Writing himself back

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I know of no better mirror than the record other people leave of their life stories. Some things are very familiar to us; other thing are about as far from our reality as they could be. But either way, if we pay attention, we learn something about ourselves. Consider Colin Wilson’s battles with depression, and his way of working himself out of it – and then consider what happened when despair led him to set out to kill himself.

Wilson, a born intellectual without the social advantages that would have allowed him to go to university, as a young man found himself in dead-end jobs that held no interest for him, a long way from the world of books in which he longed to live his life. Anyone who has ever slogged through a meaningless workweek without any clear hope of escaping to something better – particularly anyone who has done it at a young age – will recognize the bleak hopelessness that threatened to engulf him.

But then he made a discovery: From Dreaming to Some Purpose: An Autobiography, pp. 2-3.

“I had listened to a radio programme about Samuel Pepys, and decided to start keeping a journal – not just a diary of my daily activities, but a record of what I thought and felt. I had borrowed from the library a book called I Believe, full of statements of faith by people like Einstein, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. One Saturday … I bought a fat notebook, and settled down to writing my own statement of what I believed about my place in the world.

“I wrote for page after page, with a sense of freedom and release. I was objectifying doubts and miseries, pushing them to arm’s length. When I put down my pen, after several hours, I had a feeling that I was no longer the same person who had sat down at the writing table. It was as if I had been studying my face in a mirror, and learned something new about myself.

“From then on, I used my journal as a receptacle for self-doubt, irritation and gloom, and by doing so I wrote myself back into a state of optimism.”

 

Of course it wasn’t as easy as all that. Recurrent swings of optimism and pessimism threatened to overwhelm him, until finally he decided on suicide.

“I felt angry with God – or fate, or whoever had cast me down into this irritating world – for subjecting me to these endless petty humiliations. I did not even believe human life was real; it had often struck me that time is some sort of illusion. But surely, I could turn my back on the illusion by killing myself?”

He knew just how to do it, too. He had only to drink hydrocyanic acid, easily available to him at his workplace, and he would be dead in half a minute. He procured the vial and stood ready to drink.

“Then an odd thing happened. I became two people. I was suddenly conscious of this teenage idiot called Colin Wilson, with his misery and frustration, and he seemed such a limited fool that I could not have cared less whether he killed himself or not. But if he killed himself, he would kill me too. For a moment I felt that I was standing beside him, and telling him that if he didn’t get rid of this habit of self-pity he would never amount to anything.

“It was also as if this ‘real me’ had said to the teenager: ‘Listen, you idiot, think how much you’d be losing,’ and in that moment I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.”

And that was the passing of his lowest point. From that moment on, through ups and downs, “I no longer felt trapped and vulnerable.”

 

A current of ink

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It isn’t my fault. What could I do? These three men had a conversation in a bar in the middle of World War II, and one thing led to another.

See, in December, 1943, Jack Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s eldest son, was a young officer in the military police spending the night in New York City, a few days before his unit was to leave for Europe. Late at night, after dinner and a show, he dropped in to the small bar of the Algonquin Hotel, where he was staying. Other than Jack and the barman, the bar was empty except for two men engaged in a heated argument over which was a better writer, Fitzgerald or Hemingway. He injected himself into the conversation, getting away with it on the strength of his uniform in wartime. As he reconstructed the conversation in 1986 (in Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman):

 

“I think you’re both wrong. I know of a writer I think is better than either Hemingway or Faulkner. At least he’s a hell of a lot better storyteller.”

I had their attention, all right. The near man snapped, “And who the devil might that be?”

“Maurice Walsh,” I said, and then I started to detail his books I had read and that my father had told me he was a truly fine storyteller.

I stopped myself in mid-sentence as I noticed that the near man had blanched. I asked him what was the matter.

He answered, “I’m Maurice Walsh.”

A shiver went down my spine and the back of my neck crawled.  “I’m pleased to meet you, sir. My name is Jack Hemingway and my father is the writer you favored.”

The drinks we had before us, needless to say, were not the last we had that night.

 

Well, I can take a hint. I can’t remember when I bought Jack’s book – a dozen years ago, I suppose, more or less – but I remembered the reference, and after a while I began accumulating Walsh’s novels, which by the way, are indeed wonderfully appealing story-telling. A few titles, in case you’re interested: The Key Above the Door, The Small Dark Man, The Quiet Man, Castle Gillian, While Rivers Run, The Hill Is Mine. They are wonderfully evocative of an Ireland and a rural Scotland now long gone.

But of course chains of references have no end. After a while I noticed that Walsh every so often plugs an American writer, a writer of Westerns that he says is a master. At the time, apparently Eugene Manlove Rhodes was very well known. Today, I guess, not so much. But the other day I bought just one, to see if he was to my taste. At first, he wasn’t. But by the time I finished the little book, Paso por Aqui, which more or less means “he passed this way,” I decided I liked it. This morning, finding that the story stayed in my mind, I re-read it, and I can see that I will have to look out for another, to see if this was an unrepeatable fluke or a sign of genius. My guess is, the latter, or Walsh wouldn’t have gone out of his way to praise his works.

With my luck, Rhodes will praise some other writer’s work, and I’ll be swept along into yet another channel. Seems to me, I owe Jack Hemingway a drink.

 

Alderman

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

University of Virginia’s Alderman Library reopened yesterday, after being closed for a long four years. I went to take a look, and i was not disappointed.

Mr. Jefferson, in his old age, said, “I can not live without books,” and of course this was true his whole life. Life-long readers know the feeling.  About the only thing that could tempt me to want to live forever is the prospect of unlimited access to an academic library.

In those same final years, Jefferson was the man above all others responsible for the creation of the University of Virginia. He centered it physically, as well as conceptually, around the library, which was housed in the Rotunda.

One or two things have changed since the early 1800s, and the university library system today is not one but many, including the Charles L. Brown Science and Engineering; Clemons; Fine Arts; the Harrison Institute (Special Collections), and Music libraries. But first and foremost is Alderman, the main library. Built in 1938, later expanded, it served the university and the wider community until 2020, when it was closed for a complete overhaul.

And what a job they did!

The library building as it was may be envisioned at two boxes, joined by a common wall, each oriented east-west  That is, there was the original building and the expansion built directly behind it, which housed the new stacks. (The new stacks greatly increased the number of books that could be housed. ) The renovation made the two boxes one, oriented north-south.

The stacks used to be the same as university stacks have always been : poorly lit, very bare-bones, something between an attic and a storeroom . In the new building they are front and center, the entire space suffused with air and light.

As it happened, an entire generation of UVA students – those who entered in 2020 and graduate this year – missed the Alderman experience. But for those currently enrolled – and, more to the point personally, for those of us in the surrounding community who know how to value our access to this wonderful resourse –  the best is yet to come.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at these lovely photos.  https://www.library.virginia.edu/news/2024/renovated-main-library-set-open-january-8

Seth on knowledge and growth

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Let’s begin with a thought I had early yesterday and did not transcribe from my journal.

9:15 a.m. Well, I have escorted Herbert Hoover to the end of his presidential term, with, as usual, a great deal of sympathy. When I was a young man, I absorbed the liberal and academic party line about Roosevelt, and it took a long time to realize that as usual there was much to be said for the other side of every controversy. It is fascinating now to see so plainly how the personal and the “external” interact unpredictably, so that it appears that little things have large consequences, and small chances produce great detours. It all looks so different now, after decades of reading various conflicting accounts, and absorbing the point of view of so many biographies and being tutored by so many sources: Jung and TGU and Seth not least. “Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed.” It’s still the same.

Then came Saturday’s session, transcribed and put onto the blog. This morning, after salivating over the forthcoming reopening of UVA’s Alderman Library tomorrow, I noted that it’s already like the old days (that is, a few years ago!) in that I have a list of books and call letters and am ready to go.

5:30 a.m. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking about [my prospective] “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson” from the wrong end, all these decades. No wonder I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I don’t need to read everything they wrote, or understand Transcendentalism even abstractly, let alone how they understood it. I certainly don’t need to go about it in an academic manner, with apparatus of scholarship I scarcely know how to employ. It should be personal. What they say to me, here, now. What we know and can guess about how they affected each other. Their impact on people like Joseph, factual or not. That could perhaps be accomplished. Swell, one more not-yet-deceased project.

[5:50 a.m.] I was downstairs reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which I am determined to finish this time, and I got a thought about my reading of Seth on the one hand, and history on the other. (Session 818, 2-6-1978.) Seth referred to his “constant state of growth, expansion, and development.” That struck something in me. I remember the guys telling Rita she would never be bored unless she wanted to be, that there is always more to learn. I think this requires an extensive quotation.

[Quotes from between pages 87 and 90:]

“Much of this is difficult to explain, again, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed – almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself…. You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience. Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world.”

Really too much to quote but right on point:

  • “While our meetings take place in your time, and in the physical space of your house, say, the primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, an interaction of consciousness that is thus physically experienced.”
  • “Portions of your consciousness are alive in mine.”
  • “You are carried above the land of your usual perception so that portions of you glimpse subjective states.”
  • “Your intents and concerns, your interests, your needs and desires, your characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead you to it to begin with.”
  • “If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being. Your rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptances of the idea.”

I perhaps got carried away with the Seth quotations, but the point is that I am realizing that absorbing any branch of knowledge, or absorbing any mixture of first- and second-hand experience, is an active creation, a “doing” that may show no external signs and who cares. Worthwhile and satisfying in itself.

 

Filling the time

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, January 6, 2024, 3 p.m. Well, my friends, I hear you knocking at the door. Have heard you since this morning. What’s on your mind?

Consistency. Constancy. Reliability. Inertia in the productive sense of the word. Purpose. Filling of the time in the way best for you – with the usual caveat, “Which you?”

I’m listening.

What does one do with life in the absence of external constraints and external prodding? This is an important question that will shed light on how to employ constraints and proddings to best effect.

“No rest for the weary?” Or is it, “for the wicked?”

Rust is not rest. If you are idle and are content to be idle, where is the problem? But if you are idle and you feel it as waste, that’s another story.

Or if, like Rita in her eighties, you are still here but don’t know why, living without any great urge to do something, but somewhat bored.

Exactly so. UVA’s Alderman Library is about to reopen and you are feeling the urge to read everything in there, and at the same time you are feeling the discontent that goes with lack of direction.

Not just me. Charles, the same thing. He’s even tired of reading. But (although he isn’t shy about proposing projects for me to do!), one can’t just pluck a meaningful project off a bush, plus I have a strong feeling that perhaps the nature of the projects ought to change. It isn’t like I have to keep writing books or even blog posts, or even conversations with you. But a new direction is not obvious. Of course this involves getting back up to speed. I had hoped I was going to be out of this long lifetime by now, and here I am in 2024, for God knows how much longer.

We recognize that this isn’t quite a complaint.

No, but, like Rita, there is a certain amount of puzzlement. Plus, do I really want to start something new I cannot necessarily finish?

That may be said by anyone at any age.

Oh I know. But it’s perhaps more appropriate at 77 than at, say, 47, or 27, much less 17.

We return to the questions: Which you? The 3D ego self is at its best responding to the moment. It is not necessarily the best judge of direction or motion or velocity. You choose, but you don’t foresee the results of your choices (and there’s nothing wrong with that); another level of you keeps you on course, if you let it do so.

Well, I don’t know anything to do beyond being receptive to what comes. Lord knows, I don’t steer the ship.

You do steer the ship, moment by moment. You mean to say, you don’t set the course.

All right, I see that.

So if a wider, longer, older, wiser part of you sets the course, and you faithfully steer, where is the problem?

Slowing way down, I get that there isn’t a problem, so long as we steer faithfully and continuously choose according to our values (even if these values change as we go). We will move smoothly.

You will imperceptibly align yourselves moment by moment, which reduces friction and smooths progress.

In short, don’t sweat over the question of where we’re headed or how to get there.

Let’s say, live in confidence that doing your best moment by moment is the very thing needed.

No grand Five Year Plans.

Make your five-year plan if you wish. Make a 50-year plan, if you wish. You are free to choose what you prefer. Only, remember, you live moment by moment, and there’s nothing wrong with being unable to see very far ahead.

As [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain said, we don’t see far ahead, so it’s best to form habits that will carry us in future unpredicted situations.

This is just common sense, surely.

So if I’m hearing you right, you are saying that consistently living our values is, in a sense, all the planning we need to do.

It is all the execution you need to do. Live your life one moment at a time – as if you have any alternate way you can live! – and you don’t have anything worth worrying about.

Thanks as usual. A short session, but better than nothing, I suppose.

 

A deeper experience

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, January 5, 2024

7:15 a.m. I got the feeling you wanted to do a session, and I connected it to a thought I had just had, reading Kenneth Whyte’s Hoover. (“It occurs to me, reading Hoover, that I read history and biography as drama, as the most intricate and varied and character-filled drama there is or ever could be. Seems so obvious now, I don’t know why it wasn’t until just this moment.”) You wanted to tell us something. By all means, proceed.

First you should remember the question, as it will help point the conversation.

That seems a little backwards, to me. It was your impulse, as far as I can tell, why do I need to remember it? Why isn’t receptivity enough?

Receptivity is fine, and of course is essential. But if you are to do something more than the minimum, you need to work more skillfully, using what you have learned in practice.

I think you mean, the more we use our experience and our deduced rules of the road, the better the answers.

Not exactly “the better the answers.” More, “the farther you can travel; the better you will see detail and context both.”

Okay.

Each of you is a specialist – in your own life. In your being. In your point of view. In the result of a lifetime’s choosings. You understand? In that sense, the more consciously you have lived – and, note, the more consciously you are living at the moment – the more specialized and valuable an observer and interpreter you will be. Consider yourselves (among other roles) reporters to your higher selves, and to the non-3D in general (to the Akashic Record, in a sense) from one particular window in 3D life. Now, bear in mind, such reports, such interpretations of life, are being filed continuously by everybody. So at one and the same time, you are uniquely valuable, and so is everyone else, as we have always said. It doesn’t matter whether you appreciate each other, you are all individual, you are all part of the overall oneness.

Like members of the cast and chorus of a Broadway production or a film: individual yet meaningful within that context only as part of the entire production.

And we are aware we have said this before, and more than once. However, now consider: Anything that interests you has been built up through people.

No, I didn’t get it and still don’t quite have it. I know, I know: Slow down, recalibrate. Give me a moment.

Okay. Try again?

All history is drama. All biography, all anything, is drama, in the sense of a vast potential narrative packed with interesting and diverse characters in every attitude of cooperation, conflict, mutual indifference, ignorance of each other’s existence, and of reverence or detestation of those who have acted on stage beforehand. But this is equally true of the sciences, little though you might think it. Geology, ichthyology, you name it, the facts being studied were discovered and arrayed and interpreted by human 3D individuals, and interwoven with the specific drams of their everyday lives.

I don’t think you mean that to understand the study of fishes we need to understand the scientists’ lives who study them. Are you saying that we can get at a deeper understanding of those sciences by coming at them through our connection with the scientists themselves?

Does talking directly to Lincoln or Jung provide you greater insight into whatever you discuss? How should it be different in any line of research or investigation?

I’m still groping for the spine of your argument. Are you implying that we can best understand reality by moving through the minds of others who have done so? That makes a superficial sense, but why isn’t a live dog better than a dead lion, as I think Thoreau said.

The point is simple: You approach reality – no matter what it is you are studying – through the human experience. Obvious, yes, and yet perhaps so obvious as to be forgotten from time to time. You cannot see reality except from a 3D human viewpoint. Your senses, even your intuitions, assume and stem from that base. Yes, this is a limitation, but a productive one, which is why the limitation exists. You are specialists in being human.

“But.”

Oh yes. But, how you self-define has consequences. How you self-limit has consequences. Same statement made twice.

So as we learn to accept continuous communication with our non-3D selves, we remain human, but what “human” means changes, in effect. Grows.

Certainly. Only, continuous communication is not the only productive mode. Occasional, even sporadic communication is valuable as training wheels. Isolation followed by (or following) communication may be equally instructive – or, let’s say, transformative.

Sure. So the point here is what?

Whatever you do, be it woodworking or art or scholarship or drudgery or anything, do with whatever consciousness you can bring to it, and your life will be richer and more interesting even if not one external thing changes. (As if there could be anything truly external, but you know what we mean.)

And this is a sort of decision, isn’t it?

Yes! Yes. Yes. It is exactly that, a decision. That’s why you are not [illegible] or victims or spectators or useless extras. It is a decision, and once you decide and execute the decision, you are living in another, deeper, richer, less disconnected, world.

This will not be obvious to everyone.

So what? It can’t be logically convincing because those resistant to the idea can and will always come up with ten good reasons why it’s impossible. So what? Anybody who actually makes the experiment will know, and what difference will contrary opinions make then?

I think I can offer a homely example. (At your prompting?) How we deal with suffering alters our experience. When I went to the hospital a couple of years ago and calmly observed what was happening, instead of getting emotionally involved, everything went smoothly, but really the point is, I had a very different experience.

Yes, and of course suffering comes in many forms, and no one’s life is immune to it (nor would you want it to be, if you could see it as we do). As we have mentioned, even the word “suffering” is too dramatic, but we use it to avoid the accusation that we are concerned only with trivial matters. A schoolboy receiving a reprimand can’t really be said to be suffering, and yet it is on the same scale.

No, you mean, and yet it is the same kind of thing in that it is something unwanted and outside of his control.

Yes. Just as health issues, or accidents, or financial reverses, or the death or disability of loved ones. Just as war and earthquake and any kind of civil disaster. Just as anything – even ageing’s problems, even boredom, even loneliness – is similarly something unwished-for but not, nevertheless, tragic except in a limited context.

I know from experience that many people think that’s taking too blithe a view of human life.

To be sure – from the 3D person’s viewpoint. But we have not been engaged in this long conversation for the sake of supporting the 3D person’s viewpoint, but of undermining it.

There’s something else. I can feel it but can’t quite get it.

Your approach to your life – which means to each moment of your life, of course – determines the holiness of life that you will experience. Everything is holy, including nuclear waste and politicians’ speeches, as we have sometimes reminded you. The holiness inheres in reality, not in specifics. But you have to have eyes to see. As you clear your mind of emotions, of complexes, of unwanted free-associating, you see more clearly. As you slow down, as you expect to see more deeply, more clearly, so you do.

I get that this is it for the moment. Thanks as always.