January 17 2014
LIVING WITH
INSANITY
A Presentation by
Ashleigh Brilliant
Co-Sponsored by
Santa Barbara City College and the Council for Self-Esteem
© Ashleigh
Brilliant 2014
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I’m very happy to be invited here today by the Self-Esteem
Council, because although speaking in public is said to be a very fearful
experience to many people, just being asked to do so is calculated to
boost anyone’s own self-esteem, especially if the circumstances are such as to
make it seem like some kind of honor.
I will therefore gloss over the fact that after all these years in which
so many genuine local dignitaries have preceded me in addressing this
group, it might be said that you are now scraping the bottom of the barrel.
With that in mind, however, I can only hope that when I’ve
finished, your thoughts about this speech won’t resemble the comment made by the
great Dr. Samuel Johnson when he was rejecting some no doubt unsolicited
manuscript: “Dear Sir, Your work is
both good and original. But the
parts that are original are not good, and the parts that are good are not
original.”
Anyway, we might as well get the Self-Esteem part of this
presentation out of the way, before we attack today’s main subject, which is
Insanity. So here are a few pieces of my work, looking at Self-Esteem from
different angles.
SELF-ESTEEM POT-SHOTS
5562_I'm human, mortal, and fallible, but, within those limits, I can be
boundlessly wonderful.
6454_The more I learn about other people, the more I like myself.
6813_There's only one person in the world who can give you self-esteem.
7025_How to keep me happy could take you a lifetime to learn, and still be worth
it.
7065_My life is a story of triumph -- it's about all the things that have
triumphed over me.
7079_One reason I trust myself is that I'm always here when I need me.
7103_I want to be loved for what I am -- not in spite of what I am.
7402_My self-esteem, though heavily fortified, is still vulnerable to a direct
hit.
7722_Having no respect for myself is all the more reason why I need some respect
from you.
8882_Only one person in the world can have a good self-image of me.
Now on with our main topic.
The title I have chosen for this talk today is: “LIVING WITH INSANITY.”
You may ask “What does insanity have to
do with self-esteem?” In answer,
let me just refer you to the nearest madhouse.
Such places are now called “mental health facilities” and “psycho wards,”
and as it happens, there’s one just down the street, at Cottage Hospital, where
I myself have spent a little time. In
these institutions you will find about half the inmates suffering from too
little self-esteem, and the other half from too much.
I need hardly
remind you that our culture is rich with stories of people afflicted with
madness. Our History and Literature
are, so to speak, chock full of nuts.
Everywhere you look, nutty people are doing nutty things.
My wife Dorothy (whom I dearly love, but who surely merits her own
special niche in the Nutty Hall of Fame) just recently finished having me read
to her a deservedly famous novel, by Charlotte Bronte, called “Jane Eyre.”
If you’ve read it, you probably recall
that one of its big mysteries concerns the top floor of the large house to which
our heroine, Jane, has come as a governess.
Only gradually do we learn that the inhabitant of that isolated and
forbidden space is a raving lunatic of the worst and most dangerous sort – one
who periodically escapes from her confinement to do very nasty things, such as
setting people’s beds on fire. Then
comes the kicker: This murderous
madwoman is none other than the legal wife of Mr. Rochester himself, the owner
of the house and the employer of Jane Eyre, who, before she discovers any of
this, has fallen madly in love with him, and is in fact about to marry him.
But that’s only the beginning of the craziness.
This wife, we learn, did not go insane just recently, but ten years
earlier -- and not in England, where the story is set, but in the West Indies,
where Rochester had met and married her.
Then she went crazy, and only THEN, (if you can believe this) did
he decide to bring her back with him to England.
(I can’t even imagine – and Charlotte Bronte doesn’t tell us -- what a
long voyage with that deranged woman in a sailing ship would have been like).
And Rochester has kept her locked up and hidden away in his house ever
since.
But wait, there’s more!
This wealthy Mr. Rochester is just as ga-ga over Jane Eyre as she is over
him. He wants her to go off with
him somewhere, anywhere, and live together happily ever after -- and he makes
this proposition extremely attractive, especially for a girl who, up to this
point in her young life, has had, to put it mildly, a very rough time of it.
But Jane herself has insane moral scruples.
Happiness be damned!
This after all is the Victorian Age.
Edward Rochester has a living wife.
Never mind anything else.
Jane is so afraid of yielding to his tempting but totally sinful offer that she
runs off, penniless, in the middle of the night, only to endure a series of most
ghastly hardships.
I won’t burden you here with any more details of this
particular mishmash of madness. My
point – in case you don’t already find it crystal clear – is that like poor Mr.
Rochester, we are all, in some way, or often in many ways, living with insanity.
But it’s not always obvious just who belongs on which side
of the loony-bin walls. Did you
know, for example, that Richard Feynman, the physicist, and probably one of the
finest minds our society has produced, was rejected for military service by a
board of Army psychiatrists? And
this was a man who had already been one of the scientists who produced the
atomic bomb!
But before going any further into this mental morass, the
word “insanity” has little meaning unless we can come to some agreement about
the meaning of SANITY itself. We
all know that it has to do with health, just like all those other health words
such as SANitation, SANitarium, and of course SANta Barbara.
Remember that Latin slogan, which used to be inscribed over college
entrances in the days when educated people could still understand Latin: “MENS
SANA IN CORPORE SANO,” – which means “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”
But what exactly is a healthy mind?”
Surely there must be some kind of widely recognized test to establish
whether or not a person is sane.
Well if you think you can easily find any type of reliable
answers just by looking up “sanity tests” on Google, I'm afraid you've got
another think coming. I gave it a serious try, but none of the tests I could
find seemed at all legitimate, and some are obviously just meant to be funny.
One thing I did learn from Google is that the word
"sanity," appears to have been hijacked by computer people, like so many other
formerly innocent expressions, such as "mouse" and "cookie." “Sanity” now has a
very specialized meaning to programmers, quite different from our ordinary usage
of the term. It has to do with the
way computer programs calculate.
But maybe that’s not really such a stretch, considering how the human mind seems
to be in the process of becoming increasingly inseparable from the computers
which it created. I’m sure we all
remember HAL, the super-computer in the movie “2001” who actually does go crazy,
and turns against his masters while he and they are all traveling in outer
space. Total disaster is averted only when somebody manages to pull HAL’s plug,
causing his mind, before our very eyes and ears, to succumb to something like a
computer version of Alzheimer’s.
The last we hear of HAL, he has lost all his intelligence (dare I say his
“sanity”?) and is babbling nursery rhymes.
But we still need some simple straightforward means of
dividing the sane from the insane.
Otherwise there’s no telling how much crazier our society would be than it
already is. Take our military for
example. We can’t have insane
people fighting our wars, can we?
-- even if the wars themselves are insane. That’s why people who’ve been drafted
into the army against their will often quite understandably try to get out of
it, by giving the impression that
they’ve gone off their rockers.
Most of us, I’m sure, remember Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” in which anyone
trying to get out of flying combat missions by being found insane is considered
to be thereby proving that he really is sane, since only a crazy person would
willingly go on such missions.
And long before I read “Catch-22,” I heard another story,
about a recent draftee who started behaving very strangely, going around,
picking up every piece of paper he saw on the ground.
He would hold the paper, stand and stare at it, then shake his head and
throw it away, saying “That’s not it!”
Then he’d go and find another piece, saying “That’s not it,” “That’s not
it” over and over again. This went
on for weeks, until eventually, the army doctors decided to recommend him for a
medical discharge. When the
discharge paper finally came, he took one look at it, and leaped in the air,
shouting “That’s it! That’s it!”
But we still have to get at the roots of this problem of
sanity. When people are not sure
about your mental condition, what are the first questions they usually ask?
I know, because this actually happened to me just three years ago, after
I was hit by a car while crossing one of our peaceful local streets.
Besides a broken leg and a mangled gut, my head was one of my parts that
got banged up. A lady who evidently
specializes in mental assessment, was sent to my bedside, where she started by
asking things like “Do you know your name?” “Do you know where you are?” “What
year is it?” “Who is the current president?”
Fortunately I had no problem with any of these questions.
But of course a person could get all the answers to such penetrating
brain-teasers right, and still be nutty as a fruitcake.
But don’t think I’m not aware of all the psycho-jargon
labels which a whole mob of psychiatrists and psychologists now stick
haphazardly on many of us: -- labels like “schizophrenia,” “bipolar,”
“psychotic,” “dementia,” and a whole melange of manias. What bothers me is that
there’s no room left in the medical literature any more for just calling
somebody plain CRAZY.
In the old days, it used to be pretty clear who belonged in
the booby-hatch, and who didn’t.
One sign that you had a screw loose was if you kept hearing voices in your head.
There was of course that celebrated case of a certain young French
peasant girl known as Joan of Arc, who claimed that she heard voices telling her
to go and save France. As you may
recall, that was just exactly what she went out and did.
And after she had saved France, her grateful countrymen burned her as a
witch. Now they worship her
as a saint. How sane is any of that?
Then there’s our old friend the Mad Hatter.
Yes, it’s true that people who made hats did sometimes behave very
strangely -- and we can’t blame it all on “Alice In Wonderland.”
There actually was a certain kind of madness which particularly afflicted
hat-makers. It seems that inhaling the
fumes given off by mercury can actually cause people to behave in bizarre
ways. And mercury was for many
years used in the making of felt hats. Of
course this wasn’t the only new mental illness we can attribute to the glorious
Industrial Revolution. One of my
personal favorites was called “Phossy Jaw” a horrible disease affecting the
bones as well as the mind, caused by the phosphorus used in making matches.
Another famous mad person was actually a king of England –
George the Third. He’s best known
for losing the American Colonies – but he accomplished that heroic deed while he
was still sane. Among the things he
did after he went mad was to become the longest-reigning King of England.
By 1810 he had completely lost his marbles, but he stayed officially king
until 1820. This gave him a total
of nearly 60 years on the throne – a record that was beaten only by Queen
Victoria. I personally can never forgive George III for that, because it was the
answer to a question on a radio quiz show I was once on: “Which king of
England had the longest reign?”
Getting it wrong cost me $1000. So you can see I have good reasons of my own for
being mad at that mad king.
But nowadays we all hear voices –.
They come from all kinds of pads, pods, smart phones, and other devilish
devices that we carry around with us.
And at the same time OURS are the voices being heard in other people’s
heads! Actually, of all the changes in
my lifetime, the hardest for me to get used to has been the bizarre sight of
people walking around, apparently talking to themselves.
But that’s only a small part of the madness this whole
world seems to be caught up in.
What person in his or her right mind today would not feel
that war and mass killing are insane?
But these human activities, which should have gone out with the stone
age, are now almost considered an art form. And
don’t even get me started on art and insanity.
Never mind what we all know about poor old Van Gogh.
A visit to any display of modern art will surely convince you that today
anything goes if you call it art.
Then at the same time, look what has happened to
religion. It used to be OK to
die for your beliefs – That was crazy enough.
But now it hardly counts, unless you take as many other people as
possible with you, preferably innocent people whom you don’t know, and who have
nothing whatever to do with your particular issue.
What’s really insane is that we no longer even call such
conduct crazy. It has become a new
normal. We dare not stigmatize suicide
bombers as lunatics – the worst we can say about them is that they are
“fanatics” or misguided religious zealots.
They have their own rationale for mass murder, and who is to say that
blowing yourself up on behalf of a cause you really believe in is not as logical
as getting yourself marked for life with tattoos, or jumping out of airplanes
for fun, or listening to amplified music until you go deaf?
But what right have I to harangue you on these weighty
matters? If I’m going to talk about
insanity, you need to know my credentials.
It’s time for me to get up close and personal, to take the gloves off,
and start hitting myself in the only place where it really counts – below the
belt.
Let’s start with a few facts.
First, to answer the first question I always get asked:
Yes, Ashleigh Brilliant is my real name.
As of last December 9, I’m eighty years old, which means I was born in
1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt both came to power.
I was also born – just in case this may have some significance -- in the very
same month that Prohibition, which had lasted for 12 years, came to an end in
the United States. As it happened,
Hitler and Roosevelt both also kicked their respective buckets twelve years
later in 1945, when I was 12 years old.
So I spent my childhood being quite sure of the answer to what must
surely be life’s most important question -- especially if you come in in the
middle of the picture, as in fact we all do --: Who are the Good Guys and who
are the Bad Guys? On this splendid
ethical and intellectual foundation I base my own claim to have been of sound
mind, at least up to the age of 12.
The only question is, what went wrong between 12 and 80?
Let me say that matters were definitely complicated by the
fact I was born both British and Jewish.
But that could only have had a positive effect on my mental health.
After all, everybody knew that God was an Englishman, and that the Jews
were God’s Chosen People.
But after I was 12, I’m sorry to say – after my wartime
heroes and villains were all gone -- the
world for me started to become a little less safe and sane, and a lot harder to
figure out. I had been safe because
my family had spent the wartime years on this side of the Atlantic.
But when the war was over, my father’s British government job took us all
back over there, to a land of ruins, rationing, and rain.
We had a house in Edgware, a far northwest suburb of London, but nothing
for me was ever again quite so secure or certain – or sane.
For one thing, our glorious Russian allies soon somehow
became our evil Cold War adversaries, who now had what used to be exclusively
OUR atom bomb. Meanwhile our former
enemies, the Germans and Japanese, who had respectively slaughtered Jews, and
cut off the heads of captured Americans, became our good friends who made clever
cameras and cute cars, and in the process grew very prosperous.
But the promise of a true world of Peace, which we children had been told
would be our heritage -- because that, after all, was what our parents were
fighting for -- turned into a hollow joke.
Almost before I knew it, I myself was of age to be conscripted into the
British Army. What helped me to
avoid that fate was the fact that, in the middle of my college career at the
University of London, I went a little crazy.
(In those days it was called a nervous breakdown.)
I never did actually get drafted, so I didn’t reach the point of having
to go around picking up pieces of paper and saying “That’s not it!”
Instead, I did actually, then and later, pick up some other
papers saying I was a Bachelor of Arts and then a Master of Arts, and finally a
Doctor of Philosophy – but I never found out what any of that meant.
Anyway, just to be on the safe side, I left Britain altogether in 1955,
crossed the Atlantic once again, and eventually became an American – not without
some difficulty because I had forgotten to switch sides when everybody else did.
I still thought of the Russians as good people, and actually had the
nerve to visit their country, which caused my U.S. citizenship to be delayed for
about 9 years.
But here in America, it was a whole new ball game – quite
literally, since nobody knew a thing about cricket.
For one thing, I found that I could live
quite comfortably on what other people threw away.
I also found that Americans are crazy about GUNS – so crazy that I dare
not ever reveal my own feelings on this subject for fear of being shot by
somebody. And I found that it was a
greater crime to partake of certain harmless substances than to commit real
offenses like bothering your neighbors with leaf-blowers, or throwing litter
carelessly on the ground for somebody else to pick up, or polluting your
neighborhood with graffiti.
In fact I found this whole society so insane that I was
able to make an entire career out of simply writing crazy expressions and
selling them -- first on postcards, then in newspapers and books, on Tshirts,
tote-bags, and any other appropriate surface.
One of the first postcards I ever published, back in 1967, was a
beautiful expression of insanity – and a total put-down of the whole idea of
self-esteem. It says “WAIT! COME
BACK! – THERE’S A PART OF MY FACE YOU HAVEN’T STEPPED ON YET!”
But that message also exemplifies the relationship between
insanity and LOVE – a connection I’m sure we’re all familiar with, and not just
from expressions like “I’m crazy about you.”
I wrote it when I was trying to recover from a love affair which I knew
was really over, but which I kept trying to revive, and as a result kept getting
slapped down. I think somebody once defined insanity as doing the same thing
over and over, but expecting a different result.
Yet strangely enough there are those who suffer from other
types of insanity which come about not through feeling too strongly,
about love or anything else, but through not feeling enough at all --
especially not relating enough to the feelings of other people, and therefore
often doing nasty things without any sense of guilt, shame, or remorse.
These are the so-called “Psychopaths” so popular with our crime novelists
and movie-makers.
But wait!
There’s more! In fact, the line I
just quoted about getting your face stepped on is only number 3 of a series of
more or less insane expressions I wrote and published, which now total Ten
Thousand.
Anyway, for those of you who for some inexcusable reason
are not yet at all familiar with my work, let me give you a random sampling of
the kind of screwball utterances I’m talking about, which I’ve been churning out
for about the last 40 years:
CRAZY POT-SHOTS
0003 Wait!
Come back! There’s a part of my
face you haven’t stepped on yet!
0028_Only 30 more nothings until the big nothing!
0116_Before burning these papers, let me make sure they're
in alphabetical order.
1865_I'm so tired of everybody believing in me!
2455_Something about me must give lasting satisfaction,
because I’m very rarely asked to come again.
2658_Somewhere there ought to be a club for anti-social
people.
4634_How distressing! I can't remember whether or not I’m
satisfied.
4898_Now is the time to do everything!
5498_Fortunately, the news of our defeat didn't arrive
until after we'd held our victory parade.
7335_In the international cheating competition, I scored
eleven out of a possible ten.
I hope you’ll agree that some of those Brilliant Thoughts
are pretty crazy. But besides
writing crazy thoughts, I do also write comparatively sane thoughts on the
subject of insanity. So here
are a few examples of those:
POT-SHOTS ABOUT INSANITY
0951_It's good to know that, if I behave strangely enough,
society will take full responsibility for me.
0958_How can I prove I’m not crazy to people who are?
1794_It's only by appearing to be sane that I can keep a
firm grip on my madness.
2491_There never was any insanity in my family, until I got
married.
5291_It shouldn't have been necessary to go crazy in order
to give meaning to my life.
6279_Losing your mind can be less painful than watching
somebody else lose theirs.
7054_Here's a good recipe for insanity:
keep trying to answer questions which you know are unanswerable.
7058_Think too little, and people will call you stupid --
think too much, and they'll call you crazy.
9331_People who act as if nothing matters are usually
considered insane (although they may actually be right).
4701_Once we fall asleep, we all become insane.
That last one is a good reminder that DREAMING is a form of
insanity which most of us suffer from.
Psychiatrists actually define a “PSYCHOSIS” as a loss of contact with
reality – which of course is exactly what dreaming is all about.
And yet paradoxically –and isn’t this crazy?--
dreaming is considered an important part
of good mental health!
But getting back to my own life and career:
I didn’t start out as a writer of very short expressions.
(Just for the record, the technical term is epigrams -- in my case they
are limited to a maximum of 17 words.
And I am officially the world’s only known full-time professional
EPIGRAMMATIST.) After spending four
years at Berkeley, I began my brief but exciting adventures in the academic
world as a teacher, first on dry land, at a small college in Oregon, then on
board a converted cruise ship, a so-called “Floating University,” sailing twice
around the world, for 3 ½ months on each voyage.
As you can perhaps imagine, there was something pleasantly
crazy for me as a very single young man, about being paid to take world cruises
with a shipload of mostly nubile young women – and
it was all under the auspices of a supposedly Christian institution then
called Chapman College, (it’s now Chapman University) based in Orange County,
the notoriously conservative heart of Southern California. I wish I could tell
you that I took full advantage of this situation – but the most I dare say, with
my wife sitting here among you, is that it was there on that ship that she and I
actually met.
One crazy thing I did on those voyages, besides pretending
to be a teacher, was to write songs about the places we visited, and perform
them at various shows we had on board.
As a sample, here’s a song I wrote about our visit to
Malaysia. First, just a few facts to
help you understand it:
After leaving what was then still called Bombay in India,
where some of us had bad reactions to the local food, we docked in a place
called Port Swettenham (naturally nicknamed Port Sweat), and were driven to the
capital city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, (familiarly known as KL). There the
students particularly enjoyed congregating downtown around the famous Merlin
Hotel, and were also delighted to discover an actual A & W Root Beer stand.
One day, we were all required to attend a special reception, in the new
air-conditioned Parliament building.
This was really crazy because alcohol was a no-no on our ship, but it was
a big feature of the reception, where of course we were all expected to be
polite and follow the local customs. So all these elements got put together in
my Kuala Lumpur song, whose tune [“Oklahoma”] I’m sure you’ll recognize:
Because it’s
Ku-u-u-ala Lumpur, where the sticky heat may trouble you,
But it beats Bombay
‘cause the food’s OK, and the Root Beer’s A and W!
Oh yes it’s
K-u-u-u-ala Lumpur, with its brand-new Parliament so cool,
Though the drinks
flow free, it’s compulsory! What a
groovy way to go to school!
Well I think that
Malaysia is swell, from Port Sweat to the Merlin Hotel,
And I love
Ku-u-u-u-ala Lumpur, dear old Ku-u-u-ala Lumpur,
In all Asia, you
can’t beat Malaysia,
Kuala Lumpur – K.L!
That was the best teaching job I ever had – or could ever
hope to have. Unfortunately,
however, it was not the sort of thing you could go on and on doing indefinitely.
But once you had been round the world a couple of times, where else was
there to go? I had to find a new
career – in fact, I needed to completely reinvent myself.
By good fortune, this happened to be the very best time for making such
an attempt. It was 1967, the year
of the celebrated Summer of Love, the heyday of the hippie movement.
I soon found myself at its heart, in San
Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, playing the role of a sort of mock-guru.
It was then that I began reciting and publishing the seemingly endless
series of inspired utterances which I called Pot-Shots, and which I somehow
eventually built into a whole career.
But I was also still writing songs, this time about all the
strange things I saw happening around me in that insane hippie environment,
which was largely driven by mind-altering drugs, in particular by LSD – a drug
which, as you may know, was originally a focus of scientific attention, because
it was thought to reproduce the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Here’s an example of one of those songs, which I called
“TOOK A LITTLE TRIP.’ You may
recognize the tune. In Harry
Belafonte’s version he “Left a Little Girl in Kingston Town:”
In the State by the
Golden Gate, there’s a lovely city with a street named Haight.
People see where
there’s liberty, and they never want to leave Haight-Ashbury.
And I’m glad to say,
I’m here to stay – happiness has come my way,
My mind is open, and
my heart is free,
Since I took a
little trip on LSD.
It’s too soon to
embrace the Moon, but the Earth’s delightful in the afternoon.
You could hate the
world and seek Heaven above –
But when you’re in
Haight-Ashbury, Haight means Love.
So I’m glad to say,
I’m here to stay – happiness has come my way,
My mind is open, and
my heart is free,
Since I took a
little trip on LSD.
But of course, LSD was not the only mind-altering material
in circulation which produced a sort of temporary insanity.
There was one other which has never lost its popularity -- and not only
with the younger generation. I
celebrated it in this next song, using an old melody which I hope you remember
as “My Grandfather’s Clock.” My version
is called “MY GRANDFATHER’S POT,” and you may even consider it something of a
cautionary tale:
My Grandfather’s pot
was too hot for the shelf –
It was kept in a
hole in the floor.
And when Granny and
he had a smoke with their tea,
They would lock
every window and door.
For they trembled
with fright that their clandestine delight
Would scandalize all
of the town –
So they died, high,
too afraid to cry,
When the house
burned down.
Ninety years timid
turning-on, pity-pot, pity-pot,
Their home brightly
burning on, pity-pot, pity-pot,
They died high, too
afraid to cry,
When the house
burned down.
So how on earth did I finish up in Santa Barbara?
Obviously, any sane person with my talents and background would have gone
to Hollywood or New York or back to London – someplace where my genius could be
fully recognized and appreciated. But my
wife wanted to be near her mother and her aunts, who were getting on in years.
That whole family had been living here for generations, and Dorothy has
always had a fondness for taking care of old people. So we came here to Santa
Barbara, where there are always plenty of elderly, -- a group of whom we
ourselves have somehow now become members.
But of course that’s not the whole story.
I’m a sucker for a pleasant climate and attractive scenery, and it was
really just as easy to propagate my insane messages from here as from anywhere
else. And since that didn’t take
too much of my time, I soon found myself getting involved in local politics, and
actually ran twice for City Council.
The first time, I conducted my entire campaign in song, and
I can’t resist this opportunity to share some of that craziness with you.
There were 4 seats open on the Council, and a large field of candidates,
so to make things easier for the voters, I wrote a song, which I performed at
every candidates’ forum, telling everybody just how to cast their ballots:
“Who should I vote
for?” – your answer should be
Reynolds and Conklin
and Miller and Me –
Who’ll save our
town? Well, we all must agree,
It’s Reynolds and
Conklin and Miller and Me.
You can expect us,
if you will elect us,
To love and protect
from the hills to the sea –
It means better
living, when trust you are giving
To Reynolds and
Conklin and Miller and Me!
But wait!
That’s not all! I then wrote a
play, which was actually performed locally.
I called it “Begetting” and it was set in a place very much like Santa
Barbara. A main theme was the
conflict between those who were in favor of population growth in our community,
and those against. At that time,
there was a proposition on our local ballot to limit growth, and I actually put
a song about it into the play [to the tune of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing!]
Proposition A must
pass – help to keep our City small!
Fight the concrete –
save the grass! – Never let our standards fall.
Santa Barbara’s life
is beauty – help to save her – it’s your duty!
Learn the lesson of
L.A. – she grew from Small to Smell today.
Keep the good life
here to stay – YES on Proposition A!
Well, I didn’t win the election, but Reynolds, Conklin, and
Miller did – and Proposition A actually did pass – so just as the voices heard
by Joan of Arc helped her to save France, my voice may have helped save Santa
Barbara.
I did run again for City Council, some years later – and
that second effort may have been the least crazy thing I have ever done.
It was tied in with a campaign to get a ban on gas-powered leaf-blowers –
and this time the insanity was all on the side of my opponents – those who could
see no harm in making noise, blowing dirt, and spreading pollution.
We actually did win the election and got a ban passed – but insanity is
not defeated so easily. Sadly -–
and madly -- you will still often see and hear those monstrosities in use around
our town, if only to prove how crazy the world still is.
Still, that was some kind of a triumph – and I wish there
were a whole parade of other triumphs in my life with which I could regale you
in this rare opportunity to publicly puff up my self-esteem. But the truth is
that most of the things I’ve ever really wanted I’ve somehow failed to get.
When I was at school in England, my big dream was to get admitted to one
of the prestige universities, Oxford or Cambridge.
I tried very hard – even took Latin, which was a requirement for
admission to those institutions in those days – but I never made it -- which may
have had something to do with that “nervous breakdown” I told you about.
Then more recently, believe it or not, my great ambition was to be chosen
as the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, a paid position which actually exists,
and for which, when it became available, I applied in vain, after twisting the
arms of numerous supposedly influential people to get them to write letters of
recommendation in my behalf.
Why did it mean so much to me?
Because, unless you count this notable if belated honor today, I have
received amazingly little recognition from my own community.
How much less likely then that I will ever receive what I
have always said is my ultimate goal – the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Actually that is a good reason for staying alive (and I must admit I
often feel I need one), because Nobel Prizes are awarded only to people who are
still living -- (unlike our coins
and stamps, which you have to be dead to appear on.)
So far, however, although there have been many Nobel awards for novels,
drama, short stories, and even poetry, that eminent Committee hasn’t yet gotten
around to recognizing the Epigram as a prize-worthy form of literature.
But let’s not blame just the Nobel people. Even the
Pulitzers have failed to cast an eye in my direction.
In fact, so far the only legitimate paid award I have ever received (and
alas I am not getting paid anything even for today’s dazzling performance) was
back in 1987 from an obscure committee in Kansas City, who made me that year’s
recipient of the Bragg Award for Humanism in the Arts.
I was never even sure what that meant, but it was worth $2000, and a free
trip to Kansas City for me and Dorothy to accept the prize.
There are of course many other kinds of recognition – but
so far I have never even made it onto network TV.
It’s true that CNN and A&E have taken some notice of me, and I actually
was once featured in PEOPLE magazine, to say nothing of the London Times
Literary Supplement, and -- I kid you not – the front page of the Wall Street
Journal. – But what should all
that, or any of that, matter to a person who is secure and confident in his own
self-esteem?
We all know that fame is fleeting.
What really matters is not what other people think of you, but what you
think of yourself. But that can
work in both directions -- and worrying too much about it from any direction can
bring us back to insanity again.
The craziest people in the world are those who care too little or too much about
the opinions of other people – or, for that matter, about anything else.
So what is the answer?
For that matter, what was the question?
I think the most important question at this point is how do I end this
speech, and get out of this place alive?
If you can stand it, I’m going to finish up with another hippy song,
which in a way has become my theme-song.
It’s called THE HAIGH-ASHBURY FAREWELL, and was actually the last
offering in my “Haight-Ashbury Songbook.”
My excuse for
winding up with it here is that it’s really all about what is identified in the
very last line of the song as “the world in your head.”
At the time I wrote it, some of the people who had come to San Francisco
attracted by the Hippie phenomenon knew they had found what they were looking
for -- and the song is written from their point of view.
But others were leaving, feeling that there were more important things
going on in the world, which they wanted to be part of, such as the Vietnam War
Protests and the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
It was, if you like, just one more conflict between sanity and insanity –
but as to which was which, I’ll leave the final judgment to you.
In any case, I’m sure you’ll recognize
the melody, of “Red River Valley” – so please feel free to join in the chorus:
From this City they say you are going
I am sorry you feel you must flee
But remember your friends who were hippies
And stayed in the Haight-Ashbury.
Chorus: So come sit in the park one more
hour
It was here you first opened your mind
And in friendship I'll give you a flower
To remind you of love left behind.
Oh I hear you've been talking of
Justice
Of improving the world and all men,
But I tell you, that road is a circle
Leading back to yourself once again.
If you love this old world and wish
truly
To improve it before you are dead
You don't have to press others unduly -
Better start with the world in your head. ##