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Please read this information
and do the first 2 sets of quizzes.
Check your answers. Hope this will make you
more aware of pronoun agreement in formal writing!
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Also, read this excellent presentation:
http://www.dianahacker.com/bedhandbook6
--- simply the best,
Tim B.
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A thesis statement in an essay is a sentence that explicitly identifies the purpose of the paper or previews its main ideas.
A thesis statement is an assertion, not a statement of fact or an observation.
* Fact or observation: People use many lawn chemicals.
* Thesis: People are poisoning the environment with chemicals merely to keep their lawns clean.
A thesis takes a stand rather than announcing a subject.
* Announcement: The thesis of this paper is the difficulty of solving our environmental problems.
* Thesis: Solving our environmental problems is more difficult than many environmentalists believe.
A thesis is the main idea, not the title. It must be a complete sentence that explains in some detail what you expect to write about.
* Title: Social Security and Old Age.
* Thesis: Continuing changes in the Social Security System make it almost impossible for us to plan intelligently for our retirement.
A thesis statement is narrow, rather than broad. If the thesis statement is sufficiently narrow, it can be fully supported.
* Broad: The American steel industry has many problems.
* Narrow: The primary problem if the American steel industry is the lack of funds to renovate outdated plants and equipment.
A thesis statement is specific rather than vague or general.
* Vague: Hemingway's war stories are very good. (What in the world is "good"?)
* Specific: Hemingway's stories helped create a new prose style by employing extensive dialogue, shorter sentences, and strong Anglo-Saxon words.
A thesis statement has one main point rather than several main points. More than one point may be too difficult for the reader to understand and the writer to support.
* More than one main point: Stephen Hawking's physical disability has not prevented him from becoming a world-renowned physicist, and his book is the subject of a movie. [SCATTERED IDEAS.]
* One Main point: Stephen Hawking's physical disability has not prevented him from becoming a world renowned physicist.
You can revise your thesis statement whenever you want to while you are writing your essay. Writers often discover what their real purpose and point is in the process of putting their thoughts into words and then reading what they've written.
-=-=-=-THIRD DRAFT-=-=-=-
Label any 10 here: simile, metaphor, personification, literal image, or completely abstract language.(Use S, M, P, L.I., or ABS.) If part is simile and part is metaphor, underline the words you refer to! But you can just tell what the words are mainly. ~ FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE REVEALS THE HEART OF FINE LITERATURE ~
~ ~ ~
We woke early this morning,/and lay in bed kissing, our eyes squinched up like bats. (The slash (/) indicates a line break.)
. . .
His sister was taut, quivering like strings.
. . .
Tonight / I'm feeling weak: I’m water.
. . .
I watch the wind bandage the moon.
. . .
That's how it is tonight:
sky like tar. . . .
. . .
my life / jingling like a little bell on the breeze.
. . .
And now, the city is crouched, a mugger behind me.
. . .
So, what should I do — close my eyes and hope whatever's out there will just let me sleep? I won't sleep tonight. I'll stay near my TV and watch the police get everybody.
. . .
Above me the moon looks like a nickel / in a murky little creek.
. . .
I am carried in my shadow/like a violin in its black case.
. . .
All I want to say/gleams out of reach, / the silver in a pawnshop.
. . .
The construction rises and with it the crane, as if the building were being lifted up off the ground by its pigtail.
. . .
It feels as if the trains were running over your ears.
. . .
I kneeled to the crickets trilling underfoot as if about to burst from their crusty shells.
. . .
A fossil of marine shell is a stone heart. . . .
. . .
Little silent Christmas tree, you are so little; you are more like a flower.
. . .
There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her.
. . .
And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.
. . .
I hear thee, trumpeter--listening, alert, I catch thy notes, now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me.
. . .
“Do I not?” he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural power.
. . .
We opened the folding table in the living room and brought in the kitchen chairs.
. . .
It was then that the black mouth of the doorway erupted with light and the ka-boom! of the gas cans sent a tremor through the earth.
. . .
“Constant and pervasive is my meditation.”
. . .
“Give up owning things and being somebody. Quit existing."
. . .
“You’ve seen a glob / of oil on water? That’s how a lover / sits with intellectuals, there, but alone / in a circle of himself.”
. . .
“Your love / astonished, hidden in the hollow of dreams, / is like the moving sea around us.”
. . .
"We met in a nest. Before I lived.
The dark hair sighed.”
. . .
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth.
. . .
Seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
like an evening's frost. . . .”
. . .
"A lapful of apples sleeps in this grass."
. . .
“The lupines are stretching up as if they wanted to catch sight of the sea.”
. . .
“I’m an old tree with withered leaves that hang on and can’t fall to earth.”
. . .
“I . . . am as empty-handed as the shirt on the washing-line.”
. . .
Guillaume Apollinaire speaks of "the color of your eyelids / Which beat as the flowers beat in the crazy wind.”
Poetry can be a tiresome – or fascinating - set of words when we’re analyzing. The elements of analyzing poetry listed below will help you identify the meaning through its parts and give a sense of interpreting a poem. Since each poem is unique, there is no one way of going about this. Nonetheless, the general advice goes like this (and you’ll end up enjoying the work, finding it’s offered far more than you first thought!):
1. Read the title
2. Read the poem and just enjoy, catching what you can. Read again, and look for the setting, topic and voice.
3. Divide the poem into parts: intro, rising action, climax, declining action, conclusion.
4. What tone does the poem have? Pay close attention to intonation, nuance and words used. Do they suggest a meaning to you?
Now that the general structure and relationships in the poem are revealed, it's time to look at the elements of analysis: genre, voice, thesis, structure, setting, imagery, key statements, sound, language use, allusion, qualities that evoke the reader, historical/cultural, ideology. (Use any springboards here that agree with you!)
Genre-=-=-=-=-
What type of poem is it? Is it a cinquain, haiku, lyric, narrative, elegy, sonnet, epic, epistle? Is it a meditation? A political poem? A satire? A spiritual piece? A nature poem? Different genres have separate attributes, purposes and emphases. (See your glossary of literary terms)
Voice-=-=-=-=-
Who is the speaker? What point of view is the speaker? Is the speaker involved in the action or reflection of the poem? What perspective (social, intellectual, political) does the speaker show? The voice and perspective of the speaker tells of what world the poem is in.
Thesis-=-=-=-=-
What is the poem about? What are the obvious and less obvious conflicts? What are the key statements and relationships of the poem? The thesis gives an indication of what tone the poem is written in: historical, social, emotional.
Structure-=-=-=-=-
What is the poems 'formal structure' (number of meters, stanzas, rhyme scheme)? What is the 'thematic structure' (the plot)?
Setting-=-=-=-=-
What type of 'world' is the poem set in? The time, place -- is it concrete, tonal, connotative, symbolic, allegorical?
Imagery-=-=-=-=-
What images does the poem use; the physical setting or metaphors used?
Key statements-=-=-=-=-
What direct or indirect statements are made – repetition, actions, alliteration?
Sound-=-=-=-=-
How does the sound, both rhythm and rhyme (if applicable), contribute to the poem.
Language use-=-=-=-=-
What kind of words are used? Do the words have double meanings? What about connotations, puns or ambiguities?
Allusion-=-=-=-=-
Does the poem have a meaning from another work?
Qualities that strike the reader-=-=-=-=-
What sort of learning or experience does the poem give its reader? Does the poem seem hopeful or despairing as it ends? What words give this impression?
Ideology-=-=-=-=-
What values and basic ideals of the world are expressed? Are they yours as well?
- - - - -
Biographical Contexts for "Young Goodman Brown"
by Jacqueline Shoemaker [[[with my inset notes as well]]]
"Young Goodman Brown" was published in 1835, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was 31 years old. Hawthorne was born and reared in Salem, Massachusetts, a village still permeated by its 17th century Puritanism. When he was four, Hawthorne's father died, and from that point on he was surrounded mostly by females: two sisters, a maiden aunt, and a retiring mother who was not close to her children. He had little contact with his deceased father's family, but his maternal relatives were supportive and saw to it that he attended college, the first in his family to do so (Turner 33). During four years at college, despite his reclusive nature, he established close friendships with his male classmates, several of which he maintained for life. These four years of shared human companionship were contrasted by the following twelve years of self-imposed isolation spent in the upper floor of his mother's home in Salem, trying to master the art of writing. It was during those twelve years of isolation, while researching local New England history for background use in his fiction, that Hawthorne made a startling discovery. His 17th century paternal ancestors, whom he had assumed to have been yeoman farmers or seafaring men, had been illustrious founders as well as political and religious Puritan leaders of Salem. "Young Goodman Brown" was influenced by this Puritan heritage; by Hawthorne's personality which had acquired a skeptical, dual-outlook on life; and by Hawthorne's mental and moral beliefs that he revealed. Hawthorne struggles with his own morality within his own biographical framework in "Young Goodman Brown."
Hawthorne viewed his Puritan ancestors with a mixture of pride and guilt. He felt pride in seeing the history of his own family interwoven with that of Salem [[[writer gives credit for a short summary of a borrowed idea from an author:]]] (Turner 5). He was proud of their prominence and accomplishments that greatly overshadowed the declining fortunes of subsequent generations. On the other hand, he felt guilt for his ancestor's part in witch trials and intolerant prosecution of Quakers. In "Young Goodman Brown" the devil tells Brown, "I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly" (Hawthorne 2131). Historians of Hawthorne's day were harshly critical of the witch trials and inflexible Puritan ideology of the 17th century. Many current publications and lectures condemned the cruel intolerance of Puritans, and Hawthorne anticipated reader interest as an added incentive for using his Puritan heritage as a background for his work. One critic explains, "Hawthorne's fullest display of witch lore is in one of the first tales he wrote, [[[notice the quote within a quote here:]]] 'Young Goodman Brown"' (Turner 67). When Brown marveled that Goody Cloyse, who had taught him his catechism was in the forest after dark (Hawthorne 2131), he referred to a historical witch.
Hawthorne had a skeptical, dual-outlook on life. By the time “Young Goodman Brown” was published he had chosen to spend approximately one-third of his life in self-imposed isolation. Though he chose isolation, it was entirely contrary to his beliefs. Hawthorne believed society to be all-important. During his college years, associations with people and exposure to current ideas convinced him of the need for social responsibility and humanistic concern (Johnson 35). Hawthorne felt that the human self has meaning and value only through reciprocal relationships (Anderson 60). [[[author gives credit for that indirect quote]]] The choice between isolation and society recurs in “Young Goodman Brown.”
During his years of isolated study, Hawthorne’s dual outlook caused him to constantly try to see both sides of situations, and subsequent doubts increased his skepticism. He adopted what was to be a lifelong [[[run-in quote here:]]] "philosophy of uncertainty both in his private life and in his fiction" (Donaldson 216). Hawthorne's skepticism helped to develop a writing technique in which a mixture of fact and imagination lets the reader make his own interpretations. In "Young Goodman Brown" both Brown and the reader are given choices as to what is happening. Brown thinks that he recognizes voices of his minister, deacon, and of his wife, but can't be certain since their figures are not visible (2133-34). The flaming altar rock is suddenly chill and damp, while flaming trees and twigs become covered with cold dew (2137). [[[full thought to a colon here:]]] In the story, the narrator poses an important question: "Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?" (2137). The choice is dream or reality. Whatever the reader chooses to believe, Goodman Brown's own horrible doubts create a central theme of the tale (Fogel 21).
Hawthorne’s mental and moral beliefs are revealed throughout “Young Goodman Brown.” Puritans believed that the fall of Adam was the inheritance of all men, and that redemption came only through Christ.[[[run-in quote here:]]] Hawthorne came to believe that the fall was by human contrivance, that "damnation is not inherited but chosen and is redeemable through human agency" (Ziff 140). He thought that humans share a brotherhood of guilt. Critic Larzer Ziff tells us, "If guilt itself was escapable, brotherhood with the guilty was not" (142). This belief of Hawthorne's is the pivotal point of this tale. Unable to accept that society is a brotherhood of both good and evil, Goodman Brown chose his own damnation. In the forest Brown saw a mixture of pious and dissolute people, and it was strange to see that "the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints" (Hawthorne 2135). Brown chose to see that all were evil and lost his chance at redemption when he chose to isolate himself and to "shrink from his Faith" and fellow man.
We probably know everything about Hawthorne's life that we are ever going to know. [[[title in quotes here:]]] By all accounts, he was very inexperienced when he wrote "Young Goodman Brown," and I believe that he would have us make of that work what we will. A recent biographer Arlin Turner tells us that "to recognize his life and his writings as components of a consistent whole" clarifies both (vi). The biographical contexts for "Young Goodman Brown" of which we are certain are that Hawthorne's Puritan heritage was a "treasure house of frailties of human certitude which skeptics love to brood on" (Canby 236) and that he was a skeptic who brooded about his own beliefs, his own morality.
* * * * *
Works Cited
Anderson, Quentin. The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
Canby, Henry Seidel. Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman. New York: Russell and Russell, 1939.
Donaldson, Scott and Ann Massa. American Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1952.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." 1835. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Lexington: Heath, 1944. 2129-38.
Johnson, Claudia D. The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art. University: U of Alabama P, 1981.
Turner, Arlin. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1980.
Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking Press, 1981.
[[[source: http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlp
SUMMARY VS. ANALYSIS WORKSHEET
The following worksheet gives you some practice at using templates to think about and to write with.
Fill in the blanks—you may need phrases longer than the blank. Refer back to your readings if
necessary.
Part I: Summary, Or, “They Say”
1. In his essay, Sherman Alexie suggests that ________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
2. In his essay, Frederick Douglass questions whether ________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
3. In his essay, Stephen King reminds us that ________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
4. Basically, Tan is saying ________________________________________
________________________________________
5. Both, _______________ and _______________ agree that writing ____________________________
________________________________________
6. In other words, the essay reveals that ________________________________________
________________________________________
Quoting What “They Say”
7. Alexie states, “_______________________________________
________________________________________
8. According to Douglass, literacy is “_______________________________________
________________________________________
9. In his essay, King maintains that “_______________________________________
________________________________________
10. Tan describes her mother as “_______________________________________
________________________________________
WEEK 1
Adapted from templates in Graff & Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say.
Part II: Starting the Analysis, Or, “I Say”
11. While King’s language may be suspect, his rhetorical strategy here is to _______________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
12. My feelings on the issue are mixed. I do support ________________________________________
position that ________________________________________
________________________________________
13. Although Amy Tan does not say so directly, she apparently assumes that ______________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
14. While it is true that ________________________________________
follow that ________________________________________
________________________________________
Establishing Stakes, Or, “Why Should We Care About Your Analysis?”
15. ________________________________________
________________________________________
________________________________________
16. Ultimately, what is at stake here is ________________________________________
________________________________________
17. This essay has important consequences for the broader issue of ______________________________
________________________________________
18. All of the authors above challenge ________________________________________
________________________________________
- - - http://staff.washington.edu/changed/lea
of the Cave
From The Republic Book VII
[Plato (circa 427–347 BCE) | 360 BCE | Public Domain]
Book VII ~ Socrates ~ Glaucon ~ (This is a conversation: Socrates and Glaucon.)
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Yes, he said.
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
Very true.
And suppose further that the prison had an echo which came from the other side, would they not be sure to fancy when one of the passers-by spoke that the voice which they heard came from the passing shadow?
No question, he replied.
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
That is certain.
And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, —what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, —will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?
Far truer.
And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?
True, he said.
And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.
Not all in a moment, he said.
He will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. And first he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day?
Certainly.
Last of he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of him in the water, but he will see him in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate him as he is.
Certainly.
He will then proceed to argue that this is he who gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to behold?
Clearly, he said, he would first see the sun and then reason about him.
And when he remembered his old habitation, and the wisdom of the den and his fellow-prisoners, do you not suppose that he would felicitate himself on the change, and pity them?
Certainly, he would.
And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,
Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?
Yes, he said, I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.
Imagine once more, I said, such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?
To be sure, he said.
And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
No question, he said.
This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally, either in public or private life, must have his eye fixed.
I agree, he said, as far as I am able to understand you.
Moreover, I said, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted.
Yes, very natural.
And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
Anything but surprising, he replied.
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den.
That, he said, is a very just distinction.
But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
They undoubtedly say this, he replied.
Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
- - -
~ ~ ~ QUESTIONS WE MAY USE:
- - - What does the sun represent?
- - - And the shadows on the wall in the cave?
- - - And the ridicule of the people who are still prisoners?
- - - What does “approaching nearer to being” mean to you? What does the “eye . . . turned towards more real existence” mean?
- - - What are your thoughts on what's real/genuine vs. what's illusory/fake?
=== http://tash.pintday.org/ebooks/gutenber
http://tash.pintday.org/ebooks/plato/ca
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2afuTvU
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=youtub
THIS IS
http://tbellows.livejournal.com/
By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
A Study Guide
Cummings Guides Home.
.
Characters
Type of Work
Setting
The Forest as Eden
Primordial Symbols
Themes
Dream vs Reality
Brown as a Thrill-Seeker
Climax, Conclusion
Allusions, Vocabulary
Puritanism
Witch Trials
Study Questions
Essay Topics
Biography
Complete Free Text
..
Plot Summary
By Michael J. Cummings...© 2003
Revised in 2008
.
.......It is dusk in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, a community of god-fearing Puritans. At the threshold of the front door of his house, a young man named Goodman Brown kisses his wife, Faith, goodbye and embarks on a journey into the forest. He is not to return until the next morning. What activity would lure him away from his pretty wife, whom he married three months before, and into the dark and menacing uncertainty of the woods? It is a witches’ sabbath, a meeting at which he and others from Salem and surrounding communities are to be inducted into an evil brotherhood.
.......It may be simple curiosity that motivates Brown; after all, would it not be interesting to see witches performing their rituals before a blazing fire? On the other hand, it could be the challenge of braving the forest and confronting the temptation posed by evil forces. Such would be a colonial American version of a modern extreme sport or adventure. Then, too, Goodman Brown may truly wish to join the evil brotherhood.
.......In the forest, he meets a mysterious man with a staff resembling a snake, and together they travel on. The man appears to be a devil figure. From time to time, Brown expresses a desire to turn back, but his feet continue to carry him forward. Along the way, upright citizens–even members of the clergy—pass by on their way to the meeting while Brown hides behind trees and watches. At the site of the meeting, he suffers a terrible shock when he discovers that his wife—beautiful, innocent Faith—is also there. When a “Shape of Evil” prepares to baptize the newcomers into “the mystery of sin,” Goodman Brown tells his wife: “Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One.”
.......But as soon as those words pass his lips, he finds himself alone in the forest with only the sound of the wind for company. The next day, after he returns to Salem, life goes on as usual, and Brown wonders whether he had “fallen asleep, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting.”
.......Whatever the case, Goodman Brown is never the same again; he becomes “a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man.” After he dies many years later, he is followed to his grave by Faith, by his children, by his grandchildren, and by neighbors, but “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.”
.
Characters
.
Goodman Brown: Recently married Puritan who lives in Salem in the 1600's. He believes in the goodness of the townspeople until he sees many of them attending a witches’ sabbath in the forest. Goodman is a title equivalent to Mister.
Faith: Goodman Brown’s wife.
The Devil Figure: Mysterious man who meets Goodman Brown in the forest and accompanies him part way to the witches’ sabbath, where Brown is to be inducted into an evil brotherhood.
Minister: Church leader who leads Goodman Brown to the unhallowed baptismal altar in the forest.
Deacon Gookin: Salem Churchman who attends the witches' sabbath.
Goody Cloyse: Teacher of cathechism who attends the witches' sabbath.
Martha Carrier: Salem resident, described as a "rampant hag," who attends the witches' sabbath. The devil had been promised her that she would be the queen of hell. With Goody Cloyse, she leads Faith to the unhallowed baptismal altar.
Powwows: Indian medicine men who attend the witches' sabbath.
Various Townspeople
.
Type of Work
..
Young Goodman Brown is a short story, one of the greatest in American literature. One may read it as an allegory centering on the temptation everyone faces and on the human tendency to prejudge others on insufficient evidence. The story was published 1835.
Setting
The action takes place in the second half of the seventeenth century in Salem, a town northeast of Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Puritan settlers established Salem in 1626 under the name of Naumkeag. Several years later, the town changed its name to Salem, apparently after the Hebrew word shalom, meaning peace. (Jerusalem derives the last two syllables of its name from the same Hebrew word. In full, Jerusalem means city of peace.) Salem was a theocracy in which the Christian moral law, as interpreted by the Puritan settlers of the town, was supreme. “Young Goodman Brown” takes place around the time of the Salem witch trials, held in the spring and autumn of 1692. During these infamous trials, twenty innocent women and men were found guilty of witchcraft and executed.
Symbolism
The Forest as Eden
Goodman Brown appears to represent human beings confronted with temptation–that is, he wishes to enter the dark forest of sin, so to speak, to satisfy his curiosity about the happenings there and perhaps even to take part in them. The man who meets Brown in the forest appears to represent the devil; his staff is a symbol of the devil as a serpent. Thus, we have Adam (Brown, curious to learn forbidden knowledge) facing the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It was, of course, a tree—the Tree of Knowledge—that enticed Adam. Goodman Brown is enticed by an entire forest. Like Adam, he suffers a great fall from innocence. Faith appears to represent Brown’s religious faith and his faith in others; her pink ribbons stand for innocence. But when she also appears at the witches' sabbath—apparently, like Eve, desiring forbidden knowledge—she too loses her innocence. At the last moment before his and his wife's baptism into the evil society gathered in the forest, Brown urges his wife: "Look up to Heaven, and resist the Wicked One." He then finds himself alone in the forest, wondering whether he has awakened from a dream or really did attend the witches' sabbath. But the damage is done, and he becomes "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man."
Primordial Symbols
Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) theorized that all humans share certain inborn impulses and concepts residing in the mind at the unconscious level. For example, all humans react to sunlight in the same way, perceiving it as a symbol of joy, happiness, glory, optimism, truth, a new beginning, or God. Likewise, humans associate dark forests (like the one in "Young Goodman Brown") with danger, obscurity, confusion, and the unknown or with evil, sin, and death. Jung termed external stimuli (such as dark forests) primordial symbols–primordial meaning existing from the beginning of time. Examples of other primordial symbols you may encounter in your study of literature include the following: a river (the passage of time), overcast sky (gloom, depression, despair), lamb (innocence, vulnerability), violent storm (wrath, inconsolable grief), flowers (delicacy, perishability, beauty), mountain (obstacle, challenge), eagle (majesty, freedom) the color white (purity, innocence), the color red (anger, passion, war, blood), the color green (new life, hope), water (birth or rebirth), autumn (old age), winter (death).
Faith
Goodman Brown's wife, Faith, symbolizes Brown's spiritual faith. When he sees her in the forest at the witches' sabbath, he realizes he is in danger of losing not only his wife but also his spiritual faith.
Themes
Theme 1 How the Puritans’ strict moral code and overemphasis on the sinfulness of humankind foster undue suspicion and distrust. Goodman Brown’s experience in the forest–whether dream or reality–causes him to lose his faith in others and die an unhappy man. Note the last words of the story: “They carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.”
Theme 2 The realization that evil can infect people who seem upright. Goodman Brown discovers that even highly respected people in Salem fall victim to the forces of darkness. Today–when corporate executives cheat stockholders, politicians lie to win elections, and members of the clergy defraud their congregations–this theme still resonates.
Theme 3 One man’s virtue is another man’s sin, and vice versa. “There is no good on earth,” Goodman Brown observes, “and sin is but a name.” In other words, whether an action is good or evil appears to depend on who is viewing the action. The zealotry of a Puritan punishing a wrongdoer–like Goodman Brown’s grandfather lashing “a Quaker woman so smartly through the streets”–might be praised as a just act by another Puritan but condemned as an inhumane act by non-Puritans. These opposing views of the same action seem to confuse Brown; he is like a modern man who is told that “everything goes” or that one moral position is as valid as another, opposing one. There are, of course, absolute moral values which should prevail for everyone, regardless of their religion or lack of it. For example, murder is always wrong; child abuse is always wrong. However, the devil figure succeeds in confounding Brown on what is truly right and what is truly wrong.
Climax and Conclusion
The climax of the story occurs when Goodman Brown, standing before the altar with Faith to receive the mark of baptism from the devil, hesitates at the last minute and urges his wife to "look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one." The conclusion, or denouement, of the story then begins when he suddenly finds himself alone in the forest, as if he has just awakened from a dream. What he experienced in the forest—whether dream or reality—changes his life. He is now suspicious of everyone, just as the Puritans of real-life Salem were when they participated in a witch hunt that resulted in the execution of
Dream vs Reality
Hawthorne leaves open to question whether Goodman Brown’s experience is real or imagined, as in a dream. Keep in mind that normal, mentally stable people—like you or those around you—sometimes accept delusions, fantasies, or fabrications as real events. Keep in mind, too, that they sometimes see evil in a person who has done no evil.
Brown as Thrill-Seeker
It is reasonable to interpret “Young Goodman Brown” in ways other than those already mentioned. For example, Brown could represent an archetypical Ulysses or Faust figure whose curiosity prods him to seek knowledge or, like modern adventurers and thrill-seekers, undergo “extreme” challenges. It is also reasonable to interpret the short story as a tale of rebellion against established beliefs. Like young people today—who, refusing to be cast in the philosophical or theological mold of their parents or friends—explore various ideologies and dabble in nihilism. Brown may have wished to venture into the forbidden zone, into terra incognita, to discover the world and its ideas for himself.
Allusions, Historical References, and Vocabulary
Goodman: Husband or master of a household.
Goody: (1) Housewife, especially an elderly one, of a lower class; (2) any lower-class woman; (3) housewife or mistress of a household.
King William (Paragraph 13): William III, king of England from 1689 to 1702.
Wot'st: (Paragraph 15): Know.
King Philip (Paragraph 18): Nickname of the Wampanoag Indian chief Metacom (or Metacomet). Maltreatment of Indians by whites provoked him into waging what came to be known as King Philip's War against New Englanders in 1675-1676. His defiance instilled fear in the white inhabitants of New England.
Lecture-Day (Paragraph 21): Weekday on which a sermon was given.
E'en Go Thy Ways (Paragraph 25): Just (righteous) be thy ways.
Cinquefoil (Paragraph 32): Flowering plant of the rose family that has white, red, or yellow petals.
Wolf's Bane (Paragraph 32): Wolfsbane, a poisonous plant.
Devil's Staff (Paragraph 36): The narrator says, "So saying, he threw it [the staff] down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi." This passage alludes to verses 8-12 in Chapter 7 of the Bible's Book of Exodus. According to these verses, God directs Moses to tell Aaron, his brother, to cast down his staff before the throne of the pharaoh of Egypt. When he does so, it transforms itself into a serpent. The pharaoh's magicians (magi) then cast down their staffs, which in like manner turned into serpents. However, Aaron's staff consumes the staffs of the magicians.
.
Puritanism and the Witch Trials
.......Puritanism began in England in the late Sixteenth Century when Protestant reformers attempted to purge the Church of England (or Anglican Church) of the elaborate ceremonies, rituals, and hierarchical structure it retained from the Roman Catholic Church after King Henry VIII established Anglicanism by acts of Parliament between 1529 and 1536. The Act of Supremacy, approved in 1534, officially established the Church of England as an independent Protestant entity separate from the Roman Catholic Church. However, the Church of England retained Catholic rituals such as the mass and prelates such as bishops. For the Puritans, the pure word of the Bible, presented in part through inspired preaching, took precedence over rituals while direct revelation from the Holy Spirit superseded reason. After Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the Puritans petitioned the new monarch, King James I, to adopt their reforms. In January 1604 at a special conference at Hampton Court Palace near London, the king rejected most of the proposed Puritan reforms but he did grant a Puritan request for a new translation of the Bible, which resulted in publication of the King James Version in 1611.
Many disenchanted puritans left the country. Those who remained behind joined with members of Parliament opposed to the crown's economic policies. Together they defeated the king's forces in the English Civil War. With the king out of the way, the Puritans became a dominant faction in the new Commonwealth government headed by Oliver Cromwell. However, after Cromwell's death in 1558, a movement to restore the monarchy began, and King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Under the Clarendon Code, approved in 1662, the Church of England expelled all Puritan ministers who refused to accept church tenets. Many Puritans then emigrated to America and established their brand of religion in Massachusetts and other colonies.
.......Puritan ministers were generally well educated, and Puritan congregations promoted ideals that helped lay the foundation for American democracy.
.......However, because of their strict moral code, the Puritans were ever on the lookout for satanic influence and, unfortunately, sometimes saw evil where none existed. In Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, more than 150 people were accused of witchcraft and jailed. Twenty of them were executed. Nineteen were hanged and one was pressed to death. In a pressing, the executioners secured the condemned person, facing upward, on a bed of nails. Then they loaded weights onto his or her body. American dramatist Arthur Miller wrote a play, The Crucible, about these trials. Belief in evil forces such as witches, warlocks, and diabolical spirits was widespread in America and Europe during and before the 17th Century.
.......Although "Young Goodman Brown" is a fictional tale, it is based on the atmosphere prevailing in Salem, Mass., during the time of the witch trials. .
Study Questions and Essay Topics
1..Discuss situations and circumstances that cause people in today’s society to enter a “dark forest,” as Goodman Brown did.
2..Does Goodman Brown really attend a witches' sabbath or does he dream about it?
3..Research the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Then write an essay discussing the extent to which his family background influenced him ....when he wrote "Young Goodman Brown."
4..Why does Goodman Brown become "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man" after his experience in ....the forest?
5..Why are people today fascinated with stories about witchcraft, sorcery, and magic?
6..After Goodman Brown returns from the forest, he becomes a cynical man. Does he see evil where there is goodness? Identify “witch hunts” that are occurring today in your community or your country? For example, are people on one side of an issue attempting to discredit people on the other side of the issue by using unfair tactics that impugn the latter's reputation?
The Fed wants to straighten out health insurance. Very nice. But they're missing the actual first priority: Teaching people how to eat with some degree of sanity. Or do those in the Fed have a clue? And would the Fed ever suggest that we “go unprocessed” when it has such ties to food industries that sell processed foods? Hmmm. . . .
I assembled a few tips I've discovered in over 40 years of self study on nutrition - and I'll give some often-missing specifics, banishing the meaningless commandment to "eat a good, balanced diet."
To me, we need to be informed in this dangerously affluent country if we're to stay strong and not fall prey to processed or over-sweet foods. I know we all have our own physical chemistry and needs, but . . . these rules I use for myself just might help others. Anyone can, if inclined, test them out and see if daily energy isn't more stable. I innovated to make these changes in diet, and . . . what a difference in energy and overall health! So check out what I tell myself about my diet:
***Eat only unprocessed foods. “Go primitive” with food choices: leafy green veggies, mostly; poultry, or fish (and beef in moderation). Almost no fruit. (It's loaded with sugars.)
***Use quality oils: olive oil or unsalted, real butter.
***All foods should be organic if possible. (Pesticides and preservatives just add more toxins to the body).
***Go very easy on the dressings and seasonings. (This is my big challenge!)
***Have some fish-or-poultry-or-beef protein with every meal. This has helped me big time. Complete proteins do the building and stabilizing for the body, and most of us eat too much carbohydrate (alcohol being the most concentrated). Carbs (dates, potatoes, breads, sugar, etc.) can bring on problems with mood swings and energy crashes. The best carbs release sugars slowly and have more protein: Stay with quinoa, millet, brown rice, amaranth, and buckwheat. Unprocessed, not "shot from guns" or any of that.
***(If this approach seems way off the mark to you, just treat is as light entertainment and take another path.)
To ponder: What did we consume when we first came down from the trees? No pizza, no beer, pretzels, breads or chocolate covered peanuts, right? It was all plant foods and flesh foods. Simple. Why don’t we stay with what the natural human body can use well?
Even President Obama, smart as he is, could teach us better by example and drop the M&Ms, burgers, and fries. It's politically astute and maybe a bit charming to show that we’re regular burger guys at times, but to me, it's never wise for building health or teaching by example.
Well, I’m trying to get basics across, and they deserve a whole book, but these tips have taken me a long way. I always have more to learn about food choices. You might read author Donna Gates for a sensible starting point. And suggest at least finding out about candida albicans (a serious issue for many); Ms. Gates can inform you as can Dr. Peter Zeischegg in Nevada City, California (drz.org).
Let the Fed serve us well by broadcasting the fact that our foods create our health - or our weakness.
It takes self-discipline to eat for real strength, but is it not the only way to a sane health plan? Think: Why are so many of us eating body-corrupting foods (and I’ve consumed my share!), then stumbling into hospitals to repair what are often self-caused damages?
At least we could educate the populace. Some of the PBS shows can be helpful, actually.
If you like, see how these foods make you feel about four hours after eating. Be your own food-testing lab since some of the foods I listed may not work for your particular system. And check these suggestions out with your doctors - if they know about nutrition!
A big if?
In the last analysis, we're all fee to break the laws of health, but I found that in time my "fun-food" choices came back to bite me. I finally made a new approach to food: "Go primitive; go unprocessed." Fit or Fat author Covert Bailey made this same simple point in his own way. For me, it’s paid off in quality energy and maybe in longevity. (We'll see about that one!)
With goodwill,
Tim Bellows
Yes! There’s now a little Sunlight available; it’s gone “live,” offered worldwide – for the good of all. In Tim Bellows’ Sunlight from Another Day – Poems In & Out of the Body, you can check out the radically different “Afterword as Collage” and Bellows’ widely published poems. From the zany to the soul realized. He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now we can experience his poems and a dash of prose: Details, reviews, and information on purchasing here:
~:~:~:~ http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/It
~:~:~:~ Or just go to Amazon.com and search with “tim bellows.” (Free shipping’s possible if you buy new from Amazon itself.)
~:~:~:~:~
Post script: Tim is a big fan of Rumi and W.W.: “Bibles may convey, and priests expound, but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of veneration, reach the divine levels, and commune with the unutterable.” ~ Walt Whitman.)
And this from Tim’s “OLD MAN IN THE WARDLAW HOME”:
He’s watching the moving air,
its full cargo
of scrolling-by text.
His last word is
“What?” and he watches golden letters
slide past – yes,
they coast by in their full-moon
ocean silence.
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POETIPS BY TIM BELLOWS (4-5-00)
It’s a tough game in the poetry world, the land of truth, but here’s the inside dope: in your poem: leave out any words that seem typically poetic, and you'll find your work works harder for us all. If you have a word like dream, willow, soft, or silent, try to bump an odd, unexpected, or harder element against it. Such as wire or tarpaulin or backhoe.
Poetry must be real, not a series of flights into never-never land. Those are too easy. We may fly into the ethers, but we must, in the same moments, dive down through the roots, completing our piece from heaven and all that loftiness to good soil. Grounding the words in the tough challenges of living here.
Examples from a piece that appeared in Interim out of Las Vegas:
A BOY TO HIS GIRL
(IN FRONT OF HER FRONT DOOR)
Here is a nothing I can say to you
in less than a whisper and mean it
on the blue-paint porch.
I stumble just
standing in front of you.
Your blond colors,
long woven ropes
like the meat of a living tree.
Your eyes, gray ocean light.
Here. Here is an embarrassed flower.
I care, but can say so little.
It's no matter. I only plead with you
to be awake as the great no thing
steps near in a grand maroon robe and hands us
nothing less than the essence of love,
and the terror leaves my legs.
- - - - - -
“I care, but can say so little.” Notice that to “care” is one-dimensional, but adding the inability to speak much adds grit and believability—it makes the speaker more fallible and real.
Notice the physical language in “Your blond colors, / long woven ropes / like the meat of a living tree.” The girl in the poem is "long" and "blonde"; these words could be romantic and easy. But “ropes” and “meat” give more hard substance to the infatuation. Again, grittier images help the poem.
I called the spiritual mentor in the poem "the great no thing. . . ." I looked for a special way to speak of one who works pretty much in the non-physical realms. Tricky situation! I put this being "in a grand maroon robe"—again, going after physical detail.
Then I said he handed us "the essence of love," adding right away, "as the terror leaves my legs." So we have “love” and “terror” and “legs” close together. Which makes it all more solid as a poem—skirting the easy, soft words that no longer surprise us in poetry. Surprise and the unknown continue to attract high bids in the worlds of verse. As I’ve observed it, great poetry mixes the joy and the agony of this life, facing both bravely. Why not let your poem be multi-layered and multi-echoing in every line?
For the strong and true use of language in the best poetry, see Kinnell, Harjo, Stafford, Rumi, Roethke, Olds, Rilke, Clampitt, Bishop—and so many other greats. They demonstrate this approach in action. And in passion!
My hope is that these thoughts help your quest for the poem that takes your readers to new states and new terrain!
. . . . .
Friday, August 08, 2008
“I WASN’T INSIDE OF ANYTHING” –
COLLECTED NOTES FROM A POET AND STRANGER
Great ideas and ennobling influences. No one in the U.S. – or in the world – lacks access to these. Look at the range of ideas available to us in this country. Moby Dick is on the web. Also Lear, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and more. Recipes and investment strategies. How to get a grant for educational programs. Also the great and the trivial in poetry and politics, and on and on.
All on the web and in bookstores. Even the newspaper caries pithy letters to the editors – argument, counterargument. (And – sigh – vapid write-ups on fashion and the latest sexy celebs.) Just pick the writing you’re drawn to. Are you always on the lookout for a more surprising wisdom? As Paul Twitchell said, “Everything is states of consciousness.” That determines the material and people we select to read and hear. Life is our hunk of clay, and we’re shaping it with every small choice we make. With each thing we beam our attention on. The books, foods, friends, and movies we choose are both cause and effect of our state of consciousness.
Please ponder that one!
Most of the upright, noble and ignited religions agree: Until we can both feed and live from our core (call it our divine Soul consciousness), we’re in the same old trite literature, sensationalistic art, and roughhousing relationships. How many have the guts to break free of who they used to be? How is our courage today? How can we take our cues from heart-and-soul in some vital way when surrounded by all the gritty world influences?
Once – near the upstate campus in Geneva – I talked with a musician friend on the street, and I fed back some gossip I’d heard about a former favorite professor of mine (call him Dr. Merrill). I said I’d heard that he was seen going after some younger women in a bar late at night. That he was becoming an old sentimental letch! It turned out that my guitarist friend’s steady was the prof’s daughter, and he said that he knew Merrill and his family well – and that my story was way off base. I turned about a dozen shades of red and left the scene! Now if I’d been coming from my real self, I would have had the sense not to spread gossip and nonsense. Soul (or love) would have “told” me not to have any opinion at all if I had no first hand knowledge. And even if I did, not to judge!
Whitman caught something of it here:
Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it,
to another not having it;
Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof,
is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things. . . .
If I had had Soul’s wisdom, I ‘d have had my “own proof” about Dr. M. - or I would have had enough ingrained kindness not to pass on negative ideas.
Strange how a “dull and muddy-mettled” rascal’s mind can be snared and turned around by so-called proofs, even rumors. Dr. Merrill had long been a five-star favorite teacher of mine, but I lurched off, changing my mind on the most misty evidence.
Only the food from the heart-of-heart lets the true self “ascend” and find inner heights without walls or rumors or rigid laws.
Here follow some wildly subjective notions . . . but see if anything rings wildly true: I found that genuine, ineffable spirituality rises in us only from contact with God. Actually, God’s voice (meaning the spiritual “sound current,” something like a high ringing, a rushing wind, or for some, the single note of a flute; not words, but the sound of pure love which precedes words). How to make that contact – progressively – will be the primary endeavor for some. They’ll find something beyond their most lofty expectations and dreams – they’ll become actual Soul. This is what we are anyway but knew only indirectly. May I be so bold as to suggest this as a fine start?: http://www.sourcetext.com/hupage/
Singing – gently over and over - the lovesong on the “hupage” helped me shed my old, false self. And I continue to sing! What a treat! It’s a bit like Raymond Carver’s wonderful story “Cathedral.” The main character says, “It was really something”: he’s had a certain interaction with a blind man. . . . (Well, read the story!) He says, at one point, “I felt like I wasn’t inside of anything."
That would be complete liberation from all outer illusions and snares, wouldn’t it? A genuine transformation, to be completely free, to be the real self and escape the steel box of emotion, mind, even intuition. To me, most writers worth their salt take the journey of a deeper liberation – and eventually suggest to us the way to be completely uncontained. They suggest to us the rugged path out of all shallow social norms, “sacred” rituals, and ridiculous fads hooped around us all.
A final note rests with Coleridge who points up the inward journey:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
~ Tim Bellows ~
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tbellows.livejournal.com - - - for more insights, see "tim bellows" on Amazon.com - - - new book
available for purchase - - -
Dear B-Board readers,
My wife has been reading me excerpts from a superb book, and she has me fascinated. I took a few notes as she read (my copy of the book is on the way), and felt the fanatical urge to share a small slice of this book with you. So many ideas tied in to a wholeness and resonated with my – albeit temporary - beliefs.
Presenting my summary of one part of this challenging book. . . . Here goes:
All things and attitudes are part of us, since we’re essentially Godlike, and God encompasses and loves all. Is all.
That includes so-called evil. God does not judge; It just loves, radiating love like the sun that falls on good and evil, worms and priests, drunkards and disaster-relief volunteers.
Okay, so we have the dark and the light within us, and since life/God/the universe wants us to be whole, loving, and all-accepting, It will lead us (ah, those very sure-grinding mills of the gods!) to come to accept all.
Example: if I have a stuck opinion that MDs and their ways of treating illness are bad or bogus, if I’m a fan only of herbal and homeopathic remedies, I will likely be led to having a radical need for an MD. Through the trials and interactions of this experience, I’ll have to quit calling the docs bad in my deepest heart.
So what about all these things we deny, hate, fear, and reject? We file them away into our “shadow” area of consciousness. But wait! Both shadow and light are valid parts of us, and if we try to shun what we’ve defined as bad, life will bring it to us – sooner or later – in the form of illness, scandal, or accident.
Why? Again, Life wants us to become whole, to face our whole being, to accept all. With no rigid opinions that exclude things.
In short, we are – right now, today – being led to being ever more Godlike, meaning more loving to all.
Could that be why in Romans, a book of the New Testament by Saint Paul, it says we should love our enemies (12:14-21) and owe nothing to others except love? We bring illness and “problems” to ourselves because they represent an integral part of our very life and consciousness driving us on, driving us to be whole, in fact, insisting that we be whole – like God. Life demands that we make God a reality and leads us to this one great thing.
I’m learning to see illness as something prompted onto the stage of my outer life, something I haven’t faced and come to love/accept!
I drove to a spiritually tuned seminar a few years back, and one young man stood up and said that he had become everything he hated. And I will say he sported a pretty unusual haircut and radical garb. But his remark struck me.
So the point is to not suppress, hate, shun or fear anything.
I believe it’s Job in the Christian bible saying (3:25), “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”
Exactly!
And these lines tie in nicely from the Tao Te Ching:
“Return love for hate.”
*
“The highest goodness is like water.
Water easily benefits all things without struggle.
Yet it abides in places that men hate.
Therefore it is like the Way.*
(*Meaning the Tao, the primary energy of all.)
*
“Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe.”
~ ~ ~
Finally, I don’t mean we stop locking our cars or fleeing if attacked. We can be strong and sensible as we love all experiences and philosophies and . . . well, all life.
So what’s this book I’ve been going on about? Okay, it’s The Healing Power of Illness: Understanding What Your Symptoms Are Telling You (Paperback), by Dethlefsen and Dahlke. This has made such an impact on me – and I haven’t even read it all yet.
Wonders,
Tim B.
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***If you feel the nudge, see ecampus.com and The Healing Power of Illness: The Meaning of Symptoms and How to Interpret Them [Notice the strange variation in subtitles]. Authors: Dethlefsen and Thorwald. (About $12 plus shipping.) It’s a tricky book to find! See other online booksellers or your local interlibrary search system. (Note: As of June, 2007, Healing Power may be priced at over $100. See your library!)
And if you don’t feel the nudge, simply sail on!
AURAL INSPIRATIONS DEPT.
Here’s some orally delivered, charged language you can use for aural background stimulation to amp up your creative writing sessions. I like to play – at low volume – these CDs of poets reading their work. They give the gift of a wonderful ambience, a kind of fertilized ground where my words – and maybe yours – can thrive:
***Coleman Barks’ CD of Rumi’s poems with Irish tunes in the background. [What was said to the Rose]
***Billy Collins’ The Best Cigarette.
***Joy Harjo’s The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.
***Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems set of four CDs – great fun – and beauty!
***W.S. Merwin reading his astonishing work on a Copper Canyon Press CD. His metaphorical links will amaze you and help you reach for more daring, graceful heights in your own writing.
***William Stafford is another rarefied master poet. Not sure if he’s on CD yet, but I’d bet he is. Hit him up on Amazon or other internet stores? Look for Troubleshooting.
***I’m sure I’m missing some here! Your suggestions?
***What tips and tricks to boost inspiration do you have to share with us? We’ll welcome them! (Make a response post here?)
-=-=-
(If you pick up my latest book, why not write a short
review on Amazon? Much appreciated!)
-=-=-
SOUND OF THE POET'S VOICE.
SOME VIRTUES IN THIS:
***And what can we make of these closing words of Dante’s The Divine Comedy?:
"But now my desire and my will were revolved,
like a wheel which is moved evenly,
by the love which moves the sun and the other stars." (Moved by the music of the spheres?)
***Master poet mary Oliver writes about “the fields of glittering fire / where everything, / even the great whale, / throbs with song.” (“Humpbacks.” New and Selected Poems. 1992. 168.) Another brilliant poet reveals that at higher levels of life, there is only “the music of the spheres,” the spiritual streams of sound that nourish Soul.
-=-=-
UPWARD & ONWARD. . . .
LET’S GET A HANDLE ON THE WORLD AFTER 9/11,
ENRON, AND THE U.S. INVASION OF IRAQ
A thought came together for me the other day—in the shower, of
course—about how all the cause-and-effect situations in this world are
similar or perhaps parallel. I saw that any one person must take
responsibility for, say, her financial actions: to overdraw on a bank
account results in bounced check fees and a lousy reputation. Using
credit cards in a spending spree racks up a load of interest charges on a
nightmare balance. More severe penalties come back to us from cheating
on business deals. Even telling half truths can have unintended personal
consequences. Our actions return to us wearing different clothes—but it’s
the same reaping and sowing explained in the Bible, the karma of the
Hindu scriptures or of Paul Twitchell’s The Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad.
Also, the connection that came to me as I dried off was how a city or
town is an entity too, an essence, just like a person. Life quietly
insists that it has to take responsibility for its legislation and
large-scale financial moves. Also the military and large scale business
moves that a nation makes work out in this same framework, the way the
Creator—or the Universe if you like—set this life up for us all.
It struck me that someone said, “What a nation does is done to it sooner or later.” If it meddles in the affairs of other countries (Iraq? Iran? Nicaragua?), and if citizens are killed or starved because of policies, contracts and arms sales, then some disaster or other—in equal measure—comes to the initiating nation. Sometimes we forget that’s how life works. Put a lit match (sowing) against another match, and there’s a clear reaction, that burst of flame (reaping).
Send bombs and missiles into another nation and I wonder what kind of
burst results. Can we imagine a nation that follows Jesus’ saying, “Resist not evil”?
So we might well consider our thoughts and acts in this world of cause and
effect. All we do is done to us. All that countries do is done to them. It’s that simple. Many believe all things are connected in this perfect web, and some will never believe it through this lifetime. But watch how the tides move in all our lives. See if we really do get away with anything in the long run. See if
any country can escape the consequences of its own shady dealings or power plays. Let’s watch well and keep all our doors and windows open to insights—in mind and spirit.
Poet Jack Kerouac says, “I love you because you're me.” And this sums up
karma nicely because all life is one great entity – yet a collocation of
individual entities. (I for one find the paradox refreshing.) Lives are
connected; we are one: doing to others equals doing to ourselves. Jesus implied this strongly, saying something like, “Even as ye have done it unto the least of these my children, ye have done it unto me.” He could
have added “and unto thyselves.”
Finally, all lives are equally sacred. Dr. Albert Sweitzer says, “A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.”
And so I aim to hang close to Total Honesty; that behavior. To work toward
acting in the name of love all day.
Tell your political reps. Tell your CEOs. Tell – in waking and sleeping
hours – your heart of heart.
And it may be the most powerful act to daily do an act of kindness that no one knows about. Where you expect no results because it’s just for love. Just that simple.
~ ~ ~ end note ~ ~ ~
From the Tao Te Ching:
The Master has no possessions.
The more he does for others,
the happier he is.
The more he gives to others,
the wealthier he is.
- - -
(Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu. Translation by S. Mitchell. Source:
http://rhino.harvard.edu/elwin/pJoy/taot
= = =Tim Bellows = = =
5/25/05
===your comments?===
[draft five]
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POEMS IN & OUT OF THE BODY
afterword as collage:
observations & quotes
toward “something extatic and undemonstrable!”
"The whole idea is to use imagination fully –
in concert with the attitude, pitch, timbre, and resonance
of divine love. In this concert we fulfill our work,
poems, gardens, lives." ~ Alex Li
Sharing personal notes – thoughts on poetry and “the invisible dimensions” (Harjo) – is not the norm in the world of poetry collections. Okay. Call this a celebration of the spiritual side of poetry: a risk, a departure. Absolutely worthwhile in my view, as is exploring the ethereal in literature, the realm of the imagination, that most fitting aspect of consciousness that leads us toward “the glory and the freshness of a dream” (Wordsworth). And beyond.
So I write, to be on friendly terms and give a sense of my perspective on “all this fiddle,” this strange force of poetry.
VISIBLE TO INVISIBLE
Poets' written images can become part of our inner life, its flatlands, alpine vistas, and waterways (“a wind’s motion/rippling the flat light on water”). Even its characters. The monk Brother Lawrence, looking to the outer world, would see a tree and think of the divine. He used "visible things to reach the invisible." If the images we read and write are infused with life and enthusiasm, they too help us “reach the invisible.” Words infused with divine spirit (truth? “the force”? the “underlying pattern of the universe”? the Dao?) – such words help us make progress inwardly. And shouldn’t this be the primary process of life since "The kingdom of heaven is within you"?
As a writer I’m interested in what reaches for “the soft invisible” (a poetic name I cooked up last spring). Though images from written words make pictures of things, some objects nudge us toward no thing, the spiritual dimension, that flood of finer love as we walk along with a good friend or maybe – with spiritual practice – make a short visit out of the body, out of memory, out of thought. This amounts to a deep contact and affection for endless life, for the unexpected jolt of truth when a lucky sound or word opens our inward windows and doors to “Deity over and under all” (Whitman). A piece like this one by Francisco X. Alarcon opens us again:
Night
how vast
how enormous
how great
this empire
of darkness
and yet
disarmed
by one
needle
of light
May our words be needles of light.
SHIFTING WORLDS
This book is at times about leaving the body, meaning simply opening the heart, expanding awareness: Into the countless inner heavens we all carry. Or we could say it’s about touching the light of another time or becoming a “needle/of light” for others. Or imagining a golden retriever trotting across a field. That’s actually leaving the body, accessing another realm with imagination’s cleaner seeing. Dreams are out-of-body experiences too, as is projection of the inner consciousness via meditation or contemplation. It’s healthy to reaffirm our inwardness and how we all turn “together / though we may not see each other / stacked in the invisible dimensions” (poet Joy Harjo). To me, the real treasures dwell in watching my mate walk across the living room – and in taking some quiet time and singing a sacred name or visualizing the Ultimate with love and daring.
Opening the inner windows and doors: unending levels of consciousness. We may kick and scream, but the entire web of our life leads us to become masters of multidimensional experience, learning to interweave the levels of existence as our eternal selves taste daily life, dreams, intellectual wit and games, the frank divinity of animals and the natural world, and the pure heart of awareness – that’s what we are at the core. Fittingly, poetry urges our travel to new levels. I couldn’t avoid them when I first read this short piece by Francisco X. Alarcon:
it was you
sister
your voice
a seagull
holding up
the breeze
Can we resist shifting into a finer world in those “impossible” words? Truly, as we honor and speak our most secret images, conflicts, joys, and realizations, we receive the best of gathered truths, new textures of consciousness. (Science and the space program pale compared to our quietly stepping into a new inner world.)
Here’s the real bargain: We don’t have to go anywhere by boat, van or jet. We can simply rest close to silence, feeling our own beingness, sometimes using poetry as a helping hand. The Tao Te Ching tells us that “the Master travels all day / without leaving home.” What a nice suggestion of venturing out of the body in the unseen body many call Soul. Pure awareness. If I can, I like to let the poems touch dimensions beyond asphalt, electric lights, our physical skin, maybe even our thought. Yet the poems use simple, "visible things to reach the invisible." (Yes, I’m something of a William Carlos Williams type: no ideas – no intimations – but in and through things. Hard images doing their natural work.
SUGGESTED INFINITIES
Of course it's up to the reader to see what happy infinities the images in a poetry collection might call up:
Rings
of song around each twirling of water
of vine hackberry cottonwood
*
I declare, I will be both
lightening and the earth’s brown crust.
*
To other days,
memories still fragrant in our skin. To board games,
storybooks and scatterings of weightless laughter. Stews
simmered half a day – the lilt of basil.
RISKY BUSINESS
At the risk of losing the way in abstraction, I’ll try to say what Sunlight aims for in its hints and flirtations:
Something about the endless dimensions we’re free to explore as eternal beings. Easy visits into heaven . . . and the return trip to hand its gifts around. Struggles and joys of our loves and friendships. The edgy ways of poetry: “barbaric, vast and wild” (Denis Diderot). Divine sound heard within physical sounds and sometimes in ultimate silence. Also in singing messages brought to us by wolf and pine warbler. And in poems which Ferlinghetti calls “the dialogue of statues” (think about that one)! Those sounds in the sacred nature of words as we speak our pain, our inner inventions of the moment, our deathless lights and songs. Things we dream, things the grasses dream. And how to answer Yes to this one:
Can you step back from you own mind
and thus understand all things?
end part 1
***POETRY AS SPIRIT'S TRUE TURF***
DISSOLVING THE OLD HOAX
Let’s meet other writers who have – directly or indirectly – alerted us to our eternal selves, inner travels, and rightful guardianship of words that make for transformation. Surely they’ve helped us move closer to proving for ourselves these words of Mark Alexander’s: “As Soul you have always existed and always will exist. Death is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on humankind.”
Okay. Onward with four light-bursts from Whitman, who sets us off with the keynote of love:
What do you seek, so pensive and silent?
What do you need, Camerado?
Dear son! do you think it is love?
. . .
But there is something else very great – it makes the whole coincide;
It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands, sweeps and provides for all.
. . .
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part of a poem, but has reference to the Soul;
(Because, having look'd at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any
particle of one, but has reference to the Soul.)
~ Walt Whitman (from “Starting from Paumanok”)
. . .
I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people,
Do not weep for me,
This is not my true country, I have lived banish'd from my true country—
I now go back there,
I return to the celestial sphere, where every one goes in his turn.
~ from Walt Whitman’s “Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love”
. . .
Do nothing a while. Hear
inside your breath – a wind you can follow
and this life inhales your secret delight in emptiness everywhere.
~ T. P. B. – notebooks. (Not at the height of Whitman!)
. . .
black asphalt the tires roar
choir sounds built in surely God
is kissing my ear glimmer
of woodwinds breezes through me
I have no shame for the jewelry
riding up front in my forehead
~ T. P. B. – from “State Highway 108 – Driving to High Spheres”
. . .
Rings
of song around each twirling of water
of vine hackberry cottonwood
I die and take in each one cloudless
movement of my new skin now
gold tones completing their path across the land
crossing to towns where newborns
cry hello as the air
startles seagulls into whiteness same instant I
change to melody
surrounding thoughtless bones set out
to dry on the weary earth
~ T. P. B. - a slight variation of
“Wyoming Contemplation –
a Cloudless Dying.”
. . .
Ko-san and I stood on a point by a cliff, over a
rock-walled canyon. Ko said, “Now we have come to
where we die." I asked him, what's that up there,
then, meaning the further mountains.
"That's the world after death." I thought it looked
just like the land we'd been traveling, and couldn't
see why we should have to die.
Ko grabbed me and pulled me over the cliff -
both of us falling. I hit and I was dead. I saw
my body for a while, then it was gone. Ko was
there too. We were at the bottom of the gorge.
We started drifting up the canyon, "This is the
way to the back country."
A FEW MORE JAILBREAK WORDS FROM MARK ALEXANDER
This writer legitimizes the poetic habit of describing reality in radically different ways: A poet might well talk about seeing music or hearing color. Mark says, “About ten years ago I attended a performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony by the Seattle Symphony. I was not then familiar with Mahler, and the performance proved to be remarkably powerful. At one point I half-closed my eyes and I was astonished to see arcing patterns come off the violins. As I relaxed and allowed the music to move further into the patterns, they took on a remarkable life of their own, arcing, dancing, and transforming rhythmically, melodically, and harmonically with the music. Years later I saw these patterns again—captured photographically in the book Cymatics by the Swiss researcher Hans Jenny.
“I realized then that I had actually seen music. In fact, these kinds of patterns (crystalline, transforming, multicolored architectures of form and light) have been a part of my musical experience all my life. I had thought them mere imagination. Now, science shows they are objective, photographable forms.”
Alexander shows us that the strange metaphor and synesthesia of poets is real. Poetry – try some Neruda – can help us, like Mark, get beyond our old, boxed-in definitions and expectations of what’s true.
THE “LARGER” VOICE
“Voice in poetry is akin to a fingerprint: it cannot help but reveal the full and unique life behind it. It is not only what is said, but how: the timbre, the order of occurrence, what’s there and what isn’t there.
“Voice comes from the part of the self that’s larger than the ego and larger than what can be consciously known. When I write my poems, in part what’s happening is that I hear them – not as an actual auditory hallucination, but they come in words, and those words have an intonation and a music that is a part of what they mean.”
NOTES TOWARD “FORMS, THAT WANDER IN NOTHINGNESS” (from Hawthorne)
Quotes can be charged word strings that penetrate consciousness with a sharp point, startle, and teach – like the quick burst of a haiku poem, a potent distillation of and for our deeps and shallows. And so . . . I offer some passages about charged music ,“Soul, and . . . immortality.” Words helping us visit heaven and pluck “a strange and beautiful flower”:
O strain, musical, flowing through ages – now reaching hither!
I take to your reckless and composite chords – I add to them, and cheerfully
pass them forward.
. . .
O a word to clear one's path ahead endlessly!
O something extatic and undemonstrable! O music wild!
. . .
Forever and forever – longer than soil is brown and solid – longer than water
ebbs and flows.
I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be
the most spiritual poems;
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my Soul,
and of immortality.
. . .
Fearless, for unknown shores, on waves of extasy to sail,
Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,)
Caroling free – singing our song of God,
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration.
~ from Whitman’s “Passage to India”
. . .
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep
you dreamed, and what if in your dream
you went to heaven and there you plucked
a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke
you had the flower in your hand?
Oh, what then?
. . .
Here Jelaluddin Rumi again shows us a few possibilities – radical to some – of passing beyond human life, of knowing “the unseen world,” and of becoming “loving silence.” In these selected passages, Andrew Harvey translates:
When you pass beyond this human form,
No doubt you will become an angel and soar through the heavens,
But don't stop there, even heavenly bodies grow old.
Pass again from the heavenly realm and
Plunge, plunge into the vast ocean of consciousness,
Let the drop of water that is you become a hundred mighty seas.
. . .
One sight is a blessing,
The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world.
Look, every falling leaf is a blessing.
All of nature swings in unison,
Singing without tongues,
Listening without ears.
. . .
Ground yourself, strip yourself down,
To blind loving silence.
Stay there, until you see
You are gazing at the Light
With its own ageless eyes.
FINDING EVIDENCE
As I like to say, poetry is a prime place to explore for happy evidence that spirit is the genuine life in cobwebs, corgis and constellations. (Almost forgot . . . in humans as well.) To explore wonders we can’t prove outwardly but come to know inwardly:
The poet-filmmaker James Broughton had a happier attitude about dying – and why not? He apparently said, "Creeping decrepitude has crept me all the way to the crypt." But he saw death as his "wedding night with the divine." Most appropriate. As I see it, through loving spiritual practice, we can have that wedding every day. Whitman hit on it here with his phrase, “Caroling free – singing our song of God. . . .”
(At http://witnit.blogspot.com/2005/08/unco
you can read about a primary “song of God.”)
. . .
Another line from Broughton (also from citylights.com): “Things only work when the relentless current of love is plugged in." I like that! Finding out – progressively, sometimes painfully – what that truly means is the big experience of life. (I wonder how many people can meditate, contemplate, live and grow with that current?)
. . .
"Listen to the music within your soul. While listening, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you – that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly towards the light?" ~ Isadora Duncan
. . .
Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
. . .
Jack Kerouac called the poet "the great rememberer redeeming life from darkness."
~ from “Can Poetry Really Change the World?”
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
. . .
“Your acts throughout this day – on your page, in your garden, in your office – are God Itself.”
. . .
Another visit into Broughton’s words: he was apparently “saved by a guardian angel.” He said, "One night when I was three years old I was awakened by a glittering stranger who told me I was a poet and always would be and never to fear being alone or being laughed at. That was my first meeting with my angel. . . . I didn't know what his words meant but I understood everything he said. And he said a lot. He said I could call him Hermy though that was not his real name. He knew my name because it was on his agenda. He represented a company whose business was health care for the soul. And he wanted me to work for them." (Seems the poet’s assignment and connection with other dimensions meant a lot to him.)
. . .
The poem “Brothers of the Singing Void” by Broughton refers to the unending, ongoing symphonies. Again, poetry, one of the best sources of spiritual truth:
Often my ears ring with the sound the stars make
I hear it in the songs my sky brothers sing
when they shift their voices into high unison
to praise the shining fellowship of heaven
Across percussive silences of space
my brothers explore interstellar polyphony
and compose obstreperous oratorios
that stir old saints to dally forth in dance
Often their voices encircle the Earth
like a choral zodiac of orbiting friends. . . .
. . .
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
. . .
“We are born of Eternal Day – and the Spiritual Sun shall never set upon the glory of our being for it is the coming forth of God into self-expression. Every man is an incarnation of eternity, a manifestation of the Infinite.
“No man need prepare to meet his God. He is meeting Him every day and each hour in every day. He meets Him in the rising sun, in the flowing stream, in the budding rose, in the joy of friendship and love, and in the silence of his own soul.” So says Ernest Holmes in his "Immortality."
. . .
“Thus we realize how the greatest poets not only change the way we see the world but also cause us to question our perception and interpretation of everyday reality. And we realize that the greatest poetry ‘subverts the dominant paradigm,’ ultimately challenges the status quo of the world, and transforms it into something new and strange.”
. . .
Heard this from Mark Alexander (as MC at a recent seminar): “The bad news is that there will always be tough challenges for you; the good news is that you’re an eternal being, so whatever happens to you . . . you’ll get over it!”
. . .
“Relax. . . .
There is no alternative to life.”
Here’s to our next steps, inflorescent days, and our going beyond all these words,
Tim Bellows
Gold River
=\=\=
---search tim bellows in Amazon.com for more information.
---if you purchase a book, let me know your thoughts on it.
---thank you!
=\=\=
~ by Tim Bellows ~
If anything can speed us on our way to a final draft, it’s a simple focus on verbs. To demonstrate, here’s a poem set out with sleepy verbs, then again with lively verbs.
~~~WITH DROWSY, NON-ACTION VERBS:
Beyond Science
I walk into the kitchen.
A game show is on the TV.
I say a goodbye to leftover vegetables and
chicken-flavored TV dinners. The dog
has put his head under the carpet,
barely noticing my inner offer to soothe his ears.
He goes off to sleep, not knowing the world
might get to the boiling point any minute.
~~~WITH ZIPPY VERBS:
Beyond Science
I drift into the kitchen.
A game show screeches through the TV.
I mutter a goodbye to the leftover vegetables and
chicken-flavored TV dinners. The dog
has shoved his head under the carpet,
barely sniffing out my secret intent
to scratch his ears. He sprawls off to sleep,
never stumbling onto the idea that the world
might leap to the boiling point any minute.
=\=\=
Well, the “sniffing” bit might be a tad extreme, but we can see how attention to the verbs amped the poem up wonderfully. Of course, be sure to latch onto the verb that truly fits! Finally, as you move along with your skills,
develop patience, care and writing from the heart-of-heart.
=\=\=
Hope this takes your writing forward a few steps. Let me know how you're doing!
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~FIFTH DRAFT~
