Friday, November 26, 2010

24 November 2010 in San Francisco



[For slide show, click on "24 November 2010 in San Francisco" above.]
My friend Jim Breeden has returned to his artwork in spite of working as a tour guide and historian on Alcatraz, and planning other activities connected with his love of good dining. He used to work for Stacey's Books, and often made large sketches appropriate for books being featured, and the sketches were then displayed in Stacey's windows. The original intent of this blog entry was to show you some of those large sketches that Jim unrolled and showed me, but I had failed to set the camera right, the light was dim, the drawings were on vellum, etc. So, in the slide show that you can see if you tap the title of this entry, there is only a hint of how these sketches look (the one of the Mona Lisa not included).
But then Jim took me to see a relatively new wonder that I did not know about -- the very long and beautiful executed mosaic stairway at the end of Moraga Street (going uphill from 19th Avenue). Then, at the top of those long stairs is a massive wall and beyond it, wooden stairs leading to the top of one of San Francisco's 21 hills - I don't know the name of this one (Martha Hubert has suggested that it may be Turtle Hill). Here again, it was impossible to get suitable photographs of the steps as it was almost the end of the day, the light almost gone. I hope to go back some time to get better photographs.
The names of those who donated for the creation of the stairway are intimately portrayed among the mosaics, unlike most donor recognition plaques, all personalized in a way to convey the nature of the donor, and among the names is that of Jim's deceased beloved, Jeff, as shown among the slides, with Jeff's favorite flowers, daisies, close by in the mosaic.


As you go up the stairs, the view toward the ocean and around is very expansive. I include a photo taken while still on the mosaic steps.

We arrived at the top of the hill so late that we decided we might as well watch the sunset.
To REALLY see Jim's work, he is among those listed at the right on my blog page, "James Breeden": http://www.afterlifestudios.net

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Out of the Old Boxes: The First Out

Opening the old storage boxes (too common a theme these days), after the move, forced by fire, there are all these...what are they? Cartoons? Drawings? They are flimsy and will not last long, but before the next apartment fire and flood, or the next earthquake, perhaps little by little I will scan them -- but might as well play with them in Photoshop as well. These two are, I guess, what you would call constructions, like so many of the pieces from decades ago. But if you click on the title above, "Out of the Old Boxes...," you may survey, if you like, a first batch from the old boxes....



Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Preaching to Myself: Gods and Tyrants

Preaching to Himself: WHO OR WHAT IS YOUR GOD? WHO OR WHAT IS YOUR TYRANT?

I doubt if the meaning of these words will be foreign to any who may happen to read them.

How many humans on earth-2010 (including many who feel they are free) live under a self-created tyranny? It is well that most (all?) have a companion voice in their brains that they converse with – Such a voice provides a companion even in solitude: We talk to ourselves.

But this voice may have worked its way out of control of an earlier voice that gave us rules to follow. Someone implants a helpful warning in a child’s brain: “Don’t put your hand on heated metal, or you will receive a terrible burn.” “Don’t try to outrun a red light or you and others may be killed.”

I guess most would call this the superego – a sort of parent authority instilled to watch over and direct the fledgling ego. When that voice can be integrated into our final, companion voice, the moral terms “wrong” and “right,” used to imprint danger signs, can be moderated for the adult and become the less medieval terms, “toxic” and “tonic,” where one will generally want to avoid the toxic and gravitate toward the tonic.

Our companion voice is formed partly by learning, partly by personal experience. But finally we can live well only with our personally earned voice, not with an inherited voice that we may allow to possess us. We have to make or find our own voice – As we civilize and socialize that voice, it civilizes and socializes us.

How many have not achieved this self-governance? How many even realize it is a process they must undertake? The simple rules of the superego will not be sufficient as we grow and learn and are faced with ethical choices in ambiguous circumstances. That childish superego cannot be trusted even if it presents itself as infallible, in possession of final "truths." And there is the dangerous circumstance where that superego lives on longer than it should, and thrives, by dressing itself in other static rules learned along the way, taught in a family or a culture: The parents and other elders pass along warnings they have picked up from outside forces – political and religious, passed down from their own parents, or part of the general notions of the group into which they are born. A child may be taught and live by notions never tested by their own parents who have impressed those notions as law. The teachings may be imparted in a way that is not really teaching as it trains a person to avoid questioning: “This has always been so, and so you must accept it too.” Or, “we have always known that those are bad people. They have always been our enemies, and so now they are your enemies too. We don’t remember why, but it is by taking customary attitudes like this on faith that we survive. Fail to follow this and you will not survive, or you will even become an enemy yourself.”

So those thoughtless opinions, posing as thought, have a place where they can gather and adhere – a certain mountain, a collective projection of a prolonged infantile superego called God, a being of ambiguous nature and mind-crippling contradictions so that it can slip into and be confused with passing shadow superegos, temporal deities of a poisonous sort – a Hitler or a Stalin or a Jim Jones; or, more fortuitous, of a spiritual nature – a Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King; or of a political nature, like Marx or Malcolm X.

The draw of the superego authority may be very dangerous, a state of infatuation that must be reasoned with, questioned, and changed, or discarded, in your self-made psychic universe.

The mentally disturbed often complain of a voice or voices in their heads, voices that are controlling them – perhaps a too-acute awareness of the unwanted, unearned, implanted voices brought over from priests, preachers, politicians, teachers, and demagogues.

Ultimately, if we awaken to its presence, we all need that companion voice that reminds us what we have learned from past experience or drawn from sources we trust, that must not be passive knowledge, but processed and made our own by throwing out what strikes our innate bullshit detectors as poisonous or dead. This companion voice may be tutored and made our own, converted from the ever-hovering parent of superego into our peer, our ideal guest and companion (the mirror of self-reflection) that makes it easy to be at home with ourselves.

How to safely replace the tyrant with a permanent guest, the true self. How to recognize the tyrants. How long does it take to convert an externally determined superego into an internally established guardian and companion? For this, I might wish -- and this is the whole notion behind this little essay -- that it would be common social convention that in late adolescence, all humans would be advised: Now question everything you have ever been taught, even by those you love and respect. If something really feels right or true, it will survive, you will keep it. With the establishment of this habit of questioning, later reappraisal may change your assessment of what you have set aside.

Going along with such a convention would have to be exposure to the world outside the world where you have been taught, exposure to other learning, and there is also that custom practiced in some countries where a youth is expected to do as much as a year of wandering, thereby assuring that experience is not insular. Urged to keep an open mind, whatever does not survive true, personal examination may be tossed, or set aside as suspicious. In this way, real thinking – that is questioning – will have been established – the only inoculation against a tyranny against thought.

A related matter: Whether you understand this metaphorically, or literally, the God you worship creates you. Best to recognize a person's God from their character and behavior, that may reveal that they worship a murderous, vicious God, rather than by what they mouth in words from of a particular religion that may, at times, preach kindness.

Drop the heavies: One may free oneself from the worship of those ancient volcanic and (as they readily admit, vindictive and "jealous") presences and be like a friend of mine who recognizes that his “gods” are Art and Gourmet Food.

All pause here to identify your particular gods – and whether they are tonic or toxic – whether they have a benevolent influence, or seek to enslave you.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Jim's YouTube Entries

Now the "Links to Friends" Site at the lower right on my Blog Page will have a link to "Also, Jim's YouTube Entries" - A first video will appear, and in the upper right by the name "Elefancy" is a way to go to the rest of the videos. I am looking forward to adding to more than what is there now.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The Yin and Yang of Meditation

"The Yin and Yang of Meditation" -- in the hopes that it will actually prompt me to meditate!

Friday, November 05, 2010

A Rhyme for Current Events

While homosexuality was not the only issue in the recent elections, I sent this as a letter to the editor of a newspaper:

AS HOMOPHOBIA AFFECTS ELECTIONS

Is my little life the cinder in the Eagle’s eye?
the stone in Democracy’s shoe?
My modest days the terror in a collective mind?
Me, the mildest creature in their zoo?

Have I the power (arthritis and eczema aside)
to crumble the state (I guess I better not scratch).
Because of me, husband and wife lose their home?
I’m the cause when they question if they match?

I wish I had answers for my questions?
Then I might live at last free of fear
that someone looking at me will see their monster,
with finny spine and embers for its eyes – a queer.

– James McColley Eilers, November 5, 2010

Monday, November 01, 2010

Publication of a Nelly Leonie Sachs Translation


The website InTranslation has published another of my translations, a verse by German Jewish poet, Nelly Leonie Sachs: http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/prepare-to-leave

As they had requested, I created a bio of her to go along with the verse, but have since come across a more detailed, and devastating, bio on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Sachs

I include the original German below -- the InTranslation site never seems interested in publishing the original -- if anyone wants to see how I distorted the original: I thought I could convey the metaphor of pupa-to-butterfly without directly using those words.

Since writing that bio, I have found out that when Sachs died of cancer on May 12, 1970, it was only a few days after her long-time correspondent, Paul Celan, committed suicide in Paris, and there is this eloquent remark she had written to Celan from her exile in Stockholm: "Between Paris and Stockholm is the meridian of pain and solace."


I did not realize I had chosen a verse and provided a title and last line that seem to echo her words when she received the 1965 Peace Prize of German Publishers: "Let us remember the victims and then let us walk together into the future to seek again a new beginning."

“Bereit sind alle Länder aufzustehen”

[“Ready are all lands to stand up”]

by Nellie Sachs


Bereit sind alle Länder aufzustehen

von der Landkarte.

Abzuschutteln ihre Sternenhaut

die blauen Bundel ihrer Meere

auf dem Rucken zu knupfen

ihre Berge mit den Feuerwurzeln

als Mutzen auf die rauchenden Haare zu setzen.

Bereit das letzte Schwermutgewicht

im Koffer zu tragen, diese Schmetterlingspuppe,

auf deren Flugel sie die Reise einmal

beenden werden.