You're just listening to us more carefully and somewhat more urgently now.
Me, Myself, and I are contained in a bag of skin called Jim. We talk to one another regularly about the direction the bag is going, and generally, what it's all about and what's best for it. We know the bag hears us because it often mouths our dialogue and we hear ourselves being repeated, though not always accurately. We are democratic with one another within this bag and our trio never try to dominate or take over and we simply laugh off the little foibles that we see from time to time that drive the bag to go off in somewhat hapless directions. Jim, who is easily mystified says, "Who are these entities that claim to be me, or that try to direct me in my life? Are they Angels or Demons, or just Gods or Muses? Do they arise from an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato; as Scrooge apparently said to the ghost of Jacob Marley?" ------We reflected that the three of us were becoming more obvious as Jim gets older and the bag has to listen more closely to the inner life, since in addition, Me, Myself and I are probably stirring up the bag a little more often. Jim finally asked, " Who are you guys anyway?" We , as a trio, answered in unison. We have rehearsed this answer many times as we have always been there in the bag of skin called Jim and have waited for the question, which has finally come. ------" Jim, we are much older than you and have been here many years before you. You, for your information are a new bag and always will be since the elements of your cellular replacement for all your current cells arrives from earth's supplies every few weeks or months as you reconstruct your old skin of the bag and and renew the cellular contents of the bag with new materials. For that reason, though your template remains old and getting older, you become a new cellular entity each week or two as earth recycles its materials to and fro. Every cell your bag contains undergoes complete renewal; even your wet bones will rise again and be renewed, though much more slowly, but the paradox of new cells in the template of an old bag will remain. To answer your question; We just are! You however, are of earth! Relax! You are no more mad than anyone else. Not more; not less!
You're just listening to us more carefully and somewhat more urgently now.
3 Comments
Self Deception How often we eventually come to believe what we have told ourselves so often, in the face of the bald facts? Mea culpa! This is not really news. Shakespeare, in the Tempest, covered it pretty clearly in Prospero’s observation about his brother, to Miranda, “--like one, who having, into truth, by telling it, made such a sinner of his memory, to credit his own lie, he did believe---”. You could paraphrase this by saying, “ Who is kidding who?” or “Don’t kid yourself!” I often am impressed with the capacity of the mind that eventually comes to believe, if repeatedly credits, it’s own PR. The standard we hold for others, we must hold ourselves to, and that may take some digging deep. I watched Part Five of the series, “The Civil War” on PBS the other day. It included the Gettysburg Address of President Lincoln. He stated “--the world will little note nor long remember what we say here--”. How wrong he was! One of the world’s great speeches in a paragraph! There was no confabulation, no over- weening pride, no self-serving adulation and no certainty. There was vision and humility and generosity without a carapace of false optimism. The issue was too important for Lincoln to come to believe in any lies about himself. He knew he was simply a player in an uncertain world. He knew what he was, and more importantly, he knew what he wasn’t! Would that candor towards one another and towards oneself, delivered with kindness, succeed belief in our own mythology. It would be good if Donald Trump read the Gettysburg Address of Abe Lincoln to learn the absence of self-deception. It would be good if Donald Trump read the Tempest of William Shakspeare to learn the falsity of self -deception. On May 25th 2017 the pianist and I will have been married 60 years. If life is a journey, and it is, then marriage of that duration and the offspring, from which they arose, becomes a crowd traveling on the road of life, spilling off at their own intersections, the crowd thickening and thinning at intervals and rejoining when the roads occasionally meet. But for the most part the footprints of the pianist and mine are together and alone. If you have never read the prose-poem of Mary Stevenson, Footprints on the Sand I recommend you do so, not to suggest that either the pianist or me is Jesus, but to say in certain terms that in 60 years, we have carried one another from time to time. Mary Stevenson's poem is inspired.
Every morning I sit in the easy chair near daybreak and contemplate the cone shaped collection of shrubs that display their beauty before me in the morning light. This part of the garden I watch, widening in front and tapering two hundred yards to the rear, in fearsome symmetry, shows form and depth, color and beauty, shape and diversity in such harmony, that within the substance of the garden cone the thin meandering track of grass appears to fill the cone and separate the shrubs forming the walls of a cornucopia, brim with sunlight and wonder. Square, oblong, rounded, a medley of greens and bronze and reds, pruned to harmonize, and when seen from the height of my window, tapering down to the blue-grey harbour water. This is the only part of the garden that achieves this perfection and it only can be perceived from a height. Such is the nuance of perspective. To meditate with such an icon for an old man has perhaps become like reconnecting to a Child's Garden of Verses or Listen to your Garden, or connecting once again with Robert Louis Stevenson as he, confined to his room for his last years, looked out his window and found his symmetry.
|
Categories
|