Solitude and Spirituality

Our topic of “loneliness and solitude” at last Sunday’s early morning Quaker discussion group led me, predictably, to Thoreau. A whole chapter of “Walden” is devoted to solitude and bears the very word as its title.

The line that stick with me is “I love to be alone. I never found the companion so companionable as solitude.”

Thoreau, our most celebrated recluse, goes on from there, anticipating much of what we talked about on Sunday.

Oddly much of Sunday’s discussion centered around whether one feels lonely at a loud dance party. (The consensus seemed to be that if you go with friends, you have some kind of entree),

Not having been to such a party for, oh, 40 years, I couldn’t comment, but I do know that social occasions often heighten my feeling of alienation. The banter, the posturing, the superficiality numb the spirit.

I did share with the group that I have found that creativity goes with my own solitude. Some bit of writing, a sketch, an insight. Or to put Thoreau’s twist on it, I’ve never found creativity so creative as in solitude.”

Someone suggested that loneliness is often what drives us to not be lonely. The pain of it leads us to seek out others — and that’s to the good. I imagine the pain itself forces us to open our hearts to others. But it can also lead us to plumb our being and search our own souls.

Sadly, there are those who simply surrender to loneliness...and despair. It is irrefutable that we are ultimately here alone, and will leave life in either loneliness or solitude — or peace.

Thoreau never felt lonely because he put himself at one with surrounding nature. Nature was his companion and, I dare say, it can be ours. If you are lonely, go for a walk in the park. Take it in — literally.

Because Sunday’s discussion took place in a Quaker setting, I was mindful of the spiritual side of the topic. It seemed to me that loneliness is largely about ego; solitude is about spirit. The “self” that feels deprived in loneliness is the ego. The being that feels enriched and blessed in solitude is the spirit—the divine spirit if you choose to invoke it.

Loneliness is a prison, a trap; solitude is liberation and transcendence.

"Just like ringing a bell"

Recently I’ve had this feeling that there’s a jazz pianist locked inside of me trying to get out. Of course the feeling occurs when I’m listening to the likes of Oscar Peterson, Billy Taylor, Bill Evans, John Lewis, Ray Bryant or Gene Harris. Increasingly my listening happens through my iPod as I’m jogging along trying to stay limber and fit.

My locked-up-jazz-pianist feeling is one of later life’s nagging little regrets. It isn’t all-consuming and besides I suppose that I could even take a “fun run” at dispelling it by...what? Taking lessons as I approach my eighth decade?

Not impossible but unlikely.

This morning I was vaguely communing with my inner jazz pianist while listening intently to changes in a spare and perfect Count Basie riff. The iPod was in its randomizing “shuffle” mode. Suddenly, after the pause following Basie’s little opus, Johnny Winter’s pounding version of “Johnny B. Goode” popped up on the play list.

Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans
Way back up in the woods among the evergreens
There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood
Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode
He never learned to read or write so well
But he could play a guitar just like ringing a bell....

His mother told him someday he would be a man
And he would be the leader of a big old band.
Many people coming from miles around
To hear him play his music when the sun go down
Maybe someday your name would be in lights
Saying Johnny B. Goode tonight!

Oddly the line that jumped out at me was “He never learned to read or write so well.”

Imagine. There’s a trade-off, I thought. What if I had “never learned to read or write so well” but could play the piano “just like ringing a bell.”

What if I had to choose? What difference would it make? Would the wisdom of the choice be determined by whether my name “would be in lights”? Or was there something more here? Emerson and Thoreau perhaps. Or Hemingway or Baldwin or Orwell.

To me, the story of Johnny B. Goode is a story of success and failure. It doesn’t consider Johnny’s regrets in later life because “he never learned to read or write so well.” Who would he be if he had written and read well?

Then again, perhaps “playing a guitar just like ringing a bell” was enough. We don’t regret what we don’t know. (Question for another time: If ignorance is bliss, what is knowledge?)

For me, simply playing and having my name in lights would not have been enough — knowing what I do know from reading, and, yes, the challenges of writing.

Still, thanks to the Johnny B. Goodes (and the Johnny Winters and the Chuck Berrys) and the Basies and Petersons, I have music in my head.

Come to think of it, why not do it all? Find music in the words — and words in the music.

Declare your own independence

"Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think! Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves."

1858, Henry David Thoreau

Have you declared your own independence?

Do you use the freedoms we as Americans have?

If not, are you truly free?

Are we?

Views of the News: Jefferson, Thoreau and Liebling

I gave a talk today about the future of newspapers and journalism. I introduced it with three quotations. Taken as a whole, they are rife with contradictions and questions.

Start with two questions: Can the role of newspapers as described below by Jefferson, be filled by the “New Media” of the Internet? Or are the young demonstrators in Iran proving that New Media are far more potent in checking government abuse than newspapers have ever been?

The basis of our government’s being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1787.

Are the news media superficial? Or does the vastness of Internet allow us to “soar above or dive below” the thinness of “Old media” as described by Thoreau?

I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire — thinner than the paper on which it is printed —then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. Henry David Thoreau, 1853

Finally, what is the news? Does it rely on “news media”? For many, the real news might be that they have been sleepwalking through life. The real news awakens them. That is what Thoreau was telling us when he famously wrote in “Walden”: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

We need to find, and make, our own news. We are our own news medium.

Which brings us to Liebling, author of “The Wayward Press.”

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” A.J. Liebling 1904-1963

As you can imagine, the words of Jefferson, Thoreau and Liebling gave us a few things to talk about. . . .

Orwell's "Blog"

"As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later."

So began George Orwell's essay "Marrakech." He wrote it in the spring of 1939, as Europe, and ultimately the world, slid into war.

I cite the essay because it sprang from remarkable writing by Orwell that can now be found on line as Orwell's "blog."

The Orwell Prize is posting "Orwell's Diary" entries day by day as he wrote them 70 years ago. "Visitors" to the blog find Orwell writing in mid-September about Morocco. Orwell and his wife, Eileen, stayed in the French colony for a year while he recovered from being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War.

He wrote "Marrakech" in the spring of 1939 so I anticipate that snippets of the essay will turn up in his journal entries before our own spring of 2009.

Like the diary entries of Thoreau, another avid journal writer, many Orwell entries are detailed botanical and biological observations. You could probably write about book titled "Orwell, the naturalist" based on his journal and many of his less well-known essays. You could certainly do that, if it hasn't been done, for Thoreau.

The publishers of the "Orwell's Diary" assure us in their comments and notes that politics become more prominent in journal as the war grows near.

As with other blogs, readers are invited to comment. Some are elated to feel the immediacy of Orwell's writing in blog form. Others are clearly frustrated that, so far at least, there is so little evidence of the kind of insightful writing, and thinking, found in "1984."

As I read these entries, I see Orwell at that restaurant table, writing in his journal, swatting away flies. They are the same flies that trail the corpse before buzzing back to the writer's table. We'll see whether he made note of them in his journal.

Noted or not, they were there and came to be the kind of telling detail that marked Orwell's masterful work.

What if there were no newspapers?

The textbook I use in my Mass Media and Society class poses a compelling question:

What if there were no newspapers?

That’s no idle question. Newspapers as we have known them are fast disappearing.

Part of the answer to the question depends on what, if anything, we replace newspapers with.

Among the candidates are television, the internet, on-line newspapers and — nothing.

The question also asks us to consider what we value about newspapers. And it must be considered along with its companion: What don’t we value about newspapers?

My gut reaction is that if there were no newspapers we might gain the opportunity to re-assess what is important to us. We’d find out even more if we asked the question: What if there were no mass media at all?

In 1853, newspapers were the sum total of mass media, and in that year Thoreau famously had this to say about them:

“I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire — thinner than the paper on which it is printed — then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.”

So, what if there were no newspapers, no mass media? More of us might “soar above or dive below” their passing, flimsy content.

There’s another approach besides “having no time” for news trivia and media intrusion: Do something about content. Here is where the internet is a solution. We can turn to its vast trove of knowledge at times of our own choosing. We are not tethered to a pandering, insatiable, time-bound, news-cycled, (and recycled) mass media.

Thoreau himself had access to a compendium of knowledge and insight that served his “soaring” needs. It is still available to us today: Books.

Thoreau’s own books have inspired “soaring” for more than 150 years.

Books, traditionally housed in brick-and-mortar libraries, are increasingly found on-line. And much of their content is free.

What if there were no newspapers? We might begin to free ourselves of the “daily news” and seek greater and deeper meaning and understanding in the fullness of time within ourselves and elsewhere.

We might realize that the sources have surrounded us, just waiting to be called upon: teachers, parents, friends, neighbors, authors, sages, children, Nature.

Why have we not paid attention? Where have we been? How did we become so distracted?

What if there were no newspapers?

The Power of Hunger

Beth Blodgett, a Quaker friend, has been called to a monastic life of simplicity, prayer and peace in rural Honduras. A pediatrician by training, she volunteers one day a week at a clinic in a town about an hour away from her remote cabin.

The rest of her time is, by necessity, devoted to survival

She returned to Portland recently to tell us of her life and how it has changed her.

She is noticeably thinner (I believe she said she has lost 50 pounds). Her austere diet, like her simple way of life, is, by choice, like that of her neighbors.

One comment she made has stuck with me because of its deeper meaning. “I’ve passed through ‘having an appetite’ to actual hunger,” she said.

I remember when, years ago, Beth “had an appetite” for an ascetic life in Central America. When her appetite grew to hunger, her life changed.

How much of my own life is now merely satisfying my appetite? What would it mean to hunger for what I believe?

To hunger for peace, to hunger for justice, to hunger for equality. What would it mean to go from satisfying my appetite by signing petitions, voting and donating to actually acting out of hunger?

To fast, to refuse to pay war taxes, to steal the Olympic Torch headed to a China governed by oppressors.

I’m reminded of Thoreau in jail for refusing to pay taxes in support of war. When Emerson visited him and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau responded, “Ralph, what are YOU doing out there?”

Emerson no doubt spoke as a man of appetite; Thoreau spoke from hunger.

Recently I’ve been reading about Tom Paine, whose writings moved the colonists from an appetite for respect and equal rights from England to a hunger for independence. His “Common Sense” and his hunger for complete freedom inspired a revolution.

How much does change owe to hunger?

A Library of 25 Books

What I am about to lay before you is a kind of literary Rorschach test result.

It is also a work in progress.

A few days ago I put myself on a “less is more” kick and got to thinking of the few hundred books in my personal library, 75 percent of which I will never read—at last not in their entirety.

Yes, so many books, so little time.

So as an exercise I posed the question: if I could keep only 25 books, which would they be?

As I went about the exercise, I kept a couple of guiding principles in mind. I have even acted on one.

First, I decided to get rid of books I could readily get at a convenient library. The first library that came to mind was the one in our Quaker meeting house. And that led to my first act: I promptly donated nearly all of my Quaker books to the Multnomah Monthly Meeting’s library, thereby freeing about two three feet of space on my shelves.

The second principle violated the first. Although some books on the following list are readily available at the public library, I want to keep them here for ready reference. An arm’s reach away — for an emergency.

I could go into a Rorschach (Freudian?) analysis of the list (Why, for instance, are there so few women authors?), but for now, I’ll simply share them for consideration. As I say, this is a work in progress. I could change my mind about the list in the next week, or in the next five minutes.

Keepers:

The Essays of George Orwell
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
The National Trust Book of Long Walks in England, Scotland and Wales
The History of Western Philosophy—Bertrand Russell
The John McPhee Reader

The Orwell Reader (Introduction by Richard Rovere)
Small is Beautiful—E.F. Schumacher
Walden — Henry David Thoreau
On Civil Disobedience — Henry David Thoreau
Faith and Practice — the Northwest Pacific Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends

A People’s History of The United States — Howard Zinn
Markings — Dag Hammarskjold
Technopoly — Neil Postman
Conscientious Objections — Neil Postman
Essays of E.B. White

Tao Te Ching — Lao Tzu (Ursula K. Le Guin version)
A Pattern Language — Christopher Alexander et. al. (A study in place-making)
The Group of Seven by Peter Mellin (remarkable Canadian artists from the early 20th Century)
The Jefferson Bible (The new testament freed of “miracle” encrustations. By the third, and most remarkable, president of these United States)

The Essential Rumi
Time and the Art of Living — Robert Grudin
Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony — Lewis Thomas
Language in Thought and Action (Fifth Edition) S.I. Hayakawa and Alan R. Hayakawa
Leonardo da Vinci, Artist, Scientist, Inventor — Simona Cremante

That’s it. Notably laden with Orwell and Postman and males in general. Fiction is all but missing in action.

How to describe? Mystical, retro, analytical, artistic, contrary, liberal, defiant?

To prove how fluid and tentative the list is, note that the photo includes Non-Violent Resistance by Gandhi (Would Thoreau, who profoundly shaped Gandhi's thinking, suffice?). Gandhi is not on the above list.

And so it goes . . . .

Pixated

Yesterday I found myself writing a fellow editor from my print days that the “ink in my veins” has dried up and been replaced by free-flowing pixels.

Publishing is still about words and pictures, except that ink and paper are a lot more expensive than pixels — and that makes a big difference.

If you have a computer (and who doesn’t these days?), the start-up costs for on-line publishing are virtually zero. Because of that, there aren’t a bunch of advertisers looking over your shoulder.

Of course there’s a whole lot more competition for readers, resulting in what mass media moguls rue as the dread “fragmented” market.

But one publisher’s fragmentation is another’s diversification.

Besides, any moderately tagged site not fixated on profit is instantly accessible through search engines. I’m amazed at the numbers of readers who “stumble” on The Red Electric because they are searching for “Ernie Pyle” or “A Pattern Language” or “Olympia Typewriters” or “Thoreau” or “billboards” or “farmers markets.”

Now that’s diversity!

I started posting less than a year ago. Over last weekend I passed the 400-post mark. I won’t do it tonight, but I need to examine the scope of those post topics to see whether I can stitch together a theme or two.

Without going into detail here, I’ll let you in on one: I am a “res … publican,” but I’ll leave that for another time.

Finally, just to show you how bad my obsessed, pixated brain is, I’ve started another web site, and, as of today, the first post is up. If you are interested, visit Back Space Typewriters.

Oh, and then there is always Hillsdale News, a site/e-newsletter serving our community.

See what I mean? Total pixation!

Driving home the point

We were down to three peace vigilers (vigil-antes?) at Sunset Boulevard and Capitol Highway during this evening’s rush hour. Not that our numbers have ever been overwhelming. The most I can remember is 12 or 13 waving placards at two thousand or so commuters headed home. We’ve been protesting since January or February.

Some commuters, call them Group A, must wonder what good we think we are doing. It reminds me a little of Emerson’s famous exchange with Thoreau when the latter was in jail for refusing to pay his war tax.

“Henry, what are you doing in there?” asked Emerson, to which Thoreau retorted, “What are YOU doing out there?”

It’s important to prompt Group A’s 400 or 500 commuters simply to hesitate, even if only to question our motives. At least they will be forced to think of this tragic, wasteful war.

You might say that I’m standing at Capitol and Sunset, a sign in both hands, in order to get Group A to think about something other than mowing the lawn, the weekend sale at Macy’s or the price of gasoline.

If Group A commuters pause a single instant to reflect on this war, my half hour at Sunset and Capitol is more than worth it.

And then there are all those Group B folks who obviously do understand our protest. Group B still honks and gives us thumbs up. And, like us, they too draw the attention of Group A.

Even if our numbers dwindle to one, each Friday evening from 5:30 to 6:00, the protest will still have Group B, honking and helping — driving home the point for peace.

The Tenderness of Spring

"Well may the tender buds attract us at this season, no less than partridges, for they are the hope of the year, the spring rolled up. The summer is all packed in them."

Thoreau's journal entry
for Jan. 12, 1855.

Today in Hillsdale, on this first day of April 2007, the hope for the year blossoms everywhere.

Our spring and its tender buds gracefully "unroll" — revealing the promised bounty of summer to come.