All is well, even when it isn’t good

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

One of the first thing the guys upstairs told Rita and me, nearly two dozen years ago, is that “All is well. All is always well.”

For some people, that’s more than they can swallow. Wars, injustice, environmental catastrophe – even lost elections – convince them that all is far from well. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding. To say “All is well” is not a value judgment about any or all features of a given thing being examined. It is to say, the system is functioning as designed.

There is a big difference between saying “all is well” and saying “all is good.” And it isn’t merely a difference in degree; it is a difference in kind.

Tthe creation story in the book of Genesis has God creating the world in stages, and at each stage observing that it was good. Everything created was good, until –.

Enter the story of the eating of the apple. Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, and ever after were unable to escape from the perception of duality. From that point, everything became good or bad to them.

A friend of mine, a former Catholic priest fluent in Hebrew, told me, in answer to my question, that to translate the tree as “the tree of the perception of things as good and evil” was a permissible translation, and that’s what I think the scripture meant. Adam and Eve (that is, humanity) fell into an inability to see things as a unity, and became able to see things only as duality.

Of course, once you are stuck seeing things as good or evil, you are into judging. So we say, “That’s bad,” and we may mean an anything from “I don’t like it” to “This is evil.”  But evil itself, like good itself, is a value judgment, a partial view.

That habit of judging tempts us to think we’re smarter than the universe, more moral than God.  Not very good thinking.

Of course, mostly we can’t help ourselves. But after we have forgotten, and gone into fear or judgment or whatever, it is worthwhile to come back to a saner state of mind, remembering that we don’t have to wait for everything to be good, for all to be well.

 

Happy re-birthday, Papa

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

July 2 is sort of a sad anniversary., being the day, in 1961, that Ernest Hemingway killed himself.

He was physically debilitated and in continual pain as the result of two successive airplane crashes seven years before.

He was mentally ill, tortured by phobias that the doctors couldn’t help him get free of.

He was depressed, and the barbarous regimen of electric shock treatments that were supposed to help him, instead destroyed his memories.

He was old, and beat-up, and tired. A life led at double speed had made him old before his time. A series of concussions had done physical damage that was unrecognized at the time, leading to symptoms the doctors tried to cure with shock treatments, which (it was realized only long after Hemingway’s death) actually made things worse.

He could see that his writing career was over. His intense physical enjoyment of the world was over. This intensely sensory, intensely intuitive artist had run out of road.

July 2, 1961, is the day he finally succeeded in making what he used to call “the family exit.” He put a shotgun to his head and pulled the triggers, and his 3D life was over.

Oh, but what a ride it had been! I wrote about it in novelized form, as Papa’s Trial: Hemingway in the Afterlife. There is always a temptation to think of life as a tragedy because it ends in death. Hemingway himself thought that way. But there’s another way to look at it, that makes more sense to me. If every 3D life comes to an end, how can the fact that we have to die be a tragedy? It’s just part of the deal.

Over the past quarter-century, I came to feel particularly close to this remarkable man. I can’t think he was wrong to  kill himself and get out of an impossible situation. It makes more sense, to me, to think of July 2 as the day he began the next phase in the unending life we all must live.

Happy re-birthday, Papa.

 

Stray thoughts about the future

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Saturday, June 22, 2024

9:05 a.m. This is the day Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, a fatal mistake. I was thinking, a while ago, someone could look back at our history since at least 1914 and reinterpret everything as the gradual reemergence of the non-western world, partly through the west’s civil wars and partly through the natural effects of western ideas and technology on the other old civilizations. It would give people a different way to look at things.

So many contenders:

  • The Latin Americans, closest to western culture, and their attraction to and resistance to the Colossus of the North.
  • The Chinese, recovering from 300 years of decay and stagnation, first reawakened by Japan in the 1930s and then finding their way once they rid themselves of their fleeting dependence upon Moscow.
  • The Japanese, first imitating, then defying, then conquering, then being conquered, then beginning again.
  • South Asia, profiting from European institutions and then rejecting Europe’s role. India, Indonesia, Indochina, Thailand, etc.
  • The Muslim world, taking advantage of the war against the Turks, then Hitler v. the West, then the U.S. v. Britain, then Russia v. the West. Oil its greatest asset and greatest problem. Its greatest internal problem, secular v. extreme religious beliefs.
  • Russia and the other borderlands, half western, half anti-western, continually vacillating but always seeking a valid path into the future.
  • Finally, Africa, the land of the future in the way people used to call Brazil the country of the future. Sub-Saharan Africa looks like its going to take a long, long time to emerge, but you never know.

And there is the West itself, in all its contradictions. It is no longer Christendom. At the moment it appears to be secular materialism, but there is a remorseless quiet backlash growing, from several directions. It will take an external defeat, perhaps many of them, before the ruling paradigm is overthrown, but it must come.

And from all these competing fragments, each previously sovereign in its own area, each driven to distraction by the newly intrusive presence of the others, something new will arise, a world civilization infinitely complex and both familiar and alien. We who are alive today will not live long enough to see it, though the youngest among us may see the beginnings.

 

Riding Point

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

When I learned that Ken Kesey had died, I wrote a poem and sent it along, which Ken Babbs was gracious enough to acknowledge and say he liked.

Riding Point

Kesey’s son went over

in a cosmic instant, in a car wreck,

and later Kesey sent a book

“to Jed, across the river

riding point.” I always liked

what that showed he knew:

that death is change, not end;

that Jed remained himself,

if also something more; that

all our trails cross a river.

 

Yesterday, perhaps they met

and shared a fire, and coffee,

and, Kesey still being Kesey,

perhaps some hash. It’s dusty work,

riding drag; good to change over

and finally ride in,

across the river

– Ken Kesey died November 10, 2001

Track record

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

A friend mentioned that I am not posting regularly anymore, which of course is true. It set me to remembering when posting was a daily occurrence, over many years. How many posts? Over how many years? I looked at the site’s dashboard for statistics:

My first post was on March 9, 2007, nearly 17 years ago. Since then:

  • 4,356 posts, of which all but three are mine, or are credited to me. (Sometimes people would write something I would use as a guest posting, but the stats still attributed it to me.)
  • These posts have drawn 7894 comments, of which 1833 were mine, presumably in response to something someone said.

March 2007 to now makes 201 months. Divide 4,353 posts by 201 and you get an average of a little more than 21 posts per month, the equivalent of one every business day for nearly 17 years. That’s a lot of postings, enough to make something of an afterthought of anything that may follow.

 

Cheering thought

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

i happened to be re-reading “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam, and was struck among other things by this quatrain:

“Why,” said another, “Some there are who tell

Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell

the luckless pots he marred in the making. Pish!

He’s a good fellow, and ’twill all be well.”

Amen, brother. it boggles the mind to think how many people must have lived their lives in fear of hell, even while thinking they loved the God who could play so unfair a game.

BTW if you haven’t ever read The Rubaiyat, you can easily find it online. It’s great. You already know some of its verses, i suspect, and many of its phrases (well,  Edward FitsGerald’s translation of them, anyway).

Certainly you will have seen this one:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread–and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness–
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

And perhaps this one:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing.

but to see how they all fit together, take a few minutes, read the whole thing. It will brighten your day.:

http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html