Mr. Otterson is an artist, art director, lecturer, and teacher in Santa Monica, California.
When we feel we know others it is remarkable, understanding as little as we do about ourselves. The human personality is immensely complex. The person is a great deal more than a name, far more than certain physical, mental, and emotional characteristics. It is only in the human being that untried ideas are born, and by him that discoveries are made and poems written. Perhaps the true person is the hidden dweller in all things. We have resident within us not one nature, but many. We house a myriad of selves superimposed upon each other like endless reflections in opposing mirrors. Which is the true Shakespeare, the man who wrote the powerful, violent horror of Titus Andronicus or the creator of A Midsummer Night’s Dream!
The human is an extraordinary mixture of tendencies and strains. And from the time of first young years, certain feelings, certain directions grow stronger, feed their appetite, and begin to hold audience. It is a wondrous thing, both delightful and sometimes frightening, to witness this genesis of growth in the young. And we evolve as a grown person not by advancing all our capacities on an even front, but by the selective development of a few of these and by integrating them into a functioning totality. We are both chemist and crucible in this decision-making process.
If we choose any positive relationship to life, we tacitly accept its hazards and handicaps, its dissonance and harmony. Opposition comes to every man who aspires. Dissonance and consonance are as inseparable as the two sides of a coin; they are ceaseless rhythms in life. But what of the challenges: will they be masked or unmasked; will they come as a whisper or as a clap of thunder; will they inflict mere surface scratches, infected wounds, or mortal blows? And what of our direction: is it determined; is it straight as the pull of a magnet or are we like the ancient God, Janus, with two faces looking in opposite directions? Have we permitted ourselves to be caught in a revolving door? When Alice in Wonderland asked the Cheshire cat which path she should take through the forest, the grinning cat simply replied that it would depend on which way she wanted to go and then added that they all lead somewhere.
It may be the crisis moment that ultimately reveals what we are. Or it may be the “long haul,” calling for infinite patience and tenacity, determining the endurance values by which we live. There are those whose hopes have been broken again and again, but they will manage to find the resiliency to never be “used-up”; they can “take it” and frame new hopes. And does not the strength of caring, of how much we care, does this not signal the inconveniences one will suffer, the risks one will chance? Half-hearted interest did not take an Albert Schweitzer into his jungle hospital and keep him there year after year. Gigantic battles are waged, fought without bow and arrow, Without shield, without helmet, or javelin or cannon, without bayonet or rifle. One can move through the most intense conflicts with serenity. One may hear the command to surrender and yet not give up.
A flower is held before a mirror; the mirror reflects the flower, but has no knowledge of it. And the human eye has no more knowledge, no more awareness, no more consciousness of the flower than the mirror. But our inner eye, our inner reaction to what the physical eye has imaged, projects to the flower its consciousness, its meaning or feeling to us. And this might tell quite a story about the person we are; and what we mean to ourselves.
Every waking moment, consciously or subconsciously, we select, we respond, reject, accept. To live is to be for some things and against others; but always understanding that confusion destroys purpose. We listen, talk, we walk or ride. With each breath we project or reflect the results of inner selections, our emotional roadblocks, our mental foxholes: our choosings, likes or dislikes, our appreciations, loves, sensitivities or insensitivities, our enthusiasms and our beliefs, the impoverishment or richness, the peace or war within our being. All are part of our working-out whole; they are the members of our cast, the ingredients of our recipe, the thoughts, the feelings, our way. In closing lines to one of his poems Robert Frost wrote: “The road diverged in a wood, and I —I took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.”
Stone skeletons, the wrecks of past civilizations, lie scattered in awful silence across the earth’s surface. These human societies declined and fell when inner decay became their disease. As we move closer together, do we grow further apart! Do we forget that one of the greatest needs, yearnings of the human being is a sense of the worthwhileness in living? And it is the quality of self-renewal that builds this sense of worthwhileness. With continual effort opposition becomes a time for growth. Do we wish to merely exist, to vegetate, to become “it-things” —emotional strangers on earth? This earth is our home! Do we turn our backs to its natural world — the natural world with its gifts, its sights, its sounds, its colors and inexhaustable forms, its vast spaces and intricate detail? Have we been as absentees for too long a time from its wonders; have we lost our sense of proportion and developed emotional myopia? Have we lowered our eyes from the hills and mountains? And what if beauty has wings; do we grasp only a feather as she flies by? Does not the sunset allow a star to shine more brightly?
Do we let our heads and hearts and those of our young ones grow away from the earth? It is not the education but the preservation of virgin sensibilities that is vital. Can we still taste from a mountain spring; have we treasured the desire to dream? Anatole France writes, “to know is nothing, to imagine is everything.” Are we in too much of a hurry to pause; are we too in a hurry to share this pause with some young one? We open the pages of The Little Prince: “And a brilliantly lighted express train shook the switchman’s cabin as it rushed by with a roar like thunder. ‘They are in a hurry,’ said the little prince. `What are they looking for?’ `Not even the locomotive engineer knows that,’ said the switchman.” The farmer looks for rain, the fisherman waits for the tides, the sailor watches the stars. Let us discover within ourselves. Inquisitive man must part the curtains; he must seek beyond the evidence; his is the lure over the horizon as his lighted candle reveals more darkness. And the individual who has all the answers; could he be the one who is afraid not to have them? What vistas lie ahead of the words, “I do not know.” One of the most exciting traits of science is an intense desire to overcome its own ignorance.
Frequently, we refer to a beyond: beyond belief, beyond endurance, beyond understanding. But are we not thinking of the outside beyond rather than the beyond within our being? What frustrations result from inner, bottled-up beyonds? Charles Dickens told of such a situation, a Mr. Creakle, a man of undisciplined passion; but he, unfortunately, could not speak above a whisper. The searcher, the discoverer will see beyond a threatening present; he can sense possibilities and moves into each situation with an alive interest. To him life is not a sordid circus, or a comic satire; it is not a playground for hypocrisy or retarded naivete. Cynicism and bitterness have not injected their venomous solutions into his veins. He is not trapped in stifling corridors with no exits. Nor is he “sleeping away the unreturning time.” Within his vision the eye of a needle can be an opening for the longest thread. He is the owner of flexible responses; he is the human being not fighting himself, and he reflects a sound measure of self-trust. A blade of grass pushes through concrete in its journey to reach the sun; the spring crocus reaches upward, cracking a solid crust of winter’s ice. Fabre found a universe hatched by the sunlight in a stagnant pool only a few feet wide.
And what of the boy or girl dreaming alone on the hillside? Must our lostness label them antisocial; must we smother them with the suffocating vocabulary of togetherness? Has the game of the individual been called because of darkness! No — we hear the bird, the tree, the warmth of time, the quality of moonlight — they whisper “this way.” And accolades to Don Quixote, to Cervantes —Quixote is as much a child as his author was a genius, and as much a genius as his creator was a child. O, to scour that rusty suit of armor; to transfigure the country lass into a great lady; 0, to mount that ramshackle steed Rozinante and ride fearlessly into life. Is this not the world of our waking dreams! And is it not the love of life for what it truly is, not what man attempts to squeeze into his stuffy mold? Do we escape the normal undulations of routine; do we lift ourselves above despair! Long ago a wise man said, “The flowers of tomorrow are in the seeds of today.” We stand, now, not in the past, not in the future. The seeds burst with life; we hold a rainbow in our arms; we delay the sunset’s blush for another moment; we shelter the breath of twilight; we touch the rising moon.
Solitude; her hours belong to us; she is the immense stillness; a great tenderness, an at-one-ment, a vast loneliness with no lonely being. Have we both eye and vision: beyond knowledge there must be insight, beyond judgment there must be love. An opened seed joins the wind: a spark from the volcano; a snowflake from the mountain, a heartbeat from the swamp, from the slough of cities, from forgotten towns, a heartbeat from the belly of a ship, from the agony of battlefield.
Columbus wrote in the log of his first voyage across the unknown Atlantic, “This day we sailed on.” Nietzsche exhorts man to get off his knees, to stand on his feet, and then he collapses. Tschaikovsky says, “I’m sick again” and writes a symphony; Wagner grabs his stomach in pain and composes Parsival; Renoir, hands crippled by arthritis, has a brush strapped to his arm and paints some of his finest canvases. And what of Lincoln: in the mixed shame and blame of two clashing civilizations, often with nothing to say, he said nothing; frequently, he slept not at all and on occasions he was seen to weep but in a way that made weeping appropriate, decent, majestic.
Wait! a miracle: a woman alone in her tiny home and blind for twenty years suddenly regains her sight. The joy nearly overwhelms her; the colors, the rooms, the furniture, the world she has never seen, she must share this, tell it to all. Her grown daughter walks through the front door. The mother, her unblinded eyes filled with tears, says, “Darling, I see you.”
Again a whisper — come lead the way: it is the music of daybreak; it is the pageant of the seasons; it is gentle rain falling through the leaves; it is the fresh morning dew spreading silver over the fields. We feel the mystery; some seals cannot be broken. Man’s will for hope. We look above the electric lights, above the neon tubes, and see the stars.
