IF YOU’RE SO FREE

If you’re so free, why do you always choose
the chocolate and refuse the broccoli?
Oh, sure, but you’re not free if you can be
provoked into refuting me. 

You’re free to do whatever you think best
but not to eat in restaurants undressed,
or free to score by running third to first,
or free to think what you think best is worst.

Below is a close up of part of a painting by Wayne Thiebaud called “Three Donuts.” He isn’t unknown or unappreciated, but I think he should be better known and more highly valued. The “serious” art crowd (dressed in black) gets uneasy around painting like Thiebaud’s. His pastries and ice cream sundaes are not camp funny or sarcastic funny, just enjoyably funny. How can they take pictures like that seriously when Gretchen tells us the world is going to end tomorrow? ( I couldn’t find a painting of broccoli.)

And just to help you start you week off right, here are some of Thiebaud’s ice-cream cones.

“I like the worthy folk who will talk to you of the exercise of free will, ‘at any rate for practical purposes.’ Free is it? For practical purposes! Bosh!”—Joseph Conrad

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.

Why Making A Decision Is Like Taking a Photograph

A choice is like a photograph.
When it’s developed we can see
what we were like when it was taken,
and be indifferent, pleased, or, sometimes, shaken.

This photo from pinterest illustrates the way we dressed in 1948, the year I graduated from high school. Skirts got even longer when I was in college. Note the saddle shoes and bobbysox. Also the boy’s turned up cuffs. Actually, most boys turned them up a little farther to show they had on white socks. Some of the decisions I made at that time seem as strange today as the costumes.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.

MUTUALITY

A poem about needing each other

“I don’t know what to do,” he cries,
demands an answer from the skies,
hears nothing and declares, “There’s no one there!”

But if we got instructions from the air,
we’d do what we were told. We’d have no choice.
We’d be machines, free only to rejoice.

We’re free to choose because we can’t be sure
what we should do and must depend upon
each other to amend or to ignore
our choices, like those players whose
floor sense keeps them all aware of where
each other is, are constantly in motion,
setting up, and coming to
each other’s rescue—yes, out of the blue! 

* * * * *

I wanted a picture of a basketball player to illustrate this poem—one that would show a teammate coming to the rescue of a player trying to guard a good dribbler. That would fit the poem, but I couldn’t find what I wanted. Then I came across this painting, Charge of the Buffalo Soldiers by Frank C. McCarthy and decided that the sight of them charging “out of the blue” went with the poem better than a basketball game.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.

IMAGINE

Imagine you are suddenly self reliant
without a husband, child, or wife,
a telephone, a cat, a client. 
What happens to the story of your life?
And what becomes of you without a story?
Interview yourself. Your story’s you!
The self-reliant live on inventory.
When it’s used up then they are, too.

Robinson Crusoe is the most famous example of self-reliance in Western literature. But he wasn’t completely self-reliant. He survived on inventory—tools from the wreckage of his ship and ideas he remembered from his life in civilization. Fortunately, he was rescued before he went bonkers, which he would have done if he lived alone long enough. When a man lives in self-reliant isolation, he loses track of his language and his story. And without his story, there is nothing to him—nothing coherent. Below is a painting by Paul Klee that to me represents what happens to a man who loses his story. He comes apart. 

The painting is called “Contemplation.” Below is Klee’s self-portrait.

NOTE: Aids to Reflection is on sale at Amazon in both Kindle (2.99) and Print (3.99) format. Only a few of the illustrations in this blog version are included in the Kindle and Print formats.