To thine own self be true

Age 5, 1954 AD being ‘babysat’ by my wild grandmother who operated an old café in Winnipeg located on busy Portage Avenue near the Thompson Drive corner.

I became interested in the jovial McGavin’s Bread delivery man who used to stop mornings to drop off a load of bread. He was like actor Jack Carson, the kind of crackerjack guy who would be popular with young kids. I asked, or more likely he asked, if it would be ok to take the wide-eyed kid for a ride out to Kirkfield Park (where I had never been before) and then drop me off on his way back.

What an adventure and treat, standing in the van (no passenger seat) leaning against his seat as he made his stops! After he dropped me on the other side of the divided main street, I had to run across between cars to get back to the café.

Age 5. Someone older hadn’t thought out that possibility. Scary stuff, but I recall the traffic stopped. Might have been two of these trips before some adult put a stop to this, ending my fun. Likely my mother who worked part-time at the café.

I saw him in his truck years later, still working on Portage Avenue and looking pretty serious, and wondered if he remembered a little kid he once indulged for a very early unique memory of mine about exploring life down the busy road heading west and travelling far to an unknown, distant land with an amiable grown-up pal in his magic bread van.

and views of life, RD?

I realize, with aging, from parents, of course. Not just mannerisms and behavior.

From personal life experience, too–epitomized by clichés such as “Once burned, twice shy”.

But many of the values were learned, osmotically, from three principal sources: music, books, and movies.

Music would be the longest, oldest source. Old pop songs that got in me really early beginning in the ’50s: “Sincerely”, “I Walk the Line”, “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and myriad others. When I would play my old 45s in the ’50s and ’60s, I would quite often be responding to words and ideas behind favorite songs. This process cored right down to language and words, but then, too, there were, more abstractly, the myriad myths, dreams, imaginings, and the beginnings of fundamental ideas and recurring themes. Music is something I also ended up writing and performing live for others for over 30 years.

Books came later, more in my university and teaching years. Although there were some ‘popular’ titles, most of that reading was of classics and pretty much just literature, anchored by Shakespeare and poetry. At first English, then Canadian, then American and world lit. I will also mention that teaching made it easier to get many ideas percolating and articulated. Even moreso in the school textbook writing I did from 1978 to 2010. I eventually became an author, writer, blogger, and poet.

Film influences began at an early elementary age beginning with movies on home black-and-white tv in the ’50s, developing more from going to the movies in 1966 to 2005 (mainly). I taught film in senior-high English and did presentations on using film in classes, culminating in a three-year job at Alberta Film Classification actually classifying movies for the province. I bought VHSs heavily from the 90s into the 2000s, then reacquired most of these titles and added many more after DVDs came out. Like music and books, movies typically present themes, ideas, and values, and these are often the most interesting and influential aspects of film.

I will just add that character and projected personas are usually the focus of whatever musical, book, or movie work. That and the choices various characters make, imitating real-life people and their choices. Consequently, I have learned much by listening, reading, and viewing. Those three have been easily as influential as my parents and personal life experiences. Often the insights from one art intertwine/d with works from the other two arts. There was much mixing and formulating of ideas and values arising from this cross-fertilization.

Looking back on these three arts, I see them now as granaries or silos of accumulated information, perspectives, insights, ideas, themes, values, and collected wisdom. The reputed value of a lifelong arts education (including university and the creation of art works) was never lost on me. And that includes all aspects of communication  including listening, reading, and viewing, speaking, writing, and representing.

In retrospect, I am a cultural dinosaur (with a lot of history, philosophy, and psychology  with some science thrown in). A cultured relic from a now-neverland-dead zone, occupied now mainly by people my age and older. The Arts truly made me what I am. I happily, fully availed myself of the best of what has been. historically and Culturally speaking, I am a creature of lofty ideals, a certified dreamer and possibilitarian. It is through the arts that I am, have been, and can still be best known, identified, understood, and appreciated.

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(ps/My first name is Richard and I consider my life rich well beyond the very limited, normal/conventional association of filthy lucre. And it hasn’t been easy; there’s been a lot of hard work and even harder decisions and choices along the way.)

the UK story of the ex-Russian spy and his daughter being poisoned by some unknown toxic substance believed to be espionage-related. Like something out of Joseph Conrad’s classic on the topic The Secret Agent (1907). Human nature and humankind have not evolved too/that positively in a century. Small, stupid, grubby plotting with pathetically tragic outcomes. The old timeless message yet again: We do it to others and We do it to ourselves. The Human Story.

The blinds were closed that Sunday September afternoon. I had closed them for my wife’s father who, otherwise, would have been blinded by the light as we watched the football game on the tube. A familiar context, for sure, and an outing for him, nothing unusual until I looked at the closed blinds.

On them were two strange shadows. The bird shape I knew because of its location–a black bird decal on the outside of the window to ward off the many backyard birds from entering whatever vistas they might be visually tricked into beholding/imagining. The effect of sun and light on large late summer patio windows. The limitations of bird perception combined with the hard presence of man-made objects in merging worlds.

But here in the strangeness of show and surfaces–a butterfly had found the black bird shape and amazingly, on a wingtip, a place to call home for fifteen minutes or so. In that duration, it had found its precise missing piece, completion, or context and made a choice in response to the similarly deceptive,but in a way contrary to how the window decal repelled real birds. Like the birds, though, the butterfly had bought the illusion.

What joined the two shadows, one a flimsy physical item, the other a living presence? The windows are large and there is so much space to choose for a butterfly’s landing. Why the wingtip and not elsewhere? The timing was similarly uncanny with both humans inside witnessing this found art shadow-show. In that moment for two people–a privileged glimpse into the oddities of perception and Nature. In that moment, a vision of absurd connection not possible had the blinds been open, had we not been sitting there at that precise miraculous macro-conjunction of normally separate random worlds.

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“To increase consciousness is to increase mobility by metaphor.”–Northrop Frye, “Entry, Notebook 23”

“…all understanding is in a sense metaphorical understanding.”–Northrop Frye, “The Transferability of Literary Concepts”

“I think there are all questions and there aren’t any answers.”–Northrop Frye, The Great Teacher

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Dedicated to the memory of Clifford William Reade

My home viewing last evening: David Lean’s epic Doctor Zhivago from an era when they really knew how to make entertaining movies with good and great actors, with fantastic locale sets and thousands of real (not CGI) extras. not the excessive over-the-top fakery of today.

I haven’t seen a theatre movie in several years and I doubt I will again. I don’t miss the noise (of the movie, the cellphones, and people stupidly yapping away like they’re at home or in their car), the commercials, and the weakness of each film (usually apparent within 5 minutes).

And I certainly don’t miss the politicking, grandstanding, and outdoing of the fashionitas on the red carpet. The Oscar show is too full of itself, overrates itself and its people and contributions to society. And I don’t miss the smallest insignificant standing up at the mike and thanking everyone he or she ever knew that nobody else knows or cares about in the least. Way overblown. A massive ego love-in. A big pass for me.

immediately after the running woman with the baby in Doctor Zhivago got caught under the train wheels, stopping shooting:
“Dress the double.”

(David Lean filming the storm scene in Ryan’s Daughter)

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”–My Antonia

(winding down an evening in a Vancouver high-rise overlooking English Bay)

(rediscovering The Inner Child through reading to grandchildren)

(numerous examples of ‘The Wild’ in Shakespeare’s popular tragedy)

1. Freedom and Flow–very much connected, both inner and outer. The freedom leads to flow and, in turn, flow enhances the quality and experience of freedom.

2. Gentleness, Tenderness, and Touch–three relateds that constitute The Best of Love. In those, there is a special purity and unique depth of communication–touch being an even more direct and powerful medium than words themselves.

3. The necessity of what Thoreau termed “The Wild”–what is wild in Nature (and us) ranging from the beautiful sublimeness of mountains to the special wildness of animals including us–see also Hamlet and what Joseph Campbell termed The Call, and discussed as our repressed energies within, naturally intended to be realized in our life experience.

4. After the experience of our primary imagination and pre-school experience, an Inner Child still remains (something Wordsworth elaborates on this in “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”) into adulthood. It is often seen in our love of different kinds of play. It is that Child which needs to be freed and refufilled as much as the wildness discussed in #3 above. These are two ‘depths’ related to the transcendence of limited/limiting modes of perception–the sorts of straitjackets that make people afraid to truly live and love.

5. As said earlier in other blog entries–each person, situation, and choice has limits and limitations. These can limit our perceptions of ourselves and others, as well as what we believe is possible (though there are actually infinite and neverending transitory possibilities at any given moment). The freedom we all desire and seek is, basically, limited by those limits and limitations. For that reason we need to reduce or overcome those limits and limitations through acts of will, imagination, and love. Freedom-enhancing personal choices or mind, heart, and spirit over matter. And no one else can do this for us.

Agent Moi. So there I was turning over the Euros in my pocket at Charles de Gaulle Airport. That and eating an orange waiting for Mother. We agreed to meet here where we had parted a week before.

That’s when I saw him from the corner of my eye–a chubby, bearded man in a trenchcoat running, pursued by three airport guards. He was yelling something in French which I couldn’t make out in the din of announcements, bells, and crowd noise.

They tackled him, but he threw them off one at a time as they tried to handcuff him–this escaped mental patient, drug addict, or perhaps escapee from security. When the three guards were finally lying across him, the crazed man’s head gestured upward as he became aware of something on the floor high above us. “Regardez la femme, la vielle femme.”

Then the passengers around him were looking up and exclaiming, “Les anges”. I lifted my eyes briefly too, but saw nothing, before they punched him out, angels not being a common sight at Charles de Gaulle.

My mother and I had stood in about the same place just a week earlier. We were relatively separate souls–mother and son. She had a friend on the Left Bank she would visit “after all these years”. They would do the usual city tours, l’ Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tour and so on, while I headed out to the countryside. Meantime, I wanted to see Monet’s Garden at Giverny and Dieppe’s beaches.

She is seventy-eight and we had buried Dad three months before. She declared herself ready for a big trip, the two of us, and we pondered several possibilities before settling on Paris.

My mother is her own person and I am too, so there was no need for checking in on how the other was doing. She is active for her age and once cycled fifty miles and back on the Trans-Canada when she was seventy. I respect her freedom and admire her energy. She has been way busier than me in my retirement.

I did call the number once after she had left me at the airport when we arrived, but there had been no answer during the week apart.

And so now, after the apprehension of the chubby man, Agent Moi suddenly found himself surrounded by gendarmes, who turned to me and named me correctly flashing a small photo of my mother. She had died in the taxi on the way into town the previous week and so never saw Paris or her friend. A stroke. I suppose within the realm of possibility given her pack a day habit that had once wired her for previous physical feats.

I wanted to feel something, standing there in a sea of international tourists, mostly French-speaking, but nothing came to me. She had died the way she lived—on her own terms, doing what she wanted I thought, the two of us now separated forever.

And I thought then about the old woman these many strangers about me had seen above us, but not I. Mayhap my mother and a fantastic heavenly host.

Another World

“Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.”–Marlene Dietrich, Marlene Dietrich’s A B Cs

“Touch is the meaning of being human.”–Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“Touch is the landscape/of what is possible.”–Kate Green

“We are what we are, the spirit afterwards, but first the touch.”–Charlotte Mew, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends