Thinking and Feeling

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.
―Milan Kundera

For Combat Veterans From Steinbeck

John Steinbeck

In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was.”
—The Moon is Down 

Woodstock 2017: The Kids Are Alright

It’s mid October in Woodstock, but at the woodsy Applehead Studio it feels more like Midsummer’s Eve, missing only Titania and Oberon. Mature trees out front are illuminated to the canopies with bulbs no brighter than fireflies. Several folk are roasting marshmallows on the perimeter of a soaring bonfire. Others enjoy the taste of the crackling fire, its multiple orange tongues licking up the darkness. A small bar beneath the trees dispenses beverages and the fixings for s’mores. The night is a starry dome, but no scratchy rock and roll tonight. Instead it’s indoors to witness the reimagining of Joni Mitchell’s Blue by Arc Iris.

Jocie Adams, Zach Tenorio-Miller, and Ray Belli want to honor the singer-songwriter, but aren’t interested in a tribute band’s nostalgic performance. They want to remake the forty-six-year-old album for a younger generation. Implicit, but unspoken, is their desire not to offend old farts who bought the iconic vinyl half a lifetime earlier when they were the age of today’s band members. The free concert is being filmed and recorded before an invitation-only audience. It’s also being streamed live on Facebook.

Back in the day, I attended some intimate concerts. One summer Minneapolis’ fourteen-hundred-seat Guthrie Theatre, with its thrust stage, hosted luminaries like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, and Jethro Tull. I remember seeing folkies like Tom Paxton perform before a full house that numbered fewer than a hundred patrons. I didn’t count heads, but figure some number south of fifty were invited to the Arc Iris show. It was like attending a concert in your living room.

I’m something of a purist when it gets down to people messing with the Canon, but I’ve noticed the music industry (not a pleasant rubric for singers and songwriters who are mostly artists and not really an “industry”) is quite good at policing itself, unlike “literary” folk who mess with Conan Doyle, for instance. I chalk it up to a reverence, camaraderie, and sensitivity, which inhibit folk from messing with something bigger than they can handle. I’m not aware that Arthur Brown or James Brown covered a Dylan tune, but I think Jackson Browne could.

That said, I walked away from the Arc Iris show impressed with the new sound, which did not in any way diminish Joni Mitchell but certainly enhanced Arc Iris. It was a magical evening. As Pete Townsend might say: the kids are alright.

Thoughts While on the Road to Woodstock

It often seems people who demand equality really desire to be more equal, as did the piggies in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. This occurred to me while driving through eastern Canada. Leaving the no-longer-so-good U S of A (I’m in the apparent minority who believe the “Party of Lincoln” has evolved into the “Party of Hitlerjungend”) at Sault Ste. Marie, we headed toward Montreal. It had been many years since I’d been to Ontario. I was quite surprised to find the Trans-Canada Highway was still only a two-lane ribbon of asphalt (with regular passing lanes) though it broadens near major municipalities. I quickly became aware the highway signage was in English and French, which surprised me not at all.

At the turn of the last century, Canada created the territory of Nunavut, essentially turning over political control of one-fifth of the country’s land, a chunk of real estate larger than Alaska, to the indigenous Inuit. A country that would do that would have no problem dictating road signage be in French and English to satisfy the Quebecois, the Francophone population.

What did surprise me was entering Quebec and finding all English signage gone, something that would piss me off if I were a resident of Ontario. More interesting, perhaps, was the denial or perhaps the neglect of the province’s own history. Communities settled by the English and later taken over by the French haven’t gone so far as to deface the English words carved into the stone of public buildings, as the Copts did to Egyptian hieroglyphics, at least as far up as they could reach without a ladder.

Some local historians aren’t so much revisionist as moronic. How many century-old buildings have a history that reaches back to only 1937, for instance? They do exist in southern Quebec. While this behavior doesn’t reach the enormity of the destruction of the Buddahs of Bamiyan, I find it reprehensible.

Of course, a sizable number of Quebec’s population want secession and their own country, but the French tend to be better lovers than fighters—it’s been a long time since Napoleon. One might argue the French won WWII as a member of the allied forces, but that is stretching it. How many French units stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day? Then again how many wars has the US won since 1945? My guess is about the same number as the French have.

Maybe in the end Quebec will become an independent country and designate French as the only official language, as does France and Monaco in Europe, which will make Quebec one of fourteen countries to recognize French as the only official language, joining several island nations such as Haiti and Madagascar and a handful of African countries.

On Sisyphus

Albert Camus

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Your son is in a burning house. Nobody can hold you back. You may burn up, but what do you think of that? You are ready to bequeath the rags of your body to any man who will take them. You discover that what you set so much store by is trash. You would sell your hand, if need be, to give a hand to a friend. It is in your act that you exist, not in your body. Your act is yourself, and there is no other you. Your body belongs to you: it is not you. Are you about to strike an enemy? No threat of bodily harm can hold you back. You? It is the death of your enemy that is you. You? It is the rescue of your child that is you. In that moment you exchange yourself against something else; and you have no feeling that you lost by the exchange. Your members? Tools. A tool snaps in your hand: how important is that tool? You exchange yourself against the death of your enemy, the rescue of your child, the recovery of your patient, the perfection of your theorem...Your true significance becomes dazzlingly evident. Your true name is duty, hatred, love, child, theorem. There is no other you than this.

An Immodest Proposal

Oscar Wilde said that the one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. The nation is in a revisionist mood. Why not start today? And why not start at the beginning?

The fact is twelve of the first eighteen US presidents owned slaves, and the zeitgeist of our era suggests it’s time we do something about it. The coincidence of having a sitting president who enjoys good relations with the Russians could be fortuitous. If the American public could convince Trump to invite Putin to play eighteen holes, our country could be the better off for it. If you are of a certain age, you may not remember how surgically adept the Russians are at disappearing those who have fallen out of favor—images and names of the discredited disappear from public records. Even entire cities fall off maps.

Extra care will have to be taken for the top-three criminals: Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Adjusting names might be a good start in changing the identities, the rhetoric, and the mythos of the guilty.

George Washing is fairly simple, as he is already known as the man who would not be king. A little fiddling with documents will show his dominant wife, Martha, was the actual slave owner in the family. If we wished to discredit him further, we could remove Valley Forge from the map of Pennsylvania. No Valley Forge, no suffering.

Thomas Jeffers is easy. He did not write the Declaration of Independence. The document attributed to him uses the word inalienable, but the revised document uses the word unalienable, enough evidence to show the author was actually John Adams. With enough digging, the license Jeffers and Hemings used to marry might be found secreted in a butter churn at Monticello, which was built to the design of Hemings, a white woman who married the enslaved black man, Jeffers.

John Madman is problematic. He and his two fellow authors of the Federalist Papers (a practice run for the Constitution), Jay and Hamilton, owned slaves. The eponymously named musical has made Hamilton a star. If Ringo, another Starr, were to create a musical about the fifth president, the nation might forgive and forget Madman’s foibles. Another possibility is the moronic majority on the Supreme Court, with enough incentive, may just declare the Constitution unconstitutional.

Coming up. Monroe and Jackson, two more pesky presidents.