foxtales

Poems and Prose by Tim Fox

  • Mind Games

    Ellen always tells me, “You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to interpret your dreams,” and she’s right. The unfinished school paper, the forgotten class, the phone that will not work … these are all classic dreams for someone who’s personality looks like this:

    But more abstract dreams and the unconscious have always fascinated me. I was interested in psychology in high school not because I wanted to help people but because I was interested in subliminal messaging. In 1972 Wilson Scott Key published his book Subliminal Seduction. He followed that up with Media Sexploitation (1976) and The Clam Plate Orgy (1982). I found all of these books in the St. Joseph Public Library, my second home, and devoured them, though they all had the same message: the media, especially advertisers, were using subliminal messaging to manipulate us into buying products.

    About the same time I was reading Key’s books, a movement was afoot to identify hidden messages in rock songs, especially songs by heavy metal bands. The main method for delivery was said to be “back-masking,” or engineering phrases into albums that could only be heard when played backward. I spent a lot of time trying to find hidden messages in songs like “Stairway to Heaven,” though I was skeptical about the idea of being affected in any way by a message you couldn’t hear.

    Subliminal?

    Key’s idea of subliminal messaging in advertising is now so obvious, and I never did find anything as scandalous as even “Please patronize our snack bar” hidden in “Stairway to Heaven.” As lyrics became more explicit in every way, the idea that any song needed a “hidden” message became absurd. When Ozzy Osbourne was taken to court because his song “Suicide Solution” allegedly influenced a teen to kill himself with the barely discernible phrase “Do it! Do it!” whispered over and over, the lawsuit ignored more obvious (again, played forward) lyrics like:

    Evil thoughts and evil doings
    Cold, alone you hang in ruins
    Thought that you’d escape the reaper
    You can’t escape the master keeper

    I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been reading Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Not the real thing, yet, just the introduction by the editors of the Barnes & Noble Classics edition I picked up kind of randomly last week. (I can’t leave a bookstore empty handed.) Freud started as a regular doctor with a special interest in neurological pathology, physical problems with identifiable physical causes. However, he became interested in physical problems that didn’t have physical causes. His research and thinking and studies led him to his revolutionary theories of the unconscious–for example, the id, the ego, and the superego.

    What interests me so far about Interpretation of Dreams is the idea that dreams are the mind’s way of sorting out what has happened during the day, and making sense of it by attaching the day’s events to similar events from our past. It’s much more nuanced than this, and again,  I’ve only read the introduction, but my understanding now is like this: Since the events rarely match up perfectly, the mind invents connections that seem to us bizarre, but in dream language make perfect sense. Freud’s addition is to say that those previous similar events are rooted in long-suppressed memories or traumas, so the things that we see in a dream–a lobster, for example–is not really a lobster, but a representation of, say, an angry parent. Even the most bizarre dreams make sense, it can just take a lot of imaginative work (Freud’s method was “free association”) to figure them out.

    Of course, Freud is not fashionable these days, even though late in life he did reject one of his kookier ideas, the “seduction hypothesis.” The answer to most psychiatric problems today is medication, augmented by some form of talking therapy. But Freud literally opened our minds to the reality that even today, with all of the technology we have at our disposal, our minds are universes we will likely never fully understand. We look into the night sky and see the void, and we look into the void and see ourselves.

     

    writefoxllc

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  • You Gotta Move

    It’s Day 5 of Gray and Gloomy here in the ‘Lou, and the wind is picking up and the rain is falling and the temperature is falling, so my thoughts turn internal.

    Not that that should be news to anyone. I am inwardly focused to a fault, and yet curiously concerned with the image I project to the world. Maybe that’s the bane of all inwardly focused people. We focus inwardly because we internalize what we think the world is thinking about us, which of course is never accurate–either the world’s perception or our own perception of the world’s perception.

    But I digress.

    When I included “Move” on my list of verbs to focus on in 2018, I was thinking “Exercise,” but I didn’t want to say “Exercise” because that’s such a cliche and so narrow. “Move” is better because it can include all sorts of progress and change and is really easy to do. It could just be get off the couch and do something, like clean the basement–which literally moves things but also causes your emotions to move as you realize your kids don’t care about the stuff they used to care so much about, and that so little of the stuff you once thought important is useful.

    However, when I wrote it I really was thinking “Exercise,” because it’s been a tough few months for me and exercise–which I am somewhat obsessed with because, again, internalization of outside perceptions. Here is how it has gone:

    Early November: An unusually warm and windy day. I went for a run. The street cleaners were out picking up leaves and mulching them on site. Running west from Kingshighway on Murdoch, I saw a huge cloud of leaf dust hovering around the orange mulching truck at the top of the hill. I quick shifted and ran further north to Devonshire, but not, as it turned out, far enough. By the time I got home I was hacking, and that hack turned into sneezing and wheezing that lasted for days.

    In early December, finally recovered from that, I had my best exercise week in ages. I lifted weights, I rode the bike three days, I went to Pilates, I went to two classes at the Y. Then, sometime over the weekend, I lifted a 50-pound bag of kitty litter out of the trunk of the car the wrong way and twisted my back. The pain increased until I finally went to Urgent Care after passing out in the middle of the night. The Urgent Care people were less interested in my back than in the passing out. Aneurysm? Heart attack? Stroke? The list of potential catastrophes I thought myself too young for grew as I waited for test results, all negative. It was just a kitty-litter-related back sprain.

    It took weeks for that to clear up, and in fact it still sticks a little when I sneeze or cough or move the wrong way, but it’s mostly gone. But then I got a cold. And then it went away. Mostly. And then it came back. One night it was keeping me awake and I felt so bad I went to Walgreen’s at 3 a.m. for Extra Strength Nyquil. And it’s still lingering, the sniffling and the draining and the yuck.

    Where is this going, this tale of vanity and mortality awareness?

    Well, I’m not sure, but it seems as good a time as any to experiment with placing a video on my page: Mississippi Fred McDowell performing a song about humility and mortality awareness that I grew up with as a Rolling Stones song, “You Gotta Move”:

     

     

    writefoxllc

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  • Thought I’d Something More to Say

    For Christmas 1981 or ’82, my sister gave me Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. That New Year’s Day it snowed, and snowed and snowed and snowed, and I remember sitting on the beanbag in her bedroom, listening.

    It was easy to imagine–as the heartbeat fade-in that starts the album segued into the swirling steel guitar of “Speak to Me” into the comforting drone of “Breathe” into the synth-and-sound-effect laden “On the Run”–that I was not on a bean bag in my sister’s bedroom in the house I hated but was, in fact, traveling through space, the snowflakes outside the window gliding by against the gray sky like the stars when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperdrive.

    Most of the album was familiar to me. It was in heavy rotation at album-rock station KY102 out of Kansas City, especially the second side, which opens with “Money.” But the one song I had never heard on the radio before was the best–“The Great Gig in the Sky,” featuring Clare Torry’s wordless but amazing vocal performance.

    In fact, I now think that most of the best parts of the album, which has sold some 45 million copies since its 1973 release, are wordless. Not one for subtlety, lyricist Roger Waters sort of put it all out there. The themes of Dark Side of the Moon, most cohesively expressed on the first side of the album, are time, death, and futility, all neatly summed up in these lines from “Breathe”:

    Run, rabbit run
    Dig that hole, forget the sun
    And when at last the work is done
    Don’t sit down it’s time to start another one
    For long you live and high you fly
    But only if you ride the ti    de
    And balanced on the biggest wave
    You race toward an early grave.

    In case you missed it, the next song with lyrics–introduced by a small orchestra of clanging bells (“Time”! Get it?!)–opens:

    Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
    You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
    Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
    Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

    And closes:

    Every year is getting shorter, never see to find the time
    Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
    Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
    The time is gone the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

    No, not subtle, but if you’re 15 or 16 years old and living in a place you desperately want to escape, and if you like to write half pages of scribbled lines, words like that hit home.

    Whether wittingly or not, Dark Side of the Moon laid out the themes that would obsess Waters over the course of the next two studio albums–time, death, futility, and, increasingly, stardom. His lyrics grew darker as the band transformed from perfectionist studio geeks to megastars on the heels of Dark Side‘s success. Had they found themes that gave their lives meaning, or simply a formula for giving disaffected ’70s youth what they wanted?

    I often think of Pink Floyd as pioneers of the “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me” genre, in which musicians find it increasingly difficult to write about much beyond their miserable experience as incredibly successful musicians. From Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty to Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” (and Metallica’s remake of the same), the late ’70s were about decrying your fate as the overpaid, overdoped, and oversexed musician who has to turn it on every night for the fans. This is still a standard trope of rock music.

    Pink Floyd perfected and crystallized the genre in their 1979 double album, The Wall. I spent most of the second half of my junior year of high school in my sister’s bedroom after school sleeping while The Wall rolled on endlessly on 8-track tape, over and over and over again, day after day. I now recognize, with hindsight and 30 years of mental health crises behind me, that I must have been clinically depressed at the time–and that The Wall made it worse. Still, at the time I found the album cathartic and complementary to my increasingly dark and cynical worldview.

    But again, not an album of subtlety, and if you didn’t get the point of lyrics like:

    So ya
    thought ya
    might like to
    go to the show
    to feel the warm thrill of confusion
    that space-cadet glow
    I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine
    Pink isn’t well, he stayed back at the hotel
    and they sent us along, as a surrogate band
    and we’re going to find out where you fans really stand

    British director Alan Parker made a big-budget half animated, half filmed movie to drive it home. (As a friend much later told me, “The only good thing about The Wall was Bob Geldoff in the movie.”)

    In the end though, it’s the music and the sound effects  and the random voice overs that still endear me to Pink Floyd. Listening to Dark Side of the Moon again this afternoon, some 35 years later, I finally realized what others have realized before me–that Clare Torry’s improvised performance on “The Great Gig in the Sky” tells the whole story of the album. Her cries begin in a combination of joy and terror, as at birth; build and become more frenetic as adult responsibilities and banality intrude; soften as old age sets in; and finally die, in a whisper, as will we all.

    I guess you don’t need all those words when you’ve nailed the sound.

    writefoxllc

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  • Resolutions: 10 Verbs for 2018

    For this new year’s resolutions, I’m giving up on quantification (“Read X books a month”) and abstraction (“Live more simply”). Instead, I just have list of 10 verbs to focus on off and on throughout the year–nothing to complete, no real goal, and no particular order:

    Think

    Read

    Move

    Laugh

    Breathe

    Love

    Write

    Focus

    Perspectivate

    Hope

    writefoxllc

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  • The Incident

    Because Monday is a holiday this week, I’m taking a break from my usual Monday memoir piece. What follows is a kind of Christmas story–except it doesn’t take place at Christmas, or even in winter. I wrote it for school in the fall of 1984 and introduced it to my family at Christmas that year. And because of that, it makes me think of Christmas.

    Everyone thought it was hilarious, even those who hadn’t been born yet when it takes place. I didn’t intend it to be funny. I had in mind instead an epiphany, like that which occurs at the end of James Joyce’s short story “Araby”: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

    Well, that was the idea.

    I offer it here exactly as I wrote it 33 years ago. It doesn’t sound like me now. Too many words, too self-conscious, too much qualification. But I’ll revisit it, in time, for the memoir project. Because I do see it, still, as an epiphanal moment, though not quite for the reasons outlined below.

    The Incident

    My sister had her first baby when she was seven years old. It was about twelve inches long, weighed approximately two pounds, had skin with the texture of latex, a shock of blond nylon hair, and two red lips, permanently puckered to accept “milk” from a bottle. Her eyes were porcelain blue, adn stared vacantly into space, unless you were to lay her down, at which time they would snap shut. No Cabbage Patch Kid, this doll. This was the real thing. It was a beautiful creature, and my sister loved it. She loved it so much, in fact, that I sometimes suspected that perhaps she paid more attention to it than she did me. And that is why, in the summer of 1968, I decided to throw her baby out of the car window, along with the bottle she used to feed the little thing.

    Traditionally, family vacations are never much fun. It is during such excursions that you begin to notice the little quirks and peculiarities of others that just drive you up the wall. For example, it is on family vacations that you finally get sick and tired of your little brother always having his finger up his nose. The situation forces you to choose one of two options: you can fight him, or you can ignore him. Since ignoring someone in the back seat of a station wagon is easier said than done, the first option seems most logical. Unfortunately, fights in cars always lead to something ugly being said or done. After such a fight, there is an eerie silence that hangs in the air. Neither the hum of the air-conditioner nor the drone of the radio can dispel that silence. Something climactic is bound to happen, and something climactic always does.

    Situations such as the above have occurred repeatedly on my family’s vacations. the summer of 1968 was no exception. We were headed for Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. My memory of the incident is, to say the least, sketchy. However, I can safely assume that we had been on the road for several hours prior to the incident. The actual details of what raised the pressure in that car to such a climactic point will never be known. All I can remember are various scenes, as if someone had filmed the incident in slow-motion and randomly rearranged the frames. My sister was being more obnoxious than usual, hiding behind her little doll. I was aware, as well as a two-year-old can be aware, that the quickest and most devastating reaction from her could be solicited by threatening the thing closest to her physical being, the doll. She had several dolls, but the one she brought on the trip was her favorite, because it drank from a bottle, and, consequently, wet itself.

    My sister was very affectionate toward the doll, and I was jealous of it. So, somewhere in the Badlands of South Dakota, I finally grew tired of being replaced by an artificial human. I was real. I bled when I was cut, I cried when I was sad, I smiled, when I was happy. I, too, could wet myself. I personified reality; it personified fantasy.

    Dreamlike memories of the incident haunt me. The window is down. My sister is screaming. My mother is scolding me. My father is not saying a word. Knowing him as I do, I would assume that he is smiling to himself at the absurdity of the situation. I, in the meantime, am crying, as the baby bounces off the pavement, the bottle rolling after it in vain pursuit. . . .

    It can be said, I suppose, that my little tale of a childhood incident of long ago pales in the face of what the rest of the world was going through in 1968. However, I believe that the incident, and the guilt that resulted from it, has had some effect on my psyche. Why else would something that happened sixteen years ago still be lodged in my mind? I have not forgotten the incident, my sister has not forgotten the incident, and it goes without saying that her baby has not forgotten the incident. In fact, to this day, when I look at my sister’s old dolls, the eyes no longer stare vacantly into space, but stare at me with a vengeful glare. I will never go back to South Dakota.

    writefoxllc

  • In Loco Parentis

    A while ago a colleague asked me what being a parent was like. I was having a bad parenting day and immediately said, “Oh, it’s awful!” She laughed, but later I felt bad about it. What if being a parent was her dream? What if she’d been struggling for years to be a parent and was broken on the wrack of infertility or adoption bureaucracy? I apologized later, but she said, “No, it was perfect! I appreciated your honesty!” In that spirit, I present this entry.

    Being a parent is showing up on good days and bad.

    Being a parent is accepting that you may not get to do everything you had imagined for your life–at least not now. Or maybe ever. And that’s OK.

    Being a parent is understanding that you may feel like your heart has been ripped out and stomped on, but that it’s just your ego and your false belief that you can control everything that has been ripped out and stomped on.

    Being a parent is realizing that your relationship with your spouse or partner has to change, and the change may not always be what you would prefer, and that’s OK, too.

    Being a parent is knowing that some days are just going to suck and suck until you have nothing left, and then they’re going to suck some more. But you’ll survive.

    Being a parent also is knowing that the days that suck for you also suck for your kids, and maybe even worse and for reasons that they can’t begin to articulate or understand.

    Being a parent is looking at photos of happier, more innocent days and believing that those happy kids and babies and parties happened, and that the present doesn’t diminish the fact that they happened but just sets the joy in sharper relief.

    Being a parent is grasping that bad things that happen to you don’t just happen to you. They happen to you and your kids and your spouse or partner.

    Being a parent is also grasping that your happiness is not the sine qua non of your existence, nor that of your kids. It’s the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee of happiness, that Jefferson promised.

    Being a parent is being happy with the fact that happiness is a gift, and one that often comes in strange and unexpected wrapping. Be surprised. Be happy. And don’t let the fact that it won’t last–because nothing good or bad ever does–detract from the joy in the gift you have found.

    writefoxllc

  • Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams

    As anyone who has read my blog over the past year or so knows, I try to keep my posts short while I explore the deeper meaning of things. A music review or thoughts about running are portals to ways I make sense of the world around me.

    Since I launched the blog in 2016, it has been an on-again, off-again project. When I was not working full time last summer, I posted a lot. When I started working full time at WashU, my posts grew more infrequent. Well, I’m back to not working full time, and one of the benefits of semi-employment is relaunching my blog as I relaunch my Write Fox business.

    The past 15 months have been months of tremendous trial for me and my family, much of it my own doing and responsibility. Perhaps some of those details will be gently revealed in the fullness of time, as will things about my past as I work on my memoir project, but for now I want to mention three books I will be reading to guide me on the way. I believe they will inform things I write here.

    One of my deep interests now is the line between explaining our actions and excusing them. I hope to gain insight on this puzzle by reading Daniel Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will. If consciously controlling our actions is an “illusion,” what role does personal responsibility play in our daily lives? Are we machines, responding to our accidents of birth, quirks of our upbringing, our race, our social class, and so on? Wegner’s 2002 book takes a scientific approach to these questions; I am hoping that 15 years later he has much to teach me, despite the all-out assault on science and rationalism currently under way.

    Last week I went to a bookstore hoping to find books by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. I have been interested in existentialism’s challenges to our assumptions about meaning, existence, and what it means to exist (or not) since high school. The chain book store I went to (sorry, friends at Left Bank! I was out of my usual flight path) didn’t have anything by Sartre, but they did have At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. It appears to be a less weighty introduction to Sartre’s thought and that of his contemporaries, like Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. My hope is it will refresh my memory of the basic tenets of existentialist philosophy and prepare me to dive into weightier things like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

    Finally, Marcel Proust’s Swan’s Way has been on my nightstand for a long time. I started this novel once, got distracted, and didn’t get back to it. My hope is that as I meditate on my own childhood experiences and how they shaped who I am and what I have done, both good and bad, I will find inspiration, recognition, and parallels in Proust’s “novel of childhood.”

    So here’s to new adventures, professional and otherwise.

    writefoxllc

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  • Sorting It All Out: The Many Meanings of Life

    Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

    The answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is elusive for at least two reasons. The first is obvious: there is no one meaning. What life means is up to each individual to determine. But more importantly, it’s elusive because people tend to look for it where it does not exist–in the future.

    Life does not gain meaning from things we haven’t done, but from what we have left behind. For example, over the past 25 years or so, I’ve edited a lot of books. Probably at least 100, I ‘m terrible at keeping track. Those books are among the relics of my life. They are things that would not exist, at least not in their present form, without my life.

    For me, the books are things no one can take away. Even if I developed Alzheimer’s disease and forgot that I had ever edited a book, those books would still exist. Even if all books were banned and burned, they will have still affected those who read them–helped with a research project, answered a question–and so part of the meaning of my life lies there. And of course the books matter hardly at all compared to the impact my life has had on Kate, Maggie, Ellen, and all of my other friends and family.

    I’m also beginning to realize the importance of gratitude. Generally I’m grateful for things I have in what I think of as the “near-present,” because the “present-present” doesn’t exist; as soon is it is here, it is past. I’ve been grateful for things I anticipate, such as getting a new job, or things in the past, but I think most of what I appreciate is in the near present–a place to live, running water, good health. Being grateful and remembering the things no one can take away helps me be more focused in the near-present where life is happening.

    And what about those who truly believe, after carefully and honestly considering every moment of their life, that they have nothing that no one can take away, nothing to be grateful for? They may be capable of the most important gratitude of all: gratitude for having nothing to lose.

     

     

    writefoxllc

  • Running Home

     

    Limestone retaining walls add to the Parkway’s charm and mystique.

    I’ve done my share of complaining about my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, since I moved away at 18, but there has always been one thing that redeemed it. Today, I’m adding another.

    Designed in 1918, the city’s Parkway–a 26-mile stretch of greenspace and curving boulevard connecting Krug Park on the north side to Hyde Park on the south–has retained its dignity and utility for nearly a century. It is a place of beauty, mystery, and grace. You’re never sure what’s around the next bend, and it’s always a surprise–trees, a creek, a gently rising swell of green. Driving or biking it is still a thrill.

    The house I grew up in backs up to the Parkway. It was part of our backyard growing up and the heart of every season, especially summer and winter. A few tenths of a mile south of our house was a railroad berm, and when I was six or seven, not long after we moved in, I would excitedly watch the train run by in the evening from our back porch.

    Sculptures add a sense of motion and whimsy.

    By the time I was 12 or so, the train had stopped running, and the track, now abandoned, became overgrown. The wooded sides of the berm on the south side flanking Agency Road was good for beer-can hunting and bushwhacking and imagining the lives that had gone before. The tracks disappeared while I was away at college, the trees largely cleared away, the berm graded , and a biking trail installed.

    This morning I ran part of that trail, and I began to see St. Joseph as beautiful again. The sun hadn’t yet risen completely. The backs of houses I could see on the south side of the trail, houses that look sad and rundown to me from the street, looked resilient and stately perched on their generous lawns. I was surprised how far south Fairview Golf Course on the north side of the trail ran, and how far east. It seemed to go almost to the Belt Highway, about a mile and a half from where I had gotten on the trail. The smell of lilacs and trees and new fence mingled in the air. Squirrels and bunnies scurried. Everything was green.

    Looking south down part of the trail and “our” creek. Our backyard is behind the far trees on the right side.

    I have no plans to live in St. Joseph again–I mean, no plans, ever–but I was happy to see that the old town can still do some things right–things that add beauty and value to an otherwise struggling outpost of the Old West.

     

    writefoxllc

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  • Life, Unqualified

    Selfie-portrait with Kate, Summer 2015

    As a writer, qualifiers are useful. Words and phrases like “usually,” “almost always,” or “mostly” buy room for the likelihood that a statement will not always be true.

    Last night, as I often do, I was journaling about my failings of the day. Usually at the end of such an entry I’ll write, “What’s wrong with me?” But for some reason last night, I decided to write “What’s right with me?” instead. And I started a list.

    But as I wrote, I found myself wanting to qualify everything. “I am usually a survivor.” “I am a somewhat successful writer.” “I am starting to let go of the past.” And I thought: what if I wrote without the qualifiers?

    So I started writing flat-out statements. “I am generous.” “I am forgiving.” “I don’t hold grudges.” “I’m a great dad.”

    The shift was palpable. Without the qualifiers, the statements felt empowering. Writing them was empowering. Life without qualifiers felt good.

    I am. Period.

     

    writefoxllc

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