Setting.

Bach, Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her, BWV 606

The Flanders Recorder Quartet performs ...

Necessity.

Piotrowski, Inside the Flames, 1907

My friend, it is the poet’s work Dreams to interpret and to mark. Believe me that man’s true conceit In a dream becomes complete: All poetry we ever read Is but true dreams interpreted.

The fair illusion of the dream sphere, in the production of which every man proves himself an accomplished artist, is a precondition not only of all plastic art, but even, as we shall see presently, of a wide range of poetry. Here we enjoy an immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us directly, nothing seems indifferent or redundant. Despite the high intensity with which these dream realities exist for us, we still have a residual sensation that they are illusions; at least such has been my experience—and the frequency, not to say normality, of the experience is borne out in many passages of the poets. Men of philosophical disposition are known for their constant premonition that our everyday reality, too, is an illusion, hiding another, totally different kind of reality. It was Schopenhauer who considered the ability to view at certain times all men and things as mere phantoms or dream images to be the true mark of philosophic talent. The person who is responsive to the stimuli of art behaves toward the reality of dream much the way the philosopher behaves toward the reality of existence: he observes exactly and enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it. Nor is it by pleasant images only that such plausible connections are made: the whole divine comedy of life, including its somber aspects, its sudden balkings, impish accidents, anxious expectations, moves past him, not quite like a shadow play—for it is he himself, after all, who lives and suffers through these scenes—yet never without giving a fleeting sense of illusion; and I imagine that many persons have reassured themselves amidst the perils of dream by calling out, “It is a dream! I want it to go on.” I have even heard of people spinning out the causality of one and the same dream over three or more successive nights. All these facts clearly bear witness that our innermost being, the common substratum of humanity, experiences dreams with deep delight and a sense of real necessity.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 

McEnroe.

Work.

The growth of the exploiters' revolution on this continent has been accompanied by the growth of the idea that work is beneath human dignity, particularly any form of hand work. We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.

Wendell Berry, from The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Admire.

Sisley, Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La Celle Saint Cloud, 1867

HEAVY

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had His hands in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -

books, bricks, grief -

it’s all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot and would not,

put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?

Mary Oliver

Rediscover.

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story, by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

C.S. Lewis

Ray Wylie Hubbard, ¨Black Wings¨

Nap.

Some recent research has found that the right side of the brain is far more active during a nap than the left side, which stays fairly quiet while we’re asleep. Despite the fact that 95% of the population is right-handed, with the left side of their brains being the most dominant, the right side is consistently the more active hemisphere during sleep.

The study’s author, Andrei Medvedev, speculated that the right side of the brain handles ‘housekeeping’ duties while we’re asleep. The study looked at how active various parts of the brain were while participants were sleeping:

Medvedev and his colleagues used a type of brain imaging known as near-infrared spectroscopy, which involves placing optical fibers similar to electrodes symmetrically around a person’s scalp. These “optodes” send infrared light through the brain and measure how much light returns.

The intensity of light bouncing back provides an estimate of the blood flow in different regions of the brain. Blood flow, in turn, is an indicator of how active those regions are.

So while the left side of your brain takes some time off to relax, the right side is clearing out your temporary storage areas, pushing information into long-term storage, and solidifying your memories from the day.

CONNECT

Lovely.

Pass.

Rembrandt, Monk Reading, 1661

When evening has come, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and I put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak with them and to ask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass into their world.

Niccolò Machiavelli

van Eyck, ¨Doen Daphne D'over Schoone Maeght¨

François Lazarevitch performs ...

Happy birthday, Sully.

Sully, The Student, 1848

Thomas Sully was born on this day in 1783.

Joy.

Five windows light the cavern'd Man: thro' one he breathes the air;

Thro' one hears music of the spheres; thro' one the Eternal Vine

Flourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro' one can look

And see small portions of the Eternal World that ever groweth;

Thro' one himself pass out what time he please, but he will not;

For stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.

So sang a Fairy, mocking, as he sat on a streak'd tulip,

Thinking none saw him: when he ceas'd I started from the trees,

And caught him in my hat, as boys knock down a butterfly.

How know you this, said I, small Sir? where did you learn this song?

Seeing himself in my possession, thus he answer'd me:

My Master, I am yours! command me, for I must obey.

Then tell me, what is the Material World, and is it dead?

He, laughing, answer'd: I will write a book on leaves of flowers,

If you will feed me on love−thoughts, and give me now and then

A cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsy,

I'll sing to you to this soft lute, and show you all alive

The World, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.

William Blake

Boston, "Feelin' Satisfied"

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

An excellent movie ...



Always choose the lesser of two weevils.

I was born at the wrong time.

Created.

Truth can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Experience.

The tall ship Corwith Cramer stumbled into the Celtic Sea, engine roaring, 7,500 square feet of sail furled up mute. Its two masts ticked against the horizon like a metronome set to allegro. I joined a row of pallid sailors crouched at the leeward rail. Foam-lathered swell swung for my face, then reeled abruptly away. By the third time I threw up over the side, the “wine-dark sea” of Homer’s poetry just looked like the basin of a billion vomits.

Misery loves blame, so I blamed Joseph Conrad, whose fiction had brought me here. Before Conrad published his first novel in 1895, he spent 20 years working as a merchant sailor, mostly on sailing ships, and fully half his writing — including “Heart of Darkness,” “Lord Jim” and “The Secret Sharer” — deals with sailors, ships and the sea. These loom so large for him that as I have researched a book about Conrad’s life and times, I have felt it essential to travel by sea myself.

I had already taken passage from China to England on a giant container ship, tracing a historic route with the comforts of a queen-size bed, round-the-clock hot water and a mass of steel as big as the Empire State Building between me and the sick-making swell. But the more I read Conrad, the more I realized that I had to get on a tall ship like the ones he knew best, and experience its unique ways of moving, working and speaking.

CONNECT

Wind.

Neil’s like a force of nature, he’s like having the wind in your band. He’s like adding nitroglycerin to the mix. He’s pretty powerful.

David Crosby

He can't sing. He can't play. He's great.

Tom Earls

Don't Be Denied ...

Steely Dan, "Aja"

More.

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Work.

Life-cherishing.

Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

Mary Oliver

Men.

Men from the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles, D-Day, 1944

Mozart, Piano Concerto No.23 in A Major, K. 488

Vladimir Horowitz performs with The Orchestra of La Scala, directed by Carlo Maria Giulini ...

Asks.

Thank you, Wrath of Gnon.

Actively.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. 

Alberto Manguel

Typography.

Troll.

Great Norwegian Mountain Troll allegedly photographed in December 1942 by the crew of an RAF recon flight 300 miles North of Berge.

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Resolute.

Something can be done by good laws; more can be done by honest administration of the laws; but most of all can be done by frowning resolutely upon the preachers of vague discontent; and by upholding the true doctrine of self-reliance, self-help, and self-mastery. This doctrine sets forth many things. Among them is the fact that though a man can occasionally be helped when he stumbles, yet that it is useless to try to carry him when he will not or cannot walk; and worse than useless to try to bring down the work and reward of the thrifty and intelligent to the level of the capacity of the weak, the shiftless, and the idle. It further shows that the maudlin philanthropist and the maudlin sentimentalist are almost as noxious as the demagogue, and that it is even more necessary to temper mercy with justice than justice with mercy.

The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings. If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others; he must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow-men a responsibility which is not theirs.

Theodore Roosevelt

CONNECT

RUSH, "Vital Signs"

Unstable condition:
A symptom of life,
In mental,
And environmental change

Atmospheric disturbance -
The feverish flux,
Of human interface
And interchange

   The impulse is pure -
   Sometimes our circuits get shorted,
   By external interference

   Signals get crossed -
   And the balance distorted
   By internal incoherence

A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a mood lifter
Everybody need reverse polarity

Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form.
Everybody got to deviate
From the norm

An ounce of perception -
A pound of obscure
Process information
At half speed

Pause:
Rewind - replay -
Warm memory chip
Random-sample -
Hold the one you need

   Leave out the fiction
   The fact is;
   This friction
   Will only be worn by persistence

   Leave out conditions
   Courageous convictions
   Will drag the dream into existence

A tired mind become a shape-shifter
Everybody need a soft filter
Everybody need reverse polarity

Everybody got mixed feelings
About the function and the form
Everybody got to elevate
From the norm...

It's Sausage Time ...

Baptized.

Nearer to the earth's heart,

Deeper within its silence:

Animals know this world

In a way we never will.

We who are ever

Distanced and distracted

By the parade of bright

Windows thought opens:

Their seamless presence

Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time

Gone and time emerging,

We manage seldom

To be where we are:

Whereas they are always

Looking out from

The here and now.

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked minds,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing with us.

May we enter

Into lightness of spirit,

And slip frequently into

The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence

Of our animal being

Cleanse our hearts

Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk

Upon the earth

With all their confidence

And clear-eyed stillness

So that our minds

Might be baptized

In the name of the wind

And light and the rain.

John O'Donohue

Memory.

Homer, Hurricane, Bahamas, 1898

RIVERS of REPOSE

The willows carried a slow sound, 

A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead. 

I could never remember 

That seething, steady leveling of the marshes 

Till age had brought me to the sea. 

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves 

Where cypresses shared the noon’s 

Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost. 

And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams 

Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them 

Asunder ... 

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge 

And all the singular nestings in the hills 

Where beavers learn stitch and tooth. 

The pond I entered once and quickly fled— 

I remember now its singing willow rim. 

And finally, in that memory all things nurse; 

After the city that I finally passed 

With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts 

The monsoon cut across the delta 

At gulf gates ... There, beyond the dykes 

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, 

And willows could not hold more steady sound. 

Hart Crane

Freighted.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

H. P. Lovecraft

Courage.

Have the courage to use your own understanding! The energy of courage needed to overcome the obstacles to learning thrown up by both the intolerance of nature and the cowardice of the heart. Not for nothing does the ancient myth have the goddess of wisdom emerging fully armed from Jupiter’s head; for her very first action is that of a warrior. Even at her birth she must enter a bitter struggle with senses that do not wish to be torn from sweet repose.

Friedrich Schiller

Robert Plant, "The Lemon Song"

Happy Friday!

Free.

The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.

Wendell Berry

High.

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cream, "I Feel Free"

New Order, "The Perfect Kiss"

Chet Baker, "Bye, Bye Blackbird"

Pinnacle.

Abraham Maslow is the leading figure in the tradition of humanistic psychology and the modern Positive Psychology movement owes a huge debt to his theories. His "Hierarchy of Needs" remains widely recognized and used.

Nonetheless, the layperson knows surprisingly little about the pinnacle Maslow wants us to aspire to- Self-Actualization. Who is this Self-Actualized person, and what characteristics does s/he have? Maslow’s portrait is detailed and complex.

Self-Actualization

Maslow describes the good life as one directed towards self-actualization, the pinnacle need. Self-actualization occurs when you maximize your potential, doing the best that you are capable of doing. Maslow studied individuals whom he believed to be self-actualized, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein, to derive the common characteristics of the self-actualized person. Here are a selection of the most important characteristics, from his book Motivation and Personality:

1.  Self-actualized people embrace the unknown and the ambiguous.

2.  They accept themselves, together with all their flaws.

3.  They prioritize and enjoy the journey, not just the destination.

4.  While they are inherently unconventional, they do not seek to shock or disturb.

5.  They are motivated by growth, not by the satisfaction of needs.
6.  Self-actualized people have purpose.

7.  They are not troubled by the small things.

8.  Self-actualized people are grateful.
9.  They share deep relationships with a few, but also feel identification and affection towards the entire human race.

10. Self-actualized people are humble.

11. Self-actualized people resist enculturation.
12. Despite all this, self-actualized people are not perfect.

CONNECT

Will.

The art of the sculptor is made of strength, exactitude and will. In order to express life, to render nature, one must will and will with all strength of heart and brain; nature exceeds — and greatly — human genius; she is superior in everything. We know only parcels of truth. There are unknown forces within nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms that our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.

Auguste Rodin

Bill Evans, "My Foolish Heart"

More.

I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they [get] hit hard enough maybe they’ll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same; they’re not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don’t want a challenge. They want something to be done to them – they don’t want to participate. But there’ll always be maybe 15 percent maybe, 15 percent, that desire something more, and they’ll search it out - and maybe that’s where art is, I think.

Bill Evans

Thanks, Diary of a Radical Conformist

Doing.

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. 

Thomas Jefferson

CONNECT

Pray.

Listen.

Listen to a recitation of the menu, HERE.