Jim's Blog

Epic Poem Part III Chapter 13

Epic III ch 13

When I opened my eyes
The old man and the woman had joined us
kneeling around the altar
I wondered how they found us

The old man knelt next to the boy and I
The woman across from us
As the the altar itself
Had become a Shaker aisle

I looked to the water
The driftwood was packed into land
as far as my eyes could see
I wondered if this was a trap

You can’t walk on drifting wood
And thick like this you can’t sail through it
It reminded me of the old world
My old life, that fargone self

When every way of escape is gone
You can’t sail out
You can’t walk out
You can wish and wait

I wanted to destroy this altar now
To burn it
But i knew I couldn’t
It had become a shrine for those who weren’t there to see it erected.

I knew that others would come
They would kneel
Legends would be born
And the altar would be maintained

I knew that what was now a blessing
To my three traveling companions
Would become a burden
On the backs of others someday

I dare not write anything
Or accidentally leave something
That might become
A sacred oppressive book

I stood and scattered the small sticks
That spelled Hebrides
Before the three apostles
Would notice them.

Prose for the Unemployed Father

Never let them down.


It is the winter of life.  That cold and dismal season of wet snow and no work.  The children are supportive as is their mom, but it’s a support that one has to question.  When men and women are raised to compare themselves with others, it is hard to break the constant measure.

Tapes and sticks that measure lengths and widths.  Scales that measure weight and significance.  Clocks that measure times.  Those times sometimes measured in minutes that could be measuring earnings.  Or those times sometimes measured in weeks which could be measuring time with no earnings.

Bank accounts measure means, ebbing and flowing through bill cycles.  Bills use time to measure on...or past due. 

Hope filled conversations sharing possibilities merit hand shakes and slaps on the shoulder from friends.  The same friends who illicit perhaps the worst measures, not of themselves but within ones self.  What do they think of me?

In this winter, the happy bottle feeder sews an afghan of great charm, to himself.  The wonderwall of all the extremities of life has been rubbed to a nub, and there is nothing but himself.

‘The children have culled an irreversible image now,’ he thinks.  He won’t even let himself think of the adults’ opinion of him.  How then must we live? What shall we do?  The philosopher’s questions, once bold conversation pieces of which he held and shared many respected opinions, are now fiery arrows carried in the flesh of his back.

The evangelical’s advice that its always darkest before the dawn, a swan song from the depression era, left him months ago.  There is no balm in Giliad, there is no rescue.

The Buddha call to live without cravings has become a call to die, craving peace.

It is the winter.  The last meal (less than a vile offenders would be) is this dollar fifty cup of coffee on the table in front of him.  He thinks more about the quarter in his pocket as an inadequate tip than the fact that this is his last day. 

His mind drifts from the would be measure the waitress will use after he leaves to the task of the day.  It is a sadness, a deafening blow to be sure, but a piece of peace.

“To be....or not, is no longer my question,”

The journey over, he pauses before he pulls the quarter from his pocket.  He closes his eyes in silent prayer to the gods of absentia.  It is a prayer of solitude, contentment, and somehow thanksgiving. 

It is quiet here.

Before he opens his eyes, he feels a warmth on his back.  The sun rising in the East.  He opens his eyes.

He opens his eyes.

Author's Note.  This is dedicated to my friends who are struggling to find work.  May the sun rise on you and you feel it's warmth on your back.

Pt. 3 Ready to try Shakespeare? Hints for preparing to see @reduxiontheater 's Much Ado About Nothing Pt. 3

Remember, I am not an academic or professional actor, these are just my thoughts.

Shakespeare’s characters are so vast and so unique; of all the hundreds of personas he has created in all of his plays, none are alike.  They all speak to us, and Shakespeare has an incredible way of making us feel like we know them so well from just a few lines.

A few things to remember when attending Shakespearean plays in the post modern era.  First of all it is important to realize that the actors will most likely be playing several roles.  This can be confusing at first because we think that the character just changed his clothes when actually the same actor is playing a different role.  Check the playbill and take a look at who is playing who.  You will also find the different characters will always have something in particular that they wear when they return in different scenes.  It could be a hat or jacket etc,.  You will get the feel as the play progresses.  Don’t be embarrassed to ask someone around you at intermission if something seems confusing.  We all are in the same boat.

Secondly, when you read the plot summary before the play, make sure you take a look at the character list.  You won’t need to learn all of the characters, but becoming familiar with the primaries can be very helpful.  They will typically (but not always) be near the top of the list.

Another thing I like to do is really focus on a particular character; let them speak to you in a sense.  In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice (in my opinion) is the most transcendent and original personality. Her perspective and creative insight into life and how to live it is among, if not the most, brilliant of Shakespeare’s female leads (yes even more so than the effervescent Juliet in some ways).  Benedick as the co-lead is also and amazing original character in Much Ado.  You will know him well by the end of the play. 

I plan on paying particular attention to Don John this time in @reduxiontheatre ‘s upcoming production.  Don John is a brooding, malcontent bent on the destruction of other peoples happiness.  He is the classic overlooked step brother who, while not quite an Iago or Macbeth, will go to fairly great lengths to destroy a life.  I want to get inside his head, and learn about why third wheel insanity can do what it does.

Pt. 2 Ready to try Shakespeare? Hints for preparing to see @reduxiontheater 's Much Ado About Nothing Pt. 2

Why isn’t Shakespeare’s language modernized so I can understand it better?

 I am not a Shakespeare academic or actor, but let me take a moment to make a comment on the language from my perspective.  

 Shakespeare is quite a bonus for English speakers, yet at the same time he can be a challenge.  The bonus is that the verbiage, innuendo, and perspective etc. that Shakespeare used is unquestionably tied to the specific English phrases he wrote. That is a big deal because the specific words he chose and the specific order and way that he wrote them has truly sculpted how we think and act several hundred years later.  This is a plus to English speakers because when we read, hear or watch Shakespeare’s work we are experiencing almost directly what he penned.  

 When we read Cervantes or Kant or Nietzsche we have to read translations which means we end up with what is left after the filter of a translator.  This is positive in one sense because a translation will put their words into modern English and we won’t have any issues understanding what is written.  So while Don Quixote translated into modern English is an easy read for us, we miss a lot of the genius of Cervantes the writer that exists in the original Spanish.

 So there is a reason we continue to work our way through Shakespeare in the original language.  Is it as easy as seeing the latest Adam Sandler movie? No. Is it worth it?  Absolutely.  

 

Ready to try Shakespeare? Hints for preparing to see @reduxiontheater 's Much Ado About Nothing Pt. 1

I've seen Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing many times and in preparation to enjoy @ReduxionTheatre 's performance in a few weeks I thought I might tweet some laymen's thoughts and observations. It's possible to enjoy Shakespeare the same way u see a movie but I have found that some preparation takes it to a different level. 1st, becoming familiar with the plot is crucial. This helps break the language barrier between you and the old English. (It's not like Chaucer old, its more like King James old).

Plot summaries for all of Shakespeare's plays are available online, find one, read it, enjoy.

More hints on the morrow!

 

Po-esque

Midship slipping on that tuft and tucked
hideaway the leeward slip.
And I to find this trail to leave the bastion
of the primped and proper past.
For all the angles that would please me
and leave me breathless in the coriander.

Nestled close my apple dangled just
a bit ago.
Now the rocket flyboy has a warm and satiating
home that says that it is undeniably home.
And so the full tension breaks with sparks
eternal wet and sweet pungent.

Forging full ahead again the torrent rages
leaves our sweat and dampened sheet.
Breathe it in, breathe it all and again and
don’t leave any morsel there.
Shaky steps as legs are spent in all our
litany to get us home

but home has moved

And so we live.

Sometimes i think about living in the far north.  Just far enough that cold is a way of life and you don't have to get used to it every winter.  Where summers are short and so celebrated that everyone looks forward to them all year.

Where i live, the summers can be brutally hot, and yet the winters mindbendingly cold and miserable. 

I also think about climates where the temperature is 70's almost everyday.  Where you would get used to daily rainfall, and learn to pray to the local totems to keep the typhoons away.

Where to live, now that is the question.  Mostly dictated by family ties or occupations.  But think about all the downtown buildings in all the big cities all over the world.  I remember Hong Kong which was a pure concentration of downtown office space.  Think about those building and those windows.  And how many of those windows represented an office with a desk.  For some those windows represent an entire floor of hundreds of cubicles.  Now multiply that by the many floors in every building, by the amount of buildings in a metropolitan city.  I will picture Hong Kong.  Now think about how many people are employed in vast arrays of occupation. 

So many things to do, so many places to work, companies to own or to sweep up after.

Still, we live where we do, and not where we don't.  Some with chagrin and some with an enviable smile.

And so we live.

Down with Empowerment??

I recently had a conversation with a very successful executive who has proven herself time and time again as a competent visionary and extraordinary manager.  She made some comments regarding the language of leadership and said, "A lot of this gibberish about leadership is really a throwback to the eighties, what organizations want today are managers who can simply do the work and get things done, not just talk about it."

The statement rang true for me though, as a communicator who had for so long relied on the "language" of leadership, it left me a bit puzzled.

I had already been wrestling with the idea that many of the things we used to look to and rely upon for information and inspiration in business had become passe.  Books like the One Minute Manager, speakers like Tony Robbins, and business leaders turned authors like Jack Welch, don't enjoy the mass appeal that they once had.

I recently re-read "the Secret", a book which is so overwhelming with it's message that by some mental overhaul, you can control the outcome of thing.  Is this bad?  Have this type of communicator and author lost all of their impact?  I don't think so, but I do think that the way people think and learn is changing and the empowerment business will need to do some rethinking to retain, much less grow it's audience.

First of all, post-moderns don't want control, they want influence.  The three steps to guaranteed circumstantial change formulas are just not believable.  And if they are not believable, they are even more in-effective in causing change, and you can no longer sell them as books, seminars, or what you will.  People do however, in general believe that how they process internally and how they act will Influence circumstantial outcomes. 

The switch from having control to having influence is not only brilliant, it is believable.  People can run with it.

We will see more and more communication in this field begin to lean in this direction, however the audience will need to be won in different ways.  Words like self-improvement, steps to success, and empowerment, will need to be reforged and represented with new verb-age to keep the audience from thinking it is the same old song and dance.

 

The Tunnel: Chapter 1

(this is a snippet of a novel, I plan to post different chapters from time to time if my readers are interested)

The Tunnel: Chapter 1

Underneath the bloom of the earth’s most beautiful orchid lay the the beginnings of a tunnel that stretches to all the depths of reality.  A potentially endless journey begins here, although endlessness is a concept only accepted by typical humans.  I found this portal recently, as I was swash-buckling in the swamps of Louisiana.  I noticed the flower and immediately felt compelled to reach out to touch it.  Maybe I wanted to pluck it, but let’s say for now that I simply wanted to touch it.  Just three inches away from laying hands on the world’s most beautiful orchid, I slipped.  Yes, many such great things begin with a f__ up, and that is what happened here.

The root that caught my foot must have been from one of the great trees that grow in the swamp, because it was strong and unrelenting.  I fell headlong into gushy mud and beyond.  You can imagine the feeling of falling headlong into squishy mud. I tried to pull my self upward.  As my hand pushed downward against the mud it sank into an inescapable void in the muck.  I tried to lift my head but my indescribably freaked out face, now weighted down by the brown goo of the Louisiana swamp, slid forward into the void my hand passed through.  A gravity that was unfamiliar to me (having only experienced the gravity of a few things 1) the downward pull of the earth 2) the forward, awkward pull of a beautiful woman 3) the pull of any well prepared meal that surpasses my ex-wife’s cooking) pulled me downward into the void.  It was a sensation for which I was unprepared and never in my wildest dreams imagined was even possible in the mundane life of me.

Before we continue into the void that would answer every question, let me share what happened next.

the bliss of ignorance, or not

i have often wondered, and even more frequently mused to people close to me that being right or being wrong does not make a person happier.  many people continue to hold on to the goofiest of notions, arguments that are beyond belief and yet seem to be blissfully happy in their stupidity.

happiness.  what is it?  it is such a rich concept, and eluding of logic.  i have found myself experiencing happiness when things all seem to being going exceptionally well and have found myself feeling extraordinarily happy when nothing was going right.  this makes no sense except to observe that in both situations, all pressure on me was released.  so is happiness a lack of  pressure, or perhaps the in the moment when pressure leaves?

happiness has been a paramount force to the human condition.  the problem with happiness is not in achieving it, but in trying to sustain it.

we deal with this in different ways.  some lower expectations.  some alter their perceptions of what is what.  some make up phrases to force happiness into broader categories with phrases like, "love is a decision" 

if you have read any writings on my theory of life called "the paradox puzzle" you have seen more clearly how I deal with the happiness sustainment problem. 

so, if you enjoy ignorance, don't ask questions, just be happy

if you think too much, ask questions, and be happy

and don't freak out if happiness doesn't last, it will return.

jim