posted February 19, 2008 04:28 PM            

When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.
~ Henri Nouwen (author of "The Way of The Heart")

A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good,
and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad.
~ Arnold H. Glasgow

A friend is the one who comes in
when the whole world has gone out.
~Grace Pulpit

A true friend is one who thinks you are a good egg
even if you are half-cracked.
~ Author Unknown

It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
~ Marlene Dietrich

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo,
but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
~ Oprah Winfrey

A single rose can be my garden...
a single friend, my world.
~ Leo Buscaglia

Soul-mates are people who bring out the best in you.
They are not perfect but are always perfect for you.
~ Author Unknown

The most beautiful discovery true friends make
is that they can grow separately without growing apart.
~ Elisabeth Foley

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. "Pooh!" he whispered.
"Yes, Piglet?" "Nothing," said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw.
"I just wanted to be sure of you."
~ A.A. Milne

I felt it shelter to speak to you.
~ Emily Dickinson

"Some people go to priests;
others to poetry; I to my friends."
~ Virginia Woolf

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy,
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
~ Marcel Proust

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
~ Toni Morrison, Beloved

Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check her diary when we arrange to meet.
~ Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, 1992

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
~ Katherine Mansfield

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
~Dinah Craik

"I need an easy friend."
~ Kurt Cobain

posted February 19, 2008 04:32 PM            

I've spent the day however, (as the office is quite quiet today) digging through our little Yellow Wax section...

And yup. Love you, man. It's quite strange, must be our Uranian insanity and quest for the complete opposite of what is 'in fashion'... but I get you, in a way.

Member dis? http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum17/HTML/001486.html

And this, well, it just is.. relevant.
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum17/HTML/000645.html

Hope today was better than yesterday....

posted February 19, 2008 04:34 PM              

quote:

---

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
~ Toni Morrison, Beloved

---

one of my all-time favorite quotes in the world. so beautiful.

posted February 19, 2008 08:21 PM              

How can I think I can help fix others when I can't even fix myself?

posted February 19, 2008 08:51 PM            

You and me both, kid.

Listen, dont take anything I say to heart,
I'm just a grouchy curmudgeon these days anyway.

I'm not an easy person to help.

You should practice on someone easier.

I hope you feel better,
sorry I've been so touchy.
It wasnt really directed at anybody in particular.
I've just been emotional and not thinking too clearly.

You are a wonderful light here.
The world needs your compassion.

posted February 19, 2008 09:22 PM              

Or the world needs more cake?

Gosh, we're a right bunch, aren't we?

"Variety is the spice of life".

posted February 19, 2008 09:25 PM              

''BELOVED'' is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ''Beloved'' will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser.

In ''Beloved,'' Ms. Morrison turns away from the contemporary scene that has been her concern of late. This new novel is set after the end of the Civil War, during the period of so-called Reconstruction, when a great deal of random violence was let loose upon blacks, both the slaves freed by Emancipation and others who had been given or had bought their freedom earlier. But there are flashbacks to a more distant period, when slavery was still a going concern in the South and the seeds for the bizarre and calamitous events of the novel were sown. The setting is similarly divided: the countryside near Cincinnati, where the central characters have ended up, and a slave-holding plantation in Kentucky, ironically named Sweet Home, from which they fled 18 years before the novel opens.

There are many stories and voices in this novel, but the central one belongs to Sethe, a woman in her mid-30's, who is living in an Ohio farmhouse with her daughter, Denver, and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs. ''Beloved'' is such a unified novel that it's difficult to discuss it without giving away the plot, but it must be said at the outset that it is, among other things, a ghost story, for the farmhouse is also home to a sad, malicious and angry ghost, the spirit of Sethe's baby daughter, who had her throat cut under appalling circumstances 18 years before, when she was 2. We never know this child's full name, but we - and Sethe - think of her as Beloved, because that is what is on her tombstone. Sethe wanted ''Dearly Beloved,'' from the funeral service, but had only enough strength to pay for one word. Payment was 10 minutes of sex with the tombstone engraver. This act, which is recounted early in the novel, is a keynote for the whole book: in the world of slavery and poverty, where human beings are merchandise, everything has its price, and price is tyrannical.

''Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage?,'' Sethe thinks, but it does; breaking mirrors, making tiny handprints in cake icing, smashing dishes and manifesting itself in pools of blood-red light. As the novel opens, the ghost is in full possession of the house, having driven away Sethe's two young sons. Old Baby Suggs, after a lifetime of slavery and a brief respite of freedom - purchased for her by the Sunday labor of her son Halle, Sethe's husband -has given up and died. Sethe lives with her memories, almost all of them bad. Denver, her teen-age daughter, courts the baby ghost because, since her family has been ostracized by the neighbors, she doesn't have anyone else to play with.

The supernatural element is treated, not in an ''Amityville Horror,'' watch-me-make-your-flesh-creep mode, but with magnificent practicality, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw in ''Wuthering Heights.'' All the main characters in the book believe in ghosts, so it's merely natural for this one to be there. As Baby Suggs says, ''Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky.'' In fact, Sethe would rather have the ghost there than not there. It is, after all, her adored child, and any sign of it is better, for her, than nothing.

This grotesque domestic equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of Paul D., one of the ''Sweet Home men'' from Sethe's past. The Sweet Home men were the male slaves of the establishment. Their owner, Mr. Garner, is no Simon Legree; instead he's a best-case slave-holder, treating his ''property'' well, trusting them, allowing them choice in the running of his small plantation, and, calling them ''men'' in defiance of the neighbors, who want all male blacks to be called ''boys.'' But Mr. Garner dies, and weak, sickly Mrs. Garner brings in her handiest male relative, who is known as ''the schoolteacher.'' This Goebbels-like paragon combines viciousness with intellectual pretensions; he's a sort of master-race proponent who measures the heads of the slaves and tabulates the results to demonstrate that they are more like animals than people. Accompanying him are his two sadistic and repulsive nephews. From there it's all downhill at Sweet Home, as the slaves try to escape, go crazy or are murdered. Sethe, in a trek that makes the ice-floe scene in ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' look like a stroll around the block, gets out, just barely; her husband, Halle, doesn't. Paul D. does, but has some very unpleasant adventures along the way, including a literally nauseating sojourn in a 19th-century Georgia chain gang.

THROUGH the different voices and memories of the book, including that of Sethe's mother, a survivor of the infamous slave-ship crossing, we experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange, both at its best - which wasn't very good - and at its worst, which was as bad as can be imagined. Above all, it is seen as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised. The slaves are motherless, fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children, their kin. It is a world in which people suddenly vanish and are never seen again, not through accident or covert operation or terrorism, but as a matter of everyday legal policy.

Slavery is also presented to us as a paradigm of how most people behave when they are given absolute power over other people. The first effect, of course, is that they start believing in their own superiority and justifying their actions by it. The second effect is that they make a cult of the inferiority of those they subjugate. It's no coincidence that the first of the deadly sins, from which all the others were supposed to stem, is Pride, a sin of which Sethe is, incidentally, also accused.

In a novel that abounds in black bodies - headless, hanging from trees, frying to a crisp, locked in woodsheds for purposes of rape, or floating downstream drowned - it isn't surprising that the ''whitepeople,'' especially the men, don't come off too well. Horrified black children see whites as men ''without skin.'' Sethe thinks of them as having ''mossy teeth'' and is ready,if necessary, to bite off their faces, and worse, to avoid further mossy-toothed outrages. There are a few whites who behave with something approaching decency. There's Amy, the young runaway indentured servant who helps Sethe in childbirth during her flight to freedom, and incidentally reminds the reader that the 19th century, with its child labor, wage slavery and widespread and accepted domestic violence, wasn't tough only for blacks, but for all but the most privileged whites as well. There are also the abolitionists who help Baby Suggs find a house and a job after she is freed. But even the decency of these ''good'' whitepeople has a grudging side to it, and even they have trouble seeing the people they are helping as full-fledged people, though to show them as totally free of their xenophobia and sense of superiority might well have been anachronistic.

Toni Morrison is careful not to make all the whites awful and all the blacks wonderful. Sethe's black neighbors, for instance, have their own envy and scapegoating tendencies to answer for, and Paul D., though much kinder than, for instance, the woman-bashers of Alice Walker's novel ''The Color Purple,'' has his own limitations and flaws. But then, considering what he's been through, it's a wonder he isn't a mass murderer. If anything, he's a little too huggable, under the circumstances.

Back in the present tense, in chapter one, Paul D. and Sethe make an attempt to establish a ''real'' family, whereupon the baby ghost, feeling excluded, goes berserk, but is driven out by Paul D.'s stronger will. So it appears. But then, along comes a strange, beautiful, real flesh-and-blood young woman, about 20 years old, who can't seem to remember where she comes from, who talks like a young child, who has an odd, raspy voice and no lines on her hands, who takes an intense, devouring interest in Sethe, and who says her name is Beloved.

Students of the supernatural will admire the way this twist is handled. Ms. Morrison blends a knowledge of folklore - for instance, in many traditions, the dead cannot return from the grave unless called, and it's the passions of the living that keep them alive - with a highly original treatment. The reader is kept guessing; there's a lot more to Beloved than any one character can see, and she manages to be many things to several people. She is a catalyst for revelations as well as self-revelations; through her we come to know not only how, but why, the original child Beloved was killed. And through her also Sethe achieves, finally, her own form of self-exorcism, her own self-accepting peace.

''Beloved'' is written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point. Here, for instance, is Sethe remembering Sweet Home:

''. . . suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not want to make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.''

In this book, the other world exists and magic works, and the prose is up to it. If you can believe page one - and Ms. Morrison's verbal authority compels belief - you're hooked on the rest of the book. THE epigraph to ''Beloved'' is from the Bible, Romans 9:25: ''I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'' Taken by itself, this might seem to favor doubt about, for instance, the extent to which Beloved was really loved, or the extent to which Sethe herself was rejected by her own community. But there is more to it than that. The passage is from a chapter in which the Apostle Paul ponders, Job-like, the ways of God toward humanity, in particular the evils and inequities visible everywhere on the earth. Paul goes on to talk about the fact that the Gentiles, hitherto despised and outcast, have now been redefined as acceptable. The passage proclaims, not rejection, but reconciliation and hope. It continues: ''And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.'' Toni Morrison is too smart, and too much of a writer, not to have intended this context. Here, if anywhere, is her own comment on the goings-on in her novel, her final response to the measuring and dividing and excluding ''schoolteachers'' of this world. An epigraph to a book is like a key signature in music, and ''Beloved'' is written in major. 'OTHER PEOPLE WENT CRAZY, WHY COULDN'T SHE?'

Sethe opened the front door and sat down on the porch steps. The day had gone blue without its sun, but she could still make out the black silhouettes of trees in the meadow beyond. She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can't go back and add more. Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft - hiding close by - the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them - looking and letting it happen. But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more - so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind. . . . And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now. And if Paul D saw him and could not save or comfort him because the iron bit was in his mouth, then there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love. But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. . . . Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new, which is what must have happened to Halle. And how sweet that would have been. From ''Beloved.''

posted February 19, 2008 10:39 PM            

Thats what we are supposed to think when we see this, right, --
if we are to call ourselves dutiful disciples of the New Age?

After all, thoughts are things,
and what we think about, we create.

How many rapes has Toni Morrison created,
in her own mind/future, and in the minds/futures of her readers?

God, I dont want to believe a thing like that.

That would totally suck.

And I hope Kurt doesnt go to hell either.

God bless the artists, who take it all on.
For whom an idea is just an idea,
and a world is just a world,
and all things are perfectly themselves;
Who honor the soul, --
who hear, speak, and see all evil.
And play on!

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."
~ Nietzsche

"Art is powerful,
and its the only power that matters
in this sh-tty, f-cked up world.
And if it weren't for artists,
they would've killed this m-thef-cker by now."
~ Beth Ditto

"I have nothing but respect for Amy Winehouse."
~ Beth Ditto

posted February 19, 2008 11:00 PM              

At times, you want to let out yet, you hold it all back. The expression of your suffering, the tears. And, when you do it long enough you tend to get pretty good at that; holding back. There are times where you feel like letting it out but just can’t anymore. You keep it sealed within you, tightly.

Then there’s what occurs almost everyday. I might have the occasional self-praise. But, it’s almost always criticism. Even if you do something really good, you usually don’t acknowledge your own accomplishments. You may even downplay its significance and convince yourself that it was no big deal, despite the praise from others. Almost as if you didn’t deserve the success. You doubt yourself and you’re never truly confident of yourself.

There are times where you want to talk about it but, again, you hold back. You’ve tried to before, expressing your pain to another person on the hopes of understanding. But, instead, you are criticized. Your problem is trivialized and you are made to believe that you don’t have a problem … and sometimes it even works. You manage to convince yourself that you don’t have a problem, yet, you always wind up back in square one. Or, other times when this happens, you end up feeling worse. Almost as if you are punishing yourself for another’s observation; for being what they say you are, being selfish and feeling sorry for yourself when others have it “much worse.” And then you start to believe that you are selfish and then you start punishing yourself again in your mind, convincing yourself of your own convictions; that you are worthless.

Sometimes, you try to retreat within yourself. You lay in bed at night with the headphones on, listening to beautiful melodies, and trying to imagine a person who truly understands you, cares for you, perhaps even loves you. Providing you with comfort, serenity, harmony, security …. but the moment never lasts. Sometimes you just merely go back to where you were. Or, sometimes the thought reminds you of what you don’t have and you either hold back or actually manage to let out somehow…

Sometimes, you write about yourself. You express how you bring no benefit to others; how you are a bringer of pain and suffering to your friends and family. You want to rid yourself of existence to rid yourself of your guilt and shame and of the pain. Yet, you can’t. You realize how others may feel if you succeeded. You begin to feel like a paradox; not wanting to live yet not wanting to die. Almost as if you are, yourself, undead emotionally with the only semblance of sanity is when you can distract yourself from ones self. But, when you are alone, you begin to think of yourself the way that it seems that you’ve always thought of yourself.

You want it to end, but you don’t know how and you don’t know who to turn to for help. Your own being, your own mind, your own soul remains in solitude, even when there are others around you. You feel doomed with no way out.

All you want is peace, harmony, and love. But you can’t find them and you feel hopeless without them. Doomed to carry on a meaningless existence, unable to act in any way to rid yourself of the pain; you only keep to yourself because you feel that nobody wants to listen to you; that you fear retaliation for your own expression of your misery. You can’t reach out because nobody wants to take your hand and guide you.

I need somebody…..

------------------
The truth is ... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. ~ Countee Cullen

posted February 19, 2008 11:17 PM              

it speaks of the history of the people of this country, that should not be forgotten, nor whitewashed, as much as those who would desire that, try to make it so.

this history far exceeds the deplorable conditions, cruelty and deaths of the holocaust of WWII. it was a holocaust in this country that many deny and obfuscate, though the effects of its repercussions still remain.

posted February 19, 2008 11:52 PM              

------------------
The truth is ... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. ~ Countee Cullen

posted February 20, 2008 09:54 AM              

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you".

~Friedrich Nietzsche

And I feel more peaceful.

Love and Peace everyone.

posted February 20, 2008 11:16 AM            

The picture you paint is sad, and it is more common than any of us really know, because people dont talk about it. Sorrow, isolation, suicidal thoughts, -- all those things are still shrouded by the same Stepford ideals that brought us "Ozzie and Harriett", and The Great Repression, which resulted in the chaos of the 1960's. When is it alright to talk about these things, to admit to them with more than a cursory admission, and to invite others to share their own sorrows, without fear of being invalidated or invaded? I'll tell you. Now. Here. This thread. Here, you can share it, and spill it, and we'll commiserate, for once, without being shamed or made to feel like something is wrong with us for not wanting to suffer this thing called life alone, and in silence. And if anyone does say something insensitive, in response to such an honest and brave admission, I'll be the first person to tell them where they can shove it.

God bless you for being so real, and allowing me to be so real.

For me, the impulse towards suicide is just a reflex, and the thought occurs almost whenever I stub my toe. At times, when somethign is really messing with me, it comes as a powerful consolation. But then I always think about the Bardo, and how its probably a lot like taking a hundred hits of acid at once, and how, as depressed as I am, I dont really feel like dealing with the Bardo right now. Maybe tomorrow. And then I start thinking about all the worse places I can reincarnate into, and how much worse that would suck than this. Boy, what a comfort that is, lol. Then the thought of suicide is just a slap in the face, that shuts me up, and throws me back upon myself, like you described. Really, all we want is someone who understands, and who will be gentle with us. And while we wait and look for that person, we try to encourage ourselves, whenever possible, to emulate them, and to treat ourselves with tenderness and understanding. Maybe, when we practice that enough, we find that we dont need someone else as much as we thought we did. But its hard work. And its easier to love another person, or, at least, to show the signs of love for them, than it is for ourselves. We can be so tender, so understanding, so sympathetic of another person's pain, but we dont know how to show ourselves the same consideration. Well now I'm just rambling and restating the obvious, but the good intention is there. Thank you again for sharing with us. You are not alone.

posted February 20, 2008 11:45 AM            

Sometimes, you write about yourself. You express how you bring no benefit to others; how you are a bringer of pain and suffering to your friends and family. You want to rid yourself of existence to rid yourself of your guilt and shame and of the pain. Yet, you can’t. You realize how others may feel if you succeeded. You begin to feel like a paradox; not wanting to live yet not wanting to die. Almost as if you are, yourself, undead emotionally with the only semblance of sanity is when you can distract yourself from ones self. But, when you are alone, you begin to think of yourself the way that it seems that you’ve always thought of yourself.

..you only keep to yourself because you feel that nobody wants to listen to you; that you fear retaliation for your own expression of your misery.

...

Steve,

Really, all we want is someone who understands, and who will be gentle with us. And while we wait and look for that person, we try to encourage ourselves, whenever possible, to emulate them, and to treat ourselves with tenderness and understanding. Maybe, when we practice that enough, we find that we dont need someone else as much as we thought we did. But its hard work. And its easier to love another person, or, at least, to show the signs of love for them, than it is for ourselves. We can be so tender, so understanding, so sympathetic of another person's pain, but we dont know how to show ourselves the same consideration.

... the hardest things to do are to ask for help, and to love yourself...

posted February 20, 2008 11:48 AM            

Thank you so much!

posted February 20, 2008 12:09 PM              

Hugs to you all!

I was in a silly mood earlier; it's because I tend to dwell on the heavy side of life so much that it provides relief sometimes.

It's so good to know that we are not alone in the feelings we experience.

posted February 20, 2008 12:30 PM            

Groovy... ~*~*~*~*

posted February 20, 2008 12:37 PM            

Yeah, the link's on my profile.

LTT,