Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Posted on: August 31, 2009

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THE GIFT

My Lord, what a morn­ing,
My Lord, what a morn­ing,
O my Lord, what a morn­ing
When the stars begin to fall.
–Entrance hymn,
(Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,
Second Sunday after Epiphany,
January 15, 2006)

After seven years of inter–
stel­lar wan­der­ings, the space­craft
that jour­neyed halfway to Jupiter,
beyond the Earth-​​​​Moon Orbit,
came back today.
It bears pre­cious freight—
age­less dust motes, the most
prim­i­tive par­ti­cles in the uni­verse,
gath­ered from the outer lim­its—
from the time when there was no time,
when there was uni­verse inchoate—
undif­fer­en­ti­ated mat­ter—the becom­ing thing
that was always there.

It brings name­less par­ti­cles that existed
eons before our solar sys­tem was formed,
before there was water,
before there was earth.  Timeless,
they were there when life was
but a thought in the mind of God.

As the craft approaches atmos­phere
crowds gather at the Dougway Proving
Ground in the Utah desert,
their pupils reflect­ing its red–
orange glow in the pre-​​​​dawn sky.…

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Posted on: August 25, 2009

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View from the Island of Kythnos, Greece. Photo by Takeaway

I’m think­ing about extreme dis­tances tonight. Cosmic, inter­nal, time and space. Before and after, too far to ever really see. And if we stop to feel that dis­tance, we lose. If we stop to won­der about the goal itself and if it cares that we seek it, we lose.

Overcoming that haunt­ing, over­com­ing that fear of the jour­ney. The fear of, “What if when I get there finally and I .… and I’m just there, as I am here?”

I wrote this poem many years ago, and it seems ahead of me now.

Straddle the Years Like Blue Light

The hard dream of rain
In the eyes of the wind
Warm wind
Glowing across the green soft grass
Pulling the sea into my eyes

Standing wait­ing for the smoke to clear
I lean into the breath
Of the sea
Lean into the per­sonal dis­plays
Of weather and her angst

Someone moves slowly on the moun­tain
Someone deflects the rays of the past

And my back is to twenty shad­ows
And my smile creeps out like the crabs
Scuttling over the wet brown sand

Deep into the gam­ble of hori­zons
My eyes lock with the line formed by our
Biology

Black and deep deep pur­ple
Black and fade
Purple and fade

Motion from the waves and the light jumps
For me and for the shad­ows on the mountain

Grays and dark greens model into small pyra­mids
Of ocean and I cry out for the sense
Lurking under­neath
For that ancient com­fort­able mystery

For that echo of my name

…

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Posted on: August 19, 2009

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The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed. 1949

Classic Film Noir does not always give us clas­sic artis­tic noir. We don’t always get the dra­matic chiaroscuro, the bril­liant angles, the expres­sion­is­tic camera-​​​​work that makes one think of Kafka as Surrealist painter. In the case of The Third Man, we get the whole enchi­lada, taut direc­tion, sus­pense, off-​​​​kilter music and off-​​​​kilter scenes.

Set in a Post-​​​​War Vienna, divided up into four sec­tions of inter­na­tional con­trol, Graham Greene’s story takes us through the city nights and shad­ows and sharp con­trasts, and under­neath that night into the sew­ers. The angles, the dis­torted streets, the high human shad­ows launched against old city build­ings, sends us deeper into a sin­is­ter and absurd realm with­out mirth. A sort of heart of dark­ness in the mid­dle of a recently dec­i­mated “civilization”.

Joseph Cotten stars as Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp Westerns, who comes to Vienna to look up an old friend, Harry Limes, played by Orson Welles.…

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Posted on: August 9, 2009

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The Beguiling of Merlin, by Edward Coley Burne-​​​​Jones. 1874

The truly divine thing is inven­tion, cre­ation, imag­i­na­tion. All reli­gions were cre­ated by nov­el­ists and poets. That has been on my mind and under my thoughts for decades. It reached the sur­face again tonight, like the cre­ative process itself. In a rush, a burst, a light com­ing on against nuanced black. We tell sto­ries. Some of us make sto­ries. Some repeat them. But nov­el­ists invent, poets invent. Song-​​​​writers invent. They take things from nature and their own lives and think again. They expand from ker­nels and images they can’t escape. They weave and add new peo­ple and make sto­ries for them, too. A world. They build up a world and try to make it cohere.

All reli­gions were cre­ated by human beings seek­ing to tell sto­ries. All reli­gions are beau­ti­ful fic­tions, attempts to get at truths, per­haps higher truths.…

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