from early college days

Did you ever walk into one of your college classes and suddenly remember that you had been given an assignment bur forgot about it?

And, no, I'm not referring to the common nightmare - I've had it more than once myself, but this day was totally real.

It was my dreaded Accelerated Frehman English Comp class that I've mentioned here before - the one where the professor literally shamed me into learning to organize a paragraph through a deductive reasoning formula.

We used literature as a springboard for our in-class essays. We had spent most of the hour reading poetry, and several of the class members were getting bored. The professor noticed and began a tirade over the difficulty of writing poetry, and in disdain, at the end of the period, snapped that - just to show us how hard - we were to write a poem and bring it to the next class where we would have to read it aloud. And he added, because he knew college freshmen pretty well, that it would have to be rhymed, metered, and at least 8 lines long.

I gathered up my books and went stright from there to a history lecture, so the assignment slipped my mind until I arrived in class the next day. I grabbed a slip of paper and hastily began writing, I hardly noticed what. Dr. Abernathy walked in, saw me furiously writing, smirked, and shook his head.

I was the first he called on to stand up and read. When I finished, he was very quiet at first, before I got a muffled, "Well done," and I got my only A+ for that particular course.

The poem, with a few minor revisions, became one of Briny's songs in And Adam was a Gardener. I've posted it here, in the Poetry forum, and am going to add it to my new poetry pages on my website. (Hover your cursor over the word "More" in the headlines to see the individual poems, and
I've been updating the site to include more of And Adam was a Gardener just generally. A couple more bits to go.

Ann,

I love your poems--especially The Rest Home and Ode to a Lost Warrior. Simply wonderful. I also love your site. Excellent!

Ann,

You reminded me of my brother.When he was in grade school he was supposed to write a THANSGIVING POEM.
He didn't want to do it.
Mom said, "Poems are a snap here's one: There once was a turkey who loved to strut, but he ended up in the farmer's gut."
My brother loved that poem, the teacher did not.
You are truly gifted. I love your poem.

I still have no idea where that one came from, Alice. I had happened to drive by that particular house a few days earlier - it's the one I grew up in. We had sold it and moved to a different neighborhood shortly after my brother died. The whole thing just blipped into my head, sitting in that classroom. Weird.

Victor D. Lopez wrote:

Ann,

I love your poems--especially The Rest Home and Ode to a Lost Warrior. Simply wonderful. I also love your site. Excellent!

Thank you, Victor. I appreciate your stopping by on a busy evening.

My personal feeling is that the ode is probably my best work - so far, anyway. I kind of think that maybe Audie helped me write it.

His son told me through his attorney - our intermediary while I was writing the book - that it caught his father. I hope so.

Ann, you cannot get higher praise than that.

Love,

Betty

Ann
You are rare. ONE OF A KIND--PURE GENIUS!

Terry Murphy is a very cool guy. Once he sent me a brief, penned, message at the bottom of an AMRF mail-out to foundation supporters, telling me he was pleased with my research.

He's a naturally introverted, quiet kind of guy, but during the mid/late 90's he formed the Audie Murphy Research Foundation because he feared his father was being forgotten. He produced and edited a number of high-quality newsletters about his father during that time, which can now be downloaded from the Memorial Website:
http://www.audiemurphy.com/amrf.htm

You might want to look into them. They are quite informative and extremely well done.

Terry himself introduced the first issue:

Quote :

Audie Murphy was a war hero and a movie star. He was a poor kid from Texas who became the most decorated GI of WWII, cited time and again for heroism in battle, ultimately receiving this country’s highest award for action above and beyond the call of duty: the Congressional Medal of Honor. After the war he went to Hollywood and starred in dozens of motion pictures and several television shows. He died in a plane crash in 1971 at the age of 46.
That’s the short version. It does not begin to explain, however, the complex character of the man or the profound effect he had on those who knew him.
He was my father.
------
Terry Murphy

Terry was 19 when his dad died.

He didn't usually have a lot to say in these newsletters, but this next bit was an exception. I don't know how many here are old enough to remember all those old 90-minute TV drama series. This bit was from GE Theater's "Incident," in 1958. Terry wrote about what it was like having a famous dad:

Quote :

I remember seeing “Incident.” I was six years old. Television was still a relatively new, but a major part of American life.I understood how movies worked. Dad would go to the studio very early in the morning for several weeks, or go on location for a month or two, and next year he’d be in a movie playing at a local theater. But TV was different. It was a piece of furniture in the home (see above photo); the pictures came into the home, somehow, from out there, somewhere. And it had immediacy: there were news broadcasts and some of the shows were “live” and others seemed “live” because, well, they were on TV. And they were there every day. It was sort of like the movies but it felt different.
Anyway, Dad had been gone all day. That evening I was watching TV upstairs in the bedroom. “Incident” was on. Dad was a Rebel soldier who was stalking a Yankee soldier in a private, isolated war. I was enjoying the show. Commercial. I go downstairs and on the way to the kitchen I see Dad. He is in the living room, reading the newspaper. We hadn’t heard him come home and, anyway, how could he be home when he was on TV right now? I went back upstairs—there he was. I ran back downstairs—there he was. OK, maybe I wasn’t a bright six-year-old. But this was new stuff then and this little lesson did effectively demonstrate the difference between reality and TV for me. No mean feat, really.

What Alice said. Awesome!

Ann, I think you captured Audie Murphy's life very well in your book. It's an interesting study when we try to understand how hero's think and what makes them do what they do. In many instances, they don't fear death and often welcome it causing them to do things that a person would not normally do, and by so doing, they are proclaimed a hero.

One of the things I like about Campbell's work is that it doesn't leave the hero at that climactic point where he "defeats the dragon and saves the community." He continues with the hero's return home, and how he or she deals with the rest of life.

When one gets to a place like Murph did in France, from the landing and the death of his closest friend all through the forests to the pocket near the German border where he climbed on that burning tank and singlehandedly turned back an entire company and the six tanks that accompanied it, he was living in a heightened world where practically every moment was experienced in that moment, with no thought of past or future, just doing what had to be done at that particular point in time. He had entered a different reality, and when that happens, coming back to the one he left was in many ways as difficult as the battlefield itself. And to come home and build a new life, dealing with the lingering effects of PTSD on a daily basis, and still creating a successful film career, then continuing on even after that inevitable "fall from grace" that followed, when the very people whose way of life was saved by his actions (and those of so many other individuals in that war whom he had come to symbolize) turned against him for having committed those very same actions....That's where the heroism comes in, in dealing with what inevitably comes after.

Sorry, we've just had a massive hailstorm come through this part of SA. It woke me up and I couldn't sleep with the pounding going on so I came in here. I just noticed that it has become very quiet outside, and suddenly I am very sleepy, so I will go back to bed now.

I will come back in the morning and see if what I just wrote makes any sense.

Love you guys.

Annie

Ann, I’m editing the manuscript of my first book for re-publication. Re-reading my ms is reliving those experiences and the emotions have surfaced. The part where I decided to end it all and get shot has caused me to think more about my state of mind during that time. The thought of living in another reality during dangerous episodes makes sense. There is/was no thought about heroism, but a solution to a problem. Saving lives of loved ones even if that is financially based may/could be akin to saving lives while engaged in battle Being abducted and faced with the unknown is another situation where one lives in a different reality. Willing to risk ones life to save another is not something one thinks about, but a reaction to the situation faced.
I wonder if there is a common denominator to dangerous situations or if every situation is unique. How one reacts is not pre-planned. What is the foundation of that reaction?

Abe, this is from Campbell's Power of Myth with Bill Moyers;"Sacrifice and Bliss":

Quote :

CAMPBELL: One day, two policeman were drivin up the Pali Road when they saw, just beyond the railing that keeps the cars from rolling over, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man, but caught him just as he jumped, and he was himself being pulled over when the second cop arrived in time and pulled the two of them back.

Do you realize what had happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life had dropped off--his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life--all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime just disappeared. He was about to die.nLater a newspaper reporter asked him, "Why didn't you just let that man go?? You could have been killed." And his reported answer was, "I couldn't let go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn't have lived another day of my life." How come?

Schopenhauer's answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and the other are one, that you are two aspects of one life, andthat your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may be spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according the Schopenhauer, the truth of your life.

The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of realization to that truth. The concept of love your neighbor is to put you in tune with this fact. But whether you love your neighbor or not, when the realization grabs you, you may risk your life. The Hawaiian policeman didn't knowwho the young man was to whom he had given himself. Schopenhauer declares that in small ways you can see this happening every day, all the time, moving life in the world, people doing selfless things to and for each other.....
[The Oriental bodhisattva] represents the principla of compassion, which is the healing princple that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva...has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation is very different from just getting born.

Good explanation, Ann.

Yes, Abe. Campbell had a away of explaining complex ideas in an understandable way.

I just discovered, and am rewatching right now, that Vimeo has the original TV miniseries of The Power of Myth. Even if all you were only to watch the first five-ten minutes of the first episode, you would get an explanation of the importance of mythology to our modern lives, and another answer to Abe's question.

http://vimeo.com/11991616

Very interesting Ann. I got through 15 minutes. What stuck with me is that transformation comes through trials/obstacles that one has to overcome.

My transformation came with the realization that material things were not the answer. Material things can disappear overnight. It is what is inside us. It is the wealth within that matters.

When your life is at stake - all that other stuff is just stuff.