Good is Good: What Gaga Taught Me About Generosity
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tom Matlack is the former CFO of the Providence Journal and is the founder of The Good Men Project, a non-profit charitable corporation based in Rhode Island and dedicated to helping organizations that provide educational, social, financial, and legal support to men and boys at risk.
I have a post-it on my office wall that asks, “What fills you up?” Sometimes, in moments of pain, I scribble the same question at the top of a yellow pad, searching for some magical answer.
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GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAt church a few weeks ago, our minister talked about his experience of visiting hospital patients who are suffering. “I am always afraid to look them in the eyes,” he admitted from the pulpit. “Human suffering is something we are conditioned to shy away from, to deny.”
As he spoke, I thought of my time visiting prisoners in the bowels of the most god-awful human cages imaginable.
“The thing is that when we do look at the face of the suffering, we see God already there. We go seeking to help and we are the ones who are nourished.”
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I’ve always been good at holding a grudge. My primary motivation in life has been a deep-seeded belief that the world is against me, laughing at my every move. “Fuck ‘em,” I often mutter to myself in the shower or during a workout when my mind is in its natural-state.
That resentment often crystalizes with particular people who appear in my life, again and again. It’s almost as if the world is testing me, throwing up the same spiritual enemy until I have the courage to face them directly rather than plotting my revenge.
I’ve learned the hard way that my resentment of others is born always by some discomfort with myself that I project out on the world. I see, in others, that part of myself that I still hate, that I still have yet to forgive.
When I am muttering in the shower, it is always about someone else, but really, it’s addressing some piece of unresolved shame that I am either going to have to face or live with to my final hour.
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I know, at this point, it’s totally cliché, but I can’t get that Gaga song “Edge of Glory” out of my mind, specially the live performance she did at the piano on the Howard Stern show. My daughter showed me some website that allows you to strip the audio from a video. (It’s illegal, I am sure. Sorry, Gaga.) So now, as I ride my bike, I listen to her words and her song over and over again.
The song is about watching her grandmother say goodbye to her grandfather after a life of love well lived. In this particular recording, she explains that the song is also about how we will never reach the moment of glory until we pass on, so we might as well dance while we are here in purgatory.
She sings with such a raspy, soulful inflection that I get transported to a different place, a different plane of existence, every time.
I’m on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment of truth
Out on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment with you
I’m on the edge, the edge, the edge
The edge, the edge, the edge
I’m on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment with you
I’m on the edge with you
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In New York, I ran across the photographs of a British man, George Gorgiou, living in Turkey. Something in the images grabbed me by the throat. I tracked him down and purchased four of them: a woman riding her bike in front of a fighter jet, a man in a suit spraying water from a hose on a city rooftop, an empty table overlooking a mask, and a couple dancing at their wedding.
After extensive email exchanges and logistical snafus, the images arrived from Turkey, cleared customs, and then made it to my house. They are of a much larger scale than I had seen in New York. The colors are almost unbelievably vivid.
My best friend came over today, and I happened to mention the pictures. He asked to see them. As we stared at the work together, we both saw something in the eyes of the people.
There’s fierceness there: a realization that the world is not a safe place, but also a level of determination that is captivating to me. In the eyes of those men and women in that far away place, you can see that the layers of Western capitalist bullshit—the Black Sundays, the People Magazines, and the sham politicians—have been pulled back to reveal something more profound and true.
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I’ve noticed, in my writing, I come back to the same scenes over and over again: holding my wife at night, the unspoken bond to my three kids, the tears shed for and by my brothers not by blood but by friendship.
Generosity is usually thought of as giving something away. In my case it involves receiving fully that which I have already been freely given. It is as if I have to remind myself, again and again, of the beauty of life.
Each time I open my eyes and look at it directly in the face, life does not change, but my perception of it does.
For more of Tom's works, as well as other pieces on related topics, go to The Good Men Project Magazine online, here.
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