To thine own self be true

Sure words can kill. Michelle has been convicted on repeatedly e-inciting her boyfriend to kill himself and he finally did. She never called the cops or tried to talk him out it. An online Karla Homolka., she could conceivably get 20 years. (In gutless Canada courts, she’d likely pay a fine and do community service.)
This might be a just and overdue turning point in the world of toxic social media types, making them accountable for dangerous, negative communications. About high time.

(a recommended book on Wilde)

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“If you want a red rose,” said the Tree, “you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart’s-blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn.”
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“…for only a Nightingale’s heart’s-blood can crimson the heart of a rose.”
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“All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover….” …………………

“What a silly thing Love is!” …………………

“…and he threw the rose into the street, where it fell into the gutter, and a cart-wheel went over it.”

–“The Nightingale and the Rose”

Once a teacher….

In terms of whatever hope and optimism for society, the world and new generations, it really comes down to two core things: role-models and ‘copying’. One should always be aware of the roles and responsibilities of being a role-model whether one is a father, grandmother, teacher, media reporter, church leader, or political leader. Truth and honesty are probably the two most important qualities there. It is hard to have credibility or any kind of authority without that kind of integrity.

The fact is that people look for structure and direction from others around them. Leaders are key that way. One certainly can’t expect people to be much different from those they look up to or those who rule them in various ways.

And so it comes down to ‘copying’ what is otherwise known as imitating and assimilating whatever behaviors from contexts and, most importantly, the people who surround us in our daily lives. This fact takes on a particular importance within the life of a newborn, toddler, or school-age child.

What are the values and behaviors that our leaders in those situations espouse and demonstrate for the young? Why should we be surprised if we, who never read, we who swear easily, we who value everything in terms of money produce offspring and new generations of young people who copy and imitate exactly what we are? Why should anyone young do as their elders say rather than do what they do?

How we learn: mostly by imitating, a lot of the time, what we see in the world around us, according to how others behave, how they talk and act. It’s really that simple.
If there is no or little courtesy left from previous times, if cheating is ok, if ‘what everyone else is doing ok, then where is the incentive and significant influences for better behaviors, higher values, and significant positive social change in a world which prizes the freedom to be and act downward to the lowest common denominator, exhibited on such mass-popular tv shows as Survivor, Entertainment Tonight, Sex and the City, Toddlers and Tiaras, or Two and a Half Men?

Too often, the pop cultural swamp caters to the lowest, coarsest, most violent (e.g. America’s gun culture, Canada’s namby-pamby politically correct straitjacket laws and social policies, most videogames) and anti-social behaviors in the name of so-called individual freedom.

Simply put, decent, positive, unconventional alternatives in values, beliefs, behaviors, experiences offer the best and only chances for true diversity, richness, compassion, and civility for the future. And that starts from the ground-up, so to speak in child-raising and education and eventually–let’s hope–in laws, justice, and health care.

Society can fare forward from an understanding of the roles played by role-models and positively demonstrable and demonstrated behaviors and experiences. In that, the potential for well-informed, well-rounded, well-balanced citizens and an alternative to a cyclical morass chasing its own tail of ego-based/limited freedom and the ever-increasing social fabric of coarse, materialistic, restless nothingness.

(Still the definitive film version of Macbeth)

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Many quotables relevant to our Trumpian times:

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

“What bloody man is that?”

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

“Or have we eaten of the insane root/That takes the reason prisoner?”

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,/The instruments of darkness tell us truths,/ Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s/In deepest consequence.”

“Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings.”

“There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face:/He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust.”

“Unsex me here,/And fill me from the crown to the toe top full/Of direst cruelty!”

“Look like the innocent flower,/But be the serpent under ‘t.”

“I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent, but only/Vaulting ambition which o’er-leaps itself”

“I have bought/Golden opinions of all sorts of people.”

“Bring forth men-children only.”

“There’s husbandry in heaven;/Their candles are all out.”

“Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’”

“The primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”

“Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.”

“There’s nothing serious in mortality,/All is but toys; renown and grace is dead.”

“A deed of dreadful note.”

“Come, seeling night,/Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day.”

“But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in/To saucy doubts and fears.”

“I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

“Be bloody, bold, and resolute.”

“I have lived long enough: my way of life/Is fall’n into the sear”

“I have supped full with horrors.’

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day”

“They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly,/But bear-like I must fight the course.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”

Something great to aspire to. Kim Kardashian, keynote speaker at the Forbes Women’s Summit.

The woman thrust into the limelight by a sex video and umpteen physical reconstructions has said that “the most important thing is being authentic”, the sort of gag-me-with-a-spoon comment that Trump would facilely make without a blush. With a 180 million followers online, Kim’s very much in touch with the hypocrisy, shallowness, and phoniness of the times in America. In fact she is an objective correlative for it, female-wise as much as Donald is, male-wise.

Again we see the corrupt American dream fully at work with all its flawed values and hopelessly stupid, materialistic ideals. And, of course, it’s all about making money in America as The Donald will second.

(the famous twins most visitors to the tv show want to meet in person)

As learned on Antiques Roadshow this morning:

1. On Victorian family records with photos of each family member, there was a section to be filled in entitled “Called Away”. That, naturally, was for a death date and reflected religious beliefs. Made me think of Emily Dickinson signing off her last letter “Called Back”.

2. Ever notice when an appraiser is talking and the owner is constantly saying “ok, ok” or “yes, yes” after each comment by the appraiser? Well, nervousness in some cases or showing they’re really listening. Some would say an automatic response. I would say several other possibilities:
a) affirming their presence
b) affirming their agreement
c) showing they already knew this point
d) feeling that they have to answer or the world will cease to exist
e) feeling that they have to say something in any case
f) feeling they are the more/most important person and have to speak
g) asserting their ego or intelligence
h) liking the sound of their own voice and never hearing themselves speak enough
i) feeling like they have to be the dominant one in the conversation
k) exerting control or trying to maintain it since this has to do with something of theirs
l) letting the appraiser know who’s in charge so as not to ‘lose control’ of the object being discussed; an expression of ownership, possession, or possessiveness.

Are there more/other reasons and motives? Your input?

(Shakespeare’s best example of fearful, alienated man–Othello)

“Follow your bliss.” “Live from your own centre.’”–Joseph Campbell

“Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden.”–Loren Eiseley

Alienation is a word which was very popular and in wide use in the 1960s. For example, “blacks in the United States are alienated from whites and should have the vote” or “Women are being alienated by male-dominated society by being underpaid”. Usually, then, the alienation called for and resulted in a variety of social changes–long-forgotten and taken for granted by subsequent generations in the decades that followed.
Alienation, then, often referred to the generation gap and the quite different experiences and behaviors of young and old.

The sense of the term alienation has long–going back to early modern thinkers–such as Fromm and Kierkegaard–referred to a significant separation between social, ethic, and gender groups as well as what might be referred to as ‘personal alienation’.
Personal alienation would refer to the sense and experience of being alienated from others–ironically, today in a wrap-around world of 24/7 smartphones, e-mail, and texting. In some ways these e-devices have made it possible for us to be and remain instantly connected, but do they give us a true closeness beyond a lot of ‘me-ness’ and otherwise, practical, convenient communication?

By and large, our experiences are best known by/to ourselves, no matter how many or how much others may ‘walk in our shoes’. Conversely, we may empathize and even sympathize with others, and have some sense, perception, understanding, or appreciation of their condition, but this will never be exactly, fully, the same as/identical to the actual felt and known experience of someone else. In other words, we are in a permanent state of isolation or alienation from one another–a fact that that usually becomes obvious when someone we know commits a serious crime, gets a divorce, or has a large agenda or crisis we were previously unaware of.

So the question quickly becomes, “Despite whatever apparent connectedness, how close are people really?” or “To what degree are people alienated from others in their lives?” (as in ‘how much alienation’)?

So the further question then becomes one of actual closeness and depth of connection or connectedness with someone else or others. How truly close are people beyond their roles in family, with spouses, friends, workmates, and other groups of people generally speaking?

There is, of course, much restlessness ‘out there’ today in the contemporary scene, that is, lots of ‘lost souls’, unhappy, chronically dissatisfied folks with many or large ‘missing pieces’?

Alienation, finally, comes down to alienation from self. Those who are restless and incomplete or unhappy are usually separated from their dreams or goals. They are leading false, fakey lives which are largely just roles and performances. In other words, they’re living on and for surfaces, for images, for various self-delusions that often keep them going in some kind of permanent state of alienation from who they really are. In my opinion, roles and performance are easily about 80% minimum of what passes for daily life and immediate purpose and necessity.

Can one be authentic and true to oneself constantly and perpetually playing roles (in public, so to speak)? I think not, especially if following one’s bliss is not reflected in those surfaces. I think that only when one drops the roles and to, some extent, drops out, to find out who one is, without societal or work distraction, can one really begin to understand better ‘who I am’.

Life is a lot easier when one knows, mostly, their own self and identity, when one is listening to and acting out of one’s soul and spirit more simply and directly. Ironically, this may mean or lead to more social isolation or alienation, but to a large extent, that does not matter if one is more fully true to oneself–without kowtowing, masking, or pretending to others–a large %age of what passes for typical social interaction, And without projecting onto others authority and responsibility for one’s own unique, time-limited, ephemeral, ever-changing life. Basically, assuming authorship for one’s self and one’s own life.

Only then will the alienation within cease or be no more. Only then, free of unnecessary, distracting, limited/limiting people, conflicts and contexts, will one ever be truly free and autonomous.

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“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”–William Blake

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

(Welcome to the post-Kennedy assassination, post-9/11, and electronic surveillance world)

1956–Elvis gyrates on Ed Sullivan’s tv show (and is shown only from the waist up)–This opened up the world of music for me, rock and roll, in particular. From that point on, I wanted to be a singer-musician and began to collect records and listen to the top 40 on AM radio. Elvis was also a rebel and the first ‘cool’ person I was ever aware of. My nonconformist-rebel phase starts somewhere here. (For an interesting twist on Elvis’s influence, research his influence on the late great Phil Ochs.)

1962–the Cuban missile crisis. I have written about this one earlier on my blog. If not for JFK, none of us–I repeat–none of us on the planet might still be here today. He managed an impossible situation to avert potential all-out world war.

1963–JFK is assassinated. Which is why his death, in retrospect, seems so tragic and meaningless. The most important assassination in history other than the murder of Jesus Christ perhaps. The beginning of an awareness of corruption and evil and the start of conspiracy theories in modern times as in Oliver Stone’s JFK movie. The murders of King and Bobby–two other bright American lights– were soon to follow. School and work got cancelled in North America for many. The first major tragedy televised for days nonstop. The only game-changer to rival this event would happen 48 years later and, again in the U.S.

1969–Neil Armstrong is the first man on the moon. Earth was no longer isolated and disconnected from the universe. Science was capable of great things. This event got a bigger rush than John Glenn’s first U.S. space flight in that Glenn ‘only’ flew around the Earth and stayed up for a while–slipping the surly bonds of earth. The amazing thing about the Armstrong event was watching it happen on tv, and then going outside on Xmas holidays to look at the moon to see if we could see him ‘up there’. Just a major change in consciousness and a step forward in civilization’s (not just man’s) reach and possibilities.

1981–PCs are introduced by IBM. Bit of a delay effect on this one for me, but eventually I gave up ye olde electric typewriter for a word processor and starting writing ‘files’ for my publishers. This blog is some kind of final testament of how far the e-media and e-technology has changed my life and communication possibilities. PCs led to the Internet’s development and the current Information Age.

2001– 9/11 and the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Technology used by evil forces against the innocent and good. security and travel would never be the same again as we entered a more stringently patrolled world which we see reflected by cameras on roads, in malls, schools, arenas, airports, et al. Orwell’s age of ‘Big Brother is watching you’ arrived with a vengeance and nothing would be private or safe anymore.

Lest we forget the first definition of Culture in Oxford Concise English.
“the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively; a refined understanding of this intellectual development; the customs, civilization, and achievements of a particular time or people.”

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“Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.”

“Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.”

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

“Culture has one great passion–the passion for sweetness and light.”

“Art still has truth. Take refuge there.”

“I am bound by my own definition of criticism; a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

“Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.” (talking about Shakespeare and his greatness)

“The crown of literature is poetry.”

“Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.”

“To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.”