To thine own self be true

Top improv comedian of all time. Brilliant imagination. He could be or imagine anything, anyone.

I stand here dazzled with my heart in flames at this world of wonders, world of wonders, world of wonders, world of wonders…“

(Bruce Cockburn–Canada’s top folk-singer, folk-songwriter, and folk-guitarist of all time)

beyond the uselessness of rush-hour traffic, meetings, the lies of others, the pretence that one’s job is essential and defines one’s life and the many sacrifices made for a buck. To be owned by the machines, the failing system. The selling of one’s soul and spirit daily. The inner dying inside for an illusion of importance and purpose.

As I have said elsewhere, I have never regretted retiring early at 52 and having this much freedom since. It has been most me–what most of my life has been about–being my own person, being true to myself.

Ten things are necessary for daily living: freedom, family, civilized moments of being, curiosity, humor, music, good conversation, the experience of beauty, true sensibility, and always having something to look forward to.

The rest of it–the consuming ‘sold-out’ digital life, wars, violence, portfolios, hypocrisy, cynicism, corruption, phone solicitations, advertising, fame and celebrity obsession, cruelty, barbarism, dumbing down, care-less government, declining social systems–is off my radar.

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.–Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

is easily the most limited and limiting factor in people’s lives. No fear is worse than irrational, ego-based, self-imposed fear.

“A man can do all things if he will.”–Leon Battisa Alberti (as demonstrated by Roger Ebert’s life after his jaw replacement and Beethoven’s amazing works after his deafness set in)

You ask for the dream
like a child
set on ice-cream
at a Saturday circus

You yearn for
old calendars, broken clocks
and promise to keep
your corner clear of webs

You want to retell
your famous life-story
to poets and editors:
recorders of time

But most of all
you ache inside
for the touch of
someone else

nestled close
beside you
breath warm
along your hair

whispering
dark wishes
in the still nights
of your room

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In time for spring. There are many, many dreams. But if there is one common one, one that a lot of people would be missing and want, then this is likely it. The desire to be really, truly close to one other person. To be known and to fully know that person. And the end to nightly loneliness and alienation. A deep, profound connection.

And then there are the best moments, the magical ones, when dream and reality fuse and one cannot tell the one from the other, when dreams do, indeed, come true for a period of time. All suddenly becomes wildly and crazily possible.

These moments emerge materialize suddenly, intuitively, beautifully, infusing life with great unexpected meaning and purpose. They just happen.

So, dreams do sometimes come true and assume a real tangible form with great clarity and wisdom. They are what they are, though brief and quite remarkable, apart from the rest of life experience.

True moments of being with the sublimer freedom of/for two. And the best exchange of mutual gifts of self.

In all of that, Love.

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

“And then–I introduce them to Harvey. And he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And–when they leave, they leave impressed.”                                             

“Ah–well, some people are blind. That’s very often brought to my attention.”                    -Elwood P. Dowd (in Mary Chase’s comedy Harvey, about an imaginary 6 foot high white rabbit)                                                                                                                        

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I was about seven years-old and waking up Easter morning, wondering aloud if the Easter bunny had come overnight and my mother, standing by the window, said “There he goes.”

I rushed to the window hoping to catch a glimpse, but saw nothing. “What did he look like?”

“Oh he was brown and running very fast with a basket.”

No, it was not very hard to conjure up a corresponding image. But perhaps that’s just me in the long run. A dreamer. A romantic. An idealist. Wanting and preferring the dream. In that case, instead of the usual 50’s poverty and underlying, occasionally unstable home-life.

My dreams, my Harveys were never hard to imagine. As an only child, I often played by myself and had to make my own fun. Fortunately, I did not have a shortage of imagination. Whether I put a small piece dropped Christmas tree branch in the snow and pretended it was a forest, or ran about with an inverted hockey stick, making believe I was Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Cooper’s tales of a romantic, idealized American frontier past.

Everything else sort of fitted in whether it was the Classics Illustrated comics I collected or the dreamy love-songs on the 45s I began collecting about age 10. Not surprisingly, in high school, I later fell for the romance of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I slipped into music and played two leads in my final year of high school–in a play and an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan. Sometimes, I’ve found, you get caught in dreams–sometimes your own, sometimes others’.

Along the long adult way, I’ve generated many of my own–leading and starting up a number of bands, writing a number of books, and through my teaching–often of many old romantic favorites–turning on unsuspecting new generations to the many possibilities of dream and romance itself. I even had a colleague once invite me into her class to explain to her students why and how Gatsby was great. For another colleague, I read Robert Frost’s poems, enthused about nature in the fall, and showed them pictures of various Frost places I had visited in New England.

Very late in my teaching career, around age 40, a new support staff member gushed to me one day suddenly, “Why you’re a dreamer!” And I thought to myself, I guess you’re right. and I thought of how there was absolutely nothing wrong about that and that she was the first person in my long life who had really spotted that and articulated that to me.

Dream has been and continues to be very necessary and core to my life. Last week I went to an excellent production of Shaw’s St. Joan–a play I had never seen performed. I still enjoy live theatre and the wonder of make-believe in whatever form of the arts. Anyway, this morning all over again, I realize why I identified with her character. A dreamer, an outsider, an idealist. Somewhat naive, of course, and destined for that recurring inevitability–the crash with reality, like Richard Stine’s cartoon of the romantic somewhat blindly and blithely about to fall into a reality pit of vicious-looking hungry beasts. That tenuous–the dreams and life of a dreamer, a romantic–capital R in my case.

Elsewhere in this blog, I have spoken about sensibility–a word close to others: senses, sensual, sensuous, and sensitive. (Romantic poet John Keats wrote “O for a life of sensations!” and e.e. cummings proclaimed “since feeling is first”. Indeed.) There are many practical, prosaic types who will always dump on dreams, illusions, ideals, romance, the naive, romantics, and dreamers. That is just the way this somewhat harsh, indifferent and intolerant world can often be. Ask St. Joan.

But in many ways, dream is the best that we can imagine and finally be or become. As much as that boy-of-old’s easily conjurable fantasy of an Easter bunny (or Santa Claus) who offers gifts of self and gives hopes to one and all, even to William Blake’s chimney sweeper and Dickens’ Tiny Tim.

Yes, that much dream. That much empathy and connection. And that much hope and belief in a happy-best-possible despite mean and often limited/limiting others.
………………………..

Soon off to see the parks, gardens, blooming cherry blossoms, and shorelines of Vancouver. Turns out spring in the soul, spirit, and sensibility is always a physical reality somewhere…

Teach me half the gladness/That thy brain must know;/Such harmonious madness/From my lips would flow,/The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”                                                        

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “To a Skylark”

(BTW/ highly recommended–the current run of Shaw’s St. Joan at Studio Theatre directed by 30-year-director Micheline Chevrier.)

Joan is very much a reminder of what was possible for remarkable young women of the 1400s, as well as the limits and limitations that brought her downfall and death. She was, in many ways, a ‘modern woman’ dressing in men’s attire and cutting her hair in a man’s style (c.f. Ellen) though those descriptive terms are more in flux these daze. Where there are acceptance and tolerance today, such was not possible for ‘male-looking’ women in those limited/limiting times from a gender point of view. (The director of this production makes this point by somewhat boldly and successfully casting her young actresses in male roles. This serves to remind us of how much the times have changed and removes/counter-argues some of the objections of authority figures in the play.)

Of Joan’s madness, well, today she might have her own religious tv show and followers. Or she might be medicated as schizophrenics (who hear voices) are today, thereby allowing her to move about freely in the world and nature she loved, instead of being locked up for the rest of her life–the threat made by the church in the play.

All this within the longer historical context of the recent Pope’s installation and no change so far on the policy of no women in the Catholic priesthood–a sore point, no doubt, for many female believers. So much for equal rights. True, Joan might have become an earnest nun today, by default, perhaps, though one on medication, if she got too publicly embarrassing or ‘big for her britches’.

But Shaw’s play is also about those saints and geniuses who take public oaths seriously and how these reflect their own deep personal beliefs and consciences, to say nothing of their consciousnesses. It is on those bases that these unique, inspiring individuals usually run into opposition with the laws and interests of whatever country and time, and the mostly (Shaw suggests) ordinary folk who’d only too happily choose to witness whatever resultant fall and public pillorying.

Are people less ignorant today in our increasingly e-dominated, dumbed-down, greedy, selfish, materialistic society? Oh, maybe she’d have her Twitter and Facebook followers and ‘friends’, and less privacy than a private religious trial in France of the 1400s. But there would also be a lot of enemies and just plain indifferent folks out there who’d still tune in to see her burn on the six o’clock news.

There are also those out there who don’t have much use for rebels and people who ‘rock the boat’ (cf., the Alberta and Canadian governments), who don’t line up and take oaths of secret loyalty promising never to expose or embarrass those who rule. Whistle blowers, true mavericks, and others who speak the truths of their own personal and inner experiences are generally still not welcome in places of power. No, Joan would most likely still be called mad today and hastily removed. She would be very distracting–a reminder of the possibilities, power, and influence of the passionate individual. Someone many women today would have no problem identifying with.

In heavily chauvinistic times, female troublemakers were more easily disposed of back then. And like JFK, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and a host of other outspoken individuals from his/herstory, gotten rid of when their ‘usefulness’ became ‘inconvenient’ to others and their evil, selfish, political and personal agendas. Notwithstanding the conflictful context she lived in and her belated vindication by the church, St. Joan remains, more importantly, a reminder of the terrible limits and limitations of less inspired individuals and of mundane society, as well as the insensitive harm both inflict upon the true, beautiful, honest, innocent, and good.

(from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)

-Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

-Serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.

-Syntactic masonry is already a dying art.

-We can define imagination as the power to conceive and deploy representations, to combine elements–images, sounds, words–into coherent patterns.

-What you start with are pattern-making impulses of imagination.

-The technologies are spoilers.

-Turning our backs on the full sensory business of living, we have installed another-proxy-world between ourselves and that original place.

-The dollar is betting, as it always does, against the soul. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public.

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This is a very important, insightful book on reading and e-mediated experience. Birkerts contends that the saturating, virtual-based e-mediated experience erodes live in-person human presence, actual primary human experience, and the basic authority of the individual. Young contemporary e-based users have a fragmented sense of time rather than a big picture-greater context sense of history, tradition, and cumulative organic process. They have little sense of the possibility of a comprehensible unified whole and no informed sense of either a personal or collective future. With little sense of underlying patterns or structure, they see the world as basically relative.

They have a reduced attention span and, impatiently, are increasingly unable to experience natural empathy or to do sustained inquiry.  They engage in limited/limiting shallow, glib, cliched unrealistic entertainments and shun deeper analysis and critical thinking. Their language tends to be dumbed-down literal plainspeak; vertical engagements involving  the use of discourse, irony, ambiguity, paradox, wit, figurative language, metaphors, depth and meaning (via reading, books, the arts) are too difficult for many.. Overall, they choose the habitual collective e-hive over true autonomy and independence.

Re. the two different modes and paradigms, our society is turning its back on the primary world and the primary (individual) imagination as well as the fundamental durational and biological rhythms of natural process. We are losing the assumption of underlying coherence and wisdom (which is an understanding of the underlying laws and patterns of human experience).                                                                            

The e-mediated world is also an unnatural proxy world which short-circuits the pattern-making impulses of primary imagination, bestowing, instead, autonomy and authority to gadgets. Because human experience is increasingly fundamentally e-mediated, humans increasingly do not know each other via/as immediate presence. Old concepts such as truth, soul, and destiny are likewise becoming meaningless. The e-habit “distances the self from the primary things that give meaning and purpose to life. We are cut off from beauty, from love, from true passion, and from the spiritual.”

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Personally, I think we are seeing a corresponding decline in what used to be called sensibility. Sensibility is a key construct which people once were more interested in cultivating and developing. As Birkerts describes it, it is, on one level, a range of fine feelings and ability to make distinctions (whether moral or aesthetic, etc.). On another, it is a refinement or cultivation of presence (what one essentially is and could be). On yet another, it is the part of inner life that is not given, but fashioned. On still another, sensibility means a coherent inwardness. For my own part, I believe that sensibility embodies the possibilities of /for resonance, integrity, and appreciation of such ‘old school’ things as gentleness, greatness, order, wisdom, romance, love, truth, beauty, soul, and the arts.

Yeats in “The Second Coming” talked of the centre not holding, which we can easily see in a variety of external, contemporary, historical situations. I believe, too, it is the autonomy of the individual and his/her sensibility that is the current (inner) centre under siege. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and others to wilfully maintain and develop our inner centres, our autonomies, and our sensibilities. These are truly civilizing and stabilizing aspects that keep us from resembling the uncentered, Caliban-like “rough beast” that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born in Yeats’ great poem.

“Live from your own centre.”--Joseph Campbell

“O for a life of sensations!”–John Keats

E-communication (whether by phone or computer) can certainly be very powerful, intimate, and connective, though like most things, it has its limits and limitations. I will say that–as evidenced in/by this blog–words, feelings, and ideas can all be communicated and shared easily and effectively, and that–given the potential perpetuity of a long-term maintained blog–there is definitely a certain permanence and illusion of immortality to the e-media process. And there are benefits to the instantaneous 24/7 convenience of e-mail.

But, my personal preference for communication, expression, performance, and creativity remains live in-person presence–a far more ‘electric’/dynamic mode for exchanging and sharing information (broadly speaking). If you want to really get close to someone (and vice-versa) and get to know them fully and intimately, that is still the most fun, real, meaningful, and significant way to truly and beautifully connect. That is where souls and spirits meet, commune, and connect.

There is also a palpable physicality and innerly-experienced emotionality that can never be duplicated by and will never be replaced by e-media. What matters, still, most in the lives and experiences of human beings is live in-person presence as experienced by the inner self or soul. It is there you will find a reality, truth, richness, depth, completeness, and beauty that blogs, e-mails, and phone calls never do full justice to.

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one more perspective:

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

(But touch-screens are a poor substitute for the real thing. Besides which, technology will never love you.)