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July 1, 2021 - One American - Chase Geiser
01:14:57
Joseph Massey | How To Be An American Poet Despite Cancel Culture | OAP #22
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Well, thank you for coming on.
I appreciate it.
I got your book.
Came in the mail today.
Oh, there it is.
And you know, I was thinking, um I'm surprised that you don't see a lot of critic criticism of poets given all of the paper that's wasted on each page.
It's not really very environmentally friendly.
Well, if the poetry's good, then it's justified.
If it's not, then it really is a crime against trees.
I've said before that 90, at least 98 to 99% of poetry that's published is uh an insult to trees.
Uh it's it's it's it's tree murder.
Yeah, yeah, it's really a tragedy.
Um, you know, it's funny.
I uh I was talking to I can't remember who it was I was talking to about this.
I think it was I can't remember.
I just mentioned I do so many of these every week, and I can't remember.
Um, but we were uh it was my buddy Eric.
Um talking about how since everything has gotten so political no one's really talking about anything else, and um that was one of the reasons why I wanted to reach out to you is because um you know I was interested in all sorts of things that were completely apolitical growing up and into young adulthood and even into college.
Like I was reading Kerouac when I was 14, the Dharma Bums totally changed my life.
Uh Tristessa, I think is his best work.
I mean I went through the whole entire phase of being interested in poetry and making music when I was in high school and having sort of um a general a genuine pursuit of understanding the human condition.
I was having a human experience, and now that everything's gotten so political, um, and you know, necessarily so, I suppose.
I mean it's a fought that needs a fight that needs to be fought, but uh it's really a shame because we're not talking about like what movies are moving or what art is um resonating uh as a society, we're just sort of bitching at each other.
And um, I thought maybe uh um having you on would be sort of a reinsport or uh a way to kind of get back in touch because I think part of what it means to be American is to it's not just an innovative country in terms of technology and business, it is those things, but it's also a great place of cultural development, traditionally anyway, and I don't know.
I just wondered kind of what you thought about that.
Yeah, well, I mean, most discussions of art or uh you know, movies or books or whatever, painting, poetry, um, those discussions are um severely inhibited by these politics that are so pervasive,
and um to the point where at least in poetry, and I'm sure in other mediums, other fields, but you really aren't permitted to be critical of anything.
Um, particularly if you're white and straight.
I I know I'm probably gonna get crap for that, but it's the truth.
Um you have to uh either say nothing or heap praise, and that's all that's acceptable.
Um I've seen in poetry where I mean, this is like a I saw it coming, and sure enough, it's here where poets get bad reviews.
Bad is in critical, you know.
This book didn't really do it for me, or just you know, critical in the sense of um not just lavishing praise.
And they they see it as a kind of violence, they're offended by their bad reviews, and they um I think they've terrified critics in that way.
Um I I won't name it, I won't name names because it's such a small world, the poetry world, but critics who were once considered major critics.
Um kingmakers, even was a word that was used to describe one critic, a kingmaker.
Well, the king maker was the editor of a very large national magazine that has a poetry section.
And they published a poem that when it first came out, and the poet put it on uh Facebook.
Um everybody loved it.
It got Like 300 likes, and but it within 24 hours, it was accused of appropriating culture in the sense that it was using African American vernacular English, I think is the term.
And so Ebonics.
It wasn't even Ebonics.
I mean, I come from outside of Philly and in Delaware.
I knew a lot of trailer park kids.
I lived in a trailer park.
People talked that way, white or black or Asian.
A lot of us were listening to rap music, and and it was just part of that slang was just part of the part of the nomenclature, right?
Um and this poem was about a homeless person, if I'm recalling correctly, and it and it then it spoken and at points in the voice of this homeless person in a kind of slangy urban kind of way.
And but yeah, within 24 hours, it was called racist.
There were demands for apologies from the editors, um, take the poem down.
And so this Kingmaker critic completely caved to the pressure, put uh he appended, they didn't take the poem down, but they appended it with um essentially a trigger warning.
And um hell, they did that with Gone with the Wind on Disney Plus.
Oh, they I'm surprised it's on there at all.
Yeah, yeah, it's on there.
Yeah, yeah.
There was a and I you know, actually, they funny thing is they they got a bunch of bad press when they put that movie out.
Then they um uh uh added a trigger warning, and um it's since been removed apparently, because my wife loves that movie though, I hate it, and um she watches it maybe annually and she's like, Hey, they took the trigger warning away.
Well, uh they're different platforms, but it's like okay, so Disney Plus had they they took away Gone with the Wind, but did Netflix take away cuties?
I mean Oh my god, I know.
So we could watch that, but we can't watch some and I I think Gone with the Wind's a terrible movie for lots of reasons.
Um it's just boring as hell, and I was forced to watch it.
Yeah, it's way too I mean, it just goes on forever.
I I I can't I read your I read your article and I immediately regretted that I brought up that movie.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to Oh no, that's okay.
I'm not uh uh you know triggered, tri triggered, yeah, not triggered.
Even without that particular experience with the film, I still would hate it.
It's just boring.
Yeah, I agree.
But just dislike.
There are there are so many better movies to watch, even from the time.
Uh I mean, hell, it's it's fairly contemporary with uh I think it's even the same year as Wizard of Oz.
Maybe I'm wrong, but um Wizard of Oz is a far superior movie, in my opinion.
I agree.
And it's uh, you know, it's a classic.
There must be something cancelable though about Wizard of Oz.
I mean, it's just waiting to happen.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.
That's a good question.
That would probably be a really good uh article, like a sarcastic sort of conceptual James, you know, James Lindsay like uh trolling article about why we need to cancel the Wizard of Oz.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, like the the cowardly line, it's clearly insensitive to people who you know suffer from um maybe it's post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yeah, um, you know, it's it's uh it's coward shaming.
Yeah, it's coward shaming for sure.
But you know, one thing that the Wizard of Oz gets right is um it uh it recognizes inherent white supremacy, and that the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz is an old white dude.
That's right.
I think that yes, they were way out of the time.
That would be the crux of the essay.
That's right.
That's right.
The big reveal, it's it's all the strings are being pulled by an old white dude.
I mean, why not?
The patriarchy, they're just uh they are they're ubiquitous.
So the the interesting thing to me about um censorship, but particularly with the arts, is that you know it's sort of always been a problem, uh going back hundreds of years even.
Um if you look at like Hal, for example, I know um uh you had some uh correspondence with Alan Ginsburg.
But how it was it was censored for uh sort of its explicit nature, Right.
Um and you know, we don't see censorship today for um things that are explicit, but we see it for things that are offensive, and that sort of shifted.
But censorship has sort of always been a problem for the arts, and I think it's because maybe one of the purposes of art is to push uh buttons and and um cross lines that need to be crossed.
Well, you know, Lawrence Ferlingetty passed away recently, uh the the publisher and uh the the man behind City Lights Books, the publishing house, and the bookstore, and um you know, he went to court over how he published it.
And um, you know, the artists defended the artist who was being uh who was they were attempting to pulp his books and and to ban how and it was abhorrent to the poets within Ginsburg's milieu,
and just I think across the board um at that time, but now artists are censoring other artists, they're ganging up to censor artists that they that they dislike for ideological reasons, and um that's that's terrifying to me, and um it happens, it's happening at a greater and greater frequency, it seems.
Um it's it's I know in the poetry world anyway, and just the literary world in general, it's um it's almost becoming normal to cancel an author or a poet for whatever reason to demand that their books be you know uh taken out of print, etc.
And um that's the major difference.
Artists fought for other artists, artists fought for freedom of speech, you know, in that during that time period in the 50s.
Um, but not anymore.
The whole idea of free speech is completely mangled and screwed up by you know, for lack of a better way of describing it, woke ideology.
I don't even know what's going on, man.
I mean, I'm I'm it's like it's it's happened, it seems to have happened so quickly.
You know, I mean I can remember, I'm not terribly old.
I can remember when poets were not censoring other poets, and when they were acting like it's gotta be contemporary with social media, you know, it's gotta have some sort of correlation there where it's just ideas and outrage can go viral so much more easily than they used to.
Um that's right.
That's right.
They're really afraid of becoming targets, and so they line up and they shoot their neighbor so they don't get shot.
Well, they sh they tend to shoot the the and I'm speaking of the poetry world, they tend to shoot the poets who are the most successful.
And um it it seems to make sense from uh like an evolutionary point of view where the mediocriti gang up to um um to take out the uh you know the person who's seen as uh being in power.
Um I can't see my mic working, so I have to reset it everyone.
Oh, it overheats, it's that it's well I've had I had it fired up all afternoon, and I forgot to turn it off after the uh fired up.
Yeah, oh I just reset it.
Let's see.
Hold on a second, bear with me.
Sorry about that.
No, no worries.
There we go.
Just make sure it's plugged in one second, I'll be right back.
And what I'm gonna do while this um is on here.
Trying to read the trying to read the spines.
Huh.
You have the Urantia book.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'm into all sorts of esoteric shit.
I became a Freemason years ago and started reading all the all the weird stuff, actually about 10 years ago.
And uh there was a guy at my lodge that was really into that, and so I bought it.
Yeah, my dad's my dad's a f my dad's a Freemason.
Oh, cool, traveling man.
Yeah, yeah, he would get intoxicated and uh rattle off all all the secret not all the little secret things he had to memorize.
Oh shit, man, that's too bad.
It's not supposed to do that.
I know.
I know.
I'm not sure.
At least you know it's not a cult then.
No, yeah, right.
The pretty vanilla stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I I I don't remember it.
I was very small, but uh yeah, all that stuff fascinates me too.
The Urantra book, just people want meaning in life, you know.
And uh, you you probably love my bookshelf.
I got some good stuff if you're into esoteric weird old wisdom.
Um the best one is uh Morris Dogma.
Who wrote that?
Albert Pike wrote it, it's a Masonic book.
Uh he was a Confederate general, actually.
And he he basically um was commissioned by the Supreme Council of uh Scottish Right Freemasonry to scour the wisdom of the world for the lost degrees of Freemasonry, and he wrote Morals and Dogma and put together the fourth through the 33rd degree rituals.
He's like, these are what's that right?
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure he massaged them and rewrote some of them, so he didn't like rediscover the hidden scrolls.
It wasn't like you know, national treasure or something like that, but he basically did as much research as could be done in the late 19th century and try to figure out what the hell happened to some of the old secret ceremonies.
Yeah, my dad's a 33rd degree mason, and then my cousin, his first cousins, I guess my third cousin, he was I don't know what they what do they call the leader of a lodge.
He was like the he was the worstful master.
Yeah, yeah.
And he had a he had a Masonic uh funeral and everything.
Um but I think because I grew up with being kind of uh Freemasonry adjacent.
Um it hasn't been an air an area of a lot of interest.
Freemason adjacent, yeah.
Well, I don't, you know, some people think if you're if you even if you're just Freemason adjacent, you're you're like uh tainted by the Illuminati or whatever.
Yeah, which is I had a I had a guy with dreadlock.
That's when I lived in Humboldt County and everyone's high all the time.
Uh I wasn't.
And we visited this guy, my girlfriend and I, and she would she would buy weed from him.
I wasn't interested.
I just went for the ride.
And I told this guy uh that my dad's a Freemason.
He pulled a sword on me and pointed it at my uh neck.
The dude pulled a sword.
He pulled out a sword.
Yeah.
He uh he was terrified.
He he would you know, I don't know.
I I don't know why.
I mean if he thought I would like like some shape-shifting Illuminati person.
I don't know what he was scared of.
I'm not a I don't know.
Um, you know, obviously the Masons were heavily involved with the uh revolution in the United States, and so I think that coupled with their secret their advertised secrecy, um, has just made certain conspiracy-minded people very uh skeptical and paranoid about the organization,
but ultimately it's just a group of guys um uh they get together and um practice the degree work, which is highly symbolic about how to become a wiser person, how to become a better person, what it means to be a man.
And they're not allowed to talk about it, and so everybody gets freaked out when they're like, Hey, how come these kind of influential people are like in this self-help group, and they're you know, they don't tell each other, they don't tell the world anything about what they do, and it's it seems like a conspiracy, but it's not if it's hidden, people will ascribe nefarious intent, you know, or the little little it's it's shadowy, it must be bad.
Um and you see that in a lot of the uh hype over so-called cults that's been going on.
Um shit.
Did you hear you see the news about Alison Mack today?
I did, yeah, yeah.
And um, I think that whole situation is horribly sad.
Me too.
Um yeah, uh, I I think that's about as much as I can say that's articulate about it.
Um but I it clearly there's those documentaries that have come out are such propaganda pieces.
Um the one documentary that comes to mind, I forget what it was called.
It wasn't the HBO one, wasn't the vow, it was this other one.
Seduced, yeah.
They were putting in clips of Jonestown of all the dead bodies in Jonestown.
I'm like, you are like Nexium had nothing to do with uh uh a Marxist death cult in the middle of the fucking jungle.
What are you saying?
Keith Veneri Ferrari, yeah, you could say lots of things about Keith Vanier, I'm sure, but and you know, and people have, but uh he Uh there was never any mention of uh group suicide or um some kind of totalitarian rule, you know.
Um I found that so uh abhorrent that they would use the deaths of those people in Jonestown, you know, their survivors uh are still alive today, you know, people who actually survived Jonestown and then they're relatives.
So to use that as a as leverage to convince people that this is you know, some horrible, horrible cult.
It just goes to show how much overreach had to happen to make that make that organization look as horrible as possible.
Yeah, I think there's a there are a couple of things that influence that.
The first thing, the first problem they had is similar to that of Scientology, though.
I think Scientology actually has real problems.
But uh the um when you have a bunch of celebrities or powerful people that are involved in any organization, it immediately draws attention.
There's incentive created for uh district attorneys, prosecutors, investigators, everybody wants to catch those guys, right?
It's like that scene in the Wolf of Wall Street when the um FBI agent is on the boat with um uh Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, and he's like, I just can't wait till I take this boat back to the bureau, you know.
And it's like the same thing I think happened with with Nexium.
They thought, you know, everyone's ambition sort of to get these guys, because they knew it was going to be such a huge story, coupled with the whole entire bullshit that was the Me Too movement.
Um just sort of the it was just a bad wrong place, wrong time for for an organization like Nexium, in which you have uh, you know, a semi-controversial leader who happens to be sleeping with several of the members.
Yeah, bad place, wrong time for that group, and bad place wrong time for journalism, because what counts as journalism these days is I mean, the so much of it is just activism.
And I heard a uh interview with uh I think it's the Times Union, it's the paper in wherever Nexem's located in New York.
They were they were writing lots of stories about them.
I heard a podcast with him, and he was just so snarky, and it was clearly like making it very personal, you know, mocking like that they would play volleyball at night.
Like, why is that necessary?
You know, if they they've committed these crimes, you're saying that they're very suspicious.
Why don't you just stick to facts?
Stick to those your journalists.
Aren't you aren't facts your thing?
But it's just it's editorial commentary all the time.
And uh yeah, it's so it's a sensational factor.
Next team has all the all the components.
Yeah, what I and what I don't understand about it is you know, it's sort of like a Maryland man uh or a Charles Manson thing rather, um, where you know, Charles Manson never actually murdered anybody, right?
But he was convicted because he was sort of part of this conspiracy.
He was this inciter, right?
This cult leader, so they say.
And you see this thing with with Keita, I think is interesting is that you know, he was charged with a number of things, uh, but one of the main things was he was accused of basically brainwashing these women in order to perform sexual acts and get other women through collateral and brainwashing to perform acts as well, right?
That was the accusation.
But then on the other hand, they go and they sentence Alice and Mack for to three years, and it's like, listen, if she was brainwashed, then she's not culpable.
And if she's culpable, then she wasn't brainwashed.
So it's like you can't really convict both of them, you know.
You have to pick one.
I had that same thought.
I mean, how cruel is it to sentence someone to three years of prison when they were brainwashed, right?
If you really believe that that's what happened, um, why would you send somebody like that to to prison?
Uh you know, it so it just goes to show uh how seriously they really regard the idea of brainwashing.
And um it becomes a means for people to uh get out of trouble.
They just say that they were brainwashed.
It's a scapegoat tactic.
And um yeah, yeah, it's it's it's strange what's what's happened with that group.
I'm not really sure that I even believe that brainwashing exists.
Well, you have to be willing to be brainwashed at a certain point.
I mean, you're you're participating in it.
I don't, I mean, I know with hypnosis, and I'm no expert on hypnosis, but the people who are able to be hypnotized and like quack like ducks or whatever, you know.
I'm talking, you know, that kind of sh uh showmanship style of uh hypnosis.
Carnival hypnosis, yeah.
Those those people have to be really willing to be hypnotized, they have to be into it.
You can't hypnotize somebody who does not want to be hypnotized.
I think that's like a general rule in hypnotism.
I I could be wrong, I'm sure I'll probably have you ever been hypnotized before.
Uh no, I have friends who a good friend of mine who couldn't quit smoking, has been hypnotized many times, and he's definitely somebody who allows himself to be hit.
Well, he he quit for like two years, actually.
It it worked, so he has to go for a refresher every now and then.
He's gotta get a renewal.
Yeah.
Actually, it was uh probably a week or two after all this cancellation stuff with me started, and and life was just falling apart from under me and all sides.
And a friend of mine who's a hypnotist, professional hypnotist, uh called me and took me through a hypnosis thing to relax, you know.
And it worked, it was basically like a guided meditation.
But if I didn't want to go there, I I wouldn't have gone.
I guess there is a line you can draw a line with people who um have have diminished intellectual capacity, um, or who have been like, you know, I don't know, horrifically um taken advantage of in certain ways, so they're psychologically in a state where they can be you know directed.
Um but that's different.
I the that that's different than the hypnosis we're talking about.
So um, like I said earlier, I read that um collette piece that you did about uh going through the whole Me Too movement.
Um you basically got super fucked for a long time and um have sort of come out of it, it seems anyway.
Um how did you cope with going through all that shit and overcoming the challenges associated with it?
Yeah, I I think uh so much of it has to do with the way because the way I was raised, uh very abusive households, I became adept at um protecting myself by going within.
And that coupled with the training I've had in meditation over the last seven years or so, um, really saved me, really kept me from spiraling out of control.
Um there are any number of ways I could have spiraled out.
I could have freaked out on social media, just posting crazy shit, or uh could have started drinking or or killed myself, which crossed my mind many times.
Um but there was something uh call it grace, I don't know, but um it swept in immediately when all of it started happening, and it kind of kept me grounded enough to not um completely lose it, even though I was completely losing it.
I was aware that I was completely losing it, and the awareness of that awareness provided me with some stability, and um, and continuing to write poetry like uh uh defiantly because I'm not gonna let these people take that from me.
They can't, you know.
And um yeah, it's been three years and it still flares up, it flared up today.
Uh somebody wished death on me.
They said that I should uh overdose on uh on pills and die.
And this is a poetry world person, he used his real name in an account that he just created like yesterday just to fuck with me.
And um, but that kind of discourse is acceptable in the poetry world and I think in the arts in general.
If you're seen as as he called me a crypto Nazi, all right.
He probably doesn't this is how you call me a Nazi one more time, I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay blasted.
I love that clip.
I love that clip.
Yeah, I've seen it many times.
Man, they called you a crypto Nazi.
They called me a crypto Nazi.
Yeah, crypto.
And I engaged him.
I was like, what so can you tell me And what way am I a Nazi?
I don't understand.
You're the one calling for my celibate, so you can't say I was abusive.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And and you're calling for for my death because of an ideological difference that most of which you're just kind of fantasizing about because you don't really know what my politics of your conservative leaning.
Because I it it's all stems from me tweeting that I'm more conservative than not these days.
When did that shift happen for you?
Was it just after the Me Too movement?
Uh it started before then.
It started when I when I saw what was happening in the poetry world with identity politics and the absolute cowardice in uh displayed by so many poets who wouldn't give any pushback um to what was happening.
Specifically, and this is before even identity politics became a phrase that's used all the time.
This is this is like uh I don't know, five years ago or something, six years ago.
And um I'll make this very short, but a a poet who's a conceptual poet, so he doesn't really write poems, he takes texts that already exist and then reframes them in a certain way.
Well, he did that with Michael Brown's autopsy.
Why he did that, I don't know.
I think that was certainly in poor taste, but they this guy revels in poor taste.
He did this, he performed it, and then a group of poets calling themselves the Mongrel Coalition sprung up, and they just started bullying poets and editors, demanding um diversification.
And uh I from what I could tell, most major poetry journals were already diverse, um, in the in terms of having different um you want to get published, just write some fucking good poetry.
That's exactly and and it well, so yeah, well, you get right you got right to it with that comment because now it's become it's not about the quality of the work, it's about your you know, your identity, your your your bona fides as a um uh marginalized person.
And it's so bad that I've noticed you know, white poets claiming a a kind of marginalization that they that I suspect suspect they don't really have.
Like there are a lot of I've noticed white straight poets always tend to have mysterious illnesses, and you know, they're sick all the time, and so that's that that's their thing to let to let the poetry that's their signal Lyme's disease.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, lime disease.
Lyme disease, yeah.
Lyme that's a that's a popular one.
Um shit.
Yeah, because there's like no obvious symptoms, but you can just always say you don't feel good.
It's it's all these invisible illnesses.
I'm tired.
Oh, I'm so tired.
Uh you know, it's like that's their signal, you know.
Um that they're not uh I don't know, evil, evil white people.
Um so what what's your writing process look like?
I mean, are you like scouring pages at 2 a.m. or that is is it spontaneous?
Is it planned?
How how do you actually what's your creative process?
Um I I tend to write in notebooks and uh with pen and paper.
And after a period of time, whether it's a day or a couple days or a week, I go back to the notebook and mine it for things that are useful, and then I work with it in uh Google Docs, just toying with the language, you know, um revising it in all sorts of ways until it starts to sound has a particular sound that feels finished as finished as it could be.
And I like it to feel like it's outside of me at a certain point, you know.
There's no longer there's no there's no self-consciousness there anymore.
Um it's some other voice, it's mine, but it's also beyond just this, you know, small self sitting here talking to you.
It's something bigger than that, which may sound very um delusional and uh psychotic.
I kind of understand.
Uh would you would you say that creativity is something that the mind actually generates, or something that the mind picks up?
Because I often think of the mind myself, and I don't want to say this in in the street your response if you think differently, but um I often think of the mind as more of an antenna than an actual Vehicle that generates anything new.
I like that.
I like that description.
That one of my favorite poets, uh, his name is Jack Spicer, and he had a whole theory about Martians, and that his poems came from Martians from the outside.
And I don't think he really believed that they came from Martians, but it was just a metaphor.
An analogy, yeah, that the poems come from the outside, and the poem or the poet is the um the caretaker of those messages and kind of like the curator of those messages.
Um yeah, the poet is a receiver, and but it's what really separates poets from just people who rant on Greyhound buses and and and all that, who I believe probably are receiving messages from the outside.
I don't know if you've ever ridden Greyhound, but um people uh ridden a greyhound bus.
Ridden a greyhound bus, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
So you receive comfortable, it's really easy to take a nap.
So you receive these these messages that this and uh and then it's what what you do with it, you know.
That's the craft part comes into it.
And um, do I really believe that the that the language itself is coming from the out the outside?
No, but the impulse to to even write a poem, it's coming from stimulation that's around me.
It's coming from the weather, it's coming from my metabolism too.
It's coming from all kinds of sources, you know, but including certainly the outside world, you know.
Yeah, for sure.
Who's your favorite poet?
I don't I don't I don't have a particular favorite.
It's like who's one that comes to mind when you get asked that question?
That's a better way to frame it.
Uh I would have to pick somebody like uh William Carlos Williams, who's like a foundational poet for me in my practice and for for many other poets.
Uh he was a modernist, he was uh contemporary with Ezra Pound, friends with Ezra Pound.
I say he tweeted Ezra today.
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
I almost tweeted Ezra Pound sucks just to just to troll you, but I didn't know that if you would get it.
I thought you thought he maybe doesn't mean well enough to know I'm kidding.
No, I would get it.
Well, there's there's there's so much there's so much controversy around Ezra Pound, and he he's a classic example of art, the art and the artist, and there is a separation, or if you're of believe if you're the other frame of mind that there is no separation, so all of his art is tainted by his crazy politics because he was a uh supporter of Mussolini and and you know he was actually Mussolini seemed like a really good idea.
People people forget that we don't we have we have a whole different context for what fascism looks like now than the context they had in the 30s.
Yeah, well that's well that well that that that's you know people who like who who would like to cancel Ezra Pound, let's say they have no sense of historical context.
They're offended that if you to even have that introduced to the to the conversation because um they don't want their righteousness to be diluted by facts and by you know the the truth and it is true that these things that Ezra Pound said uh in the 30s, um we're in a con a historical context that we we really aren't able to fully grasp.
You know, we're not there.
We're in an so the woke people look through look at these historical and look at people, look at these people from the past who may have said something abhorrent or whatever, and they'll look at it through the lens of today.
You know, there's no there's the it's like all time collapses into the now of social media buzz and hype and anger and hive mind, you know, reactivity.
And um I think uh I think that's a that's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible thing for art.
You know, they tried to kill they're like go they're protesting Picasso recently because he was meaning he something like that.
Yeah, he was mean to his women.
So they protest the building still stands, you know, even if the architect isn't asshole.
That's right.
That's right.
I like that.
I will I will say though that that um uh you know I love the doors, I always love the doors, and I and I noticed uh you read um No One Here Gets Out of Live.
That was one of the first books I read that kind of introduced me to poetry to growing up that had that kind of orange red cover.
That's right.
And um I tore through that in junior high, and I watched the doors movie, which I thought Oliver Stone did a great job with that.
I'm gonna have to reset my camera again.
I can tell it froze.
But um, I tore through the doors movie, and I will say that you know, I think that Jim Morrison's poetry is good.
I think that his lyrics are even better than his standalone poetry.
I think the doors were great.
But I did enjoy their music more because of who Jim Morrison was and his brand and what he stood for.
So like, you know, I I don't I don't I think that you should separate the art from the artist, and I think you should you know consider them independently, but you can't say that they're completely isolated either, because you know, the way you experience someone what someone creates has something to do with their identity.
Yeah, no, there it it's never completely separate, and to really appreciate an artist's work, well I'll put it another way you can your appreciation can be richer and deeper of uh of any artist if you know a bit about their biography, the context of where the work came from.
There it enriches the work in in that sense.
Um, but to condemn a work, I mean they could there could be a movement.
We could we could start one actually to cancel Jim Morrison posthumously, because you saw it in the uh in the move in the Oliver Stone film.
I mean, he picked up a duck that his girlfriend had roasted so nicely, threw it on the ground and stomped on it, walked her in the closet and set the house on fire.
Yeah, let's not forget that one.
I mean, I know bad, but it was a duck.
Yeah, yeah.
I I think it's it's about understanding that art's made by human beings, and but art is also um hopefully uh transcendent enough to be better than the artist, you know, not in some corny,
you know, feel good like chicken soup for the soul sense, but just um at least when I the poetry that I read I know that that work is inspired and or the poetry I like the work is inspired and does transcend the human being who's writing it, you know.
It's it's it's an expression of the best of what a human is capable of when working with these materials that they're given, whether it's language or paint or whatever, and um, and for the reader, it's a way to participate in that an ideal state, but a state that can be aspired to in a sense, you know.
Um and it vivifies the world, you know, like great art, uh great.
And I hate using generalizations, but you know, like I re I read a beautiful Wallace Stevens poem, I see the world a bit uh things are uh brighter, you know, things are clear, I'm feeling more.
My heart's open, my mind's open, you know.
But he also was a dick.
So I often think of art as uh you should publish that that that rant.
Just first page.
Send me send me the transcript, yeah.
Yeah, so I I often think of art as a coping mechanism.
Um especially music, I guess all art, but music is the one that comes to mind because it's so accessible.
Uh both a coping mechanism for the consumer as well as the artist.
And it seems to me, and this could be off base, so you know, I'm totally interested in your thoughts.
Um it seems to me that in order to have the discipline and the motivation to make incredibly good art, which is often not lucrative, even if you're amazing.
In order to have that sort of discipline and motivation, it seems to me reasonable that you have a greater demand to cope with something, or you have something bigger that you need to cope with.
So it would inherently follow that there's an increased likelihood for really good art to be made by really fucked up people.
It it it bears true in the biographies of you know, poets who are are truly great, you know, who've stuck around for whose work continues to be read, like like I like Wallace Stevens.
Um yeah, he um he he said some very cruel things to people.
By all accounts, he was just kind of a kind of a weirdo, you know.
He was like we like he would he would be considered creepy these days.
Like he probably would end up on some list as creepy, you know.
He would have been me too'd, certainly.
Um but yeah, it's and I think for so many artists too.
I mean, this might take us down a whole weight uh that I'm not equipped to go to go down, but sure I I think it starts and it for so many artists, the the artists I love and then I've studied, it starts in childhood.
And um there's a wound there.
And uh the creative act is not only a way to reclaim agency, but um and a way to kind of put the world and all of its chaos into some kind of order, or at least into you know, a kind of song, a kind of way of um making sense of it, you know.
And um, and then that matures into wanting to make sense of the human condition in general, or just wanting wanting to address the human condition and then you know, and by doing that, you bring others with you um into that greater understanding of what it means to be human, like you mentioned Karouak uh earlier.
Uh he he his demons were right on the surface, you know, and um and he wrote so fucking awesome.
It's like Silicon Valley just caught up with him.
Oh, they're like microdosing.
Well, I just think kind of because he um was really into the Eastern stuff before it was trendy, you know.
That's true, yeah.
Yeah.
And and I I just I feel like sometimes I laugh at Silicon Valley when they like uh they they start doing these things in the name of enhanced productivity, and you heard a lot more about it before Trump was elected, and everybody just talked about Trump exclusively.
Um but you know, they were microdosing uh uh LSD for increased productivity and comparing the performance on Medaffinil versus Adderall and and you know, trying uh uh meditation in order to calm their mind so they could be more productive on them during a software binge, and there was like this sort of like idol worship of maximum productivity of intelligence in the Silicon Valley software tech startup thing.
And um I think that it's it was just funny to me how these people who I don't typically consider to be spiritually enlightened were kind of commercializing everything that was good about um something that really has nothing to do with commercial success, it has to do with you know personal fulfillment and self-actualization rather than external.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That that is interesting because when Karouac became involved, like uh the the story of the Dharma Bums and Jaffe Ryder's Gary Snyder, and they're discovering these Buddhist texts, they're they're they're doing Zen meditation.
Um Philip Whalen is in that uh book as well.
Under I forget the name of his character, but he went on to be, yeah.
He was the the uh what do they call the leader of a of a of a Zen uh ashram?
No, he wasn't a guru.
He was the leader of uh not well versed.
But he became a full-blown Zen monk priest, you know.
But they were they they found these teachings right at when they were introduced to to Western culture, or at least in the popular like American sense, because Alan Watts was contemporary with them and and his writings were influential to these guys, and um Haiku was just starting to become uh a thing, was being published in English.
Uh R. H. Blyce was all the rage, like an apple on the floor.
Is that is that in Dharma Bumps?
No, no, no.
He just made that up.
I just made that up, yeah.
You're a damn you're a goddamn genius.
I'm a poet and I didn't even know it, bro.
Never heard that before?
That joke?
No, no, never.
No, never.
Never, never.
No, a drunk uncle's never slapped me on the back and said that in my ear.
Jesus Christ.
But uh what the fuck.
But uh, yeah, yeah, Kerouac, yeah.
Um yeah, you're right.
They were in it for for truly in it for enlightenment.
And I think Kerouak's interest in Buddhism was uh was absolutely sincere.
And oh yeah.
And he died a devout Catholic, I believe.
I think he went back to the old Catholic roots.
But he was always Catholic, and that's an interesting thing about his his spirituality.
I guess it's not incompatible.
Yeah, he he wrote about them in tandem.
You know, um, he never fully became you know, I'm a Buddhist.
That's never he never I don't he never said I don't he he may have, but he was always a Buddhist and a Catholic, and I think more of a Catholic than a Buddhist.
But you know, if you read um Golden Scripture of Eternity, I think is the the title of a one of his uh Buddhist inspired texts, he was kind of not imitating, but but kind of writing in the style of uh Buddhist uh sutras and stuff like that.
It's um totally sincere, you know.
And I think I I my impression is some people view his his interest in Buddhism as a kind of um corny cultural appropriation thing, you know, and uh certainly was not there's no fucking such thing as cultural appropriation.
That is such bullshit because all culture is a combination of who you know, right?
That's that's right, yeah, yeah.
Like cultural appropriation because we have a taco stand and a white neighborhood.
Well, those fuckers are speaking Spanish because Spain invaded them.
Okay, so they culturally appropriated Spain, all right.
So that's right.
It's bullshit.
It's who you know, and if you're hanging out with people that know different shit, you're gonna appropriate their ideas.
It's just gonna fucking happen.
Who gives a fuck?
Oh my god, it's such a kill switch.
It's like it's if you say cultural appropriation is is morally uh um uh out of line, then how are we ever supposed to make progress anywhere?
Because it seems to me that all progress is culturally speaking, is changing and sharing ideas.
Totally.
Culture is appropriation, culture wouldn't be culture if other cultures weren't being appropriated and blended, and that's culture.
Is there such a thing as a pure culture that is undefiled by influence?
No, there's not.
And Romans culturally appropriated Greek architecture.
Exactly, yeah.
Fucked it up by making the Corinthian column.
Yeah, let's cancel them.
I mean cancel Rome, bro.
Cancel Rome.
Yeah, I mean, they were terrible.
They're you know, feeding people to blinds.
Rome's still around, man.
Roman church in the air.
They just turned the state into a religion.
Are you Roman Catholic?
Yeah, I may ask.
That's yeah, I uh I converted in college um because I thought I was gonna be a politician.
And I thought it would be necessary for me to be Catholic.
Uh my actual faith is I call myself a Jordan Peterson Christian, and that uh I consider myself Christian, but nobody who's Christian would think I was.
I think that can be said for a lot of Catholics.
I mean, uh a lot of like the the real mystic Catholics, um they're they're way they're well, Catholicism's all is already too far out for most Christians anyway, you know.
But but the mystics, and I'm thinking even of like Thomas Merton, um, there's a poet named Robert Lax, who I don't know if he'd identify as uh Catholic, but he may have been Catholic, but he was a good friend of Thomas Merton's, and um I don't know, they were just um they were they were very radical aesthetically speaking.
I mean Robert Lax was his poems would consist of just repeated words as a kind of mantra, you know.
But um I don't know, I guess it kind of ties back into Karouac because Thomas Merton and Robert Lax and others have seen the um relationship between uh Christianity or between the teachings of Christ and something like Buddhism or the great you know wisdom teachings of the East.
And um I love that.
Yeah, I I I love that approach.
I don't I was baptized Catholic and thought about becoming Catholic.
I I was going to the uh whatever they call those classes for adults, the confirmation.
Oh yeah, the RC.
The RCA, something like that.
Yeah, and I I got totally I couldn't get through the the um the uh purgatory thing.
It it I I knew that they I knew Catholics believed in purgatory, but I did not know about um indulgences, and I did not know that basically if you're not on the level of a saint, you're going to purgatory.
It doesn't matter if you just confessed and you're going to purgatory.
I mean, and that freaked me out, and I it it it yeah, it put me off, but that doesn't mean I don't.
I I think I think Catholicism is beautiful.
So the problem that I have with Catholicism and other denominations of Christianity is I think that Christians lean too much on the veracity of the magic, right?
So when I was going through RCIA, one of the guys is like, you know, uh, one of my problems as I struggle with this decision is I'm not really sure that I believe that Jesus Christ literally came back from the dead, you know, and everyone's like, oh no, there's here are the reasons why we believe that, you know.
At the end of the class, I pulled him aside.
I was like, listen, I was like, it doesn't matter if it really happened.
Like, that's not the you know, and what I mean to say is if you look at like old testament stories in particular, and there's that famous story where they're moving the Ark of the Covenant, which you were not allowed to touch, right?
And they had to move it on this like platform, just like Indiana Jones, and um one of the guys slipped, and the guy behind them put his hand on the arc soul wouldn't fall off the platform that they were carrying, and as soon as he touched it, was hit with a bolt of lightning, right?
And if you believe that literally happened, you walk away thinking, do whatever the fuck God says, or you're or you're fucked.
But if you think it's a metaphor, then maybe the meaning is don't do the wrong thing for the right reasons.
Maybe it's a deeper meaning, maybe it's an anti-Makiavellian story that the end doesn't justify the means, right?
Like and and maybe you'd be a better person if you could adhere to the the metaphor of the story, the actual meaning, the theme of the story, than adhering to it as if it actually happened literally.
And I think a lot of things in the Bible I think actually happened, okay.
So don't get me wrong, I don't think the whole thing's just made up, but I think an awful lot of it is intentionally allegorical because it forces you to discuss it with your peers, to think about it, to ponder it and come to conclusions about what it means to be a good human being that you wouldn't come to those conclusions if it was historically just a you know a text.
Yeah, I mean, and and those the books of the Bible, I mean, they're coming from an oral tradition, I think, right?
And that and it's a way I mean, just reading the gospels, Jesus taught through allegory, you know, and parables and such.
And yeah, the Bible is is full of those.
Uh like the the whale thing, I which I was thinking about recently because somebody in Massachusetts says well, it doesn't say whale.
Some guy, some fisherman in Massachusetts got swallowed by a whale for real recently.
You know what's crazy about that is if you're spending long enough if you spend long enough time I swear to god, if you spent long enough time in a in a in the belly of a whale, you the digestive fluids uh will bleach your skin.
Oh, I yeah.
And the in the story Jonah the whale, he's described as glistening or whatever when you when he's on when he's beached.
That's prove so it's like you know that yeah, I don't know if it's proof or not, but it's just it's just funny that you know, like you read it and it comes off like a miracle, like he was blessed and he came out of this whale, like resurrected, and it's like, or maybe he was just fucking bleached.
That's interesting.
Well, the the guy who got swallowed by the whale recently, he was so intent on not going down to the to the belly because he knew what would happen.
He didn't want to just hold on, he didn't want to be digested, yeah.
He was holding on.
I mean, it's wild.
But um, I saw clips of that, I didn't think it was real.
Why did I bring that up?
Yeah, I brought it up as an example of maybe something in the Bible that didn't actually happen but was used as a teaching uh tool.
Um yeah, yeah, I think that's a for lack of a better word.
It's an enlightened way to approach uh Christianity and especially Catholicism.
Um I I find a lot of value in in uh Catholicism and in the saints and in a life of devotion and in the the ethics that are conveyed and and established in within Catholicism, despite all of the you know nightmarish things that have happened uh with the why do you think that is?
Nobody Talks about that.
Really?
I think I mean so many priests, like over 30% or something.
It's like astronomical numbers.
Well, I guess there's no way to tell if priests were engaging in that kind of abuse, you know, before recorded history or before uh anything like that would be thought of would be anybody would think to record it.
But so I I'm just imagining that many years ago, century ago, uh it uh priest was probably uh he was the center of the of the of the the village or whatever the there was a much more community-based thing.
When that's even true going back, you know, before Catholicism started to take a downturn because the town I grew up in was mostly Catholic, and it was a very community-based thing, but um I just think that there's way too much stimulation in the modern world for people to live a celibate life,
and when they're trying to live a celibate life and they're surrounded by what they're surrounded by, it I think it causes major distortions in um in the in the in the in the mind, you know, and in someone's wife.
Apparently the the priests have denied themselves any sexual gratification for so long that it started to mess with their psyche, and they they they expressed that psychological stress in unhealthy ways on other people, the most vulnerable.
Uh I think that's I think that has something to do with it, but also that there are priests who um became priests to prey on on kids.
There was like a case here locally recently.
The priest, you know, this guy was abusing kids from the very beginning, as soon as he put the the you know the cloth on, and um, you know, it it yeah, so but it's nothing I just said it I do I absolutely believe because I don't know, and I wonder too, why is it so pervasive in the Catholic Church?
It's it I don't think it's as easy as just saying the modern world is is overly stimulating and to the point where trying to live this devout and celibate life um will will warp someone, but it it it seems maybe plausible to me in some situations.
I don't know.
I have no, I don't know.
Well, if you think about the um if you think about the widespread cultural use and acceptance of pederasty in the Roman civilization, and you think about the union of Rome with the Catholic Church through Constantine and those cultural influences, um you know, after the fall of Rome as a state, it's still the culture still existed in the church, and you know, they were speaking Latin at mass until the 70s, right?
Or Vatican or Vatican II was.
And maybe it's just the case that it's uh hangover from a culture 1500 years ago, and those traditions kind of stuck around in a sort of secret kind of we don't talk about a way, and we just kind of discovered it.
Yeah, no, it's like yeah, you I think you nailed it.
It's the the secretiveness of it, and you I mean, these cases of uh priests that have like you know done horrible things to many children, they were moved around from parish to parish to parish, right?
And uh the records were kept sealed.
Um, so it's a it's a culture of protecting each other and keeping it totally secret.
Maybe if that were dealt with earlier on, you know, like uh it wouldn't have blown up to the point where it has now.
Um, because I think there still is uh a culture of secrecy within the Catholic Church.
That this the guy who I was talking about, he killed, he actually killed a boy, this priest, and he he confessed only a few weeks ago on his deathbed.
He finally confessed.
People thought that he did it, but he finally confessed.
And uh were the circumstances of that.
It was someone he was abusing, and no one he he didn't go into detail about why he did it, and he was using very cagey language, but enough to let the police know that he did it.
But um, he took him down to the river and bludgeoned him with a rock and threw him in the river.
And the Springfield Springfield Diocese, uh But he was a hell of a poet, man.
Hell of a poet.
Sure, I'm sure I'm sure uh they they they still won't release the documents they have on this guy.
It's like why not?
Why?
Why are you hiding these things?
I don't understand, you know.
So they still they still keep things very um very close in that way.
And I think it's wrong.
It's disgusting.
Well, what's the solution?
Just let priests get married.
Transparency after a generation though, work itself out.
Well, I think uh after the first credible out uh accusation of child abuse, they should they should be defrocked.
And um I don't know what that word means.
I'm sorry.
Well, uh is that that might not even be the word they use.
What is the word they use when they uh make a priest the they like lay size them or something like that?
They uh strip them of their priestly, yeah.
Basically priests, that's why they're not doing it.
I know yeah.
Well God gives a hell of a homily, hell of a homily.
Give them a pass.
Uh it's it's it's very sad to me because I I love the beauty of the Catholic Church.
The beauty, literally, the aesthetic beauty and how they treat aesthetics is is uh yeah.
You you you won't go into a more beautiful church.
You have almost a spiritual experience just walking into it and the way it smells because of the incense and the holy water and and the fact that it's open all the time and empty most of the time.
Um it's it is definitely an inspiring experience to walk into um a Catholic cathedral.
Yeah, always, and it's they always have a particular silence and a particular vibration about them that um I find very uh very calming, very comforting.
Um yeah, and the the Catholic church here and uh where I live is uh very old and very beautiful, it was just recently uh renovated, brought back to its original glow, its original splendor.
They cleaned the stained glass windows, and it's just yeah, it's stunning.
And um I love that.
And I love Mass.
Mass is a beautiful ritual.
You know, it's funny because the Catholic Church believes in transubstantiation, right?
So they believe that the the communion actually literally turns into the body and blood of Christ in your body to a miracle.
And the um Catholic church that I went to when I lived in California offered a gluten-free version of uh the host that is amazing.
That is amazing.
Are you making that up?
That's real.
I swear to God, that's I couldn't come up with that.
I mean, I'm creative and clever, but that's pretty good shit.
That I haven't heard that one.
That that's California, man.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
Well, so what's next for you?
What are you working on now?
Uh I'm writing a memoir.
No shit.
Um, so the Quillette essay spurred on this idea to write a uh uh a full-length book about those experiences and and other experiences, but it's really an extrapolation of I mean, it's almost like the quilte essay is like an outline for for them for the memoir I'm working on.
Um and so I'm in the middle of that process.
I'm I'm maybe halfway through a decent draft at this point.
Um what it's gonna be called.
No, I have so many bad titles, you know.
That's just the way titles go for me.
I come up with dozens of really really really bad ones.
I mean, if I I told my brother one of the titles, and he just started laughing hysterically.
He continues to mock me.
I will, I will.
I'll do that, I'll be vulnerable here.
I have to say, I was I was so loaded on ice coffee when I came up with this, and I don't know what I was.
I mean, I was kinda yeah, and it was really hot.
I probably had heat stroke, but it was uh you can't cancel the sun.
And my brother just thinks that's hilarious.
And I I agree, it's a fucking terrible title, you know.
It's like I'm trying to trying to come up with a with a with a metaphor for like uh yeah, it's just it's not it's not working, but they have to be that bad in the beginning for me to finally stumble on the right one.
Should call it Joseph and then Technicolor Rainbow.
That would work, actually.
It would work.
Well, so what's it like when you run when you sit down to and I don't want to take too much of your time and I know that we've already gone over for you.
Um, it's okay.
I'm just enjoying this conversation So much uh um what's it been like writing a memoir?
Are you like having memories that you forgot that you even had?
Oh man.
So when I first started writing the memoir, um I didn't know about what was going to happen because I I I as I was writing about my childhood, I found myself becoming very irritable, depressed.
Um I was sitting at a picnic table in town here in a park, just like writing a notebook, and some drunk guy was screaming um screaming the word faggot and stuff, and I just stood up and walked right over to him and told him to shut the fuck up.
And I normally wouldn't do that, I would just avoid confrontation, just you know, whatever, he's drunk.
But I realized that it it I was I I was still in that I was in the frame of mind or in the space of childhood again, and I was hearing this man screaming and screaming uh faggot, which I was you know, I I grew up in a working class area.
You write poetry or show sensitivity, you're a faggot.
I've been called that many times.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I got brothers in the middle from middle middle class America been called a faggot more time.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, because I you know play the piano.
Yeah, so really it upset me, and I I went over to him, but I it's like, why did I do that?
It didn't really click until later in the day or the next day that when I'm writing about uh any period of time in the past, something happened psychologically where I'm put back there.
Even when I'm done writing, I'm a part of me is still there.
And uh the memoirist Mary Carr wrote a book called The Art of Memoir.
And um she she talks a lot about that.
And when I when I read that, I was like, oh god, like that, you know, now I really understand what's happening.
And she basically says, if you you're writing a memoir, if you can't handle that, kind of um the emotional uh uh wear and tear of working on such a thing.
Like she said after she turned in a memoir, she got the she got uh like uh the pneumonia.
She um one guy read another memoir who's popular, he relapsed.
He really Lyme disease that only happens when you're writing bad poetry.
But um, yeah, so that that part's been um as much work as the writing itself, you know, the the mitigating the uh the side effects, but at the same time, it's uh it's been a wonderful way to process so much stuff, so many things that have happened.
You already lived through it once, you can do it again.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and I I'm and it's yeah, and it's led to uh forgiving, you know, uh many of the people who were terrible to me as a kid, and and forgiving the people who were behind um ruining my life, you know, for scurrilous reasons.
I mean, just completely vague bullshit reasons, you know.
I admit I've fucked up in the past.
I was a weird bad drunk.
But uh a predator, a serial abuser, groomer of women, groomer, they use the word groom.
Who did I ever groom?
They've never, you know, it was uh a year-long campaign, they never had any receipts.
There was never anything really specific aside from one or two incidents, and they just you know, they they magnified those to the point where that's who I am.
That's who I am to them, to these people.
I'm not even human.
I'm like uh Harvey Weinstein or something, and um it's it's awful, it's absurd.
Is it hard to because I know forgiving is is part of the healing process.
Um is it hard to forgive someone who's dead?
Like I know, for example, your uncle was a bad dude and he died.
Do you wish that he was still around so you could have had some closure?
Uh no, I've no, I've never had that thought because I don't know how he would have I don't I don't know how he would have continued to to to live in the way that he was living.
Um people are might be watching or listening that don't know anything about the essay I wrote, but he was uh I I think closeted homosexual, and he he did very uh he abused me, and I don't know, he may be abused other people too.
Um yeah, but he was very closeted and lived in a very homophobic uh environment.
He lived with my grandmother who was all you know, it was yeah, faggot all the you know, that word was just being thrown around the house all the time.
So um I I don't know how he would have survived his life anyway.
So I don't really I tend to not think about it because it's so bleak to me.
Um but the forgiveness is it's never about letting someone off the hook, it's never about you know justifying his behavior in any kind of way, it's um just no longer hanging on to the anger that keeps me uh attached in this way that is ultimately damaging to me, you know, to him and like this on like just you gotta cut the cord, you know, and let him go.
It's more about release releasing the anger, no longer holding that anger towards that person because you're only damaging yourself, whether that person is alive or dead, and forgiveness too doesn't have to be done.
You don't have to tell somebody you're forgiving them, you don't have to some people you do, but um in the case of my uncle or my grandmother or these people who I don't even know who were attacking me and trying to like really actively destroy my life.
I'm not gonna email any of them and tell them I forgive you, but uh I'll be damned if I walk around with resentment and anger that um lit literally would cause me health problems.
Like I'm not giving that to them.
Like I'm you know, you're you're a really fucked up person, you know.
You must have not you, Chase.
I I understand.
You know, you gotta be really you gotta be really messed up to uh say the least to go after somebody in the way that they did and the tactics they were using, the things they were saying.
It was terrible.
They they threw the kitchen sink at me.
And um they're they're in pain.
Yeah.
I one of them, I a couple of them I see in town, because two of them live here in the town I live in.
I see him every now and then walking around, and yeah, they just look very lost, very broken, very sad.
I'm not walking around like that, you know.
So do they just like avoid eye contact?
They totally avoid eye contact, they totally avoid it.
But the the one this guy who was a male feminist at the time during me too, he put it in his bio.
He's like a poetry world guy.
He he came after me with everything, and I I don't know why.
I bear I barely know the guy, never did anything to him.
But he walked by me about two years later and uh tried to just walk right past me.
And I said, Hey, so and so, and uh you had a lot to say about me online.
Why don't you say it to my face?
And he immediately got irate as a defen person on the defense wood, like, what are you talking about?
He said, What are you talking about?
Yeah, he said, What are you talking?
He said, What are you talking about?
And I was like, you know what I'm talking about, because you spent a year harassing me, emailing my public.
If he said it to your face, if he was like, All right, what would you how would you have reacted?
Um I I would have I would have countered it with with um well, I did end up counting because he he eventually after he simmered down at you know in the beginning, he started throwing things at me.
He said, You're thuggish, you're uh uh this he called me thuggish.
Like, and I said, I just I just stopped him.
I said, What what do you mean thuggish?
Can you give me an example of my of my thuggery?
Like, how have I behaved thuggish?
He he was like uh caught in the headlights.
And it just was like seeing it in person, like how it's all about the charged language that they throw at you.
There's doesn't have to be substance around it, you know, but it's different when you confront somebody face to face and they realize they have no substance.
And so he said, let's go on a walk.
And we went for a walk, two-hour walk.
He admitted things to me that I told him I wouldn't repeat, and I'm not, but uh I I'll say though that it was an orchestrated thing that went on.
He apologized, and I I forgave him.
I I told him I forgive you.
I said, and if you ever have any problems, if you need to talk to somebody, let me know.
Because he he reeked of alcohol, and I know he had just got a divorce.
And um that really that was closure.
So when I see him walking around here, I don't have any reactivity towards him, you know.
That's awesome that you had the opportunity to do that.
You know, it's really seldom.
You know, I think everybody in their life has two or three people that really hurt them.
And it's very, very uncommon to have the opportunity to work that out.
It it was a gift.
It was a gift, as difficult as it was.
I mean, at certain points it was real, you know, I I had to really mindfully keep the rage down, you know, like really had to kind of just not go there because I'm walking next to somebody who I mean hundreds, hundreds of tweets, emails to my publishers, to the person I was work at school I was doing work for.
Um yeah, it was uh brutal.
I mean, he he would mock me relentlessly, you know.
He would it was um really bad.
Yeah.
But I you know, we're we're we're okay now enough.
We're okay enough.
And uh I guess that's that's another kind of forgiveness.
And other people, I'll probably I'll never see them, I'll never run into them.
Some of them I don't even know what they look like, but I can still forgive them in the sense that I'm not going to carry around bitterness and resentments because that would and that would also fuck up my writing because I can't write if I'm full of bitterness and anger that hasn't been processed, you know.
Sometimes anger can give you momentum when you're writing, but that kind of anger, that kind of resentment, it it's that's it's uh there's a kind of entropy to it, and it it's not conducive to to creative activities.
Fascinating.
Well, thank you so much for coming on, man.
It's been awesome.
Thanks.
Thanks.
I could talk to you forever.
I'm glad we did well.
We should just talk anyway again.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's um stay in touch.
Where can people find you if they want to follow you or in your books?
Um you can find me at I'll I'll tell you the uh the address.
Yeah, Joseph Massey, my name.substack.com.
I have a newsletter.
I send out a poet a poem a week.
And um, yeah, that's the best way to to connect.
Okay, awesome, man.
Well, thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate you.
And um uh good night and good luck.
All right, good night.
I solemnly ask of every man who hears this case to let his own mind pronounce a verdict upon it.
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