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A Better Balance.

March 31, 2017 by Exangel

by David D. Horowitz

During my youth I was impatient and temperamental. I remained this way until my late thirties. I changed because I learned through innumerable experiences how frequently wrong I was about people, places, politics, and about everything. Finally, I understood the world is complex. I need to pay attention to learn its true nature. I need to listen to other people to mature. These are easy sentiments to mimic but difficult to genuinely practice.

Oh, how wrong I was about so many people, including myself. I little suspected conservative friends of trying to manipulate me into being a hard-line right-winger or left-wing friends of trying to recruit me for their movements. I little suspected so many ostensibly religious people visit brothels or denounce gays and then have gay affairs or preach about the importance of families and cut off contact with a family member for twenty years because of one slight. I was naïve. I little suspected my own heart of duplicity with a close friend over an attractive woman. I was wrong about myself. I little suspected how angry I still was about being bullied in junior high school and how this could inflame prejudice and hatred. Slowly, very slowly, I began to change.

And, finally, in my mid-to-late thirties, I developed a radical idea: I didn’t know as much about the world as I thought I did. I was essentially ignorant, and I needed to pay closer attention and for much longer. I needed to ask more questions of both myself and others before reaching even tentative conclusions. I already had a tolerant, inquisitive streak, but I was still too prone to tantrums, blaming, presumption. Very rarely do I now lose my temper. I know I could be wrong, rather than that person and this person or “those idiots over there.”

Blame is easy—an easy way to avoid not only responsibility for one’s own actions, but responsibility to continuously inquire. Patience—solid, careful, prudent patience—is key, and it is tortoise-slow in arriving. But it arrives as a natural consequence of humility, and humility for me arose because I was so flat-out wrong about so much. My background in philosophy helped me integrate this insight into my worldview, and my background in poetry helped me use language to explore and discover. I articulated my own philosophy based on reverence for consideration and vitality. I articulated my own aesthetic combining rhymed metrics and contemporary diction. The metaphysical structure I’d lived in might have collapsed, but individual blocks and bricks could be salvaged to build a new and better “house.”

And I’m still living in that new and better house. I am humbler, more patient, and happier. I make decisions, but I realize they are tentative and subject to tests from continually accruing new data. I mistrust but rarely hate. I am wary but not unaccepting. I have some sense for what is traditionally called “the golden mean.” Yes: balance. Sometimes we go to extremes to rediscover balance. And when we do, we can take comfort in realizing almost every mature person around us has shared in that paradigm, has made numerous mistakes and trusted the wrong folks and bumbled and been deluded—and ultimately emerged improved and strengthened. Perhaps now I am less ignorant.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Now., Spring 2017: If Not Then

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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