Errant Thought

 I was re-thinking my statements about the moral universe being polar and dual.  Certainly the physical universe appears to operate via that set of principles -- at least, the macro-cosmos does -- the micro-cosmos, or subatomic world, is an entirely different matter.  Or it isn't matter at all!  T'ain't there unless you look for it....but that's another topic, for a later post.

In human terms, I was thinking about hierarchies.  I'm not someone who has flourished under patriarchal hierarchies.  Experienced alot of them, in families, in schools, in sports, in jobs, and just in society in general.  But I also have not flourished in  matriarchal hierarchies.  And again, I've experienced those within family, within schools, in jobs, as well as in my spiritual path.  

What I've realized is that I've never known a healthy hierarchy, ever in my life -- period.  Is the phrase "healthy hierarchy" a contradiction in terms?  Maybe the problem isn't the gendered inflection; maybe the problem is hierarchy itself.

Food for thought.  I'm going to go chew on that one for awhile.

"Well, This is the Forest of Arden"

That's Rosalind's comment to Touchstone in Act 2, Scene 4, in Shakespeare's "As You Like It."  The Forest of Arden was the setting for this comedy.  I haven't read Shakespeare since I was a sophomore in college, but Jack Kerouac penned this quote on the front of one his writing journals for 1947-48.  Why, one might ask?  

According to biographer Gerald Nicosia, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, longtime buddies and co-progenitors of the Beat Generation's most pertinent literature ("On the Road" and "Howl" successively ) seriously discussed the metaphorical meaning of this apparently meaningless line and often used it jokingly in conversation as their own kind of touchstone, as in "Well, this is the Forest of Manhattan," while they knocked around Gotham City in the Forties and Fifties.

It turns out there's quite a bit of critical commentary about the setting of the Forest of Arden and its imagined significance as an alternative environment to society and the supposed effect that change might work on human behavior.  In Shakespeare's day, "society" meant the Court, which, one presumes, was the site of myriad mendacious power plays, constant conniving, false fronts, back stabs, and the impassive wall of a trenchant and rigid hierarchy of nobility. 

The idea was that, removed from society and cast into a pastoral setting, one could or would return to one's own original nature.  Quite a Taoist notion, that.  But even within the play, Shakespeare had characters disputing this view and presenting nature as wild and utterly without concern for human beings, much like Thoreau's stark realization on the rocky summit of Maine's Mt. Katahdin.

The play also has the delightful conundrum of Rosalind, a part that would have been played by a boy or man in Elizabethan England, pretending to be a man while in the Forest of Arden.  So you had a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man, and thus able to speak her truths for once and be heard.  And we thought the blurring of sexual identity and the politics of gender to be utterly modern!  But then Shakespeare, with perhaps the possible exception of Montaigne, was the first fully modern man.

But why am I bringing all this up?  Well, for two reasons.  One is that I said I'd write about Kerouac again, and secondly, in my prior post about him I made a brazen statement.  I said that all cultures lie.  I knew that comment would need further vetting.  And for some reason, this comical aside that Kerouac and Ginsberg used, and which Kerouac often resorts to in his journals, seemed like a way into this topic.

It feels to me like Kerouac and Ginsberg's reference to this quote had a sly context.  I get the sense that the Forest of Arden, in their parlance, suggests a kind of illusion in which people haplessly bumble about trying both to find their way through life, and hopefully find themselves in the process.  That's my point of entry for this discussion.

As I've written earlier, I had decided in my childhood that the adult world and all its values were false and insane.  Okay, fine.  But then, what are real values?  And how does one discover them?

I had another moment of awakening in August of 1970, when I was 17.  Although I was reading Thoreau's Walden at the time, and that had begun to crack my head open, I also had a brief encounter with an image, a face on a poster of someone whom I didn't know, but whose face was instantly recognizable to me.  It was in a film.  The moment passed, the face gone, but a revolution had begun in my mind. 

 In the few weeks following, it felt as though my mind was being turned inside out.  At the end of that two week period I was no longer the boy I had always been.  I was who I am now.  That is, the broad outline of who I would become had been sketched.  I've merely been filling in the empty spaces of that template for the past fifty years.

This new person -- me -- was no longer only interested in the world I had inhabited up until then -- sports and athletics.  Now, I was interested in philosophy, poetry, and the spiritual heritage of other cultures and other times.  My real life had truly begun.  I had begun my search for alternative values.

The Sixties were a rebellion, but rebellion is simply a reaction to existing values.  Its point of reference is still those same values.  It still measures itself in relation to them.  As long as you are in reaction or rebellion to a certain set of values, you are as chained to them as when you were crushed by their weight.  You have to get entirely outside of yourself -- and outside of your own cultural conditioning -- in order to discover something fresh and new.

I identified, from about the age of twenty, with what I thought of as spiritual values.  In short, unselfishness.  That is of course an uphill battle.  And if one doesn't keep one's wits about one, you quickly become everyone's doormat.  But luckily, there is still within us all an instinctual voice which says, "Get the hell off of me!"  That's actually a healthy voice.  Usually it is buried under social conditioning and has to be re-unearthed.  So, how to be skillfully unselfish in a selfish world?  In other words, how to not just be "out for yourself," without losing yourself in the process?

Human nature proceeds most often down the path of least resistance.  In effect, everyone tries with all their might toward "the good life," i.e., pleasure, and tries with all their might to avoid the attendant suffering.  As many a sage will tell you, you can't have one without the other.  It's a dual universe.  Up, down; positive, negative.  It's polar.  Pleasure, suffering.  All these contrarieties go hand in hand.  Thus sayeth I, after having looked into the matter for all these years.  Here's my individual take:  it's okay to want what you want; just don't expect it to be free.

In the big picture, cultures are merely collective incarnations of their constituent members.  Right?  There is usually a cultural imperative or paradigm which guides the people en masse.  For many thousands of years, religion has played the dominant role.  Sometimes it's a political structure like Rome.  As any sociologist will tell you, and as the past four years in America have proven, it's easier to marshall people around negative values than positive ones.  Mob psychology.  People will do things in a mob that they might not do otherwise.  Their selfish nature is emboldened and magnified.  Our country is currently a perfect example of this dynamic.

As a child, I dismissed the Semitic cultures and religions out of hand. Ergo, I dismissed my own culture.  Why?  Well, because they had all only led up to this -- the madness of the world as I knew it -- or so I reasoned.  Why then would I believe that any of them had the answer?  I always loved Gandhi's response to a western journalist's question, "What do you think of western civilization?"  Said Gandhi, "I think it would be a good idea."

What I discovered by my readings from other times and other cultures is that all civilizations have a life span.  They're born, they grow, they mature, and they die.  They have guiding principles or values, but those values are always partial, incomplete, somewhat servile to the powers that be.  In other words, they're all the Forest of Arden -- illusory. But one wonders whether we happen to be at the end of the life span of all the cultures on earth, all at once.  

What comes next?  Don't look to the historical past.  You won't find values that will light the way and fire the heart there.  Don't dream up another model society, because Utopia doesn't exist.  A pastoral sojourn through the Forest of Arden won't suffice.  The indigenous cultures that have survived have a genuine way forward but that door might be shut to those of us not born into such a culture.  What we need is an entirely new vision, an entirely new culture.  Nothing else will work.

I haven't found that vision, myself.  I'm still working out my own individual path.  I don't know from where the new vision will come.  It's easy to be nihilistic nowadays.  But I find I still have faith.  I don't know in who or in what -- maybe just in Life itself.  I have faith that we won't entirely destroy ourselves or the world we inhabit, all evidence to the contrary.

In my reading of other times and cultures, I came to a few simple conclusions.  

If you were placed anywhere on earth, at any time in history, whether in a massive cultural construct, or within a small clan or tribe -- be it now or 40,000 years ago -- what human values would be universal?  What would you find within any grouping of human beings, at any place, at any time?  This is what I believe you would find:

Some form of love.  Some form of honor.  Some form of humor.  An appreciation of some form(s) of beauty.  Some form of awe or reverence, if only for life and Creation itself.  And care and concern for one's children.

These are the basics.  These are the core values that make human life bearable.  I believe you would find some variation upon those values no matter where you found yourself, no matter at what point in human history.  Those are our universally human, and humane, values.  And they're not too bad, are they?  All cultures are merely variations upon those themes, albeit with their own peculiar, untimely, and unseemly aberrations thrown in. That durned Forest of Arden.

I  hope we can get back down to the basics again.

Winona LaDuke on Redemption

The Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke.

Navaho Healing Song by Navaho and Sioux

 

More Images by Helen Hardin

 I wanted to put up a few more images by Helen, for your perusal. She was such a prolific artist, it's hard to do her justice but these few images may suggest more of her style.

Helen Hardin

 I thought I would write another post about Jack Kerouac, and I will before too long, but as I was thinking about art and the creation of art, I found myself thinking about Helen Hardin.

About 20 years ago, I one day visited the local county library in Bremerton, Washington, where I then lived.  I spent an entire afternoon looking at every single book in the art section.  Why?  Maybe because I write -- words tend to be my medium in this life, and not images.  Back when there were still bookstores (Amazon doesn't count), I would spend time thumbing through art magazines, searching for images that moved me or called to me in some way.  A visual image does something to me that I can't quite articulate, stirs something visceral, internal, but something which I can't easily put into words.  And I find that valuable.  It puts me in touch with a feeling-center in myself that isn't verbal or intellectual.  The verbal side of life was too easy for me, for a long time.  It's less so now, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.  I have less access to the subconscious mind, less easy access anyway, but there's no doubt that with age, if you're lucky, you also deepen and you have a kind of emotional gravitas that wasn't there or was out of your reach when you were younger.  It is time's gift to you as the lyricism of youth wanes.

I found a book about Helen Hardin called "Changing Woman," which opened up an entire world to me.  Helen was a Tewa, or at least partly.  Her mother, Pablita Velarde, was a full-blooded Tewa of the Santa Clara pueblo, situated between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Pablita was a strong woman.  Born in 1918, she became a painter, which was discouraged by the more traditional members of her pueblo.  She also crossed paths with her pueblo by choosing to paint some of their sacred images. And lastly, she married a white man.  Pablita chose a difficult path in life and suffered thereby, but she was true to her path and carried on nonetheless.

Pablita and her husband had Helen.  Helen's fate was to not be accepted by either world; neither her pueblo, which would not allow her to participate in their sacred ceremonies, nor by the white world, which excluded her with its own bigotry and prejudice.  But Helen inherited her mother's determination and indomitable spirit, as well as her mother's artistic talent.  What I find particularly interesting about Helen's own artistic path is that she took many of the images that were important to her mother and carried them further.  Helen painted small, stylized and geometric kachinas, as well as other images that held a very concentrated and symbolic spiritual power.  It wouldn't be inaccurate to state that Helen's paintings were vivid and concrete expressions of her own spiritual struggles to internalize a world which she'd not been allowed to experience fully in a more human manner.  

Back in the fall of 2016, I accompanied a friend on a trip to Albuquerque.  My friend's father had passed away and she needed to go back and close out bank accounts, clear out a storage locker, and tie up loose ends.  She simply didn't want to make the drive alone and asked me to join her as co-driver on the trip.

I love road trips and hadn't been in the Southwest for several years, though I was married there and lived in northern Arizona for a time. My friend and I had some time on our hands while there so we took one day and went an hour north to Santa Fe.

I had discovered that there was an art gallery in Santa Fe dedicated to Pablita Velarde and Helen Hardin, called "The Golden Dawn."  It had been started by Helen's daughter, Margarete Bagshaw.  I had an intense desire to visit this gallery, and happily, was able to do so.

As I walked into the gallery itself, I realized that Margarete was also an artist, and she had taken some of the imagery that her grandmother Pablita and her own mother Helen had developed in the course of their own careers, and Margarete had taken it even farther.  Whereas Pablita's work was visually simpler and on canvases of a conventional size, and Helen's were concentrated, sometimes geometric, and often on very small canvases, Margarete's work was abstracted, modern, and on very large canvases, often several feet wide and high.  But she had taken the same images that her grandmother and mother had worked with, those same sacred Tewa themes, and had extended them into the world of modern art, awash with vibrant colors.  I loved it all. 

In fact, I stood in the middle of that gallery, extended my arms, slowly turned 360 degrees around and said out loud, "I can't believe I'm finally here!"  I felt I was in a sacred space.  The caretaker of the gallery came up and took my hand and led me to a table where she started handing me all sorts of materials for free -- posters of exhibitions, tee shirts with images, biographical videos, even books.  I honestly felt a kind of awe at the work these three women, all from one family, had accomplished over the course of their respective lives and careers. My hat's off to all three of them.

Helen died of cancer in 1984.  Pablita passed in 2006, and Margarete had died the year before my visit, I think.  I was so grateful for the chance to visit that gallery.  I had been living with Helen's artwork and images for many years.  I'd attended a symposium on her life and work at Sonoma State University.  To finally see the work itself, and to discover her mother's and daughter's work at the same time, was just such an incredible experience.  I'm really speechless to describe it.

So I did the next best thing I could do.  The following summer I returned the favor of this trip by taking an artist friend of mine who lived on Camano Island in Washington state, and driving her to Santa Fe so she could stand in this gallery as well.  The curator of the gallery had begun to change the emphasis of the art therein to reflect other artists' work, which is understandable -- otherwise the gallery would become merely a mausoleum.  But most of the work I had seen was still on the wall, and we had a chance to look at canvases that weren't currently being displayed.

I would encourage anyone to explore the work of these three women and their amazing legacy as a family, as artists, and arguably, as representatives of their pueblo and their people.

There is an aspect of Helen that is important to me as a writer.  She is in a sense a muse, an anima figure.  Her imagery and style evoke that nascent whorl of creative energy for me.  The process of creativity often has a kind of gestation period, of which I have to be mindful and to which I need to be sensitive.  It has to be the right moment to write, and that's both a felt-sense and a kind of close observation of one's internal life, images, thoughts, and those fleeting feelings that pass through one almost unnoticed. There is a kind of feminine sense of containment until the moment to write arrives. Somehow these anima figures help both to inspire the genesis of this creativity, and to form a subtle shell in which that energy nests until it is ready for expression.

I find the visual work of these three committed women to be a fruitful source of, and access point into, the fecundity one discovers within oneself.  This is one of the ways we touch and influence one another in life.

Giving Something For Nothing

This blog notwithstanding, it's finally dawning on me, don't give something for nothing.  Meaning, pay attention to what you're giving and to whom.  Some people take and give nothing in return.  It's rare when someone reciprocates.  

This is not a matter of what people say, because talk is quite cheap and usually untrue.  People talk a good game.  When someone actually gives something back, for real, it comes straight from their heart, and spontaneously too.  Spontaneity can be a good thing. No talking, no judging, no measuring what's due or whether someone has earned your response.  It's natural; your heart responds.  That's the real deal.  

For years, it seems, I gave solely for the sake of giving and I believed in that.  Somewhere along the way, I realized how little I was getting back from anyone.  This is the foolishness of unconsciously expecting others to treat you the way you've been treating them.  Naivete, once again.  My front burner lesson.

So as for me, it's now a matter of choosing what I have to give and to whom.  Because I do have something to give.  Do you?

Be wise.  Give what you have to give to those who value it and can reciprocate.  Otherwise, it's a waste of spirit for an expense of same.

Kerouac's Prophecy

 Jack Kerouac aspired to be an "earthly prophet." He says so in his own journals. I actually prefer reading Kerouac's journals to his published work. I'm less interested in his performance on the printed page as a literary icon than in what he thought and felt in the privacy of his own inner world. Jack Kerouac talking to himself is far more interesting than Jack Kerouac talking to anyone else.

What brought this about is a passage I found some years ago in a volume entitled "Windblown World," which is a selection of Kerouac's journals from about mid-1947 to about mid-1954.  In 1947 Kerouac was writing his first novel, "The Town and the City," a conventional novel in terms of structure and style. Kerouac wrote it slowly, laboriously, by pencil.  He ended up with over 1,000 typewritten pages when the manuscript was done. It's interesting to note that when he was at the tail-end of this process, sometime in the year 1948, he had already conceived of the basic premise of "On the Road," had that as a working title, was already plotting the novel out as well as deciding to write it in a more personal style, in a form that more truly reflected the workings of his own mind.  Some years down the line, this became a commitment to "spontaneous prose" with the credo of "first thought, best thought."

A little later this next year, after perhaps re-reading Kerouac's first two novels, I may have something to say about them and about his arc as a writer. For now, though, I'm more interested in this passage that actually reflects his role as an "earthly prophet."

While Kerouac wrote his books, he also kept what he called "mood-logs" where he would talk out loud to himself, so to speak, about whatever was on his mind, what was going on in his life, his thoughts or frustrations about what he'd just written, the weather, women and what-not.  

And so it was that on a Sunday in December of 1947 -- December 7th, to be exact -- Kerouac was writing along about how he'd briefly gotten derailed and sidetracked by his new novel idea while not yet finished with his current novel-in-progress. In a long extended paragraph, without any transition at all, he willy-nilly broke from that discussion with this passage:

"However, it is suddenly occurring to me that a great new change is about to take place in mankind and in the world. Don't ask me how I know this. And it's going to be very simple and true, and men will have taken another great step forward. It will be a kind of clear realization of love, and war will eventually seem unreal and even obsolete, and a lot of other things will happen. But madness will rule in high places for a long time yet. All this is going to come up from the people themselves, a great new revolution of the soul.  Politics has nothing to do with this. It will be a kind of looking around and noticing of the world, and a simultaneous abandonment of systems of pride and jealousy, in many, many people, and it will spread around swiftly.  Enough for now."

And that was it. He moved on in his journal and never referred to this passage again. But to me, as soon as I read it, it rang true as an actual prophecy.  Why?  Well, we've got to trawl through the past once again in order to flesh that out. 

I've written previously about my coming of age in the Sixties and being affected by the spiritual undercurrents of the time.  It's hard to recapture the energy of those years for someone who didn't experience it directly.  It might be impossible to do.  But underlying all the startling, shocking, and radical changes of that decade was an undercurrent that said, "Something's afoot....a change is in the air...."

Two months shy of my 10th birthday, we had the Cuban missile crisis.  It's one thing to read about something in the history books.  It's another to have lived through it.  I remember leaving school that last Friday of the crisis and saying to a friend, "See you Monday."  He replied, "Yeah, if we're still alive."  I woke up that Sunday morning on pins and needles, wondering if all-out nuclear war would be waged that day.  "Cold war" is just a meaningless phrase unless you practiced laying down on a playground during a nuclear war drill, knowing full well that if there was an actual bomb you'd end up as nothing more than a shadow imprinted on the asphalt.

A year later, while sitting in class at school, we received the horrific information that our President, John F. Kennedy, had been shot and was already dead.  I just couldn't believe it.  I couldn't believe that something like that could happen in America.  As for today, well -- I no longer recognize America.  It's not the country I grew up in.  It's a dark and twisted mutation of itself, wherein half the populace would willingly accept an authoritarian poseur rather than the legally elected representative.

By about the age of 11, then, I had decided that the adult world was completely insane and I knew I didn't want to emulate adults in any way, shape, or form.  All bets were off.  Something new needed to be born, and damned if it didn't feel imminent.  I felt part of a generational change.  It felt as though we, the youth of the Sixties, had all sprung fully formed from the brow of Zeus; history meant nothing to us nor could it contain us. 

As always, generations split as people age and enter more fully into their individual lives. The presumed unity fractures or dissolves as people's lives become more clearly defined, and more clearly differ, by virtue of their varied choices. Besides, all cultures lie. It's just that every new generation tells the lie in a way peculiar to themselves.  That's the cynicism of my having lived through the decades that ensued after the promise of the Sixties fell flat.

But enormous change takes time.  Perhaps hundreds of years.  A thousand years ago, lords from the south of France would visit Moslem Spain, sometimes as guests at the courts of Muslim lords, sometimes as captives of those courts, but what happened was that they came back to the south of France with a new set of values -- the beginnings of chivalry, the fragile and nascent sense of romantic love, which developed into the troubadours and trouveres and the tantra of courtly love, a little later the Arthurian cycle of Chretien de Troyes -- this all began roughly 900 years ago, and it was the beginning of an entirely new cultural cycle which eventually swept all of Europe.  The culture we live in today is in the death rattle of that enormously important 900 year cycle of values.  Those values have been an enduring part of European thought and feeling ever since their inception.

We're on the brink of another such sea-change.  Despite Kerouac's implication, it would surprise me if such a monumental change happened in a matter of a few years.  I thought as a child that this was what the Sixties represented; I thought we were living through that change.  And in a way, we were part of the sowing of the first seeds of that change, on the heels of Kerouac and the Beats.

Some time later I will write of my own prophetic dream, which rose up out of my subconscious the summer I was twenty.  It was part of my catching this wave of change, or its catching me.

The disruptions we see all around us in our world, the enmity, polarized opposition, lies, hatred, violence, bigotry, lust for power and control -- all of which are in full sway at the moment -- are harbingers of this larger change.  I think an entirely new culture will have to be born, because the one we're in can't carry this change forward.  This civilization is eating itself alive and will continue to break down, methinks.  But eventually, over decades, or perhaps over several hundred years, a new impetus of energy will push through an entirely new culture, built upon values which we are only now dimly beginning to perceive, or maybe values which we're as yet completely incapable of imagining.  

Before the new values can be born, though, the old ones are rearing their ugly heads once more and fighting against this change. The atavistic impulses of selfishness, competition, domination, pride, ego, intolerance, racial, religious, and sectarian violence and hatred -- business as usual, in other words --  are cultural archetypes which have outlived their usefulness and utility and are fighting for their very lives.  This fight, this struggle, is embodied in our public figures and in the national consciousness prevalent in America right now. We're living through the resistance to the very shift that Kerouac was talking about.

If we happen to live long enough, it would be something to see the world, and humanity at large, come out the other side. 

I'll write more on this later but since it's early December, and as I read this windblown version of Kerouac's journals constantly, I thought I'd make a reference to Jack's prediction. Let's hope it comes true and that I'm wrong about it needing several hundred years to play out. 

It can't happen soon enough.