Old dead guys . . .

In Thor's mailbox this 16th day of 2023 March . . .

Today is the 173rd anniversary of Hester Prynne's birth in 1850 Boston, when Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, was published.

So, why, my students have asked, are we so preoccupied with “old dead guys?” The ones we tell them to read and who wrote the music played in concert halls, not to mention the folk music fossils featured on PBS during fund raising. Those “old dead guys.” Well, I think, the “why” is that they – the old dead guys (women included), have never left us. Nor will they. In a world where so many insist there is no meaning in it they continue to affirm that which is denied.

We poets, if I may speak for the arts in the broadest sense, do what we do hoping that some day, somehow, some one will read/experience something like the epiphany, ecstasy with which we were gifted during the time of our creative expression. We never know, of course, if or whether such a future moment ever occurs. The closest we can get to guessing about this, perhaps, is when we ourselves are moved by what we read, heard or saw last night or this morning, written or recorded in that “book” that somehow got published allowing us to return to it again.

This return to the epiphanic may be what keeps the artist engaged. It is a rather narrow road with an even narrower gate, in that such ideation carried by subliminal states comes unbidden into the present experience. It teaches that it cannot be found in the past nor projected into a dreamt of future. In that lesson we find how to allow “being” to “just be.” That epiphany, that ecstacy, that bliss, that blessing . . . is this present moment.

The seasons change, the days change, the hours of the day change. We ourselves change all along, and we experience many changes from moment to moment. This happens all around us and within us, twenty-four seven, never stopping for an instant. – Pema Chödrön