Ken Kesey: “Dragging Men Up by Their Hands”

Photographers Unknown, Dragging Men Up By Their Hands

“It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.”

—-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Born in September of 1935, Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure of the 1960s. Graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957, he began writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1960, following the completion of a graduate fellowship at Stanford University in creative writing.

While at Stanford University, Ken Kesey participated in an Army-funded experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital, which involved hallucinogenic drugs. The discovery of the effects of the drugs prompted Kesey to study alternative methods of perception. To further his study, he later made the decision to work as an orderly at the Menlo Park mental hospital in California, where he encountered questionable treatments for patients.

From these observations, Ken Kesey concluded that society makes ordinary people crazy and that society, itself, prevents people from functioning in it once again. This conclusion inspired Kesey to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a book he considered to be a rail against the unspoken repressive rules of society.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of America’s most challenged and banned novels. In 1974, residents in Ohio, considering the book pornographic and glorifying criminal activity, sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. Between 1975 and 1978, several school districts in New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Idaho removed the novel from the schools, with the Freemont High School in St Anthony, Idaho, firing the teacher who assigned it. Challenges against the novel being in school curriculums periodically occurred until 2000.

Note: The film adaption of the 1962 published novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Miloš Forman. It was released in 1975 by United Artists. The film went on to win five Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

David Abram: “They Spill Rain Upon the Land”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Thirteen

“Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons…”

—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology,the study of the structural experiences of the ‘self’, with ecological and environmental issues.

David Abram introduced the term “the more-than-human-world” in his 1994 book “The Spell of the Sensuous”, which received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. This term was gradually adopted by other scholars and theorists, and became a key phrase in the broad ecological movement. Abram has also referred to this concept more recently as “the commonwealth of breath”.

Abram advocated a reappraisal of “animism”, the belief system that all objects, places, plants, and creatures possess a distinct spiritual essence, as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview. He held that this view, a belief system of many indigenous people, is one which roots human cognition in the sentient human body, while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the remarkable sentience of other animals, each of which perceives the same world that we perceive yet from a different perspective.

David Abram, a student of traditional, indigenous systems of ecological knowledge, gave voice to the entwinement of human subjectivity not only with other animals but also with the varied sensitivities of many plants upon which humans depend and the bioregions that surround and sustain our communities.

In 2010 Abram published “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” which was a finalist for the 2011 Orion Book Award and the runner-up for the PEN America Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. Using his knowledge of indigenous cultures, Abram explores our human entanglement with nature and shows that awareness, or the mind, is not an exclusive possession of the human species but a clear aspect of the biosphere itself, one in which we, along with other living things, steadily participate. This book has since become a classic of environmental literature.

Baker’s Dozen

Photographers Unknown, Baker’s Dozen

“Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker’s dozen.”

—Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Haruki Murakami: “. . .From the Distant Past”

Photographer Unknown, From the Distant Past, Photo Shoot

“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Man and Flower

Photographers Unknown, Man and Flower

“The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, (the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely). Even the pleasure one takes in a flower — and, this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower, is dependent partly on the sense of mystery.”

—George Orwell, Pleasure Spots, The London Tribune, January 11, 1946

C. S. Lewis: “What is Blinding is Clarity Itself”

Photographer Unknown, Clarity Itself

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered…He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.”

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life that wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Born in June of 1888 in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent, intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. Each of these heteronyms possessed distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

In 1905, Pessoa attended university in Lisbon, however, after two years he left, educating himself by sequestering in the National Library to read literature, history, philosophy and religion. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick”, as well as poems and essays, most often in English or French and occasionally in Portuguese.

A life-long outsider, Pessoa lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, writing, reading, and working as a translator for firms with overseas connections. Throughout his life, Pessoa grappled with the possibility of insanity, spurred on by his grandmother’s mental illness, but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself either way.

“I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” —Fernando Pessoa, talking about his heteronyms

For a thorough and fascinating article entitled “Fernando Pessoa and His Heteronyms” by Carmela Ciuraru, please visit the Poetry Society of America located at: https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms

Tove Jansson: “Moominland Midwinter”

Photographers Unknown, Snapshots

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

Born in August of 1914, Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator, and comic strip author. She studied art at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1930-1933, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933-1937, and finally at L’ École d’ Adrein Holy and École des Beau-Arts in Paris in 1938. She exhibited in a number of shows during the 1930s and early 1940s, and had her first solo exhibition in 1943.

Besides producing artwork, Tove Jansson was also writing short stories and articles for publication, as well as creating the graphics for book covers. Starting in 1945, she wrote the “Moomin” book series for children, publishing books in 1945, 1946, and 1948 which were highly successful. For her work as a children’s writer, Jansson received the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1968. She later wrote six novels and five books of short stories for adults.

Tove Jansson worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Swedish satirical magazine “Garm” from the 1930s to 1953. She produced many political cartoons during that period which achieved international fame. In one of Jansson’s early cartoons, Hitler is seen crying in diapers while European leaders try to calm him down. During the 1930s, Jansson produced illustrations for Christmas magazines and several comic strip series.

Tove Jansson had several male lovers, including political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, a Finnish socialist intellectual and a member of the Finnish Parliament. However, she later met and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler, daughter of Helsinki’s mayor Erik von Frenckell.

In 1956, Jansson met her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the American-born Finnish graphic artist and professor, who became one of the most influential graphic artists in Finland. In Helsinki, the two women lived separately in neighboring blocks, visiting each other privately through an attic passageway. In the 1960s, they built a house on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where they lived together for the summer months until Jansson’s passing.

Tove Marika Jansson died from cancer in June of 2001 at the age of eighty-six. Tuulikki Pietilä died at her home in February of 2009 at the age of ninety-two.

James Baldwin: “Giovanni’s Room”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Ten

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Born in New York City in August of 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States and through western Europe.

Disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin emigrated in November of 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to Paris where he became involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, an area of artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1949, he met and fell in love with the young Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, becoming life-long partners.

While staying at the Happersberger family chalet in Switzerland with Lucien during the winter of 1951-1952, James Baldwin completed his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, which was published in early 1953. Over the next two years, while living mostly in France, he worked on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room”. In 1956 after Knopf Publishers decided not to publish this second book, Baldwin allowed Dial Press to publish the novel, dedicated to Happersberger, in the United States, and publisher Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom.

James Baldwin made his home primarily in the southern section of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began to spend half of each year in New York City. Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in their house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France, for many years until Baldwin’s death, with Happersberger by his side, from cancer in November of 1987. James Baldwin was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

“Giovanni’s Room”, with its complex narrative of love and desire, became James Baldwin’s most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. Due to its explicit homoerotic content, it caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956. The book is noteworthy for bringing complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality to the reading public with artistry and empathy, lacking in most of the contemporary literary treatments, and thus broadening the public discussion regarding same-sex desire.

“Giovanni’s Room” focuses on events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings, and his frustrations, in the relationships he has with other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, a bar keep at a Parisian gay bar. In this novel, Baldwin explores themes of social alienation, self-identity, masculinity, and manhood, expressed through relationships and learned public behavior. Though it is considered a gay novel, Baldwin has stated on occasion that the novel is not so much about homosexuality, but about what happens if you are so afraid that you finally can not love anybody..

For additional information from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/baldwin-switzerland

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/series/stories-chez-baldwin

Mark Helprin: “Winter’s Tale”

Photographer Unknown, Winter’s Tale

“Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare up-reaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run..”

—Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

Ray Bradbury: “Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay”

Photographers Unknown, Twilights Linger and Midnights Stay

“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”

—-Ray Bradbury

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Wandrers Nachtlied”

Photographers Unknown, Fleeting Episodes

“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, aesthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”)”

—-Erik Pevemagle

“Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong)” is the title of two famous poems written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The manuscript of the first, “Der du von dem Himmel bist”, was among Goethe’s letters sent in February of 1776 to his friend Charlotte von Stein. The second poem, “Uber allen Gipfein”, is often considered the most perfect lyric in the German language. It is believed, according to a letter sent to Charlotte von Stein, that Goeth wrote it on the evening of September 6th in 1780, while spending the night in a gamekeeper lodge at the top of Kickelhahn Mountain on the edge of the Central Thuringian Forest.

German poet and translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel, a friend of Wolfgang von Goethe, mentions the “Uber allen Gipfein” manuscript in his diary; and the manuscript was documented by other friends, Johann Herder and Louise von Göchhausen. This manuscript was later published in 1800 and 1803, without authorization, by writer and publicist August von Hennings. An English version of “Uber allen Gipfein” appeared in London’s “Monthly Magazine” in February of 1801.

These two poems were first published together in Goethe’s 1815 “Works Volume One” under the headings “Wandrers Nachtlied” and “Ein Gleiches (Another One)”. Both works were set to classical music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert: the first “D 224”, published in 1821 as “Op. 4 No. 1” and the second “D 768”, published in 1822 as “Op. 96 No. 3”.

“Über allen Gipfein ist Ruh, In allen Wipfein Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.”

-Wolfgang von Goethe

“O’er all the hilltops is quiet now, in all the treetops hearest thou hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait, soon like these thou too shalt rest.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Neil Galman” “. . Words on the Air”

Photographer Unknown, Words on the Air

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

—Neil Galman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Haruki Murakami: “Warped in the Folds of Time”

Photographer Unknown, Warped in the Folds of Time

“Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and shrank in the silence? I was warped in the folds of time, like a reflection in a fun house mirror.”

—-Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

Haruki Murakami: “In the Midst of the Everyday”

Photographers Unknown, In the Midst of the Everyday

“Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.”

—-Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

Born in January of 1949 in Kyoto to parents both of whom were teachers, Haruki Murakami grew up in Kobe as an only child. Since childhood he was heavily influenced by Western culture, reading a wide range of European and American literature, such as Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jack Kerouac. He moved to Tokyo, where he attended Waseda University, studying drama and graduating in 1973. After college, Murakami married and opened a small jazz bar, “Peter Cat”, in Tokyo, which he and his wife ran for seven years.

Hanuki Murakami’s first novel “Hear the Wind Sing” initially appeared in the June 1979 issue of literary magazine Gunzo, and was published in book form the following month. This first book of the “Trilogy of the Rat” won the Gunzou Literature Prize for new writers in 1979 and was adapted by director Kazuki Ōmori for the 1981 film “Hear the Wind Sing”. Murakami followed this success with two sequels “Pinball, 1973”, published in 1960, and “A Wild Sheep Chase”, published in 1962.

Murakami achieved national recognition in 1987 with the publication of “Norwegian Wood”, a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality, which sold millions of copies among the young Japanese. He is also the author of the novels “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”; “Dance Dance Dance”; “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle””, and “Sputnik Sweetheart”, among others. He has also written three short story collections: “The Elephant Vanishes”; “After the Quake”; and “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”.

Most of Murakami’s works use first-person narrative in the tradition of the Japanese “I-novel”, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. With the family being a significant role in traditional Japanese literature, a central character who is independent becomes one who values freedom and solitude over close connections.

After Japan’s Hanshin earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, Murakami interviewed survivors, as well as the Aum religious cult responsible for the subway attack. From these interviews, he published two non-fiction books, forming the series entitled “Underground” in 1997 and 2000. While the book consisted mainly of narratives from individuals, it contained common themes revealing aspects of the psyche and values of the Japanese society as a whole.

Hanuki Murakami’s work has received numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose work deals with themes of human freedom, society and government. In 2011, Murakami donated his eighty-thousand Pound winnings from the International Catalunya Prize to the victims of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, and to those affected by the fukushima nuclear disaster.