Oct 11
Joan: Art afraid?
Charles: Yes: I am afraid. It's no use preaching to me about it. It's all very well for these big men with their armor that is too heavy for me, and their swords that I can hardly lift, and their muscle and their shouting and their bad tempers. They like fighting: most of them are making fools of themselves all the time they are not fighting; but I am quiet and sensible; and I dont want to kill people: I only want to be left alone to enjoy myself in my own way. I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say: 'Son of St. Louis, gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory' you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it.
Joan: [trenchant and masterful] Blethers! We are all like that to begin with. I shall put courage into thee.
Charles: But I dont want to have courage put into me. I want to sleep in a comfortable bed, and not live in continual terror of being killed or wounded. Put courage into the others, and let them have their bellyful of fighting; but let me alone.
Joan: It's no use, Charlie: thou must face what God puts on thee. If thou fail to make thyself king, thoult be a beggar: what else art fit for? Come! Let me see thee sitting on the throne. I have looked forward to that.
-G.B. Shaw, "Saint Joan." Scene II, 547-574.
Sep 25
For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with the feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being. The music is never the same for me, never. Each day it is something new, fantastic and unbelievable. That is Bach, like nature, a miracle!-Pablo Casals, from his early 90s
Sep 2
This little lady (actually sort of a largish lady) lives in our front yard and we decided to feed her a bee. Did you guys know that the males of this species woo the females by plucking strands of the females' webs? How awesome is that?! They're like little spider harpists! Oh, and I added what seemed to be a fitting soundtrack.
Aug 4
Quill pen and ink (thanks to Michelle Knight for the quill!)
Aug 2
It is hard sometimes to drag ourselves
back to the love of morning
after we've lain in the dark crying out
O God, save us from the horror . . . .
God has saved the world one more day
even with its leaden burden of human evil;
we wake to birdsong.
And if sunlight's gossamer lifts in its net
the weight of all that is solid,
our hearts, too, are lifted,
swung like laughing infants;
but on gray mornings,
all incident - our own hunger,
the dear tasks of continuance,
the footsteps before us in the earth's
beloved dust, leading the way - all,
is hard to love again
for we resent a summons
that disregards our sloth, and this
calls us, calls us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
[Thanks to Ruth for introducing me to her.]
Jul 24
'Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said.
I dont know, the man said. Where are we now?'
Jun 5
Wendell Berry:
"I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about—a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine—which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes."
"Christianity and the Survival of Creation," Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community. Pantheon 1993
"Any group that takes itself, its culture, and its values seriously enough to try to separate, or to remain separate, from the industrial line of march will be, to say the least, unwelcome in the plurality. The tolerance of these doctrinaire pluralists always runs aground on religion. You may be fascinated by religion, you may study it, anthropologize and psychoanalyze about it, collect and catalogue its artifacts, but you had better not believe in it. You may put into "the canon" the holy books of any group, but you had better not think them holy."
"Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community," Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.
May 31
The more I consider it, the more I am convinced that people are both infinitely similar to and infinitely unique from each other. What is unique about each person (their innermost essence) may be necessarily indescribable: you can know someone's heart but you cannot put it into words, for words are only capable of describing what knowledge is shared. But every human shares the image of God, which is the foundation of our being.
May 31
Is there such a thing as a necessary evil? It seems to me that if something is necessary, then it cannot be evil; if something is evil, then it cannot be necessary.
May 13
Every type of art has its inherent limitations, and some of the most beautiful works of art seem to overcome these limitations: one difficulty of still visual art is that it can't display motion, but some of the most beautiful paintings in existence seem as if they are moving, or as if they could; one difficulty of ballet is that gravity is inescapable, yet a great dancer may appear to be outside of its grasp; one difficulty of music is that composers must (for the most part) express via exact notes with exact pitches and exact lengths, but great musical performances appear to be spontaneous, sincere, and fluid as if they were not limited to a graph.
One of the main difficulties of electronic music is that it sounds artificial. Most electronic music sounds like it was made by a computer, and this often makes it extremely dull. This is partly the fault of the musicians who create it: they often resort to extreme amounts of repetition in their compositions.
One electronic musician who appears to have made music that sounds organic, as if the music itself is alive, is Amon Tobin with his new album "ISAM." You can listen to the whole album for free at his website:
http://amontobinisam.com/ but if you enjoy it I recommend buying it to support him. Let me know what you think.
