(Ed. Note: This week we are pleased to present works first published by our esteemed co-editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar in Literally Stories UK. The theme of the week is music. All through the weekend too. Dale has a wonderful way of injecting his passion and fresh insights into his work. I think you will agree–Leila)
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” – Emily D.
“I is another.” – Rimbaud
Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old.
Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it.
When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he confirmed that he deserves a Nobel Prize.
With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.
Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.
Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.
He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.
Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.
Bob Dylan has already entered the ranks of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are millions of authors who did not deserve a Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it. Harold Bloom, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy are a famous half dozen of these. A hundred years from now (yes we will still be here), Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved such a prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language that never gets old-fashioned, will last a very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more robotic, inhuman and tyrannical.
“Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.”
– Oscar Wilde
LITERATURE, in its pure form, says The Drifter, is no longer taught in American universities.
What we have instead is economic grievance (usually from people who are already wealthy) and identity politics (also from wealthy people) masquerading as literary theory.
The pure spirit of Literature has been crucified, in the American academy. It was dead and bleeding on the cross. Now Joseph of Arimathea has disappeared with the body.
Charles Baudelaire, the first poet of the modern city, anywhere (his city was Paris) used to pray to the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, just like a Catholic prays to a saint. (Baudelaire was also Catholic, perhaps the most unique Catholic who ever lived, or one of them.)
If you told someone in American academia these days that you pray to a Literary Saint, the cynical crowd would suddenly rear its ugly head and laugh you right off campus immediately, from coast to coast and everywhere in between.
For me, the two greatest literary critics, ever (in the English language), are Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Dr. Harold Bloom. Johnson died in 1784, at the age of 75. Bloom died in 2019, aged 89.
Both of these titanic and gargantuan figures (and they were both gargantuan and titanic physically, as well as spiritually and mentally) have been wildly and consistently misrepresented in the popular press. Ideas they never had are attributed to them; stances they never took are assumed to have been their own; and their personalities, the most important thing about each of them, have been distorted beyond all recognition.
But the works and the good writings about each of these figures still remain, as well as the visual representations (from which you can learn entire worlds) and large collections of quotations about them by people who knew them well or just came into contact with them for brief periods.
One of my favorite works by Samuel Johnson is his first full-length book, the short biography The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, sometimes known as Life of Savage, and whose full title is An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (whether or whether not Savage was really the son of the Earl was one of the things about him that was always in dispute and a large contributor to his renown, or infamy, because he claimed he was, and the Earl claimed he wasn’t – loudly).
Savage was a famous minor poet, sometime actor, fulltime alcoholic conman, and all-around good guy who Johnson was friends with for a time. They roamed the London streets together at all hours, sometimes sleeping rough when they had to, starving and drinking and trying to make a living as Grub Street hacks (sometimes partially succeeding at the latter).
After Savage died, impoverished, alone, well-known, and alcoholic, Johnson wrote his life, thereby penning one of the first deeply psychological biographies ever committed to paper. One reason I love this book so much is because Savage reminds me so totally of a person I once knew, a very close friend, with whom I got into so much trouble at that time it has to be saved for another column.
Johnson also wrote a kind of nonfiction novella called Rasselas. This book was one of the very first Western explorations of Buddhism ever written, a fictionalized, Westernized account of the Buddha’s story almost as if filtered through the story of Muhammad.
Johnson himself, as a man, was such a strong and powerful abolitionist, before abolitionists even existed, that slaves in the New World ended up naming their children Rasselas after his great character. Johnson later adopted a black child as a single father after the death of his wife, raised the boy into manhood, and left him his money and name when he passed on. Such things were so unheard of in the 18th century that hardly anyone understood Johnson’s point of view at all. They didn’t know that he had moved beyond racism in an era when no one even knew what “racism” was.
Johnson was a multiculturalist (in the sense that he believed, like Jesus, that everyone should be included) not decades, but centuries, before such a thing existed with a name, and he didn’t just preach it, he lived it. And yet, the English Departments of the American academy now mostly accuse him of being an ultra-conservative “dead white male” who deserves to be ignored, forgotten, and even “canceled.”
Such thinking and behavior only give fuel to the rising and rabid fascist tide among us, a situation that is like a flood and a fire at once within human culture itself and thereby demands the mixed metaphors.
Harold Bloom has also, seemingly endlessly whenever he is discussed, been accused of being a so-called political conservative, even though he never was anything of the kind at all, and even was the exact opposite, more of an imaginative and creative, one-of-a-kind anarchist in his politics than anything else. (“Anarchist” in the sense of placing the highest possible value on human freedom, and human expression, itself; it has nothing to do with the practice of political violence, or rather believes the practice of violence should always be avoided because when you practice violence you’re not free.)
Born in 1930 in NYC, Bloom did his best work after the age of 50 (once Ronnie Rayguns took over), and perhaps his very best work after the age of 70, even though everything he did before 50 was the basis for all that came after, and led to it.
Five of my favorite books by Bloom are: How to Read and Why (2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003); Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011); and Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017).
This last book, a true and deep classic in Shakespeare studies, a brief book that takes the reader on a lasting tour of all things Jack Falstaff, was written and published just a few years before Bloom passed on at the age of 89. In its late 80s, one of the most powerful human minds of our times appeared to be getting stronger than it ever had been, not less so.
Harold Bloom was like Oscar Wilde in the way he took nonfiction writing about literature and raised it to the levels of the very highest and best imaginative literature itself. Bloom said that William Shakespeare was his ultimate model, as opposed to any critical writers he’d ever known or studied (except for Samuel Johnson). As a writer, Harold Bloom was much closer to someone like Bob Dylan or Ernest Hemingway than he was to what we usually think of when we think of a “literary critic.” And he was a real and true harbinger for many directions imaginative writing will take in the future and is now taking even as we speak, inevitably (says The Drifter).
Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter, MFA, PhD: The Drifter’s name, “The Drifter,” is not influenced by, but is rather stolen directly from (in a sense), two names that Dr. Samuel Johnson called himself, when he himself wrote columns: The Rambler; and later: The Idler.
A Few More Crucial Note/s: Samuel Johnson’s prose style can strike the modern reader as outdated at first, but a good reader can catch up with him within the hour, and the struggle to do so can only be beneficial, since this is Johnson, and since nothing too easy is any good. Johnson is far more modern than almost any other writer of English prose of his era, his pal Boswell rivaling him in this. And often enough, his prose sounds exactly as if it were written yesterday, or tomorrow (these are his best bits, and they’re scattered everywhere throughout his vast, massive work).
Harold Bloom wrote a lot (a vast understatement), and he has entire, five-hundred-page books (among his early work) that are composed almost entirely in a stilted, bloated, airy, windy, jargon-filled prose that is still, despite itself, brilliant and unique almost all the time.
After the age of 50, at his own admission, he started to write for a more general audience outside of academia, including the reader he called the “incredibly intelligent child of any age.”
He did this for two reasons. One: he wanted to reach more people while he was still alive. Two: his skills had improved.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: Reading good works or otherwise genuinely engaging with good art of any kind keeps your mind, heart, and soul in a good place, so that, the more you do it, the better your own inherent goodness becomes. The opposite of this, just as powerful, is rotting your brain (and heart and soul) with meaningless trash.
Addendum: Roger Ebert is the Harold Bloom of the movies; Lester Bangs is a Bloom of rock and roll.
Stay tuned this week as The Drifter attempts to practice literary criticism upon modern popular music, but in a late-Bloom kind of style, not an early-Bloom style, i.e. jargon free and written for the incredibly intelligent child within all of us no matter what age.
An elderly Mexican man, about five feet tall, with a gigantic, huge, massive, perfectly white, and amazingly long, drooping mustache, and also wearing a gargantuan-sized sombrero and sometimes a poncho or sometimes just a bright red shirt with collar, depending on the weather, brown pants, and sandals in summer, cowboy boots in winter time…who roams and stalks through and across the streets, the sidewalks, the alleyways, the yards, the side lots, the vacant lots, the parks and parking lots of Berwyn, Illinois, USA, in all weathers…in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, seemingly 24/7, 365, in rain, in too-hot heat, in blizzards, in nice weather, he walks, steadily and slowly, and never stops walking, not like he’s looking for anything, but more like he’s registering everything…
And sometimes when you pass him on the sidewalk he says, in clear and strong English, “Hello! Nice dog…” but more often he just keeps going, because there is something going on, in his mind, in his eyes, and in his soul…something he doesn’t need to share with anyone, but is also sharing, in the way he walks through his, and our, windy world…
And a woman, a beautiful, gorgeous, ravishing, rough-edged black woman, who always used to approach my car while I sat in the Burger King drive-through waiting for my food (I was teaching fifth grade at Saint Leonard Parish School at the time even though I’m not Catholic which is a long story unto itself and it seemed like I was always starving and had about twenty-three minutes to procure and consume my lunch which was often the reason for the convenient Burger King)…she was always alone, always working that parking lot, and would pop out of the bushes and say “Hey baby! How you doin’!?” as she walked up to the car…and we never shared anything but eye contact, fist bumps and dreams so that she knew by now (and knew it anyway) that I wasn’t about to become a customer but she always wanted to just say “HI!” anyway…and sometimes I wonder where she is now, and hope she’s okay.
And a white guy named Charlie. I was walking my Siberian Husky, Boo, along a near-Chicago suburban river trail when I looked up and saw a massive white bird skimming right by me over the river, and wondering what kind it was…Charlie, a medium-old (or an old middle-aged) man with a gigantic gray beard like Walt Whitman’s (or Herman Melville’s) zipped by me on some sort of automatic bike contraption and called out joyously, and exactly as if he’d read my mind, “WHITE HERON!” as he rode on past myself and Boo…Later we met up farther down the trail, and he struck up a conversation. “I’m supposed to be a biologist but that’s of micro-organisms…maybe I’ll just throw in the towel and look for white herons around here instead.”
Later as I was heading back to the car on foot with Boo, a gigantic, huge, massive, gargantuan-sized monarch butterfly flew straight toward me on the trail; it kept on coming, didn’t stop, flew straight at my eyes it seemed, then flew straight into my forehead before I could do anything, and bumped me directly in the middle of the forehead, paused there as if landing for a second, bounced off, glanced off, brushed my hair delicately, and, flapping his wings, flew off and away, over and above me, over and above my head, and away down the trail (where he veered off and disappeared into the summertime greenery)…
All these people and creatures are my neighbors…
Walt Whitman wrote, “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, / But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, / And filter and fiber your blood.” (And no one else wrote like that in the 1850s.)
Such things as all these neighbors don’t change; have never changed; and will never change (or not for a very, very, very, very, very long time).
It’s we, us modern people, who have changed.
And why are we always in such a hurry to get nowhere important again?
And what are we missing when we never really stop to notice where we truly are (no matter where it is)?
Concluding Post-note by “The Drifter”: The Drifter, sometimes known as Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar, could say a lot more, and describe many more characters he’s met on his daily travels on foot and by car through his own neighborhoods, with or without (mostly with) his canine companion/s.
But he’s determined to let it rest for now. He can’t think of anything better to end on on this second Sunday of August, 2025, than the two questions he wishes to leave hanging in the air like the butterfly who bumped him in the forehead on purpose (he’s certain it was on purpose, and has something mysterious to do with natural energy, no matter what else anyone else thinks or doesn’t think about it) before it flew off on its merry way again.
Astonishing Natural Fact: The monarch butterfly lives a life that is, on average, four weeks long.
When we consider this astonishing natural fact in depth, it can serve as a symbol for the precious, precarious nature of EVERYTHING in this always-passing, ever-changing, never-to-return (that we know of so far) world.
Do it now while you’ve still got the time (whatever “it” is that’s eating at you), as long as you’re good, and as long as it’s difficult – and real.
“There’s a slow, slow train coming – up around the bend.” – Bob Dylan
“This whole world’s gotta buy you a drink, man / Gotta take you to the edge and watch you throw it up / Every morning, I could give a damn what you did last night / Just tell me how far to kick this can…”
– Conor Oberst, “No One Changes”
“Christ’s religion is essentially poetry – poetry glorified.”
– Elizabth Barret Browning
The Drifter (myself) took his last drink of alcohol almost exactly twenty years ago from today: on August 5, 2005. (I write this on August 1, 2025.)
The story of my drinking, its history, its reasons and motivations, its progression, its hilarity, its adventures (many, many, and many more, including good company, bad company, and dangerous company), and the eventual fall into total addiction in my mid-30s (drinking hard liquor sometimes combined with red or white wine all day every day and never drawing a sober breath, plus other related problems like catastrophic depressions, weight loss, liver problems, heart problems, heart palpitations, malnutrition, emergency-room accidents, vicious, pain-filled, suicidal hang-overs, crushingly embarrassing behavior and psychological humiliations, near-death occurrences and much more, none of which were improved by also smoking two to four packs of Marlboro Lights per day along with the liquor) will be gone into in more detail in the near future in another column.
Because alcohol is a subject I still love to talk about, even though I haven’t had a single sip in almost twenty years.
For today, in honor of my drinking and in honor of all drinkers, addicted and not, and in honor of the one thing that has kept me sober perhaps more than any other, I will briefly explain what I think the Lord’s Prayer means.
This column is not for so-called “Christians Only.” Nor is it only for alcoholics who are looking to quit drinking. Nor is it only for ex-alcoholics who have already done so.
It is for writers and writer-friendly peoples everywhere, especially since writers are known to be, as a group, prone to drinking alcohol more so than the general population (which is a lot, especially in America, land of the binge drinker); and also for anyone interested in surviving this life (as long as possible) and living a good one while you’re here.
Because the Lord’s Prayer can even be said and studied by atheists vastly to their own enhancement at almost every single human level we can possibly imagine.
I do not presume (very far from it) to have the final answer/s about these words, unlike many of the pastors, priests, and ministers (so-called) afoot in America these days (not all, but many).
These are simply my (brief) reflections, today, on a prayer (a poem) that has saved my life.
I never could’ve gotten myself sober without this.
This column is also meant to defamiliarize the Lord’s Prayer in a personal way, so it can be renewed in at least a few of us.
(Disclaimer: This piece may sound a tiny little bit like a sermon in certain places (in the manner of John Donne) but it’s Sunday, after all…)
*
Our Father who art in Heaven: hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation.
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory: forever and ever.
Amen.
*
In the first part of this poem, which is the first sentence, Yeshua (hereafter called Jesus in this work) was asking humans to do something.
He was asking them to acknowledge the eternal existence of something greater than themselves.
In so doing, not only the Creator of the Universe is worshiped. Humanity itself, including the speaker of the prayer, is worshiped.
He is our Father, after all. And He is in Heaven. By hallowing (making holy) his name, we make holy everything there is, including all the pain, all the death, all the suffering, all the murder, all the disease, all the killing, all the death, death, death, death.
We let it go (like saying “So it goes”), and give it back to Him. Jesus believed he was waiting to receive it. Walt Whitman later said, “All goes onward and outward; nothing collapses; and to die is different from what anyone supposes; and luckier.”
In the second sentence of this poem, which is only three words long, Jesus asks for The Kingdom to come.
It’s key to remember, or point out, that elsewhere he said, many times, “The Kingdom is inside you,” when talking to a few of his small bands of disciples and followers on the lakeshore or in the hills. (The Book of Acts says there were “about a hundred and twenty” believers after his death; the first person to see him after he died was Mary Magdalene.)
When he says “Thy Kingdom come,” he means after death, yes. But he also means, and maybe more importantly, right now, and right here, while we are alive on the earth. And it isn’t outside you, it’s never outside you, it’s right in your guts, in your brain, and in your heart, like it was in Mary Magdalene’s. Or it should be.
In the third sentence of this poem, Jesus acknowledges that we are not in charge of ourselves and we do not necessarily create our own circumstances.
This sentence is about what we call in the modern world “acceptance.” Buddha and Muhammad had similar messages. We may be born blind or we may be born with a disease that will kill us before we reach the age of twenty. Such people are more beautiful, not less beautiful, than the rest of us.
In sentence four, it’s crucial to meditate on (think about) what he means when he says “this day” and “our daily bread.”
We are not supposed to hoard possessions or money like Scrooge, and we are not meant to live on the earth forever. If we have enough today it is enough; tomorrow, as he says elsewhere, has enough worries of its own. Worrying about the future is a sin, because it diminishes the present.
“Our daily bread” does not just mean food, although it also does mean food.
It also means whatever we need for today, like strength, endurance, imagination, courage, stick-to-itiveness, a purpose, a reason for being.
It’s also meaningful to isolate the phrase “give us this day.”
For sentence five, we need to define “trespass.” Trespass means SIN.
Too many modern people these days get salty when you tell them they are sinners. And too many people of the cloth (pastors, ministers, priests, etc.) have NO IDEA what sin really means, these days.
It is not the old-fashioned thing. This world is rampant with sin. The people in the White House in the USA are great examples of this.
Greed and not caring are sins. Getting drunk or “cheating” on your spouse are personal choices (maybe bad choices, but not necessarily “sins”). (And maybe the spouse being cheated on is too greedy of your own personal time; and maybe you getting drunk is sacrificing yourself for your own artistic inspiration; everything depends upon the context.)
Jesus also emphasizes what a profound, life-changing, freeing personal event it is when you forgive someone. Forgiveness is for the other person, but it is for you first. Also, we can’t expect mercy and compassion when we don’t give unto others.
Send out mercy and compassion and you’ll soon find it will come right back at you (“instant karma”).
An example would be giving an authentic smile (not a sales person’s smile) to someone on the street, instead of ignoring them. And they smile back, in a surprised and genuine way.
For sentence six one needs to define “temptation” and “lead us.”
In this sentence of the poem, is Jesus intimating that it is God Himself who leads us into temptation? If so, doesn’t that make God a bad person? And why would he want to tempt us into something that isn’t good? Did Eve eat the apple first because she was smarter and more adventurous than Adam, or because she was more underhanded? Does temptation mean a temptation to despair, which is nihilism and a lack of faith in life, which lead to greed and not caring because you have nothing better to do or focus on?
At this point in the prayer-poem, it’s time to really realize that part of one’s job in all this is thinking, and thinking deeply, and long and hard, over years, about what it all means.
And it is NOT something one shares with others, at least not in any overt kind of way (until, maybe, much later) but the thinking itself changes who you are, and it changes you for the better.
No exceptions.
Number Seven is the penultimate sentence of this poem-prayer, and it is not Number Seven for no reason, either. (Seven = Heaven.)
The last sentence was tacked on by Martin Luther (a personal hero of mine, and a person well worth reading about, whom Harold Bloom once called the most “important” person in the West since Jesus himself, although Martin also wasn’t perfect, like all of us) much later, and it deserves to stay where it is.
It’s very, very, very similar to what the Buddhists mean when they talk about attachment – being too attached to the things that are only of this world, which equals suffering for yourself, which equals suffering for others, which equals suffering in the world.
We should attach ourselves, instead, to the things that can’t be stolen by the thieves, or corroded by the rust. Instead of being outraged by what the thieves stole from you (whether it be the “white collar” thieves or the “regular” ones), attach your mind, heart, and soul to what they can’t get at. (Any other reaction is, again: sin.)
It’s up to us to decide what those things are for us – like Jacob wrestling with the angel.
“AMEN” means Let it be.
DRIFTING END NOTE: An example of a drinking adventure I had was the time I traveled to the White Horse Tavern in New York City which is the last bar Dylan Thomas ever drank in and where he consumed the oceanic quantities of liquor that helped kill him.
I went to the White Horse Tavern specifically to get spectacularly drunk in the manner of Dylan Thomas, in order to celebrate the roistering poet spirit of Thomas in a way that was living the life, not just writing about it. (And back then I was much better at living the life than I was at writing about it, although I was working and practicing at both, every single day of my life.)
And I managed to accomplish my goal. I did in fact get spectacularly drunk in honor of Dylan Thomas. My guess is that I drank at least six pints of dark beer backed up with at least one or two shots of whiskey per beer – plus nonstop Marlboro smoking – all on an empty stomach. (I never ate when I drank since drink was my food; not even a single mouthful.)
I had to be led out of the bar and back to my friend’s apartment by my drinking companions who were also spectacularly drunk (but a little less so than I, at least on that particular occasion).
I was a bit cautious that night because I didn’t wish to jinx myself and end up dead like Dylan Thomas.
(I will eventually of course, just like we all will: but not yet for any of us).
(Images “Last Mohican” and “Water Boo” provided by by Drifter)
Water Boo
“The most manifest sign of wisdom is a constant happiness.”
– Montaigne
In Russia there was a television program about an enigmatic drifter named Fenimore who visited a summer camp to tell the children tall tales: about Native Americans, but also about extraterrestrials visiting Planet Earth.
The unusual name, Fenimore, was so well-known in Russia that even children recognized it.
Fenimore was the middle name of James Fenimore Cooper, an early American novelist, creator of The Last of the Mohicans, who was so well known in Russia that “everyone” knew who he was (and he was especially well known by his unusual middle name).
Cooper is less well known in Russia now than he was a few decades ago. But he’s still far better known in Russia than he ever was in his native land of the USA. And at one point, he was very well known in his native land, one of the best-known writers in America.
The Mohicans believed that the purest and best creature on Planet Earth, among all the uncountable creatures here, was the white dog. For the Mohicans, a dog of purely white fur ruled over all other creatures because of its beauty, goodness, loyalty, and spiritual intelligence.
Modern city folk would be horrified by what the Mohicans did with the white dog in turn, because they believed it was the purest creature created by the Great Spirit: they sacrificed it.
What modern people don’t realize is that: one: the animal was sacrificed quickly and without pain; and two: the Mohicans believed the animal was instantly passing over into a world exactly like this one, except without the pain, as soon as it died.
The Mohicans believed the white dog was leaving this world of pain and going to another world exactly like this one except far more perfect than this one ever has been or ever will be.
This is a challenging paradox, even a contradiction: that there could be a world exactly like this one, except without the pain.
No more physical hardship, no more fear, no more boredom, no more sense of betrayal. No more endless feelings of injustice, no more nonstop struggle for existence and survival (mental, physical, and spiritual), no more loneliness, isolation and alienation, no more feeling of being abandoned by the Creator of the universe.
But the beauty we see, hear, feel, smell and taste here will still exist.
The sun on your head, the wind in your hair, the ground beneath your feet, the green, breathing beauty of the plants all around you would still nurture your soul, except more so.
The grizzly bear will still be there, but he will no longer tear your head off and devour you; instead he will roll around with you peacefully and playfully in the grass.
The fear of death, the one multi-pronged, many-leveled, myriad-layered primal emotion that perhaps generates all other emotions here in this world, even our sense of beauty, or especially our sense of beauty, will be gone there. But the sense of beauty will still exist. It will simply be increased, heightened to a level we can’t even imagine yet, here on Planet Earth.
I went camping this week with my kids and dogs, at Warren Dunes State Park in Michigan, ninety miles from where we live outside Chicago.
It’s only ninety miles away from Chicago around the bottom of Lake Michigan, but it feels like a different world where the raccoons outnumber the people ten to one.
There are a lot of raccoons in Chicago and environs but they still feel vastly outnumbered. Not so in the Dunes.
In the Dunes, I felt closer (or closer in a different way) to the sun, the wind, the ground, the green, the blue of the vast freshwater sea and the sky above it, the yellow sand, the raccoons, fish, and birds, and so was reminded of my own Native American heritage.
I have never had my blood tested. But as a child I was told over and over that I am part Native American. So for me, in spirit, no matter what the genetic testing would or wouldn’t say, I am indeed part Native American. Nothing could take that away from me now, not even science.
And since I’m also a lover of Russian literature, including a few of the great Russians who were nature lovers, like Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev, I have a love for the Russian love of Native Americans, the Russian love of nature, and the Russian love of James Fenimore Cooper.
Drifting along on an empty trail walk among wooded dune hills with my two Siberian Huskies and one pit bull, I was feeling the feeling of free discovery that can still be found, somewhere, in all fifty states of the USA, if you look in the right way and in the right places.
And I realized that the Indians really are still alive inside me, because I worship their worship of, and their belief in, the white dog.
Today we are debuting a new feature that yet has a name, but is part interview, part word association. I have presented Editor Dale Williams Barrigar with ten words (nine actually, the tenth is his choice). What follows are his replies. We hope that this might catch on and other lists will be given to other people in the future.
Leila
Ten Words
“The Drifter” (aka Dale Williams Barrigar, Doctor of Philosophy) has made these definitions as short as he could, knowing that brevity is the soul of wit.
Any statements he makes about “God” and so forth should be taken with a large grain of salt: because he’s not smart enough to pretend he knows what the Creator of the Universe is really up to – or why.
One: FEAR.
In many ways fear is the basis for everything in this world.
When we climbed down out of the trees, it was partly from fear (with a large mixture of curiosity).
And when we started running away over the ground trying to escape the Sabre-toothed Tiger, it was certainly from fear. (*See below.)
Hemingway called it “grace under pressure,” a paraphrase of which might be “not being a chickenshit.”
How one handles one’s fear/s is such a large part of “who you are” that it’s frightening.
ANXIETY, the much used modern word, is another term for fear.
Jesus nailed to the cross is such a universal image (even for “other people” on the other side of the world who aren’t “Christians”) because it’s based on fear (as well as compassion); and if you don’t know yet that we all get crucified in this life, one way or another, and usually many times, you’ve got a rude awakening in store. (Some of us know this as soon as we know anything.)
Fear of failure can be good, or bad, depending!!
(*The first time we escaped the Sabre-toothed Tiger on foot we realized we could escape, and almost felt free for the first time. And the first time we escaped must’ve had a large mixture of trickery involved, as well, since there’s no way we could’ve beaten the beast on speed alone, with only our feet. Call it: tricking the beast. And it’s just as important now as it ever was; usually, now, for different reasons.)
Two: HOPE.
Whales, wolves, and humans can all sing, but only birds can both sing, and fly. (I mean fly in reality, not in dreams or with mechanical assistance.) Perhaps some day “they” will create a drone that can both sing, and fly; but it will be an at least partially hideous thing; like Frankenstein with wings and tender vocal chords.
Emily Dickinson has forever made me think of a bird whenever I think of the word “hope” (“hope is the thing with feathers…that perches in the soul”) and without hope, the world wouldn’t be worth living in. Period.
Three: ART.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (wildly, he always denied he was German and claimed to be Polish instead, which would be, in 2025, like an American denying he was American and claiming to be Mexican, instead, or Bob Dylan claiming to be an orphan cowboy from New Mexico instead of a comfortable Jewish kid from small-town Minnesota) said: “These earnest ones may be informed of my conviction that art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.” Another great German, Arthur Schopenhauer, agreed with him (before Nietzsche said so himself). So did Jim Morrison, one of Nietzsche’s most famous disciples.
We all know who “the earnest ones” are, if we think about it. They take themselves all too seriously, have CONSUMERISM as their religion, and are great at passing judgement on anyone just a little bit different from themselves; they appear in the White House, the halls of Congress, the pulpits of churches, the lecterns of all the colleges and universities, and even, or especially, in the book clubs and writing groups of all small, large, or midsized American cities.
REAL ART IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO BE WILLING TO DIE FOR. You don’t have to die for it; but you have to be willing to.
Four: LUCK.
“Luck” is all the good things that happen to us which we don’t deserve that help to turn us into better people – not monetarily richer, more fakely famous, or more “powerful” – but better. Often, with the best luck of all, we don’t even know about it until long after the fact. Maybe this means that we’re always lucky; or at least more lucky than we think we are, most of the time.
Five: FAITH.
Faith is the thing without which, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said, he wouldn’t be able to eat his dinner. Because without faith, he wouldn’t have an appetite. He would be too full of fear, and it would make him not hungry. When I start losing faith in life, I know I’ve grown too tired again. For me, a lack of faith in life is the biggest sin there is.
It has nothing to do with believing we know just what God is up to. It has everything to do with believing there is always a reason to go on – even when we don’t know what it is. There is always someone watching you and cheering you on – even when you don’t know it. Don’t let them down. (If you don’t have a choice any more it’s a different story.)
Six: FUTURE.
The Future is everything. This is where, without doubt, all the most exciting things happen. Sometimes we forget that the Creator of the Universe has a plan, and it involves US. Our best moments in the present are lived in the future, if we’re doing it correctly. It’s not about escaping the present, it’s about intensifying it.
Like everything else it touches, modern American (hedonistic, nihilistic) CONSUMERISM, the religion of the United States, which has also devoured large chunks of the (human) globe elsewhere, both East and West, bastardizes the concept of the future.
It has nothing to do with what they’re trying to sell us yet again.
It has everything to do with what Art itself (at the highest levels, which are everywhere, even under your sandals) is all about.
Without the future, there is no Art, because as you work at creation, you’re always anticipating one or many moments in the future, near or far. Or you are unaware of what you’re doing, which isn’t art.
Seven: TRUST.
There have been people in this life I’ve trusted the second I met them – and I continued to trust them, even after they left me for dead in the dust.
There has been one person I’ve trusted the moment I started reading her fiction and her online commentary – and still do and always will trust, and even would and do trust with my life’s work: even though I’ve never met her in person. She’s that good of a good writer. And to be a good writer, you have to be good. Not perfect (because none of us are), but good. Zero exceptions.
Trust you to take it seriously is just one form of trust.
Eight: FAMILY.
Not all family members are blood related, though they’ve probably spilled the same kind of blood – of their own, I mean (mostly).
Nine: OBSESSION.
Obsession can lead to a compulsive disorder, or to the perfection of the Mona Lisa, depending on what one does with it.
Sensual/sexual romantic obsession is, by far, best for the artist when it’s sublimated. Leonardo and Michelangelo spent zero time scrolling through dating app’s while remaining obsessed with romantic beauty.
Ten: CREATIVITY.
It’s Everything (all around us), and it’s everything (worth fighting for).
Your life has to be your first art, even when (or especially when) you pour everything else into your art.
And when we do this, we’re imitating (in a good way, and possibly without knowing it) the Creator of the Universe.
Saragun Springs 