Released.

The Furs released Forever Now on this day in 1982.

"Run and Run"...

Happy Birthday, Francesco Borromini

Borromini, Dome of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienz, 1660

Francesco Borromini was born on this day in 1599.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Record.

Volkov, The Old Divide, n/d

SONG of the STONE WALL

Come walk with me, and I will tell

What I have read in this scroll of stone;

I will spell out this writing on hill and meadow.

This is New England's entablature of rock,

Leagues upon leagues of sealed history awaiting an interpreter.

It is a chronicle wrought by praying workmen,

The forefathers of our nation.

The walls have many things to tell me,

And the days are long. I come and listen;

My hand is upon the stones, and the tale I fain would hear

Is of the men who built the walls,

And of the God who made the stones and the workers.

With searching feet I walk beside the wall;

I plunge and stumble over the fallen stones;

I follow the windings of the wall

Over the heaving hill, down by the meadow-brook,

Beyond the scented fields, by the marsh where rushes grow.

On I trudge through pine woods fragrant and cool,

And emerge amid clustered pools and by rolling acres of rye.

The wall is built of field stones great and small,

Tumbled about by frost and storm,

Shaped and polished by ice and rain and sun;

Some flattened, grooved, and chiseled

By the inscrutable sculpture of the weather;

Some with clefts and rough edges harsh to the touch.

Gracious Time has glorified the wall

And covered the historian stones with a mantle of green;

The sunbeams flit and waver in the rifts,

Vanish and reappear, linger and sleep,

Conquer with radiance the obdurate angles,

Filter between the naked rents and wind-bleached jags.

I understand the triumph and the truth

Wrought into these walls of rugged stone.

They are a miracle of patient hands,

They are a victory of suffering, a paean of pain.

All pangs of death, all cries of birth,

Are in the mute, moss-covered stones;

They are eloquent to my hands.

O beautiful, blind stones, inarticulate and dumb!

In the deep gloom of their hearts there is a gleam

Of the primeval sun which looked upon them

When they were begotten.

So in the heart of man shines forever

A beam from the everlasting sun of God.

Unresponsive, rude are the stones;

Yet in them divine things lie concealed.

I hear their imprisoned chant:

"We are fragments of the universe,

Chips of the rock whereon God laid the foundation of the world;

Out of immemorial chaos He wrought us.

Out of the sun, out of the tempest, out of the travail of the earth, we grew.

We are wonderfully mingled of life and death;

We serve as crypts for innumerable, unnoticed, tiny forms.

We are manifestations of the Might

That rears the granite hills unto the clouds

And sows the tropic seas with coral isles.

We are shot through and through with hidden color;

A thousand hues are blended in our gray substance.

Sapphire, turquoise, ruby, opal,

Emerald, diamond, amethyst, are our sisters from the beginning;

And our brothers are iron, lead, zinc,

Copper, and silver, and gold.

We are the dust of continents past and to come,

We are a deathless frieze carved with man's destiny;

In us is the record sibylline of far events.

Helen Keller, from "Song of the Stone Wall"

Companionship.

Namuth, Rothko in His Studio, 1964

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same cause. It is therefore risky to work out into the world. It is often impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the careless.

Mark Rothko

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Mark Rothko

Rothko, Untitled (Green on Maroon), 1961

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing; no galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet it was a golden time, for then we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, and consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where they can root and grow. We must all hope that they find them.

Mark Rothko, born on this day in 1903, from his remarks upon accepting an honorary doctorate from Yale in 1969 (a reminder to the blogosphere)

Hang.

'Tis Autumn and the weekend begins now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: AC⚡DC, "Riff Raff"...

I ain't doin' nothin' wrong
I'm just havin' fun

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Sonic.

'Tis the first Thursday night of Autumn and therefore preparations should be underway for the ancient and sacred rite ...

It was a crisp Saturday night in late-October. I was probably seven or eight. My brother and I were sitting on the couch watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” for the zillionth time.

And then we heard it.

To our stunned ears, it seemed as though my parents’ bay window, situated directly behind us, had shattered to pieces. But, mysteriously, it was still there, in tact.

Our tiny nervous systems were not prepared for this sonic assault, especially because it didn’t make sense. We stared in disbelief at the window for a minute, waiting for it to spill its shards. When we got enough courage to get up and peer out the front door, we saw the lanky silhouettes of teenagers running away into the dark of the trees. Piles of dried out corn kernels were scattered all over the porch like empty shells.  We had been corned.

CONNECT ... don't miss the sound file.  

That sound would would make laugh so hard that I couldn't run.

Read.

Thanks, Kurt.

Autumn.

Wyeth, James Browning, Night Visitors, 2003

‘Tis Autumn.

THE SCARECROW

All winter through I bow my head

beneath the driving rain;

the North Wind powders me with snow

and blows me black again;

at midnight 'neath a maze of stars

I flame with glittering rime,

and stand above the stubble, stiff

as mail at morning-prime.

But when that child called Spring, and all

his host of children come,

scattering their buds and dew upon

these acres of my home,

some rapture in my rags awakes;

I lift void eyes and scan

the sky for crows, those ravening foes,

of my strange master, Man.

I watch him striding lank behind

his clashing team, and know

soon will the wheat swish body high

where once lay a sterile snow;

soon I shall gaze across a sea

of sun-begotten grain,

which my unflinching watch hath sealed

for harvest once again.

Walter de la Mare

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over rather than coexistence with the communist threat.

The Specials, "Stereotype"

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Different.

Thank you, Veerle.

Sound.

Sound man, Brendon ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, William Golding

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

William Golding, born on this day in 1911, from Free Fall

Real.

Chatham, River at Twilight, 1991

It would be easy to consider that the penciled sketch underneath, and the wash below, are the dream, blueprint, and path of a painting, but that is like saying a dry riverbed is a river. The water is the real river. The color is the painting. The palette is the real dream.  You can’t just do it for an hour a day, or on Saturday.  It’s not going to work.

Russell Chatham

Pocket.

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck, you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket.

Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast

Catch.

Catch, then, oh catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies!
Life's a short summer, man a flower;
He dies — alas! how soon he dies!

Samuel Johnson

Waken.

How we are moved by the bird’s call ...

Some single screech uniquely created.

Yet the children scream, as they play

Outdoors, beyond the need for screaming.

Screaming at random. Into this world-space,

Of cosmic space (into which the whole

Bird-call enters as people enter our dreams)

They drive their screams like wedges.

Oh, where are we? Ever more freely,

Like the loose dragon-kites we chase

At half-height, brimming with laughter,

Torn by the wind. God of song, so order

The screaming throng that, in rushing, they waken

A flowing current bearing the head and the lyre.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy Birthday, Samuel Johnson

Reynolds, Blinking Sam, 1775

I am far from any intention to limit curiosity, or confine the labours of learning to arts of immediate and necessary use. It is only from the various essays of experimental industry, and the vague excursions of mind set upon discovery, that any advancement of knowledge can be expected; and though many must be disappointed in their labours, yet they are not to be charged with having spent their time in vain; their example contributed to inspire emulation, and their miscarriage taught others the way to success.

The distant hope of being one day useful or eminent ought not to mislead us too far from that study which is equally requisite to the great and mean, to the celebrated and obscure; the art of moderating the desires, of repressing the appetites; and of conciliating or retaining the favour of mankind.

Samuel Johnson, born on this day in 1709, from Rambler No. 180, Saturday, December 7, 1751

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus, Baron von Steuben

Earl, Major General Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus, Baron von Steuben, 1786

“Baron Steuben has arrived at camp,” Washington wrote soon after. “He appears to be much of a gentleman, and as far as I have had an opportunity of judging, a man of military knowledge and acquainted with the world.” Washington’s confidence in von Steuben grew quickly. Within two weeks, he made the baron acting inspector general and asked him to examine the Continental Army’s condition.

“What [Steuben] discovered was nothing less than appalling,” wrote Fleming in Washington’s Secret War. “He was confronting a wrecked army. A less courageous (or less bankrupt) man would have quit on the spot.” Unlike the American forces in New York, who had beaten the British at Saratoga in fall 1777, the army in Pennsylvania had suffered a series of defeats. When they lost the Battle of Brandywine in September 1777, the British had seized Philadelphia. Now—following common military practice of the era—they had camped for the winter. But Valley Forge, their winter quarters, was nearly as punishing as battle: hastily built huts, cruel temperatures, scarce food.

The baron found soldiers without uniforms, rusted muskets without bayonets, companies with men missing and unaccounted for. Short enlistments meant constant turnover and little order. Regiment sizes varied wildly. Different officers used different military drill manuals, leading to chaos when their units tried to work together. If the army had to fight on short notice, von Steuben warned Washington, he might find himself commanding one-third of the men he thought he had. The army had to get into better shape before fighting resumed in the spring.

So, von Steuben put the entire army through Prussian-style drills, starting with a model company of 100 men. He taught them how to reload their muskets quickly after firing, charge with a bayonet and march in compact columns instead of miles-long lines. Meanwhile, he wrote detailed lists of officers’ duties, giving them more responsibility than in English systems.

Soldiers gaped at the sight of a German nobleman, in a French-style black beaver hat, drilling poorly clothed troops. Though von Steuben raged and cursed in a garbled mixture of French, English, and German, his instructions and presence began to build morale. “If anything, the curses contributed to Steuben’s reputation as an exotic character who was good for a laugh now and then,” wrote Fleming.

CONNECT

"Building the Continental Army," HERE.

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, Allan Bloom

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Allan Bloom, born on this day in 1930, from The Closing of the American Mind

Ring.

Quiet friend of the many distances, feel

How your breath still enlarges space.

Let yourself ring out, a dark cradled bell

In the timbering. That, which erodes you

Gains a strength from your sustenance.

Go out and in, through transformation.

What do you know of the greatest loss?

Is drinking bitter? Then, become wine.

Be, in this night made of excess,

The magic art at the crossroads of senses,

The feel of their strange encounter.

And, if the earthbound forget you,

Say to the silent Earth: I flow.

To the rushing water: I am.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy Birthday, General Pershing

If you know how to shoot, and are quite ready to shoot, the chances are that you won’t have to shoot.

General John J. Pershing, born on this day in 1860, from My Experiences in the World War

Happy Birthday, Neil Peart

Neil Peart was born on this day in 1952.

"Digital Man"...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

Happy Birthday, H.L. Mencken

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

H.L. Mencken, born on this day in 1880, from the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1923

Gratitude.

FDNY Engine 28 Firefighter Mike Kehoe headed up on September 11, 2001 ...

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Everlasting.

All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is a City of God, which men did not build, and cannot destroy, and which is everlasting.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Hang.

It's Joe Perry's birthday and, by God, that's a good enough reason to begin the weekend now ...

"Hang care!" exclaimed he. "This is a delicious evening; the wine has a finer relish here than in the house, and the song is more exciting and melodious under the tranquil sky than in the close room, where the sound is stifled. Come, let us have a bacchanalian chant—let us, with old Sir Toby, make the welkin dance and rouse the night-owl with a catch! I am right merry. Pass the bottle, and tune your voices—a catch, a catch! The lights will be here anon."     

Charles Ollier, from "The Haunted Manor-House of Paddington" 

For best results, listen to this: the lastest incarnation of The Joe Perry Project, "Let the Music Do the Talking"...

The euphony transformed me and inundated my soul in a roguish countenance, the likes of which I had know well in younger days. Such impishness soon drove out the complaints of the day. 

Umberto Limongiello

Silence.

You don’t need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man’s silence and the set of his head than by what he says.

Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow

Learn.

The West's greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own. Scholars who urge us to find the source of our morality and our politics in Plato, or in Isaiah, are out of touch with the social reality in which we live. If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all. The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. 

Harold Bloom, from The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

Tension.

From Russell Kirk's "Ten Conservative Principles"...

[T]he conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Politically speaking, power is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows. A state in which an individual or a small group are able to dominate the wills of their fellows without check is a despotism, whether it is called monarchical or aristocratic or democratic. When every person claims to be a power unto himself, then society falls into anarchy. Anarchy never lasts long, being intolerable for everyone, and contrary to the ineluctable fact that some persons are more strong and more clever than their neighbors. To anarchy there succeeds tyranny or oligarchy, in which power is monopolized by a very few.

The conservative endeavors to so limit and balance political power that anarchy or tyranny may not arise. In every age, nevertheless, men and women are tempted to overthrow the limitations upon power, for the sake of some fancied temporary advantage. It is characteristic of the radical that he thinks of power as a force for good—so long as the power falls into his hands. In the name of liberty, the French and Russian revolutionaries abolished the old restraints upon power; but power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s hands. That power which the revolutionaries had thought oppressive in the hands of the old regime became many times as tyrannical in the hands of the radical new masters of the state.

Knowing human nature for a mixture of good and evil, the conservative does not put his trust in mere benevolence. Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite—these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.

Fighting.

The word impossible does not exist for me. I’ve got a lot of signal flags in my flag bag, but there is not a white one in there. I am going to keep fighting until the day I die — and might keep on fighting afterward, depends on where I am.

Ted Turner

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

To prioritize victory over rather than coexistence with the communist threat.

Distance.

SOMEWHERE OVER CHINA

Just a semi-normal person

Thought he had the future planned

Then he won some silly sweepstakes

Now he had a hundred grand

Never stopped to think of taxes

He was gone before they knew

With a flair for old romantics

To the Orient he flew

When they fueled in Papeete

Place a call to Big Mamou

With an honest explanation

Just to tell the whole damn truth

It's his one chance in a million

Who'd deny the simple fact

Twas no use to talk it over

He'd be home when he got back

Now he's somewhere over China

Lookin' down on all the trails

On the mountains lookin' back at him

It's a real live fairy tale

Put a little distance

Between causes and effects

Like a day-old fortune cookie

Askin' who or what comes next

What the hell did Marco Polo think

When he ran into the wall

Or the crazy Flying Tigers

Doin' spins and loops and stalls

Just a taste for something different

Perking up a boring day

Now our man from Louisiana

Feels exactly the same way

They're all somewhere over China

Shanghai or old Peking

On a plane or a boat in an envelope

Real adventure has it's ring

Just to put a little distance

Between fact and fantasy

Still six thousand miles away from

where I really want to be

How I would love to drive the shuttle

Just to feel the engines roar

And to operate the levers

That control the payload doors

I could buzz the Himalayas

Barrel roll above Hong Kong

Set her down in San Francisco

To the clanging of the gong

We're all somewhere over China

Headin' east of headin' west

Takin' time to live a little

Flying so far from the nest

Just to put a little distance

Between causes and effects

Like an ancient fortune teller

Knowin' who and what comes next

Jimmy Buffett

Solace.

NUN'S FRET NOT at THEIR CONVENT'S NARROW ROOM

In truth the prison, unto which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;

Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)

Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,

Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

William Wordsworth

Liberty.

Gardner, "The Last Photograph Taken of Lincoln from Life," 1865

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.

Abraham Lincoln, from his address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore April 18, 1864

Absence.

If we can wander, without fear, not only in the streets of Paris, which bristle with police, but especially in rustic walks where you rarely meet passersby, is it to the police that we owe this security or rather to the absence of people who care to rob or murder us?

Pyotr Kropotkin, from "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal"

Wait.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

Epictetus, from The Enchiridion

Anarchy.

Lafayette got me thinking about Professor Bloom's thoughts in the Preface of The Western Canon ...

Things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called "the learned world." 

Happy Birthday, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette, Marquis de La Fayette

Sully, Life Study of The Marquis de Lafayette, 1825

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

Marquis de Lafayette, born on this day in 1757, from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"

Happy Birthday, Johann Christian Bach

Gainsborough, Portrait of Johann Christian Bach, 1776

Johann Christian Bach was born on this day in 1735.

Sophia Schambeck performs the Allegro con spirito from the Sonata for Harpsichord and Flute op. 16, No. 5, accompanied by the unfortunate clanger racket of Alexander von Heißen ...

Wonder.

What I wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school.

What would I have wanted to hear from my teachers on my first day of school, or what would I want them to tell me if I became a student again?

Tales about my vacations? No. Those of my classmates? No. I would already know everything. You have to study? This is going to be difficult? We’re going to have to make more of an effort? No, no thank you. I know. This is why I’m here, and besides I’m deaf from the ear of duties. Tell me something different, something new, so that I don’t start getting bored already, but rather that I might feel even just a slight desire to start this school year. From the ear of passion, I can hear perfectly.

Show me that it’s worth my while to stay here for a whole year listening to you. Tell me please that all this will be relevant to my everyday life, that it will help me better understand the world and myself, that it’s worthwhile for me to be here. Show me, most of all through your own lives, that the effort you demand of me will fill my own life the way it fills yours. You have dedicated studies, efforts and dreams to teach me your subject, now show be that it’s all true, that you are conveyors of something desirable and indispensable, something that you own and that you wish to impart upon me as a gift. Show me that you lose sleep to teach me these things that — you say — are worth my efforts. I want to look into your eyes and if they’re not shining I’m going to get bored, I’m telling you now, and I’m going to do something else. You can’t lie to me. If you don’t believe it, then why should I? And don’t tell me about your salaries, about the union, about [Italian education minister] Gelmini, about your family and relationship troubles, about your failures and your obsessions. No. Tell me about how much you love the force of the sun that has burned for 5 billion years and transforms hydrogen into light, life and energy. Tell me how this happens, this miracle that will continue for at least another 5 billion years. Tell me why the moon always shows me her same face and teach me how to interrogate her like Leopardi’s shepherd did. Tell me how it’s possible that a rose has petals arranged according to a divine and infallible proportion and why the heart is a muscle that beats involuntarily and how the eye transforms light into images.

There are so many things in this world that I don’t know and that you could teach me, with eyes shining, because only wonder knows.

And tell me about the mystery of humans, tell me how the Greeks built their temples that you feel like you’re in contact with the gods, and how the Romans managed to combine beauty and utility like nobody else. Tell me how Leonardo da Vinci did it, how Magellan did it. Tell me the secret of Einstein, Gaudi’, or Mozart. If you know it, tell me.

Tell me, how am I supposed to decide what to do with my life, if I don’t know about the lives of others? Tell me, how am I supposed to find my own story, if I have not a bit of passion for those that left their mark? Tell me what I should gamble my life for. Or no, don’t tell me. I will decide for myself. You show me the possibilities. Help me discover my passions, my talents, and my dreams. And remember that you will only succeed if you yourself have dreams, projects and passions of your own. Otherwise how am I supposed to believe you? And remind me that my life is not repeatable, that it’s made for greatness, and help me not to settle for small pleasures, real and virtual, that may satisfy me in the moment, but that deep down just bore me…

Challenge me, put my best qualities to the test, and write them on your register along with all those grades that are always the same. Help me not to believe illusions, not to live on dreams filled with air, but at the same time teach me to dream and to have the patience to realize these dreams, turning them into projects.

Teach me to reason, such that I may not derive my beliefs from common cliches, from the dominant thought, from unreasoned thought. Help me to be free. Remind me of the unity of knowlegde and don’t tell me about the unity of Italy, but be united among each other: don’t talk ill of one another, I beg you. And remind me of how beautiful this country is, talk about it, make me want to discover everything it is hiding before I begin to long for a tropical vacation.

And please, one last favor, keep your cynicism to yourselves. Don’t hide your battles from me, but give me the strength to bear them and don’t poison my hopes even before I have conceived them.

For this, one day, I will remember you.

Thank you, Prof. 2.0.

Know.

CHAPTER 3, BEING ALIVE

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

We know now what the quality without a name is like, in feeling and in character. But so far, concretely, we have not seen this quality in any system larger than a tree, a pond, a bench. Yet it can be in anything – in buildings, animals, plants, cities, streets, the wilderness – and in ourselves. We shall begin to understand it concretely, in all these larger pieces of the world, only when we first understand it in ourselves.

It is, for instance, the wild smile of the gypsies dancing in the road.

The broad brim of the big hat, like arms spread wide, open to the world, confident, huge, … the embrace of the child’s arms about the grass … it is the solid and entrenched repose of the old man lighting a cigarette: hands on his knees, solid, resting, waiting, listening.

In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.

And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.

One man is free at that one instant when you see in him a certain smile and you know he is himself, and perfectly at home within himself. Imagine him especially, perhaps and for one instant utterly oblivious to everything but what is in him and around him at that second.

This wild freedom, this passion comes into our lives in the instant we let go.

It is when all our forces can move freely in us. In nature, this quality is almost automatic, because there are no images to interfere with natural processes of making things. But in all of our creations, the possibility occurs that images can interfere with the natural necessary order of a thing. And, most of all, this way that images distort the things we make, is familiar in ourselves. For we ourselves are, like our works, the products of our own creation. And we are only free, and have the quality without a name in us, when we give up the images which guide our lives.

Yet each of us faces the fear of letting go. The fear of being exactly what one is, of letting the forces flow freely; of letting the configuration of one’s person adjust truly to these forces.

Our letting go is stifled, all the time, so long as we have ideas and opinions of ourselves, which make us hug too tightly to our images of how to live, and bottle up these forces.

So long as we are still bottled up, like this, there is a tightness about the mouth, a nervous tension in the eyes, and stiffness and a brittleness in the way we walk, the way we move.

And yet, until one does let go, in is impossible to be alive. The stereotypes are restricted; there are very different configurations. The infinite variety of actual people, with their vastly and utterly different, require a huge creation, to find the resolution of the person; and in finding this resolution truly, one must above all be free of the stereotypes.

The great film, Ikiru – “to live” – describes it in the life of an old man.

“He has sat for thirty years behind a counter, preventing things from happening. And he finds out that he is to die of cancer of the stomach, in six months. He tries to live; he seeks enjoyment; it doesn’t amount to much. And finally, against all obstacles, he helps to make a park in a dirty slum of Tokyo. He has lost his fear, because he knows that he is going to die; he works and works and works, there is no stopping him, because he is no longer afraid of anyone, or anything. He has no longer anything to lose, and so in this short time gains everything; and then dies, in the snow, swinging on a child’s swing in the park which he has made, and singing.”

Each of us lives most fully “on the wire,” in the face of death, daring to do the very thing which fear prevents us from.

A few years ago a family of hire wire artists had a terrible fall from the high wire, in the middle of the performance. All of them were killed or maimed, except the father, who escaped with broken legs. But even after losing all his children in the fall, a few months later he was back to work, in the circus, on the wire again.

Someone asked him in an interview, how could he bring himself to do it, after such a terrible accident. He answered: “On the wire, that’s living … all the rest is waiting.”

Of course for most of us it is not quite so literal.

The fear which prevents us from being ourselves, from being that one person unique in all the world, from coming to life -- that may mean nothing greater than the fear of giving up the image of a certain job, an image of a certain kind of family life.

One man can be as free in lighting up a cigarette, as that old man dancing on the wire. Another travelling with the gypsies. A handkerchief around your head; a horsedrawn yellow caravan, pulled up in a field; a rabbit stew simmering and bubbling outside the caravan, licking and sucking your fingers as you eat spoonfuls of the stew.

It has above all to do with the elements.

The wind, the soft rain; sitting on the back of an old truck moving clothes and baskets of old possessions while the gentle rain is falling, laughing, crouching, under a shawl to keep from getting wet. Eating a loaf of bread, torn in pieces, hunks of cheese cut crudely with a hatchet which is lying in the corner; red flowers glistening in the rain alongside the road; banging on the window of the truck to shout some joke.

Nothing to keep. Nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, an no concern about security; in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else: there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people around you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people’s ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain.

And it happens when our inner forces are resolved.

And when a person’s forces are resolved, it makers us feel at home, because we know by some sixth sense, that there are no other unexpected forces lurking underground. He acts according to the nature of the situations he is in, without distorting them. There are no guiding images in his behavior, no hidden forces; he is simply free. And so, we feel relaxed and peaceful in his company. Of course, in practice we often don’t know what our inner forces might be.

We live, for months, for years, acting in a certain way, not knowing whether we are free or not, doubting, not even sure when we are successfully resolved, and when we aren’t.

Yet still there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly – when all over forces are resolved.

A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves even.

When we know these moments, when we smile, when we let go, when we are not on guard at all – these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it – for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie; and how they can be loosed.

We cannot be aware of these most precious moments when they are actually happening.

In fact, the conscious effort to attain this quality, or to be free, or to be anything, the glance which this creates, will always spoil it.

It is, instead, when we forget ourselves completely, playing the fool perhaps among a group of friends, our swimming out to sea, or walking simply, or trying to finish something later at night over a table with a group of friends, cigarette stuck in the lower lip, eyes tired, earnest concentration.

All these moments in my own life – I only know them now, in retrospect.

Yet each of us knows from experience the feeling which this quality creates in us.

It is the time when we are most right, most just, most sad, most hilarious.

Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

More here.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World

What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the 

middle of the night and

sing?

Happy Birthday, Tommaso Campanella

Cozza, Portrait of Campanella, 1650

The world's the book where the eternal sense

Wrote his own thoughts; the living temple where, 

Painting his very self, with figures fair

He filled the whole immense circumference.

Tommaso Campanella, born on this day in 1568

Choice.

The modern ignorance is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing that cannot be proved, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell.

The next hard time is just as real to him as the last, and so is the next blessing. The new ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is the same as the old, only less aware that ignorance is what it is. It is less humble, more foolish and frivolous, more dangerous. A man, Old Jack thinks, has no choice but to be ignorant, but he does not have to be a fool. He can know his place, and he can stay in it and be faithful.

Wendell Berry, from The Memory of Old Jack