Egregious Reader

It was almost 20 years ago when I first heard this song and the world tilted. I felt it again driving to get coffee. It was the same explosion that happened when I saw my first Tarkovsky. I didn’t know that anyone could do with film what Dostoevsky did. I didn’t know this medium included anything kin to great literature. I was ignorant, uncultured. Its easy to be with the commercials.   Jezebel by The Drones hit me like that. The first time I heard it I immediately went to the internet (yes, around, but still youngish … lots more written word then). I found an entire essay just on this song. I bet some version of Chrome tied to my email still has it bookmarked.  Its a long song and it covers a lot. He begins with Strontium90 being pulled out of milk from nuclear testing and goes on from there. But he is able to weave news and history into mundane life - hanging out the washing and the haunting chorus I can never quite figure out is a love song: I would love to see you ag...

Our mental map or our picture of the world is like the glasses we wear as we look at ourselves and our world. Wittgenstein says a picture can hold us captive.  We live in a cross-pressured society post Enlightenment. The rebirth of reason with enlightenment of science reframed everything in our western world. What to do with demons and miracles? They must have been mental illness and well timed natural events. The picture we inhabit is one which sees only a natural order, read mechanistic one, the great chain of being of billiard balls and gene mutations. But now that deconstruction has spread into the wider culture, the reasoners themselves are called into question. This has caused some of us to go about a re-enchantment. The same person who cannot believe in God might accept other spirits and hang talismans from their rearview mirror.  What I don't think we hold together or realize is that the SCIENCE picture is not a complete one and I don't think it ever will be. Perhaps i...

Enlightenment came along, hugely informing the American revolutionaries as well as those across the pond (where the philosophical change originated). It disenchanted the cosmos and put reason at the top. Descartes, with I think therefore I am , disembodied us putting brain over body. Jefferson built the first university (UVA) with a debate hall at the center instead of the chapel (all European universities had the chapel as its center, as did Harvard, Yale and other American Universities if I remember right from the tour).   This brought about a way to engage with the world and each other built on reasoned debate and neutrality. With it came scientific revolutions, industrial revolutions, the death of the monarchy, etc. With it also came colonialism. These paradigms or epochs of thought shift more slowly than they seem and unless they truly explain the world in a thorough way, they are open to replacement. There were significant gaps in the Enlightenment understanding, despite a...

I struggle to be optimistic. More specifically, at a young 48, I struggle to believe the generations coming after me will make the world better. In some ways, this is not fair, they inherit my world as I inherited my parents world. How arrogant to lay the burden of “the improvement” on their backs. This interchange between Eugene McCarthy, John Callahan and the students at Lewis and Clark University struck me, from 2004. Quick reminder, President Bush was at the beginning of what would become the long war in the Middle East. After his talk there is question and answer. Noting McCarthy’s optimism about the nation during the turbulent, hard year 1968, a student asked if he had become more pessimistic. McCarthy paused, “I’m more apprehensive now,” he said simply, the slight catch in his voice betraying the same quiet alarm I remembered from 1968. To see how far he’d go, I quoted his 1968 election-night remarks in New Hampshire: “People have said that the campaign has brought the young pe...

  Last night I finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Its one of his earlier works, published in 61. At the end his main character gives an interesting analogy on extremist like Nazis or the KKK, etc. He describes them as clocks from hell. Not exactly.   Clocks, at least in the past, were built on interlocking gears and it was the teeth lining up that kept the time. He said some people file teeth off. So then the clock tells time perfect for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then misses, then another 2 hours and 52 minutes and then misses. These people in extreme political movements have access to see the world as all of us do, to know reality as we all do. But they take some of their teeth off with a metal file. They remove the vision of, lets say, little Jewish children being so similar to their own children. So then all their gears turn and they love Wagner and Brahms, perhaps even Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (1936), but they file off the teeth for Jewish human-likeness.  ...