Train-Track Tolerations

 

Toleration can be an awkward exercise. It suggests a challenge to being fully integrative. It suggests an unelected pathway of having to humor another. It suggests that one is (or at least feels, however uncomfortably) ‘superior’. Yet in the long progress of being ‘fully human’, being tolerant might at best incorporate the practices of compassion, consideration, care, and co-operation. Still, being there, something or other too easily can upset one off track.

Such are the cracks in the tracks of our contact with others. Are you herewith included? Did we journey a relatively short while in the same train-compartment, and then you, or I, got off at a given station, and went on our individual way? 

The trainset on my plywood table goes round, and round. It usually obeys such power as I feed it. But occasionally, with the disuse of time, or because of the over-long interval in which I focused on another activity, the trains dislocate, stop up, or refuse to budge. Always, it takes quite some careful sleuthing to determine the problem’s cause.

Are we at such a disconnect? Has it been too long since we gave power to our words, or gave continuity to our correspondence? Did either of us disembark, deplane, or detrain? The stations in our lives naturally involve new journeys. Details, foreign to another, take up much of our time and energy; the limitations in our sharing increases; we feel the disconnect becoming natural, non-affected, and sensibly tolerated. (Besides, one grows tired of talking just about Things; or just about Other People; and even one’s ‘wayward’ Ideas can simply become too frustrating to accommodate.)

Imprecision, quite unlike myself, is not tolerated by my trainset. Even the tiniest hair-crack in the connection points of the rails can freeze up the train’s motion. But we humans are not like that. We can accidentally reconnect with a wave, a word, a smile, or an intentional handshake. And like some strangers on a journey, we can even resume our old intercourse without the hiccup of an utter disconnect, at times sharing such intimacies of personal information as can take oneself by surprise.

We are connected. Despite all our discord and fragmentation and warmongering; despite all the Faustian pharmaceutical fallacies and their commercial iniquities; despite our ‘Territorial Imperative,’ (with its investment in our Identity; our need for Stimulation; and our want of Security,) * we cannot escape our essential inter-dependence. Our molecular osmosis is felt in the soul. At least, it is felt by those of us who are not too embroiled in an existential intolerance of others, such that our own pathways disallow the psychic current of our ‘entelechic’ energy to keep us evolving.

Unlike the relatively flat metaphor of a toy-train-set on a plywood board, the analogy of one’s place within the larger sphere of our observed universe is indeed multidimensional. It is that very multiplicity of advents, opportunities, perspectives, choices, and proclivities that impels us as individuals to make decisions for which we bear consequence, good, or bad. We are not ineluctably yoked to each other on a train-track, nor even collectively (anymore) societally mandated to 1^st, 2^nd, or 3^rd class conveyances for the rest of our lives. We are free to interrelate.

Tolerance, practiced with care, does much for us all.  

.........................................................................................................................................

*See: Ardrey, R. The Territorial Imperative. Athenium, New York. (1966)

A Pentacle Criteria for Perceptual Critique

Next to a taped-up poster of Mona Lisa on the blackboard, I draw a five-point star.

“Five points, referenced by a star shape, or conversely, by the fingers of one’s hand, make up a Pentacle of Criteria by which art, literature, (and much music too,) might readily be evaluated,” I say to my interested students. “For example, let’s take Mona Lisa.”

“Ha! She always smirks at us!” interjects Buddy, with a laugh.

I smile. “Very good. Humour, like our palms, may be central.” My hand high; I wiggle my fingers. “Yet, like all other possible points, not always obvious.” I draw a smiley in the star’s centre, then scribble a stuck-out tongue. “Next?” My index finger points. “What starts things?”

“How about ‘action’?” Roger suggests. “After all, adventures need ongoing action.” He points: “Look at those disappearing pathways, behind her. Like our ‘two paths in a yellow wood’.”

I turn, and at an arbitrary point of the star, I write:  Action/Adventure.

Purposefully, I thrust up my middle finger. “Next?”

“Sir!” Felicity demurs. “Don’t be rude!”

“Ah! Very good. But how do we know that it’s a rude gesture?” I ask. “In some countries it might be construed as a good luck symbol. Very many symbols have esoteric references, or intellectual terms, and like innocent children, we may yet come to learn their significance.”

“So,” Felicity ventures, “would the next point of the star be: Esoteric/Intellectual?”

“Say,” Clarence offers, “given the finger, we once discussed Shakespeare’s overt sexual references, or sensually subliminal ones, ‘not just to appeal to the commoners.’ But I do not see any of that in the Mona Lisa.”

“I do!” Buddy brags. “Look at that cleavage, and at her satisfied smile,” he adds, a trifle lewdly.

I shrug, give a thumbs-up, and write: Sensual/Sexual.

“But just look at her eyes!” Mandy suggests. “They’re full of love and care! Might the fourth point be: Romance, and Sentiment?”

After chalking up the phrases, I put up my pinky, and say, “Insightful observations, thanks. Now then, what might be the fifth? Given the over-arching intentions of this class, lesson after lesson, for what are we consistently searching? Is it just knowledge? Or is it something more?”

Little Linda, the youngest in our class, stands up. “We are in a search for wisdom, Sir. Always. We are, as we have often discussed, ‘spiritual beings, being human.’ And Mona Lisa does look as though she knows something that we do not, yes?”

I smile, and write the last label: Wisdom/Spiritual  

“Wonderful. Thank you. Now then, along with your insightfulness, we’ve devised, or divined, yet another rubric for what might be endemic to most enduring works of art, or literature, or music, and film too. Our criteria, even if subconsciously, variously appeals to the broad spectrum of humanity. What bears recalling is that, like the five fingers of one’s hand, those diverse aspects are not necessarily equally deployed. From our thick thumbs to our little pinkies, differentiation can be variously ascribed. Hence our circle, lest we presume that there is a necessary hierarchy, as opposed to a preferential focus. After all, just like humour, good for us as it is, every element is not necessarily in any and every classical artform. Why, even Mona Lisa, here, is but caught up in a moment.”

 “Yeah,” Buddy nods. “But what a moment! It keeps going on and on. See, she’s still smiling!”

 

Making Manifestations

 

Damocles also hung up his sword.

“You’re best to drive,” my wife caringly suggested, and added, “The Red Door Treasures is too far from here.” I looked back at our parking spot, under the shade of a tree, with the choc-a-block tourists thronging the street, many stopping to take pictures of the goats on the grass roof, and many making queues to get ice-cream and sundaes. I smiled at her care.  “I’ll be alright. I’ve walked it before, from here. And you said you’ll need about an hour in the market. I choose to walk.” “Well, let’s keep our phones on,” she responded, “I’ll come and get you, if need be.” And so, my adventure began.

It most often is not ‘one for all,’ and certainly it is not ‘all for one,’ no matter how inclusively round is our table. Rather, we each are individual and unique in our petri-dishes on Earth. Around us swirls the infinity of the Universe. Some cosmologists deem there are parallel corollaries. Some see loops in time where the repetitions are felt in de'ja vu moments, apprehended intuitively. We make much of Intuition. We make models with rubrics of mandated behaviours. We make Religion. We make supposition become fact. We make myth become reality. We turn history itself into the advantage of a whole race over another, and (lately) we become increasingly conscious of the impact of our collective responsibilities in our Colonialisms, appropriations, and usurpations. Yet despite the diversity of our collective acculturations, and the political pools of our firm-held contentions, as well as the familial obligations of our emotions, we have, as individuals, in our groups throughout our history, proven that it is the individual who affects others. One by one we influence each of us toward a paradigm shift, and so we progress through the timelines of our course, making manifestations of the things one first envisions. Yet still, much of what we manifest remains ‘just for me’.

“Just for me?” was my vacillation point, but I went past it. I pulled the sword from the rock. Well, at least, metaphorically. Thing is, back in 2008, I directed ‘Camelot’. Its King Arthur, a renown singer, did a splendid job for our Front Row Centre Theatre Company. So, since he’d worn my own Excalibur while on stage throughout the three weeks of shows, I gave it to him as a memento. But now, seventeen years later, in my man cave, I found myself picking up my copies of Arthurian writers, M. Ashley, G. Ashe, T. Mallory, and the inimitable T.H. White, and thinking of that old sword. A beautifully crafted replica, I’d had it for several years before directing the musical. But nowadays, thrown into the lake of the past, I doubted that I should ever see the gleam of that sword again. Until yesterday.

The roadside stalls alongside the tourist trap of Coombs are a colourful enticement of bric-a-brac. One may pick up a spanner, a wooden giraffe, or an old cassette tape. Should one have been manifesting something, (which is a wishing for some ‘thing,’ (if not an event) into existence,) it could well be there. And it was! Halfway twixt where I had been, and where I was going, lay yet another Excalibur, on a dusty table, unsheathed, soiled with fingerprints, yet unscathed by misuse. Avoiding anyone else cutting to the quick, that sword, as I type, is now mounted in my man-cave, safe, secure, and is again mine.     

Manifestations take on many forms. Their materializations occur so frequently that there is a disbelief that their happy happenstances are mere coincidences; (had I driven, it would not have been seen.) Yet it appears that the energies of wishful thinking, like the intentions of prayer, do collude to create circumstances of serendipity. Thing is, this story is indeed about a 'thing'. Other stories can be about persons, occasions, and dreams. We each are under the point of that sword of Damocles as we vacillate between our wants, and our needs. There is a price to pay for living. Ideally, that price is the freedom to choose. And as we make the choice, do we act from our uniqueness, or from our purported individuality, while each of us remains bound up within our acculturations? Choice, as is often the case, is indeed a double-edged sword. Excalibur defends, or attacks. All one’s choices bear consequence; Damocles would know.

Time To Change

 https://rpentelbury.blogspot.com/2025/04/time-to-change.html

Time To Change

April 30, 2025

At last, there are words. In the beginning, so it was too. Until then, all was an abstraction of energy not yet given any form, by man. And as our ‘sense of life’ developed, (to quote, in this April month, my beloved brother,) we began verbal constructs that not only turned sound into malleable meanings in our various languages, but that then became inviolate mental concepts that history has proven we are prepared to die for. Yet a house has very many shapes, dimensions, and locations, even though we understand it epistemologically to mean a place of shelter. So it goes. To formulate a paragraph of coherent meaning, let alone a series of phrases or sentences that inspire, is as much dependent on the muse of ancient and atavistic invigoration, as it is on the immediacy of the moment. Pausing to think, overlong, is to lose one’s energy on the train track of thoughts, despite such a break sometimes being but a period of gestation. Since the political slogan is ‘time for a change,’ what does that phrase really mean to you?

The difficulty of pretentious phrases is that it requires commensurate knowledge to participate in their comprehension, (much like the esoterica of knowing that Black Beauty is about a horse.) And if deprived from that cultural enlightenment as a child, so too may one not anymore know who Arthur the Great was, or what Hornby Dunblo means. Each of us is captured by the Petri dish of acculturation into which we are born. Some climb the lip and depart for yet some other grouping, but the predominances of life is what these words are about. One observes that we are persons each struggling much to maintain and persevere with our habitual norms. Yet all around, the world is yet again embroiled in the threats of great, ineluctable, change.

Political divisiveness slices into the fabric of our societies. We are hard put not to view the distinctions between Them, versus Us. And we are cautious in our interactions with friends and family to check into their proclivities, lest we tread on their firmly held beliefs, values, and constructs. The binary division becomes apparent. And the constructs of terminology, thought patterns, belief systems, and values can trounce ethics, morals, integrity, and temperaments, depending on whom one addresses. Yet even better, listening proves the most valuable. One’s vote is one’s own, and gathering whatever one can from others helps much to make one’s mind up, as uncertain, ultimately, as one may feel about the outcome. It is easier to stay in one’s lane, independent of who is at the forefront, and to vote as one’s habits have been, all one’s life. (As such the days may not, in deeds, become ‘sunny’.) Now there’s a Canadian yoking of constructs, paradigms, esoteric knowledge, and history, in a single phrase. Sonny?

Thing is, these words are not meant to persuade you. Nor are they meant to define the only way forward. They are but a nudge toward a more mindful meta-cognition, more intensity of action, more clarity of purpose, and more compassion for the whole. Without one recognizing that we all are struggling toward enlightenment, spiritual evolution, and even geopolitical peace and inclusion, at whatever level of application to task any of us may be observed, evaluated, or professed to be operating within, one is impoverishing oneself of hope, of empowerment, of influence, and of contribution toward the health of the whole. Yes, it is natural for some to be self serving and selfish, but now is the time for genuinely including, accepting, assimilating, and integrating the variables among all of one’s neighbours. By country. By nationality. By religion. By political affiliation. And by a universal sensibility toward The Whole. Still…

“I can do that, but what about them? They cannot! And if they charge at me, I’ve little choice but to retaliate in equal measure.” Yes. And the wars continue. And the political systems perpetuate divides. And the religions perpetuate hierarchies. And thinking, itself, wrestles and wrangles with the spirit, such that one is weary of it all, and sad, and at a loss for words, and fearful of getting this wrong.

So, we go with the flow. Or does one? Do we wait for change to be mandated from without, or are we each given to change, from within? Time, we gather, for each and every one of us, is finite. Truly, is change?

Foolhardy Fellowships

 

Presumptions can be foolish. The coach pointed at me. “You should all run like him. Do that again in slow-motion, boyo. Let’s see that perfect style of yours in action.” Well, for about 20 yards or so, I did it, focusing on the precision of ‘my style’. Being only 12 years old, I knew nothing, really, of ‘how to run.’ The sense of it came naturally to me. And as for ‘slow-motion,’ that too, for me, was just a concept. In those early years of the 60’s, going to movies in South Africa, for me, was a most infrequent thing, and I do not recall having ever seen slow-motion. So, on that hot and sweaty Sports Day I tried to present what I thought it might look like. “That’s good enough,” yelled the coach to stop me. “See,” he told the others, “that’s how to run.”

We were in the Pilditch Stadium grounds, just behind the soaring concrete structure, warming up. It was at last the all-schools’ meet, and I’d always made first in my own school’s playground, so sprinting was a delight. And now here, from the start, I’d impressed the coach with my take-offs. After all, with school practices, I’d come up with reacting to the ‘Buh…,” and did not wait for the “...ang!” of the teacher’s yell. Now, with this new teacher taking a special liking to me while warming us up, with each of us from a different school for the 100 yards dash, I thought I’d have the race ‘in the bag.’

And then, soon enough, we were in the big stadium. My first time. It felt very exciting to see all those people there. The grandstands looked full. The huge field had all sorts of simultaneous events going on. Long jump. High jump. Discus-throwing. There were even races like the 220 yards, the 440, and the fifteen-hundred-yard runs. I’d never conceived of them. (But no one, I discerned, sprinted quite like me.) They even had a real gun! Our impoverished school, Burgher Right Primary, had not had such things. Nor had we even had a track on which to practice. We ran on uneven ground. And a stake at either end had demarcated the start and stop of the 100 yards over a lumpy and uneven lawn. Never mind. I’d been the fastest in my school. And now, here at the big event with our warm-ups just done, I’d shown myself the fastest off the white line, and the best in style too. Sure, I was the only one in bare feet, (as I recall it,) but shoes would just weigh me down. So, when at last ready, with about eight or ten of us at the start line, I was determined to show all the people in the stands just how fast I was.

Hubris. Arrogance. Self-righteousness. These were not terms in my ken, back in those days. Nor was the obverse of those debilitating terms, with universal concepts like compassion, empathy, or concomitance. I was a boy, and like most of my fellows, I thought the best way to be a boy was to best others on every occasion. After all, ‘competition’ was designed to prove just who was ‘best’. So was swimming. So was running. So too, even, were exams.

But a strange thought overcame me as I waited for the, “On your marks!” command. What if I slow-motioned my start, and my run too, and showed them all how it’s done? Surely the very force of my energy would control the others, and we all would run in a slow motion too, and…?

Well, I came dead last. I recall the others springing up, with me still at the starter’s line, and then my still, foolishly, determinedly, running in slow-motion, perfectly, all the while intent on drawing the others back to run that way too. But of course, I never caught up.

Somewhere in our makeup is the sense that our behaviours, our connection, our similarities, are only individualized by the shells of our molecular inheritance. ‘All we need is love.’ All we need is each other. All we need is empathy, compassion, integration, and cooperation, so that others similarly, if not simultaneously, may conduct themselves the same way we do. But real life teaches us that birds of a feather do tend to gather, and even they have their pecking order. We generally have a compulsive need to be first, or better than, or at least be a part of, so that we can be secure with who we are, what we do, and even how we think. Yet I’m of a mind that right now, in the eighth decade of my life, with our world on fear-filled tenterhooks, one is best not to expect one’s behaviours to affect all others, other than to keep being the best that one can be.

Feeding Fears

 

We decimate things at our whim. The leaves from the three arbutus trees bothered both of us. He was out there, too frequently, with his broom and long handled dustpan, clearing his cobble-paved driveway, his immaculately swept pathways, his manicured flower beds. On the other hand, once in a long while, I cleared the fallen leaves on my side with my noisy battery-powered blower, and stuffed the fragmented offal into a black bag, ready for the garbage. Both of us were bothered by the fallen leaves, he much more than my little bit. And right from the start, when I first called the property mine, he’d let me know that he ‘feared that those trees would have to come down, someday’. After all, with that smaller one on my property line, and the two larger ones within his, they obscured my view, but not his.

Birds frequented them. Spring-time Robins. Summer-time Northern flickers. Winter-time Chickadees. Autumn Sparrows. And even resting hummingbirds. But the live leaves, bristling and waving, sometimes hid the birds’ flittings from us. Then too, the wide-spread branches reached up into the sky, a good fifteen feet high, and their rake did impede our ocean view. We’d see so much more of The Strait were they to come down. But I was most reluctant. Trees scrub the sky clean. Trees give life. Trees take decades to grow. Trees take precedence over our own preferences, surely?

But that neighbour also had a magnificent and deeply green and very tall Deodara tree. At some fifty feet in height, and at least twelve feet wide, it not only blocked some of our own vista, but also dropped its messy pine needles atop his other neighbor’s glass-top greenhouse. “For years now,” he uttered, uncertainly, “I’ve been meaning to cut down this tree, much as I don’t want to.”

Thing is, for most of us, excising the detritus of our lives, let alone the obvious, is a difficult thing to do. All over the yards through our very human existence there are the discards and rotten boats and rusted trucks and the heaps of rubbish that clutter our lives. There is the obvious. There is the dubious. There is the valuable, (which may not be useful.) And then there’s junk.

So too for our fears. We indeed have fear for a reason. It serves us. It can ensure that we are safe. But then too, our whole lives become conditioned to fear; fear that we are insufficient; fear that we do not measure up; fear that we do not have the latest; do not have the best; do not have what he or she has; and we can fear that we are not as worthy as any other. We do not wish to be called ‘cheap’. And so, commercialism feeds on our fears. So too do our politicians. So too do even our friends and families and neighbours. One ‘needs’ to ‘measure up’.

And so, we can hack away at the tall poppies within us. We can topple the evolving trees that may grow up from inside us, and we can scare away the birds of our thoughts that may choose otherwise to roost. We take on the constructs of others before us; we can adopt their religions; we often adopt their political stripes; we do sing beside their flags; and we follow the queues that would lead us to the troughs of acceptability, lest, like an escaped prisoner hurrying away from the ubiquitous wall, the spotlight falls on us, and we are arrested, recaptured, or shot.

Those trees on our property lines came down. All four of them. The sky grew bigger. But did our worldview? Did we really contribute to the health of the whole? Did we really gain in our yard’s value so that some future person may benefit, let alone ourselves? And do the birds now merely find some other resting place; just as does one’s own thoughts, when there simply is too much of the mind’s fluttering of fallen leaves with which to contend?

The trees were mulched. All four of them. Like letters of the alphabet in scrabble, their sense was reduced to nothing. And the snarl of chainsaws and growling augers eventually left too. So too did the birds. (But at least that awful volume of leaves shall no more be a bother, eh?)

Of Ethics and Integrity

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical lodge within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through the ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved. Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character, or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. Yet let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. At our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become embarrassingly unearthed.

Untimely Unearthed

 

Death unearths us. It can rip us untimely, roots and all, from the cracks and crevasses and detritus and dirt of our soils. The fertilizer that sustained us can get analyzed, evaluated, quantified. And others come to pick over our stuff, our mementoes, our photographs, our letters, our videos, and even the very essence of who we were. The eulogy most frequently becomes a bloated dispensation of our history. It balloons around our good life; it may chuckle at the bad. And being fully human, yet dead, we lie in ice-cold states of awaiting the glance, the touch, and even the kiss of others. Our soul, that ephemeral quality that actually finds no physical entity within us, is no longer visibly available, despite the speculations of any of the religions and philosophies to which we may have adhered. Time takes each of us, in turn.

Indeed, life makes for rattling one’s sabre. To be ‘fully human,’ as Morrie puts it, is the key. As Goethe put it: “You can tell the metal of a person by what gets their goat.” The differential between character, and personality, though, might be reviewed. As Dylan sings it, one is, “toiling in the danger, and in the morals of despair.” Character, then, becomes a matter of ethical choices, along with experience. Personality, like Elizabethan humours, appears more innate, more predicated on Zodiac signs, more congenital, and can even be more mercurial than character. Character is a rock upon which one’s house of conduct is erected; personality is the collection of accoutrements along the way, the which are largely determined by nature, and affected a little by nurture. Character, time and again, gives rise to actions based on consciousness, consideration, compassion, courage, and clear-headedness. It is the heart (to keep things simple) that governs emotions, fickle emotions, that are reactionary to the endemic sensibility of being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic in the first place. But with character, there is a marriage between heart and head that defines response, purpose, intent, and action. And so, integrity grows by one’s age, as does one’s ethical stances too. But personality, that colourful manque that clothes one to the grave, can wear different cloaks to hide its unfulfilled representations through our own ages. At death, though, one can indeed become rendered unconcealed, utterly revealed.

Encountering ethical challenges along the way is a test of living. Does one effectively change the choices of responses in our passage, or do we repeat our age-old habituations?  Are we really, truly, conscious, as much as is possible of the best choice for all parties involved? Intentionality becomes paramount. And awareness that others may not be able, or mature enough, or innately integrative enough, or wanting enough to adjust and to handle the truth becomes a great matter of sensitivity to the delicacy of each situation. Skill and care are part of character. Deception and deceit can be part of character too. And personality can conceal all, either way. A charming person can have great character; or might also be self-serving. Good character, essentially, comes wrapped in ethics. Personality is wrapped in presentation. And one adjudges each in one’s turn.

So then to come across the detritus of another’s lifetime, and to pick up this or that, with the fingerprints of the dead still very much on it, and to discard, dismiss, or disown the thing out of disassociation seems so sad in the face of another’s lifetime of collecting, of treasuring, of storing. But we all do it. We do it in Antique Shops, and in the wake of love. Sentimentality and pragmatism vie for possessions. The existentialism of our makeup determines that which we in our turn take to the grave. So then let us learn integrity, ethics, and actions beyond the mere impulses of our personality. And surely, at our own death, untimely as it may be, we’d rather not find ourselves by others become unnecessarily and embarrassingly unearthed.

Ekphrastic Expositions

 

Ekphrasis? One explains things from one’s own point of view. We expound with emotion, with insight, with knowledge, and even with a pleasurable amount of guesswork. So too do we live in the canvas of our lives. So too do we build upon our perceptions. And the original work, the poem, the painting, the photograph that we expound upon, given the creative springboard that gives rise to our own voice, is as ancient an ekphrastic exposition of our minds as would be a gift from a Greek muse.

Ekphrasis? It’s the big words that can be off-putting. The very chiaroscuro of our elucidations can be too much of a juxtaposition, and without a ready mental formula to deduce what is being read, or heard, the brain gives up. The ears tune out. We get bored. Why not just be simple? Collectively, we feel little responsibility toward assimilating every new concept. It is the rare individual, here and there, who wishes to ‘know everything.’ There simply is too much. Yet inherent to the ‘dumbing down’ of society, as we eschew big words for little ones, and as we hook into Hemingwayesque pithy pronouncements, such as those anchored in the sea of an Old Man, over a predilection for Victorianesque prolific phrasing, such as those surrurating amongst the shifting sands of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is that the vitality and richness of a living language stalls. Keep it simple. Do not ask me to look up a word. Make your references clear. Do not ask me to look up a Title. Make your references obvious. Do not ask me to read for too long, listen for too long, watch for too long, sit for too long, converse for too long, or think for too long; I just want to scroll at my phone. Its screen does not challenge me to stick to something, unless it interests me. I can flick through stuff. I can text without worry about correct grammar. My auto type will correct spellings, most Lee. So what if it makes miss steaks.

The argument for clear articulation is a double-edged sword. Ekphrasis, at best, explores one’s thinking under the Damoclean concept of evolving spiritually, responsibly. But in conspiring freely, our self-awareness by contrast becomes a consummate concentration, enslaving us to self-centricity, egoism, and independent connection. Huh? Yes, we can connect with others across the globe, but at large we get to say what we want, independently, even irresponsibly, and indubitably self-serving. Our every action, however, impinges on all, not just around us.

Chiaroscuro? Day and night have their smudging hours. The middle ground of left and right is where action yields to compromise, to complicity, to compassion. Integration, by degrees, becomes a fuller acceptance. How to accommodate that our own throne of responsibility, which is the human condition, is to be under that sword of Damocles, where every thought, and action, can be questioned, usurped, overturned? Very few things in our world are absolutely and totally and inalterably ‘right’. We are, as a species, too easily fragmented, dissociative, warmongering, and contentious to be lumped into a wholesome group, such as those with the collective brain of termites, or bees, or butterflies. Our metamorphosis is generally individualized, and random, and even a choice, or not. Yet still, mankind evolves more by accident than by design, however much an individual’s chosen cultural group, or not, may control our thinking. At issue is the meaning behind ‘mankind’s evolving.’ Unless we are entirely given to all of us simultaneously becoming loving and compassionate towards each other, as a species, we remain primitive, collectively speaking. And therein lies the rub; integration, fully, would have one accept ‘all’.

Ekphrasis, then, is a Greek word meaning, ‘exploring with a detailed description’. But it is not about the selfies we take with our cell phones, or where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what’s on our plate. It is rather about the degree of our sensibility of our responsibility toward The Whole. It is not about moralizing and controlling; it is about understanding. It is, after all, about one for all, and all for one.

Graduated Grades Theory

 

Hereby initiated, coined, theorized, full integration is not easy. There is no ultimate graduation. Individualized and abstract, the variegated shafts of the Grade Theory curriculum are neither predetermined, nor predestined. Attainments within any given Grade Level, and even from one Grade to another, are perhaps gradual, or perhaps in paradigmatic leaps. As such, insights and apprehensions are exciting, or subtle, or blends of both. And one may graduate from Grade Two to Grade Five, predominantly, or regress back down a single shaft to Grade One, at any age, or at any stage of one’s progress.

Put simply, a lifetime is seen in terms of passing through natural grades of maturation and comprehension, where predominant behavioral traits sustain one at any given Grade Level, while one may have perceptions and insights pertaining to all grade levels simultaneously. We may well attain levels of expertise in our differentiated curriculums, beyond our age group, that are observable, yet we can evidently still be out of our depth in foreign, unfamiliar, or challenging fields. Some will find such challenges invigorating. Others will baulk and retreat to their own comfort zones. Idiomatic, particularized, and empowering, we prefer the stance from which we may hold court, intellectually, spiritually, morally, physically, emotionally, and even politically.

Integration is not easily attained. Each model of mankind, however simplistic or complex, is perceived as a progress through levels of comprehension and attainment that determine one’s predominant proclivities, or behaviours. From Adler; within Graves; through Maslow; to Jung; we apprehend their integrative contentions, perhaps with sincere interest, but easily may forget the particulars of their curriculum, suggestions, or esoteric challenges. We generally are on our own pathway. Sometimes, we adhere to the group. Sometimes, we stick to our own beliefs. Sometimes we agree, disagree, vote, disavow, and absorb. Yet all along the months and years of one’s life, integration keeps challenging our humanity with its endlessness of more and more.

Being human, evidently, is a complex state. One is assailed by variability. Choices determine pathways, constraints, attainments, and patterns of behaviour. And behavioral patterns in turn become one’s predominant proclivities. Grade Theory is not about a naturally chronological maturation; it is about one’s endemic comprehension, absorption, integration, perception, and apprehension of the largely individualized curriculum inherent to one’s awareness. We take on the habits and customs of our forefathers, our tribe, our family, our friends, our school, our church, our political affiliations, our country’s cares, and our national identity. We can become racist, xenophobic, polarizing, and entrenched. Indeed, integration, full integration, absolute compassion, complete love, and utter understanding is not easily attained. Rather, we have glimpses and insights and momentary practices of them. We are, necessarily, self-protective, lest we find ourselves entirely dissipating into the morass of mankind, devoid of our own ego, smudged beyond our own boundaries, bereft of the curriculum vitae of our individual identity.

There are adults still in Grade Seven who realize Ph.D. aspects in themselves. There are post-doctorates who still need to perfect some Grade Three concepts. Being ontological does not make one epistemological. Meaning making is not always rational. To accept that each of us is highly differentiated in potential, yet sometimes may ‘naturally’ be graded and grouped, can be bristling to some. Yet to absorb, accept, include, and love everything and everybody, now there’s the rub. The Grade Theory, in conception, is hereby intended to help. Integration, after all, is all.

The Plight of Pranks

 

The belligerent banging at our cabin door penetrated my deep sleep. It was an anxious, agitated, ugly sound. Instantly, there’s a sea-dread in the dead of the night. Muffled shouts erupted in the corridor, and then the distinct, “Wake up! Get up. Get out,” urgency of it assailed me. Outside the porthole, it was pitch black. I was on the top bunk. My wife was below. And no sooner had I tossed aside the bedding, and leapt down, than my ankles were in cold water! A certain panic arose. We both scrambled to the door, and as we yanked it open, gushes of deepening water swirled and sloshed and gurgled into our space, quickly rising to our knees. The corridor lights showed the water to be an ugly rusted brown, and it reeked. I waded back into the cabin to pluck at our already floating suitcases, since they had been packed and now waited only for our early arrival at Southampton docks, but a ship’s officer barked: “Leave that! We’ll retrieve your luggage. Go! Go! All passengers, go up to the lounge!”

The lounge? That might’ve been my first indication that things were not too drastic. After all, we were not being called to the lifeboats. Yet still, the ship was listing, astoundingly, and the water grew yet more voluminous as we struggled up our short corridor, of about four cabins’ worth of noisy people to either side, to join up with the jostling passengers, almost all in pajamas and night gowns, crowding at the T junction to the main C deck starboard passageway. At the closed-up corner cabin a purser kept vaingloriously banging on its door, and shouting alarms, but then we all sloshed on past, heading for the stairs. Still, some of us had to duck our heads down from the malodorous spray of the overhead sprinklers. Several of them, it was apparent, were spewing out this putrid smelling water as quickly as possible.

We straggled into the lounge, all of us looking dishevelled, and somewhat distraught. The ship’s personnel found us blankets, and pillows, and organized hot beverages. “Your luggage will be waiting for you,” they promised. And then it struck me. My artwork! Twenty years’ worth of sketches and water-colours and even an oil painting or two, all rolled together and left standing in the cabin closet, alongside my suitcase, with my brand new pair of shoes waiting on the floor. I had to get that roll of paintings!

“You! Where do you think you’re going?” A ship’s officer called out. I baulked. "Just got to rescue my artwork, Sir,” I tried. His finger shook. “Oh no you’re not. No one goes downstairs until we’ve found out exactly what the problem is, and that everything is secure. You stay here!”

Well, that’s how come, as I write, nearly 50 years later, I have so little of my formative work. But there were yet more dire consequences as a result of that sad evening aboard the last voyage of the Edinburgh Castle, on the 11th April, 1976. Indeed, we all might still go on learning from them.

As part of a Facebook group, called Union Castle Line Ex-Passengers, which I joined just last month, Pauline Hollis wrote: “I remember that well. The crew were throwing anything they could over the side. We saved a bag of the large Lego blocks. I seem to remember a stowaway and a breakdown somewhere between Cape Town and Southampton.”

Yes. In fact, back then Ian Pursch was the purser, and (his) Paula (not Ms. Hollis), was a junior purser too. They became friends of ours. We toured Scotland together. (My wife and I waited for them in London while they went on the last voyage, sans passengers, to the Edinburgh Castle’s sad grave.) But so too had someone else met her death on the last voyage of the Edinburgh. We learned that an old Scottish woman, the one in that corner cabin, hoping to make it back to her homeland after being in Africa all her life, had died of a heart attack. She never made it home. And as for the reason? Some partying prankster, on that final night of the long voyage, had held a match up to a sprinkler. And yes, when we docked at Southampton, the ship’s flag was at half-mast. One plays pranks, but there are consequences. And one sails, but all our journeys do come to their end.

van Niekerk's Veracity

 

“I just wanted you to know I’m OK. I’m here, just letting you know,” he said last night, etched clear as a Zoom projection onto my white board in the university classroom. The other students, in their ranks up the rake of the auditorium seats, wondered how I might respond. John’s image, as a full-grown teenager with his black hair and chiselled chin, his strong brown eyes, and his swimmer’s fit physique, clad in a white shirt tucked into jeans, stood in front of a background of bright green trees.  Was he at the nearby Magnolia Dell? He was bunking, and we both knew it, but now he was contacting me, just to let me know that all was well. An intrusion on my visceral lecture about Dynamic Integration, I but briefly paused while I took in the alert senses of my students as to whatever I might say.

The thing is, the truth about one’s life gets tangled. We attempt to place happenstances precisely, but as we grow older the timelines overlap, and we can search for connections by which to slot in the particular events that demarcate our passage of time. Just when John had got up and left the classroom was not clear to me. (Is not clear to me.) Why I should be an old man, still lecturing, and he but a teenager, when he’d always been a constant friend in my own youth, was perhaps subconsciously understood, even while I was dreaming. Lucid dreaming, it is called. We know we’re dreaming. We can even direct our dreams. We can face into our fears. We can determine if we should give in to temptation. We can even be compassionate toward ourselves, and others, and we can awake with a sense of having washed away at our ‘dirty laundry’. There’s power in dreaming. We are not necessarily just ‘led by the nose’.

But the intrusion that John made into my classroom happened without my having beckoned it. Or did I not? Just yesterday I’d re-read the three-page story of John (on p. 303, of 50 Years On... Pretoria Boys High Class of 1970, Our Stories), and I felt sad that we had but one indistinct picture of him. Then too, I was reflecting on the great privilege of often being a guest at John’s parents’ house, in the prestigious neighbourhood of Waterkloof Ridge. Back in the late 60’s, a maid, a cook-boy (who was really a full-fledged man), and a chauffeur, as well as a constant gardener, complemented the house-hold staff. John appreciated them all. Laundry was always washed and ironed the same day. And the table was set for dinner guests, or luncheon guests, with crystal and... well, one gets the picture.

Thing is, almost 60 years later, just last night, I’d dreamed about John for the first time, (far as I can recall.) We never re-connected after High School. Conscription into the South African Army boiled my soul. I wanted nothing to do with my past. And whatever old school friends I had, I lost them all. But not in memory. My affection for friends stayed the same. It was just the detachment I threw around each of the people I’d befriended, so long ago, cordoning each off, like icons in the desktop of one’s computer screen, each with a program that goes unused, until one clicks it, (at times ineffectually,) open. (It’s a habit practiced, yet still too long.)

Well, John’s message has me deeply affected. It’s as if I’d been re-assured from another realm. Then again, quite aware of the synaptic gap that inhabits every one of our neuronal interactions, I’m much given to understanding the creative impulses inherent to the artistic, as well as the phenomenological bent, of those such as myself, who also are easily given toward making things ontological. ... Huh?

That’s part of the complexity of one’s thought processes, in dreaming. (Sometimes, even in daydreaming, complexity creeps in.) We make of our moments a kaleidoscope of meanings. And then we can conjure that which has some sort of sensibility to it all, for ourselves. Epistemology aside, we are, essentially, quite imaginative beings.

As for what my response was: “Thanks, John. Good of you to let us know you’re Ok. Communication is everything.”  And he disappeared. And then, John’s classmates smiled.

So, it goes. Such are dreams. And I wonder, shall we ever ‘meet’ again?

(cover designed by Justin Neway)

50 Years On... Pretoria Boys High Class of 1970: Our Stories : Pretoria Boys High, The Class of 1970 at: Amazon.ca: Books

Two To Tango

We, and them. Throughout history we’ve perpetuated it. The essential dichotomy is felt in the bones. Even when we overcome differences of race, of physiognomy, of language barriers, or even of social circles, it remains, however subtly, an 'us' versus 'them'. “We are not on the same page about this,” one person tells another. The implication is clear: my viewpoint is better than your viewpoint. We are not enmeshed in the necessary appreciation of the dual tensions it takes to do a tango. Too often, we hear entirely different music.

Life itself will do that to us, divide us, that is. From the earliest age we learn who is first, last, and somewhere in between. And as our sophistications grow into the apportionments of ourselves in the Venn diagrams of our circumstances, we become inured to the concept that we are right, they are wrong, and we go right, while they may take what’s left.

Politically, it becomes easier and easier to determine who is who. A great many of us more readily align with This, or with That. Religiously too. Even morally, we can become dis-ambiguous. And as for ethics? Well, the definitions of that concept fills volumes, so where is there a fine line to be drawn, over which one will not step? No, it is the traditions and the acculturations and the belief systems that we grow up into becoming, from child to adult, and seldom do we easily reach past the pastures of our forefathers. Seldom do we give up our identity. Seldom do we accept our sublimation into a greater whole. We are too much clung to our mortal coil, fearing we shall lose all identity if we no longer retain a ‘nationality.’ So it goes. On and on. Even much elongation of new generations will proudly say, “I’ve got the blood of a Zoroastrian in me;” especially if it be true.

And so Us versus Them continues. Thing is, it matters not at this time for particular distinctions. In our long history (even yet to be) we shall still call some, Romans, and some others, Greeks. So too do we readily call people by country, by school, by city, by family name, by ethnicity. We retain an identity. And we are 'us', while they are 'them'. So it goes.

Eventual integration is a myth. At best engendered in small groups, among individuals, it very much gets called into question (integration, that is) when the larger group sees itself more readily as an Us, versus a Them. (Anyone who has suffered marginalization knows the feeling.) 

So much is at stake when being ‘different.’

Thing is, how do you become entirely 'accepting'? That’s right, You. If not you, then who? We each are responsible for inculcating an ethos of integration that entirely absorbs the ideological differentiations extant amongst us, and allows us to inculcate instinctual compassion, sincere compassion, intuitive compassion, enlightened compassion, and persevering compassion, unconditionally. Really?

Yes, there is an appreciation of duality in the challenge. That is the point. Ideological egocentricities perpetuate the tensions in the historical making, present, future, or in our recent past too. We are each responsible for not only allowing it all ‘to be’, but also for nurturing it all ‘to become’. To become what, precisely? Well, it is certainly not the eradication of our statues, or even the changing of place names that shall alter us, each by each; it is the clarification of history's significance, such that we might learn from the mistakes of the past, truthfully, factually, considerately, and most especially, compassionately.

Are some things worth tearing down?

Indeed. “Tear down the wall” was a deeply symbolic event.

And so too does tearing down the wall between 'us' and 'them'. 

Trouble is, as just about everybody knows, it takes two to tango.