Have you ever met a celebrity in real life? Who was it and how did your paths cross? Submitted By |
What seems to fascinate some people is how I crossed paths with Paramhansa Yogananda, and my personal impression of him on the occasion. It was a long, long time ago, as you might imagine (he being now at least 50 years gone from this Earth).
It happened in the early summer of 1945, my first year out of high school, in San Francisco. I was working for the Harry McCune Sound System, handling audio equipment for public occasions (a trainee, actually), and my assignment that afternoon was to set up and monitor the equipment at the Scottish Rite Auditorium then located on Van Ness Ave. off of Post Street. I had no knowledge whatsoever of who the speaker would be. It was just a job to be done.
I piled the necessary equipment into a three-wheel motorcycle and buzzed the mile or so to where the hall was, and set it up barely a half-hour before his scheduled talk. The only problem was that I had to be in the direct audio range in order to monitor the sound, and there was no provisional space for that. So my only option was to use a small table forward of the stage, between it and the audience seating.
There were only 30 or 40 people in attendance, in a hall that could have held hundreds, because he wasn't at all known in those days. I, myself, had never heard of him, and was somewhat put off when he came onstage from behind a curtain: a dark-skinned middle-aged man in a long gown or robe, who had long black hair, like a woman! This was, of course, long before the time of hippies and I had never seen a man with long hair. He looked, in fact, more like a dowdy grandmother, to me, than any sage. With no smile, either on his face or in his voice, as he began his talk. But it was just a job, as I say, and I merely stuck to my monitoring duties.
However, he threw me a curve. To begin his lecture, he wanted everyone to stand and join him in deep-breathing exercises. I had no idea whether that included me, or not. I wasn't really part of his audience, yet I was sitting there between him and them, unavoidably conspicuous. What should I do . . . participate or just stay seated? My only concern was to be as inconspicuous as possible. But I had to make a commitment, at this point, as to how it was best done. And heaven help me, I made the wrong choice.
Chalk it up to my callow inexperience: Fearing that I might otherwise seem to insult him, I stood up with the assembled audience and began the deep breathing exercise that he led them into. After a couple of deep breaths and arm-sweeps, he paused amidst the process and gave me the most foul glare imaginable, and I could hardly help but grasp its meaning: SIT DOWN!
Totally chastened, I did so. It was an entirely wordless confrontation, that 'meeting' with the Paramhansa, but hardly an uncommunicative one. Eye to eye, something momentous was transacted. And to this day, I wonder how that may have affected my life, which has been one of extended departure from various societal norms, though not without a good deal of attendant satisfaction.
Irv
It has been a whale of a year for me, and I fairly well kept pace with it (except for LJ). But actually, I've been using LJ in another way. In September, you may recall, I started an email newsletter called Irv's Scrapbook, and right now I'm working on the third issue of it, which should be out in another week or so. It goes by email, formatted and everything, but I'm using my alternate LJ site to branch the articles off to, so I get a lot more mileage out of them. Can't explain it any better than that . . . if you want to see how it works, let me know.
October was spent mostly away from home. Almost two weeks in Washington DC, guest of a friend I met at a highschool reunion several years ago. An amazingly good time, and the basis for a budding relationship... if it continues. She's coming to visit me over the New Year's holiday. Something I hardly expected would happen at my age. But of course, I've no idea how well it will 'mature'. (An odd word to use, given our advanced age :). But she is young in spirit, just as I am. In fact, we're an exceedingly good match for each other. If only we can resolve this cross-country split.
Then I spent nearly a week, at the end of the month, in the Bay Area, for a reunion of San Francisco State College students of the 1940s! That was a fascinating experience - reconnecting with some very old friends (in every usage), including one that I haven't seen in 60 years! One of the girls who shared an apartment with my wife-to-be, who is now long gone. Hey, it's one of the distinct gifts of a long life!!
And a large part of my present focus is on the Mayan Calendar -- its approaching windup, when things are supposed to change dramatically for all of us. I'm just happy to be around when it's happening. But the really amazing thing about it is how well it links to my own life, and earlier awarenesses about it. So I have to give it some real space in my head. It could be a tremendous blessing for ALL of us.
Also, I'm taking a class now at the U of W, on the Millennium Generation. I've got to lead one session of it, later this month, and plan to do it on 'Being a Generation Junkie'. I have managed to involve myself, at some level, with each younger generation, just about every 20 years . . . and of course, I am doing it again! It's one good way to stay on my toes. (Well, figuratively speaking).
For now...
take care, everyone.
Well, I've really been busy, this time around. In fact...
...this isn't so much a journal entry as an announcement and invitation. Yep, I've got something periodical going once again, after all these years as an old zine writer beyond his prime. And I'm feeling all the energy-surge of it . . . quite a marvelous thing if it holds up. If I hold up!
It's something that's going to serve me in several ways: to begin with, as a 'staging area' for the next book, that is well-begun, but that I haven't been able to pull through a year-long lethargy problem. So I had this brilliant idea for a way to kick-start it, and before I knew it the kick-start took on a life of its own. It will be several things besides, including the vehicle for a kind of 'kick in the pants' that I think this country needs. No, not really political, but calculated to deal with how the political scene has been beating us down. Hard to explain, without getting a bit of running room for it.
So what I'm going to do, here, is LJ-cut one of the key articles in the first issue, that is going out this weekend. You can take a look at it and see if you feel it might be worth getting from me. It costs nothing, and will arrive by email. Irregularly, as is my style. But I think I may be able to keep up a 4-6 week frequency with it. Maybe!
The only requirement is that I'd need an email address from you. So if you happen to want it you can send me an address at irvthom1@comcast.net rather than publicly through a comment here. I know how antsy everyone is about that. And if it doesn't quite satisfy you, provision will be right there for unsubscribing yourself.
Okay, ( here is the article )
Anyway, I wanted to make note, here, of the circumstance. I generally feel okay about people just being 'who they are' on LJ. Or if I have a problem with anyone, I might insert a gentle prod, here or there, in a comment. But I'm feeling something different now. I've gone through the last 50 or so things posted by my 'friends' – and I admit that most of them have not posted in that span; it's been sort of monopolized by perhaps a dozen of all the friends I have here, and maybe that's really the problem . . . that the rest are too deeply involved in real life issues, which is at least a positive recognition.
But as to the ones I've tapped into, I don't see a shred of concern about what is going on in the country right now! The ones I'm speaking about seem totally unaware of or unconcerned about the very real peril this country happens to be in at the moment . . . as though it's of no real matter whether we remain a constitutional democracy or not, governed by laws and a three-branch government, as was put into place well over two hundred years ago, and sufficed for the many decades of this country's reasonable growth. Maybe they are all too young to care about the difference evident in the undercutting of that world that has been steadily in process ever since this so-called war began.
It is so bad NOW, that we are going to see a confrontational challenge between Congress and the White House during this coming week or two, the eventual stand-off (which is almost certain to result) thrown into the hands of a Court that is no longer predictable as to how it will resolve the matter. We may very well have it judicially confirmed that we are now in the hands of a president fully empowered to do as he likes. In common terminology, that is called a dictatorship.
AND THAT'S NOT ALL. A strong warning is out and about, of indications that something is likely to set off a war with either Iran or one of the other nearby nations now undergoing a process of demonization by the administration. A war that, given the larger circumstances, could easily become an armageddon.
I mean . . . this stuff is actually going on right now, and reaching crisis proportions, but you'd never know it from the personal vanities and highly self-focused indulgences currently presented here by the friends I seem to have selected on LiveJournal.
The good news is that nothing changes when you reach 80 (IF you reach 80).
The bad news is that nothing changes when you reach 80.
I met a neat woman about a month ago and had my first date with her last Saturday, and it went great. Just a late breakfast in a secluded spot overlooking the Sound (Seattle's waterfront, you know). Everything seemed to go well.
But then midweek we ran into some misunderstanding, and I seem to have been left high and dry.
Like I say, nothing changes when you reach 80. You can take it as either good news or bad, from one who now knows.
Meanwhile, I want to share a great little video with you. Definitely takes the edge off of things...
[Steroids, that's what I was trying to think of!]
For one thing, I'm being flown down to L.A. this weekend to be interviewed for an upcoming documentary. I'm not going to tell you what it's about unless you ask. And that's only the least entangling thing that's going on with me.
But the reason for this present and momentary return is really to bring you one of the most astounding YouTube offerings that I have seen. In fact, for all that is wrong about YouTube (yes, there are a few things), this single offering fully makes up for it.
Give it a try and see for yourself.
No, seriously, things aren't really all that bad. I'm amazed at how much mid-day vitality I've still got, how much walking I can still do, how vital life still seems for me. It's only the way it all fades by evening that has me less than thrilled. And, to be sure, how many of my old cohort have vanished on me. Don't believe what they say about lifespans of 80 and 90 becoming common . . . there aren't that many who actually make it.
I did see a few of them, on my trip south. My old high-school buddy, Frank, can hardly get around, for his sciatica problems. He spent 20 years as an Air Force navigator, and the rest of his life as a Deputy Sheriff, but I wonder if he is going to last another five. My advantage is that I haven't owned a vehicle for the past 35 years, which has been salutary for my health (not to mention my pocketbook, and my peace of mind).
I returned to find that some of my LJ friends have deleted, which is harder to take than my lost youth. And I reflect again on the strangeness of this so-called 'friendship' business, here on LJ. And the anonymity that seems to be quite alright with everyone. I admit, there is no reason for me to expect real friendship on such a thin basis . . . but why call them friends then? It needs another name, like 'contacts', or 'tryouts'. Or maybe they are friends in today's world . . . maybe I just don't understand how tentative such things have become. I'm pleased to tell you that in my world, I've got some thirty or forty friends who would happily put me up for a night or two if I should arrive on their doorstep. Even unannounced.
Now that is what I would call a friend. And it spoils me. I want to be in real communication with the people whose lives I follow, here on LJ (and I do try and follow everyone's, even if my own LJ input has been nothing to brag about). I try to absorb 'who you are' so when I do offer a comment or two, I feel like it could be coming from someone who knows you and thinks about what you're saying. I admit, it doesn't jell for everyone on my list (which should explain why I don't comment to everyone), but know that I think about you when I read your input, and I have some opinions about you (if you're ever curious enough to ask).
I wonder if anyone knows what happened to Bridget McClellan, one of the deleted whom I really do miss. (You see? I wouldn't even ask that, about a contact or a tryout. And why should I bother, if I already have so many friends? Only because real friends kind of rely on each other being there. It's part of what makes life worthwhile . . . Yes, even up to the age of 80).
I did want to say something about the way this year is opening. I'm picking up on a lot of tension out there, with odd kinds of hangups in the way things are happening. It's like a huge energy-buildup is underway, and somewhat worrisome for what the summer might be like. Normally, summertime has all the year's intensity; but normally, the rise of it is gentle this early along the way . . . doesn't start to really register until late in June or beyond. So my advice is to be especially observant of things and generally looking out for your own well-being. You might have to lay back a bit, before summer is done with. Get into some early morning meditation.
And when I get back, I shall have arrived, officially, in Octogenarian-land! And damn . . . I'm still having a hard time believing that. A pal of mine down there, and I, will be celebrating it together. I call him my twin, because he and I were born a day apart, on opposite sides of the bay. Yep, Al and I were just a day and a bay apart. He's the older one. I didn't meet him until we were both about 50.
Technically, I guess I'm part of what has been called the Greatest Generation. But I'm not bragging about it. In fact, I don't really consider myself part of it. Mainly, because I never got into the war. Not that I didn't try, but a lousy heart murmur kept me out of it. A kind of disgrace, at the time. And it turned out to be an albatross around my neck, in the long run. No GI Bill for me, which meant a struggle just to get only part way through college, and no breaks on home loans or other perks . . . I even found myself losing handicap points on civil service job exams. It kind of set me apart for my whole subsequent life.
But in the long run, I'm fairly happy with how that worked out, being an outsider just about as far as it can be stretched. They did well, in a desperate war that had to be won (their tactical skills make today's effort look pretty damned puny), but I think they blew it when it came to making the resultant world a better place to live. I think the whole rotten thrust of today's corporate society had its best growth years in their hands. I mean, things have been going downhill ever since they started getting greedy.
No, you guys here wouldn't know that. It's not in the history books that way. But it was like a wild-ass homesteading run . . . find your piece of corporate 'property' and let the devil take the hindmost. No holds barred, in the crazy gold rush that followed, once it really got underway. Maybe it started when the century began, maybe even earlier, but it was that Greatest Generation that devised the tax structures, the credit card games, the consumerism-without-limits that never, EVER found a point at which enough was enough. And they, of course, were the ones that wrote the history books that have told you guys how great they were, to have put together what we have today.
Yes, I guess I'm somewhat jaundiced. I wonder what you'll be like, if you make it to 80?
Yeah, it's an odd kind of community, in that it never 'gets together' except perhaps in small and no doubt private settings. But then community has always had a variety of definitions. The sad part, however, is that community is one of the primary things that the so called flower-kids counter-culture was all about. A time in cultural history that comes in for some pretty sorry judgement, these days. But I, myself - the very life I've lived, for the latter half of it - am a direct product of those years and that culture. So I of course think it sad, to hear it said by anyone at all, but particularly by young folks, that they don't know the experience of community.
And then I have to reflect that I really know what that's all about. In the two decades or so that I was part of the wage-earning world, and from among the 60-odd places I must have worked over that time, I met and worked with a lot of people but I have not a single friend to show for it, today. It is simply NOT an environment for the creation of community. From the nearly four decades since I left that 'dead world', I have collected friends here, there, and everywhere, many of whom I am still involved or in contact with. More, in fact, whom I lost to death, over the course of that time, than to the kind of distancing that is so often the case with friends-on-the-job.
So I know what this young lady meant . . . I know what she meant. And my clearest hope is that our society will oneday return to putting a high value on community, take it to heart and begin to experiment with it again. The main thing standing in its way is that we basically compete with each other in the worlds we occupy. For jobs, for lovers, for money, for status, for achievement, for recognition . . . in other words, we live in self-created worlds of scarcity, in the very midst of more than enough to go around. Doesn't that seem quite stupid?
this is the best passage i've seen on this site; irv thomas has got to be one of my top, oh, four, writers ever. and i'm a big reader. i'm off to buy some irv thomas books right now.
I don't know if he ever did — he certainly never wrote me about it — but what a nice touch, to come on that, on a day that otherwise was rather barren of satisfactions.
Anyway, it seemed something worth posting up here, but I'll have to do it as a cut. I don't know if I've ever made mention, here, of my hitch-hiking background, but it is quite extensive, having been resumed back in the 1970s as a practical necessity when I gave up the ownership of an automobile for reasons of economy. It turned out to be one of the most . . . no, I was going to say brilliant, but there was nothing brilliant about it at the time. It was simply the happiest accidental choice that I ever made, for it brought me uncounted hours of roadside adventure and carefree fun, all the way up to . . . well, heck, I guess I was 72 when I did my last long-distance hitching holiday, up the eastern flank of the Rockies, from Arizona to Idaho.
So here is this writing of mine...( Read more... )
Not true, I suppose. But I don't seem to have the knack, anymore, for keeping things in perspective . . . seeing the receding past as a field of accomplishments. It's like I'm forever focused on what I haven't found time for. Yet, I could reel off a satisfying list of people connected with, things moving along. It's just that I don't seem to sense it that way.
One particularly rewarding cluster of activity has been a series of reconnections with people from my long ago past. I had been all through the web search route a few years back, trying to find the old friends I wanted to seek out again for the 'Spring of my life' book I was working on, and I was satisfied that I had turned up all that I could. And then my old college connection (San Francisco State, where I only completed two years), finally put out an all-time alumni roster, and I got myself a copy. Plunged $80 for it, but felt it was worth it, and I wasn't wrong. I turned up a dozen names in it, most of whom I hadn't even thought about in all these years.
The really amazing thing about it, though, was the particular way it made me aware of my antiquity. The school has expanded considerably since I was there: a pretty good size campus, now, out by Lake Merced, whereas the school I went to occupied a two-block midtown site. It was a college then, and it's now a university. So the back of the huge alumni book had a class-by-class index that ran to 196 pages of tightly packed names. And the time for which I attended was on the first and second of those 196 pages.
Anyway, for the ten old friends that I hadn't seen or heard from in some sixty years, I sent books out to half of them without any prior notice. The other five, I sent advance letters to when I suddenly realized, more or less as an afterthought, that they might not even remember me. Interestingly, only two of the batch of books sent right out have brought return responses, whereas all but one of the others wrote back asking for the book. The book was sent free, in both cases.
So, in just these past four or five weeks, I've been connecting with all of these really old friends (however you use the term) — guys that are only in my mind as young fellows. There were two women in the group I contacted, but neither one has yet responded. The reconnections resulted in some marvelous exchange, and I expect I'll be getting together with a couple of them when I get down to the Bay Area.
I'll also be meeting (for the first time) with three children – full grown now, of course – of one of my childhood friends who died 25 years ago. I had seen him just once, about a year before he died, in all of the succeeding sixty-three years. But I knew him so well, as a youngster, that I wanted his kids to have my reflections of a family and neighborhood background they know virtually nothing at all about.
I rather doubt that any of my LJ friends even think about such things, so this should prompt some interesting conjectures on your own part. Someday, you may arrive at some similar point. And the world you'll look back on – meaning the last years of the Twentieth Century – will look sweeter (by comparison with the time you'll be looking back from) than you can possibly imagine.
What I'm working on is the story of my life. Volume 2, which covers my working years. That's not the intended scope of it, but that's what it's really all about. The intended scope is the Summer years of my life. My first volume was all about the Spring years. You can see the pattern I'm laying out. My 'Summer' was the second 21 years of my life. Actually, I worked a couple years beyond that, but for practical purposes I was done with it by then. I'm talking about wage-paying work, paycheck stuff. I didn't stop working then, but I stopped whoring myself for a regular paycheck. And it was not done out of principle (to begin with), but because my life had gotten so tangled up by then, that I had to bust out of the mess.
That's what I think makes my life an interesting tale. The second half of it has been as different from the first as day from night. From my personal perspective, in fact, I wish I had known better than to waste an entire season of it going in the wrong direction. I know, I know . . . I had to go the wrong direction in order to find the right direction. I suppose that's true, but I've never been convinced that it had to be so, or should have been. In my view, the schooling that taught me all the practical capabilities I possess (and for which I am thankful), should also have taught me some of the things I only learned by going through the hard knocks.
There's a letter in this month's Harpers in which the writer, a young mother from Mystic, Conn., says "Compulsive schooling, the brainchild of industrial magnates in the late 1800s, had the repugnant goal of creating a docile, easily exploited workforce. Schooling was, and is, intended to create parameters within which we are allowed to think."
Just think about that for a moment. We were trained to think within certain boundaries. And if you didn't naturally fit within those boundaries, it was just too bad. You went along with it anyway, because there was no one who ever told you there were other reasonable (or at least possible) ways of conceiving things. A vise-like grip on your mind, that you didn't even know existed.
My heresy is that I could not easily or usefully conform to the values and principles of the commercial world. So it took me some 21 years of rather pointless wandering, through every job field I had the continuing faith and stomach to invest myself in, before I finally realized that there was nothing there for me.
That's it, you see: I threw away some 21 years of my life, before I found the courage, or just the plain sense, to break out of those limiting parameters that the society and its schooling system had imposed on me. So part of my purpose, in writing about this journey of a 'seasoned life' is to help folks who are similarly stuck in the same dead-end alley, butting their heads against the same hard walls as I did, and not knowing WHY it never seems to bring them what they want.
Well, it is certainly about time that I get back to this neglected journal of mine! I more or less went into a January of seclusion, I guess to brood over the loss of my partner just before the holidays . . . well, no, actually because the month just felt right for that sort of retreat. It does take time to absorb that kind of blow. We didn't actually live together, but in the same apartment complex and had a nice mellow thing going, for about a dozen years here. Not a marriage, and not the first of my life's relationships, but almost certainly the last of them. So that has to be grieved, too.
And then I had to work up some kind of memorial to her, to share with my friends . . . around and about, and as a general update of what's going on with me. I made it a Valentine Letter, and put the pressure on myself to get it out in time. Barely did.
So that pretty much accounts for the month and a half since my last journal entry here. I've also been using the time to try and get a better feel for how I relate to this journal, and to LJ in general. I tend to feel pretty good about this space to work in, and the folks I relate to here (about half of those on my friends list, I guess — mainly the ones I respond to, so you can know if I mean you:). But fitting this into my head, when it comes to the best use to make of it is still not entirely clear to me.
I'm a pen & paper person. I've journaled for the past 35 years of my life, in one form or another, but it has always been in writing, so this still doesn't come naturally (which may also account, in part, for lagging on it as I do). And the argument that this is also a form of communication complicates the picture even more. I've no problem with sharing at the journal level; that's what I was doing with my Valentine Letter, and have done for many years. Heck, I have a hundred people or more on my postal mailing list. They are folks that go back years in my life, stemming originally from a zine I once put out, in the long ago.
Right from the start of it, I interacted with my readers on a personal level, and a good many of them remained in correspondence with me when the periodical (or 'sporadical', as I used to refer to it) faded away. Sharing is what my life has been all about. But it grew from a connection that had a focal point: we had a common sense of values (or else they never would have connected with me), and in most instances we had met and known each other face to face. So there was never any feeling that they were just names or faces on a screen. See, that's what makes LJ so strange for me!
Still, I've felt the genuine friendship and personal concern from those I do interact with here, and that saves the whole picture. In fact, I talked about that very thing, in my Valentine Letter. In that light, I consider it a superb way of breaking through the generational barrier that anyone my age ordinarily has to confront. I think some of you know the extent to which I've moved uncertainly with that; and most have affirmed me without reservation. So I'll not deny feeling a certain advantage in the spacey kind of friendship connection I find here.
But beyond those elements of gaining my '21st century footing', there is also the plain question of how I put my time to best use. While I'm admittedly slower than I used to be, my life seems as active as it ever was. Right now I'm working on my fourth book, as well as an article scheduled for someone else's book, and have recently been contacted by someone about contributing to a documentary he's putting together. So all of that crowds my 'LJ act' and it remains to be seen, how often I really will keep at this effort. Be assured, however, that my heart is really in it, and the effort will be made.
Thanks for all your patience. I have a few extra copies of the Valentine letter - a 6-pager - and if anyone would like one, send me your postal address <irvthom1@comcast.net>
It has been a helluva month on which to end a helluva year, and I say good riddance to both! It was pretty much a lousy route by which to reach 2007, but of course I had no say in it. Why people insist on planning their lives to the bone, when it clearly can't be done to any decent effect, is something I'll never understand. It would save a lot of wasted effort to just march bravely into it.
Exactly one thing came true for me as I planned it, a year ago at this time: I put out the first volume of the four I plan (there's that word again!) for my autobiography. (Well, I have to plan on four, because my life is running the full four seasons — I'm close enough, now, to make that reasonable assumption about it).
Otherwise, I should damn the planning, and strike out ahead at full speed . . . take it just as it comes. It could hardly be any worse than what I went through this year.
December, as I say, was a killer month. Specifically, it killed my longtime Sweetie. I spoke about that in my last entry, and it came to pass on the 15th of the month. Which partly accounts for why I haven't really been moved to post an entry since then.
It's a jolt, when it hits . . . even when you're expecting it. I mean, it drops you down to a whole new level of the drags . . . a floor below the one you thought was the bottom. It's a feeling of emptiness in your world, even if you were already experiencing emptiness, it makes you realize that you really weren't. You really hadn't known what emptiness was. Before, there was always the feeling that tomorrow could be different. Now you know that it won't.
That's the existential essence of it. But you bear up. Because you don't have any real choice about that, either. Tomorrow WILL be different, if I use the idea of tomorrow a little loosely. And if I have a little faith in my life. Which I do.
This week, I am pretty much hibernating. I always use this last week in the year to go through such journals as I've kept for the year, and write from them my annual retrospective of the entire year. I've done that, now, for more than 35 years. It really helps me to see the year with more clarity. As a case in point, it's reminding me, now, of some bright spots in this essentially terrible year that I had pretty much forgotten about. It wasn't ALL bad, like I said it was (and I'm alerted to how easily I fall into such generalizations).
The balanced view does help. It helps me to keep that awareness that 'tomorrow' WILL be different. Not because I say it will, but because it always is. That's about the only thing worth planning on.
Maybe that doesn't even cover it. It's been a triple-feature day, which shouldn't happen even if you're past seventy! Not all bundled together, anyway. Maybe it's the kind of day that doesn't even come along for anyone more than once every seventy years.
The lady of my heart, most recently, who sort of changed that status at the start of this year, and is very ill with cancer (all of which I told you about, not long ago) told me tonight that she is going into a hospice home. I knew she was headed in that direction, of course, so I'd already been through the shock and distress of it, awhile back. But then it hits again, when it comes down to, like, the end of this week, or next. Yes, it kind of kicks you in the gut when you get the hard reality that you won't be seeing her any longer.
That was one of today's three features. Then she called me back, a few moments later, with something she had forgotten to tell me. When our falling-out came about, at the start of the year, after a relationship of more than twelve years, she had banned my favorite term of endearment: 'Sweetie' - a term that both of us had used, for so long. I was just to call her, henceforth, by her first name, and she'd do likewise. Well, she called me back, this evening, to let me know that the ban had been rescinded; that I had been so kind and thoughtful of her, these past few months as she descended down into her hell (toward her heaven, actually), that she'd had second thoughts about the break between us, and had decided to forgive and forget. That was the second of my day's series of three.
And you're wondering, of course (if you haven't lost track of how this all began), why I said that the day could only happen if one is past seventy. Okay, well, that has to do with the third of the day's three features.
It just so happens that today, of all days, is my 50th wedding anniversary. I guess that has to be put in the past tense . . . it would have been my 50th anniversary, except for the fact that the woman I married, all those years ago, embarked on her own sad passage into heaven just a few years ago. Yes, just a few years ago, but about thirty-five years after I decided that I could no longer fulfill myself in the context of that marriage. This day would have been singular on that account alone, had not the rest of the strange confluence come into it as the day went by.
Do you think it odd that I should even recognize a wedding anniversary after all of that? Well, the full fact of it is that we had never gotten divorced. We were still married on the day she died. It was always an open question, with me - or at least, for many, many years - whether I should go back and resume that marriage. That is, if she would have me. I think she would have. She had no other love or lover than me, over all those years, and we stayed in touch, even did things together. I had brief relationships, myself, before this recent one. But there has seldom been any question, in my own mind, as to that earliest one having been the most significant love of my life.
It can certainly be strange, the way life unfolds. At every point along the way, we tend to be pretty sure we know what it's all about, for us. But we seldom do . . . even after seventy years.
Well, yes, it wasn't exactly a thundering response. Not discouraging, but it gave me some pause for thought. Thank God for
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
saltysea, or I'd have wondered if the mic was even turned on. It kind of reminded me of a strange passage by the French author, Alain Robbe-Grillet, in The Novelist as Philosopher. ( He pegged a remarkably similar situation: )
Nevertheless, and as you can see, I rose above the challenge. Response or no, I shall pursue my intent here, and harbor no ill will about it. I have much to say on this site, and may eventually stimulate some interest in it . . . and in me. So let me get on with it...
I am a writer, as you can hopefully tell, though not what I tend to regard as a commercial writer. Most who aspire to it seek the commercial venues, but I have done with that, long ago. Oh, the urge still creeps up on me, now and then, but destiny deems otherwise for me, and I am quickly reminded of it.
Destiny: the way things happen for one. I used to fight my destiny, asserting my will, this way and that, but proving only that I could flip around like a fish out of water. Most will do that, of course . . . and some fish actually flip themselves back into the briny, so there is certainly something to be said for the practice. But I learned, for myself, that it was little more than a terrible drain of energy. Not to mention time. So, over the course of time (and I mean years), I learned there is a more congenial way to live: I simply follow the lead of events, and they invariably lead me to smooth waters and a usually successful passage, relative to whatever I am considering.
I did have to decide, of course, whether I was writing for money, fame, or just because of the drive within me to write. It took me half a lifetime of terrible struggle, to finally start putting money in its proper place in my life. Half a lifetime during which I scarcely found time to write, at all. I mean, I was too busy trying to get money! (With varying degrees of success, but none quite sufficient.)
I never was fully able to discard the urge to fame . . . it still dogs me, now and then. But let's just say I have come to terms with it; I've learned to laugh at it. Maybe the biggest part of the hurdle was in getting just a small touch of it. (A very small touch of it!). Okay, if you have to know, I somehow found my way into Who's Who in America. Been there going on five years, now, and I honestly haven't the vaguest idea of how it happened. But it is enough, thank God. It is enough to keep that raging old hunger at a reasonably low ebb.
So I am fairly content to write, at this late stage of my life, just because I damn well find fulfillment in it! And the devil can take those poor souls who must keep on struggling for fame and fortune.
No, I don't mean to cast calumny upon them . . . they are more to be pitied than disdained. For the fact of it is, they are enslaved by their passion, and I am not enslaved by mine. I have three fairly recent books to my credit, all of them self-published, two of them available from web resources, the third (and most recent) available only from me. One of the most interesting factoids about them is that on this final one, I truly put down the lingering urge to make a few bucks on it, and actually have given the book away to all who requested it -and I'm talking, here, about a full scale book: 6x9 and 252 pages- and yet, it is the only one, of the three, for which donations received (non-requested donations!) have fully covered the cost of its production, and actually given me a profit.
But I'll not say another word about those efforts unless specifically requested by anyone. I merely wanted to note that I feel vindicated in my views, on these matters I've mentioned, including this idea of a destiny that rules our lives . . . if we are wise enough to allow it.
I joined an LJ group called _discussion, thinking it a good start, but the longer I stayed with it, the more discouraging it became. Though it had a lot of members, it was dominated by just a few of them: first a guy who called himself Mindwindow, whose main project, it seemed, was raking women over the coals, and the most amazing thing about it was how he got away with it! I mean most of the women - and guys, too - appeared to tolerate the language he used, which gave me a surprised insight into the common failure (in this new millennium) of common decency! I mean, I know I'm a Rip van Winkle to even make the point, but the mid-20th century was at least a somewhat civil-ized place! After that, I was increasingly aware that a cluster of neo-fascists (even by their own admission) was continually dominating the discussion.
I finally gave in to my better judgement and quit that group, but had waited way too long before doing so. Fortunately, I had by then joined the addme25_and_up group, and begun to acquire some very selectively chosen friends, from whose entries I gradually came to see a more human side of this LJ experience. It richly enlarged my sense of what might be possible here. In fact, I was somewhat amazed at how deeply that could go. I mean, how honest and up-front so many of you new LJ-friends could be. (Well, allowing for the fact that you are all, nevertheless, maintaining your distance with anonymity :-]...but I can make allowances for that).
I would have started working with this journal about that time (early this year, I guess), except that . . . ( all hell started going on in my world. )
"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
"The first story is about connecting the dots.
"I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
"It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: 'We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?' They said: 'Of course.' My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
"And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
"It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
( click here for the closing two tales )
[cross-posted to the _nuffism group]
I think the best place to start, the best place from which to approach the matter of Reality, is with something we all know, but perhaps have never considered where it can take us.
A simple fact: our brain has two hemispheres. It is lateralized in such a way that the left hemisphere controls all the physical facility of the right half of our body, while the right hemisphere controls the left side of our body. Paralysis or stricture on one side of a person or the other tells immediately which side of the brain may have been hit by a stroke, or damaged by an aneurism or a tumor.
If it happens to be the person's right side that's suddenly dysfunctional, indicating a left hemisphere problem, it's also highly likely that their language use will be crippled — in many instances they won't even be able to speak, though quite able to hear and understand others.
Starting from such points of known effect, neuro-physiological exploration has opened a wide avenue of discovery into the differences between, and the separate influence of, the two hemispheres that all of us carry in our heads. Without detailing that long trail – though it makes fascinating reading for any who are curious – we can leapfrog to some extremely potent conclusions . . .
The two hemispheres are actually two independent centers of consciousness which seem to coordinate and work together, in most of us. But this is actually a bit (maybe much more than a bit) illusory. Under certain circumstances, they can be tested as separate entities, and have thus revealed functioning capabilities that are not only fully independent from one another, but quite often in contradiction, and even in outright conflict with one another!
Yes, we have in our heads, each and every one of us, not a single unitary brain, but a strangely yoked team, or more properly a partnership up there: working hand-in-hand, but not necessarily in agreement!
This is a fact, not an invention of mine. And it opens up a whole realm of things to think about. But let me add one more element to the picture, before you start thinking about it: While each hemisphere has a 'mind of its own', only one of them is able to directly let you know what it is thinking. The other side is, in a certain sense, mute. It must convey its own thoughts, perceptions, impressions, moods – whatever it has to convey to your conscious awareness – by some kind of indirection. Maybe an impulse, maybe a hunch, maybe a dream, maybe a sudden turn in the way you're feeling, maybe even an accident . . . Who knows what might be the extent of its options? Otherwise, it is quite arbitrarily kept in check by the more dominant other hemisphere. (Which is why you are generally accustomed to thinking of yourself as 'of one mind'.)
So we have, here, a fascinating start-point for all sorts of questions and conjectures. Like . . .
Who is really me? If it's the hemisphere that is literally speaking through me, then . . . Who is that silent one? When and how does it enter my thoughts? Does it perhaps contribute to my indecision? ...to my ambivalence? What part does it play in my stress? Or my physical well-being (or lack of it)? And how can I tap into it?
See what I mean? But that's only the top layer of questions and concerns. Let me now introduce an added measure: There is good reason to believe that one hemisphere – probably the left-side and communicative one – is also the locus of our rational thinking, our 'down to earth' practical and logical side, while the other hemisphere is largely where feeling and sensitivity hold sway, and perhaps a more free-wheeling creativity.
In other words, while we are generally (or perhaps hopefully, in the sense of our desire to maintain responsible values) rational, reasonable persons, we also have a less rational, less 'reasonable' side to us that we tend to ignore, or hold down, or at least keep in the background — though not entirely with success. At times, it slips out, and manifests in odd, sometimes 'inexplicable' ways.
Can you begin to see the can of worms that is being exposed here? It seems enough to chew on, for the moment, before we take this discussion a further step.
What I want to do with this journal is to try and summarize, or organize, the fruitful insights from 33 years of encounter and discovery, along a wayside life path somewhat outside the boundaries of conventionality. It's hard for me to be very specific about how far outside the normal boundary, which is properly an autobiographical topic and not one for the sort of review I intend. But sufficiently far outside to provide plentiful opportunity for exposure to aspects of reality not generally given much credence by most people pursuing their practical lives.
I don't think being outside the boundaries of conformity is a requirement for such exposure — I think life is providing it all the time, in many subtle ways. But lives of conformity are also in the captive grip of many kinds of practical necessity, not to mention ordinary peer pressure, which leads those so involved to reject the tendered offering, as it were, and stay with the commonplace evaluation of what is taking place. Thus, meaningful synchronicities (as Jung regarded them) are seen as mere 'coincidences', instances of pure and unaccountable Providence are passed off lightly as 'lucky happenings,' moments of psychic insight are either followed as isolated 'hunches' or simply dismissed . . . and what is lost thereby are opportune openings for the exploratory pursuit of deeper reality dimensions.
The same can certainly apply to those living outside the boundaries of convention, but there is a much greater possibility, given their unconventional status and inclination, of a willingness to pursue the flicker of insight. After all, they already know that life need not be as it is conventionally portrayed. The distance from there to a perception that reality itself need not be as it is conventionally portrayed is a much more negotiable span than for the conformity-confined (or defined).
But mention of "the exploratory pursuit of deeper reality dimensions" suggests a far more extensive range of discovery and insight than those few examples I've noted. Those are merely the provocative openings that lead the willing observer into an ever-deepening journey of discovery, which may ultimately have no boundaries. That's a rash conjecture, I know . . . but I am actually seeing that possibility!
Once past the initial realization that conventional reality is a limited (and limiting) screen, maintained by unspoken social agreement, one steps down into a series of what might be thought of as 'chambered extensions', each expanding the awareness of how fluid or malleable reality may actually be. It becomes rather rarified territory, so at this point I'll just speak to the first few 'chambers' I reached, and leave the rest for later explication.
Initially, there were those startling realizations about synchronicity and Providence — how they had seemingly begun to happen exactly when I let go of my hold on conventional securities. The connection was impossible to miss, or to ignore, and the implications were profound. I was experiencing one of the elemental truths observed by sages over the course of history, and most often given their basis in religion. But I saw an insistently obvious relationship between the apparent and sudden wellspring of Providence in my world and the degree to which I had forsaken control of that world.
I began watching what happened in my world, as I let my own control of it subside, and observed something quite interesting: There were times when doors would quite readily open for me, and there were other times when I only met with closed doors, metaphorically speaking. When I took this to mean that some inner spirit was advising me which paths were 'right' for me, and which were not, and I began paying attention to those cues, my life became a whole lot easier.
Then came the discovery that I could gain insight into what was happening in my world through oracles such as the Tarot and I Ching, which opened up for me the perspective of a right and left hemisphere as our inner and outer self (respectively), leading to the eventual realization that innumerable channels of interaction could be devised and/or 'agreed to' within ourselves that could facilitate our lives. It succeeded in making an artist of me, for one notable thing, and generally enhanced my ability to communicate with the guiding spirit that was within.
I was living my life, by this time, as a grand experiment of discovery, learning things that are seldom if ever observed in 'the real world' of my earlier life — which, of course was still going on all around me. But I was inside the bubble of an increasingly happier life. It lacked for nothing I really needed – which included the satisfying resolution to some severe medical problems, and a full year's residence in Carmel-by-the-Sea, one of the west coast's most fabulous (and fabulously costly) communities – though I was no longer struggling to obtain anything. It is also worth noting that I had no money to speak of, during that year, and my time was just about entirely at my own disposal.
That was about five years into the process of discovery that I've been describing. Other permutations were yet to come. Other realizations and a deepening of the entire course I've been on. These are the things I want to summarize and reflect on, in the course of this journal, but I still don't know in exactly what order I'll choose to present it — or whether, in fact, it will have any order at all. It may just come down to what I feel like writing about, in the moment of doing it. Why not? The tree outside my window grows in whatever pattern it chooses to express. No two of them look exactly alike, and they are completely unpredictable. I could hardly do better than follow its lead.
Go to Entry #5
