Value for Tuesday of Week 13 in the season of Sowing

Developing and Pursuing Dreams and Goals

Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963

When we hope, we can dream, and set goals; then, the lives we desire begin to come into focus.

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

[Langston Hughes, “Dreams”]

Do not confuse dreams with wishes. There is a difference. Dreams are where you visualize yourself being successful at what’s important to you to accomplish. Dreams build convictions because you work hard to pay the price to make sure that they come true. Wishes are hoping good things will happen to you but there is no fire in your gut that causes you to put everything forth to overcome all the obstacles. [Dolly Parton]
Ellen had come of age in a house where education was prized, but denied to her – where she had only been able to stare at the alphabet in secret. Here was a new beginning, evidenced in the tentative series of loops and lines that she formed in her own hand – spectral, fleeting traces that she drew, erased, and drew, again, to spell out her name, Ellen. [Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom (2023), p. 137.]

Dreams and goals are states of mind, with some common elements. Both are aspirational. Through both, we direct our attention to the future, and imagine a state of affairs that does not yet exist. That is true even if we dream of remaining in our house, or in our job decades from now: by outward appearance, nothing has changed but maintaining the current state of affairs over a course of time does represent change, in that a desired state has persisted long into the future. To achieve stability over a lifetime, we may have to act: to maintain what we have, to adapt it to changes that are around us, and maybe to expand on and enhance it.

Dreams and goals differ from each other. In general, a goal is more concrete than a dream. For example, we may dream of becoming a marine biologist, and set a goal of graduating from an accredited institution in the field within five years. Someone may dream of winning a Nobel Prize in literature; if the dream is to become the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize in literature, that is a goal. “A goal is a dream with a date”.

Some people say that goals are expressed more in action than dreams are. That may not be true. Some people’s dreams may motivate them more strongly than their goals do. These words refer to mental processes; each of us conceives of them and responds to them in our own unique ways. To paraphrase Humpty-Dumpty, a dream, or a goal, means what it means to the dreamer or the goal setter. Invoking Humpty-Dumpty again, we are the masters. We draw these concepts from others, in part, but each person decides what they mean in the context of her life.

Both concepts are associated with hope and optimism. Hope looks toward an object, which may be specific or general but it is not void. The content of the idea is important, because when we act to fulfill our hopes we must direct our actions in a way that is likely to bring about our desired ends. Both hopes and dreams contain content. However, hope may persist without a specific goal, and may sustain the individual emotionally, for a long time or a short time.

Goals are useful in individual life, and in the life of organizations. “. . . goals energize and direct behaviour across the lifespan.” “. . . setting specific organizational goals (is) positively related to planning quality and organizational performance.”

Goals drive individuals forward. “Goals are usually things we want but have difficulty achieving even when we know they are achievable. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need a goal in the first place.” We have a wealth of scholarship on how people achieve their goals. “Human behavior is marked by both its generativity and its flexibility. We have a remarkable ability to conduct new tasks to meet our goals, to work toward underspecified or open-ended objectives, and to adapt our behaviors as our contexts and goals change. We can manage multiple goals at once, over multiple timescales, and we can correct course through interruptions, dead ends, and errors”

“Executive functions (EF) are crucial to a person’s unique abilities, enabling one to achieve goals, adapt to new situations and manage social interactions.” Its components include “attention, working memory, inhibitory control, and planning”. “Executive function describes a set of mental processes indicative of social and emotional intelligence. It connects past experience with present action. Executive function is known as the operational system which performs activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, and paying attention to and remembering details.” “. . . a functional hierarchy can capture important aspects of EF development, including incrementalism, partial differentiation, and a shift from reactive to proactive control. . . . children construct this hierarchy in development, (and) make functional analogies between similar EF problems, in a bottom-up incremental fashion. This results in EF structure which becomes differentiated into components which are more suited to solving some goal-directed problems than others.”

For organizations, goals are of great importance. “Generally speaking, success is the achievement of goals, and the assessment of performance is affected by how different goal systems are specified . . .” “Having clear team goals is found to enhance team effectiveness considerably . . .” “Setting high and specific goals is one of the best-established management tools to increase performance and motivation.”

The organization is best advised to care for individuals within it. “A school or corporation that ignores students’ or employees’ emotional, social, or physical needs is likely to find that those unmet needs will work against achieving performance goals.”

William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder (1799-1806)

Real

True Narratives

Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Belknap Press, 2011): “Suppose you wanted to write a novel about John Keats, everyone’s favorite English Romantic poet, whose travels in ‘realms of gold’ were purely imaginary, and who died in 1821, poor and spitting blood, at the obscenely young age of 25. Faced with such narrative restrictions, you might be tempted to invent a brother who was everything that Keats was not: practical, rich, footloose, married with a child, healthy enough to reach middle age. . . . The good news for Denise Gigante, an English professor at Stanford, is that Keats really did have such a brother . . .”
André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011): “Most of its chapters are travel essays, and Aciman is a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art and aimless wandering. The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company.”
Suketu Mehta, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “ . . . a meticulously researched and deeply felt corrective to the public narrative of who today’s migrants are, why they are coming, and what economic and historical forces have propelled them from their homes into faraway lands.”
Fiona Hill, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century (Mariner/HarperCollins, 2021): “The arresting title of Fiona Hill’s new book . . . is what her father told her when she was growing up in Bishop Auckland, a decaying coal-mining town in North East England. He loved her, and so he insisted that she had to leave.”
Hannah Stowe, Move Like Water: My Story of the Sea (Tin House Books, 2023): “Hannah Stowe grew up in coastal Wales, dreaming of a life on the ocean. Her memoir . . . recounts how she pursued her passion.”
Aaron Robertson, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024): “Those with the least to lose, socially and economically speaking, are often the most receptive to radical thinking on how to reorder human society, and the most fluent in wielding it, at least in the imaginative realm.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Ordered to fetch water and a loaf of bread, Cosette sees a doll in a shop.

At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to that wonderful doll, towards _the lady_, as she called it. The poor child paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to. The whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll must be!" [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume II – Cosette; Book Third – Accomplishment of a Promise Made To a Dead Woman, Chapter IV, “Entrance On the Scene of a Doll”.]

She dreamed of a beautiful country,—a land, it seemed to her, of rest,—green shores, pleasant islands, and beautifully glittering water; and there, in a house which kind voices told her was a home, she saw her boy playing, free and happy child. She heard her husband’s footsteps; she felt him coming nearer; his arms were around her, his tears falling on her face, and she awoke! It was no dream. The daylight had long faded; her child lay calmly sleeping by her side; a candle was burning dimly on the stand, and her husband was sobbing by her pillow. [Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (1852), Volume 1, Chapter XIII, “The Quaker Settlement”.]

Other novels:

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1933), about the tension between dreams and family ties.
Leonard Gardner, Fat City: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969): “'From his window he looked out on the stunted skyline of Stockton — a city of eighty thousand surrounded by the sloughs, rivers and fertile fields of the San Joaquin River delta — a view of business buildings, church spires, chimneys, water towers, gas tanks and the low roofs of residences rising among leafless trees between absolutely flat streets.'”
Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake: A Novel (William Morrow, 2019): “What makes this book special, even extraordinary, is that the crossword puzzle aspect is secondary. Lippman, who is the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell, is after bigger game. The arc of Maddie’s character — her mid-1960s “journey,” if you like — reflects the gulf which then existed between what women were expected to be and what they aspired to be.”
Johannes Anyuru, A Storm Blew in from Paradise: A Novel (World Editions, 2019): “In his hypnotic semiautobiographical novel, Johannes Anyuru, born in Sweden in 1979 to a Ugandan father and a Swedish mother, peels back these layers of turmoil, revealing how Amin’s rise to power altered his father’s life and provided a prologue for his own.”
Rachel Beanland, Florence Adler Swims Forever: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2020), “tells the story of a Jewish family struggling to conceal the drowning of a cherished daughter for fear that her pregnant sister, Fannie, will lose her baby.”

Poetry

After a long day of work in my hot-houses / Sleep was sweet, but if you sleep on your left side / Your dreams may be abruptly ended. / I was among my flowers where some one / Seemed to be raising them on trial, / As if after-while to be transplanted / To a larger garden of freer air.

And I was disembodied vision / Amid a light, as it were the sun / Had floated in and touched the roof of glass / Like a toy balloon and softly bursted, / And etherealized in golden air. / And all was silence, except the splendor / Was immanent with thought as clear / As a speaking voice, and I, as thought, / Could hear a Presence think as he walked / Between the boxes pinching off leaves, / Looking for bugs and noting values, / With an eye that saw it all: – / "Homer, oh yes! Pericles, good. / Caesar Borgia, what shall be done with it? / Dante, too much manure, perhaps. / Napoleon, leave him awhile as yet. / Shelley, more soil. Shakespeare, needs spraying --" / Clouds, eh! --

[Edgar Lee Masters, “Gustav Richter”]

* * * * * *

Light the first light of evening, as in a room / In which we rest and, for small reason, think / The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, / A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. / We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind. / We say God and the imagination are one… / How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.

[Wallace Stevens, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (1951).]

* * * * * *

I have almost forgotten my dream. / But it was there then, / In front of me, / Bright like a sun— / My dream. / And then the wall rose, / Rose slowly, / Slowly, / Between me and my dream. / Rose until it touched the sky— / The wall. / Shadow. / I am black. / I lie down in the shadow. / No longer the light of my dream before me, / Above me. / Only the thick wall. / Only the shadow.

My hands! / My dark hands! / Break through the wall! / Find my dream! / Help me to shatter this darkness, / To smash this night, / To break this shadow / Into a thousand lights of sun, / Into a thousand whirling dreams / Of sun!

[Langston Hughes, “As I Grew Older” (1926).]

* * * * * *

Where is my boy, my boy – / In what far part of the world? / The boy I loved best of all in the school? – / I, the teacher, the old maid, the virgin heart, / Who made them all my children.

Did I know my boy aright, / Thinking of him as a spirit aflame, / Active, ever aspiring? / Oh, boy, boy, for whom I prayed and prayed / In many a watchful hour at night, / Do you remember the letter I wrote you / Of the beautiful love of Christ? / And whether you ever took it or not, / My boy, wherever you are, / Work for your soul's sake, / That all the clay of you, all of the dross of you, / May yield to the fire of you, / Till the fire is nothing but light!... / Nothing but light!

[Edgar Lee Masters, “Emily Sparks” (1915).]

* * * * * *

Other poems:

Natasha Trethewey, “Domestic Work, 1937” (1999).
Naseer Ahmed Nasir, “Dreams Lost in Water” (1980).

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Musicologist Joachim Kaiser observes that Beethoven’s Op. 31 piano sonatas seem to “strive toward a goal (and) the unfolding of certain problems”.

Piano Sonata No. 16 in G major, Op. 31/1 (1802) (approx. 21-22’) (list of recorded performances): “After completing his Op. 28 Piano Sonata, Beethoven told his friend Krumpholz that he was dissatisfied with what he had written and was setting out to compose in a new way.” The Opus 31 sonatas mark that effort to move forward.
Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31/2, “Tempest” (1802) (approx. 23-27’) (list of recorded performances): “Beethoven, caught between his deafness and his creativity, decided to let his art, not his illness run his life. His greatest works were still ahead of him in 1802 and, although the Heiligenstadt Testament shows us the depths of his despair, the works he created show how he used his talents to draw himself back into the world.” These lines from Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest” summarize the sonata: “Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wise / Makes this place paradise. Cheer up. Our music-and-dance spectacle is over.”
Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31/3, “Hunt” (Die Jagd) (1802) (approx. 20-23’) (list of recorded performances): “A playful jocularity is maintained throughout the piece, earning it the occasional nickname of The Hunt, although like many of Beethoven's early works, the 'jocular' style can be heard as a facade, concealing profound ideas and depths of emotion.” This sonata also represents a dream of Beethoven, who was striving to move his compositions forward, and “had come to regard virtuosity merely as the necessary medium of a new type of musical expression.”

As their titles suggest, Frédéric Chopin’s three fantasies for solo piano evoke an imagined state of being. Though not idyllic, these compositions are dream-like and aspirational, suggesting a state of longing. They are: