dual personalities

Tag: Brenda Ueland

October 24, 2017

You go, Girl!

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788 – April 30, 1879) who was an American writer and an influential editor.

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Hale wrote many novels and poems, publishing nearly fifty volumes by the end of her life, but she is probably best known as the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Hale also famously campaigned for seventeen years for the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday and for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.

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That’s Colonel William Prescott in front of the monument.

Hale also founded the Seaman’s Aid Society in 1833 to assist the surviving families of Boston sailors who died at sea.

She is recognized on the Episcopal liturgical calendar with a lesser feast day on April 30.

Gracious God, we bless thy Name for the vision and witness of Sarah Hale, whose advocacy for the ministry of women helped to support the deaconess movement. Make us grateful for thy many blessings, that we may come closer to Christ in our own families; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who livest and reignest with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

We must also note that it is the birthday as well of one of our favorite writers, Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985), about whom we have written many times.

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“Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk, to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing, or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: ‘Tell me more.’ This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive.’ …Creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered. They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don’t love you just when you are nice; they love all of you.”

–Brenda Ueland, Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings

Join me in a toast to both ladies, won’t you?

And this struck me as mildly amusing:

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March 9, 2017

Food for thought

by chuckofish

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How meanly and miserably we live for the most part! We escape fate continually by the skin of our teeth, as the saying is. We are practically desperate. But as any man, in respect to material wealth, aims to become independent or wealthy, so, in respect to our spirits and imagination, we should have some spare capital and superfluous vigor, have some margin and leeway in which to move. What kind of gift is life unless we have spirits to enjoy it and taste its true flavor? if, in respect to spirits, we are to be forever cramped and in debt?

–Henry David Thoreau, Journals

As for [William] Blake’s happiness–a man who knew him said: “If asked whether I ever knew among the intellectual, a happy man, Blake would be the only one who would immediately occur to me.”

And yet this creative power in Blake did not come from ambition. …He burned most of his own work. Because he said, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”

…He did not mind death in the least. He said that to him it was just like going into another room. On the day of his death he composed songs to his Maker and sang them for his wife to hear. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened and he burst into singing of the things he saw in heaven. ”

–Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

In the empty night hours I can still walk through the streets. Dawn may surprise me on a bench in Garay Park, thinking (trying to think) of the passage in the Asrar Nama where it says that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the Rending of the Veil. I associate that saying with this bit of information: In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis recite their own names, or the ninety-nine divine names, until they become meaningless. I long to travel that path. Perhaps I shall conclude by wearing away the Zahir simply through thinking of it again and again. Perhaps behind the coin I shall find God.

–Jorge Luis Borges, The Zahir

Discuss among yourselves.

(The photo is of Lew Wallace)

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November 4, 2015

What it is

by chuckofish

Vincent_van_Gogh_-_87_Hackford_Road

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about “design” and “balance” and getting “interesting planes” into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest “a” tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”

―Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit 

It has been awhile since I shared Brenda Ueland with you. I think she is so great. I agree that Art is about Love and sharing what you love with others.

On another subject, but related–I drove a Subaru for years. It was totally against stereotype, but I loved that car . So I thought it was pretty great when the Subaru people worked “Love” into this ad campaign.

subaru-boulder-600-63663

Now they are even using a Gregory Alan Isakov song in an ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkX4aOQ_u2I

I hardly watch any television these days with commercials, but I saw this and was pleased. There are still some smart people out there working for the Man.

6 Comments
October 21, 2015

What it is

by chuckofish

Vincent_van_Gogh_-_87_Hackford_Road

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about “design” and “balance” and getting “interesting planes” into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest “a” tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”

―Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit 

It has been awhile since I shared Brenda Ueland with you. I think she is so great. I agree that Art is about Love and sharing what you love with others.

On another subject, but related–I drove a Subaru for years. It was totally against stereotype, but I loved that car . So I thought it was pretty great when the Subaru people worked “Love” into this ad campaign.

subaru-boulder-600-63663

Now they are even using a Gregory Alan Isakov song in an ad:

I hardly watch any television these days with commercials, but I saw this and was pleased. There are still some smart people out there working for the Man.

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August 15, 2012

Note to self

by chuckofish

Recently I was re-reading the wonderful If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by the wonderful Brenda Ueland, written back in 1937. She was a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing.

She graduated from Barnard College in 1913–I wonder if she knew our grandmother Mira Sargent, who graduated in 1914? Hmm. Another layer to the story.

Anyway, her book about writing is wonderful. Even the footnotes are great.

Yes, I am all against anxiety, worry. There are many people, you can see, who consider worry a kind of duty. Back of this I think it is the subconscious feeling that Fate or God is mean or resentful or tetchy and that if we do not worry enough we will certainly catch it from Him.

But they should remember that Christ said that we should cast off anxiety so that we could “seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and His righteousness” (i.e., live creatively, greatly, in the present) “and all these things” (beauty, happiness, goodness, talent, food and clothing) “will be added unto you.” Of course He is right.

That “Of course He is right” tells you a lot. Even if you are not interested in writing, you should check out this book.

But at last I understood from William Blake and Van Gogh and other great men, and from myself–from the truth that is in me (and for which I have at last learned to declare and stand up for, as I am trying to persuade you to stand up for your inner truth)–at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it. If they did not–fine. They did not need to listen. That was all right too.

She would have loved to blog.

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