Lughnasa                            Waning Harvest Moon

“The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.” – Alfred North Whitehead

Whitehead captured my inner sense of reality and did it over and over.  I’ve told many times the story of my mystical experience of the unity of all things after having left a philosophy class studying Whitehead’s process metaphysics.  The sensation moved up inside me, breaking free of an inner barrier and releasing itself into my conscious awareness.  It was as if I had touched, heart to heart, the essence of the universe and learned we shared all this, all of it.

That moment still informs my umvelt, my self-world, and has left me at ease with many variations on the theme of human/universe interrelationships.  I suppose it solves the question of life after life in that the kind of literal interweaving that made tactile sense to me in that one moment suggests the enduring nature of all things, in all things, a sort of value-free ongoingness.  How that would feel or what it could mean for, say, consciousness is not clear to me, nor does it need to be.

This reminds me of my Black Swan story.  A man wrote a book, a management/leadership type book that those groupie CEO’s read and absorb, sort of cotton candy for the narcissist in them all.  In this case a Black Swan is any infrequent, unlikely event that, when it happens, changes everything.  The Great Recession has Black Swan notes.  So does the meteor strike that created the Chicxulub crater and wiped out the dinosaurs.  Anyhow, you get the idea.

I had a Black Swan enter my life with a crash in 1963 when my family visited, as we often did, Stratford, Ontario to attend the Shakespeare Festival.  During some non-theater going time, I had the opportunity to strike out on my own and I chose to go to the Black Swan coffee house, a charming little place alongside the Avon River.  The folk music revival was in full voice and a folk musician was on the Black Swan’s tiny stage that afternoon.

During the performance I heard the first critical remarks about the United States and, in particular, the Vietnam war which had just begun to get noticed.  The actual content does not stick with me, instead what does is the electric shock, outrage in fact, at having my  country criticized.  Of course, we were in Canada, somebody else’s country and they were under no obligation to genuflect at the altar of American exceptionalism.  And they didn’t.

This was a transitional moment for me, a moment when for the first time, I realized the US did things that others found repugnant, even abhorrent.  Those were the still young days of the expanding civil rights movement and the first shock waves that would become the movement.  And it happened for me first at the Black Swan.

Here’s an odd note I found looking up the Black Swan:

The 19th Black Swan Revival at Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford
“The Black Swan Coffee House Revival pays homage to the original Black Swan event of the 60s and the Perth County Conspiracy (does not exist). All proceeds go directly to Stratford/Perth Shelterlink, the organization responsible for the revival and an active member in supporting and fighting for homeless and at risk youth in Perth county.
Good music, good times, and a worthy cause…a night to remember folks!”