Charles White: Harvest Talk (1953)

Frequent readers might recall that The Muse and I started a project to remodel our front porch in the first week of August. We end the first week of November without a completed remodel, ultimately violating our original worst case by not completing it by Halloween. Halloween found me camped out in front of the blocked-off front porch steps to ensure no goblin fell into our porch deck frame's black hole. I’ve reset my original expectations a half dozen times since we started. Everything I knew about project work informs me that we're executing normally. No project was ever supposed to be completed on the initially expected schedule. Each rightly became an exercise in recovering from the shock and shame of turning out different than initially expected. Project Mastery, a subject in which I once taught well-respected workshops, was always about managing emerging expectations rather than ensuring the originals occurred. No force in the known universe could ever ensure satisfying original expectations and it's at best naive to presume that anyone in this generation could so succeed. No, we're born to experience serial failures and somehow manage to recover from them. The MAGAs will prove to have been every bit as cruel and unreasonable as we expected they would be, and we will prove to be worthy of unexpected opponents. Who will ultimately win depends upon whether one believes in an end to history. I suspect the people to whom I will become the 16th great-grandchild will still wrestle with the same dichotomies. Evil might be just as eternal as good. My job, and your job, must be to stand on the side of good, however seductive evil might seem this time. Thank you for following along!

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Weekly Writing Summary

This Exile Story finds me recalling the time I spent as TheInvisibleHusband, purveyor of impossible plans, and as a songwriter experiencing profound transition.

Carle Vernet: Hussard Walking in Front of his Horse, Smoking a Pipe (February 8, 1817)
" … one impossible plan."
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This Exile Story, PoliticalExile, explains how all Exiles, like all politics, are local. I learned to be grateful that I had been exiled to DC at that time in history.

Emil Orlik: Three Women 1905
" … a much broader connection than I ever could have discovered had I just stayed home."
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This Exiled Story, AwayForHolidays, recounts the complications being Exiled injects into family holiday celebrations. Home For The Holidays became an acknowledged myth when we were gone, reinforced by our few attempts to return to homes where we no longer belonged.

Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [boy with Easter egg] (c. 1950)
" … celebrations exclusively reserved for nuclear families …"
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This Exiled Story recounts how being Exiled encouraged me to trade in an inherited belief in Self-Determination for a more abiding sense of Self-Sufficiency.

Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema: Self-Help (c. 1885)
"When I could no longer believe in who I might become …"
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This Exiled story, Dislocated, tells of when we were Exiled a second time while already Exiled and managed to find another suitable place to live.

7310 Willow Street, Takoma Park, MD (2012)- Our Second Exile address
"Dislocations do not always prove to be as perilous as they seem."
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This Exiled Story, Tourististan, finds me distinguishing between being a visitor and a local in proximity to so-called famous places. The locals tend to try to avoid the more noteworthy places the tourists often overwhelm.

C. M. Bell: Smithsonian Institute.[Still image Stereograph} (1870-79)
" … charge nothing for admission but leave a much more lasting impression."
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This writing week tracked my experience of being Exiled again as I was experiencing feeling Exiled again. The Muse insists that whatever's going on out there reflects something about whatever's going on in here. If this is the case, this week exposed the ultimate dark side of my existence. I'm not just being partisan when I report that Trump's election marks the absolute low point of our great American experiment. It might have been inevitable that someone even more deplorable than Andrew Jackson would one day win the Presidency a second time. It might be our great gift or curse that this occurred in our time. History will remember if people still respect history as a chronicler in the future rather than buying into the lying machine that made the results this week possible. Remember, we remain a gullible people. I admit this trait in my own experience. I expect the best and, thereby, sometimes conjure up the worst. Still, this week, like every prior and future week, was there to inform rather than punish us. We can still acknowledge how it was, as I tried to demonstrate in my writing this writing week, and also imagine how it might become. We were never merely prisoners, even when rudely Exiled.

I eternally remain, in part, TheInvisibleHusband, regardless of what I ever intended or wanted for myself. I must embrace who I became. All experience remains forever political, as I tried to describe in PoliticalExile. There was never any possibility of returning, and there was no actual home to go to for the holidays, only another away. Self-Determination remains over-rated, subtly out-paced by an underappreciated Self-Sufficiency. We remain exposed, always, to being newly Dislocated. How we respond to that rude experience might say most about us. I ended this writing week by suggesting that we might be better off behaving like locals rather than tourists. We are never Just Visiting here. Thank you for following along!



©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz