To thine own self be true

Dressing for the prevailing conditions

“Without contraries is no progression”
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Tennessee Williams says much the same sort of thing in “The Catastrophe of Success”, the essay he wrote about getting ‘soft’ after the success of The Glass Menagerie. Conflict in the crucible is a proving ground of sorts and certainly is a built-in part of process and experience. How one reacts to it affects character and choices ultimately. And often, as remarked on before, the individual is in conflict with certain contexts as well (e.g., Hamlet in Claudius’ court).

I believe the contraries Blake speaks of is also related to a dualistic view (“Fair is foul and foul is fair” revisited–opposites, as Shakespeare shows in many plays likewise, reveals or develops character. Both side/poles are inevitably true in their various ways, and need to be accounted for (with perhaps life and death being the most basic contraries), but what I said before about how one acts in response to information can also be true when people respond to conflict. Both situations reveal character and who we are, and, as I have said before likewise, these situations reveal a person’s attitude.

So much depends upon attitude. And the proverbial view of the glass half full or empty. Indeed, the attitude is the individual, reveals the personality and character of the individual. So contraries, therefore, present opportunity and lead to new possibilities. In this sense, Blake is right. The contraries and conflicts lead to progression and often positive change.

(The hits and songs written by or featuring Lennon)

Ask Me Why
There’s a Place
This Boy
It Won’t Be Long
All I’ve Got to Do
Not a Second Time
A Hard Day’s Night
I Should Have Known Better
If I Fell
Anytime at All
I’ll Cry Instead
I Call Your Name
A Hard Day’s Night (half)
You Can’t Do That
No Reply
I Feel Fine
No Reply
Yes It Is
I’m a Loser
I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party
Mr. Moonlight
Help
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
You’re Gonna Lose that Girl
It’s Only Love
Norwegian Wood
Nowhere Man
Girl
In My Life
I’m Only Sleeping
She Said She Said
And Your Bird Can Sing
Doctor Robert
Tomorrow Never Knows
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Good Morning Good Morning
A Day in the Life (half)
I Am the Walrus
Strawberry Fields Forever
All You Need Is Love
Dear Prudence
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Julia
Everybody’s Got Something to Hide
Cry Baby Cry
Come Together
I Want You
Because
Don’t Let Me Down
Dig a Pony
Across the Universe
The Ballad of John and Yoko
Instant Karma
Cold Turkey
Give Peace a Chance
Mother
Isolation Working Class Hero
Crippled Inside
Imagine
Woman
Watching the Wheels
Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

(ps/ plus many more songs: Please Mr. Postman, Money, Twist and Shout, et al)

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The McCartney concert was, indeed, the concert of a lifetime, easily. But then I recalled all Lennon had done before he was assassinated some three decades before. Lennon was definitely my favorite in the Beatles–the voice, the delving within, the wit, the irony, the great lyrics, the humor. He did most of the Beatles’ early hits.

Macca certainly kept that band together. If it wasn’t for his concepts (Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and Let It Be), his love of being in a band (which was coming apart for the last four years) and holding it together, his songwriting (which saved the last 2 projects mentioned), his work on Abbey Road, his obsessive love of playing and performing, his endless energy–there would have been no Magical, no Let It Be and a good chunk of Abbey.

But take another look at Lennon’s credits above, and ponder what role he played in the Beatles’ success and songwriting, and how those songs named affected you when you first heard them. Not surprisingly for me perhaps, most of the Beatles songs I sang and learned were his. He definitely spoke to me more in terms of subject matter, poetry, and language.

That all said, there are likely more pop song classics for the majority in Macca’s work. It would be interesting to pose a question for audiences everywhere: If you had a chance to go hear Macca or Lennon at 70 (we’ll have to imagine the latter–the concert we’ll never get to see), which of the two would you go to see? (Assuming Lennon was intact and had done several more albums and had regot the performer’s bug, too.)

I’d bet Macca despite everything I’ve said in this entry. But I’ve been wrong often and before.

Our cowardly, irresponsible PM has not said one word against the illegal immigrants entering into Canada. Silence = consent, approval and acceptance. How fair is it that public money goes to support lawbreakers? How many of these people are being returned? How fair is this backdoor rubber-stamping to those immigrants who enter Canada via the front door? Why can’t Trudeau take a stand on lawbreakers? Doesn’t he care that the illegal trek is dangerous and deadly as holds open his welcoming arms for another sunny selfie?
Australia has got the same situation right. Illegals there are told upfront they will not be allowed to stay and they shouldn’t get any ideas about permanent residence or freebies in and from Aus.
No, Trudeau is obsessed with his image as ‘popular, good guy who’s on the side of the underdog.’ In no way does he want to be perceived as being mean (c.f. recent blog entry on not challenging delinquent native groups for uncooperative budget accounting.) No, Mr. Smiley Ways is too busy hectoring the Pope about residential schools to deal with a real crisis in his own country. It is far more ‘sexier’ to be telling a pontiff what he should do. He has no sense of priorities, just political correctness ad nauseam, window-dressing, and image-spinning. Prince Hal with his tennis racquets revisited.

It is one thing for Karla to have had three kids and not have abused or harmed them. It is quite another to have her working at the children’s school after she participated in the abuse and killing of two teenage girls (one being her own sister). Especially without notifying parents. The school and board have blundered hugely. Most parents would not want a convicted killer in the presence of their own kids. Common sense. Safety factor. Holmolka should never be given this kind of privilege.

The freeing of the Greyhound killer was absurd, but this is patently crazy stuff. There should be limits placed on convicted killers’ rights and privileges. They shouldn’t get free passes to mix with innocent, unsuspecting, unnotified young people all over again. Doh, do people not remember or care about the two kids she helped ‘off’? Apparently not. Bigtime systems failures.

(O, let bygones be bygones. Forgiveness, mercy, liberalism, and the worst namby-pamby ‘reason’-shit.)

Life and lifestyles today–how fast-changing everything is everywhere, all the time. ‘Give us this day our multitudinous daily changes’. The present shocks these are creating are more numbing, distracting, and confuting than anything Toffler predicted. Westerners now walk around in a perpetual haze, barely conscious of their immediate surroundings and physical realities. Nothing lasts, nothing can be trusted, no more authorities; there is no more permanence; truths are tougher to find; meanings and purpose gone out the window. No more history, no more memory, no more context; just flux and subjective floating through the chaos and absurdity of daze.

It’s the great buildings left behind that are to be trusted rather than the politicians’ speeches. Those buildings are great truths standing, too, longer than most human memories also.

(From 17 onward…)

My main ruling passion continues to be: being an individual, “To thine own self be true”, the title of this blog and my general approach to things ongoingly and forever.

The border collie-Australian shepherd cross who saved her mistress’s life is smarter than all the dumb-ass science types at U of A’s Biological Sciences Facility who couldn’t put a brain together to set up an alarm system to save the 9,000 fish and frogs that needlessly perished on May 12.

Let that be a lesson to everyone that animal radar systems and animal intelligence and feelings are greater than the sum total of a bunch of academics and ‘scholars’ who weren’t bright enough to have the minimal common sense and imagination to see the need for an alarm and monitoring system. Human failure as usual on an absurd, unnecessarily destructive level.

Pets and Nature superior to human ‘intelligence’ and technology revisited.

what Keats and Shelley were on about: Sensuous Beauty.