By Dave Rawson \u2013 A mind once stretched can never return to its former size. Powerful stuff, comics. At best and worst, they provide us with images that feed our experience, reinforce our sense of self, and allow our subconscious to subtly choose what we will become.<\/p>\n
My \ufb01rst stories were from the Old Testament: Samson the mighty warrior, blinded and humbled, yet able to destroy the enemies of his people with a burst of self-sacrifice. David, the teenager who slew the giant Philistine, Goliath. These were lessons to struggle against the odds, because who knows what can happen, really, when you put your heart into it?<\/p>\n
From there it was a short step to the stories of ancient Greece, and from there to tales of the Norse and of the American Indian. A wonderful collection of books published by Colliers is the Junior Classics<\/em>. These have everything from Jack and the Bean\u00adstalk<\/em> to Alice in Wonderland<\/em> to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to Ho\u00admer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n While The Odyssey<\/em> and Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em> are absorbing, Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em> is riveting. God against god, hero against hero, mortals thwarting the gods, gods unfairly tricking heroes, but mostly it\u2019s the heroes\u2014hero after hero after hero after hero. Mighty warriors, each the best of their land, brought together in a futile battle that brings the death and desecration of the best of them, noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles, the most powerful.<\/p>\n I devoured all the science \ufb01ction available at the local library. I collected all I could afford. The Com\u00adplete Sherlock Holmes<\/em> was my \ufb01rst hardback purchase.<\/p>\n My 20s and early 30s brought the most profound reading of my life. I no longer ab\u00adsorbed like a sponge. I was provoked to wonder. From then, here are books I found notable:<\/p>\n On culture and perceptual reality<\/strong>\u2014Bertrand Russell\u2019s A History of Western Philosophy<\/em>, Harish Johari\u2019s commentaries on Leela (a wonderful, wonderful dice game of snakes and arrows which raise or drop the player through various realities within the eight planes of consciousness in the Hindu cosmology), G. Spencer Brown\u2019s Laws of Form<\/em> (a slim book which Alan Watts calls \u201cthe most wonderful contribution to Western philosophy since Wit\u00adtgenstein\u2019s Trac\u00adta\u00adtus<\/em>\u201d), and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light<\/em>, by William Thompson (a book as profound as the intentional ambiguity of the title).<\/p>\n On societal norms<\/strong>\u2014R. D. Laing\u2019s The Politics of Exper\u00adience<\/em>, Thomas Szasz\u2019s The Manu\u00adfacture of Madness<\/em>, Mar\u00adshall McLuhan\u2019s Under\u00adstanding Media<\/em>, and Edmund Car\u00adpenter\u2019s Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!<\/em><\/p>\n On one\u2019s sense of self<\/strong>\u2014Viktor Frankl\u2019s Man\u2019s Search for Meaning<\/em>, Buckminster Fuller\u2019s I Seem To Be a Verb<\/em>, Richard Alpert\u2019s Be Here Now<\/em>, Dane Rudhyar\u2019s The Astrology of Per\u00adsonality<\/em>, and Gregory Bate\u00adson\u2019s Steps to an Ecology of Mind<\/em>.<\/p>\n For sheer pleasure, I read Henry Miller and Charles Bukow\u00adski, two spare and brutally honest introspectors. When they suddenly hit a lyrical stride, you feel as an angel\/ape loosed from the many-footed beast who binds us, unknowing.<\/p>\n Dave Rawson<\/strong> has written many Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge adventures for Den\u00admark\u2019s Egmont Publishing and is currently scripting the DC\/Ver\u00adtigo mini-series <\/em>Chia\u00adro\u00adscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo Da Vinci.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Dave Rawson \u2013 A mind once stretched can never return to its former size. Powerful stuff, comics. At best and worst, they provide us with images that feed our experience, reinforce our sense of self, and allow our subconscious to subtly choose what we will become. My \ufb01rst stories were from the Old Testament: Samson the mighty warrior, blinded and humbled, yet able to destroy the enemies of his people with a burst of self-sacrifice. David, the teenager who slew the giant Philistine, Goliath. These were lessons to struggle against the odds, because who knows what can happen, really, when you put your heart into it? From there it was a short step to the stories of ancient Greece, and from there to tales of the Norse and of the American Indian. A wonderful collection of books published by Colliers is the Junior Classics. These have everything from Jack and the Bean\u00adstalk to Alice in Wonderland to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm to Ho\u00admer\u2019s Odyssey. While The Odyssey and Virgil\u2019s Aeneid are absorbing, Homer\u2019s Iliad is riveting. God against god, hero against hero, mortals thwarting the gods, gods unfairly tricking heroes, but mostly it\u2019s the heroes\u2014hero after hero after hero after hero. Mighty warriors, each the best of their land, brought together in a futile battle that brings the death and desecration of the best of them, noble Hector, at the hands of Achilles, the most powerful. I devoured all the science \ufb01ction available at the local library. I collected all I could afford. The Com\u00adplete Sherlock Holmes was my \ufb01rst hardback purchase. My 20s and early 30s brought the most profound reading of my life. I no longer ab\u00adsorbed like a sponge. I was provoked to wonder. From then, here are books I found notable: On culture and perceptual reality\u2014Bertrand Russell\u2019s A History of Western Philosophy, Harish Johari\u2019s commentaries on Leela (a wonderful, wonderful dice game of snakes and arrows which raise or drop the player through various realities within the eight planes of consciousness in the Hindu cosmology), G. Spencer Brown\u2019s Laws of Form (a slim book which Alan Watts calls \u201cthe most wonderful contribution to Western philosophy since Wit\u00adtgenstein\u2019s Trac\u00adta\u00adtus\u201d), and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, by William Thompson (a book as profound as the intentional ambiguity of the title). On societal norms\u2014R. D. Laing\u2019s The Politics of Exper\u00adience, Thomas Szasz\u2019s The Manu\u00adfacture of Madness, Mar\u00adshall McLuhan\u2019s Under\u00adstanding Media, and Edmund Car\u00adpenter\u2019s Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! On one\u2019s sense of self\u2014Viktor Frankl\u2019s Man\u2019s Search for Meaning, Buckminster Fuller\u2019s I Seem To Be a Verb, Richard Alpert\u2019s Be Here Now, Dane Rudhyar\u2019s The Astrology of Per\u00adsonality, and Gregory Bate\u00adson\u2019s Steps to an Ecology of Mind. For sheer pleasure, I read Henry Miller and Charles Bukow\u00adski, two spare and brutally honest introspectors. When they suddenly hit a lyrical stride, you feel as an angel\/ape loosed from the many-footed beast who binds us, unknowing. Dave Rawson has written many Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge adventures for Den\u00admark\u2019s Egmont Publishing and is currently scripting the DC\/Ver\u00adtigo mini-series Chia\u00adro\u00adscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo Da Vinci.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":421,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[55,54,56],"class_list":["post-414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recommended-reading","tag-dave-rawson","tag-issue-10","tag-november-1995"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":423,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414\/revisions\/423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}