Betsy Robinson

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Perhaps my biggest ego quality is arrogance. I know it and it is hard to incinerate. I approached this morning's meditation feeling some despair. I asked for help—from a Siddha guru in spirit and the one who is presently alive.

It felt good to ask for help from what for me is a "higher power." (Side note: I just finished a thrilling thriller called Assassinations Anonymous by Rob Hart about a killer who is attending a 12-step program to stop killing. It is an ingenious way of dramatizing what it takes to change, and in 12-step programs, that requires requesting help from a higher power which can be anything you feel is bigger than you are. For me, that is my gurus.)

I felt their presence, but it wasn't helping much. Still my arrogance was spinning. Then Gordon Parks, the late photojournalist who I wrote about last February, came in in the form of a great light that pierced my heart so deeply I cried.

I felt small and contracted after that. When I tried to straighten, I felt nausea in my stomach. I guess I have to fully experience my arrogance as a process of letting it go.

Arrogance is a very different thing from determination. Gordon Parks lived his life with enormous determination but zero arrogance.

Yesterday a friend told me that people feel pressured to "take a side" in war. Maybe in life too. The side I pick is FREEDOM and EQUALITY.

I pick that in this country. I pick that in the world. It's not that complicated.

If freedom and equality are my side, then everybody's pain matters. I can wish for wars to end and everybody to have equal rights. I can acknowledge the pain of people who have been attacked, killed, butchered, raped, burned, and abducted while enjoying a music festival, and I can acknowledge the pain of innocents who are being slaughtered by an army directed by a tyrant who cares only about maintaining power. I can call for the release of innocents on both sides from horrific actions.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can acknowledge the history of my own country and also live here, knowing that I have a right to my home, even though others were butchered in a genocide that gave me the land on which my home stands. I can choose personal actions to see that everybody's pain is acknowledged and everybody matters and that past wrongs are not perpetuated or repeated.

If freedom and equality are my side, I can hold painful contradictions and refuse to give in to catch phrases that condemn everybody of one race or ethnicity.

It's not that hard.

In summer 2023, Anderson Cooper devoted a whole hour on his show The Whole Story to The Gilgo Beach Killer, about an accused serial killer, an architect who was a family man employed in New York City and living on Long Island, where he allegedly deposited his victims on a beach. In the process of reporting this story, CNN reporters mentioned that other serial killers such as John Wayne Gacy also were family men. A few weeks later, authorities arrested a violent serial kidnapper and sex assaulter who lived an apparently ordinary life with his wife and two kids.

And yet, this "dangerous loner" trope survives.

In my essay "Walking Alone: Dangerous or Heroic" in Prairie Fire magazine, I point out that it is just as likely to be a well-adjusted, non-homicidal loner as it is to be a happy anybody else.

And yet, as a culture, we cling to our sweeping stereotypes—notions that take the place of discerning thought and the subsequent processing of information that may be different from what we believe, and therefore may elicit an inner struggle and change.

Although I'm an introvert, I have lots of extrovert friends. They are in constant social interaction and thrive in the company of others. Occasionally one will confide that they feel as if they are neglecting "who they really are"—ignoring their inner lives. That's funny because it's obvious "who they really are" is people who love people—according to song lyrics, the luckiest people. Likewise, I think people like me—contemplatives who are excited by the inner journey while examining the outer one; people who thrive by having insights, connecting metaphor to meaning, and creating something that has not existed before—live who we really are with a different emphasis.

Author Amina Cain has brilliantly turned this quiet journey, as well as a woman's need for it—a need as strong as any mammal's for oxygen—into a novella called Indelicacy (‎Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Reading it made my brain pop with identification, associations, appreciation, and flat-out glee. In the novel, a woman who works as a museum cleaner, craving freedom to deeply enter and write about the world of the paintings that surround her, finally achieves this. She makes mistakes along the way, gets involved with a man she doesn't want to marry but marries him anyway, and does some hilarious things—hilarious because they're honest and yet incongruent to people who live primarily in the "outer world"—and eventually she is happy. In fact she sometimes experiences being one with everything when she writes about paintings. In a quick search through the book for the word "open," there are many salient quotes about the power of looking within. One example:

All the windows in the restaurant were open, and as I wrote, the waves were crashing right outside them. It began to help me. I began to feel I was in a trance of writing. All around me were plump insects. They too were very alive, beating their wings, landing.

You can read this 158-page entertainment in one sitting and I did (twice)—in a state of near-ecstasy. Then I knocked out a Goodreads review, posted it, and proceeded to get really sad reading other readers' reviews calling the book "insubstantial," "cold," or, even more distressing, this comment by one who loved it: "I mourn for her [the protagonist] to break out of her self-imposed limitations, but she doesn't want to." All of this exposed a social bias I don't understand: Why do people who love connection assume that this is the only real life, the only proper way to be, and that "self-imposed limitations" in favor of time and freedom to travel one's unique inner journey is something to mourn? What limitation is there in feeling one with all that is? Were the great visionaries and mystics who changed our understanding of life and love tragic figures? Or is it that one must declare oneself by some avocation to justify this excitement of discovery? One reader who identified herself as a writer (an introvert?) commented, "This book scared me, honestly. I didn't want to be her, even if I liked her for the most part." I posit that this woman's fear is not of Cain's protagonist but of a part of herself she wants to avoid. Why? Read More 

Little did I know almost 30 years ago that my "money job" would render one of the most important experiences of love and altruism in my life. Little did I know that it would birth not only a one-act play that got published but was never read in performance until this year, and that that experience would birth journalism in the form of this essay: "To the Hero on the J Train that Crashed on the Williamsburg Bridge 28 Years Ago.

In an editorial meeting at a spiritual magazine I used to work for, owned by a church, a senior editor proposed we do a feature on all the special knowledge about money known by Jews—have a Jewish writer do it. I gasped. So did another female Jewish editor. She was kinder than I was in her explanation of why this was not a good idea. I wanted to kill the guy. He was dumbfounded by "our" problem with his idea, but finally he gave it up.

Antisemitism is in the fabric of world history. It lurks in places you'd never expect it. The stereotypes, the belief that all of "one people" are one way—although the people who think this would laugh if you put them in such a category: all white people, all Christians, all women/men/children, etc.

People's stereotypes and extreme ignorance of this history of antisemitism, and therefore the experiences of Jews—religious Jews and people like me with no religious or cultural upbringing, but whose faces tell their heritage—remains astounding to me. When you assume that people are monsters for wanting to defend themselves, when you blame people whose children were butchered in front of them, whose families were abducted, you are being unknowingly directed by antisemitism.

I keep thinking about my first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove. When I wrote it in the 1980s, I had no idea it would age and therefore morph as I have. First, it was a novel about war, then trauma, then seeing all the beautiful colors in the world, and in this particular moment, about the experience of being a person bombarded by other people's misconceptions of them.

My mother would be 102 today. I just read a letter she wrote to her brother in 1942 where she waxes poetic about a man she wanted to marry (not my father). "Don't let his last name fool you—" she writes, "he's one of us." Code that Jews know well, whether you grew up in the religion or not.

[This article first appeared in www.Rewireme.com in 2016.]

It's a scientific fact: experiences change markers on the DNA of traumatized people, and these markers can be passed to future generations—making them more likely to deal badly with stress. However, the good news is that since we know that this adaptive evolutionary process happens, we can consciously choose to use it in the opposite direction—creating a legacy of positive conscious change.

I am sitting in the cluttered office of Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D., the very vibrant and very busy Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Director of Mental Health at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. I am here because of the results of two of her studies on the transgenerational effects of trauma on the DNA of the offspring of Holocaust survivors and mothers who were pregnant and traumatized by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But I quickly learn that these studies are but stepping stones in a research journey that has been going on for decades. And it is the accumulation of stepping stones that has led Yehuda and her team to know how to interpret the epigenetics ("the study of the molecular mechanisms by which environment controls gene activity") of the Holocaust and 9/11 trauma legacy studies.

"We've been saying versions of [the study results] for a really long time," Yehuda says. But the irrefutable finding of a chemical mark on a gene that is passed from parent to child has given validation to something many people sense.

"There's no particular reason to believe that the findings would be limited to the populations that we've studied," explains Yehuda. "It's hard to imagine that if there were such a thing as transmitted effects of trauma or reactions of the offspring to parental trauma that this would only occur for some traumas and not others. So we've got to imagine that this is going to somehow be a universal phenomenon." However she emphasizes the need for more scientific studies in different groups of people.

"I think that people are resonating with [the findings]," she continues, "because they see it for what it probably is which is something more universal that explains a lot of things that have really not had the proper words by way of explanation. People do feel that somehow the experiences from their parents and generations past are meaningful in some way. Epigenetics gives us a language, a vocabulary to begin to talk about these kinds of phenomena.

"I think that people who feel traumatized know that something isn't what it should be, but sometimes they have difficulty connecting how they're feeling to an event. Or perhaps they feel that they're exaggerating or have an exaggerated response to an event. And what concepts like this—concepts of sensitization or things like that—have going for them is that they help us understand why our response to the environment isn't just a response to what's happening to us but may be more of a collective response to how we're looking at things based on events that might have occurred in prior generations. So maybe it's like an overwriting on the genes in some way."

So how can we use this information? Read More 

I'm so pleased to have a new essay on Next Avenue. "Finding My Mother's 'Talk' in Her Handwriting."

Editor Julie Pfitzinger did a stunning job with the layout.

People say too many words. The talking heads on the news shows I'm addicted to, turning each event into "breaking bombshells!" Everybody on social media. Me.

 

That's the worst. The spasms to myself about what I did wrong, whatever is my frustration du jour, my judgments about what everybody else is doing — like talking too much. Too much talking is why I write. To get it succinct.

 Read more at the linked title.

I've always preferred walking to taking transportation, so when I moved to NYC to be an actor in 1972, I walked to all my temp jobs. One day, I had to go to my temp agency first, and they were appalled by my black & white high-top sneakers. "You're NOT going to wear those, are you?" gasped my supervisor. No, I assured him. I just walk to jobs in them, and I showed him my office shoes.

About a year later, when there was a mass transit strike, everybody started wearing sneakers to walk to work. And they never stopped.

My point is: shut-downs birth new things. During the pandemic, we discovered Zoom for theatrical presentations. Dance companies invented new ways of presenting fabulous performances. As did musicians.

My big take-away from the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strike is that we must hold strong and SHUT IT DOWN—TV, movies—until artists get a fair deal. In the meantime, invent, invent. There are fantastic podcasts (Smartless), there still is theater, standup, and humans will create things we haven't thought about yet.

And if we don't hold strong, big companies will appropriate them and own them, and, once again, the artists who birth them will be relegated to being underpaid employees.

I have never felt more strongly that creators must own their own work. Let's find a way.

I love editor Chuck Reece's title and dek (line that follows a title) for my essay on Salvation South. I hope you enjoy it.

Take Off Your Shoes and Be Quiet

A meditation retreat shouldn't make you angry, right? But if it does, maybe you should simply wait, just a little longer.

Read it here: Salvation South

And check out some of the other articles on the site. In my opinion, at the hands of editor Chuck Reece, Salvation South is a New Yorker-calibre publication.

If it weren't an oxymoron, I might quip, "Loners of the world unite." And then I'd laugh, because I'm a happy loner with a sense of humor.

I like people. It's just that I don't need them around me most of the time. I have fun at gatherings. But one a week . . . or month . . . is sufficient. Conversations are inspiring, but silence feels like home.

Years ago I took the Myers-Briggs personality test and learned that my diagnosis is INFJ, which stands for Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging—a rare type (estimated to be 1 to 3 percent of U.S. population) because our characteristics are apparently incompatible with each other. I find no incompatibility between my enjoyment of people and my preference to be alone; my ability to read just about anything emotionally and intuitively and my inimitable practicality, skepticism, and love of evidence-based conclusions.

In her wonderful memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama says that if you don't see your personal story in the cultural narrative, tell it.

As I said, I love practicality and that was a practical suggestion. So I did it.

I'm thrilled that my new essay "Walking Alone—Dangerous or Heroic?" is in the spring issue of Prairie Fire magazine, distributed only in Canada, but you can buy the issue online:

Prairie Fire

And here's a little video preview:

It was February 2013. I'd been freelance book editing since losing my magazine job—on a day christened "Bloody Wednesday" in NY publishing—just before Christmas in 2008. Freelancing is a feast or famine deal, and I'd had close to a month of famine when a voice in my head whispered, "It's time. Pull Mom's manuscript out of the closet."

In 1957, when I was six, my mother, Edna Robinson, had written a short story called "The Trouble with the Truth." After it was published in the 1959 edition of the New World Writing book series, selected as one of the "most exciting and original" stories of its time by editors who had previously introduced the work of Samuel Beckett and Jack Kerouac, Edna's intensity became impenetrable. I remember watching her burrowed in her study typing. Why was she so mad, I wondered.

She wasn't mad. As a writer, I now understand the intensity. She was working her story into a novel of the same title. And when that novel was optioned by Harper & Row . . . and then dropped simply because it was about a single father with two peculiar children in the 1920s and '30s and To Kill a Mockingbird had occupied that territory, I believe something in my mother died.

When I first read The Trouble with the Truth in the 1970s, I loved it. The writing was gorgeous but I thought it needed some work. I wanted to talk about it, but Edna wouldn't discuss it. However, now it was 2013, Edna was dead, she'd left her manuscripts to me, and I was an unemployed book editor.

I pulled the crushed brown box out of the bowels of my closet and I'd barely begun to read the still-gorgeous prose on the old typewritten pages, when I realized this was a complete waste of energy. I was going to work on it, so why not read as I typed? And as soon as I began to do that, I realized there was a more efficient way: read as I edited and typed. And as soon as I began to see the timeline and fact glitches and all the undeveloped emotional underpinnings of the story, I decided to read as I doctored, typed, and yelled at Edna.

And I swear I heard her laughing. This was our dynamic when we were screenwriting partners: I'd yell, she'd laugh, I'd fix the mess, she'd write gorgeous lyrical circles around my straight-forward prose stage directions, and I'd say, "Thank you." Read More 

From out of nowhere" a sound happens. "Someone sings a pitch" and "once someone starts, everyone wants to be a part of it." The sound of the national anthem resonates and "It's completely organic."

"We are not a nation of soloists, but a chorus of shared values that when joined together resonate like nothing the world has ever heard," says Steve Hartman in his conclusion to this feel-good story about students who "spontaneously" erupt in an elegiac rendition of the national anthem . . . and become part of a tradition of young people who do this every year in this Kentucky hotel.

I would agree, with a caveat: somebody starts the hum. One person decides to be first, and then others join.

I just finished reading an astounding, devastating, inspiring story of the first Jew to escape Auschwitz—a teenager who was driven to action in order to spread the truth of the industrial murder of babies, old people, men, women and children who had the misfortune by their ethnic heritage to be deemed less than human and a scourge to Aryan society.

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (Harper Collins, October 2022) by Jonathan Freeland reads like a page-turning novel, at times so brutal that you feel it viscerally. Its subject, Walter Rosenberg, was sixteen years old when he was captured and deported, and his unlikely survival in Auschwitz was due to two qualities: his conviction that if people knew that the Nazis' lies about this being a mere resettlement of people were a public relations act to conceal mass murder, torture, and cruelty as a sport, they would do something; and his paranoid personality that kept him skeptical and therefore safe from rookie mistakes.

Rosenberg and another inmate, Fred Wetzler, do the impossible by careful observation and calculation: where others see only that the Nazis are an efficient machine guarding the prison on two concentric fronts, Rosenberg and Wetzler, students of observation, realize that it is the Nazis' predictable actions that produce a loophole for escape. (Read the book to learn what this is.) Rosenberg learns from others in the camp the basics of what not to do. (Again, read the book.) He is meticulous and patient, but also desperate because he is privy to the Nazi plan to shortly deport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Rosenberg and Wetzler want to get the news to them so they will rise up en masse and refuse to board the deportation trains. Read More 

Happy New Year!

Thirty-one years ago, with the help of editor/filmmaker Steve Clarendon,  my dog, Daisy, and my actor friend Shelley Wyant, I made this little film short that I had written to the score of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Long before digital technology, adding music from an LP became too cumbersome to attempt, so the VHS of the rough cut languished in a dusty bag on my top book shelf.

Recently, I had the video digitized and finally finished it with the help of Vivaldi, royalty free courtesy of John Harrison with the Wichita State University Chamber Players.

(Please excuse the frame counter; there is no way to eliminate it easily and cheaply.)

I hope you enjoy this love letter to New York City, seasons in Central Park, human and canine oddities, and angels in dog suits everywhere.