If I could do half of what I know how to do I would be one lucky guy. Just read a book called Last Night in Montreal and in it a character has friends who sit around and talk about art a lot and another friend who never says a word but just goes out and takes photos. Who is the artist, who is wise?

Guess.

The wise one is the one who acts, the others just know. As much as I love knowing stuff, I have to say doing stuff is better. Who cares how much you know? Most people wish those who know would just shut up and get on with it. Knowing is good for telling other people what to do. Oh yay.

Goddess send me courage, not knowledge,

LWIII

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and everyday.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It took the internet for me to find out about her, even that she was a she, for I never really pondered the author of Mary Poppins as a child reader, just knew it was P. L. Travers – male or female, no matter. When I later found out she also had published a collection of essays, as well as the Mary Poppins books, I had to get it, out-of-print or not. Seventy foolish bucks later I had the new book in my hands. This is part of what I found, from the essay “Now, Farewell and Hail”, in her valuable volume What the Bee Knows:

Thus I danced the days of my life, seeking, learning, experiencing, always living and always dying, until the long setting of the sun. And again, facing the falling light, I felt the old familiar weight and paused in the gallimaufry.

‘Where am I?’ I asked myself and from somewhere came a voice not mine, a searching echo, ‘Where art thou?’

‘On! On!’ cried the dancers streaming by. But I stood still and let them pass, knowing that I had been hiding – hiding in the midst of the dance as in the rift of a dream, letting being take on the guise of becoming, homeless, looking for home.

‘Where art thou?’ That voice again!

And out, from under the leaves of Eden, I rose and was awake, awake and in my lost domain.

I am here. Now, my eternal instant, that holds what was and will be. I am here. Now, in the all that is here. Gilgamesh reaching for the scarlet flower and the serpent seizing it from him; Isis gathering back to herself the lost parts of Osiris; the Buddha watching the golden bowl making its fateful way upstream; Galileo muttering into his beard ‘Eppur si muove!’; Prometheus bringing down the fire that men, laboriously climbing, must carry back to Heaven, a son of Adam setting foot on the moon; another walking the sky; Demeter searching for her stolen daughter; Sabat Mater, heart-stopped, breath-stopped, waiting to take upon her knees her dead and living son; Halley’s comet still sweeping past; Aratus singing to his lyre, ‘Full of Zeus are the cities, full of Zeus are the harbours, full of Zeus are all the ways of men’; the fox stealing into his hole; the crested wren swinging in her hanging mansion.

I am here. Now, a lost child found, with that Something Else, that painful riddle, again at work upon me. Perhaps it is not, indeed, a riddle but rather an intimation. There are things that may not be understood, except by standing under them, watching, waiting and empty, as a shell that the bird has flown. I could be that my lack is, on its obverse side, my treasure, that which calls and calls me back to the sole and living moment. I shall not be given to know its name nor even to ask to know it. Somewhere within me it is known, it has no need of words. And that which knows it also knows that I shall not stay long with you, my homeland. I shall fall away again and again, drawn by the magnet of Tomorrow and the treacherous hope that it exists, and carries gifts and surcease from care. Sages and seers, Now, dwell in your pavilions. To such as I it is given only to visit them from time to time and know that I have slept – slept and forgotten my meaning.

Death, be my friend! I came, waking, if weeping, into the world. Let me, waking, leave it.

And you, Sweet Lethe, run softly when I end my song that I may not drink deep of your tide. For there is a thing that I would remember.

Now is the day of everlasting. Now is the day of salvation.

Thanks Mom,

LWIII

As a child I used to dread the sunset because of the longing that came with it. ‘There must be something else,’ I would say, not at all knowing what it was, but knowing, too, that as far as the wind blows and the sky is blue I would go and find it.

~ P. L. Travers

I got that quote from Josh Kaufman’s superb business training site. In his inspirational blog he speaks of 12 core human skills that he recommends we all have:

1. Information-Assimilation
2. Writing
3. Speaking
4. Mathematics
5. Decision-Making
6. Rapport
7. Conflict-Resolution
8. Scenario-Generation
9. Planning
10. Self-Awareness
11. Interrelation
12. Skill Acquisition

Now I am far from a biological determinist, but my guess is that maybe 20% of the human population is even genetically determined to be capable of doing all this, not to mention cultural constraints. I know I don’t have a prayer of fulfilling this list, much less Heinlein’s vainglorious sci-fi hero’s.

My main hindrance is mnemonic. My memory is totally incapable of allowing me to become an expert in anything. I am a generalist because I have to be, since just when I’m about to become an expert in something I forget most of it. And anxiety can make me forget which way is up at the drop of a hat.

So my twelve core human skills would go something like this:

1. Brushing your teeth
2. Remembering to keep fresh water for your pet
3. Being nice to people
4. Setting the alarm for work
5. Not throwing up unless you have to
6. Cleaning up occasionally
7. Having sex
8. Enjoying beauty
9. Walking
10. Getting enough sleep
11. Smiling
12. Laughing really loud

I do believe that in the future human beings will be capable of doing things that would seem superhuman to us now. But that’s then.

Actually I believe there’s only one core skill required of all humans: Love.

Love your neighbors.
Love your job.
Love your hobbies.
Love your family.
Love yourself.

And then there’s that one that’s difficult yet not impossible: Love the unloveable.

Love,

LWIII

Humor seems to be becoming almost strictly a weapon these days. Family Guy-type humor that is based on putting something or somebody down. I know that ain’t a new process by any means, but I watch Family Guy and its ilk and just get bummed out by how painful humor is getting, how nasty and mean-spirited it seems, or seems to be trending over the years, thanks to our anti-blessing, television.

If humor becomes strictly an attack weapon how are we supposed to laugh at ourselves without feeling crappy?

Ouch,

LWIII

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. ~ Thomas Carlyle

~ Jim Morrison, Wilderness, the Lost Writings

Such carnal yearnings, spiritual cravings, such an American boy, singing shaman, where has the mystery gone, the magic danced away? Too far, too far. Barbaric yawp of rock and soul, seek me now my forgotton father. Into the sky, the snake of seven desert miles swirls like the sun in the eyes of the dead.

Innocence is everywhere.

LWIII

A message from the dreamtime. Have to say I really like it, even though I’m not sure what it means. “The grace benediction phrase” came to me just that way, as a solitary phrase running through my head/heart when I woke up.

In neither example did I have any recollection of a dream that evoked those words. Just the words themselves, like encrusted amphorae at the bottom of the sea, the only remnants of an ancient Roman shipwreck. I must become a dream archeologist of the deep.

If I feel into it, it seems like a gentle imperative, a hint to wait. Heraclitus said “Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.” Maybe not quite yet time for this beast to hit the green, green pasture. Need to hang out in the cattleyard for a while, milling and mooing.

Tarry on,

LWIII

(Languageological note: What did Heraclitus mean by that? I never spoke to any experts about it, in fact, have never spoken to anybody about it that I recall, other than the unwashed masses in my head. But this is what I think: It’s about how hard it is to change. Like the law of inertia, a body at rest needs a blow to get it hoppin’. Gee-up!)

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you – it will come out of that wall.

~ Anton Chekhov

Perseverance furthers,

LWIII

The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.

~ Maimonides

Wisdom knows balance instinctively, and weights learning in that balance.

Soar,

LWIII

~ Rudyard Kipling

That’s one of my favorite quotes these days. It does what words do so well, says about ten bajillion things at once.

For one thing, taken at face value it’s a penetrating insight, as true as a true thing may be. One could disprove it with words, of course, since it’s only words to begin with. But it reeks to me of truth. And aroma, as we know, is a keystone to good fiction. A good tale is highly pungent. Puts you there. In that foreign country.

But what about these implications? Did Kipling have something metaphorical in mind when he wrote that? Does it matter what he thought?

I smell something fishy. Not fishy, actually, much less fish-like than that. I smell something that makes me want to go that way. Toward the mystery, into that foreign country. Which country that is, Kipling doesn’t say. Could it be the country of the imagination, that strange mix of reality and wonder where you don’t have to say “it was stinky and bitter and sharp and made her stomach heave”?  You just say

and let the reader’s memory and imagination take over.

Smell is of the body, smell is of the earth, something visceral and not intellectual. Could it be understanding starts with a stench? What we know with the mind perhaps first must be reckoned with the nose. The nose knows. Those who have not smelt death may never understand it.

Ever-smelly,

LWIII

Give me a storm. “Blow wind and crack your cheeks!” or something to that effect. Got some snow today, but a piddling amount. Still pretty cool outside, though, kinda weatherish.

LWIII