EMPATHY: THE PROBLEM WITH WRITING

I've seen where actors sometimes have problems shedding the skin of characters they've played on screen.  They get too involved with a character, then have trouble shedding that skin when it's time to go back to real life.  As a writer, I understand that.  Sometimes you get more than involved because the character skin you wear fits tight and is hard to shed.  Perhaps you use a pseudoymn, a pen name, and you assume that character while you write.  It's more than just a change of names; it's a change of personality to a certain degree.  And then there's the character in the book, or perhaps several characters, you have a hard time with.  Maybe you don't like the character, the bad guy, but he's important to the plot, and you've got to stick with him.  And you need to understand him.  I've known about this empathy problem for a long time because I've gone through months of depression after finishing a book, or I've been angry for a while.  The reverse of that can be true: you could come out of it feeling good, even enlightened and euphoric for a while.

As of late I've been working on a book about my father.  He died over 30 years ago, but he left behind a lot of unpublished poems, stories, little bons mots that I thought were worth a life of their own in print.  I gathered together some information and started digging through it.  At the outset I planned on doing a book of collected poems and short prose without much in the way of annotation, but that wasn't possible.  For the book to be interesting, engaging, and worth the effort, it would require some history of the man . . . and some of my observations about him.  That mean doing some research because I didn't know a lot about his background.

He was born and raised in the eastern Oregon town of Burns.  I'd been there once as a seven year old, and didn't remember much.  I didn't know either of my paternal grandparents because they were either dead or near death when I was born.  I knew a few of my uncles and aunts because they had visited with us, and I knew only one of my first cousins.  Worst of all, I didn't really know my own father.  I grew up in a house with him, knew a lot about his personal life, but I didn't really know him until I read his stories and poems.  In doing that, I got to know the man quite a bit better, and there's a problem with that.  I buried him in 1983 but mostly in a haze of confusion and grief . . . and then I went on with life and worked hard at not thinking about it.  And now, I'm faced with having to bury him again, and this time wide-eyed and knowing what was lost.

The upside of all this is an awakening of who I am and where I came from.  I'm on the one hand sad and depressed, but my head is full of images of my father as a youngter, young adult, and until I got to know him as a father.  I'm piecing together his story, and through his own words, I got inside his head a little.  I never read his poetry before, and I should have.  We all say in print things we sometimes can't say in person.  I should've read it before, but better late than never.  I'll get back to being me before long, but at the present I'm still dealing with images - those pictures of the mind that can damn sure hold your attention for a while.  And even though it's a bit troubling, I don't mind at all.

Burning History

Smoke gets in your eyes when you're burning history, papers you've kept for a long time.  This week I fired up my big kiva in the back yard and started burning boxes of stuff that's been stored in my little house out back for a long time.  God only knows  how many moves those papers have made over the years because some of them were fifty years old.  But they're up in smoke now, gone, and so is a little bit of me.  A lot of me was in those papers, some of them left over from college and graduate school . . . and some from my 35 years of teaching college courses.  I watched them burn with mixed emotions, but I'm just doing what someone would've done in a few years when I'm gone. 

I don't know why I saved all that stuff long after I had no need for it, but I've got a feeling it was because they may well have saved me.  To say that I struggled as a teenager and even through my twenties would be an understatement.  My parents agonized over what would become of me.  At twenty, I was going nowhere - had barely graduated from high school, showed no inclination that I'd amount to much.  Restlessness was my worse enemy, my demon, that thing that drove me to do some self-destructive things.  I loved fast cars, even faster women, and booze.  A car accident when I was 21 almost took me out, left me with injuries I'd never fully recover from.  What do you do with a kid like that?  Well, you make a college professor out of him.

My parents and a select few other people refused to give up on me.  I managed to get a couple of years of college behind me, then quit for a while to work are several jobs.  Back in college finally, I did much better and that's because I finally learned how to study.  I fell in love with history and political science, ended up getting a college degree and a M.A., finished my residency and course work on a Ph.d., and then went to work as a college professor.  I stuck with that occupation for almost 35 years, but I didn't calm down until my forties.  I stopped drinking, went through a divorce, and remarried during the decade of my forties.  Looking back, I'm a slow learner about some things, but life as an academician saved me.  I'm still using my education in retirement, perhaps more now than ever before.  Books have been my life, and now I'm writing them.

But I burned a lot of information over the past few days - lecture notes, research material, class lecture notes, and other stuff that allowed me to get the education I needed.  I don't need them now, but I sure needed what they gave me.  They served a purpose, and they were little more than remembrances of where I've been and how I got where I am now.  Stored safely here in my files are other papers I'll never burn.  I don't need the warmth of a fire that much, and sometimes it's good to keep around enough things to remind you that history is important . . . especially when it's your history.