The Secret of the Holidays - What It Is!

The holidays are upon us. This time between Thanksgiving and New Years is in some ways one long holiday season. What is it? Holidays? Yeah, that's what it is. What it is indeed!

First of all there are all those childhood memories of the magic of those times. Even for those for whom the holidays of bygone days had some disappointments, the holidays still were believed in as promising to be a time of magic: gifts, happy family gatherings, Santa, surprises, hope, friendship, and the fullfilling of the dream. Hollywood does a good job of perpetuating this childhood dream with its movies and shmaltz. The cliches keep being repeated over and over again: "It's A Wonderful Life", "Miracle on 34th Street", "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", or "A Charlie Brown Christmas", "Home Alone", or any of the many many variations of Scrooge in a "A Christmas Carol". In all cases there is the ending - the sense the permeates the story and for which we all wait while watching - where the family comes together, love and goodwill ( a particularly holiday sentiment) triumphs. George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" questions the meaning of his life and discovers that he is a success because "No man is a failure who has friends." This is the very simple thread that runs through all these movies and is at the core of the holidays: friendship and belonging. Charlie Brown, in a Charlie Brown Christmas starts out wondering why he is so depressed at Christmas. He loses control of the Christmas play, is demoted to finding a Christmas tree. He resists the artificial and finds a pitiful but real tree, which is much ridiculed. But after hearing the Christmas story as told by Linus from the Gospel of St. Luke everyone gathers round and decorates the miserable Charlie Brown tree around which all gather in the end - including Charlie Brown - to sing and unite. In some way or other all these stories end in the same way. The lone figure realizes that he/she is not alone and in the company of friends discovers the meaning of Christmas/the holidays. So there it is: the holidays have this message that cuts two ways: we are saved by our sense of belonging. Yet we don't always feel that we belong and so the holidays come and remind us and prod us to make those connections and console ourselves. We feel disappointed because we can't constantly feel the joy of reconnection and the reassurance of belonging on a day-to-day basis. It is a feeling of returning, and sense of coming home - "I'll Be Home For Christmas" . . . "if only in my dreams". It is a dream and it is one that nobody can ever give up on. Whether or not it has anything whatsoever to do with the Christian story of Christmas it has everything to do with the hope of being delivered from our misery, whether through Christ's birth or through the secular promise of gifts and friends. In either case we want change - we want things to be much better. We want to be with others and to escape our singularity.

Big Frank hopes that all of you out there reach out to your friends and realize that it is one of the most beneficial things that one can do for oneself and for others. It is the way to happiness and that is the core of the holidays; that is why we have holidays: it is a way of reminding ourselves that only with others can we achieve that magic - not only the holiday magic, but the magic of life. We come into this life alone and we leave it alone; but that doesn't mean we have to spend the time in between those mile posts alone. Join hands - that's the holiday spirit.

Speak Memory - a review

Vladimir Nabokov's memory certainly does respond to his injunction that he gives it to speak. His memory is amazing. The book was originally published in 1947 when he was 48 and deals most extensively with the first 16 years of his life while he was still in Russia, along with a more cursory treatment of his time in exile in Great Britain, Germany, and France. He actually begins with an examination of his awakening consciousness! The real beginning of his sentient life he dates to an exact moment when on his fourth birthday he went for a walk, holding his parents' hands. Maybe this is what writers need in order to fill their store of material for writing. Nabokov's is brimming over with extraordinary detail.

His memory tells the story of his parents, their parents, along with a whole tree of aristocratic ancestors that anyone would be proud to be descended from. He has particular love for his parents and great admiration for his father. The rumble of the coming storm of communism is heard from the beginning of the book. Given the precipitous fall from all the comforts and excesses of the richly aristocratic life he was privilged to have, it is amazing that he recalls that fall with little more than a shrug. It is also amazing that given the long time that the storm clouds were seen that the family didn't have more foresight in preparing for the inevitable exile than to rely on a maid's gathering up of a few loose jewels.

Two impressions of this book: first of all the extraordinary vocabulary Nabokov trots out - a reader's vocabulary can be enhanced by reading this book. See how many of these words, gentle reader, you know the definitions of: hypnagogic, photism, synesthete, chromatism, lamellate, serfage, regardant, ophryon, decalcomania, tarlatan, tabanid, dipterist, anastomosis, nicitating, massacrous, breloque, amelus, syncopal, and inanition.

Secondly, and more interestingly, his extraordinary insights. First of all his capturing of the confidence and rightness of childhood: "A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee enters the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die." His insights into the positional nature of poetry: " . . . the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same time a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screendoor of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Doctor Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instananeous and transparent organism of events of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithica, N.Y) is the nucleus." And finally and most touching his thoughts on the radiant nature of love: "Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Somethings impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helpessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time. It is a pernicious habit, but I can do nothing about it. . . . I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."

This is a memoir of exquisite precision, of uncanny insights, of remembrance without nostalgia. Reading it puts you in the company of an extraordinary writer with a unique history and equally unique view of existence: " . . . a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Biking with Carolyn

Stay
(for c)
- Big Frank Dickinson

You arrive so late and leave so early:
It seems like you just got here, and
You're in your car and gone.
I wish you could have stayed.

Book Reviews On The Way

Big Frank has heard from many saying that this blog has not lived up to its content description. For example, there have been very few book reviews. Big Frank does aim to please, and will be writing book reviews.

(Written in the tones of those baritone-voiced narrators of the previews of coming attractions) “In a world of infinite distractions where time is in short supply there comes a book review for everyone.” These reviews will be modeled after the wonderful collection of book reviews published by Wislawa Szymborska, nonrequired reading, wherein she covers a book in a completely subjective manner using it to skip into whatever strikes her fancy. So the forthcoming entries, for the time being, will be book reviews of the Szymborskan kind.

A prelude: Vladamir Nabokov states that a very good approach to any memoir is to follow themes that present themselves in your life. Which are bona fide and which bogus? I take the position that those that catch your attention are real themes: you see what you should. These can be themes that carry themselves out over long periods of time. They can also be poignant interludes inserted between the longer running pieces. Thus, as Big Frank was sitting outside this morning and pondering this that and the other; he had an epiphany that adherence to truth would carry him through. At this moment a hummingbird flew overhead, immediately followed by the sight of a school bus, and then in the distance a hawk slowly spiraling down upon its prey. These three images (choices from among an infinite number of competing sights, sounds, and smells) were taken in for reasons of their resonating as an interlude that could develop into a theme, or perhaps because they were connected to an unrecognized theme. What is their meaning? That is tied up with the kind of introspection and recall that memoirs explore. Few take the time to write them out in the same detail as Nabokov, but all to some extent create a narrative of their experiences – in many ways that is the “I” that we identify with. The first book review will be of Vladimir Nabokov's superb memoir: Speak Memory.

What would you do?

What if our universe were somebody else’s hobby. An Oxford University Professor has speculated that there is a reasonably good chance - an almost mathematical certainly – that we in fact are living in someone else’s computer simulation. He bases this on the assumption that technological advances will, perhaps as soon as within 50 years, lead to the development of a superduper computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world. These future people could conceivably run a kind of what he calls “ancestor simulation” of their history and create worlds inhabited by virtual people with complete nervous systems – just like ours. These ancestors would have no way of knowing for sure if they were virtual or real. This is because the feelings and sights they would experience would be indistinguishable. Aside from speculating on the likelihood of this happening – there are lots of practical questions on how to behave in a computer simulation. You might, at first say that, well, nothing matters anymore – nothing’s real. However, your feelings would be very real indeed. You would still want to live as long as you could in this virtual world – and any sequels or continuations thereafter. Perhaps following certain moral principles would lead the designer to reward you – or, possibly it wouldn’t be morality that got rewarded, but people who led interesting lives, who took chances, who maximized their enjoyment of life (cyber, nonetheless), who interacted with the most other beings, etc. etc. Would this change your life? What would you do?

The Peace of Love

Feelings Intertwine
(For C)
"I like the way I feel when we're together."
---- Big Frank Dickinson

Wrap your heart around mine
And feel the warmth and peace
Of me around you and you around me.
This comfort will lead us to love.