Hello, George: My Gershquest continues

What can you say about a piece of music you've fallen wildly in love with? Having barely recovered from discovering the Makoto Ozone version of Rhapsody in Blue (and yes, his name really is Ozone), I now encounter one of the most rapturous, madly life-loving things I've heard in a long time. Or ever. As my Gershquest continues, now taking me through the rather lumpy and formerly scandalous Peyser biography, his music deepens and takes on new dimensions for me. I want to SING his stuff, I want to be draped across a piano in a smoky room. Would I have wanted to know GG? Who wouldn't want to know a genius?

When I try to take apart and figure out this strange phenomenon of the early 20th century, I find a lot of interlocking puzzles in three dimensions. In his mad social circle of drunken and underaccomplished codependents, he was more addictive than all the champagne in the world. He seemed glued to the piano at these events, or maybe his body grew up out of it, centaurlike. One of the most oft-quoted descriptions of GG's seductive charm came from somebody named Sam Behrman (who also wrote an agonizing description of GG's horrendous last days): "I felt on the instant, when he sat down to play, the newness, the humor, above all the rush of the great heady surf of vitality. The room became freshly oxygenated; everybody felt it, everybody breathed it."

This is as good a description of an addictive drug as I have ever seen, but it is also charged with an erotic longing that dares not speak its name. "Was Gershwin gay?" is still a favorite parlour game among musicologists, as if such a complex man could not be both gay and straight at the same time (which I believe he was: he was simply too beautifully androgynous and dressed too impeccably to be more than 75% straight). And he was a good dancer. My God. I begin to think I am writing about a musical Harold Lloyd.

But this piece, this Cuban overture which was largely overlooked when he wrote it: at first listening you might think, that's not Gershwin. It's just a standard rumba, Latin music writ large. But give it another chance, and another, and you'll hear the dissonances, the bluesiness, the chord progressions which could only be early 20th century (Petrushka, anyone?). He was in with those big guys, the elite composers, but that isn't what stands out here. It's the sheer heat of it, not something you expect from an urban dandy with seventeen summer suits who seldom peels himself away from the piano. Latin music informed a lot of his stuff, including the Rhapsody, but here he wades right in and is consumed. And when I listen to this, I feel an indescribable ecstasy, I want to scream with it! Largely overlooked? Were they crazy? Is everybody NUTS?

Kay Swift, one of GG's longsuffering sort-of-girl-friend-non-fiancee-longtime-lovers, believed Cuban Overture was "Gershwin's finest orchestral composition and also his sexiest. But it went all but unnoticed then, and it has never caught on." I don't know about that. The book I'm quoting from was written in 2009. When you look up the piece on YouTube, there are seemingly dozens of versions, which I have combed through to find (I think) the best. As happens to most artists, Gershwin was a victim of his own success, and once Rhapsody in Blue had everyone in thrall, they didn't really want to hear anything else.

I haven't even begun to probe the enigmatic miracle of that unit, Georgeandira, surely the most codependent songwriting team ever. I once did a line-by-line analysis of the seemingly-simple The Man I Love, a microcosm of a song that would bookend nicely with The Man That Got Away (tune by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Ira). Don't ever think you can do this stuff, because you can't. "The winds blow colder/Suddenly you're older." That's dangerous. It leaps on you like the predatory animal a great song can be. Ira was George's inverse, his shadow, his verbal self. It worked, until that great prismatic glass splintered into shards, and the universe had to do without him.

I am making my way through a long essay from a medical journal about George Gershwin's psychoanalysis and his death from an agonizing undiagnosed brain tumor. The psychoanalyst was a charlatan and a sadist who enjoyed dangling people and messing with their minds. He had sex with Kay Swift during their appointments, convincing her it was a necessary part of the treatment. Incredibly, this psychiatric fiend was convinced, and convinced everyone else, that blinding headaches, hallucinations, falling down, being unable to eat or play the piano, and having all manner of bizarre behavioural seizures was merely the result of "hysteria". For one thing, it bollixes my mind that a man could be diagnosed with hysteria - I thought that it simply didn't happen. But the real horror of it is, they killed George with neglect. By the time the medical community came to the conclusion it should have drawn years before, he was dead. But I just had this thought now - this second - George played into it too, because for all his fiery genius, he was paradoxically a don't-make-waves sort of person, almost passive, so eager to be liked that he buried his anger and went along with whatever attitude prevailed. OK, so it's psychosomatic. Now what?

But that's for another post.

SHOCK WARNING: Return of the Dancing Pig!

I am sorry.  I know I will never stop posting videos of The Dancing Pig. I keep finding new dimensions to this horror, and thus I must share them. This bit is only the last minute or so of a much longer, much stranger silent movie in which a pig in a tuxedo dances with a fancy girl who eventually rips his clothes off. They both disappear off-stage, but suddenly the pig is back - making these - faces. Some have surmised that the pig actually ATE the girl while they were off-stage, which explains the sardonic glee on his porcine face. I also can't figure out - did they use a puppet for this, or what? I can't believe it's the same pig-head as the dancing pig's head. This one has all sorts of bells and levers and pulleys and strings to make it do different things. But what makes it so wicked are those TEETH - surely someone got it wrong when designing a pig's mouth, and thought that pigs were carnivores or dinosaurs or something. The fact that this has been revitalized in that weird way they can do now - somehow resurrecting a flat, grainy image into 3D and almost-colour - just gives it an extra shot of the macabre. It's almost as if you are there.

🚗Is THIS the most dangerous car ever made?

This is a kinescope of (obviously, given the long awkward silences) a live stage show which was typical of very early TV. Nobody knew how to use the new medium, so when they weren't doing "radio with pictures", they were just filming vaudeville shows that had been running for years. Ed Sullivan somehow kept this ancient format going into the early 1970s. There were no re-takes, so glitches and ill-timed entries were common. I'd put this ad in the late 1940s, likely on "the DEW-mont Network" (infamous for the fact that when it went bankrupt, most of the kinescopes were quite literally dumped in the Hudson River). We get a good long look at this fierce-looking thing with the bared teeth, but my favorite bit is where they demonstrate just how easy it is to CLOSE THE DOOR - and, even more alarmingly, how easy to open it. That heavy, four-foot-wide passenger door they've just bragged about literally opens at the touch of a finger, so it won't slam on your feet or ankles (which it wouldn't anyway!). But just think about it. Seat belts literally did not exist back then, so one tiny touch would pop the door open like a jack-in-a-box and eject whoever was in the passenger side with enormous force. But, as they used to say in the bad old days, you don't need a seat belt anyway because in the event of an accident, "you'll be thrown clear".

The way we live, the way we die

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention".

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself! But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself. It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG. A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit.

UPDATE. This was something I found deep in the files, while looking for something else. Which could be the story of my life - but it all seems so very long ago now, and those connections, once seemingly valuable and even precious to me, so painful and costly to my soul. I republish it here because I have some sort of perspective on it all, some four years after I wrote it, and many years since the events I described happened. So what was I after here? Was it intellect, insight, heart, any of the things I thought I had at the time? These were the hollow men in my life, straw men, finally consumed in a fire of their own making. I am not sorry they are gone, and their leaving left a bitter taste, but nowhere near as bitter as the realization that I willingly played the fool to men who were not even wise, and certainly not kind.   

"MENTAL HEALTH" is affecting my. . . mental health.

TOM UTLEY: How to beat the blues - award yourself £10 every time you hear the phrase 'mental health' on TV or radio

By Tom Utley for the Daily Mail

Earlier this month I invented a game to cheer myself up through these short, chilly days of January. I’m not claiming it will work for everyone, but readers may care to give it a try.

The rules are simple. All you have to do is award yourself an imaginary £10 every time you hear the words ‘mental health’ uttered on the radio or TV, or read them in the media.

I find that even on a thinnish day I can rake in a comfortable 50 or 60 fantasy quid — while if Prince Harry, a controversial statue or an internet influencer is in the news, I often notch up a sum well into three figures.

Indeed, those who follow the media may be forgiven for thinking most of the population is incapable of expressing annoyance or sadness about anything, from Covid restrictions to rising prices or even sexism in the works of Shakespeare, without complaining about the irritant’s adverse impact on his or her mental health.

Eavesdrop on almost any industrial tribunal these days and you’ll hear a sacked employee complain that the boss showed her too much affection, or too little, and that this was having a devastating effect on her mental health.

Read any report of a criminal trial, and the chances are that the defendant will say that he nicked his dad’s credit card — or drove at 120 mph up the M4, high on cocaine — because he was suffering from mental health issues.

Ask athletes or sports stars to explain a poor performance, and they’ll claim that mental health problems lay at the root of it. It’s an all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-free card. Instant victimhood for anyone looking for an excuse.

God knows, it’s no part of my intention this week to make light of genuine mental illness, because I know there is nothing more debilitating. I have a great friend who was so clinically depressed he couldn’t get out of bed for months on end, and I’ve known others whose despair was so deep that they took their own lives.

I must also declare that I’m extremely proud of the fact that one of my sons has decided to devote his life to the care of seriously disturbed adults. This seems to me to be among the noblest and most selfless careers imaginable.

No, what I object to is the modern habit of labelling every low we experience in the course of our everyday lives as a mental health issue, as if it were a clinical condition beyond our control.

The most obvious offenders are those misguided university students — often indulged or actively egged on by academics who should know better — who demand ‘safe spaces’ to protect their mental health from exposure to ideas with which they’ve been taught to disagree.

Tell them that the British empire wasn’t all bad, for example, or that unrestricted immigration isn’t necessarily an unalloyed good, and they’ll run for cover, complaining that we’re messing with their fragile minds.

Ask students of English literature to read Dickens, Trollope or Walter Scott — all of them riddled, it’s true, with the casual racism and sexism of their time — and they’ll wail that we’re putting their mental health in grave jeopardy.

On that point, it surely doesn’t help when a respected actress suggests, as Juliet Stevenson did this week, that plays such as The Taming Of The Shrew and The Merchant Of Venice should be ‘buried’, since they portray ‘unacceptable’ attitudes. Oh, how I wish actors and actresses would stick to acting, which some are quite good at, instead of spouting the half-baked political opinions apparently shared by almost everyone in their profession.

But this unhealthy obsession with mental health is by no means confined to Left-leaning students, broadcasters and Tweeters. Academics at University College London have even devised a ‘depression index’, which purports to measure the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of the nation, according to a survey of more than 30,000 respondents.

This week, if you’re interested, UCL found that between November 1 and January 3, levels of anxiety and depression in Britain rose by 24 per cent on the scale, from 5.0 to 6.2. That’s a pretty meaningless figure, if you ask me, but then misery-mongering is all the rage these days.

No less gloomy was this week’s announcement by the Oxford University Press that the word chosen by children as their word of the year for 2021 was ‘anxiety’.

This was the finding of a survey of 8,000 pupils, aged between seven and 14, who were asked to select from a shortlist of ten words the one they would use when talking about well-being and health last year (the other contenders were: ‘challenging’, ‘isolate’, ‘well-being’, ‘resilience’, ‘bubble’, ‘kindness’, ‘remote’, ‘cancelled’ and ‘empathy’).

I note, by the way, that the children picked anxiety ‘after discussing the words with their teachers’. Call me an old cynic, but this suggests that in some cases, the teachers may have prompted them to opt for it as their word of the year.

Certainly, I suspect if they had been left to their own devices, they would have chosen a very different shortlist of words to encapsulate their year of disrupted schooling. It would possibly have included ‘smartphone’, ‘Xbox’ and ‘pizza’.

But whatever the truth, I meant it quite literally when I described the modern obsession with mental health as unhealthy. Let’s face it, we all have our ups and downs as we go through life — and I know that many of us have truly dreadful lows from time to time. But I cannot believe it’s good for our well-being to label all such lows as symptoms of mental trouble.

I know it’s a terribly old-fashioned thing to say, but I can’t recall anyone of my parents’ generation complaining about the effects on their mental health of being rained on by Hitler’s bombs, night after night in the Blitz. But ask many of today’s young how they’ve been affected by gentle teasing or other ‘micro-aggressions’, and you’ll never hear the end of their suffering.

Nor do I remember anyone from my own childhood taking time off school because of feelings of stress, depression or anxiety. Measles, mumps or glandular fever, yes. ‘Mental health issues’, no.

Children given to moping or self-pity were told to cheer up, count their blessings, look on the bright side and generally buck up their ideas. I can’t help feeling that even in 2022, there’s something to be said for this approach.

These days, by contrast, I’m told it’s far from unusual for children to cite mental health reasons for taking time off sick.

Yes, I know that in many ways it’s harder for them than it was for us, given the cruelties of social media and other pressures of modern life.

But how can it improve their well-being to bombard them daily with trigger-warnings, helplines to contact if they’ve been ‘affected by any of the issues raised in this programme’ and endless items in the media about the effects of this or that on the nation’s mental health?

It’s almost as if they’re being invited to cast themselves as victims of a mental health pandemic as widespread as Covid.

I haven’t room here to rehearse the many proven ways of banishing minor woes, such as meeting friends, taking up a hobby or just staring out to sea. I will only say that if all else fails, you might try the little game I mentioned above.

The joy of it is that instead of being plunged into gloom every time another story comes up about mental health, you will think: ‘Kerching! That’s another imaginary tenner for me!’

If you’ve got to the end of this article, you may notice that I’ve mentioned the words mental health no fewer than 18 times. That’s £180 already in your fantasy bank. Look on it as a bonus to get you started.

BLOGGER'S LAMENT. I don't often copy and paste, verbatim, something I've read in the UK press, but this guy is making some valid points. He's a little too British for my liking: this "oh, buck up" and "your grandparents lived through the Blitz" attitude doesn't help a depressed person very much. But it's true what he says about mental health. It's everywhere, these days.

This, at a time when I have never EVER seen so much socially-sanctioned mental illness turned loose in the land, nor so much utter contempt for people (whack jobs, nut bars, head cases who should be in the looney bin) who suffer from the real thing.

I suffer from the real thing. I have suffered from the real thing at least from adolescence onward. Though I was never properly diagnosed, I now understand that I was clinically depressed at the age of 15. I suffered bouts of it, soul-destroying bouts that sometimes landed me in the hospital, for as long as I can remember. Not to mention the violent up-gusts that pushed me above the clouds, where the air is very very thin and may even damage your brain.

Bipolar, in other words. That's the word for it, or at least the nearest thing to describe it clinically. Am I proud of it? Not exactly, but I'm working on the shame bit. I know, in my intellect at least, that there is truly nothing to be ashamed of. But I DID create holy hell for the people I love the most, and was never able to explain it to them, because I'd "snap out of it" (at HUGE effort and strain) and try to right myself, so I looked and sounded "normal" again. For their sake.

This racked up a huge mental and emotional debt, and after years of struggle, there was a humiliating landslide. I cracked in 2005 in the most flamboyantly awful way possible. All I got out of it was a correct diagnosis, after the this-way-and-that-way that went on for some 30 years.

The average person with TRUE mental illness is misdiagnosed an average of five times before being correctly diagnosed. I will ask you to read that sentence one more time.

Five times? I think it was ten. Maybe more. Meantime, though I did moan a lot about the term "mental illness" being a trap (for how can you be "ill" and "well" at the same time?), there seemed to be no alternative. 

UNTIL NOW!

Until someone-or-other, probably an influencer on social media, decided to take "mental health", a perfectly respectable term, and squeeze and pump and inflate it until it was the size and bulk of the Hindenberg - and every bit as gaseous and overblown. 

Oh, the humanity! With this much gross and even ludicrous misuse and overuse, the whole thing becomes meaningless and - eventually - very easy to dismiss. The upshot of it is, those of us who really DO suffer, and HAVE suffered, and likely WILL suffer from "mental health issues" until we take our last breath, are still being marginalized, because we are lumped in with the chippers who are just jumping on the latest meaningless media bandwagon.

All right, I've chuffed and moaned enough for now. But I'm glad someone else is noticing this, and saying, wait a minute. It's very telling that it's a Brit. People in North America are still tiptoeing around the subject the way Tiny Tim tiptoed through the tulips. Except that when HE did it, it was at least entertaining.

💗HAROLD LLOYD Mends a Broken Heart in Dr. Jack (1922)

How can you mend a broken heart? It helps if Harold Lloyd is your doctor. In spite of the heartbreak of my failed novel (and let's not let the pain of it break through the dam), I do come back to Harold because I love him still. And in Dr. Jack, he departs from his usual bumbling youth/spoiled rich kid persona completely, becoming a responsible and admired figure in his community, albeit a very funny one. He carries himself differently as a result - like a professional, always sure of himself - and it's the right call, for a "bumbling doctor" would have been ridiculous and un-funny. He's sexier somehow, because of it all, but it's a little heartbreaking to see what might have been, had he been able to break away from his usual Glass Character persona and spread himself out. But it didn't happen - audiences wanted the shy, awkward youth who somehow gets the girl, or the (more rarely) ridiculously entitled rich kid who finally matures at the end. And gets the girl.

This is just a snippet, but I love it - just a few seconds of magic, and the look that passes between Harold and his ACTUAL wife, Mildred Davis, is beautiful and precious. The way she literally sees his image "in the cards", as if he is her destiny, then flutters her eyelashes at him, is priceless. Though there is lots of physical comedy and madcap gags in this movie, Harold's Dr. Jack remains pretty steady through it all. He would have made a wonderful doctor.

💔The Tragic Death of George Gershwin

This excerpt is from a much longer, and at times kind of tedious, bio of George Gershwin. The best part of it is the way they use paintings as "animated stills" which the camera pans across and zooms in on. I especially loved the bit where George, addled by a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumour, takes a handful of chocolates and smashes them into his chest. It was a horrible death, made that much more horrible by medical ignorance and the denial of his friends and family, who chalked up his weird symptoms to "love troubles" and struggles with his new boss, Sam Goldwyn. 

In fact, one of the last things George ever said - miserably - was, "I should live so long as to hear Sam Goldwyn say to me, 'Why can't you write hits like Irving Berlin?'" It's true - George COULDN'T write hits like Irving Berlin because he was too busy skating rings around him, and everyone else in the competition.

So everyone, "friends" and doctors alike, ignored the fact that George was spilling his food, falling down the stairs, stumbling in his piano playing, saying nonsensical things, and pushing his chauffeur out of the driver side of a moving car. Love troubles, you see. Then he collapsed in the bathroom during one of his agonizing headaches, fell into a coma, and died, but not before they cracked his head open and "discovered" a grapefruit-sized tumour. Brain surgery wasn't what it is now, but some now believe that he could have been at least granted a reprieve, or had the worst of his agony relieved. 

So what happened? George just WASN'T a sick person, he wasn't - and part of this ludicrous denial was his own myth of invincibility. It's ironic, because he suffered from chronic digestive problems for his entire life which could also be agonizingly painful. Some believe the chronic gut pain may even have been related to the cancer which eventually ate his brain.

George's story is sad, and sweet, and not like anyone else's. He was a Mozart in his time, flaming out in a brilliant streak across the sky. No one knows what he would have achieved had he lived, but it is not a sure thing that he would have kept producing at the same phenomenal rate. Some artists are products of their time, and never quite make the transition. Harold Lloyd is an example of someone whose character would always and ever be "a youth", a young man either totally unskilled in the ways of the world, or (in a few cases) a spoiled and ridiculously-entitled rich kid. 

By the time the talkies came around, he was still playing "youths", as in Movie Crazy where he played a 40-year-old virgin still living with his parents and setting off for a great adventure in Hollywood. It wasn't just that irritating, dithering nasal voice of his, which still drives me crazy. Not everyone beat the cull. Garbo could talk like a man, but not Tallulah Bankhead. It was his 1920-ness, the way he embodied a certain era which would never come around again, and his inability to evolve into someone or something else.

In Gershwin's case, only death stopped him. It seems that nothing else could.

🙀CAT GETS MAIL!😸

My cat doesn't do stuff like this. But then - we don't have a mail slot, and it would be hard for him to get the mail out of the box.

🤍The Troll Doll Channel: MAGICAL! Spinning in Silver🤍

My trolls are a great comfort to me in this time of trial. But they're taking over my office. . .

It was ten years ago. . .

Abbotsford News, June 11, 2012

Lauren Gunning (pushing wagon) and sister Erica were among those participating in the Telus Walk to Cure Diabetes on Sunday at Rotary Stadium in Abbotsford. The event raised funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and its research into a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

(NOTE: the whole family is in this shot! My son Jeff (Erica and Lauren's Daddy) can be seen on the far left, and Crystal, their Mom, is pulling the wagon. Bill and I are in there somewhere - see the lady with the short hair and the green-striped shirt? And Bill is the guy to the right of her in the grey Tilley hat. Hard to believe it was that long ago!)

😵HAUNTING VOICES FROM THE PAST: Historic Re-enactment of the EDISON TALK...

My dolls are very generous with their time (meaning, all they do is sit there being dolls), so they were happy to do this historic re-enactment of the CREEPIEST doll in human history - the infamous Edison Talking Doll. This thing had a tiny record player inside it which had to be cranked, and which broke after only a few uses. The dolls were so frightening and expensive (something like $10.00, which would be like $200.00 now) that they only lasted a few weeks on the market. So the ones that were manufactured must have been warehoused somewhere - or collected by a few people interested in macabre artifacts. This was the pre-pre-predecessor to Chatty Cathy and other hideous "talking" dolls, so once again everyone claims Edison was "ahead of his time" - but I also found video of French dolls which laughed and talked using the same primitive technology. My feeling is that, as always, Edison stole someone else's brilliant idea, but he managed to botch it just the same.

🙏MORAL TEACHINGS THROUGH PUPPETRY😃

Puppets are humans in effigy, which is disturbing enough in itself. But this little blonde girl is beyond creepy - she looks like someone I sat next to in Grade 7, glasses and all. The fact that she is spouting Christian propaganda (the audio of which is blessedly muted) just adds another level of dismay. 

True things: a comment, maybe to myself

This somehow ended up as a comment on a YouTube video, but it poured out with such force that I thought I would place it here and not just let it sit there, likely either unread or shot down by someone who disagrees. But it's a way to try to describe the process of something so deep that is really beyond any words.

ferociousgumby
5 minutes ago (edited)

@D Onion Just to throw in my two cents: I kept getting told by therapists, ministers, etc. to "forgive myself". But then in the next breath they or someone would say, "There's nothing to forgive." So I would get stuck: OK, nothing to forgive, so I CAN'T forgive? So what do I do? BUT, I know I did a lot of damage to myself and the family when I was deep in my alcoholism and undiagnosed bipolar. Yes, I DID hurt them and confuse them, and I failed to explain it because I was too deep in the chaos. So now I have this "voice" - I'm not psychotic, it's just a helpful voice I hear in myself - saying, "OK then, you did nothing wrong, but often you BELIEVE you did. You still carry it. Can you feel compassion for that hurt, confused, lonely, screwed-up, struggling person you were?" The answer is yes, I can. Compassion IS part of my deeper nature because I am empathetic. I also feel some compassion (pity is more like it) for the people who hurt me. They are kind of pathetic, after all, and I can't think of anything worse than to BE that way. But when people say things like, "Oh, you MUST forgive them (your Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc.) or you will be in a state of rage for the rest of your life", I believe this is a very sneaky form of the Christian agenda. No, I not only don't have to "forgive", I do not have to do ANYTHING AT ALL. That is up to me. Compassion has crept in like a tide, gradually and gently, and it amazes me, BUT I had five years of therapy that was sometimes overwhelming and often didn't feel like it was helping me. But it is now over 20 years later, and "something" happened deep inside that is really only making itself known to me now. "Forgiveness" gets my back up because it implies "it's OK what you did". It is NOT OK what my Dad, sister, bad therapists, etc. etc. did to me. And I don't feel OK about hurting myself. But I DO feel deeply for that hurt and confused person, and if I could only talk to that hurt younger self now (which in way, I am) I would say, "You're in terrible pain and feel alone, but you're getting through it, and that is incredibly brave." Is that "forgiveness"? I think it's more complex and goes far deeper. I don't like the "f-word" because of the toxic way it was pushed on me by the church and others who "only wanted to help me". Is there any other way? Are they right that I "MUST" forgive myself or be in a state of rage, etc. etc.? That's a bunch of hooey and only represents a way to get me to shut up. Think of it this way: if you think, "OK I'll forgive my Dad", it means you can't really talk about it any more or people will realize you have NOT forgiven your Dad. It is a way to get you to shut up about it because it makes THEM uncomfortable to witness those emotions. They are threatened by it, so they will find a way to silence you. Like the Bible, forgiveness can be used as a weapon and is actually very selfish of THEM to push it on you or anyone else. It is some sort of awful test of whether you're a good Christian or good person or - whatever. But the compassion came from somewhere so deep it feels like a kind of miracle. It's not up to me, I can't "summon" it, but when I feel it and want to just push it away or tell it to get lost, I do have a choice to let it be (let it be, like the song says!), and let myself feel the untying of knots inside myself. Really, if you believe in Jesus at all, compassion was "his way". It was being in a state of grace. All the emphasis on "forgiveness" may even be a mistranslation of the Biblical text. I have read that the root for "forgiveness" means "to untie". Sorry for the length of this! Once I got going, it was hard to stop. If "the f-word" doesn't work for you, there are MANY other ways, and there is YOUR way, which will eventually make itself clear.

🌹🤍BETTY WHITE: We're going to miss you so!🤍🌹

From Golden Girls to Sue Ann Nivens to dozens and maybe even hundreds of appearances elsewhere - including a sitcom she starred in before I was born (and I am soon to turn 68!). We'll miss her so - she was a light in the world, and you never heard her whining or complaining (which is all I seem to hear now!). I made this animation years ago from a photo shoot she did while enthusiastically eating a hot dog. 

💥The Troll Doll Channel: 😲OW-EE! Crash-landing for Twirling Troll💥

SMASH!!

                           

Don't Crush Oobleck Too Hard

Or else.

MERRY CHRISTMAS from the DOMINO CATS!

This is one of the most incredible videos I have ever seen! I cannot imagine how long it took to set up, or if they needed different takes. And how many cats do they have?!

Merry Christmas to my readers, wherever you are!

💗MY VERY LAST pandemic hair update: blessings in adversity💗

I swear, this is my LAST. Even with the new variant. 

😾CHRISTMAS AMBUSH! 😲 Kitty LUNGES at me from under the tree!😾

A Christmas classic, taken several years ago. Bentley still slips under the tree and hides, or even tries to climb it. Last night he got his toe caught in the base of the tree and had to be rescued. That's what we get for having a TREE in the house for weeks on end! 

🎅SANTA CAT?!😳 BIZARRE '50s Christmas Puppet Show😽

Children's programming hit a peak of surrealism in the early 1950s, when puppet shows abounded. These look like marionettes, with great staring eyes that almost resemble anime eyes. The "cat" is weird even for a cartoon cat (and cartoonists NEVER seem to get cats right - except, maybe, Archie and Mehitabel. I will just have to do a post on THEM.)

🎅STRANGE AND SURREAL SANTAS🎅

Would it be Christmas without bizarre Santas? Not MY kind of Christmas.

🎅😽CAT goes COMPLETELY NUTS UNDER CHRISTMAS TREE!😽🎅

This is one of my favorite cat videos of all time. A seasonal favorite. My cat has never done this, but he''s known to go a bit wacky, what with ribbons hanging down, flashing lights, dangly ornaments, trees brought in from the outside - what cat wouldn't go a bit nuts?

Capybara enters its spa bucket

I love capybaras! What's not to love about a 200-pound rodent who squeaks and squeals like a giant guinea pig? Their eyes and nostrils are all the same level, at the top of their head, kind of like a crocodile's, because they are aquatic animals and spend a lot of time underwater. I suppose they could hide from predators that way, but what sort of predator could handle a creature like this? To me they resemble giant beavers without the flat tail, or those prehistoric mammals who for some reason were so gigantic. When I first got interested in them, there was one website which had no videos, and now there are entire channels devoted to them. Some things are worth waiting for.

Invisible, like the wind: the divine feminine in Bob Dylan's Mother of Muses

 

Mother of Muses

Mother of Muses, sing for me

Sing of the mountains and the deep dark sea

Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest

Sing your hearts out, all you women of the chorus

Sing of honor and faith and glory be

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

Mother of Muses, sing for my heart

Sing of a love too soon to depart

Sing of the heroes who stood alone

Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone

Who struggled with pain so the world could go free

Mother of Muses, sing for me.

 

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott

And of Zhukov, and Patton, and the battles they fought

Who cleared the path for Presley to sing

Who carved the path for Martin Luther King

Who did what they did and they went on their way

Man I could tell their stories all day

 

I’m falling in love with Calliope

She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me

She’s speakin’ to me, speakin’ with her eyes

I’ve grown so tired of chasing lies

Mother of Muses, wherever you are

I’ve already outlived my life by far.

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

 

Take me to the river, release your charms

Let me lay down a while in your sweet lovin’ arms

Wake me shake me, free me from sin

Make me invisible, like the wind

Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam

I’m travellin’ light, and I’m slow comin’ home

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and the mother of the nine Muses. The term Mnemosyne is derived from the same source as the word mnemonic, that being the Greek word mnēmē, which means "remembrance, memory".
A titaness, Mnemosyne was the daughter of Uranus and Gaia. Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine Muses, fathered by her nephew, Zeus:

 
Calliope (epic poetry)
Clio (history)
Euterpe (music and lyric poetry)
Erato (love poetry)
Melpomene (tragedy)
Polyhymnia (hymns)
Terpsichore (dance)
Thalia (comedy)
Urania (astronomy)

BLOGGER'S COMMENTARY. I have fallen in love, not with Calliope, but with Bob Dylan, all over again. Only now he's an 80-year-old phenomenon once more in the thick of a year-long world tour, a task which would be daunting to a man half that age. Yes, and that tour likely features mostly new material, including songs we have not even heard yet. Through the wonders of YouTube, we are now able to hear and even SEE him perform only a day or so after the show. Entire performances are popping up that only took place last week.

Mother of Muses is one of my favorite songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways (released last year, and considered by many to be the finest album he has ever produced). It's both tender and haunting, with an undertone of flinty defiance as he rhymes off the names of the heroes he so admires. (Only Dylan could mention Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King in almost the same breath, and still make it work.) Initially, this post was going to be "the divine feminine in Rough and Rowdy Ways", but there were so many references to women, divine in one way or another (like the "transparent woman in a transparent dress"), that I had to cut it down and focus on one song which seemed like the concentrated essence of all the others.

Yes, Mother of Muses is a lovely and poetic title for a sighingly beautiful song -  but until I did a little bit of digging, I had no idea what it really meant. My Greek mythology is rusty, but Dylan's isn't. His knowledge of mythology, literature, and (most especially) the Bible is legendary. Not only that - his knowledge has both tremendous breadth and spooky, mysterious depth.  In fact, I believe Bob Dylan is one of the greatest minds of our time. Who else has won the Nobel Prize for writing what is so erroneously labelled as "popular music"?

So what I found, and maybe it should not have astonished me as much as it did, is that there WAS an actual "mother of Muses" named Mnemosyne. I had heard the name before, of course, and the term "mnemonic" as a device for remembering things. But Mnemosyne is not only the mother of memory, but the mother of NINE muses, the first one being Calliope (the one Bob Dylan is falling in love with), who is responsible for EPIC POETRY.

Which is why this song completely knocks me over.

It's perhaps no mistake that in calling on his "muse", Dylan chooses the "mother of all Muses", one who has the power to transform and redeem. She is not unlike the female face of Jesus. This verse especially spells out the extent of her power:

Mother of Muses, unleash your wrath

Things I can’t see, they’re blocking my path

Show my your wisdom, tell me my fate

Put me upright, make me walk straight

Forge my identity from the inside out

You know what I’m talking’ about.

The line "put me upright, make me walk straight" has made me weep more than once. Dylan is 80 years old, looks as old as time, and seems small, slight and frail.  I know very well from my own deteriorating body about the ravages of age and the slipping away of mobility. This line describes a power which can literally lift him up bodily and set him down on a purposeful path, guiding each step along the way.

But the spookiest line of all in this richly-laden poem is, "Forge my identity from the inside out/You know what I'm talkin' about." No, we don't, Bob - we are gasping in awe at the way in which an ancient Greek goddess can become your own mother, with the relationship close enough that she seems to have literally given birth to you. I've worked my way through many a Dylan biography, and the one I am reading now (a 1,000-page tome by a Scottish writer named Ian Bell) focuses mainly on the fact that Dylan's identity as an artist is in a constant state of flux, as if he doesn't really have one. I hope he is listening to this song right now.

Just think of it: those "women of the chorus", the nine Muses who call Mnemosyne their mother, are almost literally Dylan's backup singers. But this primal mother-figure also has a son, and as we trudge through the travesty of a season originally meant to honor the Son of Man, I am immensely grateful that our greatest living poet has found yet another way to be born again.

POST-POST-OBSERVATIONS. You knew there had to be more! I noticed that in the Wikipedia entry, Mnemosyne was called a "titaness", which is a half-assed way of saying she was a bloody TITAN (why not just come out and say it?). This means, among other things, that she really kicks ass, with considerable mythological clout behind her motherly legend. I knew nothing of titans, and found way too much when I looked it up, but here is the gist of it for those who are interested:

In Greek mythology, the Titans were the pre-Olympian gods. They were the twelve children of the primordial parents Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), with six male Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and six female Titans, called the Titanides or Titanesses: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. Cronus mated with his older sister Rhea and together they became the parents of the first generation of Olympians – the six siblings Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Some descendants of the Titans, such as Prometheus, Helios, and Leto, are sometimes also called Titans.

So if we got the whole clan together for Christmas, we'd need more than one turkey.