“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
And such a weary world it is.
It’s Veteran’s Day 2020. My sister and I visited Woodlawn National Cemetery in our hometown where my parents are buried along with my grandfathers, uncles and assorted other relatives. It’s a lovely spot that holds over 11,000 veteran graves including a sizeable contingent of Confederate troops who died as inmates in the Elmira prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War.
I am always moved by the sight of the symmetry and starkness of the lines of the white marble stones there. There’s an inherent symbolism contained in them. To me, they’re like the heads of candles lit against the lush green of the grass.
As always, I try to read a number of the names when I wander through the stones. Some are familiar local names, some of folks that I have known or known of. But most, of course, are unknown to me.
They all served their country in some way. Some, no doubt, performed courageous and heroic deeds while others served in other ways. But beyond that, I wonder about their lives after their service, their legacies, the memory of them that remains with their families.
What light did these candles shine?
No answers for that, really. Just a question that I ask myself in cemeteries.
Anyway, I am sharing this thought fragment along with the painting at the top, Finally, Light, which I recently took to the West End Gallery. It’s another older piece, from 2008, that has been hanging in my studio for well over a decade now. It’s a piece that I have tight to for some time for reasons I can’t determine. Whenever I was gathering work to take to a gallery I would always decide that I wanted to keep this piece when I came to it.
I am pairing it with Morning Song, a lovely tune from the Avett Brothers. Enjoy and have a good day. Try to spend a moment remembering a veteran you might have known.
“Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are more open than we think, that their behavior cannot be confidently predicted from their past, that we are all creatures vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes.
And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
“It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August
Yesterday was an interesting day. A good day.
A good and decent man and a strong and smart woman of mixed race and immigrant parents were declared the victors in our presidential election. Throughout the country and around the world spontaneous celebrations took place with throngs of people ( almost all masked, by the way) taking to the streets. A total release of emotion. Dancing. Singing. Banging drums and honking car horns.
A cacophony of joy.
In Paris and other cities around the world the church bells tolled.
I would like to think that witnessing this explosion of celebration might cause those who have steadily supported the divisive rhetoric and vindictiveness of the current president*** watched this and wondered how his loss could have possibly triggered such elation and joy. I would like to think that it made them feel cracks taking place in the shield of the cognitive dissonance they have maintained for the past four years, being fed as they have been a steady diet of pure falsehoods and subsisting on beliefs and .conspiracies that do not align with any sort of reality.
Living in their self-contained bubbles doesn’t allow them to even consider the possibility that their reality is not everybody’s reality.
I have to admit this applies to both sides to some extent. But the blind allegiance to the lies, vitriol and cruelty of this president*** is beyond anything seen on the other side. It is complete acceptance of every lie as truth even when their own eyes tell them it is not so. Their support for him even when confronted with facts is an amazing bit of pretzel logic that rationalizes his every action. In the four years since his election I have yet to hear anyone speak of their support for him in anything but broad generalizations and mischaracterizations of events.
They want to believe so hard that their kind rejects the reality that is before them.
I think yesterday went a long way toward bursting that bubble for some of those folks. Not all, of course. There were counter-demonstrations, though much smaller and less ebullient. And largely unmasked. Even when it comes to their health and a raging deadly pandemic, many still refuse to accept the reality that is so apparent to all others.
But for many, it had to be illuminating to see how country and the world reacted. It wasn’t a reaction to a political victory. People celebrated when Obama was elected but even that was dwarfed by yesterday’s outpouring.
This was a reaction similar to the winning of a world war or the toppling of a tyrant. It looked like something from a movie where the citizens of Earth have turned away an alien invasion.
To witness that from the other side had to be a mix of bitterness and bewilderment, probably wondering how so many people could be so wrong. And probably even more so, if they watched President-elect Biden’s speech last night, heard him speak in positive terms about unity and moving ahead together. Where was the anger? There was no promise of American carnage, no threat of retribution or revenge. Not raging with grievances. No us and them.
It was an extended hand and a promise to speak to and for all Americans. It was sane and calm and delivered in terms of unity and future built on hope, not fear.
It most likely didn’t resemble in any way the strawman that they come to fear and hate. The future he spoke of includes them, doesn’t push them to the side or minimize their concerns.
Like I said, yesterday was probably a day of illumination for some. The future doesn’t have to be dark, doesn’t have to be built on demonizing or blaming others. It can be okay, maybe even better than okay.
All they have to do is allow the possibility that there is sometimes another way of thinking about things.
Hopefully, yesterday cracked some bubbles and some new light was shed on their minds. Like Howard Zinn, whose words are at the top of the page, I believe in the potential for people to change their way of thinking.
Okay, enough. I am writing this off the top of my head so I apologize if this is not as concise or focused as I would like.
For this Sunday morning music let’s go with a song, Anthem, from Leonard Cohen whose message is most fitting today for this post:
Ring the bells (ring the bells) that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything (there is a crack in everything) That’s how the light gets in
Have a good day. There will be tough days ahead, but let’s hope there are many more good ones to come.
Thought I’d rerun this post from last year. I can always listen to The Revelator and it seems appropriate to the moment.
**********************
Darling remember, when you come to me I’m the pretender; I’m not what I’m supposed to be But who could know if I’m a traitor? Time’s the revelator
—Gillian Welch, The Revelator
***********************
I came across an image of the painting at the top, a piece from 2006 called What Is True that holds a lot of meaning for me, and it set me thinking.
Truth is patient. It waits for the light of a sun that sometimes travels through the vastness of space and time, millions and millions of light years, to shine on it.
Time always finds truth at some point and when it shine its light upon it, there is revelation.
Every day is filled with revelation, so it seems.
Time and truth are coming together.
Here’s a favorite song of mine from Gillian Welch, The Revelator.
“But there is always a November space after the leaves have fallen when she felt it was almost indecent to intrude on the woods…for their glory terrestrial had departed and their glory celestial of spirit and purity and whiteness had not yet come upon them.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars
November slid in under a blue moon this year with clocks being reset to give us a redo of that first hour or so of the new month. Perhaps to let us get adjusted to the change the month brings.
No comment this morning on the potential change that seems headed towards us, in one way or the other. Just taking in the stillness and the darkness of the first morning of November in the year 2020. It feels like the clocks being set back an hour are more of a timeout this year, a pause amidst the chaos that seems omnipresent lately.
The quiet feels good.
Here’s a piece, November, from composer Max Richter performed brilliantly by violinist Mari Samuelsen. It fits the morning.
Even if it weren’t Halloween today, there’s plenty enough scary stuff taking place. And, unfortunately, it won’t end with the passing of this day of normal tricks and treats. I am just hoping that there are more treats than tricks in our near future.
But today I am just sticking with Halloween and playing a song that kind of aligns with the day. It’s Season of the Witch from Donovan from way back in 1966. Great sound. One of my favorites, Richard Thompson, does a good cover but I am sharing the Donovan original.
The video that accompanies the song below is from a landmark 1922 Swedish silent film made by Danish filmmakerBenjamin Christensen titled Häxanwhich was called Witchcraft Through the Agesin its English release. It has truly remarkable and sometimes disturbing imagery, sometimes seeming as though it were pulled directly from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. I have written here about my admiration of the silent films around this time who were realizing the visual potential of the medium and this is certainly one of those films that come to mind. I have included a trailer for the film below the song’s video.
There was also a rerelease of the film in 1968 which was shortened and featured a narration from author William S. Burroughs and a jazz score featuring violinist Jean Luc Ponty. It’s interesting but I don’t think it has the same impact as the original.
Anyway, have a safe Halloween. Be careful because, as we are seeing, there are a lot of witches and devils out there. Hoping we can exorcise some of these demons on Tuesday. Have a good day.
Yeah it’s just what you need when you’re down in the dumps One half hillbilly and one half punk Big long legs and one big mouth The hottest thing from the north to come out of the south Do you understand? do you understand?
—The Cramps, Garbageman
Okay, it’s just about Halloween. Between a deadly pandemic and the looming election, most likely many of you are already sufficiently spooked. But since those other things will still be hanging over our heads for a while, I thought we’d head towards more typical Halloween fare today.
Well, a little more typical.
In a couple of prior years here on the blog, I have played a couple of songs from The Cramps, a now defunct band that emerged the legendary punk scene in NYC in the late 1970’s. The Cramps had their own look and schtick, a brand of macabre psychobilly that just made them a perfect fit for Halloween. Their first album in 1980, Songs the Lord Taught Us, had a host of weird but wonderful songs like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Zombie Dance, The Mad Daddy, and TV Set, which is a gruesome but highly singable ditty about a cannibalistic serial killer.
I bought the album it on vinyl when it came out and have really enjoyed it periodically through the years. I say periodically because I believe a steady diet of it might be detrimental to my overall state of mind. That would no doubt please The Cramps.
One of my favorites from that album is Garbageman. It’s a song I revisit quite often when I want to get my engines revved a bit. I seem to always end up stomping around the studio, yelling, ” Do you understand? Do you understand?”
I thought I’d share it along with a great cover of it from the legendary rock vocalist William Shatner. Who can ever forget his cover of Rocket Man? He did this version of the song with The Cramps on a single whose cover, shown above, that employs the iconic artwork style from the cover of their greatest hits album, Bad Music For Bad People.
Actually, the Shatner version is not bad. A lot of kitschy fun. And in these weird and wild days, can’t we all use some of that?
Enjoy. And try to have a good day. And be careful — a lot of weirdos out there!
I was going to write this morning about the death of singer/songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker yesterday at the age of 78. He was an upstate NY guy, born and raised in Oneonta, who moved to and became synonymous with the state of Texas. Most of you will no doubt best know him for his song Mr. Bojangles. Sad to see another favorite pass away.
But I feel compelled this morning to comment on the remarkable turnout taking place at polling locations around the country. Huge enthusiastic crowds lined the streets of nearly every city and town offering early in-person voting. Records for voter turnout are falling everywhere. Even in my home county, the lines yesterday on the first day of early voting in NY were well over an hour long.
I read of a guy who rolled by one such line of waiting voters in his pickup truck and yelled out his window to another guy standing near the end of the line.
“How long you been waiting?” he asked.
“Four goddamn years!” the fellow in line responded as the other people in line responded with loud applause.
I can’t tell you how heartening this turnout and enthusiasm is for someone has long decried the political indifference of so many in this country. This is the dream of democracy, to have the vast majority of people engaged and passionate.
Unfortunately, there are those out there who try to suppress the vote and make voting much more difficult than it was ever intended to be. They reduce the number of polling locations, shorten the hours, use archaic rules for disallowing votes and disenfranchising potential voters and just plain try to stop people from voting. They even try to sabotage the US Postal Service.
Nobody should have to wait four. six, or eight hours to vote. You have to ask why they so want to keep voters from voting. They do not seem to desire a true representative democracy.
But the more they try to suppress the vote, the more it hardens the resolve by those affected to overcome this callous disrespect for them and our system.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
People are getting out there. They wait and wait, sometimes for hours in rain and wind. They bring seats and snacks.
And some bring the music and the fun. At a line in Philadelphia it was pure joy as the crowd and one particularly exuberant dancer moved to Mississippi Cha Cha Slide from DJ Slide. A group from Philly, Joy to the Polls, is providing music and entertainment at polling sites around city. There’s a short clip below of them in action.
And in the one below it, a marching band is providing some stirring entertainment for voters at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Just great stuff.
Like I said, it’s heartening to see such response at a time when it is so necessary. So, if you find yourself in line today or sometime this coming week waiting to vote, keep the joy up. There’s some Mississippi Cha Cha Slide at the bottom for you to have on hand if you feel like dancing a bit.
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
I paused a little bit before using this quote from Nietzsche this morning. The use of anything from a philosopher whose work, and the book from which this excerpt has been taken, had been appropriated and distorted to justify their own ends , by the Nazis is a little risky, especially in this time of rising authoritarianism here and around the world. For many of us, just the title, The Will to Power, immediately conjures up imagery of invading Nazis goose-stepping through conquered cities in their quest for more and more power.
People naturally assume that that the power to which he is referring is ultimate power, ruling power to be exercised over others. That is how the Hitler and his ilk interpreted it. But Nietzsche was talking about two separate forms of power which are expressed in German as the words Kraft and Macht. Kraft refers to brute force, both physical and mental, while Macht refers to true power. Kraft is the animal force, that primal element that is possessed in all of us. Macht, on the other hand, is the power to control one’s own kraft and use it in positive ways.
Macht is the overcoming and controlling of the kraft within us.
And that’s where we are now. We have two elements within this nation, one who see the power of this nation as pure animal power, and another who recognizes our power– our kraft— but understands that it cannot solely guide our actions and future. It is unsustainable. History shows that clearly.
So, the question is how do we emerge from this? Do we have the fortitude to endure this tug of war between these two concepts?
Though I have my doubts on some days, in the long run I think we do have the ability to endure, actually.
And as Nietzsche expresses above, perhaps this struggle is just what we need to really move forward. Maybe we need some real hardship and suffering to understand the responsibility of our power. Maybe we need it to finally recognize that we must at some point sacrifice something of ourselves to a greater good, that our bounty does not come without a price.
Many of us have never had real hardship. I am not talking about normal loss and suffering that comes with being a human being. I am talking about widespread hurt that runs through the nation and touches most every citizen. Most of us have never had to sacrifice much for anyone.
Maybe we need the hurt and the humbling. While nobody wants to willingly take on great suffering, there are lessons to be learned from it. Perhaps that one can overcome and endure great hardship is the greatest of these. That and allowing more of us to develop a greater sense of empathy with those who continue to suffer around us.
Maybe we need to simply learn that we can endure.
Maybe then we can cross the divide between us and work together for some greater good.
Let’s hope, okay?
Hey, here’s some old Canned Heat from about 50 years back with a fitting message for any time. It’s Let’s Work Together. Now, have a good day.
“Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra
I wasn’t planning on writing about angst this morning. I think most of us are all worn to nubs from the anxiety of this time so unless I have come up with some sort of therapy or special salve that will take it away, my words will have little effect.
Might even make it worse.
But an item popped up on my alerts that piqued my interest and it had to do with angst. Well, angst in the form of one of my paintings. I clicked on the link and there was YouTube music video with a painting that was very recognizable to me as the image illustrating it.
It was from Lithuanian-born musician/composer Žilvinas Smalys for a short composition of his called Growing Angst For 2 Bassoons. It was written and recorded on October 11, 2020 so it is most likely his take on the anxiety of this time in his part of the world.
Angst knows no boundaries.
I am not surprised that he chose this particular painting, The Angst, to accompany his composition. It is one of my personal pieces, a keeper, that has been with me for the past 25 years or so. Whenever I show it, it gets a lot of attention. It was even used in a college level textbook a few years back. It even shows up on the Google search for “angst paintings” right under Munch’s The Scream.
And it works well with this compsotion.
Žilvinas Smalys is a performer, teacher and composer who was, as I wrote, born and raised in Lithuania. His training as a classical musician throughout Europe has been extensive and he has played with orchestras around the globe. He currently resides in Santiago, Chile, serving since 2008 as the principal bassoonist at Teatro Municipal de Santiago as well as being a professor of bassoon and chamber music at Universidad Mayor de Santiago.
Smalys has a nice YouTube page that features many of his compositions. I urge you to take a look. His music is lovely. Below is Growing Angst and another short piece, Lament For 2 Bassoons.
Hopefully this will help free up your own angst and you can move on to have a good day.
“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”
― Martin Luther
Martin Luther wrote the words above in 1521 in his defense against the Papal Bull from Pope Leo X that excommunicated Luther, condemning him as a heretic for his Theses. They were applicable then as they certainly are today.
He had a clear understanding that we are ever-evolving creatures, that our purpose is to attain depth as humans. To continue to grow and learn.
To follow a road, even as we know that we will never reach a final destination.
I am not a religious person so, for me, the purification of which he writes is not a religious thing. I see it more as an attainment of wisdom as one travels their road through life. The purification comes in discarding those negative traits that have been doggedly held close during the whole journey. There is a lot of energy expended in maintaining these negative feelings and losing them allows a shift of energy towards more positive thoughts and feelings.
That sounds like an easy thing to do. But those darker negatives stick tight to us, digging in until they appear as part of us. They won’t be tossed aside easily.
But it is a noble task for us to consider as we travel our endless roads.
Here’s a lovely version of the great traditional song, The Wayfaring Stranger. There aren’t many bad versions of this song, it’s that great a song. I’ve played several here over the years. But for today, I thought I’d share this version from the Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra. Listening to their version, it’s hard to believe they are a Norwegian band and not right out of the Appalachians. Lead singer Rebekka Nilsson has that wonderful plaintiveness in her voice that defines this type of music. Just a great version.
Redtree Times 