To thine own self be true

You can tell when the Frame channel on Shaw starts broadcasting its continuous fire segment.

This morning I got up, opened the front door to pitch darkness, and still-snowing -30 windchill, took in and read the very real physical newspaper, had a nice brekkie with Guatemalan bananas and large Chilean blueberries, and then returned to the warm, cozy bed. There was simply no reason to stay up or go outside. (Freedom 52 now into its 13th blissful year. O Lucky Man!)

Blog entries are copyright by entry date, Richard Davies. If accessing site from Internet, activate any photos not showing automatically, by clicking on any picture frame. Then, despite Caution, safely click “Continue to this website”–pics will then emerge. When loaded, click upper left-pointing arrow twice to re-enter entire website with all blog photos now displayed. Individual pictures can then be enlarged as wished by clicking on each photo per se.                 

N.B./ *If your bent is poetry or prose meditations on life, there are a zillion of these in the first several months of this blog’s life. A non-commercial site for study or contemplative uses only, this blog is Read-Only, but you can reach me by Google-searching “Richard Davies Edmonton” for the first link which comes up–my LinkedIn address, and you can access basic and contact info via there.

shallowly, into the future. They have sold or given up their souls and hearts to 5 1/2″ screens, technology, machines and abandoned consciousness, ideas, language, depth, sensibility, and authentic, physical presence, live-in person-living.

“I am a part of all that I have met.”–Tennyson, “Ulysses”

I, on the other hand, choose to live in the ever-disappearing, ephemeral here-and-now, ever-conscious of who and what I am, how these have arisen naturally, organically, process-ly from ever-changing contexts, but contexts nonetheless, of the ever-growing, ever-receding, important, and relevant past. I respect and revere the past, the best and what has been (as Matthew Arnold termed it), that made Western civilization what it is, or rather once was, at its zenith.

“Context is all.”–John Updike

Everything that is good, memorable, meaningful, and truly significant arises in the contexts we choose. Anyone with real depth, empathy, sympathy, kindness, full consciousness arises in and is simultaneously aware of the best of the past and the great thinkers and spirits of Western civilization, not just some dumb app or computer expert.

And so the shallowness of the e-age washes over and trivializes our time and young minds, dumbly removing much of what is still good, true, and beneficial of the past. Institutions are deconstructed and torn apart daily. The truly good and great people and authorities ignored, missed, or forgotten in the prevailing e-haze. The vacant souls and minds stare shallowly at and glibly emote about the latest hollow screen technology.

“…and almost hear a meaning in their noise [and flickering screens.]–Thom Gunn, “On the Move” [with personal amendment]

It was Sven Birkerts who warned us on the incoming shallow screen seas and wisely opined “Resist it.” Ironically, this blog dares to speak against the same, soul-less, direction-nless e-bandwagon as it careens madly over a Calvin and Hobbes-like cliff.

“Colored lights can hypnotize/Sparkle someone else’s eyes”–Bachman & Cummings, “American Woman”

in tuning in to one’s self and actualizing oneself, attitude and personal choice are the two singlemost things that determine one’s life and fate, regardless of limitations. In whatever situation or context, the individual typically has a choice even in the case of a dilemma or limited possibilities. In whatever situation or context, the individual chooses his or her attitude. If the attitude is negative, it is strictly of the individual’s doing. We are all responsible for our lives, our personal choices, and attitudes. No one else. In that sense, as the cliché goes, Life is, indeed, what we make of it. And whatever personal freedom we eke out or choose. Lemonade as opposed to lemons, suggests another cliché.

My daughter talking with her boss today after several months of working together. They establish that they both lived in the same community of the city at one time. Then he reveals he lived in the same condominium complex as we once did. My daughter asks which number he lived in. He says the number. It is the exact same unit as ours. He lived there 17-23 years after we left.

Six degrees of separation. The power and long reach of mystery on a cold winter’s day. How close we all really are. Purpose? Design? The two hugged after they realized the connection. Our family has had many such connections that can might be pooh-poohed as random coincidence. But one does start to think in terms of design and fate as these mysteries and mysterious coalescences over the years pile up. They cut through whatever surface separation, alienation, and uniqueness to express that some things are just simply meant to be, and that we are not all just isolated islands.

Remarkable, today’s event. What are the odds? What, if anything, does it mean? Awareness and consciousness turn over the information and derive an easy instant pleasure, engagement, and extrapolation from all of this good, happy, fortunate news and information. It began with some curiosity and questions and led to the same condo down the road which we all once shared.

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This kind of stuff piles up for us and my daughter in this huge city. On the previous job, my daughter and her co-worker discovered they had lived in the same apartment block, in the same apartment! And the same woman had lived in the same house that my daughter had gone to, to make a delivery to a doctor! There are many, many more epiphanies like these experienced by my family. Some to do with death, some to do with avoiding death or danger.

As winter descends bigtime on Katzville, I am reminded yet again how cold and dangerous travel is in winter as reflected in Jack London’s short story “To Build a Fire”. When I started teaching in 1972, the short story text for English 10-1 (AB) was Studies in the Short Story. The London story was long (about an hour to read aloud in class), but it usually went over well in the wilds of Grand Centre in the Cold Lake area. There, we were all closer to Nature and to the dangers of winter (e.g., one teacher’s wife died travelling on the highway out of town in winter on her way to work; I nearly perished when my car spun out in a winter storm.). Living there gave me, a city-born kid, a healthy, more realistic understanding of both Nature and winter.

I wish this movie version, faithful to London’s story, had been available to me before 2004 when it was released on DVD by VCI Entertainment/Blair & Associates. I would definitely have used it with the story. Ian Hogg plays the Cheechako and Orson Welles all-knowingly narrates. I would highly recommend this DVD to teachers in grade 8-9, or 10-1 or 10-2, who are looking for something to teach the man vs. nature theme, a good classic story, and a reminder of how dangerous winter and cold can be.

Just in time for winter. Adapted from a novella by D. H. Lawrence, The Fox tells the tale of Jill and March, two women who’ve found they can manage a remote farm in the Canadian woods without any men around. Jill is the more neurotic and childish of the two women, played convincingly by Sandy Dennis. Sexy Anne Heywood plays the more obviously ‘hungry’ March–the more ‘masculine’, reflective woman with missing pieces where men are concerned.

Both women, though devoted to each other, become interested in Paul (Keir Dullea), an oddly attractive young man passing through the farm, the winter, and their  superficially stable lives. His initial interest in the indecisive March eventually leads to the triangle conflict and a brutal betrayal of Jill who has her own issues and missing pieces where the other two are concerned.

The movie unfolds slowly and leisurely in a timeless 1967 farm and woods setting with ominous animal (the fox of the title, birds and fowl) and nature (the “still-living” tree) symbolism. Numerous connections are made between intense male, female, and fox gazes (via close-ups and lighting) suggesting that the plot is largely about Nature and its larger ways of attraction, desire, passion, as well as an underlying ‘predatory human possession or ownership’ theme. In fact, there is a playful sensuality and edginess throughout the plot, even in the relatively unresolved, inconclusive denouement.

Characterization is mysterious, subtle, and harshly honest at times. (All three actors are at the peaks of their careers here.) Atmospheric music, by the great Lalo Schifrin, adds to the emotionally frozen winter landscape and the unstraightforward love triangle. Director Mark Rydell, who later directed On Golden Pond, shows a similar talent to keep everything under control (and wraps) while leaving the viewer in uncertainty and doubt as to where all the tense, anxious manoeuverings are headed. He and famed co-scriptwriter Howard Koch are to be applauded for their successfully adapting and filming Lawrence’s tricky original without any false steps.

*Recommended for viewers who like relationship triangles with a pronounced edge (e.g., X, Y and Zee or Sunday Bloody Sunday), for Lawrence fans, or for anyone who wants to see a surprisingly, flawless, moody, well-acted Canadian film.

Don’t fret, angst, or worry; it’s all brief, transitory, and ephemeral in the great scheme of things. Focus, instead, on the personal choices you make by the moment, the day, the week, the month, and the year. In that is your purpose, significance, and meaning. In that is who you essentially are and what you can still make or create of yourself.

We all have expiry dates. Live each day as if you will die in the near future. Then the flotsam, jetsam, and crap will be much easier to remove. To pare down. To downsize to what really matters personally–an authentic, fuller, richer, happier life in whatever time and life remains for you.

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“After the three R’s, the three A’s: anxiety, alienation, absurdity”.–Northrop Frye, “The University and Personal Life”

It was inevitable naturally that someone would try to film W.O. Mitchell’s classic novel and, in the 70’s blossoming age of Canadian filmmaking, this was finally done by the experienced Allan King. He used the prairie town of Arcola, SK and Canadian actors fairly effectively to recreate the Saskatchewan of the 30’s Depression. The script by Patricia Watson sticks to the original for its main plots, subplots, and characters. The eccentric characters of Ben, Saint Sammy and Uncle Gerald account for much of the film’s humor with Jose Ferrer leading the way. And other characters such as Brian’s father (Gordon Pinsent), Digby, and Miss Thompson are nicely, accurately realized. The film also does a fine job of rendering tricky book content such as the Berkeley conversations, which no doubt left movie audiences wondering about why that ‘philosophical stuff’ was included. But of that had much to do in the original with Brian’s growing sensitivity and increasing consciousness about reality, and so King, in a nod to Mitchell, retained it.

Where the movie differs from the novel in its lightening of the time and death elements; the atmosphere of the movie is lighter and ‘sunnier’, focusing more on the conventional subtheme of freedom Mitchell also included in the original. Spoiler alert: Not surprisingly, then, the movie ends with the freeing of Young Ben and the caged owl, making for a more upbeat ending. Tonally, the movie occasionally uses conventional crackerjack ‘Tom Sawyer’-style music/comic themes by composer Eldon Rathburn, which again lightens the movie’s mood, purpose and main focus.

Missing are Mitchell’s use of point of view, the sense of alienation, and the more serious themes of time passing and death within Nature. The movie, then, emphasizes parts of the book which were more comic and entertaining rather than serious and thought-provoking (Berkeley’s inclusion aside). The VHS version suggests this is a suitable film for young kids (i.e., Children’s Treasures presents), but it isn’t. It would be of interest to those familiar with the book, to those interested in small town Canadian prairie life of the 1930s, and to grade 9-11 students, specifically, studying the novel and viewing the movie.

(*N.B., Language, though faithful to the book, may be too coarsely ‘blasphemous’ for under 14s in the classroom.)

The blinds were closed that Sunday September afternoon. I had closed them for my wife’s father who, otherwise, would have been blinded by the light as we watched the football game on the tube. A familiar context, for sure, and an outing for him, nothing unusual until I looked at the closed blinds.

On them were two strange shadows. The bird shape I knew because of its location–a black bird decal on the outside of the window to ward off the many backyard birds from entering whatever vistas they might be visually tricked into beholding/imagining. The effect of sun and light on large late summer patio windows. The limitations of bird perception combined with the hard presence of man-made objects in merging worlds.

But here in the strangeness of show and surfaces–a butterfly had found the black bird shape and amazingly, on a wingtip, a place to call home for fifteen minutes or so. In that duration, it had found its precise missing piece, completion, or context and made a choice in response to the similarly deceptive,but in a way contrary to how the window decal repelled real birds. Like the birds, though, the butterfly had bought the illusion.

What joined the two shadows, one a flimsy physical item, the other a living presence? The windows are large and there is so much space to choose for a butterfly’s landing. Why the wingtip and not elsewhere? The timing was similarly uncanny with both humans inside witnessing this found art shadow-show. In that moment for two people–a privileged glimpse into the oddities of perception and Nature. In that moment, a vision of absurd connection not possible had the blinds been open, had we not been sitting there at that precise miraculous macro-conjunction of normally separate random worlds.

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“To increase consciousness is to increase mobility by metaphor.”–Northrop Frye, “Entry, Notebook 23”

“…all understanding is in a sense metaphorical understanding.”–Northrop Frye, “The Transferability of Literary Concepts”

“I think there are all questions and there aren’t any answers.”–Northrop Frye, The Great Teacher

Blog entries are copyright by entry date, Richard Davies.

(In memory of Mike Nichols)

Two of my most formative which are also cinema classics: The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Top-notch satires and two of the most truthful films about their times and about human nature. The best coming-of-age and social satire film of the ’60s and perhaps the most harrowing film about honesty in marriage and relationships ever made. Nichols at the absolute top of his (movie-director) game. Burton, Taylor, Hoffman, and Bancroft at their absolute best acting-performance-wise.