Two by Two, Eh? (#2 of 3)

Two-dimensional thinking persists with dichotomies. He and She; us and they; we and them; this and that. Distinctions persist. It is as though one is in one’s own vehicle, attendant (despite varying degrees of distractions) to the rules of the road. We accept the traffic patterns of others, yet at times are easily able to call out another’s mistakes en-route. At worst, road rage; judging; vitriol; aggression; envy; and distrust can amplify our sense of ‘me’ and ‘another’. If only no one else bothered me! Idiots! Fools!

How does little Jack or Sean or Sally or Meisie not identify with an ‘I’ in the culture into which he or she is born? Lessons create an environment of ‘things’ distinct from the self; persons distinct from the self; people distinctly different the further afield one ventures. And like and dislike; ‘love’ and even ‘hate’ set naturally in. “I love it!” we’ll exclaim over a taste. We arm ourselves with lessons. And some of the tools we acquire along the way can become so habituated to us that we do not easily replace them with another. So the ‘I’ of ‘Me’ sees life from ‘my’ point of view, from my wants and preferences (which sometimes are not easily distinguished from my needs.)

Discussion about others leads to comparisons and slander. We and they. Our sense of some ‘one’ else, some ‘thing’ else becomes so pervasive that only some One-Person else satisfies; some One-Place else is deemed perfect. Naturally. We perpetuate the mythology of my one and only love, the very best car to have, the best place to vacation, the best product to buy. Somewhere nearby in the subconscious is an awareness of perpetual distinctions depending on where one is at; we easily allow for the best place to eat in Paris as opposed to London, or Calgary, or Pretoria. But the best place to live is.... And no one, no One could be better than...

Dichotomies are subtle; two red VW Beetles parked on the front lawn (when I was about five years old) were encircled by my Uncle David and his friend. “Mine has better.... whatever,” the one would declare. It clearly was a comparison, a contest, a pitting of one against the other. And so we grow up. Size-servings on plates of food are compared by almost everyone (if one watches for the ‘other’s’ glance). On TV in a make-up commercial (I think) two young women sit with their loaded shopping bags on a bench in a busy mall while another young woman, evidently gorgeous with her hair streaming in the wind and attired to blended perfection passes them by. They watch her, envy etched in their countenances, and the one turns to the other and out of the side of her mouth stage-whispers, “Thick ankles!” Ha! We have to compare!

Integration, by degrees, becomes more and more as one lets go of the ‘my’ in one’s ‘I’. We grow up with me and it; me and my parent; me and my family; me and my club, team, school, workplace, city; my preferred province, country, nation and even my world. Thinking about my responsibility to the universe (in terms of my own significance as a molecule within it) seems, well, paradoxically egotistic: Who do I think I am? Let me rather just be the best I can be wherever life may find me, wherever I may choose to be a participant in life. And it will do me well, and I shall do well by it. Life and I. ‘I’, and all the others.

So it goes. One hardly can give up being an ‘I’, a ‘Me’, and wanting, nay... even needing a ‘My’. So it goes. Martin Buber wrote ‘I and Thou’.  Erikson wrote ‘Identity and Crisis.’ I write of this and that. And ‘me’ must perforce be within each word, for who else will type my thoughts for me? But to be content with what just ‘is’? Nope! I have to be more-better or less-gooder by perpetual comparison, don’t I?

                                                           
                                                                 "I prefer a Texan, any day!"

Things, Hm? (#1 of 3)

Uni-level thinking focuses chiefly on things. Like my record-album collection. Like my souvenirs. Like my new-ish car, my possibly new house, my collectible dishes, my curios, my mementos, and my personal knick-knacks.  One becomes consumed by the stuff. Difficult to get away from the significance of it all; difficult to diminish the feeling of ownership, connection, or attachment. Difficult not to want to explain, to share, even to show off. Difficult at times even to acquire!

“I wore my new striped bell-bottoms and my Carnaby Street double breasted blazer,” I once wrote with pride to my father, back in 1968. Surely he would think more of me for now owning and wearing such fashionable items. I was in my 17^th year! And although John van Niekerk, my best friend in those cataclysmic years of youth (full of broken rules and wild adventures,) ... although John had given me his second-hand items, I was full of pride at their ownership. Me, wearing a .... Surely the girls would take notice! Surely...

“You can play three or four chords over and over as we walk the beach,” I told Peter, my brother, when I gave him that first of his second-hand guitars, back in the beginning of 1970. We were scheduled for a holiday and I was hoping he’d learn to play; with him beside me we’d impress the girls! Boy, would we ever impress!

And then it was my first car. And then it was...  Well, my things have had significance to me because...

We give ourselves reasons for our attachments. Two pebbles given in hand to me by a very special friend from our stop beside a turbulent tributary stream to the Colorado River are beside me in their glass case as I type. So too is a little marble pyramid (got by my Dad in 1963) above me on the shelf. So too for two little ivory carved elephants, as small together as is my pinky. Then there’s my precious blue wren from Australia, and... But what do you really care about my things? We weep crocodile tears for the loss of another’s sentimental stuff; it can mean little to ourselves. What is my glass bubble to you? What of my poster of Romeo and Juliet? What of..? What’s it to you?

One collects for some deep well to fill in the self. For some of us there is never enough. Some collect those little crystal things one sees of unicorns and bears and lions and tigers, oh my! Some collect movie posters, or movies themselves. Some collect beer bottles, or stamps. One friend I know (with lots of money) collects and restores old cars! And me?  Well, apart from my books (I love books!) there is my record-album collection. Did I mention it before? Well, let me show you...

Who has time sufficient for another? Who really cares about your own stuff? Who will go through my library, book by book, and hear why it is I treasure this one, or that one? Who will open up my iTunes file and look at all 4,400 plus of my albums? (Especially the album covers!) “That many?” Yes, with my brother-Andy’s visit last year he added about 1,000 Afrikaans albums. Yes, with friend David’s extensive record collection he gives me lots of music whenever he visits. And there’s.... But who really ‘cares’?

We speak of ‘things’ ad nauseum. We choose things based on how we might appear, how we might feel, and then too, because of their usefulness to us. Well, if usefulness is about the feeling one gets from a thing, then a lot of things do indeed mean a lot to a lot of people. Thing is, do they mean anything to you? And then again, is it necessary to talk, to tell, to write, and to focus so much energy on any one of them? Aren’t they, well, for you? Hm?

All About Me!

It's all about me. Or might it be about you? After all, Carly Simon sings, “You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you; don't you?” Carly’s indelible 1973 album, ‘Secrets’, still resonates: “Sometimes I wish, oft times I wish, I never knew… Some of those secrets of yours!” Indeed, we see ourselves but through the pane of that which we both see; the second pane is that which I see in myself that you don't; then there's the third pane that you see in me (that I clearly don't see sufficiently); and all the while there’s that fourth pane too, the one into which neither of us sees. At least, those are the four panes amalgamating personhood, according to The Johari Window. And yes, much of the necessary clearing up of things are painful, indeed.

“You want the attention,” I was told, however kindly, after we'd left our gathering of loving friends. “You don't realize how much you make the moment all about you, at the expense of the other. It can be shaming. It actually detracts from you. And it's worth examining why you need so much focus.” Yes, immediately I thought of the renowned concert pianist reputed at any coughing in an audience to stop his performance and demand the offender leave, or worse, refuse to continue to play. Yes, I had to admit, when performing, I wanted all the attention on me not to be disturbed, disrupted, or fragmented. (Or did you think this story was about you?)

“And here comes our waitress, just as I'm telling my story,” I blurt at her unsuspecting and innocent entrance through the French Doors into the private room we had for our gathering, annexed from the noise. (I’m feeling interrupted; my exposition is now disjointed!) Kim, with whom we'd earlier established camaraderie, apologizes. “Sorry, just checking if anybody wants anything?” In the polite Canadian idiom each of us responds with, “I’m good, thanks.” Keith, youngest among us, then lightens things up, “We're all good!” And everyone laughs. Yet at Kim's exit I must admit that my subconscious wanted her to stay and hear me too. After all, my story was just about to introduce the inciting force. And the classic question posed by one of us was: “What in your life was a moment of great fear for you?”

I do not recall all the others’ answers. I'd kept quiet, and listened. But while listening, I confess, I’d mentally prepared my own response. After all, I've lived a long and fairly adventurous life, at times. So I divined an old incident from my boyhood. And when Jessie, the most senior among us, had finished her tale of negotiating a treacherous mountain pass in the dead of winter, and then deferred to me with, “What about you, Richard?”, I was ready.

Even when I was finished, and it was another's turn, my creative bent continued to churn and instead of listening with full intention I felt regret at not having come up with the image of my being as though within the belly of a whale, sunlight streaming down into the mouth of our sea cave, the black rock of its orifice-like teeth waiting to clamp down, the menace of the giant torpedo-like shark a real threat directly below. Yes, I had to swim over the dragon and… But now I’ve to listen to another’s story. And then I realized my vanity: I’d revealed myself the hero!

Thing is, I am too often involved in the parameters of my own being. I seldom memorize the details of another’s dialogue. With a ‘him’ or a ‘her’, as the poet e.e. cummings says, “Feeling is all.” Yes, it’s an intuitive connection that contains the accord of my reciprocity; the details of lives are but fodder for repetition, re-examination. Then again, isn't life about me? Or is it ‘all’ about you?

Key Concepts

From B.C. to Star Wars, that's where I was taken as I awaited the programming of my car's spare key. 'Ellen,' a vital "87 years old," sat down in the plastic chair beside me. "That thing a computer?" she demanded, pointing at my iPad. I acceded. She held out a newspaper and pointed at the crossword: "Who wrote the cartoon, B.C.?" I typed in the phrase, and J. Hart immediately showed. "Of course," she stated, "I knew that," and her story began.

Children are “doomed”. Society is doomed. "Glad I have no grandchildren!" Neither of her two sons had had children, and the one had been married 25 years! The "impending Cascade Plate earthquake"; the "xenophobic reactions" to “global take-overs (I have a big Oxford dictionary at my desk, as well a little upstart one" she averred); and the inability "anymore" to leave doors open; "to allow children to go play outside"; all of it, conspired to impel the future to doom.

The keys to longevity and health lie in vitality. One readily intuits that much. Thing is, in the intermittent periods between our years, between paradigm shifts, between leaving one room and entering another (where 'waiting is like silent action' as we may take on someone else's words, ideas, ideology, contentions), there can be days, weeks, years. It is in retrospect that one sees the chronology of another's life as seamless. ‘Ah, your husband fought in the Second World War while you were a WAC, in the women's army corps. And then this happened, and then that.’

Our own lives may seem too trivial on this petty path from day to day. The hurtle from home to work ("compared to the old days"); the sheer volume of media coursing through our senses (compared to a time when “a single newspaper was precious”); the incredible ease with which we divorce and remarry and blend families and "expect everything to be given to us, well, life is just not what it used to be! Nowadays we lock up everything!” Yes, we lock ourselves inside the cages we make for ourselves. We lock ourselves inside our heads. “Yes, we lock up our hearts! We are selfish and myopic and moribund! ... Now then, there's a word for you to look up!"

There are Facebook placards of 'Life Back When it was Simpler'. There are youngsters, even now, who agree that our world is doomed. The issue is one of "preponderance". (She twinkles at me: "See," she exclaims, "I love my dictionary!") Eight billion people "are suffocating our planet. All those cars! All those mouths to feed!" (She leans in closer, looks about to ensure no one is overhearing,) ... "All those toilets! Euw! ... And ne'er you mind the extraterrestrials!"

My wife and stepson have lunch with me (about a week after my typing these first five paragraphs) and we choose a spot by the window, where it's quiet. We've not been together for several months, and we look forward to a pleasant conversation. But the workmen arriving at a nearby drink-less fountain commence drilling and pounding and hammering and yammering, and the din is so great that we, and others at nearby tables, raise our voices too. Interestingly, Keith, at 31, says he hardly notices it. But it is enough for Linda and I to seek relocation.

Intrusion has many guises. The neighbour's knock. The car passing by. The telephone jangle. The new beeps from the computer. The stranger who engages. We lock ourselves away, or not. And the key to it all (if peace be 'it'), the key is certainly not necessarily ‘vitality’. Vitality can have one moving and being grumpy and being disturbed, even in our longevity. We each have hidden clauses; (and Jo and Hari see things in us neither of us sees). No, the key to peace is to accept, to change what one can, and to let the rest go. Life unlocks itself. (Now then, where’re my keys? Ha!)

Might a Mite make for Might?

When Jason threw the rock he knew not what ended, or began. The tranquility of our little bay abruptly burst into flight as the heron took wing, garrulous seagulls launched, sea-otters scurried down rocks and slipped under the liquid surface, and the raccoon scrambled deep into the undergrowth. These are creatures I regularly watch from my fourth floor window. But the rock that Jason threw went down deep, and I can only imagine the crab it killed as that big rock landed so weightily atop the smaller rock the crab hid under. Jason was very strong. He proved so to his friends when he lobbed that huge rock from the beach. His friends threw smaller rocks after it, as young men and children do when beside the water. And the effect upon nature is perhaps as dramatic for small things as would the sudden seismic shift of tectonic plates for human beings be. After all, so very many meetings and meals and homes and even breeding possibilities are interrupted by a singular event. Even for crabs. Yet how else can we be but do that which we do? That a single crab was killed is not within Jason's purview. He meant it not.

Two tiny little things clung to glass today. One was a mite, a beige little grass-fly so small I took it at first for an itty-spider. But within the naturally splashing waters of my shower (as I, nakedly God-like in my indecision whether consciously to kill it or to let it die of its own accord after venturing into so foreign an environment,) it disappeared. Still, it remains in my consciousness (and now may be a speck saved in yours.) Later, when with my friend Clive at 'Habit', our local coffee shop, a big black carpenter ant scurried fruitlessly up and down the great glass walls separating it from a natural reality. Large and full of menacing vitality, it still was quite comparatively small to me; me who easily might've reached out and flicked it to earth, or even squished it for its distractions and scurrying impudence, or out of my fear of it landing atop me.

The seismic proportions of the inevitability of the future, right here in Victoria, continues to be gambled against. Tectonic plates are awaiting subsidence. The resulting quake, designated at a 9.0 and probably "any minute now", has apparently very few alert. Like crabs going about our daily business we scuttle across our domain, unaware that nature itself is about to crush us under the weight of 100 foot waves that come hurling at us with their flotsam of transport trucks and other stuff asunder. We are overdue for it. Last time, in the year 1700, was more than 230 years ago. And the average over centuries, according to seismic depth analysis, is every 230 years. All of the Western seaboard may indeed become another Atlantis; except that 7 million of us will succumb, and that anyone left living, anywhere, will know where what once was, is now gone.

We venture in bubbles of excitability and restlessness. Some of us perhaps are more grounded, more readily anchored. But for those of us in search of yet more we accept the changes and allow for the instability that makes not only for our progress, but for those who may be left in our wake. That’s what happens to the kayakers who paddle too near the taxi-ferry paths. Initiates hold their paddles up and do not steer through the sudden tempest, seriously endangering their stability. That’s what happens to the bobbing ferries themselves when the big waves are whipped up by the wind. The normally smooth surface of their passage, like a stretched piece of string between point A and point B, is now given a ragged and jagged hurly-burly outline instead, and their passengers can quickly become green and sickly. Yet rough or smooth, the paying price is the same for the journey. It is the psychic price that is inestimable. We gather unto us memories.

Like any Argonaut, Jason’s acts are like a search for the Golden Fleece; attaining worth. The impermanency of his physical acts he is yet to learn to let go. He and the others ventured on down the beach, leaving trails larger than footsteps. Yet one can but feel compassion for that which oneself once was. To become silent, respectful, observant and patient takes the pain of living long past the point of realizing there is no actual Golden Fleece; actions create results.

 

,

 

For the sobering reality, please see:

 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

 

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.