Knock, Knock

For 15 years, Harris has taken an annual poll with one question: “Who is your favorite movie star?” As a sign that there may be hope for our culture, Sean “Spicoli” Penn doesn’t make the Top Ten. Matt Damon is also absent, as is Tom Cruise. And Vaht Is Dis? No Brad Pitt?

Trivia Question: Who is the only actor to appear in the Top Ten each of the 15 years the poll was taken, ranking in the Top Three 13 of those years? Yup: The Man, The Mountain, The Legend, The Rugged Individualist, The Duke--John Wayne. This year, he is tied for Third Place with Will Smith. By the way, during the 15 years of this poll, he is the only actor to appear posthumously.

This has got to just rip the weenie actors, directors and writers who want nuanced boys and girls to emote like Sophomore Thespians over the plight of anyone and anything that is anti-American, anti-Individual, or anti-Hero. In one of Wayne's movies, there is a scene where he kicks down the door, and says (deadpan) "Knock, Knock." This Poll is Wayne standing just inside their splintered and broken door, saying, "Well, Pilgrim: you were saying ...?" Along with Box Offices receipts around America, this Poll is also saying, "We'll take The Duke, and his kick-bad-guy-ass-or-die -trying movies over your Nancy films, any day."

This Year's Top Ten

Denzel Washington
Clint Eastwood
John Wayne
Will Smith
Harrison Ford
Julia Roberts
Tom Hanks
Johnny Depp
Angelina Jolie
Morgan Freeman

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009

Love

Has the inner eye of the soul lost its power? I have seen her, but it is as if I had seen a heavenly revelation—so completely has her image vanished again for me. In vain do I summon all the powers of my soul in order to conjure up this image. If I ever see her again, I shall be able to recognize her instantly, even though she stands among a hundred others. Now she has fled and the eye of my soul tries in vain to overtake her with its longing. I was walking along Langelinie, seemingly nonchalantly and without paying attention to my surroundings, although my reconnoitering glance left nothing unobserved—and then my eyes fell upon her. My eyes fixed unswervingly upon her. They no longer obeyed their master’s will: it was impossible for me to shift my gaze and thus overlook the object I wanted to see—I did not look, I stared. As a fencer freezes in his lunge, so my eyes were fixed, petrified in the direction initially taken. It was impossible to look down, impossible to withdraw my glance, impossible to see, because I saw far too much. The only thing I have retained is that she had on a green cloak, that is all—one could call it capturing the cloud instead of Juno; she has escaped me … and left only her cloak behind … The girl made an impression on me … (Soren Kierkegaard, writing about Cordeilia)

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
SK

Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.
SK

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength,
While loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu

Love is a portion of the soul itself, and it is of the same nature as the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of paradise.

The greatest happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Percy Shelley

Do you love me because I am beautiful,
or am I beautiful because you love me?
Cinderella

You are the most beautiful girl that has ever lived, and it is worth dying to have kissed you.
Dylan Thomas

He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.
Leo Tolstoy

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods.

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
Plato

It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster, A Room With a View

Stealth Warfare

We have all encountered such behavior:

You walk into her office, as scheduled, prepared to get a critical report you will need for your meeting with upper management. The report is not ready. What happened was that her computer froze. Time before that her car broke down.

He had agreed to come pick you up from work and take you to get your car at the auto repair shop. “I forgot.” Problem is that whenever it comes time to help you, he forgets to ... A LOT.

She calls it wit: everyone else experiences it as sarcastic barbs.

He is most always late.

Usually very emotionally mature, she goes into her Dumb Blond Routine whenever she feels she is about to be confronted.

He repeatedly changes the subject or drops a Confusion Bomb when team meetings are not going his way.

Quite articulate in most settings, she consistently is befuddled when it comes time to explaining why she disagrees/was late/ forgot.

He is the busiest person you know. There is not a speck of dust in his office and material on desk is in alphabetical order. You never see him sitting still. But he gets very little done.

It is never her fault. Never.

Every time there is a confrontation, he gets a headache.

Rather than telling you she will not grant you the loan/help you with the project/ go out with you Friday night, she simply disappears until it is too late for the loan to do any good/ the project due date passes/ it is Monday.

Whenever he wounds your feelings, he says he was only teasing.


Passive aggressive behavior defies expectations by Not. Doing. A. Single. Thing.

Passive aggressive behavior sabotages in ways that cannot clearly be attributed to the saboteur

Passive aggressive behavior is stealth warfare

What is the source of this behavior? I don’t think there is a single cause. Sometimes it is fear of authority, other times it is the behavior of a control freak, and quite often it is evidence of internalized anger. I am ticked off at you, him, them, it or myself but cannot talk about it so shall demonstrate it.

I was coaching a client last year that I noticed was often forgetting things, and would become confused when I asked him to explain to me a specific assignment he had been quite clear on just the day before. Turns out he was terrified of Being Wrong: his passive aggressive behaviors were to protect himself.

How to Deal

Confront I noticed that whenever we begin talking about this issue, you get a headache and we have to postpone the discussion. What is the problem?

Inform Do you realize that by being late to this meeting, you wasted $500 of the company’s money? (Ten team members being paid $50 per hour.)

Hold Accountable You are expected to be on time. If you are late again, no matter how “legitimate” your excuse, you will force me to (depends on context) remove you from this team/ assign you to different department/ fire you/ send you to counselor.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009

March 17: What a Day

432 St Patrick is carried off to Ireland as a slave

1521 Ferdinand Magellan discovers the Philippines

1755 Transylvania Land Co. buys Kentucky for $50,000 from a Cherokee chief

1756 St. Patrick's Day 1st celebrated in New York City at Crown and Thistle Tavern

1762 1st St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City

1845 Rubber band patented by Stephen Perry of London

1861 Italy declares independence; Kingdom of Italy proclaimed

1868 Postage stamp canceling machine patent issued

1871 National Association of Professional Baseball players organized

1905 Eleanor Roosevelt marries Franklin D. Roosevelt in NY

1932 German police raid Hitler's Nazi-headquarters

1941 National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. opens

1942 General Douglas MacArthur arrives in Australia to become supreme commander

1944 Actor Charlton Heston weds Lydia Clarke

1945 Monte E Wilson, Jr. weds Billie Lynn Webb

1959 Dalai Lama flees Tibet for India

2002 Death of Billie Webb Wilson

Infinitely Expressive

It was his (Merlin’s) voice that fascinated me. Infinitely expressive, it served him in any manner he wished. When he lashed, it could raise welts on a stone. When he soothed, it could have shamed nightingales into silence. And when he commanded, mountains and valleys exchanged places. (Stephen R Lawhead, Arthur, p. 394)

One of the differences between a decent communicator and an individual who is powerfully persuasive is found in the melody produced by their words and the tonality with which those words are spoken.

Your words have a melody. The question is this: Does this melody serve or deter the intent of your communication? Listen to the melody of the words of Merlin’s father, Taliesin, when he was first wooing Princess Charis

...tell me the word that will win you, and I will speak it. I will speak the stars of heaven into a crown for your head; I will speak the flowers of the field into a cloak; I will speak the racing stream into a melody for your ears and the voices of a thousand larks to sing it; I will speak the softness of night for your bed and the warmth of summer for your coverlet; I will speak the brightness of flame to light your way and the luster of gold to shine in your smile; I will speak until the hardness in you melts away and your heart is free... (Stephen R. Lawhead, Taliesin, p. 375)

Taliesin’s choice of words creates pictures, feelings and sounds, surrounding Charis’ senses with his message of love. However, what if his tonality— the musicality of his voice—sounded like a John Philip Sousa military march? The message would have been lost in the incongruities between word and tonality.

Compare this with Merlin’s words to the Knights of the Round Table when they were about to go in search of the stolen Holy Grail

Hear, Men of Britain, Valiant Ones … the Head of Wisdom speaks. Heed and take warning … the battle is joined, and every man who would achieve the quest must face many ordeals. Be not dismayed, neither be afraid, but face the trials to follow with all forbearance, for the Swift Sure Hand upholds you, and the Holy Grail awaits those who endure to the end. (Stephen R Lawhead, Grail p. 330)

Well chosen words: words that elicit courage, strength and valor. Again, however, what if the musicality of the spoken words sounded like something sung by The Carpenters?

Be not dismayed (“They long to be”) or afraid (“close to you…”)

Listen to the conversations taking place around you today. Each person’s words have a peculiar melody and tonality: some are monotone, others utilize a few notes, and others create melodies and harmonies between word and tonality that carry their words into the hearts and minds of their listeners. I can have all the relevant facts at hand and choose fairly precise words to convey these facts, but if the musicality and tonality of my words is discordant to the intent of my message, the intent is drowned out.

Read the following two quotes aloud.

Men speak foolishly of the beauty that slays, though I believe such a thing may exist. But there is also a beauty that heals, that restores and revives all who behold it. (Stephen R Lawhead, Merlin, p. 210)

Morgian, rarest of beauty, frozen and fatal, mistress of the sweet poison, the warm kiss of death. (Merlin, p. 203)

You intuitively knew that there is a specific sentiment behind each passage and changed your tonality accordingly. Now, go back, reread each passage aloud: only this time swap tonalities. You can hear the incongruity between the words and the sentiment behind the words, can you not? You not only hear it, you feel it. So do those with whom we are communicating.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009

Flannery O'Connor: Living and Writing in the Shadow of Death

Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies. Flannery O’Connor

I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft which she shows man’s fall and dishonor. Thomas Merton, printed on book flap of O'Connor's When Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously


When I was a boy, I wasn’t all that interested in reading. For my father, this was a sure sign of some hidden mental illness. He was obsessed with reading history, theology, and some philosophy. His strategy for converting me was to leave small biographies of people he knew I admired: Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Einstein and Edison, Madam Curie and Florence Nightingale. While I devoured these pocketbook bios, I remained uninterested in what dad considered “serious reading.” This all changed my senior of High School, when I took a class in Honors American Prose and Literature, taught by Mrs. Cogar.

Mrs. Cogar didn’t merely teach American literature, she embodied it, making it come alive for me. To this very day, I can still remember the thrill I experienced when she would recite passages from Hemingway and Steinbeck, Faulkner and O’Connor. When she spoke, it was if she were channeling the minds, hearts and voices of these authors.

O’Connor’s works were particularly intriguing to me. There was a peculiar tone to her books that resonated: dark, terrible, and frightening, her words pierced through the bravado of a young man’s pretended nonchalance and veneer of savoir faire.

Knowing my love for all things Flannery, my friend Joseph Spiccia recently sent me a link to a review of the biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch. I immediately ordered the book. My habit is to research the life of authors whom I admire. I want to know what made them tick: why did they write as they did, choose the subjects they choose. Up until now, the only book that I found helpful in this regard was A Habit of Mind: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor. (If I had to choose only 5 books to keep in my library, this would be one of them.) Now, there is Gooch’s biography, which is incredibly insightful.

Even when it comes to theology and philosophy, I am as interested in the author’s life experiences as I am their academic assertions. As Frederick Buechner once said, “All theology is biography.” By this he meant that the writers’ theology told us as much about themselves as it did their theology … so I want to know the biography.

Who died and caused you to say this? What lost love moved you to have this notion of life and love? What crime did you commit, or think you committed, that motivated you to have your particular perceptions of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, Truth and Error, Sin and Forgiveness? Why do you focus on moral failures and not on the human capacity for greatness, or vice versa? Who hurt you so terribly that it left this indelible imprint on your soul? What is it you think the Almighty did (or didn’t do) that led you to your perceptions of “God”? Where does your hope, despair, cynicism, faith, agnosticism come from?

Gooch’s book answers the kind of questions I ask myself, as I read O’Connor’s stories.

When Flannery was 15 years old, her father, Edward, died of lupus: he was 45 years old. Two years later, she wrote of that black day, “The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side.”

Like a bullet in the side That perfectly describes what I experienced when I first read, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

When Flannery was 24-years old, she was diagnosed with lupus. The Doctors gave her 5 years to live. Over the next 15 years, living with her widowed mother in Milledgeville, GA, she wrote her stories in the shadow of her impending and inevitable death.

O’Connor’s novels, short stories and letters grapple with the battle between hard heads, hard hearts and an even “harder” divine grace.

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, and brutal.”

“The stories are hard but they hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism … when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”

Hard, but never morose: severe, but most always accompanied with a wit and humor that can dislocate a rib.

Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” O’Connor knew that she was going to die, and knew her “fortnight” was speeding toward her. She also knew why God had loved her into existence.

When she was doing her graduate work at University of Iowa, a friend asked why she worked so obsessively at her writing, and she replied that she “had to.” (Her friend, Barbara) “She was very serious about her mission in life, and had a sense of destiny.” Only a few years later, lupus honed this single-mindedness into a laser-like focus.

Upon reading a review of one of her books and discovering that the critic had mentioned her lupus, Flannery was livid, noting that her disease had no place in evaluating her work. Fair enough. True enough. However, the presence of the lupus did, with God’s grace, shape the soul of the author. Living and writing while “looking down the barrel of the Misfit’s shotgun,” give her stories a luminosity that very few writers ever attain.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009

Wonder-full

Another wonderful day in the neighborhood. Snow falling outside, a fire burning in my fireplace, a great single malt to sip and cigar to smoke, while watching The Lord of the Rings. Doesn't get much better than this.