'Harvey', Homilies, and Hope

How very fragile it all is. One hurtles between cities and hopes all will be well. Like life. One mounts a concept, a production, a venture, and expects a success. All our lives, we have grand schemes, dreams, and beliefs. We wear talismans. We imprint ourselves with tattoos. We pay obeisance to our ancestors. We take on personas and beliefs and expectations. And eventually, it dawns on us: perfection is so very fleeting, so momentary. We best go with the flow. (Learned lines, rules, are so difficult to generate each time, as though truly "for the first time, every time"). And our holding onto what is essentially transitory, each little passage of life itself, tends for too long to be too attached to the past. We each move from moment to moment. We step but briefly on the boards of the great panoply of life, and each person, in their time, "plays several parts."

Where have we heard that before? What part of Awareness; Balance; Character (versus Personality); Demon-(S)-tration; Enfoldment; Fear or Favour; Give; Heighten; Intensify; Justify; Kinetics; Lunge or Lilt; Momentum; Notes; Observe; Pivot; Question; Respect, Receive, Rejoice;

Semiotics of Speech; Tone, Tempo, Texture; Utterance; Value; Waken; Axcept or Expect, (but not Except); Yield; or Zig-Zag is just far too esoteric for you? Precise coordination, definition, or resonance may well be obtuse. (So also for incomprehensible medical or engineering terms. Or for cosmology and astrology and phrenology. Yes, big words and their effect on our eschatology can be off-putting). The more one knows the more one knows how much one doesn't know!

But this I know: We had a marvelous success! We each took a slice out of life, committed ourselves to its import, to its moment, and brought ourselves to the creative collaboration with passion for attaining a product worthy of our time and effort. (For those not "in the know" we might refer to a social engagement, or a graduation, or perhaps even going on a holiday. The generality of 'application to task' is what is here called up for inspection.) The specifics, the details, all add up to what becomes a fragmentary memory, eventually. Recall the holidays you've been on? Recall every day? Recall the parties you've been to? Recall every guest? Recall the birthdays you've had? Recall every present? Indeed, the specifics fade away. But the essence of the time spent, the energy that went into the event, the feelings that were realized, they all become part of the past that we are making, even as you read these words. We can but do what we do within the given moment, imperfect as the collage of moments may eventually appear, on reflection. But that overall 'good' sense, the lasting 'happy' impression, that's the one for the memory banks! (Even though, yes, some of our memories are indeed 'bad'). We each learn. We each process things. And many things strike us each quite differently, indeed.

Science needs have it perfect. Certainly, I want my brakes on the car to work! I want my vehicle's engine, mile after mile after hour after hour to turn over, smoothly, efficiently, and to transport me to yet another realm. So too for our hearts. So too for the arteries and vessels and molecules and atoms that constitute our very sense of existing. Be good, "Or what's living for?"

'Harvey', an invisible Pooka, as the alter ego of Elwood P. Dowd, harboured being pleasant as opposed to being smart. He imbued politeness, respect, dignity, grace, and comportment. He stood for sensitivity to others, inclusion, and integration. He was neither pretentious nor inauthentic. He imbued a sense of collaboration, of a ghostly presence to be accounted for at every occasion, and of a respect for the dignity of the whole. Harvey, indeed, is expected to be a part of all of us, always. To see Mike Johnson play Elwood was to witness the very best of a person brought to light, each and every time, as though being present was indeed the first time, every time. So too then might we represent that much in ourselves, as much as is possible.

Or is that just too full of homilies and hope?