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The real crisis of our time

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Just “coincidentally,” I came across this conversation from 18 years ago, and it seems worth sharing.

Friday, February 17, 2006

It is 8 a.m., nearly, the start of a cloud-heavy morning. If you’re ready to answer [my brother] Paul’s question – what is the real challenge of our time, what is the equivalent of the Civil War to us – I’m ready to hear it.

You have heard it many times, each time in a slightly different context. You have expressed it many times, enough that it is just another of your beliefs. What is your Iona book about, after all?

Pardon us while we circle around the subject. You know how a dog has to circle before it can lie down and sleep, it is a reassuring habit.

Look at what the crisis can’t be. That will add conviction.

Can it be political? Economic? Ideological? You have already fought those battles, and everyone is sick of them. Can it be religious? Same answer. People have struggled over these questions, and some always will struggle. But they do not define your time.

In the 1500s and 1600s, religious questions – the relation of religious organization to state power and to society and to categories of everyday thought. Once the state monopoly of Catholic thought was broken up, has anyone been proposing to return to it? No, the West moved on to other questions.

In the 1700s and 1800s – again, staying with the West, because that is where the world’s power was – the destruction of the medieval viewpoint and the birth of the industrial viewpoint came in a long series of political and then nationalistic struggles. You have experienced plenty of social upheavals since – but how many fundamentally transforming revolutions? American, French, Russian, in ascending order of fundamental transformation – and of violence. And, the nations expressed themselves. Are there new nations coming forth? Welsh devolution, Scot devolution, the emergence of French Canada, are mere afterthoughts with sometimes slightly comic overtones, in the way that minor actors playing major roles sometimes are.

In the 1900s, ideology. Fascism, Communism, Nazism, and many minor variants not noted. In your day you see the stragglers, your shrill right-wing and left-wing know-it-all podium pounders. Do you imagine that they are the wave of the future rather than the remnants of the shipwrecked past?

What we are saying is that the energy has gone out of all these things. With all the ill-will in the world, with all the cock-sure certainty, no one is going to be another Napoleon riding on revolutionary fervor or nationalism. There are moments of intensity, but it is a fire of straw, quickly flaring up, quickly burning out.

So do not look in old directions for the meaning of your time, or the fundamental challenge. These are shadow puppets that you are projecting against the wall – and scaring yourselves with! And as to partisan politics, we smile. In fact we laugh. The only thing that partisan politics does is to keep people occupied and out of trouble. It keeps lawyers and ad men and activists happy and occupied; it channels vast amounts of otherwise troublesome public emotion; it expresses but does not create public sentiment. This, except very occasionally.

You are fond of quoting Lincoln’s statement about the purpose and nature of politics, which is to create an effect and then fight that effect. Those who understand this have their fingers on the mainspring of things; those who don’t, should ponder the statement. There is a world of practical wisdom there.

But, we say to you – you having asked – politics is not the mover of anything, it is the result. If one of the major parties were to decide to instigate compulsory vegetarianism, say, how far do you think it would get? But if a movement for compulsory vegetarianism were to spring up, how long do you think it would be before one of the parties discovered that compulsory vegetarianism was deeply entwined in its principles? Try not to confuse cause and effect, or perhaps we should say locomotive and caboose.

Neither are the physical and organizational challenges of your day the central crisis of your time. The challenges are very real, and there are a lot of them – and they are all coming to a head just at about the same time. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence?

We smile.

Nothing of your old ways is sustainable in the spirit in which it operates. Does that not tell you something? Your economies, your environment, your animal companions, your social balance – none of it. You are ringed by the desperately poor economically – and by the desperately poor spiritually and mentally. Is it not obvious?

Hopefully this brief circuit is enough to move you from your accustomed thought. If it is not, then either your accustomed thoughts are closer to ours than the average, or we are meeting no response with you. Here is our thesis, and those for whom it is dead should leave it: Not in politics nor ideology nor religious forms, nor social upheaval is your salvation. Not in technology or scientific investigation or social organization and reorganization is your way out. Not in –

Well, no point in continuing; you get the idea or you don’t.

The crisis in your time is the greatest to be faced in recorded history. (Note the adjective.) it needs to be, to provide the energy to propel you – propel us – to the next stage in human development. And here is where we burst categories. That is what a transformative crisis does – it bursts categories. From the far side of the crisis there is no going back, because everything is different. You are different.

We stress this – and we went on that little survey ramble – because it is easier to say something new than to have it be heard as something new. Without new ears to hear, without (in other words) your being at a new place mentally and spiritually, the news will be filtered through your old categories and will seem embarrassingly vapid, or obviously ridiculous, or – favorite thing of the academic habit of mind – “nothing but” that and that comprising element. Why do you think Jesus kept saying “let those of you who have ears, hear.” He was saying “these words will mean one thing to many, but something much more to those who are in a place to really hear them.” So, here. The ears you bring to the message determine what you hear. It can be no other way.

And this, incidentally, explains or should explain why so much that is precious and even vital has not been absorbed. It isn’t that the masters ever wanted to keep it secret! They wanted to give it away freely, but could find only a few ears able and ready to hear. Think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, whose forthcoming destruction must have been plain to him. “How many times did I try to give you the key,” he said, “and yet you wouldn’t and couldn’t hear me.” And – just for an aside to an aside – we deliberately used “wouldn’t” and “couldn’t” to remind you that Jesus wasn’t speaking English! Revere the spirit, not the form.

What can the defining crisis of your time be but a spiritual one? And yet, to say “spiritual” is to mislead. Again, the crisis will burst categories.

In your time the destruction of the materialist illusion proceeds from all sides. It loses its scientific underpinning. It fails the practical test of providing meaning. It offers no hope of a better future. Each of these sentences is an essay in itself, but for the moment we will not stop to provide them. Thought and meditation will provide them for you.

The death of materialism as an operating principle leaves your time as a loss. The poor cannot look to achieving your American standard of living. Americans living it – and Europeans – know that it isn’t an answer to meaning anyway. And the hypertrophy of concentration of wealth demonstrates in any case that a society’s accumulation of wealth is not necessarily to the benefit of any but a predatory few. (And this is how it always has been in uncontrolled society. Remind us sometime to speak of the models that have succeeded.)

You may have guessed that we had a reason for discussing the Civil War. It is the previous step taken. And Abraham Lincoln played a major role in the history – and future – of the world, as is recognized already but only in a restricted context. As matters play out, his ultimate significance will be seen more clearly.

So many essays and side-trails, and we cannot pause for them!

The struggle in your time is between inclusion and exclusion. Here you will find the key to every specific, for every problem in your time will naturally align itself in the magnetic field of the defining polarity. And so you see that Lincoln’s role was to make a major inclusion – bringing the inclusion of another race into the shared idea that was America. In other words from that time it was no more a dream of one race – even a race of many nations but all European “whites” – but now a totally unprecedented expansion to be more than one race. And once black, then there was no logical barrier to yellow, red, and brown. Of course you are still in the initial stage of working all this out – of living the expanded ideal – but the decision was made, and ratified in blood and military success, and there was no going back for the human race.

Yes, for the human race. The American experiment was unique, and might have been held to one race, and would have failed and could not have been re-created. It was to preserve this over-archingly important pattern that states rights was sacrificed, and much more would cheerfully have been thrown onto the fire from this side as best we could.

The struggle is between two ways of seeing things – inclusive and exclusive; unitary and divided; and this means, ultimately, it is between two forces, Love (attraction and interpenetration) and Fear (repulsion and attempted separation.)

Now, don’t say “oh, that’s only Course in Miracles” or “that’s only” anything! You cannot hear without new ears to hear with. But once you have new ears, of course you will find that it has all been said – but you will understand it perhaps for the first time.

Love versus Fear. Faith versus fear. Courage, joy, life – versus fear.

This is the crisis of your time. But you may ask – how is this a crisis? What is the practical working-out of this?

Those of you who are willing to live in love will find your way by always seeking to include, rather than drawing logical or other distinctions and drawing lines saying “us” versus “them.” Now of course this immediately brings in a paradox, in that we’re saying in effect, “the world must not be divided, so don’t be like those who divide things.” This too can be transcended by realizing that everything may be seen as part of a polarity rather than as opposition. If you are a part of a polarity, you are a necessary part; something had to be playing that part. So it takes you beyond the blaming and the excluding. Hitler, Stalin, played their part. They were not arbitrary occurrences – nothing in life is arbitrary, despite appearances. They were, you might say, the personification of social forces.

You will live in love, and will continuously draw nearer to all people, to all animals and birds and fishes, to all things created, to all things not physically manifest. You will rejoice in what is, and will not fear the future, even as you work to affect that future in what you do and – more vitally – in what you are.

Or – you will express the other side of the polarity and will live in fear, and soon in hatred and despair. You will divide, and divide, and divide, until you whittle away your standing-place and are alone in a howling wilderness.

You will contribute toward the creation of a new consciousness – for that and nothing less is what is at issue here – or you will lose yourself in a wilderness of repelling mirrors behind which (you will fear) are unnamed horrors.

This is the challenge of your times, nothing less. Do you think, now, that environmental cleanup or political triumph or any other issue is at the same level?

And, Frank, do you see why we did not begin this last night or yesterday? This has taken an hour and a quarter and you are already tired at 9:15! How far would we have gotten yesterday afternoon?

Yes, well, as always, my thanks, and presumably the thanks of those with ears to hear. I am tired. I hope I will be able to decipher to transcribe.

 

Organization and Scheduling

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday, July 19, 2024

7:30 a.m. I suppose it is time to get to work again. When the weather cools off even temporarily, the same conditions that may lead to breathing troubles often lead to a burst of productive activity. That’s how it feels this morning. So guys, a few tips would be appreciated

We have a “no tipping” policy.

Very funny. Come to think of it, that is the first joke you’ve made in a while.

It has been a while since your inner pressure has risen high enough.

So it’s the old “Tides and decisions both, not decisions merely.”

Doesn’t everything in your experience show you this? You all have to act as if you were independent of one another, and often enough as if independent of circumstances. But how could that be? It is the better part of wisdom to recognize that everything that is shaped is therefore bounded, and this goes for intangibles such as possibilities, no less than for physical objects or even abstractions such as something pictured. The very thing people kick against – limitation – is what makes them distinct, with their own possibilities.

Some people think our lives are predestined, though that makes no sense to me.

We have said, predestination and free will are intricately connected. It is only in seeing one in the absence of the other that you can go wrong. As usually, “both, and” or even “neither nor”; not one or the other.

Well, if my inner tide has risen to the point that we can go back to doing something more than passing the time, what can you tell me? On this, or on anything you care to discuss.

You had a dream that held your attention. Paraphrase your description.

This was yesterday morning. I dreamed of being in a vast room, surrounded by boxes or cartons – containers of some kind. I knew I was packing and also seeking visas, and it was an overwhelming task. I think I was trying to get papers for the cat, too. (Not genealogy but, again, visas.) I wasn’t panicked or frantic or even rushed, but I was overwhelmed. So much to do, and no one to help, come to think of it, and no structure, just all these boxes on all sides. And when you and I talked about it here, it became clear that it wasn’t a sense of urgency, just overwhelm at the extent of the clutter.

And in that recounting just now, you heard something.

Yes. Lack of structure. That has always been a problem for me. If no external structure, you have to provide one for yourself, and I haven’t been doing it.

You have done it sporadically, and occasionally, usually tied to one specific project which, accomplished or abandoned, leaves you again without structure to lean on.

This shouldn’t come as any great revelation, but I see that the simple habit of getting up to talk to you whenever I couldn’t sleep or had had enough sleep provided a structure.

It provided half a structure. The habit was half; the activity was the other half. When you had both, you functioned. When either failed you, you couldn’t. although, saying “when either failed you” is misleading.

No, actually, it’s clarifying, because sometimes the material dried up, but other times I wanted to keep on but for some reason I couldn’t. Or – come to think of it, that’s what you just said, it’s a matter of tides and decisions both.

There is something within you that rebels against compulsion every once in a while. It may be your own rule, your own resolution, but at some point you decide you’ll be damned if you will.

As my old friend Dave Wallis used to say, “Guilty, your honor.”

This is why every rule should carry within it the exception. A Sabbath day of rest makes the other six days bearable; it is a formula for continuity.

You have to un bend the bow every so often if you’re going to be able to use it.

Tastes and needs differ, but  regular periodic unbending is usually more reliable than unbending only when you happen to think of it (on the one hand) or unbending whenever you happen to feel like it (on the other).

I could use a realistic schedule I could keep to.

Again the schedule is half. The other half is awareness of what you want to do. It can be chasing rainbows or grinding corn; the nature of the task doesn’t matter. But clarity is always helpful.

So set up a schedule of projects always a little ahead of where I am, so never come to a gap?

That sounds practical, and for some it may be. For you, probably not.

What, then?

If you come to the end of a project, there’s nothing wrong with using the pause to survey your situation. Only, use the time. That is, actually consider what has been done, what needs to be done, what can or can’t be done.

Should I set up a definite amount of time when I work? I know that some writers resolve to sit in front of a blank wall for X time if need be, only not doing anything at all if they don’t write – which of course gets them writing, soon enough.

You wouldn’t observe the rule anyway, and there’s no need. If you schedule yourself for an hour, you will get something done, if only sifting things in your mind. But of course this will work differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Often enough, all I accomplish is one of these conversations.

So?

Yes, I get it. The process, not necessarily the result.

Remember, this started with the realization that all those resources are clutter unless organized somehow.

But what about the travel aspect of the dream? Not urgent, not panicky, but definitely a presence.

One way to look at it, you aren’t going to live as you are forever. Another way is, in creation as in everyday life, you want to go somewhere, which means moving. Few people ever crossed the ocean by rowing with only one oar. Going in circles is not the kind of movement you find satisfying.

Neither is standing on a wharf surrounded by luggage!

You are neither on a wharf nor surrounded by luggage. Your dream describes you as isolated in a room among a clutter of background materials.

Well, I’ll send this out, see if it strikes people. And I’ll try to figure out how to apply it. Sitting at a desk willingly is one thing, but doing it to effect is something different.

You can do as you often do: Make lists, see what strikes you.

At least organize the boxes, anyway. Okay. Thanks as always.

 

Freedom and choices

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Friday July 12, 2024

10:10 a.m. All right, boys, I sense a conversation coming on. Maybe. What’s on your minds?

Notice that you are now able at a deeper level to “do nothing” as you think of it. Potential projects are not in short supply. Most of your material is not in finished form. (We realize that the word “most” came as a jolt.) but it is quite true that you have every right to decide you are done, and to spend your time reading or daydreaming or whatever comes.

Not the decision per se, but the freedom to decide, is an achievement. Like anyone, you were born the subject of internal dynamics that resulted in assumptions and moods that seemed to bound your life more or less beyond your ability to control or even – almost – to battle. With time and life and effort, and as a result of victories and defeats, you have come, as people do, to a different set of internal guidance, one shaped more by your prior and current decisions and less by what we could call your inherited dynamics.

It is the freedom to choose, even more than the freedom resulting from choice, that matters.

Is that what he meant – whoever he was – who said “to be free is nothing, but to become free is everything”?

Regardless of his intent, jhow about yours? Does it ring true?

Maybe. I get the sense that no matter what our condition is, it has its pluses and minuses, but a trend toward greater freedom, greater potential, seems to be an obvious good.

That’s an important qualifier, “to me.” But yes, we agree: For you, greater freedom, broader awareness, deeper understanding, is the pearl beyond price, worth any expenditure. Only, not for everybody. Different people need different things, and that’s as it should be.

I do regret so much uncompleted work, just as a regret that I do not regularly use so many things I have learned over the years.

You might mention the rebal.

Yes. When I did Gateway in December, 1992, we were told that we could visualize ourselves within a “resonant energy balloon,” or rebal. I don’t remember if someone specifically suggested temperature or if I tried it out. But I decided to use a rebal to keep comfortable barefoot in the snow, and it worked. On the Friday after the program, Bob and I walked around the UVA campus, and he was none too warm in his coat, while I was comfortable in my flannel shirt inside my rebal.

I used that trick sometimes over the years, but I had forgotten about it until last night, lying on my bed, too hot for comfort (I don’t use the AC, as you know) but not willing to use the overhead fan. I remembered the rebal – how? – and decided to try, and a bit to my surprise, it worked just fine.

A trivial example of the magical expansion of our abilities that I learned over the years – but why haven’t I used them routinely?

And, you just heard –

I did. I heard that I use them all a lot more than I realize because I use them automatically – which is to say non-consciously. And that’s as it should be.

Now draw the analogy. You wrote so much, even your history, thinking that books were the way to shape and preserve what you knew. (You will recall, we have always said, write books if you wish to, but that isn’t why you are where you are.) But how permanent are books? It is the difference between holding something in memory (books) and having absorbed them (your own everyday consciousness).

So achievement counts for nothing and intent is all? That’s sort of backwards.

It is also a very inaccurate paraphrase, we’d say, external achievement counts for vastly less than internal achievement, and therefore sustained intent is a real accomplishment.

Think of George Washington or George Marshall molding their characters through rigid self-control. Their characters were their personal achievement, not the external results of their interactions with the world.

I’m getting a different sense of this, but it is vague so far.

Do you think the non-D being of which Washington is part hugs to itself the memory of his struggles and achievements? Does it hold anniversary celebrations for Trenton or Yorktown? Do his other strands (call them) hold him in awe in the way 3D contemporaries did?

More to the point, do you suppose that the strands that came together to form George Washington spend their time sighing over the good old days of glory?

The 3D is less real, we keep reminding you, than what we can only call All-D, the 3D and non-3D considered as one. So how could an All-D character think in 3D terms?

Harrison Ford might reminisce about playing Han Solo.

But he wouldn’t confuse himself by thinking that Han Solo was the thing that was real, and Harrison Ford not.

I see.

We are saying merely that your achievements in life are very different from those you think of as achievements. It is natural to se it that way while thinking in 3D terms, nothing wrong with it. But it makes more sense to see it as it is.

Hemingway said that any story, carried to its end, results in death, as if that meant things were finally fruitless. I don’t understand why he didn’t see clearer than that.

Sometimes he did. Don’t confuse a thing said in a certain mood (no matter how often said) with a definitive summing-up of a creed. And of course he learned soon enough that the end is not the end.

This is a lot of words to tell me it’s okay to do nothing if I want to.

Perhaps that isn’t all we said.

Well, thanks as always.

 

Hemingway and the high cost of war

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

July 8 is the anniversary of nearly-19-year-old Ernest Hemingway becoming one of the first Americans wounded in World War I. There are a few things that ought to be said about that, including some from the other side, from Hemingway himself.

March 3, 2013

Have been re-reading Charles A. Fenton’s wonderful book, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1954.

All accounts agree that young Hemingway was a tremendously sensitive, complicated organism. And then, shortly after mid night, July 8, 1918, an Austrian shell hit the front-line trench where he was distributing chocolates and cigarettes to the Italian soldiers. Two men next to him were killed. He was wounded by more than 200 pieces of shrapnel. Being wounded in the middle of the night, a couple of weeks before your 19th birthday, is not the kind of thing that leaves you unscathed. If nothing else, it is going to shatter your assumption of your own mortality,

Elementary, but in those seemingly innocent days, nearly 100 years ago now, nobody had heard of post-traumatic-stress syndrome, nor of combat fatigue. They knew of shell-shock, but they hadn’t yet learned that its effects could last a lifetime.  Two brief excerpts make a point that is often lost:

“[Hemingway’s friend Carl] Edgar was much impressed by the impact the war had so evidently made on Hemingway. `He came back,’ Edger once said, `figuratively as well as literally shot to pieces.’ Edger concluded that the intensity of Hemingway’s desire to write was  directly connected to the war. `He seemed to have a tremendous need to express the things that he had felt and seen.’ (p. 72)

Many years later, Hemingway friend Bill Horne said ,“`Hemingway, to my own certain knowledge,’ never threw off his experiences in the war.’” (p. 73)

Hemingway was the first American to be wounded in Italy. [One had been killed, but Hemingway was the first to be wounded and survive.] Months of recuperation among veterans followed, as did the experience of falling in love and being jilted.

An Industrial Accident

Wednesday, March 9, 2011, 4:20 AM. Papa, using this cane yesterday and this morning [having injured an ankle in a trivial accident], I was thinking about you. It was romantic, that limping around — but it wasn’t only romantic.

No, it wasn’t only romantic. It was a damn nuisance, as well. And it was a loss that was bearable because it had meaning as an honorable war wound. Only with the coming of time did I start to feel it as an industrial accident, and then saw the other woundeds as equally the result of industrial accidents, regardless of their valor — an important point people often miss. And from there it became possible to see the entire war not as a crusade of right versus wrong — which is how it had been sold to us, how we had sold it to ourselves — but as one colossal industrial accident that had maimed us for no particular reason.
If you understand how I came to see it that way, you’ll understand better my attitude toward the second world war. I went into that one without illusions. The men at war were a fascinating phenomenon, and the war had to be won, but as evil as the Nazis were, they were only evil in a different way from the people running England and France, not to mention Russia and the little dictatorships all over Europe. The little countries weren’t so much to blame, but their sufferings were as much the result of geography and history as of anybody’s evil intent. You might say that the invasion of Belgium both times, and Holland and Denmark and all, the second time, were another form of industrial accident.

That’s a lot of insight to get from your wounding.

From my wounding, but also from some reporting for the [Toronto] Star after my wounding. The Turkish war showed me World War I in miniature and in retrospect. It is all there in Farewell To Arms and The Sun Also Rises, but you have to be able to see that my perceptions were neither simple-minded nor trendy nor the party line. And God knows, I wasn’t advocating that anybody live like Brett or Mike or even Jake. I was just describing the emotional aftermath of one giant industrial accident.

With time it became clear that this accident was still in progress. As you’ve seen and see and are going to continue to see. It’s hard to get too excited about Progress and the Rights Of Man and the Victory of this or that principle, when you see that it is mostly illusion on some people’s part and deception on other people’s part and what you would call general unconsciousness on everybody’s part living through it. It’s just that I was wounded so quickly that I had just what I had wanted when I shipped out! I was a hero, or as much of a hero as you can be when you are wounded out of the blue — or out of the black, to be more accurate — with no combat involved.

And isn’t that how nearly all the boys and men were injured and killed, after all? If you are torn apart — a little bit or extensively or entirely — by high explosive thrown at you from a distance, by somebody you never saw, who knew or cared nothing about you except maybe as an abstract representation of “the enemy” — the valor involved is entirely different from a cavalry charge, say, or a sword fight or even a duel of rifles at point-blank range. The soldiers saw it, whether the officers did or not, in the Civil War, 50 years earlier. Getting blown to bits by artillery fire while you hide from it in trenches was exactly what was happening in France and Italy in 1918. It was a world of difference from warfare as it existed in 1861, let alone in the Napoleonic era, say.

And when you were wounded you were a little embarrassed that you hadn’t been doing anything heroic.

Exactly. The experience didn’t match what we had been fed about it — mostly lies, of course, as usual in war — so at first I assumed there was something wrong with me. So, I dressed up the story to make it bearable, so I wouldn’t feel like a pretender.

You had to pretend to avoid feeling like a pretender.

Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? But I didn’t see it that clearly then, and maybe you weren’t so clear yourself when you were 19. The real soldiers, the ones who had gotten wounded after long service, saw through me at once when I paraded through all decorated. They knew, you see. I was still seeing through civilian eyes, and the eyes of a kid who had just arrived, like a new recruit in 1864 would have been among men who had been wounded at Gettysburg and were still recuperating, or who had just been wounded at Forts Hell and Damnation. They knew, and I didn’t, even though my industrial accident had given me a spurious membership in the club. It was okay for me to use the clubs facilities, but I was an honorary member, and they knew it and made it plain.
Now, it’s funny how life works. I was an innocent, though I didn’t quite realize it because I was such a fast learner. My few months as a reporter in Kansas City had given me enough of a peek into the lives of the men who kept things going, like police and firemen, and the lives of people who had had their own industrial accidents (though I didn’t think of them that way yet) that I thought I had become hard-boiled. I felt toughened and knowledgeable. And of course I was so green, so much living in image and illusion, and everyone around me knew it, but I didn’t know it.

So — I pretended my way through a succession of roles, altering the part as I went, learning from observation how the real heroes acted, figuring out how they felt, and mimicking them when safely not in their presence. This whole sequence was invaluable when I came to become a writer, for what is a writer of fiction if not somebody who gets inside somebody else’s skin and describes how the world looks from there?
And the result was that even when I was back home, or in Chicago, and I was still playing the role, I was feeling my way to a reevaluation of what I had expected to feel and what I really had felt; what I thought was the way things are, and what I had really found them to be. I pretended, or posed, maybe we should say, and it gave me cover, and with time I learned what had happened to me, and then I could start to express it.

I get that as others wrote their experiences, you learned from that too.

Well, sure. You think writers can always write and never read?  Reading other people’s stuff is a prime window on their world, and some things are going to be obvious, and some you’ll reject and some are going to surprise you and lead you to think about things differently.

Thursday, April 29, 2010. I find myself recurrently thinking about — brooding on — Hemingway’s emotional life. I feel that I understand him as perhaps his biographers do not, quite. So, papa — what would you like to say about your life and/or reading and/or experiences.

I came out of the hospital in Italy as Jack London came out of the bars in the Klondike, with no first-hand experience, but a wealth of secondhand experience. After all, I had never fired a rifle at an opponent, and hadn’t even had the preliminary fear of going into combat. The shell that injured me was a bolt out of the blue to a boy who assumed his own invulnerability. So what I knew was pain and suffering and irrational fear. Everything else was second-hand; the life in the lines, the comradeship of arms, the mixtures of fears and courage that filled people at different times, the nature of the Italians.
I was on slightly more first-hand ground with the love affair, except I glamorized it, adding an older man’s perspective on a very young man’s experience. I killed Agnes as I had had to kill my love for her when she rejected me — but the emotions and experiences Frederick Henry had were those I learned much later in life than 18. So to that extent there is a fairytale element in the love story.
All right, I romanced, telling my story to the press and to my fellows at home. I told it as I dreamed it, rather than as it was. You could look at it as novelizing without the writing of it. But the things that I pretended had happened to me, I knew, even though secondhand.

I do see that. And of course you and I discussed this somewhat three years ago when I read The Young Hemingway while in England.

Well, this is the foundation for understanding my later life, you see. Not Paris, not my upbringing, not the things that happened in Spain and all. Being wounded without warning, being the first of the Americans in the hospital, listening for many months to the real veterans, being able to pretend I was a veteran too, and sort of feeling that because of my wounds, I was. And then knowing that I had a whole extra life to lead, for I could have been killed, even was killed, but came back –. This was the central experience of my life, and it came before I was 20.

[And, just for the record, for those people who think Hemingway liked war, this, which came to me out of nowhere on April 14, 2011, about Fukushima:. It was as if i could hear his voice: the words were quite plain. He said, “If you want to understand my attitude toward war, just combine your admiration for the men who are doing their heroic best [to clean up the mess] and your sympathy and pity for them and their families, with your anger and disgust at the decisions that made this all possible, and the people (and their motives) who made the decisions. Nothing is different.”]

Emotion and telepathy

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Wednesday January 23, 2019

Watching Peter Jackson’s 90-minute film “They Shall Not Grow Old,” comprising restored footage of British doughboys in World War I, I remembered an experience I had in 2001 or 2002. I was in London, walking near Trafalgar Square, trying to give David Poynter (experienced as a past life) a sense of modern London, knowing that he would recognize the buildings, which are essentially unchanged since his time. I walked down to the Embankment, the north shore of the Thames, reading the monuments, not particularly moved, but interested.

Then I came to one that said only “July 1, 1916,” and although I had no idea what it referred to, I was instantly filled with the most violent rush of emotion I have ever experienced: rage, grief, indignation, despair. I realized, this was David’s reaction I was experiencing, though I was pretty sure he himself had not been in the war. So after I saw the movie, I searched both “the Battle of the Somme” and “July 1, 1916.”

So, David, let’s talk about July 1, 1916. What was the nature and source of that upwelling of anguish that I experienced?

You felt correctly that I was not in the war. I was past the age of enlistment, and perhaps could not have stood the physical toll. But neither was I caught up in war fever. My sympathies were with the poor. The warfare that interested me was an uprising against the forces that were grinding the faces of the people. I don’t mean insurrection – that couldn’t happen – but organized resistance to the overwhelming combinations of force and law and opinion that held society in an unfailing grip.

You were a socialist, I remember thinking.

I was. But my socialism did not have its roots in a belief in materialism, so I was somewhat out of the socialist mainstream in the same way you have always found yourself out of the mainstream of political opinion – and for the same reasons. Any social movement necessarily presumes certain commonly accepted beliefs, and to the extent that you cannot share them, you find yourself having to go along unwillingly, or with mental reservations. This does not tend to make you an effective partisan.

When war broke out in August, 1914, there was a unanimity of emotion, an enthusiastic springing to arms, a lust to destroy. People didn’t realize it, but they were desperate to destroy the lives they were leading. They wanted to tear down the structure, but they thought they were tearing at something that threatened them from outside.

A socialist could see that, if he could keep his head against the group-think. Was I keen to fight for the King-Emperor and the social system I despised? Only it was not so simple. Is it ever? German autocracy as personified – almost as caricatured – by the Kaiser was clearly worse. Privately I deplored the war and did not believe in it – and yet, at the same time, I deplored Prussian autocracy even more, and certainly could not have rooted for a victory of Germany. I sat on the sideline. I observed, I remained conscious, but this only got more agonizing as time went on.

I got that you were an editor at the London Illustrated News.

We would call it a sub-editor. I was a selector of photographs and illustrations, a glorified caption-writer. It was not a glamorous nor an influential position, but it did keep me somewhat better informed than the average man in the street. I had been there for some three years, maybe four, by the time the war began, and I was there for a decade or so after the war concluded.

Surely you had to do some official drum-banging for the war.

Less than you might think. If I kept to describing specifics, there was no need to hint at the self-destructive futility of it, not that any such hints would have had any result beyond getting me fired. But the anguish cumulated as the months dragged on. You cannot envision the change from 1914, when the war would surely be over by Christmas, to 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918, when it clearly was going to go on forever. In 1914, even in 1915, it was possible to imagine that the end of the war would find us unchanged. By 1916, certainly by 1917, it was clear to those with eyes to see that nobody was going to win this war, and it was about who would lose it more thoroughly. The one date that marked that change more than any other was July 1, 1916.

I looked it up yesterday: 57,000 casualties in one day – 19,000 of them killed – the worst day for casualties in British history. The beginning of a 141-day battle that cost more than 400,000 British casualties and resulted in a six-mile advance over a 16-mile front. To my surprise, I saw that it was no longer considered to be useless butchery that accomplished nothing. Some think it led to the beginning of the end for the Germans, for reasons I won’t go into.

But you asked for the source of my reaction, which you felt that day, and my reactions had nothing to do with questions of strategy, nor even with the question of was it worthwhile even in its own military terms. Mine were rooted in something deeper.

I can feel a certain complication here, a reluctance to dip into it.

Yes, it is powerful, isn’t it, still? What you are calling first-tier and second-tier effects. And the third-tier effect went into the making of you, you understand.

In that you are a dominant strand comprising me.

Yes. You might be fascinated reading about military history (that was another strand’s influence, of course) but you could not enter whole-heartedly into such a career even if your health had allowed, because I knew better.

How do you think I felt, watching without being able to do anything, as a generation of young men was ground into the mud in France, and Gallipoli? Futility, official stupidity, dirty motives of politicians, economics behind it all, deliberate whipping-up of public hatred. It stank, and there was no way out except through it, by way of killing, killing, killing. Just as for many people Sept. 11, 2001, marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, so for me July 1, 1916, marks the end of a relatively innocent age. World War I destroyed Edwardian society.

So to focus in specifically on what I felt that day in London –

Imagine concentrating your emotional reaction to all the wrong-turnings you have witnessed in your life, and spraying them out in one burst, like a capacitor discharging. That’s what you were on the receiving end of. You are thinking of it as if I were sending you a message and you were receiving it. That’s the same idea people in my day had about what telepathy was. But, change metaphors and the nature of the event will become clearer. Think of something that equalizes with something else when brought into contact, the way water seeks its own level. Say you were in the Panama Canal and someone opened the gate between your lock and the adjacent one. The water might come in quickly or slowly overall, but it would come from the higher level to the lower as quickly as it could. The higher lock didn’t “send,” exactly, and the lower one didn’t “receive” in the way people think of telepathy as being sent and received. Instead, in the absence of a barrier, the water naturally sought its own level. A lightning bolt may be seen as the equalization of energy too, violently and suddenly.

So you are saying it wasn’t that you were trying to send a message, but that time and place created the spark?

As you intuited, place is an important part of this.

I have always wondered why ghosts haunt specific places, and why they mark anniversaries.

And now perhaps you see the answer. This is one world, not a physical and a separate non-physical world. Therefore place matters; time matters. Only, it is a matter of conceiving of things correctly. One might say the first of July, 1916 was in 3D on that date, and subsequently is in non-3D only. Yet it is not gone, as conventional thinking would have it. The non-3D version of events does not pass away, any more than other time-space combinations pass away when the living present moment passes on beyond them. But if you were to stand on the Marne battlefield today, it would be the same place (to all extents and purposes), which might facilitate your communication with that place-time that is otherwise difficult or impossible to reach.

When you reconceptualize the world to remove certain thought-barriers, sudden inflows of knowledge and being are enabled to occur. Such barriers include:

  • I am only a 3D being
  • Those in the non-3D are accessible only through effort and practice, and perhaps special talent.
  • The past is beyond touching.
  • The future is “the” future, and in any case does not yet exist.
  • The world is physical and external, rather than mental and internal.
  • We are each alone.
  • “On the other side there is no time.”
  • The 3D and non-3D worlds have little or nothing to do with each other.
  • Mental, spiritual, and physical are three realities, rather than merely three words describing reality from different viewpoints.

The pursuit of happiness

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

[At yesterday’s ILC meeting, we wound up with a somewhat open-ended drumming session centered on the question of happiness. I said, “Guys?” and got the following.]

Happiness as in joy? Or Happiness as in “going with the flow”? They can be but aren’t necessarily the same.

Tranquility is living in minimal friction with what seems external. But living without friction is not automatically the best thing. It may be, it may not be. But if not tranquility, what?

Acceptance, not quite the same thing. It amounts to living in faith that everything that comes to you is for the best, regardless what you may think of it.

Acceptance, not bucking the system, is productive. Trying to get what you want may be productive, but may not be. If you are on a counterproductive path and don’t know it, how will you correct course except by receiving something you may not want, may not like, may not believe is for your benefit?

It would be easy to raise logical objections to this, but more helpful to yourself to tentatively accept it and see what you learn.