Sometimes, as the weekdays click by like a train churning thunka thunka purposeful yet deceptive, the sum of its sheer doggedness depositing me with unexpected speed on yet another Friday with no coalescence, no particular object of attention bobbing to the top from the background sea of ideas for this page, I yield to the steadfast gravitational pull of those near-and-always-dear, almost interchangeable twins: poetry (with its inherent music), or music (yep, with its poetry). No matter that the world seems going to ruin (hasn’t it always been so?), its cruel tempests both natural and human descending with oppressive regularity…
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In the idyll of a mid-summer Sunday, a middle-aged man in the ostensible prime of life, with four daughters at home in a WASPY and affluent northeastern burg, lounges in a friend’s pool with his wife and a few others, fresh from an invigorating swim. One hand dangles in the water and another, portentously, is “around a glass of gin.” (The group is nursing hangovers.) In one of those slightly whacky creative inspirations that at the very least will give him a good story to share at the next of what we are soon given to understand are regular cocktail…
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My natural inclination is toward the silver linings, buoyancy, resilience, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Light followed by dark followed by brighter light. The view from afar, over the long-term. Not letting our daubers down, lemonading from the lemons. First the birth, then the fall, then the grace. I used to think time was on the side of the human project, our capacious brains ultimately squeezing out a net gain for human reason, the virtues of cooperation, and the case for common decency in the face of ignorance, superstition, greed, and fear. That however ceaseless is the struggle for mere survival, humanity would…
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Yes, we must always give credit to the songwriters. They are the poets of the musical world, and though the best singer-songwriters only rarely match poets for sheer literary value, the challenge of linking words, their syllables and their sounds with musical notes makes for a heady and challenging art form for which no composer-lyricist should ever have to apologize. So: hosannas to Don McLean, he of “American Pie” and “Vincent” fame, still going strong with an active concert schedule at age 80, a good 55 years after his less renowned, less brilliant “And I Love You So” premiered on…
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Another binary in the long list of “two kinds of people in the world”: spring people and fall people. Sure, you can (and should!) love them both, or even make a case for summer beaching or winter snowing as your particular cup of preferred tea. But there’s a serious question to explore, I think, down there at the literal roots of the natural world: Do you identify more with those roots propulsing out new leaves in the bright glory of spring, or accepting those leaves back to earth as future mulch in the diminishing, slanted light of autumn? Personally, while…
