Hail Eris!
Never more than now, the uninvited are showing up to set the sails of civilization.
My friendly anima, a constant companion in the bunker, has this to offer you - a golden apple inscribed “To The Fairest” - and it’s up to us to decide who should be the recipient of this gift from she who wasn’t invited to the party. It’s an archetype of the times.
Running through my memories this morning, I was reminded that when I was just shy of turning 7, Bertrand Russell drew his last breath and departed this plane. His religion, he said, was to do every duty without expectation of acknowledgement or reward here or hearafter. This resonates with me. Though I was but 6 about to turn 7, I was struck by my father explaining death to me when we heard that he had died. I might have asked him what it meant, that he died. I think it might have been the first time I understood that this life ends….for everybody.
I could go on. I will go on….until I too join the most common variety of person ever to have walked the earth, the dead. A big part of “Harrowings” is to help us party in the graveyard. That, after all, was one of my rights of passage. It happened here:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/roosevelt+cemetery+trevose+pa/@40.1277099,-74.9757654,878m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1?authuser=0&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDEyOC4wIKXMDSoKLDEwMDc5MjA3MUgBUAM%3D
The link will show an aerial view of Roosevelt Cemetary just north of Philadelphia. It was at the celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the arrival of the Baron von Steuben in America where he’d train the troops at Valley Forge. My brothers in the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps had marched that fall Saturday in the city and then been brought to this motel across the street - now a Knight’s Inn - where we proceeded to celebrate our freedom from adult celebration. I suppose there was a “bed check” but we managed to get up to no good. It’s a little like the line written by Robert Hunter for “Deal” -
“If I told you all that went down, it would burn off both your ears!”
So it feels now, because what happened there would set the tone for a good part of my life - until, of course, I found reason to do differently and that didn’t go all that well either. Onward!
Years pass. Suicide is attempted and failed. Those who care don’t know what to do or how to do it and they simply hope for the best. Traumatized beyond imagining just by the fact of being alive in the 1970’s and into the 1980s. Things seem to settle down for a bit in 1989 when I get engaged to be married and then marry in October of 1990, get a house of my own, start putting a plan into action that was, amusingly, inspired by the A-Art Encyclopedia falling from a shelf and striking my then-wife on the head.
It was a time when all seemed right with the world. I’d gotten a fellowship to work on the database project and could step away from my gig at the Foundry. I’d go on to land a gig in the Conservation Department at Colonial Williamsburg and then, well, one thing led to another. I supported my then-wife through her certification to teach Art and then it was time for me to get on with my education. I went on a winter’s day in January 1994 to Erie, PA near where my wife was living and working in her first full-time teaching gig. Lake effect snows had me shoveling a four-foot drift out of a parking spot for her car. She told me she was thinking of divorcing me. I was there for my interviews to become a graduate student at the Department of German in the University of Pittsburgh. I wouldn’t make that interview, but they’d give me a full ride anyway.
In April, she came and cleaned out half the furniture from the house, took the healthy cat we’d adopted when we’d first set up house back on December 7, 1989. I’d be left with a dying cat and have to put it down before leaving for an immersion program at the Goethe Institut at Prien am Chiemsee. I spent June through July doing that program before returning to the US and finding an apartment in Pittsburgh; a small room on the third floor of the second house down Neville Street from Center Avenue. My father’s Celebrity Estate wagon overheated hauling my Encyclopedia Brittanica (1939 13th Edition) up the hill coming into town.
I suppose I was brave to try. I’d nearly die trying. I wouldn’t trade the experience for the world. It’s made me who I am. Why am I retelling it now? Good question. I suppose I need to tell myself what I have endured to understand where I am now.
Lucky. I’m simply very lucky to be alive. We are all lucky to be alive but I don’t know how often we think about it. I don’t know how often we think about those, like my late father, Harold Bledsoe Gill, Jr., who loved us enough to help us get to where we are - even at the price of an overheating Chevrolet station wagon!
Life is really beautiful. There are guides who have gone before us. Here is one:
If you give Upasni Maharaj a listen, you might think. You might not. But if you don’t listen, you won’t know what he has to say and how it might be useful.
Add this to the mix - and it will help, I’m convinced. We have a hard time giving up, but in the end, we end up giving everything up anyway. Onward!
Let’s go back to the 6 year old listening to his 37 year old father tell him about the fact of death - upon hearing that Bertrand Russell had died. I was struck by the fact that he would not be coming back. That once a person had died, they were gone - for all time.
Most of you know by now that I am very much impressed by the work of Maria Popova. She has created a digital monument to the best of us and I’ll share these with you. My hope is that more than a few will find these, click, read, listen, and be moved to pass them onto others. It’s a sneaky little network we have here - and we have the ability to change the world, one mind at a time.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/05/08/bertrand-russell-the-scientific-outlook
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/13/bertrand-russell-mysticism-logic-time
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/18/bertrand-russell-free-thought-propaganda-doubt
I leave these here at the feet of my readers.
Give this a listen too. It is transformative if we take it in. If not, well, sometime someone might just find these bits and bytes floating in cyberspace. It’s all a shot in the dark - a message in a virtual bottle, so to speak.
I’ve just spent some time sharing some of my experiences with a young man on the left coast - one-on-one texting. Some of what I shared might hit pay dirt there. It might just change a life for the better. I’m hopeful. When ever I connect with anyone, it is with the intent that the interaction sends ripple effects through the fabric of society, subtly shifting things toward a brighter future for everyone.
Here’s where it all started:
Well, here’s where it all started on Substack.
How about you? What are you up to? Why are YOU on Substack?
Onward!