IN MY OPINION, BUT GRACIOUSLY

alexander calder

 

It's early Monday morning, first light. An appointment to repair a brake line in the car that has a rusted hole in it. The fluid in the left front brake holds enough to operate brakes enough to stop when necessary. I carry a quart of brake fluid for this purpose. The line broke Thursday. No problem staying at home. The appointment is for ten o'clock. I have an affliction that makes me worry about getting up on time when I have a morning appointment. I can't get to sleep the night before. The alarm system on the clock radio is so complex I've never attempted to figure it out. Went to sleep early last night to insure I'd get up early. Often when I lie down too early, I'll be awake all night. I turn the radio on down low and let it play while sleeping. I hear BBC news that is mostly African in the night, Nigeria and Kenya, the British colonies. The volume is down to where I can only hear what they're saying by listening closely. Mostly, it's just white noise. I use it when mind is racing. The white noise acts as a scrambling device for mind's ongoing activity, thoughts quit attempting to compete with BBC, mind shuts down and here comes sleep. I'm reminded of a quotation I wrote down from a utube interview with artist, Agnes Martin. She said, I don't have any ideas of my own, and I don't believe anybody else's. That leaves me with clear mind. I say, thank you, BBC, for clear mind. I've come to get used to hearing news from Africa. Like news from everyplace else, it's about killing. This bunch killed that bunch. And that bunch killed this bunch. African killing is up close, in your face with machetes and machine guns mounted on the beds of Nissan pickups, operated by hyper-stoned pre-teen boys. It's a totally different attitude toward life and death from mine. American news comes from a different attitude toward life and death from mine, as well.

 

 

alexander calder

 

That's a presumptuous saying, implying I know what my attitude toward life and death is. I ask self what I mean and get no answer. Even implying I know what their attitude is toward life and death. It's just different. Maybe the difference can help me to define my own. Like it takes darkness to define light and the other way around. Duality. Warlord mentality is medieval. Kings and castles of old Europe were warlords. China before unification was six provinces ruled by warlords. It looks like Africa is attempting to bridge the gap between the medieval and the post-modern world in a few decades. It's six decades after the civil rights laws in USA, and American racism has not diminished the least little bit. It went underground. Nothing like a black president to surface the racist submarine. American racism is out in the open where it can be dealt with out in the open. The black people are hunkering down, keeping a low profile, flying below the radar, staying out of white man's cross-hairs the best they know how. Many are not successful. Here, concerning my attitude toward life, racism never made sense to me. I came up in a racist family in a racist white baptist culture where racism was a natural law, like gravity. I learned in the Navy and from then on that regarding black people with the same respect as white people makes me a nigger-lover. Oh well. I'd rather be a nigger-lover than have a white robe in my closet for special occasions. I can't help but think the shrinking globe of our time has something to do with the clash of cultures going on all over the globe. Also, the USA has its tentacles in every country on earth, and the world is turning against us for it. Even Germany is now insulted by American arrogance. My attitude toward life does not want to dominate any country. It doesn't want to dominate anybody. I asked my friend Pat, who goes to Costa Rica for a month every year, how Costa Rica can exist without a military to protect itself at least somewhat from USA. She said Costa Rica has nothing USA wants; no oil, no minerals, no gold. They have nothing to fear.

 

alexander calder

 

One bit of sound counsel came to me from daddy in childhood. Because he barely made it through school after the sixth grade, he told me, your education is one thing nobody can take away from you. Last week I was asked why a man would want to take philosophy courses in college, you can't do nothin with it. A volcano of wind exhaled from my lungs, "For your life!" It can be very important in your life. I know a guy majored in philosophy at Chapel Hill working as a welder. He also has a fairly even temperament because he's a thinker, even reads books. He's not jumping up and down inside, waiting for the chance to fight somebody that looked at him wrong. Nor does he carry a "nine" in the back of his pants in case somebody who wants to kill him turns up. I can't help but feel like one's attitude toward life is a basic driving force. I've used my adult life to improve my own. Early on I had a fairly sour attitude toward life. Therefore, what I gave out was sour and what I got in return was sour, reinforcing what I believed about the world around me, a projection of myself. As my attitude toward life changed, the world around me changed, the people around me changed. My attitude toward life includes compassion and kindness in these years; therefore, I have plenty to draw from when needed. I've honed it down to what I call the gospel in a fortune cookie: Love God and treat others right. My next art object will have these words on it. My personal interpretation of others includes non-human others; the four-legged, the winged, the six-legged, the no-leggeds. When I treat others right, including donkeys, others tend to treat me right. I've "trained" the donkeys not to kick me by their own will, not by fear. I treat them right; they treat me right.

alexander calder

 

In the column of quotations on the right is one I hold to myself by Meher Baba as a reminder: (I paraphrase) Opinions reside in a superficial layer of the mind, having no affect on the core of personality, wherein resides one's attitude toward life. I have opinions, though I do not regard them truth. The Worthington coat of arms motto: In my opinion, but graciously. It reads like something in my horoscope. This was back when the name was in northern England, before anybody crossed the Atlantic. John Worthington, the original one to cross the water in my line, lost eight kids and his wife during and soon after the crossing. He had an inn in Philadelphia and a cattle ranch outside the city, in the same time Ben Franklin was there. He was a Quaker exiled from England for his faith. He found a second wife and raised several more kids. I didn't know any Worthingtons of the past, not grandfather, greatgrandfather, not even cousins. Of the Worthington third and fourth cousins I've met, I can see "in my opinion, but graciously." I can see it in photographs of distant relatives. It's a firmness in the face like standing on both feet, yet not aggressive. About ten years ago I met a 4th cousin at Ninemile, Tennessee. On sight, he said, "I can see the Worthington in you." I believe it is that attitude he saw in the set of the face, the eyes. I saw it in him too. For my part, but graciously amending in my opinion says I do not take my opinions for natural law. They grow out of my limited experience. I don't have a problem talking with somebody whose opinions are different from mine, though find few able to do the same in turn. It's like the old country sayin, Opinions is like assholes; everbody's got one. An attitude toward life I'm glad I entertain is that everybody has their own way of seeing by way of individual experience. No two can be alike. It's how it's meant to be. It's in the very life force itself. I feel much better about self when I fall in line with understanding we all have our own experience, our own minds, our own selves. The beauty is, like shells on the beach, no two are alike.   

 

alexander calder himself

 

 

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INNER NATURE

 shrimp

I've been wondering a bit lately about the word nature as it applies to our own individual natures and to what we call the natural world. I'm seeing that in this time when we have next to nothing to do with what wecall nature except out the window of the car when we're in the country. In the city, you have  some trees, some lawns, shrubbery, insects and sky. After half a year in Europe, when I came home I wanted to kiss the ground. At NY airport we walked through a tube to the airport, then through a tube to the next plane to Charleston. In Charleston the ground was paved where I got off the plane. Took a cab to town and when I got there, no ground. Brick sidewalk, only small flower beds. By then, the urge had passed. The only "nature" I'd experienced since leaving London was the air the plane was flying on.



Most of my purpose coming to the mountains was to be surrounded by nature all the time, live among trees and meadows, even some wild animals, wild meaning not domesticated. In other words, nature is wild. I can look at what we call our individual nature and our human nature. Dogs have dog nature that makes them act like dogs, and among the dogs there is individual nature, like among humans. I was about to say our individual nature is something like our personality, but the word personality has so much associated with it that is not natural. Remembering high school when conformity is at its highest, everyone was judged by personality. "He has such a good personality." Meaning he smiles a lot and talks upbeat all the time, nice. Fake in every way. Good personality means good conformist. That's not what I mean by nature. Like it's somebody's nature to have a short fuse. Or it's somebody's nature to want to be busy all the time, whatever the reasoning.



Personality we can shape at will, acting. Nature is what we can't change without a great deal of effort and then it doesn't work. A horoscope spells our an individual about the best of anything I can think of besides knowing somebody very well, like in marriage. Some people are compelled to talk a lot, some are not. Again, for whatever reasonings or justifications. I've especially been able to see someone's nature in people I know best. People we slightly know, we take things said and done as representative of the person's nature, whether they are or not. I know I've been read off center, especially when I use irony. Americans just don't get irony. Again, television that deals in the obvious. I figure when everybody is doing it, television is behind it. Like I look at all the young girls fashioning themselves after Britney Spears. I tell myself to stop making ironic comments, but sometimes they slip through. It took me years to learn to say Unsweet tea when ordering at a restaurant. Wanting to be clear, I'd say, "tea without sugar." The response every time was, "Unsweet?" Unswseet.


We adjust our personalities to circumstances, to what works best socially. Our nature doesn't change. It can be suppressed and it can be expressed. I see young people getting out in the world of jobs and responsibility, having to figure everything out for themselves the best they can. I know a few who are natured such that they can't keep a job very long without getting mad and quitting. That strikes me as nature more than personality. Personality is to act like I'm not like that. Political correctness bypasses nature. You're natured this way, but it's politically correct to do it that way, so again, nature is over-ruled. Our individual natures are over-ruled by wanting "to be like everybody else." Whatever that means, unless like television. I don't mean to complain about conformity, because it's how we live in a world with a lot of other people. We find avenues where we can over-ride nature and associate on the ground of understanding on another. We don't live in communities anymore. We live largely among people we only know superficially, or strangers, and we do need a common language. Television is the culture we all share.



Among the mountain people in the old days, people were known by their natures instead of their personalities. I'm suspecting it had something to do with living so closely with nature, the untamed world. They lived by the weather, working the land, sawmilling trees, making things of wood, like wagons, and leather, like shoes and saddles. Working in solitude on the farm and in community at harvest time. People of different natures respected each other's natures the same as they knew not to try to make water flow uphill. Someone's nature is who the person is. There is the man who will borrow something and return it in better condition than when he borrowed it. There is also the man who will return a lawnmower out of gas and out of oil. This is nature. The spiritual path works with one's nature, not one's personality. Say I have a short fuse and have hurt quite a lot of people with it in the past. On the path, one being self-aware will see that a short fuse is not practical. One will dive within and examine this short fuse and determine to be less hurtful with it. Be conscious with it. Not necessary to crush it down and pretend it's dead;you get the Edgar Allen Poe Fall Of The House   Of Usher going. Better to be conscious of one's own nature than to suppress it.



Our human nature is certainly a part of what we call nature, the natural world, the untamed, the wild. Living among a lot of people all the time we have to get along. Living in the light of God's love, we wouldn't need laws, but since we don't, we have so many laws regarding our human behavior we're locked down in a system where we break unenforced laws every day. The critters of the forest don't need laws. They had a good balance going until civilization came along and turned away from the natural world, the world of the untamed. The natural world is only resources, like calling a tree timber. I'm wondering if the closer we are to nature in the physical world determines how close we are to our own nature. Perhaps this has something to do with why I felt the need to get out of the city. I was seeing my own nature overridden and came to have no confidence in my own nature, whatever that was? I believe that the years of living on the edge of the woods, walking in the woods, living close to the weather, living in the seasons, living with the cycles, I've come closer to finding my own nature that was hidden under years of attention to personality. My nature is the same as in the city years, yet my personality is different. Maybe this is high-sounding palaver, but it feels more like a puzzle piece  that found its place.



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