allanhunter.net Blog

This morning I got up and went to vote.  I had heard that turnout would be strong, so I didn’t do what I usually do, which would have been to boil the water, set the tea aside to brew, walk round the corner, vote, and be back in time for the perfect cuppa tea. That’s the way it’s been each time I’ve voted over the past dozen years or so.

This time I got to my polling station and there were already over 100 people in line, and this was 7.15am.  I was thrilled.  Finally the USA is taking democracy seriously - even in the solid democratic state they’re turning up in droves, determined to be heard for once.  Lot sof people of color, some with kids in tow.  Lots of ordinary Watertown folks like me, saying hellos and then exercising their civic right to vote before hopping on the bus to work.

Leonard Cohen may be right ; “Democrcay is coming, democracy is coming democracy is coming ……. to the USA.”

You’d better believe it.

Since I teach memoir and writing and literature people often ask me about blogging as a way forward with their writing.  I can’t answer for everyone, since we’re all different, but I’d have to say that blogging is a way of checking in with oneself and finding out if one has anything useful to say.  Usually I think I have (or I wouldn’t do it).

Of course, blogs tend to come in many shapes and forms - short is good, and some bloggers reveal all sorts of aspects of their lives that seem self-indulgent, at least to me.  No one really cares what your child’s bowel movements might be (which was a theme on a couple of blogs I ran across) unless one has a sick child - whereupon I would go to a medical professional by preference.

The point is not to produce more words, but to see if one can produce thoughts and ideas that are an authentic reflection of one’s own inner voice, and that might, in that way, lead to wisdom.

Personally I don’t blog ’short’. It takes me time and space to express myself the way I feel I need to. Oscar Wilde may have had brilliant one-liners, but I am not made that way.

That said, turning up daily at the keyboard is a wonderful way to make sure one stays in touch with one’s inner self, which seems to want to flow the moment I click onto the appropriate page.  Sometimes we write to discover what it is we feel.  Without that we might not know.

But I do more than this.  Just about each month I have columns in such on-line and print journals as Wisdom Magazine and PlanetLightWorker. Check them out if you have a chance.  There I’ll put about 1500 words at a time into a piece that I hope will convey useful thoughts and insights to others in the wider world. Each time I do so I feel I’m doing just a little bit to help move our world towards more compassion and understanding. I don’t pretend to have all the answers.  I just think I can be a useful part of the on-going dialogue. Now that seems like a good idea to me.

I also read a few blogs (since time can easily be frittered away if one reads many) and I’ve lately been reading one by Jenni Ballantyne, thecomfyplace.com, as Jenni, who writes beautifully, deals with the final stages of cancer.  If you want to read her words don’t delay.  She may not be able to wite for much longer. If you want to witness grace under pressure, you really should read her words.  Real courage is not so plentiful that we can afford to ignore it.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I was going to a Diwali party, the Hindu version of Halloween and Christmas sort of rolled together.  It’s a celebration of the arrival of winter, the shortening of the days, and hopes for the future.

The party itself was delightful.  This year the open flames in which the written wishes were to be burned were absent.  Partly this was because the prayers and messages will be kept until Tuesday (the actual day of Diwali) and then ceremonially burned, partly it was in deference to the large numbers of small children at the party, none of who we wanted to be singed!  What was remarkable to me was that this wonderfully mixed bag of people, certainly not all of whom were Hindu, accepted the rites and rituals in a spirit of real reverence.  For when people gather together in tolerance and joy everyone’s ritual becomes Holy to those present, and the barriers that separte religions collapse. So we all chanted the sanskrit peace prayers, because peace is not dominated by any one language.  And we all placed flowers petals and rice on the altar, because flowers are not confined to any one culture, and the need to eat symbolized by rice is about as universal at it gets.

The whole event reminded me very much of India as I knew it years ago.  The children were part of handing out flowers, and they moved in an out of the room, and it was all just a little bit choatic when compared to the rigid protestant church services of my youth.  But it felt so much more genuine.  Why?  Because the children were themselves, slightly restless at times, but they were also quiet, attentive, thoughtful and self controlled. I can recall being in temples in Rajasthan where some people prayed, while children and babies played in the dust beside them, their mothers nursing other babies nearby, and then a goat would wander through the whole thing, or perhaps a sparrow would swoop onto the altar for second, chirp, and fly off.  It sounds confused, but it didn’t make any of it feel even slightly less holy.  Quite the reverse.

The Holy is with us at all times, perhaps especially in the hubbub of living.  Real internal quietness is not disturbed by such things.

Thank you Ken and Laura and Seth, for another opportunity to grow our hearts.

Some absolutely fascinating correspondence has popped up in the old email box over the past few days and I only wish that I could share it in detail.  Of course, I can’t do that without violating the basic decencies of confidentiality, but some kinds of news are too important to keep to oneself, so I’ll try to be respectful and yet make sure the information doesn’t stop here.

Suz in Oregon comes to mind first.  She’d heard my New Dimensions Broadcast on Public Radio this week and felt moved to write to me.  What she sent me was remarkable because it was deeply poetic in its rhythms and resonances (and, my friends, that’s certainly not a component of the average email); it was thoughtful, exploratory, and intuitive.  Here was a person who knew she had to become a Pilgrim, again, in order to come to a completion of the self - she’d already been a Monarch in one aspect of her life and knew what the Magician’s role was, yet she could sense she still needed a few more explorations….

Another letter was from Michelle, who discovered that circumstances had thrown her back into the memory of a time of panic and despair, and she found herself an angry Orphan again, just for a while. Fortunately she knew there were other ways of being, and that the past was not going to dominate the future unless she allowed it to.  I feel honored that she chose to vent to me, because, in the poetry of the soul, we usually vent to people who, in some way we feel only in the Unconscious, will be those who can reflect back an ‘answer’. Perhaps we don’t think we want an answer.  Perhaps we can’t listen for one right now.  Yet the wisdom of the Unconscious is stronger than that. In writing to me, all she had to ask was, ‘why him?’ and the response would be not that I’m able to offer a solution, but that the wisdom of the six archetypes, which I’m always trying to understand better, truly does offer a way forward.  The human homing instinct can be surprising that way.

Then Mary Lou, my ever faithful correspondent, wrote to me about the Soul Work that is at the basis of personal writing, especially Memoir.

What does all this mean?  Well, I ended with Mary Lou because it seems to me that all the writers (and I haven’t mentioned them all) are aware that we’re doing soul work at the deepest levels we can.  Sometimes when we write to each other we may lok like we’re asking for something; yet the letter itself may well contain the answer we’ve been looking for.  And so we can, by reading our own communications, become the recipients of what we need that we thought might only exist outside ourselves.  After all, we really already know all the answers we need.  We just have to get out of our own way sometimes so that we can hear those answers, since they lie deep within us.

And sometimes we need someone else to reflect that back to us, too.

October 22nd, Home Depot - the Christmas trees are already alight and on sale, plastic ones at 6 foot and taller for something over $100 if you’re desperate.  Two months ahead of the day, yes, you can get started on the Festive Fantasy.  The mannequin figures alongside the trees were dressed as snowmen, I think, or possibly as mutant trolls with cheery red faces.  I’m not sure.  And anyway, does it matter?

The Dalai Lama suggests, as do many people involved with the spiritual world, and as do skilled therapists of almost every school, that it is important to live as fully as possible in the here and now, rather than dwelling in the past or in anticipation of the future.  Eckhart Tolle hit a nerve, too, when he wrote about the Power of Now.

But Home Depot knows better than that.  Perhaps the thing to be aware of is that we have within each of us two currents, each of which is powerful and sometimes overwhelming.  One yearns for the now; another wants to fill up that space with anticipation and memory (in this case of previous Christmases and holidays of all kinds).  Which will you choose?

On Saturday I will be going to a Diwali party.  The Hindu version of Christmas, or the Festival of Light, asks us to be present in the now, and to take our hopes and prayers for the future, write them down, pray, and then burn them.  It’s a ritual that acknowledges that anticipations are best dealt with by being acknowledged and then by being let go.  The flame of burning prayers is present, now, and will disperse very soon. The longing is felt, and released.

Perhaps we can all learn from this.

Working with my Memoir group I’ve been, once again, astonished by the courage with which writers are willing to go towards their lives and wrestle with the values that lie (perhaps the pun on ‘lie’ should be intentional) behind the facts.  One woman was writing about a sister she hadn’t seen in over 40 years (because of adoptions laws) and her narrative was one in which she approached again and again her sense that she ‘should’ feel something particular for this person, her sister, but actually she didn’t, and couldn’t, and didn’t want to.  She asked questions that had no easy answers, always returned to the gap that existed between what she wanted to be the case, what she hoped would be the case, and what actually existed when seen by the cold light of dawn.

Another woman wrote an astounding piece in which she tried to recreate the moment (at age 5) she first felt the symptoms of the disease that would so damage her body and cause so much pain for the rest of her life.  How can one remember these things, and is the memory likely to be accurate?  Or will it be pieced together later out of things that one is told?  And will that information be accurate?  And, above all, what did it feel like just before the symptoms struck, when life was, for the very last second, ordinary, normal, easy…?  How does one get to the heart of that?

Perhaps one never can.  Perhaps it’s simply the attempt to do so that matters.  Perhaps truth has its limits, its sell-by date. We can only ever give a gesture towards the complex thoughts that swirl through us at those moments.

Many years ago Virginia Woolf pioneered the idea of the stream of consciousness in writing.  This was, as many of you will know, the technique of recording a seemingly unedited stream of ideas, such as they might be if we had a tape recorder (which hadn’t been invented at that time) embedded in our brains, recording every little wayward thought.  James Joyce, of course, was famous for getting inside Molly Bloom’s head in this way.

The trouble with this approach is that thoughts move far faster than anyone’s ability to record them, so it is always a case of the edited highlights only, and the emphasis is on ‘edited’.

In my work with Memoirists, however, I think I’ve come across something even more vital than this – the sorts of narratives I’ve just tried to describe.  And that is the narrative the circles around, like a dog at a bone, trying to find truth and uncover memory, by attacking an event from different angles, over and over again.  In terms of the readability of the writing this can be a bit of a challenge if one is expecting neatly crafted sentences of clarity and poise.  The mind doesn’t work that way, although the brain can. This type of circling, sometimes repetitive, hypnotic narrative is what we see in Faulkner at times, and he was certainly worth making the effort to understand.

I suspect that this way of writing is, in fact, a new departure in writing generally.  Some of my colleagues don’t like it, don’t understand it, and urge memoirists not to write it.  They want things to be tidy and literary.

But the mind isn’t tidy and literary – at least not when it’s being authentic.

Well now, here’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, George (with apologies to Laurel and Hardy, who made that line actually sound funny).

Like so many other Americans I saved my money, invested conservatively, paid my debts, and now I discover that most of the money I had intended for that mythic time called ‘retirement’ is gone.  Ah well, that’s the market.

But wait.  I was one of the responsible ones. I was one of those who did it ‘right’ by most people’s standards.  I didn’t go for top dollar returns, I went for pretty safe long-term investments. Now they tell us there never were any safe investments anyway.  They were all horribly risky, because the mortgage crooks looted everything.

So yes, those who never saved actually did have the joy of their money, which I didn’t.  Those who saved, who paid into a social security system that is as broken as everything else, well, we won’t be getting anything in this lifetime, it seems. This is a reversal of Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper - in that tale the industrious ant does get a reward of stability, at least.

It won’t break my heart.  I’m still able to work and earn and get along.  But older folks aren’t, and some of them will wind up being cared for by their middle-aged children.  You can see where I’m going with this, I think?

Me?  I won’t bother to save from now on.  There’s no point. Not that I’ll spend a lot. I can’t get excited about the shiney junk we’re expected to care about and buy.  No, I guess I’ll be giving to charity and helping those people I know.  There are now a lot more of those, every day. And they’re going to need every cent.

And in my spare time I will devote my energy to bringing down, through political and legal means, any Republican party that shows signs of being remotely like the one we presently have.

So perhaps we should thank George Bush for turning so many of us into activists, and for giving us the chance to love our neighbors.  Thanks, George.

The BBC news is deliciously sneaky.  Last night they had a whimsical piece about a competition in England to see who could be the most economical car driver.  The rules seemed simple - factory car of your preference, unmodified, and see who could be most sympathetic towards the actual every-day road conditions during the 405 mile trip. The car in which the reporter was traveling notched up 73 miles per gallon. The winning car was noted as achieving over 80 mpg.

So why can’t we get that in the USA?

Even the Smartcar, which is finally now being imported, only gets about 50mpg here in the USA, or about the same as a hybrid.  My cousin Martin in England, who has a European model Smartcar guffaws at this.  His gets over 70 mpg - in a country where ‘highway driving’ is almost a non-existent concept.

So what’s happening here?

Well, the thinly-veiled US protectionism plan, in the name of ’safety’ and ‘emissions’ won’t allow these types of vehicles into the country without messing about with their engines, because they don’t meet their ’standards’.  Admittedly a Smartcar is small, and I wouldn’t want to drive one to Arizona.  But then I wouldn’t want to drive a checkered cab to Arizona, either, and that gets barely 10 miles to each gallon of juice. (Think about that when you hop a taxi and think you’re being kind to the earth.  You’re not.)

No, it’s the same load of garbage as always. It amounts to US protectionism of US made second rate gas guzzling junk. When I lived in England my Citroen regularly returned over 55 mpg, and that was nearly thirty years ago.

Hello?

Of course, the BBC didn’t say any of this directly.  They presented the story and left us to make the connections.  And in the background was a picture of the bridge at Ironbridge gorge - the world’s first iron constructed bridge, built in 1750, still in use, and a symbol to most historians of the actual starting point of the Industrial Revolution. Not that they were hinting anything, you understand….
Funnily enough one of the other stories on the BBC that night was the news of the Nobel prize for literature. It went to a Frenchman.  The judge’s spokesman, a Mr. Engdahl, made the comment that he did not expect the USA to win many Nobel prizes for literature in the near future, because the US literary scene was too ‘parochial’.  Interesting words.

Perhaps it’s not just our literature and our cars that are parochial and out of touch.

While the presidential candidates go about their days with town hall meetings (more about that later…) I had the distinctly more pleasurable experience on Monday of addressing the good people of the OLLI institute at UMass on the Six Archetypes of Literature.  For those of you who don’t know about it OLLI is a wonderful organization aimed at mature students - its proper name being the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute - and these people were as intelligent, and as stimulating an audience as any presenter could ever hope for.  Their wise minds, penetrating insights, and real life experience meant that I felt we developed a dialogue that enriched us all.

Alas, it was all too soon over, but I do want to thank all those involved for inviting me along, and I look forward to discussing further the proposals that were floated to run a six week course based on the archetypes.  We’re aiming for Spring 2009 for that one. I’d love to be able to do that.
One of the things we did talk about, thoughtfully, was the way the current presidential candidates (and their VPs) might fit into the concept of archetypes.  In Jungian terms one could see McCain as the old dragon ‘defending’ the young maiden (Palin, in case you haven’t been able to see her as anything like that), while Obama is the young knight supported by his faithful shield bearer, the experienced Biden.  We all know who wins that fight, and it’s not the dragon.  And, symbolically, it’s interesting to play with this because that makes Palin the damsel who gets ‘rescued’ - - if we’re slavish to the legend.  So let’s twist the legend just a little. Indeed I do think that people who identify with Palin, and who are attracted to what she projects, seriously need rescuing; and they need it now.  They need to be rescued from the seductive delusion that there’s anything in her that is remotely other than totally self-serving.  Perhaps that’s Obama’s task; to rescue us all from the delusion, fostered by the movies, that surface female glamor and soap opera cliches will save us.  They won’t.

In terms of the six archetypes, though, we pretty clearly have McCain and Palin as Orphans of the saddest kind.  Palin has no idea what she’s got herself into, and she has no idea about global issues either.  She’s the Orphan who knows she can hide behind the Republican party machine and bully others with her bizarre announcements, ones that have lately been racist.  Saying that Obama is ‘not like us Americans’ is racism.  Let’s not overlook that. Those are the words of the bully.

For his part McCain is the essential Orphan. He hid behind George Bush for years. In last night’s debate he couldn’t stop mentioning his heroes, Teddy Roosevelt got a good long series of mentions, as did Ronald Reagan (twice) and a couple of others. What sort of man harps on about his ‘heroes’? He spoke about them as if he was a kid with a baseball card collection of famous sluggers to drool over.  A man who talks like that is one who has not developed his own inner courage sufficiently. Now he has the chance to make himself look good by ‘adopting’ a young, female, governor from one of the more remote and desolate spots in the Union.  And that makes him look like less of an Orphan.  But he’s still at that stage, I’m sad to say.  After all, any homeless man on the street can find a stray dog to follow him around….

Biden is the old politician’s politician, and he looks to me like a man who has been waiting his whole life to make a bigger difference than he’s been able to so far.  He is looking forward to his possible new promotion - when he will become a Monarch, one who can work with others and strive for the common good that Obama, as a Monarch, knows is the essence of the job in hand. They are pretty well balanced in themselves, and can be balanced when working with each other.  Compare that to the wild rantings Palin’s been allowed to spout off recently.  The McCain campaign can’t seem to stop her blabbing. Not that control is everything, but when she mutters dangerous racist inanities, well, it becomes a problem…. What kind of politician allows his second in command to do as she does?  Or perhaps he’s turned her into his pawn, so she can say things he’s too scared to say?  Either way, it’s shabby stuff and it’s Orphan behavior.

We need real leaders, not Orphans such as the Republican Party is offering us. I won’t tell you which way to vote (that’s up to you), but I think you can see which way I won’t be sending my own vote.

Joseph Campbell famously said that we should ‘follow our bliss’ rather than anything else.  If we place our faith in money, he went on, we could one day lose our money, but we can never lose our bliss. It’s excellent advice, and I’ve always tried to follow it.
The stock market free for all of the past few days has made his statements even more poignant.  Most people I’ve come across have lost money from retirement funds, and are more than a little upset about it.  It will take more than a folksy bimbo like Sarah Palin winking at them during the one debate her handlers allowed her to cheer them up.

And so here’s what I see around us - levels of real stress and anxiety. The only people who seem not to be affected are my European friends (state pensions with mandatory retirement ages take the decision making out of their hands) and my students, who have no money of their own.  Some of these last named will have to withdraw from college, of course, over the next few months, as loans and actual parental money evaporate. They may yet feel the pinch.
So, where is the outrage?  I’m just waiting for someone, somewhere in Europe to protest, because, as we all know, those things don’t happen in America. The trouble is, I don’t think it’s because people are following their bliss that they’re able to rise above all this in detached serenity.  I think it’s because they have taken on all the gloom of the prisoner waiting to be hanged.