To thine own self be true

We start with whatever routines–cleaning up, making up beds, having breakfast, reading the news, etc. Aspects of regularity–illusions of temporary permanence. For the most part, though, there is always new or changing incoming information that we have to process–changes involving self, family, relationships, work and so forth. Change and process remain the main constants each day.

A lot of our lives have to do with processing the information of seeing family off, driving to work, planning what we are likely to encounter in a day. “The readiness is all”–definitely. Certainly if one has backup plans and imagined responses. For there is likely to be the unexpected anyway–a lane blocked off suddenly, gas in the car running low, a cyclist zipping across in front of your car, co-workers who don’t show up, etc. To some extent, the longer one lives, the less one is surprised by how much randomness and arbitrariness there really is in one’s day despite whatever best-laid plans of mice and wo/men.

I am never surprised at how little many people ever get done or successfully accomplish. (This tends to be the rule rather than the occasional exceptions.) Our fates, especially in urban life, depend largely on others and our various social relationships. We cannot do some things without the will or cooperation of others and predictability–the latter which is hard at best to even guesstimate.

A lot of the above led me to ‘dropping out’ to a large degree and charting my own course beginning in 1990. The simpler one’s life is and the fewer people one needs or is dependent on does remove much of the stress and confusion typically encountered by overly-connected people or in the lives of those, say, who see hundreds in a day. How much noise, madness, negative attitudes, and other people’s unchangeable problems does an individual need?

I always come back to self. One has to live with oneself. One has to be good to oneself in order to be good or helpful to others, ironically. That’s just the way it is. And what about one’s own life, one’s missing pieces, and the responsibility to one’s own soul, spirit, mind, body, development, and learning?

I think we often miss the Big Picture and what’s important especially when working with others. Too many others–especially those we don’t really want to have anything to do with–obscure the clarity of our own lives and purpose. One must never confuse one’s job or role with being anything resembling deep, long-lasting personal satisfaction, the ability to innerly cope, or the possibilities of significant personal growth. These are not automatically compatible, mutually-overlapping aspects.

But, hey, only one’s deeper self, soul, or spirit could ever provide the requisite answers to such questions and more necessary, personally-fulfilling living.

most successful male endeavors is a helpful, supportive, often sacrificing spouse.

What the average Canadian family pays from their income for federal, provincial, and municipal taxes per year. Apparently some middle and upper families pay over 50%. Now that’s servitude, baby. (info: Fraser Instittute, 2013)

Freedom is universally acknowledged to be a good, desirable thing. There are the large en masse freedoms for the many, such as the end of a war or a dictatorship. As seen on tv news, people are usually quite happy to be free from the many limitations that those negative contexts impose. On the basis of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s greatest good for the greatest number, these examples might be considered strong instances of freedom at its obvious, maximal best.

There are other freedoms available to individuals that are more familiar to most of us, albeit on a smaller scale. There is the freedom given to a baby or child to wander and explore his or her environment. There is the freedom to pursue whatever pleasures, pastimes, hobbies, and passions in whatever leisure time people can eke out in their busy lives. There is the freedom to pick one’s friends or where one wants to go to school or university, or to decide what one finally wants to do to make a living, career- and work-wise.

As is always the case with freedom, there are limits, limitations, and restrictions that hold people back from being free to choose and act. A child may have to go against parental wishes or leave home in order to have friends or a freely-chosen career or lifestyle. A wife may have to go against her husband’s wishes and work in a job in which she earns her own money and makes more of her own choices. A man may have to leave a marriage in order to find himself and do more of the things he is interested in, perhaps things he once enjoyed and were ‘more him’ in his youth. Individual freedoms, then, which people choose and decide for themselves can be very liberating and lead to the realization of dreams, plans, goals, and self.

But what of the freedom shared between two–with another? Sometimes when we fall in love, we may find that we are stretched such that we are moved beyond many familiar limits (including the ones we place on ourselves) to experience and embrace new ways of living and loving that free us from the same-old. In such shared moments of coupledom, we may find that we are reborn anew, changed, and enhanced by this revitalizing two-ness. Our minds, bodies, feelings, and souls are released to experience the life-changing liberation that can only come through the open-heartedness and intimacy that are only possible through close contact with another.

There is a proverb that says “Love laughs at locksmiths.” Indeed, true, deep love unlocks the many limits and limitations that we and others place upon ourselves. At its best, it is the ultimate liberation: the shared, mutual, simultaneous experience of multi-levelled heart, mind, and soul connectedness. It can change the way we live and experience, and free us forever from a monolithic ‘single’ way of living and allow us to know and realize our life with and through others to the fullest. And so it is that the best freedoms might be the ones that consciously connect us deeply and meaningfully with at least one other person. And that the best freedom that most of us will ever know will be beyond that experienced as ‘one’, and encompass at least one more person, likely someone whom we love and become very close to.

CAPOTE (2005)

Director: Bennett Miller
Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener

“All I want to do is write the ending and there is no ending in sight.”

Based on true life events, Capote is a quiet-toned film about the 1960s period when writer Truman Capote covered the famous Clutter family murder case in Kansas. Capote (Hoffman) with the help of Nell Harper Lee (Keener) thoroughly and doggedly researches the case that led to his best-seller masterpiece In Cold Blood. Although Capote clearly exploits and repeatedly lies to his main storyline character–the murderer Perry Smith, he finds that he cannot remain detached from the horror of the killings and the trust that his killer-source has placed in him as a ‘friend’. In a strange, parallel fashion, the movie suggests that Capote’s life also ends with the execution of Smith.

Capote is a classic about how things often turn out differently from what one expects. There is much talk early in the film about true to what one is and the importance of honesty in one’s writing and life. As much as Capote takes James Baldwin to task about that author’s work, Capote himself is later challenged by Lee and Jack, his writing partner, about his motives and responsibility to Smith who blindly and naively trusts him.

Capote’s involvement in the Clutter case is a fascinating oddity, beginning with casually reading a newspaper account of it and spontaneously deciding to cover it. Likewise, his reactions to examining graphic photos of the dead and stealing a look into a Clutter coffin are chillingly impersonal: “I found something so horrifying, it’s a relief.” There is, too, a superiority and snobbery in comments such as “he’s given me absolutely everything” and “he’s a gold mine” following his first interviews with Smith. For Capote, the case is just a means to an end–the making of his own personal reputation and commercial success, “When I think of how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.”

On the other hand, like Capote’s friends and publisher, the viewer sees that Perry Smith deserves far better than the egotistical writer is not giving in return. Smith himself is a pathetic figure downing large quantities of aspirin, is a product of a miserable childhood, and is someone who has already been abused and exploited many times before he befriends Capote. Despite his irrational violent crimes, the audience can sympathize with him; unlike his confidant, he is at least capable of shame.

Capote toys with Smith, lying about how much he cares for Perry, his book’s title, how much he has actually written, Smith’s sister’s feelings, and how he is trying to save the killers from death row. But it is only later, as he wishes for Smith to die, that it becomes apparent that the case, Smith, and Capote’s betrayal of Smith have all gotten to the writer. Cracks begin to appear—friends refuse to let Capote off easily and the writer begins a long road to alcoholism.

In the end, the film becomes a study not just about the betrayal of others, but the betrayal of one’s self, and the realization of moral responsibility in one’s work and relationships. Is Capote his ‘friend’s’ keeper? The epiphany is a painful one because of the honesty required to admit to one’s selfish motives. When Capote says “I did everything I could”, Lee answers with a truth far exceeding the professed objective truth of Capote’s nonfiction novel, “the fact is you didn’t want to.” Intimacy always implies responsibility and there is a terrible price to be paid for dishonesty to and betrayal of others as well as one’s self.

(the lesser known CD Capote The Album with Truman Capote reading hauntingly from In Cold Blood)

Thoreau’s cabin, Walden Pond, Mass.

(Some personal sacred places)

“A sacred place is any space that is set apart from the usual context of of life….Sacred space has no function in the way of earning a living or a reputation….You do not have anything in your sacred space that’s not of significance to you for the harmonization of your own life. In your sacred space, things are working in terms of your dynamic–and not anyone else’s. Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.”

“The ideals which have lighted my way and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.”

–Sydney J. Harris

“The goal of the hero’s journey is yourself, finding yourself.”

As my film classifier-friend said, boy was he disappointed when he went to this one in his youth on the basis of the title and the presence of Mickey Rooney in the lead role. The movie was largely written by William Saroyan who wanted to direct and produce it as well, before he got fired by MGM, and then quickly wrote a successful novel version which was released before the movie came out!

Everything you need to know about this tearjerker about decent American people living in a small California town during WWII is obvious in the opening scene when a cute, freckled five-year-old boy (Ulysses) hears a train whistle and runs down back lanes to get to the railroad tracks where a train is passing so he can wave at the people on the train. The misery of the lingering effects of the Depression can also be seen there as well as the discrimination of Jim Crowism.

The heart-tugging tone continues as the widow-mother talks about death to the naïve boy who keeps asking the tough questions of a typical child about death. By this point, the non-stop cloying background music and American themes begin to assert themselves in just about every scene. The family and townsfolk are basically and uniformly innocent, good, honest, hard-working, caring, and never lie or shirk their social responsibilities. In short, this is an age totally opposite today’s impoverished, diminished T-worlds on both sides of the border.

There will no doubt many cynical modern viewers who say That’s phony, fake; life is not and could never have been that way. But this is a powerful idealistic (what’s wrong with idealism in an age that no longer has any?), optimistic philosophy and societal view that even goes so far as to anticipate the global village when Tom and his fiancé drive by all the different ethnic families in the park in something resembling Alberta’s Heritage Days.

The core plot is about a happy-go-lucky protagonist, Ulysses’ brother Homer (an effective Rooney), who delivers telegrams from the war front to people like the mother-turned-widow on a dime. Whatever flaws that people may have (the alcoholic old man that Homer works for), are contextualized and redeemable in any case. Any rough patches are philosophized with faith, much of it with Christian religious values-plugs.

The didacticism, patriotism, and propagandizing aside, this is still a very emotionally moving (albeit contrived) expression of core family values and truths that have motivated and been instilled in Western people for a century or more. It is a hard film not to like (with the attractive Macauley brothers, including Van Johnson as the oldest brother who goes to war and realistically fears death), that offers hope past human suffering, death, and discrimination. (So much for the human ‘comedy’.) It portrays individuals and family as we romantically/idealistically would like them to be or how we choose to remember them.

There are many memorable, powerful scenes in The Human Comedy including when the outsider-boy takes the younger Ulysses to the town library, when the town boys try to steal apricots, when Ulysses is scared by a Mr. Mechano mannikin, when the old alcoholic dies just as a telegram comes in for the Macauley family, and when the orphan Toby finally acquires a family via tragic circumstance.

All told, there are far more inspiring, heartening reasons to check out this MGM oldie than to quibble about its obvious music and periodic ‘messages.’ For me, warts and all, this movie captures the best of people and olde school film-making. It appeals to the best in people and is a rare treat to behold, especially in  today’s world. An interesting glimpse into a world long gone and that in some ways, never was, except in the imaginations and desires of people of the wartime ’40s. Highly recommended for its positive portrayals, strong vignettes, and hopefulness.