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.
 

 

 

"The Interview"

 

"Teaser poster with original release date. The Korean text reads "The war will begin", "Do not trust these ignorant Americans!" and "Awful work by the 'pigs' ..."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interview_(2014_film)   [Wikipedia]

Spoiler alert, I'm not going to hold back! "The Interview", as a movie, is iconic. It stands as a testament to our times. It invades the realms of sacrilege, appropriateness, etiquette, rips into lady and gentlemanliness, skews 'common' decency, and yanks up the cultural carpets on which societies stand. It’s a movie to provoke, entice, and evoke excitable emotions. It grabs. It goads.

It leaves me astounded.

We treasure loyalty, friendship, courtship, mutual attraction, sacrifice, and love for a puppy. We certainly value an underdog rising to the occasion and rescuing another human being, if not a whole country from harsh dictatorship. We understand the moral and ethical implications of having to kill in self defence, or even more, the import of being assigned to kill an Evil Leader.

Or do we?

Taken seriously, "The Interview" would grip most viewers. The opportunity to see a televised interview with a nowadays Supreme Leader of a hostile and reputedly brutal regime makes for fascinating stuff. What makes 'the other' tick? And that the USA's TV host is approached by the CIA and actually given an epidermal strip of lethal poison by which to shake the hand of The Oppressor makes for high tension. The travel to North Korea. Those indelible moments of the Supreme Leader privately befriending the TV host, and then his revealing those tender and vulnerable sides of his personality in the unexpected camaraderie between them. The sharing of the puppy. The tenderness of loyalty tested between the network producer and the talk-show host. The extreme sexual tension between that TV producer and the Supreme Leader's right hand, er..., Chief Assistant. The revelations of the subterfuges. Or am I spoiling things for you?

There is more. Much more. And it all makes for a powerfully engaging story. If it were true.

Betwixt actuality and fiction lies many a lie. We accept that. Suspended Disbelief is of primary value in our lives. How else would we accept musicals, movies, plays, novels, and all that is a never-ending story? How else can we accept humour, the comedian, the bard, the minstrel, the story teller? And within the themes and methods of making up those lies, lies the whole gamut of differentiated representation available to us as Art Forms. And thank goodness we've broken so very many of the conventions imposed upon our representations by conditioning or rule or even that of cultural expectation. Or how else might art have loosed from Egyptian one-dimensionality locked in the rock? How else to break free from the Grecian Chorus? What of the imposition of all action taking place in a single day? Or that of the Five Act play? Or that of the imperative corset, the rules of sports-games, or producing the perfect sentence? Change arises out of broken rules. Advancement arises out of experimentation. Evolution itself evolves out of the Outliers finding pathways to entice the rest of us slowly but surely to follow until, en masse, we establish a new cultural norm. Important to keep progressing. How else to free the people?

Sacrilege, rudeness, bad manners, in-your-face vulgarity, gratuitous violence and sex and clear provocation are all ingredients for the melting pot. They take from our restrictive, up-tight, and prescriptive societies and foster new paradigms of overcoming habitual sensibilities. They reveal closeted morès, and let loose both our Angels and our Demons from the inability to be exercised publicly, freely, and even with celebration. How else do we nowadays 'allow' western women the vote, promote freedom of speech, religion, publication, and even advance the rights of minorities? We are a society at large on the brink of An Integration such that ‘all and everything’ is permissible, allowable, and are even asked to be taken lightly at that. Or why else is one asked to "lighten up"?

But some things remain lewd, crude, vulgar, and bad-mannered. Clear provocation is like a child daring another to cross a line, wanting a fight. Carelessness is just that. And unless one speaks up with warnings, or by not participating, not promoting, or by not supporting one may become counter-productive with embitterment, with blind acceptance, or perhaps worse, compliance.

An interview is taken as one person asking questions of another, yet the word itself denotes that two (or more) persons are taking a look at each other. In the face of "The Interview", as a movie, we show a culture that I for one am not proud to promote. No. Artistically as well in our daily living there are always more caring and considered choices to be made!

Or should I just 'hold back'?

 

Stuff Stays

[photo courtesy of Brian Crovet]

 

Stuff outlasts us. A precious little girl, struck by a sudden avalanche, died just before Christmas this year. Here, in Vancouver! Dismayed by her death, and so very conscious of the pain of those who cared for her, we apportioned the sad news into compartments privately visited over the holiday season. We did not want our friends and acquaintances to know; there was too much of celebration in the air. Christmas. New Year. And now, although the years will certainly diminish the intensity of the immediate memory of her, it is her things that shall remain, treasured by those who knew her, her bereaved parents, her loving family; yet one day they too shall pass on, and whatever that lovely little girl left behind will likely end up in an antique store, or a recycling shop, or be lost entirely. So too for each of us: our gravestones, our things. Yet though we may be forgotten in antiquity, our lost things can gain in meaning. Appreciation is all.

The dinky-toy race-car (unearthed some thirty years ago in the back garden of my now sixty-plus year old friend) for some reason this week regained his interest. He wanted to repair the front tires. A Google search revealed the battered little thing now worth up to $400! The condition, of course, mattered.

The condition of things takes on many meanings. Relationships. Families. Finances. And especially health. They all do fluctuate. Material things too. We can refurbish. We can fix, glue back, and entirely replace bits and pieces. Just like we do with our bodies. Yet the more original, authentic, and aged a material thing, the more value it has. Irony is, it matters sometimes not so much who owned a thing, as long as the particulars for its perfection are met. My friend’s dinky-toy is much scratched up, but what if it ‘once upon a time’ had belonged to a prince? Well, my 90+ year-old friend, M'Lady Nancy in Australia, happens to have an ancient oak armoire, dating back to the late 800's. It came directly from Arundle Castle, mentioned in King Aelfred's will. His very own eyes may have seen it!

Who was Aelfred?

He amalgamated the fractious Angles, Saxons, and Jutes under the Treaty of Northumberland. He promulgated the Anglo Saxon Chronicles, whereby our English language finds its roots. He instigated England's first navy. He established education as a necessity for his people. And the possibility of our now seeing something he saw, let alone touching it, or having it, makes it very valuable indeed! Are our museums not treasure troves of just such things? Ever heard of the Aelfred broach? Or the Bayeux Tapestry?

Things outlast us. And though we might collect them with care and addiction (like a full set of crockery, or the works of Shakespeare) they eventually get passed on until deemed no longer of much value. (Seen a 20+ volume collection of Encyclopaedia Britannica owned by anyone lately?)

The Pulsar watch I wear (almost daily) is now over 30 years old. Several battery and wrist-strap changes have kept it with me and ticking. Functionality has assured its value. But who would treasure it once it no longer works? Yet the beauty of many collectibles continues to inspire the perceiver, and so the presumed value accretes. Paintings certainly can do that. But what of the value of my vast iTunes collection; or even of all my books; or even of my ... many other things?

A life extinguished in reality can live on in the perception. King Aelfred's life; that lovely little seven year old girl's life. (Although I did not know her, I care deeply for her grandfather and aunt.) We do give any life value according to known or inherent significance, historically. (You likely did not know this little girl, but if you did?) So too for things. Five hundred years hence some things we can think of will have even more value. Some people perhaps too. But most of what we now have will have gone by the way of the discarded. In the meantime, appreciation is all. 

 

   

Presence in The Present

Looking for one's keys, wallet, or glasses is one thing. Wondering where the mislaid friends are is another. Did I neglect to contact you? Did I not send the card, the note, the letter I'm sure that I wrote (at least in my head)? Being present in the present requires more than presence, it requires a certain prescience of being too; an awareness of actions impacting the future. Just telling myself that I'm putting my glasses down 'here' allows me to locate them more-easily later, indeed. But for that ease of relocation I must needs be very conscious of the 'now'. Or else.

Or else so much energy is wasted. Time smudges into circular motions, going over and over the past. The steps one took. The pictures in the head. The emotions felt. The meanings meant but lost in translation. We pick up and put down and forget, or some things haunt at us. And we wish to be able to revisit, to reconnect, to re-find! But yes, most things slide by in our continuum; we can but hope for memory’s clarity. After all, the New Year makes for each one of us being older.

My Mum Joan did not know who I am any longer. She really is my stepmother. I spent a seaside summer holiday week with her and my father when I was fourteen. And for very many years in my father's biannual letter, Joan would tag on some news in his aero-grams. But when I did see her again, nearly five years ago, she was in her 80s, and I a grey old man. We are not actually connected, other than by circumstance. So too for the very many people and things that pass through our being-alive along the way? We can hardly be blamed for not remembering all the names in the pathways of our journeys. But not to remember where one puts one's glasses?

Vision is limited by our immediate. We make plans and we do not pursue them because of the distractions en route. We have New Year's intentions and then the reality of old habits, or of chance circumstances, or worse, of accident happens. If, as professed by some, there are no coincidences, then why is it that I may spend wasted time searching for my glasses? Or is the lessons really circulating and circulating until I come to the concrete realization of my presence in the present? (Often, I imagine I am waylaid that I might not meet with some other misfortune.)

We take ourselves wherever we go. And we are not perfect. Even the reaches of that last word is very much arguable. How possibly to be ‘perfect’?

I’ve a long-time friend whose stance is that we cannot control the future; we will get dementia if it’s in the genes. He would argue this contention in the decades before brain-plasticity was a fertile topic, and nowadays, with Epigenetics as a ‘new discovery’ (its probabilities for self-change exciting the populace as if there never was such a thing) many still retain a deep-seated disturbance that dementia or Alzheimer’s might be inherited. At present I’m reading Julian Jane’s book: The History of Consciousness in The Bicameral Mind. Impressive title! Impressive book. It would appear that evolution of the mind is indeed a historical fact. We once thought a certain a way, collectively, if not individually. And slowly our consciousness grew such that we individually formed a new collective. So too for now. We are at least a national if not a global consciousness, and our group-think is evidently responsible for our socio-political contentions.

The bell curve is much like an inchworm, progressing bit by bit. The outliers push at the edges of established belief, thought, and ideals. And very, very, very slowly we progress. Patience is needed, and compassion. We easily forget the lessons given by history. We easily forget the examples given by our parents. We easily forget the wording and the philosophy and the sentiments that stir our hearts. They are things that we but momentarily give focus to, and we continue with our busy lives. Even the keys to our doors go missing, let alone our glasses.