Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been. -José Ortega y Gasset The typical greeting for encounter of any sort is “How is your day?” The expected reply is a chipper “Just great!” To answer simply “good” is sometimes received…
René Descartes is often quoted to emphasize reason as the hallmark of Enlightenment based culture of the West. Cogito, Ergo Sum. A pithy saying indeed, “I think therefore I am,” with Latin lending the words a patina of sophistication. Descartes by profession a mathematician naturally would be inclined to believe the clarity of reason…
Tuesday morning after Independence Day 2022, is overcast with intermittent sunshine. Is today the beginning of a new week, or a continuation of the week that was, a week that seemed compressed into one day? I refer to the mass murder that occurred yesterday at the Highland Park Independence Day parade. A young man,…
A sultry Sunday afternoon, and here I am at Starbucks, moving words on this screen, like pieces on a chessboard. Yesterday evening was spent at Henry Maier Festival Park, Milwaukee for Summerfest. Summerfest bills itself as the worlds largest music festival. As a marketing ploy, I suppose the outsized claim works. The site is…
Another Independence Day weekend. Monday will be the 4th of July. We are planning a family gathering for breakfast in the morning, and then a viewing of the Independence Day parade. On the surface around here life appears to be good, never better for some. Are such generalizations warranted? Of course not but we…
Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles. -Fredrick Sommer Since my adolescence I have found photography fascinating. With a machine held in one’s hand, it is possible to make an image of the world of which we participate, a freeze-frame depiction. I felt the…
Dunbar By Anne Spencer Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I—Ah, how poets sing and die! Anne Spencer, born on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She published…
Polaroid’s SX-70. It won’t let you stop. Suddenly you see a picture everywhere you look… now you press the red electric button. Whirr…whoosh …and there it is. You watch and your picture comes to life, growing more vivid, more detailed, until minutes later you have a print as real as life. Soon you’re taking…
It has been argued in detail, by Guy Debord that the 20th century West is a Society of the Spectacle. There is little doubt that the information received by the eye, vision, has always been a pivot point for finding food and shelter necessary to life, and for self preservation. The rabbits that come…
Yesterday we viewed from curbside the Geneva Swedish Days parade. I have enjoyed a good parade as long as I can remember, the magic, the exuberance of seeing and being seen. A parade is a meaningful social ritual, in a secular time is it not? I took photographs using my iphone 13 camera. However,…
