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Letters and Back-at-ya
BLUE is the (dated) voice of the narrator of this letter page, and will hopefully provide the context for the letters.
BLACK is a letter Toc wrote to someone.
RED is a quoted voice ...or your voice (...and thanks).
Gray is a second generation letter included in a first generation black letter.
Green is my interpreter interpreting my words for little kids.
Hello
Daniel Quinn
From Toc Fetch
I
have just discovered you … in my world. I am wonderfully nervous,
feeling like something huge and live is passing behind me underwater where
I thought I was alone. Cool!
I've had a copy of the film "Instinct" for a couple of years.
Alone I would watch it every so often just to reconnect with a-feeling-of-belonging
that it offers somewhat left handedly. It is funny that it took me so
many years to imagine that whoever wrote the story must have this same
feeling-for-the-world offered in other stories. Minutes after I drank
this understanding I arrived at your website, and now I have read "Ishmael,"
and "B." …Wonderful. I have all sorts of complements for
you jostling inside. Thank-you for presenting such excellently felt story.
You have wonderfully elucidated all the things my intuition only allowed
me to feel but not say (I suppose to avoid "the nillistic registration
marks that scare the skin of your heart," [and to be honest …
the truth never stopped a fall before] Hi-ho!). I am so glad to hear from
you (in your work), and I am glad you are here also at this end of time.
I
actually have a vague question for you; I'm unsure how to state it, it
comes from split-brain research (which comes from shrapnel research),
and …children-of-the-right-hemisphere.
(I apologize for my [blithe/embarrassing] autobiographical voice, my ability
to write has this terrible limp).
Dyslexia is what they call it now, but when I was
a kid we were just called …bad, because we seemed to be rudely unwilling
to learn. We were walking-talking problems, but rarely did any of us have
a choice. We were mostly hard-wired to do only what felt necessary. Anything
more than what was our "inner necessity" (Kandinsky) had no
substance.
We were the ones who never did homework, and couldn't quite fear the retribution
of teachers. It just had no substance, and to be honest - it was a relief
of entertainment to read their reactions. And their reactions more than
often disqualified there authority.
Circumstances in my earlier childhood, with larger scale things like death
(and beauty), had thrown me on my own authority and had forced definitions
from me (from I to me).
My best definitions were feelings I found in the woods alone as a kid
(said in a line from Transtromer) "We've sided with the animals,
they welcome us…" Where the heart feels alive is your Self.
To force a kid to sit in a room punishing his energies, concentrating
on abstractions and not to live in the Day and all of its endless beauty
… is doubtless cruel. Does authority equal cruelty? Yes, when it
goes against …our nature.
In school, kids who favored right-brain dominance, were passed along up
the grades, illiterate, (the broken and the unbroken), as if invisible.
And depending also on their linage of love they either grew a heart and
created their place…or grew a hungry asocial pathology instead.
My life as a kid completely changed when in ninth grade I meet a true-human
animal disguised as a mathematics teacher who convinced me that many writers
were animals also. Animals who wrote their books just for me (and …others
like me). I was 16 and I began to read for the first time in my life,
though it would be more-to-the-image to say I was eating books, patching
my snarling Heart with those books. As a reader I had no tolerance for
writers who offered their ideas without images, without story, as innate
to their language. ("Images are sacred and no ones image is
more sacred then your own," said Pope Joey). I was not looking for
ideas as much a Heart's response to them. (Cuts out most science doesn't
it?)
The idea of God had long ago broken down and was left on the road like
a broken poem, along with my immortality. But what was never shakable
was my awe (at the beautiful care) and my astonished reverence for The
Woods
Animals are holy - is an echo of my Heart from my earliest memories,
I was born with this echo.
I was always looking for what I called an animal ethics in which,
feeling (in 'still-point ' beyond e-motion) was the final arbiter
of truth. If you could not feel the beauty then you did not know it, then
it was not your truth. This led me into the mechanics of feeling
and eventually Advaita-Vedanta as a means of directly observing my Self,
directly experiencing my Self. The body is the animal and feeling
is its voice, its final arbiter. (I was wonderfully sparked when, as a
kid, I discovered this prose-poem by eecummings).
A Poets Advise to Students
A
poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel-but that's thinking
or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling-not knowing
or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single
human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or
you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment
you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself-in a world which is doing its best, night and
day, to make you everybody else-means to fight the hardest battle which
any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just
a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why?
Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We
all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time-and whenever we do it,
we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working
and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very
lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something
easy, like learning how to blow up the world-unless you're not only willing,
but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
Or
so I feel.
My first son was born when I was 20. I wanted to play with him while we
were both still kids - strong and crazy-bold. We had a lot of fun romping
and reading the Olympic Woods, up the Elwa and the Hoa, full of bear,
elk, and eagle.
So …backed by my own experiences (and the writings of John Holts),
my son did not go to school, until at the age of twelve when he asked
to, as a social experience. In six hours of tutoring he was up-to and
beyond his age group despite no schooling or home-schooling. For 12 years
before that, he did what ever interested him, and lived his childhood
only on his inner desire to know and do. We supplied him with materials,
with our living example of passionate research (in art), and with an admiring
love for his …anything.
And I honestly admire him still, he is a very cool guy, and …he is
a father too now.
I think this meandering question I have for you is something like …have you made observations about the close relationship between right brain dominance and animism?
But …all-in-all, this is really just me saying "Hello," and "Thank You," and "Bravo," and a welcoming Agape.
Your
pal
Toc Fetch
PS -The Image above is B, (even though it was done before I read you). It is page 26 from a large 56 page comic I am doing for a show at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in NYC, for the spring of `07.
or read on below...
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