Strike.

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;

Strike the bell and bide the danger,

Or wonder, till it drives you mad,

What would have followed if you had.

C.S. Lewis, from The Magician's Nephew

Enlightens.

Samuel Meric enlightens the populace with his carnyx ...

Barber, Agnes Dei

VOCES8 ...

Aren't.

Thanks, Kurt.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Peter Rowan: My Songs and Guitar

Episode 1: "I Liked the Freedom"

Episode 2: "Earth Opera - Part One"

Episode 3: "Earth Opera - Part Two"

Episode 4: "Dust Bowl Children"

Episode 5: "Martin 1937 D-18"

Episode 6: "Ramirez 1973 Flamenco"

You're welcome.

It's sandwich time.

Know.

Eschen, Untitled (Small Boat on a Canal), 1943

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Richard Feynman

Fight.

Ari Weinzweig on living outside today's definitions of living ...

The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places, people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And this has little to do with success as we have defined it.

President Reagan reminded us in his January 5, 1967 Inaugural Address ...

Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.  And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

Depends.

Doisneau, L'écolier puni, 1956

“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."

"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing 'chicken' and 'knock hubcaps.' I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Happy Birthday, Amedeo Modigliani

Modigliani, Jeanne Hébuterne with Hat and Necklace, 1917

I want to be a tuneswept fiddle string that feels the master melody, and snaps. 

Amedeo Modigliani

Care.

Pissarro, The Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage, 1879

I began to understand my sensations, to know what I wanted, at around the age of forty - but only vaguely.  At fifty, that is in 1880, I formulated the idea of unity, without being able to render it. At sixty, I am beginning to see the possibility of rendering it.  

Cover the canvas at the first go, then work at it until you see nothing more to add.  Don't be afraid in nature: one must be bold, at the risk of having been deceived and making mistakes. God takes care of imbeciles, little children and artists.

Camille Pissarro

Brahms, Clarinet Sonata No. 2 in E-Flat Major, Op. 120

Han Kim performs, accompanied by pianist Ilya Rashkovskiy ...

Divine.

Luigi Schiavonetti after Phillips, William Blake, 1808

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.

William Blake

Happy Birthday, Buckminster Fuller

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller, born on this date in 1895

Here.

Bourgeau, Lake Superior, 2025

I look up to see, again, the lake

stretching, I know, to another country,

and I take its blue measure,

and I take in its wind-brushed

surface, its narrow breakwater crusted

with ice, clouds dropping to a near horizon, and I know

I don't want to live forever,

but I want to live

here forever.

Lynn Domina, from "The Road to Happiness"

Released.

Ultravox released Vienna on this day in 1980.

"Sleepwalk"...

Excellent.

Excellent albums ...

Sees.

William Blake's letter from Hercules Street to the Reverend Dr. John Trusler ...

To Revd Dr Trusler, Englefield Green, Egham, Surrey

13 Hercules Buildings,.Lambeth, 

August 23, 1799

Revd Sir

I really am sorry that you are falln out with the Spiritual World Especially if I should have to answer for it I feel very sorry that your Ideas& Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of Study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art & Especially that you would not reject that Species which gives Existence to Every other. namely Visions of Eternity You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses Solomon Esop Homer Plato.

But as you have favord me with your remarks on my Design permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is. That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause.--Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in another& Serenity & Happiness & Beauty a Cause of Malevolence. But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alledged as the Cause of his Thievery. for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs. 

I have therefore proved your Reasonings Ill proportiond which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo Rafael& the Antique & of the best living Models. I percieve that your Eyes is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth--I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination & I feel Flatterd when I am told So. What is it sets Homer Virgil & Milton in so high a rank of Art. Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason Such is True Painting and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says “Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.”

Outward.

Bourgeau, Red Canoe (The Day I Paddled Farther Than Ever Before), 2025

I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger. Wandering flushes a glory that fades with arrival.

J.A. Baker, from The Peregrine

Rouse.

Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fash[i]onable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of Men whose whole delight is in Destroying.  We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever; in Jesus our Lord.

William Blake, from Milton

Quatuor de l'Atelier, "Solastalgie

Apolline Lafait plays the cello ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Through.

If.

What if ...

Peter Rowan, "Mississippi Moon"

Happy Birthday, Ronnie James Dio

Ronnie James Dio was born on this day in 1942.

"Neon Knights"...

Ozzy who?

Determination.

Clear-Headed.

During the night rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter. I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall off my horse the Friday night preceding, and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest. The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause. Some time after midnight, growing restive under the storm and the continuous pain, I moved back to the loghouse under the bank. This had been taken as a hospital, and all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.

Ulysses S. Grant, from Personal Memoirs Of U.S. Grant

There is one West Pointer, I think in Missouri, little known, and whom I hope the northern people will not find out. I mean Grant. I knew him well at the Academy and in Mexico. I should fear him more than any of their officers I have yet heard of. He is not a man of genius, but he is clear-headed, quick, and daring.

Richard S. Ewell, Confederate Lieutenant General

Same.

Bitter, Thomas Jefferson, 1911

During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Thomas Jefferson, from his first inaugural address, March 4, 1801

Understand.

So what can we really do for each other except just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope—for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?  But don’t lose heart, dear ones—don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.

James Baldwin, from Another Country

Weapons.

Together.

No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together in one garment for us.

Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451

Ultravox, "Same Old Story"

Django Reinhardt, "Lentement Mademoiselle"

The players ...

• Giangiacomo Rosso, guitar
• Rémi Oswald, guitar
• Julien Cattiaux, guitar
• Edouard Pennes, bass
• Robert Fish, clarinet
• Jules Dussap, violin
• Anton Hanson, violin
• Emma Girbal, viola
• Apolline Lafait, cello

Fires.

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Preserve.

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.

William F. Buckley Jr.

Attics.

Rowan.

Thanks, Jess.

Round.

Behr, Stoat on a Branch, n/d

For a dreamer of words, what calm there is in the word round. How peacefully it makes one's mouth, lips, and the being of breath become round. Because this too should be spoken by a philosopher who believes in the poetic substance of speech.

Needless to say, all the poet really sees is a tree in a meadow; he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasill that would concentrate the entire cosmos, uniting heaven and earth, within itself. But the imagination of round being follows its own law: since, as the poet says, the walnut tree is "proudly rounded," it can feast upon "heaven's great dome." The world is round around the round being.

And from verse to verse, the poem grows, increases its being. The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God.

One day it will see God

And so, to be sure,

It develops its being in roundness

And holds out ripe arms to Him.

Tree that perhaps

Thinks innerly

Tree that dominates self

Slowly giving itself

The form that eliminates

Hazards of wind!

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Beloved.

In old times, there were no burgers and french fries in Russia, but there was plenty of ancient “fast” food. All the fairs, markets and bakeries across the country offered many kinds of pastry, but the most beloved was a simple bread called kalach (literally “a circle”), that looked like a bagel with a “handle”. 

Thank you, Grandma Firchau.

Capabilities.

As Kurt is fond of saying, "We were once a proper nation."

Imagine the intelligence gathering capabilities ...

Remember.

Happy Birthday, Bela Fleck

Bela Fleck was born on this day in 1958.

Bach, Violin Sonata No.2 in A minor, BWV 1003/"Sinister Minister"...

An excellent album ...

Handel, Water Music Suite No.2, HWV 349

Hervé Niquet at the helm of Le Concert Spirituel ...

Challenge.

Robert George on truth-seeking and freedom ...

When I was a sophomore in college, I was persuaded of a position that I'd never even considered before, which is that the truth has intrinsic as well as instrumental value. In fact, its most fundamental value is its intrinsic value, which is not to deny that it has important instrumental value as well. But I became convinced that it was a basic, irreducible, constitutive aspect of the meaning and fulfillment of human beings: as rational creatures, as thinking beings, as agents. So that makes me want to know the conditions that have to be in place for people to look for the truth and find it. Well, they need to be free to look for the truth. They need to be free to speak the truth as best they understand the truth, subject to revision in light of counter-argument and evidence and reasons that critics might have. But you can't be a truth seeker, much less a truth speaker, if your speech—your right to think for yourself, to inquire, to express your views, to engage with others to put your ideas on the table—is restricted. I think that's the essence of the case for free speech. And it's important in a lot of areas, including economic matters. But it's really important with institutions whose whole reason for being is truth-seeking: universities, colleges, research institutes. And it's really important in government, in politics—not exclusively, but especially when you have a democratic republic, where the people are supposed to rule themselves and make good decisions for themselves. 

Now, you have to recognize that when you allow free speech, the demagogues have got it the same as the statesman. Huey Long has it just as much as Abraham Lincoln does. And here I'm operating on what you might call either a “bet” or “faith.” I prefer to think of it as faith but it's not certain either way. My bet, or faith, is that truth has a certain power and luminosity. That doesn't guarantee that it will win out every time. What it does mean is that we are more likely to get to it or nearer to it—grasp it a bit more fully—in circumstances of freedom than we are in circumstances where everyone is required to conform to a particular point of view, and where the institutions of society and we ourselves reinforce each other in what we already believe. In academia, groupthink and conformist culture are much too common, as you know, and I can tell you it is toxic to truth-seeking. 

Freedom doesn't mean you're going to get the truth. You might get things really profoundly wrong in circumstances of freedom. But I consider those circumstances much healthier for the truth-seeking enterprise than when those circumstances disappear, even if it's not because of course of laws or rules. A university might have great free speech rules. But if the culture is a culture of groupthink and conformism, that is absolutely toxic to the truth seeking process. Nobody learns anything. People are reinforced in what they believe whatever they happen to believe. A lot of what we believe at any particular moment—what right now, every human being on Earth, right this moment, has in his or her head—is wrong. That's because we're fallible, of course. We're going to get some things wrong, but our only hope of moving from false beliefs in any particular domain to true ones—swapping out the false ones, getting rid of them and getting some true beliefs in their place—is if we allow ourselves to be challenged, and if we're in conditions where we are challenged, and eventually able, at least, to challenge ourselves. My real goal for my students and myself is to get ourselves to the point where we're not only open to the challenge from others, but we're willing to be our own best critics, to be self-critical to challenge ourselves.

Happy Birthday, John Calvin

Seeman, The Younger, John Calvin, n/d

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.

John Calvin, born on this day in 1509

Happy Birthday, Camille Pissarro

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro, born on this day in 1830

Setting Sun and Fog, Eragny, 1891

Imagination

It's later on a Wednesday, the sun is going down

I'm standing naked by a swimming pool, there's no one around

My imagination wanders back, red dust is always there

We lay together in the jungle, and love was in the air

As I dive into the water, both time and motion freeze

I'm hanging there suspended like a feather in the breeze

Below is your reflection, like an image from the past

But I can't be sure if it's really you, because you're wearing a tribal mask

Roger Glover, from "The Mask"

Happy Birthday, Ottorino Respighi

Ottorino Respighi was born on this day in 1879.

Olga Scheps performs the Siciliana from Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite No. 3 ...

Stretch.

Severn, Posthumous Portrait of Shelley, 1845

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Obliged.

Trumbull, Benjamin Franklin, 1778

Keep reminding me, Steve ...

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

Ben Franklin, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, September 1787

Hats matter. 

Declaration.

Pyle, Reading the Declaration before Washington’s Army, New York, July 9, 1776, 1892

Early this evening in 1776, George Washington's troops were read The Declaration of Independence. Later in the night, the citizens destroyed a statue of King George III, which stood at the foot of Broadway on the Bowling Green ...

[The statue] has been pulled down to make musket ball of, so that his troops will probably have melted Majesty fired at them. 

Ebenezer Benezer, United States Postmaster General

Pyle, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III, 1854