One of These Days

Big Frank has been thinking about all the good friends he's known. Neil Young's great song "One of These Days" immediately came to mind. Big Frank has included it below. One of the beautiful things about this song is how it avoids sentimentality and captures the wistful woebegone nature of friendship at a distance, friendship in memory, and like memory lying there, just waiting to be accessed and retrieved. How many times have we all thought about that friend that we haven't seen or heard from in months or sometimes even years. We tell ourselves that we are going to pick up the phone, or send an e-mail . . . one of these days. This song expresses that moment wonderfully well. Big Frank has put on some miles in his life and he has friends scattered like leaves from Washington to to Florida to Arizona to Colorado to Minnesota to Texas to Indiana to California to North Dakota to New York to Poland to Hungary to Singapore to Japan and they are all going to get that long letter - or more likely that long phone call . . . one of these days . . and it won't be long.

One of These Days

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
And I'm gonna try
And thank them all for the good times together.
Though so apart we've grown.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

And I'm gonna thank,
That old country fiddler
And all those rough boys
Who play that rock 'n' roll
I never tried to burn any bridges
Though I know I let some good things go.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

From down in L.A.
All the way to Nashville,
From New York City
To my Canadian prairie home
My friends are scattered
Like leaves from an old maple.
Some are weak, some are strong.

One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.

--- Neil Young

Two from Wendell Berry

With the continuation of peaceful acceptance it is enlightening to turn to a great American writer, and a Kentucky gentleman farmer - Wendell Berry. Turning to nature, as Whitman did, and Frost also - is an ever present and easily accessible source of comfort. As Wendell Berry writes, echoing Whitman, "I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief." The simplicity and presence of solace is near: "What we need is here." No need to look any further than out your window.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

--Wendell Berry

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

--Wendell Berry

Acceptance

Big Frank now turns back again to Robert Frost. As surely as the divine surrounds us, it not only permeates the objects around us, but the events and circumstances that we are embedded within. Nature flows with natural acceptance as Frost demonstrates in this beautiful poem. Frost would surely be the first to place us in that same context.

Acceptance

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, "Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be."

-- Robert Frost

A World in a Grain of Sand

The divine permeates all and defies all. It shines through the smallest and through what is commonly thought the most insignificant. What is most natural is most revealing. Whitman captures this over and over in his great poem “Song of Myself”. And even though the image of Whitman “stucc’d with quadrupeds and birds over” – is bizarre in the extreme, still we get his point. Blake saw the divine everywhere also – he even saw angels in his garden!

From Song of Myself
By Walt Whitman

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the
stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

From Auguries of Innocence
By William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

“Time, space, and causation are like a glass through which the absolute is seen. . . . In the absolute there is neither time, nor space, nor causation.” Swami Vivekananda

A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts

The placidity of animals. The nowness of the animal and the oneness of the animal with everything else. Wallace Stevens in his “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” captures the presence, the fullness, of the rabbit at night. It’s memory is jogged at the beginning of the poem – from fur to the cat. However the associations leads the rabbit back to the present and a remarkable unity with all that surrounds it, “In which everything is meant for you / And nothing need to be explained; / Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself”.

A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

- Wallace Stevens

Walt Whitman and the animals

Below is an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. We humans take ourselves to be the peak of evolution and the yet we aspire to what animals possess already. How many times have we heard the call to “be now”. Animals cannot be anything else but now. Our imagination takes us out of ourselves. We can relive the past and we can project ourselves into various futures. This has given us dominion of them. We have the power – they have corner on being entirely immersed in the moment. They also have the dignity of being only who they are. With diligent effort and much practice we might just be able achieve their level of contentment.

From "Song of Myself"
By Walt Whitman

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Future Error

In the last post Big Frank mentioned positive psychology and how empirical studies show that people are really not any good at predicting their future happiness. Dan Gilbert, in “Stumbling on Happiness” invokes what he calls the Reality First policy, which goes something like this: it is impossible to both focus on present reality and at the same time imagine something else. For example, look at a pine tree and then while looking at that tree try to imagine a maple tree – can’t be done. And another thing that can’t be done is for our brain to confuse an actual visual image with an imagined one. However, with emotion – it’s a whole different screening room. As Gilbert puts it, “The emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in the world is called feeling; the emotional experience that results from a flow of information that originates in memory is called prefeeling; and mixing them up is one of the world’s most popular sports.”

It is also a similar confusion of emotions with imagining how we will feel in the future. We make the assumption that the feeling that we have when we imagine some future circumstance, event, or situation is actually what we will feel when we get there. This is usually as erroneous as the picture of the future you see above (retro-future at best). The reason is that what we feel when we imagine the future is most often a response to what is actually happening right now in the present. We mistakenly assume that we will feel tomorrow as we feel today. However, this rarely is the case. As he writes: “The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won’t see the world the way we see it now.”

The real irony of this is that the emotion that most people actually feel in this present moment is not really applicable to the future; but that presently felt emotion is often a reaction to an anticipation of future events. And, as Gilbert has shown, the future felt emotion rarely matches what we feel about it now. So, not only are those poor forecasters making false predictions, but they are poisoning their present situation as well. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar:

O hateful Error, Melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou throw to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not?

A Happy Road?

Big Frank has been thinking about Frost’s “Road Not Taken” and has another way of looking at it that links with a relatively new school of thought – positive psychology: the study of well being. Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel Gilbert, and Jonathan Haidt, among others have been at the forefront of this. Gilbert writes that humans have evolved and developed a great capacity to synthesize happiness. He points out that there many more ways to think about things than there are things to think about. The mind not only can choose how to think about experiences, for example, but it also can select which facts to dwell on. Reality is ambiguous: there are many ways to view it, and some are more positive than others. When thinking about past experiences we generally use these abilities to put a happy spin on past events. This is a kind of psychological immune systems that predisposes us to happiness. Ironically enough, though, what works towards the happy spin in retrospect, generally does not work looking forward. Gilbert writes: “When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will. When we imagine future feelings, we find it impossible to ignore what we are feeling now and impossible to recognize how we will think about the things that will happen later. Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness, and there have been many empirical studies that show people are not very good at predicting their reaction to future circumstance. However, we do have the capacity to turn “stumbles” into happy events.

So what does this have to do with Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”? Well, keep in mind that the quote is made by the narrator with a view towards how he will view this past event in the future, many years after having faced the “fork in the road.” While, in fact, neither path was factually any different than the other – one was not chosen. The narrator then constructs a fictional treatment than imaginatively makes the chosen road into the one less traveled, to fit with his imaginative construct of what makes him happy. He sees himself as having made the right choice but distorts the one path (equally trodden as the other) into the rarely trodden one – which made him an interpret trailblazer. However, to complicate things further, keep in mind that the narrator is predicting that this path choice will have "made all the difference." That is very unlikely. What is likely is that he will in the future be able to look back on this and see it as having made all the difference! It's not the path that made the difference - it's his imagination!