To thine own self be true

we live in a limited/limiting age of images and visuals as opposed to the preceding age long centered on words and print-language. The latter two remain necessary fundamental or core elements of Western civilization and truly conscious personal living. This is why we, generally, don’t find an expansion of mind or spirit and significantly constructive, informed imagination these daze. The inspiring, inspirational, elevating ideas that naturally go with words and language just aren’t there. Only banal clichés, conventions, and dumbed-down, frivolous ‘talk’. (Again, as previously reported here, 83% of Westerners surveyed spend no time thinking by choice each day.)

I say retreat as opposed to escape–a different state, more desperate-sounding. Retreat is a planned choice designed to improve the individual, to free up and clarify inner self, personal identity, and one’s place in and relationship with the world.

Let’s face it–the world today is a glut of sensations, distractions, and confusions, many of them ultimately unsettling to one’s inner self and overall well-being. I was at a crowded restaurant yesterday evening and the din was deafeningly constant. It is this sort of external physical thing that intrudes on one’s nerves and desire for civilized pleasure even if this just ‘an evening out’. I have often remarked that one needs to ‘cut out the noise’ in order to hear oneself think and in order to truly relax. And so solitude is sometimes necessary merely for that purpose.

But more importantly, solitude is necessary to refresh oneself (as in retreat), to allow one to hear oneself at a deeper, more reflective level, to get or stay in touch with oneself, to get a clearer idea of who one really is, to ‘feed’ the soul and renew the spirit, to process the external world as well as one’s own immediate situation or context, and to improve oneself for social company. I have also often said that One can’t be any good for others if one is not good to oneself. Indeed, it is hard to operate, function, to have confidence, to withstand external irrationality, and to be strong in conflictful situations for others if one is ‘half-full’ or ‘spilling over’ with unfocused, stressed-out energies.

One of the major turning points in my life was when I decided, while working as a nose-to-the-grindstone teacher, to retreat to New England in September early in a school year, something none of my colleagues ever would do. You always have to heed The Call when it comes and not be limited or intimidated by rules and others in making important life-giving/healing choices. (I stand corrected. There was a young Phys Ed teacher at our school who went even bravely further in following her bliss enough to shave her head and go to a Tibetan monastery for a year off! Now that is a much riskier, even more interesting, life-changing event. That is someone who truly knew/knows the value of retreat.)

Yes, solitude (whether it be a retreat to a sacred place or taking time to meditate on some level) and retreat are totally necessary aspects of the human journey. Both provide much helpful information and insights.

If there’s only one program you ever see of Kenneth Clark’s landmark 12 part Civilization tv series, it would have to be part 5–“The Hero as Artist”. In it, Clark zeroes in, for 50 minutes, on the three Renaissance greats: Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. There are many wonderful moments when Clark remains quiet and the camera lingers or roams over the Sistine ceiling, “David”, “The School of Athens,” and da Vinci’s notebooks. Three Giant-Geniuses–one age. It never got better than that in any one era of Western civilization. The program seamlessly and sinuously presents the three greats in an exalted, loving fashion. As usual, Clark adds his personal quips and humorous asides as he does elsewhere throughout the series.

His biggest challenge in this program was the order in deciding on the order in which the artists are presented, but he ended up with a perfect sequence: Michelangelo (to o’erwhelm the viewer out of the gate), Raphael (the great ‘copier’ who takes a longer time to appreciate), and then da Vinci (the man of insatiable curiosity and a million questions in his passionate search for the truth). The climax of the program comes with Clark showing da Vinci’s prophetic catastrophic water deluge drawings while quoting Shakespeare’s King Lear. The program is then summed up by his last sentence: “For a few years it seemed that there was nothing which the human mind could not master and harmonise.”

I remain the auteur of my own life and work, making my own thoughts and consciousness visible in this: my blog-notebook Tothineownselfbetrue.ca

Favorite Oscar Wilde quotes: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”  “Create yourself. Be yourself, your poem.”

It is in light that one finds civilization, not darkness.

I’d much rather pursue a full use of human faculties and possibilities than chase the making of money. Materialism, mindlessness, and diminishment don’t much interest me.

In Canada today, we are seeing a death of dignity relative to seniors with the crumbling health care services. There is an absolute total lack of political will and responsible caring to fix this problem. The ‘entitled’ leaders are frankly defective, humanistically speaking.

The light of human intelligence is now at a low ebb in the context of the greatly dumbed-down public world.

Absurdity, disruption and chaos are the popular political choices of the day.

Don’t depend on a technological-obsessed culture for a return to a more humane humanistic civilization. Screens will never love you.

The most interesting people are passionately engaged in the search for truth.

One sign of our declining civilization is that there are no Giants of the order of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Beethoven. The more heroic people of the times are busy expanding their sensibilities and mental and spiritual powers.

Worthy of attention or emulation is any struggle of the soul to free itself from the glut of matter.

(rare illustrated movie book for Wilde signed by director Brian Gilbert and Fry who played Wilde)

In conjunction with the Wilde project, Fry also did audio recordings of De Profundis (complete) and the fairy tales of Wilde. He has been perhaps no better than in the Jeeves and Wooster series as the Wooster’s wiser, witty man-servant.

is much more than the limits and limitations of relationships, lifestyles, work, and career. It is a deep engagement, understanding, and appreciation of possible fully-lived moments and the personal choices made in a truly free, autonomous, authentic life.

which Oxford University Press has issued denials on immediately, is an interesting one. The controversy arose when OUP writers were notified to omit pork and pig references in children’s book-writing. Which would certainly have implications for “The Three Little Pigs, “This Little Piggy”, and Animal Farm. Apart from whether this will lead to big politically correct changes at OUP and a stupid caving in to minorities and minority agendas at the expense of majority traditions, culture, and reading choices, it does illustrate again what’s so terribly wrong with minority agendas causing majorities to make stupid, irrational undemocratic concessions to hypersensitive-entitled minorities. The simple rational solution is for the minorities to avoid these books.

Instead, there will probably be trigger warning labels on children’s books with such admonitions as “Parental guidance: Contains porcine subject matter.” And with other minorities flooding in on the wake of this concession, such warning and spoilers as “does not contain LGBTQ’ references”, “Contains references to death”, “May be offensive to gay parents”, “Has Christian bias”, “Not recommended for environmentalists’ children”, “Only contains male or Caucasian characters”, “May present content that upsets children or gets them to think”. How dumb we all get when minority rule subjugates majority experience and preferences.

(example of human design using Nature–Butchart Gardens, Victoria)

(or Purpose and Fulfillment through Design)

This manifests itself as early as the first human year and throughout natural, un-e-mediated pre-school play. We search for and wrestle with design through our school years, relationships, and early work years. This search and its various expressions define us as individuals. In short, there is something basic in humans that seeks pattern, thus, it is that we often end up making things or creating things. We have a strong (often subconscious or internal) need and drive to build or create which is-incidentally, one of the marks of civilization and civilized people (as opposed to killing, barbarism, and destruction). We are all, potentially, makers and creators, and it is this that defines us, again, as civilized people. All beginning with a drive or instinct for or toward pattern and the process of making connections. A desire for design.

Film, at its best, does belong every bit as much as a Beethoven symphony, a Turner painting, a Wright house, or a Shakespearean tragedy (examples given by Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation U.K. tv series). There are many film examples which are civilization/civilizing landmarks in affecting the Western world or cultural consciousness such as The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and Citizen Kane.

Usually these works are very deeply affecting (emotionally, mentally, spiritually), change the way we look at ourselves helping us to understand better and significantly Nature, the world, life possibilities, and human nature or human experience. There is a largeness of vision and artistic control of purposeful, thoughtful design that transcends movie schlock of the day or even moderately well-made, or justifiably popular flicks. These films are clearly works of art with excellent deployment of film elements. They have larger views that move us, that we easily identify with, or that change our heads about what art, movies, life, and people are and might be/come.

In and of themselves, there is a heightened realization of the spirit of man, large leaps forward, and expansions of human consciousness. In that sense, then, we can speak of great films as artworks on a par with some of the other greats mentioned above. These have contributed to Western civilization and to an enlarged sense of what is humanly possible.