I would recognize life as a progression of qualitatively different states, with new realizations and burned energies each step of the way… You have cycles: birth, life, death.

Perhaps a more pragmatic, less metaphysical take on our species and individual existences than my own.

My comrade posed a provocative question on what in fact I meant by “more evolved” and what exactly did I see the human species developing towards?

So in the spirit of what I see as an important ongoing dialog… here goes!

I believe we are evolving as individual consciousnesses and collectively as a species towards…

* Being more thoughtful and reflective, integrating intellectual, emotional and metaphysical intelligence

* Being more capable of compiling, synthesizing, archiving, accessing and employing the ever accumulating wisdom of our species

* Treating each other as peers with very different insights and capabilities but comparable inherent worth and dignity and extending this circle of equals even to our young people

* Being fully conscious of the workings of our ecosphere and the entire cosmos and the role we can play to maintain and enhance it

* Enhancing our abilities to be effective actors, differentiated from each other to handle the increasing complexity of our shared existence

* Moving to a point beyond fear and ego toward love and freely giving what each of us has to give

I see this evolution as a process of many millennia, many behind us and many more still ahead with no utopian end state or destination. It will probably continue to proceed as three steps forward and two steps back at times. Like all developmental experiences it will continue to be punctuated by failures of various sorts, including failure of imagination, and succumbing to fear.

The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems… are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another.

Recorded music has certainly played a critical role in my own development and even survival. In my own life my deepest emotions and passions have been captured and recalled by a catchy tune, mostly recorded popular music heard on the radio or played on a record (and later tape or CD) player. Lyric, melody and rhythm have continually inspired me to live more fully or (in those most difficult of life’s moments) to keep on keeping on.

The first such piece of music that I recall playing such a role in my life was Petula Clark’s 1965 hit, “Downtown”…

When you’re alone
And life is making you lonely,
You can always go downtown

In 1965 when I was ten years old my mom and dad divorced. My mom had found out that my dad was having an affair with another woman, I remember her crying on the phone to someone that she could not breathe (what years later I would learn was called a panic attack). But in the previous coupl years I also remember my mom’s angry words to my dad that there was not enough money, that she felt like a drudge, and that she needed the opportunity to pursue her own development as my dad was working for his PhD and later as a college professor. My dad would not say so much in response except to express his hurt at her anger and that he was doing the best that he could.

The event was apparently so traumatic for me that I do not have any memory of my parents telling me at the time that they were splitting up or my dad moving out of the house (while I still remember two years earlier exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard JFK had been shot).

But what I do remember from that time was the crisp diction and soothing timbre of Petula Clark’s voice on the radio…

When you’ve got worries,
All the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown

The chorus accompanying my life’s tragedy was reminding me that life goes on and I need not despair, and at some level I understood and was heartened by that message. When I hear the song even today, it brings back a memory of being in the front seat of our station wagon next to my mom as she drove the 850 plus miles to Cape Cod with my younger brother Peter and I (without my dad for the first time), and of course hearing the song on the car radio. The emotional memory is soulful but I would not characterize it as sad. The song can still lift me up even today, and like other pieces of music that strike a deep emotional chord in my consciousness, it can literally give me goose bumps all over my body.

Just listen to the music
Of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where
The neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?

Well I was still just ten years old. My mom let me go out on my own as long as I came home “when the street lights come on”. So I was going to have to postpone the whole lingering by those neon signs thing until I was older. But Petula’s image of the call of the urban metropolis did resonate with me, a child transitioning into youth. It reminded me that if I hung in there I would eventually be an adult myself, and hopefully better able to control my environment than I could at the moment.

The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles,
Forget all your cares and go
Downtown, things’ll be great when you’re
Downtown, no finer place for sure,
Downtown, everything’s waiting for you

It was certainly nice to know that everything was waiting for me and the rest of my Baby-boom generation to come of age and make our mark on the world. I took great solace in that at the time.

Now 45 years later my young adult kids, of the Millennial generation, are ready for my generation to hand over that proverbial magic marker so they can take their crack at redrawing the world. Many of my peers have lost their perhaps naïve idealism of “peace, love, joy” pursuing a fleeting materialism that seems so narcissistic.

Don’t hang around
And let your problems surround you
There are movie shows downtown

Somehow Petula knew that I would eventually get caught up in my birth family’s “diaspora” and leave my friendly Midwestern college town to plunge myself at age 23 into the big pond of Los Angeles, initially with the goal of working in the film and TV business. But at ten I had no inkling yet of all that, just perhaps a commitment that my life was somehow going to turn out better.

At age ten, it would still be five years before I would realize, as my mom wrestled with depression and thoughts of suicide, that she was just another flawed but striving kid like me (she just three decades older), and the whole divorce thing had been her problem and my dad’s, not mine. Rather than continue and act out based on my own frustration the best I could do was to be of assistance, to her and to myself.

Just listen to the rhythm
Of a gentle bossanova
You’ll be dancing with ‘em, too,
Before the night is over
Happy again

I would find my own love, my own mate to dance with some day. It would be very different than what my parents were going through. Just as both my mom and dad had committed to raise me with love (as opposed to the fear and anger directed at them by their parents), I would end up finding a partner I could share my life with in joy.

And you may find somebody kind
To help and understand you
Someone who is just like you
And needs a gentle hand to
Guide them along

Petula took me aside, my head in her hand. “Coop… hang in there sweetie! You’ll have your shot to make it right… just give it time.” And every of the many times I have heard that song since I can feel that loving hand.

That conscious thinking thing… which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.

That orthodoxy discounted the role of the spiritual, and any knowledge beyond the realm of the senses and rational thought.

A prime example of that Unitarian progressive orthodoxy, were the ideas and actions of Unitarian Horace Mann, who launched mandatory universal schooling in Massachusetts, the basis of today’s American public school system. Capturing the view of social engineering, Mann famously said…

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

That orthodoxy grew out of a Unitarian religious establishment in Colonial America where the religion was the official or “first” church in many towns in the Massachusetts Commonwealth prior to the US Constitutional mandate of separation between church and state. Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists did not embrace this mainstream Unitarian thinking were soon to lead a rebellion against it, which given our history in retrospect, could be judged ultimately unsuccessful.

So this was the milieu that Sarah Margaret Fuller was born into in 1810, born just a little more than two miles from the Harvard stronghold of Unitarian orthodoxy. Her surname came from her father, Timothy Fuller; a Harvard trained lawyer and son of a Unitarian minister, later serving in the US Congress from Massachusetts, and playing a key role in John Quincy Adam’s successful campaign for President in 1924. Her given name Sarah was the name of her father’s mother. Her middle name came from her mother (of whom I could find little on the Internet) Margaret Crane Fuller, but a clue to the closeness of their relationship might be the fact that by the age of nine she insisted on dropping the “Sarah” and being called “Margaret” instead, and so it was.

From her earliest years her father strove to give her the sort of robust classical education almost exclusively reserved for the young men of the intellectual elite, and at an accelerated pace on top of that. By the age of six he had taught her to read… in Latin! (He had taught her to read English by age three.) Interestingly, he forbade her from reading the etiquette books and other standard female fare of the times, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1795 feminist manifesto, A Vindication for the Rights of Women.

She wrote later about her father in her autobiography…

He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible… Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age, with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late.

As a result, she believed, she suffered nightmares, insomnia, and migraine headaches, which continued throughout her life.

To maybe get a sense of the journey for this prodigious but perhaps over-educated young person, at the age of 10, Fuller wrote a note which her father saved, which said…

“On the 23rd of May, 1810, was born one foredoomed to sorrow and pain, and like others to have misfortunes.

Again, those are the words of a ten-year-old.

Fuller was a determined autodidact (that is, self-learner) with a life-long passion for learning. Like most sons and daughters of elite families in the early 19th Century, she did most of her learning at home with parents, relatives and friends functioning as teachers, mentors and tutors. She in fact reached young adulthood before Unitarian Horace Mann spearheaded mandatory universal public school for all youth in her home state of Massachusetts in the 1830s.

In 1824 at the age of 14 and at the advice of her father’s siblings, Fuller was sent off to school, to the School for Young Ladies in Groton. She resisted the idea at first but apparently enjoyed the enriched environment, including all the people, ideas, libraries and other resources the school gave her access to. After two years at the school she returned home at age 16 and “unschooled” (can’t resist getting that in…*g*) reading all the classic literature she could find and learning several modern languages.

As Fuller reached adulthood, family friend Eliza Farrar (the wife of a Harvard professor and later author of an etiquette manual for young women) made an attempt to teach Fuller proper female etiquette that the Wikipedia article on Fuller characterized as “never wholly successful”.

Beyond the more conventional training for a young woman in an elite family, Fuller continued to be a voracious reader, and by the time she was in her 30s she had earned a reputation as the best-read person, male or female, in New England. It was presumably the result of all this self-directed study, unvarnished by the conventional framing that teachers might have brought to her education, that she read the philosopher Immanuel Kant, Hindu Vedic thought, German Idealism, English Romanticism and the mystical spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg, the building blocks for the Transcendentalism that she, Emerson, Thoreau and others would embrace and put forward.

Initially, she used her knowledge in a more traditionally female venue as a tutor and giving private lessons, but she hoped to earn her living as a journalist and by translating foreign-language works into English. Her first published piece was a response to historian George Bancroft, appearing in November 1834 in the North American Review.

It was soon after that in 1835 that great calamity and tumult entered Fuller’s life. Her father contracted and died of Cholera. Since he had not written a will, his brothers stepped in and gained control of the family estate and all family finances. This put Fuller, her mother, and her sisters in the humiliating position of being forced to rely on her uncles for support. Fuller wrote that she regretted being “of the softer sex, and never more than now.” Still, she tried the best she could to step in to her father’s shoes and focus her time and efforts in supporting her mother and sisters.

As often seems to happen, calamity and opportunity seem to come together, coincidentally if not directly related. It was also in 1935 that Fuller met Ralph Waldo Emerson at a meeting in Cambridge. She made an instant impression on him as he recalled, “She made me laugh more than I liked”, which is an interesting insight on these two giants of American philosophical thought. Later that year she spent two weeks as a guest at Emerson’s home.

So a digression on Ralph Waldo Emerson…

The publication of Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature is usually considered the watershed moment when Transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. Emerson wrote later in his speech “The American Scholar”…

We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; Divine Soul which also inspires all men.

Emerson closed the essay by calling for a revolution in human consciousness to emerge from this new philosophy…

Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.

Perhaps the contemporary equivalent of Emerson’s thinking is what is known today as “the law of attraction”, that we create our own reality by our strongest thoughts and intentions.

Interestingly, the name “Transcendentalists” was originally a pejorative term coined by harsh critics of the movement, who were suggesting it was beyond sanity and reason.

Three years after this coming-out and calling out by Emerson in the elite lecture circuit, in 1839 Fuller held the first of many salons for discussions among local women of the elite. Fuller intended these meetings to compensate for the lack of education for women, holding discussions and debates which focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature. Serving as the “nucleus of conversation”, Fuller also intended to answer the “great questions” facing women, including, “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” Questions, according to Fuller, which so few women “ever propose to themselves ’till their best years are gone by”.

Her “conversations”, as she called her salons, spread through the community of daughters, wives and mothers of the male intelligentsia of New England the ideas of Feminism and Transcendentalism. A number of significant figures in the women’s rights movement attended her salons, including Sophia Dana Ripley, Caroline Sturgis, and Maria White Lowell. The fact that her events were contained to the more domestic world of women, while her comrade Emerson lectured before audiences of prominent men, probably accounts again for her relative historic obscurity.

During this period Fuller was recruited by Emerson to be the Editor of his Transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, and she served in that capacity for four years but was never paid her promised yearly salary of $200. Perhaps Emerson was guilty of the prevailing patriarchal thinking of the time, that Fuller, as a woman and a friend, did not require the payment that a male editor would expect and require.

But after four years, as the publication’s readership declined, she left the position, moved from her hometown and Unitarian nest in Boston to New Your City and took a job with Horace Greeley’s now famous daily paper The New York Tribune. She joined the paper as a literary critic, becoming the first person in American journalism to be a fulltime book reviewer.

Given her philosophical agenda, her first piece was aptly a review of a collection of Emerson’s essays. After two years she became the paper’s first female editor. During her four years with The Tribune, she published more than 250 columns, most signed with only an asterisk as a byline. In her columns, Fuller discussed topics ranging from art and literature to political and social issues such as the plight of slaves and women’s rights.

While Emerson spoke in the rarified air of universities and other intellectual venues, and Thoreau (seven years her junior) was living in Emerson’s house and serving as tutor to Emerson’s children, Fuller was speaking to the general public and putting these alternative ideas out their in the American cultural zeitgeist.

While working at The Tribune, Fuller published in 1845 her most influential work, Women in the Nineteenth Century, the first great American feminist work, on a par and as influential as Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, published fifty years earlier in England. Her book is credited as one of the key motivators for Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Seneca Falls conference in 1848 which launched the 19th Century American women’s movement. It was just one more piece of Fuller’s incredible legacy.

In 1846 Fuller was sent to Europe, again as another first, this time as The Tribune’s first female foreign correspondent. Over the next four years she provided 37 reports from overseas, including interviews with prominent writers such as George Sand and Thomas Carlyle. In her somewhat perhaps arrogant style she found both of them lacking, Sand (who had been an idol of Fuller’s) because she would not run for the French National Assembly and Carlyle because of his reactionary politics.

While working in Europe, Fuller met the Italian revolutionary Giovanni Ossoli, a marquis who had been disinherited by his family because of his support for the Italian revolution. Though there is no clear evidence that they actually married, they had a child together, Angelino, in 1848. Ossoli fought in the 1849 revolution while Fuller volunteered at a supportive hospital to treat the wounded.

In 1850 Fuller and Ossoli decided to return to the United States with their now two-year-old son. They booked passage on a freighter rather than a passenger ship to save money. Early in the voyage the ship captain died of small pox. Their son Angelino contracted the disease but recovered. Possibly because of the inexperienced first mate, now serving as captain, the ship slammed into a sandbar less than 100 yards from shore of Fire Island, New York, on July 19, 1850, around 4am in the midst of a hurricane. Some of those on board swam to shore, but neither Fuller nor Ossoli could swim. The crew offered her a place in a lifeboat, but she refused to leave her family. All three drowned.

Fuller was just 40 years old when she died, but she had done more of note than most people do in lives twice as long. Though she suffered depressions, illnesses, and money worries throughout her life, she had an unquenchable passion to know everything there was to know and be a full participant in the world. As she wrote in her memoirs, “Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow”. That she did!

By the late 1840s, Emerson believed the Transcendentalist movement was dying out, especially after Margaret Fuller’s death. “All that can be said”, Emerson wrote, “is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation”. Thus Emerson put the Transcendentalist movement in its place as part of the developmental coming of age of American culture.

So here is Margaret Fuller in her own words…

On the primacy of human growth and development she said…

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression” and again, “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

On gender…

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

On the struggles of life…

Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.

On love…

Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

On applying imagination to one’s life…

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

Besides her compelling life’s narrative, I resonate with Fuller because of the ideas that she and her fellow Transcendentalists put forward. These are ideas that championed self-reliance, self-direction and individual liberty, and challenged dogmatic liberalism and the kind of one-size-fits-all social engineering that grew from it.

It was the sort of dogmatic thinking that Fuller, Emerson, Thoreau and others railed against, that inspired a different, more doctrinaire breed of Unitarians like Horace Mann, to champion heavy-handed institutions, like mandatory one-size-fits-all public education to try and instruct all the children of Massachusetts (particularly the immigrant Catholic ones) in a “non-sectarian” Unitarian Protestant theology.

But that’s another post! For now… happy 200th birthday Margaret! Thanks for being there and championing the cause of liberty, a cause that I and others continue the struggle for today.

I used to get mad at my school
The teachers who taught me weren’t cool
Holding me down
Turning me round
Filling me up with their rules…
But I’ve got to admit its getting better

Just the whole challenge of designing a life, finding the right job, the right work site, the interesting commute, the weekly rituals that add variety, finding space for my “life’s work” as well, is an adventure in intentional living. It is my intention to spend as much of the time as I can giving back to the world what I hope to pass as wisdom, for all the wonderful experience the world has given me in my first five decades of this incarnation on planet Earth. It is my intention to make every minute of my waking hours at least somewhat interesting, with a nice thread of randomness woven in. It is my further intention to make the work for pay that I still have to do (to finance this life) not so burdensome that in overwhelms the other aspects of my life. (That all said, I am blessed to be skilled enough to do work that pays well!)

So that’s the deal… the thoughts that are going through my brain as now I am getting close to completing my two hour bus ride down this awesome street (Sunset Boulevard), in my adopted home that it took many, many years for me to finally come to love, but is definitely now where I intend to be.

My Mom & Dad Circa 1977

I’m in the middle without any plans
I’m a boy and I’m a man
I’m eighteen… And I don’t know what I want
Eighteen… I gotta get away
I gotta get out of this place
I’ll go runnin in outer space… Oh yeah

Well I had certainly felt that way at age 18 as I stumbled through my backpacking through Europe odyssey. Now after four years of college classes, playing military simulation board games in dark basements, being schooled in feminism (see “My Feminist Aunts”), plus exploring recreational intoxicants and the magical side of life, I still didn’t know what I wanted.

So on that bus ride, I decided that I was going to plunge into the moment and enjoy every bit of my last year in my home town, and hopefully in the process what to do next would magically appear before me. And I did just that, living in that apartment with Ned, taking interesting television, film and history classes, and traversing those so friendly tree-lined streets of Ann Arbor.

And as I hoped, during that year a path forward emerged. The person behind the youth theater group (that had been so developmentally significant to me, see “JLO”) offered me a room in his house where he now lived in Los Angeles. I could come out and help him manage his young actors (in exchange for the room) and take my crack at working in the entertainment business. In retrospect, it was a hair-brained scheme that was not that well thought out… but it was a path forward.

FYI… I have written these pieces out of chronological sequence. For the next installment, see “Saying Goodbye to Ann Arbor”.