A Friend

I went into a Walmart Vision Center last night to have the optometrist measure my eyes for new glasses. I normally don't like to patronize Walmart because of their treatment of workers but the price for an eye test there is less than half of what it is anywhere else.

Anyway, I was very heartened, pleased, restored to find that the optometrist, an old guy like myself, was not only competent but understanding. He spoke this in less than three seconds but it restored my soul.

I get in the chair, he looks at my paperwork, and says simply, abruptly, “You don't look like a truck driver. You don't speak like a truck driver.” I get that from time to time and it's true. I look more like an academic.

So I say to this guy, “I picked up the trade as an avocation so that I could speak truth in my other world.” He got it immediately. “Been there.”

This is a true story and it happened last night at the Walmart Vision Center in Moraine, Ohio.

The Other Point

One of the biggest stories, if not the biggest story, in the world and beyond, is the necessity and miracle of the self and the other being “in the same field,” as my favorite philosopher put it. The idea is that there is no way of seeing your self unless you take a viewpoint that is outside of that self.

 

The idea seems so very simple at first – that there must be a second point in order for there to be a perspective on the first point – but it actually gets into implications that are very far-reaching. My philosopher says that “Mind is the importation of the social process," meaning that our reflexivity presupposes a dialogue between two points. “Otherness” and “alterity” are two words you hear a lot in such discussions, which can get pretty dense.

But it is actually an old and very familiar idea. Like, love, for instance! - wherein the feelings and thoughts and welfare of the other are as immediate as the the feelings and thoughts and welfare of the self.

The idea of the Yin and Yang is also the idea of two in one.

And then the old idea of the Ouroboros has the meaning of the outside being within.

Another common symbol of it that I particularly like is the idea of the Cadeuceus. There is pedantic controversy about the Cadeuceus often being used as a medical symbol instead of the rod of Asclepius, but I think the so-called error is actually quite shrewd in the human way because our bodies' health is actually more of a balance between opposites than the approximation of some ideal on its own.

Asclepius

Cadeuceus

The commercial meaning of the Cadeuceus is just as shrewd in that commerce is actually a two-way proposition rather than the see-what-you-can-steal-from-someone-else attitude that is so common where I live. I recently saw the Governor of Ohio and some of his colleagues congratulating themselves on having lured a business away from the neighboring State of Indiana. But don't the people of Indiana matter? Business and commerce has to take into account the welfare of others, or else it just becomes a savage, rapacious, race to the bottom for everyone.

There are so many examples of the necessity of the two-ness that are in one that come to mind – male/female, self/other, good/bad, conservative/liberal, plus/minus, no man is an island/ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee – that it almost feels like a fundamental principle of reality. It's why they say that you really don't know your own language until you know a second language. I often think that to say that love is at the center of the universe, or that God is love, is saying just that.

It is very common, at least outwardly, among people around me to say that life is a war of all against all, so well described by Old Thomas Hobbes as to be called now "the Hobbesian worldview.” “Bob Dylan” saying in his Rolling Stone interview that “What other people think about me, or feel about me, is so irrelevant” is that attitude. It's all about me, the idea that life is a jungle where everyone is on his own and you get what you can “successfully" get off of others regardless of others.

A strange irony is that individuation, true selfhood, does not occur unless the viewpoints of many others are taken. We find ourselves by getting outside of ourselves. And if this getting outside of one's self isn't done, then the person remains a copy or even becomes a caricature. How often does it happen that a person becomes a caricatured copy of parents or others whom they have hated!

What really gets me angry sometimes is when I see a sensitive, loving person being told not to pay attention to what anyone else thinks. In particular, I know a couple women who are Highly Sensitive Persons, who get deeply devastated by others who are jealous, destructive, even murderous. The answer isn't to tell the others to rot in hell or not to pay any attention to these others. The answer is to understand, to take, the viewpoint, of these hostile others deeply – and thus discover that they may be feeling inferior to you for various reasons, especially your sensitivity; may be projecting their own un-admitted faults; looking for someone to pay attentions to them; perhaps having mixed up their medications; or having a thousand other inner realities that can only be understood by getting inside them, putting yourself into their shoes in some way. I can see certain cases in which there are people who are so hostile and murderous that there is no way on earth, given the practical and real limitations we have, that we can do anything else but escape or fight. There are limits! But it seems to work better with ordinary others to see more clearly through their eyes, to try to see more clearly where they are coming from.

It gets me angry when I see the sensitive being devastated, but then I myself have to understand that without this wrong, we would not be able to value the difference, to appreciate the good. Evil is still evil, but I think the fact is that there has to be an outside point in order to know and to appreciate the first point.

Cinderella's Tree

The Cinderella story, as recollected by the Grimm brothers in 1812, is my own favorite piece of literature. There is an immense amount of scholarship on it (e.g., cinderellaroma2012) but just reading it with a child who hasn't yet been unplugged has to be one of the greatest experiences in life. I read the story a few times every year and find it ever new and exciting each time, even without the kid.

 

The thing that struck me most during last night's reading was the hazel tree bit. You may remember that the hazel tree had a central part in the story.

It happened that the father was once going to the fair, and he asked his two step-daughters what he should bring back for them. "Beautiful dresses," said one, "Pearls and jewels," said the second. "And thou, Cinderella," said he, "what wilt thou have?" "Father, break off for me the first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home." So he bought beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels for his two step-daughters, and on his way home, as he was riding through a green thicket, a hazel twig brushed against him and knocked off his hat. Then he broke off the branch and took it with him. When he reached home he gave his step-daughters the things which they had wished for, and to Cinderella he gave the branch from the hazel-bush. Cinderella thanked him, went to her mother's grave and planted the branch on it, and wept so much that the tears fell down on it and watered it. It grew, however, and became a handsome tree. Thrice a day Cinderella went and sat beneath it, and wept and prayed, and a little white bird always came on the tree, and if Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for.

 It takes far more direct acquaintance with hazelnut trees than I have to be able to appreciate the meanings involved. But there is a lot easily available on the Internet that helps. The nuts apparently fall to the ground outside the husks in which they are developed, yielding some kind of maturity imagery and the tree itself is associated with the tree of knowledge. Also, apparently there is something called “brutting” whereby you break certain branches of the hazel tree just above the old growth, not breaking them fully off, and the result is a greater yield from the tree.

The first time I learned of the need for direct acquaintance with the ancient agricultural sources of such symbols was in the Bible with its references to lambs and vines. Lambs in springtime, for example, are just so astonishing that you have actually to see them to believe it.

One last thought from last night's reading of Cinderella: Another great help in getting the meaning of the images in fairy tales besides direct acquaintance with the actual source of the image is experience in dream interpretation. Fairy tales are, after all, as Jung said, the dreams of humanity at large.

The Knife and Gun Show in Dayton

There is a big “Bill Goodman's Knife and Gun Show” out at the Dayton airport exposition hall this weekend. I happened to be out there yesterday, attending a truckers' meeting next door. There were several thousand guys there. I didn't see any women but there may have been a few. It was clearly a very big event with all the parking lots filled to overflow and many RV's with people staying overnight.

I got to talking with some of my fellow truckers about this gun show and they really lit up. A lot of truckers are into guns and know the different makes and models, and the sizes of the ammunition.

The most memorable remarks I heard were about “the parking lot” and “Obama.” It seems that you can buy a very wide range of weapons at such shows but if you don't have the legal right because you are certified crazy or something, you can buy buy them “in the parking lot” or “in the aisles.” They also believe that President Obama has a secret plan to take their guns away from them. A third thing, after the “parking lot” and the “Obama” items that I learned, was that it's currently difficult to buy ammunition because all the usual stores are sold out of stock.

I myself have no interest in knives and guns and don't share any of these beliefs about Obama or the need for guns in schools or any of it. I lived several years in a low-income area of south-east London, in the UK, but even the police there did not carry weapons. So, no, I don't share any of it.

But I know a lot of these gun guys and they are just the nicest people you'll ever meet. The average academic person I've know from my years in the academy is a more dangerous human being than these guys.

Then there is this evangelical Christian couple, actually two such couples, who are very friendly with me. We've known each other for a long time and they like me even though they know that I think differently. I just can't picture Jesus owning an assault rifle, or carrying a concealed handgun, or getting excited about President Obama's putatively secret plan to take away people's guns. One of these ladies, who sincerely wants you to open your heart to Jesus Christ, is currently taking shooting lessons. She says that her principal worry is whether or not she will be able to pull the trigger when the moment comes to shoot someone.

The word “perspective” comes to my mind often when I think about all this, as in keeping a large perspective, like breaking out of a hypnosis.

Robert "Bob Dylan" Zimmerman

This video of US President Obama awarding Dylan the highest US civilian honor seemed a little strange to me: 

I got the same feeling while reading his recent interview in Rolling Stone and will share, below, with you a few quotations from that interview.

Sept. 27, 2012, issue

Some of the early Dylan songs, such as “All I Really Want to Do Is Just Be Friends with You,” appealed to me at the time, although not when I listen to them now, and some, such as “Like a Rolling Stone,” really repulsed me even then. “Like a Rolling Stone,” has on several occasions been voted in large polls as the “greatest song of all time,” but it has always seemed to me to be the kicking of a young, defenseless, devastated girl when she was down. It is interesting to read in the wiki on this “greatest song of all time” that even Dylan himself has publicly referred to the song, twice, as “vomit.”

The incident in London in which someone in the audience yelled “Judas!” at him was roughly the point at which I lost interest in his music. Many people have remembered and written about that incident, by the way, and you can see in the Rolling Stone interview that he hasn't forgotten it either. The fact that he can say so testily even now that it had something to do with whether his guitar was electric or not shows that he has still not dealt with it.

My first misgivings came from two of his concerts that I attended in the early 'seventies. It struck me at the time, particularly in the second, "Rolling Thunder," concert, that he seemed to have no rapport with the audience. It was if the audience wanted to believe in him, but couldn't connect with him and even felt sorry for him.

Joni Mitchell

Then there were Joni Mitchell's recent observations: 

Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I. 

And here is the entry in Andy Warhol's diary for Saturday, July 13, 1985:

Andy Warhol

 
Watched the Live Aid thing on TV. Bobby Zarem’s office had been calling, wanting me to go down there, but when you’re with that many big celebrities you never get any publicity. Later on that night Jack Nicholson introduced Bob Dylan and called him “transcendental.” But to me, Dylan was never really real—he was just mimicking real people and the amphetamine made it come out magic. With amphetamine he could copy the right words and make it all sound right. But that boy never felt a thing—(laughs) I just never bought it.

I met Carrie Fisher in Los Angeles a couple times when I was young and was struck by how lovely she was and by her straightforwardness, although I didn't know at the time “who she was,” that she was Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds' daughter, etc. This was before her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars. She writes in her recent book, Shockaholic, about the aura of unreality in which celebrities are seen by the public, and calls it the “shine.” There is a passage in her book about Michael Jackson, whom she knew well, and she offers this plausible explanation of how his celebrity and the shine may have resulted in his attraction to children:

Carrie Fisher

Michael's celebrity turned many people into eager, greedy stargazers who only wanted something above and beyond what a normal human is willing, or expected to give. They were there for the anecdote. It's what I call 'the shine.' People want to rub against it, and in so doing, their own value is increased. But I'd like to propose a reason why Michael preferred the company of children to what I've referred to as adults.

Kids of a certain age being too young to understand the peculiar phenomenon of fame, are potentially easier to trust and hang out with than a certain kind of adult who, as I said earlier, more often than not have a tendency to start acting completely disorganized around someone as outrageously famous as Michael. 
…

The other people who aren't rendered strange around famous people are generally...other famous people! In such instances, the issue of celebrity is neutralized, and they are free to move on to whatever they like or don't like in the normal human way.

I experienced fifteen minutes of celebrity myself and have known a few famous people well enough to have a feel for what Carrie Fisher calls “the shine.” I remember a student finding me in a supermarket and saying to me, “What are you doing here?” meaning, “Do you eat food?” I remember working at a department store in Hollywood one Christmas when Jayne Mansfield came to my counter to buy something. People just acted crazy, goofy, strange. Just imagine living in the “shine” for fifty years or more the way “Dylan” has.

Here are a couple quotes from the Rolling Stone interview:

Interviewer: “Are you saying that you can't really be known?”

Dylan: “Nobody knows nothing.”
…

Interviewer: “[There is] a long-stated perception of you as somebody with a lot of phases and identities.”
...

Dylan: “It's not like I have a great memory. I remember what I want to remember. And what I want to forget, I forget.”
…

Dylan: “What others think about me, or feel about me, that's so irrelevant.”
…

Dylan: “In my case, there's a whole world of scholars, professors and Dylanologists, and everything I do affects them in some way. And, you know, in some ways I've given them life. They'd be nowhere without me.”

Now, really, as Joan Rivers would say: “Can we talk?” Seriously. Can we talk?

Am I wrong in thinking that “Dylan”is a lost, inauthentic person pretending to be authentic, and that President Obama himself looks a little lost as he presents Dylan in that video with the Medal of Freedom?

When someone like Joni Mitchell or me thinks that everything about Dylan is phony, and he says that we are “evil motherfuckers who can rot in hell” for it, what does it say about this Christianity about which he is so touchy?

I know I have mentioned this in a previous post, but I come back again to Hawthorn's writing “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Finally, what goes through my mind most is that certain sensitive, perceptive, deep young people whom I know and love are coming into a world in which they see this, and I wonder what can be done to protect them from despair, from winding up in an asylum like Salinger's Holden Caulfield, or even suicide. The only thing I can think of doing is just to acknowledge and to tell them that what they are seeing is true, “to bear witness to the truth” as Christ put it. I think The Catcher in the Rye, for example, strengthens such a person because it enables him/her to see that he/she is not alone, not crazy; that there is at least one other person out there who sees it too; like Old Lear hoping that he and his daughter could be God's spies together.

Burns Day, Gratitude

My remarkable brother has this thing about “gratitude,” as if it were a very big deal, maybe the biggest thing of all. I'm serious. He thinks it's the essence, essential, like that. A spectacular Louie Schwartzberg video I saw this morning brought my brother to mind for the millionth time.

I have been thinking about this lately because the birthday of The Immortal Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) is coming up soon, and it was one of the highlights of my university experience.

Notre Dame Basilica, Montreal

My university days in Montreal were hell itself, relieved by rare days like Burns Day, when I was able to get it all into a large, even joyful perspective. Another such day was the annual performance of Handel's Messiah at the Notre Dame Basilica.

Robert Burns

Burns is big in Montreal, and Canada generally, because of all the Scots who emigrated to Canada in its early days. Canada's first two prime ministers, Sir John A. Macdonald and Alexander Mackenzie, were actually born in Scotland. Burns Day was like getting back in touch with the good green earth after the dry, lifeless, abstract, desert of the Enlightenment classroom and January in Montreal can be pretty cold and bleak. That is where I got my first inklings of appreciation of the Romantic era following or supplementing the Enlightenment era, Burns being one the best bards of the Romantic.

Here is an excellent reading of Tam o' Shanter, which was one of his best. You will probably need a reading copy to follow it. There are so many personal favorites which I could have chosen, notably Comin' thro' the Rye; John Anderson my Jo, John; Of A' the Airts the Wind Can Blow.

William Wordsworth

There were so many great Romantic poets. Germany. Everywhere. Wordsworth, yes, but not really as accessible to me in those days as old Burns. Wordsworth's masterpiece Ode: On the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood has this stanza about being grateful for trouble which takes a little more time:

...
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest,
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
          --Not for these I raise
          The song of thanks and praise;
     But for those obstinate questionings
     Of sense and outward things,
     Fallings from us, vanishings,
     Blank misgivings...

This business of getting the horrors in proper perspective so as to be grateful for them takes a bit more time. I've thought about it often and read about it long ago in such places as St. John of the Cross on The Dark Night of the Soul. There's nothing about it in the Schwartzberg video, great as that is. I know it's true. It just takes a whole lot of thought-work to see it! I'm still working on it!