The Bearable Lightness of Being

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The reduction of being to shameful glory is the problem of emptiness in plenty.  Shameful in that I cannot justify my good fortune in the face of  apparent lack for so many other beings who daily work out their lives against the same constraints I face, and glorious in that I have time and means to write something like this which feeds no one, saves no one from disease or eases some one’s want for immediate relief.  When many, even the majority of people live with less of the armor against nature that I routinely pick up and throw away in the course of a day I find myself rattling around in spiritual poverty in a world that seems smaller every moment.  I am propped above disease and dissipation of resource by the present end of the works of my ancestors.  Cold cannot find me unprotected, hunger is a visitor that comes only at my invitation, and I never sleep on anything but a bower made by the work of many hands.  I’m a pharaoh building a temple for the minutes rather than the centuries.  The smallness invades my thoughts as I watch this building of health care plans, retirement funds, tax strategies and investments, restaurants and bars.  Let it ride; keep the comfortable bower feathered and then tip the others who have less than me with an occasional voucher for similar comforts. A soporific waking dream.  It doesn’t sound bad until I make it a creed.  Augustine calls it ‘dying life or living death’.

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Marching Alone – When a soldier becomes a citizen

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I always try to listen to the state of the union speech since I can’t help being avidly attentive to the history of politics.  I became enthralled with the ideas of the Greeks from ancient times and their discussion of virtue as it applies to the individual and to man as a classification or aggregate. It is from this vantage point that I tend to understand the long march of western democracy and, in my limited understanding, the ancestral continent of western tradition. My views are also tempered by my experience as an enlisted Marine, and later as a soldier in the US Army.  I was recently challenged and surprised by a current of thought that appeared in President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech.

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How Big is Blue

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Yesterday the cast for ‘The Great Gatsby’ assembled at the San Francisco Conservatory for a music rehearsal. The normal course of events in opera preparation is a complete read through of the music with special consideration for the tempi (speeds) of the music selected in the various segments by the conductor and an attempt at comprehension and compliance from the singers prior to staging rehearsal. Usually, the singers have been laboring away prior to this rehearsal memorizing the music at a tempo that accommodates the words contained in the score. Singers are the ones responsible for turning the corner between the worlds of abstract musical construction and theater or drama. Often the feeling is “I can make this work” when the reality of the collaborative situation arises. By this I mean that an artist brings their best guess to the situation, and when he meets the musical chief of the enterprise and encounters the concept ‘in the flesh’, adjusts his expectations to the requirements of the project as stated by the designated genius of the moment.

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