Sunday, May 18, 2008
"Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon" by Galen Green
Galen Green
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Saturday
November 24, 2007
(my late grandmother,
Phoebe Evans McCall's
127th birthday)
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Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon
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oh if we knew
if we knew what we needed if we even knew
the stars would look to us to guide them
-- W. S. Merwin, from "The Different Stars" (from The Carrier of Ladders; 1970)
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When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
-- from King Lear (Act iv, scene vi) by Wm. Shakespeare
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
If I might just possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're all going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. In this sense, what teacher, writer or grandparent can, after all, ever hope to wholly escape the taint of subjectivity? What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners (Odysseus being my personal favorite among them), from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning what I could along the way. This past summer and fall, I finally got around to reading The Education of Henry Adams , a book so nice I read it twice. And while neither of my grandfathers happened to have been President of the United States, nor any of my great-grandfathers to have been a signer of The Declaration of Independence; and while my own Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon has not been as well-financed nor as impressively peopled as was that of Henry Adams (1838 -- 1918), I couldn't help being struck by a handful of significant parallels between the process of his education and that of my own education. Foremost among these parallels would have to be the stark contrast between our so-called "formal" and "informal" education. In Henry Adams' case, the irony which inheres in this contrast pulses through every chapter of his chronicle to become, in the final analysis, one of the dominant themes in The Education of Henry Adams, and perhaps most inescapably in the title itself,
as though Adams were smiling at the reader from the corner of each page, saying to us: "Oh! Did you think that this was going to be about my schooling? Well, surprise!"
Thus, as you'd probably imagine, The Education of Henry Adams (published posthumously), like the education of Galen Green, turns out to have been a journey fraught with serendipity. Likewise, both his education and mine involve a considerable amount of self-education, i.e. autodidacticism.
Somewhere in his hefty classic, Adams even comes right out and says that (to paraphrase here) most of the burden of learning is in learning how to learn. For most human beings, living in most times and places and under most circumstances, learning how to learn translates as learning how to teach oneself.
So, if autodidacticism is such a nearly universal human experience, then why do we hear so little about it, here in the America of The Roaring Zeros? That's a very good question.
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”Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?)" That sounds a lot less pretentious than my comparing my autodidactical travelogue to the majestically mythical voyages, shipwrecks and heroic deeds of someone like Odysseus -- or, for that matter, to the Boston Brahmin, first-class, five-star, Henry Jamesish, aristocratic, genteel "education" of someone like Henry Adams.
I purchased a used book a year or so ago for a quarter (25 cents, American) entitled Blackberry Winter (My Early Years) by Margaret Mead (Wm. Morrow, 1972; 351 pages; hardcover). The Red Bridge Branch of the Mid-continent Public Library here in Kansas City was discarding it, most likely for lack of interest. I'd thumbed through it briefly then shelved it for future reference. It's been gathering dust in our office library at home ever since. Until last night. After I'd had a chance to read over what I'd written here yesterday, it "dawned on me" (as my late mother, Margaret, used to say) that the time had come for me to take down my dog-eared copy of Mead's memoir and revisit some of the immense admiration I'd felt for her back in the early 1970's, when she was at the sunset of her life and career and I as just beginning to mosey into the noonday of mine.
Not that I'm any kind of expert on Margaret Mead (1901 -- 1978); I'm not. I can guarantee you that the most mediocre second-year Cultural Anthropology major at the most third-rate of America's state universities probably knows ten times as much about Mead and her work as I ever will. That's mostly because Cultural Anthropology, strictly speaking, is not my "field." Nevertheless, I've found myself inspired and energized by Mead, her writing, her vigorous mind and vibrant imagination, and even her admittedly Gerry-rigged methodology, throughout the entirety of my own checkered career. And if I had adequate time to paint for you a detailed canvas of my own life and work in the 40 years since you and I graduated from high school there in Wichita, Kansas in 1967, I suspect that you'd understand in fairly short order the metaphorical parallels between Mead's "process" and mine.
Even so, I myself can easily understand how any comparison between my career and that of the illustrious Dr. Margaret Mead might strike most folks as laughable -- and even delusional . . . until they allowed themselves to get close enough to actually look inside the thing -- that thing being my own unique and fruitful Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. Throughout her career, Dr. Mead traveled to many exotic places, encountered and studied a number of previously underdocumented (or misdocumented) cultural patterns and survived to tell about it -- as have I. Where both she and I have run into the troublesome teeth and claws of monstrous theocratic disapproval has been to do with the taboo factor. To put it much more simply that "it" deserves to be put: Most of the cultural patterns which both Margaret Mead and I survived to tell about turned out not to be what the powers that be (and the stooges of the powers that be) WANTED for us to have learned. Both her field notes and mine contained a bit too much inconvenient truth.
This is, of course, one of the main reasons why The Autodidactikon which is the natural habitat of any investigative journalist, cultural anthropologist or mythoklastic therapist worth his or her salt, has lost favor with "the academy;" inconvenient truth, taboo truth, scientifically verifiable truth, etc . . . are the inevitable products of any clear-minded honest inquiry. But exactly what, you may be asking, do I mean by The Autodidactikon?
Because it is a construct, a useful fiction, a metaphor, existing in the imagination (albeit, the most rational realms of the imagination), let's settle, for now, on the following functional definition: The Autodidactikon is that otherwise indefinable passageway through which every human creature voyages in his or her (hopefully lifelong) process of inviting the world, nature, the cosmos, etc. to teach him or her whatever is worth knowing. Another way of putting it might be to say that The Autodidactikon is that inextricably interwoven braid of modes, means, and media whereby we teach ourselves "stuff," i.e. wherewith we do autodidacticism.
I personally imagine The Autodidactikon to be both (and inexplicably simultaneously) a marvelous machine, like the fabled orgasmatron and a bright azure sea over which I voyage from shipwreck to shipwreck -- the total phantasmagorical experience of which I nickname "wisdom."
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I spoke earlier of my immense admiration for Margaret Mead and of how I've been inspired and energized in my own life and work by the example of hers. This fact notwithstanding, Dr. Mead is only one of hundreds of heroes, heroines, role models and shining examples whose lives and works find miraculous convergence in my mind's night sky to guide me like some inner Bethlehem Star to where I seem to need to go.
But of all the constituent parts of that blazing star, my #1 hero (rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly) has to be that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's wonderful story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," to exclaim out loud what no one else is willing to: that the emperor is naked. As I always like to point out, however: the teller ends his tale there because, as it is aimed at children, it cannot share with its fragile audience the hideous scene which ensues a few seconds later, when the crowd of other onlookers, gathered there in the street to watch the royal procession, turns on the little boy -- my little all-time #1 hero -- like a pack of wild dogs, and stones him to death. Worst of all: it turns out to be his very own family, standing right there beside him in that crowd, who cast the first stones. But, after all: has it ever been otherwise?
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Which brings us to The Stockholm Syndrome, The Lynch Mob Syndrome and The Scapegoat Syndrome. If I were some kind of Margaret Mead from, say, Jupiter, sent here to these United States of America, here in The Roaring Zeros, on a secret mission to "go native" or to "go underground" in order to observe, study and analyze the indigenous population of this place and time -- their (our) cultural patterns and such -- I know for a fact that I'd begin my field notes with a systematic analysis of these three virtually universal patterns of group behavior: The Stockholm Syndrome (It's not just for hostage situations anymore -- and never was!), The Lynch Mob Syndrome (Now an equal opportunity abuser!), and The Scapegoat Syndrome (Power is freedom from responsibility!).
Although the vantage point which Destiny hath dealt me lacks the exotic appeal of a Latter-Day Margaret Mead From Jupiter, I find that I have, in fact, been blessed with enough of an outsider status so as to allow me to observe my fellow Earthlings with what feels to me like just the right degree of detachment so as to perhaps serve as a humble conduit for our learning a little something new and useful about ourselves -- about how we go about being what we are.
Detachment, yes. Distance, no. In fact, it feels to me as though this outsider status which Destiny hath dealt me has, paradoxically, drawn me closer to those around me -- regardless of my literal physical proximity to them, whether measured in centimeters or kilometers. It's as though, being kin to nobody, I've intuitively opted to let myself be kin to everybody.
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Shannon, do you happen to recall what grade we'd have been in when that asphalt "inner" play area (the one for playing four square and hopscotch and for jumping rope -- and for rainy sloppy days in general) was laid down at Fairmount Elementary, between the big red brick main school building and those ticky-tacky green annexes surrounding it and separating it from the expansive outer, dirt & sand, playground? Would it have been around 1957 and, therefore, when we'd have been, say, in Mrs. James' 2nd grade class together? (And, therefore, perhaps 7 or 8 years old?) The reason I'm asking is this:
For the past half century, I've had this recurring image -- actually an entire recurring moment -- a flashback of sorts -- but the blessed blissful opposite of those flashbacks produced by PTSD. It seems to be stirred every time I see workmen spreading fresh hot asphalt with their rakes and shovels and hoes. I suspect that that unmistakable odor of fresh hot asphalt is as much the initial sensory trigger as are any of the visuals.
The flashback to which I'm referring is of a small crew of perhaps 6 or 8 African-American workmen "laying down" that asphalt play area at Fairmount Elementary, one temperate afternoon while our class was outside for recess. I remember that the area where they were doing the pouring and spreading and leveling out of the asphalt which would, the next day, have cooled and hardened into our new play area was cordoned off to prevent curious little heathens such as myself from tramping around in this sticky stinky mess. But what I recall most persistently vividly is my epiphanal experience of gazing out through my insatiably curious hazel eyes at one workman in particular, a somewhat stocky middle-aged fellow, who was putting the finishing touches on the project with the aid of a kind of heavy-duty custodian's push broom. He was dressed in what amounted to rags and tatters -- at least in my wistful reminiscence of the scene -- but he struck me as being strangely free, bent over as he was like an antebellum field hand, performing the very type of grungy manual labor my parents were endlessly warning me that I myself would be stuck with, if I didn't apply myself with sufficient diligence in school.
To put this indelible epiphany into proper perspective, Shannon, let me hasten to emphasize here that I actually enjoyed going to school. Even so, it was at that mystical moment that I first felt kindled within my soul some vague longing to be free in the same sense in which my naive brain mythologized this overworked Black man's being free.
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The more pertinent point I was trying to make, however, in sharing this early childhood epiphany with you, Shannon, was that I now look back on that moment of epiphany as the moment I crossed a metaphorical threshold to make my quiet entrance into The Autodidactikon. That's because it was the moment at which I first began to begin to realize that I was realizing that, as much as I enjoyed school, there was a big wide world just beyond whatever cordon did or did not separate me from it, a world no further from my five hungry senses than was that overworked Black man, smoothing out the fresh hot asphalt that day on the school ground, whom I imagined to be so free. As a psychotherapist, you could have told me that it was my own freedom, and not that workman's, that I was suddenly becoming aware of for the first time, that afternoon at recess.
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I believe that it was Mark Twain who famously said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." And I suppose that, in some sense, this pithy quote could be adopted as the motto of every autodidact, inscribed in huge lettering over the door to The Autodidactikon -- except that there's more to it than that. Didn't Mark Twain have the equivalent of a 4th grade education? And Abraham Lincoln, no intellectual slouch, was in pretty much the same boat, as were Benjamin Franklin and Socrates.
What I want to know is this: Could folks such as Mark Twain and Lincoln have acquired the "education" they did and born the magnificent fruits they bore, had they poured the precious time and energy of their youth into graduating with good grades from a modern American high school and then going on to struggle through college and graduate school? While the answer to such a question is obviously unknowable, I personally believe that it's worthy of our attention, contemplation and discussion. (Don't you?)
An even more worthwhile question for me is this: How do we go about presenting every child born onto this "great stage of fools" a magical gold ticket to The Autodidactikon?
We both know that we can't.
We also both know that, here in The Roaring Zeros, it requires both knowledge and wisdom - both a tremendous amount of schooling and a lifelong voyage through The Autodidactikon -- for most of us to merely squeak by. Despite our both knowing this, I can see and hear all around me everyday a sizable majority of the local citizenry (including many who are educated enough to know better) proclaiming the fashionable fantasy which constitutes so-called "conventional wisdom."
Not that it's ever been otherwise. It never has been. My favorite books of the bible, the three which I always recommend to young people who want to go straight to the heart of the matter, are the psalms, the proverbs and Ecclesiastes. (By the way: have you had a chance yet to check out my blog that's entitled Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)? I named it after my single favorite passage of scripture -- for those who want to go straight to the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter. Moreover, it goes straight to the heart of today's homily: I mean the one you're reading at this very instant.)
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As nearly as I can recall, it would have been sometime during the summer of 1964 -- between the 9th and 10th grades, between our years at Brooks Junior High and our years at East High, between the JFK assassination and LBJ's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, when I'd just turned 15 years old -- that I decided to focus my energies on becoming a writer. Well, let me correct that statement right up front: It was sometime during the summer of 1964 that I figured out that I was destined to become some sort of writer. I'm underscoring this correction in my wording here because, looking back, I can see clearly that my moving with increasing intentionality, beginning sometime during the summer of 1964, toward a life of writing was, to be perfectly honest about it, no more a conscious decision on my part than was my being destined to pursue a heterosexual lifestyle or to enter into what others before me had referred to as "a life of the mind" or to incorporate into the deep structure of my personal modalities my father's practical toolmaking skills and my mother's wry sense of humor and touch of the poet.
Be that as it may, because of all the recreational writing in the which I happened to find myself caught up during my 15th summer here on earth and because of the indescribably special way the process of that writing made me feel, I also found myself beginning to make some decisions about how I wanted to go about my life of writing. Or, more accurately: I found myself beginning to be impelled by the midwife of Destiny toward cultivating a talent which said midwife was then in the process of convincing me I might possibly possess, for what I now, in the fullness of time, find myself impelled to name "Mythoklastic Therapy."
A simpler way of putting this might be to say that I began to begin, sometime during the summer 1964, to give myself to an attitude of writing which involved learning lots of new things and then thinking about those things for a while and then passing my mostly processed thoughts along to my readers -- metaphorically somewhat like a cow turning grass into milk. For the sake of brevity, let's agree for the moment to call that end product which I ended up putting into some form or other of writing to share with my readers back then "insight."
This attitude of writing to which I began to begin giving myself, sometime during the summer of 1964, this sharing of what I thought of as my "insight" with my dozen or so readers, worked sufficiently well for me for the 15 or so years that followed. When my first wife, Kate Schulte, and I split up near the end of 1976, however, I found myself going -- as we used to say back then -- "through some major changes." The major change which most closely pertains to today's theme involved my turning away from composing free verse poetry and prose poems and submitting them for publication (with respectable but increasingly unsatisfying success) to literary magazines. It was around this period
Songs had been my first love. (Although, psychoanalytically speaking, my real first love may have been the sound of my own voice, which the songs I learned from other people simply provided me with an excuse to enjoy without undue opprobrium. Throughout our years together at East High School (1964 -- 1967), I had composed somewhere between 30 and 50 songs, a handful of which I can still remember parts of, from time to time. (Mentioning this here reminds me that I've thus far completely omitted from my Autodidactical Travelogue the tedious, clumsy and only moderately successful process of my "teaching myself" to play the guitar and harmonica. We'll try to come back to recounting that particular leg of my Autodidactical Voyage somewhere up ahead. OK?)
I guess that all I'm really trying to say here is that, when I put poetry on the back burner to take up songwriting, sometime during the winter of 1978, it marked a significant turning point in my Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. That's because it marked a kind of paradigm shift in my understanding of for whom I was writing and of from where inside me that writing was coming and what I expected to happen, both within my perceived audience and within me, as a result of this "new" art form to which I was inviting myself to return for the first time in nearly a decade.
And why am I telling you all this, Shannon? What does this late-1970's paradigm shift in my way of thinking about myself as a writer have to do with anything or everything else I've tried to articulate here today?
I suppose that the briefest answer to this question of pertinence would have to be that the breakup with Kate seems to have, in a mostly positive sense, jarred something loose inside my psyche. I'm guessing that, for you as an experienced psychotherapist, the big bouquet of epiphanies I experienced between the autumn of 1976 and the autumn of 1979, must surely resembled the sort of story that you've heard recounted hundreds of times in your office over the years.
As I said at the outset of today's homily: I sometimes feel as though I'm some ancient mariner, swept along by the winds of Destiny, History and Random Chance from island to island, striving mightily to take a few halfway decent field notes as I'm swept along in my Taboo Voyage. What I managed to write down as a "Poet of the 70's" represented one type of field notes. The 200 or so songs which came out of me between 1977 and 1991 represented a second type. The thousands of pages of journal entries and personal correspondence I've produced, over the past 40 years, have represented a third. The field notes which have poured forth in recent years in the form of legal briefs, affidavits, and firsthand accounts of sociopolitical conflict, corporate corruption and abuses committed in the name of organized religion and misbegotten labor relations represent a fourth. And finally, the types of rough drafts of various philosophical treatises, flimsily disguised as installments and/or fragments of this chronicle of my life and times, with the working title of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, one such installment of which you hold in your hands at this very moment, represent a fifth.
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Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?) But what of the islands themselves? What have they been? And why do I keep insisting on calling my (hopefully lifelong) voyage through The Autodidactikon a taboo voyage? What is there about it which makes it taboo?
Once again, I'm going to grab for the briefest accurate answer I know to offer: The reason why I refer to my voyage through the autodidactikon (through lifelong, postgraduate self-education, in other words) as taboo is because of the simple fact that even the least mention of any of what I've learned along the way, no matter how innocent, well-intentioned and humanitarian, invariably has the effect of upsetting, disturbing, displeasing . . . nearly everybody. I mean to say that, by comparison, the "Inconvenient Truth" referenced in the title of Al Gore's award-winning documentary on global warming cannot hold a candlepower of inconvenience to the supernova of inconvenience invariably provoked by the slightest iota of reportage from the copious field notes I've scribbled down throughout the course of my taboo voyage.
Inconvenient, taboo, unfashionable, unpopular, distasteful, off-putting -- it all comes down to the same thing. What's a Mythoklastic Therapist to do? For lack of any better suggestions, let us now bow our heads and observe a moment of silence in memory of that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" to shatter - to klast, as the prototypical Mythoklast -- the myth, i.e. the convenient, fashionable lie that the emperor is richly attired rather than completely naked -- and who is immediately stoned to death for his . . . insight.
Bob Dylan, in an excellent song entitled "Dirge," on his relatively obscure Planet Waves album (1973?), reminds us that "the naked truth is still taboo, whenever it can be seen." Truer words were, of course, never spoken. So, Shannon, another way of saying what I've just now failed to say very well is that my taboo voyage is taboo because its product, the fruit it has born, i.e. my writing, my insight, has turned out to be nothing more or less than the naked truth, which is, by Dylan's highly credible definition, taboo.
I trust you to believe me when I assure you that, at least on a conscious level, when I decided to give myself to a life of writing, back during the summer of 1964, at the age of 15, all those years ago, I never expected my honest, clear-headed reportage to turn out to be anathema. And yet, here we are. Analogous to the little boy who blurted out that the emperor was naked, which was the last thing that anyone wanted to hear, I now find myself approaching the age of 60 having written the 5, 000-page equivalent of "the emperor is naked."
I can't help being reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw several years ago. It shows the minister of some respectable, bourgeois looking protestant church, running for his life, out the front door of the church, with an angry mob of his own parishioners hot on his heels, obviously thirsty for his blood. We then see that the title of his sermon that morning was: "Are We All Prostitutes?" The chief difference between his predicament and mine is that, instead of being met with an open, vocal, aggressive hostility which might conceivably have been answered publicly, the hostility to my 5,000-page sermon (my field notes -- in all those manifestations mentioned a few pages back) have been met, for the most part, with a chilly, ostracizing, passive aggressive silence. (Well, so far, so good.)
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But all metaphors break down and fall apart at some point, sooner or later. It's just a matter of where and when. Here's where my metaphor breaks down and falls apart:
Were Galen Green, indeed, some windswept ancient mariner, come back from some buffeted voyage to faraway places inhabited by some exotic race of beings who were practically incapable of telling the truth, who labored beneath the crushing weight of a complete misinterpretation of the cosmos, themselves and one another, and who were, thereby, in the process of destroying themselves, their fellow creatures and their habitat -- then that Galen Green, come home at last, like some Odysseus or Gulliver, would most likely encounter an enthusiastically receptive audience.
But the actual "faraway places" from which Galen Green has returned, with his journals crammed with the field notes described above, the actual exotic countries I've visited -- island by island by island -- in the course of my Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon , have mostly been within the continent of North America, many of them no further away geographically than the outermost reaches of my own epidermis. How this actuality translates, of course, is into the acknowledgement that the aforementioned exotic beings who inhabit these various and sundry "islands" I've visited in my aforementioned windswept voyage are (for the most part) none other than My Fellow Americans.
Thus, I return bearing the incomparable gift of Mythoklastic Therapy. That's the good news. The bad news is that, as is the case with so many other modes of truly effective healing, Mythoklastic Therapy can often prove to be a rather bitter, jagged pill to swallow. Or, to latch onto a somewhat different metaphor: Mythoklastic Therapy can, at times, demand more of the patient than he or she is prepared to give. Or, to flog our theme here with more metaphors than may seem necessary: Mythoklastic Therapy may simply turn out to be a bridge to liberation, empowerment and improved inner wellness . . . his or her half of which the average patient is either unwilling or unable to build.
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Remember the Firesign Theater? A kind of radio acting company -- unique, and yet not entirely unlike the early Monty Python or perhaps a few of the better radio skits you might have heard over the past 25 years on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion (the NPR program, not the Robert Altman swan song). Very popular with certain of us, back in the late 1960's and early 70's. (And they've recently made a startlingly impressive comeback of sorts, by the by.)
Anyway, back in 1974, the Firesign Theater released a comedy record album entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong. I love that title: So utterly straightforward. And for a given segment of the populace, I'm afraid that it's probably an accurate assessment. That is to say that everything they know IS wrong. For the vast majority of us, however, it's probably safer to say that everything you know is wrong serves us best as a cautionary mantra. When, in future installments, I finally get around to revealing -- either systematically or haphazardly -- some of the specifics of what each of the islands upon which I've been shipwrecked has taught me, I'm confidant that it will become clear why I bothered to mention the phrase "Everything You Know Is Wrong" at this early juncture. In point of fact, my reasoning goes straight to the heart of my motive for deciding the attempt to compile The Toolmaker’s Other Son -- in other words, a patchwork of observational discourses and reminiscences of my life and times, of which today's letter has been but a small part.
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And what are the names of the islands we'll be visiting? I haven't decided yet. Trying to choose their names is part of why I'm writing this to you today. What I have decided today is that I still have a considerable amount of processing to do.
If I might possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners, from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning along the way. In my own case, however, most of the foreign places have been within the borders of my native land, and what I keep referring to as "islands" are actually those watershed episodes in my life, those epiphanal bends in the river, those peak experiences, which have, for better or worse, proven most worth "writing home" about. Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat!!!)
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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P.S.
Preview of Coming Attractions:
When we're able to observe an object or a phenomenon from 3 different locations, we call it "triangulation." Therefore, I suppose that observing a thing from 5 different locations might be called "pentangulation;" from 8 different locations, "octangulation" -- and so forth. Ah, but how much more sublime our perspective when we find ourselves with, let's say, a dozen or a thousand locations ("islands") from which to view whatever it might be that we're observing!
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Coda:
LITTLE BROTHER
Little Brother, life is like a boat.
And rowing it all day, your arms get tired.
Your little soul will fly up to its rafter
And look down to where you hang your little coat.
Little Brother, life is poorly wired.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after.
You toss and ride upon life’s purple sea
And dream about a land you once desired.
Little Brother, life will have its laughter,
But please don’t take this as a guarantee
That you’ll have laughed your fill before you end
Or gaze at life forever from your rafter.
Little Brother, you may not agree
That life is both your lover and your friend.
It all depends on what you think you’re after.
But life has loved and walked away from me.
Little Brother, life is what you float upon
And what will break you ‘til you bend.
Little Brother, yesterday I wrote
This note upon a page too torn to ever mend.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1980
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(working title for) A Memoir by Galen Green
Copyright 2005 - 2007 by Galen Green
All Rights Reserved
/gg
mythoklast@mailstation.com
msmith2210@aol.com
Saturday
November 24, 2007
(my late grandmother,
Phoebe Evans McCall's
127th birthday)
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Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon
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oh if we knew
if we knew what we needed if we even knew
the stars would look to us to guide them
-- W. S. Merwin, from "The Different Stars" (from The Carrier of Ladders; 1970)
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When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
-- from King Lear (Act iv, scene vi) by Wm. Shakespeare
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Dear Shannon (& Co.),
If I might just possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're all going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. In this sense, what teacher, writer or grandparent can, after all, ever hope to wholly escape the taint of subjectivity? What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners (Odysseus being my personal favorite among them), from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning what I could along the way. This past summer and fall, I finally got around to reading The Education of Henry Adams , a book so nice I read it twice. And while neither of my grandfathers happened to have been President of the United States, nor any of my great-grandfathers to have been a signer of The Declaration of Independence; and while my own Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon has not been as well-financed nor as impressively peopled as was that of Henry Adams (1838 -- 1918), I couldn't help being struck by a handful of significant parallels between the process of his education and that of my own education. Foremost among these parallels would have to be the stark contrast between our so-called "formal" and "informal" education. In Henry Adams' case, the irony which inheres in this contrast pulses through every chapter of his chronicle to become, in the final analysis, one of the dominant themes in The Education of Henry Adams, and perhaps most inescapably in the title itself,
as though Adams were smiling at the reader from the corner of each page, saying to us: "Oh! Did you think that this was going to be about my schooling? Well, surprise!"
Thus, as you'd probably imagine, The Education of Henry Adams (published posthumously), like the education of Galen Green, turns out to have been a journey fraught with serendipity. Likewise, both his education and mine involve a considerable amount of self-education, i.e. autodidacticism.
Somewhere in his hefty classic, Adams even comes right out and says that (to paraphrase here) most of the burden of learning is in learning how to learn. For most human beings, living in most times and places and under most circumstances, learning how to learn translates as learning how to teach oneself.
So, if autodidacticism is such a nearly universal human experience, then why do we hear so little about it, here in the America of The Roaring Zeros? That's a very good question.
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”Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?)" That sounds a lot less pretentious than my comparing my autodidactical travelogue to the majestically mythical voyages, shipwrecks and heroic deeds of someone like Odysseus -- or, for that matter, to the Boston Brahmin, first-class, five-star, Henry Jamesish, aristocratic, genteel "education" of someone like Henry Adams.
I purchased a used book a year or so ago for a quarter (25 cents, American) entitled Blackberry Winter (My Early Years) by Margaret Mead (Wm. Morrow, 1972; 351 pages; hardcover). The Red Bridge Branch of the Mid-continent Public Library here in Kansas City was discarding it, most likely for lack of interest. I'd thumbed through it briefly then shelved it for future reference. It's been gathering dust in our office library at home ever since. Until last night. After I'd had a chance to read over what I'd written here yesterday, it "dawned on me" (as my late mother, Margaret, used to say) that the time had come for me to take down my dog-eared copy of Mead's memoir and revisit some of the immense admiration I'd felt for her back in the early 1970's, when she was at the sunset of her life and career and I as just beginning to mosey into the noonday of mine.
Not that I'm any kind of expert on Margaret Mead (1901 -- 1978); I'm not. I can guarantee you that the most mediocre second-year Cultural Anthropology major at the most third-rate of America's state universities probably knows ten times as much about Mead and her work as I ever will. That's mostly because Cultural Anthropology, strictly speaking, is not my "field." Nevertheless, I've found myself inspired and energized by Mead, her writing, her vigorous mind and vibrant imagination, and even her admittedly Gerry-rigged methodology, throughout the entirety of my own checkered career. And if I had adequate time to paint for you a detailed canvas of my own life and work in the 40 years since you and I graduated from high school there in Wichita, Kansas in 1967, I suspect that you'd understand in fairly short order the metaphorical parallels between Mead's "process" and mine.
Even so, I myself can easily understand how any comparison between my career and that of the illustrious Dr. Margaret Mead might strike most folks as laughable -- and even delusional . . . until they allowed themselves to get close enough to actually look inside the thing -- that thing being my own unique and fruitful Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. Throughout her career, Dr. Mead traveled to many exotic places, encountered and studied a number of previously underdocumented (or misdocumented) cultural patterns and survived to tell about it -- as have I. Where both she and I have run into the troublesome teeth and claws of monstrous theocratic disapproval has been to do with the taboo factor. To put it much more simply that "it" deserves to be put: Most of the cultural patterns which both Margaret Mead and I survived to tell about turned out not to be what the powers that be (and the stooges of the powers that be) WANTED for us to have learned. Both her field notes and mine contained a bit too much inconvenient truth.
This is, of course, one of the main reasons why The Autodidactikon which is the natural habitat of any investigative journalist, cultural anthropologist or mythoklastic therapist worth his or her salt, has lost favor with "the academy;" inconvenient truth, taboo truth, scientifically verifiable truth, etc . . . are the inevitable products of any clear-minded honest inquiry. But exactly what, you may be asking, do I mean by The Autodidactikon?
Because it is a construct, a useful fiction, a metaphor, existing in the imagination (albeit, the most rational realms of the imagination), let's settle, for now, on the following functional definition: The Autodidactikon is that otherwise indefinable passageway through which every human creature voyages in his or her (hopefully lifelong) process of inviting the world, nature, the cosmos, etc. to teach him or her whatever is worth knowing. Another way of putting it might be to say that The Autodidactikon is that inextricably interwoven braid of modes, means, and media whereby we teach ourselves "stuff," i.e. wherewith we do autodidacticism.
I personally imagine The Autodidactikon to be both (and inexplicably simultaneously) a marvelous machine, like the fabled orgasmatron and a bright azure sea over which I voyage from shipwreck to shipwreck -- the total phantasmagorical experience of which I nickname "wisdom."
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I spoke earlier of my immense admiration for Margaret Mead and of how I've been inspired and energized in my own life and work by the example of hers. This fact notwithstanding, Dr. Mead is only one of hundreds of heroes, heroines, role models and shining examples whose lives and works find miraculous convergence in my mind's night sky to guide me like some inner Bethlehem Star to where I seem to need to go.
But of all the constituent parts of that blazing star, my #1 hero (rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly) has to be that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's wonderful story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," to exclaim out loud what no one else is willing to: that the emperor is naked. As I always like to point out, however: the teller ends his tale there because, as it is aimed at children, it cannot share with its fragile audience the hideous scene which ensues a few seconds later, when the crowd of other onlookers, gathered there in the street to watch the royal procession, turns on the little boy -- my little all-time #1 hero -- like a pack of wild dogs, and stones him to death. Worst of all: it turns out to be his very own family, standing right there beside him in that crowd, who cast the first stones. But, after all: has it ever been otherwise?
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Which brings us to The Stockholm Syndrome, The Lynch Mob Syndrome and The Scapegoat Syndrome. If I were some kind of Margaret Mead from, say, Jupiter, sent here to these United States of America, here in The Roaring Zeros, on a secret mission to "go native" or to "go underground" in order to observe, study and analyze the indigenous population of this place and time -- their (our) cultural patterns and such -- I know for a fact that I'd begin my field notes with a systematic analysis of these three virtually universal patterns of group behavior: The Stockholm Syndrome (It's not just for hostage situations anymore -- and never was!), The Lynch Mob Syndrome (Now an equal opportunity abuser!), and The Scapegoat Syndrome (Power is freedom from responsibility!).
Although the vantage point which Destiny hath dealt me lacks the exotic appeal of a Latter-Day Margaret Mead From Jupiter, I find that I have, in fact, been blessed with enough of an outsider status so as to allow me to observe my fellow Earthlings with what feels to me like just the right degree of detachment so as to perhaps serve as a humble conduit for our learning a little something new and useful about ourselves -- about how we go about being what we are.
Detachment, yes. Distance, no. In fact, it feels to me as though this outsider status which Destiny hath dealt me has, paradoxically, drawn me closer to those around me -- regardless of my literal physical proximity to them, whether measured in centimeters or kilometers. It's as though, being kin to nobody, I've intuitively opted to let myself be kin to everybody.
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Shannon, do you happen to recall what grade we'd have been in when that asphalt "inner" play area (the one for playing four square and hopscotch and for jumping rope -- and for rainy sloppy days in general) was laid down at Fairmount Elementary, between the big red brick main school building and those ticky-tacky green annexes surrounding it and separating it from the expansive outer, dirt & sand, playground? Would it have been around 1957 and, therefore, when we'd have been, say, in Mrs. James' 2nd grade class together? (And, therefore, perhaps 7 or 8 years old?) The reason I'm asking is this:
For the past half century, I've had this recurring image -- actually an entire recurring moment -- a flashback of sorts -- but the blessed blissful opposite of those flashbacks produced by PTSD. It seems to be stirred every time I see workmen spreading fresh hot asphalt with their rakes and shovels and hoes. I suspect that that unmistakable odor of fresh hot asphalt is as much the initial sensory trigger as are any of the visuals.
The flashback to which I'm referring is of a small crew of perhaps 6 or 8 African-American workmen "laying down" that asphalt play area at Fairmount Elementary, one temperate afternoon while our class was outside for recess. I remember that the area where they were doing the pouring and spreading and leveling out of the asphalt which would, the next day, have cooled and hardened into our new play area was cordoned off to prevent curious little heathens such as myself from tramping around in this sticky stinky mess. But what I recall most persistently vividly is my epiphanal experience of gazing out through my insatiably curious hazel eyes at one workman in particular, a somewhat stocky middle-aged fellow, who was putting the finishing touches on the project with the aid of a kind of heavy-duty custodian's push broom. He was dressed in what amounted to rags and tatters -- at least in my wistful reminiscence of the scene -- but he struck me as being strangely free, bent over as he was like an antebellum field hand, performing the very type of grungy manual labor my parents were endlessly warning me that I myself would be stuck with, if I didn't apply myself with sufficient diligence in school.
To put this indelible epiphany into proper perspective, Shannon, let me hasten to emphasize here that I actually enjoyed going to school. Even so, it was at that mystical moment that I first felt kindled within my soul some vague longing to be free in the same sense in which my naive brain mythologized this overworked Black man's being free.
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The more pertinent point I was trying to make, however, in sharing this early childhood epiphany with you, Shannon, was that I now look back on that moment of epiphany as the moment I crossed a metaphorical threshold to make my quiet entrance into The Autodidactikon. That's because it was the moment at which I first began to begin to realize that I was realizing that, as much as I enjoyed school, there was a big wide world just beyond whatever cordon did or did not separate me from it, a world no further from my five hungry senses than was that overworked Black man, smoothing out the fresh hot asphalt that day on the school ground, whom I imagined to be so free. As a psychotherapist, you could have told me that it was my own freedom, and not that workman's, that I was suddenly becoming aware of for the first time, that afternoon at recess.
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I believe that it was Mark Twain who famously said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." And I suppose that, in some sense, this pithy quote could be adopted as the motto of every autodidact, inscribed in huge lettering over the door to The Autodidactikon -- except that there's more to it than that. Didn't Mark Twain have the equivalent of a 4th grade education? And Abraham Lincoln, no intellectual slouch, was in pretty much the same boat, as were Benjamin Franklin and Socrates.
What I want to know is this: Could folks such as Mark Twain and Lincoln have acquired the "education" they did and born the magnificent fruits they bore, had they poured the precious time and energy of their youth into graduating with good grades from a modern American high school and then going on to struggle through college and graduate school? While the answer to such a question is obviously unknowable, I personally believe that it's worthy of our attention, contemplation and discussion. (Don't you?)
An even more worthwhile question for me is this: How do we go about presenting every child born onto this "great stage of fools" a magical gold ticket to The Autodidactikon?
We both know that we can't.
We also both know that, here in The Roaring Zeros, it requires both knowledge and wisdom - both a tremendous amount of schooling and a lifelong voyage through The Autodidactikon -- for most of us to merely squeak by. Despite our both knowing this, I can see and hear all around me everyday a sizable majority of the local citizenry (including many who are educated enough to know better) proclaiming the fashionable fantasy which constitutes so-called "conventional wisdom."
Not that it's ever been otherwise. It never has been. My favorite books of the bible, the three which I always recommend to young people who want to go straight to the heart of the matter, are the psalms, the proverbs and Ecclesiastes. (By the way: have you had a chance yet to check out my blog that's entitled Ecclesiastes 9:16 (KJV)? I named it after my single favorite passage of scripture -- for those who want to go straight to the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter. Moreover, it goes straight to the heart of today's homily: I mean the one you're reading at this very instant.)
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As nearly as I can recall, it would have been sometime during the summer of 1964 -- between the 9th and 10th grades, between our years at Brooks Junior High and our years at East High, between the JFK assassination and LBJ's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, when I'd just turned 15 years old -- that I decided to focus my energies on becoming a writer. Well, let me correct that statement right up front: It was sometime during the summer of 1964 that I figured out that I was destined to become some sort of writer. I'm underscoring this correction in my wording here because, looking back, I can see clearly that my moving with increasing intentionality, beginning sometime during the summer of 1964, toward a life of writing was, to be perfectly honest about it, no more a conscious decision on my part than was my being destined to pursue a heterosexual lifestyle or to enter into what others before me had referred to as "a life of the mind" or to incorporate into the deep structure of my personal modalities my father's practical toolmaking skills and my mother's wry sense of humor and touch of the poet.
Be that as it may, because of all the recreational writing in the which I happened to find myself caught up during my 15th summer here on earth and because of the indescribably special way the process of that writing made me feel, I also found myself beginning to make some decisions about how I wanted to go about my life of writing. Or, more accurately: I found myself beginning to be impelled by the midwife of Destiny toward cultivating a talent which said midwife was then in the process of convincing me I might possibly possess, for what I now, in the fullness of time, find myself impelled to name "Mythoklastic Therapy."
A simpler way of putting this might be to say that I began to begin, sometime during the summer 1964, to give myself to an attitude of writing which involved learning lots of new things and then thinking about those things for a while and then passing my mostly processed thoughts along to my readers -- metaphorically somewhat like a cow turning grass into milk. For the sake of brevity, let's agree for the moment to call that end product which I ended up putting into some form or other of writing to share with my readers back then "insight."
This attitude of writing to which I began to begin giving myself, sometime during the summer of 1964, this sharing of what I thought of as my "insight" with my dozen or so readers, worked sufficiently well for me for the 15 or so years that followed. When my first wife, Kate Schulte, and I split up near the end of 1976, however, I found myself going -- as we used to say back then -- "through some major changes." The major change which most closely pertains to today's theme involved my turning away from composing free verse poetry and prose poems and submitting them for publication (with respectable but increasingly unsatisfying success) to literary magazines. It was around this period
Songs had been my first love. (Although, psychoanalytically speaking, my real first love may have been the sound of my own voice, which the songs I learned from other people simply provided me with an excuse to enjoy without undue opprobrium. Throughout our years together at East High School (1964 -- 1967), I had composed somewhere between 30 and 50 songs, a handful of which I can still remember parts of, from time to time. (Mentioning this here reminds me that I've thus far completely omitted from my Autodidactical Travelogue the tedious, clumsy and only moderately successful process of my "teaching myself" to play the guitar and harmonica. We'll try to come back to recounting that particular leg of my Autodidactical Voyage somewhere up ahead. OK?)
I guess that all I'm really trying to say here is that, when I put poetry on the back burner to take up songwriting, sometime during the winter of 1978, it marked a significant turning point in my Voyage Through The Autodidactikon. That's because it marked a kind of paradigm shift in my understanding of for whom I was writing and of from where inside me that writing was coming and what I expected to happen, both within my perceived audience and within me, as a result of this "new" art form to which I was inviting myself to return for the first time in nearly a decade.
And why am I telling you all this, Shannon? What does this late-1970's paradigm shift in my way of thinking about myself as a writer have to do with anything or everything else I've tried to articulate here today?
I suppose that the briefest answer to this question of pertinence would have to be that the breakup with Kate seems to have, in a mostly positive sense, jarred something loose inside my psyche. I'm guessing that, for you as an experienced psychotherapist, the big bouquet of epiphanies I experienced between the autumn of 1976 and the autumn of 1979, must surely resembled the sort of story that you've heard recounted hundreds of times in your office over the years.
As I said at the outset of today's homily: I sometimes feel as though I'm some ancient mariner, swept along by the winds of Destiny, History and Random Chance from island to island, striving mightily to take a few halfway decent field notes as I'm swept along in my Taboo Voyage. What I managed to write down as a "Poet of the 70's" represented one type of field notes. The 200 or so songs which came out of me between 1977 and 1991 represented a second type. The thousands of pages of journal entries and personal correspondence I've produced, over the past 40 years, have represented a third. The field notes which have poured forth in recent years in the form of legal briefs, affidavits, and firsthand accounts of sociopolitical conflict, corporate corruption and abuses committed in the name of organized religion and misbegotten labor relations represent a fourth. And finally, the types of rough drafts of various philosophical treatises, flimsily disguised as installments and/or fragments of this chronicle of my life and times, with the working title of The Toolmaker’s Other Son, one such installment of which you hold in your hands at this very moment, represent a fifth.
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Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat?) But what of the islands themselves? What have they been? And why do I keep insisting on calling my (hopefully lifelong) voyage through The Autodidactikon a taboo voyage? What is there about it which makes it taboo?
Once again, I'm going to grab for the briefest accurate answer I know to offer: The reason why I refer to my voyage through the autodidactikon (through lifelong, postgraduate self-education, in other words) as taboo is because of the simple fact that even the least mention of any of what I've learned along the way, no matter how innocent, well-intentioned and humanitarian, invariably has the effect of upsetting, disturbing, displeasing . . . nearly everybody. I mean to say that, by comparison, the "Inconvenient Truth" referenced in the title of Al Gore's award-winning documentary on global warming cannot hold a candlepower of inconvenience to the supernova of inconvenience invariably provoked by the slightest iota of reportage from the copious field notes I've scribbled down throughout the course of my taboo voyage.
Inconvenient, taboo, unfashionable, unpopular, distasteful, off-putting -- it all comes down to the same thing. What's a Mythoklastic Therapist to do? For lack of any better suggestions, let us now bow our heads and observe a moment of silence in memory of that little boy who shows up at the end of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" to shatter - to klast, as the prototypical Mythoklast -- the myth, i.e. the convenient, fashionable lie that the emperor is richly attired rather than completely naked -- and who is immediately stoned to death for his . . . insight.
Bob Dylan, in an excellent song entitled "Dirge," on his relatively obscure Planet Waves album (1973?), reminds us that "the naked truth is still taboo, whenever it can be seen." Truer words were, of course, never spoken. So, Shannon, another way of saying what I've just now failed to say very well is that my taboo voyage is taboo because its product, the fruit it has born, i.e. my writing, my insight, has turned out to be nothing more or less than the naked truth, which is, by Dylan's highly credible definition, taboo.
I trust you to believe me when I assure you that, at least on a conscious level, when I decided to give myself to a life of writing, back during the summer of 1964, at the age of 15, all those years ago, I never expected my honest, clear-headed reportage to turn out to be anathema. And yet, here we are. Analogous to the little boy who blurted out that the emperor was naked, which was the last thing that anyone wanted to hear, I now find myself approaching the age of 60 having written the 5, 000-page equivalent of "the emperor is naked."
I can't help being reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw several years ago. It shows the minister of some respectable, bourgeois looking protestant church, running for his life, out the front door of the church, with an angry mob of his own parishioners hot on his heels, obviously thirsty for his blood. We then see that the title of his sermon that morning was: "Are We All Prostitutes?" The chief difference between his predicament and mine is that, instead of being met with an open, vocal, aggressive hostility which might conceivably have been answered publicly, the hostility to my 5,000-page sermon (my field notes -- in all those manifestations mentioned a few pages back) have been met, for the most part, with a chilly, ostracizing, passive aggressive silence. (Well, so far, so good.)
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But all metaphors break down and fall apart at some point, sooner or later. It's just a matter of where and when. Here's where my metaphor breaks down and falls apart:
Were Galen Green, indeed, some windswept ancient mariner, come back from some buffeted voyage to faraway places inhabited by some exotic race of beings who were practically incapable of telling the truth, who labored beneath the crushing weight of a complete misinterpretation of the cosmos, themselves and one another, and who were, thereby, in the process of destroying themselves, their fellow creatures and their habitat -- then that Galen Green, come home at last, like some Odysseus or Gulliver, would most likely encounter an enthusiastically receptive audience.
But the actual "faraway places" from which Galen Green has returned, with his journals crammed with the field notes described above, the actual exotic countries I've visited -- island by island by island -- in the course of my Taboo Voyage Through The Autodidactikon , have mostly been within the continent of North America, many of them no further away geographically than the outermost reaches of my own epidermis. How this actuality translates, of course, is into the acknowledgement that the aforementioned exotic beings who inhabit these various and sundry "islands" I've visited in my aforementioned windswept voyage are (for the most part) none other than My Fellow Americans.
Thus, I return bearing the incomparable gift of Mythoklastic Therapy. That's the good news. The bad news is that, as is the case with so many other modes of truly effective healing, Mythoklastic Therapy can often prove to be a rather bitter, jagged pill to swallow. Or, to latch onto a somewhat different metaphor: Mythoklastic Therapy can, at times, demand more of the patient than he or she is prepared to give. Or, to flog our theme here with more metaphors than may seem necessary: Mythoklastic Therapy may simply turn out to be a bridge to liberation, empowerment and improved inner wellness . . . his or her half of which the average patient is either unwilling or unable to build.
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Remember the Firesign Theater? A kind of radio acting company -- unique, and yet not entirely unlike the early Monty Python or perhaps a few of the better radio skits you might have heard over the past 25 years on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion (the NPR program, not the Robert Altman swan song). Very popular with certain of us, back in the late 1960's and early 70's. (And they've recently made a startlingly impressive comeback of sorts, by the by.)
Anyway, back in 1974, the Firesign Theater released a comedy record album entitled Everything You Know Is Wrong. I love that title: So utterly straightforward. And for a given segment of the populace, I'm afraid that it's probably an accurate assessment. That is to say that everything they know IS wrong. For the vast majority of us, however, it's probably safer to say that everything you know is wrong serves us best as a cautionary mantra. When, in future installments, I finally get around to revealing -- either systematically or haphazardly -- some of the specifics of what each of the islands upon which I've been shipwrecked has taught me, I'm confidant that it will become clear why I bothered to mention the phrase "Everything You Know Is Wrong" at this early juncture. In point of fact, my reasoning goes straight to the heart of my motive for deciding the attempt to compile The Toolmaker’s Other Son -- in other words, a patchwork of observational discourses and reminiscences of my life and times, of which today's letter has been but a small part.
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And what are the names of the islands we'll be visiting? I haven't decided yet. Trying to choose their names is part of why I'm writing this to you today. What I have decided today is that I still have a considerable amount of processing to do.
If I might possibly possess any helpful insights worth passing along to future generations, they're going to be drawn, by definition and of necessity, from the bittersweet well of what it's been to be me. What it's been like to be me has been to travel, like any number of ancient mariners, from island to island, from foreign place to foreign place, learning along the way. In my own case, however, most of the foreign places have been within the borders of my native land, and what I keep referring to as "islands" are actually those watershed episodes in my life, those epiphanal bends in the river, those peak experiences, which have, for better or worse, proven most worth "writing home" about. Live a little. Write a little. Live a little. Write a little. Live, write. Live, write. (Rinse & repeat!!!)
Until Next Time, Stay Well,
Galen
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P.S.
Preview of Coming Attractions:
When we're able to observe an object or a phenomenon from 3 different locations, we call it "triangulation." Therefore, I suppose that observing a thing from 5 different locations might be called "pentangulation;" from 8 different locations, "octangulation" -- and so forth. Ah, but how much more sublime our perspective when we find ourselves with, let's say, a dozen or a thousand locations ("islands") from which to view whatever it might be that we're observing!
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Coda:
LITTLE BROTHER
Little Brother, life is like a boat.
And rowing it all day, your arms get tired.
Your little soul will fly up to its rafter
And look down to where you hang your little coat.
Little Brother, life is poorly wired.
You might burn up before you know what you’re after.
You toss and ride upon life’s purple sea
And dream about a land you once desired.
Little Brother, life will have its laughter,
But please don’t take this as a guarantee
That you’ll have laughed your fill before you end
Or gaze at life forever from your rafter.
Little Brother, you may not agree
That life is both your lover and your friend.
It all depends on what you think you’re after.
But life has loved and walked away from me.
Little Brother, life is what you float upon
And what will break you ‘til you bend.
Little Brother, yesterday I wrote
This note upon a page too torn to ever mend.
Words and music by Galen Green c 1980
Performed on Peasant Cantata c 2003
Excerpted here from The Toolmaker’s Other Son
(working title for) A Memoir by Galen Green
Copyright 2005 - 2007 by Galen Green
All Rights Reserved
/gg
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