A creative confluence of ideas, feelings, prayers, texts, images, insights, songs, poems, and events seems to be taking form within me of late. Or maybe I am just letting the influences in my soul connect. Whatever is going on, I felt my inner fog start to burn off last week while talking with my brother. As we entered City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, he was telling me about the birthday party for the City's Poet Laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who just celebrated 100 years of life "He's still got it," Phil said robustly, "and he's still talking about the dream." I was browsing through a graphic novel based on the life and wisdom of Herbert Marcuse - already a trip as a graphic novel, right!?! - when my brother's enthusiasm for Ferlinghetti's new book, Little Boy, and the German philosopher's commitment to a revolution of joy became one. Brother Lawrence put it like this in his free verse jeremiad, "I Am Waiting." I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder.
Brother Herbert was more didactic, but no less passionate when he wrote:
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.
Later that afternoon, sitting outside Cafe Trieste sipping caffeinated brews, we pondered the fate of North Beach. Once the heart of the Beat Generation, a bastion of free thinkers exploring what it means to know that "the best minds of our generation have been destroyed by madness" and can only be healed by beauty and love, the hood is now awash with ahistorical young techy hipsters who became millionaires at 24 and raised the rent for everyone else. My mind went to T Bone Burnett's keynote address at SXSW. A music industry insider, Burnett sounded like a 21st century Ferlinghetti or Marcuse albeit with a 21st century awareness that in our technocratic age, our emotions and ethics are manipulated by social media. Our politics, culture and economics have been reduced to the lowest common denominator that can turn a fast buck, too:
I am going to begin today with a quote from Marshall McLuhan from his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: “Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.” I would like to come to you today with a message of unity and love and peace, and I will try to get there by the end, but I have to begin by stating a fact that must be becoming obvious to most people by now - the fact that we are in a battle, a battle for the survival of our species, and our enemy, is within... and artists are our only hope for salvation. (check it out en toto @ https://livemusicblog .com/news/watch-t-bone-burnett-keynote-speech-sxsw-2019/
When I returned to City Lights to get a t-shirt, I read the opening quote in the recent edition of ADBUSTERS. It is taken from the March 2019 book, The Second Coming, by Italian neo-Marxist, Franco Berardi, who writes:
We have entered the gates to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economic delirium ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynics, technological simulation of life. One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time a new change occurs nowadays, it seems a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us anymore shouldn't be seen as a form of surrender or fatalism. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear: a world where the apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence.
And later that night while reading the novel, Goulash by Brian Kimberling, about an American ex-pat teaching English in Prague, these words popped up before I went to sleep:
America (had become a nation of) guns, Republicans, megachurches, personal injury lawyers and five square meters of television screen per household, headache-inducing beer, and far, far too much space that was relentlessly paved. It had laws determined by pressure groups, a language debased by idiots, and a mythology based on subliterate kids chasing cattle.
Juxtapose the collapse of this era and the challenge and chaos of our current context with the joy of the wedding I presided over last weekend and the truly good, noble, hope-filled and holy death of Jean Vanier the founder of L'Arche. Such wildly different values were at work in these later events, yes? At the wedding, we paid homage to the unexpected and undeserved gift of love and grace that has come upon two old friends living into the second half of life. It was a festival of tenderness, of living into the risk of vulnerability, and stepping up to the ever-changing dance of intimacy. It was beautiful - and my heart was full to overflowing for both my dear friends and all who gathered. For a moment in time, we were all on holy ground.
And Brother Jean's death? While sad, to be sure, and not unexpected, his last message to the L'Arche community cuts to the chase:
The cycle of God's presence continues: new life erupts from death beyond our wildest imaginations. A new world is being crafted by those willing to climb down the social ladder rather than just scrambling up to get ahead. New hearts are being healed by those living into their fears with the trust that God's love is greater than all our stumbling blocks - including death. New music, poetry, art, and movies are popping up through the cracks of the old order offering us a vision of beauty and awe beyond the carnage. And I have encountered new souls being reborn as we learn to experience and trust the first word of God - creation - rather than relying solely upon technology, stress or cash. After working in our yard and garden yesterday and today, I am certain of it.
Interestingly, the last page in the ADBUSTERS journal dedicated to "a new mythology" quotes the late Mary Oliver's poem, "When Death Comes" as part of our new consciousness:
When it's over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to
amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking
the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to
wonder
if I have made of my life
something particular, and
real.
I don't want to find myself
sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world.
I am going to begin today with a quote from Marshall McLuhan from his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: “Instead of tending toward a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside.” I would like to come to you today with a message of unity and love and peace, and I will try to get there by the end, but I have to begin by stating a fact that must be becoming obvious to most people by now - the fact that we are in a battle, a battle for the survival of our species, and our enemy, is within... and artists are our only hope for salvation. (check it out en toto @ https://livemusicblog .com/news/watch-t-bone-burnett-keynote-speech-sxsw-2019/
When I returned to City Lights to get a t-shirt, I read the opening quote in the recent edition of ADBUSTERS. It is taken from the March 2019 book, The Second Coming, by Italian neo-Marxist, Franco Berardi, who writes:
We have entered the gates to the apocalypse. This theological concept is the best metaphor to describe the world in which we are already living. Chaos is all around us: political folly, economic delirium ecological catastrophe, intellectual cynics, technological simulation of life. One century after the Communist revolution, the very idea that the world could be changed for the better seems dead once and for all. Every time a new change occurs nowadays, it seems a change for the worse. But the fact that nothing can save us anymore shouldn't be seen as a form of surrender or fatalism. On the contrary, if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear: a world where the apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence.
And later that night while reading the novel, Goulash by Brian Kimberling, about an American ex-pat teaching English in Prague, these words popped up before I went to sleep:
America (had become a nation of) guns, Republicans, megachurches, personal injury lawyers and five square meters of television screen per household, headache-inducing beer, and far, far too much space that was relentlessly paved. It had laws determined by pressure groups, a language debased by idiots, and a mythology based on subliterate kids chasing cattle.
Juxtapose the collapse of this era and the challenge and chaos of our current context with the joy of the wedding I presided over last weekend and the truly good, noble, hope-filled and holy death of Jean Vanier the founder of L'Arche. Such wildly different values were at work in these later events, yes? At the wedding, we paid homage to the unexpected and undeserved gift of love and grace that has come upon two old friends living into the second half of life. It was a festival of tenderness, of living into the risk of vulnerability, and stepping up to the ever-changing dance of intimacy. It was beautiful - and my heart was full to overflowing for both my dear friends and all who gathered. For a moment in time, we were all on holy ground.
And Brother Jean's death? While sad, to be sure, and not unexpected, his last message to the L'Arche community cuts to the chase:
When it's over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to
amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking
the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to
wonder
if I have made of my life
something particular, and
real.
I don't want to find myself
sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply
having visited this world.
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