To thine own self be true

and even more irrelevant nude cyclists to meet the Pope. Coarse, dumb-ass politicking Alberta-style.

(as presented by critic Elizabeth Drew):

“Life never builds itself into the convenient symmetry of a plot. Life is the quality of the immediate present as we live it from moment to moment. Experience is made from the silt of innumerable moments of consciousness, fusing the present with memories of the past; blending thought and action and sensation; expanding into the widest contemplation of the human situation in its universal aspects or contracting into the observation of some small objects around us, or into fragments of talk, gestures, some fleeting association. It’s all discontinuous, inconclusive, fugitive, flickering. This, at last, is life!”

(previously posted on September 14, 2016)

I think Dickens got it right with the original short, ‘sad’ ending. Much there is in the book before that, that supports an unhappy ending. Both Pip and Estella were both so used and damaged that a happy ending does not fit the greater context, tone, atmosphere, and characterization.

I used to like the longer, happy, revised ending back at Satis House with no shadow leaving the couple as they walk off into the ‘Casablanca’ mists, but it’s just a little too hackneyed, clichéd, and Pollyanaish to think that the two different conflicted characters could ever find true love and happiness after all was said and done. (I used to believe more in miracles and that love could overcome all, but I’m too much of a realist these daze, I’m afraid.)

So the second/final/happier ending is possible if ‘anything is possible’, but not as likely as reality and what Dickens intended. Definitely a case of Kerouac’s “First thought, best thought” methinks. As he rewrote the ending, it was an obvious case of giving Wilkie Collins and the people ‘what they want’ and limitedly/Victorianly-preferred.

I think that the two endings are unnecessary in any case. The book should have stopped with Pip finding Joe and Biddy happily married. There’s your real happy ending for two good, deserving characters and just deserts for the proud, ignorant, hesitant, blind Pip. As much as Estella and Drummle deserved one another; on a par with leaving Pip a sadder, but wiser man. Period. The End.

sleeping (leaving shorter days), preparing food and eating ( 3x a day; in the olde days they had to spend a lot of time finding and growing food daily), and ‘going to the bathroom’. They also had to have a shelter to sleep in and spent a lot of time building or securing shelters from the elements.

For women, often, there were the additional challenges of childbirth, cooking, ‘spinning’ (making clothes), cleaning, etc.

Men, traditionally, were the hunters and warriors–the ones who went to work and often had to fight or kill to survive and ‘bring home the bacon’.

In short, most of people’s days, historically, were focused on survival and necessities. People had little time to think and reflect upon themselves and their lives in terms of possibilities.

[Which is why it is amazing what humans accomplished building such structures as the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the innumerable European castles and churches despite small populations and plagues.]

No question that technology (beginning with the Industrial Revolution) which started making inroads in the late 1700s-early 1800s led to more leisure time as well as new challenges.

Things speeded up considerably into the world wars and a more general consensus for global peace until recently.

People suddenly had more time to think and improve themselves (especially for women in the West). Education mattered and was viewed by many as a ticket into professions, hifalutin things, and fewer limitations from physical/’grunt’/menial work and jobs.

Today the technology has basically taken over and is widely viewed as flawless while Nature and the planet fall apart from neglect and abuse. There is no longer a sense of reverence for the planet backed by significant political action.

Whatever ‘thinking’ that goes on tends to be shallow, frivolous, and irrational leading to a gridlocked world of limited agendas that people want to impose on others and what’s left of all the freedoms of old.

Individual license has become more important than real individual freedom and autonomy.

There is, generally, a turning of backs on history and past culture: Western civilization and its many benefits hard-earned in twentieth century. That and on progress and many positive values and virtues including objective truth and facts, justice, and beauty.

The latter has been replaced with an uncouth crassness and coarseness bottom-lined by commercialism and advertising. Everything, including education, health care, and politics cater/crater to the lowest common denominator. We no longer have respected authorities or well-working institutions.

What we are witnessing via events in the U.S. and conservative agendas is a shift to dictatorships, massive shortages, social chaos, and irrational unrealities that suppress possibilities for freedom, sanity, fairness, and creativity.

A profound shift, indeed, in values, beliefs, literacy, and social and political order.

In short, we are living in a serious decline of Western civilization and all the fruits and benefits of it that the 20th century had achieved. It is an age of suppression and idiot leaders. An age with few helping hands and exploited peoples everywhere globally.

Amelioration will begin at the individual level with people surviving Screwball Central, developing their various coping and growth mechanisms, building positive relationships and connections, and preserving the best of past Western civilization and cultures.

It all starts from within, first, as it did so long ago with the Homers, Platos, Shakespeares, Michelangelos, Newtons, Einsteins, Gandhis, MLKs, Terry Foxes, et al–the motivated geniuses who evolved from the chaotic ‘woodwork’, who moved the world forward by their examples; who gave us higher ideals and visions of the world we’d rather live in.

As Browning said ” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”

the power and value of things and place.” (RD)

Had the grandsons over yesterday for their first visit here in 2 1/2 years. I knew, in advance, that this would be a powerful experience, their returning to our house and yard to rediscover missing pieces–reclaiming and reliving a past that was once a happy, familiar haven once every week or two weeks before the pandemic started.

I gave each (7 and 10) a tour of every room in the house which they thoroughly enjoyed, recalling where they had played, things that had happened and remembered plus acquiring new information to questions they asked.

Based on my own past, I recall well what it felt like to return to old places years later and the kinds of mental, emotional, and spiritual connections that occur.

As for things, there is nothing quite like reconnecting with objects that once gave one pleasure, especially pieces of childhood experience, whether via toys or activities involving things. (Think Rosebud in Citizen Kane.) We are all moved by certain images that evoke happy/happier/missed/missing times.

There is nothing like playing bird sounds from an audible bird book or playing a metallophone. Or seeing a picture on a big bed where you once slept. Sensations suddenly and memorably re-lived.

Things–too often the once-precious, meaningful things given away, disparagingly and casually disposed of, or thoughtlessly sold in a garage sale. Too often what we fill our lives up to enrich our imagined needs or compensate or refill our inner hollows or spiritual selves. Each to each, no accounting for taste, eh?

But ‘mere’ things have long been the precious bits and artifacts of who we are and what we, each, truly treasure. Later in life with the passage of time, we can still have feelings holding a favorite stuffed, named companion or looking at pictures of a favorite childhood book. One of those great possibilities in life.

Yesterday, I watched what Helen Keller called “The thrill of returning consciousness” as Anne Sullivan pumped water over her hands and she suddenly connected that sensation with the word she had long spelled: w-a-t-e-r.

And there were the boys, each rediscovering the joys of their previous times playing and staying here at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. Things, places, and live in-person hands-on experience relived deeply and profoundly.

Never discount the palpable, significant, necessary power and value of oft-taken-for-granted things and place. As well as the many connections and personal meanings that are automatically and magically generated in the thoroughly engaging, energizing process.

(…To say nothing of photographs–memories of otherwise transient, ephemeral moments of being or becoming involving things and place)

Where have we all seen this before?

The last paragraph of Orwell’s 1984:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

A brilliant, perfectly-timed stroke of shameless genius, Justin trumped Kenney’s nothing- burger Alberta Day announcement ( a pseudo-holiday without time off from work)–another shameless attempt to curry favor with Albertans and to ‘immortalize’ himself’.

Even before the next trucker convoy from the West could arrive, Justin surreptitiously dropped hush-money-hundreds into AB, SK, and MB bank accounts (as well as in his home base’s accounts–ON, but not in Quebec’s or the Atlantic provinces’–where he can do no wrong, nor in BC–where all those Lotus-eaters in La-la Land are already onboard with long-term eco protests and stand-offs). Certainly he need not drop any more dough for natives after the no-strings-attached billions spent or pledged unto eternity.

Me smells a fall election in the offing, as millions of Westerners (though not the brainwashed harcorest freedom fighters) now will stop throwing stones at T2. Who, in their unkindest, ungrateful minds, would even consider voting against our national hero-saviour, and, instead,  for Trumpian Poilievre, King of the Convoys and Supporter of the Destruction of Ottawa? (Recall, in the dauphin’s past, too, him also deserving credit for saving our government and Ottawa earlier this year.)

I, for one, have learned my lesson well,–my gin-scented tears falling profusely from my eyes Friday afternoon–as I  realized deeply the error of my ways with four hundred plus smackers magically in my bank account (where are the Kenny rebates?), and this merely 1 of 4 promised Trudeaubucks installments. O frabjous joy! Callooh Callay!

Now, I know, I am deeply loved and appreciated for my silence over carbon tax and despite my myriad salvos during his undeserved rule up to the Ottawa attack). I, too, had been bought off like so many others during the pandemic debacle. But now I, too, have come to love T2 and the brand-new Dumb and Dumber haircut.

I shall start voting Liberal in future elections. My conversion is complete; I have experienced a total epiphany of consciousness. Better late than never, I suppose.

In the words of the immortal Dickens and Sid the Kid Carton, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” 

for the heatwave in Edmonton this weekend!

Hot temps and high humidity.

Stay in the sun to avoid the Sohi mosquitoes.

AC turned on in the house most of the daytime.

the next morning, 6:30 a.m.

another signature poem by William Wordsworth.

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

………………………

There are moments and days when one realizes that there is much that is of value and healthfulness in Nature–the restorative and healing spiritual powers that the English Romantic poets imagined and experienced in/within Nature. Wordsworth’s best poems exemplify the essence of this wisdom.

Nature is a great companion and teacher and book learning/scholarly pursuits, like everything else, have their limits. We can ‘reason ourselves out of life’ and thinking can get in the way of an honest, open response to the natural world around us, alienating us–something Wordsworth wrote concisely about in “The World Is Too Much with Us”.

Excess of ego/analysis can destroy whatever we come into contact with: “Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things”. There are limits, too, to what the worlds of Science and the Arts can offer to us. Perhaps these are too rational, too ‘second-hand’ to what Nature offers in abundance and without limits.

Far more important is having an open heart to receive what Nature and the greater world offers far from the “barren leaves” of book learning and academic pursuits. For anyone too serious and overly-engaged with human agendas and conflicts, Wordsworth’s poem is a brilliant tonic, an invitation to live life more wholly.