"Bobbe, I must point out that fitting in with us does not say anything good about your sanity."
–Mushtaq Ali
The great philosopher, teacher and activist Booker T. Washington once said “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” I have to say that I never felt close to the saying until today. I didn’t get it. In the orphanage, I could tell you that hate is a powerful thing, it can keep you alive. It can be what gets you through the bad times. It can keep you warm, and it can be a motivational factor in your life.
I was too young to understand that it came with a price as well. At the time, I didn’t realize I was giving anything up at all because I had never experienced what else there could be.
If you have been following this blog for the past couple of months, you can’t help but to have noticed that I indulged in an internet flame-war recently. Because it involved a subject and a human being that I dearly love who was insulted, and because it came from a camp that claimed top be the last word in this art, I jumped in with both feet and dredged up the most hateful part of me that was still around from the old days. I don’t like doing things the way Mushtaq often counsels “Assessing the situation and being patient”, or the way Steve Perry advises, “Take the high road, Kid”. I’m too impetuous to listen to Todd and Tiel when they tell me you can’t wrassle a pig. Those two have been fighting this same war since time out of mind, they of all people would know best. But lines were crossed, words were said, and before I knew what I was doing I had fired both barrels.
If you don’t already know it, take this as good advice: Some things shouldn’t be dug back up if you’ve spent half your life trying to bury them. Actions have consequences, there is no exception to this rule.
The only way I could behave like this is if I allowed the hatred anger to overcome me again. So I opened the doors to my soul and freed the demon, giving him carte blanche. After two weeks of political infighting and saying some of the vilest things on both sides, I was exhausted. I had neglected everything else in my life in favor of this bullshit, and when I finally came back to my senses things felt…Different.
A day or so later I sat back down in front of my computer, hoping to pick right back up where I had left off. Turned it on, sipped my coffee and stared at the screen.
And stared.
And stared.
Nothing. It was gone. The creative reservoir that had sustained me and seemed like an endless supply flooding out of my mind was now bankrupt, I couldn’t think of a goddam thing. I have about 30 loosely typed ideas and outlines set since I fully committed myself to being a writer. I poured over them for a few days & just couldn’t pick the track back up. I began to panic, where was all that inspiration I had a few weeks ago??!? My mind had turned to mush, apparently the inherent rage I felt had somehow suffocated the other part of me that thinks clearly and constructs rational thought processes.
Shit. I was just picking up momentum with this thing, too.
I write out of a kind of split personality, one part of me is seeing what’s happening at the moment & the other is projecting several events ahead. Sometimes I have to scribble like crazy to capture all of the essence to hammer it out coherently later. And now I couldn’t get in touch with either side at all, when they were both screaming in my ear just a few weeks ago.
I moped around for about a week, not quite knowing what to do with myself. Half heartedly scanned a few journals, walked around the sci fi museum, thumbed through a cookbook. I just couldn’t raise that part of me back from the dead.
Purely by coincidence, I happened to gravitate towards the comfort food of my library; The Dune series, the Jungle Books, a Canticle for Liebowitz, a few others. These are books I can re-read anytime anywhere and not grow tired of them. As I sat flipping through one of the space opera collections I had, something weird happened: I started imagining a separate series of events in the same universe, along the same timeline, but out of the normal frame. I remember thinking “I’d really like to know more about this place, but the author doesn’t tell us much that doesn’t pertain to the main characters.” I started imagining how life in this world would go down for the characters in the book, and absentmindedly made some food, taught a class and walked back to the video rental store with the idea blooming in my head. Before I went to bed that night, I started typing a few notes to myself. “Just get the basic principle and outlay done & I’ll go to bed” I thought.
And then the walls melted away. When my wife’s alarm went off the next morning, I was still typing. I was back.
I don’t know if there is a God or not, but I took the past few weeks as divine intervention: Don’t do that shit again.
I still accumulate my share of internet trolls. But as far as engaging them to any degree, brother, you can count me out. I stand to lose too much from this work that I feel passionately about, this martial art that I love, this life that I live. I don’t want to work for other people anymore, I want to be a writer. I can’t do that if I can’t write.
With the current influx of online trolls cyber-picketing me, I have had to take a few precautionary measures. I want to give good material, but not everybody who comes to you for knowledge is willing or ready to receive it. When you’re in the public eye, even to the limited degree that I am, you are a target. You’re a focal point for those who either disagree with your point of view or simply walk around with an axe to grind, and in recent years I have seen this go from bad to unbelievable over nothing more than the use of terminology in a language that neither party can speak fluently.
If you allow yourself to get caught up in it, then you’ll never see the end. Never. I know some people whose lives have been wasted trying to defend their name and opinions online, marriages dissolved, money lost, all while trying to fend off the online barbarians.
Martial arts and the internet is a troubled marriage at best. The thing is, in a typical public setting, a person with no experience or training wouldn’t walk up to a high ranking master and start insulting him, or badger him with an endless barrage of questions. But with the advent of the internet the plebes are no longer regulated to the kids’ table. Anybody with a keyboard and an agenda can sling crap at whomever is in the current crosshairs.
Charlton Heston read a negative review of the movie “
Laurence Olivier is reported to have replied; “Good reviews or bad reviews; My dear boy, you must learn to ignore them all.”
5 comments:
See, contrary to popular opinion, you can in fact learn the hard lessons.
The kewl thing is, by getting this one, you send the trolls into the outer darkness to gnash their teeth and gnaw their knuckles in vane.
It would be cheap of us to say we told you so. But that's never stopped us...
What this proves is that you write from the heart. Not everyone does, or at least not all the time. But for those who do, you damage the heart, you damage the writing.
It would be cheap of us to say we told you so. But that's never stopped us.
What this proves is that you write from the heart. Not everyone does, or at least, not all the time. But for those of us who do, you damage the heart, you damage the writing.
It's good to hear. You were letting them run your life and control your creativity. Why give something precious to a bunch of shits like them?
Hey Bobbe, we've all crossed this line at some point. Some of us not really that long ago. Don't go thinking you're not average (well in this respect at least).
I still get pissed but now I just let it go a lot faster than before.
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