To thine own self be true

Well, ain’t that the truth? We start young, on the level of grass and Earth. Microcosms and macrocosms opening richly to our alternately awakening/slumbering consciousness. That Wordsworthian closeness to Nature, Blakean Innocence, and a simple direct connection with all the energies of Life and Process. But as Blake pointed out, Urizen–your reason, the rational mind–takes over as up we cummingsest grow. Till all, too often, becomes the limited/limiting, often blind, cold irrationality and “common sense” described by Dickens in Hard Times. Heads so/too far up above the Earth for many a year. Until we are lucky perhaps and recentre/relocate our selves in terms of the Earth per se and rediscover a closeness with Nature, children, and dream, opening ourselves up to the prime/primal energies all over again–more playful, pleasurable, accepting, free, and child-like in spirit, and yes, oh-so much truly wiser and deepened from our long journey back to home.

…………………………………………………

ps/ also applies to head close to The Wild, the air, water, and fire, and something I will eventually write more about, which Aristotle called “quintessence”.

With my grandson Sunday–he wanted to see “Raccoon Nation” again, a program I had recorded on the PVR on spec for him. He likes raccoons–he loves his retro Fisher-Price raccoon pull-toy–but who knew how much? He pointed me to the couch and sat down with the small stuffed raccoon we’d brought him back from Victoria. The raccoon was also going to watch the show with the sound turned down.

And so I started to describe what the show raccoons were doing: “Now he’s coming down the tree. Look he’s crawling into the garage! There’s his face peeking out. Peek-a-boo.”

Of course, he started getting into it, repeating phrases, to make the experience his own. Lifting his raccoon to see the show better, and adding commentary of his own. “Pink” he called out when the night lens showed a pink scene. “”White” when he saw the top of the wall. “Garage” when he later saw it beyond a garbage can. “Mama” when he saw the mother with the babies. “What a mess” he repeated, when they knocked it over. And he even got a little worried when the raccoons started crossing the street with moving cars in the background. It’s a raccoon world out there for my grandson, who wanted me to replay the program after.

Timing–the readiness for new experience, new understandings, new discoveries that truly matter and resonate to a learner. And so the world opens up wide with the readiness to learn. That and Raccoon Nation.

“And many are the dead men too silent to be real”–Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”

Lightfoot speaks of the many nameless workers who gave their lives to forge the Canadian Dream of the 1870s and 1880s which united this country. Like any history, there is the recognition that we arise from the past, from the often-forgotten contributions and efforts of others–the many dead.

I was reminded of this truth, yet again, recently in Victoria. The significance and uniqueness of Emily Carr’s art, the long elegant past of the Empress Hotel, the myriad 1800s houses which are just back of the main drag, the centuries-old Chinese art on display at the art gallery there, the Spencer mansion nicely restored attached to the gallery; and all the ghosts evoked by these places.

The strangest things will likewise evoke the same thoughts. The Miniature World with its many scenes of human history; even the wax museum which exists to stir a connection with the dead via its own attempts at facsimiles and reproduction.

Returning home via plane continued the same line of thought. That portion of the trip started with no plane bayed or in sight, no announcements regarding the delay, and tv screens announcing we were boarding. Curious and playful as ever, I wandered over to the departure desk and asked if we were “virtually boarding” to a puzzled hostess. I pointed beyond her to the screen which announced the same news. She looked and said, “I guess we are.”

Once up in the air, with a third-full plane–some 30 passengers, and tv screens that didn’t work for the free satellite programming, I noticed the profile of the elderly woman sitting across and on the aisle one row ahead. She was in her early 70s, a spitting image of my mother, now seven years gone. Everything about her was the same. Every new gesture or movement proclaimed the uncanny likeness. She fingered her rings the same way. She moved her hand to her mouth the same way. On and on.

She had the same frosted hair, the same sunken areas below the eyes, the same wistful expression, the same greyish eyes, the same size and body shape. She was doing a newspaper crossword, much as my mother used to do the Jumble. She even put on a flashy silver jacket, not unlike the fancy jackets my mother chose to wear. It was hard not to keep looking at her the rest of the flight.

My thoughts were many. Perhaps this was my last flight and she was an omen and escort. I even thought of uttering her name aloud to see just how far the coincidence might go (but didn’t). Amazingly, she had gotten on at Victoria and was headed to the same destination–a city my mother did not like as much as her hometown.

Mysteriously, she vanished ahead of me when we deplaned. There was no sign of her in the terminal or at the baggage pick-up. I concluded that the coincidence was a favorable sign of her continuing presence, perhaps in others and elsewhere. She looked her old self and was much as she always was and had been. Overall, a positive, possible visitation.

I had not thought of my mother for a while, on or just before this trip. There is much of her still in me and around me, by way of photos and artifacts and humorous remembered one-of-a-kind anecdotes. In the midst of life, we are…

Yes, I am also reminded of this each day when I open the delivered newspaper and read of a mother killed by her husband, murders by coworkers who lose it, babies’ obituaries, and so forth. In the midst of life…

In my study, I look around me this morning at the many books written mostly by numerous dead authors. I think about the long-dead great actors and actresses, the deceased giants of art and architecture with whom I share a vicarious affinity–those many geniuses who continue to influence some of us today. I look out the window and see a cat hanging around the bird feeder, and imagine the very real poodle that used to walk around the house. In the midst of….And I think, too, of those I once knew, loved, and enjoyed who are no more except in personal memories.

And yet I do not find any of this particularly troubling or fear, as many do, for their demises–this is just the way it is and has always been as part of the nature of process and life. Instead, I find a strange comfort and familiarity as much as a confirmation. This mysterious fact is simply at the core of our daily lives. It is there for anyone to imagine and explore for whatever meanings and answers one might turn up.

Most of us are hip to change and the eternal ephemeralness of life experience. But there is this much larger perspective that surrounds us and informs us at the same time. The coincidences are there. The mysteries are there. They ‘speak’ to us. And the dead, as always, continue to offer their gifts of self from their own lives and pasts.

Listen. It only takes acceptance, openness, and receptivity to experience the fuller consciousness, understanding, and appreciation these three have to offer.

“It’s your world so live in it.”–Johnny Clegg, “Cruel, Crazy Beautiful World”

There are the wild, sublime places where one can be free and wild in response to a greatness of beauty and spirit, places vastly exceeding a human life, though not those imaginations which roam and search for worlds larger than their own habitually limited ones.

And there are green arcadian worlds with never-ending colour and slow civilized flow where nature and timelessness surround one, where sensibilities can breathe and creative souls can subsume a largeness of slow time and natural peace–a precious harmony of sky, earth, and water.

Both work, satisfy, and soothe deeply, filling inner lives and quenching thirsty spirits. Both are finer, more fulfilling environments for those o’erwhelmed by deadness, winter, and cold–the myriad, perpetual, meaningless, illness-inducing traps.

What was left of his life, his freed innerness, was sustained by alternating experiences and visions of both places. And with his last, latest trip, he never quite came back to that harsh, dead world of monster trucks doing wheelies on his crescent, the unused bike lanes covered in snow, the dumb city sculptures of glassy balls and ugly empty shoes, the empty hospitals set ablaze, the public schools deconstructed in favor of trades training centres, and the brown so-flowerless spring.

Where he now stayed, he could wander the endlessly rich bloomful gardens, ride quiet 1800s back streets in an old-fashioned carriage, sip afternoon tea in stately hotels, hob-nob endlessly till late in homey restaurants with story-full Greek owners, or do his Tai chi on a large private, terraced balcony looking out on a quiet sun-warm morning bay forever. In short, he had entered, permanently and deeply, a world large and hospitable enough for his great soul and infinite imagination.

No, he would never be winterly-limited again. His latest new world would continue to be that free, that beautiful, that real.

(the spirit of South Africa returned to Edmonton Saturday)

“You are the rolling ocean
You are the mighty sea
You are the breath that brings each new day to me
You are what you are, you are
You are what you are, you are
You be what you are.”
–“Rolling Ocean”, Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World

“I’m searching for the spirit of the great heart
To hold and stand me by…
Sometimes I feel that you really know me
Sometimes there’s so much you can show me…
And your life is a story like the wind”
“Great Heart”, In My African Dream: The Best of Johnny Clegg & Savuka

………………..

“Gonna make it through, I can feel it.”                                                                           –“Tough Enough”

Concert post-script–best Clegg show ever. The Spirit of the Great Heart very much intact and soaring. His son Jesse, an established platinum artist, opened with an amazing acoustic set–best opener I’ve ever heard in many years of concert-going. Talked to both at some length afterward. My concert cup runneth over this spring…

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousands of miles away. This responsiveness…was an extraordinary gift of hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

……………………………………………………………………………….

Beacon

He was a light
they had wanted to be
close to, even briefly
in passing.
A certain remoteness
and glow they had
hoped to ‘reel in’
like some precious catch.

In those ephemeral seconds
they had, indeed, connected
or seen a glimpse
of their other possibilities,
their own imagined lives.
They had sensed a music
of the spheres from afar,
the pleasure of presence
and the splashy warmth
of intimacy.

It was all that he was
and had been to
many a passing boat or craft:
a beacon by which to gauge
their own relative depths,
light, desires and love.
Their own best gifts
of self.

(previously published Nov. 12, 2013)

It is in our dreams that we mostly find ourselves and one another.

Then (1871-72) Middlemarch–ending and book conclusion:
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Now (1997) Barney’s Version –the ending, (not the actual conclusion):
“Before his brain began to shrink, Barney Panofsky clung to two cherished beliefs: Life was absurd, and nobody ever truly understands anybody else. Not a comforting philosophy, and one I certainly don’t subscribe to.”

Unconventional individual personal choices abound in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Dorothea refuses to limited by her dead husband’s will and gives up her estate to marry Ladislaw. Ladislaw refuses Bulstrode’s (atonement) money because of the corrupt source, much as Mr. Garth refuses to work for Bulstrode, once he knows his employer’s background. Against his father’s wishes, Fred gives up a shot at the ministry to seek his own fortune close to home. Mary Garth refuses to take the dying Featherstone’s bribe money and does not marry Fred till he can support them. Lydgate, though broke, refuses to ask others for money and ultimately returns Bulstrode’s bribe in connection with Raffles’ death. In spite of his financial and marital setbacks, he continues to pursue his curative dreams.

The many temptations and many limits and limitations of money and materialism in Victorian society and in the Middlemarch town notwithstanding, the best personal choices in the book are not made on the basis of those two factors. Characters make difficult unconventional choices and act on the basis of their own inner needs and values. The book is ultimately about personal integrity.

“Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”–Eliot, Middlemarch

In the end, reading a great novel like Middlemarch or watching a Shakespeare tragedy for the memorable characters we desire to see and deepl/innerly need, we are back to the simple fact of presence–the individual presences of certain characters, much like those of certain people who flit through our essentially flux-full, evanescent lives.

Someone once asked me, Which is the best form of communication? And though one can get nuanced and deep via e-mail or with voice tones on the phone, live in-person presence is still the best and potentially most interesting and memorable mode, the others being mediated in various ways.

Earlier in this blog is a ‘bearings-framework’ piece on Presence and Non-presence, and what I’m taking about now is as easy to understand as those two concepts. If you want a more dramatic example, it is, of course, when someone close dies and is physically removed from one’s life forever. (Or if the non-presence is oneself.)

As well, when one encounters another remarkable person’s presence and consciousness in person, there is also the sensibility (often terribly coarse or sadly surfacely-limited in our time) to be reckoned with. And now we go beyond appearances–and whether we like the eyes, shape, or gait of someone–to talking about the inner or spiritual–which, after all, is what matters more than whatever glandular coupling of the tv-sitcom or online-dating-site variety.

So, the big questions in life become: Who or which people have the most interesting, appealing presences and significant sensibilities? Are they worth the time of day and the effort of getting to know? Do I make room for them for what they have to offer me, via the gifts of self, or do I look elsewhere?

And so the author asks himself on a daily basis, Where are those presences which most interest me? Where are the sensibilities that speak to me, my mind, and soul? And what closenesses or connections might thereby be forged with those persons, processes, and consciousnesses?

In that, appropriately enough, do I find my meanings and purposes this gloomy-looking Easter morn, 2014.