Revisiting To Kill a Mockingbird (searching for the worlds of Scout, Jem and Atticus.....*SPOILER*)

I suppose I have to start by saying that this blog post is a bit of a departure from the usual weirdness I post at this location. It began, when I found a link on a forum to the video below.



The clip is an amateur film taken documenting smalltime life in Groveport & Canal Winchester, Ohio. About halfway through, I realized, this is probably what town life looked like in the time of Harper Lee's classic book, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', which was based on an incident in 1936. Given, it is another state, but would the internet allow me to take a closer look at this world of almost 80 years ago?

I did 'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee in high school as a prescribed book. It was a bit of a mystery to me, even then, that the Apartheid era South Africa of the early 1980s would include a book examining racial prejudice in its curriculum. I read the book again, several times as an adult and even speculated with a friend about the author, Harper Lee. It is a well-known literary legend that 'To kill a Mockingbird' was produced when Harper Lee was given a year's wages to take time off to do some writing. The book won various awards, but its author has yet to produce a follow-up. Her silence remains an enigma to this day.

The above video prompted me to search for more windows into the world of Scout Finch and her family. Here's what I found...



This is the Alabama of 1937. You won't see Mobile, but the video does includes a glimpse of the Confederate White House in Montgomery, footage of Selma and Auburn. It even features the dog who, unlike Pavlov's, rings his own bell. The clip is on the youtube channel of buyout footage, a website that sells a large variety of archived historical footage - at a price, of course.

Then I found it.







Yep, this is the Mobile, Alabama of 1935. You could almost imagine Miss Maudie Atkinson, Miss Stephanie Crawford and Aunt Alexandra walking amongst those azalea gardens or shy Boo Radley lurking in the shadows of one of those porches. While a large section of the video focuses on the harbour and the national parks, there is also footage from a prison farm near Atmore - perhaps the sort of establishment where Tom Robinson was shot and killed for attempting to escape?

In closing, here's a short slide show of historical Mobile...







... and a look at the Mobile of today...

Bodies and Souls

Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?
What if a beautiful body came to you and there was nothing inside?
Would you keep it around anyway, because it looked good?
What if a soul came to you without a body?
Would you pretend not to see it?
Or would you open up a door to madness without a moment's hesitation?
Do we fall in love with bodies or with souls?

The "truth"

We tend to think that, when the truth comes to us, it will be in a box, clearly marked The Truth and pre-organized for easy use. It does not work that way. It's more like a huge haystack, with a few tiny needles hidden inside.

So what am I doing? Well, I have a few needles in the palm of my hand. Which means I'm probably looking for a haystack. Or two...

The Art of Understanding

Some time ago, I wrote a somewhat wry blog post on the joys of being misunderstood, which can be found here. Soon after I realized that I would inevitably end up writing about understanding as well, or rather, the art of understanding, because to me, that is what it has become. An art form, like music or painting or story-telling, rather than an absolute.

One way of explaining what I mean by that, would be to tell you about Table Mountain. This mountain dominates the scenery of Cape Town and has a very distinctive outline, from the city side, but there are many other faces and perspectives to it. From Kirstenbosch Garden it presents a completely different face and again, from the Atlantic seaboard side. You really wouldn't say it is the same mountain at all. To borrow an analogy from Robert Heinlein, how do you know the WHOLE house is painted white, if you've only seen one of its walls?

In the same way, the process of attempting to understand something, keeps shifting, showing new vantage points to the reality you are trying to grasp. Understanding, in its true form, is an active, ever-changing song, that keeps playing different phrases to your consciousness. It keeps refining itself... finding new pathways to the same destination. It is not frozen within a single moment. Understanding does not stop unfolding. You are never, ever finished ... in fact if you are done understanding, it probably means that, really, you are done with the process of understanding... you have thrown in the towel, or perhaps, you arrived at a certain spot, grown attached to that particular viewpoint, and now you do not want to move on anymore... It means, "I've made up my mind; stop adding things to it. I don't want to know any more. I'm closing the door and switching off my brain now."

Being understood, often hurts.

Understanding hurts doubly so.

Understanding is like an alchemy of ideas that briefly blends to a particular compound. But, tomorrow, life will add something... perhaps time, perhaps another element or thought to consider and then the compound is transformed into something completely new... the only constant being the ability to continue changing...

The key turns...

They spiral out
from inside of me
all the who's
that I could be...

(This is an old drawing, dating back to August 2009)

A personal koan...

If you have been painted into a corner, how do you escape before the paint dries? There are at least two solutions to this one...

(definition of a koan: 'A paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.')

You're the most misunderstood person on the planet? And this is a problem?

... this train of thought began months ago, when some metal musician (I think it was Mike Portnoy, ex of Dream Theatre) called himself the most misunderstood person on the planet... and my first knee-jerk response was: And this is a problem how?

Having spent 40 plus years on the planet, I can safely say I've probably had a fair amount of experience being understood and being misunderstood and when the dust clears and the smoke and mirrors road show that is the human ego goes silent, I'll say this... being understood can be a heck of a lot MORE uncomfortable than being misunderstood...

Being misunderstood, on the other hand, can be one of the greatest opportunities for entertainment and inspiration. Being misunderstood has given me some of the best laughs of my life... and an untold wealth in song and story ideas. In my opinion, every creative person should relish and embrace being misunderstood. Sure, the ego wants people to get how clever he/she is, but let me tell you a little secret, the ego is neither the artist nor the genius, so screw his/her precious little feelings...

Life is a game, and words can be the game pieces or the boxes you hide in... if you truly want to play, hold your secrets close and stay just beyond the edge of shadow and mystery... because, if you want to have fun, then being misunderstood is definitely the longer game...

But that's just me...