Kim Phuc and Her Son Thomas

Daily Kos has an update on Kim Phuc, “The Napalm Girl,” with some good links. The following photo of Kim now, with Thomas, is taken from that article.

Kim Phuc and her son, Thomas

There are many images from the war in Viet-Nam, such as the one of Kim then, that burn in my mind and others' minds, and always will. The image of the military shooting college students in Ohio is another one of those images.

Now there is this image of Thomas and his mother, now Canadians, to remember.

This struck me particularly strongly this morning because I just finished reading La muerte de Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes. There is much to say about the book but the main point that comes to me right now is the question of there being any redemption from crimes of this magnitude. Fuentes writes of them in the context of Mexico and has his protagonist envisioning redemptions just before he dies. Here is one vision near the end of the book:

“But here life will already have begun the next phase, ceasing to be the past....Innocence will perish, not at the hands of guilt, but at the hands of amorous astonishment...”

The Press Is Despicable

Todd Gitlin wrote an article this week in which he reviewed some of the major failings of journalists over the last fifty years, and which struck me as being very accurate because I lived through those failings and remember them very well. There were a very small number of journalists who were true, like I.F. Stone, but the hatred with which they were treated at the time is as remarkable to me still as it was then. I remember vividly each one of those incidents that Gitlin mentioned and the reaction when the truth about them first started coming out.

The reaction to Patrick Kennedy's “the press is despicable” speech, given just before he left the House, strikes me as being almost the perfect example. There are new examples appearing constantly of the phenomenon but “the press is despicable” example is pure.

I remember the reaction to that speech perfectly: remarks about his father's failings, booze, the Kennedy family, assertions of moral superiority, all the usual kind of personal hatred and dismissal. The fact that every word that Patrick said was absolutely true was mentioned only by a very small number of people, and the delightful thought for me was that this small number included equally both conservative/Republicans as well as liberal/Democrats.

Self-Other Misconceptions

“Val doesn't give a sigh what other people think of him.” My friend said that about me, meaning it as a compliment. I understood what she meant, and took it that way. But the exact opposite is the truth.

I've often had the experience of someone, even a person one-fourth my age, treating me with contempt. My friend would imagine from my equanimity about it that I “don't care” about what such people feel about me, but the truth is that I take these others' viewpoints immediately and seriously, which enables me to see very clearly that they are inexperienced or imperceptive. It's impossible for me to give a sigh over what such people think of me – having put myself in their shoes!

What I really feel in this situation is sorrow that there is such a prevalent, widespread misunderstanding about the fact that self-hood, self-knowledge, self-awareness, individuation, is actually derived from taking seriously the viewpoints of others. It's the only way to see yourself – getting outside one's self. And just in general, putting ourselves in others' shoes is always a good thing, even seeing through the eyes of our enemies. It's the ethical imperative, too, the “Golden Rule” - do unto others as you would have them do to you requires it. The ability to put ourselves in the other's place to see and feel how he sees and feels is the best definition around of the word “humanity.”

These reflections are much in my mind now because I've just read best-selling memoir entitled “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” by Bronnie Ware. The “top five regrets” that she lists are her own choices based on her own qualitative observations as a home care worker with the dying, rather than the quantitative results of a scientific survey:

Regret 1: I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me

Regret 2: I wish I hadn't worked so hard

Regret 3: I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings

Regret 4: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

Regret 5: I wish I had let myself be happier

Now, my friend who thinks that I “don't give a sigh” would understand immediately what Bronnie Ware is saying here, as have the millions who have read Ware's book and website. All of the “regrets” express a person's sense of not having achieved true individuation, true self-knowledge and integration.

We all know the thing she is trying to deal with here. But I find this to be just heart-breaking because, despite all the beautiful, deep perceptions and citations of others who have tried to deal with it, I don't think that she surmounts the misunderstanding of the self-other connection, the self-other paradox.

“Know thyself” is an ancient quest and is at least one expression of the purpose of our lives. Self-knowledge is the central part of the Biblical Genesis teaching and the Greek gnothi seauton tradition and in Egypt before that.

It's the point and central theme of the Grail legends, and of fairy tales and of philosopher's stone, and of dreams and of the attempt by depth psychologists to recover lost and hidden fragments of the self to re-integrate them. The alchemists wanting to find the true gold was the same thing.

So I ask, why it is that the central quest of all these generations of highly intelligent and learned people has yielded, say, George Bush and Barack Obama? What went wrong, where is the difficulty? Why is achieving self-hood such an all-encompassing, mistake-fraught, difficult, “life-long heroic struggle?”

Recovering, finding, achieving genuine self-hood can not be found through selfishness. That seems to me to be the crucial paradox. There has to be a real identification with others – not just a solipsistic imagining what others feel – but a genuine communion and identification in which the other is equal in importance and reality.

The implications of this paradox are infinite. And the vision that immediately comes to me on this, and about which I hope to write in the future, is that cleverness, and abstruse, complicated, massive learning is absolutely no closer to resolving it than complete stupidity.

It think that the “me-me-me” meme of the last forty-five years is actually a widespread attempt to resolve the self-other problem, but which has not been successful because self and other are actually in the same existential field. It has been deflected into selfishness, greed and "Screw you" which is just as unsatisfactory and unworkable as the communism it so vehemently rejects.

Fundevogel

That bird that found Fundevogel, stole him from his mother, and left him in the top of a tree, has been much in my mind since I mentioned it in my last posting.

Birds are apt symbols for ideas, because they are quick, have good eyesight, travel far, can be beautiful yet bad, sound good, disappear quickly, soar into the heavens or fall to earth. I usually take them in dreams as well as mythology and fairy tales to stand for ideas.

The Grimms' Fundevogel makes immediate, profound and liberating sense to me if I take the symbols in the story the same way as I would take them in my dreams. But when I read the story from the points of view of, say, Bettelheim or Tatar, it does nothing for me at all. Bettleheim feels like psychoanalysis and Tatar feels like ambition. I see the big-beaked bird before my eyes that stole Fundevogel in the first place! I know that most reviewers differ from me on this, but the point of the story is, isn't it, that we have to respect and to integrate what we feel with our thought? It seems to me that unless we take such stories the same way we take our own dreams, we mutilate them.

Fundevogel, in the Grimms' story of that name represents to me the part of us that is more intellectual than earthy. He was taken to the top of a tree, the tree being seen as branching knowledge that goes quite high up in the air, far from its roots. A bird with a sharp beak took him by force or stealth away from mother earth, in the way that can happen under certain circumstances. The forester hears the cry of pain, brings Fundevogel back down to earth, as we might expect from someone who is in touch with nature and the woods of the unconscious. Fundevogel then integrates with the child of the forester, the two vowing three times to be friends with each other forever:

“Lina said to Fundevogel, 'Do not forsake me, and I will never forsake you.' And Fundevogel answered, 'I will never forsake you as long as I live.'”

It sounds like the alchemical marriage doesn't it? - the integration of the earthy and intellectual parts of our full selves. There follow three adventures of Lina and Fundevogel in which they are seen as the rosebud on the rosebush, the chandelier in the church, and the duck in the pond. These images are obviously, plainly, about such integration. And the story ends with the sentence: “Then the children went home together as happy as possible, and if they are not dead yet, then they are still alive.”

A note: I am very pleased to find that my blogs have a substantial readership in Germany, more than any other country except the USA, and I wonder if one or two of my German readers could kindly recommend to me a German-language edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen Der Brüder Grimm. I can see that the stories are best read in German and I have this vision that one of my German readers has a favorite edition, perhaps with illustrations, that he or she warmly remembers from of old. If so, please leave me a recommendation in the comments box below or send me an email at valdemarparadise@gmail.com. Thank you -

A Book for Clarity and Solidity

There is this book of the Grimms'fairy tales right beside my bed, always, the

translation by Lucas, Crane, and Edwardes. I sometimes try to imagine life without it and then just feel grateful.

There are so many books to read and so little time, that choosing what we are going to read is an almost inconceivably difficult problem. We try to balance all the considerations involved, such as time available, sheer pleasure, the necessity of finding truth that stretches, and avoiding narcosis and the road that leads nowhere.

I picked up the book last night after having spent a few difficult hours with some other books that were valuable but difficult, subtly flawed and limited here and there, and it was like walking into sunshine.

The story I lighted upon, Fundevogel, begins:

There was once a forester who went into the woods to hunt, and he heard a cry like that of a little child. He followed the sound and at last came to a big tree where a tiny child was sitting high up on one of the branches. The mother had gone to sleep under the tree, and a bird of prey, seeing the child on her lap, had flown down and carried it off in its beak to the top of the tree.

The forester retrieves the child and brings it home where it becomes the eternally faithful, beneficial friend of his own son.

There was time for one more before I slept, The Golden Goose, which begins:

There was once a man who had three sons, the youngest of whom was called Simpleton. He was scorned and kept in the background.

This third, simple, most unlikely, scorned, brother in such tales is the one who achieves the treasure hard-to-obtain, marries the king's daughter and inherits the kingdom. He does this by sharing with a being in distress, helping a fish or other animal or a small old person. Simpleton's brothers in this story are selfish and rude to a little gray man who is hungry, to their own harm. Simpleton meets the little man and responds with this:

I only have a cake baked in the ashes, and some sour beer. But if if you like such fare, we will sit down and eat it together.”

So they sat down. But when Simpleton pulled out his cake it was a nice sweet cake, and his sour beer was turned into good wine.

The little man directs Simpleton to a golden goose at the roots beneath a tree, and grace follows.

I think of the countless women who evolved these stories, these teachings, these images of our inner lives and shared them with their children. Robert Frost once suggested that we should probably take as much time to read a book as the author took to write it. Impossible to do, of course, but I keep coming back to this book whenever I am looking for clarity and solidity.

Optimistic Notes

The arrival of spring here in Dayton, with sunshine and new grass and the return of birds, is having a happy emotional effect upon me and people around me that is surprising. We are so much more than we are aware!

There are two areas of optimism that come immediately to mind this lovely spring morning. One is that the despair we have felt during the long years since the ascendancy of Reagan and selfishness was not necessary. The “greed masters” themselves feel they have lost the battle of the last forty years.

The other optimistic note I feel this morning is that I have recently met several people who very clearly see through the riches and respectability thing. I don't want to delude myself into thinking that this is more widespread than it actually is, but I do notice it. It could be just a sampling error. But hard times such as many of us have had over the past few years can bring out something good in us – a sense of what is worthwhile and what is really not worthwhile.

The reaction to the Romney 47% speech and the realization that the banking/financial “winners” are criminals are real despite not being well announced.

I had the privilege recently of visiting a family who had CNN running constantly, day and night, while the family was awake. It seemed to me that one story was repeated for at least half that time, a story about a court official in Texas having been murdered. It was every bit as mindless and out of touch as if the CNN people were taking psychoactive drugs or certifiably insane or in the same “world” as Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or the Washington Post. It was easy for me to see the insanity of it because I live pretty much outside TV and the bubble, and when I get into that “world” it's very striking to me how manufactured and crazed it is. It's like being suddenly placed into a National Rifle Association meeting or a rich people's party – the contrast is startling and clear. My thought was: If this is so striking and obvious to someone as slow as me, everybody knows. I am never taken in by the assertion that USA people, or any other people, are stupid. People don't miss a thing. They know. They are far, far sharper than they are given credit.

Perhaps this is in my mind this morning because I re-read Jimmy Carter's 2009 article on women before going to bed last night. Everybody knows.