most intricate, most carefully crafted “argument” about why our obligations are properly enforced with physical coercion. And more…why this is so very, very moral and why it’s downright necessary for happiness. It’s a maze of contrived definitions, false dichotomies, stolen concepts and even more, and this fellow also happens to be an eloquent writer, a pleasure to read if you ignore what he says. He goes from “moral obligation” to “legal obligation” with everything resting on what an obligation is. Which is how, according to him, you come to be obligated because of the volition of others. He acknowledges that your volition has to exist, but the key element is that the other person “expects, demands or relies” upon your freely chosen decision to be in debt to him. On its face this is intuitive, but as always it’s missing the underlying connection…”So even then, why would it be proper to engage physical coercion?” This is Greg’s specialty, so I won’t explain now, why that’s not proper.
No, my point is even wider. It’s that an expectation, demand or reliance can’t create anything in you anyway. Nothing can create anything in you, but you. Other entities can do things to you, but they can’t do them in you. This is plainly obvious, almost childish to say. Yet virtually every craziness we engage socially, is built around the pretense that this is not true. From God to the Poll, every contrivance we make to control ourselves, has an implicit premise that something might control ourselves, besides ourselves. I mean, really now.
Nothing can ever change until we lose this false foundational premise. You are as you choose, now and forevermore. You don’t choose what other people or other things do to you, but you exclusively choose who you will be in the face of them. The good news, of course, is that this applies to happiness or joy or pride or humor or fun or…
I call my ethical system “egoism” but oddly, I don’t choose it because I judge that it’s so ethical, like compared to other ethical systems. No, for me it’s only about the facts of the matter, and I always identify before I judge. How we engage with others is a very important ethical judgment, and so I believe it must be built upon accurate, or correspondent, identification. I don’t pick from among systems; I develop principles.
I owe Greg Swann because I decided that I owe Greg Swann. I have very good reasons for that, but it really doesn’t matter for this. The relevant point is that I owe him, and this is how I choose to pay him. Those reasons are all mine, and it feels good–that is, it enhances ego-adoration–when one pays one’s debts. That’s why that last car payment feels so good…you earned that car, which translates almost directly to, “You lived.” And living is what Splendor is all about. Living, as a human, creates Splendor.
If we choose to create it, that is. Greg can’t create any Splendor in me, nor anyone else. But he can point out some facts with which we can create it ourselves. The identification of facts is the fuel of the mind. I go so far as to call us “identifying machines.” As I wrote here a while ago, Greg has spent his life dishing out some facts about being human, and just like Crick & Watson, he cracked some important keys. You all know this; that’s why you’re here. You’re people of the mind, and Greg has filled you up with what we used to call “Ethyl”…nowadays it’s “Premium.” Well, I took those facts and used them. Since I don’t like something for nothing, and since I don’t want to do what I don’t like, I therefore decide that I owe him, and that this is how I shall pay him.
That’s all. Notice that Greg has nothing to do with this existential state. Notice that nobody could have anything to do with it, except myself. Everything else is prattle. Everything else is someone saying what they’re willing to do to hang onto their false premises.
This post was originally “Owing and Owning,” with about half dedicated to real estate. I think I’ll go with one at a time, and cut this off here. You all made me feel quite welcome when I first arrived, so maybe I’ll save the rest as a sort of payment in gratitude for that.
That way I can even enjoy the time I owe you!
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Jul
11
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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
Cinderella was in a snit, and who could blame her? She was an orphan swarmed by a family of strangers, accidental intimates, pushy and intrusive and unwelcome. And the most distant stranger of all was the original Prince Charming, the man she had expected would always be beside her.
Physically distant, too, for he led the little brood, prancing on the balls of his feet, ostentatiously trying too hard, while Cinderella dragged her small feet at the rear, palpably punishing Prince Charming. Once he flounced back and tried to jolly her into joining them, into becoming one with them, but she blew him off with a furious shake of her head, horse-whipping him symbolically with her imperious, impetuous, long brown hair.
And something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo. I was sitting on a bench watching the Galapagos tortoises fornicate, a surprisingly delicate, amazingly time-consuming process. The post-modern delegation from the Brothers Grimm came trundling up the path, and they made a fine exhibit, too.
Only a fool would call them a family. They were a composite, an ungainly grafting of two diseased trees. If you keep your eyes open you can spot them all over, whisper-shouting through clenched teeth at the mall, squabbling over dinner at Denny’s, caucusing in sub-groups at gas stations and national parks. He’s responsible for his kids, if he has any, and she’s responsible for hers, and the children, ultimately, answer to no one. Very sad. Very stupid. Very common.
I didn’t pay them any mind, not then. If you’ve seen one tragedy, you’ve seen one too many. But I caught up with them again on the Zoo Train, a sea serpent’s idea of the ideal golf cart, designed for people who would rather sit than see the animals. And I didn’t go looking for trouble, neither; I was sitting peacefully, placidly, blessedly alone when they invaded me. I was waiting for the train ride to begin, and they tumbled into the row of benches ahead of mine, puncturing the quiet with random and raucous thrusts of sound.
The Wicked Stepmother was not the loudest of the bunch, not by half, but she was certainly the busiest. Picking at the Wicked Stepbrother’s clothes, lecturing the pouting Cinderella, brushing at the Wicked Stepsister’s hair, bossing Prince Charming around. She was a porcine excrescence on stubby legs, and her little round face was dominated by an expression that was both smug and profoundly stupid.
“Are we having fun yet!” she shrieked in a tone that mocked jocularity by being hostile. Her demand was directed at Cinderella, who glared in return.
The Wicked Stepbrother’s face was smeared in a technicolor history of his day’s devourings, chocolate and cotton candy and a slurpee and who knows what else. He was maybe five years old, and he wasn’t evil, just practicing for it. He was batting at Cinderella’s hand, trying to get at some small treasure she had clenched in her palm.
The Wicked Stepsister was impenetrably, imperviously, imperturbably wrapped up in the rapture of her own conversation. She yakked and she chattered, she blithered and blathered, and not one of the others paid her the smallest attention. In truth, her discourse was interesting, full of fact and insight, but her words seemed almost like a barrage — the best defense is a good offense.
The Wicked Stepmother jostled her with an elbow, temporarily interrupting her monologue. “Why don’t you tell your sister what you’ve been doing in school.” At the words “your sister” Cinderella blanched. Her face, until then haughty, went blank with rage. Very carefully, very decorously, she stood up, hopped down to the tarmac and climbed up into the bench beside me. As symbolic gestures go, it was nicely done.
Prince Charming’s chief skill seems to be looking the wrong way at all the right moments, but now he tried to intervene, however ham-handedly. “But — ” he started, then started over. “But aren’t you glad you’ve got a new sister and brother? You’ve got a whole new family! Isn’t that something!”
Of all the many flavors of dishonesty at Uncle Willie’s Palatial Emporium of Lies, hustling children with faked enthusiasm is easily the most repellent. By the sour expression on her face, I’d say Cinderella came to the same conclusion.
“Oh, come on, honey,” he wheedled, betraying his knowledge of the truth by pretending to deny it. “She didn’t mean anything by it. Would you rather she called you her stepsister?”
Ice burns when it’s cold enough and Prince Charming winced and looked away when he saw Cinderella’s icy glare.
The Wicked Stepmother couldn’t leave bad enough alone, though. She didn’t say anything, but she kept turning back and looking at Cinderella. Sometimes furtively, sometimes angrily, sometimes hurtfully. I had the idea she was trying things more or less at random. I also had the idea that the shame of being spurned was far more important to her than the reason for the spurning. To her credit, Cinderella ignored her entirely.
And to my credit, I said nothing — for a change. Instead, I waited for the Wicked Stepmother to look away for an instant, then I tapped Cinderella gently on her clenched fist. She looked up at me with pale blue eyes, sad and defiant and enormous. I shrugged and she opened her hand as though it were a treasure chest. In her palm was a tiny locket on a delicate gold chain. “He was trying to take it from me,” she said, pointing the Wicked Stepbrother.
“Is it from your mom?” I asked.
Her chin quivered and I thought she was about to bawl. Instead she said, “He gave it to me.” She gestured with her head at Prince Charming. He displayed his talent for looking the wrong way at the right moment.
And without being told, I knew the rest of the story. Cinderella was visiting her daddy’s new home. His new wife, who was not her mother. His new children, who were not her brother and sister. Not really his children, but she had no way of knowing that. A father’s relationship is to his children. A mother’s relationship is to her children. But a stepparent’s relationship is to his or her new spouse, and the relationship to the children is indirect and attenuated. That’s why the composite families shout and squabble and caucus, because they’re not really families. They can’t be. Everybody knows the stepparent is an after-market add-on, spare parts. And everybody pretends not to know. And everybody betrays the pretense, constantly undermining the stepparent’s false status by affecting to uphold it.
But Cinderella couldn’t know that. From her point of view, she was the spare parts. Her daddy had abandoned her — or so it must have seemed to her — and now he had replaced her and her mother with a brand new family, complete and ready-made. She had been robbed of her father and he had been robbed of his fatherhood and both of them were doomed by blindness and longing to race frantically after vain substitutes for the treasures that can never be replaced.
Very sad. Very stupid. Very common.
But everybody’s gotta take a side…
I said: “It’s hard to believe it’s so cool today when it was so hot just last week. Fall has fallen, resoundingly.”
She giggled, and that was good enough.
“I was swimming this time last week. I jumped in the water, and I got some up my nose. And just for an instant I was eight years old again. I had a pure and perfect memory of being a kid and getting water up my nose every time I went swimming. Does that ever happen to you?”
“I always get water in my nose. In my ears, too.”
“That’s not what I mean. Did you ever have a memory that’s as perfect as a dream? The other day I smelled a two-stroke engine, and it just about knocked me over.”
“What’s a two-stroke engine?”
I smiled. “I’m not going to explain internal combustion engines, not without a blackboard. A two-stroke engine is a simple little gas motor. You find ‘em on garden equipment and motor boats. That’s what was so weird about it, though. I smelled that motor and it took me back thirty years. I felt like I was standing on a dock launching a fishing boat with my grandfather. I could smell the motor and the water and the fish and the dirt and the nightcrawlers. I could hear geese a long way off and I could hear my grandpa whistling, and it was just like I was right there, all in a flash. Does that ever happen to you?”
The Wicked Stepbrother had turned around and he was watching me with rapt attention. His chin was planted on the back of his bench, and he wasn’t missing a word. His mother was straining to turn and straining not to turn and doing everything she could to interpose herself between Cinderella and me, everything except actually planting her fulsome fundament between us.
Cinderella scrunched her tiny little shoulders in a shrug and I said, “I can think of a hundred little things like that. Camping out or riding my bike on dirt roads or bouncing around in the back of a pick-up truck loaded with Halloween pumpkins or looking at a great big yellow moon and wondering why it was so big.”
“I know why it was so big,” announced the Wicked Stepsister, launching into an endless lecture about perspective and proportion.
I said: “The point is, my past isn’t gone, it’s all right here.” I rapped myself on the noggin and the Wicked Stepbrother laughed with a wicked delight. “The good part is, it’s all in there, pure and clean and perfect. The bad part is, I didn’t pick what’s there, it sort of picked me.”
“What’s that mean?” Cinderella asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, precisely. When you live, you just live. You don’t think, ‘I must remember this, I must forget this.’ You just remember and forget, and you don’t have a lot to say about it. But you do have a little to say about it.”
“What?” she demanded. Who could resist a hook like that?
I shrugged again. “I’m too stupid for this job. I think you find what you’re looking for, so I guess the thing to do is look for things in your life that you hope someday to find in your memories. Does that make sense?”
“…Not really.”
“Well, something’s gonna go in there, and it’s gonna come back out, again and again, pure and clean and perfect. If you live for pain, if you treasure every little wound, if you pick at your scabs so they never, ever heal, that’s what you’re going to find in your memories. But if you live for happiness, for the joy and accomplishment you can find in life, then that’s what you’ll find in your memories.”
Cinderella said nothing, just looked thoughtful. The Wicked Stepmother looked like she was about to bust a valve.
“Do you know the word ‘wrest’? As in ‘wrestle’?”
Cinderella shrugged. The Wicked Stepsister said, “I do,” and launched into a dictionary definition.
I said, “To wrest something means to take it away by force, like you might wrest a weapon away from a bad guy. I want you to remember that word, because the most valuable thing I know is this: To live, to love your life, you have to wrest joy from pain.”
She whispered it: “Wrest joy from pain.”
“Wrest joy from pain. If you remember that much, you’ll remember this day forever.”
She said it again, louder. “Wrest joy from pain.”
The Wicked Stepmother glared at me, and I would have been delighted to know whatever it was she thought she might want to say to me. The simple truth is that I’m a subversive, and I do nothing to hide it. But not very many people know how I’m subversive. And who is going to get in the way of a man who’s talking a little girl back from the depths of misery? I’m sure the Wicked Stepmother wanted to, though, more from censorious impulses than understanding. Prince Charming was quietly delighted to have me solve his problems for him.
I said, “Do you know the story of Cinderella?”
“She got married to the prince!” said the Wicked Stepbrother. The train was moving, snaking along like a gaggle of Shriners on tricycles. It wasn’t safe to jump off and back on, so the little boy climbed over the bench and hopped down beside me, tucking himself under my arm. Prince Charming tried to haul him back over but he wrestled free then handily wielded the rusty scalpel of stepfather emasculation: “You’re not my daddy! You’re not the boss of me!”
I ignored all these events. “It’s just at the end of the story that she marries the prince. Here’s what really happened,” I confided.
It’s not the story, it’s the storyteller, and I have proof: The Wicked Stepsister closed her flapping yap and turned around to listen. The Wicked Stepmother was ostentatiously not listening with all her might. Prince Charming seemed to be grateful to be temporarily relieved of all the indefinite responsibilities of his tenuous non-position.
I said, “Cinderella was a little girl who lived with her mother and her father, and she was very happy. But then her mother died. She was sad for her mother, but she was happy that she still had her father. But then her father married a very wicked widow woman who had two very wicked daughters.”
“They were mean to her!” said the Wicked Stepbrother.
“They were mean to her,” I agreed, “but she still had her father, and she was happy when they could be alone together. But then her father died, and Cinderella was all alone. She was an orphan, but no one knew it. They thought she had her stepmother and her two stepsisters, but really she had no one left at all. She was all alone, but no one could see that. It didn’t matter that they were mean to her, that they made her do all the work. What mattered was that she had lost her whole family and no one knew it, no one could see the truth.”
To their credit, the Wicked Stepsister and the Wicked Stepbrother both had tears in their eyes. Cinderella’s eyes were glassy but defiant. I said, “Wrest joy from pain,” and she nodded.
The train was stopped by the baboon exhibit. I looked at my watch. “Gotta run, my lady. Empus-tay ugit-fay.”
She giggled. “What’s that mean?”
“It means time flies right over your head.”
Prince Charming turned and said, “Thank you.”
I smiled a sweet, subversive smile. “If you only knew…” I looked into Cinderella’s big blue eyes. I said, “Wrest joy from pain.”
She said, “I’ll remember,” and I knew she would.
The Wicked Stepmother felt compelled to reassert herself. “Say good-bye to the nice man,” she said in a sing-song, saccharine voice.
To her credit, Cinderella ignored her entirely.
I touched my fingertip to the end of her tiny nose, the only Fairy Godfather on call at the zoo. “Don’t fall for the first idiot who rubs your feet.”
She giggled, and that was good enough.
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