The Secret Sharer

In a viral conversation with a friend this morning, the topic of secrets came wedging itself into your awareness, in the manner of an Oreo cookie or, as a mixed metaphor.  Questions written in Spanish are begin with an inverted question mark,  To make sure the respondent has no doubts, the question concludes with a question mark.  Thus your Oreo cookie reminder.  ?Secrets?

There are shared secrets, an example being your friend telling you a few secrets and you, enjoying the exchange, offered some of your own, a payment in the same medium of exchange.  What are friends for?  They are for a number of complex transactions, including the trading of secrets, particularly if the shared secrets are emotionally charged elements you'd not be comfortable broadcasting about.

Thus you've just added an important element to secrets, the force of some intense emotion that, acted on directly, could cause a spectrum of trouble.  The ideal response from a friend with whom you've just told such a secret is, "Of course, you're not going to act on it."  And the ideal response to that observation is, "I'm tempted."  Lovely dramatic equation there.  

No wonder secrets have such a high exchange value in story.  Secrets are the gold standard of dramatic narrative, every bit as significant as suspense and conflict.  In fact, with proper arrangement, secrets could be the catalyst for suspense and conflict.  

Knowing the secrets of another is a form of power by which you have the leverage of knowing an aspect of the secret bearer few other persons have.  You have the power of betraying the secret by sharing it, deliberately or inadvertently.  Another way to demonstrate the calculus of power is the strategy of speaking obliquely about the secret to the secret bearer, causing that person to ask you for the reassurance that you will keep the seal of the secret.

Secrets are the footpaths to hidden agendas, which are common enough in Reality and essentials in Story.  If the motives of all characters in a dramatic situation were overt and immediate, there would be less surprise and suspense.  Story would rely on arguments more than on arguments acted upon, which would be conflict.

In addition to shared secrets, there would be the carefully guarded ones, sometimes allowed to fester within from the fear of sharing them with anyone.  Neil Simon, the shrewdly observant playwright, once observed that the most compelling way of beginning a story or a fresh scene is with a character making the admission, "I've never told this to anyone before."

Who could fail to pay some ransom of curiosity to such a statement?  Who could fail to be curious about a bit of information deliberately withheld by another?

Here's where the irony creeps in.  You are not alone in having secrets, nor are you unique in keeping secrets from yourself?  There are things you wish, fantasy, yearn for, and on the other side of the equation detest, loathe, dread.  You might share some of those secrets.  Worst case scenario is mild to intense embarrassment, were these made public or shared with however much discretion.  The greater likelihood is that the secrets you keep from yourself are kept in fear of the abject humiliation you'd suffer were they made apparent.

You do see the catch there, don't you?  The bait is your sense of self.  A similar "secret" in another might not be a secret or a threat to that person's self image.  The boundary lines are those you've set yourself, perhaps without active consultation.  But the self knows.  You know what aspects of yourself would humiliate you, were they made public, and yet there is the possibility that you have not as yet been able to tell yourself what these visions or aspects of yourself are.

Those early writers who saw enough to build the analogy between the human psyche and the onion were wise beyond measure.  You join your brother and sister members of the species in wrapping the layers about the armature, covering, coding, insulating.

At some early age, you became aware of the mantra "Know thyself."  Reaching into metaphor again, your quest for self-knowledge and its most attractive product, self-awareness, has by your judgement been as successful as your attempts to understand and put to practical use algebra and geometry.

You've done in the Reality of seeking self-awareness  the equivalent of repeating those courses until you were able to demonstrate lackluster, mediocre understandings and comings to term with algebra and geometry.  There are often multiple possibilities of answer in the subjects that interest you most and in which you have some demonstrable measure of ability.  Of algebra and geometry, as with much math, there is one right answer per problem.  All others are close but no actual or proverbial cigar.

In the most subjective of ways, you've done better at self-awareness than you have at algebra or geometry.  For some time, your struggles with the two were your secrets, thus you come to yet another kind of secret.  This is the OBE or overcome by events secret.

You have any number of those, secrets who've outlasted their use-by dates, thus becoming irrelevant.  To whom?  Why, to you, of course.  But there are still some things you're holding back on, things you've not told anyone.

Yet.

Trompe l'Oeil: Trick of the I

A biography is an attempt at conveying the personality, influences, energy sources, and methods by which the individual engaged life.  More than a mere recitation of events in an individual's life, biography places the individual in context of his or her zeitgeist, the better biographies demonstrating the effects of the individual on the zeitgeist and, reversing the process, the effects on the spirit of the times on the individual.

Although you've not seen the two terms used in connection with one another, many biographies, particularly those of artists, say for examples the American painter, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), or the American poet, Countee Cullen (1903-46), would seem to include that entity known as a catalogue raisonne.

At first blush, a catalogue raisonne might appear to be limited to graphic artists including photographers.  You believe and herewith argue for the inclusion of musicians, poets, writers, actors, choreographers, dancers, many of whom have the equivalent of catalogues raisonne compiled to cover their life's works.

In its most basic aspect, a catalogue raisonne is a comprehensive, perhaps even exhaustive listing of every work the subject has connection with.  The catalogue would include critical commentary, reviews, and the compiler's attempts at providing a large-scale sense of the artist, evoked through examination of the artist's work.

Thus, in literal and figurative ways, the biography and catalogue raisonne present the creator in dramatic, work-oriented dimension as well as evoking the artist's work ethic and the growth arc of the artist's vision of both the human condition and the medium of the artist's expression.

When these two media, so close in ways and disparate in others, found themselves on the stage of your mind at the same time, you experienced that aha-moment of thinking they did belong together.  Other aha-moments followed, including the potential for judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers, philosophers, and inventors to be thought of in terms of the aggregate personal history that is a conflation of biography and catalogue raisonne.

Both media have been orbiting the culture for some time.  The concept of the personal history was yanked into prominence by an individual you personally associate with his trademark red gingham shirt and his longtime association with the city of Chicago.  You refer, of course, to Louis "Studs" Terkel (1912-2008), a man who incessantly interviewed and produced biographies of working persons, emphasizing the work they performed, how they did it, and their attitudes to it.  In real and dramatic senses, Terkel did for biography what Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler did for the mystery novel; he democratized it. 

In a sense, Terkel, through his radio broadcast interviews and his books, made the term personal history seem more interesting and fraught than biography.  Yes, for an ardent certainty, there were splendid and meaningful biographies well before Terkel, not the least among them being Ben Franklin's autobiography or that stunning prose poem of Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory.

To get at your point about the confluence of biography, catalogue raisonne, and personal history,the Czech composer, Bedrich Smetana (1824-84) wrote a collection of six orchestral tone poems, Ma Vlast (My Country), a memorable sense of time, place, theme. There is little if any stretch of logic in suggesting Smetana did in music what Maxine Hong Kingston (1940--) did in her memoir/biography/personal history, Woman Warrior.

You have personal connections with the versatile and eccentric writer, William Saroyan (1908-81) first meeting him when you were the number two attraction to him at a writer's conference.  This meant he was the keynote speaker and you got to attend the dinner in his honor.  But at this dinner, he excused himself for a visit to the men's room, and was next heard from half an hour later, via a telephone call from the nearby Elk's Club to the manager of the writer's conference.  "Bill's been here for fifteen minutes, knocking back doubles and telling us to go fuck ourselves.  Says he's headed over to the Eagles."

Indeed, the manager of the conference heard from the bartender at the Eagle's Lodge.  "I guess it's a good thing, we got no Moose Lodge here in Santa Barbara.  Bill's signing your name to the tab and saying the Moose are more understanding than we are."

By all accounts an inventive writer, both in short story, novel, stage and screen plays, and essay, Saroyan was in effect an enthusiastic autobiographer.

Your favorite work of his, loaned you by his son (and your faculty mate at USC) Aram, was a collection of obituaries he'd written for persons he'd never known in life but, as reflected through his obituaries of them, wished he had known them.

Individuals are known through their life events, their imagination, their causes, their triumphs, disappointments, colossal failures, and the inspiration they radiated, often without knowing.

You first came upon the term "catalogue raisonne" when you were editor in chief of a scholarly publishing house, intent on acquiring a series of such works reflective of modern artists.  The term has bumped around in your imagination for some time, until you took over your late wife's class in personal history, which you've been giving three times a year for about three years.

One of your longest term friends, in addition to being a writer, was an accomplished artist.  At one point, you broached the subject to him of a catalogue raisonne of his work.  He considered this for a moment, then confessed that perhaps the catalogue raisonne would have to begin after his discharge from the Betty Ford Center.  "Less trouble trying to remember what came before then,"  he said.  "Besides, I'm more interested in trompe l'oeil."  

Trick of the eye.

And your come back.  "Trick of the I."

Sisyphus and the Physics of Resistance

The musician runs scales and moves into improvisations.  The artist sketches with some abandon before moving into a more finished drawing of a person, a place, perhaps a small thing.  You use such blog moments as these to open up process to some project in some state of construction.

As you see it, you're working against the resistance of not being ready.  Being unready to work is different from sitting somewhere to compose.  You've long since had to argue yourself into sitting to compose, moving past the place of wishing to have written and into the place of timelessness, which is to say into the now and immediacy of composition.  In such a place, you're beyond time, space and causation; you're in effect beyond resistance.

Resistance is a form of cultural overload, a place where awareness is not of the sounds of the you you've cultivated as an instrument of observation, rather the you who has taken in decades of family values, cultural values, and the Muzak blare of political, religious, and academic propaganda.

Being outside these influences leaves you free to take a closer, more original look at the landscape about you.  Being stalled by these influences is the equivalent of having to argue your way out of the resistance that broadcasts as though it were cable news, needing 24/7 to have talking points.

This resistance has little to do with what has also been propagandized as writer's block.  You are not blocked.  The occasions when you thought yourself to have been blocked were in fact not blockages but the resistance that comes from allowing the culture about you to silence your inquiries, protests, and presentations of alternate possibilities.

The reigning culture wishes to present to you an elite to which you have not been invited because of your past history.  What is your past history?  In all irony, you past history is all the times you were silenced by resistance to the propaganda.

A significant aspect of the cultural bullying is the use of the rhetorical questions it prompts you to ask yourself.  Aren't you playing the stereotype of the misunderstood artist?  Aren't you elevating yourself to heights your own past history uses to attest your status?  Thus you use the culture to shut down the sense of self as late bloomer, just as in earlier days you used the culture to shut down the sense of yourself as the new kid on the block.

One evening many years ago, during the days when your alcohol consumption was considerably high, you were at a party, in character to the point of having found a rest room, where you slouched against a sink, turned on the water until it grew chilly, then began cupping it onto your face.  Your hope was to stop the dizzy spin and the oppressive sense of being hot.  A great friend of yours at the time, and an even greater friend later on, stumbled into the same restroom in slightly worse condition than you.  His purpose was almost immediately realized.  He deposited the contents of his stomach into a toilet, flushed it, then sought the same kind of relief with cold water as you.

Seeing you at your wash basin, he began to laugh.  "Golden boy gets messed up, too,"  he taunted.  "You have no idea how comforting this is."

You accused him of schadenfreude, protested your golden nature, and insisted on the alloy nature of your person.  Further accusations followed about his characterizations of you, but he stopped you with a wave of his hand.  "Let's just say that it's a surprise to see you messed up."

Perhaps that was the true beginning of your friendship with Lee W. Cake.  Some years later, while he was still in law school, you hired him to ghost the lay version of a scholarly legal work by an attorney regarded at the time as "The King of Torts," Melvin Belli.

You'd gone from being boy wonder to a place best described by you as The Peter Principle Incarnate, which is to say you'd had several early rises to levels of uncertain void.

Now, you're thinking to find some definition as a Late Bloomer, but this is every bit as much propaganda as the cultural propaganda you've been pointing at in these paragraphs, the voices of your time, telling you to shut up, take the money and run, don't make waves, don't try to take on battles for which you have neither armor nor weaponry.  Try to look good.  Write long sentences.  Bury the cultural animus.  Worse of all, act your age, emphasis on the act part as opposed to the be part.

In short, what you once saw as competition with persons and positions now presents itself to you as a need to stay at your desk, outlasting the resistances that have kept you from listening to such voice as you have, colluding and collaborating and conspiring with it.

The culture and the interpretations of your own history may well be right, but you will begin to reap the benefits of listening to your take on your personal history after all those years in which you allowed yourself to be swayed and shouted down by the notion that you were Sisyphus, pushing with no purpose at a large rock. 

There's Good News...and Bad News.

The good news is, something you've written will be published.

The bad news is, something you've written will be published.

When you are in the pre-publication stage, working on the thing you intend to find a home for publication, you are closer to being in that state known as being a writer.  There are aspects of frequent residence in that landscape you have furnished, graded, stabilized, fenced or somehow shrubbed in.  

Your companions are aspects of self you've come to cultivate as working allies, perhaps even as friends.  Among these are fear, doubt, anger, desires for revenge, empathy, curiosity, all of whom have recognizable landscapes of their own which they have, in their turn, furnished, graded, stabilized, and somehow set boundaries upon.

In this stage, a good working day consists of picking up a project from yesterday, then seeing it through the Reality of today until that Reality merges with your internal landscape.  You have no realistic hope of finishing the project today.  There may be some hint of a tangible end being in sight, but the closest you can come is something glib such as, "Maybe another month or so."

There is inherent happiness in such days, but you have the inchoate sense of being about to reach the place of the first tingle of alarm.  You may be a step or two beyond the midway point.  The project still speaks to you, speaks volumes, in fact, volumes you already know will have to be pruned.  

You might even have reached that first shrill of boredom, which is a sign to you that you have remained too much within the boundaries, have not come close enough to the edge for that serious squirt of fear to take hold.

A few more good days, and then the boredom is tangible, hovering like the long lost chum from high school you've reconnected with, who wants to hear all about what you've been doing with yourself all these years.  Time to step over the line, into the unknown, where the step is a necessity but the outcome is not by any means a sure thing.  You may, indeed, have to start fresh, throw out significant parts, rethink the material, looking for the unrecognized you within the material, the you just beyond your reach and sight because you were staying too close to the shoreline.

Much of the creative takes place while you're in this stage, this stage of being a writer who may stand a chance of being published rather than a writer who sees his entire image of self as a writer depending on the act of being published.  At one point when you were less familiar and clear about this dichotomy and about dichotomies in general, it seemed to you you were continually being asked by persons you'd just met if there were something of yours they'd be familiar with, which was a diplomatic way of asking you if you'd been published or produced.  

The creativity comes from the ability to begin your workday with something to say, some line of inquiry to follow, some understanding from your characters or your essay of what the characters want or what step the theme wishes to take.  If the creativity does not come, you work around it, pretend it does not matter until the pretense becomes tangible and you are able to step out on your own, looking for and often finding keepable pages.

The stage shifts after you've reached the point where the work seems done.  You begin showing it, tentatively, to readers you trust to tell you things you need to hear, such as the work in actuality being done or being a puzzlement or lacking or carrying too much weight.  Until this time, your only companions have been those pesky aspects of yourself and of things you've been reading and especially things you've been reading or remember reading from the men and women whose works are the stars and planets in your subjective sky.

Soon the inner landscape shifts.  You are about to be published again.  You are no longer a writer, you are an author.  Your agent has had a whack at the work, strengthening it, perhaps causing it to appear to you as one of those remarkable pop-out books, where a three-dimensional scene erupts from the opened facing pages, and you not only feel ownership, you feel a part of it.  Now the content and copy editors come after you.  Dross you could not see at composition time, at being a writer time, appears before you in memos and the Track Changes application on the digital manuscript.

You are humbled by the inconsistencies.  If you are of an age and your copyeditor another age, you might even feel a squirt of irritation at her query of some individual out of your culture.  You've been queried in reference Frank Sinatra, Shirley Jackson, Susan Sontag, Stan Musial, and Budd Schulberg.  "Who he?"  "She still alive?"

Someone relatively unknown to you or completely unknown approaches you to tell you how much the work meant to them, attaching to it an implication or intent at best one hundred eighty degrees from your own intent.

You nod thanks, you even venture a few spoken words of thanks.  The good news is that you were published again.


For any of a number of reasons, you come across something you've published and experience the relief that it still holds the integrity of your intentions.

In equal measure, the bad news might be that you were published again.

You've gone from being a writer to being an author.

Time to get your sorry ass back to being a writer again.

How Sir Isaac Newtron Helped Formulate the Laws of Story

 Your first introduction to Sir Isaac Newton had to do with his observation, then formulation of the behavior of physical bodies as expressed in his notable laws of motion.  You were of an age where you presumed he wore a wig and would have any number of things to tell you about the behavior of matter and persons.

In some of the drawings and portraits you later discovered of him, you were not disappointed; he did wear a wig. You bore him no envy or ill will because of the wig, accepting that as a cultural affectation.  In some ways, Sir Isaac, if not a hero, became a person to respect.  You could learn neat things from a person like that.  You especially liked the idea that he was driven by his curiosity.  

This is, of course, a retrospective view.  At the time, you told a friend, "He wasn't doing shit like this to get ahead in the world.  He did it because he could.  Because he had to."

To the extent you were able to keep your own focus on the world about you, you did begin a modest form of observation of what then seemed to be the world about you.  At the time, you were quite a literal person, struggling with such aspects of physical behavior as your emerging self, the seeming mysteries of puberty, and, in an appropriate riff on Newtonian physical behavior, your attraction to girls.

Because of your literal nature, you were not yet ready to attach the caboose of your own observations to the mighty and impressive locomotive of Sir Isaac's spectacular visions, although you do recall in one class during the hated middle school years your passionate argument favoring Newton over Aristotle.  The teacher in question was likely too surprised by the depths of your thesis, coming form the known troublemaker she saw you as, to suggest you might well have been mixing apples and oranges.

This is not to suggest you have things better in hand now as to offer that you have had a wider swath of experiences, which you're able to equate with such forces as movement and evolution.  You're almost ready to posit experience as emotional movement, although you do recognize that ageing comes with experience and ageing often exacts tolls such as wrinkles, thinning of hair, occasional creaking of bones, and the unexpected bouts of crankiness.

You are ready to posit motion as the meeting ground for Story and Reality.  In either landscape, lack of motion is stasis, which equates with boredom.  Let's not be too quick to write off boredom as an enemy of Reality or of Story.  

Sometimes boredom becomes the stew pot for resolution or, even better, rebellion against the static, the lack of influential energy.  If the Peasants, tired of their cramped stasis, hadn't revolted (pick a time, pick a year, pick a country), there'd have been no Magna Carta, the Romanoffs would still be in power, the Ottoman Empire...well, enough said.

The enemies in Story and Reality are Apathy, Indifference, and lack of curiosity.  They are central to the Marxist response to Hegel's thesis and anti-thesis dialectic.  In some form or another, Story needs Apathy, Indifference, too much introspection rather than or as a prelude to action, and let's throw in too much self-interest rather than a reasoned measure of empathy.

Story in motion tends to stay in motion until it is overcome by too much description, too much introspection, speechifying instead of dialogue.  Story at rest tends to stay at rest until it is overcome by intent, fueled by significant desire or need.

You did not need a wig to see this aspect of story, projected as a physical entity, but you took considerable advice from Sir Isaac, who gave you a helpful shove in the right direction.

Reality: Where Were You When We Needed You?

For most of your emerging life, you've been in an arm-wrestle with Reality, at first attempting to understand it, then define it, and then duplicate it in laboratory conditions you've come to see as story.

Without your conscious awareness of the fact, you were creating a dialectic, which lead you in earlier years to think you understood Marxism.  At more or less the same time, you were investigating another dialectic, the charged, argumentative conversation of story, which led you to think you understood it.

In more recent years, you became aware of and intrigued by such phenomena as parallel lines and how they began to assume for you the movement of Reality and Story, thus your dialectic materialism became distinct from the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels,  You settled into a negotiated settlement with the notion of parallel lines and argumentive conflict as your pole stars for your life in Reality and your life in trying to understand and produce the drama of story.

Such explorations led you on merry stumbles of mind, heart, and that borderline landscape between the two you've come to regard as imagination.

Reality reminds you at times of some of the Vedic approaches to Hindu theology, wherein most attempts at defining the divinity, aka the godhead, are doomed from the start because the act of definition immediately places limitations on a thing held to be limitless.  

Your attempts at defining Reality produced the sorts of dreadful reading to which you were often subjected during your years as editor in chief of a scholarly book publishing venture.  The dreadful reading was frustrating and disheartening, qualities you work to keep out of your own composition.  But as these blog essays attest on occasion, your success in this area has some notable holes.

At the moment, your attempts at defining Reality have taken you far enough to give you a sense of a huge apparatus, much like an enormous loom, spinning out events with neither pattern nor purpose other than to serve as fodder for a kind of Darwinian progression.  And yes, you recognize one immediate flaw in logic as you attempt to describe Reality, just as you recognize the flaws inherent in many attempts to describe the godhead.  

In simplistic but by no means reductionist terms, many Hindu thinkers refer to the godhead as "the one without a second," leaving It as a unique form, without shape, size, time, space, or causation.  Some non-Hindu religionists see such Hindu presences as Shiva, Krishna, Kali, and Durga as a pagan panoply rather than the Hindu regard of them as mere aspects or segments of "the one without a second," accordingly missing the Advaita or oneness aspect of Hinduism.

Your attempts at defining Reality have left you with a number of simplistic visions such as "A universal progression of causes, events, and spaces."  You are willing to let matters with Reality rest there, until the idea for a story comes to you, at which point you attempt to see the elements of that story as an aspect of Reality.

Whether your approach holds logical water or not, it allows you for the present to move away from the line of definition and onto the parallel line of a linked series of invented events which you attempt to portray as having a tangible sense of Reality.

Whatever it is you are defining or attempting to define is one-dimensional description.  So much then for mere description.  You're looking for the movable tide of Reality and its component events, involved in argumentive flux.

Motion is the essence of matter.  Dialectical materialism is a way of measuring and discussing Reality.  Motion is also the essence of story.  Story is a way of measuring and discussing Reality.  Because an infinitude of events and movements are possible in Reality, an infinitude of stories orbit our lives, waiting to be told.

We can never complete the description of Reality, whether as philosophers, storytellers, or both.  Some amazing individuals--Hegel, Marx, Hannah Arendt, Camus, Simone De Beauvoir, and Susan Sontag--have attempted one or the other or even both.  We are caught between the rock of dialectics and the hard place of writing, even if we attempt to keep the investigation close to hand, focusing on the Self.

Embarrassing Questions

In many ways, irony is sarcasm refined.  Young persons, let's say persons under the age of twenty-five, can be observed refining their sarcasms.  

Let's say, as an example, the taunt "Don't mind me." is a sarcasm directed by a young person to a peer or older.  Since we're speculatively saying things, let's say a plateau upward toward irony from "Don't mind me." would be, "I hadn't thought you'd noticed."  Same situation.  Different degrees of sarcasm.

You recall yourself being well into the default sarcasm of the early and mid teens until you discovered an early role model of irony, Oscar Wilde.  You were beginning to see the light of irony on your own and through reading, but the process was hurried along by the kinds of schoolmates one recalls with admiration if not fondness for the long haul ahead.  

These schoolmates brought you closer to Dr. Johnson, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.  By the merest of good fortune, on your own, you discovered Dorothy Parker and Ring Lardner, of "Shut up," he explained, fame.

These forces all came into convergence one lunch hour afternoon at 7850 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles California, in the company of a group of fellow students at Fairfax High School.  At least two of those present were eleventh graders, a fact of social prestige.  The Fairfax High of your youth was probably every bit as stratified as the Fairfax of today, the strata and their implications having evolved from its then demographics and sociology to its current enlightenment.

You were not particularly fond of the eleventh graders, but there was some rub-off prestige in having been beckoned over to lunch on the lawn with them and a few of your tenth-grade friends who'd turned your attentions to philosophers and cynics.  However charged and lofty such conversations could be (try this:  "We hear you're reading Marx."), the subject of sex was as insistent as a show-off student, waving hands or arms to be noticed by a teacher.

When a sex-related topic came forth, your reply to it produced one of those moments that you can now, at this remove, relate more to irony than to the humiliation of being the center, not only of attention but of ridicule.  "You're in high school now,"  you were informed by an eleventh-grader.  "We don't get boners any more.  We get hard-ons."

Another semester, a year at the most, with the likes of Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker, and you'd have had some response other than silence. "Roger that,"  perhaps.  Even "Copy that."  Possibly, "Rise to any occasion."  

Early years are years of observation, looking for those key instruments of purpose and intent, which are both important instruments for the growing self to distinguish and determine, then find ways to use in composition. Early accusations that "You did that on purpose" were just as likely to be met with the defiance so common to the age or with the same near humiliation at the discovery that we don't get boners any more.

Another semester or two, and you could use purpose as a refined instrument.  "To what purpose?"  Those three words are, at the least, instrumental beginnings of an essay, which leads to a conclusion and a discovery.

For the next several years, you were asked your intentions by a number of girlfriends and, in some cases, their parents.  Now, you ask questions about intent and purpose of your characters, the characters of your students, of writers you are paid to edit.  But most of all, and on these very cyberpages, you ask those questions of yourself.