I considered myself an agnostic until I was in my thirties, and yet as a fledgling adult I found myself seeking Answers. I remember buying three or four neatly-bound little chapbooks of Hindu teachings, which I must have obtained by mail order. These dense little booklets often had a lightly-textured card-stock front cover. The authors had Indian surnames, and usually two or three initials instead of a first name. Each chapbook had a title like Wisdom Practices Which Elevate Life, sometimes embossed in shiny letters, and sometimes printed in dignified block type.
At that time, I knew as much about Hinduism as I did about the finer points of glass-blowing, but I'd sit down with one of these little chapbooks read a paragraph carefully, slowly, and consider the meaning. Generally I got the sense that I should be less grasping and self-centered and think of the greater good By elevating my mind I'd bring my energy or my spirit or something up to a higher plane and... Well, I was a bit vague about it all but it felt good to know I was at least trying to be a better person.
Then there was the day I read something that didn't make me feel good at all. The subject was the foolishness of over-investing in one's posterity. There was strong emphasis on he futility of wasted effort -- specifically, striving not to be forgotten, to try and make a mark on the world, building monuments to oneself, and so on. The middle of the paragraph reminded me that all would fall to dust. The writer had brief pithy things to say about the soul passing through waves of experience and it all being one giant learning curve so each lifetime wasn't that important when you looked at the big picture.
But I was not raised in India, and these ideas came as a shock. I was only a loosely-affiliated aspirant to being a bit more of a spiritual soulful type, about twenty-one or twenty-two years old. I expected to live another six decades, assuming we weren't all blown up by nuclear bombs. Until I read this paragraph on posterity's silly qualities that I'd ever had any real sense that I myself would actually die some day, and and I might well be forgotten. It would be as though I were never here. I sat there holding the little book, which had a yellow-0range textured cover, in my two hands. I was horrified, just horrified.
I was so wrapped up in myself, being young, that I don't think I'd considered that way, way more people die and are forgotten than die and are remembered. Even if what they'd accomplished or built or invented or revolutionized was remembered, the actual person who'd made it all happen would be lost in the shuffle, like as not.
I must have gotten over these difficult thoughts after some amount of time, but today I can't help but wonder if these long-ago fears of vanishing after my life ended might not have formed the bulk of my drive to write and to be published. I didn't think posterity was foolish I craved it. The e-book was far off into the future, along with the internet, so my idea of a lasting artifact was a physical book with my name on the spine.
What I didn't know then was that even in the days of paper-only reading, books that weren't bought or borrowed were culled from the shelves and ended up in a dumpster. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't know that, so that the dream of immortality through the written word inspired me to do not only the hard work of writing and editing and re-writing, but also the even harder work: finding markets for my work -- and running a tiny little publishing company.
Many years later, I find that my former distress about disappearing from the Earth without having left much of a mark is much less -- well, distressing. It really helped to be a parent to a child to whom I was not related by blood. My child doesn't look like me and did not inherit my traits or issues. Yet, I see the influence I had as my little girl became a young adult. For example, we both try to take good care of the planet.
Besides the treasured moments of parenting, life has brought me other moments in which to act, times whehn I've thought "Good thing I was right there." Once, on a very long, very steep escalator, which I shared with a group of children and adults on an outing, a boy about five years old had insisted on riding down by himself, holding the hand rail. His mother rode a few steps behind him, nearer the top of the escalator. Out of the corner of my left eye, I saw the boy's blond head begin to waver forward and back, forward and back. I realized that he'd been watching the lines of the escalator steps as they folded under and disappeared into the escalator housing. He had vertigo. The boy swayed forward, came up, swayed forward, came back, went forward again. He was like one of those drinking-bird toys on the rim of a glass, except that each time he bobbed he went forward further and more deeply. He was going to lose his balance.
Lucky for him I was tall with long arms and legs, and lucky for his both, the child wore a pair of little blue overalls with a cross-over strap in the back. Just as the five-year-old started to topple completely off his feet to sled down the steep moving escalator face-first, I stretched forward as far as I could, and just barely got my left index finger hooked into the X of his little overalls. He'd just gone limp when I pulled him back up. There was a yell of fright behind me as his poor mother had seen him nearly fall but hadn't been able to get down past people to catch him. The mom pushed her way down and pulled her child to her, and all was well.
While I'm not sure this rescue was enough to justify years and years of Earthly existence, I think it was important that it was me personally who was there. I'm not sure anyone else would have recognized how dizzy that kid was. What other mom would have been tall enough to reach out far enough to hook a finger into that overalls strap and pull the boy back upright? Maybe another person could have done it, but not everyone would have been able to.Remembering that moment of action now, I think "Okay, that was good."
With things like that to hang onto, who needs posterity? And yet -- while I feel much less urgent about saying something creatively that the world will hang onto, I still don't want the words I've put together to just come apart into so many vowels and consonants flying around randomly in the Universe. When I am gone, I want my words to be here
Thus I created Perfect Waffle Media, an outgrowth of my old company, Big Breakfast Publishing. More about the details on that another time, but for now let's just say Perfect Waffle Media is a way to gather my creative work from various platforms and put it all under one roof.
Easier said than done, let me tell you. The roof is rather patchwork, leaky, and unfinished around the edges, but I do have some places from where my work is gathered. Eventually the clearinghouse site will have all the links in one spot. In the meantime, there are some places my stuff is easily found.
There's a Facebook Page called "Reader Favorites," and the cover image looks like this.
Follow this link to see what's at "Reader Favorites."
There's a brand-new Facebook Page which has links to all the current episodes of my audio suspense story "Freedom Island." The profile picture has a book-inside-headphones logo.
And then I have a YouTube channel, Garbo Seltzer at Perfect Waffle Media
One item on that channel is found in a playlist called Audio Stories. The tale, which has a slideshow to go with it, is called "Subtle Order Everywhere." Here's the video.
Next time: something about what someone else has done.
Comments
Post a Comment