Bumbling Blindly

It began, of all places, in Zululand. That a song so should capture a young boy's soul seemed chronologically, geographically, out of place. It was operatic. It was not in Zulu, or Afrikaans, or Dutch, German, French or Fanagalo; it was a strange mixture of unintelligible sounds that was to haunt me for the rest of my life. Stranger still, it first was heard in a muggy hut, an offshoot from the main house overlooking the vast maze-meal plantations. I was thirteen. In the corner rested the .303 ready for the next early dawn drop-off for me to search for and shoot the marauding baboons. My two younger brothers were quartered with me, and we had been given a portable gramophone player and some long-playing records to keep us company, as long as the generator kept going. With the great machine's perpetual a-thud-thud, thudding eventually coughing to a stop, all the lights would go out. I would lie in the deep dark and recall the times in Northern Rhod... in Zambia, when it was my responsibility to go from the house across the driveway and up a parapet to the bulk of the shed and reach inside the pitch toward the reverberating hulk of the great black engine blindly to flick up the trip switch to..., but that is not what this story is about, it is about a song.

That song arrested me. Cooped in the summer holiday heat of the tin-roofed hut my brothers and I listened to the records as though they were living things; an unusual privilege for us to make our own choices and to listen to at will. And then that song drifted up from the speaker and it was as though there never was a time that I had not heard it, and at the same time as though it was the first time, every time. "Fa la na na, nay Bonnie," she sang. "Neigh bra-zettie, fella monda. Key la na na, nay Bo-o-on-nie; Kwell a monda, etc." At least, that's how I phonetically transcribed it. Even way back then. But the tune! The tune burned in my brain.

I would "regret for the rest of my life" (a phrase that now adds 50+ years to my age back then), I would regret that I did not mentally register just who the singer was. Vaguely, I recalled a white lady on the cover, and for years I thought she might have been Debbie Boone, or Doris Day, or Debra Reynolds, or... Someone with a beehive hairstyle. And I sang the notes to many a record clerk. In Africa. England. Spain. Ontario. Saskatchewan. Alberta. I sang the song in Classical Record stores. I repeated the tune to the professional orchestra directors I occasioned to work with in my career (and being in theatre, and a singer, actor, dancer, and director most of my life, there've been many.) But none knew the song. No one recognized the tune.

In Australia the magpies have a distinct voice. They are quite unlike Canadian magpies. Like black crows with white police-car markings they gather in groups and sing a song that is magical and lyrical and memorable. It trills in the brain. Yet there is one magpie who stands out more than the others in the summer scorched backyard of FLINDS Cottage, South Western Oz. It's a blind old bird that has been coming to visit M'Lady Nancy for years. The others sometimes steal its food, but the poor thing manages, evidently, to live. In 2013 it listened for the food thrown in the grass. In 2015, M'Lady reports, it still is around. "Hasn't dropped off the perch," she chuckles; she who herself is now 93. I'm sure that particular magpie has its own song. I'm sure one could recognize it, uniquely, if one bothered to hear it properly. Blindly, we do overlook so very much.

"Richard," an old voice just today says into the phone. And just about instantly I know who it is, but still need to check: "Doon?" And though very many years have passed between us, it is as if just yesterday that we last heard each other. Some sounds are like that. Some songs stay deep inside us. Some individuals have an impact. Indelible. And sometimes, if we search hard enough, there is a conjuring so powerful it makes life as if immediate.

Into the iTunes search bar I typed: 'Fa la na na.' The results? Oh wow! Anna Maria Alberghetti, the singer; oh wow! Her version of Sadero's simple little song, operatic and resonating, soars! 

 

July 8th, 2015: " I was honoured to get a mention & the blind Maggie just could not stop carolling out his special song ,when I told him about your essay ,as I fed them this afternoon"
~ M'Lady Nancy Sinclair

Tears of Truth

 

The Don is dead. In 2005 I met him in his restaurant in Cochrane, a town near Calgary. “You’re sitting in the same seat Brad Pit sat in,” he informed. “And do I hear a South African accent?” he enquired of my 21 year old niece, Zoe. And so our friendship began. Invited to be a cast member in ‘Iolanthe,’ the show I was directing with Morpheus Theatre, Don Sylvestre demurred; he’d sung with professional choirs; his restaurant displayed multiple theatre posters; but when we passed him coincidentally on the road back to Calgary he gave a thumbs up, and came to our next rehearsal. Our friendship grew. We had lunches together over the years. On one occasion we travelled the long road to ‘The Iron Goat,’ swapping life stories, and measuring the days. Don had had heart surgeries. He was a man aware of the ticking of time. And he was a gentleman, that caring breed of a person guided by consummate consideration for another. When I’d left to retire to Victoria he gave me a treasured copy of Ogden Nash’s poetry. But on this Saturday, May the 24th, the day I happened to leave from a short visit back to Calgary, I was in Golden, at a hotel, when the news came up on my iPad feed. Don Sylvestre had died on Monday the 22^nd. He was done with tilting at his windmills.

 

Inside, I cried. True tears are not always seen.

Jessie Peters cried. Jessie’s been our friend ever since meeting with her husband Vic, stricken with ALS, back in 2005. At our leaving this time she held us tight and said she missed us already. Our visit all the way from Victoria was too short. And the affection we all feel was a living tug at the heartstrings. I loved seeing her tears; the authenticity of life often wrenches at me too that way: A kind word. A gorgeously rendered theatrical moment; a song; a painting’s splendour; the loving look of one’s friend, one’s partner; or even seeing an animal. These are moments we treasure. These are the moments that can bring us to tears. And in the feeling there is a sublime truth. We know our affection is real. Not just at death. Yet not all tears are seen.

“Redemption” is what the female protagonist in Mad Max wanted. She’d been ripped from a childhood paradise, grown up in a savage land, finally as an adult made the gauntlet back to her homeland, only to find it a wasteland. Redemption lay in overcoming the way of life she had left, not in retiring to the land of milk of honey. And even in going back, there are yet more and more trials. It took her new friend, Max, to help her. Yes, we make shifts in our consciousness with intention, or not. Either way, the passage into a new paradigm is filled with the challenge of today, and tomorrow, and yet another tomorrow. Unless you’re like Don Sylvestre. There comes a final day. So too for each of us. Tick. Tock.

But between the contracts we make with life, with our friends, with our family, with ourselves, and with the very nature of being human and our need to coexist, there are ethics and decisions and actions and intentions and meanings to be made of it all. Don Sylvestre stayed with our community theatre for nearly ten years. His influence affected so very many; our love for him grew and grew. Zoe, my niece, could only perform in one show before she had to go back to Cape Town. But she introduced Laura, a fellow cast member, to her brother, Peter, and out of that meeting a marriage and two new souls, Sean and little Jack, found life. Their lives have just begun. Don Sylvestre’s has ended. It is all that we give and do and feel and think and intend and love that makes for the interim. Don Sylvestre, Sir Sagramore in our ‘Camelot,’ had those five virtues of a true knight naturally: frankness, fellowship, courtesy, purity of heart, and courage.

Mad Max, a modern day Don Quixote, was faced with very many choices as he struggled with his life cast across the Chinook Movie Screen. And although redemption was indeed found, the expected Hollywood romance was not. It was a mirror of real life. We may find redemption in the things we do; the circumstances and events surrounding us are out of our control; it is our handling of life that makes up for our true story. Don exemplified the gentlemen, handling life. Jessie exemplifies the Lady, every gesture and intention and action a giving of herself to others with care and concern and contribution to the whole. In Jessie’s tears, I saw my own. We weep in different ways. Yes, the losses along the way are greater for the loving of those alive; but better to love and to love dearly than not to love at all. ALS, heart disease, and death teaches us too.

As Don, and Jessie, and even Max exemplified it: so very much of life is defined not so much by what we think and feel, as by that which we do. Don, here's tipping our hats off with the love of and to a person such as you! Indeed, not all tears are seen.

 

 

Dubious Disintegrations

 

Disintegration is not always negative. We pick up the pieces, some very sadly, and move on, saying, "What have I learned from this?", or not. Certainly my brothers and I never played with matches again. At least, not so far as I can recall.

The flames bright orange and the tinder-dry squirrel's nest too soon a raging conflagration in the fork of the sprawling tree, I recall clambering up beside my delighted younger brother, Peter, to see what he'd done, and then the two of us scrambling down the limbs and trunk as the fire quickly grew horridly hot and thick and the smoke billowed blackly and engulfed the tree top. So much for our childhood picnic on a sun-sprawled farm, near Kuruman, South Africa, with girls!

But all disintegration has consequences. It is the management of those consequences that shapes us. We either get up on the saddle and ride again, or we walk away from horse-riding for always. Allegorically, we take personally our results. At least, many of us do.

Last night's break-up might've been ugly. Two friends dissolved their relationship; the one more secure about the choices than the other. Thing is, without an assured sense of wanting growth and exploration and evaluation of life, by both partners, there is a fear of stagnation as the evinced insecurities of the other to get back up on the horse is viewed as a handicap in the potential of a protracted union. Would that we all might engage the potential in ourselves with an ongoing sense of not giving up, of not yielding, of not stagnating, of not folding to the circumstances and the fallibility of life. Would that we were willing to work at it, work with each other, dialogue and discuss and articulate and examine and explore and initiate and integrate and evolve. But many do not quite see it that way. And the myopia of old age creeps upon one with an inevitability least we ward it off with our very own conscientious objection. Continually!

Brother Peter has suffered much in his life. He has watched his fortunes come tumbling down after all his efforts to secure the cookie against the evidence of crumbling. He has held up his face to the storms. He has weathered the arrows of outrageous fortune. He has girded his loins yet again and again in the name of progress and achievement and self-sacrifice for a cause. Yet apart from his being able eventually to stand back and watch it all go up in smoke, proverbially, Peter continues to pick himself up and get on with the next project, the new scheme, the dream, the 'needs to be'. Brother Peter bristles with entelechy, that essential quality of 'wanting more'.

Wallops on the backside can bring us to our senses. The old farmer was outraged. We'd not even asked to use his field! The lone shade tree was ruined! He made us run all the way up to his cow-barn and bring back buckets of slopping and ineffectual water. Three if not four times I did the trip. Trembling. I knew there'd be an even bigger consequence when we got back home. I did not think then of robbing the squirrels of a nest, of stealing from the birds and cows their shade, of burning down the tree that gave oxygen to a universe. Nor did I necessarily think of my brother. I thought then only of me. (At about 13 being walloped in front of girls one was trying to impress was a most difficult thing to endure.) Youngest brother, Andy, I think, got scott free?

Disintegration sometimes drips slowly and creeps into the structures we make; it breaks down the edifices of our memory and reveals the nature behind our actions and thoughts and even our instincts. Just because we humans through the centuries have learned a certain way to be or think it does not give atavistic licence to the act of setting fire to things as we see fit, nor to maintaining relationships for the sake of the status quo, nor even to our conceiving the way we always have. Disintegration is about the dissolution of what was for what can be; and if there is a 'should have', 'could have', ' ought to have' sentiment in there, why, that's part of the lesson!

 

 

A Memoir of Everything?

 

The same man who rises in pain to let out the tiniest of fruit flies battling against the window can also bang his fists in frustration on the bathroom counter. We are indeed capable of actions. We struggle in our vain-glories to attain the light. And many times it all comes crashing down. Like the fruit flies lying in their black specks of lifeless carcasses on my windowsill. How many hours did they battle to go through the transparency? How did they enter in the first place, and why not find their way out again? Are we humans like that? Are the days in which we number our years really like a fruit fly's hours numbered by the seconds? Does it see each moment of its life as but a reality in time, to be filled with as much exploration and satisfying of the self as possible? Can it be consciousness of wanting more and more and more? And does it not also rail against the perceived over-taking of another? Does it have some deep atavistic impulse to be first, like a sperm beating out a billion others and attaining life in the first place! Are we like that, deep down, given over to the selfish gene that wants all and everything to be just right, for ourselves, ultimately? Even Mother Theresa, Gandhi, and Christ himself have been accused, ultimately, of being innately selfish. Yes, I let out the fruit flies because I felt good about it. Good enough to even tell you about it. Had I not spoken a word I still would've felt good; fruit flies were incidental to my feeling of being the rescuer. One bangs fists on the counter to gain the other's attention: I want to be heard! Yet the reaction of the other is also my responsibility; I set up the dynamics in which that person is involved, like it or not. Our actions impact others. Fruit flies or earthworms, baby birds or lost puppies; a lost soul or an evolved one; we impact each other. So it is.

Train wrecks can resemble one's life. Mine certainly did. I struggle still correctly to ascertain events in a chronological order of the carriages that make up my own train of progress. The fact that a memoir allows one to get an order to all that went before is quite settling; before this I was distinctly indistinct about the past. A childhood journey became "away for a year," especially since my eleventh birthday was 'away'. Yet the record shows I was away only five months. Time for a child happens in great chunks of absorption that in retrospect seem to take forever to get to be a teenager. And then, it takes forever to be 21. And then, like the surprise party given me at 50, half a decade appeared to have whizzed by! Now, as I face into my seventh decade, I am aware that the engine which is me, and the carriages attached to me which are my past, and the rails that lie beneath me, which are my actions, are dependent on the earth-bound ties that bind my actions to my thoughts, so that each tie that I lay down, in preparation to move forward, needs be carefully solidified to accommodate the passage of my future. But some ties get laid unexpectedly and impulsively, like venting frustration, or worse, like using another for one's own satisfaction, however voluntarily the other person may be complicit. Go on, have another drink!

My father certainly did that much. We discovered a sister after 44 years. (And there is now continuing speculation that he may have sired another, but kept secret from us by my mother's family.) So be it. This Memoir is mine, not my father's. And how many indiscretions and regrets shall I not reveal? Of what use to another that my life is full of bad moments, moments when in my deep frustration to be more fulfilled, or to countenance what I perceived as another's overwhelming me, I voiced my anger, or needed to escape, to jump ship, to abandon, to break free! What selfishnesses have I not perpetrated along the way. After all, is life not all about me? All the good and marvellous things that attended me were deeply satisfying too. Thank all that be that the bulk of my life was about trying to be of service and to provide insight and clarity of 'being' toward compassion and integration and inclusion and acceptance and absorption and contribution toward the health of the whole. But... Can I be forgiven for the lapses of good? Understanding myself or another is one thing. But how very many may have misunderstood me? We are indeed everything. Choice en route is all. This I would ask of all: choose wisely! Even to this day, I myself need follow that stricture! Forgive my train of trespasses, please. You?

 

 

The Damage Done?

 

You and I need to grow up. We have little choice. The years from babyhood to adult, or to the day we die are filled with lessons. And we may see those lessons as the damage done, in many cases, or as the passages by which we in turn have learned not only to survive, or thrive, but also to give us the experience for empathy, consideration, care, and compassion for others.

We sit on a bench beside the popular pathway along the ocean shore, my long-time old friend and I. A young couple in their 30's are panting and perspiring as they overtake five younger women also headed in our direction. They all pass by and I think I overhear:

"Ew! A sweat drop hit me! When they run that close I'd like to trip them!"

"Check out her lard ass," comments another, leaning over, colluding.

"Wouldn't be caught dead wearing that outfit," responds yet another.

"There but for the grace of God go I," the fourth demurs.

"Nice that she's out with her husband, trying to keep fit though," offers the fifth.

At which her friends lean over, almost musical in unison, and tease, "Oh, trust you!" Giggle.

And they wend their way.

Our pathways from birth to now are like that, full of observation, comment, reaction, responses, provocations, misunderstandings, and temptations. We cannot but help grow up under the influence of others, of our culture, our country, our parents, our friends, our teachers and...

The lesson is always there to be learned, but do we always learn all from the lesson? Evidently not, and so the lessons repeat in ever increasing cycles of differentiation, however subtly, with an essential essence at their core; the ethics and integrity of the individual. Would that such concepts have been articulated when I was a child! Would that all children be made cognizant of such precepts  at their earliest ages, with love and care and compassion and nurturing from the most mature and insightful and integrative of elders, in ever increasing spirals, but...

Too many of us have suffered abuse and maltreatment and war and poverty and the insecurities of disenfranchisement and the imposition of paradigms established by others and the sad or bad consequences of our own choices en route. We kinda all know that. Yet we also too easily perpetuate the negativity and the harshness and the dismissive-ness and even the unkind. We too easily do not think ethically (let alone enact it), and we too easily cheat our own integrity by thinking we can get away with things when 'others do not know.' And too many of us then drag the anchor of our shame along the pathways of our route, letting its weight trip us up, hold us back, or go round and round in circles. Fundamentally, we understand, deeply, though we may not conceive of it nor understand it, what P.B. Shelley meant by, "And perne [my soul] in a gyre."  Few dictionaries contain ‘perne’. Knowledge is not all. We whirl in spirals of insight, or?

It is that precise spiralling in our evolutionary process that allows for compassion, forgiveness, understanding, acceptance, and inclusion. "A gentleman is defined not so much by what he thinks and does in front of others," intoned my old Headmaster, "but by what he does and thinks when he is all by himself!" Ethics, and Integrity; indeed, now there's the gyre of one's perseverance!

 

 

Transcendent Man (A Review)

 

Immortality is more immediate, apparently, than we can foresee. By 2029, (a mere 14 years from now,) we shall sufficiently have integrated technology into the human being that he (or she) indeed shall have become ‘A Transcendent’. It means that one’s aging innards can be implanted with nano-bots so small as to circulate in the bloodstream, entirely overcoming our natural katabolism. Yes! Ordinarily as we reach our young 30’s we begin naturally to decline. Our bodies are no longer easily in anabolism, such that our regeneration and rejuvenation takes longer; we wrinkle and age and slowly but surely decay. But not necessarily after 2029! We shall have the technological capability to live forever! Not only that, we shall have the ability thanks to brain and nerve implants to be Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omnipotent at that! Truly! (At least, according to Ray Kurzweil.) He wrote, The Singularity is Near. And it’s fascinating stuff. He also is the subject of the documentary, Transcendent Man. Well, it all is a mesmerizing probability!

Yes, he has his detractors. (Imagine trying to explain television to a cave-man?) Yes, he has the Religious Right up in arms. (Imagine confronting a man who says God is not yet awake, nor will exist until brought into being by The Singularity!) Yes, this Singularity is the enmeshing of man and machine and technology such that all information, all knowledge, all constructs and probabilities (think of what 3-Dimensional printers are already producing) are immediately at one’s command. Transcendent Man will engender an entirely new paradigm, integrative and assimilative and absorptive and inclusive and altogether able to create new dimensions and even material things just by virtue of his interconnection with The Whole, not only globally, but Universally.(In such Oneness are some of my individual indignities not suffered?)
Yes, Kurzweil has his gainsayers. What arguments and contentions and beliefs and fears do we not each put forward? And yes, several scientists and physicists and biologist pooh-pooh his pronouncements, but... What if he is right?

Kurzweil, deeply affected by his father’s death in 1970, seeks immortality. For us all! Now a billionaire thanks to his genius with very many technical products (heard of the Kurzweil reader for the blind?) he points out the growing intelligence already inherent in our machines (ever wrangled with the computer intuitive-spellchecker?) and emphasizes the rapidity of technology’s exponential evolution. It was a mere decade from DOS to the Internet. It took less for bulky cell-phones to shrink to the size of credit cards. Technology is so exponential that we hardly can conceive of the possibilities. (Recall when Skype was a thing one saw, with awe, on Star Trek?) Hm? Who’da thunk we’d be where we are at now??

Throughout the documentary, and in his book, Artificial Intelligence is the buzz-phrase, and accreting our Knowledge and Ability are the overriding concepts. We transcend biology. We transcend our beliefs. We transcend our limitations. We can transcend our individuality to be a participant in “The Singularity”.

For me there are three factors that basically govern Man: His Biology; His Knowledge (as used by his Intelligence); and His States of Consciousness. For me, it is one’s states-of-consciousness that most will determine one’s degrees of Enlightenment, not knowledge. Kurzweil naturally interlinks Knowledge, Intelligence, and Consciousness in the documentary (which is more likely to be seen than his dense book is to be read). For him Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence are the paramount operatives. For me, were we indeed to become Omni-All, then at what level is ego-mania, evil-intention, and all-power no longer an issue; other than that a person, an Individual, be more enabled to be entirely caring, compassionate, and serving the Whole? Hm? I say, bring on 2029 and beyond! (Don’t you wanna be aroun’ to see it??)

M'Lady's Mirror

Pregnant with possibility, Arnolfi had to have her. That’s what the 1434 painter, Jan van Eyck displayed. The small convex mirror behind the couple in the painted bedroom revealed all. It had an eye on the present, and the past. Its convex circular shape gathered in all that happens in 180 degrees to left and right, and 360 degrees in the round. Yet that which was behind (like that which was in the past) was entirely forgotten. Unlike humans, it could not recall the image. It lived only in the present, absorbing the immediate, and taking in the complex and multiple dimensionality of life that few humans, at a glance, could possibly be expected to see.

M’Lady Nancy Sinclair has just reminded me that she bequeathed to me her family heirloom, the convex mirror now hanging above her fireplace in her living room in Guildford, South Western Australia, “When I drop off the perch!” Her phraseology is idiomatic and platitudinous. Yet she is very brave, very accepting, and generously perspicuous so to email me. At 93 years old and still young, alert, brilliant, gifted, beautiful, caring and compassionate, M’Lady’s gift is of a mirror that has travelled with her most of her adult life. It’s seen her five children grow up. It’s seen her dear departed husband and all her dearest friends and relatives and visitors as well. It has taken in much of her life. It has watched her smile and weep. And it still reflects her lonely opening of the living-room curtains every morning, and the closing of them at night. “You must tell me now,” she entreated me in her museum-like-house of artefacts when I was there in 2013, “what item would you like to have from me when I drop off the perch?”

Awkward moments, those. With things, which of us does not feel like a vulture?

“Oh, I couldn’t,” I demurred. “Besides, you’ve a decade or two to go yet; there’ll be no flopping from a perch, thank you!”

But when she asked again, and again, I succumbed, and mentioned the convex mirror. Her blue eyes sparkled as she looked at it, then at me. “That’s exactly what my beloved Perry wanted too!” she exclaimed. “But he died before I did.” She smiled again. “It’s yours! When I go. But you must tell me, why?”

I downloaded van Eck’s ‘The Marriage of Arnolfi’ onto her computer. “When I was a schoolboy in the late 60’s,” I explained, “our art master, Mr. Payne, asked us what was special about the painting; what did we notice? For South African boys, it was a matter of indelicacy, this business of being pregnant, but when he said, ‘look in the mirror,’ my world of symbolism was born! And now that I’ve seen that mirror in your family pictures, I know its import to you, its history. It may well reflect our own present as we stand before it, but it will always reflect you!”

 

Present and past converge and get reflected in the convex surfaces of our lives, get swallowed up in the concave. Unlike mirrors, we see backwards sometimes more clearly than our present. (How often have you not wished you could repeat some passage of time to say or do different things?) Upon reflection, we gather insights that we did not have in the moment. Yet we are not as objectively perceptive as mirrors; we are not even as subjectively reflective! We can but hope to gather into ourselves sufficient unto the moment. How possibly to live entirely in the now?

The mirror sees all.

Framed in the round, reflecting in the round, even when that magical mirror of M’Lady's makes its dark way packed up in the mail to me one eventual sad day, it will reflect a past filled with love and vitality and a lifetime of her memories. And like the indelibility of the magic in the mirror in Van Eck’s painting, I too shall make M’Lady’s mirror live on in a canvas of my own.