Happy 3rd Birthday, Sophia and Eduardo

Anti Mubarak Demonstration, San Francisco, 29 January 2011

To see a slide show of this demonstration, click the title above.

Father Roy: Inside the School of Assassins

Click on the title above to see a documentary on the insidious SOA (School of the America), the U.S. government's school to train assassins.

Fred Goldsmith's Photography Website Launched

To see Fred Goldsmith's newly launched photography website, click on the title above -- but it will also join other friend's websites, ever available in the list to the right on my blog page -- and I hope I gave proper fanfare introduction for each of them.
Fred's design for his website, you will find, is very restrained and elegant.  

Fifty Nests and the Birds That Built Them

For lovers of art and nature photography -- and for the photographers I know who ought to publish a book of their work -- have a look at Sharon Beal's new book -- Click on the title above, NESTS:  Fifty Nests and the Birds That Built Them

The Chinese Character for Tao (Dao), "the Way"

I suppose there may be copyrights on the three representations of the Chinese character for Tao (the Way) shown at right of this text, but I simply want to show them as examples before presenting my new version of the character:  I am prepared for anyone who wishes to call my new version the "comic book" version!

In "The Spirit of the Chinese Character" (Barbara Aria with Russell Eng Gon), the character, "tao," is said to have originally meant a "course of action," perhaps a military one, as the character combines "foot" or "to follow" with "the leader" -- a "head" topped with two plumes (in ancient days signifying the rank of general."  To Confucius (the law-giver type), tao is the "way" of life rules and moral rectitude, while to Lao-tzu (the intuitive type) "Tao" is the fluid truth of the universe.

Just as its meanings were being transformed in the beginning, friends and I see still other images in the character.  For instance, it is a ladder to one; to me, a ladder with broken rungs, suggesting how the Way is not straight and narrow and easy -- One sometimes goes into cul-de-sacs (one rung may break under foot), and one must take a leap or back out, having lost the main way (as Dante says in the first lines of his Divine Comedy) and continue the search to find the true Way, the search, constantly refined, that IS the Way -- Don't you think?  Two ways of coloring my version -- just for the fun of it:

Finding the Origin of Names

Paul Harmon has provided me a website you can access by clicking on "Finding the Origin of Names," above, where the meanings of names can be found, and where they originated on earth.

What follows will be of no interested except to my relatives:

It has verified what I had always heard in my father's family, that the Eilers came from a part of northern Germany that borders with the Netherlands.  I could not find the name "Niehaves" (a variation of Neuhaus or Newhouse, perhaps), which was the name of my great grandfather, whose widowed wife and sons were taken in by the Eilers in Michigan and given that family's lat name.  According to this site, the Eilers outside Germany settled mostly in the U.S. and Canada.

Other people, researching my mother's family, the McColleys, have established that they were in the U.S. before the Revolutionary War -- I have wondered if they came as bonded servants, but there is no reason to think so.  They were among the Scots who  came down to northern Ireland, coming to be known as the Scots-Irish -- some say, an immigration arranged by the English to dilute Irish national identity -- that too I cannot verify.  But the odd thing is that any connection with Ireland, or even Scotland, is not indicated on their map; whatever McColleys are still in the British Isles seem to be almost entirely in the lower and mid part of England.
But most McColleys are in the U.S.A., and, according to those who researched the family, were first in New England, but now are concentrated in about ten states, especially Montana and Minnesota.  In my native Indiana, the largest concentration is in Wabash and Owen Counties; next, in level of concentration of McColleys, and where my mother's people lived, was Lake County, and Porter County next to it.  McColleys were also in the counties St. Joseph, Kosciusko, Tippecanoe, Shelby, Rush, and Henry.

Newly Published Translations

If you would like to read my translations of four German verses, plus the biographical texts they require on the translated poets, they have just been published on-line, where you may find them by clicking on the title above, "Newly Published Translations."  It does not show the Synopsis they elicited from me as it is on their webpage introducing the new translations being featured.  The Synopsis, below, is the context in which Strauss chose these verses for his last work:

FOUR LAST SONGS:  the poems that comprise the final song cycle by Richard Strauss

Written by Hermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff

Translated from the German by James McColley Eilers

January 2011

SYNOPSIS:

In October 1947, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) went to London where Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a festival of his music.  The British, so soon after World War II, were still suspicious of this German who had remained silent about Nazis while surviving in the Third Reich.  A young reporter asked the 83-year-old composer his plans for the future.  “Oh,” said Strauss, “to die.” 

In this end-of-life state of mind, Strauss began work on his last work, the Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder).   He set the song cycle, which premiered only after his death, to verses written by two poets at a similar twilight stage of their respective lives, Mermann Hesse and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.  Strauss’ inspiration began with his discovery of Eichendorff’s poem, Im Abendrot  (At Sunset).  Perhaps it was because Strauss and his wife had lived through a grim period of history over their fifty-four years of marriage that Strauss was moved by the Eichendorff verse, which describes an old couple who have survived a life’s journey through sorrow and joy.  At around the same time, Strauss received a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse, and Four Last Songs cycle includes three of them –  Frühling (Spring), September, and Beim Schlafengehen (When I Go to Sleep).

Strauss composed the Four Last Songs with Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she sang the first performance on May 22, 1950, in the Royal Festival Hall, London, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

"The Child" In Honor of Christina Taylor Green

KEEP THE TOUCHSTONE OF THAT CHILD’S IMAGINATION

Is there anyone who did not cry at the murder of the victims in Tucson, most particularly at the death of Christina Taylor Green?  Obama, in his speech commemorating these citizens, found the greatest touchstone for political behavior:  Would your next act be worthy of that child’s imagination of how great the U.S could be?  There is a longstanding “spiritual” map for the human race:  The original Age of the Matriarchy was supplanted by the Age of the Patriarchy, and, finally, we may hope the gender war will end, and the Patriarchy be replaced by the Age of the Child.  It is a common notion that every child represents our hope for the future.  For many reasons, there is no better guide than to ask, as President Obama did, “Would this act be worthy of the vision of America in the imagination of Christina Taylor Green?”  While using That Child's name makes the most effective rhetorical flourish, for the sake of her family, I would not want to use her name like a picket sign.  Perhaps we could say, “Would this act be worthy of the vision of That Child [or a general and universal “The  Child”]?”

And we might hope that all political figures, including President Obama, would daily, hourly, keep that touchstone in mind.  Shall we address the President and all politicians with “Would the use of drone bombers be worthy of The Child?  Would The Child approve of people without jobs and money having to do without proper health care, food to eat, a place to live?  Would causing the American people to live in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity be worthy of The Child?  Would The Child approve of concealing the thousands of tragic scenes where people are turned out of their homes?  Would The Child be pleased with the food lines outside churches?  Would The Child approve of the government announcing a hit list on various people around the globe?  Would The  Child approve of continued military adventures based on U.S. notions of exceptionalism and entitlement, pressed on by messianic notions of being the purveyors of a particular notion of truth?  Would The Child want us to restore, or find ourselves, a national democracy, or would she want us to be an empire attempting to control all on earth?  Would The Child consider it worthy for the nation, through capital punishment,  to be the murderer of murderers?

If this sounds right to you, please add your own questions.  (Watching Amy Goodman daily will provide you many, many more such questions: http:/www.democracynow.org)
I intend to send this to the White House (comments@whitehouse.gov).   Perhaps you will send your own enhanced list there, and if they receive enough of the messages, perhaps one of them will be heard.

Publication of the verse "Father"

My verse, "Father," will be published fairly soon on the 2010 on-line collection of 100 verses called "The Poetry Ark."  It is very likely that you have read it before, but, if not, you can see it by clicking on the title line.

Women Muralists in 1980

I want to share with the muralists at Precita Eyes in the Mission these images from 1980.  Click on the subject line above "Women Muralists in 1980" to see a brief slide show of images women artists painted on the side of the Galleria de la Raza in 1980.

Veterans For Peace

Photographers captured the passion of the die-in staged by Veterans For Peace/Veterans Against War at the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco on Thursday, 16 December 2010, the bodies of veterans and their supporters blocking doorways.  On the milder side, for a few photos of people, and a review of the wonderful signs at the preliminary demonstration, click on the title above "Veterans For Peace."

In Washington, D.C. (as reported on the Democracy Now website), "an estimated 135 people were arrested outside the White House in an antiwar protest led by the group Veterans for Peace. The protesters were detained after chaining themselves to the White House fence. Iraq War veteran Mike Prysner urged continued civil disobedience to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mike Prysner: "They’re not going to end the wars. And they’re not going to do it because it’s not our government. It’s their government. It’s the government of the rich. It’s the government of Wall Street, of the oil giants, of the defense contractors. It’s their government. And the only language that they understand is shutting down business as usual. And that’s what we’re doing here today, and we’re going to continue to do until these wars are over. We’re going to fight until there’s not one more bomb dropped, not one more bullet fired, not one more soldier coming home in a wheelchair, not one more family slaughtered, not one more day of U.S. imperialism."

"Among those arrested were the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley."

EAT -- or TAX THE RICH

I joined some friends -- and strangers with signs -- outside the S.F. Federal Building on Seventh Street, San Francisco, waiting to see if the U.S. House would follow the U.S. Senate's approving of giving tax breaks to the rich.  A Homeland Security man found some way to scold us, but we were grateful then to have his vehicle to hold up one of the signs:

Happy Autumn

December 2010

Happy Autumn: Anthem for an Altar to the Seeming Dead


This year the falling of leaves is a celebration –
swatches in burgundy, amber, umber, yellow,
scarlet – the warm colors of antique tapestries.
These leaf shapes, everyday and ancient, are each
a vowel or word in the deeper text we live.

In this happy time, Sherrill, Michael, the two
Roberts, and the one Bobby – my beloved dead
never truly departed – hunger for reviving speech.
The falling leaves are not notes from the dead.
The only language we share now is in a place
beyond sadness where bright leaves laugh.

Random Thoughts, and Pictures from the Oakland Museum

While too much energy is being absorbed by the issues of establishing civil rights for gay men and lesbians in regard to marriage and service in the military, it may be fully warranted by the positive effect this "distraction" would have on all those more life-threatening issues, by causing one more change in those rigid, strangling defintions that are nonsense venerated only because they are ancient. Any clear mind would see through these unquestioned habits of thought. Even those who mouth those prejudices stumble in trying to make the irrational sound rational. If the state really lived by their definitions of heterosexual marriage, most heterosexual marriages would be declared illegal. According to their definition, men and women only marry to propagate the herd, not for any feelings of intellectual rapport or emotional attachment.


In a negative form of the Golden Rule -- the more common Leaden Rule -- they did Saddam Hussein as he would have done. He understood death by hanging, having known the world as cruel form his birth. The U.S. showed him nothing new while they pretended to be different from him. And via film, the population was able to gather at his gallows as a sick entertainment. Where vengeance rules, the most heinous villain begins to seem pathetic; his conquerors, seem, in their own right (wrong), butchers of the butcher. As my old college mentor used to say in farewell greeting: "Onward and downward."

The Film, "127 Hours," and the book, "The Fall of the US Empire -- And Then What?"

On this New Moon evening...


December 2010

Those involved with the film, “127 Hours (director, Danny Boyle),” must surely receive the honors they deserve. (James Franco was finally given a great and demanding role, and I suppose he was selected as co-host of the next Academy Awards in anticipation of a Best Actor nomination.) The film is a perfect mate to the recent film “Into the Wild (director, Sean Penn),” that many of us felt should have received that year’s Best Picture Oscar.
While meaningful in its own terms (enduring and surviving the most dire circumstances – a portrayal of the incident when hiker Aaron Ralston, his arm pinned down by a fallen boulder, had no choice finally but to cut off his own arm), the film takes on other meanings, some of them epic.
The biographical characters in both “127 Hours” and “Into the Wild,” one surviving, one dying, mature and arrive at the same insight, expressed in their own words, that the “individualism” that is part of the U.S. “faith” is a dead end delusion: Humans survive and thrive because of a blessed interdependence.
Seeing “127 Hours,” while reading Johan Galtung’s “The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?,” the film became another in the thousands of current phenomena seen, from Galtung’s analysis, as symptoms of the death (we hope) of the American Empire. Aaron’s rash, self-absorbed behavior mirrors the current American collective myth.
While respecting Mr. Galtung’s copyright, which forbids me quoting him at length, I have to believe he would not mind my quoting his Dedication:
“To a country I love, the United States of America: You will swim so much better without that imperial albatross around your neck. Drown it before it drowns you, and let a thousand flowers blossom!”
I hope everyone will read his book – I have not reached the “And Then What?” portion of the book yet, but from what I have read so far I recognize what many know about our current U.S.A., that as the central “faith” of U.S.-as-Empire dies, those on the periphery, losing touch with that foundering center, begin to form coalitions with the others on the periphery in what might possibly be outposts for the possible post-Empire U.S. – The U.S. as a republic, for Mr. Galtung spells out the convincing facts that the U.S. position on the earth is already that of the latest dying empire, with all the conditions of previous dead empires.
Many of us know that the best comes from extragovernmental people-to-people responses to human needs. (I think of organizations like that of friend Gregg Biggs’s World Neighbors – organizations that help the underdeveloped set up microeconomies, etc.)
After the recent election, which seemed to fragment both the political right and the political left, leaving rational and compassionate people with no national leadership, I suggested to Dan Beam in the Crossroads Café that the pockets of progressive compassion and rational planning that exist in many separate places across the “red” and “blue” states might feel less helpless and hopeless (confronted by a bizarre electorate, and feeling under assault) if they reached out to each other and formed a bond and, perhaps, a common vision.
Those at the table came up with various progressive sanctuaries, naming “Austin,” “Boulder,” and probably most university towns. Dan suggested that such a concord of disparate “colonies” be called an archipelago (“a chain or cluster of islands”). For me it would be the Archipelago of Earthumans. A way to feel human solidarity.
I immediately fear that any such construct would become static and moribund in its own way, torn apart by inner dissensions, like all other constructs so I thought the first principle of that archipelago should be a frequent reminder, from Groucho Marx: “I would never belong to any group that would be willing to have me as a member.”
I might hope, however, that with religion being an automatic source of conflict that religious talk be carried on outside, and that those in the archipelago would limit its ethical code to the Golden Rule, an easy touchstone that conveys empathy, compassion, equality, fairness.
The intent is only to imagine or begin to create the post-Empire republic, or to begin to think in non-Empire terms, pan-human terms.
I thought I would ask people to add to the comments on this blog their own list of possible “islands” in the “archipelago,” understanding that sometimes that would be only part of a city, and keeping in mind that any individual in any obscure place in the US who looks forward to an end to Empire-thinking should not be excluded from such an archipelago.
Your sites for such an archipelgo in the Comment sections, please, and then perhaps following this fantasy notion, maybe someone would actually begin to form those links.
Mr. Galtung has been interviewed on several of Amy Goodman’s Democracy now programs, if you go to http://www.democracynow.org and search for "Johan Galtung"
or possibly paste this in your search engine:
http://www.democracynow.org/search?query=Johan+Galtung&commit=Search

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

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....

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.

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.