Bhagwad Gita As Seen By Osho

Bhagwad Gita As Seen By Osho I have always been intrigued by one question the response to which I was always not able to a find or say this one question always confused me , baffled me or say that this very question always made me contemplate or say left me pondering. Every time I would see a court scene in a Hindi movie, I would find it very funny rather very strange. A witness or an accused being called to the witness box , he being made to take an oath in the name of the holy Bhagwad Gita by touching it and saying mein jo hi kahunga sach kahunga , sach ke siva kuch na kahunga. I would find it funny and would think whether it was some kind of narco test being conducted or what, that the truth will automatically start flowing from the mouth of the person. I could never understand and thought would perhaps never understand the reason behind it. Every time the same holy Gita and the same old oath. Then why only the Gita why not some other religious scripture. Well it could always be the Ramayana, the Upanishads, or say the Puranas. The other day the same question again came to my mind and I found the answer to it in one of the editions of Osho times and I found it quite convincing and relevant and at the same time very interesting. In the words of Osho, no other person on earth has been as complete as the Krishna. Looking at the personality and the character of the Lord Krishna , one would observe that he has been the only multidimensional person with so many faces and in a way complete, imbibing in himself almost every possible aspect of human nature . If he is a warrior, a Kshatriya at the same time he is a very learned being, a knowledgeable person, a great pundit, a Brahman. At the same time a lover, a flirt, a musician, a dancer, a thief, a liar, and a politician as well. There is hardly any aspect of human nature, which you will not find in the Lord Krishna. It is almost impossible, something which is not imaginable. Krishna is a complete man, which is why he has been called a purna a vatar. Before him and after him no body has ever been so complete and so multidimensional. Ram has been there, Vishnu has been there but no one so complete, so interesting and so varied in his personality with all shades and colors of human nature. According to Osho, if God descends on earth, he would look somewhat like Krishna and no one else. Lord Ram, however big he may be, in the consciousness of this country has never been a complete avatar, he always been a part of it but never the complete. The rishis of Upanishads however knowledgeable they may have been are not complete avatars. Only Krishna has been complete and thats why the majority of Indian consciousness and mind has been touched by him .And the reason for this is his being a multidimensional person who touches all the aspects of human personality. As far as Lord Ram and others are concerned, they are all one-dimensional and they can be loved and worshiped by only a particular category of people. As far as Krishna is c oncerned, it will be hard to find a person on this earth who will not fall in love with any of the aspects of the personality and the being of Shri Krishna. A thief may fall in love with him, a dancer will love him, a sanyasi may adore him, a nonsanyasi as well and he may even be source of inspiration for a Kshatriya. Therefore, Krishna is like a complete orchestra with all the musical instruments and in this orchestra, everybody finds an instrument of his choice. However, the strangest thing is there has never been anyone who would have loved Krishna as a whole. Surdas loves only the BAL Krishna, he is afraid of the Krishna who dances around with the Gopies and flirts with them. Keshavdas on the other hand will love the young Krishna dancing and enjoying himself. But to love him as a whole is very difficult or rather impossible. To be able to love him as a whole requires one to be multidimensional. And the majority of us happen to be one-dimensional and all of us we have a single t rack mind set and in Krishna we choose what suits us. That is why all love Krishna and everyone finds a reason to do so. According to Osho, in a court of law, one will seldom find good people; people who are bad in some way or the other usually frequent court. A bad person in love with Ram may perhaps never go to the court .So taking an oath in the name of Ram is almost impossible. Taking an oath in the name of Krishna is quite relevant and possible because Krishna seems to be open to even the criminals and all kinds of bad people .His doors are open for all. That is why even the bad people, the offenders, love Krishna. According to Osho, it will be hard to find a person who would not feel like hugging Krishna, who would say that Krishna is not meant for him or her. Moreover, for Osho the greatest truth greater than truth is love and it is almost impossible to lie in front of a person we are in love with. Truth can be found only in a love relationship. If one is not able to be truth ful towards ones lover then it is something else in the name of love and love not at all. Moreover, the psychology has proved that if somebodys cord of love is touched it will be impossible for him to lie. So it is all in the name of love for Krishna that all the accused and the witnesses are made to take an oath in the name of the Bhadwad Gita. Like wise there have been other questions too troubling me and keeping me pensive all the time since my child hood. I have my exams and say I m not well prepared, I m worried and my parents would always say karm kar fal ki icha mat kar; this again would leave me wondering. How can you do anything, perform any karma without thinking of the outcome at all. Finding it written everywhere would again make me feel guilty because lord Krishna had said so as my parents told me. I would feel something wrong with me as I never did anything without the outcome, and even today, I do not do anything with out the result in mind. There are expectations all the time. But today there is no guilt associated with it at all and again Osho helped me resolve this quarry of mine which earlier would never let me feel free of my guilt. I used to feel as if I was a criminal. But I was not responsible because that was how my parents and the people around had interoperated it. But the Osho does it, its really i ncredible. He says something very interesting. Karmanye vadhikareste à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦.. he interprets it not by associating it with any result at all. According to him, it means being here and now completely. What so ever one does if done with full concentration and by immersing into it in ones totality, he or she would never fail. That is it. But the way people have been interpret ting it has been very unrealistic and impossible. How can you do anything without having the purpose in your mind? And doing anything without anything in mind would be foolish and stupid at the same time. But that is what we have told by all kinds of idiots and cunning people, or says the followers of Hitler. According to Osho, misinterpretation is done only with the purpose of creating guilt in the people. And it is very simple to dictate upon the people who feel guilty. Hitler also did that. He also created guilt among his people, ruled over them, and could have his way. Karma kar à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ That si mply means doing everything with full samagrata, with full concentration, by being here and now and that is what epitomizes the whole philosophy of Osho. Like wise, there are other questions as well. I once saw a film in which a serial killer goes around killing people and saying Na koi Marta hai na koi maarta hai à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦.. Aisa main nahin Gita kehti hai à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦. Nobody ever dies nobody ever kills, this again seems to be justifying the violence committed by General Dyer or the killings done by Hitler. But this is not what Krishna means to say. According to him just because no one dies does not in any way justify the desire to kill or the passion for violence? According to him, there is nothing wrong in the occurrence of violence but the sin is in the act of violence. So listening to Gita if someone concludes that killing someone is not killing at all is not right, that is all a fiction. Krishna is not saying, Go ahead and kill people. He is saying only if it becomes your experience that no one is ever killed, then, and only then, can you let whatever happens, happen. And there is one more thing who is Krishna addressin g this to. This is very important. This discourse is not meant for the common man, it is meant for the Arjuna who has refused to kill. And then he tells Arjuna that he is a Kshatriya and that he should perform his duty that of being one. But does that mean that Krishna is a warmonger? No. According to Osho, Krishna is only trying to help Arjuna realize who he is and what his duties are and how can he achieve the pinnacle of his being and that naturally is possible only by being what he is. In the battlefield, Arjuna has dropped his weapons and is talking like a Brahman, which he is not suppose to. This has only one message that all of us we should do everything to be what we are and that we should realize all our potentials and possibilities we have born with. Then there is one more important thing, which Osho says in the context of Bhadwad Gita. According to him, the Bhagwad Gita happens to be the first psychological scripture available to the East long before the works of Freud, Adler and Jung. And in his words, it would not be an exaggeration if Krishna were called the father of psychology. In the Bhagwad Gita, the way Krishna approaches Arjunas problems can only be appreciated once we really understand the working of the human mind with all its intricacies and complexities. According to Osho, all of us all the time carry an Arjuna within us and all the time we are confronted with situations and are facing one crises or the other. And as we listen to him it becomes clear that our situation too is not very different from that of the Arjuna, it is perhaps more complex and of a greater magnitude. In the words of Osho, the root cause of all of our problems, difficulties, miseries, dilemma, conflict and war is nothing else but mind. So in or der to find a solution to all these problems its very important rather imperative to understand the working of mind, its patterns and conditionings. According to Osho, only mind is the problem and all that chaos which we find all around ourselves, behind all this only mind is the one who is responsible. Some people have called the Bhagwad Gita a spiritual shastra but its not so according to Osho.In his opinion no shastra can ever be spiritual, it can only be psychological. Rather shastras have nothing to do with spirituality. The spiritual journey starts where the mind ends. And Osho goes further and says that there is nothing like a spiritual shastra because as far as spirituality is concerned, spirituality itself is life, is experience and shastra only helps understand the functioning of mind. Bhagwad Gita is not spiritual also because the problem of Arjuna is not spiritual; it is more of a psychological problem, a practical one. And the answer to a psychological question can only be a psychological one. According to Osho if someone says that Krishna is, addressing to Arjunas problem in spiritual words, that too would be wrong because then no communication would be possible between the two. According to Osho, no problem can ever be spiritual because spiritualism can be the solution and the problems always arise from the mind. In his words, all problems are psychological whereas spirituality itself is solution. Only mind is the problem. Mind itself is the chaos. That is why whatever is shastra cannot be beyond the mind and whatever is beyond mind has no name at all. According to Osho since most of our problems, arise from the mind, since most of them happen to be psychological, so the solutions to them too have to be of the same level. That is why Krishna in order to resolve Arjunas problem brings himself down to his level or say to his pedestal. How ever if Krishna addresses his problem from he already is i.e. is from his own pedestal, in that case no communication will be possible between the two; Arjuna wont understand anything. And that what happens to be difference between the modern teacher and the rishi of Upanishads. The difference is that of the methodologies. A modern teacher always keeps his student on the centre whereas the rishi of Upanishads, he himself happens to be the centre. Krishna talks to Arjuna just like a modern teacher. He does not preach him at all rather he discusses the problem with him. According to Osho, only those scriptures have future that are psychological. Metaphysics has no future at all. People have problems and they want those problems to be solved. All they want is a solution to them; and who so ever will solve them who so ever will answer to their questions will have a place, will have a future. According to Osho only if Krishna shows the courage to stand in a queue with Freud and Jung, then and only then Gita will have a future.

Imprisoned by Society in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilm

The Yellow Wallpaper: Imprisoned by Society Charlotte Perkins Gilman's, "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the story of a woman's descent into madness as the result of being isolated as a form of "treatment" when suffering from postpartum depression. On a larger scale, Gilman is also telling the story of how women were kept prisoners by the confines of the society of her time and the penalties these women incurred when they attempted to break free from these confines. In the beginning of the story, the narrator, whose name is never divulg... ...s a fascinating look into the mind of a woman slipping deeper and deeper into mental illness. It is also, however, clearly a statement by Gilman of the absurd confines society places on the women of her time and the extreme consequences that befell the women who attempted to break free of those confines.

Bag of Bones CHAPTER ONE

On a very hot day in August of 1994, my wife told me she was going down to the Derry Rite Aid to pick up a refill on her sinus medicine prescription this is stuff you can buy over the counter these days, I believe. I'd finished my writing for the day and offered to pick it up for her. She said thanks, but she wanted to get a piece of fish at the supermarket next door anyway; two birds with one stone and all of that. She blew a kiss at me off the palm of her hand and went out. The next time I saw her, she was on TV. That's how you identify the dead here in Derry no walking down a subterranean corridor with green tiles on the walls and long fluorescent bars overhead, no naked body rolling out of a chilly drawer on casters; you just go into an office marked PRIVATE and look at a TV screen and say yep or nope. The Rite Aid and the Shopwell are less than a mile from our house, in a little neighborhood strip mall which also supports a video store, a used-book store named Spread It Around (they do a very brisk business in my old paperbacks), a Radio Shack, and a Fast Foto. It's on Up-Mile Hill, at the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. She parked in front of Blockbuster Video, went into the drugstore, and did business with Mr. Joe Wyzer, who was the druggist in those days; he has since moved on to the Rite Aid in Bangor. At the checkout she picked up one of those little chocolates with marshmallow inside, this one in the shape of a mouse. I found it later, in her purse. I unwrapped it and ate it myself, sitting at the kitchen table with the contents of her red handbag spread out in front of me, and it was like taking Communion. When it was gone except for the taste of chocolate on my tongue and in my throat, I burst into tears. I sat there in the litter of her Kleenex and makeup and keys and half-finished rolls of Certs and cried with my hands over my eyes, the way a kid cries. The sinus inhaler was in a Rite Aid bag. It had cost twelve dollars and eighteen cents. There was something else in the bag, too an item which had cost twenty-two-fifty. I looked at this other item for a long time, seeing it but not understanding it. I was surprised, maybe even stunned, but the idea that Johanna Arlen Noonan might have been leading another life, one I knew nothing about, never crossed my mind. Not then. Jo left the register, walked out into the bright, hammering sun again, swapping her regular glasses for her prescription sunglasses as she did, and just as she stepped from beneath the drugstore's slight overhang (I am imagining a little here, I suppose, crossing over into the country of the novelist a little, but not by much; only by inches, and you can trust me on that), there was that shrewish howl of locked tires on pavement that means there's going to be either an accident or a very close call. This time it happened the sort of accident which happened at that stupid X-shaped intersection at least once a week, it seemed. A 1989 Toyota was pulling out of the shopping-center parking lot and turning left onto Jackson Street. Behind the wheel was Mrs. Esther Easterling of Barrett's Orchards. She was accompanied by her friend Mrs Irene Deorsey, also of Barrett's Orchards, who had shopped the video store without finding anything she wanted to rent. Too much violence, Irene said. Both women were cigarette widows. Esther could hardly have missed the orange Public Works dump truck coming down the hill; although she denied this to the police, to the newspaper, and to me when I talked to her some two months later, I think it likely that she just forgot to look. As my own mother (another cigarette widow) used to say, ‘The two most common ailments of the elderly are arthritis and forgetfulness. They can't be held responsible for neither.' Driving the Public Works truck was William Fraker, of Old Cape. Mr. Fraker was thirty-eight years old on the day of my wife's death, driving with his shirt off and thinking how badly he wanted a cool shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. He and three other men had spent eight hours putting down asphalt patch out on the Harris Avenue Extension near the airport, a hot job on a hot day, and Bill Fraker said yeah, he might have been going a little too fast maybe forty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He was eager to get back to the garage, sign off on the truck, and get behind the wheel of his own F-150, which had air conditioning. Also, the dump truck's brakes, while good enough to pass inspection, were a long way from tip-top condition. Fraker hit them as soon as he saw the Toyota pull out in front of him (he hit his horn, as well), but it was too late. He heard screaming tires his own, and Esther's as she belatedly realized her danger and saw her face for just a mome nt. ‘That was the worst part, somehow,' he told me as we sat on his porch, drinking beers it was October by then, and although the sun was warm on our faces, we were both wearing sweaters. ‘You know how high up you sit in one of those dump trucks? ‘ I nodded. ‘Well, she was looking up to see me craning up, you'd say and the sun was full in her face. I could see how old she was. I remember thinking, ‘Holy shit, she's gonna break like glass if I can't stop.' But old people are tough, more often than not. They can surprise you. I mean, look at how it turned out, both those old biddies still alive, and your wife . . . ‘ He stopped then, bright red color dashing into his cheeks, making him look like a boy who has been laughed at in the schoolyard by girls who have noticed his fly is unzipped. It was comical, but if I'd smiled, it only would have confused him. ‘Mr. Noonan, I'm sorry. My mouth just sort of ran away with me.' ‘It's all right,' I told him. ‘I'm over the worst of it, anyway.' That was a lie, but it put us back on track. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘we hit. There was a loud bang, and a crumping sound when the driver's side of the car caved in. Breaking glass, too. I was thrown against the wheel hard enough so I couldn't draw a breath without it hurting for a week or more, and I had a big bruise right here.' He drew an arc on his chest just below the collarbones. ‘I banged my head on the windshield hard enough to crack the glass, but all I got up there was a little purple knob . . . no bleeding, not even a headache. My wife says I've just got a naturally thick skull. I saw the woman driving the Toyota, Mrs. Easterling, thrown across the console between the front bucket seats. Then we were finally stopped, all tangled together in the middle of the street, and I got out to see how bad they were. I tell you, I expected to find them both dead.' Neither of them was dead, neither of them was even unconscious, although Mrs. Easterling had three broken ribs and a dislocated hip. Mrs. Deorsey, who had been a seat away from the impact, suffered a concussion when she rapped her head on her window. That was all; she was ‘treated and released at Home Hospital,' as the Derry News always puts it in such cases. My wife, the former Johanna Arlen of Malden, Massachusetts, saw it all from where she stood outside the drugstore, with her purse slung over her shoulder and her prescription bag in one hand. Like Bill Fraker, she must have thought the occupants of the Toyota were either dead or seriously hurt. The sound of the collision had been a hollow, authoritative bang which rolled through the hot afternoon air like a bowling ball down an alley. The sound of breaking glass edged it like jagged lace. The two vehicles were tangled violently together in the middle of Jackson Street, the dirty orange truck looming over the pale-blue import like a bullying parent over a cowering child. Johanna began to sprint across the parking lot toward the street. Others were doing the same all around her. One of them, Miss Jill Dunbarry, had been window-shopping at Radio Shack when the accident occurred. She said she thought she remembered running past Johanna at least she was pretty sure she remembered someone in yellow slacks but she couldn't be sure. By then, Mrs. Easterling was screaming that she was hurt, they were both hurt, wouldn't somebody help her and her friend Irene. Halfway across the parking lot, near a little cluster of newspaper dispensers, my wife fell down. Her purse-strap stayed over her shoulder, but her prescription bag slipped from her hand, and the sinus inhaler slid halfway out. The other item stayed put. No one noticed her lying there by the newspaper dispensers; everyone was focused on the tangled vehicles, the screaming women, the spreading puddle of water and antifreeze from the Public Works truck's ruptured radiator. (‘That's gas!' the clerk from Fast Foto shouted to anyone who would listen. ‘That's gas, watch out she don't blow, fellas!') I suppose one or two of the would-be rescuers might have jumped right over her, perhaps thinking she had fainted. To assume such a thing on a day when the temperature was pushing ninety-five degrees would not have been unreasonable. Roughly two dozen people from the shopping center clustered around the accident; another four dozen or so came running over from Strawford Park, where a baseball game had been going on. I imagine that all the things you would expect to hear in such situations were said, many of them more than once. Milling around. Someone reaching through the misshapen hole which had been the driver's-side window to pat Esther's trembling old hand. People immediately giving way for Joe Wyzer; at such moments anyone in a white coat automatically becomes the belle of the ball. In the distance, the warble of an ambulance siren rising like shaky air over an incinerator. All during this, lying unnoticed in the parking lot, was my wife with her purse still over her shoulder (inside, still wrapped in foil, her uneaten chocolate-marshmallow mouse) and her white prescription bag near one outstretched hand. It was Joe Wyzer, hurrying back to the pharmacy to get a compression bandage for Irene Deorsey's head, who spotted her. He recognized her even though she was lying face-down. He recognized her by her red hair, white blouse, and yellow slacks. He recognized her because he had waited on her not fifteen minutes before. ‘Mrs. Noonan?' he asked, forgetting all about the compression bandage for the dazed but apparently not too badly hurt Irene Deorsey. ‘Mrs. Noonan, are you all right?' Knowing already (or so I suspect; perhaps I am wrong) that she was not. He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the heat baking down from above and then bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight. There were red marks on her face. When I identified her I could see them clearly even on the video monitor. I started to ask the assistant medical examiner what they were, but then I knew. Late August, hot pavement, elementary, my dear Watson. My wife died getting a sunburn. Wyzer got up, saw that the ambulance had arrived, and ran toward it. He pushed his way through the crowd and grabbed one of the attendants as he got out from behind the wheel. ‘There's a woman over there,' Wyzer said, pointing toward the parking lot. ‘Guy, we've got two women right here, and a man as well,' the attendant said. He tried to pull away, but Wyzer held on. ‘Never mind them right now,' he said. ‘They're basically okay. The woman over there isn't.' The woman over there was dead, and I'm pretty sure Joe Wyzer knew it . . . but he had his priorities straight. Give him that. And he was convincing enough to get both paramedics moving away from the tangle of truck and Toyota, in spite of Esther Easterling's cries of pain and the rumbles of protest from the Greek chorus. When they got to my wife, one of the paramedics was quick to confirm what Joe Wyzer had already suspected. ‘Holy shit,' the other one said. ‘What happened to her?' ‘Heart, most likely,' the first one said. ‘She got excited and it just blew out on her.' But it wasn't her heart. The autopsy revealed a brain aneurysm which she might have been living with, all unknown, for as long as five years. As she sprinted across the parking lot toward the accident, that weak vessel in her cerebral cortex had blown like a tire, drowning her control-centers in blood and killing her. Death had probably not been instantaneous, the assistant medical examiner told me, but it had still come swiftly enough . . . and she wouldn't have suffered. Just one big black nova, all sensation and thought gone even before she hit the pavement. ‘Can I help you in any way, Mr. Noonan?' the assistant ME asked, turning me gently away from the still face and closed eyes on the video monitor. ‘Do you have questions? I'll answer them if I can.' ‘Just one,' I said. I told him what she'd purchased in the drugstore just before she died. Then I asked my question. The days leading up to the funeral and the funeral itself are dreamlike in my memory the clearest memory I have is of eating Jo's chocolate mouse and crying . . . crying mostly, I think, because I knew how soon the taste of it would be gone. I had one other crying fit a few days after we buried her, and I will tell you about that one shortly. I was glad for the arrival of Jo's family, and particularly for the arrival of her oldest brother, Frank. It was Frank Arlen fifty, red-cheeked, portly, and with a head of lush dark hair who organized the arrangements . . . who wound up actually dickering with the funeral director. ‘I can't believe you did that,' I said later, as we sat in a booth at Jack's Pub, drinking beers. ‘He was trying to stick it to you, Mikey,' he said. ‘I hate guys like that.' He reached into his back pocket, brought out a handkerchief, and wiped absently at his cheeks with it. He hadn't broken down none of the Arlens broke down, at least not when I was with them but Frank had leaked steadily all day; he looked like a man suffering from severe conjunctivitis. There had been six Arlen sibs in all, Jo the youngest and the only girl. She had been the pet of her big brothers. I suspect that if I'd had anything to do with her death, the five of them would have torn me apart with their bare hands. As it was, they formed a protective shield around me instead, and that was good. I suppose I might have muddled through without them, but I don't know how. I was thirty-six, remember. You don't expect to have to bury your wife when you're thirty-six and she herself is two years younger. Death was the last thing on our minds. ‘If a guy gets caught taking your stereo out of your car, they call it theft and put him in jail,' Frank said. The Arlens had come from Massachusetts, and I could still hear Malden in Frank's voice caught was coowat, car was cah, call was caul. ‘If the same guy is trying to sell a grieving husband a three-thousand-dollar casket for forty-five hundred dollars, they call it business and ask him to speak at the Rotary Club luncheon. Greedy asshole, I fed him his lunch, didn't I?' ‘Yes. You did.' ‘You okay, Mikey?' ‘I'm okay.' ‘Sincerely okay?' ‘How the fuck should I know?' I asked him, loud enough to turn some heads in a nearby booth. And then: ‘She was pregnant.' His face grew very still. ‘What?' I struggled to keep my voice down. ‘Pregnant. Six or seven weeks, according to the . . . you know, the autopsy. Did you know? Did she tell you?' ‘No! Christ, no!' But there was a funny look on his face, as if she had told him something. ‘I knew you were trying, of course . . . she said you had a low sperm count and it might take a little while, but the doctor thought you guys'd probably . . . sooner or later you'd probably . . . ‘ He trailed off, looking down at his hands. ‘They can tell that, huh? They check for that?' ‘They can tell. As for checking, I don't know if they do it automatically or not. I asked.' ‘Why?' ‘She didn't just buy sinus medicine before she died. She also bought one of those home pregnancy-testing kits.' ‘You had no idea? No clue?' I shook my head. He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. ‘She wanted to be sure, that's all. You know that, don't you?' A refill on my sinus medicine and a piece of fish, she'd said. Looking like always. A woman off to run a couple of errands. We had been trying to have a kid for eight years, but she had looked just like always. ‘Sure,' I said, patting Frank's hand. ‘Sure, big guy. I know.' It was the Arlens led by Frank who handled Johanna's send off. As the writer of the family, I was assigned the obituary. My brother came up from Virginia with my mom and my aunt and was allowed to tend the guest-book at the viewings. My mother almost completely ga-ga at the age of sixty-six, although the doctors refused to call it Alzheimer's lived in Memphis with her sister, two years younger and only slightly less wonky. They were in charge of cutting the cake and the pies at the funeral reception. Everything else was arranged by the Arlens, from the viewing hours to the components of the funeral ceremony. Frank and Victor, the second-youngest brother, spoke brief tributes. Jo's dad offered a prayer for his daughter's soul. And at the end, Pete Breedlove, the boy who cut our grass in the summer and raked our yard in the fall, brought everyone to tears by singing ‘Blessed Assurance,' which Frank said had been Jo's favorite hymn as a girl. How Frank found Pete and persuaded him to sing at the funeral is something I never found out. We got through it the afternoon and evening viewings on Tuesday, the funeral service on Wednesday morning, then the little pray-over at Fairlawn Cemetery. What I remember most was thinking how hot it was, how lost I felt without having Jo to talk to, and that I wished I had bought a new pair of shoes. Jo would have pestered me to death about the ones I was wearing, if she had been there. Later on I talked to my brother, Sid, told him we had to do something about our mother and Aunt Francine before the two of them disappeared completely into the Twilight Zone. They were too young for a nursing home; what did Sid advise? He advised something, but I'll be damned if I know what it was. I agreed to it, I remember that, but not what it was. Later that day, Siddy, our mom, and our aunt climbed back into Siddy's rental car for the drive to Boston, where they would spend the night and then grab the Southern Crescent the following day. My brother is happy enough to chaperone the old folks, but he doesn't fly, even if the tickets are on me. He claims there are no breakdown lanes in the sky if the engine quits. Most of the Arlens left the next day. Once more it was dog-hot, the sun glaring out of a white-haze sky and lying on everything like melted brass. They stood in front of our house which had become solely my house' by then with three taxis lined up at the curb behind them, big galoots hugging one another amid the litter of tote-bags and saying their goodbyes in those foggy Massachusetts accents. Frank stayed another day. We picked a big bunch of flowers behind the house not those ghastly-smelling hothouse things whose aroma I always associate with death and organ-music but real flowers, the kind Jo liked best and stuck them in a couple of coffee cans I found in the back pantry. We went out to Fairlawn and put them on the new grave. Then we just sat there for awhile under the beating sun. ‘She was always just the sweetest thing in my life,' Frank said at last in a strange, muffled voice. ‘We took care of Jo when we were kids. Us guys. No one messed with Jo, I'll tell you. Anyone tried, we'd feed em their lunch.' ‘She told me a lot of stories.' ‘Good ones?' ‘Yeah, real good.' ‘I'm going to miss her so much.' ‘Me, too,' I said. ‘Frank . . . listen . . . I know you were her favorite brother. She never called you, maybe just to say that she missed a period or was feeling whoopsy in the morning? You can tell me. I won't be pissed.' ‘But she didn't. Honest to God. Was she whoopsy in the morning?' ‘Not that I saw.' And that was just it. I hadn't seen anything. Of course I'd been writing, and when I write I pretty much trance out. But she knew where I went in those trances. She could have found me and shaken me fully awake. Why hadn't she? Why would she hide good news? Not wanting to tell me until she was sure was plausible . . . but it somehow wasn't Jo. ‘Was it a boy or a girl?' he asked. ‘A girl.' We'd had names picked out and waiting for most of our marriage. A boy would have been Andrew. Our daughter would have been Kia. Kia Jane Noonan. Frank, divorced six years and on his own, had been staying with me. On our way back to the house he said, ‘I worry about you, Mikey. You haven't got much family to fall back on at a time like this, and what you do have is far away.' ‘I'll be all right,' I said. He nodded. ‘That's what we say, anyway, isn't it?' ‘We?' ‘Guys. I'll be all right.' And if we're not, we try to make sure no one knows it.' He looked at me, eyes still leaking, handkerchief in one big sunburned hand. ‘If you're not all right, Mikey, and you don't want to call your brother I saw the way you looked at him let me be your brother. For Jo's sake if not your own.' ‘Okay,' I said, respecting and appreciating the offer, also knowing I would do no such thing. I don't call people for help. It's not because of the way I was raised, at least I don't think so; it's the way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It's not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else. I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, ‘Are you all right?' I can't answer no. I can't say help me. A couple of hours later Frank left for the southern end of the state. When he opened the car door, I was touched to see that the taped book he was listening to was one of mine. He hugged me, then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth, a good hard smack. ‘If you need to talk, call,' he said. ‘And if you need to be with someone, just come.' I nodded. ‘And be careful.' That startled me. The combination of heat and grief had made me feel as if I had been living in a dream for the last few days, but that got through. ‘Careful of what?' ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I don't know, Mikey.' Then he got into his car he was so big and it was so little that he looked as if he were wearing it and drove away. The sun was going down by then. Do you know how the sun looks at the end of a hot day in August, all orange and somehow squashed, as if an invisible hand were pushing down on the top of it and at any moment it might just pop like an overfilled mosquito and splatter all over the horizon? It was like that. In the east, where it was already dark, thunder was rumbling. But there was no rain that night, only a dark that came down as thick and stifling as a blanket. All the same, I slipped in front of the word processor and wrote for an hour or so. It went pretty well, as I remember. And you know, even when it doesn't, it passes the time. My second crying fit came three or four days after the funeral. That sense of being in a dream persisted I walked, I talked, I answered the phone, I worked on my book, which had been about eighty percent complete when Jo died but all the time there was this clear sense of disconnection, a feeling that everything was going on at a distance from the real me, that I was more or less phoning it in. Denise Breedlove, Pete's mother, called and asked if I wouldn't like her to bring a couple of her friends over one day the following week and give the big old Edwardian pile I now lived in alone rolling around in it like the last pea in a restaurant-sized can a good stem-to-stern cleaning. They would do it, she said, for a hundred dollars split even among the three of them, and mostly because it wasn't good for me to go on without it. There had to be a scrubbing after a death, she said, even if the death didn't happen in the house itself. I told her it was a fine idea, but I would pay her and the women she brought a hundred dollars each for six hours' work. At the end of the six hours, I wanted the job done. And if it wasn't, I told her, it would be done, anyway. ‘Mr. Noonan, that's far too much,' she said. ‘Maybe and maybe not, but it's what I'm paying,' I said. ‘Will you do it?' She said she would, of course she would. Perhaps predictably, I found myself going through the house on the evening before they came, doing a pre-cleaning inspection. I guess I didn't want the women (two of whom would be complete strangers to me) finding anything that would embarrass them or me: a pair of Johanna's silk panties stuffed down behind the sofa cushions, perhaps (‘We are often overcome on the sofa, Michael,' she said to me once, ‘have you noticed?'), or beer cans under the loveseat on the sunporch, maybe even an unflushed toilet. In truth, I can't tell you any one thing I was looking for; that sense of operating in a dream still held firm control over my mind. The clearest thoughts I had during those days were either about the end of the novel I was writing (the psychotic killer had lured my heroine to a high-rise building and meant to push her off the roof) or about the Norco Home Pregnancy Test Jo had bought on the day she died. Sinus prescription, she had said. Piece of fish for supper, she had sa id. And her eyes had shown me nothing else I needed to look at twice. Near the end of my ‘pre-cleaning,' I looked under our bed and saw an open paperback on Jo's side. She hadn't been dead long, but few household lands are so dusty as the Kingdom of Underbed, and the light-gray coating I saw on the book when I brought it out made me think of Johanna's face and hands in her coffin Jo in the Kingdom of Underground. Did it get dusty inside a coffin? Surely not, but I pushed the thought away. It pretended to go, but all day long it kept creeping back, like Tolstoy's white bear. Johanna and I had both been English majors at the University of Maine, and like many others, I reckon, we fell in love to the sound of Shakespeare and the Tilbury Town cynicism of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Yet the writer who had bound us closest together was no college-friendly poet or essayist but W. Somerset Maugham, that elderly globetrotting novelist-playwright with the reptile's face (always obscured by cigarette smoke in his photographs, it seems) and the romantic's heart. So it did not surprise me much to find that the book under the bed was The Moon and Sixpence. I had read it myself as a late teenager, not once but twice, identifying passionately with the character of Charles Strickland. (It was writing I wanted to do in the South Seas, of course, not painting.) She had been using a playing card from some defunct deck as her place-marker, and as I opened the book, I thought of something she had said when I was first getting to know her. In Twentieth-Century British Lit, this had been, probably in 1980. Johanna Arlen had been a fiery little sophomore. I was a senior, picking up the Twentieth-Century Brits simply because I had time on my hands that last semester. ‘A hundred years from now,' she had said, ‘the shame of the mid-twentieth-century literary critics will be that they embraced Lawrence and ignored Maugham.' This was greeted with contemptuously good-natured laughter (they all knew Women in Love was one of the greatest damn books ever written), but I didn't laugh. I fell in love. The playing card marked pages 102 and 103 Dirk Stroeve has just discovered that his wife has left him for Strickland, Maugham's version of Paul Gauguin. The narrator tries to buck Stroeve up. My dear fellow, don't be unhappy. She'll come back . . . ‘Easy for you to say,' I murmured to the room which now belonged just to me. I turned the page and read this: Strickland's injurious calm robbed Stroeve of his self-control Blind rage seized him, and without knowing what he was doing he flung himself on Strickland. Strickland was taken by surprise and he staggered, but he was very strong, even after his illness, and in a moment, he did not exactly know how, Stroeve found himself on the floor. ‘You funny little man,' said Strickland. It occurred to me that Jo was never going to turn the page and hear Strickland call the pathetic Stroeve a funny little man. In a moment of brilliant epiphany I have never forgotten how could I? it was one of the worst moments of my life I understood it wasn't a mistake that would be rectified, or a dream from which I would awaken. Johanna was dead. My strength was robbed by grief. If the bed hadn't been there, I would have fallen to the floor. We weep from our eyes, it's all we can do, but on that evening I felt as if every pore of my body were weeping, every crack and cranny. I sat there on her side of the bed, with her dusty paperback copy of The Moon and Sixpence in my hand, and I wailed. I think it was surprise as much as pain; in spite of the corpse I had seen and identified on a high-resolution video monitor, in spite of the funeral and Pete Breedlove singing ‘Blessed Assurance' in his high, sweet tenor voice, in spite of the graveside service with its ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I hadn't really believed it. The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead. You funny little man, said Strickland. I lay back on our bed, crossed my forearms over my face, and cried myself to sleep that way as children do when they're unhappy. I had an awful dream. In it I woke up, saw the paperback of The Moon and Sixpence still lying on the coverlet beside me, and decided to put it back under the bed where I had found it. You know how confused dreams are logic like Dal clocks gone so soft they lie over the branches of trees like throw-rugs. I put the playing-card bookmark back between pages 102 and 103 a turn of the index finger away from You funny little man, said Strickland now and forever and rolled onto my side, hanging my head over the edge of the bed, meaning to put the book back exactly where I had found it. Jo was lying there amid the dust-kitties. A strand of cobweb hung down from the bottom of the box spring and caressed her cheek like a feather. Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane. ‘Give me that,' she hissed. ‘It's my dust-catcher.' She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed. I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn't been asleep long the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me. There was nothing there, of course dreams are just dreams. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.

Ted Bundy a Personality Comparison with the Theories Od...

Ted Bundy 2 Ted Bundy: A Personality Comparison With The Theories Of Rollo May and Albert Bandura The objective of this case study is to examine the personality of one of the most notorious serial killers in modern history, Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy was alleged to have humiliated, tortured and murdered at least 50 women. Possibility more, but the true number will never be known. Because Ted Bundy kept the true number of his victims to himself and refused to inform authorities of the exact number of his horrific deeds, before he was executed on January 24, 1989 (Wikipedia, n.d.). Ted Bundy was once a Boy Scout and those who knew him in the labor force said that he had a promising career in politics, because Ted Bundy†¦show more content†¦After high school, Ted worked his way through the University Of Puget Sound and the University of Washington. Some of his low-level employment positions that he obtain to support himself through College were as a bus boy and shoe sales clerk. His employers considered him unreliable due to the fact that he never stayed in one post very lon g. Even though he was inconsistent in his work outside of school, he always stayed very focus on his high grade-point average (Wikipedia, n.d.). Ted Bundys life changed forever in the spring of 1967, when he met and fell in love with the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful, sophisticated and from a wealthy family. She was Teds first love and possibly his first sexual encounter. She liked him a lot, but did not have the same deep feelings towards him. This didnt discourage Ted Bundy since he would ask her to marry him on several occasions. She was very reluctant to make a serious commitment, because she felt that Ted had no future goals or real direction in his life. Ted began to try to impress her by lying and even winning a summer scholarship from Stanford to try to influence her feelings for him. But the mask of Ted Bundy 5 deception that he was trying to display for her admiration fell away leaving all his lies and immaturity exposed to her (Bell, 2005). When Teds girlfriend graduated in 1968, she broke off the relationship with him; she realized that Ted had some serious character