Redtree Times

If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

–Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945

If you haven’t been paying attention to the growing number of incidents of racial and religious hatred taking place, please begin. Law enforcement and groups like the Anti-Defamation League are warning that today has been targeted as a National Day of Hate by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, marked with rallies designed to draw attention.

There are some who say that we should just ignore them and they will fade away without the spotlight. Unfortunately, that will most likely only move the point of normalcy, allowing them to move on to even more drastic actions.

We’re already seeing a normalization of harassment and violence from neo-Nazi groups who have been emboldened by the relative lack of response against their actions as they openly taunt and threaten people.

Social media is filled with more and more of these gatherings and confrontations, often filmed by the neo-Nazis themselves. The theatre in NYC at the premiere of Parade, a play based on the story of Leo Frank, who, in 1913, was accused of raping and murdering a 13 year old. He was kidnapped and lynched by a mob spurred on by antisemitic propaganda. At synagogues in Florida and elsewhere. Signs hung from highway overpasses.

This week Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, released a video spewing racial hatred against blacks, advising whites to stay as far as possible from blacks. He tries to rationalize it with anecdote and misguided social myth but his racial animus is undeniable.

And it goes on and on.

They’re not trying to be secretive or hide their actions. They want the attention. Their hatred is a rage that blinds them to reality, allowing them to believe that most people support their actions. That they are in the right.

I don’t get it myself. I look at these people and wonder what is in them that drives to hate so much. You can almost see the toll that hatred takes on their faces. Not to mention their psyches, spirits, and souls, if indeed they have them. I also wonder, with how little time we get to spend in this world, why they choose to devote so much time to hating others. I certainly don’t have time to spend on hating or attacking any group of people.

Maybe not understanding that level of hatred allows us to dismiss it, to try to shrug it off. To think that there will always be hatred and there’s little that can be done. an That’s understandable position. But it’s also a foolishly dangerous one.

At some point, you have to take notice and take action against this level of hatred and intolerance, or it cascades and grows into a greater threat to society as a whole. We may be past that point. I wrote about Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance back in 2017 and, as predicted, the situation has only grown more dire over the intervening years. Hate groups have grown unchecked and have continually learned to better use the tolerance of our society against it.

Here’s a longer excerpt from Popper’s book:

“Less well known is the Paradox of Tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

—Karl Popper, The Open Societies and Its Enemies, 1945

And:

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

So, please don’t turn away or dismiss it as just a fact of life when you hear that there is National Day of Hate or some other act of hatred taking place. It will not stop from its own inertia– it has to be stopped from without.

And it’s up to all of us to do that.

Remember: Silence is Compliance. Silence is Complicity.

Here’s a brand new song from Ian Hunter, best known for his work with Mott the Hoople. This is a song called I Hate Hate.

Solitary Song— At the Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

It’s been warmer than usual here and with the recent precipitation, light as it has been, we are back to being Mud People. It’s one of the things that come with living in the woods. You can look at it as a bad, good, or indifferent thing. For the longest time, I decried the wet times of the year that left my boots always caked with mud and my studio floor forever in need of a good vacuuming to pick up the dried flecks of mud and leaf matter that somehow made their way into my space.

But as the years passed, I have come to look at it as a good thing, an earthy reminder that we live close in with the elements. The trees around and above. The mud and pine needles underfoot. The water running in the creek and the companionship of critters that live within our sight– the many birds, deer, raccoons, skunks, possum, squirrels and on and on.

Thinking of those things, the mud doesn’t feel like a hardship at all. If anything, when I do think of it now when the treads of my boots are caked with mud, it is more as a badge of honor, a symbol of the good fortune I have to be living in close proximity to the natural world, close to our beginnings and our endings.

To not have mud or paint on my clothes would feel strange anymore. And I am glad of it.

Here’s a 1970 performance from Joni Mitchell of her song Woodstock. I was going to include the wonderful version from CSN&Y but the sheer simplicity of Joni’s version really accentuates the lyrics for me.

And maybe it’s the time of year
Yes, and maybe it’s the time of man
And I don’t know who I am
But life is for learning

 

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Archaeology: Deja Vu– At West End Gallery

Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.

–Honoré de Balzac, Seraphita, 1834

If time were a pyramid, we here in the present sit at the very highest point of that pyramid.

For the time being.

Eventually, time overtakes us and builds around us, leaving us to maintain ever lower positions on that pyramid. New, shinier, and supposedly improved versions of ourselves now sit atop the pyramid and we are lost in the rubble below. We become part of an artifact field held in secret until the archaeologists from future generations that then sit atop the pyramid either seek us out or stumble upon us.

I wonder why they might seek us out. What will be the legacy they might find in their digging? What shall we have added to the continuing and ever expanding (hopefully) continuum of human genius and knowledge?

The easy answer is that we added much in the way of invention and technology. Even in the length of one existing lifetime, technology has changed the world perhaps more than at any other lifetime in known history.

But have these changes improved us as human beings? Are we any better, as we perch temporarily atop that pyramid of time, than those who occupied that space in past generations? Do we love more? Do we trust and cooperate more? Do we respect and accept others more than those in the past? Do we have less hatred, greed and prejudice?

Take away the technical leaps forward and what have we added? Do we have greater understanding?

Don’t take this in the wrong way. This is not rant against technology’s progress. It is a plea to be more pro-human, to use our brief time at the top of time’s pyramid to show that we have made behavioral progress as a species, that we recognize our place in time and plan to make the best of it.

We are, after all, the sum and total of all that has come before us. We have the benefit of all known thought and invention, the legacy of ancestors going back an unknowable number of generations. We have often dug into that past and can see the mistakes that have plagued the past

Can we learn from those mistakes? Can we improve our behaviors and be less awful? Because, even with the benefit of all the technical improvements from the beginning of time to now, an awful person now is no better or more improved than an awful person living in a cave eons ago.

The question is: Do we have the will to be better now?

I don’t have any answers. You know that. And my asking questions without answers probably bugs some folks. It’s just what I do, my own little crusade every early morning against the hubris that comes with being at the top of that pyramid.

Here’s the late John Prine with a song I haven’t played here in a while, Living in the Future.

The Allure— At the West End Gallery

For my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways,
And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low;
I’m at home and at ease on a track that I know not,
And restless and lost on a road that I know.

—The Wander-Light, Henry Lawson, 1902

One of the great pleasures of writing this blog has been stumbling on to people– writers and artists and thinkers and all other sorts– I had never known before. Just this morning, the word restless lingered in my mind as I began thinking about what the subject would be today. I went to a favorite site for quotes and punched in the word and started scanning through the quotes. Most did nothing for me, raised no response in me.

Then I came across the verse shown at the top with just the name Henry Lawson attached. It wasn’t even shown as a verse, but as a paragraph. I had never heard of Lawson so immediately began a search.

Turns out that Henry Lawson was born in Australia in 1867 and died there in 1922. He wrote poetry and short stories about the people of the bush or outback of Australia. He is considered as perhaps the country’s greatest short story writer and bush poet. I am not sure what the difference is between bush and outback but one source said for a rough rule of thumb, the bush in Australia means green, and the outback means red or brown. His prose style has been described as an earlier version of Hemingway or Carver with short, sharp sentences and raw language.

Unfortunately, Lawson struggled with alcoholism and mental illness for much of his short life, dying from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 55.

Doing a little more research I discovered that the lines above were the last verse in a longer poem titled The Wander-Light I read that the poem, written in 1902, comes from a period when Lawson became convinced that his mother was descended from Gypsies. This poem reflects this belief. I found the whole poem which I will post at the bottom. I like it very much mainly because it doesn’t have the maudlin feel, the sentimentality, that you often find in popular poetry from this era.

I next checked to see if there was reading of this poem available but found that there had been a musical show in Australia that was a tribute to the writer called Looking For Lawson and that The Wander-Light had been transformed into a song. As I wrote only yesterday, I enjoy seeing how other artists of one medium translate the work of artists of other mediums in their own. They do a great job with this piece, creating the feel that one might get from a Kurt Weill or Stephen Sondheim piece. Worth a listen.

Glad I stumbled across Henry Lawson this morning. Hope to read more soon.

The Wander-Light

And they heard the tent-poles clatter,
And the fly in twain was torn —
Tis the soiled rag of a tatter
Of the tent where I was born.
And what matters it, I wonder?
Brick or stone or calico —
Or a bush you were born under,
When it happened long ago?

And my beds were camp beds and tramp beds and damp beds,
And my beds were dry beds on drought-stricken ground,
Hard beds and soft beds, and wide beds and narrow —
For my beds were strange beds the wide world round.

And the old hag seemed to ponder
(‘Twas my mother told me so),
And she said that I would wander
Where but few would think to go.
‘He will fly the haunts of tailors,
‘He will cross the ocean wide,
‘For his fathers, they were sailors
‘All on his good father’s side.’

Behind me, before me, Oh! my roads are stormy —
The thunder of skies and the sea’s sullen sound,
The coaster or liner, the English or foreign,
The state-room or steerage the wide world round.

And the old hag she seemed troubled
As she bent above the bed,
‘He will dream things and he’ll see things
‘To come true when he is dead.
‘He will see things all too plainly,
‘And his fellows will deride,
‘For his mothers they were gipsies
‘All on his good mother’s side.’

And my dreams are strange dreams, are day dreams, are grey dreams,
And my dreams are wild dreams, and old dreams and new;
They haunt me and daunt me with fears of the morrow —
My brothers they doubt me — but my dreams come true.

And so I was born of fathers
From where ice-bound harbours are —
Men whose strong limbs never rested
And whose blue eyes saw afar.
Till, for gold, one left the ocean,
Seeking over plain and hill;
And so I was born of mothers
Whose deep minds were never still.

I rest not, ’tis best not, the world is a wide one —
And, caged for an hour, I pace to and fro;
I see things and dree things and plan while I’m sleeping,
I wander for ever and dream as I go.

I have stood by Table Mountain,
On the Lion at Capetown,
And I watched the sunset fading
From the roads that I marked down;
And I looked out with my brothers
From the heights behind Bombay,
Gazing north and west and eastward,
Over roads I’ll tread some day.

For my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways,
And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low;
I’m at home and at ease on a track that I know not,
And restless and lost on a road that I know.

–Henry Lawson, 1902

Lawren Harris- Isolation Peak, 1930

Every work of art which really moves us is in some degree a revelation: it changes us.

–Lawren Harris

Need to get right to work this morning so thought I’d share something from a favorite of mine, the late painter Lawren Harris. I am including a piece of music inspired by his paintings, Lawren S. Harris Suite for Piano Quintet, from composer Stephen Chatman. It is performed by pianist Sara Davis Buechner. This particular piece is inspired by the painting above, Isolation Peak. which is a distant view of Mont des Poilus in Yoho National Park, Alberta.

It’s always interesting to see how the work of artists is inspired by the work of those who work in other mediums. How many paintings have been inspired by pieces of music or how many pieces of music risen from seeing a film or dance?  I think this goes back to the Harris quote at the top. We are changed by art that moves us and that inevitably change shows up somehow in our own world and work.

And that’s a good thing…

The Song That Brought Me Here– At West End Gallery

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
And all trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go
I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown

–Joni Mitchell, Urge For Going

Felt like listening to some Joni Mitchell this morning. Something reminded me of a short film I saw many years ago which reminded me of her. I think it was on HBO in their earliest days when they would often play short films between their offerings. I remember quite a few of them much better than the movies they were sandwiched between.

This one was, as I remember it, from the Canadian Film Board. It was set in the rural western plains of Canada and was about a young girl, maybe 13 years old, being raised there in the 1950’s. The details are vague in my memory after 40 years or so, but I remember that it concerned a wild horse that was finally captured and broken. She saw the horse’s wildness in herself and quietly vowed at the end that they might have broken the wild horse, they would never break her.

I’ve looked casually for years for this film but can’t locate it. But that young girl’s sense of defiance at being forced into conformity stuck with me. It also reminded me of some of the performers that came out of the plains of Canada, like Joni Mitchell and KD Laing. I can imagine they felt that same urge to run free as the wild horses.

The urge for going, I guess, which brings us to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s a video that ran here about seven years ago. It’s a very early version of Urge For Going from Joni Mitchell. This is taken from a Canadian television program, Let’s Sing Out, that ran from 1963-1967. It was broadcast from various Canadian college campuses and featured many folk performers of the day. Joni Mitchell first appeared on the show in 1965 using her maiden name, Joni Anderson. This particular performance using the more familiar Mitchell is from October of 1966 at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. You can see how special her talent was in the faces of the other performers watching her. I think it’s a beautiful rendition of the song.

Be Careful What You Wish For — 1996

Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I came across the line above from a favorite book, Man’s Search For Meaning, from Viktor Frankl. It made me stop and think for a bit.

I have long believed that if we can give name to our desires, our psyche sets it as a goal and does all that it can, most often in ways of which we are not aware, to make those desires come to be. It gives you in situations that make the desire possible, makes you begin to believe in the possibility and then behave and think as though it were inevitable.

Of course, there has always been a caveat to this. Kurt Vonnegut put it plainly in the introduction to his novel, Mother Night:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

We can never fully anticipate what may come from our quest to make our desires a reality. There are always unintended consequences, both good and bad.

But Frankl made me think about how the same concept applies to not just our desires but our fears as well. Too strong a fear in us becomes much like a strong desire, with our psyche unconsciously pushing us toward that which we desire/fear. And whatever side of that desire/fear coin turns up for us, we often find ourselves at the mercy of unintended consequences.

Before you slam me for spouting psychobabble BS, let me note that I am just thinking aloud here at 5:30 AM. Later today or tomorrow, I may read this and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But I think it might be possible that by fearing too much, by trying to completely avoid those things we dread, we do create an environment in which they might come to be. Maybe that’s the results of physics, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

I don’t know but now that it’s a little after 6, it sounds good enough to believe.

That’s all I go this morning. Think what you will.

But be careful, you never know what might come from it…

Here’s song from Bonnie Raitt from just a few years back that is kind on subject. This is Unintended Consquence of Love.

Dispersing Darkness– At the Principle Gallery

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.

–William Faulkner, The Mansion (1959)

I read yesterday that newly elected Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had entered a hospital to be treated for clinical depression. It reported that he had suffered from this for much of his life.. I am sure that the great stress inflicted on him by the stroke he suffered during his campaign played a big part in this latest bout with his affliction.

I also wouldn’t be surprised that his time in the current DC political climate might have played a role as well. While the potential for meaningful progress and change that is always near at hand there might be inspiring, there is an abundance of the obscurity and darkness to which Faulkner alluded in the excerpt above.

To peer firsthand into the opaque shadows of the darkness there, to see the levers of government manipulated by the force of money and power might well be disillusioning for someone with ideals and ethics, someone dedicated to elevating those with neither money nor power. There’s a darkness there of the quality that, like Faulkner also points out, keeps those in it from seeing the shadow of their own deformity, their own afflictions. It’s a darkness that spawns the rampant shamelessness and selfishness we are seeing now.

I hope that the Senator moves past his darkness. Being the forthright speaker he is, my other hope is that he might make mental health a cause he can champion. It might be a great opportunity to bring attention to a subject, mental health, that is often forced into the background, especially by those in politics, where it is usually portrayed as a sign of weakness or instability. A flaw to be exploited and stigmatized.

Maybe he can shine a light into the darkness.

As someone who has struggled with depression for much of my life, I would love to see a greater safety net for the many who struggle with mental health issues.

And it is many.

Who doesn’t have a family member or friend who has struggled and suffered? Or who struggles now and simply suffers, accepting it as the normal state of being? I know that’s how it was for me in the early part of my life. Many people in my youth scoffed at the word depression even though, looking back now, their own actions and behaviors gave all the indications of that condition. They just accepted the behaviors from it –alcoholism, addictions, suicides, etc.– as being the normal state of being.

With all the years of stigmatization, it’s still a hard thing to talk about. But like any problem, it can’t be improved on until it is named and confronted. I know this well. My life would be vastly different– if I still were even alive– if I hadn’t become aware that darkness in which I was struggling was not the normal state of being. It’s an important subject in this and every other country. It deserves to be moved away from the darkness, where you can see the shadow it casts on our lives in the brightest of light.

I’ve said a lot more than I intended when I started this morning. Maybe too much. Like I said, there is still that stigma present. But it is out there in the light and that can be a good thing. I have work to get to– the work that takes away a lot of my darkness– so we’ll have to talk about this later.

Kind of the same subject, here’s one of my favorites, Killing the Blues, written by Rowland Salley and performed by the late John Prine.

And Warmth Arrives– At West End Gallery

As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night turn up to the returning sun and spread their petals wide on his new warmth and light-just so my wilted spirits rose again and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins that I was born anew.

–Dante Alighieri, The Inferno ( John Ciardi translation, 1954)

Been working on a couple of long delayed maintenance projects around here in recent days. Wanting to get a bit more done while I am still running strong on the energy from first light of the new day and the possibility contained in it, I am leaving this short post with you. A new Little Gem, a line from Dante and a great old song from The Rascals to get your day off and running.

Now, I have things that need to be done. As they say–got to make hay while the sun shines.