To thine own self be true

Long overdue. New versatile hand drum (multiple sounds, tones) on right with some of the CDs I first played with/to when I got it. Tocca 7″ synergy-free-style made of Indonesian wood. Works well with anything from folk (Bruce Cockburn, Seals & Crofts) to Eastern sitar (Ravi Shankar) to rock (Chicago, BTO, Fleetwood Mac, Doors) to country (Mavericks).

When I was in grade 9-10, drums were my first choice of instrument, but were too expensive; besides, we lived in an apartment block–it would never have worked. I was interested, then, in rock drums (Sandy Nelson, Ringo Starr) and jazz (Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich). Because the Hootenany era had started, I bought a banjo instead, but quickly changed to guitar in grade10-11, which I have stayed with ever since.

It’s been a lot of fun to come full circle and partially-fulfill this olde desire. I’ve been doing half-hour sessions with various famous musicians since I brought it home. Great sound–a very immersive and pleasantly distracting instrument.

1. of the limits and limitations of many others one has known in one’s life (even those who are close) –particularly in their choices, freedom, and own (human) nature. (People are what they are, regardless of whatever positive possibilities they never actualize.)

2. eventually, of the aging process and one’s own increasing limits and limitations. One can only do so much, timewise, in particular. (Focus and maximization of dreams and one’s own freedom become central as one ages.)

Great 1981 film classic directed by Louis Malle. Daring–consisting mainly of 2 hours of non-stop conversation between two male friends in a restaurant. Stars screenplay writers Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. Full of challenging material for complacent people and viewers. Some quotes:

“‘I could always live in my art, but never in my life.'”

“I mean, really, we’re just going around all day like unconscious machines, and meanwhile there’s all this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us.”

“Because somehow in our social existence we’re only allowed to express our feelings weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly, everyone goes crazy.”

“Everything passes in a kind of trance.”

“…one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at one of these parties we’re all too busy performing. We’re concentrating on playing our own roles and giving a good performance, so we can’t perceive what’s going on around us.”

“And so everyone acts as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment, and they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately, people are very mixed up about themselves, you know, and don’t know what they should be doing in their lives, and they’re reading all these self-help books–”

“You know, we do live in ludicrous ignorance of each other….But we really don’t dare to ask each other.”

“We just put no value at all on perceiving reality.”

“Our minds are just focused on these goals and plans, which in themselves are not reality….They’re part of a dream life.”

“And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living. I mean, you know, in Sanskrit, the root of the verb “to be” is the same as “to grow” or “to make grow”.

“If you’re just eating out of habit, you don’t taste the food, and you’re not in touch with the reality of what’s happening to you; you’re in a dream world again.”

“Because we don’t see the world. We don’t see ourselves. We don’t see how our actions affect other people.”

“But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process which creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money?…that somebody who’s bored is asleep? And somebody who’s asleep will not say no?”

“You see, I keep thinking that we need a new language, a language of the heart…some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is.”

“You see, Wally, the trouble with always being active and doing things is that it’s quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely dead inside.”

“Because I do believe that if you’re just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.”

“I just had to put myself into a kind of training program to learn how to be a human being.”

“[I had to] cut out all the noise around me and stop performing for a few moments and just listen to what was inside me.”

“…or maybe what we’re really talking afraid of is thinking about a kind of existence that we’ve lost, which if were to remember would make us give up everything.”

“I think it’s that moment of contact with another person. That’s what scares us. That moment of being face to face with another person.”

……………………….

Quotes that stimulate and challenge viewers leaving them with questions to ask of themselves and their lives.

Freedom from what had become a slavish job, working unappreciated with/by great numbers of people–2002.

Freedom from full-time work–2005.

Freedom from any negative people–2010

Freedom is, first of all, largely related to being from the 9 to 5, then from any job at all in which one is working for others. (Freedom, basically, has to do with freedom from illness and health problems, of course.) Freedom from debt is a somewhat limited comfort if one is living cheaply, meanly, and limitedly; like why isn’t that person spending money to pursue his or her bliss and passions or getting free/r of a limited focus or obsession on Mammon?

Freedom from negative relationships is a very big deal. Being one’s own person or being capable of autonomy and being responsible for oneself are also basic and important.

Then you are into varying degrees of freedom, spending your time and days as you wish, able, on a dime, to go and do something you want to, able to get something or some experience you desire suddenly.

All my life, right from my latch-key-kid years in grades 1-12 and university days, has contained harbingers of this kind of total, desired freedom. My adult years had much freedom with the 3 months of holiday during the teacher years. My past 12 years retired from teaching have been wonderfully and leisurely free. Freedom, for me, at this point, continues to grow and and offers enough deep spiritual fulfillment as long as my health-luck continues.

If someone asks me, What’s the most important thing in a person’s life, the answer is still the same–freedom. It is the very thing that others have envied me all the way through my life at different stages. I did what I wanted and have lived my life largely, very largely, on my own terms. For me, this has been the ideal and the best of who I am and what I have been and experienced. If someone said There are other ways, I would say Yes, I know and have seen these up close. But they never interested me as much as the way I have lived, based on freedom, consciousness, beauty, Nature, love, and possibilities. But freedom has allowed me to enjoy, understand, and appreciate all the other aspects in that latter list. With less freedom, my life would have been greatly diminished and ‘smallened’. I never wanted a limited, limiting life. Especially because of the limits and limitations of others and the limits they live by or suggested and sometimes foisted on me.

“I am large; I contain multitudes.”–Walt Whitman

“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.”
(Illusion, dream, and idealism are generally very internally satisfying, compared with mundane forms of reality.)

“An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.”
(Pleasure is pretty basic and necessary as one ages.)

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
(Absolutely. Most folks choose not to see or imagine the stars.)

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
(Wilde’s downfall, unfortunately.)

“Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.”
(Why copy someone else, wear their clothes, act and talk like them?)

“Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes.”
(Lots of mistakes =lots of experience.)

“Irony is wasted on the stupid.”
(Shakespeare’s “Caviare to the general”.)

“Create yourself. Be yourself, your poem.”
(The ultimate creative act in life. How I have lived my life.)

“Never love anybody who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
(Why would you bother with someone like that?)

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
(Limited minds=self-imposed limitations and limited lives. ‘We do it to ourselves’. Often.)

“I put my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life.”
(Why choose any differently?)

“Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.”
(Roles tend to be familiar, comfortable. Even Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern would agree. Some parts are better than others, too.)

“The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.”
(as in Hamlet–”O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right”. There are also many weak, poor performers and performances.)

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
(Float, sleepwalk, like Meursault in Camus’s L’Etranger. Hence the expression ‘the art of living’.)

“I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no need to write. Life cannot be written, life can only be lived.” (Why write when one knows how to live and especially when time is getting short? Plus, Life is the greatest art.)

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
(typical soft news item these daze: Lady Gaga stops wearing machine-gun bra on tour.)

“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”         (can be–c.f. the art of Richard Stine)

(previously published here January 16, 2013; modified)

by W. Somerset Maugham

The fact that a good many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

You see, money to you means freedom; to me, it means bondage.

Always interesting to come back to for a glimpse of Larry, the central character, who pursues a life-long quest for higher, unconventional meaning and purpose. Too, the various other limited characters–the shallow, conventional Isabel who can’t control Larry and who marries for money; Elliott, her snob-uncle, whose surface/appearance-oriented shallowness is repeatedly and humorously emphasized; Sophie–a decent woman who tragically loses her husband and child and then slips into alcohol and opium addiction and promiscuity; the limited, rich, but then poorer Gray who at least appreciates the second chance Larry gives him after the former’s breakdown; and even the Maugham-narrator who, though a writer, an accurate social observer, and fan of Larry’s, nonetheless, lacks his passion and active life-engagement.

Ultimately, the book is about a reflective do-good outsider, who is far more interesting and morally finer than the limited materialists and socialites with whom he starts out with in Chicago, notably the scheming Isabel who loses him forever after he confronts her with responsibility for Sophie’s death. Given the fate of Sophie, the childish nastiness of Isabel, the simplicity of Gray, and the limitations of the Maugham-narrator, Maugham suggests that life can be unfair, tragic, hypocritical, deceptive, misfocused on making money, limited, and limiting except for those with consciousness and awareness (like the narrator) and for those with more moral purity and idealism (like Larry).

The famous 1940s film version is, incidentally, a good adaptation and well-acted with Tyrone Power as Larry and Herbert Marshall as Maugham. Anne Bancroft won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role as a likable, yet pathetic Sophie.

I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. 

I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

…rather than of thoughts!”–John Keats

A focused, thoughtful moment pondering sensuous delectables on a three-tiered tray, afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel, Victoria, this spring. Cucumber sandwiches made- to-order by special request (bottom level) being enjoyed first.

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, double-click upper left-pointing arrow twice to re-enter entire website with all blog photos now displayed. Pictures can then be enlarged or smallened as wished by clicking on each photo per se. This blog is, incidentally, 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.

Well worth visiting in Victoria–Miniature World, on the side of the Empress Hotel. Numerous exhibits, with amazing detail, some moving like trains or night scenes with lighting. Scenes inspired by literature and history, including Canadian landscapes.

The top picture is a WW11 air bomb strike, the second is a European castle extravaganza, the third is an old American town square with antique cars, the lowest one is a scene from Gulliver’s Travels. Much of the best and most interesting is about such attention to details.

Grade 12. Class reading Keats’ first stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, which describes men or gods chasing nymphs:
“what maidens loath?/ What mad pursuit?”

I asked the young woman student-teacher “Why are the maidens loath?” –which broke up the class and left her flabbergasted. She did not know what to say. At the back of the class, our regular teacher, who was quite the wit and lover of words, seemed to enjoy all of this, as I recall.

Yes, I was an occasional class clown-entertainer ( I used to do imitations when reading aloud in English–e.g., Brando, Peter Lorre), though there was more earnestness in my dumb question above than one might suppose. And so why were those maidens so loath anyway?

There are many nice, beautiful CDs in the Solitudes and Exploring Nature with Music series and many featuring birds with or without music. The above collection is especially outstanding and highly recommended.

The quiet, reflective music is sensitively composed and played by John Herberman with flute, clarinet, guitar, oboe, English horn, and harmonica accompaniment. Sounds recorded by long-time nature-lover  Dan Gibson include thrushes, grosbeak, sparrows, blackbird, wrens, mockingbird, cardinal, meadowlark, killdeer, Canada goose, blackbird, osprey, quail, yellowthroat, and woodpeckers.

A delightful audio sense-experience any day or time inside, though colder months and winter offer many reassuring reminders of pleasant, warm or green weather to return. The experience of Nature indoors is easily achieved by having plants, pets, PVR- and DVD-recorded Nature programs, as well as remarkable CDs such as Songbirds at Sunrise. The latter is also great to use for meditation and Tai chi exercises, especially mornings, in rooms with plants.

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, double-click upper left-pointing arrow twice to re-enter entire website with all blog photos now displayed. Pictures can then be enlarged or smallened as wished by clicking on each photo per se. This blog is, incidentally, 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.