Yearly Archives 2013

A Google world is a humbling world. One of the consolations, I suppose, is that the humbling can be nearly instantaneous, and after your conceit that you may be having something vaguely resembling an original thought is quickly dispatched (in 0.16 seconds!), you can get back to your dullard’s life of cliched thinking and self-delusion, no delay involved.

This line of thought (no doubt unoriginal, but I’m going to be defiant and not even Google it) occurred to me recently when staring again at the ever-intriguing “stairs photography” of Larry Rose (self-portrait to the left). “Stairs!” I found myself thinking. “I’ll never look at them the same way again. I wonder how much has been written about them.” Turns out, quite a lot.

One could start with The Staircase: History and Theories, by John Templer, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992. “Theories” of stairs—who knew?

What else mi...

The cultural divide between the sacred and secular plays out on many fronts, and as revealing as any of them is the simple matter of how we wish each other well when someone is ill or enduring some personal trial. “I’ll pray for you,” say the traditionally religious, who may even tack on a pledge to fire up a “prayer chain” via their Facebook friends or church and thus multiply the purported power of prayer to affect human events.

“I’ll be holding a good thought for you,” say the secular, studiedly avoiding any reference to the divine.

Now: the essence here is quite similar, yes? We care, we sympathize, we want to offer the person whatever comfort we can in riding out the storm he or she is facing. The different phrases bespeak deep differences, though.

The secularist’s “good thought” does not generally reflect belief in a divine power who listens to human utterances and perhaps takes them ...

Sometimes it seems that music does religion better than religion does. Which is to say it elicits depths and ranges of soul-stirring emotion (wonder, rapture, joy, universal brother-and-sisterhood) that all religion aspires to but so often falls short of when it focuses more on doctrine and notions of absolute truth and exclusivity.

As much as we may cleave to and even argue over our musical preferences, I can’t find any listings for “The Music Wars” or “The Folk Music Crusades” on Wikipedia, and dinner party conversations are rarely if ever fractured by an otherwise gracious guest’s semi-bellicose insistence, after that second glass of wine, that jazz really is the one true music.

These thoughts occurred to me again the other night while glorying in the second “largo” movement of Dvorak’s Ninth “New World” Symphony, and the many interpretations of it offered by an astonishing array of artists,...

I’m about to let my membership in the Church of Human Wholeness lapse. It’s not that I can’t afford the tithe anymore (there isn’t any). Nor that the people there aren’t nice (everyone I know striving for wholeness tries unceasingly to be as kind as they can be).

It’s just that the effort is based on a model and goal that are not only unattainable in this fractured existence we encounter, but, in my mind, not particularly desirable. Too many treasures abide in the roiling waters just below the surface of our everyday social selves—nuggets of contemplation, tensions leading to inspiration, interpersonal imbroglios leading to insight.

So I’ve had enough of wholeness. I’m giving it up. And I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s face it: human beings are a mess. A glorious, endearing, mystifying, contradictory, staggeringly complex, often-edifying-but-also-aggravating mess, but a mess nevertheless.

Sometimes, life is just crappy and sad, so sad. And those who bear it may show tremendous dignity, but that doesn’t necessarily earn them a return of cheerfulness the next day, or the next year, or ever. Life is never even remotely that fair.

“The Dutchman” and his devoted wife look to be two such people. Michael Peter Smith’s haunting elegy to aging and dementia casts a plaintive poetic glow that settles on the quietly shifting scenes like a dreamy summer fog as Margaret guides her ex-seaman husband through his old haunts in Amsterdam. His faculties ebbing, she serves as both his physical escort and his memory.

The wedding day question “Till-death-do-you-part?” meets its existential peak in dementia...