THE BENEFITS OF BEING UNKNOWN, An Obscure Writer's Confession

For many decades, I have put considerable effort into finding an audience for my creative work, an effort that got started in the late 1960s when I began writing the first novel that I subsequently was to complete. By putting “considerable effort into finding an audience,” I mean that over the years I have sent the things I have written to many people and organizations in the business of helping writers reach wider audiences, such as publishers and producers as well as literary agents. This effort has earned me many rejections.

During the period, I have experienced many fallow or inactive periods as a marketer of my own works. Sometimes this inaction has been the result of carefully considered priorities. As a creative person, I want to give the lion share of my time to creating, not to self marketing. Self marketing takes a lot of time. It is the creating that I love and feel compelled to do. I don’t love marketing. At any rate, I don’t love marketing my own work.

Confession: I Was A Marketer

Since I am indulging in self confession, I had better quickly own up to the fact that working as a marketer is one of the ways I earned a living during a long career, recently ended. And so it may sound a little strange when I as this one-time marketer confess that I’ve never enjoyed being a marketer of my own work, and, of course, the record shows that it is an activity in which I have been a particularly poor performer.

Interestingly, during the early part of my career the job was called not “marketing” but “promotion.” Hence my very first full-time job in New York City in 1963 was as a “book promotion copywriter” for the book publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising business. The term “marketing” came into fashion only later.

Father’s Field: Promotional Sales

My father during a lifetime in sales including many jobs in which he originated many sales strategies —some might call them “sales gimmicks”--frequently referred to what he did as “promotional sales.” Today how Louis Saft earned a living would probably be called “sales marketing.”

On the other hand, I recognize that as a creative person I am not just creating for myself. No writer writes just for himself. I write to reach people. I write because I think I have something to say to my contemporaries and those who will come after. Hence as much as I don’t like self promotion or self marketing I have to do it. I recognize that fact. Otherwise there will be no chance that my work will ever get out into the world.

Despondency Over Past Rejections

My not sending out my work has been the result of carefully considered priorities, as I indicated, but it also has been the result of despondency over past rejection and fear of future rejection. I get no pleasure from having my work rejected. Having my work returned with a rejection note has often made me sad and feeling sorry for myself.

On rare occasion this sense of despair has led me to consider giving up writing, but then the fact that I would be walking away from something that I love, namely writing, has hit me square in the face. No, I can’t do that. That’s an unacceptable proposition. Tired of self pity, I have aroused myself with self-generated exhortations, exhortations that I will not quit, that I will keep on trying, that I will keep on writing as long as my brain still works and I have the energy to keep coming up with cogent ideas and startling images and the arsenal of sizzling words to express them.

Unencumbered by Expectations

Of late, I have even started seeing my situation as an unknown or obscure writer—to use a painful expression common in literary circles—as an advantage. As a writer without reputation, my audience comes to me with a clean slate, without preconceived ideas of who I am and what I stand for. If I have an axe to grind, they don’t know it. I am unencumbered by expectations—other than the assumed expectation that what I have to say will be presented clearly, with conviction and with a concern for the fact that many other subjects cry out for all of our attentions and that I as the writer, the creator, need to put some effort in keeping you, the reader, interested in what I have to say.

Because I am a blank slate to much of my intended audience, I don’t have to allow myself to succumb to an attack of nerves over whether I will live up to expectation or not. Will my intended audience find my latest work on a par with everything else of mine they have pored over with relish and in such huge numbers in times past? Having experienced my first rate murder mysteries, my wonderful fantasy thrillers, my engrossing memoirs, my Tony award winning plays, my Oscar winning film scripts, and my poet laureate quality poetry, will they come to my latest work with overblown assumptions?

Perhaps my past works have deserved such recognition, but the fact is I don’t have the credits to prove it. The vast majority of my intended audience come to my work with no such knowledge of who I am and all that I have previously written. I am fresh. I am new to them.

There is a freedom and correspondingly a sense of empowerment that can come from such a realization, and I need to try to keep that fact forever in my mind. I am free. I am stuck in no rut. I can say what I believe.

You can reach the writer at stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

ACQUISITIVENESS, THE CONSUMING OBSESSION

Wanting something can be a very powerful preoccupation that interferes with a steadiness of mind and a balanced perspective, two states of mind that I have come to value greatly. My latest obsession is land, acquiring land, and sometimes I am aware that thinking about the subject is keeping me from thinking about subjects that I normally want to occupy my thoughts like my creative work.

An obsession with land acquisition is an easy fixation to catch when you live in an area filled with beautiful vistas such as the southwestern mountains of Virginia. I forget that the enjoyment of what I am seeing is what is important, and I start imagining myself owning what I am seeing. I convince myself that I have to own the land in order to enjoy the land.

Before Land Came Boats

Before the beautiful scenery of southwestern Virginia there were boats—large live-aboard pleasure boats. Over many years I became fixated on many large boats, most of which I could not afford, but that didn’t matter. I spent a lot of time thinking about them anyway. These were boats that caught my eye along the coast of New Jersey, along the mid coast of Maine, and in Maryland and Virginia on Chesapeake Bay. Sometimes they were pure products of my imagination, that is, they were boats I conceived of, designed and even drew on paper. I saw myself living on these real and imagined boats, doing maintenance on them, and driving them on calm and challenging seas.

The fact is that over many years, I did own a very small number of relatively large pleasure boats, and I now have scores of memories to show for it—many of them happy, but a few of them the raw material for nightmares. For example, in the summer of 1991, I once took our 43-foot live-aboard trawler with a round, roll-prone hull past the Cape Charles Lighthouse out in the ocean into 10-foot waves knowing that small boat advisories had been issued by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Out into the Ocean

On a planned circuit of the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula, we had gotten tired of being tied up day after day in a marina in the town of Cape Charles while waiting for the weather to clear. Fortunately, after about a half hour of crashing through the waves in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel complex we reached much calmer seas further off shore, and we were able to reach our next port of call by ocean of Wachapreague, Virginia, without incident.

My new preoccupation with land ownership has a practical side, and it also comes with a further complication. In January my wife and I traveled to Evansville in southern Indiana to get an unusual breed of dog, a girl puppy just 11 weeks old at the time, whom we named Cassie Rose. Cassie Rose is a Portuguese Water Dog or PWD, and true to her breed, she loves water. She loves to swim. Hence my obsession with land has not just been with land per se but with land with water on it such as a creek or stream.

No Personal Watering Hole

I should point out that we already live on a piece of land that is not exactly tiny, not anyway in comparison with what is common in metropolitan areas. And we have beautiful mountain views in two directions. What we don’t have is unlimited land for Cassie Rose to work off her youthful energy, and we don’t have water. We don’t have anything that we can consider Cassie Rose’s very own swimming hole.

What are we going to do about this deficit in our lives? With great difficulty we’ve decided to do absolutely nothing about it. We’ve decided that now is not the time to be adding to our indebtedness or to be sacrificing our limited liquid assets. Cassie Rose is just going to have to make due with running around on other people’s land and jumping into other people’s streams, creeks or ponds.

Hence we’ll be walking away from the creek-front property less than 10 miles from our home that became our obsession for awhile. Creek-front property, I should add, that we also started to worry might be in a flood hazard zone.

Meanwhile I’ll be working at the restoration of the steadiness of mind and better balance of mental faculties that was mine before this latest land obsession took hold of me. Good luck to me.

Write to the author at stephen. saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

WAR IN IRAQ, NOW WHAT?

What about the war in Iraq, this most divisive of issues facing this nation? I am not going to say much about whether we should have gotten into conflict or not other than to admit that like a lot of Americans I was fooled by the Bush Administration into thinking that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed more of a threat to us in the West than he actually did. Like most of our congressmen, I initially supported our getting into the war.

I now see Hussein as a maverick with only minimal connection to his Moslem neighbors, a maverick whose single greatest inspiration for governance was Josef Stalin. Hussein used political terror to cobble together a nation and to keep himself in power just as Josef Stalin, his role model, used political terror to keep his hold on the Russian people and then to extend his empire to the countries of Eastern Europe.

Blunder: Misunderstanding Iraq Ethnic Structure

By failing to recognize how the separate elements of Iraqi society were being held together and through blunders such as disbanding the defeated Iraqi army, the Bush Administration set us up for and put us in the middle of the disastrous civil war that ensued. There was, for example, no functional Al Qaida in Iraq until after the defeat of the forces of Saddam Hussein and disbanding of the Iraqi army.

So that’s my take on how we got where we are today. It’s a position that a lot of commentators on the war have staked out including a lot of people running for president in the 2008 election campaign. However, what these commentators aren’t presenting us with is a clear picture of what a so-called victory in Iraq would look like and, secondly, a strategy for withdrawing our forces that makes sense.

Is the Surge Working?

Is the surge in U.S. troops, currently going on, working or is it not? General David Petraeus, our new top general in Iraq, has asked for more time before he gives his own answer to that question. Meanwhile, we’re getting a lot of assessments from the media including from frequently quoted observers. These sources are all over the lot with their evaluations.

One commentator, Ken Pollock of the Brookings Institute, who says he previously was a critic of how the administration has managed the war, recently spent a week in Baghdad. He argues that the surge appears to be working and that he’s seen a substantial improvement in U.S. troop morale as a result, his first pro administration assessment, he tells us.

Inept Regime

If Pollock’s observations bear out as accurate, that’s all to the good, but what about the regime of Iraqis now governing the country? No reliable source that I have come across is telling us that this feeble organization is anywhere close to being able to effectively govern the country. Bringing democracy to Iraq was a stated goal of the Bush Administration in initiating the war in the first place. Remember the administration’s insistence on using the words “the war for Iraqi freedom” in describing the action? As of this writing, one would have to say that that policy is a sad failure.

Given the level of hostility, in fact, the extreme ruthlessness with which the two major ethnic groups, Shiite and Sunni, have exhibited toward each other, finding an accommodation that would make possible an effective governing body including representatives of the two groups strains credulity. It’s even harder to imagine democracy ever working in such a caldron of hatreds.

Democrats Call for Quick Withdrawal

Some presidential candidates on the Democratic Party side, despairing of ever resolving these issues, are saying that the solution is simply to withdraw our troops and quickly. In that case, what about Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia? The fear is that the more radical and aggressive Moslem states, namely Iran and Syria, would jump into the breach, and that that would force action by the Saudis. Some observers see the whole Middle East erupting into war as a result. What then would become of the world’s oil supply, most of which comes from the Middle East?

Then there is the issue of the Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurds are the only people to have benefited from the U.S. invasion. Oppressed and the victims of poison gas attacks under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds in northern Iraq are free for the first time, and many of them are prospering. With a wider scale war erupting in the region, the area known as Kurdistan would inevitably be sucked into the conflict.

Turkey Won’t Stand By

Further complicating the issue is Turkey on the northern border of Iraq. The Turks are currently engaged in a battle with elements of their own native Kurdish population over the issue of political autonomy. These elements say they want to be free of Turkish control to establish their own government or to merge with their brothers and sisters to the south. In fact, they have taken up arms in support of their cause, and fighting has occurred.

The Turks are opposed to independence for their native Kurdish population and have accused the Kurds in Kurdistan of providing safe haven, money and arms to the dissident Kurdish population in Turkey. Were the U.S. to withdraw from the region, what would Turkey do? Would it invade Kurdistan in an effort to pacify its own Kurdish population and to prevent Iran, for example, from becoming the power broker in the world of the Kurds?

Politicians Responding to Polls

A quick withdrawal from Iraq sounds good and seems to be in keeping with what the current polls of the American public are telling us. Many of our politicians appear to be responding to those polls and frame their answers during questions in public debates accordingly. The trouble is a quick withdrawal is not in the interest of this country and not in the interest of the world at large.

Yes, we need an exit strategy from Iraq. No doubt about that, but that exit strategy is going to have to be phased in gradually. We have no other choice.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

A POLITICAL AND PUBLIC POLICY INVENTORY, WHAT DO I BELIEVE?

It’s time I took a look at the major issues of a political and public policy nature that are currently having a profound effect on the peoples of the world and on my outlook. I can’t possible cover all the issues nor can I possibly cover any one of them in any depth in one posting, and so this will be just a start.

The first item is the State of Israel, which recently engaged in a war with Hezbollah that did not have to take place—unless, that is, the conflict was the only way for the nation’s military analysts to gage the current military strength of Hezbollah—for example, its arsenal of mobile rockets—a proposition that I doubt. Many people died in the conflict and much property was destroyed. Was all this bloodshed and all this destruction necessary? No, not in the least. The current leadership of Israel did not act with good sense and needs to be replaced.

Israel Needs to Survive

Having said that, I want to quickly add that I strongly support the State of Israel, and I strongly support its need to survive. The State of Israel needs to survive, but it needs to survive as a place where commitment to the highest ideals of humankind are exemplified and practiced. For one thing, its leaders must be vigilant about finding the moral high ground with respect to treatment of the Palestinians. In saying this, I realize that finding that high ground has never been more difficult given the current conflict between Fatah and Hamas with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza.

The Jews have a right to be in the Middle East, the birth place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the founders of the religion of one God and its Patriarchs, and they need to have their own country with their own elected government. One important lesson for Jews from past history is that a minority without political status, that is, without the status that comes from having a piece of geography associated with its ethnicity is even more vulnerable than it would be otherwise. One would like to believe that the vast majority of those in the majority in any nation will always be tolerant of their minorities, but history provides many terrible lessons that contradict such a hope.

Are You Being Fair Minded?

Some of the policies of Israel with respect to the territories it annexed in the 1967 war are certainly not beyond reproach. Many instances of injustice can be found, and these injustices need to be addressed and rectified. But I ask those who have taken stands against Israel including the use of boycotts of Israeli products and services and Israeli intellectuals whether they have scrutinized their own actions to determine if they are being fair or not?

First of all, have they taken stands against all examples of what they perceive as injustices sanctioned by governments in our current world, or have they chosen to single out Israel? Do they genuinely want peace in the Middle East and in the world, or do they want peace in a world without Jews, in a world in which all the Jews have converted to Christianity or Islam or some other majority faith?

Long History of Persecutions by Moslems

At the same time, have they stopped to consider that the persecution of Jews by Moslems predates the founding of the state of Israel by many centuries? The founding of Israel gave the Jew haters in the Moslem world a new script, but that is all. The hatred was pre-existent and often virulent. Many Jews--and Christians as well--died at the hands of Moslem fanatics long before the founding of Israel or even Theodor Herzl and the birth of the Zionist movement in the 19^th century.

Hitler, Haj of Jerusalem Sign Pact

In reading a recent issue of Newsweek magazine (June 18, 2007 issue), I made this startling and chilling discovery in an article by Robert M. Morgenthau and Frank M. Tuerkheimer. “In November 1941, Adolf Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met in Berlin and reached an agreement that a German occupation of Palestine and other mandated territories would result in the annihilation of the Jewish population, adding well over half a million Jews to the 6 million European Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.”

So much for any notion that the turmoil of hatreds coming out of the Middle East originated with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Had the State of Israel not been founded, one shudders to think what would have happened to the half a million Jews of Palestine. These Jews needed the protection of their own country with its own army and security apparatus to keep them safe.

The Problem of Germany

Finally for this posting the problem of Germany or more specifically the problem of the annihilation of the Jews of Europe by the Germans before and during World War II. Though now 62 years behind us, is this matter now closed? It may be in the minds of many people, but not mine. Was justice done with the Nuremberg Trials, the executions of some Nazis of rank and the payment of reparation to some Jewish heirs of holocaust victims? Not for me it wasn’t.

The Germans murdered not just millions of Jews, but the whole Jewish culture of Europe of which just a remnant remains today. What can be done about the loss of that culture—a culture based on the language of Yiddish and including a treasure trove of literature, theatre and other performing arts, painting and other visual arts, music and a thousand years of history?

Proposed: Jewish State of Europe

The people and all their heirs who should have existed but can’t because of mind numbing German atrocities and the lost Yiddish culture cannot be resurrected, but there should have been and there can now be a better settlement than that which was initiated with the ending of hostilities in 1945. The Germans should have been forced to relinquish land toward the founding of an independent Jewish State of Europe back then, but the political realities of the time made such a solution impossible.

The Soviet Union was intent on having its piece of Germany, and the U.S. and its Allies wanted to make sure that what was left was protected from the Russian lust for a socialist empire. Hence the East and West Germany solution, a division that ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

German or Nazi, Which?

In a future posting I will treat this concept with greater detail. However, let me call attention before closing to the fact that I am deliberately using the word “German” in this posting instead of the term most often used in describing the perpetrators of the atrocities in Europe just before and during World War II, namely the term “Nazi.”

Here is the fiction underlying what many commentators on what took place have adopted as their reality and the fantasy they want others to believe: Once upon a time a group of monsters masquerading as people appeared in the country known as Germany. These monsters were known as “the Nazis.” Lead by the arch villain called Adolf Hitler, these monsters forced the German people into waging a devastating war and to commit countless atrocities that they would not ordinarily have committed.

This piece of fiction is a rationalization that lets a criminal nation off the hook and prevents us from facing what really did take place in the period 1932 to 1945 and from looking at the numerous other atrocities in human history and, ultimately, at looking at ourselves—at our many insufficiencies and failings.

WIFE'S BROKEN WRIST FORCES SURGERY CANCELLATION. NEW ONCOLOGIST QUESTIONS PROCEDURE

If you are a regular reader of Mind Check, then you think I have now had the surgery I’ve been talking about in this space for awhile and am now ready to report on the results. Wrong! Two days before my date in the operating room at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, my wife took a fall in one of our bedrooms on a bedspread dangling on the floor and broke a wrist.

Suddenly she was faced with having to keep appointments with orthopedic surgeons to deal with the injured wrist, and she couldn‘t drive. How could I go forward with surgery that was a diagnostic procedure and no life or death matter when she was dealing with something more urgent and needed me? I canceled the surgery.

Additional CAT Scan

I then attempted to get a new date for the surgery, but a week passed and I did not hear from the surgeon’s office. More than a little dismayed by the lack of response, I then discussed with my oncologist whether some alternate approach might be a good way to proceed while we waited for the surgeon to forgive me for missing my appointment and rescheduling me. I raised this possibility with the oncologist because I thought that it might be a good way to gain more information on just how fast growing or slow growing my “olive-size” lymph node might be. My hope , of course, was that the node might have decreased in size or might even have disappeared.

The oncologist agreed that the additional CAT Scan was a good idea, and she acknowledged that the interval between scans was of sufficient length not to jeopardize my health due to excessive radiation exposure. I then went to Baptist Hospital and had the new CAT Scan. Two days later, feeling apprehensive over what the results might be, I called the oncologist. I was told that she was not in. This surprised me and left me a little upset since I was calling on a day when I had been informed the oncologist was always in. When I hung up I was wondering if I would ever get my results and, of course, what they might be.

Unexpected Call Back

My uncomfortable feelings were not to last. Ten minutes later I received a call back, but the caller was not who I had expected it to be. The caller announced to me that she was another oncologist with the same organization, and as she talked I learned that she had a very different approach than the oncologist with whom I had been dealing. First, she told me that the other oncologist was no longer with the practice, and she asked if I knew that. “No,” I responded, “I had no idea. That subject never came up in any of our conversations.”

She then proceeded to give me the test results. The lymph node was still there, she informed me. I was not happy at that news. However, while it was still there, she was quick to add, it had changed in size. It could not be said to have gotten any smaller, but it wasn’t larger either. In fact, what had happened is that the dimensions had simply changed with one dimension larger than before and one dimension smaller.

Called Quite Stable

Having said that, she then asserted, “I consider this lymph node to be quite stable.” She also said that she felt the data from the PET Scan, cited in a previous posting, did not reveal unusually high activity, a different interpretation than I had gotten from the previous oncologist.

She then volunteered that she did not feel that surgery was very helpful in cases like mine. She said, “I prefer a wait and see approach using procedures that are non invasive. For one thing, you should have CAT Scans every two to three months.

Bone Marrow Test Preferred

“Before subjecting my patients to invasive surgery,” she added, “I’d sooner see them have the bone marrow test. I know my patients don’t like them, but I think they would all agree that they are preferable to anything invasive.”

A word about the bone marrow test, to which the doctor was referring. The bone marrow test involves drilling into the hip bone to take a blood sample from the marrow area. If that description makes the test sound unusually painful, that’s fine because it is in my opinion a test somewhat akin to torture. How would I know? I know because I’ve had 10 of the bone marrow tests. They were all awful, but I would have to agree with the doctor. They were all preferable to having surgery.

Specialist in Lymphoma and Leukemia

Finally we talked about where I go from here given the fact that the oncologist I had been seeing had departed for a new endeavor in another part of the state. The doctor told me about the remaining physicians in her oncology practice, and she let me know that of those physicians she and another were the two specialists in lymphoma and leukemia. I wouldn’t have to choose any of the physicians in the practice if I didn’t want to, she told me, but she implied that she would be happy to have me if I chose her.

Easy decision. Given her specialization in my disease and given that I liked what she had to say, anyway most of it and especially what she had to say about surgery, I felt I had an easy decision. “I’d like you to be my oncologist,” I told her.

Where do I go from here? Like the lady said, we wait and see. That means at least four CAT Scans a year and maybe an occasional bone marrow drilling (ouch!!!), that is, if I continue to be “very stable.” That’s a pretty good deal, especially given what almost happened to me.

A friend of ours aware of how my wife’s broken wrist saved me from surgery asked us what I was going to do for her in recompense. Harriet answered, “His not having to have surgery is good enough for me, broken wrist and all.” That’s my wife!

SUBSTITUTION, HOW A RED WAGON HELPED ME TO GET TO SLEEP AT NIGHT

My current health crisis has helped me to learn more about how my mind works. I have learned, for example, that I carry in my mind at least one protection mechanism (and probably more). Some might demean this protection mechanism by calling it a form of denial. Others, however, might be kinder and see it as a legitimate even laudatory means to cope with unhappy prospects. When fears start building up, this mechanism allows me, indeed forces me, to think about something else. I call this mechanism my substitution system.

Substitution goes back to my earliest childhood. I remember learning how to use mental or thought substitution as a child of three to four years of age. As a young child I was filled with fears. Witches, demons, and ghosts populated my mind and became especially troublesome at bedtime. Some of these demons may have originated inside my young head (and may be attributable to defects in my family life), but some of them were introduced in the stories read to me and by the movies I was taken to.

The Problem of Snow White

Movies were a special problem, and nothing scared me more than “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The wicked stepmother-queen in this Walt Disney production, based on a Grimm Brothers fairy tale and completed in 1937, caused me much terror, and night after night I found myself fixating on this example of jealousy and vanity carried to the extreme. I couldn’t sleep. Something had to be done about it, but what? Well, I could force myself to think about something else.

I’d seen a kid in my neighborhood in Philadelphia with a wagon, and I thought I’d like to have one too. Did I want one just like his? No, I wanted a better one. I began to visualize the kind of wagon I wanted. I began to build it in my head. It would be bright red and shine like crystal. The wheels would be large, as large as possible, and the tires would have jet black tread. Rising up from the body for the protection of its precious cargo would be side extensions made of polished wooden slates.

The Boats Fixation

By forcing myself to think about the red wagon I pushed the wicked stepmother queen out of my head, and I was able to get to sleep. I have been practicing wagon substitution ever since except that the object visualized ceased to be a wagon decades ago. Long ago boats became my fixation. I started becoming interested in boats when I first moved to Margate, a suburb of Atlantic City, in 1953.

Like Atlantic City, Margate along with Ventnor and Longport, are parts of Absecon Island. One is never very far away from water anywhere on Absecon Island including, of course, the beach and the ocean. One is also never too far from boats.

Building a Barge in Margate

In 1953 I started building a barge-like structure on the shores of the bay that runs the length of the island about two to three blocks from my house. I was building it with a friend I’d recently made, and we were designing it as we went along. We were both fourteen at the time, I think. Barges are not exactly major challenges in naval architecture, but I suspect we would have had more of a challenge on our hands had we ever gotten to the house that was to sit on top of the barge platform.

Our barge building came to an abrupt halt when the police arrested us. My friend and I had been using house lumber taken from the house construction site of a local builder. No, we hadn’t paid for the lumber, but as part of the resolution of the case the judge decreed that we pay the builder an amount that far exceeded what we would have paid had we gone to lumber yard and purchased our wood directly.

Avoided Reform School

We had to pay through the nose, as the saying goes, and we ended up with nothing to show for our efforts. The builder sent a crew to our construction site, dismantled what we had built, and took the wood back to be used on one of his houses. Hence he profitted many times over from our misfortune. But at least my friend and I didn’t end up being sent to reform school for our misdeeds.

I recount this small episode drawn from the annals of juvenile justice not only as an example of how I learned at a young age that crime didn’t pay, but to place a date on when my efforts in mental substitution switched to the use of boats. For many years hence, designing and building boats within my head (I would frequently commit my designs to paper, but never attempted to build any of them) was a method I used to escape the everyday worries of keeping a job and supporting a family and the stresses from the political realities of the day, namely the cold war and the possibility of missiles raining down multiple nuclear warheads.

Cruising the Chesapeake

Boats were my escape, but they were not all fantasy. For a while, I lived in Maine and was paid to write and edit articles about the sea. Throughout my life, I have been privileged to own and operate boats of significant size. During the 1990s, the Chesapeake Bay became my cruising ground, and my wife and I spent many hours traveling to and getting to know its many very interesting water towns. And now my substitution object has switched to unusual varieties of aircraft and spacecraft, about which I may write in the future.

As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, some members of the psychiatric community might look at my use of substitution and accuse me of living too much in a state of denial. At the age of three, had I analyzed what it was that scared me about the wicked stepmother queen of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and then somehow risen above it instead of spending mental time with imaginary red wagons, perhaps I would be better off today.

Developing the Imagination

Possibly, but then something has to be said on behalf of exercising the imagination, especially if one is a creative person. My red wagon was one way I discovered and developed the power of the imagination as a means to overcome fear.

I am now actively involved with the program of the Blue Mountain School of Meditation, as I have previously indicated. Some of the reasons I am pursing this practice are to get control of my mind and keep it focused as much as possible on the positive, to enhance the moral center of my life, and to minimize the role of fear in my outlook. In addition to daily meditation itself, this practice calls for the daily use of a mantram, that is, the use of a saying of a religious nature repeated over and over again to oneself to substitute for the negative thoughts during times of anxiety.

Not So Benign Substitution

Yes, another form of substitution. Let us acknowledge the value of substitution then, despite what some mental health care professionals might say, but let us quickly bring the importance of good judgment into the discussion. There is benign substitution and not so benign. When we use addictive substances and fall prey to risky attitudes and behaviors to substitute for the fears that plague us, we are doing ourselves and those around us no good. We cannot eat our way to a sound mind, for example.

At the same time, we must assert the principle of moderation even with benign substitutes. If we are spending a preponderant amount of our time in our head designing red wagons or boats or whatever and not accomplishing other things that need to be done in our lives, that may be our clue that a rigorous re-examination of what is going on in our lives and the need for intervention are necessary.

Yes, but no one should have to spend his every waking moment thinking about health problems. We all need a break from that kind of fixation, as steeped in reality as it may be.

ABOUT MIND CHECK

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check, a biweekly effort to prove that we are what we think and that clear thinking leads to effective action and to a better world. Mind Check is intended to serve as a bridge between the realm of the human spirit, that center of our energy, mental and physical, and our rationality or reason, of which the scientific method is an excellent example. Mind Check is also intended to prove that the ideas of right and wrong are innate, not exclusively inherent in the situation or the whim of the moment.

To communicate with the author of Mind Check, please write to stephen.saft@gmail.com. For examples of the writer’s other writings, see the website http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com. The author is also preparing to launch a site of podcasts consisting of spoken poetry, essays and short stories. Be on the look out for it.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

FINDING THE OLIVE IN THE HAY STACK

So what’s happening? I would love to launch into a brand new subject in Mind Check, but I have unfinished business to attend to, and I feel I owe you, the visitor-reader-viewer, an explanation of what’s been happening since my last posting.

My big news is that since that posting I met with the surgeon and his assistant. This visit was strictly a consultation, not the procedure itself, as I originally expected it to be. The visit also included a disappointment. According to the surgeon, the laparoscopic approach may not be able to do the job, that is, it may not be able to find the very small object it is supposed to remove—an object measuring 2.4 cm by 1.4 cm.

Searching Less Familiar Territory

Performing such a task is a challenge just a little less daunting than finding a needle in a haystack—for several reasons. First, the surgeon and his team are looking for an object that is very small. In our meeting, the surgeon described it as “the size of an olive.” Second, the surgeon and his team are dealing with less familiar territory than what they are normally used to as a laparoscopic team where known parts of the anatomy such as the gall bladder or appendix or spleen are the usual targets of a laparoscopic search. What they have to go on are the images from the CAT and PET scans. And that’s all!

Finally, even if found relatively easily, this “olive,” which is an enlarged lymph node, may turn out to be behind something important like a blood vessel that can’t be moved aside too easily, anyway not by something as small as a laparoscope.

Conventional Surgery An Option

If the surgical team cannot find or reach the object, then right on the spot they will enlarge the initial incision and perform a conventional surgical procedure. First, however, they will be using the laparoscope.

Laparoscopic surgery, what is it? Laparoscopic surgery is usually what people in medicine mean when they talk about “minimally invasive surgery.” Because it is minimally invasive, recovery time is normally much quicker than with conventional surgery. Hence my disappointment when the surgeon told me that he might not be able to complete my procedure laparoscopically.

Cavity Inflated

Here is how the online encyclopedia Wikipedia defines laparoscopic surgery (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/laparoscopic_surgery): “The key element in laparoscopic surgery is the use of a laparoscope: telescopic rod lens system that is usually connected to a video camera… Also attached is a fiber optic cable system connected to a cold light source …to illuminate the operative field, inserted through a 5mm or 10mm cannula [hollow tube] to view the operative field. The abdomen is usually insufflated with carbon dioxide gas to create a working and viewing space.”

The target of this tiny gizmo is, as the surgeon described it to me, “a thing the size of an olive.” Not only must this olive be found, but it must be cut away from the surrounding mass and then extracted. Once out of me, it will then be sliced and put under a microscope by a pathologist (an expert in the causes of disease) and a report prepared.

Lymphatic System Defined

The olive is an enlarged lymph node, a part of the body’s lymphatic system. What is the lymphatic system? Every cell in the body needs to be fed to stay alive. Every cell in the body also needs to be cleaned to remove the byproducts of metabolism or feeding. The feeding is accomplished by the body’s tissue fluid, which is part of the body’s blood system. The cleaning is the role of the lymphatic system, which is also responsible for defending the body against disease. Tissue fluid and lymphatic systems are linked.

On the web site http://www.lymphnotes.com, one of many that deals with lymphatic issues, tissue fluid and lymph are compared and contrasted. “The role of tissue fluid is to deliver the groceries to the cell. The role of lymph is to take out the trash [the byproducts of metabolism] that is left behind and to dispose of it.”

Known As Lymphoma

Lymph nodes play a central role in the production of antibodies, which the body produces to fight disease including cancer. Sometimes the nodes are cancerous themselves. That may be the case with “the olive” inside of me, found by both CAT and PET scans and shown to exhibit higher than normal metabolic activity by the PET scan. Cancer originating in the lymph nodes is known as lymphoma.

If the “olive” is found to be evidence of lymphoma, then my oncologist (cancer specialist) is likely to recommend chemotherapy as the treatment. Chemotherapy primarily involves the transfusion of chemicals into the blood stream. Sometimes chemicals are also taken by mouth.

Chemicals Are Killers

Most of these chemicals are killers. That in fact is why they are taken. Their job is to attack and kill fast growing parts of the body such as cancer cells. Unfortunately, there is no way to stop them from also killing other fast growing cells in the body such as hair follicles and parts of the stomach lining. Hence the sudden baldness we see in cancer patients. Hence the bouts of nausea they frequently experience.

By talking about chemotherapy at this stage, I am getting ahead of myself, and that is not a very good idea when dealing with anything as momentous as the possibility of a cancer reoccurrence. In fact, it is not a very good idea in any case. I am learning from my meditation practice to live in the present, and never has such a skill been more important.

It is the now that is important. It is learning to make the most of the present that is essential. That is the best path to getting the most out of every moment of life.

ABOUT MIND CHECK

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check, a biweekly effort to prove that we are what we think and that clear thinking leads to effective action and to a better world. Mind Check is intended to serve as a bridge between the realm of the human spirit, that center of our energy, mental and physical, and our rationality or reason, of which the scientific method is an excellent example. Mind Check is also intended to prove that the ideas of right and wrong are innate, not exclusively inherent in the situation or the whim of the moment.

To communicate with the author of Mind Check, please write to stephen.saft@gmail.com. For examples of the writer’s other writings, see the website http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com. The author is also preparing to launch a site of podcasts consisting of spoken poetry, essays and short stories. Be on the look out for it.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft