To thine own self be true

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool, sequester’d life,
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.”

“Full many a gem, of purest ray serene,
The dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

(July 2, 2013)

The robin’s rhapsody rebuts
“No, This is it. This is what matters.”
No smartphone sale or
cheap coffee queues today.
Only a 30 plus enhancement
designed by Nature.

Days forever change.
The 100 k winds
will likely come,
flowers flattened in hail,
the continuous sirens
beginning anew.

But for now
cloudless blue and green
for some morning eyes.
A nuthatch yanking
the chickadees back
in eloquent appless song.
I rock perpetually clockless,
left leg crossed by right,
on the garden swing.
A warm and welcome peace.

As elsewhere
mad shoppers fry
their kids and dogs
in furnace-cars
beside the swarming malls:
a phone-y, soulless half-life.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”–speech, Harvard U, Sept. 6, 1943

…………………………….

In response to the ‘in your face’ June 2013 Apple print ads and tv commercials:

Mind control is what it’s all about, baby. Control of the masses’ minds via mass advertising online and everywhere in the world. ‘Buy, buy, buy’ to keep this whole thing goin’. E-brainwashed masses. Digitally-educated masses trained to keep the online world up and running to sell products and agendas. Who needs to think? Thinking for oneself is not to be encouraged or tolerated. Personal autonomy is the corporations’ and advertising’s great foe. (You hurt the economy every time you don’t pick up junk phone calls and every time you exercise your freedom to say “No” after the endless pitches are made. “Thank you, I have other plans.”)

Much of what I have written about the past 10 months has been about personal consciousness and assuming authorship for one’s own life. Everything in the media and in advertising is hellbent on shaping and manipulating people’s autonomy and personal experiences in order to rattle the Orwellian stick in the swill bucket.

More than ever, I believe one has to provide the above sort of information to young people and family about what is transpiring and the behavior and d/e-limits and limitations that are being foisted on new generations. It took a lo-o-ng time to build the best that has been said, thought, and created in Western civilization. Now we are in the hasty process of dismantling it via governmental willy-nilly deconstruction of institutions and large-scale public and societal stability. Call it a limited/limiting relentless obsession to destroy a lot of folks’ lives, health, and well-being in the name of saving bucks. That and the shameless quest to digitize people’s minds to control their behaviors and sell them an endless black-hole of immediately obsolescent e-media products.

We have met the enemies and they are, more than ever, advertising, corporations who could care less about your freedom and dreams, and nasty governments who want to gut health care (e.g., Orwell’s imagine a boot stamping on a human face as in the AB govt’s recent cruel attempts to stomp out supporting society’s disabled) and other working institutions that took hundreds of years to build up. It is time now to look after oneself, one’s family and providing them with the alternate info that governments, advertisers and corporations don’t and never will.                                                     

There are limitless non-d/e ways of feeling, thinking, imagining, creating, and experiencing which don’t depend on dumbed-down masses buying d/e-products. and sitting unhealthily with screen devices. There is air! There is movement! There is Nature! There is endless non-ersatz (as in d/e-mediated) beauty, meaning, engagement, and purpose. Unplug and be gloriously free this summer!

(by closing the text book bureau)

Save money! Let the children play!

“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs”–James Thurber

The connection process. It is that which makes observing my 18-month-young grandson’s journey so interesting. There was one day a couple of months ago that epitomizes that. It was a windy day outside, trees moving outside. He was sitting on the floor playing looking up at the front picture window at all this activity and he started gesturing gently upward with his left arm and hand in response. Then he turned to his right in the direction of the dining room window at the other side of the house, gesturing similarly with his right arm and muttering in his primary language, explaining that what he was seeing was the same thing going on outside two different, separate windows. There even seemed to be an element of quiet awe about this private moment of consciousness.

I have carried him for some time now, during visits, to various light switches and he has enjoyed turning lights on and off. Two weeks ago we were in the living room and I walked around switching on lights and lamps. Each time he said “‘ight”. True, he had previously correctly identified single objects each time he saw them beginning with “dada” and “‘nana” (for bananas), but these two experiences I’ve recounted show something beyond simple identification. He is making connections, even (in the case of the moving trees) connecting movement or process.

I suppose I should also mention his single-time verbalization of “windy” three weeks ago when we had the front door’s window open and he noticed the peacock feathers in the vase being ruffled by the afternoon breeze through the screen.

Making connections–what we spend most of our lives doing whether it be in our learning in school, in our empathy and sympathy with acquired friends, lovers, and mates, in our choice of work and career, in our daily lives whether unfolding online or in our family, neighborhood or community.

In those connections, the emergent information, knowledge, empathy, understandings, appreciations of what passes for life and daily living. In those connections, we discover ourselves, others, nature, and the world. In those connections, we find what engages and interests us, what gives our lives meaning and purpose. We begin and later develop what is inner and personal while connecting with who or what is external and separate from us.

Thus, we begin to see and better understand the basic concept of “‘ight”. The great mythologist Joseph Campbell said “Awe is what moves us forward”, akin to what Clarke wrote and Kubrick visualized in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the moon investigators ponder the mysterious black slab or the Star-Child ponders Earth at the end of that movie–aiming first at some modicum of understanding, and later (re)acquiring connection and wonder all over again.