Another Election, 2022

Another election day is less than three weeks away and I am panicked at the possibility that the Republican liars might win control of Congress and pave the way for Trump to announce his candidacy for 2024. I am forever appalled by the willingness of the Republican candidates to continue to promulgate the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” despite the existence of absolutely no evidence to support that claim and sufficient evidence to refute it. I am horrified by the willingness of Republican leadership, despite their acknowledgement that Joe Biden won the presidential election, to support candidates who continue the lie. I am astounded at the illiteracy Republican candidates display in their public pronouncements and I am insulted by the continual racism, sexism and antisemitism that spews from their mouths. This is not Germany in the Nazi era, but Republican rhetoric smacks of fascism; their behaviors and words portend what might happen should they, indeed, succeed in gaining power.
            But more, I am horrified at the willingness of so much of the populace that continues to accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was won by Trump and then illegally stolen from him. There is a sign on a lawn I pass regularly that announces, “He is not my President.” What a display of disrespect and ignorance, I think. The reality is that Biden was legally, unequivocally elected by several million votes. Under normal circumstances that might be considered a landslide. If the electoral college system suggests that with the change of a handful of votes in several states Trump might have won the election, then it is simply further evidence that the electoral college system is badly flawed and anti-democratic. It is ironic to me that the founding fathers (and mothers?) tried to ensure that the country would be run by the intelligentsia and yet it is the ignorant that the electoral system has most supported. These founders were afraid of what they perceived the ignorant and unwashed. So am I, but in fact the 2020 elections seems to me to suggest that the electorate is not at all as ignorant as the founders believed.

I am horrified that Trump’s legal troubles seem not at all to concern either the Republican party (save for a few brave ones: Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, for example) or the MAGA world. Yesterday the news reported that the Trump organization had charged exorbitant rates to the Secret Service and today Trump himself is being deposed in a defamation suit brought by a woman who has accused him of raping her. His defense is that he didn’t know the woman and besides, “she’s not my type,” as if there are others who are more his type and who he would prone to rape. He continues to spew his lies, ugly bombast and repulsive calumnies, and his minions delight in his lies and insults and despotic spewing. He gives voice to the hate within them.

This has been yet another rant. It is meaningless in the long run, and does not relieve my concern and anger, nor does it affect the situation. Oh, I remain angry and fearful; I know that there is precedent to support my anxiety. 

Baking Bread to Save My Soul

Once I would take my anxieties out on the road and run long distances. I would sense an anxiety episode beginning as a small flame, but then as if it came into contact with an accelerant it would blaze up and overtake me. In such moments and regardless of the weather, I knew it was time to run. I would strip quickly out of my street clothes, change into my ready running gear, lace up my Asics running shoes and strap onto my arm the ready radio or programmed iPod, settle the headset into my ears and head out to the road. On the radio the station was always set to WNEW-FM or to the NPR station local to New York City or to Wisconsin and Minneapolis; the iPod playlist I had created was set on random so that the music seemed always new. I was ready to run and hoped for some relief from my anxieties and even for some healthy activity that might help me live longer and make a pint of ice cream and a beer acceptable. After a mile out there I would be calmed and during the rest of the run—anywhere from six to twenty miles—I would continue to decompress. I could return home.

Alas, I still suffer my anxieties but I no longer run. Oh, I get my out-of-doors walking in almost daily, but the walking . . . well, it just doesn’t yield the same relief as the efforts of the run. For one thing, there isn’t the sartorial change into a different frame of reference. The music remains and it often sustains me, but the anxieties do not dissipate, are not pounded out, perhaps because the type of effort in walking does not afford that release. And so, today, when I experience the onset of anxiety, I bake bread. Not that this is a new activity. I have baked bread and other goods for the household for at least 30 years: muffins, cookies, cakes, pancakes and waffles. But then there were two daughters in the house and well, they happily ate whatever I had that day baked.

            I live alone now—the daughters are grown and live in a different city, but my anxieties have not—do not—adjust to the altered domestic population. In my anxieties I bake a great many breads, and I keep on the counter for consumption a single loaf and in my freezer I store what I produce. As I write at present there are three baguettes, two sourdough loaves and a challah, and as a sourdough Italian loaf is rising in the proofing box. Oh, I do share my stash, but in my recurring anxious moments I return to the baking and refill the freezer. One of the Hobby-Horses in my well-stocked stable that I ride frequently fears that the supply will run out—it is an old Hobby-Horse—and I will suffer hunger and deprivation. I recognize how this particular Hobby-Horse had been acquired, and though over the years I have tried to rid myself of it, I have not been able to do so. But I appreciate that the baking harms no one and that I can gift loaves satisfies me. And the baking of bread absolutely relieves my anxieties.

            I wonder that if we could help people find some means to relieve their anxieties—their particular Hobby-Horses—then perhaps the newspapers would not be so horrifying to read. (Actually, I can’t read much of a newspaper except for the Arts section and the Obituaries. If I’m not there I know I’m not dead. And I am not overly fond of the contemporary journalistic style of writing/reporting). And then I think we need to be more tolerant of the Hobby-Horses of others. As Tristram Shandy avers, “But everyman to his own taste—Nay . . . Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses; their running horses,—their coins and their cockle shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” Me, I bake bread and I’m not hurting anyone. Acknowledgement of our own Hobby Horses and those of others might make for a safer and more pleasant world. We might perhaps care better for each other.

Come Watson, the Game's Afoot

Freud introduces Chapter 6 of Beyond the Pleasure Principle this way: “What follows is speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead.” I love both of those statements! In his first sentence Freud authorizes the reader to feel free to accept or reject the argument presented according to the individual’s preference, partiality, penchant, or inclination. Accept or reject what you will, Freud declares, it is, of course, of not much interest to me whichever path you choose. By the writing, in the writing, I am enjoying some pleasure. And while he writes, Freud lives even if he writes about death. Maybe the writing pursues Death even like the detectives in the novels and TV shows I so enjoy.
           And so the second sentence justifies the first. Freud isn’t terribly interested where in thought that idea might lead him. The writing is a form of play and even, perhaps, playful. Writing is itself a school, a learning environment where the writer might find something for which he did not know he was looking. The discovery will bring pleasure. Freud’s comment here reminds me of Montaigne’s declaration: “And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts?” For Montaigne in his leisure hours his writing serves as entertainment as he follows an idea to some destination. Writing is a pleasure. Freud, too, sees writing as a gratifying means of thinking through an idea to its unknown and unanticipated end.

Now that I am retired, and have been so these past four years, I enjoy many leisure hours and often I fill them with writing. As did Freud and Montaigne, I enjoy the freedom to unravel the thread of an idea to see where it may lead me. Once I was concerned with who had read me, who would read me, who should have read me, but at present, midway through my eighth decade, those concerns have fallen away, thankfully. I do not have to influence anyone and have no need to expand my curriculum vitae.  Of course, I’m going to post this on my blog and so I am careful to use correct grammar and spelling, though I can admit that there have been  lapses over the years. I am yet concerned with style if I can be said to have one, and I do labor over the text word by word and sentence by sentence. Eventually one hopes the world might see . . . and then, as Freud says, any reader might “consider or dismiss” as they wish. Emily Dickinson might have hidden her poems in a trunk, but she had first sent not a few to Thomas Higginson in the hopes of getting published. When he proved not helpful as mentor or promoter, she stopped attempting to put her poems out into the world. She wrote almost wholly for herself . . . but, she must have worked religiously on her poems, and if she did not publish during her lifetime, she also did not destroy her work. Perhaps one doesn’t write without an external audience in mind. Maybe journals, commonplace books, diaries (but not then so much) are meant to be privately kept, and I have thousands of pages of journals placed in the archives and on shelves in my home in which editing has been done and even before the pen touched the page. Why write anything if it isn’t meant to be seen . . . or, I consider as Freud’s second sentence avers, perhaps writing is the exercise of following an idea . . . if not consistently then certainly, and as Montaigne suggests, to do so with pleasure. And if no one reads what I may and may not publish, if I have entertained myself I have not wasted my time with what I have considered such useful and agreeable thoughts.                                                                                                    

 And then at the conclusion of chapter 6 Freud writes, “It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that I have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them.” Come Watson, the game’s afoot!