A Book Review
by Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - March 17, 2002
I am probably walking through a minefield in taking on this review of Jeanne Martinet’s brilliant send-up of the romance comics of the 1940s, 50s and 60s and 70s. I noticed Truer Than True Romance while foraging among the new books in the local library and figured my spouse, Joyce, would get a kick out of it.
Now I probably would not have reviewed this book (perhaps barely on topic for Caring for the Soul), had I not heard hysterical howls of mirth emanating from the side of the couch where Joyce curls up with her favorite books and pots of Earl Grey tea.
(Even while reading the comics and laughing herself senselessly, Joyce has just told me that I am a chauvinist by definition merely by suggesting that she--just because she is female--would naturally read such magazines. See, I am already blown to smithereens.)
But wait! Martinet says that the original comics, which began in 1947 and lasted through the mid 70s, (when the genre was mercifully killed off) were in fact written by men! She claims that this explains the “sexist sensibilities,” and why all the women have perfect bodies, the men are never bald and always taller than the women.
In Truer Than True Romance Martinet rewrites ten episodes of the old True Romances. The drawings are from the original classic comics, but written from the point of view of a modern, early 21st century woman. You know you are in for a satiric tornado when you peruse the front cover. A handsome young couple embraces with the woman looking up love struck into the man’s eyes. Yes, she is blond and blue-eyed and he is. . .what else. . .tall, dark and handsome with that fabled “blue-black” hair of comic book fame.
In the word balloon, the guy is saying to the girl, “Wow, you really are clingy and filled with self-loathing. No wonder I find you so attractive!”
Perhaps because I do not have a great deal of hair on top, I particularly liked “I Hate My Hair,” an episode originally called “Stolen Dreams.” This is the story of a hairdo gone bad enough to turn not only the poor girl’s day but most of her young life into a bad hair day. She simply wants that fabled "different look" and winds up looking like Sinead O’Connor while falling for a guy that she is convinced hates short hair.
In another episode that I thought was quite clever, a young woman, who usually winds up hurt from dating married men, finds herself dating the shrink from hell, as she lives though “My Heart Said Yes, But My Therapist Said No.”
I do not want to give too much of the book away. Here is a sampling of some episodes:
Too Dumb for Love
My Heart of Darkness
The Narcissist Heart!
What Are You Saying?
If It’s Raining, It Must Be Love
The old comics carried columns full of advice for the lovelorn also. Martinet does not miss a trick here either, and we read such columnists as “Ask Dr. Mary, Licensed Therapist” or “Dee Pressen, Love Counselor.” You cannot fool these pundits; they know what is going on and are ready to rescue the innocent from the wages of sin or at the very least lay a really good guilt trip on the unassuming.
There is even a modern columnist for “The Male Point of View.” "Hank Hanson" (a self-proclaimed hunk) advises women that want to "get over" with men to "dress like you love them, but act like you hate them. . .So show your cleavage and your claws, kitten.” Well, I suppose a bonafide "hunkarama" would know. . .
One of my favorite inclusions is the “test” Martinet includes. “A Test of True Love” tries to help lonely women to recognize their true love, but it is probably decidedly more tongue-in-cheek than the original. Here’s a sample from the True/False Quiz:
True/False - [You Will know he is your one, true love if]some of his hair is blue.
Answer: True. If he has dark hair, and he probably does if he is your true love, you will notice a distinctive, royal blue sheen on parts of his head.
Anyway, I felt that I would be remiss as a columnist if I did not recommend this screamingly funny satire of American pop culture. After all, in caring for the soul, one must always stand vigilant and strong against the wages of cultural mythology and stereotypical thinking.
Hmmm. . .I dunno. . .You think the chicks would really go for that blue-black hair, a narcissistic, "god's-gift-to-women" attitude, and perhaps a withering sneer?
Truer Than True Romance was published in 2001 and is available at bookstores everywhere. More information is available from the publisher, Watson-Guptill Publications.
Copyright 2002, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Ask Doctor Zin
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - September 1, 2002
I recently received a letter from an old friend of mine who had suddenly disappeared many years ago. It turns out that he has been studying ancient religions and mysticism all over the world during the past few years.
After years of meditation and spiritual practices, he opened his eyes one morning after a particularly deep meditation to discover that he had been in satori for weeks and to find dozens of other spiritual seekers sitting around him in a circle. They immediately bowed to him en masse and introduced themselves as his students.
Apparently, they had become so awed while watching the play of golden colors above his head as they watched him in meditation that they now considered him an enlightened master. Soon his fame spread far and wide, and many were amazed at the effortless wisdom with which he handled the problems of his disciples. An avid group of his followers determined that the master should share his wisdom and glory with all the peoples of the world.
Thus, the media phenomenon of Doctor Zen (I mean Zin) was born. The good Doctor has asked me to function as his intermediary. His mailbox is overflowing (as well as the tongue in his not so politically correct cheek). Here are some questions from tortured souls along with his humble but possibly "brilliant" answers.
Dear Doctor,
I have lost my job, my life savings, and have had to declare bankruptcy. To make matters worse, my wife called me a deadbeat and ran off to Madagascar with a lingerie sales clerk with money gained from selling our children to a black market adoption service. My psychiatrist tells me that I am depressed and has put me on various anti-depressive medications.
However, I feel there must be a spiritual answer to these problems. Can you help me, Dr. Ze\in?
Broke in Buffalo
Dear Broke,
Just snap out of it man!!! You don't need no stinking pills!
Of course, there is a spiritual solution to any of life's challenges. I prefer the word challenge to problem as a problem is really an opportunity for growth. Now you can do something with your life that you really want to do. For example, you could:
Teach seminars to the recently unemployed at $500 a pop on coping with change
Sell homemade cayenne pepper ice cream
Open a carwash that specializes in SUV's and other earth-friendly vehicles
Become a hit man (the money's great!)
Take a course in VCR repair (preferably Betamax). By the way, DVD's are just a temporary phenomenon in my opinion.)
Earn thousands of dollars on the Internet just mailing out letters to friendly folk clamoring to fill up their empty hard drives
Earn a substantial living telemarketing, as you help willing people find mortgage refinancing or various types of siding at dinner time or even better while they are watching Monday Night Football or reruns of Ally McBeal or Seinfeld
I would not lose any sleep about losing your life savings and retirement either. Most convenience stores will continue to hire older workers, especially for the graveyard shift. (Don't forget, just give them the money; no heroics.)
Hope this helps!
Sincerely,
Z
Dear Doctor Zin,
What is the secret of life?
Siddartha
Delhi
Dear Siddhartha,
Now it wouldn't be a secret any longer if I told you, would it? Don't ever ask me that again. As they say in alphabet agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.), If I told you, I might have to kill you.
Sincerely,
Z
Dear Doctor Z,
My boyfriend is into natural foods and has become obsessed with pistachio nuts. He eats them everywhere, and usually I don't mind. It's just that lately he's started shelling them while we are. . .well, you know. . .mixing it up so to speak.
I wouldn't mind his eating the nuts if he would just properly dispose of the shells, but he insists upon just throwing them anywhere, and I, for one, am sick and tired of lying on the them.
Also, I am becoming quite nauseated when he runs those red-stained hands over my body. Oh, Doctor Z, I don't know what to do. I do love Billy, and am afraid that he will leave me if I complain.
I don't know if I can take it anymore, Doctor. Please help!
Nutty in Naples, Florida
Dear Nutty in Naples,
Since you are a female and a second-class person, you can try talking to him in that sweet simpering tone of voice for which your sex is famous. Tell him how you honestly feel about the situation. (Hey maybe you could do this while ironing his shirts.) Don't go too far of course; you don't want him to dump you!
Try watching some movies from the '40s or '50s if you need some cultural conditioning to help you achieve the proper passive aggressive tone and manner. May I suggest almost any of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies, such as "Lover, Come Back" or "That Touch of Mink."
Some of the romance comics of the period offer some good advice on how the "little woman" should deal with the dominant sex. Try some of the old "Modern Romances." If you have trouble locating old copies of the comics, try Truer Than True Romances, a modern update on the romance comics.
Yours,
Dr. Zin
Dear Zin,
I recently appeared on the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" television program. I was all excited about the prospects of winning a million dollars and international fame and fortune.
Unfortunately, I missed the first question. It was just too hard. They actually asked me to name any two sexes of human beings. How was I to know that BDSM and Foot Fetish not actually the names of the sexes.
Of course, now I know that male and female were the correct answers, but I don't know if I will ever be able to show my face in public again since I am so humiliated.
P.S. - I also lost on Jeopardy.
Clueless in Seattle
Dear Clueless,
Don't ever again send your filth to me! After washing your mouth out with soap, you should crawl under your bed and never come out again!
Furthermore, don't even think about tying me up with #2 twisted fiber hemp rope to the goldplated iron rings that were mistakenly installed by rambunctious disciples in the base boards of my heart-shaped bed.
Believe you me, I WILL find out and suitably punish with my new cat-o-nine tails whoever of my enemies told you about this!
Also, I will sue you into eternity if you tell that I also lost on Jeopardy.
Exasperatedly yours,
Z
Well, that is all the advice the good Doctor sent me this time. If his column catches on, he has promised to send me some more of his enlightened wisdom and advice. Until that future time, Doctor Zin has asked me to pass along to you this deep thought which struck him one evening as he was eating his usual box of Milk Duds:
Don't you think you would like it if it were likable.
Peace.
Copyright 2002-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published Suite101 - September 1, 2002
I recently received a letter from an old friend of mine who had suddenly disappeared many years ago. It turns out that he has been studying ancient religions and mysticism all over the world during the past few years.
After years of meditation and spiritual practices, he opened his eyes one morning after a particularly deep meditation to discover that he had been in satori for weeks and to find dozens of other spiritual seekers sitting around him in a circle. They immediately bowed to him en masse and introduced themselves as his students.
Apparently, they had become so awed while watching the play of golden colors above his head as they watched him in meditation that they now considered him an enlightened master. Soon his fame spread far and wide, and many were amazed at the effortless wisdom with which he handled the problems of his disciples. An avid group of his followers determined that the master should share his wisdom and glory with all the peoples of the world.
Thus, the media phenomenon of Doctor Zen (I mean Zin) was born. The good Doctor has asked me to function as his intermediary. His mailbox is overflowing (as well as the tongue in his not so politically correct cheek). Here are some questions from tortured souls along with his humble but possibly "brilliant" answers.
Dear Doctor,
I have lost my job, my life savings, and have had to declare bankruptcy. To make matters worse, my wife called me a deadbeat and ran off to Madagascar with a lingerie sales clerk with money gained from selling our children to a black market adoption service. My psychiatrist tells me that I am depressed and has put me on various anti-depressive medications.
However, I feel there must be a spiritual answer to these problems. Can you help me, Dr. Ze\in?
Broke in Buffalo
Dear Broke,
Just snap out of it man!!! You don't need no stinking pills!
Of course, there is a spiritual solution to any of life's challenges. I prefer the word challenge to problem as a problem is really an opportunity for growth. Now you can do something with your life that you really want to do. For example, you could:
Teach seminars to the recently unemployed at $500 a pop on coping with change
Sell homemade cayenne pepper ice cream
Open a carwash that specializes in SUV's and other earth-friendly vehicles
Become a hit man (the money's great!)
Take a course in VCR repair (preferably Betamax). By the way, DVD's are just a temporary phenomenon in my opinion.)
Earn thousands of dollars on the Internet just mailing out letters to friendly folk clamoring to fill up their empty hard drives
Earn a substantial living telemarketing, as you help willing people find mortgage refinancing or various types of siding at dinner time or even better while they are watching Monday Night Football or reruns of Ally McBeal or Seinfeld
I would not lose any sleep about losing your life savings and retirement either. Most convenience stores will continue to hire older workers, especially for the graveyard shift. (Don't forget, just give them the money; no heroics.)
Hope this helps!
Sincerely,
Z
Dear Doctor Zin,
What is the secret of life?
Siddartha
Delhi
Dear Siddhartha,
Now it wouldn't be a secret any longer if I told you, would it? Don't ever ask me that again. As they say in alphabet agencies (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.), If I told you, I might have to kill you.
Sincerely,
Z
Dear Doctor Z,
My boyfriend is into natural foods and has become obsessed with pistachio nuts. He eats them everywhere, and usually I don't mind. It's just that lately he's started shelling them while we are. . .well, you know. . .mixing it up so to speak.
I wouldn't mind his eating the nuts if he would just properly dispose of the shells, but he insists upon just throwing them anywhere, and I, for one, am sick and tired of lying on the them.
Also, I am becoming quite nauseated when he runs those red-stained hands over my body. Oh, Doctor Z, I don't know what to do. I do love Billy, and am afraid that he will leave me if I complain.
I don't know if I can take it anymore, Doctor. Please help!
Nutty in Naples, Florida
Dear Nutty in Naples,
Since you are a female and a second-class person, you can try talking to him in that sweet simpering tone of voice for which your sex is famous. Tell him how you honestly feel about the situation. (Hey maybe you could do this while ironing his shirts.) Don't go too far of course; you don't want him to dump you!
Try watching some movies from the '40s or '50s if you need some cultural conditioning to help you achieve the proper passive aggressive tone and manner. May I suggest almost any of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies, such as "Lover, Come Back" or "That Touch of Mink."
Some of the romance comics of the period offer some good advice on how the "little woman" should deal with the dominant sex. Try some of the old "Modern Romances." If you have trouble locating old copies of the comics, try Truer Than True Romances, a modern update on the romance comics.
Yours,
Dr. Zin
Dear Zin,
I recently appeared on the "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" television program. I was all excited about the prospects of winning a million dollars and international fame and fortune.
Unfortunately, I missed the first question. It was just too hard. They actually asked me to name any two sexes of human beings. How was I to know that BDSM and Foot Fetish not actually the names of the sexes.
Of course, now I know that male and female were the correct answers, but I don't know if I will ever be able to show my face in public again since I am so humiliated.
P.S. - I also lost on Jeopardy.
Clueless in Seattle
Dear Clueless,
Don't ever again send your filth to me! After washing your mouth out with soap, you should crawl under your bed and never come out again!
Furthermore, don't even think about tying me up with #2 twisted fiber hemp rope to the goldplated iron rings that were mistakenly installed by rambunctious disciples in the base boards of my heart-shaped bed.
Believe you me, I WILL find out and suitably punish with my new cat-o-nine tails whoever of my enemies told you about this!
Also, I will sue you into eternity if you tell that I also lost on Jeopardy.
Exasperatedly yours,
Z
Well, that is all the advice the good Doctor sent me this time. If his column catches on, he has promised to send me some more of his enlightened wisdom and advice. Until that future time, Doctor Zin has asked me to pass along to you this deep thought which struck him one evening as he was eating his usual box of Milk Duds:
Don't you think you would like it if it were likable.
Peace.
Copyright 2002-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
The Key to the Treasure
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - October 22, 2001
The key to the treasure is the treasure.
--John Barth, Chimera
Dear Reader, if you are like myself you probably long to read in a column such as this one fabulous notions on how to calculate with absolute accuracy the exact location on the planet of your true soul mate. Perhaps you would like me to whisper in your virtual ear the secret of enlightenment or show you how to juggle all your various karma chameleons until they vanish as the delusions they are. Even just a few words about the nature of reality would probably be welcome. Surely, Martin, you can twirl the Dance of the Seven Veils on the head of a pin while changing a tire and drinking a latte.
When I figure out such matters, I will gladly relate the findings to you, especially that one about the tire and the latte. However, I do know a tool that I believe has helped my life, helped me to live more abundantly and come closer to my mature goals. The use of Affirmations has been an important tool for me, and while their use may or may not lead to the sudden enlightening bolt from the blue (or salvation or nirvana or heaven), they do help me at least to live my life in a positive frame of mind.
The creation of this positive framework is why affirmations are both the key to the treasure and the treasure. When I am in a positive state of mind, I am open and responsive to new experiences, to new ways of thinking and doing things. I am not afraid to be creative; I share and enjoy and enjoy your sharing and joy.
Contrast the preceding with what happens when you are down or in a negative frame of mind. As you talk negatively to yourself, perception narrows and often pessimistic expectations lead to negative experiences by way of the self-fulfilling prophecy. That is you get out of life what you put in. If you constantly expect negative experiences, you will tend to get just that, negativity in your life.
As we have learned from sports figures such as Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and the inspirational lives of such figures as Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, and the current Dalai Lama, attitude may not be everything but it almost is. Negative events happen in every life whether we like it or not (and no one truly knows why), but what is so important is how we respond to such events. We can maintain a positive attitude that will help us move more gracefully through such circumstances.
So, I am not here to preach that saying a few magic words will heal your life. I am saying that talking positively to myself has helped me to lead a life that at least is open to the possibility of prosperity, joy, harmony and love. In that openness the magic can happen. The sun may not shine all the time but it surely cannot shine through a shuttered window to bestow its gift of warmth and light.
There are many sites on the Net that offer affirmations. Here are some links to get you started. Just pick affirmations that seem pertinent to your personality or situation. You can find books in the self-help section of your local bookstore or you can check them out of the library. Here are some books that I have found useful. (To check Barnes and Noble for titles featuring affirmations, just click the "Buy" icon at the top of the page to go to their online bookstore. You may need to use their search function.)
You can also write your own affirmations but please remember always to use positive language. For example, do not write “I am never broke,” as the word “broke” is negative and with the word “not” you already creating a negative situation. Instead, write something like, “My income is constantly increasing.”
There is some disagreement as to the timing of affirmations, but in general be sure to write your affirmations in the present tense. Write as if the situation you wish is already happening. "Doing what I love serves others" is stronger to your consciousness than "Doing what I love WILL serve others." Use of the future tense implies that you are approaching but possibly may never reach your goal.
Using affirmations is easy. Some people find a quiet place and meditate on a few statements. I believe the key is to expose yourself to the positive statement as much as possible. I carry cards with me at all times on which I have written affirmations dealing with areas of life that I feel need some positive energy. I place a few cards near my computer where I see them many times throughout the day. Sometimes I pick one up and concentrate on its significance. Another good way of handling affirmations is to tape a few of them to your lavatory mirror. Every time you wash your hands or look into the mirror you are reminded to consider your positive statements. Even when I work out my health club, I repeat my affirmations to myself while on the treadmill or with each repetition of my strength training.
Here are some affirmations that have helped me keep my windows clear. Perhaps you will find them useful also.
I am thankful for the prosperous circumstances of my life.
I am glad that others are prosperous and successful.
I am generous with myself and others.
Action helps transform my goals into reality.
I am constantly creating my life anew.
I love and accept myself.
I have an attitude of gratitude
I allow others to be who they are.
I choose my response with love.
What I concentrate on expands.
Money is good.
I am prosperous in all areas of my life.
Hair continues to grow on top of my head.
This is such a vast subject, and I have only scratched the surface in this essay. I will be writing some more articles on the general subjects of affirmations, self-talk, prosperity consciousness, etc.
While the individual affirmations sometimes work wonders in my life, I am even more impressed with the positive attitude that seems to derive from constant attention to them and other techniques of positive thinking and meditation. One reaches a state of mind whereby one begins to operate from a sense of trust in the universe. An alignment with the positive forces happens. And, it is not "magical thinking" or engaging in “pollyannaish” behavior. People who practice these techniques do realize that accidents happen, loved ones die, sources of income dry up, wives or husbands suddenly leave.
They do however hold a precious key that enables belief in themselves and a continually growing confidence in maintaining a positive alignment. To possess and to use that simple, but powerful key of affirmation in whatever life circumstances one finds oneself is indeed the treasure itself.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published Suite101 - October 22, 2001
The key to the treasure is the treasure.
--John Barth, Chimera
Dear Reader, if you are like myself you probably long to read in a column such as this one fabulous notions on how to calculate with absolute accuracy the exact location on the planet of your true soul mate. Perhaps you would like me to whisper in your virtual ear the secret of enlightenment or show you how to juggle all your various karma chameleons until they vanish as the delusions they are. Even just a few words about the nature of reality would probably be welcome. Surely, Martin, you can twirl the Dance of the Seven Veils on the head of a pin while changing a tire and drinking a latte.
When I figure out such matters, I will gladly relate the findings to you, especially that one about the tire and the latte. However, I do know a tool that I believe has helped my life, helped me to live more abundantly and come closer to my mature goals. The use of Affirmations has been an important tool for me, and while their use may or may not lead to the sudden enlightening bolt from the blue (or salvation or nirvana or heaven), they do help me at least to live my life in a positive frame of mind.
The creation of this positive framework is why affirmations are both the key to the treasure and the treasure. When I am in a positive state of mind, I am open and responsive to new experiences, to new ways of thinking and doing things. I am not afraid to be creative; I share and enjoy and enjoy your sharing and joy.
Contrast the preceding with what happens when you are down or in a negative frame of mind. As you talk negatively to yourself, perception narrows and often pessimistic expectations lead to negative experiences by way of the self-fulfilling prophecy. That is you get out of life what you put in. If you constantly expect negative experiences, you will tend to get just that, negativity in your life.
As we have learned from sports figures such as Michael Jordan and Larry Bird and the inspirational lives of such figures as Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, and the current Dalai Lama, attitude may not be everything but it almost is. Negative events happen in every life whether we like it or not (and no one truly knows why), but what is so important is how we respond to such events. We can maintain a positive attitude that will help us move more gracefully through such circumstances.
So, I am not here to preach that saying a few magic words will heal your life. I am saying that talking positively to myself has helped me to lead a life that at least is open to the possibility of prosperity, joy, harmony and love. In that openness the magic can happen. The sun may not shine all the time but it surely cannot shine through a shuttered window to bestow its gift of warmth and light.
There are many sites on the Net that offer affirmations. Here are some links to get you started. Just pick affirmations that seem pertinent to your personality or situation. You can find books in the self-help section of your local bookstore or you can check them out of the library. Here are some books that I have found useful. (To check Barnes and Noble for titles featuring affirmations, just click the "Buy" icon at the top of the page to go to their online bookstore. You may need to use their search function.)
You can also write your own affirmations but please remember always to use positive language. For example, do not write “I am never broke,” as the word “broke” is negative and with the word “not” you already creating a negative situation. Instead, write something like, “My income is constantly increasing.”
There is some disagreement as to the timing of affirmations, but in general be sure to write your affirmations in the present tense. Write as if the situation you wish is already happening. "Doing what I love serves others" is stronger to your consciousness than "Doing what I love WILL serve others." Use of the future tense implies that you are approaching but possibly may never reach your goal.
Using affirmations is easy. Some people find a quiet place and meditate on a few statements. I believe the key is to expose yourself to the positive statement as much as possible. I carry cards with me at all times on which I have written affirmations dealing with areas of life that I feel need some positive energy. I place a few cards near my computer where I see them many times throughout the day. Sometimes I pick one up and concentrate on its significance. Another good way of handling affirmations is to tape a few of them to your lavatory mirror. Every time you wash your hands or look into the mirror you are reminded to consider your positive statements. Even when I work out my health club, I repeat my affirmations to myself while on the treadmill or with each repetition of my strength training.
Here are some affirmations that have helped me keep my windows clear. Perhaps you will find them useful also.
I am thankful for the prosperous circumstances of my life.
I am glad that others are prosperous and successful.
I am generous with myself and others.
Action helps transform my goals into reality.
I am constantly creating my life anew.
I love and accept myself.
I have an attitude of gratitude
I allow others to be who they are.
I choose my response with love.
What I concentrate on expands.
Money is good.
I am prosperous in all areas of my life.
Hair continues to grow on top of my head.
This is such a vast subject, and I have only scratched the surface in this essay. I will be writing some more articles on the general subjects of affirmations, self-talk, prosperity consciousness, etc.
While the individual affirmations sometimes work wonders in my life, I am even more impressed with the positive attitude that seems to derive from constant attention to them and other techniques of positive thinking and meditation. One reaches a state of mind whereby one begins to operate from a sense of trust in the universe. An alignment with the positive forces happens. And, it is not "magical thinking" or engaging in “pollyannaish” behavior. People who practice these techniques do realize that accidents happen, loved ones die, sources of income dry up, wives or husbands suddenly leave.
They do however hold a precious key that enables belief in themselves and a continually growing confidence in maintaining a positive alignment. To possess and to use that simple, but powerful key of affirmation in whatever life circumstances one finds oneself is indeed the treasure itself.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
'Twas All Hallows Eve
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - October 30, 2002
Part the First: Introduction
I discovered this poem in a haunted house in my part of town.
My ghoulfriend liked its silly rhymes and lack of renown;
She admired it so much, she started to rhyme without reason
So realizing the true nature of the Halloween season.
She loved it so much that she shucked her gown,
And danced quite naked on a moonlit down,
Screeching and yowling like the banshee she was
Howling the words 'til the cops came fas-t.
Cuffing us and throwing us in the city jail;
Wondering if we would ever make bail,
Gave us lots of time to shape shift this verse,
Though God only knows how we could get it any worse.
Part the Second: Twas All Hallows Eve. . .
Twas the night of All Hallow's and all through the room
Not a creature was stirring not even a broom,
The apples were floating in a deep cauldron pot
And without the sorry revelers were turning to rot;
The little ones were'nt nestled all snug in their beds,
Whilst visions of sugar goblins danced in their heads;
And Queenie with her boas and me in Versace threads,
Had just settled down to dine on the dead.
When up in the attic there rose such a clatter,
I sprang from the table to see what was the matter;
Up the stairs I flew like a flash
Shooshing Elvira 'way from her mash;
Saw the moon on the plates of my best dragon brood
Snarling and feasting over some fast-flowing blood
When, what to my hooded eyes should appear
But a large, hooded coach and eight wolves a-howling
Followed in reverence by Nine Kings a-groveling
And a partridge in a pear tree deliciously hanging;
(. . .Oops, dreadfully sorry, wrong schtick);
I heard rattling chains then someone get sick;
I roared out so loud that spiders sprang for corners,
Then what should I see but Drac and his mourners,
Cavorting and singing in the silver moonlight,
Dark shadows lurking, children of the night!
"Now Basher! Now, Necromancer! and Vixen!
On, Vomit! On Cuspid! On, Condor and Bludgeon!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall,
Now tear away! Tear away, tear away all!"
As dry bones before the vile Witches do fly,
When they meet an obstacle, such as why
On earth the coursers to the house top they flew,
Maddened with bad poetry and and smelly body parts too.
And then, in a wrinkling, I heard in the raw
The scraping and scratching of each hairy paw;
As drew back my hand with a snarling frown
Into the chimney Old Dracula slid down.
He was dressed all in black from his foot to his head,
And his cape swirled around showing glimpses of red,
His minions before him carried bags of naughty boys,
Demanding more candy and making dreadful noise.
His eyes -- how they stared! his face so pale!
His cheeks were like paper, his nose like a rail!
His droll little mouth was twisted upside down,
In danger of setting in a permanent frown
I guess I embarrassed him when I pointed to his teeth,
Where a smear of blood circled like a spinach wreath;
He had a mean little face and hardly any belly
And as he smiled, I shook like a bowlful of jelly.
He was a lean and mean, a right scary old vamp
Didn't mean to laugh when I saw him, but doubled up in a cramp;
Then a wink of his yellow eye and a glimpse of his head
Soon gave me to know I'd soon be among the living but dead.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And took all my blood, then turned me into a jerk,
Just like him, and taking his finger aside picked his nose,
And giving a nod for me to follow, up the chimney we rose;
He sprang to his coach, to his team gave a whistle,
And away we all flew like a guided missile.
But I heard him exclaim, 'ere he drove into the night,
"HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD FRIGHT!"
Part the Third: This Sounds Familiar
I wish I could say I knew the author true,
But really, I must say I haven't a clue;
Some say some flake of a monster
Borrowed the rhyme from a right old Napster.
I say this verse is based on The Night Before Christmas,
Something most shameless, since those verses delight-mus;
Some attributed those great children's verses
Peviously to Clement Clarke Moore but trust us
Major Henry Livingston Jr (1748 to 1828)
Is To whom is now attributed that poem's fate;
Now if you will allow me one final word,
Cursed be the reader who calls me nerd.
Editor's Note: I am not open to discussions of enjambment.
Copyright 2002-2006 article and verse, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published Suite101 - October 30, 2002
Part the First: Introduction
I discovered this poem in a haunted house in my part of town.
My ghoulfriend liked its silly rhymes and lack of renown;
She admired it so much, she started to rhyme without reason
So realizing the true nature of the Halloween season.
She loved it so much that she shucked her gown,
And danced quite naked on a moonlit down,
Screeching and yowling like the banshee she was
Howling the words 'til the cops came fas-t.
Cuffing us and throwing us in the city jail;
Wondering if we would ever make bail,
Gave us lots of time to shape shift this verse,
Though God only knows how we could get it any worse.
Part the Second: Twas All Hallows Eve. . .
Twas the night of All Hallow's and all through the room
Not a creature was stirring not even a broom,
The apples were floating in a deep cauldron pot
And without the sorry revelers were turning to rot;
The little ones were'nt nestled all snug in their beds,
Whilst visions of sugar goblins danced in their heads;
And Queenie with her boas and me in Versace threads,
Had just settled down to dine on the dead.
When up in the attic there rose such a clatter,
I sprang from the table to see what was the matter;
Up the stairs I flew like a flash
Shooshing Elvira 'way from her mash;
Saw the moon on the plates of my best dragon brood
Snarling and feasting over some fast-flowing blood
When, what to my hooded eyes should appear
But a large, hooded coach and eight wolves a-howling
Followed in reverence by Nine Kings a-groveling
And a partridge in a pear tree deliciously hanging;
(. . .Oops, dreadfully sorry, wrong schtick);
I heard rattling chains then someone get sick;
I roared out so loud that spiders sprang for corners,
Then what should I see but Drac and his mourners,
Cavorting and singing in the silver moonlight,
Dark shadows lurking, children of the night!
"Now Basher! Now, Necromancer! and Vixen!
On, Vomit! On Cuspid! On, Condor and Bludgeon!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall,
Now tear away! Tear away, tear away all!"
As dry bones before the vile Witches do fly,
When they meet an obstacle, such as why
On earth the coursers to the house top they flew,
Maddened with bad poetry and and smelly body parts too.
And then, in a wrinkling, I heard in the raw
The scraping and scratching of each hairy paw;
As drew back my hand with a snarling frown
Into the chimney Old Dracula slid down.
He was dressed all in black from his foot to his head,
And his cape swirled around showing glimpses of red,
His minions before him carried bags of naughty boys,
Demanding more candy and making dreadful noise.
His eyes -- how they stared! his face so pale!
His cheeks were like paper, his nose like a rail!
His droll little mouth was twisted upside down,
In danger of setting in a permanent frown
I guess I embarrassed him when I pointed to his teeth,
Where a smear of blood circled like a spinach wreath;
He had a mean little face and hardly any belly
And as he smiled, I shook like a bowlful of jelly.
He was a lean and mean, a right scary old vamp
Didn't mean to laugh when I saw him, but doubled up in a cramp;
Then a wink of his yellow eye and a glimpse of his head
Soon gave me to know I'd soon be among the living but dead.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And took all my blood, then turned me into a jerk,
Just like him, and taking his finger aside picked his nose,
And giving a nod for me to follow, up the chimney we rose;
He sprang to his coach, to his team gave a whistle,
And away we all flew like a guided missile.
But I heard him exclaim, 'ere he drove into the night,
"HAPPY HALLOWEEN TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD FRIGHT!"
Part the Third: This Sounds Familiar
I wish I could say I knew the author true,
But really, I must say I haven't a clue;
Some say some flake of a monster
Borrowed the rhyme from a right old Napster.
I say this verse is based on The Night Before Christmas,
Something most shameless, since those verses delight-mus;
Some attributed those great children's verses
Peviously to Clement Clarke Moore but trust us
Major Henry Livingston Jr (1748 to 1828)
Is To whom is now attributed that poem's fate;
Now if you will allow me one final word,
Cursed be the reader who calls me nerd.
Editor's Note: I am not open to discussions of enjambment.
Copyright 2002-2006 article and verse, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
The Graffiti of Middle-Earth
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101- August 5, 2003
Glancing around to make sure that no one saw me, especially renowned hawk eye, Mrs. Margaret King, my chemistry teacher, who was sitting nearby, I surreptitiously scribbled Frodo Lives! on the inside, back cover of the Broadman Hymnal as I sat in the back row of the First Baptist Church of Liberty, North Carolina.
Holding the volume up a little, I pretended to look over the hymns. Then taking one more look around, I quickly put the hymnal in its holder on the back of the wooden pew in front of me. I felt sure that no one had noticed. Glancing around the auditorium I saw that a few members of the congregation were absorbed in Dr. English's lengthy sermon on the Beatitudes while the rest were struggling with varying stages of wakefulness.
"I live!" I mumbled to myself. "I live!"
Such is the power of J.R.R. Tolkien—even in those days before appalling media hype, DVDs with director's cuts, targeted merchandise, computer modeling and fantastic special effects.
Such is the energy and vitality of Lord of the Rings that I, a shy, quiet, small-town teenager and scholastic overachiever initiated my rebellion against the narrow moralistic confines and shallow intellectualism of small town life with those two words.
Later, I learned that some nameless artist first wrote the same words on subway walls in New York City in 1967. Those scribbles essentially started the graffiti movement in the 60's and 70's to write, paint, on chalk on every available surface in the western world that the heroic hobbit had survived the armies of Mordor, the lava pits of Mt. Doom and Sauron, the Dark Lord, himself.
I have always been something of an admirer of good graffiti, as sometimes people truly reveal themselves in this "art form." Anthropologists study quite earnestly the graffiti of ancient cultures, as the writing tells them so much about daily life.
For example, in ancient Rome, lost in the dust of history is the name of the young man who posted this message: Helena amatur a Claudius (Helen is loved by Claudius). Some things about civilization never change, as one famous bit of writing from the walls of ancient Pompeii translates: Cornelius made me pregnant. The Romans also left jokes, laundry lists, stories, and even a few advertisements on the walls.
I hasten to add that with the exception of the Frodo incident and maybe one other minor indiscretion having to do with a jilting by a certain girlfriend; I am neither a graffiti artist nor have any ambitions to write such trash.
. . .Ok, well, maybe just a little. . .
You see, I did come across some ancient writings from various walls, tables, lavatories and, yes, pissoirs of Middle-Earth. I suspect the Dark Lord himself, knowing that I would not be able to resist publishing these mad scribblings, sent this muckraking journalism to me to spite arrogant wizards, self-righteous warriors, dour dwarves, goody-goody elves, small-minded men and other fops and fools over which he hoped to hold dominion. However, I must say they do offer some fascinating insights (and reality bites) into the diverse folk of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion.
For your convenience and possible amusement I have translated the inscriptions from the various languages—Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin), Khuzdul (language of the dwarves), Orkish, Westron (the common tongue) and even the Black Speech and Entish.
Carved into a tree in Mirkwood:
Watch out for Treebeard, girls. He's fast!
On a restroom wall in the Shire:
Hoo boy! that Bilbo Baggins,
I'm so tired of His Naggins.
Scribbled on the pink walls of a Mordor Pissoir in black ichor:
Sauron sucks Galadriel's toes!
Do Nazguls really need to go?
Free Gollum!
Scrawled on the poker table in the Orc's Recreation Room:
Those Nazguls are such creeps
They've been dead so long
They actually think DVDs
Are really BVDs.
Once every millennia or so Galadriel's Mirror fogs up. . .
Elrond's mother was a brunette!
Arwen rocks!
The Grey Havens suck.
Who's your Daddy?
Attributed to Orcs in the Mines of Moria:
Elves, schmelves
They think their ichor don't stink.
More from Moria:
Mordor!
I'll give you Mordor,
You two-timing dwarf!
Attributed to a bright Olog-hai at Isengard:
How many dwarves does it take to change a light bulb in the caves of Moria?
Answer - At least fifty: One to change the bulb, one to twiddle his beard while wondering what a light bulb is, and 48 to feed the cave troll!
Lipstick (from wild berries of course) smeared on the mirror in the Rivendell Ladies Room
He's so pretty, he's so cool
I can't help it, Legolas rules!
Stencilled on an inner wall at Minas Tirith:
Gandalf rides a whisk broom!
Thimk, you Hobbits!
Boromir slept here with Hobbits.
Gimli did too!
Carved on the White Tree:
Isildur did it!
Bored with the Rings (Initials below are almost illegible but may be JRRT.)
While not technically graffiti, the items that follow were sent to me by another clandestine source. Though he did not request anonymity, I am still loathe to attribute these materials to someone known to me only as that "Fool of a Took."
A small collection of Middle-Earth bumper stickers:
Orcs do it in the dark!
Wizards do it with will!
Balrogs fire it up!
Elves do it lightly!
Rangers do it with elves!
Merry changed his name and did it!
Nazguls used to do it!
Trolls still wonder. . .
Recent headlines in The Gondor World News:
Treebeard Is the Father of My Child!
I Was a Balrog Love Slave
Samwise Gamgee Separates from Mr. Frodo
Merry and Pip. . .Together Again
Eowyn Breaks Up Aragorn and Arwen's Love Nest
Amphibian Rescued from Flames. . .
The rest of the sentence. . .
Frodo lives. . . and though sick and tired of elves, is hiding from Samwise in the Grey Havens
Author's Note:If you are a fan of the Lord of the Rings and other works by JRR, check out the outstanding articles entered in the 2003 Tolkien Event.
Copyright 2003, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved
Published Suite101- August 5, 2003
Glancing around to make sure that no one saw me, especially renowned hawk eye, Mrs. Margaret King, my chemistry teacher, who was sitting nearby, I surreptitiously scribbled Frodo Lives! on the inside, back cover of the Broadman Hymnal as I sat in the back row of the First Baptist Church of Liberty, North Carolina.
Holding the volume up a little, I pretended to look over the hymns. Then taking one more look around, I quickly put the hymnal in its holder on the back of the wooden pew in front of me. I felt sure that no one had noticed. Glancing around the auditorium I saw that a few members of the congregation were absorbed in Dr. English's lengthy sermon on the Beatitudes while the rest were struggling with varying stages of wakefulness.
"I live!" I mumbled to myself. "I live!"
Such is the power of J.R.R. Tolkien—even in those days before appalling media hype, DVDs with director's cuts, targeted merchandise, computer modeling and fantastic special effects.
Such is the energy and vitality of Lord of the Rings that I, a shy, quiet, small-town teenager and scholastic overachiever initiated my rebellion against the narrow moralistic confines and shallow intellectualism of small town life with those two words.
Later, I learned that some nameless artist first wrote the same words on subway walls in New York City in 1967. Those scribbles essentially started the graffiti movement in the 60's and 70's to write, paint, on chalk on every available surface in the western world that the heroic hobbit had survived the armies of Mordor, the lava pits of Mt. Doom and Sauron, the Dark Lord, himself.
I have always been something of an admirer of good graffiti, as sometimes people truly reveal themselves in this "art form." Anthropologists study quite earnestly the graffiti of ancient cultures, as the writing tells them so much about daily life.
For example, in ancient Rome, lost in the dust of history is the name of the young man who posted this message: Helena amatur a Claudius (Helen is loved by Claudius). Some things about civilization never change, as one famous bit of writing from the walls of ancient Pompeii translates: Cornelius made me pregnant. The Romans also left jokes, laundry lists, stories, and even a few advertisements on the walls.
I hasten to add that with the exception of the Frodo incident and maybe one other minor indiscretion having to do with a jilting by a certain girlfriend; I am neither a graffiti artist nor have any ambitions to write such trash.
. . .Ok, well, maybe just a little. . .
You see, I did come across some ancient writings from various walls, tables, lavatories and, yes, pissoirs of Middle-Earth. I suspect the Dark Lord himself, knowing that I would not be able to resist publishing these mad scribblings, sent this muckraking journalism to me to spite arrogant wizards, self-righteous warriors, dour dwarves, goody-goody elves, small-minded men and other fops and fools over which he hoped to hold dominion. However, I must say they do offer some fascinating insights (and reality bites) into the diverse folk of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion.
For your convenience and possible amusement I have translated the inscriptions from the various languages—Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin), Khuzdul (language of the dwarves), Orkish, Westron (the common tongue) and even the Black Speech and Entish.
Carved into a tree in Mirkwood:
Watch out for Treebeard, girls. He's fast!
On a restroom wall in the Shire:
Hoo boy! that Bilbo Baggins,
I'm so tired of His Naggins.
Scribbled on the pink walls of a Mordor Pissoir in black ichor:
Sauron sucks Galadriel's toes!
Do Nazguls really need to go?
Free Gollum!
Scrawled on the poker table in the Orc's Recreation Room:
Those Nazguls are such creeps
They've been dead so long
They actually think DVDs
Are really BVDs.
Once every millennia or so Galadriel's Mirror fogs up. . .
Elrond's mother was a brunette!
Arwen rocks!
The Grey Havens suck.
Who's your Daddy?
Attributed to Orcs in the Mines of Moria:
Elves, schmelves
They think their ichor don't stink.
More from Moria:
Mordor!
I'll give you Mordor,
You two-timing dwarf!
Attributed to a bright Olog-hai at Isengard:
How many dwarves does it take to change a light bulb in the caves of Moria?
Answer - At least fifty: One to change the bulb, one to twiddle his beard while wondering what a light bulb is, and 48 to feed the cave troll!
Lipstick (from wild berries of course) smeared on the mirror in the Rivendell Ladies Room
He's so pretty, he's so cool
I can't help it, Legolas rules!
Stencilled on an inner wall at Minas Tirith:
Gandalf rides a whisk broom!
Thimk, you Hobbits!
Boromir slept here with Hobbits.
Gimli did too!
Carved on the White Tree:
Isildur did it!
Bored with the Rings (Initials below are almost illegible but may be JRRT.)
While not technically graffiti, the items that follow were sent to me by another clandestine source. Though he did not request anonymity, I am still loathe to attribute these materials to someone known to me only as that "Fool of a Took."
A small collection of Middle-Earth bumper stickers:
Orcs do it in the dark!
Wizards do it with will!
Balrogs fire it up!
Elves do it lightly!
Rangers do it with elves!
Merry changed his name and did it!
Nazguls used to do it!
Trolls still wonder. . .
Recent headlines in The Gondor World News:
Treebeard Is the Father of My Child!
I Was a Balrog Love Slave
Samwise Gamgee Separates from Mr. Frodo
Merry and Pip. . .Together Again
Eowyn Breaks Up Aragorn and Arwen's Love Nest
Amphibian Rescued from Flames. . .
The rest of the sentence. . .
Frodo lives. . . and though sick and tired of elves, is hiding from Samwise in the Grey Havens
Author's Note:If you are a fan of the Lord of the Rings and other works by JRR, check out the outstanding articles entered in the 2003 Tolkien Event.
Copyright 2003, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Looking Breathlessly
By Thomas James Martin
Published - May 5, 2002
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. ~Don Juan (Yaqui indian shaman in Carlos Castneda's series of books)
I have been in and out of photography all my life. It all started with a “Brownie” box camera given to me for my 10th birthday. In my teens I saved up enough money to graduate to a cheap 35mm camera.
I was early captivated by the great photographers and it seems that I bought a magazine of collected photographs of various types almost every month. For example, I had collections of Scandinavian photographers, Ansel Adams and other nature photographers, photojournalists, etc.
In those days there was more question than there is nowadays as to whether photography is an art. This was never a problem for me. Photography is its own art form, ". . .a discovery of the world in terms of light."
How those photographs enriched my experience and understanding of life. The French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was my earliest hero.
Looking over his work in collections (those "annuals") as a farm boy on tobacco road in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I yearned for a little 35mm Leica rangefinder like he made famous and a knapsack with which to travel and photograph the world.
I dreamed of capturing--like Bresson--the essence of the eternal moment: An embrace of lovers; bicyclists caught in some great mysterious design, the ineffable truth of which could only be expressed visually; Language at times unable to express the true nature of the infinite heart of existence.
If you were to ask me what is the most valuable thing that I have
learned from photography, I would have to answer, “seeing.” When I work with a camera, I am fascinated with how so often I cannot find anything of interest to photograph at first.
Then, as I relax and shed layers of mental preoccupations, the linear expectations and anxieties of our very mental (perhaps insane) culture, my mind settles quietly into my intention to take pictures, I find myself shifting into greater connectivity with my feelings, and I begin to “see.”
What we see so often is a kind of consensus reality, an inventory of preconceptions that we have agreed that is the way the world should be. For example when I first look at a tree when I am in my ordinary, preoccupied mental state, I don’t see that tree in its totality. I filter it through so much mental noise that I only see the obvious things happening around it. I may notice a bird flying away or if there is a strong wind, I may notice the swaying of branches and trunk, but I don’t really “see” it.
To really “see” you must become as an infant or small child who does not see the world the way we see it as adults. A child does not see the color blue or rather s/he sees one color as a continuum of all colors; not a tree, but an extended form. The child has not learned all our adult notions of consensus reality.
Turning away from all my mental preoccupations, I become a vessel for expression. As my intellect joins with my feelings, suddenly pictures are everywhere: A leaf falls into an interesting arrangement of wild flowers; a spider web glistens with dew; a curve of sunlight on wind-swept water.
I think this phenomenon is an example of what some spiritual masters call “falling into the heart,” that is releasing the bonds of the conscious mind and acting from one’s center of being, a place where heart and head and senses meet.
For me it is the place where true art is found whether the art form is visual or not. Photography—as well as poetry—have from childhood been natural ways for me to diverge from the ordinary mind into a kind of “super-mind,” where I find that I can use so many more of my faculties other than the intellect.
Once experienced, to attempt to create without functioning in this "super mind," is rather like the taste of a sugary soft drink after sipping a fine wine; cheap and empty and heartless.
Don Juan, the shaman quoted in the epigram, offers additional observations about "seeing" when he tells his disciple, Carlos Castaneda, that he is teaching him how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.
We have talked about "seeing" in this first essay. Next time we shall continue our exploration of the relationship between art and spirituality as we look into some ways to "stop the world" and see it as it really is rather than how we think it is.
Copyright 20002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved
Published - May 5, 2002
For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. ~Don Juan (Yaqui indian shaman in Carlos Castneda's series of books)
I have been in and out of photography all my life. It all started with a “Brownie” box camera given to me for my 10th birthday. In my teens I saved up enough money to graduate to a cheap 35mm camera.
I was early captivated by the great photographers and it seems that I bought a magazine of collected photographs of various types almost every month. For example, I had collections of Scandinavian photographers, Ansel Adams and other nature photographers, photojournalists, etc.
In those days there was more question than there is nowadays as to whether photography is an art. This was never a problem for me. Photography is its own art form, ". . .a discovery of the world in terms of light."
How those photographs enriched my experience and understanding of life. The French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was my earliest hero.
Looking over his work in collections (those "annuals") as a farm boy on tobacco road in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I yearned for a little 35mm Leica rangefinder like he made famous and a knapsack with which to travel and photograph the world.
I dreamed of capturing--like Bresson--the essence of the eternal moment: An embrace of lovers; bicyclists caught in some great mysterious design, the ineffable truth of which could only be expressed visually; Language at times unable to express the true nature of the infinite heart of existence.
If you were to ask me what is the most valuable thing that I have
learned from photography, I would have to answer, “seeing.” When I work with a camera, I am fascinated with how so often I cannot find anything of interest to photograph at first.
Then, as I relax and shed layers of mental preoccupations, the linear expectations and anxieties of our very mental (perhaps insane) culture, my mind settles quietly into my intention to take pictures, I find myself shifting into greater connectivity with my feelings, and I begin to “see.”
What we see so often is a kind of consensus reality, an inventory of preconceptions that we have agreed that is the way the world should be. For example when I first look at a tree when I am in my ordinary, preoccupied mental state, I don’t see that tree in its totality. I filter it through so much mental noise that I only see the obvious things happening around it. I may notice a bird flying away or if there is a strong wind, I may notice the swaying of branches and trunk, but I don’t really “see” it.
To really “see” you must become as an infant or small child who does not see the world the way we see it as adults. A child does not see the color blue or rather s/he sees one color as a continuum of all colors; not a tree, but an extended form. The child has not learned all our adult notions of consensus reality.
Turning away from all my mental preoccupations, I become a vessel for expression. As my intellect joins with my feelings, suddenly pictures are everywhere: A leaf falls into an interesting arrangement of wild flowers; a spider web glistens with dew; a curve of sunlight on wind-swept water.
I think this phenomenon is an example of what some spiritual masters call “falling into the heart,” that is releasing the bonds of the conscious mind and acting from one’s center of being, a place where heart and head and senses meet.
For me it is the place where true art is found whether the art form is visual or not. Photography—as well as poetry—have from childhood been natural ways for me to diverge from the ordinary mind into a kind of “super-mind,” where I find that I can use so many more of my faculties other than the intellect.
Once experienced, to attempt to create without functioning in this "super mind," is rather like the taste of a sugary soft drink after sipping a fine wine; cheap and empty and heartless.
Don Juan, the shaman quoted in the epigram, offers additional observations about "seeing" when he tells his disciple, Carlos Castaneda, that he is teaching him how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.
We have talked about "seeing" in this first essay. Next time we shall continue our exploration of the relationship between art and spirituality as we look into some ways to "stop the world" and see it as it really is rather than how we think it is.
Copyright 20002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved
Monday, July 12, 2010
Mitakuye Oyasin
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - October 2, 2001
. . .only connect. . . ~ DH Lawrence, Over the Rainbow
There is a wonderful word which I learned several years ago when I participated in a sweat lodge offered by Wallace Black Elk, a teacher, healer, and shaman of the Lakota Sioux tradition and Dr. William Lyon, an anthropologist formerly of Southern Oregon University. That word,mitakuye oyasin, seemed to penetrate so deeply into my consciousness that even now I continue to marvel at its depth and relevance to my life and spiritual path.
That summer evening as we sat stuffed into a large teepee-shaped lodge, our bodies issuing buckets of sweat as "warriors" brought in one fiery, red stone after another, "Grandfather" Black Elk (spiritual descendant of the original Oglala Sioux holy man, Black Elk) referred to an honoring of all our relationships in our personal world. He asked each of us to consider mitakuye oyasin, a word from the Lakota language that literally means all my relations.
As steam splattered from water poured over the stones and the sacred pipe was passed around, Black Elk explained that the Lakota saw the universe as a living, breathing, entity in which we are all connected, not only flesh and blood creatures, but mountains and trees, oceans and rivers; all the inanimate world also. He even referred to the heated boulders as the "Stone People." The Lakota word to express this interrelated web of life in which we all exist and have our being is mitakuye oyasin.
This powerful word for which there is no equivalent in English, is a recognition of the unity innate in the universe. Even more, it is a salutation, a prayer for all creation to commune in the harmony and balance that bridge the diversity of our lives.
I have come to understand that this Lakota word is a sort of touchstone for my feelings about myself and my relationships with the other beings in my life (human or otherwise). A touchstone was originally a black stone (somewhat like flint) used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when scratched by the metal. Thus, it has come to mean by connotation a standard by which other things are measured.
Whenever mitakyasi comes to mind, I know that I am receiving a signal from my higher consciousness that I need to consider my relationships not only with friends, relatives and coworkers but also how I am feeling about the world outside my personal realm. As a person with a long history of exhibiting a tendency to cut myself off from people and live as a loner, I find that I must look more deeply at "all my relations."
When I test my soul's streak against the touchstone of mitakyasi, I see neither gold nor silver. I see a myriad of gossamer strands shining where each person that I have known has touched my life, and also where I have touched them. I see that I am part of a greater whole, and that I cannot ignore my relationships with beings outside my small consciousness.
When I forget this truth of our "ecology of being," I sometimes fall into the psychological trap, of "exclusivity." Perhaps it is due to the "loner" mentality, but I sometimes think that "exclusivity" may be the only true "disease" of the soul. Now please understand that I am not referring here to individuality, but rather to "exclusivity" in the sense of the verb "to exclude." To be excluded is to be isolated such that one cannot participate.
Exclusivity becomes a disease when a person believes that her/his truth or beliefs are truer than another's. The condition (rather like the sin of pride) occurs, for example, when I think that God favors me rather than my neighbor for the righteous life that I have led.
While I am sure you have your own list of ways in which you separate yourself from others and the world around you, I will step forward here and list just a few preconceptions that keep me from realizing my connections with others, animate and inanimate, mortal or immortal at times:
Do not participate in gatherings of fellow human beings, as the people all engage in "groupthink" rather than think for themselves.
If I sing, everyone will start leering at me when they see that I cannot carry a tune (Actually, this may be really true!).
My search for truth is more profound than yours.
It’s just an animal; it can’t really think, can it?
That person muttering on the street is probably crazy.
I'm turning to gold, turning to gold; I don't know about you!
Do not show love; someone may laugh or worse show indifference.
Participants in that sweat lodge left that evening with various images or ideas about truth through the eyes of a Native American shaman. From talking with them, I knew that some had received visions while others heard voices that provided some direction as they left to proceed on their own paths. Others experienced healing or peace. Each of us left the sacred ground with a different experience.
I experienced neither visions nor voices nor very much peace; only legs cramping from sitting too long and heat so fierce that I had longed for the coolness of a sauna. With good fortune though, I took away a word of power, mitakuye oyasin, which I have never forgotten, and which reminds me from time to time that I am not alone in this world; I am connected with everyone and everything. My participation in this universe we call home illumines this whole shining web in which we all live and have our being.
If I take the time to speak, think and act with a sense of my interconnectedness (as the Lakota concept implies), I can only feel compassion toward all creatures as they are indeed part of my self. If I am indifferent to you, I am indifferent to myself; If I care for you, I am offering love to myself as well.
Editor's Note: "Grandfather" Wallace Black Elk continues to offer sweat lodges and workshops. Together with Black Elk, Dr. William Lyon wrote Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota. Dr. Lyon is also the author of Encyclopedia of Native American Healing and and other works about Native American cultures.
Published Suite101 - October 2, 2001
. . .only connect. . . ~ DH Lawrence, Over the Rainbow
There is a wonderful word which I learned several years ago when I participated in a sweat lodge offered by Wallace Black Elk, a teacher, healer, and shaman of the Lakota Sioux tradition and Dr. William Lyon, an anthropologist formerly of Southern Oregon University. That word,mitakuye oyasin, seemed to penetrate so deeply into my consciousness that even now I continue to marvel at its depth and relevance to my life and spiritual path.
That summer evening as we sat stuffed into a large teepee-shaped lodge, our bodies issuing buckets of sweat as "warriors" brought in one fiery, red stone after another, "Grandfather" Black Elk (spiritual descendant of the original Oglala Sioux holy man, Black Elk) referred to an honoring of all our relationships in our personal world. He asked each of us to consider mitakuye oyasin, a word from the Lakota language that literally means all my relations.
As steam splattered from water poured over the stones and the sacred pipe was passed around, Black Elk explained that the Lakota saw the universe as a living, breathing, entity in which we are all connected, not only flesh and blood creatures, but mountains and trees, oceans and rivers; all the inanimate world also. He even referred to the heated boulders as the "Stone People." The Lakota word to express this interrelated web of life in which we all exist and have our being is mitakuye oyasin.
This powerful word for which there is no equivalent in English, is a recognition of the unity innate in the universe. Even more, it is a salutation, a prayer for all creation to commune in the harmony and balance that bridge the diversity of our lives.
I have come to understand that this Lakota word is a sort of touchstone for my feelings about myself and my relationships with the other beings in my life (human or otherwise). A touchstone was originally a black stone (somewhat like flint) used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when scratched by the metal. Thus, it has come to mean by connotation a standard by which other things are measured.
Whenever mitakyasi comes to mind, I know that I am receiving a signal from my higher consciousness that I need to consider my relationships not only with friends, relatives and coworkers but also how I am feeling about the world outside my personal realm. As a person with a long history of exhibiting a tendency to cut myself off from people and live as a loner, I find that I must look more deeply at "all my relations."
When I test my soul's streak against the touchstone of mitakyasi, I see neither gold nor silver. I see a myriad of gossamer strands shining where each person that I have known has touched my life, and also where I have touched them. I see that I am part of a greater whole, and that I cannot ignore my relationships with beings outside my small consciousness.
When I forget this truth of our "ecology of being," I sometimes fall into the psychological trap, of "exclusivity." Perhaps it is due to the "loner" mentality, but I sometimes think that "exclusivity" may be the only true "disease" of the soul. Now please understand that I am not referring here to individuality, but rather to "exclusivity" in the sense of the verb "to exclude." To be excluded is to be isolated such that one cannot participate.
Exclusivity becomes a disease when a person believes that her/his truth or beliefs are truer than another's. The condition (rather like the sin of pride) occurs, for example, when I think that God favors me rather than my neighbor for the righteous life that I have led.
While I am sure you have your own list of ways in which you separate yourself from others and the world around you, I will step forward here and list just a few preconceptions that keep me from realizing my connections with others, animate and inanimate, mortal or immortal at times:
Do not participate in gatherings of fellow human beings, as the people all engage in "groupthink" rather than think for themselves.
If I sing, everyone will start leering at me when they see that I cannot carry a tune (Actually, this may be really true!).
My search for truth is more profound than yours.
It’s just an animal; it can’t really think, can it?
That person muttering on the street is probably crazy.
I'm turning to gold, turning to gold; I don't know about you!
Do not show love; someone may laugh or worse show indifference.
Participants in that sweat lodge left that evening with various images or ideas about truth through the eyes of a Native American shaman. From talking with them, I knew that some had received visions while others heard voices that provided some direction as they left to proceed on their own paths. Others experienced healing or peace. Each of us left the sacred ground with a different experience.
I experienced neither visions nor voices nor very much peace; only legs cramping from sitting too long and heat so fierce that I had longed for the coolness of a sauna. With good fortune though, I took away a word of power, mitakuye oyasin, which I have never forgotten, and which reminds me from time to time that I am not alone in this world; I am connected with everyone and everything. My participation in this universe we call home illumines this whole shining web in which we all live and have our being.
If I take the time to speak, think and act with a sense of my interconnectedness (as the Lakota concept implies), I can only feel compassion toward all creatures as they are indeed part of my self. If I am indifferent to you, I am indifferent to myself; If I care for you, I am offering love to myself as well.
Editor's Note: "Grandfather" Wallace Black Elk continues to offer sweat lodges and workshops. Together with Black Elk, Dr. William Lyon wrote Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of a Lakota. Dr. Lyon is also the author of Encyclopedia of Native American Healing and and other works about Native American cultures.
Let It Be War!
By Thomas James Martin
Published Democratic Underground
The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited.
--Larry Kudlow, National Review, June 26, 2002
I remember my mother telling me when I was an idealistic teenager about a person who she called an "ignorant old man," who she heard say in public prior to WWII, "If it means higher prices for corn, then let it be war!"
I could not help but think of those callous words when I ran across the esteemed Mr. Kudlow's words, which I cited in the epigram to this essay. Now Mr. Kudlow by no stretch of the imagination could you be considered "ignorant" like the poorly educated farmer my mother mentioned so many years ago
Mr. Kudlow is CEO of Kudlow & Co. and Economics Editor of the National Review, a respected (by Republicans anyway) conservative periodical. I took a couple of economics courses in college, and I know that the subject is quite difficult even if it still retains (somewhat erroneously) Thomas Carlyle's nineteenth century moniker, the "dismal science."
Thus, Mr. Kudlow, you are no lightweight—at least with respect to financial theory and market savvy, and since you are a CEO of a your own corporation, you must also be well versed in management, and human relations. (I may have that last bit about the human relations wrong, since in today's corporate world, the winners are the sharks that excel at corporate infighting.)
Aw shucks, Larry (May I call you, Larry), I am only a sometime journalist and writer, but I can't help but wonder what all those soldiers may think about your statement. Having served one hitch in the U.S. Army, I might have felt pretty good about keeping the "families safe," and maybe even have agreed with some of that keeping the businesses open since that implies keeping the breadwinners working to support their families.
However, I do know what I would have felt about elevating the "stock market a couple of thousand points," and it probably would have involved procreation with your self in a darkened room.
Now, I know gambling—excuse me—investing in--the market is supposedly not the same as "making book" on sports action or the "ponies," as there is research done by a whole lot of smart people—probably like yourself--who attempt to time the market and pick the securities that are on the way up or down (since knowledgeable investors make money either way). Then again, maybe my naiveté exceeds that of a little old lady buying Enron stock with the last of her nest egg from a trusted broker at Merrill Lynch.
Hey, Larry, you know; it just dawned on me--in spite of my persistent 3rd grade view of American history and society. People at your socio-economic level with your inside knowledge of markets, access to the corporate "old boy" network and good friends over at the SEC most likely only bet on sure things—like the fact that wars drive up the stock market. After all, it took the entire mobilization of the country during WWII—not to mention a few tens of million of deaths--to end finally the Great Depression. Hey, Larry, I guess I just made your case, didn't I?
Still, Larry, dying for one's country, making the ultimate sacrifice for the survival of our people and our democratic republic is one thing. I could probably have even died peacefully while serving my country knowing that my parents were living well and my children, eating hamburgers and fries under the flawed economic system that some now worship as free-market capitalism.
However, I don't think that I would have been exactly thrilled to die for the greed of you and your cronies, no matter how much it is couched in your quasi-patriotic language expressing "that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited."
You go on to say in the same paragraph, "The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization." Since when did the upward mobility of Dow Jones have anything to do with preserving anything of our values and civilization other than the most crass—much less the gallantry of our young men, Larry?
All too often the deaths of a brave soldiers merely to preserve entrenched political and business interests smacks of the "rich man's war and the poor man's fight." I cannot help but think of World War I British poet Wilfred Owens' lament:
The old lie:
Dulce et decorum for patria mori.
Those Latin words translate to "Sweet and glorious it is to die for one's country." Those words are not always a lie used by elites to rally the population around the flag; occasionally those deaths may be necessary for the greater good.
Nevertheless, Larry, it is not sweet and glorious to die for greed and crony capitalism. Besides, I wouldn't want to shock my sweet, 80-year old mother with the truth of your well-wrought words about truth, money and the "American Way." After all, she still, in all innocence, thinks that only a low-class, semi-literate old dirt farmer would wish for the deaths of young men and women just to drive up the price of corn.
Certainly, she would never in her wildest dreams believe that a man as well-educated, well-connected, and literate enough to write for a prestigious national magazine would want to unleash the dogs of war just to chase a few bears on Wall Street.
This site was last updated 07/12/10
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published Democratic Underground
The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points. We will know that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited.
--Larry Kudlow, National Review, June 26, 2002
I remember my mother telling me when I was an idealistic teenager about a person who she called an "ignorant old man," who she heard say in public prior to WWII, "If it means higher prices for corn, then let it be war!"
I could not help but think of those callous words when I ran across the esteemed Mr. Kudlow's words, which I cited in the epigram to this essay. Now Mr. Kudlow by no stretch of the imagination could you be considered "ignorant" like the poorly educated farmer my mother mentioned so many years ago
Mr. Kudlow is CEO of Kudlow & Co. and Economics Editor of the National Review, a respected (by Republicans anyway) conservative periodical. I took a couple of economics courses in college, and I know that the subject is quite difficult even if it still retains (somewhat erroneously) Thomas Carlyle's nineteenth century moniker, the "dismal science."
Thus, Mr. Kudlow, you are no lightweight—at least with respect to financial theory and market savvy, and since you are a CEO of a your own corporation, you must also be well versed in management, and human relations. (I may have that last bit about the human relations wrong, since in today's corporate world, the winners are the sharks that excel at corporate infighting.)
Aw shucks, Larry (May I call you, Larry), I am only a sometime journalist and writer, but I can't help but wonder what all those soldiers may think about your statement. Having served one hitch in the U.S. Army, I might have felt pretty good about keeping the "families safe," and maybe even have agreed with some of that keeping the businesses open since that implies keeping the breadwinners working to support their families.
However, I do know what I would have felt about elevating the "stock market a couple of thousand points," and it probably would have involved procreation with your self in a darkened room.
Now, I know gambling—excuse me—investing in--the market is supposedly not the same as "making book" on sports action or the "ponies," as there is research done by a whole lot of smart people—probably like yourself--who attempt to time the market and pick the securities that are on the way up or down (since knowledgeable investors make money either way). Then again, maybe my naiveté exceeds that of a little old lady buying Enron stock with the last of her nest egg from a trusted broker at Merrill Lynch.
Hey, Larry, you know; it just dawned on me--in spite of my persistent 3rd grade view of American history and society. People at your socio-economic level with your inside knowledge of markets, access to the corporate "old boy" network and good friends over at the SEC most likely only bet on sure things—like the fact that wars drive up the stock market. After all, it took the entire mobilization of the country during WWII—not to mention a few tens of million of deaths--to end finally the Great Depression. Hey, Larry, I guess I just made your case, didn't I?
Still, Larry, dying for one's country, making the ultimate sacrifice for the survival of our people and our democratic republic is one thing. I could probably have even died peacefully while serving my country knowing that my parents were living well and my children, eating hamburgers and fries under the flawed economic system that some now worship as free-market capitalism.
However, I don't think that I would have been exactly thrilled to die for the greed of you and your cronies, no matter how much it is couched in your quasi-patriotic language expressing "that our businesses will stay open, that our families will be safe, and that our future will be unlimited."
You go on to say in the same paragraph, "The world will be righted in this life-and-death struggle to preserve our values and our civilization." Since when did the upward mobility of Dow Jones have anything to do with preserving anything of our values and civilization other than the most crass—much less the gallantry of our young men, Larry?
All too often the deaths of a brave soldiers merely to preserve entrenched political and business interests smacks of the "rich man's war and the poor man's fight." I cannot help but think of World War I British poet Wilfred Owens' lament:
The old lie:
Dulce et decorum for patria mori.
Those Latin words translate to "Sweet and glorious it is to die for one's country." Those words are not always a lie used by elites to rally the population around the flag; occasionally those deaths may be necessary for the greater good.
Nevertheless, Larry, it is not sweet and glorious to die for greed and crony capitalism. Besides, I wouldn't want to shock my sweet, 80-year old mother with the truth of your well-wrought words about truth, money and the "American Way." After all, she still, in all innocence, thinks that only a low-class, semi-literate old dirt farmer would wish for the deaths of young men and women just to drive up the price of corn.
Certainly, she would never in her wildest dreams believe that a man as well-educated, well-connected, and literate enough to write for a prestigious national magazine would want to unleash the dogs of war just to chase a few bears on Wall Street.
This site was last updated 07/12/10
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Organic Touchstone
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - April 7, 2002
This April as Joyce and I prepare the soil for our vegetable garden and visit the natural foods store in search of organically grown seedlings to set out, I, in a fit of abstraction, began contemplating the implications of the word, organic.
I wonder if there is a better word than organic to serve as a “touchstone” for our feelings and beliefs about Nature and perhaps also the nature of reality. A touchstone was originally a black stone (somewhat like flint) used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when “scratched” by the metal. Thus, it has come to mean by connotation a standard by which other things are measured.
Organic is not just a word describing the farming or food produced without the use of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides, but is a word implying a certain world view.
If I rub my soul on the touchstone of Organic, I find that I enjoy working with nature, finding and following its laws to encourage growth and development rather than to force out the biggest and best with artificial means. With a growing thing, this means to plant the seed, use natural fertilizers, and see that it gets plenty of sunlight and water, and to give it space to get as big as its current genome intends it to be. My small organic apples are much more delicious than any supermarket apple, polished to waxy “perfection.”
The essential thing here is getting out of the way. Sure we can help Nature (We do have to introduce some fertilizer sometimes to help the plant flourish.), but the idea is to be a steward not an overbearing master.
In like fashion I find that when I am true to myself rather than trying to behave a certain way to impress a boss or some other human to whom I sometimes give too much power, my life flourishes anyway. I’m not sure if it matters if I get the next promotion or not. One thing I have learned for sure: All that “material, status-chasing stuff” will not make me any happier.
On the “organic touchstone” my streak shows me that I appreciate simple food cooked in simple ways. To flourish I need to give and receive love. I have also found that I like my life much better when I am thankful for great and small blessings that befall me each day.
The structure of my life has grown organically from the complex networks of nature, both seen and unseen. I have learned that the body is the only true healer. All the “nostrums and potions” in the world are but temporary palliatives of greater or lesser success to the body’s own healing processes. I try to get out of the way, use natural remedies, drink plenty of water, get lots of sunshine and fresh air.
Sometimes, I can let go enough to thrive as a human being.
Copyright 2002, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/12/10
Published Suite101 - April 7, 2002
This April as Joyce and I prepare the soil for our vegetable garden and visit the natural foods store in search of organically grown seedlings to set out, I, in a fit of abstraction, began contemplating the implications of the word, organic.
I wonder if there is a better word than organic to serve as a “touchstone” for our feelings and beliefs about Nature and perhaps also the nature of reality. A touchstone was originally a black stone (somewhat like flint) used to test the purity of gold and silver by the streak left on the stone when “scratched” by the metal. Thus, it has come to mean by connotation a standard by which other things are measured.
Organic is not just a word describing the farming or food produced without the use of chemically formulated fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides, but is a word implying a certain world view.
If I rub my soul on the touchstone of Organic, I find that I enjoy working with nature, finding and following its laws to encourage growth and development rather than to force out the biggest and best with artificial means. With a growing thing, this means to plant the seed, use natural fertilizers, and see that it gets plenty of sunlight and water, and to give it space to get as big as its current genome intends it to be. My small organic apples are much more delicious than any supermarket apple, polished to waxy “perfection.”
The essential thing here is getting out of the way. Sure we can help Nature (We do have to introduce some fertilizer sometimes to help the plant flourish.), but the idea is to be a steward not an overbearing master.
In like fashion I find that when I am true to myself rather than trying to behave a certain way to impress a boss or some other human to whom I sometimes give too much power, my life flourishes anyway. I’m not sure if it matters if I get the next promotion or not. One thing I have learned for sure: All that “material, status-chasing stuff” will not make me any happier.
On the “organic touchstone” my streak shows me that I appreciate simple food cooked in simple ways. To flourish I need to give and receive love. I have also found that I like my life much better when I am thankful for great and small blessings that befall me each day.
The structure of my life has grown organically from the complex networks of nature, both seen and unseen. I have learned that the body is the only true healer. All the “nostrums and potions” in the world are but temporary palliatives of greater or lesser success to the body’s own healing processes. I try to get out of the way, use natural remedies, drink plenty of water, get lots of sunshine and fresh air.
Sometimes, I can let go enough to thrive as a human being.
Copyright 2002, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/12/10
Sunday, July 11, 2010
The Blackberry Couple
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - April 17, 2001
There is a comeuppance to those lost souls who simplistically try to classify us humans into only two types of people. The appropriate--perhaps even politically correct--rejoinder is that there are those who distinguish only two types of people and those who do not.
How then am I to explain the infamous Blackberry Confrontation that occurred a couple of years ago between my spouse, Joyce, and yours truly. My God, this battle brought out the personality differences inherent in two otherwise close people. Such differences finally drive a hopeless writer into the bright but intellectually shallow waters of simplistic classification.
Sadly, I must declare that there really are two types and only two types of people. Psychologists, I am truly sorry for all your wasted studies, but I have learned that attitudes toward blackberry vines fully explain every nuance of human behavior.
I grew up on a farm and though we mowed our lawn and cut our hedges like middle class folk everywhere, we usually just let fields and cow pastures go un-mowed for years. Thus, we had many blackberry brambles on the land from which we gathered buckets of berries every summer. Thus, when blackberries invaded the fence surrounding our home in Beaverton, Oregon, my attitude was a welcoming, "Let'em grow."
These same blackberry vines made Joyce (who has both an urban and a rural background) very nervous. Where I saw a magical bramble full of nesting birds and maybe a rabbit or two and, of course, delicious berries, she saw only a creeping menace threatening to take over the yard, our neighborhood, and possibly the world.
I won for two or three years while the vines were multiplying and climbing all over the fence. We scored a few berries every summer also which helped my case. There is nothing like a fresh blackberry cobbler to settle everyone's nerves.
Admittedly, the blackberries were beginning to take over. I would cut them back every year, but they would come back stronger, hardier, and denser every spring. Of course, I admired the tenacity with which they clung to our fence. Here is an example of the force and intelligence of Nature; I mused--silently to myself of course, as Joyce was fast losing patience with my philosophical ramblings about the encroaching of humankind on the wilderness.
I suppose she felt that the wilderness was encroaching on her.
Finally, unable to get near the fence without risking major hemorrhage and torn clothing, and what with my take on Thoreau beginning to wear on my spouse, we determined to get rid of the bramble. We even used the "H" word a time or two, but could not bring ourselves to institute a scorched earth policy using herbicides (the "H" word).
We tried various natural ways to get rid of the blackberries, but in the end, vines were simply too strong. To make the punishment fit the crime, Joyce decided that I would just have to dig them up. After an enormous expenditure of effort--and not a little bleeding-- I thought that we would never see another blackberry on the land. The fact that every summer I dig out yet more blackberry vines, attests to the fallacy of that logic!
So the blackberries are under control (somewhat) and our yard is now neat and orderly--a veritable testament to the heritage of the 18th century and its emphasis on the regulation of nature. "Not Nature, but Nature mechanized," said poet Alexander Pope. Like Pope and many gardeners, Joyce loves Nature but wants to keep it in perspective. After all, we humans must also live on the planet.
Now I can respect that opinion, but personally, I feel sure that we have insulted the intelligence and spirit of the Blackberry guardians, not to mention various earth divas and nature spirits. Surely we shall be cursed for the rest of our days. Everytime that I see a bramble I keep my distance lest fierce shoots impale and wrap me like a green mummy.
As for Joyce, I am sure that she will end her days food for berries.
Yet there is compensation. I do surely love the peaceful vines that now climb our fence. The clematis and Rose of Sharon are quite beautiful, but, ah, those blackberries; so tough and strong with an unyielding vigor to live; so beautiful when flowering streams of white, star-shaped blossoms.
Published Suite101 - April 17, 2001
There is a comeuppance to those lost souls who simplistically try to classify us humans into only two types of people. The appropriate--perhaps even politically correct--rejoinder is that there are those who distinguish only two types of people and those who do not.
How then am I to explain the infamous Blackberry Confrontation that occurred a couple of years ago between my spouse, Joyce, and yours truly. My God, this battle brought out the personality differences inherent in two otherwise close people. Such differences finally drive a hopeless writer into the bright but intellectually shallow waters of simplistic classification.
Sadly, I must declare that there really are two types and only two types of people. Psychologists, I am truly sorry for all your wasted studies, but I have learned that attitudes toward blackberry vines fully explain every nuance of human behavior.
I grew up on a farm and though we mowed our lawn and cut our hedges like middle class folk everywhere, we usually just let fields and cow pastures go un-mowed for years. Thus, we had many blackberry brambles on the land from which we gathered buckets of berries every summer. Thus, when blackberries invaded the fence surrounding our home in Beaverton, Oregon, my attitude was a welcoming, "Let'em grow."
These same blackberry vines made Joyce (who has both an urban and a rural background) very nervous. Where I saw a magical bramble full of nesting birds and maybe a rabbit or two and, of course, delicious berries, she saw only a creeping menace threatening to take over the yard, our neighborhood, and possibly the world.
I won for two or three years while the vines were multiplying and climbing all over the fence. We scored a few berries every summer also which helped my case. There is nothing like a fresh blackberry cobbler to settle everyone's nerves.
Admittedly, the blackberries were beginning to take over. I would cut them back every year, but they would come back stronger, hardier, and denser every spring. Of course, I admired the tenacity with which they clung to our fence. Here is an example of the force and intelligence of Nature; I mused--silently to myself of course, as Joyce was fast losing patience with my philosophical ramblings about the encroaching of humankind on the wilderness.
I suppose she felt that the wilderness was encroaching on her.
Finally, unable to get near the fence without risking major hemorrhage and torn clothing, and what with my take on Thoreau beginning to wear on my spouse, we determined to get rid of the bramble. We even used the "H" word a time or two, but could not bring ourselves to institute a scorched earth policy using herbicides (the "H" word).
We tried various natural ways to get rid of the blackberries, but in the end, vines were simply too strong. To make the punishment fit the crime, Joyce decided that I would just have to dig them up. After an enormous expenditure of effort--and not a little bleeding-- I thought that we would never see another blackberry on the land. The fact that every summer I dig out yet more blackberry vines, attests to the fallacy of that logic!
So the blackberries are under control (somewhat) and our yard is now neat and orderly--a veritable testament to the heritage of the 18th century and its emphasis on the regulation of nature. "Not Nature, but Nature mechanized," said poet Alexander Pope. Like Pope and many gardeners, Joyce loves Nature but wants to keep it in perspective. After all, we humans must also live on the planet.
Now I can respect that opinion, but personally, I feel sure that we have insulted the intelligence and spirit of the Blackberry guardians, not to mention various earth divas and nature spirits. Surely we shall be cursed for the rest of our days. Everytime that I see a bramble I keep my distance lest fierce shoots impale and wrap me like a green mummy.
As for Joyce, I am sure that she will end her days food for berries.
Yet there is compensation. I do surely love the peaceful vines that now climb our fence. The clematis and Rose of Sharon are quite beautiful, but, ah, those blackberries; so tough and strong with an unyielding vigor to live; so beautiful when flowering streams of white, star-shaped blossoms.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - March 24, 2002
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out ev'ry night.
~Traditonal Hobo Ballad, (Often attributed to Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock)
One of the first songs that I remember enjoying as a child and that I used to play over and over again on my cheap, little portable record player was The Big Rock Candy Mountains. It was on a little yellow record (a 45 rpm) along with A Tisket, A Tasket, A Red & Yellow Basket and a few other songs that I no longer remember but were intended just for children.
The version on the child’s record was quite a bit more sanitized than the actual hobo ballad. The “alcohol springs” that “come a-tricklin’ down the rocks” of the original become “lemonade springs” in the children’s song. Likewise the sanitized version does not mention police truncheons turning to rubber and railroad "bulls" with wooden legs.
Where the boxcars are all empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
Oh, I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall and the wind don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Still, once again about 40 years later, I find myself utterly fascinated with the song since hearing it again, this time in the movie,“O Brother, Where Art Thou.” Playing it over and over, grateful for the tonal quality and handy index of the CD rather than the tinny overtones of my old but beloved and now defunct record player. Obviously, this song strikes a deep chord in me.
Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the peppermint trees
'Round the soda water fountains
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
The artist who sings this song in such a rhythmic but raspy sing-song voice with such wonderful phrasing seems right out of the lawless, almost mythical 1930s, the era that defined so many of the attitudes and sensibilities of the parents of the baby boomer generation. But, this is not an essay about the grim but fascinating era of the Great Depression.
Rather, it is about that longing for the perfect land and easy living, where everything goes right all the time; where there are no headaches or trips to the dentist or complaints from the boss—Just pure, unadulterated joy all the time. Heaven, Nirvana,the Happy Hunting Grounds, Honalee. . .The Big Rock Candy Mountains are just a few of the names of the ideal world of some of humanity’s deepest longings and fondest dreams.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And little streams of lemonade
Come a-tricklin' down the rocks.
Just lower your cup in the stream and draw up a cup of the finest lemonade; Nothing to worry about. No surgeon will take out your gall bladder or boss demand that you work overtime in The Big Rock Candy Mountains. There’s always plenty eat and drink as we sit with gentle companions by the fire in the evening.
And I suppose that a possible attribute of enlightenment could be never having ". . .to change your socks. . ."
The hobos there are friendly
And their fires all burn bright
There's a lake of stew and soda, too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Maybe paradise exists in some religious sense; maybe it does not. Perhaps, as the wise have said through the centuries, we are living in the fabled land even now, but sadly cannot realize it. I have always found this quote by Alfred Souza useful:
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Actually, Souza’s words probably sum up my philosophy of life up to the current moment. Believe as you will about the after life; you have your faith. Personally, I have to be happy now; I can’t wait for the possibilities of a reward later. I suppose there is nothing new here. We are so often told to live in the present. We hear this helpful, and insofar as I can tell great truth proffered so much by saviors and savants of the moment that it has become deified in the digital age.
Yet, I do not want to be misunderstood here; I am no enlightened soul. I am just like most of humankind. I long for my own personal paradise: I want the bluebird of happiness singing constantly in a beautiful Alpine meadow, complete with tiny golden flowers and sheltering evergreen trees under a great Delft bowl of a blue sky. A dappled stream flows through the meadow where I drink with the deer and bluebirds. A lovely maiden whose hair shimmers with every color of the rainbow lives with me in perfect harmony. As the old song goes:
Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the peppermint trees
'Round the soda water fountains
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Well, I suppose it's up to the individual how it works. One time a street person, after assailing me successfully for a handout, toasted me with some nameless wine. As he lifted his bottle to his lips, he shouted: “Here’s to the holidays! All 365 of them!”
I hope that it was a good wine even if probably not a great one; I will never know, as he did not offer me a drink only a toast. I wish now that I had stopped to chat with him. I should have asked if he was as happy as he seemingly appeared to be.
Well, this essay has really been about my own whimsical longings as a deluded mortal, I guess. I find no great truths to hand out from my personal well of wisdom (such as it is); Just a song that started some wheels of mind a-turning.
Maybe I will just give you (and me) one small scrap of advice. Since it is a day for old, anonymous songs redolent with insight and wisdom, here’s a lyric from another nameless genius:
Dance as if no one's watching;
Love as though you've never been hurt;
Work as though you don't need the money;
Sing as though no one is listening,
And live as though it's Heaven on Earth.
I can’t speak for you, but I have a feeling that this is the real “Candy Mountain,” living as though each day is truly heaven on earth.
Editor's Note: There is some confusion over the provenance of the song, Big Rock Candy Mountain. The song is listed as a tradional hobo ballad by many accounts, but many sources also attribute it to to Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock, a tramp entertainer and organizer for the "Wobblies," who apparently recorded it sometime around 1928.
There is little doubt, however, that he based his lyrics on a traditional hobo ballad. According to some sources, McClintock himself lost a lawsuite on the issue of copyright and was not allowed to receive royalties from his original recording, as the judge ruled that the lyrics were in the public domain. Singer, Burl Ives, popularized the song in the '40s and '50s.
The copyright may be owned by either MCA Records, or the McClintock or Burl Ives Estates, but I have been unable to determine who actually owns the song.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/11/10
Published Suite101 - March 24, 2002
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out ev'ry night.
~Traditonal Hobo Ballad, (Often attributed to Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock)
One of the first songs that I remember enjoying as a child and that I used to play over and over again on my cheap, little portable record player was The Big Rock Candy Mountains. It was on a little yellow record (a 45 rpm) along with A Tisket, A Tasket, A Red & Yellow Basket and a few other songs that I no longer remember but were intended just for children.
The version on the child’s record was quite a bit more sanitized than the actual hobo ballad. The “alcohol springs” that “come a-tricklin’ down the rocks” of the original become “lemonade springs” in the children’s song. Likewise the sanitized version does not mention police truncheons turning to rubber and railroad "bulls" with wooden legs.
Where the boxcars are all empty
And the sun shines ev'ry day
Oh, I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall and the wind don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Still, once again about 40 years later, I find myself utterly fascinated with the song since hearing it again, this time in the movie,“O Brother, Where Art Thou.” Playing it over and over, grateful for the tonal quality and handy index of the CD rather than the tinny overtones of my old but beloved and now defunct record player. Obviously, this song strikes a deep chord in me.
Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the peppermint trees
'Round the soda water fountains
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
The artist who sings this song in such a rhythmic but raspy sing-song voice with such wonderful phrasing seems right out of the lawless, almost mythical 1930s, the era that defined so many of the attitudes and sensibilities of the parents of the baby boomer generation. But, this is not an essay about the grim but fascinating era of the Great Depression.
Rather, it is about that longing for the perfect land and easy living, where everything goes right all the time; where there are no headaches or trips to the dentist or complaints from the boss—Just pure, unadulterated joy all the time. Heaven, Nirvana,the Happy Hunting Grounds, Honalee. . .The Big Rock Candy Mountains are just a few of the names of the ideal world of some of humanity’s deepest longings and fondest dreams.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And little streams of lemonade
Come a-tricklin' down the rocks.
Just lower your cup in the stream and draw up a cup of the finest lemonade; Nothing to worry about. No surgeon will take out your gall bladder or boss demand that you work overtime in The Big Rock Candy Mountains. There’s always plenty eat and drink as we sit with gentle companions by the fire in the evening.
And I suppose that a possible attribute of enlightenment could be never having ". . .to change your socks. . ."
The hobos there are friendly
And their fires all burn bright
There's a lake of stew and soda, too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Maybe paradise exists in some religious sense; maybe it does not. Perhaps, as the wise have said through the centuries, we are living in the fabled land even now, but sadly cannot realize it. I have always found this quote by Alfred Souza useful:
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Actually, Souza’s words probably sum up my philosophy of life up to the current moment. Believe as you will about the after life; you have your faith. Personally, I have to be happy now; I can’t wait for the possibilities of a reward later. I suppose there is nothing new here. We are so often told to live in the present. We hear this helpful, and insofar as I can tell great truth proffered so much by saviors and savants of the moment that it has become deified in the digital age.
Yet, I do not want to be misunderstood here; I am no enlightened soul. I am just like most of humankind. I long for my own personal paradise: I want the bluebird of happiness singing constantly in a beautiful Alpine meadow, complete with tiny golden flowers and sheltering evergreen trees under a great Delft bowl of a blue sky. A dappled stream flows through the meadow where I drink with the deer and bluebirds. A lovely maiden whose hair shimmers with every color of the rainbow lives with me in perfect harmony. As the old song goes:
Oh, the buzzin' of the bees in the peppermint trees
'Round the soda water fountains
Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Well, I suppose it's up to the individual how it works. One time a street person, after assailing me successfully for a handout, toasted me with some nameless wine. As he lifted his bottle to his lips, he shouted: “Here’s to the holidays! All 365 of them!”
I hope that it was a good wine even if probably not a great one; I will never know, as he did not offer me a drink only a toast. I wish now that I had stopped to chat with him. I should have asked if he was as happy as he seemingly appeared to be.
Well, this essay has really been about my own whimsical longings as a deluded mortal, I guess. I find no great truths to hand out from my personal well of wisdom (such as it is); Just a song that started some wheels of mind a-turning.
Maybe I will just give you (and me) one small scrap of advice. Since it is a day for old, anonymous songs redolent with insight and wisdom, here’s a lyric from another nameless genius:
Dance as if no one's watching;
Love as though you've never been hurt;
Work as though you don't need the money;
Sing as though no one is listening,
And live as though it's Heaven on Earth.
I can’t speak for you, but I have a feeling that this is the real “Candy Mountain,” living as though each day is truly heaven on earth.
Editor's Note: There is some confusion over the provenance of the song, Big Rock Candy Mountain. The song is listed as a tradional hobo ballad by many accounts, but many sources also attribute it to to Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock, a tramp entertainer and organizer for the "Wobblies," who apparently recorded it sometime around 1928.
There is little doubt, however, that he based his lyrics on a traditional hobo ballad. According to some sources, McClintock himself lost a lawsuite on the issue of copyright and was not allowed to receive royalties from his original recording, as the judge ruled that the lyrics were in the public domain. Singer, Burl Ives, popularized the song in the '40s and '50s.
The copyright may be owned by either MCA Records, or the McClintock or Burl Ives Estates, but I have been unable to determine who actually owns the song.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/11/10
Friday, July 9, 2010
Biblical Verses--Lost and Found
By Thomas James Martin
Published suite101 - May 25, 2005
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.~ The First Letter of St. Paul to Corinthians 13:1-13
The Bible is one of a number of sacred books based on the legacy of the lives of great spiritual masters. I try to honor all spiritual traditions, but lately some in the United States who wish to politicize evangelical Christianity into a one-party theocracy seem to find a few things in the Bible that I cannot for the life of me find there.
For some reason I always thought Christ based his message on love, faith and mercy and somehow came to update the old Jewish law. Where in the Bible does it say:
Thou shalt discriminate against all who are not like you.
Thou shalt not allow Gays to marry.
Thou shalt honor only Christians who take the words of the Bible literally.
Thou shalt steal from the poor to give to the rich.
Thou shalt not kill--unless of course it is "anyone wearing a towel around their head," (as one conservative Southern senator remarked), or those referred to as the "collateral damage" of war or maybe a doctor who honors a woman's right to choose.
Thou shalt base U.S. foreign policy on hate, fear and divisiveness.
Thou shalt base U.S. domestic policy on hate, fear and divisiveness.
Thou shalt treat with contempt any mainstream Christian who questions your beliefs.
Thou shalt believe that God created the world in seven days. (Even if God did create it in seven days as it states in Genesis, I do not find a passage in the Bible that says you have to believe that concept literally.) This leads to the ancillary commandment following:
Thou shalt assume that thou knowest the mind of God (Hey, just what exactly is a "day" in the mind of God anyway?).
Yea, thou shalt rub mercury and PCBs into the fertile land, destroy the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea--since it matters not a gasping salmon after you are Raptured.
And ye waiting for the Rapture, pay not attention to the following words of Christ recorded in the Gospel of Mark (13:32) about predicting the time of Christ's second coming:
"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." (Mark 13:32)
Thou shalt be as self-righteous as is humanly possible. Ye are not the same as other religious fanatics. Ye shall be forgiven and not kept from the Kingdom for promoting wars and killing a few medics with whom you disagree.
Thou shalt support imperialism in all its perfidious circumstances and use it for the conversion of those who do not follow your path.
Thou shalt not support stem cell research no matter what the cost in human suffering.
Good News! I did find the following verses:
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. [Beatitudes]
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Beatitudes]
You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you be sons of your Father who is in heaven. . . . [Matthew 5:43]
. . . You shall love your neighbor as yourself. . .[Matthew 22:37]
This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. . .[John 15:13]
They are some of my favorites. They are the ones I first learned at the First Baptist Church of Liberty, North Carolina on Sunday mornings, that church of the beautiful stained glass windows, red brick facade and cheerful-sounding bells.
They are the words that truly comforted a small child.
They are the ones that offer a "lantern for my feet and a light upon my path" as I wend my way through this life. They are the words that help me offer love when I feel hate, mercy for vengeance though I am most decidedly human and practice Christ's message so very imperfectly.
The ones that I cannot find in the Bible have not--insofar as I know with my admittedly limited human perspective--really helped anyone. They do not offer bread to the poor or a hand to the suffering. They do not address the social or economic needs of most Americans or help a powerful nation offer compassionate leadership in the world.
In my opinion, those verses that I cannot find mostly feed hypocrisy and self-righteous bloviating. I cannot help but wonder if they are not the beliefs of latterday "scribes and Pharisees."
I do not believe that a small child has ever taken comfort from them.
Published suite101 - May 25, 2005
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.~ The First Letter of St. Paul to Corinthians 13:1-13
The Bible is one of a number of sacred books based on the legacy of the lives of great spiritual masters. I try to honor all spiritual traditions, but lately some in the United States who wish to politicize evangelical Christianity into a one-party theocracy seem to find a few things in the Bible that I cannot for the life of me find there.
For some reason I always thought Christ based his message on love, faith and mercy and somehow came to update the old Jewish law. Where in the Bible does it say:
Thou shalt discriminate against all who are not like you.
Thou shalt not allow Gays to marry.
Thou shalt honor only Christians who take the words of the Bible literally.
Thou shalt steal from the poor to give to the rich.
Thou shalt not kill--unless of course it is "anyone wearing a towel around their head," (as one conservative Southern senator remarked), or those referred to as the "collateral damage" of war or maybe a doctor who honors a woman's right to choose.
Thou shalt base U.S. foreign policy on hate, fear and divisiveness.
Thou shalt base U.S. domestic policy on hate, fear and divisiveness.
Thou shalt treat with contempt any mainstream Christian who questions your beliefs.
Thou shalt believe that God created the world in seven days. (Even if God did create it in seven days as it states in Genesis, I do not find a passage in the Bible that says you have to believe that concept literally.) This leads to the ancillary commandment following:
Thou shalt assume that thou knowest the mind of God (Hey, just what exactly is a "day" in the mind of God anyway?).
Yea, thou shalt rub mercury and PCBs into the fertile land, destroy the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea--since it matters not a gasping salmon after you are Raptured.
And ye waiting for the Rapture, pay not attention to the following words of Christ recorded in the Gospel of Mark (13:32) about predicting the time of Christ's second coming:
"But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." (Mark 13:32)
Thou shalt be as self-righteous as is humanly possible. Ye are not the same as other religious fanatics. Ye shall be forgiven and not kept from the Kingdom for promoting wars and killing a few medics with whom you disagree.
Thou shalt support imperialism in all its perfidious circumstances and use it for the conversion of those who do not follow your path.
Thou shalt not support stem cell research no matter what the cost in human suffering.
Good News! I did find the following verses:
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. [Beatitudes]
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. [Beatitudes]
You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you be sons of your Father who is in heaven. . . . [Matthew 5:43]
. . . You shall love your neighbor as yourself. . .[Matthew 22:37]
This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. . .[John 15:13]
They are some of my favorites. They are the ones I first learned at the First Baptist Church of Liberty, North Carolina on Sunday mornings, that church of the beautiful stained glass windows, red brick facade and cheerful-sounding bells.
They are the words that truly comforted a small child.
They are the ones that offer a "lantern for my feet and a light upon my path" as I wend my way through this life. They are the words that help me offer love when I feel hate, mercy for vengeance though I am most decidedly human and practice Christ's message so very imperfectly.
The ones that I cannot find in the Bible have not--insofar as I know with my admittedly limited human perspective--really helped anyone. They do not offer bread to the poor or a hand to the suffering. They do not address the social or economic needs of most Americans or help a powerful nation offer compassionate leadership in the world.
In my opinion, those verses that I cannot find mostly feed hypocrisy and self-righteous bloviating. I cannot help but wonder if they are not the beliefs of latterday "scribes and Pharisees."
I do not believe that a small child has ever taken comfort from them.
Stopping the World
By Thomas James Martin
Published by Suite101 on: June 12, 2003
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing. --The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda
In the companion piece to this essay, Looking Breathlessly, I introduced the concept of "seeing" as related in the teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman or sorcerer that Castaneda encounters in the Sonoran desert of Mexico, impresses on his student, Castaneda, the importance of going beyond the intellect to truly experience the greater reality of the world.
I remembered Castaneda's words as my wife, Joyce, and I recently as one of our annual spring rituals visited a local nursery to purchase cut irises and bulbs which are Schreiner's specialty. After we had walked over the gardens on the grounds and selected about two dozen of the elegant flowers in all shapes, colors and sizes, we were walking back to the car when we noticed before us the acres and acres of Iris blooming before us as far as the eye could see.
I stood gazing at the layers of colors in the field: Bands of bright yellow, pale and royal blues, purples, lavenders, oranges. Then, it occurred to me that I was not really "seeing" all that beauty. I was merely observing it with my intellect, having a superficial experience.
However, the nursery is located on a country road, and though popular in the spring, is rather isolated. Suddenly, I realized that I was hearing bird song, different calls of birds mating and gathering nesting materials in the spring.
As I listened to the birds, I felt a small breeze ruffle my hair. I was not just watching the different bands of color in the fields at Schreiner's any longer, but had entered the realms of sound and hearing also.
Then, in a moment, I felt closer to the beautiful sight before me, the fields of growing blowers. I realized that I was now not just looking but seeing those fields. The sounds of the birds and cool breeze on the balmy spring day had helped to take me "out of my head."
I brought out the pad of paper that I always carry around with me, and wrote down a few lines of poetry that occurs to me sometimes in such moments. I do not always write in such moments. Sometimes though, I do not want to think about artistic expression; I just want to be with what is happening or I just want to be.
After recording a few lines, I found myself still in a joyful state, and began noticing with more depth the other people around me, seeing flowering plants and hearing the sounds of nature more from the heart than with the head. The sense of this phenomenon is hard to relate, but all human beings experience it from time to time.
The problem is not that we do not as Don Juan says, "See." We all experience this state of being from time to time just from being members of the human race. It's a natural state of consciousness.
Rather the problem is one of cultivating the experience so that we are not always running around anaesthetized and held prisoner by the tryarnny of the monkey mind, the one that chatters constantly, wants you to worry neurotically about money or what someone thinks about you or the thousands of other fears and anxieties that we are prey to.
How then shall we cultivate that special blessing called "seeing" that is known by so many names in all the cultures of the Earth, names uch as inspiration or oneness or the "grace of God".
Well, I am not sure anyone truly does anything by oneself. I feel that the sacred (or inner nature or God) stands ready to help us at all times if we can but open ourselves to it body, mind and soul.
While regular meditation certainly helps greatly in learning to "stop the world," and cultivate a rich inner life, here are some techniques that have collected through the years that have helped others and myself to fall from the head into the unity of consciousness found when head connects with heart.
Concentrate on the breath; feel (and possibly hear) your breath going in and out. Do not try to force it or control your breath; just witness the experience of breathing.
Softly or mentally repeat a mantra or other word of power or expression of your own choosing. Repetition and fixating on your word(s) calms the mind which is a necessary conditon for this experience.
Singing a song that inspires you is another good technique and helps balance your breathing, producing the calmness necessary for the experience. (Sing to yourself or mentally if you do not want to be heard by others.)
Here is one of my favorites. Since so many of us get most of our information visually, sometimes focusing on your surroundings with another sense helps you to experience the world in a more feeling way. I find, for example, that relating to the world through sound often helps me to get in touch with myself. Listening to the sounds of the forest—the whisper of the wind running through the leaves of the trees or the sound of running water does it for me. Others find that focusing on pleasant fragrances or touching the bark of a tree or petals of a flower puts them more in touch with their feelings.
Many people find prayer useful to enter a receptive, feeling mode of being.
Experiment! Find what works for you. A friend of mine finds she "stops the world" by the simple act of taking water. She has come to experience drinking as a sacred rite (which like the taking of food, is considered a sacrament in some spiritual paths).
Often, "seeing" is simply reaching a state of consciousness where you appreciate experience of the true self and that life that is happening moment by moment so beautifully. I shall never forget being alone in the forest after a storm and listening to the drip of the rain off of the leaves. Suddenly, I started experiencing each drop and every drop at the same time, and, though it was extraordinary and mystical in its own way, it was a very simple experience.
As the Zen master says:
Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains, trees are trees, and stars are stars;
After the first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and trees are not trees;
After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and trees once again trees and stars once again stars.
In other words, the beauty and mystery are always with us; Indeed those flowers and trees and rushing waters and winds whether--breezes or gales--are part of us in my view. We simply must awaken to experience the world through our true nature, to see. . .to see with the heart.
Copyright 2003, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published by Suite101 on: June 12, 2003
I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing. --The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda
In the companion piece to this essay, Looking Breathlessly, I introduced the concept of "seeing" as related in the teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan, the Yaqui shaman or sorcerer that Castaneda encounters in the Sonoran desert of Mexico, impresses on his student, Castaneda, the importance of going beyond the intellect to truly experience the greater reality of the world.
I remembered Castaneda's words as my wife, Joyce, and I recently as one of our annual spring rituals visited a local nursery to purchase cut irises and bulbs which are Schreiner's specialty. After we had walked over the gardens on the grounds and selected about two dozen of the elegant flowers in all shapes, colors and sizes, we were walking back to the car when we noticed before us the acres and acres of Iris blooming before us as far as the eye could see.
I stood gazing at the layers of colors in the field: Bands of bright yellow, pale and royal blues, purples, lavenders, oranges. Then, it occurred to me that I was not really "seeing" all that beauty. I was merely observing it with my intellect, having a superficial experience.
However, the nursery is located on a country road, and though popular in the spring, is rather isolated. Suddenly, I realized that I was hearing bird song, different calls of birds mating and gathering nesting materials in the spring.
As I listened to the birds, I felt a small breeze ruffle my hair. I was not just watching the different bands of color in the fields at Schreiner's any longer, but had entered the realms of sound and hearing also.
Then, in a moment, I felt closer to the beautiful sight before me, the fields of growing blowers. I realized that I was now not just looking but seeing those fields. The sounds of the birds and cool breeze on the balmy spring day had helped to take me "out of my head."
I brought out the pad of paper that I always carry around with me, and wrote down a few lines of poetry that occurs to me sometimes in such moments. I do not always write in such moments. Sometimes though, I do not want to think about artistic expression; I just want to be with what is happening or I just want to be.
After recording a few lines, I found myself still in a joyful state, and began noticing with more depth the other people around me, seeing flowering plants and hearing the sounds of nature more from the heart than with the head. The sense of this phenomenon is hard to relate, but all human beings experience it from time to time.
The problem is not that we do not as Don Juan says, "See." We all experience this state of being from time to time just from being members of the human race. It's a natural state of consciousness.
Rather the problem is one of cultivating the experience so that we are not always running around anaesthetized and held prisoner by the tryarnny of the monkey mind, the one that chatters constantly, wants you to worry neurotically about money or what someone thinks about you or the thousands of other fears and anxieties that we are prey to.
How then shall we cultivate that special blessing called "seeing" that is known by so many names in all the cultures of the Earth, names uch as inspiration or oneness or the "grace of God".
Well, I am not sure anyone truly does anything by oneself. I feel that the sacred (or inner nature or God) stands ready to help us at all times if we can but open ourselves to it body, mind and soul.
While regular meditation certainly helps greatly in learning to "stop the world," and cultivate a rich inner life, here are some techniques that have collected through the years that have helped others and myself to fall from the head into the unity of consciousness found when head connects with heart.
Concentrate on the breath; feel (and possibly hear) your breath going in and out. Do not try to force it or control your breath; just witness the experience of breathing.
Softly or mentally repeat a mantra or other word of power or expression of your own choosing. Repetition and fixating on your word(s) calms the mind which is a necessary conditon for this experience.
Singing a song that inspires you is another good technique and helps balance your breathing, producing the calmness necessary for the experience. (Sing to yourself or mentally if you do not want to be heard by others.)
Here is one of my favorites. Since so many of us get most of our information visually, sometimes focusing on your surroundings with another sense helps you to experience the world in a more feeling way. I find, for example, that relating to the world through sound often helps me to get in touch with myself. Listening to the sounds of the forest—the whisper of the wind running through the leaves of the trees or the sound of running water does it for me. Others find that focusing on pleasant fragrances or touching the bark of a tree or petals of a flower puts them more in touch with their feelings.
Many people find prayer useful to enter a receptive, feeling mode of being.
Experiment! Find what works for you. A friend of mine finds she "stops the world" by the simple act of taking water. She has come to experience drinking as a sacred rite (which like the taking of food, is considered a sacrament in some spiritual paths).
Often, "seeing" is simply reaching a state of consciousness where you appreciate experience of the true self and that life that is happening moment by moment so beautifully. I shall never forget being alone in the forest after a storm and listening to the drip of the rain off of the leaves. Suddenly, I started experiencing each drop and every drop at the same time, and, though it was extraordinary and mystical in its own way, it was a very simple experience.
As the Zen master says:
Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains, trees are trees, and stars are stars;
After the first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and trees are not trees;
After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and trees once again trees and stars once again stars.
In other words, the beauty and mystery are always with us; Indeed those flowers and trees and rushing waters and winds whether--breezes or gales--are part of us in my view. We simply must awaken to experience the world through our true nature, to see. . .to see with the heart.
Copyright 2003, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
A Southern Line
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - February 17, 2002
We die of cold and not of darkness.
~Miguel de Unamuno
Supposedly travelers on the trains of the Southern Railroad Line taunted departing passengers by parodying Patrick Henry’s patriotic words, Give me Liberty or give me Death. . .I’ll take Death! as the train started slowing to stop at the small town of Liberty, North Carolina.
To paraphrase Tennesse Williams, the “Milk Train” does not pass through Liberty anymore. It was before my time anyway, the era of the steam locomotive pulling into the old "Depot" that still stands on the tracks in the center of town as far as I know.
The taunt (a bit unfair perhaps) doubtless derived from the perceived dullness of the town, a place whose greatest claim to fame was the tying of the mayor’s race in the early ‘60s. While the name, Liberty, fairly rolls of the tongue, recalling visions of Lexington and Concord, I cannot help but wonder if I could have pronounced that name without dripping sarcasm if I had been a black living there prior to the '70s.
There were perhaps five stoplights, a rather large water tower visible for several miles, a town cop who drove around in a converted Buick most always chomping on a cigar; he was called “Lop.” He mostly chased teenagers driving hot rod Chevies or Fords; sometimes he caught one too, hair slicked back in a "ducktail" with large, plastic dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.
I am not sure how many black folks lived in the town where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. Actually, my family and I did not live in the town of some 1400 souls, but resided instead on a small farm about four miles down Highway 421, the real Tobacco Road, that if followed another 15 miles leads to Randleman, home of NASCAR legend, Richard Petty. Keep on going another few miles or so and you wind up in Greensboro where a number of black students from North Carolina A&T initiated sit-ins at the Woolworth Cafeteria in 1954.
In those Jim Crow days in which I grew up, I seldom saw black people shopping in the small downtown. Of course, there were never a lot of people shopping in downtown Liberty anyway, though the funeral home did a good business, having a monopoly on the business of death for a radius of several miles. Every member of the owner’s family drove a Cadillac; still do.
I remember the blacks sitting up in the balcony of the Curtis Theater; they had an entrance separate from us white breads. I especially remember Saturday matinees with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers features and maybe a Flash Gordon or Three Stooges short; sometimes I would get up and go for popcorn or candy and happen to glance up. There were throngs of children floating like little dark balloons over the auditorium.
In reflection, what I remember most about those Saturday matinees is the silence from that dark upper story. Little children are not quiet; they are boisterous; they yell and scream and laugh. It must have been a tedious nightmare to sit in almost total silence, sometimes the whispering between friends or a suppressed snicker at a Stooge drifted down into the first floor melee.
Movies were very cheap in those days; for a while only nine cents for a child. Town children used to stand outside the theater asking for pennies from their friends and neighbors so they could “go to the show.” I never saw any of the black kids doing that. And of course there were two sets of bathrooms, one for the whites and one for the “coloreds.”
Sometimes I would see a black child going in the special side entrance; It didn’t strike me very hard at nine or ten years old. I barely noticed and went back to my chemistry set or astronomy books or rode bikes with my brother around our grandparents’ farm.
In growing consciousness by junior year in high school, I had begun reading James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and especially Ralph Ellision. I read Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a novel that shows only too well what was going on in those days prior to civil rights movement. That book is far scarier than the most horrible blood sucker or acid-tongued alien because the characters in the novel are us, we who need as a species to grow in the consciousness of our connections at all levels, racial, soul or otherwise.
“I am an invisible man, this classic of the American experience begins. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If he registers on white consciousness at all, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."
I never really knew any black children until I was about fourteen, when my father hired two black teenagers to help us on the farm in the summer, harvesting. . .what else. . .tobacco. My brother and I really enjoyed James and Benjamin though. Being lonely country kids we were always on the lookout for playmates, and we all dearly enjoyed trying to hit each other with corn cobs or dirt clods when the adults were not around.
We were always sad when James or “Benny” were no longer around after the harvest in late summer, and in fact, we became friends. I lost contact with the pair after I went off to college, but I understand that Benjamin went on to finish college, and James had stayed around Liberty and eventually had a fine family of which he was very proud.
Let’s be clear about something here. I certainly do not pretend to understand the black experience in the United States. I am just offering some memories and reflections about growing up in a segregated town in in the South where the people were neither good nor bad any more than people in any other place in any direction of the compass--just people caught up in a vicious, negative pattern that had existed for centuries.
With the innocence of growing up in the country in those times, my brother and I were only dimly aware of the poverty of the black people who lived in the shanties in that special section of town that began with the “N” word. We knew the children went to one of those “separate but equal” schools, but we never had any contact. Every now and then at high school basketball or football games, it ran though my mind that maybe we should play the other Liberty High School.
I don’t go back to Liberty very much though it is not a reflection particularly of the people who live there; they are like people eveywhere. There’s just too much past in those parts for me, though white attitudes toward African-Americans have changed somewhat as far as I can tell.
Since the civil rights movement the schools are now successfully integrated. White people complained for a while, but in the end things worked out. The adults had the problems, not the children. From my sparse visits I saw for a couple of decades that blacks and white worked side by side in the furniture factories and sewing mills that used to predominate the area. Not the best work, but that was all that was available. Now, there is not much in the way of work around the town at all; most people commute to Greensboro or Burlington. There are few farmers left; many of them rich gentlemen “hobby” farmers.
Sometimes I think the South gets a bad rap; sometimes I don’t. For a long time I put the region down when talking with friends from other parts of the country. As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that the “redneck” mentality is everywhere; Southerners just have that hick-sounding accent.
The recent release of the movie, The Monster’s Ball, has placed the issue of southern racism and ignorance front and center in our consciousness. Debate rages on Internet forums about just how bad it is “down South.” Have white people in the South really changed? Certainly the South still remains the “whipping boy” of the country, especially for educated Americans.
These questions are too complex for so short an essay, though I as I mentioned previously, I do see many positive changes for minority opportunities both in my former home town and elsewhere in the South. These are just some thoughts and experiences that I have been wanting to express for a while.
I write only from my experience of those times and places as a white boy growing up in a rural environment in the South. Perhaps this quote from the poetry of Claude McKay, an influential literary and political figure of the Harlem Renaissance sets the boundaries for white expressions--however personal and even tangential--of the black experience:
So what I write is urged out of my blood.
There is not a white man who could write my book,
Though many think their story should be told
Of what the Negro people ought to brook.
Copyright 2002-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Published Suite101 - February 17, 2002
We die of cold and not of darkness.
~Miguel de Unamuno
Supposedly travelers on the trains of the Southern Railroad Line taunted departing passengers by parodying Patrick Henry’s patriotic words, Give me Liberty or give me Death. . .I’ll take Death! as the train started slowing to stop at the small town of Liberty, North Carolina.
To paraphrase Tennesse Williams, the “Milk Train” does not pass through Liberty anymore. It was before my time anyway, the era of the steam locomotive pulling into the old "Depot" that still stands on the tracks in the center of town as far as I know.
The taunt (a bit unfair perhaps) doubtless derived from the perceived dullness of the town, a place whose greatest claim to fame was the tying of the mayor’s race in the early ‘60s. While the name, Liberty, fairly rolls of the tongue, recalling visions of Lexington and Concord, I cannot help but wonder if I could have pronounced that name without dripping sarcasm if I had been a black living there prior to the '70s.
There were perhaps five stoplights, a rather large water tower visible for several miles, a town cop who drove around in a converted Buick most always chomping on a cigar; he was called “Lop.” He mostly chased teenagers driving hot rod Chevies or Fords; sometimes he caught one too, hair slicked back in a "ducktail" with large, plastic dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.
I am not sure how many black folks lived in the town where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. Actually, my family and I did not live in the town of some 1400 souls, but resided instead on a small farm about four miles down Highway 421, the real Tobacco Road, that if followed another 15 miles leads to Randleman, home of NASCAR legend, Richard Petty. Keep on going another few miles or so and you wind up in Greensboro where a number of black students from North Carolina A&T initiated sit-ins at the Woolworth Cafeteria in 1954.
In those Jim Crow days in which I grew up, I seldom saw black people shopping in the small downtown. Of course, there were never a lot of people shopping in downtown Liberty anyway, though the funeral home did a good business, having a monopoly on the business of death for a radius of several miles. Every member of the owner’s family drove a Cadillac; still do.
I remember the blacks sitting up in the balcony of the Curtis Theater; they had an entrance separate from us white breads. I especially remember Saturday matinees with Gene Autry or Roy Rogers features and maybe a Flash Gordon or Three Stooges short; sometimes I would get up and go for popcorn or candy and happen to glance up. There were throngs of children floating like little dark balloons over the auditorium.
In reflection, what I remember most about those Saturday matinees is the silence from that dark upper story. Little children are not quiet; they are boisterous; they yell and scream and laugh. It must have been a tedious nightmare to sit in almost total silence, sometimes the whispering between friends or a suppressed snicker at a Stooge drifted down into the first floor melee.
Movies were very cheap in those days; for a while only nine cents for a child. Town children used to stand outside the theater asking for pennies from their friends and neighbors so they could “go to the show.” I never saw any of the black kids doing that. And of course there were two sets of bathrooms, one for the whites and one for the “coloreds.”
Sometimes I would see a black child going in the special side entrance; It didn’t strike me very hard at nine or ten years old. I barely noticed and went back to my chemistry set or astronomy books or rode bikes with my brother around our grandparents’ farm.
In growing consciousness by junior year in high school, I had begun reading James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and especially Ralph Ellision. I read Ellison’s The Invisible Man, a novel that shows only too well what was going on in those days prior to civil rights movement. That book is far scarier than the most horrible blood sucker or acid-tongued alien because the characters in the novel are us, we who need as a species to grow in the consciousness of our connections at all levels, racial, soul or otherwise.
“I am an invisible man, this classic of the American experience begins. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If he registers on white consciousness at all, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."
I never really knew any black children until I was about fourteen, when my father hired two black teenagers to help us on the farm in the summer, harvesting. . .what else. . .tobacco. My brother and I really enjoyed James and Benjamin though. Being lonely country kids we were always on the lookout for playmates, and we all dearly enjoyed trying to hit each other with corn cobs or dirt clods when the adults were not around.
We were always sad when James or “Benny” were no longer around after the harvest in late summer, and in fact, we became friends. I lost contact with the pair after I went off to college, but I understand that Benjamin went on to finish college, and James had stayed around Liberty and eventually had a fine family of which he was very proud.
Let’s be clear about something here. I certainly do not pretend to understand the black experience in the United States. I am just offering some memories and reflections about growing up in a segregated town in in the South where the people were neither good nor bad any more than people in any other place in any direction of the compass--just people caught up in a vicious, negative pattern that had existed for centuries.
With the innocence of growing up in the country in those times, my brother and I were only dimly aware of the poverty of the black people who lived in the shanties in that special section of town that began with the “N” word. We knew the children went to one of those “separate but equal” schools, but we never had any contact. Every now and then at high school basketball or football games, it ran though my mind that maybe we should play the other Liberty High School.
I don’t go back to Liberty very much though it is not a reflection particularly of the people who live there; they are like people eveywhere. There’s just too much past in those parts for me, though white attitudes toward African-Americans have changed somewhat as far as I can tell.
Since the civil rights movement the schools are now successfully integrated. White people complained for a while, but in the end things worked out. The adults had the problems, not the children. From my sparse visits I saw for a couple of decades that blacks and white worked side by side in the furniture factories and sewing mills that used to predominate the area. Not the best work, but that was all that was available. Now, there is not much in the way of work around the town at all; most people commute to Greensboro or Burlington. There are few farmers left; many of them rich gentlemen “hobby” farmers.
Sometimes I think the South gets a bad rap; sometimes I don’t. For a long time I put the region down when talking with friends from other parts of the country. As I grew older, it slowly dawned on me that the “redneck” mentality is everywhere; Southerners just have that hick-sounding accent.
The recent release of the movie, The Monster’s Ball, has placed the issue of southern racism and ignorance front and center in our consciousness. Debate rages on Internet forums about just how bad it is “down South.” Have white people in the South really changed? Certainly the South still remains the “whipping boy” of the country, especially for educated Americans.
These questions are too complex for so short an essay, though I as I mentioned previously, I do see many positive changes for minority opportunities both in my former home town and elsewhere in the South. These are just some thoughts and experiences that I have been wanting to express for a while.
I write only from my experience of those times and places as a white boy growing up in a rural environment in the South. Perhaps this quote from the poetry of Claude McKay, an influential literary and political figure of the Harlem Renaissance sets the boundaries for white expressions--however personal and even tangential--of the black experience:
So what I write is urged out of my blood.
There is not a white man who could write my book,
Though many think their story should be told
Of what the Negro people ought to brook.
Copyright 2002-2010, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Bread and Circuses
By Thomas James Martin
Published Suite101 - August 12, 2003
It is hard NOT to write satire. ~Juvenal , Roman satirist, writing about the Rome of his time)
Every time I turn on the television these days, I cannot help but think of Juvenal. Yes, that's right, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, better known as Juvenal, an ancient Roman writer who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he wrote some of the most biting, bitter satires of ancient or modern times.
I cannot help but wonder what he would make of the "lamest medium;" television is full of distracting programs that must have the great Roman satirist turning in his grave.
In Juvenal's time (55-127 A.D.), the Roman Republic was but a distant memory as the power of the emperors grew stronger and stronger. The once proud Senate that had witnessed the splendid orations of Cato and Cicero—dominated and weakened year after year by the succession of dictators—atrophied into a figurehead of an institution. However, Juvenal felt that the populace took the duties of citizenship far more seriously during the days of the Republic than in the virtual dictatorships of the Caesars
.
He lamented that "the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddle no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses."
Those scornful words "bread and circuses," panem et circenses in Latin, become more meaningful when you understand that Roman citizens became increasingly addicted to free distributions of food and the violent gladiatorial and other contests held in the Coliseum and the chariot races of the Circus Maximus. He felt that Romans had lost the capacity to govern themselves so distracted by mindless self-gratification had they become.
Thus, bread and circuses, is a phrase now used to deplore a population so distracted with entertainment and personal pleasures (sometimes by design of those in power) that they no longer value the civic virtues and bow to civil authority with unquestioned obedience. Bread and Circuses has also become a general term for government policies that seek short-term solutions to public unrest.
Unfortunately, Juvenal's words apply quite strikingly to the United States, certainly a people who at the turn of the 3rd millennium are almost wholly distracted by cheap fast food (relative to other countries) and by the decadence of an entertainment industry that that deals so much in sex, violence and propaganda.
I wonder how our own mass distractions compare with those of Juvenal's era:
In ancient Rome, muscular men called gladiators (actually slaves from all parts of the empire) fought each other in front of thousands with swords and axes to the death. If they fought savagely and well, the emperor du jour might save the loser with a "thumbs up."
Hmm, muscular young men and women (many of whom are the descendants of slaves) contest for our allegiance in a complicated "box" while fighting desperately to overcome opponents and sell beer.
While the Romans threw Christians to the lions, we watch reality TV and watch young men and women devouring such appetizing concoctions as Pureed Centipede a la Mode or Black Pepper Grilled Scorpion with Grubs and Live Ants on the side.
Related to the prior bullet: Please note that for Romans who had eaten too much but who still wished to indulge themselves, there were "Vomitariums" available, rooms, where those feasting on delicacies superior than the ones mentioned above I am sure, lightly waved a feather against the back of their throats. . . Well, you get the picture.
Also playing on reality TV, more young men and women attempting to survive canoe trips on the Amazon without Off or other insect repellents while fending off hungry piranha and avoiding deadly snakes. Great fun! I sure do enjoy watching all that suffering.
We watch "electrons deify" dubious politicians into hero status while the economy worsens and matters of real nation security (such as our poorly guarded borders and mediocre safeguards for nuclear power stations) are ignored. I seem to recall that while Nero fiddled (actually more of a symbolic legend), no one paid much attention until the capital of the Empire started burning.
Viewed with a little distance, almost all television commercials are really satires of a low (certainly not high) order. I mean, really, who can watch those clips advertising prescription drugs without snickering. All those "feel good" scenes of couples playing on the beach or rolling around in grass without peeing or collapsing due to allergies are pure comic opera.
Now don't get me started on the television news! Ok, if you insist I will say just a few words. . .actually maybe only one: Condit. . .Now I know the man is not particularly likable maybe even somewhat reprehesible, but the media news--all of them but especially the "fair and balanced" one-- crucified the poor man in the court of public opinion. I seem to remember reading that in the United States we are innocent until proven guilty. For those of you not familiar with the "Roman Spectacle" that sometimes passes for TV news in this country, Gary Condit was a Democratic congressman from California who was investigated for the death of a politcal aide.
Disgracefully, the corporate news media gave the U.S. populace saturation coverage of this "non-event." Do you think it was a conspiracy to distract the people from various corporate accounting scandals and downright felonious actions of Enron et al? Who knows? Nevertheless, we were distracted!
Eventually the media feeding frenzy calmed down. Gary Condit was never charged with a in the death of Chandra Levy. Talk about the distraction of "bread and circuses!"
Which brings us to Jerry Springer. I am not sure there is a Roman correspondence here; the times being what they were, full of danger and intrigue, they probably did their best not to air dirty laundry in public (not always successfully, I fear). I just cannot see the Empress, Agrippina, getting up in the Forum and telling all about her adulterous escapades while her husband, the Emperor Claudius, waits offstage to be ushered into her presence where she confronts him and the assembled Patricians with her latest lover from the Praetorian Guard. (Though she did come close!)
Well, enough of this foolishness already! I do fear that Juvenal would probably be out of a job in the 21st century, since in our modern times we do not really need a literary genius of his calibre, only a humble scribe to write down the events of the day--epic or inconsequential--gleaned from the mass media, especially those on the small screen.
Yes, Decimus Junius, it is indeed hard NOT to write [down] satire in these times, in the midst of a civilization, whose people and (seemingly) its government are so consumed with panem et circenses, that it continually satirizes itself.
You probably would have liked Benjamin Franklin—our first great man of letters, and though not in your league as a writer of satire, was no slouch with words. Like you, he served human liberty. As the story goes, this exchange of conversation occurred as the now infirm 81-year old was carried out on a "sedan" from Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787 after he and the other 38 delegates had signed the Constitution:
"What kind of government do we have, Mr. Franklin?"
"A republic," the elderly statesman, writer and scientist replied, ". . .if you can keep it. . ."
Copyright 2003-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Back | Home | Up | Next
Published Suite101 - August 12, 2003
It is hard NOT to write satire. ~Juvenal , Roman satirist, writing about the Rome of his time)
Every time I turn on the television these days, I cannot help but think of Juvenal. Yes, that's right, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, better known as Juvenal, an ancient Roman writer who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he wrote some of the most biting, bitter satires of ancient or modern times.
I cannot help but wonder what he would make of the "lamest medium;" television is full of distracting programs that must have the great Roman satirist turning in his grave.
In Juvenal's time (55-127 A.D.), the Roman Republic was but a distant memory as the power of the emperors grew stronger and stronger. The once proud Senate that had witnessed the splendid orations of Cato and Cicero—dominated and weakened year after year by the succession of dictators—atrophied into a figurehead of an institution. However, Juvenal felt that the populace took the duties of citizenship far more seriously during the days of the Republic than in the virtual dictatorships of the Caesars
.
He lamented that "the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddle no more and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses."
Those scornful words "bread and circuses," panem et circenses in Latin, become more meaningful when you understand that Roman citizens became increasingly addicted to free distributions of food and the violent gladiatorial and other contests held in the Coliseum and the chariot races of the Circus Maximus. He felt that Romans had lost the capacity to govern themselves so distracted by mindless self-gratification had they become.
Thus, bread and circuses, is a phrase now used to deplore a population so distracted with entertainment and personal pleasures (sometimes by design of those in power) that they no longer value the civic virtues and bow to civil authority with unquestioned obedience. Bread and Circuses has also become a general term for government policies that seek short-term solutions to public unrest.
Unfortunately, Juvenal's words apply quite strikingly to the United States, certainly a people who at the turn of the 3rd millennium are almost wholly distracted by cheap fast food (relative to other countries) and by the decadence of an entertainment industry that that deals so much in sex, violence and propaganda.
I wonder how our own mass distractions compare with those of Juvenal's era:
In ancient Rome, muscular men called gladiators (actually slaves from all parts of the empire) fought each other in front of thousands with swords and axes to the death. If they fought savagely and well, the emperor du jour might save the loser with a "thumbs up."
Hmm, muscular young men and women (many of whom are the descendants of slaves) contest for our allegiance in a complicated "box" while fighting desperately to overcome opponents and sell beer.
While the Romans threw Christians to the lions, we watch reality TV and watch young men and women devouring such appetizing concoctions as Pureed Centipede a la Mode or Black Pepper Grilled Scorpion with Grubs and Live Ants on the side.
Related to the prior bullet: Please note that for Romans who had eaten too much but who still wished to indulge themselves, there were "Vomitariums" available, rooms, where those feasting on delicacies superior than the ones mentioned above I am sure, lightly waved a feather against the back of their throats. . . Well, you get the picture.
Also playing on reality TV, more young men and women attempting to survive canoe trips on the Amazon without Off or other insect repellents while fending off hungry piranha and avoiding deadly snakes. Great fun! I sure do enjoy watching all that suffering.
We watch "electrons deify" dubious politicians into hero status while the economy worsens and matters of real nation security (such as our poorly guarded borders and mediocre safeguards for nuclear power stations) are ignored. I seem to recall that while Nero fiddled (actually more of a symbolic legend), no one paid much attention until the capital of the Empire started burning.
Viewed with a little distance, almost all television commercials are really satires of a low (certainly not high) order. I mean, really, who can watch those clips advertising prescription drugs without snickering. All those "feel good" scenes of couples playing on the beach or rolling around in grass without peeing or collapsing due to allergies are pure comic opera.
Now don't get me started on the television news! Ok, if you insist I will say just a few words. . .actually maybe only one: Condit. . .Now I know the man is not particularly likable maybe even somewhat reprehesible, but the media news--all of them but especially the "fair and balanced" one-- crucified the poor man in the court of public opinion. I seem to remember reading that in the United States we are innocent until proven guilty. For those of you not familiar with the "Roman Spectacle" that sometimes passes for TV news in this country, Gary Condit was a Democratic congressman from California who was investigated for the death of a politcal aide.
Disgracefully, the corporate news media gave the U.S. populace saturation coverage of this "non-event." Do you think it was a conspiracy to distract the people from various corporate accounting scandals and downright felonious actions of Enron et al? Who knows? Nevertheless, we were distracted!
Eventually the media feeding frenzy calmed down. Gary Condit was never charged with a in the death of Chandra Levy. Talk about the distraction of "bread and circuses!"
Which brings us to Jerry Springer. I am not sure there is a Roman correspondence here; the times being what they were, full of danger and intrigue, they probably did their best not to air dirty laundry in public (not always successfully, I fear). I just cannot see the Empress, Agrippina, getting up in the Forum and telling all about her adulterous escapades while her husband, the Emperor Claudius, waits offstage to be ushered into her presence where she confronts him and the assembled Patricians with her latest lover from the Praetorian Guard. (Though she did come close!)
Well, enough of this foolishness already! I do fear that Juvenal would probably be out of a job in the 21st century, since in our modern times we do not really need a literary genius of his calibre, only a humble scribe to write down the events of the day--epic or inconsequential--gleaned from the mass media, especially those on the small screen.
Yes, Decimus Junius, it is indeed hard NOT to write [down] satire in these times, in the midst of a civilization, whose people and (seemingly) its government are so consumed with panem et circenses, that it continually satirizes itself.
You probably would have liked Benjamin Franklin—our first great man of letters, and though not in your league as a writer of satire, was no slouch with words. Like you, he served human liberty. As the story goes, this exchange of conversation occurred as the now infirm 81-year old was carried out on a "sedan" from Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787 after he and the other 38 delegates had signed the Constitution:
"What kind of government do we have, Mr. Franklin?"
"A republic," the elderly statesman, writer and scientist replied, ". . .if you can keep it. . ."
Copyright 2003-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
Back | Home | Up | Next
A Soldier's Christmas Memory
It was the evening before Christmas Eve, and I padded along in my boots headed for the snack bar where I hoped to have coffee and conversation with my army buddies.
New fallen Snow covered the streets of Blakeman Caserne near Frankfurt, Germany and brushed with angel hair even the rows of battle tanks lined up like toys on the barbed wire enclosed concrete field that determined the northern boundary of the U. S. Army post. I noticed that the fir trees surrounding the small pond that was the heart of the Caserne were filled with drifts of white snow, almost but certainly not quite making even an army post into a magical place for Christmas.
Actually, the multi-storied, stone barracks and service buildings taken over by the U.S. Army's Third Armored Division after World War II still had a little of that look of a medieval fortress as it row after row of buildings marched up the hill. Were it not for the uniformed servicemen and soldiers on guard duty walking around, a visitor might have felt that he/she had truly returned to the Olde Country for the Holidays.
This was my third Christmas in Germany, and God willing, it would surely be my last. I was tired of the military life with all my decisions being made for me, had only contempt for the military pecking order with its artificialities of respect and classification, and had rather unsuccessfully not managed to sublimate my desires sexual or otherwise into a bottle.
However, there was an almost sacred comradeship that developed among soldiers, and even at twenty, I realized that I would probably not know such friendships again in my life.
I had also learned to love the beautiful land of Goethe and Schilling even while casting a cold eye on times past while visiting Zeppelin Field in Nurnberg where the ghosts of millions continued to scream.
While on maneuvers, gazing at the village lights tucked like jewels into the foothills of the Wildflecken or falling asleep beside pools streaming starlight in the Schwarzenwald near Stuttgart, I felt as if I lived in some labyrinth of magic and mystery. In my soldier's loneliness, I awaited only a sweet, flaxen-haired Ariadne, whose eyes would hold me fast in their blue depths until locked in dreamy armor, we at last followed her silvery threads through those misty corridors to what. . .something more wondrous and finer than hard steel and a landscape of olive drab.
Walking along lost in thought, I suddenly felt a tremendous slap on my back that hurt just a little also. I stumbled a little and turned to look around for Father Brewer, the only person I knew who would dare deliver such a blow to a young GI, a "trained killer." Indeed, I thought I saw his slight figure up a head, hunched down into his overcoat against the damp chill of the German night. I thought I could make out that deep chuckle of his in the distance also.
I suppose that I should explain that Father Brewer was noted for giving these great Zen-like "whacks" on the back. You would be wandering around the post lost in your own thoughts when suddenly you would feel one of these powerful slaps. I mean, I am not talking some little friendly tap on the shoulder. No, I am talking big, powerful soul-rattling whacks that totally filled your consciousness for a second or two. You could not deny such an experience.
"Just wanted to be sure you were ok!" he said to me one time. Having through some wonderful but mysterious agency been the recipient of several of these "whacks," I had noted that usually he just smiled at you while holding your eyes with his crisp, blue ones.
The effect of Father Brewer's engaging rather "Zen-like" whacks should not be underestimated. To this day I remember that deep look, that sense of compassion and, feeling as he had shared some deep, unfathomable mystery of God with me.
I looked up, caught a deep breath of starlight, and started hurrying to catch up with Father Brewer. Once or twice we had shared coffee and some pleasant small talk. Suddenly I wanted that cup of coffee more than anything in the world, more even than getting out of the Army or sharing a real Christmas with a real girlfriend.
I went into the PX and then entered the snack bar. I looked around for the Father. I even asked a friend who was sipping coffee with a group of other soldiers at a table near the entrance to the snack bar, if they had seen the Father enter. No one seemed to have seen him that evening though.
I did not learn the truth until the formation the next day.
Standing stiffly at attention with several dozen other headquarter's personnel, various clerks, medics (such as I), cooks and signal personnel, I listened to Captain Aves, the company commander say
"Many of you knew Father Robert Brewer. You also know that he was recently transferred to Vietnam. Be it known that he died yesterday while leading services in a small village near Saigon. I do not know any other details.
"Remember, men, though I want you to enjoy the holidays, we must always we remember that we are soldiers first. Always be prepared to be called back to base if necessary.
"Dismissed!"
Youth is such a time of black and white, right and wrong. Everything is such high drama; even real tragedy so often becomes a mere melodrama. I remember sitting with a beer in the room in the barracks that we medics shared. I stared through the window engaging the darkness, pondering the meaning of life and death until Taps was finally played, ending my attempts at playing roles of great sadness and profundity.
Of course, I will never wonder who actually gave me such a bone-rattling whack on the back on that evening near Christmas at the height of the Vietnam War; I know and do not really care if you believe me or not. I actually seldom saw Father Brewer as I was not Catholic and did not know that he had so recently transferred to take up a chaplain's post in Vietnam.
Looking out that window into the ensuing darkness, I gaze from that selfsame window even now, as dusted with age and grave beyond stars, I write these words.
I did get out of the Army, though I stayed in Europe for a while, eventually winding my way back home to finish college and marry and proceed down some more of life's seemingly endless byways.
It was there in Germany though that I began to see that there is a true self that is at once all beauty and heart and intelligence. You cannot hold it even as you cannot hold the wind or spread the stars, hold onto your youth or hold your true love without trembling.
You will know it one day when you open a door and are suddenly engulfed by a yellow morning. You will know it when the fire you are making springs to life or as you watch each ember die. You can come to know it with every breath you take. You will know it when you reach with care for someone. You will know it when you are aware of the movement of life and death within yourself.
I first knew it when a certain priest came up behind me and whacked me on the back so hard it jarred my self awake.
Editor's Note:Though this story is quite autobiographical, I consider it a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. There are many barracks in Germany called Casernes (also Kasernes), but "Blakeman Caserne" is fictionalized though modeled after a real caserne.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/08/10
New fallen Snow covered the streets of Blakeman Caserne near Frankfurt, Germany and brushed with angel hair even the rows of battle tanks lined up like toys on the barbed wire enclosed concrete field that determined the northern boundary of the U. S. Army post. I noticed that the fir trees surrounding the small pond that was the heart of the Caserne were filled with drifts of white snow, almost but certainly not quite making even an army post into a magical place for Christmas.
Actually, the multi-storied, stone barracks and service buildings taken over by the U.S. Army's Third Armored Division after World War II still had a little of that look of a medieval fortress as it row after row of buildings marched up the hill. Were it not for the uniformed servicemen and soldiers on guard duty walking around, a visitor might have felt that he/she had truly returned to the Olde Country for the Holidays.
This was my third Christmas in Germany, and God willing, it would surely be my last. I was tired of the military life with all my decisions being made for me, had only contempt for the military pecking order with its artificialities of respect and classification, and had rather unsuccessfully not managed to sublimate my desires sexual or otherwise into a bottle.
However, there was an almost sacred comradeship that developed among soldiers, and even at twenty, I realized that I would probably not know such friendships again in my life.
I had also learned to love the beautiful land of Goethe and Schilling even while casting a cold eye on times past while visiting Zeppelin Field in Nurnberg where the ghosts of millions continued to scream.
While on maneuvers, gazing at the village lights tucked like jewels into the foothills of the Wildflecken or falling asleep beside pools streaming starlight in the Schwarzenwald near Stuttgart, I felt as if I lived in some labyrinth of magic and mystery. In my soldier's loneliness, I awaited only a sweet, flaxen-haired Ariadne, whose eyes would hold me fast in their blue depths until locked in dreamy armor, we at last followed her silvery threads through those misty corridors to what. . .something more wondrous and finer than hard steel and a landscape of olive drab.
Walking along lost in thought, I suddenly felt a tremendous slap on my back that hurt just a little also. I stumbled a little and turned to look around for Father Brewer, the only person I knew who would dare deliver such a blow to a young GI, a "trained killer." Indeed, I thought I saw his slight figure up a head, hunched down into his overcoat against the damp chill of the German night. I thought I could make out that deep chuckle of his in the distance also.
I suppose that I should explain that Father Brewer was noted for giving these great Zen-like "whacks" on the back. You would be wandering around the post lost in your own thoughts when suddenly you would feel one of these powerful slaps. I mean, I am not talking some little friendly tap on the shoulder. No, I am talking big, powerful soul-rattling whacks that totally filled your consciousness for a second or two. You could not deny such an experience.
"Just wanted to be sure you were ok!" he said to me one time. Having through some wonderful but mysterious agency been the recipient of several of these "whacks," I had noted that usually he just smiled at you while holding your eyes with his crisp, blue ones.
The effect of Father Brewer's engaging rather "Zen-like" whacks should not be underestimated. To this day I remember that deep look, that sense of compassion and, feeling as he had shared some deep, unfathomable mystery of God with me.
I looked up, caught a deep breath of starlight, and started hurrying to catch up with Father Brewer. Once or twice we had shared coffee and some pleasant small talk. Suddenly I wanted that cup of coffee more than anything in the world, more even than getting out of the Army or sharing a real Christmas with a real girlfriend.
I went into the PX and then entered the snack bar. I looked around for the Father. I even asked a friend who was sipping coffee with a group of other soldiers at a table near the entrance to the snack bar, if they had seen the Father enter. No one seemed to have seen him that evening though.
I did not learn the truth until the formation the next day.
Standing stiffly at attention with several dozen other headquarter's personnel, various clerks, medics (such as I), cooks and signal personnel, I listened to Captain Aves, the company commander say
"Many of you knew Father Robert Brewer. You also know that he was recently transferred to Vietnam. Be it known that he died yesterday while leading services in a small village near Saigon. I do not know any other details.
"Remember, men, though I want you to enjoy the holidays, we must always we remember that we are soldiers first. Always be prepared to be called back to base if necessary.
"Dismissed!"
Youth is such a time of black and white, right and wrong. Everything is such high drama; even real tragedy so often becomes a mere melodrama. I remember sitting with a beer in the room in the barracks that we medics shared. I stared through the window engaging the darkness, pondering the meaning of life and death until Taps was finally played, ending my attempts at playing roles of great sadness and profundity.
Of course, I will never wonder who actually gave me such a bone-rattling whack on the back on that evening near Christmas at the height of the Vietnam War; I know and do not really care if you believe me or not. I actually seldom saw Father Brewer as I was not Catholic and did not know that he had so recently transferred to take up a chaplain's post in Vietnam.
Looking out that window into the ensuing darkness, I gaze from that selfsame window even now, as dusted with age and grave beyond stars, I write these words.
I did get out of the Army, though I stayed in Europe for a while, eventually winding my way back home to finish college and marry and proceed down some more of life's seemingly endless byways.
It was there in Germany though that I began to see that there is a true self that is at once all beauty and heart and intelligence. You cannot hold it even as you cannot hold the wind or spread the stars, hold onto your youth or hold your true love without trembling.
You will know it one day when you open a door and are suddenly engulfed by a yellow morning. You will know it when the fire you are making springs to life or as you watch each ember die. You can come to know it with every breath you take. You will know it when you reach with care for someone. You will know it when you are aware of the movement of life and death within yourself.
I first knew it when a certain priest came up behind me and whacked me on the back so hard it jarred my self awake.
Editor's Note:Though this story is quite autobiographical, I consider it a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. There are many barracks in Germany called Casernes (also Kasernes), but "Blakeman Caserne" is fictionalized though modeled after a real caserne.
Copyright 2002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
This site was last updated 07/08/10
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