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Dear Uncle Mike,
You’ve probably been asked this
question before but would you give me
some advice on how to deal with gossips? I
have a good friend who I love dearly but she
insists on telling me juicy nuggets about
people we both know. Most of the time, it’s
in a good spirit but sometimes it's
information I neither want nor need to know.
What does Uncle Mike do in this situation?
C W /ir d iM 'fs ita à i
Diane
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Dear Diane,
Uncle Mike tells them it’s information he neither needs nor wants
to know. Of the many mysteries he confronts each day, none is deeper
than the obsession some humans have with the affairs of others. Gossip,
you might remind your friend, is story telling. What people do with their
lives is splendid subject matter but, without fail, the stories are better told
and more entertaining when not cluttered up with names. Uncle Mike
tries never to say anything about anyone he wouldn’t say if they were in
the room. The practice has, if nothing else, made him a better listener.
TRILLIUM
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WATURALF0ODS >
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H. Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain, similarly:
"As the breath of the oxen in winter, as the quick star that
runs along the sky, as a little shadow that loses itself at
sunset, as I once heard a Zulu called Ignosi put it, such is the
order of our life, the order that passeth away."
W.B. Yeats:
Had 1 the heaven's embroidered cloths.
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,«
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But, I being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
RESSO
Dear Annie,
Interesting word, should. You should do what it’s in everyone’s
best interests that you do. It wouldn’t be unusual for a man of fifty to,
when confronted with a twenty-six year old woman who might just be
being friendly, do his level best not to make an ass of himself and behave
like a bad cliche. For this reason, you should probably ask if he’d like to
meet for a nosh after work. You’re right: Uncle Mike has danced this
dance. Here’s what he learned about young women and older men. The
young woman will eventually need to go somewhere the older man cannot
or will not go. You have no idea how important it is that everyone
understands this. The ends of things are in their beginnings, waving hello
and goodbye. No fault, no error, no blame. In between, it’ll be whatever
you make it. Knowing your time together is limited can make the time
you have a thing of great value. Who was it who said, knowing you’re
going to be hanged in a week focuses the mind wonderfully?
Theodore Roethke,"Meditation at Oyster River":
In this hour,
In this first heaven of knowing,
The flesh takes on the pure poise of the spirit,
Acquires, for a time, the sandpiper's insouciance,
The hummingbird's surety, the kingfisher's cunning_
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dream of you, caught at last
in their black beaks. Dream of you
leaking your life away. Yourw'ings
crumbling like old bark. Feathers
falling from your breast like leaves,
and your eyes two bolts
of lightning gone to sleep.
Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco:
...
hawk, never laughs and punishes us if we don’t know the songs. Uncle
Mike believes that for God to be God, God (not He or She) must be
everything. Uncle Mike believes in a universe in which all things are one
thing, everything is alive and everything is on its own path of becoming.
There are no wrong paths; but there are paths that lead to pain and sadness
and paths that lead to happiness. Uncle Mike regards any religion that
discourages the spread of happiness as an organized crime against
humanity.
There’s nothing wrong with being uncomfortable in church. When
the priests scolded Jesus for not worshipping in the House of God, Jesus
asked them to show him a place where God does not dwell. It’s probably
no accident the teacher from Galilee spent a lot of time in the wilderness.
Does Uncle Mike believe in heaven and hell? No, Uncle Mike believes in
cause and effect: love and be loved, hate and be hated. As Omar
Khayyam, the Persian mystic poet, put it: “Heaven but the image of
fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire.” Uncle Mike sees no
evidence that the future exists and so tries to do his best in the present.
This never includes imagining that those who believe differently will
spend eternity roasting on a spit. Uncle Mike regards this as way weird.
Uncle Mike recommends you keep your eyes and ears open,
question all authority, find something to have faith in and actively have
faith in it. Uncle Mike has faith in love, laughter and life. This may make
him a pagan. He doesn’t go to their meetings either.
■ .. II.1 |I ...IP
VMlKV
Pablo Neruda, "Night on the Island":
All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,
between fire and water.
Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.
Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth:
I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an
autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish
shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked
bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud.
Like a viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent,
symbol of nature and love.
Five windows light the cavemed man: through one he
breathes the air;
Through one hears music of the spheres; through one can
can look
And see small portions of the eternal world.
“People will sometimes forgive you the good you have
done them, but seldom the harm they have done to
you.”
Somerset Maugham
Cormac McCarthy, Suttree:
“It is a mistake to believe that
science consists in nothing but
conclusively proved propositions,
and it is unjust to demand that it
should. It is a demand only made
by those who feel a craving for
authority in some form and a need
to replace the religious catechism
by something else, even if it be a
scientific one.” Sigmund Freud
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Mary Oliver, "In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl":
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing,
intellect. Night has fallen, the day's work is done. I return
like a mole to my home, the ground. Not because 1 am tired
and cannot work. I am not tired. But the sun has set.
Dear Deanna,
Uncle Mike would suggest you not worry about it. The world in
general is pretty messed up over religion. Does Uncle Mike believe in
God? No, not if you mean some bearded white guy who watches us like a
¡OARING CRANE GALLERY
Ground floor Inn at Cape Khvanda
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Pacific City
Crowfoot, on his deathbed, 1891:
"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is
the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little
shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the
Sunset."
Dear Uncle Mike,
I have one of your books and there are two letters in it about
relationships between young women and older men. You sound like
you’ve been there and done that. I’m a twenty-six year old woman who’s
interested in a fifty year old man. Until it happened, I thought that was
weird. W e’ve known each other for a month and have socialized with
coworkers. 1 think he’s interested in me but he doesn’t act on it. I don’t
know if I’m misreading him or not. I think I’m being pretty obvious that
I 'd accept an invitation if it was offered. Any advice for me? Should I
ask him out?
Annie
Dear Uncle Mike,
Do you believe in God? I don’t know if I do or not and want to
know what you think about it. Some of my friends are real religious and
go to church and they want me to go with them. The times I went I didn't
like it much. I wasn’t comfortable and didn’t know the songs or what I
was supposed to do. Some other of my friends are like pagans and into
wicca(?) and magic. Some of it’s good but some of it’s weird and my
religious friends say they’re going to go to hell. Do you believe in heaven
and hell? J ’m getting pretty messed up over this. Thanks.
Deanna
Seated on a summer dune last week, someone very close
asked what 1 read and favored. This is a partial answer, a
short list of readings dear to me. I would like to dedicate my
column this month to her.
GREGOR' K'FOl
202 Oregon Pioneer Building
J20 S.W S tirk Sireet
Portland. OR 97204
R'
Phone:
0 0 3 ) 224-2647
Peering down into the water where the morning sun
fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay
trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes am
blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic
strobes where motes shifted and spun. A hand trails over the
gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker
plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat's slight
cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the
mud-stained stanchions.
Louis De Bemieres, Corelli's Mandolin:
Mandras sat passively as his mother ardently and
disapprovingly cut away the ropes and pads of his head am
beard She tutted and grimaced at every glimpse of a louse,
and earned away the rank locks in the blades of the scissors
that they and their cargo of nits could bum foully in the
charcoal of the brazier, shrivelling and spitting, releasing a
thick and stinking smoke vile enough to banish demons and
disturb the dead.
***AII these works are fine specifics against that
contemporary scourge, that demon plague, television. Ingest
pieces of literature daily until the madness subsides and the
spirit and brain pan heal.
Professor Lindsey