Navel-gazing into the Past
By: Bill Burkett
Tags: Old Letters, Sexual Mores, 1968, Nostalgia, Writing

Staring into a rainy night in Georgia. An illustration for a column I wrote for my Sunday magazine, by the woman I then believed the love of my life. Not my only mistake as a young thin-skinned but stubborn male.

Phrases such as “contemplating one’s navel” or “navel-gazing” are frequently used…(disparagingly) to refer to self-absorbed pursuits….

In yoga, the navel is site of …a powerful chakra of the body. (Chakra: wheel, circle; various focal points…) One’s navel is an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature…Monks at Mount Athos, Greece, according to a J.G. Minningen in the 1830s,”…pretended or fancied that they experienced celestial joys when gazing on their umbilical region, in converse with the Deity….”

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Famous dictum, attributed by Plato to Socrates at his trial.

— C/f Wikipedia

More than a few times over a fairly long life people have disparaged my preoccupation with memory as self-involved navel-gazing. Objectively, I have to agree. Always used the Socrates defense, and kept right on with my self-examination; hold the hemlock. How can a writer be other that self-involved? When I was in my forties, married with kids, a dead-end job with developing health problems, I wrote in my journal:

“Am I a writer? Writing always brings me ease from my lifelong bugaboo, depression. But not when I cannot freely set down some of my feelings. Not writing them fresh makes me fear losing them to the peculiar chemical alterations of unsupported memory. My body begins to run down under work stress and a frustrating and largely unsatisfying life…I routinely get terrific headaches every single weekend; the doctors say maybe migraine, maybe caffeine deprivation. I don’t drink my three daily quarts of coffee on Saturday, the only thing that keeps me awake during the work week. Docs say a third possibility is tension headaches: a week of work tension released all at once on Saturday. I am unable to write feelings about my life surrounding the job. Things done, seen, experienced. When I lie awake under insomnia I try to remember until memories go gray and flat and meaningless. When I wake up they’re gone…I will lose recent events because I didn’t write them down….”

That was over thirty years ago. Before the doctors diagnosed and treated me for migraines and sleep apnea and Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, aka insomnia. Their skill improved my life and freed me for a good many productive and reasonably content years before other issues, emotional, mental, and physical, dragged me down again. Somehow I plodded stubbornly through it all and came out the other side, still writing. Twenty books for sale at last count. No vast output. But not inconsiderable. Pushing my eighth decade, with more works in progress, I can answer my forty-year-old’s question affirmatively: I am a writer.

A writer with Rubbermaid tubs full of words on paper I began accumulating when I was a teenager. Intended grist for future stories. Mulch, you might say. Underlying motive was the fear my forty-year-old self alluded to: that unsupported memory would play me false when it was time to create. I don’t like to think of myself as anal, but I even kept carbon copies of letters, for Pete’s sake.

In this unsettling year of sheltering in place from a frightening bug, I finally am delving into the written history of my past. Everything crammed together, no neat file folders, no chronology; I wasn’t that anal. I dug deep, selected at random, and read: A 1968 letter-carbon. My first impression was evenness of the key strokes and paucity of typos; it would be another five years before bilateral carpal-tunnel syndrome from years of pounding manual typewriters affected my touch.

My second reaction was surprise that at twenty-four I already fought sleep problems: “My hours are all turned around. I can’t seem to get to sleep before dawn, no matter how I try. Mostly I just give up and get up and try to read, or worry over my manuscripts some more. Every inch of table space has vanished beneath the clutter...”

Reading the carbon was like opening a time capsule to a long-gone time, stirring memories. My Manhattan editor was pushing for a second novel while my first still was selling. I was struggling to finish a novel and a novelette. The youngest Sunday-magazine editor in the state of Georgia, I was very proud of stories and layouts I produced for a medium-sized daily newspaper on the banks of the Savannah River. The daily work distracted me from my novel-writing. The magazine was popular — but not with the boss. I wrote:

“Today, the executive editor came and walked with stupid, clod feet all over my latest center-spread, titled In Winter, In Love…Four photographs of a girl, very good stuff; some kind of poetry, kind of not, lines. I tried to frame it into a visual impression of what Rod McKuen is trying to do…”

(Parenthetically, McKuen was allegedly the most-widely read poet of his time in the strange sixties when girls were going to San Francisco “with flowers in their hair.” In 1968, his Lonesome Cities won a Grammy for best spoken-word album. He began reading poetry with Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg in 1950s San Francisco. In the Bay City it was a hop and skip from Beats to Hippies. McKuen skipped nimbly.)

My center-spread was the work of a lovesick infantry captain at Fort Gordon whose hobby was photography. His passion was a slender good-looking girl in the Sears, Roebuck credit office. He combined the two in a sequence of photos of his lady-love bundled in winter clothing at a reservoir, and McKuen-style blank verse…The photos were dramatic: close-up of a curve of cheek beneath dark fall of hair on a sheepskin collar; strolling across stubble in a dead corn field. A wide-legged stance on the lake shore, slim jean-clad legs, curves hinted under her car coat, gazing at her reflection. Subtle sexuality in stark winter. His poem began: Anyone can love in summer — in winter, I love you…I bought it all for forty dollars…Public reaction was quick. Memorably a colonel’s wife, for whom I published a story about fort life, calling to say her husband sat with the spread in his lap all morning, gazing out at the weather. “Remembering somebody…It wasn’t me….”

My 1968 letter about the executive editor’s reaction: “of a mood shot, the girl’s pants and heavy windbreaker-clad body silhouetted against a lake shore, head down…he asked: is the child pissing in the water? He told me he was going to call a meeting to see about getting something decent done with the (magazine)…I haven’t really been able to calm down since. My ego is too involved….”

Coming events cast their shadows before was an old-wives saying when I was a kid. How odd the first random pick from my tub is a letter casting such a long shadow on my life. The shadow was the executive editor’s contempt. The event: in the ensuing editorial debate, I was fired summarily within a month. Followed by six traumatic months out of work. A lifetime in your twenties. A trauma infecting every one of my subsequent employment decisions, clinging to unsatisfying jobs and keeping my head down in fear of a reprise.

But the McKuen entry presaging trauma was just three paragraphs. I moved on to a mutual friend’s chaotic love-life: “Dottie made a date with him and stood him up. Left him hurt and enraged. He simply stayed away. So she stopped by…all contrite…and he came back again, and now she is all glow-y. His ego with women is a strange one: he is the Messiah, saving them…I have been by the apartment two different occasions now…he is chaperoning two other girls. One he thinks so very cool. Ten of her wouldn’t make one Dottie. The other — a getting-to-be-divorced type — I don’t know. I just don’t know….”

He was a good friend, former TV news broadcaster, night-time DJ with a trained, honeyed voice that hypnotized women. We discussed opening a public-relations partnership after I was fired. But I was in no shape for new ventures; without a job I felt like a non-person. I left town to lick my wounds. Never saw him again, though we exchanged Christmas cards. Last heard from running a small newspaper in the Shenandoah Valley with stints in DC broadcasting. Never knew if he found the right woman. Never told him I fictionalized his peripatetic love-life in a short story with no happy ending. The risk you run being friends with a writer.

Navel-gazing: the final paragraphs of the letter evoke personal memories of the sexual mores of the sixties. And the angst of the very young. At a private party, a woman I’d never seen before told our host she intended to fuck me. (I didn’t say that in the letter. “I want to jump in the sack with him” was the quote.) I described the conversation:

“Do you really? I said. No, she said, you are not a weekend sort of person. You are a tomorrow person. If I sleep with you I will not leave Augusta. And my tomorrow person is waiting for me in Fort Lauderdale. If I don’t love you, I will if you’re around another half-hour or so. And you will hurt me. You can hurt me. This guy I’m sleeping with here — he’s just a nice pleasant horny-GI person. No involvement. But I’d fight for you. And I’d lose. You’ve told me that straight. You’ve got your tomorrow person and she is who you want, so you don’t need me and you don’t want me, so please get the hell out of here before I start wanting you too much…And then I got the hell out…But I sure wish I had a tape recorder to get down all those ego-soothing things she said. She talked like a good book — like a woman should talk if she were an intelligent sensuous woman and the book was a ships-passing-in-the-night affair…I had to resist an urge to take notes….”

So of course I went home and typed what I could from memory. Another woman I didn’t sleep with, to add to a life-list of near-misses. She’d just found an elegant way to retreat from her drunken declaration of sexual intent. A way to fend me off without hurting my feelings. A memorable young woman, heiress to a Midwest newspaper dynasty. There turned out to be more to her story later. I did wind up hurting her feelings. It took decades to achieve enough distance to fictionalize her. Not as satisfying as sleeping with her, but it’s what writers do.

With something like regret, I tear up the ancient carbon and consign it to the recycle bin. Tug another sheet from the Rubbermaid tub. Another letter-carbon, this one dated 1966. I was a Military Policeman in Germany, writing to my grandmother. I can see this excavation of the past is going to take some time…