My favorite of Thoreau’s poems, included here merely because I like it.
Smoke
Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
I have begun reading Odell Shepard’s selection of Alcott’s Journals, which Alcott kept for more than 50 years, and it is like finding an old/new friend. A few samples from the first few pages:
Someone said that the 19th century was Emerson’s, the 20th, Thoreau’s, but the 21st would be Bronson Alcott’s. I am beginning to believe it.
Absorbing new material intellectually is satisfying, sometimes exciting. But how hard it can be to actually live it!
It is good to become thoroughly familiar with the Cayce work, or Seth, or scriptures, or the guys upstairs. Certainly all that wisdom can enrich our lives. But if we can’t apply it, what good does it do us? We know so much more than we know how to live. But every once in a while…
Last month, my friend Charles and I were shown a simple concept to overcome a stubborn underlying problem.
Charles is very rational, very intellectual, quite at home with metaphysical concepts. He has done extensive reading in metaphysical and philosophical subjects. (Also, he has a positive genius for explicating complicated concepts by clothing them in entertaining stories. For instance, Motorcycle Enlightenment, the novel that Hampton Roads published.)
But sometimes life and matters of feeling and human relationships leave him baffled. [Gee, I wonder what that would feel like!]
On the one hand, he knows that things don’t “just happen” in our lives; that problems are opportunities, in that they are manifestations of things within us that need attention. But on the other hand, sometimes he looks back on his life and has to ask himself how he could have made this or that bad decision.
From years of introspection, he had come to identify a pattern. As long as a problem involved the rational mind, he could deal with it, and usually quite easily. But anything that involved the emotions – and what human relationships don’t involve the emotions? – led his rational, thinking mind to flee, turning over the helm to an emotional part that reacts – as one would expect – emotionally.
The result was bad decisions made impulsively and regretted at leisure when the thinking part came back. He knew that this pattern developed as a result of an early childhood trauma (which is his business, not ours). But knowing it is not the same as overcoming it.
Talking about it, we found an insight forming, and a practical way to apply it.
Charles is a Virgo, God help him. 😊 He is at home with spreadsheets and anything practical. Business was always easy for him, because, as he says, “numbers made sense.”
As we discussed his situation, the metaphor arose. I said, in effect, “You have two spreadsheets, one intellectual and one emotional, and the problem is that the two don’t communicate. When one enters the room, the other leaves. What you need to do is to sync the two, so that they will learn to work together.”
(Charles points out that the understanding seated in for him when I said that when the emotions were triggered, his IQ went to 0. He says, “That’s what registered first for me. I guess it was because my mental-rational part found it both humorous and partly insulting, so it wanted to understand how it could improve itself…I don’t know. I just know it worked.”)
He tried it, and that began a cascade of positive changes. We can see the results already, sometimes in minor things, sometimes in things that are not so minor. I don’t’ see any reason to think it won’t continue to work for him.
Now, this idea of syncing your emotional and rational spreadsheets may not seem like any big deal, but, if you sometimes find yourself making bad decisions for reasons that baffle you, you might try it. I offer it for what it is worth.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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