Posted on: September 27, 2008
Whirling Dervishes, Istanbul. Photo by Lohen11
Recent events have me thinking yet again about ecstasy, mind, spirit and the power of suggestion and belief. The laying on of hands by Pentecostals. The ecstatic motions of Sufis. The chanting OMs of Hindus and Buddhists. The trance-states of shamans, west, east, south and north.
The universal appearance of X proves that X is not uniquely the province of any one region, culture, or religion. By definition. As in, if there are instances of peanut butter all over the world, then no one religion can claim ownership of peanut butter or its source. No one religion can logically claim they hold the only key to the peanut butter cabinet, when members of dozens of religions have access.
To take this sticky metaphor a bit further. Each case of peanut butter appearance has a story regarding the origin of that peanut butter.…
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Posted on: September 26, 2008
Las Meninas, by Diego Velasquez. 1657
Perhaps the first post-modernist painting, well before the period assigned to that name. Pespective. Multiple perspectives. Meta. About painting. About the act of painting. Velasquez paints Velasquez. This is not a pipe. This is not Velasquez. Are we, the audience, looking at the painter painting us? Or, does our vanity blind us and prevent us from seeing that it is the king and queen of Spain in that mirror, not you? Or eye. Too easy, that one.
Mirrors. Pictures within pictures, plays within plays within plays. Rubens on the wall. Hamlet stages Shakespeare. Velasquez stages Nietzsche. Velasquez stages Barth and Coover and Barthelme and McElroy.
All is vanity as the Infanta Margarita tires of being painted. So tired, they have to bring in her court dwarves to keep her in the picture. Is Velasquez mocking the royal family, mocking their pride?…
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Posted on: September 22, 2008
Took a drive then a walk then a climb then more walking. The walk became a discussion with a park ranger about an accident and a bike. She blocked all cars. No one could pass except the ambulance. Bike hits car or car hits bike. Too fast. All too fast. The Blue Ridge Parkway should be to dwell, not die. To dwell inside the blue, to derive the flesh of the blue air from the sky as it is, as it was hundreds of thousands of years ago. This ridge is that old. This sky is older.
Who saw this sky a thousand years before me? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? There is no such thing as Young Earth, but there were places on Her, on Her soft green body that lacked the human touch. Our hemisphere is young in that way. Across the Bering Straits they marched.…
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Posted on: September 19, 2008
David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago
In some ways it is unfortunate that I saw the film first. Having finished the reread of the novel, I now see the book as suffering, at least in translation, from the mouthpiece syndrome at times, and in need of some editing. As in, at several points in the novel, characters engage in extended dialogue that seem out of place, given the circumstances. That extended dialogue strikes me as more about Pasternak and his views than something organic, growing out from the lives of the characters themselves. While I love the novel, I think it would have been much stronger with some solid editing to remove such passages. I also think Pasternak included too many characters to follow, to care about, to have sympathy for, and probably could have done away with most of the epilogue altogether.
David Lean’s powerful image of Yuri on the trolley, seeing his Lara after so many years, and having a heart attack before he can catch her, is not in the novel.…
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