Never Give Up and Define Who You Are

(Photo by M. Bencivengo, "Roots Drifted In,"

Beachwood Cove Beach, Huron OH)

I wrote this today in direct response to a friend's post (and added about a paragraph or two at the end):

Definitely, don't ever give up. I know it's a strong word but I detest petty jealous people who want to see others fail. I used to want to be a depth psychologist in practice but I decided against it because I have strong emotions and as a creative writer am strongly expressive. It gets tiresome to me to try to continually be tactful or seeming an enlightened peaceful type. I now leave that to more passive and harmonious people. I really don't want to be or seem perfect. I don't want to hold back the way I am. I enjoy being expressively outspoken, especially because I know that I am innately essentially harmless. I like social satire. In other words, I am not the Buddhist type of being able to let go. I remain often bitter, meaning bitter-sweet, but in a humorous way, seeing the terribleness but humor in all things as well as seeing happiness and joy. No, I do not forget the happiness and joy in life either. But what would our literary heritage on earth be without Dante's "Heaven and Hell" and Tolstoy's "War and Peace?" I am just being honest, real, about my feelings and tendencies. I do not wish to counsel others (I mean other than as friend to friend listening to one another) but just only myself and even then I cannot always do so or be always very effective at it. None of us alone knows everything, but together, maybe we do.

I do like to sugar-coat though sometimes depending on the mood and in writing some types of fiction. But mostly I write social satire combined with supernatural horror when writing adult or young adult fiction. But also other things.

I just recently took a stand in my own head (mind--no I did not stand on my head!) to define and declare who I am and what I am made of and which is not my true vocation. I love mythopoetics in depth psych, much the same as literary analysis and explication, but with more mythology involved and less literary terminology attached--butu I sense that changing: Perhaps soon, more literary terminology like I used in papers in the distant past. Mythopoetics are not necessarily literary analysis or vice-versa. But mythopoetics are my main interests in depth psychology, inclusive in my belovedly charmed dream studies, synchronicity studies, and eco- psychological studies--all of which by me are seen mostly through a lens of mythopoetics anyways.

And I always give most people the benefit of the doubt even though some people out there have tried to destroy me or my spirit or my soul or my job or my happiness. I only keep those people in my life anymore who are mutually nice and well-meaning, if I can help it. Due to certain associations, that is not always completely possible, but I try, through avoidance.

***This got two likes and two loves on FB***

FROM POETRY MONTH: I Spent Some Recent Tuesdays with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE (FROM LAST YEAR'S PLAN OF 2022, NOW BEING 2023)

 

 

 

(Photo compliments Pixabay)

NOTA: This sat in my blog post list as a draft for a year. 

 

 

 This book I refer to here is not poetry but I see it as poetry in motion in life, or a life poetically lived--whatever that means or conjures up for you.

 

Intro

 

A few weeks ago at the library I came across a child of God, he was walking along the aisle, and I asked him where he was going and this he showed me: 

 

More accurately, I came across a table display of books that all had the day "Tuesday in their titles, and I picked up and checked out the one called "Tuesdays with Morrie about an old man who is dying and a young man who was his student who is still now asking him questions, this time the big questions about life itself rather than the subject matter years ago in school. I had read the book before years ago and decided to refresh my memory and see how by now I would view and answer the same big life questions now that I am more up in years. I have always said that I will never know all the answers to life's big mysteries of its purpose, why we are even born, why we have to die (other than that the planet could never hold all of us if none of us ever died so it sounds like a sensible enough natural plan), etc. etc. etc. As I have mentioned elsewhere more than once, I have had near-death experiences and life-after death or life-after life experiences, but those experiences did very little to answer my lifelong questions for me. So even with those near death and life-after-life experiences, I still know very little for certain about death and have only speculations as to what might be the truth but then I do not think there is only one truth to what an afterlife co:nsists of. But, I do know this:

C.G. Jung, the psychologist, did say this: "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness ofere being." Is this italicized to say I believe this is an absolute? I don't know--it makes more sense than anything else I have come up against, yet I can't say because I do not know exactly what made the darkness in the first place and what made the dark matter in the universe and what caused the light. I used to think it was the mind of God with its synapses being sparked and blasting off and making connections, much like the Big Bang. But who knows? Certainly not me. Now some scientists are saying the Big Bang never happened. And life's big questions are like that, or so it seems to me. 

 

Part 2: Enough lead-in, let's get to the book. 

 

Here are the chapter titles, each a life topic full of question, and each Tuesday I will fill in some of my thoughts on some of these, I would like to hear my readers thoughts on theese topics of the chapter themes of this book, if you would like to leave your thoughts below in the comments section. 

 The First Tuesday--We Talk About the World

The Second Tuesday--We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself

The Third Tuesday--We Talk About Regrets

The Fourth Tuesday--We Talk About Death

The 5th Tuesday--[...] Family

The 6th Tuesday--[...] Emotion

The 7th Tuesday--[...] The Fear of Aging

8th--[...] Money

9th--[...] How Love Goes On

10th--[...] Marriage

11th--[...] Our Culture

12th--[...] Forgiveness

13th--[...] The Perfect Day

14th--[...] We Say Goodbye

These are the topics I have been pondering lately and will continue to do so. 

 

 

It Comes to a Certain Point in a Quote by Andre Breton

 

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

--André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism.

Sounds Jungian, as if surrealism is a transcendent function. Sur also implies sub. Like subconscious, a popular cultural term for the unconscious. Often people think of trans to mean rise above, but as the I Ching hexogram of 'The Tower' tells us (Wilhelm edition), 'trans' means across and does not mean only up. The tower affords a wide view because of its height.

*

This does remind me of a poem I wrote a long time ago about Indeterminism in poetry. It is all a vantage point but indeterminant poems do not exactly or quite have a vantage point. I wonder just how much of that began with the Language Poets when nothing else mattered much except for the language sounds. The Cocteau Twins songs have mastered the language poetry in their verses. The voice becomes an instrument. It conveys sounds, emotions, but no "real" or distinguishable meaning.

But this is different, this is transcendence. I guess that one way transcendence can be identified and then discerned in an indeterminatnt poem is when you have to ask transcendeing what? Whatever the symbol is even if you cannot quite put a finger on it. Then diuscern what in it is "real."

The main point here is, before I digressed, that Breton spoke of the poles of opposites as did Jung.

Fools in the Tarot--Then and Now

      

     Better late than never?!?! This is no April Fool's joke that finally at the end of April I can post some things about fools and foolishness because my phone cam started working again. So here is a painting I did way back when sometime during the 80s when I was taking drawing and watercolor classes at BGSU. I drew the sketch in a drawing from life class I took then painted it later using gouache in a watercolor class I took. At the time I was researching various historical Tarot decks and thought I would try my hand at creating my own deck. This painting was going to be The Fool card.

You can see that her hair looks a bit like a jester hat. There is a fire behind her either just catching flames or dying down (reader's choice), the fire can be indicative of the burn of embarrassment and/or righteous indignation, and she frowns because this upsets her pride. It also hints at feeling naked and exposed as a fool, reflective of people telling stories about dreaming of being naked in front of a group of people--and here was a model posing nude and unashamed. Fire here was not intended to indicate an astrological Fire sign; indeed, the model was an Earth sign and my fool-ish interp was not personal to her or what I thought of her, but because I had been studying Fool cards. Like many of my old paintings, this one disappeared, and all that is left of it is its image and my memory preserved in this photo. Thus you see the camera flash on the glass from its framing.
      I hope you have all had a Happy April Fool's month!
      Later I will try to find old European tarot cards of The Fool. I am searching for images without copyright. Italy and France both had old decks that I have seen before but cannot find them right now. I haven't been blogging because I have been trying to get a lot of my typing work done on my manuscripts. So I am not sure when I will get back to this--it is just that I came across photos of my old artwork the other day and when I had written about the tarot cards I was once upon a time designing...so felt like posting this.

Poet Bill Arthrell's "Ukranian Heart: The Land This Tortured Beauty Through the Eyes of an American Poet"

 

By chance, I found a beautifully moving book of poems at the library while browsing a shelf of local writers; the poetry collection is titled, Ukrainian Heart: The Land, This Tortured Beauty, Through the Eyes of an American poet. I have been reading a poem a day all October. Or sometimes two, when the poems are extremely short. I end up re-reading the intro and back pages of the author's background story probably about every three poems or so--meaning every few days. The sentiment in this book is sweetly sad, sadly intense, and real. It seems to be not contrived for any sake of commercialism; in fact, these poems did not come out and about this year in 2022 during Putin's Russia's current war on the Ukraine that we keep seeing on the news and dropping tears over as more bombs and bullet shells are 

dropped; these poems are the result of many years of many wars on the beautiful bread basket of Ukraine, as it seems most everyone has at one time or another coveted its grain. 

I was so surprised to find this book and then see that it was published in 2019. Arthrell is pictured on the back cover posing with two Cossack fighters in Ukraine, which he felt inspired to visit on account of the Maiden Revolution. Arthrell is a retired high school history teacher from Cleveland, Ohio, local to me and the local library because Cleveland is a one-hour hop and skip and jump down the road East from me and the state's Huron Public Library. He is also pictured on an inside page of the book standing with "The Holodomor Girl" which stands at the Holodomor Victim's Memorial in Kyiv, Ukraine. The name means, "Death by Starvation." The Ukrainian people were forced to starve. Any real-life girl or person would be shot to death for holding the five stalks of wheat the statue holds and be blamed for "theft," Arthrell explains. Ten million Ukrainians were starved to death deliberately in 1932-33 and also by Russia two other times, in 1946-47 and back farther in 1921-22. At the time of the publication of this book Russia was invading the Ukraine much as it is now. 

In Part One of this book, the poet shares his experiences in the Ukraine, which he portrays as a land of great beauty such as of the "farms so large--/so much bigger/than dreams," he describes in the very first poem in a "Rapid Gallop/to the horizon/where eternity begins" (p. 16), where the large farms lead to eternity. 

I remember a day when my daughter was little, an afternoon in which my husband and I finished digging and tilling a new backyard garden, one that was rather large for our large-enough yard; our kindergarten-age daughter ran to the middle of the garden, exclaiming, "Oh, Mommy, this is just like a dream!" She was filled with glee over how big it was under the sun above and all the things we would grow in it. That is how the poem I described above, called "Ukraine" made me feel in regards to its large farm image.

Part Two of the book is called "A Nation of Survivors" and the poems in it discuss the horrors of war and the dead, yes, but then those that survived. Those that survived, survived in cities of streets lined with "veins and marrow" (p. 66) like concrete sorrow into the hope of a

better tomorrow. Part Two is filled with historically political facts about all the fighting for the land of the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people's  frequent dire struggles. Time and time again, they have had to defend themselves against other nations wanting to take them over, such as, we now know, Russia, though also "the Mongol Horde, to the Ottoman Turks; from Poland to the German Nazis" (p. 120).

Part One is a nice, easy read; Part Two is a tough read for those who feel others' pain. How could one not become empathetic, however, after reading these poems, how could the terribleness of what some humans do to other humans not be felt when you read about children being killed? What mother or father or sister or brother or grandmother and grandfather can read these poems and not cry? 

Yes, I have been reading one poem a day.  

Source

Arthrell, Bill. Ukrainian Heart. 2019. ISBN #978-617-7777-43-3.

Indian Summer: Hearing a Song by That Name at That Time of Year (Or This Time of Year, September 2-7, 2022)

September 2, 2022, with editing September 7, 2022

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oE38psKkcNM

When summer is passing and seems but a dream, there is that memorable afterglow of warmth and yet the light still much remains. At the end of August the night air got chillier and the daytime sun felt a bit more distant, as if not as direct somehow. This leads us into the dream of autumn that we fall into before deep winter sleep. The song "Indian Summer" by Michael Jones and David Darling from their album Amber aptly captures that feel of Autumn's Indian Summer in the woods or along a country road, one in which it is so easy to feel, even if a tad bit chilly, cozily ensconced. We feel yet the warmth of the color amber as if a teardrop of the sun like a piece of liquid sunshine falls upon the ground as the leaves turn yellow to orange.

Here is what strikes me as I hear the fingers striking the keys and the strings of the piano and the oboe, about this music being successful in describing this time of year:

At the very beginning of the song, the music fades in, like a fade-in of a movie; this can sound to the listener like a past continuous action (action verb!), the way a recurring scene within the mind's memory, going over and over a place in time. It is like then the afterglow of the warmth of the summer. 

Some patterns emerge like more and more leaves dropping upon the scene--I love this. Then, both the instruments themselves--the piano and the oboe--and those patterns of notes begin to layer themselves upon one another like bunches or clusters of leaves falling into layers or piles upon the ground. I love how music can depict nature, can mirror it. 

So much of music is inspired by nature. Go to YouTube and search for the titles of the songs on the album Amber by Michael Jones and David Darling. Also recall Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and Claude Debussy's "Claire de Lune" mirror the moon, and how "The Blue Danube" waltz was inspired by the river of that name. 

Oh, Horrors!

😨h, horror. 

 Oh, sure I loved Stephen King and Lon Chaney  when I was growing up and I loved Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum and yes of course I loved The Wizard of Oz which has its evil witches and mean come-to-life trees and oh the flying monkeys;  but then in my 30's something not so scary gripped me: I stopped reading scary books and watching scary films. Isn't that odd? Yet, I still write horror. Why would this be so?

Oh, I do imagine the back cover bio blurb on my very first published horror novel will begin with, "Even though she hates reading and watching horror in real life,  she loves to write it." 

To the above, I could (natch) add, "especially late at night."  

Over the years I have written horror both in poetry and in fiction. I ate Count Dracula for breakfast and Dark Shadows for my after school snack. Previously, when even younger, I enjoyed Scooby Doo and Casper the Friendly Ghost. 

There are two films or TV shows (not sure which) I have been looking for all these years that I saw when I was probably around age 10: One is about a group of shipwrecked people who start turning into rocks until finally the last woman is standing, sitting in front of a mirror and pulls the front of her dress down off her neck and sees the stony formation growing on her neck and the other has something to do in the credits with High Noon and in the last scene an older women seems to be getting buried alive while a bunch of family members and "friends" are looking on and a young girl reaches down into the coffin and pulls off the older woman's wedding ring--or something like that. Like a distant dream, I cannot remember anything else, but it haunted me for years. Some people have suggested to me that the film about the stone people island must be Attack of the Mushroom People, but I did re-watch Mushroom People and it does not ring the same. If anyone reading this has an idea about the titles of these two films or TV episodes (such as from Twilight Zone or Night Gallery) please message me on my Facebook page(s) at:

https://www.facebook,com/bencivengo.mary

facebook.com/author.mBenci

Now I as an author will leave those in the depth psychology field to write about horror if they feel so inspired. I intend to finish the edits on my horror novels, not write about horror itself--in other words, I write horror, not usually about horror. However, I did include horror in some of the fairy tales such as  "Hansel and Gretel" and "Ashputtle" in some of the library programs I did on fairy tales. The fairy tale program events were at The Sandusky Library in Sandusky, Ohio; the program was called, Beyond the Fairy Tale. You can find some of the talks I gave on the Sandusky Library YouTube page.

Finally, I think that the reason I write horror sometimes but do not like to read or watch it much is because I like the old-time horror that leaves things to the imagination more than the contemporary more graphically explicit horror. 

This blog entry is copyrighted as all my other blogs are, so if you paraphrase or quote me, include the source. Copying the material of others without acknowledging the source is a very grave matter.

(Image by Pexel on Pixabay)

          Mary Ann Bencivengo

Note: This blog entry was edited on September 1, 2022 and first written at least one month prior.