Two Magnificent Songs

These two popular, or folk, songs have a “mythic" feel, perhaps because they connect what is inside us, elements of our own psyche, with individual experiences, and the experience of many others irrespective of time or place. They feel like myths, the dreams of the human race. The outer reflects the inner symbolically as in dream imagery and myth. They are also Romantic, in the best sense of that word, as in looking back from where we come, being thankful in the present, and made whole for the future.

The Furey family, who sing them, are Irish and both songs are usually considered to be Irish, although “I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen” was actually written by Thomas Westendorf, 1875, in Plainfield, Illinois, for his wife from Ogdensburg, New York. I've listened to many others sing these two songs, but none do them as well as the Fureys, in my opinion. It seems to have something to do with their sincerity.

If you have some further idea of why these two magnificent songs have such resonance, please leave a comment.

Those Oranges on the Lusitania

A Scottish nurse who survived the sinking of the Lusitania said in a filmed interview, which I saw many years ago, that what was in her mind when she realized that the ship was sinking was that now the oranges on her dresser would roll over to her roommate's side of the room.

She laughed as she said it and then said “That's what I was thinking about.”

That interview struck me strongly at the time and I've often remembered it over the years. Her humor in retrospect of horror, her candor about her concern over the oranges rolling to her roommate's side of the room, and her laughter, formed a sort of archetypal image that still gives me delight to this day.

It Often Takes a Long Time, Much Longer than Expected

My astonishment is not abating from re-reading books now in my old age that I read when I was young. I am able to see so much more in them now and there is a feeling that they are true and faithful friends.

My recent re-reading of Betty Eadie's account of her near-death experience is a case in point. I actually feel stunned by reading it now, there is so much magnificence there that I did not see before.

Pim van Lommel mentions in his book on NDE's that the experience deepens over a long time for the people who have them:

As mentioned earlier, the process of integrating and accepting an NDE may take many years because of its profound impact on people's values and outlook on life. Finally, the lifelong transformational effects of an experience that lasts only a few minutes was a striking and unexpected finding.

Perhaps there is some way in which it helps to die, as it were, to so much that is important to us and to experience how upside down and illusionary and shallow things are which we and the world hold dear. Then we can let the truth be.

Van Pimmel relates the following incident:

Research has also shown that most patients remain silent about their near-death experience because nobody believes them when they first try to talk about it. This was confirmed during and NDE conference at an American university hospital in 1994 attended by some three hundred people. After a few presentations, a man got up and said, “I've worked as a cardiologist for twenty-five years now, and I've never come across such absurd stories in my practice. I think this is all complete nonsense; I don't believe a word of it.” Whereupon another man stood up and said, “I'm one of your patients. A couple years ago I had a cardiac arrest and had an NDE, and you are the last person I would ever tell.”

One of the things I am getting from this is a vision of the possibility that we will eventually be able to see that many of the glimpses we have had that seemed fantastic or impossible, magnificences that we haven't dared believe, we may see clearly one day to be true.

Predator Nation

There is a section near the end of Charles Ferguson's new book, Predator Nation, that rang a lot of bells for me. The section is entitled “The Ultimate Insult: The Financial Penalty for Being Decent.”

Ferguson's main theme in the book is the perpetration of financial crime by high-income, high-education people in the US and in this chapter he is speaking of a certain consequent damage this has done which is rarely discussed, at least in public. He says of decent people:

Often they go along with the system, but they hate themselves for it. They play the game to survive and feed their families, but they and society suffer for it. In America, the issue is rarely mentioned in public or in the media, but in my personal experience it is increasingly discussed in private conversation.

I have a lot of feel for what Ferguson is talking about here and it deserves far deeper and more extensive treatment than he gives it.

Just seeing someone mention it in a mainstream book was a bit shocking as well as heartening to me. In fact, just seeing anyone even mention the problem was shocking and heartening. A fundamental issue is involved and I have just assumed that people have read Thoreau ("You must get your living by loving") and so many other authors who have earnestly recognized it and struggled with the serious, primary reality of it.

My very first take on this “Ultimate Insult” section of the book was that “insult” is the very least part of it, if a part of it at all, although there is probably more to that than I have realized. But the damage it does to youth who are loving and trusting and decent and hopeful seems a far greater horror than any “insult.” It's amazing to me that people can bring children into the world, to have babies, in view of the horror of the situation. “How can I bring a child into such a world?”

And it's not just that “the worst people have risen to the top” and exploited the “decent:” they want to destroy the “decent,” too. There is a positive animus against the existence of the poor and decent.

Isaiah comes to mind now, Mother Julian of Norwich, and there are many others who have seen through it all and glimpsed the Promised Land. I suppose it is the problem of Job and the problem of theodicy, way way beyond me, and yet somehow just speaking of it with you feels like it has a clue to the solution!

Life Is Empty Without It

The first time I heard of Noam Chomsky was over forty-five years ago, during the Viet-Nam war, when he wrote articles in the New York Review of Books and other places that were courageous, informed and undeceived. His writings helped me to break through the insanity of those times.

But some of his writings in the subsequent years were difficult for me. I just didn't have the depth of understanding of linguistics to evaluate his contributions to that field nor the background reading in history to evaluate his socio-cultural critiques. He says things such as that the 1990's were probably the lowest point in the intellectual history of the world. I now think he is probably right in saying that, and in the other things he says, but it certainly took a lot of background preparation to get excited about such statements and have them ring true to me.

Here is just one video of many of Chomsky speaking that are available on YouTube. It rings true to me in every detail, and the detail about the people who have impressed him the most goes right to my soul.

Two Good Books on Life after Death

That old question of what happens to us after we die is pretty much always on my mind, especially as I get closer to the hour of my death. Most of my acquaintances seem to dismiss the question, however, saying that we have no evidence one way or the other and, further, it's useless even to spend time and effort on the question.

I suppose that one of the most complex and influential statements of their position was the work of Immanuel Kant, who even wrote a book (Dreams of a Spirit Seer)  early in his career against Emmanuel Swedenborg. The whole search is impossible and unnecessary, is the position.

And I suppose the simplest statement of the dismissal is “No one has ever come back from the dead so we will never know.”

The trouble with the dismissal of the question is that it contradicts the direct, first-hand experiences of many people who do come back from the dead, of people who have “Near-Death-Experiences” as well as the experiences of people like Swedenborg who visit with the dead.

The latest book I've read on the subject is Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death-Experience, by Pim van Lommel.  Van Lommel is a cardiologist well within the Enlightenment empirical science tradition who shows from that approach itself that there is evidence that we are conscious beyond death.

The book is comprehensive and I think van Lommel's main conclusion is irrefutable. But I personally enjoyed and placed more weight in a much “simpler” book, written in a completely “non-scientific” way by a father about the death experience of his child. That book is Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back.

 My first reaction to browsing the book in a bookstore was sceptical and I didn't buy it. But what I did read stuck in my mind so I went back a month later and bought it. It just rings true to me and is a lot more fun to read than van Lommel's book. I think both are excellent books but I think that the one which I will read a second or even third time will be the little boy's book.

One of my friends worked for most of his life in his family-owned funeral home business  and says that you have all kinds of experiences in that business that tell you of there being life after death.

Two of Life's Great Pleasures

I remember walking with my mother in her old age in New Hampshire, walking out to her clothesline with a basketful of freshly-washed laundry, and she saying "Hanging laundry out to dry in the fresh breeze is one of life's great pleasures." I am sure that she always thought as she hung out the laundry, of my father's building that clothes line for her many years ago.

The symbolism of washing one's clothes and letting the fresh air blow through them causes many reverberations in my soul.

Doing the mowing around my parents' place in New Hampshire was one of life's great pleasures for me. Mowing carries a great symbolism, too: of death and life and maintenance and renewal. The symbolism and scents and sounds and sights combine with the sheer facticity of the labor and the everlasting truth of Robert Frost's line, in one of his poems about mowing, that goes "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Then there is the subtle but substantial sociality of it that he brings out in the sequel poem, "The Tuft of Flowers."

Mowing

by Robert Frost

   There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

   And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

   What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

   Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

   Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

   And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

   It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

   Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

   Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

   To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

   Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

   (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

   The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

    My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

My father, who had a lot of New Hampshire in him, once visited Frost's classic farm in Derry with me and said of it, "I may not understand Beethoven but I understand this."

 

Robert Frost's Farm in Derry, New Hampshire

The Tuft of Flowers
by Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

As all must be,' I said within my heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'