Tuesday, March 12, 2019
4:20 a.m. A somewhat industrious day yesterday, preparing two more blog posts. So, decks cleared for a chat. You’re up, guys.
No specific questions you wish to address?
Can’t say that I have. I suppose I could think of one. Would you prefer that?
It would indicate a focus.
All right. Let’s see. Is this blogging about Egypt going to interfere with my getting to the work you want me to do?
We would scarcely be encouraging it, if it would. It all flows together. The important thing is how you put it together.
Say some more about that?
You – the person in 3D – is the focus for the forces flowing through you in your life. You are not responsible for what the winds or currents are, but you are responsible for how they are channeled, shaped, dealt with by your 3D decisions. 3D is focus if it is anything.
Yes, I see.
You woke up thinking of Hemingway and his abandoned earlier version of To Have and Have Not. You can see that his decision was a 3D decision, however the forces running through him may have been channeled.
I don’t even know if it is true, but I think I read somewhere that his great revolutionary novel set in the Keys and in Cuba was a monument to the futility of revolutionary politics, but before he could polish and publish it, [Martha] Gellhorn and [Spanish rebel general Francisco] Franco came into his life, and changed his politics, and made him unwilling to add his weight to the scale on the side of not resisting the fascist dictators. I have been toying with the idea of going up to the JFK Museum’s Hemingway room to read the manuscript for myself, if it exists. They won’t let it be copied or published. And Papa says it is so, and I am afraid maybe I am “hearing” something from him that is entirely untrue. So, it is worrisome.
And now that you are willing to fly again, after ten years, you could go find out.
I could.
The point is that, suppose the story is true. Let’s take it as true if only for the sake of example. In such case, you’d see that various political currents swirled by, and through, Hemingway in his vigorous thirties. On the one hand, his long-held conviction that war is evil, that politics is a dead-end path, that salvation is individual, not to be found in groups. On the other hand, his equally long-held conviction that fascism is a lie told by bullies, that the powers that be had been planning a new war for some time, that this time the US should stay out of it and yet that the fascists had to be defeated. Depending upon his choice among the ideas he was swimming among, his finite 3D self would channel the current to maximize one strain and minimize the other. Neither was absolutely right or wrong, neither came free.
And then came Martha Gellhorn and her admiration and her long legs and her temptation, to which he was only too willing to succumb. Gellhorn, who as far as I can see never saw more than one side to any political issue in her life.
But it was still his choice.
And I think he sort of knew that it was a form of truncation to throw himself into a political cause, no matter how right the cause.
As we say, no choice is entirely right, nor doss any choice come free.
I may go up there, this summer, see for myself. I wouldn’t mind seeing Jack Kennedy’s library anyway, though a memorial is no substitute for the man himself.
Don’t be too sure. Consider what being in Egypt’s place, if you couldn’t be in the ancient time-place, has done to your consciousness.
Time for a pilgrimage, maybe?
We throw up the possibility. And we name it not for you alone, you understand.
Interesting. That it?
For the moment.
Okay, thanks. I have several previous chats to transcribe anyway. Maybe I’ll do that.