A RIGHTER SUIT OF PAIL: DYSLEXIA AND THE OLD MAN

I love writing. That's why I love me some Lennon. Always have, always will. "Across the Universe" is one of the songs I'd liked played at my funeral. Yes, I know, I know -- I AM the guy who grumbles about bongos and gazoos at Mass and the modern version's degeneration, halfway through, from a solemn mystical ritual into a sort of ersätz Lion's Club meet-and-greet ("and now, back to our blood sacrifice! Take it away, Real Presence!").

But I love writing and Lennon nailed it with that song… when you close your eyes, fingers at rest on the keyboard, and you meditate the blank screen from impatient into expectant, "Across the Universe" so gracefully captures the way words flow, turn into colors and sound and shadowed faces, morph into gentle heart-beat pulses of fractured laughter and phrases from youth that turn out to have lingered in the attic for decades, waiting for the right moment to float by and whisper one last time, one last wink, one last wistful bid at relevance that lifts past you on a breeze scented by autumn leaves from a place that's no longer there -- unless you choose to bring it back to life now, dressed up as another but bearing the soul of that memory.

"Vanity of vanities -- all is vanity," is the usual translation of the opening in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and as usual it completely misses the profound depth of the Hebrew original. Literally, the verse reads: "Emptiness within emptiness -- the universe is nothing but emptiness."

The image painted is that of a black hole, a naked singularity within a vacuum whose existence is only a thought experiment in an attempt by ants to comprehend the atom. It's all so relative, but the absolute is found in the deeper apophatic break through darkness into that bliss discover atop Jacob's ladder by the Syrian mystic Dionysius, harmonized with otherworldly swirls by the Rheinlander mystic composer Hildegaard von Bingen, articulated to his mortal peril by her spiritual companion Meister Eckhart.

I loved Hebrew when I was younger; these days I have a brain resembling moldy pie crust and I can barely manage English.

Ah, but Lennon's legacy and work. Still, it turns me on.

To-wit:


Words are flowing out like
Endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip 
       away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy
Are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me.

One of the more interesting experiences of my life came late last year when I learned I was dyslexic.

Early fifties, numerous publications including legal works, literary review and award-winning fiction -- it took some convincing. Ironically, a lot of reading. A couple of tests. Consultations. Etcetera. (I am both a very simple and a very stubborn man ….)

Turns out a lot of published writers are dyslexic. One explained she had no idea until her publisher told her editing her copy was just too expensive (and she couldn't figure out why because it looked fine to her). Similarly, it took a bit of a crisis in my professional life for me to dig deep enough to find out.This was after a sharply increased incidence of dyslexic errors now thought by the medics to have resulted from a cardiac incident I had in 2010. There is still some exploration they want to do when I line up the money, looking for stroke-like after-effects in my brain. In short: like everyone else who knows me, they think I need my head examined.

An unknown but presumptively high percentage of dyslexics learn from pre-school forward how to adapt to the condition and mask it. It's a fascinating insight into human functioning. We are children, we have no experience and little comprehensible education to fall back on, and the world we experience becomes the foundation of our reality. For the dyslexic, that reality is one where mental trickery becomes second nature in order to achieve the same outward results as everyone around us. Here's the trick: when you're five, it never occurs to you that no one else in the room is amending teacher's instructions to achieve the same result.

And even when someone does discover the condition, they face two problems. By then, they may very well be (in fact, often are) in a position where the process and evaluation of information is a key factor and any weakness in that area is professional suicide. Also, the form(s) of dyslexia for which they have compensated over years, or decades, are not those familiar to the public. As I did until being educated on it this winter, most think dyslexia consists solely of a tendency to see individual letters backwards or rearranged within words.

The two strongest symptoms that I have include a tendency to type one word in place of an intended word. The word that goes on paper will usually (in this order) sound like the word intended (roughly 90 percent of the time), begin with the same letter (roughly 70 percent of the time), and be of roughly the same length give or take a couple of letters (roughly 50 percent of the time). As you can see, it's a rough science. And some displacements defy all three markers -- "are" substituted for "I" being an example -- or on a grander scale, involving a disarranged sentence. At times, it may involve a series of incomplete sentences in which (usually) the verbs simply aren't stated.

These errors don't show up on spell check and usually escaped my proof reading unless I begin adopting strategies others have developed for spotting them. I'm a pack rat who never throws anything away, especially now that it's so easily stored in this flashy little boxes that light up when you plug them into your computer, so I had all kinds of raw drafts of all kinds of writing to work with over the past months. The computer had been kind enough to date when they were last modified and I found that my incidence rate has gone from around one every four pages around 2004-09 up to a current rate of around two per page. I choose to find that fascinating rather than intimidating.

Meanwhile, I am finding that the rapid advance in voice-to-text tech may be my salvation. Vocalized displacement (for me) is minute. But when the ability to write with any real coherence is gone, I am gone. I will breath and eat and move but I won't exist as me anymore. I sit for hours at a time pouring thought into the machine for the day I may only see myself again by pulling up files.

The funniest thing about learning I was dyslexic is that I had joked for years about my "math dyslexia," only to learn there really was such a thing and I have it. I have never, ever been able to keep a sequence of numbers three or greater straight. I can not do it. I can read them, or hear them, and within five seconds (literally) I won't be able to recite them in proper order except by extreme concentration to the exclusion of all else, including breathing.

Turns out, this is called dyscalculia. In retrospect, it is at least hypothetically possible this explains why from 1st grade through graduate school through law school, I invariably got top grades in every other subject but failed math. I assumed up to now I was just stupid -- and there's no really solid reason to abandon that theory in general -- but it was a bit eye-opening to learn I was joking about having a condition that actually existed.

I am obviously a man who needs to read more.

I've thought quite a bit lately about an English politician whose zenith was reached in the late 1980s. He was a brilliant and erudite man. I followed him closely during a period of time where for job reasons I knew much more about the internal workings of British politics than our own. He was rumored next in line to replace Maggie Thatcher as PM (and indeed came within a hair's breadth).

Everyone inside British politics knew he was dyslexic -- very much so. Only a few of my experiences since 2010 match what he spent his life dealing with. His methods of masking it were masterful -- almost like a magician's sleight of hand -- and his aides were expert at playing their part in the effort. In retrospect, what strikes me is how much time and energy went into the charade, perhaps enough distraction to have kept him that quarter-step behind the man who beat him to the PM's post in the end.

Everyone knew he was the smartest man in the room in any gathering that did not involve Stevie Hawking. What was the point, really? No one doubted his competence in a crisis, his cool under pressure, his encyclopedic cartography of the pits, traps and quicksands of European politics during the period of time the Fulda Gap was the switch that could have launched the nuclear devastation of the world. And still, because we are human, the effort was demanded of him and he made it without complaint.

As a "senior statesman" figure, essentially retired to the House of Lords, he went on to gracefully haunt the back rooms of post-Soviet diplomacy, quietly assuming an unheralded, yet crucial, part in guiding a new generation of European leaders toward a democratization of eastern Europe that was accompanied (this is the tricky part) with stability and prosperity. The histories children are taught from now on will tell them the name of the man who beat him to that PM's post, but the world they live in is much better because of his efforts, not those of the man who won the race.

It took me a good hour proofing this, and still I bet somewhere above is yet another artifact of the way my decayed mind is killing my ability to do the one thing I have always loved, in which I have always found my refuge and myself. Still, that is not the end.

Life is a quick flash in a dark place but it is worth the light and the glimpse you get into the far corners of the Room. We die like moths in the closet of an abandoned house having ruined coats no one will ever wear again but it's worth the chew. Every man and every woman is a creator. We are not gods, and there is no god within us, but we may choose to shepherd ourselves toward points in mental space no one even saw before.

My God, I love the creative act. If I may paraphase Heidegger (and really isn't even the most literal translation of Sein und Zeit really just a paraphrase in the end): We are born as Everyone but die Alone. But this truth is joyful, not despondent. This is not loneliness; this is enlightenment. This is not dying; this is transcendence toward God. This is what my brothers and sisters of Eastern Orthodox mystic faith call "theosis," what the Yaqui shaman and his western academic disciples call "entheogenic consciousness." Turn off your "here-mind," relax and float downstream.

I love writing. That's why I love me some Lennon. Always have; always will. Endless rain into a paper cup.

It's all relative in flow. Focusing well enough to find the true absolute? Ah, that's the trick!


Kurt Stallings
Good Friday, 2012
Bedford, Texas

Man, I'm Gonna Miss Twinkies

That's it.

Just, gonna miss 'em. That's all.

Move along. Nothing to see here. Just a grown man crying over the jackboot slam-blasted remains of his heart.

Golden sponge cake. Creamy filling.

Just ... move along .... {sob}

Nuts, Nukes & Happy New Year

Fruit Cake for the Holidays Image (c) Matthew Bietz, 2007, 2011

Kim Jong-il having died, North Korea’s leadership recently confirmed its devotion to socialist scientific egalitarianism by searching through the entire population before its somber deliberation concluded that the best man to lead the country was none other than Kim Jong-Un, the “Dear Leader’s” son. Dad will be hard to replace. There are so few true Stalinists left, outside of the Weight Watchers Division of the State of Ohio’s Child Protective Services agency and the guys with the NCAA whose job is to make sure college athletes are never able to make an informed decision about their career options.

Kim Jong-Un follows in the path of his father, Kim Jong-il, who overcame enormous adversity in rising to the top from  humble beginnings as the son of Kim il-Sung, a dictator who spent roughly the last half of the last century as one of only nine men in North Korea able to eat on a weekly basis. The boy was born in the Soviet Union in 1941 where Kim il-Sung was fighting for Korea as a colonel in the Soviet Army, and he was named Yuri Irsenovich Kim.

Although his dad was an atheist, the child Yuri would later be born again, this time in 1942 as Kim Jong-il, on top of a mountain in Korea. His rebirth, taken as a sign that he was chosen for great things, was accomplished entirely on paper through the same sort of sympathetic magic the Fed practices on currency yet with none of the inflation.

Shortly after Born Again Kim rolled down the hill, Stalin gave half of Korea to his Dad and shortly after that passed over to where ever it is good Marxists bide the afterlife. (I have always assumed this to be the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where bureaucratic malaise meshes perfectly with eternity.)  His father frequently hinted that he thought the boy should succeed him and considered the expression of dissenting views as the best way to identify those individuals whose destiny was to serve on the army’s firing range as targets.

Kim il-Sung was called the "Great Leader" by his people as an expression of the love that filled them in place of actual food. He went on to build one of the world’s most impressive highway systems, albeit in a country where there are only nine cars on the road at any given time, eight of which are driven by somber men with hollow eyes masked by dark sunglasses, men gifted in making people wish they had never born.

Born-again Kim inherited this estate and by singular genius actually made the country worse, no mean feat in a nation that had already successfully deployed three of the four horseman of the apocalypse in a population control scheme resulting in the sort of menu the Donner Party enjoyed during the winter of 1846. Thankfully, pestilence, strife and famine covered the bases and he never had to saddle up the fourth horseman of war. God knows the boy wonder who became the “Dear Leader” was certainly prepared to do so.

His devotion to the arts was notorious. Or criminal, to be more precise. Kim Jong-il thought of South Korean actresses as his personal dating pool and dedicated substantial security resources to having them kidnapped and delivered to his chambers. It is unclear how this helped answer the problem of keeping people from starving to death in an economy where five grains of rice was a fat payday, but perhaps this is an example of the remarkable insight into social problems that made him “Dear.”

And now he is gone, this sterling rebuke against curmudgeons like myself who are skeptical of any sanguine ideal that world events are shaped by leaders of rational benevolence and caution. The press in Pyongyang has opined that his spirit was of such magnitude that it yet dwells upon the Earth, albeit invisible now, a thought that should strike terror in the heart of every South Korean actress alive, particularly if she’s seen that very disturbing Kevin Bacon - Rona Mitra scene in Hollow Man.

The Telegraph reports that the North Korean press has filmed birds gathered in mourning for the "Dear Leader;" the more astute observers suggest the silent chirp proves that all of nature is stricken with grief. One hopes this was based on the crows’ facial expressions and not a reading of their entrails or those of political prisoners.  In any event, this stunning miracle of birds sitting closely together in  trees has the world praying to the soul of the departed dictator that these magpies don’t go all Hitchcock on us before recovering their equilibrium.  The last time we saw anything like this was – hang on, let me think.

Thursday.

Last Thursday, it was, during a light shower – but those black jays wound up trolling for soggy crickets in the grass. God only knows what these Kim-minded birds will do if any South Korean actresses hove into view.

Now the curtain rises to show us a quiet boy fiddling with that big red button marked Apocalypse. He has already had the savvy to out-maneuver his brother Kim Jong-nam in claiming the mantle of leadership by avoiding the spectacle the latter created when arrested by the Japanese for trying to sneak into the country with a fake passport in the hopes of seeing Disneyland, doubtlessly intrigued by the thought of mingling in crowds of people in which no one was expected to die from starvation or disease for at least two or three hours.  Japan could not have been more surprised by this turn of events from a foreign leadership whose hobbies have included kidnapping ordinary Japanese citizens and holding them for years at a time for questioning. That’s how hard up for conversation one gets in a worker’s paradise.

In a country of skeletal citizens devoted to feeding the various appetites of the Imperial Family, small wonder one of Kim Jong-Un’s prized endorsements came from the household chef, who noted that the lad was “a big drinker” who “never admits defeat.” The implications for a nuclear power that hates Japan and is politically committed to extending the wonder of mass starvation to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula suggest that Roland Emmerich may have one more blockbuster catastrophic thriller to make “based on a true story.”

As for the United States, we must first determine whether Kim Jong-Un has the same preternatural level of grace with which nature gifted his father. The former famously bowled a perfect 300 in his first trip to the lanes.  He also shot 38 under par his first time on the links, a score including eleven holes-in-one that he officially reduced to five out of modesty, the first and only instance of socialist accounting being used to discount rather than inflate actual productivity.

If the young Un comes anywhere close, we’ll need to get in touch with the folks at Dos Equis and negotiate diplomatic representation for America by that “most interesting man in the world” guy as he may be the only jasper that can face the Un-leader across the table.  

And we must fervently hope Kim Jung-Un is not easily over-burdened. The list of titles and grants of authority he has graciously accepted upon the demands of his grateful nation suggest that deciding whether to launch nuclear missiles at Seoul or Tokyo will be only one of his daily activities over the coming decades whereas it is something folks living in those cities would hope receives undivided attention.

Ever the pessimist, I find it only a mixed blessing that he’ll have less immediately destructive distractions like pushing his technicians to develop missiles capable of nuking Los Angeles sooner than the three to five years currently anticipated. I’d drop a footnote here about the 2012 election but I am loathe to digress again and certain the Dear Reader will agree.

As a reminder that they are awaiting orders, though, North Korea’s rocket forces lobbed a couple of missiles out into the sea the day Kim Jung-il officially went astral.  Careful parsing of the earliest notices, and word around the water coolers in Langley, Virginia, suggest he died twice. He died once in what we historically minded fools call objective reality, and then again at a later hour or day with the bureaucratically approved finality that contemporary news media find curiously comforting. This was, perhaps, in honor of the manner of his birth.

One thing we already know, thanks to the golden transparency of the North Korean press, is that the little braniac now in command  was born with political, social, economic and cultural knowledge far in advance of the best tutors a nation could buy – at one point, they must have cut the daily rice ration per household to three grains just to pay for the lad’s Swiss education that so befit a servant of the working class. He did well enough without paying attention that North Koreans cried out in one voice spontaneously demanding a national holiday to honor him and his father humbly obliged. Meanwhile, the UnLeader has spent virtually every waking moment since birth drawing intricate pictures of Michael Jordan, with whom he is obsessed, leaving the actress population finally at peace.

In this case, then, the persimmon has fallen pretty far from the table. There is a new fixation on which this Communist dynasty is focused. Given no reason to assume that his twice baked daddy’s secret service hospitality tour guide unit has been disbanded, it seems wise to triple Mr. Jordan’s security detail for now. Hopefully, somewhere in the recesses of the Pentagon, someone is drawing analogous conclusions with respect to the sanctity of the city of Los Angeles.