To thine own self be true

“Infinite possibility is good, not bad.”–James Gleick, The Information

What do you know? What do you want to know or need to know in a given moment or situation? ‘The Information’.

You could be an executor dealing with a parent’s estate and phoning various people and companies to get information. You could be a parent telling a child how something works or why something is the way it is. You could be the same child learning what happens when you topple building blocks. You could be a student taking an evening class on intuition, trying to learn more about how it may work.

But always there is the quest to know, to get, to use, or understand some kind of information. I think even the quest for relationships or a special someone who might be your ultimate partner in life falls along the same lines as another kind of information we seek. Getting to know someone, find out about someone, getting close/r to them. In our relationship choices, we want to know what makes that person ‘tick’. We want to see if they sync with us in attitudes, behavior, values, and tastes. ‘The Information’, the lowdown on them.

So much then, simply comes down to the information about something, someone, some process, some area. Our perpetual and restless curiosity that keeps us searching daily and over long periods of time.

Some of these information quests are themed as in the case of say an image or adopted totem, such as owls, that seems to ‘take over” our interests and sometimes become passions, even obsessions. And, in turn, the information we seek tells us much about ourselves–who we are, what makes us ‘tick’, what motivates us, and what makes us unique as individuals. The information that defines us.

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Many thanks to Jerry Wowk, my writing partner and friend for his timely gift of a book, The Information by James Gleick, which has continued to resonate and produce more awareness of how much of our lives and life quests center around information. The author’s bent is historical, scientific and mathematical, but the potential spinoffs from the thesis are potentially astounding and downright epiphanic. It is no wonder that information technology and e-information have become so central to our age. I believe there is a power and application well beyond the book’s initial intentions which I have tried to articulate in this entry above.

Our minds, bodies, sense, feelings, spirits, and souls are constantly processing information from a world of sources. Life and whatever understandings we arrive at are not just one thing but a multiplicity of layers and levels of experiential information. I believe that once we understand and appreciate that we are receiving and sending information from many sources that we will better understand ourselves and how we might become more attuned to that wealth of information which many times threatens to swamp us and literally boggle our minds. (“I am large…I contain multitudes.”–Whitman)

To adapt an old quotation (“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.”), The quality of your life is determined by the information of/in your life and an understanding, appreciation, and expression of that information. In that, potentially–Maslow’s “self-actualization”, personal fulfillment, happiness, and the potential for true, significant connections.

ps/ Of course, whatever incoming information has to be filtered, sometimes critically questioned, examined for truth and personal usefulness and positive applicability. In much the same way, whatever information is expressed requires that it be beautiful, true, honest, heartfelt, or necessary in some way.

The matter of what information becomes personally meaningful, knowledge or wisdom is finally left to each individual. In the end, personal choice and the limits and limitations built into each person come into play. And so many other factors including such qualities as imagination, empathy, sympathy, and love.

(Dylan: a big poetic influence via sixties music)

We live in an age of image-laden screens and customized e-media–an age in which information, e-connectedness, and money rule all. Whatever remnants of poetry, as it used to be studied in schools and universities, has morphed into the blase song lyrics of the day. To most music listeners, their songs–regardless of who they listen to–are the poetry of their lives, and all the experience of language they are ever likely to need aside from some social talk.

What used to be called poetry in North America and England, for instance–such as the poems of Frost, Shakespeare, and Dickinson–can no longer compete with the demands and expectations of a fast-moving, impatient, easily-bored and distracted movie-headed populace. The genre formerly known as poetry is simply too boring,wordy, irrelevant, highbrow, and difficult to read. It requires context, an ability to read thoughtfully between the lines, a sense of irony and ambiguity, and an interest in and love of words and language.

That poetry is not utilitarian has been known for many years. No remaining poets of the day can make a living as Frost and Service once did. A knowledge of, let alone an exposure to poetry will not make one rich and connected as in e-connected. In short, there’s no money in it, or nothing that one needs to connect with. It is no wonder then that poetry has disappeared from changing schools and curricula. Poetry won’t help one to become an entrepreneur or or even help one to find a job. The reading, writing of, and study of poetry is a sheer waste of time, and one would do much better to buy the latest smartphone and focus on building one’s financial portfolio.

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And yet…making money, being a slave to one’s smartphone and checking e-mails nonstop even in the night is, well, very limited and limiting. Deadening and totally unfocused, if you ask me. So why poetry, why read, write and study it?

My own love of poetry did not come naturally. I can remember at age 2, listening to my father who was carrying me between two city apartment buildings and reciting “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” as he pointed out the stars which magically appeared above us. Something happened. The image and the rhyme got in me somehow and I have carried that sixty-five-year-old memory ever since.

In Grade 4, I memorized (complete with punctuation and line breaks) Walter de la Mare’s poem (What %age of kids today memorize a poem of their very own?) that begins with “Someone came knocking at my wee, small door.” When I went trick-or-treating a couple of years after, a homeowner demanded I perform a trick and that was the poem I performed, as if I had first memorized it only minutes before.

I can remember my grade 5 teacher reading our class “David” outside to us on the school lawn. What a story! What conflict! What magical words–“faceted cone”, “musky woods”, “cold blue chasms and seracs”, “thirsting lichens”. Whatever I know and understand of the Rockies, mercy-killing, and true friendship dates back to my first encounter with that narrative-poem, The Great Canadian Poem by Earle Birney.

In grade 11, I met Mr. Brian Kells, the man who was to direct my choice of career and teaching style. He did a unit on Robert Frost with the class and I have never forgotten him drawing bending birches on the chalkboard to show the class what Frost was talking about in “Birches”. Many years later, I would to get to thank both him and my grade 5 teacher for the gift of the word, that they instilled in me, and which lay dormant until I began my first efforts at writing poetry in university: e.g.,  “A new born sun awakes in seas of flower flagrance blooms”; “A promise came from Paul today/’Heaven will die today/at 4 pm.’”

Flash-forward to the early 1980s and Glen Kirkland, my fondly-remembered colleague and long-time textbook-co-author who demystified, for me, the ways of free verse. I would never have become a successful poet if it was not for his influence. Many thanks, old friend.

And, of course, I taught poetry for 30 years to high school English students, judged newspaper poetry contests, had 100s of poems published in magazines and books, read in public and published chapbooks with my performance poetry trio. Why? I suppose a love of performing (another story), making the most of opportunities, and striving for some other writers’ recognition (including prizes, appearances on tv and radio).

But, in this decidely unpoetic age, and given all the criticisms of poetry, why do I still read and write poems? The answers are many and they range from the familiar/mundane to some perhaps surprising revelations.

I have always enjoyed words, especially new words and words with connotations like Shakespeare’s sense of the word “wit”. I enjoy the sound of words and the sound of different voices reading the words. I enjoy playing with words whether writing or reading them. I like moving them around for different affects and effects.

I have always found poetry to be the most personal, intimate, and moving form of language; poetry always speaks from the heart, soul and spirit. That is why and how poems are alive for me, like sacred artifacts and monuments to Keatsian Truth and Beauty. (“Genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.”–Matthew Arnold). That is why and how I write as I do.

At its best, poetry is deep and deals with deep topics and feelings, poems such as Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations on Immortality”. At its best, it presents large perspectives and meditations about human experience and human nature. Ultimately, poetry has helped me to understand myself, others, life, and love much better.

I have, as I have mentioned, enjoyed the performance aspect of poetry. Frost who was quite the ‘ham’ spoke of poetry as a “performance in words.” I think Dylan Thomas was also right when he spoke of a good poem this way: “The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.” And there is, incidentally, the thought that poetry does matter and is of value.

Poetry’s conciseness has always marked it as superior expression for me. Most poems are short or brief and can be read in minutes unlike longer pieces such as plays or novels. I find their eloquence (“Brevity is the soul of wit”) to be much punchier and often more memorable than a piece of good prose. In an age of bits and bytes, it’s surprising to me that the hoi-polloi has not yet glommed onto poetry as the perfect genre for these very short-attentioned times.

“The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”–Robert Frost.

“Imagination is the eye of the soul.”–Joseph Joubert, The Science of Mind

Imagination is a mental faculty which creates images and possibilities of things we think of and suppose. Typically, when we imagine, we behold things that we would like and might prefer, as well as those we dislike and fear. As long as our minds are working, we imagine a range of possibilities in the course of sleeping and daily wakefulness.

Of especial interest are those positive imaginings that tease us with what might be or become, what only we ourselves can actualize or bring into being. That archetypal imagined process has been responsible for much of what is beautiful and man-made, whether they be impressive or admirable buildings, paintings, pieces of music, movies, books, quilts, and many other works of art. Every work of art or architecture that one might think of had its beginnings with one person’s imagination and a desire to realize imaginings and dreams of various kinds.

By itself, imagining can be a totally fascinating, self-engrossed/engrossing process that never gets off the ground until the imaginer chooses or is impelled by inspiration to take action through the acts and process of creation. “It is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.” (Vida D. Scudder) Otherwise, imagining is nothing more than a limited personal “possession” or diversion likely to be shared at most in conversation with family and friends.

Far more interesting and influential are the imaginings shared with greater numbers of people, including many strangers and people we will not necessarily ever meet. When something as relatively brief as a poem is published in a newspaper or magazine, it is encountered later at different times by many (usually personally unknown) others. It becomes a meaningful and purposely shared communication that is a realization of something briefly and uniquely imagined some time before. In short, whatever becomes creative, whatever is creatively shared adds something to the knowledge, experience, and soulfulness of others as well, as to that of the world. “The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.” (Rita Mae Brown)

Whereas imagination originates in self first, registering as inner awareness and exploration, creativity and creation bring imaginings to birth, to light, and into existence. It is much the same way with unborn children as it is with works of art–that which is imagined, conceived, and brought forth into being. Generally, human beings are creative by nature, whether they are parents or artists. In that life-giving, life-potential sense, we are, finally and perhaps ultimately, defined by our creativity and creative potential. “When I can no longer create anything, I’ll be done for.” (Coco Chanel)

Clearly, imagination is a wonderful faculty and process, in and of itself. But the creativity realized from imagination and imaginings is a fuller, richer, more significant expression of our individual potentials as people and as inner beings or souls.

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Imagination and creativity have played a major role in defining who I am and what I have done. Imagination has had much to do with my own dreams, dreaming, and desire for what Northrop Frye called wish fulfillment. Creativity has been “something I do”; I have often had no choice but to express myself as an individual and that has often identified with creativity and the arts. In short, what I have imagined has often been better than the reality I have lived in and with at various times in my life. Imagination has given my life retreat, refreshment, perspective, purpose, depth, and much of the connectedness I have been fortunate to experience.

Today I continue to be inspired by the imagination, creativity, dreams, and visions of such artists as Rachel Carson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andrew Wyeth, Bob Dylan, Beethoven, Miles Davis, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Ray Bradbury, Robert Frost, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Miller, Phil Ochs, Bruce Cockburn, Glenn Gould, Michael Caine, Sidney Poitier, Woody Allen, Paul Simon, and many others. We each of us have our cultural heroes.

I believe that imagination and creativity, as indeed do all the arts, move and stretch people and present significant values and answers to life’s problems and challenges. My soul, mind, and sensibility impell me to imagine and create daily. I have no choice in these matters, as I continue to ‘write myself into e-existence’ with this blog.

As I have often remarked, I have been a very lucky man who, as e.e. cummings said–“danced his did”, mostly thanks to language, literature, poetry, music, writing, and teaching. My main medium has been words with feelings and thoughts honestly, playfully, and romantically expressed. Finally, being an only child of the sixties has stood me in good stead–I was richly nourished by my solitude, my times, and the continuing influences of the/my past. For after all, innerness, richness (bad pun on my name), memory, and depth are keys to imagination, creativity, and whatever growth, positives, love, epiphanies,and self-actualization one achieves in life.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”–Albert Einstein

(often the best freedom–nothing like the freedom of two)

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, past-times, 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 always 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? 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 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.

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There is a lot to said for autonomy and independence, especially from situations and contexts which don’t or no longer work. The freedom of one is the most basic mode of freedom and has many advantages. The freedom of two I am writing about above has to do with the possibility that two people can, in fact, free each other from limited, limiting experiences.

In other words, there is a different consciousness based on deep connection between two people in which the individual is freed of the potentially isolating and therefore limited basic ego state which is, in itself, basically interchangeable with autonomy and independence. And in many ways, a close relationship between two people is greater (more multi-layered, multitudinous) or a greater entity or possibility than that of just one person. It is only through the expanded consciousness, experience, and depth of two that an individual might come to realize a richer, deeper, more intense life, love, and freedom.

“Only connect”

Open-heartedness and intimacy are two related states between any two connecting or connected people. To be open-hearted is to be honest, to share, and to hold nothing back. It is the other end of a continuum whose opposites are withholding, separateness, and egoic alienation. The open heart state usually involves full disclosure of one self to another and making oneself fully available to another for the free sharing of confidences, secrets, and deeply personal feelings and thoughts.

At the core of open-heartedness are two things: listening carefully and responding personally, sensitively, and thoughtfully. These may be tricky or elusive for people who are too full of themselves, or who are used to dominating conversation. Open-heartedness requires will, a desire to know, curiosity, and a commitment to treating someone else as an ‘end’ to be known, understood, and appreciated rather than as a ‘means’.

Intimacy is a much-abused word today that, for many, merely means physical familiarity or sexual intercourse. But intimacy is, above all else, a strong true closeness and deep knowledge of another person. It many ways, it is basically a profound friendship that involves a free sharing of oneself with another. In those ways, it closely resembles open-heartedness.

Human beings travel through life, basically from the perspective of individual experience and ego. Many people, for instance, express their thoughts and feelings through disagreement and complaining, what might be called ‘voicing opinion’. And although we may say and do a lot, even good things, that does not necessarily mean that we are truly close to anyone, even family members and spouses. So, to be able to connect closely and intimately with someone else might be viewed as a gift or an uncommon privilege.

American novelist Ellen Glasgow wrote that “It is only in the heart that anything really happens.” Although ideas may shake and move the world, it is, indeed, at the level of the heart where one finds what personally matters most to many people. And certainly nothing can be worse, in a figurative sense, perhaps, than a failure of that organ in relationships or in dealing with the various conflicts encountered in life.

We know, too, that leading with the heart can often be a risky enterprise fraught with hurt and suffering. In the words of Virginia Woolf, “Intimacy is a difficult art.” An art in the sense of something fine, involving human creative skill and aptitude. Difficult in the sense that it depends a mutual will and desire to connect at levels that belie ego, fears, suspicion, and distrust of others.

Connectedness is highly prized in this digital social media age. People proudly count their e-friends and followers in a modern digital take on E. M. Forster’s advice to “only connect”. But is there anything finer than open-heartedness and intimacy between two live, in-person individuals that allows them to be their best, happiest, and mutually free-est?

Only on the dark
wet streets of night
can i ever hope to
find your face again

only with the sun
on april morning snow
can i tell you how
i love you still

Much there is that makes us distrustful of others in our daily experiences. Too often we find too few to trust or believe in the honesty of. Openness is a key state to receiving whatever benefits of love and affection. The naturalness and comfort we feel toward pets, for instance, does not come as easily with other humans, even if they are family or friends.

To be truly open to someone else one definitely needs to be in a receptive, even ‘needy’ or ‘needful’ state. To be open to and for someone else requires more than simple giving. It means that one must pay attention to what the other person wants, needs, and may initiate. It requires a relaxation of normal defences and defence mechanisms. One cannot be truly open and guarded simultaneously.

To be open to love means ‘not resisting’ the other person. It means empathically ‘going with the flow’. This is not easy for people used to checking their cellphones every minute for the most trivial of messages! It means that time itself must stop or cease to be a concern and that watch or clock time cease to exist and are no longer the most important things in the world. One has to make time for the other person in order to be truly open for him or her.

To be open to love means that whatever previous conclusions about love must be erased and a new slate created for whatever possibilities of the moment. Whatever one believes, therefore, is ‘thrown out’ or discarded temporarily in a real sense. One must be open for newness and discovery, ready to receive the unique information and possibilities of the love that might follow.

It may be also that a number of strange and wonderful things subsequently occur. For instance, one may no longer be limited by regular mealtimes or capable of consuming larger-than-necessary meals. Too, one may spontaneously do unusual, freer activities like jumping up as high as possible from a standing position just to enjoy the feel of escaping gravity! Similarly, it may be that all the trivial things that one once considered so important don’t matter as much or anymore, unnecessary self-imposed chores like repainting a fence every few years. Perspective and priorities get changed that much by love and a full reception of love. Many limits and limitations suddenly, magically, become blissfully fewer.

Receptivity is, indeed, the key. Too often we see ourselves in the role of agents or initiators, so much so that we do not stop to receive whatever information and affection others may wish to give us. “The readiness is all.” (William Shakespeare) In that sense, we must be ready to receive love if we are to ‘get it’ at all. We have to be prepared to allow the love of others for us to happen, to understand and accept it, sometimes passively at first. It is through this ‘passivity’ and open attitude that our own active expressions of love, in return, may emerge and find their way.

After all, openness to love requires that the other, at some point, accepts the love we find in our hearts and souls to share and communicate. A rare agreement and common will/ingness to love mutually on a receiving, as well as giving, basis.

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There needs be a reciprocity and an acceptance as well as a giving to love. Too often, there is a nervousness, hesitancy, and (call it) a natural or instinctive ‘untrustful’ attitude on the part of the receiver, an attitude or response-reaction which needs to be transcended for ‘real’/deeper love to begin. This is probably the toughest aspect of love to achieve since it requires typically more active agency to balance itself with the other person/the other person’s own active agency. Although there are some that say or argue that it is better to give than receive, the receiving part,and a corresponding cessation of ego, may be the final key or lockstep in the process of equitable love and loving.

is symbolized by each person having a ‘smart’phone. No depth, no context, no duration, no resonance, no sense of significant pattern, no attention span or patience with the complex or difficult, and no significant individuality. A world obsessed with only the transitory, unsifted present, permanently divorced from the past with no real sense of either personal or collective future, and a major disconnect between outer and inner realities. A marked preference for images over words with a subsequent mass dumbing-down and an ever-growing alienation (within self and between people). Basically, a herd mentality and pig-piling. And, often, a deluded notion of ‘safety’, ‘connection’, and ‘purpose’.

(movie was well-adapted from Steinbeck’s popular book)

John Steinbeck’s novel The Wayward Bus became a reasonably successful black-and-white film directed by Victor Vica, shot in widescreen, which has finally been released on Blu-Ray.
The topic is an old familiar one: of travellers revealing their life stories, conflicts, and dreams, this time on a run-down California bus on a rural run from Rebel Corners to San Juan.
Actors include Dan Dailey (a travelling salesman), Jayne Mansfield (a burlesque dancer), Rick Jason ( a rugged bus driver in a role intended for Marlon Brando), and Joan Collins (looking very young and speaking with an American accent, as the alcoholic bus-stop café-owner). Other bus characters include a grumpy old man, an unhappily married couple with a restless daughter, the driver’s young assistant (named after Kit Carson), his love-interest–the cafe’s fired waitress, and “Sweetheart”–the wayward bus herself.
As the bus heads to San Juan, the movie is mainly about the characters and their relationships, how they interact, and their future plans. Vica and the plot keep things interesting with a rainstorm, an avalanche, a flash-flooded bridge, the bus stuck in a pond, and the driver’s wild driving on backroads. Despite their various failings and flaws, the characters get to where they’re going, which, in each case, is different and more positive from where they were at the start of the film.
A film recommended for viewers interested in ’40s and ’50s rural America, people commonly found back then, quest narratives, and Grand Hotel/Canterbury Tales types of movies. Entertaining, strangely believable, and unpredictable. Unique then and after all these years.

(for my daughter Heather)

The poet is in the garden
He has come to hear your confession
to grant you absolute pardons
He speaks to you in earth-tones
many sounding strange to your ears

A bird sings of the evergreen
Here there is time still to bud
and bear fruit in the garden
to turn into leaves and trees or flowers
here on this ever-changing land

Growing seasons have been known
to vary, but always recur in the annals
of earth With some sun and belief
in the garden, you too might grow
here in a summer of stems

There is so little time, though
The wind calls your name
and whispers of eternity
Clouds come and go
and the fence needs repainting

A poet is in the garden now
No one else will walk with him today
But the sun is surely good to all
and blinds his failing eyes
with a white warmth of wisdom