Heritage Symbols

Of course the Bishops of the Catholic Church in Quebec do not want the Crucifix to remain in the National Assembly. Who in God's green earth would want to be part of the scent of a mandated religion, including bishops? Who would want to be part of a heritage structure in an assembly, when one is part of a living religion, not a historical society? This is Canada and if a particular government within the country chooses to fossilize Christianity we are not going to be mandated as a thing of the past, so remove the crucifix for God's sake now and the one on the mountain too.  We'll join the abundant religions that seek peace and goodwill to all mankind. It's not the end of secularism, that's for sure, but hopefully it's moving toward the end of sectarianism. At least I hope God gets my drift because he has a big stake in the matter. I'm hoping that Sophocles once again will remind us all, as he did, that, "Without numbers are the world's wonders, but none more wonderful than man." Let's not write anyone off.

Just Who do You Think You Are?

As I lay in bed asleep last night I woke up with a start and a small inner voice said, "Just who do you think you are?  What right have you to keep saying "you" in your writing, or your diatribes in fact, as if you are lecturing to some invisible novitiate who is hanging onto your every pathetic idea. Take your last blog, Happenstance, all I can say is what a pedantic piece of nonsense masquerading as something deep. Drivel! Why don't you stick to the strange little episodes of your life events, some of which are exaggerated, but at least less pretentious than your meagre ideas of life. And your putative book cover, that's another matter. You haven't even left enough rope to hang yourself."  Well, you can see I am having a crisis of confidence! I admit that from time to time I have over-rated my puny ideas of life.  "It isn't so bad that you write these ideas of life, but that you think you are on the high road when in fact you are a poseur, because you keep preening yourself as you write that it is all newness," said the small voice. I suppose that I am grateful for the small voice even though down deep I admit it is not all that comforting. Still, if I believe that what comes along is always for the good, whatever comes, I accept that Jobian idea, at least for the moment till the next bad thing comes along, as it will and then I'll chuck Job. Pontificating is unfortunately a fault of mine, but magnified as a fault if one has no business doing it! Maybe as the pianist says I should stop saying "you", as if I was a teaching somebuddy and use "one" or better still "I" when it really is me, not you. Anyway, I have to ask the small inner voice, "Just who do you think you are? I'm not going to take everything you say as gospel." I may be kidding myself, but even if some of it is stupid it is at least my attempt to be  honest. There is a lot of crap out there in the writing world so I am entitled to contribute mine as well, including Happenstance.

Happenstance

 If you believe that some of the seemingly trivial events in your life leading to consequences have happened without your control you may have some concern about life and your prospects. If you believe that life in the final analysis occurs without much control, like Brownian Movement, and flecks of dust particles just collide or don't and control ultimately is of limited value anyway, then que sera, "it ain't my fault!"  If however you consider happenstance, and that is, there is direction, as yet unknown, to the seemingly unrelated and trivial events leading to whatever consequence you may  arrive at, one will have a somewhat fatalistic point of view. I have no doubt  all of these conditions are in operation, but I can't help but think that there were coincidences in my life that were directed, but not by me. Things beyond my control, things that were not randomized, but linkage that led to a chain of events that were arranged from beyond. Does it not feel good that there is some guidance in this life?  That there is some outside force that will connect whatever dots there are to connect! That the direction is not all up to me and I cannot hold the whole world in my hand and direct it to do the right thing or know the right thing for that matter. That I am not powerful enough to avoid all the pitfalls in life or alternately the pitfalls in my life may for my own good. If Brownian Movement is in an epic battle with Control and Happenstance for our lives, and it's winner take all, then we had best be on our knees. I'm cheering for Control or Happenstance: hanging loose or anal! I think a dose of both! Not either/or!

Memory and Acuity

My brother Ken, four years younger than me, has a more accurate long term memory of the events of our youth than I do. Whereas I recall the effect of the events on me in fairly vivid detail he had the more acuity for the event itself. I knew enough to know never to argue with him because he was almost always right. I had remembered, I thought, of an event I heard of in 1946. My uncle Edgie had been a prisoner of war in Stalag 8B for 3 and a half years after Dieppe. I was telling Ken's son that in prison Edgie had wagered a fellow prisoner that he could swallow a dead mouse for a dollar. I was telling Ken about this and he said, "No, you are wrong, the bet was that he could bite the mouse in half for a dollar." He did! Now neither Ken nor I have talked about this probably for 60 years but his acuity in the matter does not in any way take account of the horror I felt learning of that event and whether it was biting or swallowing is completely beside the point in my memory of my interior revulsion at the time. So far this little story has nothing elevating or useful to teach, but I have been reading Roger Lundin's book, Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief. He says," for her, (Emily) memory meant the recollection of intense experiences or encounters rather than the rituals of general commemoration. It usually involved the revival of a sensory impress." In addition, he says, "She was intrigued only by the memory of what went on within the dwelling of her conscious life." I think that may be the difference between Ken and me. He saw and remembered the details of what went on in life vividly but accurately. My recollection of the same facts that I would have heard so long ago, is completely colored by the recall of the feelings. The acuity is swept up by the memory of the feelings which are the more powerful in me. In a world of law, testimony, false memory syndrome, accusation, redemption, recall, feelings, emotion, acuity,  and recompense---Justice demands, stick with the reporter rather than the poet.

Casuistry

Casuistry may seem an obscure word, but it is a noun more employed in the world at the moment than any other I can think of, from all advertising, political rhetoric, advocacy groups and legal selectivity. It is not hyperbole, it is worse. It is more subtle, more damaging and employs both anabole and hyperbole as well as deceptive reasonableness. Anabole at what it wishes to ignore and hyperbole about what it wishes that you not ignore. It can be seen in newsprint and internet and in the clever constructions from the comment sections. It is convincing to those who hear or read things, the spectators of life, than those who do things. Unfortunately, there is such a limited breadth of things we can do, and such a wide breadth of things we can watch! The only object of the casuist is to convince. We must always ask what is the interest of the convincer? The reaction of the audience may be cynical and believe nothing, or gullible and believe everything, or somewhere in between. You may in fact have already become aware that this paragraph I have written is an example of casuistry. It may not rank as a clever construction but it smacks of too much generalization to be on the high road. Still, it probably contains a tuppance worth of truth that those who already share the premise will find it wholely satisfying. If the file folder in your cerebral cortex is only available for A and not for B, then A will be accepted and B rejected. We have been programmed as spectators. As always, evidence is in the eye of the beholder. How do we get to a folder AB? I wish I knew!

Battling over Symbols

The Wand of Hermes, called the Caduceus, is a stand alone symbol that once represented the medical profession in the United States. The wand  consists of a staff with two serpents rampant.  The Wand is quite pretty. Hermes, or his Latin equivalent, Mercury, was the god of commerce. Like all Greek gods he had a variety of other jobs like protecting travelers, including bandits and  card players and any on the road.  Generally meeting the needs of  hustle-bustle. Hermes was as fast as Mercury. That's how the planet and the metal got their name. The Rod of Asklepios is in fact the historically correct symbol of the medical profession and employed world wide. It however, had to be radically redesigned in order to be pretty  Asklepious was the Greek god of Medicine, but his Rod is ugly and does not have a stand alone tradition. In all the statuary and  vase painted images I have seen, the Rod is held in the hand of Asklepios. As a symbol one is stuck with images of Asklepios holding the Rod and the single serpant  not so rampant, if verity is to be prized.  Do not believe symbols are powerless.As a stand alone symbol, the Rod of Asklepios in the original would look  like a fat club with a snake wrapped around it. From the temple reliefs and statuary it looks like something that would be carried by Alley Oop.  It's a saw-off then. Did the US go for pretty, but hopefully inaccurate as a representative of physicians; Fast Eddy, commerce, itinerant travelers, card sharks, banditry, and sharp practice. Or do we take UBS (Ugly But Satisfactory) and tart it up. If symbolism is a visible manifestation of an invisible ideal we don't have much of a choice.

The Crawl Space

The crawl space of the house that belongs to the pianist and me is two and a half feet high,labyrinthine in nature, and large. When traversing the labyrinthe on one's belly the pink insulation that hangs loose from aged split bindings brush the face in the dark; movement causes cement dust to stir up a little storm, and the sounds of fluids running in and out the many pipes,ingress and egress, give one's hand a little thrill as the myriad of pipes softly vibrate. Here is a world apart from a house that knows nothing of the workings of the vital and visceral nature from this dark region. There is no area so underestimated in importance as this subterranean world.The heat,the light, the water, the ventilation, the septic system, the internet, the communication all arise from the Action Central,the crawl space. I like being there because it seems like being right at the source, where every thing else hangs in its balance. And yet, the realtors never sing the praises of the crawl space. The purchasers never celebrate the crawl space with its firm foundation. No poet creates a panegyric to this footprint of the house that serves so well unsung. Some may find it arduous and unpleasant to enter the dark world where the possibility of vermin and wasps and bees and ants may coexist. They won't adversely affect Action Central. They just know a good place when they find one. My son-in-law and I just spent an hour in the crawl space, worming our way through the apertures to all the rooms of this underworld; celebrating by prostrating ourselves at the foundations, the wires and pipes and cables and really receiving the emanations of the house, from the bottom up.

The Unheavenly Host

And there came to Lotus Island in the year of the Dragon, the unheavenly host of tent caterpillars, targeting and ravaging the soft leaf trees, devastating the landscape thoughout the island. I am reminded of the drought years of the early 40's on the bald prairie with the grasshopper clouds, eating every grain in sight, leaving so much bodily debris and grasshopper juice on the grill and windows of one's car that it was difficult to travel. They even constructed grasshopper screens for the car grill in those days. The windscreen looked like a deluge of tobacco spit from the spittoon. A repeat worm plague today on Lotus island, resembling the plague of locusts in old Egypt and Kindersley from yester-millennium and yesteryear. The tent caterpillars on Lotus Island have now left the trees and are in cocoons, metamorphosing into the adult moth form in mid July. There is, I am happy to report, a glimmer of light on the horizon, at least on the patch of ground of the pianist and the elderly eclectic gentleman. I took apart and examined 50 cocoons on my blueberry patch. The cocoons are of an intricate construction. They comprise an inner sack that contains the headless black nymph, awaiting transformation from Cinderella to Princess. This is a secondary oval silken sack, finely woven and close ended. The outer cocoon is a loosely woven primary sack designed initially by the worm to secure the later inner sack to the leaf and branch. 50 compound sacks were investigated by me yesterday. There were only 5 sacks containing a healthy black, headless instar that will transform to a moth.The balance of the sacks contained dead or immature worms in a state of dissolution, empty sacks without exit holes, or parasitic larvae, not identified, foraging on worm carcases. There were no further gestating nymphs in metamorphoses. Today I see the devastated trees are beginning to re-leaf and the meagre 10 percent cycle success suggested by my admittedly short and local series, still gives me some cause for optimism that the plague cycle has peaked. I may be dreaming in vain but, unlike Joseph,I can not interpret a dream. Nevertheless, like Pandora's box, Hope remained available in the box, while the Evils spread their wings and entered the world.

Formication and Slug Fest

The tent caterpillars are now dropping like rain from their webs after the feeding frenzy, having denuded most of the soft leaf trees on Lotus Island. They are now resting for two weeks on any object they fall on, including the unwary. As they fall on the neck or head or clothing of the passer-by they perform jactitations, swiveling and squirming here and there, giving rise to feelings like formicatiom that linger in one's mind into the night in bed when one wakes with the distinct sense that something is still crawling on the limb and trunk. Soon the worms that survive will cocoon 'til the middle of July and then emerge in force as yellow orange moths. Imagine the bizarre tactile hallucinations of the psychiatric patient afflicted with symptoms of formication and the desperation to sweep or swat what is not there. The rain forest on Lotus Island has also had a profusion of slugs as well, munching the vegetation below in concert with the caterpillars as the trees are munched above, the ground feeding especially vexing to the gardener of iris and dahlia. However,the nightly visits to the garden by the gardener, dividing the slugs in half with sharp secateurs as he weaves through the rain of worms, is the most humane and satisfying of pursuits. The small bodies of the slugs and caterpillars, oozing out the green juices of the gardener's vegetation, when chopped, is sweet revenge. Tossing at night,waking in a world of squirm and slime! Carpe diem!

A Food Source

Mother Nature and Human Nature are really One. If we see ourselves as a food source amongst our other useful attributes, we can embrace the universality of all the ions and atoms we are related to, plant and animal and mineral that spend much of the time eating and being eaten by one another, perched on the food chain of life and death. If you believe that you are at the top of the food chain, know that you are food for the mosquito, tape worm, E.coli, the commensals, and at the end, the Yew tree, the grass, the vultures and other members of the so-called lower orders that enjoy you in perpetuity,along with the maggotry that eventually conquers the embalmer. The lower end of the food chain, for which we are a constant source of food, completes the circle of life. We eventually embrace the mineral world when those bones will rise again. Therefore it is hard to call those feeders the lower order, since we all are part of the wheel of life.There is no humility in this matter. There is no humility in being one with Human Nature and Mother Nature. The sin in the Garden of Eden was the sin of believing that we were diffent than the garden and could freely eat of the Tree of Knowledge rather than be content in the shade of the Tree of Life!

A Person

In the days of spontaneous abortion, if you held a 14 week foetus in a kidney basin that made silent mouth opening signs, chest fluttering, and limb writhing activity, it seemed like a person and you might have strong feelings thereupon about personhood. If you were the parent of a 13 year old girl who ran away from home because she was pregnant by her brother and you were in agony to find her before she did something desperate, you also might have strong feelings about personhood. Maybe Jeremiah 1:5 is wrong. No amount of abstract reasoning by elderly judges, swayable politicians or fossilized medievalists will answer this question. There there may be an answer but there is no solution arising that satisfies! Content ourselves therefore that we are merely tissue in a world of a Petri Dish? I have no ideas that are useful! What may work? Depersonhood! It may be easier to see ourselves as tissue that talks rather than barks!

Caduceus, Warp and Weave

The Caduceus is a staff with a single entwined serpent that is an insignia representing the healing professions, particularly the medical profession, world wide. It has traditionally been regarded as of Greek origin dating from the Hippocratic Corpus, 460 to 337 BCE, or the healing and religious tradition of the Greek god Asklepios, beginning from the same era! We read however in the exilic text, Numbers, 21, 5 to 9, probably written from 586 to 538 BCE, that Moses, on instructions from beyond, created what was clearly the Caduceus, a staff with a bronze serpent, in order to prevent the frequent deaths from vipers in the wilderness. This of course is evidence of a creation, described in writing, more than 100 years before Hippocrates and the Asklepian priests, of an oral tradition from an even earlier era. Still, it is not of general knowledge that the Caduceus is a figure created from the warp and weave of what went for science and faith at the time of Moses. Whether Greek or Jew, whether mystic or pragmatic, the cloth one wears as a physician is created by the Weaver. Hippocrates the scientist, Asklepios the mystical god, and the exiled Hebrews codifying the oral tradition, spoken to, and repeated by, a bronze age people, shows us that modern medicine still has its roots in the warp and weave of timelessness. The haze of technology alone may seduce the unwary; the hubris of the antiscientist may founder, but the cloth of the Weaver will continue to stand.

Dorothy and Martha

Dorothy and Martha were two Labrador Retrievers I spent a year with. They were experimental subjects in my project, determining the effect of hypertensive agents on cellular exchange of potassium and sodium. A conflict I wrestled with was, I have always had a love of dogs, as does my pianist and my children. The dog lab was at the University of British Columbia and the year was 1960. At that time UBC had a large attached farm and I would pick up Martha from the kennels on Tuesday and Dorothy on Thursday. They were well looked after in the kennels because they needed to be healthy throughout the period of experimentation. When I picked them up, they seemed to know which was their day, and after a little quivering they would come with me down the trail, ambivalent, since they enjoyed the time out in the un-kenneled world, and with an interlude before the day's trial. My predecessor had spent a year teaching them to lie still and supine on a table for 4 to 5 hours while they were cannulated in the femoral artery and two veins, infused, injected, arterial pressures measured, and blood sampled over the period, all the while un-anaesthetized and unrestrained. I have often thought of Dorothy and Martha, and still do 52 years later. I think they were precious. I suppose that is sentimental! I don't care. That year was my only encounter with animal experimentation, thank goodness. In some curious fashion they were attached to me despite the pain and discomfort I must have inflicted on them, which they bore in silence. At the end of it all, we always had a little play and they gave me tail wagging. I suppose even painful attention is better than no attention in the permanently kenneled. Though animal experimentation, even then, went through rigorous ethics assessment and is the heart beat of scientific progress, the feelings I have today are mixed with the sense of man's inhumanity to dog, and what they will say to me in the hereafter, when I ask their forgiveness for fooling them.

Lilacs

While one can admire the dedication of the French hybridizers in the development and selection of superior cultivars of lilac, there is a homely side to the old timers of yesteryear and more so their progenitors. (Syringia vulgaris) may be seen in their varietal splendor in The Royal Botanical Garden in Hamilton Ontario as the pianist and I observed when we visited some years ago. They say, "The largest lilac collection in the world." Spouting off! Not a very Canadian thing to say, for a self effacing nation. Despite Lotus Island being Rhododendron country, lilacs have a place everywhere, as they are ubiquitous in nature. Every barn and abandoned house on the more sheltered prairies and the interiors had an old timer, surviving after a fashion without demanding a great deal of care. Maybe not as varied and fancy as the new cultivars, but a survivor to be admired and a touch of class, colour and fragrance in an environment of sometime drabness. I have two lilacs that are grafted specimens and horror of horrors,I have allowed a limited growth of the suckers alongside the cultivars! Though I treasure the cultivar, the progenitor is the creation of Mother Nature rather than the French hybridizer, and it reminds us where both we and the cultivar came from and what we have become, for better or for worse. It's like grandpa up in a spare bedroom in the mansion, getting by on his gruel! The progenitor has small florets on spare heads, but it is history and if contained by removing most of the suckers as I did today, it provides some interest to those of us who are probably quirky and know down deep that "beauty" is still," in the eye of the beholder"! If you don't remove most of the suckers they will overcome your cultivar because the progenitor is as vigorous as is Mother Nature. There is no harm in recognizing and prizing our origins,thick or thin and tough as nails!

Diurnal Rhythm

If you have to take a nap or siesta after lunch, or struggle to stay awake in the early afternoon; if you wake up in the middle of the night for a period, or struggle to go back to sleep; and these episodes are consistent, you have a quadrinal rhythm, a variety of diurnal. Of course that rhythm is not satisfactory for most employers of today's workaday Western world, so those of us who had it, struggled to change to a diurnal sleep-wake rhythm unsuccessfully. Now that I am retired I can embrace my true quadrinal rhythm. The seasonal change of long dark nights and short days as now, in deep December, can increase the torpor of the organism, not only for Hibernators, but for the Quadrinals as well. Those of us that are dark-adapted will still thrive in the quiet and reflective 3am period when the night is long and satin. To thrive, one uses that rhythm to advantage. We do not mistake periods of torpor for depression, but see it as renewal, resting our metabolic rate, and being, rather than always doing! Sadly, those who have to manufacture energy, sometimes trumping the natural rhythm of the organism, may be stuck by the external demands of work. A paramecium embedded in a milieu, not of one's own choosing! At least, by embracing this concept one will erase blame and give one the hope that retirement will allow the natural man to emerge!

Fat Elvis

A useful service a parent can offer a boy in his early teens, is to accept that the father is a foil for certain mirthful commentary by the son and his friends. I learned, through some sort of inadvertency in the grapevine, that I was referred to by the diminutive set as Fat Elvis! I think it had something to do with my 60's hair style, carried over a later time, rather than my singing voice or my pelvic inclinations. I wasn't particularly dismayed by this description as I recall, since I considered the source. It is important for a son to have the opportunity to rail away at his father with his friends and to share in the joy of their raillery with one another! Heaven knows there are far worse labels to apply to a parent than that of an aging Elvis. Elvis Presley and I were the same age. If they were more literate they could have called me something really demeaning like Sancho Panza. At any rate they would skulk around, claiming the smell was just Patch, shoelaces untied, and nothing done up, and claiming victory to themselves over the Foil. Little did they realize the honour felt, being compared to one of the finest voices and rhythm makers in the world, less the girth.I won't say I was glad to be called Fat Elvis as it smacked of schoolboy insolence, but as long as it was behind my back it remained unacknowledged. I have never yet asked him how that name came about. He may have even forgotten about this period. I just celebrated the fact that a little derision, particularly with your friends when bravado is practised, is part of the important and necessary distancing process! I could have got back at him by calling him "dear" in front of his friends, as I occasionally did when we were alone, but I assiduously avoided this in company. Like most conditions in life, if you wait it out in good humour, it gets better.

Black Bamboo

In 1971 I planted several clumps of Black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) along a faked dry river bed of Saturnalite that gave a pleasing appearance, even if contrived. I wanted it to remain clumped and it did since it was surrounded by poor soil and the aggregate of Saturnalite. My understanding at the time was that it was a naturally clumping bamboo and would not spread. Since there had been an embargo on bamboo at around that time and particularly Black bamboo I was pleased to have it, and I might have imagined I was in China as I sat, musing on my dry river bed. We moved from Lotus City to Lotus Island, both in the Pacific Northwest, and I took some rooted portions of the clumps with me. They are still in my garden here today, protected from wind by windbreak plantings, and having weathered a particularly cold winter in 2010 with some top foliage loss. In the garden here they are in three big clumps, but this year they have started to move! They have, for the first time in 40 years, begun to develop spreading rhizomes in spades! The clumps are monstrous after this length of time and have probably responded to exhausted soil by seeking fertile land, sending probing rhizomes and new plants abroad. In addition, probably seeking for a location warmer than their present spot. Lotus Island is in zone 5, Black bamboo's top cold tolerance threshold. Like populations of anything, the plant does what it has to do to survive and thrive. It goes to show that the classification of clumping or spreading, in plant and animal, fails to account for the contingent capacity to change and move with whatever means is necessary to survive! Climate and food trump stick in the mud, in the plant and animal world!

The Advertiser

In the 1960's, advertising for patients in a medical practice was forbidden by the College of Physicians and Surgeons! They were tough regulators! Making claims of any sort were also subject to sanctions by the College! A new specialist in town was to simply hang a modest shingle and a tiny and dignified announcement of arrival in the paper (three times I think), and then wait until their colleagues saw fit to refer a surgical case. The growth of the surgical practice occurred ostensibly through practicing the three A's, Available,Affable and Able. That does not include Advertising! Remember of course that this was before Medicare and paying patients were jealously guarded by their General Practitioners. When the pianist and I moved to Lotus City with our little family in 1965 to start a surgical practice, I took a job at the Veterans Hospital to keep the wolf from the door while the slow process of developing a consulting practice began. A tough old veteran had been having serious trouble with an old gunshot wound to the lower leg, incurred during the Second World War. He needed a below knee amputation and the Veteran's Hospital Prosthetics Department was keen to try a new prosthetic technique with the immediate application of the artificial limb in the operating room. After the team surgery, I was astounded to read a front page article in the Lotus City Paper the following day relating an interview with my tough old patient who was walking around in the veteran's canteen, fully weight bearing on the limb, extolling my surgical virtues! He was so elated he had phoned the paper! It wasn't very long before I was called to the mat by the College of Physicians and Surgeons for unfairly advertising! Several of my surgical confreres had complained and the Registrar warned me that I was on thin ice. I pled innocence! However---it was a good start!

The Story's Butt

It was often my habit when I was working, to go fishing at daybreak off the waters by Lotus City! I would start at 5 am and finish at 8 am, change on the boat and go to work. I fished alone at that time of day and there was nothing more pleasant than to troll along the Discovery Islands in Strongtide Bay on ebb-tide, with the wire lines humming and the trolling bells on the rods rhythmically ringing with the gentle swell. Because it was early morning, nature usually called sometime shortly after the setup, and in the cabin on the throne I would rest a bit, watching and listening to the bells through the open cabin door, in repose, with an air of contemplation and expectation. The joy I felt on the briny deep in pursuit of the salmon was enhanced by the embrace of Mother Nature, who was mine alone at that time in the morning. The world was still asleep! My lines were fishing deep, the depth maintained by planers, that, when tripped by a strike, prompted the rods to ring the bell urgently. The planers rose to the surface quickly with the fish, causing line slack. The fisherman always needed to act with alacrity to get to the rod and tighten the slack to avoid the fish throwing the hook! In the midst of my meditations the bell rang stridently on the starboard rod and with great speed I hopped off the throne, pants dangling at the ankle and retrieved my rod from the rod holder and began to reel in the slack to start to play the fish! I suddenly heard great cheering and looked up to see high fives from a quartet on the guide boat fishing long-side me, starboard. My boat had little freeboard so I wasn't entirely sure that they were cheering my catch or my crotch! To be perfectly clear, neither were impressive! I wasn't fishing for compliments but so much for ego!

Self publishing

My experience in self publishing has been stimulating and exciting, but a financial failure. On the other hand my book has only been available for 6 weeks and it takes that long for some to read it. I would do it again in an instant for the self gratification it brings and the heartening responses from my family and friends! The book I wrote, "An Elderly Eclectic Gentleman", was taken from this blog over the three year period and edited for publication by myself. The self publishing company was very helpful throughout and the cost was not exorbitant. I have some weaknesses, not the least of which is, I love my own writing much more than most books that I read. I am sure the weakness also includes more pride than sense, but I did not wish to go hat in hand to a commercial publisher at my age! I still have the perennial optimism that I will be discovered eventually. My book is 294 short topics on the real and mystical world around us that I have encountered. If I went to a commercial publisher I figured they would delete a third of my work for market reasons and I didn't want my muse assaulted. Therefore I am poised, willingly, on the horns of my own dilemma. So be it! In the meanwhile I continue to write because I can't help not writing from time to time as something weird, quixotic, or quirky, occurs. My thematic is the ordinary is almost always extraordinary in some settings and life is a mystery. God is a mystery to me but there always seems an Immensity in much of life that is both ever present and evanescent. Maybe that's it! This is much of what I touch on, but I only know what I feel. Jesus is more tangible for me and the Holy Spirit more recognizable for me, but God, I can't quite grip since for me he exists objectively only by hearsay. I hope he doesn't mind me saying so. Writing is therapy when sex,violence and cynicism are replaced with wonder! It's just that it may not be commercial.