To thine own self be true

Imagination, empathy, kindness, and natural, easy closeness and warm intimacy. No masks, egos, or withholding. The acceptance, letting go, and sharing of true inner selves. Living in and for each other. All levels open–only freedom, mutual flow, and limitless possibilities.

Glasses cleaning cloths and glasses case. I spent a lot of Saturday afternoons with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Roadrunner and the Coyote. They have stayed with me longer than any other cartoon characters–Mickey excepted. The great Mel Blanc voices and Chuck Jones artwork–second-to-none for wit, situational humor, plots, and take-offs.

1955 paperback edition, flatsigned by Arthur Miller (received today–full moon Valentine’s Day 2014). The modern play I  taught in English 30 (gr. 12), most years going back to my student teaching round in 1971-72. Most recently, the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman starred as Willy and got good reviews. The 2012 Citadel production of this play was the best I’ve ever seen with a strong Linda. Students used to enjoy reading this one aloud despite its datedness. Many powerful scenes and significant quotations. I have found many of Miller’s ideas from his essays and interviews still speak to our times and common human problems. He was quite the thinker and intellectual. Very honest, always truthful.

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“I think women need kindness more than love. When one human being is kind to another, it’s a very deep matter.”
–Alice Childress, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights

“Love between women is seen as a paradigm in love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.”
–Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth and Meaning

“”Love interferes with the fidelities.”
–Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher

“Love in itself she felt should be like the creation of a succession of works of art.”
–Hayashi Fumiko, “Lady Chrysanthemum”

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”
–Dorothy Parker, quoted in While Rome Burns

“Marriage: a souvenir of love.”
–Helen Rowland, Reflections of a Bachelor Girl

“If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.”
–Marie Dressler, My Own Story

“There is nothing ridiculous in love.”
–Olive Schreiner, “The Buddhist Priest’s Wife”

“When my self is not with you, it is nowhere.”
–Heloise, Letter to Peter Abelard

“Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.”
–Jean Anouilh

“For if a man should dream of heaven and, waking, find within his hand a flower as token that he had really been there–what then, what then?”
–Thomas Wolfe

“Touch is the meaning of being human.”
–Andrea Dworkin

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air round him. She had become a physical necessity.”
–George Orwell, 1984

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
–William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Love sought is good, but given unsought better.”
–William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.”
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

“We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and love as we are to die.”
–R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
–Oscar Wilde

“To refuse the call means stagnation.”
–Joseph Campbell

“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”
–Denis Diderot

“Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.”
–Marlene Dietrich

“Touch is the landscape of what is possible.”
–Kate Green

“Love seeketh not itself to please.”
–William Blake, “The Clod and the Pebble”

“You can never step in the same river twice.”
“All is flux, nothing stays still.”

Our modern preoccupation with process and processes owes a great debt to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (600-540 B.C.?) He was absolutely correct–nothing stays the same; everything changes over time–be it a human being, a pet, a building, a natural scene, a work of art. Everything is subject to change and, over time, dissolution. The moment, the mood, the thing, being, or place will be changed in seconds, again and again, and so forth. It will not be there forever, let alone seconds, months, days, months, years, decades or centuries from now. Time and its passing implies change and process; process implies our notion of time in its various forms experienced–clock time, mental time, etc. We are forever finding ourselves in various contexts experiencing one process or another. Usually, process implies a duration or portion of process.

There is also an inevitability of process or processes, regardless of how small or how large. To live, to be born, to grow, to decline are all given, inevitable aspects of process. Consciousness is also very much related to process–where one is or is situated in a given process. And so we are relatively aware or unaware of where a process has come from or where it is going, or where we are at any given moment in Heraclitus’s river. We can only be sure that all we see and experience is a part of process and processes, that everything will change (including us), and that there will always be process and processes as the fundamental part of human lives and experience as well as in nature, societies, cultures, and any individual or socially experienced life.

From a Heraclitian perspective, windows, doors, and opportunities become significant; they simply will not necessarily be there to choose later. They will disappear, dissipate, or crumble. Much like those precious personal moments of being or becoming experienced alone or with others. They, too, like everyone, like everything shall change or pass.

As an orientation and the beginnings of consciousness, a basic understanding of process brings one closer to understanding the ephemeralness of life, experience, and anything seemingly permanent. In the end, nothing lasts and everyone or everything changes. The flow itself–the central underlying one- is simply called process. As process, flow subsumes chi, movement, change, and never stops.

“Everything flows and nothing stays.”

Fact. Basic fact, orientation, and world-view. “Process” was not invented in the twentieth century nor today. Nay. It was introduced by an ancient with a lot of common sense and observation who simply knew how things really are and how they go everywhere for everybody and everything for all time.

Yes, Heraclitus=Process and vice-versa. Who’da thunk?

…………………………….

An astute friend extrapolates below with regard to viewer and reader demonstrating the nuances and depths implied by the processes of viewing and reading experiences:

Your “(including us)” is a whole lot more than a simple throw-away statement.  When we repeat any process – view a painting for a second time – the effect of that painting on us will not be the same because we have changed since the first time we saw it.  Seeing it the first time had an effect on us, no matter how great or how small, and so it changed us.  Because we are now no longer the same person who viewed it the first time, it’s effect on us in our second viewing will be different: the process is different.

It’s [Louise] Rosenblatt’s “poem” metaphor – the text and the reader interact to create a “poem.”  And when they interact a second time, and a third, though the text remains the same in each case, the reader is not, and so the resulting poem is no longer the same.  The basis of her response theory.

And recurringly, a great self-actualization and effortless transcendence via language, imagination, curiosity, freedom, and leisure.

(my earliest expression for ‘breakfast’)

The morning paper delivered to the door. And Chilean blueberries and Ecuador bananas on cereal. Thus, the world comes to me despite the bleak local weather.

Looking back as an only child of poor working-class parents, I was left, largely, to play on my own with few toys, to make up my own fun, play, and worlds. My imagination started early from being left with an old radio to entertain me whenever my mother ‘stepped out’. Voices, music–all ‘got in me’ then. My mother remembered me running into the house whenever favorite ’50s songs came on the radio. Anyway, this has much to say about why and how I became attracted to popular music at a very young age. The creative expression of music part publicly lasted from grade 10 to 2003. A singer, a songwriter, a guitarist, always a band leader.

Likewise, without toys, I was left to make my own–6 or 7ish pretending hockey sticks were James Fenimore Cooper rifles, for instance. Classics Illustrated comics (I now own a copy of each one–most I never saw when young) were my first main reading and ‘story’ got into me there, inspiring various approaches, tones, values, and behaviors. All hemisphere crossings, no question.

Whatever stirred my initial imagination became ‘large’. My private world was inhabited with various characters I would play myself, sometimes with a pickup or passing friend or my dog. It was a free and glorious time. I made it all up as I went. There were only people and things to be curious about. With both parents working or away, I was free to look after myself (a latchkey kid all through school) and play pretty much through high school as well, as my marks then will attest.

Looking back, I see though that the possibilities for expanded thought and experience came mainly by that insatiable curiosity and my primal, unfettered imagination–key qualities I still have today. Those qualities blossomed even more in the luxury of 5 heavily book-based university years (education was instrumental in setting up a career the next 30 years in teaching). Though music would continue to be a sideline (performing for thousands and making not-bad money too) until 2003, it was specialized reading (literature) which fired the imagination, passion, and desire to share the gifts of lit, culminating in teaching.

I was and have been very lucky further with the hemisphere transition into creative expression via writing, including books, poetry, and a blog. My books have sold over a million copies. Not bad for a poor working-class only child.

And so the hemisphere crossings continue, what with the finding a comfort zone for innumerable topics and depths on these blog pages, and the grandfather experiences, connecting with a young version of myself and son, my childhood, my son’s childhood, and how we learn, grow, and develop–educationally speaking–from the beginnings to my own advancing age.

My life has been one of constant growth and adaptation. It has Largely been an inner one I once shared more in person with others and the rest of society. It was an inner life which has always sustained me and made me what I essentially am today–very autonomous and my own more-than-integrated person. In many ways, the hemispheric crossings have been the most fun, the most pleasurable of all. ”

Tothineownselfbetrue.ca’ is a record of all those defining moments of being and becoming, my character, and values.

Have I said before that I have been a lucky man?

……………………………………………                                                                                     An abundance of freedom and leisure (in childhood, after school, in university, via school leaves, and finally during 12 years of retirement) also played a great formative role as well. One needs time and no bosses to think, grow, change, imagine, create, write, or perform.

“crossing hemispheres’–with a thank-you to a good friend-collaborator and Jane Healy’s educational classic Endangered Minds

(“Glad Am I”–selfie signed sketch by and of Dean-o, alias Daddio in Spiritus)

Remembering Dean Morrison McKenzie (June 15, 1940-Feb. 4, 2013)                        We will not meet his like and greatness again.

“My friend, your gloomy song must end.”–Dean, “Chinook”

“Personally, broadly, and imaginatively speaking, what are the possibilities for me today? the future?”

“I dwell in possibility.”–Emily Dickinson

“A man can do all things if he will.”–Leon Battista Alberti