Let me tell you a story...a gathering of old men, part 2

                                                                Marshall Plantation

Part two...

While Mapes was trying to make sense of the killing and confessions of all the old men, Gil Boutan, a star football player at LSU and Beau's brother, gets the news that his older bro has gone to meet his Maker. Confused, angry, and hurt, Gil heads on back to the Boutan home and has a heart-to-heart with his not-so warm and cuddly daddy. Gil begs Fix not to do anymore of the evil things that he's done in the past, and Fix agrees—after he disowns Gil, that is.

Gil is pretty upset in more ways than one, but Luke Will—one of Beau's drinking buddies with a whole lot of hate, not a lot of brains, and ties to the Ku Klux Klan—is angry for a completely different reason. He promises that bad things are going to happen to Black folks in Marshall, whether Fix is there himself or not.

The next thing you know, it's back to Marshall Plantation, and Sheriff Mapes is just about as happy as a five-year-old on his sixth birthday when he finds out that Fix isn't planning on showing up. When he tells everybody the news, Mathu agrees to head over to the station and go down for killing Beau. Most of the old men are pretty upset, because they'd been secretly loading fresh ammo into their shotguns this whole time, and were planning on either taking Fix out, or going down in a blaze of glory.

That's when Big Charlie shows up. He admits to killing Beau in self-defense, and says he's ready to take his medicine and take his chances with the law.

But Charlie isn't the only unexpected guest who shows up late to the shotgun party. Luke Will and some of his redneck pals show up too, drunk and armed with guns of their own. When one of them wings Mapes (who's too fat to get up afterwards), a firefight kicks off. At the end of it, one of Luke's pals is wounded, and Luke and Charlie are dead. When the case goes to trial, the judge gives every surviving member of the battle at Marshall five years of probation. Mathu and his pals head back to Marshall, leaving Candy and Lou holding hands and watching the dust clouds that the truck kicks up as it leaves.

The author, Earnest  Gaines was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, living in old slave quarters on a plantation.

Gaines' first years of school took place in the plantation church. When the children were not picking cotton in the fields, a visiting teacher came for five to six months of the year to provide basic education. Gaines then spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads, Louisiana. Schooling for African-American children did not continue beyond the eighth grade during this time in Pointe Coupee Parish.

As of November 2013, Gaines lives on Louisiana Highway 1 in Oscar, Louisiana, where he and his wife built a home on part of the old plantation where he grew up. He had the church he grew up with moved to his property.

From The Far Side of The Glass...Kissing Cousins

Observations from behind the glass...my time with my cyber family has really evolved since I started about two years ago. I have collected a great circle of friends. I have a special name for my friend circle. I named you Kiss...ing Cousins. Remember the ole Elvis movie in 1964, same name. Relatives you feel close enough to greet with a kiss or hug...

To be technical, that kiss thing should make us at least second cousins. You see, in the south second cousins are as far back as we go in really knowing another layer of our family. Second cousins represent the fourth generation. Seems we can't retain to much more than about four generations of linage.

So here is my reasoning. The people that know more about me than my best second cousin should be on equal liner space of kinship...there you have it my Virtual Kissing Cousins...smile on occasions...it might make you feel about half not bad on a good day.

Scribblings From The Sane Asylum...whistle

I was watching a football game today and they delayed the game while the Referee unfroze his whistle. Did make me grin realizing just how important that whistle really was. Seems there are not a lot of extra whistles laying around. You would think the Ref. would just grab a spare one from a warming cabinet. Who makes whistles anyway? Looks like the company would advertise, like Nike. Some nifty little whistling commercial. You know a happy little tune. Whistle while you work kind of thing...

Wet your whistle or is it whet your whistle? Easy to get that confused. Whet your appetite comes to mind as being correct, but I have not used that term in a number of years. I've been around three score and ten, and my guess, I could count the times I've used the term on one hand.

I’ve  seen both “whet your whistle” and “wet your appetite,” and neither correct. Most people’s lips don’t need to be any sharper, and appetites aren’t aroused by giving them a good soaking.

Wet Your Whistle...Seems this phrase has been around for a while. Don't really think there's a hidden meaning in wet—probably some ole Saxon word meaning moist, quench or liquid. Whistle is a little harder to decipher. It may refer to a person’s lips or throat. I think it came from a time when pub regulars used whistles to order more drinks.  I would bet a whistle was part of the mug, built into either the rim or handle. I went digging on the web and could find no example of Ye Olde Whistle Mug. I'm sure one wet ones whistle before one whistled? I know you just can't whistle with dry lips. A word of caution, don't wet your whistle in freezing weather.

Now to whet your appetite is almost the opposite. Whereas wetting your whistle quenches your thirst, whetting your appetite, sharpens. Whet, probably another ole Saxon term. Blades are whetted by whetstones. Appetites are whetted by tasty morsels or glimpses of interesting or desirable things. Like...bring me some corn nuts or moose jerky to whet my appetite. Another word of caution. It's best to eat coconut while you still have your teeth. I know that has nothing to do with what we are discussing, but it did cross my mind.

I did a very unsophisticated test on the Internet and Googled “wet your whistle” and had 426,000 hits, the majority directed towards drinking. “Whet your whistle” resulted in 421,000 hits, the majority of the answers related to stimulating further thought or experience processes. Now you have a good basis to go scratching around for more information and draw your own conclusion on this important discussion.

I asked my friend Jess B Rambling about this subject, as I often do on the more puzzling aspects of life.  Jess is anal about placing language in its proper order and knowing when to use whom. He said "whistle was a metonym." "Kinda started out as one meaning and just morphed into another." Makes a lot of sense to me...just an ole Saxon morphing-ism.

I was around this crazy ole uncle years many years back. I recall when he used the term " I'm going to whet my whistle", it meant he was going to relieve himself. See how I'm being appropriate and not using the word pee? I'm just that way. Don't want to offend anyone...:)

Did you know the opening in a whistle where you blow is called a fipple ? Hell I didn't. Never thought of it. I know I'm glad the ref's whistle had so much spit it froze up. Learned something new, got to talk to an old friend, explored the deep recesses of my mind, even pondered on Uncle Rufus for a spell. Hell, I think I will design a little whistle koozee warmer. Jess, how do you spell Koozee?

Not half that bad on a good day...Doc

Discovering Ourselves...the pain of an unlived life

The Pain Of An Unlived Life...

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives — even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available — because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children — it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice — that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes — that is, to call our wants wishes: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true — and, at worst, to hate our needs. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.


"We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason — and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason — they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are." Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise Of An Unlived Life..

The Human Conservancy Field Office

Field Notes...

Today's psychology, as a collection of theories, concepts, and techniques, has attempted to help individuals and the society realize relief from mental problems solving methods that do nothing to increase ones understanding of the role of thought. This has led to the misperception that rituals, techniques or other placebos are the route to change. Thus, by creating the illusion of change through altering the form or formate through which people express their insecurity, negative feelings, and dependencies, psychology has unwittingly contributed to its own inability to progress as a science and as a field of study. There is nothing to be found in studying and explaining the attributes of placebo sugar pills, water injection, or psychotherapeutic rituals, because in the end it is the human beings level of understanding and ability to think that brings results.

The field of psychology will take a new and exciting direction when we begin to look directly toward the mental power we as humans possess. Once this new wisdom is formulated and shared with people, the benefits will spill over into our society to help many people looking for relief from emotional dis-ease. Mostly from their own fear anxiety and recurrent life of self destructive behaviors that seem just out of individual control. Life Adjustment issues I call them.

This direction is also the one that will help the most people in the long run become better humans. Whether they are talking about improving the quality of their own individual reality, or possibility that of a society or even an  entire humanity, the principle is the same. The only barrier to accomplishing these feats are those of thought. It is the knowledge of this fact that will allow human beings to successfully break the perceptual, emotional, and behavioral barriers that we all struggle with.

It's a beginning...but now the idea must mature into a reality. Our evolution of humans being human as a science will emerge. After all, consciousness is now being studied as a mass, something akin to gas and other quantities that cannot be seen. Our evolution will emerge as a willingness to accept something new, to listen to someone saying that the world is round rather than flat; that the earth is not the center of the solar system; that energy, matter, and space are alloted. Or perhaps by shifting our focus away from the manifestation of people's problems and move to the principles of thought, reality, consciousness, and emotions we will see our connection to mental well being. Society may just find the route to its own wisdom.

Human Ecology, The Human Conservacy, a new way of being human, a new humanity...it's time, it's a possibility...well that's what I'm thinking on this day...Doc

From The Road...Rosie

                                                             

Walking through the dark and fog, this morning I ran into Rosie, in the French Market courtyard. We talked about Christmas, her hat collection, the weather. She told me her boyfriend gave her an iPhone for Christmas and she would take my picture if she knew how to use it. I told her we could take her picture if she wanted. She said, "Sure, but I have to hurry or John will be around." (Rosie collects the small cans from the big cans in the early hours. John, another pal, is her competition for the cans: whoever gets there first gets the gold. The recycling business is intense, and it starts over every morning — especially in festival and holiday season.

We hurried. This is her picture.

Rosie, recycling, in a hurry
From The Labor Suite
French Market
New Orleans, LA   2016

Thanks Christopher Bryson...Doc

Let Me Tell You. Story...a gathering of old men.

A Gathering Of Old Men...
Earnest Gaines

How It All Goes Down...Part One

It's just another quiet day near Marshall Plantation. Old Aunt Glo is feeding her little nieces and nephews a healthy little meal. Then Candy Marshall shows up, and things get a whole less quiet.

She tells Glo's nephew George—whom everybody calls "Snookum"—to get a hold of Lou Dimes—a big city reporter and Candy's main squeeze—and Miss Merle, the owner of what remains of another plantation. Along the way to Miss Merle's place, Snookum's also supposed to tell Rufe and pretty much every other African American male in the place to get over to Mathu's quick. Beau Boutan's corpse is getting ripe in the grass outside Mathu's house—and everybody knows Fix's (Beau's dad) unhealthy obsession with revenge, destruction, and murder.

A few hours later, literally every male member of the Black community around Marshall has shown up at Mathu's house, along with a few women and children, including Candy herself. Oh, and all the men are carrying shotguns with at least one empty shotgun shell—the same type of shotgun and caliber of shell that killed Beau. Not long after the Gun Club for Men starts hanging out around Mathu's front porch, Lou Dimes shows up—with Sherriff Mapes, and you had better believe that Mapes is not thrilled by what he sees. He's also more than slightly afraid of what might happen if Fix Boutan jets down to Marshall with some of his redneck pals and sees a group of elderly, shotgun-toting Black men in the wake of his son's killing.

Mapes tries to get to the bottom of all of it and get it all over with before Fix has a chance to do the kind of awful hideousness that he does best, but the old tried-and-true scare tactics that Mapes has used in the past aren't flying that day. Everybody there is taking credit for sending Beau on a one-way trip to that Honky-Tonk bar in the sky.

                                                                      Mathu's house

Entry Note To Self...faith in humanity

Steinbeck writes on January 1, 1941:

Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the humanity he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his own filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.

Entry Note To Self:

So when we witness evil, punctuate the line of our moral and humanitarian progress, as we periodically do, and may we remember Steinback’s sobering perspective and lucid faith in the human spirit.

Christopher Bryson...French Quarter

The French Quarter...by Christopher Bryson

Automotives. When we talk at all, we talk about cars. Mostly, it's the 1950s and 1960s models, out of Detroit. The ones that were there for us when we were young. Proof that we were there at that time, having our formative car dreams. Maybe proof that we were young.

Just the Americans. We never talk about Porsche, Mercedes, Triumph, Fiat, and the rest. No exotics.

We discuss lines, the color combinations, how they sound. Their shape, trim. How they look from the front, the side, and going away. How they look when they move. How they might feel, the ones we have never ridden. How they smelled when they were new, or used. Leather. Cigars. Dream cars: Buick, Lincoln, Cadillac.

We talk about these cars as if we are talking about women we do not know—women we have only seen, or heard about, or imagined, admired, but never met. Women we have dreamed about, maybe. We find common ground. That's how it is when we talk.

Angelo, on the corner
Governor Nicholls Street
New Orleans, LA  2017

The Human Conservancy Field Office...

Notes From The Field...

Every person has many different and often contradictory emotional dispositions, desires, and ways of responding to the world. Our emotional dispositions develop by looking outward, not inward. They are not cultivated when you retreat from the world to meditate or go on a vacation. They are formed, in practice, through the things you do in your everyday life: the ways you interact with others and the activities you pursue. In other words, we aren’t just who we are: we can actively make ourselves into better people all the time.

Entry Note To Self...here and there does not matter

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning...T.S. Elliot

From Inside The Sane Asylum...Dumb Ass Reflex...

For the last few days I have been watching more football than my brain can enjoy. But what the hell, everyone else seems to be enjoying so why not join in. There is a lot of talk about the coaches...mostly about how much they make and second guessing their play calling. What I noticed most was the dumb ass mental mistakes by the players. Case in point. The Off Side call. The lineman execute this down set before you snap the ball thousands of times, but every once in a while they just jump off sides before the ball is snapped for no dump ass reason. The brain just makes a dumb ass reflex.  Can't explain it. The reflex just happens. Grown men slapping their helmet in disgust and lip syncing "What the ----".

The other day I was backing out of my garage. I thought I put the car in reverse but guess it was a dumb ass mental mistake and I dropped it a notch or two lower into drive. Now when you accelerate and you sense you are going in the wrong direction your brain wants to help out and slam on your breaks. It knows how to do that, but the brain makes a big dumb ass reflex and presses the foot harder on the accelerator rather than withdrawing. "What the ----", I thought as I sat in my storage closet looking at the rake and hoe hanging on the wall. Never use them but there they were, hanging neatly just outside my car door. Ended up off sides in my storage closet.

Now I must say, Ms. Ego was not very happy, even after I tried to explain to her that it was a big dumb ass mental mistake followed by a dumb ass brain reflex. "It was only a mental mistake and a brain reflex, can happen to anyone", I pleaded.  I even tried to explain to her that older people's response time is much slower and it never occurred to me to take my foot off the accelerator.  A lot like my recall lately. Things just don't occur to me like they use too. I went so far to explain that the average reaction reflex time to a visual stimuli is .025 of a second and .017 to an audio stimulus, and if she would have been watching she could have yelled at me and maybe I would have stopped sooner...She's not happy!

Reflexes come in all kinds. Conditioned, unconditioned and just the ordinary kind when an action is carried out through the mediation of the nervous system but not requiring the cooperation of the brain for its execution. Just a response of a perturbing stimulus that acts to return the body to homeostasis. The reflex arc, the receptor at the end of a sensory neuron, the afferent neuron, the efferent neuron traveling up the efferent pathway. I know all that crap but it was of no value in explaining how I ended up in the storage closet due to a dumb ass reflex.

I needed some deeper insight on this reflex subject, so I called my good friend Jess Ben Rambling and related how I had been hit hard of recent by "dumb ass reflexes".  Now I don't  know what I was expecting to hear. Maybe some sympathy followed by "it can happen to the best of us". Or maybe, "are you ok?". Hell, I would have settled for, "that was a real dumb ass reflex". He was silent for a moment trying to make contact with his deeper self, I suppose, then responded..."Many times I reflex while I reflect on past memories and friends."

What the ----!

Somewhat-not-half-bad-on-a-good-day...Doc

Discovering Ourselves...Emotions

The concept of ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ emotions dates back at least to the Book of Rites, a first-century Chinese encyclopedia that identifies seven ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking.

In the 20th century, Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and Robert Plutchik eight, which he grouped into four pairs of polar opposites (joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation).

It is said that basic emotions evolved in response to the ecological challenges faced by our remote ancestors and are so primitive as to be ‘hardwired’, with each basic emotion corresponding to a distinct and dedicated neurological circuit. Being hardwired, basic emotions (or ‘affect programs’) are innate and universal, automatic, and fast, and trigger behaviour with a high survival value. So much can hardly be said of more complex emotions such as humility or nostalgia, which, for example, are never attributed to infants and animals.

The other day, I opened a cutlery drawer on a large lizard, which, of course, I had not been expecting to find. As the critter darted off into the blackness behind the drawer, I unthinkingly jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Having done this, I suddenly discovered myself to be feeling hot and alert and primed for further action. This basic fear response is so primitive that even the lizard seemed to share in it, and so automatic as to be ‘cognitively impenetrable’, that is, unconscious and uncontrollable, and more akin to a reflex than a deliberate action. One of high survival value I suppose.

Reflections From The Sane Asylum...

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us... don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be a somebody!...Emily Dickenson