thinking thinking thinking

So the real question is: can I just say, fuck everybody else, and only compose?

Fuck all the perceived responsibilities and obligations; I have art to do…? I mean, I actually see a way where I could do that. I see a job I could get, with flexibility for me to do that. And I can’t even believe how much it excites me. To the point of stomach flip flops, fer reals. My apprehensions about it are just fear that no one will accept or like or perform my music. I can’t know until I start doing it. I know some people will like it. I do know that much. But I have to do it a lot, AND---AND---I have to market myself. I have to send it to people.

Fuck teaching. Fuck conducting church choirs, as some dues-paying bull shit, to earn my legitimacy as a composer. DO you have to have a choir to be accepted as a composer? [redacted] might say yes….  I dunno.

I don’t want to make my money doing art because it’s messy and exhausting and LIFE-DRAINING. And I need that life for writing music. So, day job (an actual good one, with benefits, doing something not menial, but at least--well, two cuts, let's say, above menial...), and then composing.  …??

Benefits of Rumination

The following was intended as a comment on a post at /r/exmormon. The OP was about how Mormonism's emphasis on "Go and Do!" (as opposed to a more critical "Stop and think...") keeps Mormons enthralled. I decided not to comment, but saved the text:

Oh man, I. Love. This. Do not apologize for this ramble. This is an incredibly good ramble.

Let's keep going with it: How many times have you heard members disparage themselves for being a person who thinks too much? Or how many of you here were a Mormon who "thought too much," or had lots of roiling ruminatey type thoughts? Maybe this is one massive reason why! Because when you try to suppress something natural, it always grows—actually it fights back, with vengeance. 

If you’re a thinker (let’s be generous and say most humans are, to a certain extent) and you get told over and over and over and over that you have to “Go and do!!” and not ruminate on God’s commandments, and any time you did start to ruminate you’d smack your forehead in self-loathing, then 1. Not only do you never learn how to have positive, critical thoughts that lead to conclusions (and CHANGES), but 2. That ruminating tendency goes into overdrive, with the same principle on which so many men (and women) get shamed into thinking they are sex addicts.

Yeah, it’s a common meme here that Mormons are kept so busy they don’t have time to really think about the truth claims of the church. Partially true, I’m sure, but I bet plenty of Mormons are doing tons of thinking about the church and it’s truth claims, it’s just that the messaging they’re getting about thinking is so incredibly dysfunctional and manipulative it puts them constantly in a quandary. (God’s thoughts are higher than man’s thoughts, and similar bull shit.)

I’ve recently become aware of how negative I am toward myself when it comes to thinking about my thinking. My meta-thinking is very negative. When I really start to mull something over, I leap immediately to the meta thought that this mulling and ruminating is bad for me, that I should have already had a conclusion, or that the very fact that I am ruminating at all means that I am a negative, depressive, person. Maybe that’s a result of “I will go, I will doooo!” being pounded into my 5 year old brain.

Thanks to recent therapy, though (therapy is so essential for fucked-up ex-cult members), I’ve learned to start putting a positive spin on my thinking. My thinking, even my ruminating, is indicative of a very positive trait!, says my therapist. It shows that I am critical, interested improving the conditions around me (a basic evolutionary impulse, I imagine) and concerned with excellence. Thinking is good. Fuck, over-thinking is good. We can use our thinking and our meta-thinking to help ourselves out of negative feedback loops, discover the things we really value, prioritize those values, and aim our lives in a direction that aligns with our values. We can decide if Mormon God or Jewish God or Catholic God, or NO GOD  aligns with our values, and hang onto or throw out any or all gods.  We can think; and then, after a while, after the thinking creates new neurons and changes the actual physical structure of our brains, then we have become a different person, who chooses different things than when we first began thinking.

So yeah. I guess Mormonism in general, and that little ass-wipe Nephi in particular, fundamentally impede natural human brain development.

An artist trusts herself

No.

No.

No.

No to you, you, and you. And no to everybody except me.


Yes to me.

(And ok, yes to that one person, but only like once a year.)

Artists' witching hour.

1-5-17 oh, no. 1-6-17

The witching hour of artists is well after midnight. You’re up because, well you were up the same time last night, and then you slept in because you’re an artist for fuck’s sake, and don’t have a real job.

And your person in bed next to you has settled in and started sleeping peacefully, ceasing to provide you with an adequate distraction to the NOISE IN YOUR BRAIN, which, as often as not, is a disorganized flurry of anxieties, but which, at this hour, grows brighter and brighter with visions terrible and fantastic which desperately want to play out in your workspace. The workspace which, during the day is an unsightly mess of incoherent piles, but the night lighting gives it the romance you need to dream up the next bits of adventure for your favorite characters. There’s scope for the imagination at this hour, scope which, as likely as not, will be dashed by daylight. And you’re fighting it all of course, lying in bed next to your person sleeping peacefully, not just because you're not sure why or if you're shit matters, in the great scheme of things--if I do another choral arrangement of Motherless Child, does that change anything, really, for anybody aside from the romantic faerie-demon that possesses me well after midnight?--but also because: why can’t you have a normal fucking sleep schedule, for once in your life? And work during the day like normal people? 

Well, it’s because the witching hour of artists is well after midnight. That's it. I figured it out.

Anger

As I’ve learned more about meditation and some basic principles of Buddhism, I have realized that I’m very addicted to telling myself stories about myself.

What I do is I have conversations, in my head, with people. The people are real, usually people from my past, but the conversations are just in my head. And the conversations aren’t really conversations. They are me lecturing the other person, or explaining something about myself or about how I view the world. This is my way, I believe, of defining myself, to myself. Often the mind-conversations are confrontations. Often I am angry in these conversations. My current theory is that because I so loathe and avoid confrontation in real life, I need to set my boundaries to myself, in my own head, to distinguish and define and maybe even understand myself.

But I’ve realized that these story-telling conversations are constant. If my attention is not otherwise engaged—in reading, watching or listening to something, actually conversing with a real live person, making music, etc—I am 100% likely to be having one of these conversations.

Last night was a very angry one. We live in an apartment complex and our unit is right next to the laundry room. On the laundry room door it is posted that residents are not to do laundry after 10pm. This is because the dryers are really noisy, and the motion-sensored light right outside the door goes on and off right into ours and a few other resident’s windows when people are going back and forth. It’s very disruptive to sleep. This hasn’t been a problem for most of the 3 years that we have lived here. But recently someone moved in who completely disregards the rule, and two or three times now has kept us awake quite late with their laundry-activities.

This completely enrages me. Blind rage. But remember—I hate confrontation. So my go-to response is to have horrible angry conversations with the perpetrator in my head. I obsess over things I’m going to do to this person, and enact these things in my head, alongside my angry conversations. It’s late, though, and I’m in my PJs, and it’s cold outside and I don’t really want to have to go out there to actually deal with it. Furthermore, I would have to wait until the person walks by between loads to catch them, and that requires constant attention at my window for as much as 45 minutes or something. And I’m much too distracted by my blind rage to do something like that.

Last night, since I knew I wasn’t going to go out and do something about it, and since I’ve had some Buddhist meditation principles rolling around in my head, I laid back and tried an experiment with my angry story-telling. I experimented with letting go of the story. This wasn’t intentional, but as I imagined letting go, I imagined the anger rising off my body, of its own accord, like steam after a hot bath.

I immediately experienced peace. It wasn’t peace combatting my anger, it was the peace that was always there under the story. It was absence. Absence was quite peaceful.

In that space it occurred to me that part of my holding on to the angry story was a duty.

In the past when I’ve thought about anger, I’ve mostly experienced it as an entitlement. I learned early on in therapy that anger could be really important and useful, especially for getting out of abusive relationships or situations and moving forward. I grasped that idea for years. And I still think it’s true. Thus for many years, even when I’ve known that it was time to let go of anger, I imagined that it was a sense of entitlement that kept me holding onto it. Almost like a guilty pleasure. I should probably stop eating this chocolate, and I should probably let go of this anger, but I DON’T WANT TO BECAUSE IT FEELS SOOO GOOD.

But last night when I let go of the anger, and it dissipated and vanished in the space above my body, I realized that I had also felt a duty to hold onto that anger. I have no idea where that duty came from, but... 

No. No, I take that back. As a very good little Mormon girl, I grew up experiencing most things as duty. If a certain activity could be considered a good thing to do, my dutiful little mind turned it into a duty. I think this was a big part of my descent into major depression on my mission. At any rate, last night, it felt MUCH better to let go of the anger-duty. Much better.

I suppose anger is just an emotion. It’s a murky, smoky, gaseous substance that can propel us forward, and can cloud our clear vision. It can be useful and it can be distracting and it can be destructive, but it’s just an emotion. And it’s ok to let it go.

     

Some Ideas about Humans

I need to write something about us and them. Us-and-them-ness. This syndrome, so prominent in Mormonism, and brought to light this week by the very Mormon boundary-maintenance habit of excommunication.

So anyway, two ideas:

1. I think a lot about what a good life is. Almost invariably, for me, a good life is centered around helping others. Growing up, that has always meant other people. It was hard for me to grant the same importance to helping a homeless dog, for instance, as to helping a homeless man or woman. Why is that, I wonder? It might just be a function of my very intense religious upbringing--the fervor of my belief, growing up, in the importance of being Christlike. But I also wonder if it has something to do with a baser element, a very simple, very deep, totally unacknowledged instance of us vs. them. So deep, it's probably written in my DNA. Explained by evolution--the tendency of a species to propagate itself, at the expense of other species. Simple competition. My first excuse is always to go straight to the idea of consciousness--sentience. People are higher on the scale of importance because we feel things more deeply--we have greater sense of awareness-self-awareness as well as awareness of others. But current research on the sophistication of bee communication, ...and other stuff... tends to lead to a different conclusion. Furthermore, granting the helping of other species--even plant, fungi, insect species--the same level of importance as helping people can be attributed to a similar kind of biological self-preservation. It seems, more and more, that science is pointing to the insight John Muir had when he said;

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

It does, however, seem to require an awareness beyond that which most of the human race seems capable. Or at least the fox-news-watching portion of the human race.

2. Ok, second idea, related to the first. That our sky-rocketing human population requires, most likely, a constant re-thinking of the traditional us vs. them. Because the actual physical fact is that we are constantly bumping up against each other much more than we have in millenia past. Centuries past. Hell, even decades past. 7.2 billion people is a fuck-ton of people, is all I'm saying. The booming population, and the physical requirements thereof, in terms of living arrangements, feeding arrangements, transportation, communication, etc., means that each individual human is much more aware of diversity. At least, in the modernized world. We are much more aware that a particular set of human beings was perhaps taught from birth that their religious world-view is the only true religion, and despite having been taught that very thing ourselves, we do need to respect them as people, and try as hard as we can not to commit genocide against them, like we did several centuries ago, because, well, we've acknowledged that that was perhaps not our finest hour. In fact, this much diversity awareness may even result in a large number of us humans concluding that one miniscule little worldview trying to vaunt itself up to exclusive truth claims might be a bad idea, because of the way so many other humans despise and ridicule us on that count...

I mean, ultimately, that rigid, violent boundary maintenance, of the sort the Mormon church seems hell-bent on carrying out, might be a tad out-dated. That's all I'm saying.    

My mother's mother's mother.

I'm just back from a few days in grand Junction, CO, where now reside my grandparents, Aunt and uncle, parents as of about a year and a half ago, and most recently, a cousin and his little family. I have a lot of people  in GJ. I also have a ton of family history there. I think it's the closest thing I have to an ancestral home. Grandpa Roper had a big-ish plot of land there that he farmed, that has now been parceled out a bit to the four kids, so my parents own a piece of it. I suppose for almost a century now, Ropers and Walkers have lived in GJ, and for over a century, in Gunnison, about 120 miles to the southeast, in the Rockies.

The main purpose of my visit was to immerse myself in Grandma Dot's rather large collection of family history work--binders full of letters, pictures, maps, newspaper articles and clippings, lineage charts, every possible historical documentation you can think of. Grandma had started a biography of her mother, Arla Tufly Walker, many years ago, and the last time I was there, I decided it would be up to me to help her finish it. Grandma is 87 now, and in remarkably good health for her age, but she is beginning to show signs of mental decline: forgetfulness, repeating herself, occasional disorientation. Based on her own judgment as well as that of her two children who live nearby, it's unlikely she will finish the biography by herself. She had outlined about 11 chapters, and written 3 of them. So I decided what I could do was get her to talk about what she would have put in the remaining chapters, record her and transcribe it in order to finish the thing.

So this last trip, we got started. As it turned out, it seemed more efficient to actually take notes in a word document as Grandma talked, rather than add the extra step of recording and transcribing. That also meant she could look over my shoulder and correct things, and even start to edit a little bit. Actually, this revealed to me some more detail about Grandma's short-term memory loss. I would write exactly what she told me, with just a bit of grammar editing, and as she looked over my shoulder sometimes she would correct me, insisting she hadn't said such and such a thing, but in fact something different. That didn't happen a lot. But it happened enough that I decided this was a better way than recording her. I will also have to do my own research to verify things.

And I'm pretty excited about that. Our next move will be--hopefully--to take a trip up to Gunnison together, along with Grandpa. I'm hoping they will both be up for that. I don't know... they might not be. It's not exactly an easy drive, even for a passenger, and I don't know if they could manage there and back in one day. And if not, we'll have to find some sort of lodging, which seems pretty disruptive to a couple of old folks who have a very set daily routine.    

It's been pretty amazing getting to know Arla better. I wish I could have known her--and I do hope I will know her. I feel that I have a lot in common with her. She was well-educated, being quite bookish and motivated to succeed in school from her childhood. Her own mother, Minnie Curtis Tufly, insisted on Arla attending college, and worked to help pay for her education. Arla eventually got her teaching degree from Colorado State Normal School (as it was then known--today it is Western State Colorado University, with some other intervening appelations), and went on for more advanced work a the state university in Denver. She then came back to teach English at CSNS. The last few days, Grandma mostly focused on stories relating to Arla as a young mother, and trips they took together when Grandma was very young. Grandma has a great memory for her early years. We just barely got to talking about Arla's extensive involvement in the community. She was instrumental in starting up Gunnison's first public library. (This fact was what made me eager to visit Gunnison--seems to me the current library must have some of it's own history on file, including information about Arla's involvement. Much as I love Grandma's stories, I feel it will be important to gather information from more sources.) Arla also taught Sunday School at the Community Church in Gunnison, and Grandma says she can't remember a time when she *wasn't* teaching Sunday School.

I'm beginning to understand the family history freaks--the people who can't understand why you are not as excited about it as they are! The more I learn about Arla and her personality, and the things with which she filled her life, the closer I feel to her--and consequently, I feel inspired as to the things with which I want to fill my own life.

It's been interesting to consider the intricate, positive interaction between biological and environmental heredity, as well. I've seen personality traits in Grandma's stories of Arla that seem very fundamental to my own personality. It's fascinating to ponder on the ability of both DNA as well as parental influence to pass traits down through generations. Even though Grandma Dot was quite rebellious against her mother's high-class, college educated influence, preferring to do farm work with her father, she nevertheless eventually finished college, and became a teacher like her mother. She even eventually got a master's degree, moving beyond her mother's educational accomplishments. And even though, as far as I can tell, every mother-daughter relationship from Arla to me has been characterized by resistance and rebellion, we all of us nevertheless have a passion for books and learning. And I don't doubt that that trait has it's roots in both biology and environment. There have been times when I felt I owed it to my maternal line to go on and get a doctorate. But I suppose, now I feel I only ought to do that if I can actually use it to improve the lives of those around me, since that seems to have been the motivation for my forebears.  

I think one barrier to my getting into my family history has been Mormon guilt--the huge "should" attached to it. Now that I feel quite a lot less of that, it's much easier to get interested in the stories. I honestly think learning these stories of my ancestors is MUCH more important than doing proxy ordinances for them in a temple which, more than likely, they'd never willingly entered on their own, taking on strange, sexist oaths and devotions to a cultish, mortal institution...  No. What's important is learning about my people, my heritage. Learning what my blood is made of, and perhaps understanding who I am generationally. What's important is keeping these stories and making them available for the next generations. I believe this knowledge of each other is what seals us.