To thine own self be true

Emily Carr statue (with pet dog and monkey on shoulder) near Empress Hotel, Victoria

Response to visual from new iPhone 5 commercial– of wasted- and lost-looking, reclining young kids zonked-out in a dark other-world.
With ironic tagline: You’re more powerful than you think. [with an iPhone5–thinking is not necessary; kids will be powerful if they–or their teacher–own this phone]

Ironically, the iPhone 5-’empowered’ teacher looks more excited about her projected show than the extremely passive, uncaring kids lying on the blue gym mat.

Reassuring millions of trance-like, screen-obsessed kids that the depicted dark, dreamy, sedentary lifestyle is not harmful, but actually empowering.  And kidding many techno-hip teachers that they’re making a deep significant difference to lazy, bored, spaced-out students’ lives.

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Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” are here. The ultimate wish-fulfillment dream of escape from adult responsibilities and conflictful life for an entire wireless generation.

“The Lotos-Eaters” (1833)–Tennyson poem line excerpts:

“Why should only toil, the roof and crown of things?

Should life all labour be?
Let us alone.

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind….
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands,
But they smile, they find a music centered in a doleful song
Steaming up a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.
Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong…
Till they perish and they suffer–some, ’tis whisper’d–down in hell
Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

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other iPhone5 ad copy:

iCool. iExpensive. iRulez.

Catering to fantasy pipedream of ultimate power and control.

Complete with proudly defiant misspelling signalling originality, rebellion, and nonconformity.

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I see the picture/I feel strong/I see the river /Flowing on

Do you see the picture?/Do you feel strong?/Do you see the river/Flowing on? 

–Johnny Clegg, “Into the Picture”

(not the most commonly used of the alphabet letter words, but most delightful)

Not-So-Favorites:

quantitative
qualmish
quarrel
queachy
querimonious–inclined to complain
querulous–as above
queue–love the sound, hate the reality
quicksand
quinsy
quitter
quomodocunquize–trying to make money any which way
quop–throbbing with pain
quota

Favorites:

qualitative
quality
quarterback
quartz
quay–love the pronunciation vs. spelling
query
quesadilla–again, love the pronunciation
quibble–as in pun
quiche–real men do
quick–as in the quick
quid–essence
quiescence
quiescent
quietism–similar to Negative capability
quietude
quilt
quince
quintessence–Aristotle’s term and meaning
quintessential
quip
quite
quixotic
quote
quotation
quotidian

“You can have a million dollars free today in this one-time offer. However, you have to lose the life you’ve had and give up the one you currently have.”

“No thanks. I have and have had way more richness, beauty, truth, happiness, and freedom than you’re offering. I’ve had an interesting, fullish, pleasurable life. What you’re offering me is definitely a diminished thing. Not interested.”

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For me, money per se is and has always been the shallow end of the pool big-time.

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Quiescence

And I shall play/all the soft, sweet poems of morning–/of golden light, of green and blue./For one–or if it be your will, two.

(of Virginia Woolf? A letter to a friend responding to”Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”, a New Yorker article by Rebecca Solnit)

“Patches of darkness, those places of unknowing”, “essential mysteries” or simply the mysteries of life and consciousness are what interested Virginia Woolf the most. She was curious about other people, had great observer skills, and an unlimited empathy and imagination which is why her novels flit from consciousness of one character to another. You can see this early in Mrs. Dalloway (where there are fewer characters) and later in To the Lighthouse in which she not only takes on many points of view/consciousnesses, but also the passing of time! The Waves was probably her biggest stretch–she focused on alternating several points of view/consciousnesses from youth to old age. Challenging to follow, but the ultimate five-finger-exercise for her. She was incredibly smart, probably the smartest significant female author since Dickinson.

Interesting Sonit also mentions Keats’ `Negative capability’ since that is the source of a confident sense of self as well as the empathic imaginative consciousness that Keats and she both have (and all great writers–Shakespeare, Tolstoy, et al). Woolf, though, was manic-depressive and knew it, particularly how it affected her writing. Amazingly, she still entered many others (and many authors and their works through her reviews), and many experiences (through her essays). She knew this was a precious gift, though it was as mysterious (“I have no notion”) as the rest of life.

“London Adventure” shows how she ultimately embraced and loved the mysteries, though. Movement (as you know from jogging–“thinking is an outdoor activity”) generates/frees thought which is why she enjoyed socializing of her choice. She would talk to various people at parties, ask many questions, and absorb all. She was very interested in what made people, including herself and friends, tick. She generally waited for inspiration and project ideas, trusting natural chi and life flow. It is that flow she captures so deeply and beautifully in her best writing and thinking.

No, she didn’t mind “getting lost”–Lost, not Missing as I titled one Spiritus publication. “Lost as in open to the unknown”. Negative capability again. She easily and naturally empathized and imagined, creating subsequently. She, indeed, contained Whitmanesque “multitudes”. That consciousness and connectedness is what she wrote of.

Certainly the wonderful essays fearlessly go anywhere and everywhere. She is not afraid to turn herself inside out for readers to see. Woolf is also conversational in the essays, very open and intimate that way. She absolutely trusted her intuitions and impressions.She was not, as Sonlit points out, afraid to explore the myriad conceivable, experiential possibilities.

I would concur that she liberated the text, the imagination, the fictional character. She opened everything up, aired all that she could see, think, and imagine. Very free that way. I think that’s what she was most about–freedom, the free mind, the free consciousness, the free exploring consciousness, a total open-mindedness that crossed the usual gender lines. Hence, her belief in what Coleridge described as the androgynous orientations, attitudes, and approaches of great writers (like Shakespeare). She certainly understood the limits and limitations of men, which can be seen in the first two novels mentioned. Her ideal and perhaps happiest publication was the very free Orlando about a totally liberated man-woman who transcends history and time. It was also a celebration of and homage to her favorite and most intimate relationship with Vita Sackville-West. (Suffice to say, Woolf’s consciousness of West greatly exceeded West’s limits and limitations as person and writer.) The book is ultimately most about Woolf–her freest and happiest, fulfilled self.

Woolf was, naturally, a feminist because of the many great limits and limitations on women of her day with which she did not hold. She was a gutsy rebel and a role-model then, much as she has been for many women since, including Sonlit. Free and outspoken. A Room of One’s Own is a classic tract and credo combined. Wonderfully rambling and discursive like everything else she wrote.

In the end, her words and marvellous unique sentences do flow like water, like air–freely, without any conventional restraint or inhibition. Thus, Virginia Woolf spoke of the unlimited possibilities of life, imagination, consciousness, and human relationships: “as endless as desire”.

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photo credit: Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell’s dust jacket for The Waves

These would be the most significant musicians, singers, and songwriters from my musical past going back to the 1950s, who are still alive and, in many cases, still performing         

Jimmie Rodgers (singer) 1933-

Ian Tyson (singer, songwriter, Ian and Sylvia) 1933-

John Mayall (blues singer, pianist, guitarist, songwriter) 1933-

Willie Nelson (singer, songwriter) 1933-

Leonard Cohen (poet, singer, songwriter) 1934-

Bob Shane (singer, original Kingston Trio) 1934-

Herb Alpert (trumpeter, The Tijuana Brass) 1935-

Glen Campbell (singer, guitarist) 1936-

Don Everly (singer, remaining half of The Everly Brothers) 1937-

Gordon Lightfoot (singer, songwriter) 1938-

Sandy Nelson (drummer) 1938-

Judy Collins (singer, songwriter) 1939-

Sylvia Tyson (singer, songwriter, radio host) 1940-

Ringo Starr (singer, drummer, The Beatles) 1940-

Paul Simon (singer, songwriter, Simon & Garfunkle) 1941-

Buffy Sainte-Marie (singer, songwriter) 1941-

Bob Dylan (singer, songwriter) 1941-

Art Garfunkle (singer) 1941-

Eric Burdon (singer, The Animals) 1941-

Joan Baez (folksinger, activist) 1941-

Felix Cavalieri (singer, keyboards, The Rascals, Joey Dee) 1942-

Paul McCartney (singer, bassist, songwriter, Beatles) 1942-

Paul Jones (singer, Manfred Mann) 1942-

Johnny Rivers (singer) 1942-

Roger McGuinn (singer, guitarist, The Byrds) 1942-

Jim McCarty (drummer, songwriter, The Yardbirds) 1943-

Mick Jagger (singer, songwriter, Rolling Stones) 1943-

Chad Allan (original singer-songwriter Guess Who) 1943-

Joni Mitchell singer, songwriter) 1943-

Robert Lamm (singer, pianist, songwriter, Chicago) 1944-

Roger Daltrey (singer, The Who) 1944-

Ray Davies (singer, songwriter, The Kinks) 1944-

Pete Townshend (singer, guitarist, songwriter, The Who) 1945-

Rod Argent (keyboardist-songwriter, The Zombies) 1945-

Colin Blundstone (singer, The Zombies) 1945-

Eric Clapton (singer, guitarist, Cream) 1945-

Neil Young (singer, guitarist, songwriter) 1945-

Bruce Cockburn (singer, guitarist, songwriter) 1945-

Donovan (singer, songwriter) 1946-

Elton John (singer, pianist, songwriter) 1947-

Burton Cummings (singer, pianist, songwriter Guess Who) 1947-

James Taylor (singer, guitarist, songwriter) 1948-

Billy Joel (singer, pianist, songwriter) 1949-

Janis Ian (singer, songwriter) 1951-

Johnny Clegg (singer, guitarist, songwriter, activist) 1953-

Suzanne Vega (singer, songwriter) 1959-

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As powerful as the desire and drive for peace and civilized experiences are those for The Wild in its many shapes and forms, ranging from gardening to free, intense living and uninhibited natural behaviors.

For many urban dwellers, this desire and drive can be seen in the weekend and vacation getaways, often to the country or wilder locations such as the sea and mountains. The reason many folks own pets is to have that sense of The Wild in their own living rooms with a comfortable/comforting proximity. Dogs represent one kind of ideal of wildness with their responsiveness and interactions with humans. Cats are more ‘primal’ and untameable to varying degrees. (They are their own creatures and definitely a ‘wilder’ species except in the cases of such dogs as pit bulls and others that can lose whatever learned controls.)

Even bird followers and feeders seek that connection with The Wild, sometimes feeding chickadees by hand, for instance. And one thinks also of the frenzy generated in motorists by Rocky Mountain sheep or ducks appearing on a highway or city road.

Wild landscapes seem to evoke strong feelings and active passions in many who go hiking and climbing. Many times there are edges or extremes to these experiences such as in skydiving, hang-gliding, climbing Everest or canoeing the Nahanni. People feel most alive and reconnected with Nature in these more active encounters with The Wild, and closer to Earth, whether on land, in the water, or in the sky. The Wild in its physical exterior forms, then, is an insatiable, recurring part of human experience and desire.

But there are other forms of The Wild as represented by human nature, behaviors and passions. Ofttimes these behaviors ‘break out of the conventional’ to express and fulfill themselves. Something there is, as mentioned above, that wants excitement, drama, depth, and connection with wilder manifestations of human possibilities of experience.
Some of the most interesting forms and variants of The Wild are to be found in the arts–in music, painting, movies, and literature, in particular.

In movies, it can be seen in the ‘human wilds’ or natural chaos depicted by such diverse works as Deliverance, Into the Wild, Apocalypse Now, All Is Lost, Persona, Ran, Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, Cape Fear (1962), Pierrot le Fou, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Dog Day Afternoon, Equus, Badlands, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Mississippi Burning, The Misfits, The Mosquito Coast, Brewster McCloud, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dances with Wolves, Dead Ringers, Crash (2005), The Godfather, A River Runs Through It, La Dolce Vita, Straw Dogs, Walkabout, Wild Strawberries, Zorba the Greek, and Lawrence of Arabia. Often there are psychological dimensions or madness to such edges. Director David Lean perhaps spoke for many of us when he enthused about his Lawrence: “I love nuts.” And so do the masses, especially loving antiheroes, psychopaths, and criminals (to wit, Silence of the Lambs and other films of that disturbing ilk).

Some of the most interesting, ‘wild’ painters have included, first and foremost, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock. People have found beauty and a strange aesthetic or soul satisfaction from their wild, edgy works. For examples of The Wild in music, one need go no further than Beethoven, John Cage, the ’50s avant-garde jazzmen, Jimi Hendrix, or The Who. (In Canada, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn have frequently turned to The Wild, particularly of nature, for their song subject matter.) Regardless of genre, music aficionados have generally sought and welcomed the ‘wilder’, more challenging artists who have pushed the limits of music, reinventing it and us in the process.

And The Wild is to be found in the greatest works of memorable literature: The Odyssey, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Robinson Crusoe, Wuthering Heights, A Tale of Two Cities, Walden, The Return of the Native, War and Peace, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, The Moon and Sixpence, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, A Passage to India, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway, 1984, Lord of the Flies, Suddenly Last Summer, On the Road, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost; and such diverse Canadian titles as “David”, Never Cry Wolf, Who Has Seen the Wind, Beautiful Losers, Wolf Willow, Where Nests the Water Hen, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the poetry of Archibald Lampman and E.J. Pratt, and even those olde animal stories by Grey Owl, Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton.

The Wild, then, is potentially a very broad topic and mode of experience. For many, it superficially has more to do with Nature than people. But as shown above, The Wild runs deep and long through the history of human behavior, culture, and civilization. Like the English Romantic Rebellion of the late 1700s–early 1800s, it rears its head from time to time in history, and still drives much of what still interests or fascinates us about life today: the raw energy, the unconventional enthusiasms, the need for Nature or human nature and their many edges. Our spirits, souls, bodies, and consciousnesses perpetually and repeatedly hunger for The Wild. It goes with the territory of being human, ultimately.

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I will just add that perhaps the supreme forms of The Wild are The Wild as experienced, understood, and appreciated by individual consciousness, and The Wild as experienced by and in the Imagination.

photo credits:                                                                                                             

-“Self-Portrait with Pipe” (Jan. 1889 by van Gogh)                                                 

-cropped close-up of much larger original photo by Roddy McDowall of Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1964 production of Othello                                                                           

-lake scene east of Jasper, Alberta

with the passing today of Farley Mowat.
Still standing: Alice Munro (1931-) (ironically, I had a passing intuition in a restaurant at lunch today that she had passed), Margaret Atwood (1939), and Leonard Cohen (1934-). May these great  three continue to live happily, perform, and create. (postscript: Leonard passed in 2016–greatly missed by the many worldwide.)

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(visual: a typical humorous letter from Mowat to a friend, among my burgeoning collection of CanLit ephemera, soon to be displayed on a new forthcoming weblog devoted to that sort of wonderful stuff)

(Alice’s elusive garden, a gated variant in Victoria–a symbolic id dream of desirable freedom and possible beauty)

Another very basic paradigm one has to be conscious of at whatever stage of one’s life.
The Big Question is “Who has the power and/or control in whatever context or process you are currently experiencing?”

Other corollary questions are: “What are the ends, agendas, or purposes of this power and control?” “How much does the power and control of others over one inhibit, restrict, and otherwise limit one’s ownlife (Orwell’s most important term/concept in 1984) and potential freedom?” “What are my possible choices in the here-and-now?”

*If major goals in life are maximal freedom, liberation and autonomy, then these are the questions which an individual must ask and answer him/herself.*

(minus his scratching and clawing comments)

“We’re all in our private traps.” (with an incidental nod to Psycho screenplay writer Robert Bloch)

True–We all potentially have limits and limitations–which I have spoken of earlier. These are our private traps, frequently non-physical ones, as William Blake described them–“The mind-forg’d manacles” (“London”) or as Sting put it–“These are the soul cages.”

Bates and Marion describe the traps as “born in” or “stepped in”–two common ways of acquiring or inheriting traps. “Born in” might prove to be physical or hereditary. The “stepped in” kind of traps are very common and myriad. They are most often (like Marion’s) the self-created ones. As I have frequently said as far back as my teaching daze, “We do it to ourselves and we do it to one another (sometimes at the same time).” Certainly we do it to ourselves more often than not via attitude. One may not be able to control one’s circumstances or context to one’s own satisfaction, but one can often choose the attitude that one has toward these things. It is our attitude, finally, that defines us as persons and individuals—our deep style, so to speak.

I think in all of this, it is important to remember that nothing is good or bad, as Hamlet pointed out, and only “thinking’ makes it so. For me, this Shakespearean perspective confirms the final arbiter of experience and consciousness as one’s own attitude toward whatever context or problems you care to name. Thus, we ourselves are most responsible for our own potential freedom and liberation. How much we have and are able to access. No one else. Returning then to Bates’ initial comment–to a large extent, our private traps are just that–our private traps, and no one else’s.

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photo credit: portion of the author’s Johnny Clegg t-shirt; original design by South Africa’s Norman Catherine