You’re neither here nor there, a temporary place you move through to get where you’re going. You spend your teenage years in between being a child and an adult, unmoored from both, floating in a sea of hormones and unfinished growth.
I am smack dab in the middle of Liz Cheney’s “Oath and Honor” and there can be zero doubt that Trump invited and incited the January 6th mob to overthrow our government.She meticulously lays out the plan that then POTUS Donald Trump orchestrated this attack and had been plotting with other Republican lawmakers to stage this rebellion. It is eye-popping but also disturbing how so many Republicans denounced the January 6 attack on our government but then caved because of a variety of reasons. It also illustrates how her party completely abandoned her when she stood up for our Constitution and our democracy. Say what you will about her and her politics, she has definitely shown extreme courage in the face of unthinkable horror. She is a shero for our country.
One of the reasons Trump was selected to run the first time was his lack of empathy for anyone but himself. That and his total lack of interest in governance, let Bannon and Miller run the country.
Liz Cheney is the opposite, she is a lifelong Republican, but, not a traitor. Her performance during the 1/6 hearing was magnificent, she needs to be back in government...along with Al Franken.
So many thoughts, Lucien. Being new to your Substack, although I had known of you a while ago, I had not remembered reading you and, quite frankly, you know your way around words. In my life, I was always at ease and happiest sailing somewhere, for to me, the sailing was the destinaton, the being there, the cat on a lap.
Your Slim Harpo piece from long ago was absolutely the float away kind of experience. It took me way back.
The wetter the better! Well, that was 65 years ago as an avid dinghy and ocean racer. But the gentle roll at anchor rocks me to sleep very well lately. That name rings a bell from other Substacks.
If you're living aboard now I'm envious. Yes—i encountered Bob in another Substack first. He doesn't talk a lot though about the days when he captained yacht deliveries in the Pacific.
No, not living aboard. Just at the mercy of friends who invite me. I've taken time off work to do a few long coastal deliveries, but spent about half the year on ships doing marine geology and geophysics all over the Pacific and Arctic oceans. Then another twenty years supporting solar astronomy and basic scientific research. Lots of very interesting people.
What a singular résumé, Ransom! Among all the interesting people you say you've known, I doubt many could have outdone you. I'm surely not alone in hoping you'll stick around here and share your spacious perspective. —diane
Yes we are. He lets us breathe slowly, which is much needed these days. I've heard that wishing one an interesting life is a curse in some cultures. Gotta be careful.
Ha! Depends on the cockpit cushions. A memory of both was when a friend contracted the return of Merlin to Santa Cruz after the Cabo race. Three non sailor friends came along. Tom always brought Merlin home after the Trans-Pac and would take the long tack north to the Gulf of Alaska before he did any nav, just to be lost in the middle of nowhere. The broad reach to California was "That way" By the angle of the swell, it was pretty clear how close it was getting and he'd take a sight and adjust the course. He was like that on my only Merlin trip north, and he let me do it my way with the ancient Mexican charts and compass. No Loran, as the antennas had been busted off.
The sunsets were blazing and I had the helm all the nights. Storm jib and third reef. 11-12 kts on 20 or so days close hauled, hands free. The night watches were the most memorable. Only a little anxiety on a long starboard tack headed just south of Sacramento Reef before sunrise. That fifty foot curl was amzing in the sunrise.
I know these are times when we need to be vigilant about what we're being told and what is being withheld or disguised -- but I also like quiet days where I organize my art supplies, or go through old photographs, start a new book ("Delta Wedding" at this point in time) ... or provide a warm resting place for the cats. (Dogs have owners, cats have staff.)
May we survive 2024. May we find ourselves laughing this time next year.
My kindest regards to you, your family, and the critters.
Our grown son returned to us and our cat duo, today. He was apartment and cat sitting for his sister in Harlem.
He carefully explained Norse mythology and its application to a video game he bested. I’m learning to listen, no easy task for a know-it-all mom who’s patiently for him to grow into his own life.
Some might call it extended adolescence. To me It’s just another challenge that comes of living between then and now.
We’ve been chatting and singing about Ives. I decorated a pumpkin as Santa this year. Serendipitously, it turned out to be the spitting image of Ives’ animated character in the 1964 “Rudolph”.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there!
---- Robert S. Pirsig
Highlight of a Philosophies of India course at Macalester circa 1972 was the instructor -David White, WW2 draft resister from Oklahoma who lived and studied for some nine years in India and translated the Bhagavad Gita - getting Pirsig to visit the class and do a Q& A, never saw so many people quietly crowding every available edge of a classroom in my life, before or since - not even Chomsky!
The most profound movie I ever saw involved a man who traveled many miles and many years to find his 'truth'-after many trials and tribulations he did climb to the highest mountain where his master was.
when he asked the Master where the answer to life was, the master gave him a book with pages of mirrors and told him, "This is your answer."
Can't remember the name of the movie, but that ending never left me.
Edit-the movie was: The Circle of Iron, starring David Carradine, Christopher Lee, and other notable actors-written by Bruce Lee, he intended to star in it, but abandoned it and then died.
I found it rather profound in its' message although most critics did not think very highly of it.
Arguably - I start with that term to immediately signal I am ready (and even eager) to be shown a clear and convincing counter-example! - every single psychotherapy and much of religion will boil down to the individual's embrace of some form of "the infinite," here it's the absolute merging and loss of the ego-mind, what Shunryo Suzuki called returning to the "Beginner's Mind."
"To quote zen master Shunryo Suzuki, `In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.'"
But religions calcify and soon we have experts, not beginners, experts, not masters [or `mistresses,' but that term has semantic overlays (no puns intended, I promise!) maybe best avoided, so we can use `mystic guide' or even `guru' - a cat can be a guru, everyone knows that, even dogs know that! - and soon dogmatists, ensorcelled by their own self-created snares and delusions, are eagerly explaining what they do not know and have not personally experienced, but are completely sure beyond any reasonable doubt IS the final truth, and ready to enforce as such, yes, and mirabile dictu, may the saints be praised! - from the most saintly of motives, to save heathens, apostates, heretics from the flames of Hell, Eternal Hell, thus they hit on upon the slap-happy plan of consigning them to the flames here instead, and [or so they claim] it is really truly scout's honor the one true divinely inspired immutable eternal absolutely perfect path to *Enlightenment,* so they fiercely defend their mad career of burning heretics and witches as, yes, ordained from Eternity by God!
Comes the reckoning with the unvanquished heretics, the people-burners are told, for example: no, no, no, the ancient Greeks, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians and Indians and likely Native Americans and Chinese left a host of Labyrinth myths and tales, for example, with a panoply of paths to the destination.
[My own Grandfather Foster's Masonic book Rites & Dogma was helpful on this point too!]
"What you people did was a crime," the unvanquished assert, "an atrocity, a blot on the good name of seeking the Divine and higher states of consciousness, consciousness of the ultimate oneness, that overwhelming blasting blessed torrent of joyful ecstasy, beyond all forms, words, signs, symbols, but if we must have any of those, perhaps best captured through music, the most inspired visual arts, and dance, and the most skillful writing, variously defined and with nearly infinite context-sensitive variations - but not your crabbed, shabby, narrow, viciously enforced rigmarole of robotic affirmations, denunciations, and abject intellectual suicides, so sorry, please try harder in the future!
But the good news for you is, we won't burn you, no, we will have a fair trial where you lot can produce your case, we will produce ours, there will be cross-examinations - Wigmore's "greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth" - and then we will do our best to defend the community from your depraved indifference to human intellectual liberty, by decreeing a just punishment, depending on the consensus of the judges and the law, with the law being the vital necessity, and not your *religious* dogma, which could just as well be called *irrelegious, anti-religious ad hoc sadism* as any worthwhile respect for humanity's craving for transcendent meaning.**
Thus endeth the morning first cuppa coffee rant, maybe I should wheel it over to my just begun Substack column and credit you for spurring it on, Mary!
I should have added to my comment earlier "Sheer poetry" That put the thought into my head that you should write a poem around this theme. .So although no doubt not in proper format since I am not a poet, I plagiarized what you wrote as perhaps a foundation to inspire you to write a poem.
Wow, thank you, Elisabeth. I confess I did write a poem previously. Several years ago when I was driving after an early retirement my boss and his wife were guests of the new owner of the Sinatra house in Rancho Mirage and I got to stay there too in one of the bungalow. Anyway they were in another part of the house completely and the caretaker said I could use the jacuzzi and he played Sinatra records over the outdoor speakers, so the beginnings of a poem and shortly after that I read that Hofstra University was having a four day symposium on Sinatra and invited people to send in a poem. I finished what I had started and sent it in, a week or so later they informed me it was one of six chosen and invited me to read it along with the other people who they had chosen. I'm on the West coast didn't go and one of the organisers read it: So here it is.
Dear Robert, I am just catching up on your response to my comment, days back. You have a knack for poetry. Not everyone does....thank you for your words....Regards from India, Liz
Ah, thank you Elizabeth, you inspire me to write more. I've always been interested in writing and when my kids were little I'd make up stories at bedtime. You are in India, eh? I have never been there but sad to say although I am in LA now I grew up in England (born in Scotland) and the British did some terrible thing in India leading of course to rebellion and the peaceful resistance approach.
Yes, I tell my Indian friends we (the US)and India are united by our common enemy....I do hope you write more. My wonderful father also made up stories for me and my sister. We couldn't get enough!
What wonderful insights into the sameness of our hours, days, lives...you have made the mundane, anticipatory. This is an outlook I will carry into the New Year and onward. This is why I love your writing and your perspicacity. I look forward to your posts every day.
I am smack dab in the middle of Liz Cheney’s “Oath and Honor” and there can be zero doubt that Trump invited and incited the January 6th mob to overthrow our government.She meticulously lays out the plan that then POTUS Donald Trump orchestrated this attack and had been plotting with other Republican lawmakers to stage this rebellion. It is eye-popping but also disturbing how so many Republicans denounced the January 6 attack on our government but then caved because of a variety of reasons. It also illustrates how her party completely abandoned her when she stood up for our Constitution and our democracy. Say what you will about her and her politics, she has definitely shown extreme courage in the face of unthinkable horror. She is a shero for our country.
One of the reasons Trump was selected to run the first time was his lack of empathy for anyone but himself. That and his total lack of interest in governance, let Bannon and Miller run the country.
Liz Cheney is the opposite, she is a lifelong Republican, but, not a traitor. Her performance during the 1/6 hearing was magnificent, she needs to be back in government...along with Al Franken.
I totally agree.
I agree.
but I'd never vote for her.
never.
So many thoughts, Lucien. Being new to your Substack, although I had known of you a while ago, I had not remembered reading you and, quite frankly, you know your way around words. In my life, I was always at ease and happiest sailing somewhere, for to me, the sailing was the destinaton, the being there, the cat on a lap.
Your Slim Harpo piece from long ago was absolutely the float away kind of experience. It took me way back.
That's what I thought, too, when I first found him: He knows his way around language.
In these troubled times, it such a soothing break to go somewhere else with words that just take you, as the now with no destination. The happy cat.
A great phrase - a great compliment!
Ransom—Can't help but wonder if you and Bob Palmer, another salt here, will find some matters to discuss.
The wetter the better! Well, that was 65 years ago as an avid dinghy and ocean racer. But the gentle roll at anchor rocks me to sleep very well lately. That name rings a bell from other Substacks.
If you're living aboard now I'm envious. Yes—i encountered Bob in another Substack first. He doesn't talk a lot though about the days when he captained yacht deliveries in the Pacific.
No, not living aboard. Just at the mercy of friends who invite me. I've taken time off work to do a few long coastal deliveries, but spent about half the year on ships doing marine geology and geophysics all over the Pacific and Arctic oceans. Then another twenty years supporting solar astronomy and basic scientific research. Lots of very interesting people.
What a singular résumé, Ransom! Among all the interesting people you say you've known, I doubt many could have outdone you. I'm surely not alone in hoping you'll stick around here and share your spacious perspective. —diane
Lucien set the hook tight. I'll be around.
And...an extraordinarily interesting life, I think. LKT IV’s way with words is also extraordinary and how grateful we all are to be in this sphere!
Yes we are. He lets us breathe slowly, which is much needed these days. I've heard that wishing one an interesting life is a curse in some cultures. Gotta be careful.
Hello Ransom ! Long retired from the seas, I remember the
sunsets more now than night watches.
Ha! Depends on the cockpit cushions. A memory of both was when a friend contracted the return of Merlin to Santa Cruz after the Cabo race. Three non sailor friends came along. Tom always brought Merlin home after the Trans-Pac and would take the long tack north to the Gulf of Alaska before he did any nav, just to be lost in the middle of nowhere. The broad reach to California was "That way" By the angle of the swell, it was pretty clear how close it was getting and he'd take a sight and adjust the course. He was like that on my only Merlin trip north, and he let me do it my way with the ancient Mexican charts and compass. No Loran, as the antennas had been busted off.
The sunsets were blazing and I had the helm all the nights. Storm jib and third reef. 11-12 kts on 20 or so days close hauled, hands free. The night watches were the most memorable. Only a little anxiety on a long starboard tack headed just south of Sacramento Reef before sunrise. That fifty foot curl was amzing in the sunrise.
I'm mesmerized.
Then you should ask Mr. Palmer for stories. He'll have a lot more than I do.
I know these are times when we need to be vigilant about what we're being told and what is being withheld or disguised -- but I also like quiet days where I organize my art supplies, or go through old photographs, start a new book ("Delta Wedding" at this point in time) ... or provide a warm resting place for the cats. (Dogs have owners, cats have staff.)
May we survive 2024. May we find ourselves laughing this time next year.
My kindest regards to you, your family, and the critters.
I read a long time ago in a cat care book that cats cannot look ahead as we do. I think that is why they enjoy the moment.
Awwww, mine can!
The same is true of a person with dementia. They live “in the present.” At times the past seeps in but mostly, NOW!
Happy In Between,
I love reading your reminiscences and thought monologues in between news events. Many thanks.
Our grown son returned to us and our cat duo, today. He was apartment and cat sitting for his sister in Harlem.
He carefully explained Norse mythology and its application to a video game he bested. I’m learning to listen, no easy task for a know-it-all mom who’s patiently for him to grow into his own life.
Some might call it extended adolescence. To me It’s just another challenge that comes of living between then and now.
There were many, many incidents of my adult children living “in between” for far too long. Even in their 50’s, the teenage years crop up periodically.
Your riff made me think of Burl Ives' "Call Me Mr. In-between."
As for "Wanna go outside?" I did not know it was a universal invitation! Sonofagun.
Love Burl Ives! Grew up on a Lilly Pad with a frog and a little white duck!
We’ve been chatting and singing about Ives. I decorated a pumpkin as Santa this year. Serendipitously, it turned out to be the spitting image of Ives’ animated character in the 1964 “Rudolph”.
I love being in transition. But lately I want to just be present in the moment. With gratitude.
Your essay, all of our journey to the same place. Great write!
Lovely essay, Lucian. Thank you. I plan to spend the rest of my time engaging in creative staring.
I feel like I'm in between a lot-between going there and here, being there and somewhere else.
A great piece on the existential problem for all of us: where are we supposed to be, if we're not there or here?
Happy New Year!
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there!
---- Robert S. Pirsig
Highlight of a Philosophies of India course at Macalester circa 1972 was the instructor -David White, WW2 draft resister from Oklahoma who lived and studied for some nine years in India and translated the Bhagavad Gita - getting Pirsig to visit the class and do a Q& A, never saw so many people quietly crowding every available edge of a classroom in my life, before or since - not even Chomsky!
The most profound movie I ever saw involved a man who traveled many miles and many years to find his 'truth'-after many trials and tribulations he did climb to the highest mountain where his master was.
when he asked the Master where the answer to life was, the master gave him a book with pages of mirrors and told him, "This is your answer."
Can't remember the name of the movie, but that ending never left me.
Edit-the movie was: The Circle of Iron, starring David Carradine, Christopher Lee, and other notable actors-written by Bruce Lee, he intended to star in it, but abandoned it and then died.
I found it rather profound in its' message although most critics did not think very highly of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_Iron
Arguably - I start with that term to immediately signal I am ready (and even eager) to be shown a clear and convincing counter-example! - every single psychotherapy and much of religion will boil down to the individual's embrace of some form of "the infinite," here it's the absolute merging and loss of the ego-mind, what Shunryo Suzuki called returning to the "Beginner's Mind."
"To quote zen master Shunryo Suzuki, `In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.'"
https://jamesclear.com/shoshin
But religions calcify and soon we have experts, not beginners, experts, not masters [or `mistresses,' but that term has semantic overlays (no puns intended, I promise!) maybe best avoided, so we can use `mystic guide' or even `guru' - a cat can be a guru, everyone knows that, even dogs know that! - and soon dogmatists, ensorcelled by their own self-created snares and delusions, are eagerly explaining what they do not know and have not personally experienced, but are completely sure beyond any reasonable doubt IS the final truth, and ready to enforce as such, yes, and mirabile dictu, may the saints be praised! - from the most saintly of motives, to save heathens, apostates, heretics from the flames of Hell, Eternal Hell, thus they hit on upon the slap-happy plan of consigning them to the flames here instead, and [or so they claim] it is really truly scout's honor the one true divinely inspired immutable eternal absolutely perfect path to *Enlightenment,* so they fiercely defend their mad career of burning heretics and witches as, yes, ordained from Eternity by God!
Comes the reckoning with the unvanquished heretics, the people-burners are told, for example: no, no, no, the ancient Greeks, and before them the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians and Indians and likely Native Americans and Chinese left a host of Labyrinth myths and tales, for example, with a panoply of paths to the destination.
[My own Grandfather Foster's Masonic book Rites & Dogma was helpful on this point too!]
"What you people did was a crime," the unvanquished assert, "an atrocity, a blot on the good name of seeking the Divine and higher states of consciousness, consciousness of the ultimate oneness, that overwhelming blasting blessed torrent of joyful ecstasy, beyond all forms, words, signs, symbols, but if we must have any of those, perhaps best captured through music, the most inspired visual arts, and dance, and the most skillful writing, variously defined and with nearly infinite context-sensitive variations - but not your crabbed, shabby, narrow, viciously enforced rigmarole of robotic affirmations, denunciations, and abject intellectual suicides, so sorry, please try harder in the future!
But the good news for you is, we won't burn you, no, we will have a fair trial where you lot can produce your case, we will produce ours, there will be cross-examinations - Wigmore's "greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth" - and then we will do our best to defend the community from your depraved indifference to human intellectual liberty, by decreeing a just punishment, depending on the consensus of the judges and the law, with the law being the vital necessity, and not your *religious* dogma, which could just as well be called *irrelegious, anti-religious ad hoc sadism* as any worthwhile respect for humanity's craving for transcendent meaning.**
Thus endeth the morning first cuppa coffee rant, maybe I should wheel it over to my just begun Substack column and credit you for spurring it on, Mary!
**
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72520
Annals of the persecution in Scotland : From the Restoration to the Revolution
by James Aikman, Esq.
Edinburgh Hugh Paton, Adam Square M.DCCC XLII
I should have added to my comment earlier "Sheer poetry" That put the thought into my head that you should write a poem around this theme. .So although no doubt not in proper format since I am not a poet, I plagiarized what you wrote as perhaps a foundation to inspire you to write a poem.
Life
We’re neither here nor there . . .
A temporary place
Moving through life
But to where?
Teenage years
Freshly minted
Morphed from a child’s body’
Unmoored from both
Floating in a sea
of
Hormones
Unsettled . . .
Front seat of a car
She’s on your right –
A space between
You want her closer
You take her jand
A ripple of electricity
As thighs touch
She smells of Spring
Orange blossoms
Your first crush
Your first kiss
Nirvana
Then war comes
Fire and smoke
Explosions
Acrid smells
Screams of men in pain
Suddenly silence
Home at last
She awaits - smiling
Happy - smiling
Then wedding guests
Confetti
A little abode
Cats and dogs
A tail wags, a wet nose muzzles
Cat on lap purrs contently
Next thing you know
A baby crying
Now dry and fed.
Gurgling; happy sounds
Time passes
Off to college
And one day when
we look in the mirror
an old and gray person
looks back
Next thing we know
We’re slipping away
Then suddenly gone!
But to where?
Perfect, Robert. You ARE a poet....thank you!
Wow, thank you, Elisabeth. I confess I did write a poem previously. Several years ago when I was driving after an early retirement my boss and his wife were guests of the new owner of the Sinatra house in Rancho Mirage and I got to stay there too in one of the bungalow. Anyway they were in another part of the house completely and the caretaker said I could use the jacuzzi and he played Sinatra records over the outdoor speakers, so the beginnings of a poem and shortly after that I read that Hofstra University was having a four day symposium on Sinatra and invited people to send in a poem. I finished what I had started and sent it in, a week or so later they informed me it was one of six chosen and invited me to read it along with the other people who they had chosen. I'm on the West coast didn't go and one of the organisers read it: So here it is.
Frank
As I sit here
in your Jacuzzi
on a balmy
Palm Springs night
the sound of your music
fills the air
I take a sip of wine
and think
of how
it must have been
A thousand voices
in idle chatter
the clink of glasses
peals of laughter
spaghetti dinners
made by your mamma
Famous guests
Dean and Sammy
Joey and Peter
Shirley M.
Marilyn M.
Jack K.
Cary
So Many
So Many
And now
as I enjoy
your music
I know...
you will live
forever...
your way
Here is a reason I always read and ponder not only L's but followers' posts. Unexpected beauty here.
Dear Robert, I am just catching up on your response to my comment, days back. You have a knack for poetry. Not everyone does....thank you for your words....Regards from India, Liz
Ah, thank you Elizabeth, you inspire me to write more. I've always been interested in writing and when my kids were little I'd make up stories at bedtime. You are in India, eh? I have never been there but sad to say although I am in LA now I grew up in England (born in Scotland) and the British did some terrible thing in India leading of course to rebellion and the peaceful resistance approach.
Yes, I tell my Indian friends we (the US)and India are united by our common enemy....I do hope you write more. My wonderful father also made up stories for me and my sister. We couldn't get enough!
I had a 97 Ford with a bench seat, that's the last time. It was AWESOME.
Profound, something to ponder for sure, especially as we enter a year filled with unimaginable challenges. Strength and peace.
That was beautiful. I just read it to my wife and our dogs.
Thank you.
What wonderful insights into the sameness of our hours, days, lives...you have made the mundane, anticipatory. This is an outlook I will carry into the New Year and onward. This is why I love your writing and your perspicacity. I look forward to your posts every day.