Lost in Paradise (Still Manages to Be Walt Disney World)

It was around 9 pm at the Beach and Boardwalk World; or I suppose that's where I was, given that I took the wrong turn, after having been intrigued  by a shop with the same Dooney &Burke retro-Disney designed messenger bag I had purchase a few weeks earlier at disneystore.com.

Was the amount I paid online the same as in the store? I was gratified to see that the pricing was consistent.  I contemplated purchasing a few bags of the same design, but then thought better of it. I’m not necessarily a hoarder, but I do seem to have a difficult time letting go of vintage bags and designer items. In theory, I could sell them on eBay, but it’s tedious and frustrating to do so. Perhaps if I had an assistant who would deal with all the mechanics of it, I’d feel comfortable, but as it is, I just feel a sense of dread.

Walt Disney World opened in 1971. The retro views and art evoke the late 60s and early 70s fascination with the Space Age, and an affirmation of values that differentiated us from our Cold War obverses. Instead of Mao suits and a “Great Leap Forward” we embraced fairy tales and frontier homilies that suggested that if you ground yourself in early American values, your fate would be a certitude of prosperity, joyous family relations, and above all, a validation of imagination and creative reach.

These were some of the thoughts I contemplated, so it was not too surprising that I took the wrong turn. With a start, I realized I missed the bus back to the Contemporary Resort, where I was staying, and the Boardwalk was many worlds away.

But, perhaps I had willed it this way. Walt Disney World offered me various options; I chose a combination of boat and bus.

The weather was glorious and cool, and standing at the back of the boat, breathing the humid air, the smell of swamp, I looked at the American flag flapping at the back. My uncle in Lake Placid has a boathouse filled with vintage mahogany Chris-Craft “cigar boats” he restored by hand.

A surgeon by profession, he also had a talent for surgicating wood, and so had, in addition to his meticulously restored wooden boats, an entire Adirondack “Camp” (a 14-bedroom lake house), outfitted in faux-Stickley and other Craftsman-vintage furniture. He told me the key was in the fittings. They needed to be authentic. I had questions, but he did not like to listen to or answer my questions. He preferred the role of seed-sower and scatterer of wisdom. It was my job to harrow my heart and mind so that these seeds would sprout and not be carried off by an adventitious bird.

He took me for a spin in one of his boats. He mentioned that it was leaking, but not to worry, he had a good bilge pump (although it was on the fritz at the moment). As we slowly settled deeper in the water, and the shoreline receded, he regaled me with “fun facts” about Lake Placid. It was the deepest lake in the Adirondacks, and the coldest. Did it have a creature as did Lake Champlain?  A lake monster of sorts? The sound of the engine drowned out my words, which were not projected with any sort of confidence, so it was less than surprising that they sank somewhere in the depths.

As we tooled, lower and lower in the water, across Lake Placid, he pointed out the Gilded Age “Camps” – some no longer extant having been burned to the ground by reluctant heirs who found, to their dismay, that the Township of Lake Placid relied exclusively on property tax for the maintenance of their schools, fire department, police, water and sewage, road salt – in short, everything.

I would have preferred to see someone turn a “Camp” into a church of sorts, and use it for a renewal of the utopian experiments that so characterized upstate New York during the 19^th century. A “New Oneida” anyone?

But, no one was listening to me, and, the grand utopian experiment that was Walt Disney World, was, at least in terms of physical security, much more benign, although there are those who would argue that ideologically, it was not so. I like utopias, and don’t much care for dystopias, so it probably is more likely that a “better world” is more feasible in central Florida, the 1980 Lake Place Olympic Games notwithstanding.

I had no idea of the name of the central Florida lake, and wondered how many alligators the park might hold, and if / when any escaped Burmese Pythons made their way here, and if they found it to be the pristine Edenic habitat that they found the Everglades to be. I would think that unless they could subsist on dreams and air, there would not be much to forage for. There was precious little trash, and it was hard to find stray pets or unattended toddlers.

We docked at Hollywood Studios, and so I made my way to the bus destined for the Contemporary Resort. I was impressed to be surrounded by impeccably groomed and comported young children, who either slept noiselessly or quietly conversed with siblings, discussing math facts and maps. One 6-year-old girl waxed eloquent about addition to her younger brother, who clutched a box containing Star Wars action figures. They seemed so beatifically calm that I wondered if they piped in some sort of happy gas, or did they put it in the water? I would consider living here if this is truly how people behave.

Social engineering on a large scale is not easy; change is never easy to manage, at least when it comes to the hearts, minds, and attitudes.

P. G. Wodehouse: Why Not the Canon? A Contemplation of His Early Works

P. G. Wodehouse did not make the canon, at least as far as I can tell. I’m not surprised, really, when considering how so many of his themes and characters repeat themselves. Also, one might view his work as a bit sentimental and lacking introspection. I don’t agree with those views.

My sense is that Wodehouse became considered a “popular” writer (as did Anthony Trollope and Booth Tarkington), and they fell out of the canon in the late 1980s, during the celebrated “canon wars” –

I remember the 1980s on the Norman campus quite clearly. I would wander through Gittinger Hall as I was taking other course, just because I found the territory so fascinating. I took my first English course after graduating with my B.S. in Geology. It was taught by Larry Frank and covered gothic fiction. I loved it. I had a relaxed summer – I was selling oil and gas prospects after having returned from Amarillo, and I had a very flexible schedule. I could easily take courses, so I did – English courses, Music theory courses, and even an Astronomy course (which I dropped because I found it tedious). It was during the oil boom, and we were buying and selling leases, and even participating in drilling wells. I thought (hoped) it would go on forever. I had gotten back into swimming and tried out aerobics (popularized by Jane Fonda) and sometimes would even go to back-to-back lessons. I did not run too much, but sometimes mixed that in, along with long, long walks.

I took more English courses starting in 1985, eventually taking many undergraduate as well as graduate courses. It was a time of awakening, and I was fascinated by the ideas surging forth. Yes, it was ideological and political, but also there was an “undiscovered treasure” feeling in it all. Women and minorities whose writing had been more or less ignored became career-builders for those who dedicated themselves to them and who successfully introduced them into the canon. Kate Chopin was one writer who made it into the canon in the 1980s. She had been well-known for writing short stories or serialized novellas that appeared in popular ladies’ magazines. Zora Neale Hurston was rediscovered (thanks to the efforts of Alice Walker), Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Russian futurists were almost mainstreamed. Modernists ruled. Heaven help you if you were a realist or humorist. Even the women fell out of favor. I’m thinking of Pearl Buck. Of course, some of the issue was political correctness. It’s hard to read Tarkington, Wodehouse, and Buck without cringing at times.

Nevertheless, they’re really quite wonderful – they describe the readings, writing, cultural institutions, new technologies (they were, after all, in the midst of another Industrial Revolution). For example, a Baedeker is a short name for a guidebook to foreign countries. So, for the first time I understood Mina Loy’s title, “Lunar Baedeker” – it’s a guidebook to the moon (or being moonstruck) – and that’s precisely how those magical years of discovery hit me. It was amazing to find entire new territories of writing – In the 90s, I had the amazing privilege of working in the collections of the Huntington Museum rare books collection and reading letters of H.D. discussing her psychotherapy sessions, and I was even more aware of the general times, the general zeitgeist.

Ironically, men who gained fame in the same way (for writing serial novels for the magazines), fell out of favor. In addition to Wodehouse, Trollope, and Tarkington, others also fell out of favor. John Dos Passos was deeply admired, but is more or less invisible today. O. Henry, Saki, and Jack London were also admired then, but not so much now. Occasionally, you’ll see “The Gift of the Magi” in a composition anthology, and perhaps “Call of the Wild” – but they are not the standards they once were.

I’m not even going to touch British literature from Restoration through the Victorian age. Women were incorporated into the canon, even the ones whose work was fragmentary and written pseudonyously (Ephelia in Charles II’s court), and the solid establishment pillars were pulled down as conservative critics got a short, sharp haircut and lost their strength.

But to return to the point at hand, I’m enjoying discovering for the first time the highly popular works of the past. They are engaging and entertaining, and they even contain elements that make them intriguing to me, a person who tended to favor the cryptic and inaccessible (while harboring a guilty appetite for Victorian and Edwardian detective novels).

Here is a brief overview of what I liked most in Wodehouse’s Uneasy Money (1916).  It’s in essence, a meditation on what the prospect of “easy money” does to people, either in the form of inheritance or by marrying into it. There are also a number of reflections on morality and ethics; namely, what it means to be “straight” vs “crooked.”

There are many stock elements:

Plucky women making their way in the world, supporting themselves:  Elizabeth Boyd and her bee farm, Claire Summers and the chorus, Polly, now Lady Weatherby, dancing barefoot in dance halls, a sensational hit as “The Barefoot Countess.”

Good-natured, decent, with internalized code of honor (which also slows them a bit): Bill Chalmers, Lord Dowlrish

Dissipated artists: Nuttham Bloomingdale Boyd, Elizabeth’s brother

Captain of Industry: Dudley Pickering, worth $30 million due to his cars

Lord Weatherby: aspiring painter (but sadly lacking in skill)

Quirky, mischievous animal: Eustace, the monkey

People who should not be carrying guns, carrying them: Dudley Pickering

Legal advisor whose error sets everything in motion: The youngest Nichols, who was Bill’s school chum, alerts Bill that he will inherit $5 million dollars from the man he cured of his golf slice. A later will was made just before the man died, but this does not come to light until later. In the meantime, Bill sets off to New York to find the woman he has supplanted, in order to do what he considers to be the right thing and to give her half.

Golf: Important here because Elizabeth’s uncle left everything to Bill after he cured him of his vicious slice

Pastoral ambitions:  Elizabeth and Bill both have desired to have a bee farm in the country

My favorite scenes:
Eustace, the monkey, wreaks havoc, throws eggs at people, while the publicist is energized by the possibility that the plan to garner publicity for Polly, Lady Weatherby, the Barefoot Dancing Countess, by having an unruly (or even marauding) exotic pet, will work. Obviously, I like physical humor (!) and irony.

At any rate, after reading at least 20 Wodehouse novels at this point, and continuing to study them, my thoughts are continuing to develop.  I do think that Wodehouse is definitely in a category by himself -- there are some subtleties that make the works different than, say, the work of prolific romance writer.

So -- I'll share those thoughts later, as they gel. 

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s Political / Social / Industrial Novels

Industrial novels that deal with the impact of technology and technological change on society. The focus on the elements of the Industrial Revolution that are extremely transformative and disruptive, namely, steam-powered factories of “Milton” (in North and South) along with the coming of the railroad in Cranford.

North and South:
Factories have transformed the town of Milton, provided work, but have also resulted in labor problems as global pricing pressure drive wages downward, and the workers protest conditions, low wages, and the idea that workers are squeezed in order to assure huge profits of the industrialists.

The airborne cotton fibers (“fluff”) results in chronic and ultimately fatal medical conditions (seems like emphysema brought on by breathing the particulate matter); Mary dies young as a result.

Waterways are polluted with dye, which creates a ghastly impression when one of the striking workers – the one with nine starving children, who hurled a rock, hitting Margaret Hale – drowns himself, and then is dyed himself purple with the dyed factory effluent.

The great “masters” of the factories develop a political philosophy that resists interference by the government and regulation. The idea is that good practices will prevail naturally (and do not need to be legislated) because safety, fair wages, and good working conditions make sense, and in the end will lead to increased productivity. John Thornton espouses this philosophy, and delivers an extended explanation and apology to Margaret.

Mrs. Thornton, as John’s mother, suggests a new social order will emerge, which is a blend of meritocracy and capitalist.  She looks at the role of an industrialist as a very responsible one, because society itself rests on the prudent, responsible, and just administration of the business, which extends along the entire supply chain, from raw materials to transformation.

The suggestion is that labor relations will improve once the various parties sit down with each other and get to know each other, and treat each other with mutual respect.

Gaskell’s descriptions are very realistic, and the insights into the psychological conditions and the inner thoughts are insightful, compassionate, complete, and realistic. There is little melodrama – if so, it’s only in Cousin Phillis, where Phillis goes into a deep and dramatic physical decline that parallels her emotional state.

Gaskell describes the impact of the factories on the city, and does not shirk from describing the air pollution, water pollution, and the dangerous conditions within the factory. She also discusses the noise, and the oppressive, gray, depressing appearance. Margaret Hale, who has come to view Halston as a kind of idyll of England (until she returns after the death of her mother and father, and sees just how dreary and unenlightened life can be there, and comes to realize she has romanticized it), and London as a place that establishes the norm of polite living (until she returns and finds it stiff and stultifying), first encounters Milton in a state of shock. Her father has renounced his comfortable position in a crisis of faith, goes to Milton because his old friend from Oxford can help him find students to tutor.

Cousin Phillis:
Phillis is a victim of changing times; her cousin comes to visit, and they develop a brother-sister relationship. He desires to be a good engineer; his father, an inventor, has achieved significant social mobility through his ingenuity, and owns the patents on several very valuable (and profitable inventions).

Her cousin comes into her life because he is working on the construction of the railroad, ostensibly in design and engineering.

Phillis meets her cousin’s boss, who has just returned from Italy, where he was involved in railroad construction. He helps her with Dante, acknowledges and appreciates her intellectual curiosity, and gives her the impression that he will return to marry her. He leaves for Canada, where he will work on the railroad there. He meets someone and marries her; Phillis’s cousin receives a letter with the terrible news.

When he does not return, she becomes very ill after the shock – almost dies of heartache.

Phillis: educated in an eclectic, questioning way, in an inclusive, all-encompassing method of inquiry, guided by her father, a rector.

In this way, she reminds one of Frances Trollope, whose father was a rector, and who has a quick wit, a sharp, observing eye, and a solid facility with various languages, literatures, and cultures.

Phillis also echoes the protagonist, the doctor’s daughter in Wives and Daughters, who is also a self-taught, self-guided reader, who dedicates herself to the pursuit of entymology, yet also remains a dutiful, diligent daughter.

Phillis’s father, a rector and also a farmer who participates in the responsible husbandry of his working farm, is an avid reader, scholar, and thinker, but resolutely Classical. He is a perceptive judge of character, and finds Phillis’s beloved to be rather disrespectful, and his mannered way of jesting to be ultimately corrosive, and undermining of authority and the eternal verities.

Is the narrator reliable? He may be, but not entirely, as he displays resentment that Phillis did not find him attractive, and his initial puppy love is rewarded with a rather blunt denial of any possibility – ever – of their being more than friends.

Industrialization collides with traditional agrarian worlds (as it does in North and South, and also in My Lady Ludlow). The summer storms, the depictions of the flowers, birds, bees, cattle, are made in a very nostalgic way, and yet, the limited scope of life, the potentially grinding monotony, are also honestly depicted.

Harvest time is a time of dramatic change; and the scene in which Phillis, her cousin, and his boss are caught in the rain, is a turning point. The rain, a kind of baptism, brings all together, or a kind of primordial bath which strips away the skin of external difference.

Gaskell’s nostalgic view of agrarian life brings to mind some classic English landscapes, specifically The Haywain and some of Turner’s paintings. In this case, realism alternates with Romanticism.

My Lady Ludlow

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow is a strangely affecting novella, which, once finished, makes the reader feel as though they really knew Lady Ludlow, and the dramatic changes which occurred during her lifetime.

The novel opens with the arrival of a poor relation whose mother has tried to place because she is unable to afford to care for her eight or nine children upon the death of her husband.

Lady Ludlow, whose nine natural children have all perished, save one, often allows the daughters of poor relations to live with her and to be educated, and to work as assistants.

The novel is essentially the chronicle of radically shifting times, and it contains a story within a story, which makes the reader aware of the dramatic changes in France (during the Revolution) as well as in England. One of Lady Ludlow’s aristocratic distant relatives flees France to stay with them, but ultimately, the son returns to France to rescue his cousin for whom he has formed an abiding tendre but whose object of love has no respect or regard for him whatsoever. Ironically, his love, Virginie, is a progressive who has a great deal of sympathy for the publicans’ desire for liberty, equality, fraternity, but they turn on her as they do all the aristocracy. Her cousin comes to rescue her, and they do find love at the end, but with a tragic outcome. They are both guillotined. I’m not doing the story justice, because there are a number of subtle narrative elements that heighten the drama and introduce a truly Romantic element in the story. What it does within the framework of the larger narrative is to reinforce the differences between the values of the ancien regime and the revolutionary, republican upstarts.

The differences in viewpoints between the pre-revolutionary world and the post-revolutionary world are telling:

--the modern person speaks of “rights” whereas before, the thought was of “duty”
--education has uplifting, transformative potential; whereas before, breeding is all; one cannot transcend one’s origins
--the Church of England is the true church (although there are fond feelings for the Catholic church), and dissenters and dissenting is not acceptable
--the aristocrat has an obligation to his or her title and place; it is important to notice and to serve, and to protect and preserve one’s grounds, position, people, property
--there are irresponsible nobles; titled men may gamble, be profligate, and ignore their responsibilities. It is important to compensate for that if possible.

Lady Ludlow changes and comes to accept changing times:

--she accepts the daughter of man who jilted Miss Golindo (and broke her heart), who subsequently died, leaving a “love” child and orphan, whom Miss Golindo took in as her own daughter
--she recognizes the efforts of a rector who has radical, seeming dissenting ideas, such as teaching the children of the poor (including poachers) to read and to do math
--she invites the local gentry ladies to tea, and when their manners are not up to the standard of 18th century aristocracy, instead of ostracizing or scorning, she accepts and embraces the practice

The description of the manners and the materials of daily life within the manor house is minute and absolutely fascinating. We learn about the daily work in the manor: preparation of medicinal potions, the putting up of preserves, jams, and special fruits; the fashioning of lace and fine needlework.

Lady Ludlow powders her hair, wears an elaborate wig, and lovely lace cap; her dress is of the 18th century, and not in the “classical” or “republican” lines of the early 19th century. She maintains her wardrobe as a matter of class. Each article of clothing has significance, and is of very high quality.

The household is run very strictly, with a certain regularity, with the goal of making sure she is a responsible mistress of the property that passed into her hands and which is her responsibility.

Industrialization intrudes in certain ways: the railroad allows quick delivery of mail; it leads to more mobility of the labor force, and a change in desirable education. It makes it necessary for individuals at all levels of society to be able to read, write, and to do math.

My Lady Ludlow is filled with illustrative vignettes and insights into the worldview and mindset of an incredibly kind-hearted, generous, and intelligent woman. She is truly a leader, and a woman born into dramatically changing times. Her story is essentially tragic and heroic; when she passes away, she has outlived her son (who was irresponsible and profligate). The stately home will most likely be destroyed; her times have irretrievably changed. Nevertheless, the acts of kindness and generosity she has been able to effect will live on.

There is keen nostalgia, and yet a recognition that the world has changed, and universal education is necessary. But, to what degree, and to what purpose?  Lady Ludlow desires above all stability, balance, dignity, and hierarchy. That said, she does show compassion and does accept those who would ordinarily not fit within her structure (Miss Golindo’s adopted daughter, and the son of the poacher).

What makes My Lady Ludlow fascinating to the 21st century reader is the resonance with extreme social changes, and the impact of industrialization on society.

Tourism of the Mind: The Place From Which You Cannot Return

Are there place you can go in which you really can NOT return unaltered?

I’m thinking that it’s harder and harder to find them. Most places you travel to do their best to help you feel happy, and to reinforce your pre-existing beliefs and values.

Chain hotels, conference centers, and resorts are like that. They’re like artificial flavoring and preservatives to one’s consciousness.

Who wants that?

 It sounds like a comfort zone experience until you start to realize it’s more like the MacDonald’s hamburger a guy kept for 13 years to see what would happen to it over time.

In a word, nothing.

The hamburger mummified rather than decaying. It’s also like the loaf of Mrs. Baird’s white bread that accompanied a big order of barbecue for an office group lunch. The plastic-wrapped loaf sat out on the countertop in the office  2nd-floor kitchenette and turned into a lab experiment. One, two, three… then five, six weeks passed, without any discernible alteration in the “bread.” It even stayed bolster-pillow soft for at least three of those weeks.

I think that if you go to a tourist resort destination in a country that lives, breathes, and eats tourism, you’re likely to become that loaf of Mrs. Baird’s white bread.

Not even the most dramatic “tourist spectacles” (juggling flaming hoops, jumping over fire, banging on steel musical instruments, and energetically choreographed gestures that mimic Dionysian abandon) are likely to change you. You might overeat, drink too much, and get sunburned, and if you suffer a bit, you can then feel temporarily miserable and less sorry to go back to your predictable routine.

However, that said, if the resort is beautiful enough, I think that transcendence is possible.

You can find yourself transformed, simply your eyes are opened and you see magic.

Magic is all around you, and you, yourself become magical. The exaltedness takes over, and all feel are waves and waves of exultation and “lifted-upness” that is, without putting to fine a point on it, worthy of Sir Philip Sidney’s “Astrophil and Stella” and the power of poetics, as the language takes you from the “dungeon of the body” to the high reaches of joyous union with a higher plane of awareness. It takes you out of your daily cares, and scrubs you clean of all the dark, toxic residue of negative thoughts.

Granted, it takes quite the resort to achieve what amounts to a mystical, transcendent experience, but it is absolutely possible. Think volcanoes in the Big Island of Hawaii, the arches at San Luis El Cabo, the long serpentine trail on a ridge just north of Beijing on a feeder edge of the Great Wall.

And, think of your own back yard.

It’s all in how you see, breathe, and approach life.

Noodling for Channel Cat

If you've never noodled, you've missed out one of those great lost sports -- like going javelina hunting in arroyos, dry washes, and blind canyons with only a .22 pistol. You might live, and even have something you can taxidermy onto your wall, but it's unlikely.

Noodling is a kind of "body-fishing" that you do when you want a fish to eat, but it turns out you don't have anything to fish with but your fist and a mind full of reckless delusions.

You find a muddy, zero-visibility body of water - preferably a pond or a lake, but it could be a slow-moving bend in a river -- then you stick your hand and arm along the bottom of the stream. I guess the fish think you're good eating because they take your arm as though it's bait.

Which fish? Those fish. Those olive-toned, slimy, big-mouthed, spiny-finned catfish. They're "channel cat" and they can be neolithically large.

Yuk.

But, you're hungry. You want a fish to roast over the fire you've managed to get started in a little alcove under the 23rd-street bridge. You're burning boxes you fished out of the dumpster behind the QuikTrip a few blocks away.

Okay. So you use your body as a fishing lure. What's so wrong with that?  Nothing, if you are depressed and hating life. You see, the cats that lurk around in these waters are no kittens. They're "channel cat" -- catfish that can reach 50 - 75 pounds of pure fish muscle, and if you don't think they can't take you to the bottom and keep you down there until you stop flailing about like a fish caught on a hook, then you're just wrong -- dead wrong.

Random question to you: Would you swim in a river that is filled with discharge from a reservoir contaminated with toxic algae and chicken farm run-off? Would you eat fish that had been living in that slimy, turbid, miasmic fluid?

I can tell you in a word what my answer would be. It's a simple NO.

The Arkansas River is not exactly a noodler's paradise. It does, I believe, have channel cat, although I'm not sure how or why, when you consider that most of the fish in the river are only there because they've been swept away with the water released from reservoirs upstream. For a fish, I suppose it's the ichthyologic equivalent of the end of days - but with a rather depressing twist. You assume you've been raptured up, carried up to the heavens, and not "left behind" with those who failed to find salvation in time, but to your dismay, your fishy confreres you thought were squealing "rapture" were actually saying "rupture" -- and then you found yourself in dark, thick straits, churning through a slim "swim-space" under a dam.

Suffice it to say, you, as a fish, *hated* it, and you would warn every other fish against this horrid dark night of the soul, but you have no way to communicate back to your buddies, lazing about, bloated on algae and chicken offal, back at the reservoir "ranch" upstream.

***

The Arkansas River is what I consider an industrial, utilitarian river. As it exists now, it’s used for flood control, the source of cooling water, and an urban beautification project with bike trails, walking trails, informal arboretum, shoreline benches, picnic tables, and the loveliest array of flowering shrubs and trees I’ve seen outside upstate New York (specifically, Voorheesville).

The fauna of the river's edge is also interesting – I’ve seen turtles sunning on logs, groundhogs scampering on dry winter grasses, lots of hideous fish, Canada geese, ducks, egrets, seagulls, and lots of frogs. And, there are the people: fishing from the pedestrian bridge, biking, skateboarding, running, rollerblading, walking, eating lunch, walking their dogs (or being walked by their dogs).

I know I've shared that my favorite thing to do is to walk, but I have run a few times. I prefer walking. It gives me a chance to think and to listen to recordings of classic literature that I download from Librivox. I have walked as long as 2 hours while listening and thinking, and, when the weather’s right and the foliage is blooming, it’s absolutely utopia.

****

That said, there is no way that I’d want to swim in the river. It’s inutterably foul when it’s low, and it smells like pond scum.

When the river is high, it runs fast and deep because the civil engineers have released water from Lake Keystone.

That scene, too, fills me with horror. Last year, there was a surge of red-green-blue-variegated algae that sickened swimmers, water skiers, and anyone who had contact with the water. Someone said it was due effluent from poultry farms, or perhaps a hog farm.

That does not stop the channel cat.

And, it does not stop the anglers. People fish from the bridge and presumably eat the fish they caught. Some even stand in the shallows in waders and fish as water flows over the dam.

They may noodle, too, and it would not surprise me. I've seen police cars near the places where the best fish seem to be, and I have always wondered if they're fishing the drowned out with grappling hooks and ropes mounted on the back of pickup trucks.

Of course, there may be the occasional doomed lover -- Millais's Ophelia, face up amongst the lily pads -- but that would be near the Ampitheatre in an oxbow lake, and not in the rapids on the downriver side of the dam.

Somehow, though, Ophelia's drowning persists as a fascinatingly romantic self-sacrifice to love.

Being noodled to death by a huge catfish possessing a gigantic slimy mouth, big lips, what appears to be a long drooping moustache does not.

In fact, the spectacle of it leaves me gaping in horror. There are just too many parallels in the dating world, but that's another story altogether.

Anyway, I read somewhere that in a noodling contest somewhere in southeast Oklahoma (near Antlers, Idabell, or Broken Bow), the winner dragged up a 90-pounder. One time I watched a documentary on "low tech" fishing for Hemisynodontis membranaceus ("Moustache Catfish) in the lakes of equatorial Africa, and I thought that what they did was child's play in comparison with noodling for catfish in Oklahoma.

 

Speaker Case Monkeys

There is a structure like a giant orange slice propped up on the west bank of the Arkansas River, just south of the 11th Street bridge in downtown Tulsa.

It is an amphitheater and it reminds me of the Hollywood Bowl – same art deco style, but in miniature. Also, the acoustics would have to be different. The Hollywood Bowl abuts the Hollywood Hills, but the Tulsa Amphitheatre lies in a little cove, technically an oxbow lake (or semi-lake), created when the river changed course and deposited sand into what used to be a channel, effectively cutting off the old channel and creating a calm little body of water.

One muggy summer evening, I made my way through the clouds of gnats to check out the look and feel of the place. It was very relaxing - perhaps the retro feeling of it made it that way.  Spectators could watch the concert as they regarded the art deco and futuristic neon Tulsa skyline and contemplated the buildings reflections in the water.

Up the slope from the stands, was a large putting green. Lost balls tended to roll downhill and end up on the banks of the river, sometimes next to where people liked to fish.

That evening, the Amphitheatre was open, and it appeared that people would come around eventually to clean up and prepare it for the next evening’s scheduled conference. It was open, but the boxes atop the side pillars that held the speakers were locked shut, and the walkway that connected the stands to the sidewalk had been retracted.

For the first time, I noticed that the Amphitheatre was surrounded by water. How did people keep from electrocuting themselves?  I seem to remember wires and cords draped over the walls.

I’m not sure if the guy I saw walking up to the Amphitheatre was a fisherman or a swimmer. He had the look of a person who spends all day outside. I wondered if he was one of the ones who lived in a tent on the banks of the river. I wondered if he was one of the guys who liked to deliver sermons to the flowing waters and the birds. It was hard for me to say. I had tried to follow the sermon one day, but gave up. It was completely scatological.

“Did you notice there are no walkways to get from the sidewalk onto the Amphitheatre?” I asked idly in the way of a polite greeting. “I guess you have to be able to jump well if you expect to perform. And, you’d better not be carrying anything hooked up to an electric cord,” I commented.

He looked at me and seemed to be mulling over what I said.

“I think that there is a bridge,” he said.

“No. I don’t think so,” I said. “Look. Water all around. It’s a moat. Perhaps the performers have to defend themselves. They can send flaming arrows across the moat. Maybe even pour large jars of boiling oil on anyone who is assaulting them or who is still insisting they play their moldy-oldy hits from the 70s rather than their brilliant new compositions.”

“I think they have a bridge,” he repeated.

“A moat. Yes. It would be a great way to deal with hostile audiences. And then, you could get the monkeys they keep up there in the cages…” I waved at the locked metal boxes atop pillars where they kept speakers and perhaps displays or screens.

“Yes. You could unlock the lids, so the monkeys could fling anything they could get their hands on through the bars of their cages,” he said.

“I think that’s where they keep the sound system,” he said.

“Oh no. I don’t think so. I think they’re monkey cages. At the University of Oklahoma, they used to have monkey cages – okay they were different – but they held monkeys they were teaching sign language. No one likes to hear monkey chatter. Everyone wants them to sign. It’s quieter.”

I was on a roll.

“I’m coming back for the concert tomorrow. I hear it’s a band really popular in the 70s, and they’ll be performing new work and none of the old stuff. You know no one will like that! I can just see people leaping across the moat and falling into the water. I can just see the boiling oil, and the monkeys hurling old golf balls and fishing lures.”

“Are you a nurse? Do you work in the hospital over there?” He gestured to a hospital that specialized in psychiatric care. It was about a half mile from the river, and I could see its lights and signage.

“No. I’m – ah – working in other things,” I said. The more I spoke to him, the more convinced I was that he was, in fact, the river preacher of the scatological apocalypse. I wondered if it was wise of me to speak to him.

Clearly, he was having the same thoughts of me and wondering if he had put his safety at risk by speaking to me. The idea took me aback. I’m a boring workaholic who punctuates work with exercise. I have a few friends, but to tell the truth, not many.

Well. Was it the first time I had been confused for an outpatient? A deranged homeless person?  I regretted that I had stopped writing in an experimental way.

“Have you ever tried deliberately not to make sense?” I asked.  I mean – keep a journal of free associations and absolutely refuse to let yourself stop and censor?” I asked. “It’s not as easy as it seems. It’s actually easier to create collages of random words you find from different sources.”

I fell silent.

“Guess I should keep moving on,” I said. He took advantage of my pause to start a free association ranting worthy of Kerouac fired up on whatever it was that enabled him to type nonstop on his manual typewriter and one endless paragraph - single-spaced and typed onto a long scroll which allowed him to keep going and not stop to replace sheets of paper.

Oklahoma history, Cherokee nation lore, politics, petrochemicals, casinos, Superfund, ducks, economic history, development projects, assassinations, conspiracy theories, the future of the planet.

Eye opener moment.

He and I at that moment were one of a kind. I wondered what would happen if I burst into imprecatory sermonizing that would rage at the fallenness of consciousness.

Probably not much. Probably everything.

Well. I guess I seek closure.

"Climbing Mountain" Overlooking Beijing

The trail behind the Sinopec Center just outside Beijing starts with a koi pond with a small waterfall at the end. Water splashes from sharp, slabbed rocks. White foam churns up from the base of the waterfall, and koi school at the outer edge of the bubbles and foam. Orange and red carp rise to the surface, gulp then belch air with their large, vaguely gross mouths. Large white, orange, red, and black-speckled koi, some 5 times larger than the smaller ones, lurk along the bottom. They rise up, gulp air, belch, then slowly descend.

There are 400 steps to the first stop on the climbing mountain. I hear only the sound of my own breathing and the wind whispering through the fir trees. The sun is bright. The fruit trees are flowering with white and the shade of hot pink that was my favorite for many years, along with neon green. The cedars in front of me are a dark, brownish green. The new leaves on the deciduous trees are chartreuse.

And that reminds me -- chartreuse is a fascinating color, too, halfway between yellow and green, but it does not have that intensity of the hot pink or neon green.

I am reminded of how coal tar dyes revolutionized fashion when they came onto the scene during late Victorian times. Before, colors were muted, and tended to fade. With coal tar dyes, they popped and they held that optic sizzle. No wonder fashion suddenly became ablaze with colors, patterns, and fabrics, all dizzyingly and discordantly stitched together.

Here in the foothills outside Beijing, the colors are muted, especially with the haze in the air that is white, almost cottony in appearance.

A small pagoda is at the top, at the end of the steps. An elderly couple is seated there, and I’m impressed that they made it up the mountain. Of course, you never know their age, but they seem about 80 to me. I wonder if they’ve ever walked the “Chong Chun” / “Long Wall” (Great Wall of China).

Going down is harder than going up. There is something in my brain that seeks to flatten out the steps and make them appear on a level plane, which of course they aren’t. I have to look up and out across the valley to reset my brain so it perceives depth again. I proceed, ever gingerly, and my legs tremble.

The sound of screaming startles me. I look downhill, toward the sound and expect to see a woman being attacked by a man, perhaps being stabbed. I smile realize the screams are from peacocks, and I think of author Flannery O’Connor, who kept peacocks and wrote about them in her collections of essays. I also think of Rucker’s farm east of Norman, Oklahoma, where my dad owned an interest in oil and gas fields.  I see a large wire fenced pen at the base of the mountain, and wonder if the peacocks long to be free.

Next to the peacocks are three large, black and gray German Shepherds.

I wonder if the trees are lychees. At the afternoon break, we had fragrant peeled Asian fruits and nuts. I tried two types of lychees, choosing to peel them myself. The larger one had a reddish peel, leathery and thick. The fruit was sour and the seeds were large.

I also tried “dragon’s eye” which had white, transparent flesh through which a firm, black seed was visible, which gave it a definite “eyeball” look. It was firm, juicy, not too sweet, but very fragrant. I thought of rose, peony, honeysuckle.

The wind is ageless here.

It’s warm in the sun.

There is a cool sharpness along the edges of the afternoon and the ground is very dry. The trees are dusty, and a dry pine needle carpet makes me think of the forests of New Mexico or Colorado.

All living things eventually hug the dust of forgetfulness.

I wonder how hot it gets in the summer. Right now, during the end of April, it is chilly, even cold at times.

Online Dating, Disruptive Technologies, and Meditations on Hunting

I’m at Hastings book store, in the coffee shop, and I can’t help overhearing a conversation between two people who are meeting each other for the first time, connecting through some sort of online dating site. Yuk. Both are 59. The woman looks pretty good. They are both painful to listen to. They are both “retired.” Not to self: Never retire. However, I relish the idea of freedom. But what is freedom anyway? Illusions.

She lives in an apartment off Lindsey Street. She says there was a cat in the apartment and it smells like cat urine. He lives on a farm off Alameda (near the mental hospital), and he grew up here in Norman. He’s turning 60 next week. He’s worried about turning old. He has a pronounced rural Oklahoma twang. She does not. She’s a pro at this. I can tell by her questions. “What else do you want me to know about you?” She’s not talking about herself. Why is she so broke? What is she retired from? Who retires at 59? She was in Hawaii in 2 years, was in Norman for 6 years before that. She said she should not have moved back – things had changed, and there was a lot of traffic. She worked in sales at a radio station. So she decided to quit. She said she gets project from Hawaii, and it’s not regular. I am sure she is pretty much broke, with not much hope.

She mentions her children. They are adults, and she does not see them often. She’s a grandmother now. She looks great to be a grandmother, but then, there are 40-year-old grandmothers. I always think of the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood.

Thought: Newborns are homely little things. I can’t comfortably express those thoughts. I’d be pilloried. They are fragile, often wizened looking.

The woman is now telling the guy that she’s been using the site for a long time, and there are a lot weirdos. (Oh, good, seedy anecdotes.) She met a very weird guy (not surprising here in Norman!). I wonder if she happened to meet a guy I know, although seemingly normal, he likes to pontificate endlessly. He also likes to send weird text messages, which I delete immediately. I've asked him not to do so, but it only encourages him. It is offensive and I don't like it.

So the blind date guy is describing picking up a date at an assisted living center (she was 67). It seems pathetic. Ageism. Note to self. Never live in a retirement home.

He likes camping, hunting (deer, turkey, etc.), motorcycling, and supposedly has a degree in petroleum engineering, but then instead of going back to school during the oil bust, he started doing construction and then tile work. He has done well, he says. He has a lot of projects – a Corvair, lots of cars, motorcycles, etc. Where do you keep them? She asked. In the back yard (but I really shouldn’t, he adds). He lives on the farm he grew up on, and they used to have a dairy, plus cotton, alfalfa, etc.

They are talking about match.com, eharmony.com, or some such online dating service. Online dating’s been around for 15 years or so by now, and I tend to think that the people who like to do it are adrenaline junkies or trout fishermen. There are also the Craigslist Killers, but that’s a different genre, I think. Basically, it’s hunting, I guess. I think of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting – the fact of focusing on prey give you a vacation from the human condition. At least that’s his premise. I think it’s also a look into the primordial essence of fantasy and childlike wonder. Who knows what magical land you’ll encounter in the clouds.  Is “The Cloud” the digital equivalent of the magical kingdom of the Giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk”?

Thought about dating and disruptive technologies: Is there a beginning, middle, or end to disruptive change? Do technologies always disrupt? I guess the easy answer if “yes.” Especially if we want them to disrupt.

She is asking him what kind of food he likes. She is talking about how she likes to cook – comfort food – just after he has talked about how much better food is that is cooked at home. Now she’s describing a casserole she made, and how she freezes the excess. He’s talking about chili that he makes.

I can’t stand this! Is this as good as it gets? She’s warming up to him as she learns more about his financial stability.

He’s commenting that he does not feel as though he is being interrogated (but he is).

Back to technology. I guess the dating process has been technologically mediated for a long time now. I have no interest in this. Overhearing this conversation is reinforcing that belief.

And now, I head to the tennis courts to practice serves. I’m alone. No one to hit with right now.  I head to the ladies’ locker room to put on tennis stuff, including Dri-Fit shirt and skirt. I in the mirror, see that I failed to apply my makeup evenly. Face looks blotchy. Eyes look bleary. I blame nerves and hormones. Nerves because I’m in a constant state of panic dread. Hormones because I believe my body no longer produces them. How else to explain the flat-line feelings I have toward things that used to fascinate me? Okay. It might be scar tissue. Well, focusing on serves will help. Tennis is my vacation from the human condition – not because I’m focused on prey, but in the coming together of mind’s eye and the physical self.

Is that the same as online dating? Whatever it is, it’s perpetual and there’s no beginning, middle, or end.

So it goes.

Urban Rivers

The river flows, and it’s hard to tell quite what it was in the past, or even what it is today. As usual, the disgusting possibilities occur to me first: open sewer, carcass-dumping zone, industrial waste disposal, unregulated water taxi and barge thoroughfare.

But, even though the water is not very clean, there are other happier purposes: drinking water source (for animals), fish hatchery, fishing pool, flood control, crew team training course, houseboat pier, in-stream fountains, cooling towers for power plants, reflecting pools, and flower garden irrigation.

I always think of an urban river as an “industrial river.” I like the big rivers that have navigable depths and which eventually achieve an almost mystical confluence with larger, continental rivers such as the Mississippi. They flow, and the moving waters suggest infinity.

They also suggest power: power that can be harnessed, directed, and shaped into various Industrial Revolutions and superhighways of manufactured goods and raw materials that make their way downstream. The rivers can also snap their flimsy harnesses, too, when the rain gods (or HAARP, if you believe conspiracy theories) cause super-collisions of hot, wet Gulf air and the crisp, dry jetstream, and it rains 11 inches in a day.

There may no longer be a need for urban centers to be located near navigable rivers, but they can still be centers of commerce for the post-industrial urban center, which succeeds when it manages calm and provide a sense of a future to its seething, change-addled masses.

River at Tulsa: The Arkansas, flows into the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi. It reveals its industrial origins with two refineries within several miles of each other, electricity generation, gravel pits, and flood control that results in water levels that verge on the surreal. One day, the stream flows high on the banks. The next day, the water practically disappears and its pools are jammed with ducks and geese, and wide expanses of stinking fetid mud. When I look at this, I remember it’s not the Arkansas River that is navigable. It’s the Verdigris River at the Port of Catoosa.  There’s a big ammonium nitrate plant at the edge of it, which makes me think simultaneously of the Murrah Building (Oklahoma City bombing) and of algal blooms, “red tide” and noxious bio-activity…

Arkansas River: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Rivers at Pittsburgh: Monongahela and the Allegheny. I wish I could time-travel and experience Pittsburgh when it was a Faustian “Witches’ Kitchen” – with forges emulating rounds of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory – it just seems really ironic these days that the same locations are now graced by genteel baseball stadiums, running (aka “wellness” trails), open-air restaurants featuring “nouvelle cuisine,” and barge-ride history tours…

I suppose it’s all a good thing, and contributes to Pittsburgh being widely touted as America’s “most livable city” but I have to say that I shudder at the de-industrialization because to me it means that we have found a way to sugar-coat underemployment and exploitation of the “brain drain” enticed newly-arrived immigrants, and point out that everyone’s happy if they know where their next paycheck is coming from, and if it’s skimpy, well, then, they can go panhandle on a bridge as sports aficionados file across to watch a Pirates baseball game, or football with the Steelers, or hockey with the Penguins.

Aren’t they somehow ashamed? I long for the muscularity of foundries and vats of molten metal, along with bargeloads of finest-in-the-world hot-burning anthracite coal.

What does having an industrial-level river going through your town actually mean? How does it affect the sense of identity of those who live on the river’s edge? One initial impact is to make you aware of water and the need to cross it. I know that’s shallow – but it’s not just about the flow and the power of the water to transport; it’s also about the way the water can be a barrier, and when in flood, an intruder.

There is a walkway that extends from the Monongahela River to the entrance of the Pittsburgh Convention Center. At first, it seems like a nice stream that flows down from street level to the river where you can walk down the paved pedestrian river trail that parallels the river. In the evening, the stream fountain is no longer merely a rippling, babbling brook that flows over the artificial rocks in the artificial stream. Instead, it’s an intensely and technically choreographed play of lights and “wall of water” fountains.

I felt I was in Cecil DeMille’s production of The Ten Commandments, and the part where the testosterone hero of the age, Charlton Heston, assuming the role of Moses, parted the waters of the Red Sea, and walked through, leading his people. Previously, my drought-jaundiced view was that Moses simply found a place that had dried up due to drought, and he took advantage of an ephemeral meteorological phenomenon. Now, however, I wonder if it was a grand metaphor for the way it feels to walk through corridors of the most intense imaginable white noise and it’s something that makes you feel joy, spunk, and an odd devil-may-care abandon.

Oklahoma City's "Manufactured River," the Oklahoma River: I think there’s a certain charm in the “manufactured” rivers – the San Antonio Riverwalk, and the body of water that was once thought of as the North Canadian River, but now is known as something else as it flows through Oklahoma City’s “Bricktown” – I’d say they are both the river equivalents of an HO-scale model train railroad.

Bricktown, Oklahoma City -- the Oklahoma River

Before the careful grooming and sculpting of the river channel, the North Canadian River (now known as the “Oklahoma River”) was just a click away from being an ephemeral stream, with water in it just part of the year.

With trenching, damming, dozing, and more construction of urban storm water drainage, the “Oklahoma River” is now an urban pressure valve; situated as it is in what used to be an urban war zone, with detox center, half-collapsed boarded-up crack houses, and semi-abandoned old brick warehouses and spurious junkyard-esque shopfronts. There were more Dobermans and pit bulls than people. There was also a lot of crime, and the brick streets were just one vote away from being asphalted over when the idea of turning blight into a species of theme park was born.

Now, the post-industrial urban river, the “Oklahoma River,” sports water taxi rides, outdoor dining, and clusters of colorful, locally-owned restaurants. It is the core of a new collective consciousness; the city reinventing itself, while also giving itself a small place to get away, eat, drink, laugh, bond, embarrass oneself, strike business deals, and dream of connections.

The new urban river may not be harnessed into generating electricity or transporting bargeloads of heavy industry, but it still accommodates (and even transforms) the often very heavy, even overloaded, psychological cargo of the times.

Will, Kate, and the Haters (of the Monarchy, of the Windsors, of the Middletons, of Americans)

William and Kate are machines in the tourism and trinket-peddling racket. The Middletons, with their party favor business, knew how to monetize the costumery of the Windsors, so they're Wal-Mart-izing the monarchy.  It would be tempting to say that they're turning the MOnarchy into a Disneyfied simulacrum, but Walt Disney World is an infinitely smoother operation. At least the cast members KNOW they're cast members. (oh that reminds me of the earlier fairy tale that took place a few years ago -- Beauty and the Beast ... the Beast being Camilla...)
.... comment on The Daily Mail's article, "The Making of a Middle-Class Monarchy" published on April 3, 2013.

I’m amazed by the monarchy haters. The majority of people who posted comments were Americans (or appeared to be). Their comments reinforce Frances Trollope’s impressions of Americans published in her 1832 The Domestic Manners of the Americans based on her travels up the Mississippi, up the Ohio, up the Erie Canal, and the Hudson, and to many of the major cities. I never quite understood how she afforded such an expensive trip. The book does not provide much insight into how they earned money, or even who formed a part of the traveling party, except it is clear that there were at least two children, and a Mr. Trollope visited (but was never mentioned after his initial arrival).

 Frances Trollope retreated back to England where she assembled her book from notes, and the published it to great success.  I possess a 5th edition published just a few years later in 1839, and I can fully understand how and why the Americans took offense. The pen and ink drawings are highly satirical, but the text, while humorous, is not satirical. It paints a farcical, absurdist view of early American life, and it’s highly entertaining to an American reading in 2013 who is well acquainted with American mores and attitudes, and finds it interesting to see how many seem to be utterly intact from the 1830s.

The most pronounced difference, however, from the 1830s America and 21st century America is that may not hear so often the phrases that Mrs. Trollope heard repeated endlessly (at least that’s how she perceived it):  “We have the best political system in the world!” and “I’m just a good as you are, so I’m not going to put up with your attitude!” and “We showed your old King George a thing or two!”  Further, I think it’s unlikely that one would hear spontaneous choruses of “Yankee Doodle” in bars and sports gatherings. However, it’s probably worthwhile to see that the American core belief in the essential equality and dignity of all individuals still holds true, thus the concern of universal access to affordable high-quality education, which is essentially both the rainwater and the nutrient source to permit optimal blossoming.

It strikes me that the monarchy haters (both American and British) would be intrigued by Elizabeth Cleghorne Gaskell’s My Lady Ludlow, a novella that was originally published in Household Words in a serialized format in 1858. The work contains many stories within a story that all serve to shed light on the difficult political, economic, ideological, and sociological changes that occurred during the time of 18th-century revolutions (America, France, South America), when the aristocratic ranks literally had to fear for their heads. The book made me gain an appreciation for the sense of duty and responsibility of a woman who found herself with a title and the need to take care of those who depended upon her.

Lady Ludlow’s regime was not far from feudalism, and what Gaskell’s book showed me is that it was possible for an individual to have a great sense of responsibility, and to manage estates with dignity, fairness, and forthrightness, even through great financial and emotional sacrifices. It also demonstrated how some members of the aristocracy were willing and able to alter their views over time, and to accept religious diversity, literacy training for children, and education for girls.

New from Shearsman Press: Work by Rochelle Owens and George Economou

Readers who wish an overview of avant-garde and forward-thinking poet and playwright Rochelle Owens can how read Out of Ur: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2012. 

It has long been my contention that someone should write a biography of Rochelle, which would provide insights into the shifting zeitgeist of times marked by disruptive change and profound epistemological (as well as existential) insecurity. Her poems reflect energy even as they energize.  

George Economou, medieval scholar, poet, translator, and scholar, brings both gravitas and humor to his work on the revolutionary and controversial poet, C. P. Cavafy, whose work challenges assumptions about form, language, and ambiguity.

Economou's translations of C. P. Cavafy, collected in C. P. Cavafy: Complete Plus, bring a lifetime of experience, thoughtful meditation, and scholarly research to the often art of translating Cavafy's layered and emotionally multi-tonal work.

My Personal Mission: Read Mine, Develop Your Own

My mission is to encourage creativity in all walks of life in order to build bridges and help solve what seemed, in the past, to be intractable problems in human relations, technology, economics, politics, and in one’s sense of self and destiny. Creativity, coupled with action and hard work, can, with luck and perseverance, open doors and expand access to education, economic life, and social groups, in order to strengthen one’s ability to have a purposeful, enfranchised, examined, and courageous life.

How do I actualize my mission and vision?

Tactic One:  List and Describe Core Values

Creativity:  I like the way that thinking creatively requires the willingness to put unexpected things together, and to look at a set of things, circumstances, or concepts from multiple perspectives.  Sometimes it’s necessary to explore biases and blind spots in order to avoid confusing the status quo with the truly creative, or simply using new ways to reinforce old biases. Creativity, in the ultimate sense of the word, should be generative and life-supporting, as well as psychologically freeing.

Perseverance:  I value staying with a project until it’s done. If the project is on the wrong path, I think it is perfectly acceptable to drop it. Nevertheless, the ability to envision the outcome, and to stick with it, is something I have always respected.

Teamwork:  Working alone is efficient, at least for awhile. Teams are better. They bring energy, diverse perspectives, and multiple skillsets to a challenge, task, or problem. Being in a team is also vital for feeling enfranchised and that you have a sense of belonging.

Connecting the Previously Unconnected:  I like the idea of taking two or three things that never worked together and seeing how they might connect. It’s a great way to approach problems, and can lead to breakthroughs of engineering. It’s also a great way to energize a team or group problem-solving group – there are usually moments of absurdity and humor that encourage the open exchange of ideas and create a supportive, non-punitive atmosphere.

Tactic Two:  Describe the World as It Is Now, Describe Potential Vision for the Future (key example of this tactic: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech)

I see the world as a place where, despite the eternal self-fashioning and energizing transformations of technology, commerce, and human invention, the majority of the world’s peoples still behave as though they were approaching end times, “slouching toward Bethlehem” (as in the great Yeats poem, “The Second Coming”), and they interpret the events and activities around them as signs of decline, rather than opportunities for creative, energizing, empowering growth.

The fear-driven mind finds apocalypse in the random words, signs, and acts that surround it. For the fear-driven mind, the future is a predetermined horrorscape of chaos, equivocation, and snarling despair. The end is predicted to be ugly and inescapable, and there is no way to protect oneself from it.

The hope-driven mind may find apocalypse to be in our future, but instead of suffering and horror, the vision and hope-driven mind finds generative patterns, and pathways to growth. The end of the world signals Dionysian transformation, a necessary death phase that one goes through in order to be reborn, revitalized, regenerated. The vision-driven mind may have a mystical inclination, and the “dark night of the soul” is the test of faith that ushers in a state of union, of intuitive knowledge, of the achievement of great things.

I would like to work toward a future that allows individuals to find a balance between their fear-driven and hope-driven minds, and which provides a strategy for overcoming short-term, immediate anxieties by recognizing that working through the negative emotions is a necessary part of growth, and simply seeking to avoid pain will mean that one will remain in pain because no major changes have been made.

In the future, I would like to see a world where people understand that they may transform themselves, and that the barriers that once existed can be eliminated. It may take some time, cooperation, and willingness to learn another language, computer skills, philosophy, or higher-order math. It might also require one to examine one’s own internal resistances to change, and to read works of literature and creative non-fiction in order to understand the mindsets of others vis-à-vis one’s own.

The young child born into cold, hard streets of despair and abandonment has the same future as the young scion of a social media billionaire. It’s not enough to scoff and say that they share the same ultimate destiny, to die and be forgotten. It’s imperative to nurture the spark of life and imagination that drives one person to reach a hand out to another, without expectations or preconceptions, but simply to invite another to go on a journey together. The journey will strange, unpredictable, and yet infinitely worthwhile.

I’m reminded of “Woyaya” by the South African song written by Osibisa, performed by Art Garfunkel in the early 1970s:

We are going

Heaven knows where we are going

We ‘ll know we’re there…

The Spectacle of the Cat

The “Spectacle of the Cat.” Is that what you get when you cross Christopher Smart (Jubilate Agno – “my cat Jeofrey”) and Guy DeBord (“Society of the Spectacle”)?

Or, the Cat with Spectacles?

I have to say that I am a big fan of spectacles, productions, and shows of all sorts. I’ve seen my share of tourist spectacles in the form of “indigenous” dances, and I love it when they devolve into a quest for some essential element – the primal, the core, the essential concept of being and beingness that informs that whys and the “how we knows” of our postmodern selves … 

the fact that we’re convinced that we can only know ourselves when some we are able to see ourselves in some sort of mirror. In other words, our inner worlds become externalized and placed into some sort of visual metaphor for the mélange of conflicting feelings and ideas that we have and live with.

I can’t think of a single culture that does not have its own “star-crossed lovers” Romeo and Juliet tradition. In Guam, there was the cliff where two lovers whose families refused to accept them leapt to their deaths. Azerbaijan has its story of the Muslim youth and the Christian maiden (from Georgia), whose forbidden love is realized, but then quickly transforms itself into a tragedy of the highest order. The spectacle is not the love, but the condition of thwartedness. The satisfying denouement is not the glorious transcendent union, but the desperate suicides of the two lovers who (mistakenly, of course) think they’ve been rejected by the other…

After you see enough of those star-crossed lover / suicide narratives, you start to consider the possibility that Freud was unjustly neglected … not for his libido and dreams stuff, but for his “thanatos” issues – the “death drive” that represent the flip side of procreative, generative, libidinal drive.

And, death does not mean death at all, but Dionysus.  I appreciate Nietzsche in this case: oblivion that slides slowly (or even quickly) into obliterated self, recovered self, and absolute, glorious rebirth. 

Suicide is never a final waltz of dancing bears and oblivion.

No, no, no.

After all, we’re not talking reportage. Instead, we’re considering the narratives that flow from a culture, which embark upon a quest to find a way to express the most intense feelings, the most extreme conditions of existential anxiety, of doubt, fear, longing, and a need to become … to merge, metamorphose, to assume the identity of one’s deepest desires.

That’s what it’s all about.

And, I’m a bit ashamed to admit what I am, what I’ve become. In my eagerness to explore different ways of looking at the world, I’ve become incapable of maintaining a consistent sense of who or what I am in the world. “The centre does not hold” and I’m in Yeats’s “Second Coming,” “turning and turning in the widening gyre” ... If I myself am not that “rough beast” that represents the ultimate end of time, the transformation, the end of the world as we know it, then at least I’m the rough beast’s proxy.

Death does not mean death in this elaborate equation.

Death means a phase change. It means transformation. It means that, when it’s time, (and that time comes for everyone sooner or later – for my mother, it came just over two years ago) -- walking through the open door that promises you a way to unchain yourself from the voices that tell you that you just don’t measure up. In my mother’s case, that final walk was horrific. I was not there – I was at a workshop in Golden, Colorado on the Colorado School of Mines campus – but my dad was, and he remains traumatized to this day.

So, I’m not talking about the real thing. I’m talking about the mythical, metaphorical “death,” which means radical, dramatic change. It means transformation at cell level, well-nigh irreversible.

I’ve taken to sleeping on the futon-sofa in the spare upstairs bedroom that has nothing in it but a carved oak armoire and a cherry secretary desk with a flat screen monitor through which I can watch DVDs or the cable television provided by my homeowner’s association (bundled with other services covered by my monthly HOA dues).

Let me tell you, I’m not one who was seemingly “born for” our times.  No way. If anything, I hate these scary, uncertain times, and the realization that no matter how trivial or inconsequential the perk, there seem to be thousands who would cheerfully drag out the daggers and fight for every job that pops up on job boards in our global workplace and marketplace – even if it costs more to work than to stay at home, and it takes a great deal out of us to “civilize and sterilized” ourselves in order to conform to fluorescent-lit surveillance cubes that most of us call a workplace these days.

What is the alternative? Many of us could live simply, and choose to chill out on the patio, breathe deeply, have time to think about life and the eternal verities.

But then, not working means feeling outside society, and disenfranchised in a rather major way.

And when I awaken at 3:30 am after a long, dismal night of nightmares and creeping, sad knowledge that I’m alone with my thoughts, it occurs to me that it’s much easier to live in a place where consciousness and too much self-awareness are reined in by trivial, busywork coupled with draconian punishment for missing deadlines and failing to live up to expectations.

Keeping fear alive is a great way to block out the tough questions about life, life’s stages, and what it all means (and if meaningfulness matters at all)…

Sometimes, though, questions have a way of surfacing, no matter what we do to keep them submerged. At that point, it’s good to pull out the spectacle – either attend or participate in one. My vote goes to participating – if you are playing a role and are absorbed in creating a dramatic enactment of something, you are more likely to feel comfortable about yourself because you are a part of something that is larger than life, and larger than yourself.

The best example might be Disney. If you are a “cast member,” you’re role-playing in a large spectacle, and your individual beingness is subsumed and transformed into a collective one: the show.

It’s a gorgeous, brilliant concept: not only do you have the opportunity to train your mind on something other than your quotidian worries and pesky intrusive thoughts, you’re also able to achieve a sense of unity. Some writers such as William James (Varieties of Religious Experience) and Evelyn Underhill (Mysticism) might call that a mystical experience. I know I would.

So, returning to the original, triggering thought that precipitated this little “Sunday drive” of the mind, let’s regard Christopher Smart’s cat, Jeoffrey: 

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.

For he rolls upon prank to work it in. (Smart, Jubilate Agno, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174440)

And then let’s combine it with our media, Internet-driven sense of spectacle, and the possibility that we’re voyeurs of our own lives. Where is the power? What is the power? I’d say that it resides within one’s capacity to create visions – to envision.

***

Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night