“When a man is truly creative he works single-handed and he wants no help. A man acting alone, on faith, can accomplish what trained armies are incapable of doing. To believe in one’s self, in one’s own powers, is apparently the most difficult thing in the world…”–Henry Miller, AN OPEN LETTER TO SURREALISTS EVERYWHERE (reprinted in THE COSMOLOGICAL EYE).
https://reghartt.ca/cineforum/?p=24590
“Can you sleep in the park?” a young man asked me around midnight one summer in 1968.
“It is supposed to rain. You could get arrested for being a vagrant. Why?” I replied.
He answered, “My father said, “My way or the highway.”
“You made the right choice. Come with me,” I said.
His name was Bruno Weckerle. I wrote about that night here: https://reghartt.ca/cineforum/?p=37006
Bruno took me to a party where I met a man reading the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of THE I CHING: https://akirarabelais.com/o/thelibraryofbabel/i.html#25
The next day I bought my first copy (I have given away many copies).
In 2012 I found myself under vicious attack.
Oliver Moore wrote about it in THE GLOBE AND MAIL: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/toronto-alternative-theatre-founder-stands-up-to-bullying-threats/article549053/
THE I CHING when I consulted it said, “You are going to have to make a saintly effort to turn the other cheek.”
I believe the hardest words in THE BIBLE to follow are, “BE STILL. VENGEANCE IS MINE. I WILL REPAY.” (Deuteronomy 32:35 ).
Hardly anyone follows them.
I am.
On my birthday this year and last year THE I CHING gave me the same reading:
Annie Besant was an atheist. She said, “Someone ought to do it, but why should I? Someone ought to do it, so why not I? Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution.”
Years before I read this I was biking on the city streets when I saw a blind man waiting to cross. “Someone will help him,” I said to myself. A still small voice said, “Why can’t that someone be you?”
Jane Jacobs taught that when we see wrong being done and do nothing we kill our soul.
Once the soul is dead what6 is left?
I have been called everything that Jane Jacobs wrote about in THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.
What makes me that is the concerted effort by forces in this city to bring me to ruin.
Not that I am the only one.
When Oliver Moore called about writing the piece that appeared in THE GLOBE I said, “Please include the other people who have been and are being attacked so that no one can say this is a feud.”
He did.
Nonetheless, people say this is a feud.
It is not.
The hour has come and is now.-
Let those who mock THE BIBLE mock.
Jane Jacobs, in her book THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, wrote of what kills a city.
In her last book published just before she left us Jane Jacobs wrote of what she saw coming.
Henry Miller wrote, “When a man is truly creative he works single-handed and he wants no help.”
I want no help. I need no help.
THE BIBLE says, “BE STILL.”
I am.
The hour is now.
-Reg Hartt 2024–07–04.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=daniel%205&version=ESV
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