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| A novel to read on
Shakespeare's 461st Birthday: Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?" (233) Click for more quotes. & Hamnet on my Book Blog & Facebook. |
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Paul Robeson
That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond. [emphasis added]
Written in 1970
by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000)
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| The Mighty Mississippi
[Not forgetting The Wide Missouri] |
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| Respect the Earth! |
Heather Cox Richardson: The first "Earth Day, held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history."
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Larkin's poem is mentioned in the wikipedia entry of novelist Malcolm Bradbury (1932 - 2000): "Though Bradbury was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's poem, 'Church Going.' "
The first fruit of a liberal education is to free a person from ignorance, which fundamentally means freedom to think, clearly and logically. Moreover, allied with this release from stupidity — nonthinking or poor thinking — is the freedom to communicate one's thoughts, hopefully with clarity, style, and grace . . .
A liberal education should also enable a person to judge, which in itself presupposes the ability to evaluate: to prefer this to that, to say this is good and that bad, or at least this is better than that. To evaluate is to prefer, to discriminate, to choose, and each of these actions presupposes a sense of values. . . . This, too, is a value judgment and a liberation from valuelessness, insecurity and despair, at times.
Liberal education, by all of these value‐laden processes, should confer a sense of peace, confidence and assurance on the person thus educated and liberate him or her from the adriftness that characterizes so many in an age of anomie [valuelessness].
Lastly, a liberal education should enable a person to humanize everything that he or she touches in life, which is to say that one is enabled not only to evaluate what one is or does, but that, in addition, one adds value consciously to relationships that might otherwise be banal or superficial or meaningless: relations to God, to one's fellow men, to one's wife or husband or children, to one's associates, one's neighborhood, one's country and world. In this way, the list of what one expects of liberal education is really a list of the very real values that alone can liberate a person from very real evils or nonvalues — stupidity, meaninglessness, inhumanity.
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| Le Cirque Bleu ~ The Blue Circus
By Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) Many more Chagalls: QK & FN |
A Chagall (#1)
A Blue Circus,
a spotlight, and a red girl
swinging in the air,
illuminated, twisting,
face and breasts and buttocks
all facing you, you'd
really find it hard
to believe, except
it's supernormal compared
to the floating green donkey
she's facing, and the blue carp
who holds a bouquet,
floating above her, and
a blue chicken
with a yellow bill
resting upon her leg.
There's a radiant yellow sun
which contains a white crescent
moon with an eye, and a violin,
the moon may be playing it,
you can't be sure,
and other people, dancing,
hanging, twirling, spinning
hoops and playing violins,
and a green beautiful boy
who could be a Samurai
or the son of God,
vague among green leaves.
7 / 2 / 68
by Dan Propper (1937 - 2003)
[See also UN & Gulf]
Music for Maundy Thursday & Good Friday:
Mozart's "Confutatis and Lacrimosa"
&
Some thoughts about Jesus
from The Rev. Sarah Condon
from her book Churchy
"Jesus was terrible at encouraging equitable relationships with good boundaries. Just ask those people who worked all day in the vineyard. Or the ninety-nine lambs that got left behind while he searched for the lost one. Or even the disciples who felt they had rightfully earned their place at the front of the heavenly queue.
. . . Whether we like it or not, a low anthropology exemplifies the reality of human nature juxtaposed with the perfection of Christ. If he did not come to save us from ourselves, then what did he come for? To be a teacher? A prophet? A community organizer? He was an elusive teacher at best, a failed and crucified prophet, and the world's least organized community organizer" (12, 19).
See also Imbolc Angel & Small Sweet Tangible Things
On an errand from Jesus, St. Matthew speaks to Satan: "'He [Jesus] has read the Master's work and asks you to take the Master with you and reward him with peace. Is that hard for you to do, spirit of evil?'As you can imagine, there is a lot of literary analysis on the topic of why the Master & Margarita deserve peace [comfort] instead of light. But obviously it is seen as a sad outcome & a lesser reward than light -- and all the other things that Huxley mentions: God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, sin.
"'Nothing is hard for me to do,' answered Woland [Satan], 'You know that very well.' He was silent for a while, and added: 'But why don't you take him with you, into the light?'
"'He has not earned light, he earned peace,' Matthew said in a sorrowful voice.
"'Tell him it will be done,' Woland replied."
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| Stanford Online |
Between The Master and Margarita -- the perfect novel for Holy Week -- and Jesus Christ Superstar, I've sort of put together my own version of the Life of Christ that I carry around inside my head. Every now and then, I have to remind myself that it's not entirely biblical. On the other hand, much of it is!
The Bees
In the street outside a school
what the children learn
possesses them.
Little boys yell as they stone a flock of bees
trying to swarm
between the lunchroom window and an iron grate.
The boys sling furious rocks
smashing the windows.
The bees, buzzing their anger,
are slow to attack.
Then one boy is stung
into quicker destruction
and the school guards come
long wooden sticks held out before them
they advance upon the hive
beating the almost finished rooms of wax apart
mashing the new tunnels in
while fresh honey drips
down their broomsticks
and the little boy feet becoming expert
in destruction
trample the remaining and bewildered bees
into the earth.
Curious and apart
four little girls look on in fascination
learning a secret lesson
and trying to understand their own destruction.
One girl cries out
“Hey, the bees weren’t making any trouble!”
and she steps across the feebly buzzing ruins
to peer up at the empty, grated nook
“We could have studied honey-making!”
by Audre Lorde (1934 - 92)
These are the only two I kept, a matching set for my twin brother Bruce and me. I get them out every year and fill with miscellaneous memorabilia. Look closely, and you can see that the date on the photo of me says: 1959. The bottom of one of the baskets says: “79 cents.”
Steven clarified: "Alas, my Easter Basket was falling apart, so I decorated it with flowers and used it on the set for The Miser two years ago. It now has a new life, after 70 years. It was mine as a child. I think my mother must have gotten it at Woolworth's. It came back to me after my grandmother died. I used it for keys and other stuff, but finally it couldn't stand on its own. I was going to have it remade, but decided it should be a prop instead."A good life for a cherished item! Sometimes a new life is for the best, right?!
In a serious family discussion, Lara's daughters express their concern about the dangers of childbirth and the disinclination to bring children into a troubled world.
Lara responds: "Every generation believes the world is going to end."
Her daughter Emily: "Is that true? Did you and Dad think it was all going up in a fiery ball?"
Lara: "No, I said it to make you feel better." We "thought about the plays we wanted to get tickets for, the price of rent, whether or not we should go out to dinner, how soon we could afford to have a baby. We didn't think anything would end, any of it ever." (149).
" . . . there is no nuclear apocalypse in the original 'Mad Max,' just Australian society teetering on the brink of dissolution due to natural resource scarcity.
"That film was made in 1979, when eco-dystopian thought had incredible cultural currency. . . . It’s not that we don’t still have eco-dystopians. But they are much more likely to worry that oil is too plentiful than that it’s too scarce. [emphasis added]
"What’s fascinating, though, is that in the doomer mindset, the line between 'the world will end because we are running out of oil' and 'the world will end because we are burning too much oil' is paper thin."
One of Yglesias's readers responds:
"Doomers went from 'the world will end because we are running out of oil' to 'the world will end because we are burning too much oil,' just like they flipped from 'We're doomed because people are having too many children' to 'We're doomed because people are having too few children,' or from 'Society is falling apart because permissive parents give their kids too much freedom' to 'Society is falling apart because helicopter parents give their kids too little freedom.' The one constant is the belief that humanity is bad and deserves to be punished; they fill in the details later."
~Wayne Karol
In her memoir Loose Change, Sara Davidson recalls being a college student during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Up until then, around the fountain on the mall "at noon, liberal students and religious fanatics would speak to small crowds. In October of 1962, something changed . . . the crowds . . . swelled to thousands. The Russians were sending a fleet of ships loaded with nuclear missiles to Castro . . . Atomic weapons would be pointed at our cities. . . .
Around her kids were talking about buying canned food and building air - raid shelters. She closed her eyes and saw San Francisco in flames beneath a mushroom-shaped cloud. She went to a pay phone and called her mother to say good-bye. . . . The next morning, Susie woke up to find herself alive. The crisis was over; the Russian ships had turned back" (37).
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| Is there a proper blessing for the sliders?
[Why do I always feel a little nauseous saying "sliders"?] While I'm not exactly recommending the 2017 movie Brigsby Bear, one line has stuck with me over the years. It features a wacky family with a solid ritual blessing: "May our minds be stronger tomorrow." I think that works for Lent! |
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| And just like that -- the year is 1/4 over! |
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| ~ More on facebook ~
~ More photos by Gregg & Kim |
"To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of who they used to be.Upon reading this meditation, I immediately thought of my sibs and how we keep on growing and changing and loving each other, even as we become old people!
The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people
they don't recognize inside themselves anymore. The people
they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into.
We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back
when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are
lost.
"But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people
they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each
version and to honor what emerges along the way.
Sometimes, it will be an even more luminescent flame.
Sometimes, it will be a flicker that
disappears and temporarily
floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness."
by 🖋Heide Priebe
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| Key West Sunset ~ February 2025
Originally called "Cayo Hueso," meaning "Bone Island" in reference to piles of bones & human remains dicovered by settlers in the early 1800s. |
1. Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) : "She hadn't any of the sentimentality that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature."The Professor's House, 256
2. Thomas Pynchon (b 1937): "At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted. (I suspect one of the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so much to younger readers is that, when the space and time have been altered to allow characters to travel easily anywhere through the continuum and thus escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities, mortality is so seldom an issue.)"Introduction to
Slow Learner: Early Stories
p 5, emphasis added
3.Terry Pratchett (1948 – 2015): "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."from his novel Reaper Man
Ripples Left Behind
Thanks to my friend Lynn Z. who said:
"Nice way to hold people close even after they’re gone
~ be the ripple."
I used to love "Prufrock" so much -- "There will be time, there will be time." But now we see that indeed there may NOT be time! So hurry, hurry, hurry to take it all in. In younger days, if I hadn't heard from someone in awhile, I would tell myself, "Oh settle down, they're just busy." But these days: no! You're right to worry; you're not being pararnoid; they may be dead. That's no longer being morbid, just realistic. Sometimes, your time has come; other times, your time is up.
Sadly, even after all the bargaining and denial, nothing will ever change the outcome — no amount of knowing or not knowing, no amount of poetry, no amount of soul searching or second guessing or rewriting history. This is the story now and we’re stuck with it.
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| Calendar caption from my friend Megan: "The robin's egg!
A good find but a sad outcome for that baby chick! George Saunders: " . . . nobody knows why death happens. It's not bad. But it's not great. . . . What are we to make of death? How are we to live in a world where death is king?" ~from The Braindead Megaphone, 181, 182 |
