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Happiness |
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Copyright © 2000 by Dave Badtke |
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On the one hand, there was a wonderful party hosted by Gwenn Connolly in her sculpture studio near Arts Benicia, followed nine days later by a discussion and reading in Christine Mayhall’s Bookshop Benicia. These were great events. People got together and talked and read and had a terrific time. But there were also a handful of newspaper articles, some of which included pictures which couldn’t help but emphasize my post-middle-aged, bearded, thin-haired self that only roughly approximates a much younger, slimmer person who would be able to remember the name of the person he just met if only he could get his hands on that gene drug—you know, the one they wrote about in the newspapers that extends the life of fruit flies by a factor of two. And the newspaper articles caused me to be introspective, especially when I read about me doing this, about me doing that. After all, I thought, I’m publishing the Carquinez Review to explore community in print. What’s all this stuff about me? Personally, I’d prefer it if someone would just review ONE. If they sat down for a few hours and read ONE from front to back, they could then say something really nice about it. Something like: “I read ONE and felt years younger. When I woke up the next morning, my hair had grown back, my waist was smaller, and my wife actually smiled at me.” Or: “Reading ONE reminded me of the tea parties I had when I was a young girl. The next morning, I knocked on all my neighbors’ doors and invited them for breakfast. Everyone called in sick to work. We had a grand time. Our lives were changed forever.” Despairing that a modest review of ONE might not be forthcoming, something that might suggest that ONE would be just the thing for all who bought “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” or that ONE was as compelling as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, I decided to find solace in Jonathan Lear’s “Happiness, Death and the Remainder of Life”, where I read on page 106 that: ‘According to Aristotle, the goal of all human striving is happiness; according to Freud, ‘the aim of all life is death.’” Great, I thought. Just the kind of advice I need. On the one hand I published ONE because I want to be happy. Am I supposed to be happy when I see a picture in the paper of this strange man who doesn’t look at all the way I feel? On the other hand, I did ONE because I’m going to die. Terrific! Thinking that there must be more to Lear’s thesis—after all, he’s a well-respected philosopher and psychologist—and desperately seeking some hope that Fall ONE will be followed by Winter, or at least Spring TWO, I read on, a balding, 36-inch-waist-challenged man straddling the gulf between happiness and death. But the going was rough, with ontological explanations following on the heals of protests against teleological conveniences, when on page 114, I stumbled on two key words that would set me free, the yin and yang of philosophical truth, the basketball moves of psychology: swerve and break. Could it be so simple? Since “[t]he space of reasons is always and everywhere susceptible to being bent out of shape,” we swerve when we correct “…distortions in our thinking—as when we recognize that all the efforts we have been putting into getting that new car, new house, new job, new man, new woman”—new publication!—“could not possibly yield the happiness we have been anticipating.” For example, what if a reviewer reads ONE and doesn’t like it? I mean, I know it’s unlikely, but what if he had a fight with his wife or had an accident or didn’t like the name Carquinez, something like that? Then he might actually say something bad about ONE. I shudder and swerve to avoid my dark thoughts and break with a new realization. I experience a petit mort, a little death, an epiphanic moment when everything becomes clear, when I finally understand what I must do. Even if I can’t get a reviewer to read ONE all the way through, I’m going to read it again myself. I’ll read the wonderful stories and poetry, the personal recollections and history, the tour of hidden Benicia, the stories about the artists, maybe this time reading ONE from back to front. The heck with the reviewers. Anyway, the day after reading ONE is always the best: My waist is smaller and there’s a little more hair on top of my head. |
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- Dave Badtke can be contacted at: www.CarquinezReview.com; Dave@Badtke.com; PO Box 763, Benicia, CA 94510; or by calling 707-745-5540.
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