A Daring Adventure with Beloved Friends in Your Heart

This video of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan catches the essence of what it means to be human. You can just feel it, know it, regardless of the "latest" scientific research on the brain or what computer enthusiasts might say.

My own first knowledge of Helen Keller (1880-1968) was “The Miracle Worker“ film of 1962, starring Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. That entire film, although it seems a little dated to me now, is available on YouTube along with many other clips of her.

There is some sense in which my own life has been primarily an attempt at a working out, an elaboration, of what you see in the above clip. Every thing correctly named, every word, every true symbol, is a sharing of life with loved ones, even if those loved ones are old beloved friends in my heart and I may have lost the sight of their faces and the warmth of their hands. The academic field in which I studied, researched and taught for many years, “Symbolic Interactionism,” is basically an elaboration of what you seen in that short clip.

Here are two good Helen Keller quotations from among many at brainyquote:

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.

 

Usurpations

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One of my favorite places to go during those seven years that I was an independent owner-operator was onto the great plains and prairies of northwestern North America. They stretch from the Mexico border far up into Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

North Dakota

I just loved the prairies, the great sweep of the land and the unspeakable skies. But I was also very much aware while I was out there that these lands and skies were taken by exterminating the people who previously lived there.

Jung was particularly aware that the past is much more in our minds than we realize. I have often heard here in the US several variations on the phrase that goes “Let's put all that behind us and move forward.” Perhaps that attitude has its temporary place, its virtues, and is understandable in a nation of immigrants. But I think it is ultimately impossible. Here is Jung writing again about “America,” meaning, as I wrote in a previous post, the USA:

...the American...shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror...Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of the indigenous inhabitants.

I not long ago saw a film documentary in which some Finns visited their ancestral lands and homes in Karelia that were usurped by the Soviet Union during World War Two. I actually felt sorry for those Russians who had moved into the expropriated Finnish homes – you could just see their agony as they were being interviewed. I'm sure the usurpation of others' lands and homes has occurred all over the earth.

My guess that the reason the highest-income 1% are feeling like victims, even like “battered wives,” is that their usurpation of our homes and wealth are giving them agony in the unconscious parts of their minds.

Sometimes the Smallest Clue

Someone recently mocked my liberal tilt in politics by repeating the misquotation of Winston Churchill that goes: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."

Churchill has always seemed to me to be far more experienced and perceptive than to say something so obviously shallow.

Truth can come from any source, any party, right or left, often from the most unlikely places. I constantly try to be receptive for that often-faint hint, that smallest indication, sign, symbol, thought, clue, dream, suggestion, awareness, that will enable me to resolve difficult problems or to keep me safe from catastrophe. Sometimes it is even a child who points out to us not just that an emperor does not have clothes, but leads us to where the true significance of a flower lies.*

Raphael, 1506

Our good old myths and fairy tales contain the idea that it is the stone that was rejected that has become the headstone of the corner. It's often the unlikely, simple son, who wins the treasure hard to obtain. The hero who slays the dragon often comes from some unheard of place in the countryside after all the known knights have failed, and he finds just the right place to sink his sword so that he can kill the previously invincible, loud-roaring, fire-breathing monster and can retrieve the dragon's ill-gotten treasure hoard from the cave and wed the princess, enabling the trees and flowers and animals to come back to life and the laborers in the kitchen to regain their liveliness and joy.

* "I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains."                                                                                                  -Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1852 

Awfully Funny

There is a memorable Wonkette piece that appeared today about Josh Romney's glaring during the presidential election debate #2, entitled “Don't Turn Off the Lights: the Most Frightening Moment of the Obama-Romney Rumble.” The video clip and Wonkette's snark are not especially funny, but what really had me laughing were the readers' comments. Some of the comments were just absolutely hilarious, maybe the funniest stuff I've ever read in my life.

    Is he the Master?

    "Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?"

    That dude is definitely looking at me......
    I swear ima beat the shit out of him if he doesn't stop staring at me.  

    so scared. mormon will eat me. 

They brought to mind Sandburg's poem “The People Yes.” There is just so much talent, so much intelligence and power and ability out there that if we could succeed in enlisting it properly, there's is no problem we couldn't solve.

Ode to Joy "Flash Mob"

This brought my friends together in my mind this perfect autumn afternoon:

Everybody Knows

One of the things about studying hypnosis is that you come to realize that people pick up everything. They don't miss a thing. It's all in there. You hypnotize a few subjects and you can be absolutely astonished at how much people know, how much they have in their heads, from even back into their childhood.
 

I remember being with my father once in his old age when he came out with one of his startling and memorable observations on life. Those were such golden moments. This time he said: “People pick up on everything, more even than animals.”

This is currently on my mind because of my recently having read a book on how “dumb” “Americans” are. There are a lot of these books around now. You are probably familiar with Jay Leno's “Jay Walking” segments where he goes out on the streets and interviews people who can't identify the name of the U.S. President or Vice President. They can't locate New York on an unlabelled map, never mind locate Canada. Stuff like that. People who voted for Bush the second time. People who watch TV an average of more than eight hours per day.

But you find when you get to know such people that they know far more and are way more intelligent than meets the eye of anyone who likes to feel superior to them. I think it's never fair to say that people are stupid, much less the whole United States.

The book I just read, Why America Failed, by Morris Berman, says things like this:

What possibly can be done to save a culture that thinks iPads represent 'progress,' while everything humanly valuable is going down the drain?

(Quoting de Tocqueville): '...the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues...Hence the majority lives in a state of self-adoration....'

No. I think the same kind of arrogance is behind the “banality of evil” explanations of Eichmann et al. The traditional view of evil, that it was clever in the extreme, is surely true. People are sharp, clever, knowing – even more than animals.

The Jerry Falwell Biography

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I finished reading last night the new, “long-awaited” biography of Jerry Falwell, Michael Sean Winters' God's Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

Falwell was an important figure in recent U.S. History, particularly with his TV preaching and appearances, his “Moral Majority” organization, his Liberty University and his role in electing U.S. Presidents. Winters' book seems to me to be comprehensive, truthful, objective, balanced – a good book, although perhaps a little dry at times to my own taste. It's an important portrait of an important person in U.S. History.

I remember when Falwell's “Old-Time Gospel Hour” from Thomas Road Baptist Church first appeared on TV. He said some good stuff, no doubt about it. But then something crept into it that increasingly alienated me.

One of my first doubts about Falwell arose from seeing him in a debate at Oxford in the UK, when a young British twit spoke disparagingly of Falwell's “redneck followers.” Falwell, who was a skillful debater, as are his Liberty University debate teams, just destroyed the British twit. He said, for example that he and his followers had given these large amounts of food to starving people in central Europe – Falwell and his followers did a lot of “good works.” And then he says: “And what have you done?”

Yes, yes, Falwell “won” the debate with the British twit, but did he lose the central message of Christ and thereby undercut what was good in himself? Satan tempts Christ during His forty days in the desert with talk about turning stones to bread, which Christ rejects. I know it's a complicated issue, and one that is quite at the center of US historical and cultural life.

But I myself feel Christ more in the following words to Pontius Pilate than I do in winning a debate or eating or surviving:

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

And then there was that time when I heard Falwell say, perhaps on Fox News where he frequently appeared, that if it helped George W. Bush win the election, he, Falwell, would say that he was against Bush. It was clever, personable, self-effacing in that it acknowledged that many people disliked him, and effective – but it was also a minister of Christ promoting deception for political purposes.

Winters writes of this problem, moderately, in several places in the book and notes the paradoxical effects, such as an increase in the US of people rejecting organized “Christianity” and even in political degeneration. Winters quotes impeccable conservative Barry Goldwater as saying that “Every good American ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass” and that he was “sick and tired of political preachers...telling me...that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, or C.”