To thine own self be true

(All is Vanity. C. Allan Gilbert. Picture is pre-1910.)

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“We are not there until we can say ‘yea’ to it all.”–Joseph Campbell

You know the end may be coming when:

1) your mobility drops to nil and you are confined to a bed.

2) you lose your sense of humor and find nothing funny anymore–being unable to laugh.

3) when you stop eating and drinking.

4) Needless to say, these are all important things to be aware of when one is very ill. But sometimes when the above road signs have been passed, the body just seeks significant rest or relief from unrelieved pain, and death becomes the natural end.
I have seen both my parents immediately after they passed, relieved of pain and suffering and nonstop decline, at peace. A true peace which passeth understanding. It is very hard to begrudge death, resist though we may try. The way of all flesh.
And we know that, by the very nature of process, that “end is right” even when one does not “go gentle into that good night” (Dylan Thomas).
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A piece of mine follows about the often accompanying diminishment process, something I have witnessed a number of times…

Downsize

One by one the leaves fall from September trees as “Claire de Lune” plays on piano. It is like this with all and sundry. Gradually worlds you knew and once lived in vanish suddenly or gradually, one day at a time, from moment to passing moment.

Diminishment. You are downsized steadily–your world, how far you can travel, the people that know and remember you. Previous lives.

All the glorious plans and dreams shrunk or forgotten. Withered in fact.

And so a shorter day becomes what you can make of it, how much you can fill it up with spontaneous, useless pleasures. So that when evening comes and sunset, the melancholy feeling of emptiness is minimal and minimized.

What were you? Who are you? Scarcely known or understood, let alone appreciated.

Limited with limitations. And to think you once dared to assume or presume.

Obituary pages. Passing friends and family–all with their own lives and private struggles. Countdown. Finally maybe, just and only you.

The way of all flesh. incomplete, isolated, alone. An ember left of the glowing coal. A cipher. Ashes.

A sigh. Gone.

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And on that factual, inevitable, pessimistic note:

“We can’t rid the world of sorrow, but we can choose to live in joy.”–Joseph Campbell

(Attitude and personal choices (if available) being the saving graces.)

from the ’90s and before would know and recall the way things used to be at some kind of peak of Western culture and civilization. Know and remember what beauty and true culture are and where/how they can be retrieved.

Sad. Our present society is catering to the lowest common denominator as law and order get lost in political correctness and young people are turned over to a society which panders to the lowest common denominator, what Faulkner identified as ‘of the glands’ and to what has been called the society of rights and entitlement.

A telling moment for me was when a construction worker in his late 20s came to the door in response to an online sale ad–he wanted three books by James Joyce I had for sale. Imagine that! They were like manna as he turned them over, lovingly and respectfully, in his hands. He had sought out something precious–true culture, something elevating, soulful, and civilized. This man is a definite rareity in our society today.He came to find some of the best that was once known and thought in the world today.

Pity the young folk of today who believe all you need is a smartphone or tablet to ‘open up/gain the world’. Arnold’s “The best that is known and thought”–would the poor blighters even have a clue of what they were missing or why Culture, civilization, soul and beauty are all worth having and aspiring to?

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”

(Illusion, dream, and idealism are generally very satisfying, compared with mundane forms of reality.)

“An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.”

(Pleasure is pretty basic and necessary.)

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

(Absolutely. Many folks would rather wallow in the gutter than try to ‘raise themselves’, to see the stars.)

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”

“I can resist anything except temptation.”

(Wilde’s downfall, unfortunately.)

“Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.”

(Why copy someone else, wear their clothes, act and talk like them?)

“Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes.”

(Lots of mistakes = lots of experience.)

“Irony is wasted on the stupid.”

(Shakespeare’s “Caviare to the general”.)

“Create yourself. Be yourself, your poem.”

(The ultimate creative act in life.)

“Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary.”

(Why would you bother being seriously connected to anyone like that?)

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

(Limited minds=self-imposed limitations and limited lives. We do it to ourselves.)

“I put my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life.”

(Why choose any differently?)

“Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.”

(Roles tend to be familiar, comfortable. Even Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern would agree.)

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”

(as in Hamlet–“O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”)

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

(Float, sleepwalk, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Etranger)

“I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no need to write. Life cannot be written, life can only be lived.”

(Why write when one knows how to live and especially when time is getting short?)

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”

(news item: Lady Gaga stops wearing machine-gun bra on tour.)

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”

(one can be pilloried for being honest and truthful–e.g., Comey)

“It matters not how long we live, but how.”

(Following my bliss at age 40; Robert Frost’s West-Running Brook, Derry, N.H., September 1990–one of many places I took time off from teaching to go see in New England; there are teachers then who told me dismissively, “That’s the trip I’ll make when I retire.” Many of them never did or are dead now.)

There are a lot of problems out there, many in the lives of people we know and may be closely connected to. We do our best in responding to those needs and concerns, often saddened or shocked by what others go through or put others through unnecessarily.

But time goes by as we get swept up by our work and the demands of the day. We try to hang onto our dreams and plans whatever they might be, on the side. Sometimes it is just a matter of periodic escape or getaway to remember who we are, were, and wanted to be and do.

Well, what about self and the passing, inevitably, of one’s life? Sometimes we throw in our fortunes with someone else, only to find that this, too, can fall a victim of the vines of change (Phil Ochs, “Changes’). All is in flux–today more than ever.

What does one actually feel inside about anything so fast-moving, social-media-bound, and transitory? New life–as in babies and young children–gives us some glimpses of what is or at least once was for us. Starting out as something resembling Wordsworth’s child in “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”, what Joni Mitchell in “Both Sides, Now” described as “So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.’

To come to understand not just process, sooner or later, but also the process of one’s own life–a certain self-development often opening up in mid-life or retirement.
All the questions:”Who am I?” “What most needs doing?” “What do I still want to do?” “What is missing from my life?” “What freedoms are available to me?” “What is my meaning and purpose?”

Sometimes, however, it may be enough to find what gives one delight, pleasure and engagement to begin with and build outward from that.

I think, though, that the freedom and dreams are realized individually and with someone one else/others. And that one ultimately needs to be open to both possibilities. And I would venture to say that a lot of focus is required to put others and what is external to ourselves–which we often cannot control or even influence, into perspective. And to remember that our main obligation is to ourself in order to keep ourselves healthy, sane, intact, true to ourselves–this all for ourselves and others.

After all, there are many choices each day. Which ones are productive, positive, enhancing either to self or others? Life’s complexities quickly rush in as one starts another day.

I find, though, that in the long run, death is often the main event which puts all and everything into perspective and, being still alive, one is quickly reawakened to oneself and whatever remaining possibilities within one’s own life and choices. In that, the Existentialists were very correct, that the fact of mortality creates a huge unavoidable responsibility to self–biologically, emotionally, spiritually and so forth.

So there you are today, lost in the myriad buzz of others and the conflicted world’ out there’. When all the time, there is that ebbing inner self and consciousness and presence which will one day be no more. Don’t get me wrong. It is good to do for others, but finally it is necessary to do for oneself, to eke out some kind of meaningful, purposeful, satisfying, fuflilling life “under the ribs of death.” (Milton)

that one is or was completely known, understood, loved, and appreciated by one other person. It will be more than enough if one completely knew, understood, loved, and appreciated one other person.
That will suffice for whatever meaning or purpose in one’s life.

Only then will whatever ongoing nameless dread, anxiety, or restlessness inside be quelled or evaporated.

In that the ultimate fufillment, freedom, and peace which passeth understanding.

“

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth/That nibbles at the soul–“–Emily Dickinson

And often one just works hard and long, endlessly giving, doing for others, sacrificing one’s own inner self, giving many performances (many of them hollow, ephemeral) giving, turning oneself inside out for others, hopefully, to see.

And do you ever feel that the long mysterious restlessness inside will never lift and that you will never fully connect with or be very close with anyone else in your ticking life– that you will never truly be fully known and loved for who/what you are, or fully known and loved by someone else?

The palpable ache remains–a restlessness, hunger, thirst, and deep desire so total it makes itself felt on all levels–mind, body, heart, soul, spirit.

And only occasionally the mind may dare to ask: What’s in it for me? What’s it all for? What is my true meaning and purpose that will leave me with no sense of anything vitally missing? Will I ever get back anything half-resembling what I give out and have selflessly offered others, society, and the world?

And one day, if we are lucky, the clouds may part and we shall meet someone remarkable and truly special. And they will begin to know us as we begin to know them- the essential informations shared and turning darkness into light. Like Molly Bloom, we will simply say “Yes” to someone else, their presence, and unlimited love for us and our presence.

And so we’ll respond in kind, finally trusting, letting go, believing in something and someone other than just ourselves, as we heed The Call that will not likely come again.
And all and everything shall open up, and the two shall be both truly free–deeply, significantly, and mutually changed forever.

To be that lucky, to take the chance, to find out what it means to live totally in and for someone else and to feel them doing likewise within us.

To feel the sad, old, depleted, exhausted self magically washed away forever.

To live life, floating in love on the highest, maximally free-est, most glorious heights.

To feel rapturously alive again, and strangely, wonderfully reborn like the child in Wordsworth’s famous “Ode”.

Nothing left unsaid, undone.No risk regretted.Freeing self and soul for the home stretch.

“To refuse the call means stagnation.” “When the refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost.”–Joseph Campbell

“He who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”–William Blake

(Reading an unforgettable story in a grade 1 reader; shared last evening with my older grandson–stands/stood the test of time)

“God is in the detail/s.”–Gustave Flaubert, “The bien Dieu est dans le detail.”

Moments of being are those more elusive transitory times when one is especially aware of the sublime pleasure and excitement of a given moment, and how it is unique and distinctly different from the many more ordinary, mundane moments in the passing flow of daily life. Moments of being tend to ‘announce’ or ‘proclaim’ themselves with an extreme obvious positiveness. At the time that they are experienced, the person (and sometimes persons) involved know and sometimes even share the specialness, uniqueness, and importance of the moment. Often there is a definite pleasurable sense of discovery, revelation, or epiphany about the moment in question.

The “being” part of whatever moment usually manifests itself in/as a heightened sense of being or becoming. A moment of being might very well also be the consciousness of significant change–possibly of imminent or possible change–an awareness of great hitherto inexperienced individual or situation potential. In any case, moments of being are primarily inner individual experiences in response to context and external events.

It is not surprising that moments of being comprise our most treasured memories of important things that have happened to us in the past. Think back to when you had special recognition that no one else you’ve known has had such as being chosen by your principal to receive the gift of a painting for the school’s official opening, or of being allowed the privilege of playing disc jockey in charge of your high school’s noon-hour intercom music. Often it is these sorts of special defining moments which determine one’s direction in life, too, career-wise.

Often moments of being have to do with relationships such as the first time one spoke to or spent time closely with a particular person. Experiences with members of the same or opposite sex in a first-time intimate way can introduce us to aspects of ourselves and others that ‘mark us’ for life.

Moments of being sometimes occur in moments of learning through the arts such as when we read a very emotionally moving book such as To Kill a Mockingbird, experience a powerful piece of music such as Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” or visit a gallery containing Monet’s enormous panels of water-lillies. In such experiences, we are moved through our senses to experience something deep and true about the human condition that connects us with other people and other times. Moments of being can have that kind of broadening, enriching impact and influence.

We know, too, that nature can also create moments of being, an effect we attain anytime we go to the mountains, the seaside, or desert. Under favorable active or contemplative circumstances, interaction with nature can produce deep inner effects that go way beyond words to transportive spiritual satisfactions, akin to those we might call religious. In that sense, ‘God’ can be found in the “details” that make up whatever moving moments of being.

As we look back on our lives, we find that our lives can, to a large extent, be defined and understood by the many personal moments of being that we have been lucky to experience and sometimes fortunate to share and communicate to others. To them, we should pay special attention, as we should, indeed, to all passing, precious transitory moments, regardless of their relative ‘shine’ in the great scheme of things.

“We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand…and melting like a snowflake.”–Marie Beynon Ray

Suzanne

The Stranger Song

Going Home

The Sisters of Mercy

Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye

So Long, Marianne

Famous Blue Raincoat

Bird on the Wire

Chelsea Hotel #2

Who by Fire

If It Be Your Will

Everybody Knows

Ain’t No Cure for Love

Closing Time

Take This Waltz

Dance Me to the End of Love

The Future

Democracy

In My Secret Life

A Thousand Kisses Deep

It Seems So Long Ago, Nancy

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Easily.