TALKING TO MYSELF

TALKING TO MYSELF

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© September 25, 2012

REFERENCE:

Over the past decade (2001 – 2011), I have published a series of 30 missives on “A Way of Looking at Things.”  The topics varied from “the loss of a hero” to “what is the world coming to.”  It also covered such topics as “where have all the Catholics gone” to a tribute to my mentor, a devout Catholic, “Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth.”  I’ve also wondered about such insanities as the pervasive “cut and control” philosophy of American enterprise better known as creative destructive capitalism. 

The reception to my missives has been difficult to measure as the Peripatetic Philosopher blog indicates viewers and comments with tens of thousands viewing the blog, but only about one-tenth of one percent ever commenting.  Early on, most comments attempted to sell something.  That doesn’t happen anymore. 

The idea was not original.  I got it from reading “A Way of Looking at Things” (1987) by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson.  This book was a collection of his published papers from 1930 to 1980. 

Lawrence J. Friedman’s biography of Erikson salutes the man as “Identity’s Architect”(1999) when he was never comfortable with his own identity.  Erik H. Erikson was not even his real name.  Often those most passionate in a singular pursuit, in this case identity, are on a solitary journey to self-discovery. 

*     *     *

The idea of “Talking to Myself” comes out of the fact that most of my creative work comes out of walking and thinking and recording my thoughts on an ancient handheld micro cassette recorder.  Virtually all my published (and unpublished) books and most of my articles come out of this peripatetic wandering. 

Aristotle celebrated this method and added to its dynamism by putting pebbles in his mouth and talking to strengthen his voice.  I don’t know if Aristotle was an extrovert or introvert but I sense from reading that he enjoyed speaking to an audience.  I have never enjoyed the process, yet a good part of my life has been spent in such a theatre.

David Brooks mentioned on “PBS with Charlie Rose” that former President Bill Clinton talked to himself by looking at himself in the mirror.  Variations of that same tactic have been common to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in preparation for his “fireside chats” during WWII, Sir Winston Churchill before addressing the British people during the United Kingdom’s darkest hour in that same war, and by the actor turned governor then president, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan gave an electrifying speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964 that eclipsed everything in Senator Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency and introduced Reagan to a national audience as a political spokesman.   

*     *     *

Yesterday, PBS’s American Masters featured “The Life and Work of Carl Sandburg.”  Sandburg has been important in my life, first when my seventh grade teacher, Sister Mary Cecile, read his poem “Chicago” to the class.  I could visualize the “city of the big shoulders,” as I had been there many times with my da, a railroad brakeman on the Chicago & North Western Railroad.  I was surprised in the poem by the expression “the hog butcher of the world.”  Although I lived in farm state of Iowa, I knew nothing about farming being reared in a small industrial city on the Mississippi River.

When I was a young executive in South Africa, I had my company send me Sandburg’s “Lincoln: The War Years.”  Sandburg meant to write a letter to young people on the Civil War, but his effort grew to four volumes filled with the passion of the prairie poet born in Galesburg, Illinois not far from where I was born in Clinton, Iowa.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for the work.  Devlin quotes a passage from one of these volumes in “A Green Island in a Black Sea” (still unpublished).

*     *     *

Leaders who shape our destiny are explainers not orators, not complicated thinkers but people such as Carl Sandburg, and yes, Bill Clinton, who understand the heart and soul of the pragmatic American conscience. 

Sandburg’s works still sell, but he has been ignored for many years.  Others may be ignored in their lifetime but discovered when they are no longer with us.  Fortunately, we have their works.  Destiny will see that their wisdom surfaces.  Why is that so?  Because as flawed as they might have been in life they remind us what it means to be human.  They somehow managed to be genuine and authentic in that identity and reality.  Still others make a brief splash and then are forgotten because their disingenuousness cannot survive.  We have more than enough of that to go around.

*     *     *

Postscript: My first missive in the “Talking to Myself” will be on nuance leadership.  It may involve a series of such missives.