Clare Graves, the psychologist upon whose work this theory is based, referred to this move as a “momentous leap,” across    ”a chasm of unbelievable depth of meaning”.  In essence, Clare says, those individuals who have evolved into second-tier consciousness can think about human existence both vertically (ranking) and horizontally (linking).  

They are fully and vividly aware aware of all the interior stages of development –even if they cannot articulate them in a technical way.  Thus, they  appreciate the necessary role played by each of the various stages, thinking in terms of the overall spiral of existence rather than any one level. 

The extensive, global research of Graves, Beck, and Cowan indicates that there are at least two major waves to this second-tier integral consciousness: 

7. Yellow: Integrative.  Life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies [holarchies], systems, and forms. Flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality have the highest priority. Differences and pluralities can be integrated into interdependent, natural flows. Egalitarianism is complemented with natural degrees of ranking and excellence. Knowledge and competency should supersede power, status, or group sensitivity. The prevailing world order is the result of the existence of different levels of reality (memes) and the inevitable patterns of movement up and down the dynamic spiral. Good governance facilitates the emergence of entities through the levels of increasing complexity (nested hierarchy). 1% of the population, 5% of the power. 

8. Turquoise: Holistic. Universal holistic system, holons/waves of integrative energies; unites feeling with knowledge; multiple levels interwoven into one conscious system. Universal order, but in a living, conscious fashion, not based on external rules (blue) or group bonds (green). A “grand unification” [a "theory of everything"] is possible, in theory and in actuality. Sometimes involves the emergence of a new spirituality as a meshwork of all existence. Turquoise thinking uses the entire Spiral; sees multiple levels of interaction; detects harmonics, the mystical forces, and the pervasive flow-states that permeate any organization. 0.1% of the population, 1% of the power. 

“Where the green stage (stage 6) begins to grasp the numerous different systems and pluralistic contexts that exist in different cultures (which is why it is indeed the sensitive self, i.e., sensitive to the marginalization of others), second-tier thinking goes one step further,” says Ken Wilber in A Theory of Everything.  ”It looks for the rich contexts that link and join these pluralistic systems, and thus it takes these separate systems and begins to embrace, include, and integrate them into holistic spirals and integral meshworks. Second-tier thinking, in other words, is instrumental in moving from relativism to holism, or from pluralism to integration.” 

I find this understanding of human psychology compelling and very useful in thinking about human behaviour - the chief subject of the novelist.  I am also particularly interested in how it applies to a nonfiction project I’m doing around freethinking.  

Unsurpisingly, many of those who dub themselves atheists, agnostics or freethinkers, are Stage 5, scientific thinkers.  I want to argue for freethought moving to higher levels of thinking. 

More on this next time.

All of these stage conceptions – from psychologists of the calibre of Abraham Maslow, Jane Loevinger, Robert Kegan and Clare Graves - are based on extensive research and data.  “These are not simply conceptual ideas and pet theories, but are grounded at every point in a considerable amount of carefully checked evidence,” says Wilber.  “Many of the stage models, in fact, have been carefully checked in first-, second- and third-world countries…. and there have been no major exceptions found to the general scheme.”

One of the most interesting and most useful of these stage models of human development is Spiral Dynamics.  

Based on extensive research begun by Clare Graves, developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Spiral Dynamics a way of thinking about the complexities of human existence and understanding the order and chaos in human affairs. It explains deep forces in human nature which shape our values, and lays out both a pattern and trajectory for change. 

Spiral Dynamics proposes eight major waves of consciousness.  Here are the first six.  (Final two tomorrow). I believe this way of understanding human development has radical implications for the freethought movement.

SPIRAL DYNAMICS AND THE WAVES (STAGES) OF EXISTENCE 

1. Beige: Archaic-Instinctual. The level of basic survival; food, water, warmth, sex, and safety have priority. Uses habits and instincts just to survive. Distinct self is barely awakened or sustained. Forms into survival bands to perpetuate life. 

Where seen: First human societies, newborn infants, senile elderly, late-stage Alzheimer’s victims, mentally ill street people, starving masses, shell shock. Approximately 0.1% of the adult population, 0% power. 

2. Purple: Magical-Animistic. Thinking is animistic; magical spirits, good and bad, swarm the earth leaving blessings, curses, and spells which determine events. Forms into ethnic tribes . The spirits exist in ancestors and bond the tribe. Kinship and lineage establish political links. Sounds “holistic” but is actually atomistic: “there is a name for each bend in the river but no name for the river.” 

Where seen: Belief in voodoo-like curses, blood oaths, ancient grudges, good luck charms, family rituals, magical ethnic beliefs and superstitions; strong in Third-World settings, gangs, athletic teams, and corporate “tribes.” 10% of the population, 1% of the power. 

3. Red: Power Gods. First emergence of a self distinct from the tribe; powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic. Magical-mythic spirits, dragons, beasts, and powerful people. Archetypal gods and goddesses, powerful beings, forces to be reckoned with, both good and bad. Feudal lords protect underlings in exchange for obedience and labor. The basis of feudal empires –power and glory. The world is a jungle full of threats and predators. Conquers, out-foxes, and dominates; enjoys self to the fullest without regret or remorse; be here now. 

Where seen: The “terrible twos,” rebellious youth, frontier mentalities, feudal kingdoms, epic heroes, James Bond villains, gang leaders, soldiers of fortune, New-Age narcissism, wild rock stars, Atilla the Hun, Lord of the Flies . 20% of the population, 5% of the power. 

4. Blue: Mythic Order. Life has meaning, direction, and purpose, with outcomes determined by an all-powerful Other or Order. This righteous Order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and unvarying principles of “right” and “wrong.” Violating the code or rules has severe, perhaps everlasting repercussions. Following the code yields rewards for the faithful. Basis of ancient nations . Rigid social hierarchies; paternalistic; one right way and only one right way to think about everything. Law and order; impulsivity controlled through guilt; concrete-literal and fundamentalist belief; obedience to the rule of Order; strongly conventional and conformist. Often “religious” or “mythic” [in the mythic-membership sense; Graves and Beck refer to it as the "saintly/absolutistic" level], but can be secular or atheistic Order or Mission. 

Where seen: Puritan America, Confucian China, Dickensian England, Singapore discipline, totalitarianism, codes of chivalry and honor, charitable good deeds, religious fundamentalism (e.g., Christian and Islamic), Boy and Girl Scouts, “moral majority,” patriotism. 40% of the population, 30% of the power. 

5. Orange: Scientific Achievement . At this wave, the self “escapes” from the “herd mentality” of blue, and seeks truth and meaning in individualistic terms–hypothetico-deductive, experimental, objective, mechanistic, operational–”scientific” in the typical sense. The world is a rational and well-oiled machine with natural laws that can be learned, mastered, and manipulated for one’s own purposes. Highly achievement oriented, especially (in America) toward materialistic gains. The laws of science rule politics, the economy, and human events. The world is a chess-board on which games are played as winners gain pre-eminence and perks over losers. Marketplace alliances; manipulate earth’s resources for one’s strategic gains. Basis of corporate states. 

Where seen: The Enlightenment, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , Wall Street, emerging middle classes around the world, cosmetics industry, trophy hunting, colonialism, the Cold War, fashion industry, materialism, secular humanism, liberal self-interest. 30% of the population, 50% of the power. 

6. Green: The Sensitive Self. Communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking. The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness; feelings and caring supersede cold rationality; cherishing of the earth, Gaia, life. Against hierarchy; establishes lateral bonding and linking. Permeable self, relational self, group intermeshing. Emphasis on dialogue, relationships. Basis of value communities (i.e., freely chosen affiliations based on shared sentiments). Reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus (downside: interminable “processing” and incapacity to reach decisions). Refresh spirituality, bring harmony, enrich human potential. Strongly egalitarian, anti-hierarchy, pluralistic values, social construction of reality, diversity, multiculturalism, relativistic value systems; this worldview is often called pluralistic relativism . Subjective, nonlinear thinking; shows a greater degree of affective warmth, sensitivity, and caring, for earth and all its inhabitants. 

Where seen: Deep ecology, postmodernism, Netherlands idealism, Rogerian counseling, Canadian health care, humanistic psychology, liberation theology, cooperative inquiry, World Council of Churches, Greenpeace, animal rights, ecofeminism, post-colonialism, Foucault/Derrida, politically correct, diversity movements, human rights issues, ecopsychology. 10% of the population, 15% of the power. [Note: this is 10% of the world population. Don Beck estimates that around 20-25% of the American population is green.] 

INTERLUDE: 2^ND TIER THINKING

With the completion of the green meme, human consciousness is poised for a quantum jump into what the psychologists call “second-tier thinking.” Clare Graves referred to this as a “momentous leap,” where “a chasm of unbelievable depth of meaning is crossed.” 

We’ll look across the chasm at the final two waves - and their implications - tomorrow.

I have much more of a sense of what I want to do with the blog now than when I wrote the first post back at the beginning of Sept — but it’s gratifying to see that it hasn’t strayed too far from those first intentions. And I am loving the direct connection with readers that blogging affords.

I’ll be back in 2009 with more Writing Tips, firstly finishing out the series on the Eight Stages of The Writing Process.  

I’ll also be offering more thoughts on the Good Things I’m Gaining from Having Cancer and sharing the changes that are arising as I attempt to put creative - dare I say inspired? - principles and approaches at the heart of my life as well as my writing.  

It looks like 2009 is going to be an(other) adventurous year, with a new novel and new nonfiction book in the pipeline and a house move too.  More details on what’s afoot when the plans are firmed up.

And more in 2009 - lots more - on Freethinking and, of course, Freewriting.

In the meantime, a holiday gift in the form of a poem from the great Rumi, which expresses the sort of space I hope we can continue to create in the conversational corner that is this blog and your comments:  

There’s courage involved if you want

to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What’s the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won’t do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

Have a wonderful holiday time.  Draw your loved ones close.  Remind your children that it’s more important to be kind than to be right.

And here’s to our most inspired year ever in 2009!

x

Orna

A freethinker, according to Dictionary.com (rapidly replacing the OED in my affections) is: “a person who   forms opinions on the basis of reason, independent of authority or tradition”

No problem there.  Then it goes on: “esp. a person whose religious opinions differ from established belief.”

Freethinking originally arose in the nineteenth century as a reaction against organised religion.  Today it still defines itself in that reactive and limiting way and is often used as a synonym for atheism or agnosticism. 

The Freethinker Magazine ( ”The Voice of Atheism since 1881″ ) is illustrative.  Its founder wrote: “The Freethinker is an anti‑Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general, and against Christian superstition in particular. It will do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense.”

This agressive, warring tradition has been upheld for more than a century, with the magazine’s website today priding itself on its “cutting”, “abrasive”, “sarcastic” and “offensive” approach.

There’s lots about this magazine - and the rational, anti-religious movement - that’s admirable.  Many of the lively  articles, reviews and commentary are intelligent, inquiring and thought provoking.  Historically it played a key role in pioneering the birth control movement and it still campaigns for progressive change on a wide range of important issues.

But, but, but…

It seems to me that The Freethinker isn’t free at all.  Defined by that which it abhors, it has locked itself into a very confined space with its perceived enemies. 

Ever since I started to question my inherited Roman Catholicism in my late teens, I have read - and learned from - rational, secular, humanist and atheist writers.  But I could never sign up for atheism.  As well as being uneasy with its certainty in the face of uncertainties, having to define myself in the negative (a non-believer, anti-religious) goes all my positive, creative, evolutionary instincts.  

I believe that attacking other people’s opinions, realities or beliefs is wasteful and self-defeating.  A dissipation of time, energy, attention and focus that strengthens the presence of that which you oppose — in your own life and the life of others.

A more productive approach, it seems to me, is to support models that embody what you consider desirable. Or, in their absence, to create new models that offer complexities missing from outworn sytems. 

So I’m wondering: could we reclaim the Freethinking concept, make it over a positive, creative, spiritual force, rather than a negative, destructive and anti-religious protest?

Could we have a Freethinking movement that is:

• Intelligent
• Inquiring and 
• Informed

• Tolerant 
• Open and 
• Contemplative 

What do you (free)think?

By Susan Daly

Áine McCarthy who writes under the pseudonym of Orna Ross, has a knack for unlocking hidden potential. As a writing teacher, she developed a method to help her students tap into their deeply buried creativity. As a former journalist, she pushed and prodded herself into    finishing her first novel at the age of 43, the best-selling Lovers’ Hollow.

I read this morning, though, that Gertrude’s pronouncement wasn’t   answer enough — even for her. According to her biographer, Donald Sutherland, on her deathbed Stein was still asking, What is the answer?

When no answer came, she laughed.  ”In that case,” she said, “what is the question?”  These were her final words before she died.

What is the question?  I can’t help but think that is where Stein should have started.   

And the rest of us too.  

We have so many answers.  But first, really, what is the question?

So I’m 20 minutes late posting.  Sorry folks!

My post is two extracts from my first novel, Lovers’ Hollow, that describe what it is like for the narrator, Jo, to see her best friend, the wisecracking, lover of life, Richard, develop AIDS in 1980s San Francisco.

It’s a long one — you might want to get a cup of coffee. 

—–

1986

‘So I like fucking strangers. Call me old-fashioned.’

I’ve heard Richard use this quip before. He still wants to be Mr Entertainment but he hasn’t the energy to think up new lines. He hasn’t the energy to do anything much, which is why     he is lying here in a hospital bed. George, one of his nurses, is holding his wrist and Frank, another patient, sits on the bed beside his. It’s for them that he has delivered his line, though it’s addressed to me, and they respond with the requisite laughter. In the AIDS ward, good humour is an imperative.

I put his GQ and Esquire onto his bedside locker and lean low to kiss his forehead. His rash is inflamed, a flash of red blazing up his neck and face from beneath his white linen pyjama top. ‘You’re wearing that look again,’ he says. ‘You really must try to be more tactful.’

His nurse, George, releases his wrist, makes a mark on his chart and hangs it back on the bed. ‘Make him rest,’ he says to me, on his way out of the ward.

George and the other nurses know me well. I spend long hours here: because of my schedule I can visit at odd times, when Gary and other friends are at work. I bring in good soups and salads, the ones I know he likes. I coax him to sleep, chide him out of self-pity, ensure he takes his medication. Often, I sit silently beside him while he sleeps: more like a wife than a friend.

Today he doesn’t want to rest: he has something to tell me. ‘Marcus was in yesterday after you left.’

Marcus is a friend and another PWA, as they are coming to be called. Person With AIDS. ‘How’s he doing?’ I ask.

‘He brought me a present. I kept it to show you. It’s in the top drawer.’

I open the bedside locker, take it out. It’s a book, a Bible. ‘Oh-oh,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘He meant well, I suppose.’

‘Meant well, shit.’

‘Come on, Richard, it’s not like you to be so tetchy.’

‘Tetchy.’ He giggles. ‘Tetchy.’ It’s been a long while since my vocabulary tickled him. ‘I’m tetchy, my dear, because I was looking forward to a real conversation with somebody who knows what this damn thing feels like. Instead, he brings me this born-again booby present and an evening of sermons.’

He’s not joking, he’s offended. Deeply.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I sent him packing.’

‘Poor Marcus.’

‘He deserved it.’

‘But, Richard, if it gives him comfort . . . ’

‘Comfort? Hasn’t he registered that the Bible-brigade has us all down as damned, whether we believe their hooey or not?’

‘Do me a favour,’ he says when I don’t respond. ‘Put it in the bin.’

I’m surprised at his vehemence. Marcus isn’t even that close a friend. I look at him to make sure he means it then drop the Bible into the wastepaper basket and go over to sit beside him.

‘He actually asked me to repent. Can you believe it? The guy used to be queen of the pleasure dome and now he’s turned into one of those freaks who hawk God from door to door, trying to sell Him.’ He shudders. ‘I mean, how insulting is that? Do they really think any God capable of creating this foul and fabulous world is going to be flattered at being marketed like a household gizmo?’

I don’t know whether to laugh or pat his hand, so I do both. ‘Come on, cut the guy a break. Whatever gets him through the night, and all that?’

He lies back, feeling better for his outburst, closes his eyes. Under the rash, his skin is colourless as water. We’ve seen two close friends go already, Joe and Lucien, and others we loved a little less. Richard knows what this disease’s cocktail of assaults can do. Will do. He has faced what’s ahead and has no patience with those who console themselves with what he believes to be fantasies.

‘The Afterlife . . . ’ He shudders, theatrically. ‘Ugh.’

‘Come on, I don’t believe in it either but I can see the attraction.’

He opens one eye. ‘Honey, you’d be miserable there. We both would. With the God squad in charge of the guest list? And the entertainment? Can you imagine? We’d hate every minute of it, believe me.’

Thanks to a visa amnesty I am no longer an ‘alien’. Instead of teaching aerobics to the public for cash, I now franchise my routines to teams of instructors. Now, thousands of people do a Rí Rá workout each week, in gyms and halls and studios all across the Bay area and beyond. I even have a small slice of fame through my exercise video and the fitness features I contribute to newspapers and magazines. I am moving from facilitating health and exercise to writing about it. The Chronicle has approached me about doing a column. So has Fitness World.

I make a good living now: I have an agent and an assistant, a bank account and health insurance, a payment just put down on a two-bedroom apartment in the Haight. I eat at Mani’s, buy my clothes at Mary Coles, drive a European car, a Saab. All things that might catch me occasionally with surprise or even pride if I were free to think, if my friend did not have this disease that is going to kill him. Instead I find I’m going about like an aged English lady who lost her beau in the Great War, or an American who was a flapper in the 1920s and hungered in the Depression, forever looking back in awe. Oh, that younger me! The way I went about my youthful business all unknowing! The way I had nothing to worry me but my mind’s mindless worries!

The breach came the night I called to his apartment to hear the results of his test. As soon as he opened the door, there was my answer, in his eyes, in his face, in the stoop of his shoulders: positive. It was what we had been waiting for, we did not expect good news – how could we, with his night sweats and his weight loss and his history? – but still I looked at him and said those stupid words we always seem to say at moments of crisis: ‘No. I don’t believe it.’ As if he were not a promiscuous gay man, as if we knew nothing about AIDS and its predilections.

I held him hard, there in the doorway, held him for far too long, like I’d never be able to let him go. Then we went inside and waited together for Gary, who came home steely, well prepared. I made dinner in the little white kitchen while they had their words and when the meal was prepared, they made me stay and eat with them. Over the food we talked ourselves out of disbelief so that by the time coffee came round, Richard was able to look at the man he loved, for once not joking, and say with true, discerning knowledge: ‘We’re all going to die.’

AIDS punched a hole in our liberation theories. No wonder some thought initially that it was a CIA conspiracy to obliterate the community. Who could believe in a disease that targeted only gay men? Those were the days before we realized it was practices not populations that nurtured the virus. Now we know, and now the people who were the front rank of my sexual avant-garde are floundering around the Castro, open-eyed with horror. You bump into somebody you haven’t seen for a while and feel a flood of relief that he is still alive, followed by a wave of dread that he might tell you he has it. So many are afflicted that those still testing negative are beginning to suffer survivor’s guilt.

The Castro men have become like women, Susan says, now that their pleasure comes edged with danger. Women have always known what it is like to live with worms in the bud: unwanted pregnancy, sexual violence, fatal childbirth . . . That, she says, is why women are responding so generously to their brothers’ cause, though the same brothers were so dismissive or even hostile to them in the Castro’s heyday.

Susan is one such, applying her formidable skills and energies to the crisis, organizing fund-raisers and aggressively lobbying for political and medical attention. Her indignation is voluble: men like Richard are dying not just because they have a medical condition but because Ronald Reagan’s administration doesn’t give a god-damn about a disease that, in the main, kills gays. This homophobia that keeps the government from investing in medical research, that keeps our B-movie cowboy president from being able even to say the word AIDS: that is what is killing people, every bit as surely as the virus. And it isn’t just AIDS, she storms. You can see the work of the Republican vandals everywhere: in her project for recovering drug addicts, now failing her clients because of axed funds. In the growing army of the homeless people on the streets, shouting half-crazed at their phantom enemies, or hustling for money or food or some other, nameless need that isn’t so easily granted.

The surprise is that, through all this, she and Richard have reached a tentative liking. At a time when he felt he was losing everything – his job, his insurance, his good-time friends – Susan turned up regularly to visit and wouldn’t be jibed away. When he is hospitalized, she shares visits with me and Gary and helps with the practicals. Richard accepts services from her, as from me, that he won’t take from Gary: grumbling at our ‘fussing’ but acquiescent. Something in him makes him recoil from such solicitude in a lover. We all know that nicety will have to go with time, that he will have to learn to accept his dependence, but for now we indulge him.

The other night, the three of us sat around him, Susan sprawled across the end of his hospital bed, while Gary spoke of how lesbians are so ahead of gay men in so many ways, especially in their sense of cooperation and interdependence. Lots of men are now getting this message, he believed, beginning to look anew at ideas of love and intimacy, beginning to make different choices. ‘The party is over,’ he said. ‘The “Me generation” has been replaced by the “We generation”.’ Susan was visibly delighted with this, keen to believe that AIDS might have some redemptive meaning beyond the horrors, but Richard would have none of it.

‘Oh, my,’ he protested, ‘it’s the 1950s again. Except now it’s gays peddling myths and getting “married” for all the wrong reasons.’

The Faggot Mystique, he called it, and even Susan had to laugh.

He is out, taking pleasure from things that he wouldn’t have noticed before, making me stop to look at a garden crowded with primroses and orange California poppies, or a baby crawling across the grass. Everything is dear because soon he won’t be able to see them; the virus is chomping at his retinas. Already the light in his left eye is dimming. He leans on me, so frail I feel no burden.

Back in again, another pneumonia. This afternoon, he is sleeping or perhaps lying still with his eyes closed. His breaths are short and shallow, like little sniffs. Beads of sweat form periodically and crawl like insects down his forehead until I wipe them away. I sit in the chair near the window, reading. Everybody is quiet today. Bill and George are talking to Patrick in the corner bed, acting out for him some bureaucratic drama with hospital administration, trying to cheer him up: he got results yesterday and the news is the worst.

Steps approaching from the hall make us all look up: something new has arrived. Steps in an AIDS ward are usually tentative, not this stamping tread. Richard opens one eye when he hears the footfalls. ‘She’s here,’ he says and he begins to haul himself up his pillow. The doorway of the ward fills with a large middle-aged woman in red pant-suit. Only North America could have produced her. Richard’s mother. He finally got round to telling her two months ago; now she has finally got round to coming to see him.

Mothers are moving in their droves to San Francisco, to care for dying sons who have been left alone. Gary’s friend Lucien’s mother left a disapproving husband and a job in some upstate New York town to move west. She lived in his apartment until he died, both of them broke, managing to survive only through the kindnesses of friends who kept them supplied with gifts of food and money. Richard’s is a different type of mother: if I had never heard a word about her, I would know this from the way she holds herself in the threshold of the door, taking in the scene, rigid with umbrage. Her eyes come to rest on George and Bill, two nurses, engaged in their camp pantomime with Patrick.

Hurling her eyes heavenwards, she alights on her son’s bed. ‘This is unbelievable, Richard. Beyond belief.’

‘Hello, Mother.’

‘Who is responsible, that’s what I’d like to know.’

‘Mother dearest, what are you talking about?’

She puts her handbag down on the bed. Distress contorts her face. ‘Can we close this curtain?’ she says.

‘Sure. But first let me introduce you to Jo, one of my very best friends.’

I get up from my chair near the window, hold out my hand. She barely takes it, then lets it drop. ‘Is she one too?’ she asks Richard.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I think you know what I mean.’

‘Jesus, Mom!’

‘Well, Richard, you’re the one who said it’s no big deal. If it’s no big deal, then what’s the problem with asking?’ Her double chin is half the size of her face, a cushion on which the rest of her face – her pursed mouth, the hard line of her jaw – reclines.

‘Shall I close the curtain for you, Mrs Burke?’ I enquire, pulling it across before she has time to answer. I toss Richard a sympathetic face but he doesn’t see me. He is terrified, like an animal on its way to the abattoir. I take my seat a discreet distance away and sit, in case he needs me.

Inside the cubicle, Mrs Burke whispers loudly. ‘What are those people doing here?’

‘Who?’

‘I must say, they are the last people I expected to see here.’

‘Who, Mom? Who?’ Richard’s voice is lined with pain. I don’t know if he is playing dumb or whether she genuinely has him confused. I know that it’s George she objects to and Bill: the two nurses who are so obviously gay. ‘It’s a disgrace. They’re the last people who should be here. They did this to you.’

Light dawns for Richard. He raises his voice, addresses us outside the curtain. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he says. ‘My mother.’

‘There’s no need to get fresh, young man.’ She scrapes the curtain open again and steps out. ‘I don’t want you here,’ she says to George. ‘Or you,’ to Bill.

Their faces freeze.

‘You needn’t stand there smirking. I’m going to see what can be done. I am his mother, you know.’

She walks out.

‘Oh, God,’ Richard groans. ‘Why did I ring her? Squirrel, get in here.’

I go to him, try not to laugh at his crumpled expression. ‘Poor Richard.’

‘What did I tell you? See, mine wins.’

He means our mother competition. I try to imagine Mrs D. here and find I can’t. I don’t know how she’d be: lost, I think. I think.

I take a tissue and wipe his forehead. ‘I’m not able for this, Squirrel. She didn’t even say hello.’

‘She’s upset. She’ll come round.’

‘What’s she trying to do down there?’

‘Shhh, Richard, it’s OK. Nobody’s going to pay her much attention. They’re going to realize she’s upset.’

He groans. ‘You have the right idea, Squirrel. Cut off. Don’t look back. I should never have rung her. Why did I? Why?’

1989

Richard dies on the evening of October 17th 1989, a date known to every San Franciscan, and when he dies I am not there. Gary has called me. Susan has called me. I know his time is getting close. I know I have not seen him for weeks. I know, I know . . .

I am at home in my apartment, alone, doing not much, certainly nothing that can’t wait. Sitting at the kitchen table making notes for a magazine feature titled, somewhat ironically, ‘Urgency Addiction: Why You’re Not As Busy As You Think’. It is a perfect October afternoon, blue and balmy. I have an orange juice – freshly pulped from my new juicer – before me. I am wearing my favourite, most comfortable T-shirt, my best and fastest pen is between my finger and thumb, filling my page with words and phrases I know are just what my editor wants. All is as it should be, except for the awareness of my failure underlying every thought and feeling and act.

I haven’t been to the hospital for weeks. Weeks. In August, the disease started in on his brain. For the longest time before that he had seemed to us too fragile to last. Just skin on a shrunken skeleton, everything that made him Richard, including his sense of humour, gone. He was just a sick man, full of sickness’s self-pity. And after that came the dementia.

I push on with my work. ‘The stress addict has the same troublesome dependence as any other addict,’ I write. ‘Just because your mood-altering drug of choice is the physiological responses of your own body doesn’t mean you are safe. Surging epinephrine or glucocorticoids won’t get you in trouble with the law or leave you bankrupt, but like any addictive substances they trigger side effects that can wreak havoc with your health and happiness . . . ’

Though I am getting proficient at this writing, learning just the right tone of certitude, part of me despises it, especially magazine-land’s breezy conviction that life is eminently fixable, just a matter of tweaking the right buttons. I won’t be able to do this forever, I say to myself, not for the first time. As I write, the table begins to vibrate beneath my notebook and I feel – or is it hear? – a subterranean growl, like a deeply buried tummy rumble. The windows rattle, making me look up. Quake. I set to sit the tremor out, as I always do, but then the earth growls and everything is wobbling, violently. The floor jerks and screams rise from the street outside, flying in through my open window. This is not the usual, could it be the long awaited ‘Big One’?

So, I think, it may not just be Richard. We may all go together.

The thought leaves me strangely comforted. At the same time, facts I have heard or read about old concrete, new concrete, stress levels, earthquake procedures are flashing through me, each more useless than the last. There is a low-roaring snarl underfoot then the world bucks. Books come crashing down off my shelves. A second newsflash from my mind asserts that I don’t, in fact, want to die and for the first time since I came to San Francisco, I go to stand in the doorway. The steel L-shape shelving unit that lines one corner of my living room is flapping back and forth violently, trying to tear apart. Crockery is falling, smashing against tiles and more books tumbling down in heaps. Oddly, my television, atop another shelving unit, doesn’t budge.

It goes on for what seems like a long time, though it can only really be seconds, then the world slowly settles to stillness. I wait. Yes, it is still.

It seems to be over.

It seems I am to live.

Now I have a good excuse for not being at the hospital. Crossing the city becomes an impossibility, I give up even pretending that I might go. I stay home, listening to the news reports come in on my battery operated radio. The upper deck of Bay bridge has collapsed onto the lower, squashing hundreds of cars. A building has collapsed here, a gas-main has flared into fire there. Of the inhabited areas, the reclaimed land in the Marina district and parts of the inner Mission are worst hit. Liquification, they call it, when earthquake dissolves reclaimed soil, so that it temporarily acts like a thick, viscous fluid. Like quicksand. Those with power still up get to see it all on TV – history’s first real-time disaster movie – available on three major networks, thanks to the World Series football game that was in progress when it struck.

Sixty-seven San Franciscans die that day from being in the wrong place, at the flashpoints of the quake. In the weeks that follow, the whole city is in mourning, which feels fitting for Richard. But I, I am not good at grief. I cannot cry and I don’t want to. I go about my days, aghast. Stunned by what it is to know that he is dead. Dead. His mouth was covered in ulcers and his body, inside and out, in excruciating KS lesions. He was blind in one eye, only barely sighted in the other. He couldn’t hold his own coffee cup, his own medicine, his own shit. A time ago, I heard him writhing through the night, pleading with no one: ‘Please . . . please . . . ’ And it got worse after that. Dementia. That last day I arrived to the hospital and he screamed at me from the bed about stealing his food, I looked at his face disfigured by KS and rage and thought: you are not Richard.

But who, then, was he, this crazed stranger in Richard’s bed and body?

I couldn’t bear it. By the end, Susan was going into the hospital more often me. There: that is how loathsome I am.

Death was a release. That’s what I tell others, at the funeral. Not Richard’s mother’s Episcopalian cremation but afterwards, at the memorial we hold for ourselves and all his friends. Mozart’s Requiem and Judy singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. Gary reading Thom Gunn and Oscar Wilde and me reading my own poem: (‘ . . . We thought the laughter would roll on and on / But we were young and we were wrong’). The horror of scanning the room, seeing those who were going to die next and all the other missing faces, those gone already. And afterwards, everybody talking about Richard’s enthusiasm for life, his humour, his irrepressibility.

He would never have let us away with it, I find myself thinking, even as I cling to the compliments. Death was a release, that’s what I tell all those people who so kindly try to comfort me, and it’s true but it’s no consolation. Really, I am outraged, outraged by his loss.

Sometimes I dream about him, dreams where he is fleshed out again, his old self. He is usually silent but once I dreamed that I answered my buzzer and his voice said, ‘Hello.’

When I opened the door, there he was, standing on my step, looking sheepish. ‘Hi! I’m back!’

‘But you’re dead,’ I said to him. He turned his eyes away from me, evasive. ‘Richard, you’re supposed to be dead.’

‘I went to Ireland.’

‘No, you didn’t. You died. I was at your funeral. You were cremated.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said, ambivalently, smiling a maddening, unanswerable smile.

Everyone tries to be kind. Susan goes into motherly mode and I have to pull out of her grasp. Maeve sends a surprisingly thoughtful letter. Deirdre too tries to help but she’s at a loss; Richard was sick before she arrived out here and she never knew him well. She is getting impatient with me, can’t understand why I’m taking it so hard.

I don’t fully understand myself. He was my friend and I loved him and I miss him. But why do I feel like it is my own life that has ended?

What Gary finds hardest is that he wasn’t there for the end. He rang Richard’s mother in Telport to let her know and she thanked him by arriving and making him leave so that it was she, not Gary, who saw Richard out of this world. The hospital let that happen because she was next of kin. The rule has since been changed to allow the patient to nominate their own person. Richard would have wanted his lover, the person who had loved him best from the moment they met. Instead Gary’s last sighting of him was of his face muzzled by the ventilator, his eyes rotating wildly, unable to see, unable to object.

Gary can’t shake that image out of his head.

The two of us see a lot of each other, sit together in slumped silence. Is it worse for him? Everybody says it is and I suppose it must be but I cannot imagine how worse might feel….

….

First e-published @ Copyblogger.  Check out this great site overflowing with tips for blogging and all online writing. 

10 Surefire Steps to Beating Blogger’s Block, by Orna Ross

Dragging or pushing yourself to the computer? Too many posts starting with an apology for not having been around of late? The joy you first brought to blogging now a distant memory?

Looks like a case of blogger’s block. Don’t worry… there is a cure.

It’s largely a matter of making friends with your creative     mind. The reason so many of us find this difficult is that our education has trained us to respond to problems only with linear, rational, conscious thought.

Willpower, discipline, and good old-fashioned work may squeeze another blog post out of you but to produce words effortlessly, to connect with the joy and optimism and inspiration which makes it all worthwhile, to be as good as you can be, you need to know how to nurture abstraction and your hard-working subconscious.

First off, stop focusing on your block and start thinking about establishing flow. Flow is that delectable condition where the words seem to appear of their own volition. Where all we writers have to do is turn up at the page and get ‘em down. Below are ten tried-and-tested methods – five daily practices, five writing practices - for keeping in flow, not just for the next blog post but for the rest of your writing life.

Establishing Flow Part One: Writing Practices

1. Understand the stages of writing process. Any piece of writing moves through distinct, though not always separate, phases. I have seen so many writers who start to edit or judge their writing (stage 7) when they are only in the first draft (stage 4), or even the preparation (stage 2), point in the process — and thereby strangle their work before giving it full form. Delay the actual writing for as long as you can, until you can’t wait to get at it. At a minimum, never sit down at the computer until you have your beginning, your ending and your research notes in place.
2. Change your timeframe. A blogger feels like the deadline is always now but this is a false pressure. It’s far more important to write something worthwhile than to post today just for the sake of it. Always give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.
3. Drop your standards. Wherever there is block, there is fear. “I can’t say that.” “What if people laugh?” “This is garbage.” The only way to get beyond those carping inner voices is to give yourself permission to be bad. I love Annie Lamott’s suggestion of the “shitty first draft”: “The only way I can get anything written at all,” she says, “is to write really, really shitty first drafts… romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later”.
4. Know when to stick with it and when to walk away. The thing about the unconscious is that it needs time to percolate some ideas (you know what they say about watched pots). You can’t bully the unconscious into producing on demand and that’s why every writer needs a physical, automatic task to turn to when focused, rational thought is not getting the goods. Peter Beadle fools around with his Gibson guitar. Barbara Ehrenreich does housework. Joe Survant plinks at squirrels with a BB gun. John Lennon took a bath. Find something for yourself — and enjoy.
5. Leave a little ink in the well. This one from Hemingway. Don’t finish your day with your writing tasks complete. Stop in the middle of a sentence. Tomorrow, when you sit back down, you will pick up immediately from where you left off, without any time-wasting faffing about or tortuous analysis of what you’re doing and why.

Establishing Flow Part One: Daily Practices

1. Consciously fill the well. Too many bloggers, holed up “working” or surfing, are locking themselves away from new experiences, sights and insights — and then they wonder what’s become of their imagination’s sense of play. After decades of trial and error with my own routine and observation of hundreds of writers and writing students, I now recommend three simple, daily practices as the most effective and time-efficient ways to keep our writing wells stocked and our ideas overflowing: 1. A good walk/jog (30 minutes or more); 2. A half-hour meditation session; and 3. Three early morning pages of F-R-E-E-writing.
2. Read, read, read. I am always stunned by writing students who say they don’t read. Whatever kind of writing you aspire to do, however long you’ve been writing, however good you think you are, always search out and carefully read other writers that are good at what you aim to do. 
3. Get organized. All good writers have an organizational structure and a discipline that works for them – no matter how chaotic things might appear to others. So, right now, do whatever organizational task you’re currently leaving for later - tidy your desk, set up a filing system that works, write an outline – right now (The more you resist this task, the more you need to do it).
4. Keep a notebook. Research has shown that creative people are creative because they respect the intuitions, ideas, snags on their attention that pass through all minds while less creative beings let them pass. Creative theorists call it capturing. The simplest, most effective capturing device is pen-and-paper, a notebook but you may prefer to use your cell phone or a more high-tech solution. Fine, so long as it is something small enough to carry everywhere. Make as many entries as possible each day– ideas, quotes, snatches of overheard dialogue, feelings, description. You won’t use everything but you don’t want to miss anything.
5. Play. Creativity tutor and author of The Artist’s Way Juliet Cameron, recommends a weekly Artist’s Date, “an hour or longer weekly block of time spent on yourself and with yourself, doing something festive”, fun and creative. “Aquarium stores, museums, cathedrals, flea markets, or five and dimes… vintage films, lectures on the odd, the improbable, or merely interesting… musical performances by traveling Tibetan monks, a trip to acquire to come a riverside spot — any of these can function as an Artist Date.” This creates inflow, new images and perspectives and thoughts that are there when you need them, back at your desk.

They nodded because this, in a sense, is true of every piece of writing that takes itself seriously — but I also meant that it had taken me far too long to put this work together.

Now I know why.  Now I know that the first three stages of the writing process - Preparation, Percolation and Planning - are the keys to writing fast while writing well.  

To writing efficiency, if you like.

Efficiency is a word that brings most writers, and writing students, out in a rash but I’ve learned the hard way, as well as through editing and mentoring other writers, that efficiency is what makes writing pain-free and fun. 

Understanding the stages of the process and doing only those tasks appropriate to the stage you are in induces that delectable condition called “flow” — where the words seem to appear of their own volition and all we writers have to do is turn up at the page and get ‘em down.

Preparation: The Challenge

The challenge is to give preparation enough time, but no more than that.  Many beginning writers get stuck in this phase, unable to move on; others (me!) avoid it altogether and plunge right into working, which is just as debilitating.

Preparation: The Steps

Step 1: Create Time.

When are you going to work?  First thing in the morning? Last thing at night, after the day’s work and the kids are in bed?  Your choice — but once you’ve decided, take out your diary and mark out the time blocks. They don’t have to be big but they must be regular.  A 17th-century French Chancellor, D’Aguesseau, on noticing that his wife was habitually 10 minutes late coming down to dinner decided to make use of those 10 minutes (3650 minutes a year i.e. more than 60 hours).  The resulting three-volume work became  bestseller in 1681.   

Step 2: Create Space

Where are you going to work?  It can be a study, a library, a coffee shop — it doesn’t matter so long as you feel comfortable there and it provides the conditions you need to concentrate and produce.

Step 3: F-R-E-E-Writing

No surprises here if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I recommend daily  F-R-E-E-Writing as an integral part of the writing life.  During one of your sessions, F-R-E-E-Write around the following question: “What do I need in order to write this work and write it well?”  Be open to all answers.

Step 4: Begin to Make Some Big Decisions

What genre or literary form will this work take?  Who is your reader?  What about voice?  If it is a story you are telling, who is your narrator?  Your protagonist?  Who else will inhabit the story?  What will definitely happen?What happens at the end. (I believe nobody should start writing a story until they have done enough preparation, planning and percolation to know the ending).   If it is nonfiction, what are the key points of your argument?  What illustrative material will you use?  How will you amass it?  What is the tone of the work? What is its conclusion (as important as endings for the storyteller)?    

Step 5: Allow and Capture

Capture all ideas, odd images, snippets of conversation, passages in books etc. that “snag” at you during this preparation time.  Anything that has an energy that attracts your attention, even if you don’t know why. Don’t label anything unworthy of attention,  – no matter how fleeting, insubstantial or puzzling.  Allow it all — no matter how unconnected to what you want to write.  Make notes — no matter how silly or trivial.

You don’t have to get anything into order or put sense or shape on your ideas.  That comes in the next - planning - phase.  For now, all you have to do is take it easy and have fun opening up to all. 

Step 6: Get Organised.

Organisation is another word that writers hate, but anyone who produces writing of significance has an organisational structure and a discipline that works for them – no matter how chaotic things might appear to others.  Organisation creates a structure within which inspiration thrives.  

So, at the same time as you are netting in snippets, get your writing house in order.  Ensure you have a method sufficient to capturing and storing all the materials you’re going to need.  Easy enough for a short blog post but if you haven’t thought it through, you canget quite overwhelmed when it comes to the support material for a book — notes, photocopies, clippings, F-R-E-E-Writing, diary entries, other books…  

Whatever system you use, ensure you include a “you never know” file.  Every writer should have one.

Step 7: Find models & mentors

I am always stunned by writing students who say they don’t read.  Whatever kind of writing you aspire to do,  however long you’ve been writing,  however good you think you are, always search out and carefully read other writers are good at what you aim to do.

——-

Note:

Whenever you run into problems progressing a piece of writing, it’s pretty certain that you have neglected some aspect of preparation.  Return to this phase, identify the steps — and take them.  

Next Up, Stage 2: Planning.

They are:

1. Preparation
2. Percolation         
   
   
3. Planning
4. Drafting
5. Shaping/Ordering
6. Deepening
7. Editing
8. Completing.

Producing a piece of writing is never a linear endeavour and the eight stages don’t operate as separately from each other as putting them into a list might imply.  But understanding the shape and order of the process is crucial for writers.  

Not knowing what stage you are in can lead to confusion, frustration, despair and ultimately, throwing the work aside. 

I have seen so many writers who start to edit or judge their writing (stage 7) when they are only in the  or first draft (stage 4), or even the germination (stage 2), point in the process — and thereby strangle their work before giving it full form.

Each stage has its own distinct tasks, rewards and demands.

I will explore each of the stages in detail over eight individual posts.

First up: Preparation