Daily Prompt: The Sword of Damocles

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 12 asks, “A literary-minded witch gives you a choice: with a flick of the wand, you can become either an obscure novelist whose work will be admired and studied by a select few for decades, or a popular paperback author whose books give pleasure to millions. Which do you choose?”

(Why is it a witch? Why not a literary agent? And who “flicks” a wand, anyway? On to my response.)
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I know nothing about the life of the actor Hugo Weaving, and I even had to look up his name before typing it. He is so famous that he is obscured by his success. He played Agent Smith in the three “Matrix” films, Elrond in the three “Lord of the Rings” films, V. in “V for Vendetta,” and provided the voice for Megatron in the “Transformers” franchise and Noah in the “Happy Feet” movies. I trust that the film industry has made him an extraordinarily wealthy man, given that these dozen films have earned approximately $8 billion dollars for that industry. Yet he could walk down my street unnoticed.

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Hugo Weaving doesn’t know. (Photo from aceshowbiz.com.)

He disappears into roles that require makeup, prosthetic devices, masks, but always gives portrayals that are compelling, fully realized, quotable—not only quotable because the lines are memorable, quotable because of his delivery of them. Other actors may take on make-up-heavy parts, but, well, Gary Oldman is always Gary Oldman, the best Gary Oldman that there is, but always recognizable as himself.

As I wrote above, I know nothing about Weaving’s life and truly hope it is a joy-filled one, but it seems to me that he has the ideal successful life in the arts: He can shine when he wants to and not when demanded, because his face is not his art, even though he is an actor. I once met Stephen King, the rare author who looks like his various portraits on his book jackets, and watched a crowd assemble once someone recognized him and then follow him down Main Street in New Paltz. He was shopping, not doing the things that make him famous, not typing a book while walking, just window shopping. Individuals in the crowd were vying for his attention, perhaps auditioning to be cast by his brain for a part in his next book.

(If any of his books published in the last 15 years features a bespectacled, young, not-attention-grabbing bookseller, it’s me, just so you know. Hugo Weaving can play me in the movie version.)

In the legend of the Sword of Damocles, Dionysus, a king, offers one of his courtiers, Damocles, that which Damocles covets: total power and extreme wealth. The king suggests they switch places and Damocles accepts. There is one caveat: Dionysus places over the throne a sword that is held in place with a single hair from a horse’s tail. Damocles learns his lesson: Watch what one wishes for. A life of supreme power and wealth comes with the inner neurotic knowledge that the world is vying to take it from you. Damocles happily switches back to his old life.

Does a writer want fame and wealth now or long-term but minor admiration later? Myself, I want both most days and do not see these as mutually exclusive. Pulp writers are deserving of study, since they, usually, describe better than many what is happening in his or her culture’s collective imagination. There is a reason so many people buy their books.

The writers who are obscure in their lifetimes usually possess something many creative artists do not: a supreme confidence that what they are doing is important to someone, even if that someone is only his or her own self. Readers are nice and all, but are they necessary? Out of the millions of people on this planet, someone might be touched to read these words and learn that they are not alone in feeling or thinking or imagining this or that. It is like believing in true love, and people fall in love every day, right? A single true love reader might be all a writer really needs, whenever love comes to town, humously or post.

Every writer is writing to an audience whose size truly can not be known, and it may not matter. If I write a letter to you, I do not know what you are going to do with it. You might toss it away unopened or you might show it to friends. Kafka told his friends to burn all his writings upon his death. Obviously, since we know his name and his works, they (happy for us) betrayed his last wish. If I post a public response to a blog prompt, I do not know if it will be liked (I want it to be considered witty and what-not, but the only say I have in the matter is to write it) or even if it will be read.

I want the true love readers and I want to make a living at writing. These are not mutually exclusive. It’s money that matters.

I want my sentences to be of some use, and feedback and encouragement in the form of $ would be great. I’d take Hugo Weaving’s fame over Stephen King’s, but I am careful what I wish for.

Daily Prompt: King for a Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 11, 2014, asks, “You wake up one day and realize you’re ten years older than you were the previous night. Beyond the initial shock, how does this development change your life plans?”

(Heh, for too much of my life, when I got up I felt like I was ten years older than the night before. This is an attempt at flash fiction; i.e. write a story in an hour or less.)
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It was never the day’s fault. There is no physical law that states unequivocally that the next day must be the next day. Someone, someone very annoying, decided that August 11 ALWAYS follows August 10, and to make matters worse, we all continue to agree. It was like being an employee, he thought. (He was shaving already, making good time.) Some dude says he owns the factory and his major stipulation for paying you for work is that you agree with him that he is the owner of the factory. What happens if today I decide-slash-discover that I am the owner of the factory, he thought. What if I am the chairman of the board instead of second lead for the first-level documentation department? (The best thinking happens in the shower.)

Physics is proving that our motion from the past to something we call the future through a sometimes heartless expanse we call the present is a local phenomenon. They have seen particles exist in two places at the same time, even seen a particle’s effect before the particle came into existence. The next day can be yesterday once again or July 4, 1776, over and over. (Just with better plumbing this time, he thought after leaving the bathroom.)

So it was never the day’s fault that he hated it upon awaking and rediscovering what he had to rediscover about himself. Poor, guiltless day.

He didn’t hate the day, he hated what he rediscovered: that time moved forward. A local phenomenon, but no more local than everywhere on the planet. And somehow he was running late.

No time for breakfast, but there was none to be had, he found. He had visited the grocery store the night before. (“But did I?” he joked with himself, continuing his philosophical inner life. He pictured someone interrupting, “You’re pleased with your deep thoughts, huh?” No one did.) He filed away the thought that he was going to need to go shopping tonight. (“Brilliant, I can hold two unrelated thoughts in my brain at the same time, one about quantum philosophy and “sci-fi in my life” and the other about shopping lists. Just like physics. Where did I put my groceries?”)

His regular newsstand was closed, so he crossed back to another stand. “Slumming today, eh?” the clerk asked him.

“Excuse?”

“Well, you used to come around this street before … .” Looking for his daily, he saw it: August 11, 2024. And he was on the front page. A board vote about his chairmanship of the the factory had been scheduled for the afternoon. Things did not look good for his continuing in the position, it turned out.

Matt Coleman, Some Memories

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I wish you could have known Matt Coleman. Many did, but not enough. There was not enough time. “Matt’s heart was so big, it surrounded him,” one colleague wrote.

I am grateful that I think this about so many people that I have met, those clauses like “You ought to know,” or “You should have met,” but frustrated that I have not said it out loud often enough.

A person’s end should not be what the world knows of them, and three years ago today, August 11, 2011, my friend Matt Coleman was murdered. If you type “Matt Coleman Mendocino,” or variations that include the names of the small towns in that beautiful county in California, you will see some of the eye-catching news headlines from the time. This is because the murder was a national news story for a month, not because of my friend’s prominence, but because his dead-eyed killer shot and killed one other man, and the manhunt that followed in the redwood forest stretched on for 36 days, ending with the shooting death of the murderer. Three families lost loved ones that terrible month: the family and friends of Matt, the family and friends of Jere Melo, and the family of the murderer. The killer suffered from untreated schizophrenia, as it turned out, but this gun-filled story took one more gun to conclude it.

At least one book has been published about the sad tale, told from the point of view of law enforcement. In it, Sheriff Tom Allman of Mendocino County recounts Matt’s memorial service, and it sounds like the memorial was a fitting tribute to the Coleman I knew: “Boats of flowers were floated down Big River and many positive things were said about the deceased. It struck me as very odd that nobody was angry. … I was so struck by the community’s love for Matt Coleman. He had no enemies. As I left, somebody asked me if I thought the killer was at the funeral. ‘I doubt it,’ was my reply.” (From “Out There In The Woods.”) I am certain that the sheriff learned that day something that I believe: That Matt Coleman’s last conscious thought was an offering of love and empathy.

There was sadness at the memorial, I am sure. Despair or anger, no. Matt was a generous spirit and the most generous gift he offered was that all who met him became more generous, too. I believe I have met that quality only once and I realize now how lucky I am for that one moment in time.

Matt was a land steward, a passionate environmentalist who worked for the last six years of his life as coordinator of volunteers for the Mendocino Land Trust, which meant that he knew the forest, knew the ocean, and knew the land between. There are many stories about his 24-hour-a-day dedication to the land and waters, about him stopping whatever he was doing when he would spot an invasive plant species and remove it.

Invasive species or not, Matt was always at his best as a student, learning what brought the species of plant or fish into the part of the world that he was a part of, understanding the natural history, teaching others about humbly understanding. Look at him in this video, shot by Aron Campisano a few years ago as part of a film he is making about invasive species:

Matt loved to teach, he loved to coach, he loved to do; he loved being.

Before Mendocino, there was New Paltz. In my 1990s in New Paltz, New York, Matt Coleman and others (John, Sean, Mat, others like Gerry and Dan) were the big brothers I never had and taught me a lot about being a writer, an actor, and about being a man.

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Coleman, mid-grin. This is the look I saw when he threw me over his shoulder.

One day, a few of us were walking as a group up Main Street in New Paltz, and Matt, a bear of a man, slowed his stride—he always walked very quickly and purposefully—and I slowed with him, probably to continue belaboring whatever point I was belaboring. He grabbed me and tossed me over his shoulder like a duffel bag, a bag of me, and took off running. To our eternal comedy credit, we did not break off whatever conversation we were engaged in. The others followed, laughing. I was the one out of breath when he let me down at the top of the hill that is Main Street in New Paltz.

Matt had an extensive collection of books but not in his possession. Upon finishing a book, he gave it away or left it somewhere. More correctly, Matt had an extensive collection of books in his memory banks and he could grab a quote at will. His reading was extensive, legendary among friends, and he never showed it off. He was a journalist and loved great writers like John McPhee, Edward Abbey. If he was a fan of someone, his enthusiasm was total, unembarrassed, and loud. I am certain Elvis Costello heard Matt from inside the Beacon Theater one night while we were waiting to be let in.

He had one of the greatest screams I have ever heard.

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Coleman, mid-roar.

While preparing this post, I returned to Gifford Pinchot’s “Eleven Maxims to Guide Foresters.” Pinchot was the first head of the U.S. Forest Service and a two-time governor of Pennsylvania, and his mansion, Grey Towers in Milford, Pennsylvania, is now a historic site. Matt and I visited it once because I lived near it at the time and yet, strange to Matt, had not been to it. I enjoyed the house and its history, and Matt patrolled the grounds; Grey Towers is like a zoo for plant species and Matt impressed the rangers with his practical knowledge. (This is why I thought of Pinchot in connection with Matt.)

Pinchot’s Eleven Maxims are:

1. A public official is there to serve the public and not to run them.

2. Public support of acts affecting public rights is absolutely required.

3. It is more trouble to consult the public than to ignore them, but that is what you are hired for.

4. Find out in advance what the public will stand for. If it is right and they won’t stand for it, postpone action and educate them.

5. Use the press first, last, and all the time if you want to reach the public. Get rid of the attitude of personal arrogance or pride of attainment or superior knowledge.

6. Don’t try any sly or foxy politics, because a forester is not a politician.

7. Learn tact simply by being absolutely honest and sincere, and by learning to recognize the point of view of the other man and meet him with arguments he will understand.

8. Don’t be afraid to give credit to someone else when it belongs to you; not to do so is the sure mask of a weak man. But to do so is the hardest lesson to learn.

9. Encourage others to do things; you may accomplish many things through others that you can’t get done on your single initiative.

10. Don’t be a knocker; use persuasion rather than force, when possible. Plenty of knockers are to be found; your job is to promote unity.

11. Don’t make enemies unnecessarily and for trivial reasons. If you are any good, you will make plenty of them on matters of straight honesty and public policy, and you need all the support you can get.

Matt is inscribed in many of these lines. “Don’t be afraid to give credit … use persuasion rather than force … .” Matt probably quoted these to me at the time, but I did not know. Later that day, we drove north of the Catskill Mountains and a bald eagle swooped at my car. “Dude! Did you see what that was?! How great was that!” It remains my one bald eagle sighting to this day. His voice is pinned to the memory. And many others.

He was “Clawman Treefeller” in our group of friends; he was Coleman; he was a verb (any missing lighter had been “Coleman’ed”); he was Matt.

Matt’s generous spirit, immense playfulness, and epic inquisitiveness brought him from Brooklyn to the woods of Northern California. His humble nature led him not to chase fame or glory but to a life restoring the lands near Mendocino, pathway by pathway. It is that beautiful brief life and that ever-giving, often hilarious spirit that some of us on two coasts celebrate today, August 11, simply because our path crossed his.

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The Community Foundation of Mendocino County established an endowment fund in 2013, the Matthew Coleman Fund for Environmental Education and Conservation. An “endowment fund” is one in which the funds that are donated are not only applied to the cause but are also invested to earn interest and keep the fund alive. Here is a brief video: