In the course of a brief phone conversation yesterday with a friend, music was mentioned. What does music affect for us, when we listen, when we are enthralled with rhythm, rhyme, harmony, and the lyric of a human voice? Could it be we are addressed by a god that we cannot name, one without…
These lines compel reflection. Songs about love beyond counting have been written. Just within my short span of life, poets and lyricists find a bottomless well of material, as they peer into the surreal experience of love between two human beings. And, this is not limited to male-female love, never has been… Nietzsche comments…
It is Friday. I’ve got almost nothing to write. What does it mean “to be” here, to exist, to be located in Starbucks at 7:15 AM on a Friday morning? What links my being, to my physical position in space and time, here-now? The room is quite full, humming with voices and movement. I…
Many, myself included ask ourselves WTF has happened to us Americans. What happened? What happened to the Republican Party, when they had opportunity to convict this shape-shifting con man, impeaching him and banning him from holding future office? They feared him, feared their actions would anger their own voters. That is what the prosecutor,…
Sunday morning dawns, time enough for reflection. We were guests at a concert last night at the Royal Fox Country Club. Arcada Productions presented the music of Styx and Boston: Boston and Styx at the Fox. Musicians included members of Dennis DeYoung Band and Tommy Decarlo lead singer for Boston. I struggle to find…
Today will be another sweltering day. Heat and stifling humidity. One adapts to conditions as one is able, constraints presented by the thermal energy-surge of atmosphere, of ocean currents, a result of millennia of sequestered carbon release since the advent of the industrial age. The “waste” must go somewhere… Wouldn’t you agree? You cannot…
I am amazed that anyone could subscribe to a religion or a quasi-religious movement, such as the Republican (Trump) Party as it now stands. Shiny surfaces notwithstanding, the truth of our time, this first half of the 21st century, is that of existential exhaustion. There is a market for fanaticism, many “takers,” those willing…
The tragedy begins…. Thus Nietzsche ends this section of The Gay Science, book four. Every ending brings a beginning, an interregnum, an interlude when “what comes next” cracks the old constraints, a climax of a chain of events, only described as WTF, when you crest the apex, the highest point in a roller coaster,…
When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and Lake Urmi and went into the mountains. There he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of that. But at last his heart changed –and on morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and…
Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! “Not to laugh, not to lament, nor to detest, but to understand” —Tractatus Politicus by Spinoza …what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once? One result of the different and mutually opposed desires to laugh,…
