Good morning. Hello. How are you? #549
Hope and optimism and happiness and Shakers and copy edits
Good morning! What is up? How are you? What day is it? Man. I don’t think I like Christmas on a Saturday. I should be off already. This week is busy. So much to do. So much to do.
Longtime GMHHAY readers will remember my obsession with the last three remaining Shakers, who live up in Maine in the last remaining active Shaker village, Sabbathday Lake. They are lead by Brother Arnold, who is 65. He’s been in charge since Sister Frances died in 2017 at the age of 89. They do a lot of baking for the holidays, apparently it’s a big thing up there in the Portland area. Brother Arnold oversees the baking. In the old days, it was the Sisters that did the baking, the Brothers werent’ allowed to, but when your once mighty religion has been reduced to three whole people, you gotta make some compromises. They sell lots of cakes n stuff. They have a big holiday dinner. It is a busy time for Brother Arnold. Seems that they are still operating in quarantine mode this Christmas, so good for the Shakers for, you know, being responsoible. Anyway, here is an article about how Brother Arnold and the Shakers are doing, including a nice recipe for Brother Arnold’s Plum Kuchen. Weirdly, it makes absolutely no mention of the other two remaining Shakers. Not their names, ages, genders, how they’re doing, nothing. I feel like the Shakers are really trying to, like, use marketing for their baking and Shaker Chair concerns, without, like, actually telling us anything about how they’re doing. I feel like they’re just gonna die off, without saying a word. We have a while, though. Brother Arnold is only 65.
I spent some time yesterday evening working on the GMHHAY book edit. I hit a particularly tricky part: the entry of September 15, 2020, wherein I write 7,000 words, meticulously outlining my daily routine. Lisa, my editor, wisely cut this part down to something more manageable, a representative page or two of the routine, a snippet of the breakfast part. I am deeply torn about this, and in a somewhat controversial move, I am considering restoring the entire routine. It’s a dilemma. It probably is boring, and it is too long, but also that is the point. It was a dark time for all of us in the pandemic, and many of us took solace in our routines, tried to fray all the rough edges off of our existence, because any additional difficulty would set us off. But I’m not sure if that comes through or not. But this routine magnum opus feels, to me, like the very heart and soul of the book. When I think back of the entire year, it is that piece of writing I remember the most. The monumental effort it took to document every stupid, fleeting decision, gesture, action that exists in any human’s daily routine. I’ve never seen anyone actuall manage to complete the exercise before, because it is so navel-gazing, so lint-staring, so completely detatched from the rest of the world, which of course was the point, it was a conscious, willful, attempt to block out the misery of the outside world for a few days. But maybe none of that comes through. I am torn. But for now, it is back in.
It was also a complete headache to edit, back then when I first posted it, and once again, now, to get it back into the book. No one wants a 20-page bulleted list. It is insanity. I feel like this is a make-or-break moment for the GMHHAY book. Like the 18-minute wall of white noise in the live versions of My Bloody Valentine’s “You Made Me Realize.” You love it or hate it.
I just don’t know.
Jane woke up sad yesterday. It’s not the first time. It’s rare, but it happens. Maybe once a month or so, from the moment she wakes up, she is just sad. She didn’t jump up from bed when I came into the room. She layed in bed, she didn’t say anything, she was like an adult, who was depressed and didn’t want to face the day, and wanted more sleep. It continued through the morning. By breakast time, she was at least acknowledging she was sad, and talking about how she wanted to be happy again, which is both heartbreaking but also kind of reassuring because that is the beginning of the process, the beginning of the return to normal, because of course we can never be happier if we don’t want to be happier.
After breakfast we went downstairs and I pulled out the big guns. Lately, the thing that makes her most happy — at least in the time I spend alone with her — is to break out my 750 Words and write down everything we both say out loud. She loves it so much. “'Hi Jane said,” she’ll say, making sure I write it down as “‘Hi, Jane said,’ Jane said.” She loves that, the recursiveness of it. She loves proclaiming her love for mommy and daddy and Grammy and Brown Bear and Kitty and seeing it in writing. She loves it when I make a typo and she can say “Daddy made a typo.” That is just the best for her.
I feel like I “gave” this to Jane, being the one in the family with depression, and I feel like I need to give her the skills to manage it. It took me years to learn to manage it. I don’t want her to have to go through all that blindly, like I did. I feel like Dexter’s dad. This is how you live with this thing you have, this is how you be a normal person, and you can even live, love, laugh and be happy. Here are the tricks. Here is the toolset.
But, man. Days like thast, I jsut think: “I’m sorry I did that to you Jane.”
I’m probably reading too much into it. She probably just stayed up too late talking to her animals and reading her Pusheen book (which is amazing, by the way).
Anyway, she cheered up after the 750 Words and the rest of the day was just fine.
Nick Cave wrote something revelatory yesterday. I am shaken by it. It effected me deeply, in the way a bit of writing hasn’t in quite some time, and I am surprised it came from Nick, because it violates my internal narrative of Nick slowly descending into Boomerism and smallness, complaining about cancel culture and PC being the dominant problem on the planet, making a million albums that sound exactly the same. But yesterday, he said this:
Hope and optimism can be different, almost opposing, forces. Hope rises out of known suffering and is the defiant and dissenting spark that refuses to be extinguished. Optimism, on the other hand, can be the denial of that suffering, a fear of facing the darkness, a lack of awareness, a kind of blindness to the actual. Hope is wised-up and disobedient. Optimism can be fearful and false. However, there exists another form of optimism, a kind of radical optimism. This optimism has experienced the suffering of the world, believes in the insubordinate nature of hope and is forever at war with banal pessimism, cynicism and nihilism.
Honestly, he kind of lost me after that first sentence. But that first sentence: “Hope and optimism can be different… forces.” I don’t get that whole bit about his weird negative version of optimism, seems a bit too poetic and pinko to me. I’m not sensitive or artistic or smart enough to get that whole part.
But that first part: Hope and optimism are two different thing. I needed that. That makes a lot of sense to me. And I think that explains, to me, something that is a core part of my being. I almost always have hope. I rarely have optimism these days. But i can work with hope, hope keeps me going, hope keeps me fighting.
So, begrudging thanks, Nick.
Talk tomorrow, where I will thrill you with very interesting thoughts about NFTs. Sorry in advance.