The road not taken

Monday, March 28, 2022

6:05 a.m. I awaken to sorrow and indignation that Messenger, which should be an acknowledged classic by now, was let to die unknown because nobody would fight for it – not me, particularly.

[Messenger won an award upon publication, and a German company wanted to make it into a TV film. But when a firm of agents challenged my right to use James Hilton’s characters in a novel, we didn’t fight, but caved in, and forfeited the right to reprint the book. We should have fought it.]

The splinter ran so deep, and it blighted all the rest of my life. What ought to have been a beginning became one more dead-end. Perhaps it is time to ask “why” not in the sense of what did I do or not do wrong, but in the sense of, “What purpose does it serve, that I live in obscurity rather than a justly deserved fame?”

You mean, what if it wasn’t an accident?

I never thought it was an accident. But it seems a malevolent twist of fate.

Or maybe a dramatization to you of the effect of traits, just like anything else in life.

I can’t deny that it had that effect. I suppose if the shaping of my soul is more important than the shaping of my life, I should count it a good thing.

There’s “good” and “bad” again. Or do you mean fortunate, useful? In any case, a lesson is useful only if it is learned, not if it is disregarded. But even then, it may be useful eventually, if it eventually sinks in.

I have “The Spy” [a Netflix series] running in another part of my mind. I neglected to focus.

Multiple mental channels may be of use, if you recognize them for what they are.

A barometer?

A barometer. They show you, indirectly, the things that have come to the surface in a given moment. They are part of an internal weather report. A given moment will prompt these memories, dreams, reflections, associations, rather than those, and what is chosen will give you a glimpse of the energies working.

Ah, which is the basis of the I Ching.

And of Tarot, yes. Where astrology maps the pattern mathematically, I Ching and Tarot, among other systems, dowse the moment for the qualities it conceals and reveals. The one is predictive, the others are more analytical of the moment one is in.

I always suspected that the things we were being taught in New Age workshops weren’t quite what should have been meant.

If that sentence were ours, you would be severely critical of its opacity.

It’s true, I would. Let me say it more clearly. We were taught mindfulness, as if it meant, no stray thoughts, no chains of association. The teachers of yoga or meditation seemed to assume that such things were bad, were distraction, were the norm only because people were asleep.

Nor were they wrong.

Not were they entirely right.

It depends upon the mind you bring to the subject. You didn’t know what they meant, only what you picked up.

Well, that’s true.

A major thread running through your life is inability or unwillingness to express yourself – except explosively – to defend your own interests (Messenger, case in point) or to present your own point of view not as confrontation but as an attempt to clarify your or another’s ideas.

Yes, it has taken all these years, but now that it is too late, I have been seeing it.

Too late for what?

For my writing career, for Hampton Roads.

Maybe. But not for you as eternal part of the eternal human mind as it exists in non-3D.

Well, I wonder about that. What good does it do for the universe to know that if you put these qualities into this situation, one result can be such and such?

What good is anything?

That too.

No, ours was a rhetorical question meaning, How can the fragment understand the whole? We do not agree with the impulse that says, “Nothing is of any use.”

I suppose it amounts to having blind faith that “All is Well.”

Even faith is going to waver, form time to time. “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.”

So I guess it is as Michael Langevin said a few years ago. I’m doubting the past, rather than having faith in it.

Aren’t you?

As I said. So the lesson going forward would seem to be, change. But what if I can’t, or don’t, make that effort?

If you change or don’t change, you have your life, don’t you? It isn’t as if a “wrong” choice will blight it. “There is a tide in the affairs of men” may be true in terms of the individual subjectivity’s relation the shared subjectivity – that is, of the person’s relation to his society – but it does not apply to his own internal development. A choice will determine a course, but it will not result in blighting his possibilities. Every choice always leads to new choices. Is where you landed so bad? Do you know that alternatives would have been equally satisfactory?

Point taken.

But do you feel better?

I do, I think. I could wish for more analysis and perception going forward.

“Wishing won’t do it, saving will.”

PSFS. [A long-time advertising slogan of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society when I was growing up.] Good advice that may have been disastrous for some who took it.

Good thing the world isn’t random.

Yes. We do have all these unreconciled or unconnected places within us, don’t we?

It’s natural. You were not created all of a piece. Why should you not expect to have dissenting voices among your crew, and some who didn’t get the word.

Memories of John F. Kennedy. [“There’s always one guy who didn’t get the word,” he said, harking back to his years in the Navy.]

Take his life as an example. Should he have turned right instead of left, done this instead of that? Anyone’s life can be different, but different isn’t necessarily better, or worse, just different. The road not taken is always going to seem brighter with promise. The drawbacks and calamities will always seem lesser, perhaps nonexistent. But nothing is good or bad entirely; it just is.

One more private session that can go out into the world?

There’s nothing shameful in it, or anything that needs to be private. Why not? Don’t you think everybody’s life has regrets and unhealed places? Call this “The road not taken,” maybe.

Thank you Robert Frost. Except, that was “The Road Less Traveled.”

You took that, too, did you not?

I did, and as he said, it made all the different. Till next time, then.