To thine own self be true

(Rick, 17, gr. 12 English class, lost in a book)

“Oh, the glory of growth, silent, mighty, persistent, inevitable! To awaken, to open up like a flower to the light of a fuller consciousness!”–Emily Carr, “Hundreds and Thousands”. The Journals of Emily Carr

What is it that makes ‘you’ uniquely you, quite apart from your soul, spirit, and heart? You were born with a brain and sensibility to perceive and experience this world. Ever since you were young, you have experienced this world and everything in it in terms of consciousness. That is how you understand yourself, others, situations, and the world at large. Generally speaking, you are conscious of various things and experiences, or not. You have acquired a fair bit of consciousness (and subconsciousness) already, though sometimes there are things you choose to put ‘out-of-mind’, out-of-consciousness.

Think for a moment about your life. You are either alive and conscious of that aliveness, or not. You may be a few weeks old and vaguely conscious of a mother feeding you, or a teenager conscious of having done something wrong, or an old person in hospital, listening to and conscious of the machines that may be keeping you alive. Maybe at another point in your life, you hit your head, and lose consciousness. Or maybe you actually forget something and someone you used to know well, or in an extreme case, develop consciousness-damaging dementia.

Consciousness is that important, (self-)defining state in which one is aware of oneself and that which is outside of self. Essentially, it is how we experience each day and how we interact with others and our various environments. It is where we spend most of our days and time, whether we’re sleeping, remembering, or imagining. In life, consciousness always goes with the territory. It is truly who we most and each are. At any given moment, it is summarily the total of what we know, have experienced, and have learned or are learning in our busy, ephemeral, transitory lives.

****************************************************************************************************

In terms of what matters, is most important, or relevant to our lives as individuals would be consciousness or conscious awareness. Watch a baby in its third month starting to become aware of his toys and try to imagine how that baby might feel or how you might have felt with those same toys at that age. Recall an important lesson you learned from a favorite teacher. Remember how the death of a pet or wild animal may have affected you. Recollect your first job and how you learned to work with others.Think back to when you graduated from high school, college, or university. And all the things that stood out or are memorable to you. Perhaps you can even have some recollection of how those moments felt and what specific things you suddenly became aware of.

“Consciousness” is also a good old ’60s word. Back then, when I grew up, young people were all interested in increasing consciousness. For some, this meant a political consciousness as in women’s lib, civil rights, or gay lib. For others, it emerged through such physical things as long hair, different clothing, drugs, and a questioning of or rejection of ’50s-style adult authority. For still others, the consciousness sought was to be found in new writing of the day and different emerging genres of popular music.

But as the third paragraph of the piece states, consciousness is truly larger and more fundamental than some things that emerged in a specific decade in the Western world. What I find most interesting about any other individuals is what they know and what they are aware of. Beyond whatever behavior and action, consciousness is what defines who they are, every bit as much as their values or character.

Worth noting, in passing, is that consciousness can be physical (such as in our response to massage therapy), emotional (such as in our learning from the feelings evoked in relationship conflicts), mental (such as in transcendental meditation), and spiritual (such as in our response to religion or cultural rites). Consciousness is palpable in a number of ways, on a number of levels or dimensions.

In the earliest entry on “Individual Process, Briefly”, I spoke of how so many of us seek missing information, often things we want or need to know and are curious about. That information when found, in turn, satisfies and expands our consciousness, knowledge base, and understanding of ourselves, others, and the world. When we expand our information, we expand ourselves and become ‘larger’, metaphorically speaking. The more we are conscious of, the more we grow innerly–a core manifestation of expanded consciousness.

Later, as we age and look back, we may see that our lives were not just about the things we did and the relationships we had. Instead, we might come to realize how important, basic, and significant consciousness was in defining what we essentially were and in understanding or appreciating what we learned from life and others.

A drowsy fly trembled on the worn wooden window screen. The April breeze was cool and, looking down to the breaking ice on the river below, I wondered how many times both my cancer-stricken parents had stood there, by day and night, contemplating the familiar, yet ever-changing panorama.

Behind me were piled some fifty boxes of packed belongings that represented their now-gone, irrelevant past. My inheritance. Ready for moving day. Lit by the sun from another window in the living room, the brilliant pink hydrangeas I`d bought her the first day I came to stay lived blithely on, without my mother.

The ceiling fan stood still, though a black clock–a gift from the newspaper–ticked monotonously. On the floor, a cooler from long-ago picnics inquired about the possibility of another summer. A cold heating pad sat aimlessly on a chair for her return. In the corner stood the crutches from a fall she never told me about. On the floor a dark braided oval rug my father, weak from chemo, had lain on nine years before, lovingly cleaning it with a tiny vacuum. By the window, the tv screen was clean once more, its nicotine haze now wiped off.

On the wet lawn outside, two deer edged up the bank cautiously–one male, one female, nibbling the grass. Life was, indeed, tough enough though spring had chosen now to return. In the end, there was no choice, you see. I spared the fly and turned away from the window.

*********************************************************************************************

Apparently I was meant to revisit the fly and another take on death, more close and personal, a decade later. There is much that is implicit/explicit about time, the past, memory, change, process, time passing, death, and finally life, rebirth, and choices here in this piece. Nature, as always, plays a role in whatever destined moments of being. For my own part, I know the timely deer represented/were the spirits of my parents.

Everything is there to be seen and observed, internalized and finally understood and appreciated. Writing has been my great luck. It embodies who and what I am and whatever truths of life and love experience. And perhaps you`ll agree that we all, like the fly, deserve another chance to live and experience another day and season.

April and a black
fly at my window
slugs his dormant buzzz
against the blue pane

Heavy, fat & unloved
he was spent
from his vented life
embalmed by winter

Hibernation kept him
safe a while
& then it killed him
when he wanted out for good

Vermin of the ledge
he never found a mate
his dream smacked
impotence on that glass

No angels sing his hymn
He lies uncanonized
in a valley of bureaucrats
no monument for his shade

Leaving work I think of him
as the sun warms my soul
Breathing slow the afternoon air
I feel myself rise rise rise

**************************************************************************************

And then there is leaving work/driving home from work…. Keats thought the poet was “the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity–he is continually…(empathically) filling some other body.” As he said “If a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.”

Amazed always at flies that hatch out of nowhere, so to speak, and forever enthralled at the story (described by Thoreau) of the bug that one day hatched from an egg embedded in a 60 year-old apple-tree table, I once wrote my own way to a winged life on wings of poesy and imagination. What the soul or spirit wants or needs most, it will create under the ribs of death.

This poem was also an alternate take on Katherine Mansfield`s story “The Fly”. Thus, it is and has been the possibilities and intimations that have long interested me as I have literally and figuratively written myself into existence. Certainly if one finds one is or has been living what Eliot called the “buried life”, one may still find escape, hope, and new life through the sheerness of will and the potentially indefatigable, undefeatable human spirit.

Aristotle wrote that “Man is by nature a social animal.” Similarly, poet John Donne wrote, that “No man is an island entire of itself.” And there is, indeed, truth that we are connected to others, living in social contexts daily. Often we do things for others or the approval of others. We are prone to seeking validation through connection and relationships from others. The opinions of others often influences us and guides or prevents us from doing or saying things we would not otherwise do.

And, so it is, that we go through life being praised, complimented, validated, criticized, and corrected by others. There are many other opinions of who we are as individuals, as persons. But what of our own views of self and who we really are? How many others, whether family, friends, or workmates do you feel really know, understand, accept, and appreciate you as you likely or truly are?

If you have seen the classic movie Citizen Kane, you may recall that the reporter Thompson collects different opinions about who the reclusive millionaire really or essentially was. He is left finally with many jigsaw-like pieces (that resemble Susan’s large puzzles) each of them possibly true and significant, incidentally. But it is left to the lonely, weary old protagonist himself to sum up the personal meaning of his life as he once desired, lived, and loved it. He confers the meaning of his entire life in one word–a name, a single image.

We are mostly conscious of what others think and say about us, and what we say and think, often differently, about ourselves. The famous Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, concluded that, as individuals, we must answer for our own lives and find our own meanings through actions, values, suffering, and sacrifice. We each of us have the option of choosing and creating an “immortal footprint in the sands of time.”

And like Kane, we may have ‘the final say’, so to speak, in defining ourselves, the essence or significance of who we are, and the core personal, and perhaps privately understood, meanings of our own lives. Like him, we, too, may choose to confer the meanings of our own lives upon ourselves.

***************************************************************************************************

As in Emily Dickinson’s poem “The soul selects her own Society”, we, too, might ultimately come to know and understand the mystery and meaning of our own lives if we are blessed with understanding, luck, and opportunity via self-knowledge.

(Spoiler) “Rosebud”–the power of word, image, and memory. To be able to say concisely in one word what we essentially are or once were, what our lives meant, what our romantic innocent childhood dreams once were.

(Self-) knowledge and language. Memory and language. Consciousness and language. Meaning and language. Purpose and language. Dreams and language. And one could substitute the word “image’ in the above statements as easily. A life and Life boiled down to two things, two words, receptively and expressively–language (or word/s) and image. How could one know and understand oneself/one’s own life without the communication or expression via either?

(Frank Lloyd Wright–The greatest architect of all time who had no use for ‘pig-piling’– what he said most of society does, conformingly)

“The boughs of no two trees ever have the same arrangement./Nature always produces individuals.”–Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York–second series (1845)

‘Connection’ is a desirable aspect potentially achievable with the dead and living, and via the real, fictional, and online–but it is best, of course, realized through close connection to friends, a ‘significant other’, family, one’s children and (great) grandchildren.

However, the fact remains that we are all of us individuals and regardless of how connected with and empathetic we are with others, our main consciousness and experience is largely ‘separate’, separated, unique, and individual. We are each of us defined and, to some extent, limited by those two things. We, each of us, have individual characters, personas, values, beliefs, styles, voices, senses of humor, and so forth which identify us and which are uniquely us.

Much of our days is spent ‘inside’, largely isolated from others. Our inner life and personal experience are how we, to some extent too, measure many, if not most, of our interactions with others, places, and events. Often, we are comparing and measuring our relative contentment, satisfaction, happiness, status, and success during our contacts with others.

The fact is, as any psychologist would likely tell you, we have to live with ourselves, accepting who we are, our limits and limitations. Oftentimes, our dreams may frustrate us by the simple fact they cannot be achieved or don’t match up significantly with those of others we wish to be with or, perhaps, love.

“To have one’s individuality completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life
Like being blown out as one blows out a light.”–Evelyn Scott, “Escapade”

Hamlet’s “To thine own self be true” has long offered a wisdom and perspective about these conflictful matters. The honest person and the most self-accepting person is the one who is and remains true to his/her own personal nature and potentialities, with all the limits and limitations that that thought implies.

Ironically, it is on the basis of self-acceptance and self-knowledge that one can proceed to have a good, happy, fulfilled life. Obviously, freedom has a lot to do with this possibility once adulthood has been achieved. The lucky persons who are free are able to construct their days, make of them as they choose, even without worrying how much something may cost. The true individual moves through the day without worrying what others will think of his/her dress, appearance, behavior, and choices. He or she makes his/her own day or own life.

The true individual kowtows to no external, extraneous, bogus authority who prescribes how others should live. The free-est individual is able to think and create freely, expressing whatever he or she thinks. It is from such a position of self-possession and conscious will that individuals can and ought to live freely with as much social interaction and connection as they choose or require.

The simple fact, too, is that we are who and what we are. For that, we need may make no apologies if we do not conform to the many wishes, limits and limitations imposed on us by others. It is for others to figure out their own responses and to construct their own meanings within their own lives and worlds. Although we can offer our best opinions, advice, and help, it is up to others to make their own meanings and purposes as individuals within their own lives and experiences. In that, the free-est and best sense of what it means to be an individual and to account for the unique individuality of each of our basically autonomous lives.

“I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.”–Emily Bronte, “Stanzas”

(one of several illustrated books on George Orwell’s life and work)

(a vintage 1950 paperback version of Orwell’s classic)

(the excellent, harrowing, faithful-to-the-text movie-adaptation of Orwell’s book, starring John Hurt as a vulnerable Winston and Richard Burton as a nasty O’Brien, MGM DVD)

……………………………………………….

George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-four, forecast many things that have become truths and truisms today. Here are some quotes from that book and others by one of the most unappreciated authors of the twentieth century:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.

Reality is inside the skull.

Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

To think, to think, even with a split second left–to think was the only hope.

Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.

Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

Ignorance is strength.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind is controllable–what then?

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to know.

Early in life I noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

The very concept of objective truth is fading put of the world. Lies will pass into history.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Myths which were believed in tended to become true.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

All issues are political issues.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.

Power is tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face–forever.

The power is not a means; it is an end….The object of power is power.

Big Brother Is Watching You.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Quotes from Walden, “Walking”, and Reflections at Walden

(replica of Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond which I visited in twice in the fall)

-I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

-Our life is frittered away by detail….Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!

-The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation….But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

-In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.

-Books are the treasured wealth of the world and fit inheritance of generations and nations….How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

-I love a broad margin to my life.

-The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

-Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

-Cultivate reverence.

-Follow your genius closely enough, and it will never fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

-To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

-If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

-In literature it is only the wild that attracts us….In short all good things are wild and free.

-I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay to life itself, than this incessant business.

-There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living…You must get your living by loving.

-If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and friends, and never see them again–if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man–then you are ready for a walk….I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

-So we saunter to the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

-Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

-The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another tenderly.

-A wise man will know what game to play and how to play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the seasons rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature`s. Nothing must be postponed.

-Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this….Take any other course and life will be a succession of regrets….There is no world for the penitent and regretful.

-All change is a miracle to contemplate.

-He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul`s estate.

-Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.

-The true poet will ever live aloof from society, wild to it, as the finest singer is the wood thrush, a forest bird.

-A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

-Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

-I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

-It takes two to speak the truth–one to speak, and another to hear.

……………………………

A definite highlight of my two `90s  fall wonder trips to New England was walking all around Walden pond and visiting the Thoreau Lyceum. He has long been an inspiration as a connection to nature. solitude, and individualism. (I even wrote a one man play about him!) I always start to recall those trips and his work when summer is winding down and autumn begins…

and the most prophetic book about reading in our time– The Gutenberg Elegies:

“I believe that what distinguishes us as a species is not our technological prowess, but rather our extraordinary ability to confer meaning on our experience and to search for clues about our purpose from the world around us.”
“Only in the duration state is experience present as meaning. Only in this state are we prepared to consider our lives under what the philosophers used to call ‘the aspect of eternity,’ to question our origins and destinations, and to conceive of ourselves as souls.”

According to Birkerts, what’s been lost in the last quarter-century with humans’ increased technological immersion and surrender-enslavement to computers, tablets, and phones:

“a) a fragmented sense of time and a loss of the so-called duration experience, that depth phenomenon we associate with reveries; b) a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry; c) a shattered faith in institutions and in the explanatory narratives that formerly gave shape to subjective experience; d) a divorce from the past, from a vital sense of history as a cumulative or organic process; e) an estrangement from geographic place and community; and f) an absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future.”

No one else has stated this mass cultural diminishment better, more clearly, and more profoundly than Birkerts. He understood, more than anyone else in North America how technology would diminish human consciousness and possibilities.

(One of the things I’m proudest of in the first several months of this blog was the focus on core themes and patterns in any person’s life. The following first-ever entry kicked things off with a typical big view of things. I will replay some of these worthy, unique takes in April and May.)

Individual Process, Briefly

Life being largely about the impact of the world on an individual.

Beginning with the flow of images, sounds, language, feelings, thoughts–various information via lived experience.

Received, filtered, organized, processed by the individual’s senses, body, mind, feelings via imagination, intelligence, and empathy.

Thereby generating important meanings, understandings, epiphanies including pattern- recognition, meaning-making, personal understandings, and expression/sharing of same.

What might also be called the potential development of a sensibility with resulting integrity, values, and style.

In short, what comprises a fully-realized, autonomous individual.

The more developed and multitudinous the sensibility, the more interesting the person, the broader and richer the quality of experience and capacity for empathy, connectedness, expressiveness and creativity.

What is important, then, to any individual is obtaining and knowing the information that satisfies curiosity, that is wanted, needed, necessary, missing, missed in order to maintain ‘life-flow’, to ‘move forward’, to develop, and to grow.

Life’s information cannot be understood or expressed without language, thought, and feeling, and sometimes whatever missing experience.

Ultimately, throughout a day and life, whether one realizes it or not, one searches for the very information that is necessary to live more fully, freely, connectedly, and purposefully.

*************************************************************************

2 inspirations: The Information, a book by James Gleick, and watching my first grandson up to his seventh month.

“Sensibility” is one of those good old ‘lost, forgotten’ nineteenth century words, as in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. (cf the recent past blog entry on Sven Birkerts.)

We all seem to be ‘looking for something’ at a given moment or at various stages of our lives. In the case of the latter, the missing pieces usually complete some understanding of self, others, or something we previously lacked. Often, we are just plain impelled or driven ‘blindly’ toward whatever unknown missing information or experiences that enable the potential to complete ourselves or to fulfill our destinies (and which we don’t know till we ‘get there’).

Something in all of this individual process that seeks freedom (of self or via something or someone else) and personally satisfying and fulfilling connection. In any case, it is the flow, the process, or ‘the journey’ as the old quote goes, that matters and reveals most.

And reflecting many of the entries that follow–it is in the knowing or consciousness of same that lies the meaning and purpose. Facilitated by words, thoughts, and feelings understood within and expressed to/shared with others. In that, finally, meaningful communication and the possibility of significant connection and relationships as well as whatever resultant positive personal and social actions and behaviors.

(the rare VHS version of the Alan Paton South African classic)

Thank goodness for the Turner Movie Channel specializing in movies from The Golden Age and ranging from the 1920s to 1980s. Likewise, those brave, uncopyright-concerned souls who have made rare out-of-print movies like L’Etranger and Portrait of a Jazz Musician available for all to see on YouTube. And the Criterion Collection folks who have cleaned up and preserved lost classics like Salesman and The Fallen Idol.

Only older movie buffs like me who bought numerous VHS tapes and still have the machines to play them can view many films which never made it to DVD like Ah, Wilderness!, Betrayal (Irons), the original Cry, the Beloved Country, The Glass Menagerie (Newman), Hedda (Glenda Jackson), The Naked Edge, King Lear (Scofield), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Stevie (Glenda Jackson), the original Death of a Salesman, to name several.

Similarly, many of the DVDs that came out in the past 15 years have never made it to Blu-Ray. And now with the mass transition to Netflix streaming, most of that old pre-1980s catalogue is gone forever unless you were fortunate enough to own the VHS or DVD movie versions. True, Netflix might rotate a handful of classic oldies like Patton and Gandhi, but, by and large, Netflix users are hugely kidding themselves if they believe they have a choice of more than 1% maximum of the good and great movies ever made before the ’80s and ’90s.

Having worked as a film classifier myself, I got out when 90% of what I was seeing in first-run 2002-and-later-movies were simply weak, flawed, mediocre, terribly banal and predictable, and plain mind-stultifying crap. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some strong movies like The Social Network or Doubt since. Just that most of the movies people pig-pile in to pay big bucks to see are either glorified cartoons or special effects flicks. The strong quality and independent writing (there has been a serious decline and abasement of language the past decade), directing, actors, editing, music, and artful cinematography are all conspicuously absent and it is from this weak pool that–you guessed it–Netflix draws most of its largely dumbed-down fare.

Lately here, I’ve been writing reviews of old movies most people in today’s society will never see again unless on the Turner channel, from Criterion, or YouTube in some cases. These movies have remained timelessly entertaining, provocative, or inspiring. No question these pictures are classics and belong to another time. Anyone who enjoys a good or great film would find them very interesting. But the chances of ever connecting to a whole wonderful, exciting, timeless mass of remarkable viewing diminishes daily and, as a result, we are all made smaller, shallower, dumber, and fatally tunnel-visioned, movie-wise. So Netflix is not frankly an option for any serious cinephile.

…………………………………

Just a footnote to say that all VHS movies are out-of-print and many of the rarer DVDs already sold out. However, it is still possible to get most of the films which were once on VHS and DVD; many of them are available online from Amazon, eBay, or other private businesses. (Purchase prices can run high, to over $50-100 quite often.) You can even get some very rare titles which were only shown once on tv (as YouTube attests to). Generally, your best bet for seeing many of these pre-80s oldies when you choose is, ironically, dependent on the size of your own movie and off-air collections