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Something I Posted On My BLOG A While BAck.
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Edmund talks about the meaning of his peak experiences at sea.
"I was set free!
I dissolved in the sea,
became white sails and flying spray,
became beauty and rhythm,
became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky.
For a second you see
and seeing the secret are the secret.
For a second there is meaning."
Act 4 from A Long Days Journey into Night
by Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill went to sea when he was younger. What he wrote in the play was a description of an actual experience he had one night at sea. He spent the rest of his life writing tragic plays like Long Days Journey Into Night and trying to re experience that transcendent moment from his youth.
From what I have heard he suffered from depression and in his plays wrote about the struggle human beings had in finding a meaning for life in a meaningless existence. One theme was how people kept on repeating themselves. Repeating there mistakes and held on to illusions about themselves and there lives. It's been said that he believed they did this because with out there illusions (The term "pipe dreams" in the play The Ice Man Cometh) all they would have was the hell of existence. What Eugene O’Neil felt about life was expressed by the same character quoted above in the lines below from the same play.
Edmund speaks of his feelings as he walked home in the fog.
"Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.
That’s what I wanted
to be alone with myself in another world
where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself."
Act 4 from A Long Days Journey Into Night
”Where life can hide from itself.” I understand that desire.
The lesson he puts forth for me is how difficult it is to confront the things you believe to be true. But what resonates most with me was the experience of transcendence he had at sea. Other artists describe experiences like it. They seem to be able to embrace them more fully and carry them along through there lives: from a letter written by Ansel Adams
"I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses ...the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks... I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world -- and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience."
Ansel Adams
A few years back I drew a cover for a friend’s zine. His name is Jeff Junker. We were on the phone and after volunteering my talents I sat and took notes of what he had in mind. I quickly made sketches on some blank sheets of paper and after hanging up started working on the cover. After three days I mailed off a photo copy for his suggestions.
He wrote back “More Mohawks.” I obliged.
When I received his approval of the changes I mailed it off to him.
The next day I crashed emotionally. For three days I would lay on the sofa with tears in my eyes. In a time gone bye I would have been described as having a “mercurial personality.” Today I have what they call a “Bi Polar Disorder.”
I got a phone call from my friend Jeff Junker after he got the package with my drawing.
He told me it was “...the coolest looking thing...” he ever saw. I don’t know about that.
But what I did realized as I heard the joy in his voice was that my “depression” wasn’t the cost I had to pay for my creativity.
It was what I now call emotional exhaustion.
And the pleasure I heard in Jiff’s voice was the very pleasure
I had felt while drawing the cover for his zine.
It was if the happiness I experienced had been transferred from me to him through my work.
Since then I have learned to pace myself when I get into a creative mood. And I now no longer experience “writers block”.
No matter what it is I’m writing I imagine that it’s a letter to a friend that I love.
And what ever it is that needs to be heard find’s its way through
my hand to the page; as it is now.
"Dear Cedric. A strange thing happened to me today.I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone;
the resonance of all spiritual and physical things...Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality. Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self.
It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these. Ansel"
===========
Edmund talks about the meaning of his peak experiences at sea.
"I was set free!
I dissolved in the sea,
became white sails and flying spray,
became beauty and rhythm,
became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky.
For a second you see
and seeing the secret are the secret.
For a second there is meaning."
Act 4 from A Long Days Journey into Night
by Eugene O’Neill
Eugene O’Neill went to sea when he was younger. What he wrote in the play was a description of an actual experience he had one night at sea. He spent the rest of his life writing tragic plays like Long Days Journey Into Night and trying to re experience that transcendent moment from his youth.
From what I have heard he suffered from depression and in his plays wrote about the struggle human beings had in finding a meaning for life in a meaningless existence. One theme was how people kept on repeating themselves. Repeating there mistakes and held on to illusions about themselves and there lives. It's been said that he believed they did this because with out there illusions (The term "pipe dreams" in the play The Ice Man Cometh) all they would have was the hell of existence. What Eugene O’Neil felt about life was expressed by the same character quoted above in the lines below from the same play.
Edmund speaks of his feelings as he walked home in the fog.
"Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.
That’s what I wanted
to be alone with myself in another world
where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself."
Act 4 from A Long Days Journey Into Night
”Where life can hide from itself.” I understand that desire.
The lesson he puts forth for me is how difficult it is to confront the things you believe to be true. But what resonates most with me was the experience of transcendence he had at sea. Other artists describe experiences like it. They seem to be able to embrace them more fully and carry them along through there lives: from a letter written by Ansel Adams
"I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses ...the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks... I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world -- and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience."
Ansel Adams
A few years back I drew a cover for a friend’s zine. His name is Jeff Junker. We were on the phone and after volunteering my talents I sat and took notes of what he had in mind. I quickly made sketches on some blank sheets of paper and after hanging up started working on the cover. After three days I mailed off a photo copy for his suggestions.
He wrote back “More Mohawks.” I obliged.
When I received his approval of the changes I mailed it off to him.
The next day I crashed emotionally. For three days I would lay on the sofa with tears in my eyes. In a time gone bye I would have been described as having a “mercurial personality.” Today I have what they call a “Bi Polar Disorder.”
I got a phone call from my friend Jeff Junker after he got the package with my drawing.
He told me it was “...the coolest looking thing...” he ever saw. I don’t know about that.
But what I did realized as I heard the joy in his voice was that my “depression” wasn’t the cost I had to pay for my creativity.
It was what I now call emotional exhaustion.
And the pleasure I heard in Jiff’s voice was the very pleasure
I had felt while drawing the cover for his zine.
It was if the happiness I experienced had been transferred from me to him through my work.
Since then I have learned to pace myself when I get into a creative mood. And I now no longer experience “writers block”.
No matter what it is I’m writing I imagine that it’s a letter to a friend that I love.
And what ever it is that needs to be heard find’s its way through
my hand to the page; as it is now.
"Dear Cedric. A strange thing happened to me today.I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that relate to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone;
the resonance of all spiritual and physical things...Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality. Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self.
It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these. Ansel"
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