To thine own self be true

No, I ain’t seen
no smartphones or tablets
stop a bullet.
Nor makerspaces or
digital citizenship
curb a shooter’s will.
And I ain’t seen
no 3-D printers, coding,
microbits or Chrome browsers
bring back the teenage dead.

D- and e-tech
always lose to gun-barrel tech
and second amendments.
And young (or old)
male crazies who
don’t care a fig for
a brave new world
of ed tech illusions.

but the integrity of your own mind.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Winnipeg’s Union Station-now Via, formerly CN)

Starting with the symphony here and a super finale with cannon fire and streamers for the 1812. Then flying into Winnipeg, my hometown, for a full, rich 10 days. Reconnecting with my earliest friend of some 64 years and my grade 5 teacher at her nice house after 60 years. Great stories and laughs.

The rest of the stay included: the absolutely unique and exhaustive Human Rights Museum (which is also breathtaking visually with its architectural views inside and out), the Forks market and grounds, Union Station, the nostalgic railway museum, Rae and Jerry’s (still the best restaurant in town, waited on by a 32-year-server), the Holiday Inn Airport West (with pools and fish on the elevators still), the original pancake house (with giant apple waffle), Assiniboine Park’s beautiful Leo Mol Sculpture Garden and English Garden, the Pavillion (with Ivan Eyre paintings and Winnie the Poo gallery), the Zoo (with polar bears gliding around zoogoers in a glass-surround tunnel, my parents’ memorial bench nearby), a visit to Jeanne’s Bakery (home of my birthday cakes for the past 65 years), the airplane museum, a (monthly) sup with my high-school-alumni friends, the Park Café (where my parents’ memorial stone is located), the Mint, a Salisbury House sup, the downtown Bay, the art gallery (with its Inuit sculptures and French Impressionist paintings), Bailey’s (a long-time nice English-style pub near Portage & Main in the Exchange District), the large Manitoba Museum (with a facsimile of the Nonsuch), two trips to Grant Park’s McNally Robinson (one for brekkie at Priarie Ink café, the other for checking out a jazz show), the wonderful large Lights of the North light show (a one-time anniversary show in the open on the edge of town).

Weather was sunny and in the 20s. It was a tremendous ‘fill-up’ of experiences, adventures, fun, and nostalgia. This was The Trip of 2018 and it will take some time to process and reflect on. A busy month ahead, reading and hosting at the Stroll of Poets’ Upper Crust evenings, and heading toward double cataract surgery.

You either wake up or you don’t.

(Living and creating ‘Large’)

who don’t have Art in their lives. Those who have never seen or experienced the great painters and paintings. Those who have never savoured the great music of Beethoven, Bach, and Louis Armstrong. Those who have never seen the great films by Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, and Robert Altman. Those who have never read or seen great plays like those of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov., or been to good live theatre. Those who have never seen the great sites and buildings of the world. Those who have never read about great people like Michelangelo, Einstein, and Walt Disney. Those who have no sense of social contexts and the relevance of history. Those who don’t care or empathize. Those who are too cheap, money-grubbing, and materialistic. Those who think corrupt politics is the highest calling.

Imagine those then who live trapped in skin-capsulated egos with no sense of anything other than instant gratification and expecting the world to conform to their narrow, limited selves. Imagine what the Existentialist term “Death-in-life existence” means today as applied to these cynical, selfish, limited people. O how little they know, how much to discover…

of Hardy’s The Return of the Native. I feel myself closer to Clym as my eyesight continues to diminish because of the double cataract situation (to be remedied later this year). Most noticeable on these darker mornings, trying to read the newspaper under the dinette light. I have to change rooms and read under the dining room chandelier. At other times, I have to hold up something I’m reading to see all the words more clearly.

Anyway, the academic and scholarly Clym lost his eyesight and became a common furze-cutter on Egdon Heath. Eventually he recovered some eyesight after the book’s main tragedy and became an itinerant preacher.

I have long been a teacher (elements of this still showing up in my blog) as I write of hope and inspiration as much as Clym preached in his later life. And I am similarly optimistic that I will one day be able to see more clearly and perhaps be able to dispose of full-time glasses becoming more visually sensitive, which may perhaps allow me to have a renewed sense of beauty, awe, and wonder about Nature for starters. I’m optimistic to dream that my feelings and thoughts will become even more sensitive, clearer, and sharper than they are now.

When people have something special to say at special occasions, they still use poetry to elevate their expressions of feeling and thought. Yesterday John McCain’s son read this Robert Louis Stevenson poem at his father’s funeral service.

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

From where you stand
beside the road,
you can almost see
the house. Fence slats
bow to you & paint
curls upon itself~
a mockery of maintenance.

Overhead
tall spreading trees
threaten sun. Strange
you never understood
what time might do
to plans & seeds.

Cracks in the walk
meander like veins
toward a wooden door.
Open it. Step inside.
Enter the house.

Brush by leaves
& buds that
cover the air
with unremembered names.
Pass calendars & mirrors
that conceal the holes
& smears of yesterday.

A rabble of books
throng aching shelves
with the wisdom of dust.
Photographs on a table.
Who are these faces?
These prisoners
in gilt-edged pose.

In the final room of all
there is an unmade bed.
A pair of glasses
stand upright
on the dresser.

Listen. You can almost
kiss the silence.
Clocks whirr–a heart beats
as slowly time
engulfs the house.

Leave the house.
It’s best that way.
People have grown old
& died here.
Children once laughed
& laughing took
their voices, left for good.
Left to live in
other rooms
of other houses
glimpsed by roadways
through tall spreading trees.

……………………………………………………………

(Written on a warm Sunday afternoon in the ’80s at my wife’s family’s house, while they all had gone for a fall walk. I believe the poem pretty much wrote itself in the time they were gone. I walked around the quiet house and imagined the above. Solitude sometimes automatically invokes the writing mood or impulse for me. I had been reading James Dickey’s poetry and had used some of his work in a school poetry anthology I had written and edited. “Inside the River” was one of his that stood out. I guess you could say I wrote “Inside the House.”)

Both presence and non-presence are simultaneously quite palpable in this poem. The house itself seemed veritably alive with a character and presence all its own, which I tried to capture. On the other hand, it wasn’t hard to imagine non-presence since the family was absent and, one day in the future, the various people would be gone for permanently. I guess you could call this imminent or palpable non-presence there for the imagining.

Simply put, someone or something either is or isn’t. He, she, or it exists and has being or doesn’t. You’ll recall that life starts and ends that way in the form of presence or non-presence. In school, students were either present or absent (that is, not-present). A feeling went with that. One either felt like one was there (in class) or wasn’t (as we or someone else noted an empty desk). In some cases, we were the ones who were not present–at home with the mumps, skipping class, and so forth.

But with the experience of being absent from the group at school came another impression and that was that presence was a subjective state and that one could still experience presence and the presence of absent others and other situations even when in a changed scene or setting. Presence was potentially something one felt, imagined, and experienced all on one’s own.

As well, presence was not just something experienced in relation to environments. One could be thought of as a presence within a family, experiencing the presence of parents and siblings. Or one was aware of the presence of animals via owning a pet or visiting a zoo. Perhaps one experienced the presence of nature, as in the morning when stepping out into the freshness of morning air or when travelling to a memorable place such as the mountains or seaside. Poet William Blake said this best, perhaps: “To see a world in a grain of sand,/ And a heaven in a wild flower,/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And eternity in an hour.” To know presence, then, is to connect and possibly transcend.

Most of us know, though, that presence is often or mostly transitory and ephemeral. And it is dependent ultimately on the presence of whichever people you choose to consider, including yourself. One day someone is there, another he or she is not, and connections and entire worlds are suddenly, conspicuously absent, vanished, or blotted out by absence, death or memory losses. There is great value, meaning, and purpose in the simple fact of lived, shared, and experienced presence, a fact often only fully known, understood, missed, and appreciated belatedly. As Joni Mitchell once put it, “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

No connection is possible without others, without presence. Wherever each of us is, our presence is capable of being experienced by others.

But do e-mails, text messages and social media network sites do justice to presence? (For one thing, they significantly omit the physical human voice which is our main, unique, expressive, identifying self.) Are they as good, strong, or personal as a phone call or a Skype communication (the latter with the extra advantage of mediated visual presence)? When it comes down to it, would you rather talk to someone via mediated electronic forms or spend time face-to-face with the presence of the same live in-person human being? What does live in-person presence give us that other mediated communications can’t?