To thine own self be true

(required reading for anyone who is a secondary English teacher, English lecturer or English prof, or training to be)

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Northrop Frye, that is. Our genius literary critic.

“I think there are all questions and there aren’t any answers.”

“The word ‘classic’ as applied to a work of literature means primarily a work that refuses to go away, that remains confronting us until we do something about it, which means also doing something about ourselves.”

“To increase consciousness is to increase mobility by metaphor.”

“The aim of education is to distinguish illusion from reality.”

“Education is loaded with an apparatus of magical systems and methods which are supposed to inscribe significant patterns on the student’s tabula rasa.”

“If you want to smash human freedom, the first thing you have to do is to smash language, because people will always be free as long as they have the words to form ideas freely.”

“Individuality, which is the condition of freedom, is never achieved without some genuine form of education.”

“In literature the sense of fact is subordinated to an ultimate intention of producing a pattern of words for its own sake.”

“The poet does not think of himself as making his poems. He thinks of himself as a place where poems happen.”

“…every beginning that matters is verbal and conscious.”

“The ‘real me’ may be a layer of personae, the relationships with people.”

“There’s only one story–the story of your life.”

“The central story of all literature is the loss and regaining of identity.”

“In a sense I don’t believe anything I say until I hear myself saying it.”

“The reality-illusion distinction clearly does not work for plays: the illusion is the reality.”

“Thinking, of course, is not something I do: it’s something that happens where I am.”

“There are no wordless thoughts.”

“…all understanding is in a sense metaphorical understanding.”

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(excerpts from the highly-recommended John Robert Columbo’s excellent compilation The Northrop Frye Book (Dundurn,2014)

(Two thumbs way up for “Vintage Getz” DVD (Warner Music Vision, recorded in 1983 at the Robert Mondavi Winery, Napa Valley)

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Who could ever forget “Ipanema”
and the wispy, silky sounds
accompanying Astrud
on her husband’s song?
Clearly classic, like forever.
You played both sweet and sad
opening up the melancholy
aloneness of our hearts
deep within.

Decades later,
posthumously, no less,
you sprang free
with Barron’s rich piano
live in Copenhagen
dancing forever
beyond your cancer.
“Night and Day”,
“People Time”–
How you guys cooked!
A wonder and miracle of two.

Later I watched you, magically
play one summer’s night
in a California vineyard
before an appreciative throng,
unlike any dive you gigged
in your heroin free-fall daze,
fixes feeding your so-eloquent pain.

Ah, the tunes and greats you knew,
or had known and internalized
like no other jazzer since.
“Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”,
“Lush Life”, “Blood Count”.
Billy Strayhorn.
Stan, you remain The Mellow Man
affecting the quality
of our inner jazz lives
though your ashes sleep deep
off Marina del Rey.

Looking to a traditional, warm start on a cold Katzville winter morn. Cue the Costa Rica bananas for brekkie cereal and large Nescafe Rich coffee (with Dad’s oatmeal cookies). Here-and-now civilized sensual pleasures and preferred images.

(metallophone used for spontaneous daily jazz-tone poem composition at home)

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with my favorite Edmonton jazzer Charlie Austin and his excellent trio. We were mutual friends of the late local bassist Stu Millman, acknowledged on Charlie’s latest CD.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/charlieaustintrio2

Under Album Notes, Read more… are references to this connection and an excerpt from my long homage poem to Stu called “As Good as It Gets”, which I performed memorably with the trio at the Yardbird Suite after Stu passed.
(I have also written other jazz poems to other jazzers including Peter Erskine, Lenny Breau and Miles Davis, and have one tentatively planned for Stan Getz.)

(An old social compartment: authors Davies and Kirkland starting out, 1980)

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Our lives and relationships are made up of many compartments. Often we even choose to keep these separate or from mixing with one another.
The compartments serve different needs and purposes, but in each case, the chosen ones are necessary in some way and address some part or aspect of ourselves, our values, and inner needs.
Often we are different in each compartment, revealing different facets of our potential and, often, real selves. One-on-one with someone else, our presences manifest themselves or are shared with others. We open up and express what we typically do not say in many other contexts or compartments. (This usually, incidentally, happens with close friends, neighbors, and sometimes co-workers.)

Cohen sang of “My Secret Life” and there is something of this to our lives of compartments and quite often what is said or happens there, stays there, so to speak.
Each time we connect with someone or become closer to that person, a compartment is potentially formed, especially if it continues over a period of time. The most successful compartments occur when people respect and trust one another as well as accept, understand and appreciate one another. Never do people in the most successful, positive compartments treat each other as means to ends, rather just as ends and interesting autonomous beings in themselves.

Obviously, I believe we all have inner needs, people we are close to outside of family (even marriage), and private spaces we occupy in the flow and episodes of daily or long-term life.
It is in these compartments, that we play different roles or manifest basic values and desires. Each compartment fulfills a different aspect or need of self, and with each fulfilling compartment, we move more outside ourselves, connecting with others, while at the same time, revealing our true inner selves. A dual balancing process that bespeaks both inner and social health and well-being.

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I will just add that individuals have many solo compartments of their own. These are for solitude or refreshment, and are found at home, in childhood, in Nature, etc. Private personal spaces to breathe, play and contemplate on our own. (I still believe the solo compartments are more basic or fundamental ways we experience, initially, in life. Anyone who is an only child or watches a baby play understands this truth.)

“Cursed be the social lies that warp us from living truth!’–Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”

The sleepers lie so deep,
their gardens go unplanted.
Their summer song unsung forever,
the spring-words half-remembered.
The rose and the smell
of running water here.
And then a voice
that tries to find itself,
to speak the saddest silence.

It is said the sleepers
never wake to rise,
only babble with their bedmates,
discuss the latest zygote
or virtual reality,
unplugged from the umbilical
cords of imagined souls.

The sleepers dance in masques
of nightmare shapes.
All-serious now, they
bury their affections
in cozy plots of work and reason,
complain of what they miss
on full-moon nights,
refuse the cracks of entry
to another life in stars.

It is said the sleepers put
themselves to sleep at last
with dreams of tv,
mortgages and murder.
They give up hope and try
to plant themselves in vain,
their only seedlings
dust of secret song.

In the great shared cemetery
of heart and mind,
the sleepers stretch their forevers
in separate pallets,
ache to recall a recurring dream:
the sprouting wings of distant love.

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This poem about the `saddest silence`owes something to T.S. Eliot and works like Four Quartets and “The Hollow Men”. Death-in-life existences and buried lives are not hard to find; there are days when they seem all-too-common. I think the alternate choices are fairly clear here. They have a lot to do with living out dreams and love; sometimes these two are totally antithetical to the customary modes of work and reason. People often settle for less, in my opinion. As I have said before, too often `we do it to ourselves` in our choices. And so many gardens remain wintry and many “secret songs`go unsung.

(reprint from September, 2012)

(left: Rex’s first book, first tour-stop signing & first tour book signed–which I was first at Audrey’s, Edmonton, Nov. 2003, to get signed, in an aisle before the actual signing got started; a follow-up e-mail reply indicating he was seeing the finished book/my copy above for the first time)

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Universities today are “slenderly disguised kindergartens for intolerant narcissists.”
–another super Rex Murphy column, “University Administrators and real professors should take note: every brain needs a spine”, National Post, Nov. 14, 2015

Murphy has been and remains our top journalist social critic and satirist in Canada. Fearless, perspicacious and witty with an amazing deployment of diction, allusion, and pop culture references. Pointing out the hypocrisies of phony aggrieved p.c. victims as usual.

Sony has decided to stop making Betamax tapes.

(my favorite old childhood book)

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“There is enchantment right in front of you, waiting for you to notice.”

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.”