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The best way to know God is to love many things....Vincent
Van Gogh.
Photo by Ann Marie Nolan
 "Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington,
where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to
twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great grandmother to twins." Author: Edward P. Jones "Tapestry," from All Aunt Hagar's Children
"I stand on deck with the Wireless
Officer looking at the lights of America twinkling. He says to me, My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn't this a great
country altogether? 'Tis" Page 362 Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
"Stormy believed
that we are in this boot camp to learn, that if we don't persevere through all this world's obstacles and all its wounds,
we won't earn our next life of great adventure. To be with her again, I will have the perseverance of a bulldog, but it seems
to me that the training is unecessarily hard. My name is Odd Thomas. I am a fry
cook. I lead an unusual life, here in my pico mundo, my little world. I am at peace. Dean
Koontz, "Odd Thomas," 383
If people bring so much courage to
this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward
many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and
the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Hanging Party
Johnny Kelly sat in the parking lot at the
Valley Diner as though it were safe haven against an impending storm. It wasn’t. It was just the first place off of
route 8 in Ansonia to stop and he was early, Salesman’s habit. Loosening his sedately striped silk tie and slipping
out of his woolen suit coat, he got out of the car and walked the length of the lot to stretch his legs, recalling the times
he’s walked here as a boy, eager to spend the few dollars he earned each week delivering the Ansonia Evening Sentinel.
He looked around his town and took a deep breath and held it. This was his town. This
is the place they would bring him back to, this place where they still called him Johnny because it was the only name they
had for him.
Out of boredom he carefully kicked the mud from the hand-sewn leather
on his Oxblood loafers and watched a pretty little thin blonde in a waitress uniform and with a light sweater and no rain
coat leap from a cab and dash through the light rain into the diner. Then, seeing the procession approach through the cold,
rain soaked streets, he straightened the nose of his silk tie around his neck, slipped back behind the waiting warmth of the
automobile’s black European leather seat. Turning the ignition, he slid the car into gear and joined the procession
at the end.
They drove slowly through the streets. The town was lifeless. Where were the
vast herds of loud and laughing children who once roamed these streets? What became of the corner markets with
their crooked floors and wooden counters, bent under the weight of those enormous, ancient cash registers with the white ivory
keys? Places like Senesky’s with their hand stuffed kielbasa and Nicoletti’s where the mozzarella
was so fresh it dripped with warm milk. Like the children, they were gone and with them went the identity that was, to him
anyway, the things that defined this place. The mills were gone too. Closed and silent as coffins. They said the
wages were too high and the unions wanted too much. The truth is, the profits were too low and it was the bosses who wanted
too much. When they left, they took everything with them, leaving behind a generation too proud to cry foul.
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Annabelle and the Charge of the Light Brigade
Jimmy Hughes felt good enough to
do another lap around the track at Nolan field. He wasn’t jogging, not exactly. Nor was he was walking, not exactly.
He was doing something in the middle for which there is no known name. But, he was wearing sneakers and white athletic socks
and sweat pants and a tee shirt and as far as he was concerned, it was jogging. Besides nothing is ever what we
think it is. He didn’t think his heart attack three years ago was a heart attack. He remembered that he thought it was
a snake because suddenly, he had this otherworldly sensation that a massive boa constrictor had wrapped itself around his
rib cage and was squeezing the life out of him. He looked down in terror to watch the creature devour you, him it is not there.
It was just a sensation. That scared him more because he could not see what had him. It squeezed tighter. He could not
breathe. His eyes opened wide in a sort of fright he had not felt since childhood. He looked around frantically for someone,
anyone to help him.
Then it stopped. It released him. His breath returned. He looked around
to ask somebody, anybody what happened? Before he could speak, an unbelievably sharp pain in the left side of his throat
caused him to twist his head downward and raise his shoulder to his ear. At the same time the snakes returned and began to
crush the breath out of him. He fought back. He was outmatched by its brute strength. It forced him, slowly, to one knee.
He fought back. He tried to stand but there was no air. He did not understand what was happening.
‘Why doesn’t somebody help me?’ he screamed to himself in a panic ‘Don’t they see what’s
happening?’ then he was on his back and the pain was gone. The serpent had released him and that God-awful once-in-a-lifetime-pain
in his neck was gone. He gasped for air and his arms, spread out beside him, were shaking.
From out of nowhere, he thought, there was a woman talking to him. She had an accent. Accents always surprise him. Hers is
deep, refined and southern. Why is she in the valley? Then he remembers. He is in Memphis. Then he remembered Elvis died in
Memphis. Of course, he died while sitting on a toilet bowl reading pulp fiction. He takes some pride in the fact that by comparison,
his pending death in this dirty, hot, black-tarred parking lot is a monument to dignity.
The woman’s silky smooth voice tells him she is a nurse and that he has had a heart attack
and she is calling for help. He grabs the rear bumper of a car with his right arm and drags himself up to the sitting position
and fumbled around in his coat pockets until he found his cigarettes. He lights one up. He thinks that a thousand cigarettes
this year, one more won’t kill him. He’s just tired. So tired. He slowly drops his head back on the cars
bumper; close my eyes and waits for the ambulance.
He remembered the three of them in bed watching
a flickering image of Ronald Reagan making the 1980 State of the Union address. The sound and lights are off so the baby will
fall asleep. But the baby doesn’t sleep. He is wide-awake, staring at him, mouth open, mesmerized by his profile. He
isn’t home much and he thinks he frightens the child so he gives him a wink. The boy smiled up at him.
His wife has fallen asleep. He wishes she would wake up because he needs to talk to her. If he takes that sales job, he will
be on the road constantly but the money is good and right now that’s all that matters. The mortgage is $650 a month,
the car payment s $125, then there’s insurance and gas and utilities and the baby needs new everything.
He’ll tell them tomorrow that he’ll take the job. He doesn’t want it but he doesn’t have a choice.
He let out a long tired sigh through his lips phhhfffffff
A few seconds later the baby lets
out a long tired sigh through his lips phhhfffffff
In the hospital,
he closes his eyes to sleep because the attack exhausted him. Maybe he was asleep and he was waking up because he could not
remember changing into a hospital issued sleeping gown. Nor did he remember climbing into the hospital bed and he could not
explain who this man in the suit was or why he was sitting on his hospital bed. Apparently, the man in the suit has been talking
for a long time.
“Who the hell are you?”
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Leto and Paeon.
Running in from the rain, it surprised him how
quiet it was inside the Valley Diner.
In the two and a half decades that consisted of his life, he had never been in
the diner in the day light hours and the stillness made him feel that he had dropped by unexpectedly on an old and popular
friend.
Why was it empty? What time is it? Wiping a few remaining drops of
rain from his face he looked at the very large black and white clock on the cool steel wall above the white tiled counter.
It was 10:30 in the morning.
He cringed a little. He hated 10:30 in the morning. He had always
hated that time. Well hate is such a strong word especially in such a trivial matter as disliking a time of day.
But he allowed himself the satisfaction that there is something conceited about that time of the day. It was too aloof, almost
pretentious. It wasn’t the beginning of the morning or close to lunch time. It was just a stupid, pointless time and
he wondered why they had it at all.
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Balanced and Serene
Francis Gallagher loved his garden and his cat and his
friend Henry Wilson. But Henry was gone now and the cat wasn’t far behind him and the rain that morning kept him from
his garden. Dressed in his blue jeans and white thermal shirt that were tattered and worn from the weather, he drove
his pick up to a late breakfast at the Valley Diner and a smiling young man in an ill fitting black suit and a peculiar tie
in the company of smiling young woman held the door open for him.
He slide his aging,
narrow frame into his usual booth, the one towards the front and folded his hands on the table and crossed his legs in a way
that was unfamiliar in the valley, looked out the fog stained window and watched the smiling young man with the peculiar tie
open the rusty door to his seemingly ancient automobile for the smiling young woman.
These
days, he ate alone a great deal of the time and he had gotten used to it. It was okay. He didn’t mind. He liked the
diner because it remained the same over all these many decades of his life while in his garden, where he spent all his time
now, every day was different. Looking out the window from snug warmth of his favorite booth, he thought that the rain meant
more to him now that he was a man of the gardening science, as Henry used to call it. It meant more but it didn’t mean
much, not in the larger sense, it just meant that the rain fell and soaked in around the green beans, which was very, very
important to him these days. And he liked to be alone on days like this. Dark and rain swept days appeal to all the
Irish the world over. He wondered if God gave us these days because he is a gardener too, the ultimate gardener, and that
he made these rainy days so his fellow gardeners would do housework, shopping and other the necessary chores of life.
These days, these dark and windy days reminded him of some many things. They reminded
him of Ireland and his vacations there, and they reminded him of his mother, Nora, and it reminded him how much he missed
her in his life. He was a private man. He never told her he was gay. It wasn’t the sort of thing one discussed
with Nora Gallagher; it was one of the many, many things one did not discuss with Nora Gallagher. But she knew about him,
he was fairly certain that she knew about him.
He was a private man. Aside from a small circle
of friends, he never discussed his life with Henry Wilson, how happy they had been all those decades, and how much he missed
him in every second that passed and with every breath his took. And when he shared those things with his small circle of friends,
he would cry and they would hug him and hold him and tell him he and Henry would be together again and that everything was
alright. But then, another one of them would die and the small circle of friends would grow even smaller.
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Jimmy & Tina at Lunch
Tina held the ringing cell phone behind her back and
stepping several feet away, she spoke loudly into the phone as she walked across the room “Mommy will be home shortly.”
Reaching a patch of empty hallway near the bathroom doors, she hushed her tone and hissed into the phone “You’ll
get paid when I have the money I don’t know when that will be. Then sue me, go ahead. Fine.”
She slammed the phone shut and sighed deeply, her eyes focused on the dingy gray wall in front of her. They were going to
turn the phone off any minute now. She was not sure how much more of this she could take but she knew that for the sake of
her daughter that she would take as much as the world dished out because she was one hell of a good woman.
“Bill collectors?” A deep voice behind her said “They try to shake you up. Don’t worry about it.” She was suddenly flooded with guilt “Look, I’m not being mean or anything,
it’s just that……”
“I understand.” he said with a smile
she liked instantly “Separated people, they got issues and suitcases like you said…”
“Baggage”
“Yeah and luggage, you name it” he said trying to cooperate.
She stopped leaving. It seemed like the decent thing to do. He needed to talk and she felt
compelled to listen.
“Man, I hate this singles thing.” he said to the
wall “At my age and after 15 years of marriage, you just feel like you should get some sort of seniority rating,
privileges of rank. But you don’t. You just have to start over again. I want to start over again, but I
don’t want to. You understand that?”
“Oh Brother.” She said, “Believe
me I do.”
She was glad she stopped leaving.
“The thing is, I don’t know what happened.” he continued but now he was facing her and looking at the wall
behind her “Over the years, things steamrolled, and the next thing you know, the entire situation just went too far.”
She barely waited for him to finish his sentence because she needed to say something about
the last thing he said and about the thing he was saying now. “Yeah” she said “and you don’t
know how to make it stop or get it back to where it was. And you’re so dug into your points, your principles on
making him try to understand that you don’t hear the other side anymore. You want to go back to what things were
and you can’t and you know that even if you could it would never work and things would never be the same. You
just want it all to go away. We went through so much together and most of it was his fault. Still when it’s
over, you’re shell-shocked and at the same time you feel like the whole world sees your failure.”
They fell into a comfortable silence for a second, each staring into a different dirty spot on the wall. She smiled only because
it felt so good to say those things aloud finally. He smiled because he now understood he was not the only person in the world
to feel the way he did. Plumbers don’t get a lot of interaction. After a couple of seconds, he spoke up, but without
looking at her and said, “I regret everything. For these past two years, that’s all I’ve done,
regret, regret, and regret some more. I think the problem with that is, that you can get so caught up in regretting
the past you start to forfeit the future. What I resent is that I’m an intelligent, capable person, but I’m
in this place that I don’t understand, I’m in over my head. I’m confused.”
She nodded in agreement and added her thickest Valley-ese, “Listen, about divorce and making sense out of it, I can
tell you from my own life, you’ll never understand why you got divorced. And if you spend too much time thinking about
it, you become a slave to trying to understand what happened. But when you give that up, you start thinking, “Will I
ever love again?” and then she fell silent and considered her own question. The silence between them was
good and not uncomfortable.
“Yeah, sure you will.” he said feeling responsible for
her happiness “ I think you will. I really do. I think that if you have enough in you to suffer from love you
have enough in you to love again.”
She did not answer him or look at him.
She was lost in thought. Looking someplace into her past she said aloud “I never thought this would happen to me.
I always thought that divorce is what happened to someone else. Divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there's
less of you.”
She snapped back to life and looked around her as if she had been
gone for a second and returned. She looked into his large brown eyes and said “ I think my ex is crazy .”
“I know my ex is crazy.” He shrugged and then smiled “You’re easy to talk
to.”
“Yeah” she smiled happily and relaxed “you too.”
“It’s nice to get things off your shoulders huh?” he added relaxed “well,
anyway, you’re busy and here I am rambling on.” and started to walk backwards.
“No!”
she yelled and then realizing she yelled, she said quietly “I mean, no. It’s okay.”
He did not want to leave so he continued with the previous conversation as though it had never ended “I live alone.
It’s very hard for me to be alone.”
“I live with my kid” she laughed
“which is sort of like living alone.” But he remained sullen
“I don’t do alone well.”
He said trying to explain himself “I’m a people person. I come from a big Italian family. People all
over the place. When I was a kid, I used to wish for just one minute in the bathroom without somebody banging on the door
“What happened? What did you do? Fall in?’ now….it’s just…it’s empty.
Divorce….jes.”
“You die a little bit from it.” She said empathically
“Those sounds like strong words, but I believe that inside of my heart.”
“It
kills a little part of you.” He added
Now she was sullen. “I know,
I know.” she added “I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”
“I guess” he interrupted “what I’m saying is this, to live without
being loved or giving love, it’s not really living it’s just like surviving and frankly, I’m scared.
I’m man enough to say that too. I don’t care what people think.”
She
felt a need to protect this giant of a human being “I’m scared too.” She said “I mean, it scares
you, when you think that you could end up dying alone. I’m getting to that age where if I dated someone half my age,
I wouldn’t be breaking the law.”
“What kind of world is this?
I mean who’s in charge?” he asked “Who do I talk to about this? Who makes the rules anyway?
You know, if you’re in a crowded elevator and say ‘I hate so and so and I wish he would die’ everybody laughs
but if you say ‘I’m sad and I hurt and I need a hug’ everybody moves to one corner of the elevator…trust
me on this, I know. “ he paused and narrowed his eyes in thought “You wonder sometimes, why you try. I mean
we keep coming up empty handed and I’m not getting any younger and……but I keep at it because I think that
someplace in the world there’s someone for me, that I have a lot to offer. I’m a good man, I think. I don’t
know, I try to be. I’m honest and I work hard and I try to do the right thing. I don’t know, maybe I’m
just looking for redemption. I mean, that’s not the right reason to meet somebody, to prove you can do it right
the next time. So I dunno, maybe I’m just stupid.”
“No”
she said shaking her head “I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re brave and daring.
I think anyone who keeps trying when they fail because they’re certain in what they believe in is a very brave and noble
soul….unless it involves stalking or something weird like that”
“Thank
you.” He said softly “That was a nice thing for you to say.”
“Well, I’m a hopeless romantic.” She answered
“Hopeless romantics”
he said firmly “are only hopeless in the eyes of those who don't believe in romance.”
“That’s so insightful.” She said sincerely impressed “That’s very deep.”
“Yeah.” He said “I read it on an ad for this movie. You like movies?”
“I love movies” she swooned “but I don’t go much anymore, it’s been years since I’ve
been out to a movie. I have kids, it’s expensive, I mean for us to take in a show, and I’d have to put one
of the little darling in hock.”
She laughed too her hard and too long
at her own remark and she felt stupid and she looked at her feet and she prayed to God to let this guy ask her out to a film.
She waited but God must not have heard her “But, why don’t you go?”
“Alone?” he asked “Naw. You don’t go to the movies alone, cause then people will think you’re
alone.”. His hands motioned the signals for going out to the movies but his tongue refused to cooperate. They
were silent for a few seconds he prayed to find the courage to ask her but several more seconds went by and there was nothing.
“Yeah” she said nervously “I miss movies”.
“God” she prayed “where are you? Would it kill you to have this guy ask me to a movie? “
He took a deep breath, clenched his jaw and felt his mouth go dry. When he spoke, his voice
went very high and he thought he sounded oddly like his mother. “Well, look, you know, you like movies, I like movies,
movies need people, and we’re both people. Maybe if you’re interested……” Embarrassed, she did her best to muster a weak smile and nodded.
She looked into the main dining hall. If he heard her, did they hear her? She would die if they did.
“So I see you’re not wearing a ring over here.” The man said, each word taxed by a strong, guttural accent
heard only in the valley.
Her heart sank. She was in no mood for this.
“But I see you are.” She snapped
Surprised, Jimmy Hughes looked down at the gold
band on his finger and said, “I guess I should take that off huh?”
She stared at him for
a long time. She sensed he was not being sarcastic or coy and there was
a look of sincere questioning in his eyes, but
no one, she reckoned, could be that stupid.
“If I were a cheating piece of scum”
she said brushing past him, “I would.”
Jimmy recoiled, stung by her words that lit
into him one by one like burning arrows.
“It’s not like that.” he said, almost shouting, but
he did not shout because it was not his way. “I’m separated and not divorced yet. You just…it’s
just tak’n it off you know it’s um.” He threw up his arms and looked to the left “I guess I
jumped the gun on that one. I’m sorry. I’m new at picking women up”
She could
tell they were honest words spoken by an honest man.
“Well, you laid that on with a trowel.”
She smiled but the words came out sounding harsher then she intended and because he was looking at the floor when she spoke,
he missed the adjoining smile.
“I didn’t mean picking up women in that sense, what
I meant was” he threw his hands in the air, totally and completely defeated “I work with my hands” he showed
her his palms “words and me … forget it…I’m sorry.”
She felt
sorry for him. He was a human being in deeply over his head and he had resigned to drown. He seemed like a nice guy and he
was handsome, but……. “Look,” she said softly “I’m real flattered and all,
but I don’t date guys who are separated. I’m sorry but there’s just too much baggage with that. Really
sorry.”
He stood to his full, considerable height, and mustering what little dignity he
felt he had left, he said bravely “No hey no problem No big deal. I understand completely. In fact, that’s
a smart move.”
Be
kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle...- Philo of Alexandria
For as long as he could remember, Morty always had
a problem with Jesus. He recalled Rabbi-Parent day down at the temple when his parent, Mary and Jospeh listened to Gafelt
the Elder counsel them, in all his wisdom, on the failings their eldest son, Morty. "The kid is dreck, a huck, a klutz and a nudnik" Gafelt the Elder said with a weary eye on Morty "Now
Jesus," he added as he visibly sparked up "Jesus, on the other, there’s a boy to be proud of!" he beamed
rising an index finger in the air. "So tell me something I
don’t know" Mary shrugged which caused Morty to peel a suspicious eye toward Jesus and sum him up. While Morty,
like his parents, was short, squat and, well, hairy, Jesus was tall, handsome and had that instant likability thing going
for him, a trait so desperately disliked by those who lack it. "He’s
adopted you know" Morty whined in his nasally voice, pointing to Jesus. "Different Father, you said so youself"
he reminded Mary. Embarrassed, Mary shrugged "I don’t where he gets these things" and then mouthed the word
"Meshuga" to Gafelt the elder who nodded solemn in agreement.
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"Nothing
is as approved as mediocrity, the majority has established it and it fixes it fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way."
Pascal
John Callahan
John Callahan (February 5, 1951, Portland, Oregon – July
24, 2010), was a cartoonist, artist, and musician noted for dealing with macabre subjects and physical disabilities. Callahan became a quadriplegic in an auto accident at 21.The accident happened in Callahan's
car after a day of drinking alcoholic beverages. His car was being driven by a man with whom he was bar hopping. Following
his accident, he became a cartoonist, drawing by clutching a pen between both hands. His visual artistic style was simplistic
and often rough, although still legible. It has been likened to that of William Steig, James Thurber, Richard Condie, and
Ben Wicks. Callahan's cartoons dealt with subjects often considered
taboo. His black humor may be exemplified by the title of his "quasi-memoir", Will the Real John Callahan Please
Stand Up?. The subject matter and treatment of his cartoons shares something with the work of Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson,
and especially Charles Rodreguis, although it is much more aggressive than even the Playboy cartoons by these cartoonists. Two animated cartoon series have been based on Callahan's cartoons: Pelswick, a children's
show on Nickelodeon; and Quads, a Canadian-Australian co-production, which retains the violence, joie de vivre, and political
incorrectness of his cartoons. The main character, who "walked out of a bar and into a car," as the theme song relates,
is a quadriplegic who won a large settlement from the rich driver who ran over him, and lives in a mansion with his buxom
girlfriend, gay Australian physical therapist, and a cast of fellow handicapees. Their outrageous adventures infuriate the
neighbours, which include an angry nun, the milquetoast millionaire who originally ran over the main character, and his domineering,
Joan Riversesque wife. Friends said Callahan realized that his cartooning
was a form of counseling, which led to him pursuing a master's degree in counseling at Portland State University. However,
his deteriorating health prevented him from finishing his first term. Callahan
died on July 29, 2010, following surgery for chronic bed sores.
Brian
Tuohy is a poet from Vermont South, Australia
Simplicity of Emotion
It's the afternoon now.
The music is filling the room
And what sunlight is left
Struggles to stream through
Between the thin matchstick blinds.
You
gaze intently at the paper
Looking once more for new opportunities
And I gaze at you silently
Although inside
I’m screaming wildly
A smile creeps into the lines of my face.
Loving you
It’s the reason
to smile
And no other explanations
Seem necessary.
Summit
Avenue, St. Paul Minn.
The
Fitzgerald House
Fitzgerald’s
Club on Summit Avenue
Scott and Zelda's Apartment
and Speakeasy
The
Fitzgerald’s in Connecticut
Mull It Over, If You Please
Practice
"For those on their way to greatness [in intellectual or physical endeavors], several themes
regarding practice consistently come to light:
1. Practice changes
your body. Researchers have recorded a constellation of physical changes (occurring in direct response to practice) in the
muscles, nerves, hearts, lungs, and brains of those showing profound increases in skill level in any domain.
2. Skills are specific. Individuals becoming great at one particular skill
do not serendipitously become great at other skills. Chess champions can remember hundreds of intricate chess positions in
sequence but can have a perfectly ordinary memory for everything else. Physical and intellectual changes are ultraspecific
responses to particular skill requirements.
3. The brain drives the brawn. Even among athletes, changes in the brain
are arguably the most profound, with a vast increase in precise task knowledge, a shift from conscious analysis to intuitive
thinking (saving time and energy), and elaborate self-monitoring mechanisms that allow for constant adjustments in real time. 4.
Practice style is crucial. Ordinary practice, where your current skill level is simply being reinforced, is not enough to
get better. It takes a special kind of practice to force your mind and body into the kind of change necessary to improve. 5.
Short-term intensity cannot replace long-term commitment. Many crucial changes take place over long periods of time. Physiologically,
it's impossible to become great overnight. "Across the board, these last two variables - practice style and practice
time - emerged as universal and critical. From Scrabble players to dart players to soccer players to violin players, it was
observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited
a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that K. Anders Ericsson came to call 'deliberate practice.' First introduced
in a 1993 Psychological Review article, the notion of deliberate practice went far beyond the simple idea of hard work. It
conveyed a method of continual skill improvement. 'Deliberate practice is a very special form of activity that differs from
mere experience and mindless drill,' explains Ericsson. 'Unlike playful engagement with peers, deliberate practice is not
inherently enjoyable. It ...does not involve a mere execution or repetition of already attained skills but repeated attempts
to reach beyond one's current level which is associated with frequent failures.' ... "In other words, it is practice that doesn't take no for an answer; practice that perseveres; the type of practice
where the individual keeps raising the
bar of what he or she considers success. ..."[Take] Eleanor Maguire's 1999 brain scans of London cabbies, which revealed greatly enlarged representation
in the brain region that controls spatial awareness. The same holds for any specific task being honed; the relevant brain
regions adapt accordingly. ... "[This type of practice] requires
a constant self-critique, a pathological restlessness, a passion to aim consistently just beyond one's capability so that
daily disappointment and failure is actually desired, and a never-ending resolve to dust oneself off and try again and again
and again. ... "The physiology of this process also requires
extraordinary amounts of elapsed time - not just hours and hours of deliberate practice each day,
Ericsson found, but
also thousands of hours over the course of many years. Interestingly, a number of separate studies have turned up the same
common
number, concluding that truly outstanding skill in any domain is rarely achieved in less than ten thousand hours
of practice over ten years' time (which comes to an average of three hours per day). From sublime pianists to unusually profound
physicists, researchers have been very hard-pressed to find any examples of truly extraordinary performers in any field who
reached the top of their game before that ten-thousand-hour mark." David
Shenk, The Genius in All of Us, Doubleday
Pages: 53-57
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker
William Blake, part of a series of texts written in imitation of biblical books of prophecy, but expressing Blake's own intensely
personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets from etched plates containing
prose, poetry, and illustrations. The plates were then coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine.
The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical ferment and political
conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work
Heaven and Hell published in Latin 33 years earlier. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake several places in
the Marriage. Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral structures
and his Manichean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in
which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order, hence, a marriage of heaven and hell. The
entire book is written in prose, except for the opening "Argument" and the "song of Liberty." The book
describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost.
Unlike that of Milton or Dante, Blake's conception of Hell begins not
as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated
perception of Heaven. Blake's purpose is to create what he called a "memorable fancy" in order to reveal to his
readers the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion, which he describes thus: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling
them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever
their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each
city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system
was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities
from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd
that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
In the most famous part of the book, Blake reveals the Proverbs of Hell.
These display a very different kind of wisdom from the Biblical Book of Proverbs. The diabolical proverbs are provocative
and paradoxical. Their purpose is to energise thought. Several of Blake's proverbs have become famous:
"The road
of excess leads to the palace of wisdom;
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction;
One law
for the lion and ox is oppression"
Blake explains that, "Without
Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil
is the active springing
from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."
During a visit to a "printing house in hell,"
Blake learns that diabolic printing is conducted with corrosives (that is by etching). This method helps to "cleanse
the doors of perception." Blake promises to adopt this "infernal method" in his own works back on Earth. The
book ends with a series of revolutionary prophecies and exhortations, climaxing into a fierce proclamation for the different
peoples of the world to break the bonds of religious and political oppression. Blake's text has been interpreted in many ways.
It certainly forms part of the revolutionary culture of the period. The references to the printing house suggest the underground
radical printers producing revolutionary pamphlets at the time. Ink-blackened print workers were jokingly referred to as "printing
devils," and revolutionary publications were regularly denounced from the pulpits as the work of the devil. In contrast,
the book has been interpreted as an anticipation of Freudian and Jungian models of the mind, illustrating a struggle between
a repressive superego and an amoral id. It has also been interpreted as an anticipation of Nietzsche's theories about the
difference between slave morality and master morality.
Click here to read William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Writers in Black and White
"Arthur Conan Doyle's books strike the reader as part of a (possibly unconscious)
project - a series of attempts to articulate systems of thought which might make sense of the chaos of life and the human
condition (was his father's own desperate alcoholism, and the death of his brother and son in the horror of World War I: 'this
circle of misery and violence and fear', as Holmes puts it in 'The Cardboard Box'). First comes the ratiocination of Baker
Street, inspired by the techniques of Conan Doyle's old university teacher Dr Joseph Bell (who, in 1892, reviewed the original
Holmes adventures, calling his former clerk 'a born story-teller'), then extreme patriotism (in 1899, [George] Bernard Shaw
boasted that he had converted Conan Doyle from 'Christmas-card pacifism to rampant jingoism') and, finally, the magical world-view
of spiritualism, a philosophy which could render even the slaughter of the Great War explicable. In 1914, Conan Doyle was
praising the 'glorious spectacle' of mass enlistment and imagining that 'our grandchildren will thrill as they read of the
days that we endure'. Twelve years later, following the deaths of his brother and his eldest son, he had come to see the trenches
as 'God's first warning to mankind' ('ten million young men were laid dead upon the ground . . . twice as many were mutilated'),
even claiming to be glad that his son was killed ('am I not far nearer to my son than if he were alive . . . ?'). Spurning
'Victorian science' for having 'left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon', the doctor was reduced
to arguing that "'have always held that people insist too much upon direct proof'. ... "The figure behind much of this is surely Arthur's father, the artist Charles Altamont Doyle.
A chronic alcoholic who, according to Andrew Lycett's biography Conan Doyle: The Man who Created Sherlock Holmes (2007), was
sometimes to be found dragging 'himself around the floor . . . unable to remember his own name', and who, 'when nothing else
was available . . . drank furniture varnish'. He spent the last twelve years of his life in an asylum, or 'Convalescent Home',
as Arthur disguised it in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures, where he wrote that the old man's 'thoughts were always
in the clouds . . . he had no appreciation of the realities of life'. Russell Miller, another recent biographer, adduces Charles's
confession to his doctor that he was 'getting messages from the unseen world' and also, significantly, his belief in fairies.
... "When one thinks of Charles Altamont Doyle (who on occasion
stripped off his clothes in the street with the intention of selling them to buy drink), ... It is as though Conan Doyle began
his writing life by assuming a position which repudiated all of Charles's weaknesses, associating himself instead with the
substitute father of Bell before gradually - painfully - giving himself over to a worldview that vindicated his parent's supposed
insanity and which reduced Bell's rationalism to blinkered, pharisaical refusal to accept the truth." Jonathan Barnes, "Mediumistics", The Times Literary SupplementJune 25, 2010
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