Author: Dale

Like your freedom?

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I saw —yet again—one of those bumper stickers the gist of which is “Like your freedom? Thank a veteran.” These things drive me nuts.

Let me see if I can parse this whole thing. First of all, I find the sentiment to be a snide bit of conservatism. (Hold that thought.) The implication is that without our armed forces deployed in Iraq, we would soon find ourselves without freedom of the press; that unless we use our soldiers to invade and occupy somewhere, we will no longer be able to hold free elections.

Such thinking is of course incredibly bad thinking. Our armed forces have not been engaged in any kind of conflict the outcome of which would have affected our system of government since 1865. Everything since then has been wars of empire or wars of strategy. Even the invasion of Afghanistan, which could be justified in terms of self defense, was not occasioned by any threat to our actual constitutional structure, nor would we have lost any of our rights had we decided not to tackle the project. I will say nothing of Iraq.

I think it likely that the teabagger on the other side of that bumper would offer the rejoinder that, in our current two wars at least, we’re “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” To which I would reply, that’s not freedom you’re worried about, sweetheart, it’s safety. Those are two different things. You know, the things Patrick Henry was quick to distinguish one from the other: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

And even that kind of thinking is ludicrous, not to mention cowardly. No one in their right mind suggests that any of the Islamic extremists are prepared to invade us. What are the teabaggers thinking is going to happen, Baghdad Dawn? I suggest those people check under their bed every night, and then sleep tight and leave the rest of us alone.

Yes, certainly, the extremists are constantly plotting to harm us. No question. But it’s also true that all such plots have been foiled by careful police work, not by armed incursions either “over there” or here. And it’s also true that our military response to the problem has served as our enemies’ greatest recruitment tool. So thanking a veteran for keeping us safe is offbase as well.

So does this mean I hate our military? Of course not. The men and women who choose to serve in our armed forces are mostly people with a vision of service. I respect that more than a teabagger would believe possible.

However, I distrust our military, and in that I don’t think I am alone. It seems to me, from my reading of Max Farrand’s Annals of the Constitutional Convention, that most if not all of the founding fathers were of the same opinion. And certainly our greatest general-Presidents believed as I do. Can you imagine George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower suggesting that patriotism required us to, in effect, idolatrize our army?

Our founding fathers were clear on the subject: funding is to be restricted and controlled by the Legislative; the armies and navies are to be commanded by the Executive, a civilian. There is no independent military, and this arrangement is the source of our liberty, not the use of firepower. One only has to think of places such as Turkey, Pakistan, Chile, to realize that our liberty excludes our army from our freedoms. And that is why we remain free.

Oh, and how am I so sure that it’s a conservative bumpersticker?

You’re welcome.

The perfect life

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I said yesterday I would write in more detail about my complicated relationship with the journal-effort that I’m calling A Perfect Life. It’s complicated.

First of all, a reminder of the physical object I’m talking about:

It’s a beautiful thing, a leather-bound journal with probably 120 pages or so of nice paper. I bought it at the Renaissance Festival two years ago with the intent of using it for something literary.

Eventually my intent coalesced around an idea that’s bugged me since childhood. When I was a kid, I had a burning curiosity to know how people lived in the past—not just “they lit candles instead of turning on lights,” but “What kind of underwear did they wear?” “How did they cook a meal?” “What did they do to be liked by each other?”

So I began to think about writing a nonfiction piece that would detail what it was like to live my life, i.e., an upper middle class white male of the late 20th/early 21st century American small town culture. To be sure, I am atypical. I won’t be writing about playing golf or dinners at the club or bedding the neighbor’s wife. There will be a lot more about gourmet cooking and music and architecture and the underpinnings of our social structure and examinations of my privilege.

Why didn’t I get started on this project this summer? Why didn’t I open the damned thing the day after I bought it and start scribbling in it? It’s not as if it’s the Red Book of Westmarch, although that’s exactly what it’s going to be, only without, you know, heroic quests and the passing of ages.

And I’d hold off judgment on the “passing of ages” thing as well. I’m not sure but that the world as a whole and the U.S. in particular is entering a new, more painful stage. It may be that the life I’ve lived will never be possible again, and it would be interesting to have a simple account of that life.

So why didn’t I start this project this summer? I know exactly why: the blank page. What is the first thing I need to write in this book? It is not my intention to create a “finished” book, i.e., that when I’m done all a publisher would have to do is photocopy it. I mean for it to be fragmentary, first-draft, exploratory. But where do I start?

Perhaps the answer lies in the Red Book: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.”

Summer Countdown: Day 1

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If I had had the last six days free, this would be the final day of my summer. However, even though technically I have no firm obligations today, I am determined to be a Good Person and go into the media center to start setting it back to rights, so time was up last Wednesday. Oh well.

So how did I do? As a reminder, here were my goals:

sketch five proposals for the Ayrshire Fiddle Orchestra piece

I did this one. Easy.

sketch, if not complete, the designated proposal for said piece

I started work on the segments of Rondo mobile, since it’s going to be a rondo, but I haven’t been very assiduous on that.

make headway on the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait

I did a lot more sketches and a serious number of paint sketches, plus I put myself through the torture that is Diane Mize’s Art Camp. (Yes, I see you there, Diane.) Two of them go on exhibit in a week up at Picaflor Gallery.

further explore my “Field” series of paintings, and even finish the one I promised a young friend this time last year

Nope. Not even once.

build a “party patio” on the upper lot

I could use the excuse that unexpected expenses , like the child scraping his face off , prevented me from working on this, and I would not be wrong. I did take a few steps towards working on the planting area, but honestly this one’s a cras melior est as well.

finish a couple of things in the labyrinth, especially the westpoint

I didn’t get to the westpoint. When am I going to get to the westpoint? I revamped what I have there, but I didn’t even come close to getting the drillpress out and creating the stone circle. On the other hand, I have struggled mightily to maintain the grass out there all summer, and largely I have failed. I don’t know what the deal is. And I owe an apology to the child for suspecting that he simply failed to water it last summer.

begin writing the journal I’ve chosen to call A Perfect Life

Not even once. I think, without turning around here at my desk, that I know where the gorgeous blank book is that I’m going to use to do this… someday… but I could not swear with certainty. This goal is an interesting one, and I’ll discuss it more fully tomorrow.

establish some kind of exercise routine

Hey, I did for a couple of days. I’m going to claim health issues on this one. If you had been as dyspeptic as I’ve been since January, you wouldn’t want to exercise either. I even had used The First Churchills as a carrot to get me to stay put on that stupid elliptical for at least 30 minutes. Bleh.

So, out of eight goals, I only accomplished two and a half? I am not proud. In my defense, I did get the Six Preludes (No Fugues) started and largely finished, and I did a fearsome amount of reading/study this summer, but on the whole, I was a lazy lazy wastrel.

Almost the end

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We went to Abingdon, VA, this weekend, mostly to visit Ginny’s parents, but also to hit the Virginia Highlands Festival. Think Powers’ Crossroads scaled down and staged in downtown Newnan. It was the usual mixed bag, ranging from interesting to pedestrian, art to crafts. The Barter Theatre, of course, is also a mainstay of the Festival, but Annie is not quite my idea of art, is it? (Did I ever report on their production of Lying in State? We went up to see it a couple of years ago. David, the playwright, now deceased, had rewritten it a bit after we premiered it in 1996; the cast was competent, but frankly not as razor-sharp as ours.)

Abingdon also has the William King Regional Arts Center, housed in the city’s old high school building, a fairly magnificent Arlington-style mansion atop a hill on the west side of town. It’s a very nice facility, one you would think they would think twice before abandoning. But apparently they’re concerned about cost of upkeep and the lack of foot traffic, so they’re looking a building a new facility over on Barter Green. My advice? Take the millions and buy up all the auto shops and low-rent housing that clog the entrance to the hill and re-landscape it.

Anyway, a couple of interesting things at William King. One exhibit was called “Cabinet of Curiosities,” and really was just an excuse for a hodge-podge of local antiques, including a desk from my in-laws’ house. There was something about “can you spot the fibs?” in the exhibit labels, but that was not interesting.

This was, though:

Just a candlestick fashioned from a tree branch, but isn’t it spooky? I’d love to have something similar out in the labyrinth. It resembles the aliens from War of the Worlds, I think.

The other was in one of the galleries upstairs, a young artist whose exhibit featured self-portraits on unstretched canvases. This is a sample:

Megan van Deusen’s work examined the veils behind which we conceal ourselves, both metaphorical and literal. The draperies are sketched in with figures draped themselves, and in the example above, the figure holds/generates another drapery with a draped figure emerging from it. Very nice indeed.

So my last days of summer were spent consuming the creative work of others, not creating my own. Oh well.

Summer Countdown: Day 8

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I built a couple of boxes to serve as platforms for the paint studies I’m submitting for Picaflor Studio’s If a Body… show. It was a great feeling to have absolutely every tool I needed to do it correctly and efficiently. To recap: hundreds of dollars worth of equipment so that I can put together some boxes and paint them black to tack some crappy studies onto and send them to a small gallery. Yep, great feeling.

Actually, I haven’t figured out how to attach them yet. I don’t want to glue them nor double-tape them, and those are probably the ways one does these things. This morning I thought I might attach some wire to the boxes and just go all industrial on the aesthetic, clipping the paper at the corners.

Then I cleaned up—again—because the amount of clutter around here is boggling.

And we have a problem: my numbering of the days I actually had to work on creative projects has become inaccurate, null and void. We’re off on a trip to Abingdon, VA, to visit Ginny’s parents but also to catch the Virginia Highlands Festival, an arts conflagration of some merit. (Think Powers’ Crossroads, only not as much art and a whole lot more involvement downtown. Plus music. Plus a quality regional museum with first-rate exhibits.)

Also, I failed to calculate for the leadership team meeting at school next Tuesday, and if I’m being halfway a decent person, I will have to go in on Wednesday to begin putting the media center back together after stripping it for the installation of new carpet.

Essentially, that means I’m out of days. My original plan gave me seven more, but next Monday is the only day I have free to sit down and spend a morning writing music or painting, and half of that must be devoted to getting the paintings up to Picaflor. Time’s up.

Maybe I’ll write Prelude (no fugue) No. 5 on the road.

Summer Countdown: Day 9

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Since I spent the morning under general anesthesia for the purposes of entertaining an upper endoscopy, it is safe to say that I accomplished nothing. (The procedure revealed no problems, other than a nodule that appeared to be a healed ulcer, which they biopsied. The source of my gastrointestinal distress, which seems to have calmed down in any case, goes unspecified.)

I was able to read more in Opening to Inner Light, chapters on Finding the Source and on Returning Home. This is a very good book. Everyone should have a copy.

And I was able to get a stack of New York Times cleared out. Somehow this summer I have not been very assiduous in my news reading. I had nearly two weeks of papers stacked up. What I discovered is that I have tended to read Mondays and Tuesdays—the crossword puzzles are very easy on Monday and Tuesday —and then get behind on Wednesday. In my defense, for the last three weekends, we have left town on Thursday and not returned until Sunday.

But otherwise, not so much.

Summer Countdown: Day 10

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I spent a lot of the day doing errands and stowing materials all over the house.

The only halfway creative thing I did was work on labyrinth a bit. My dear friend Anne’s family has been clearing out her house, giving away things to those of us who loved her before they donate the rest to charity. I was offered the lanterns out by her “party patio,” a beautiful concrete circle that was the former base of a municipal water tower.

I’ve been looking for ways to light the labyrinth that don’t blind the person walking, so I gratefully accepted the offer. We’ll see if the work. If they don’t, I can still use them on the margins.

Here’s one, that I set up on the walkway to the lower lot:

The other three are identical, and I put them at the northeast, northwest, and southwest corners of the labyrinth. The southeast corner, of course, is lit by the fire.

I doubt I will get anything done tomorrow (today); I am having an upper endoscopy to determine exactly what might be the cause of my ongoing intestinal distress. Since that involves general anesthesia, I’m pretty sure I’ll be useless the rest of the day.

Summer Countdown: Day 11

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Step one to re-entering productivity: take my laptop back upstairs to the study. I’ve been sitting in the living room and it’s hard to write productively when I’m using the thing actually in my lap. And it’s impossible to compose.

Not that this produced anything. My batteries are still depleted. The only valid stuff I did today was more reading in Opening to Inner Light and Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

Now I’m off to visit GHP. Tonight is the dance concert, along with the ongoing student art exhibition, and tomorrow night is the Prism II concert. Then Saturday morning, as soon as everyone has gone to majors, I will come home.

Work may resume on Sunday. Maybe.

Summer Countdown: Day 12

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Today (yesterday —the time slippage in these posts is always a confusing thing for me) was a regeneration day. I nursed my continuing gastrointestinal distress—I’m seeing the doctor again on Wednesday (today), thank you—and read, mostly Opening to Inner Light. Also, a new book came in the mail, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: the religious significance of entheogenic plants and chemicals, a collection of essays by Huston Smith, author of the classics The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth: the common vision of the world’s religions.

Inner Light (Metzner) is a pretty powerful little book. As I posted previously, the first chapter’s metaphor, that of waking from a dream, was instrumental in helping me see my way out of a significant funk that I had gotten myself into. Already, then, the author’s purpose, providing a summation of the world’s metaphors and symbols as structures for psychological transformation, has borne fruit.

The second chapter’s metaphor is that of lifting the veil. “Now we see darkly,” “I was blind, but now I see,” that kind of thing. Is there any interest in the readership for a running commentary on each of the metaphors? It might make for some interesting discussion, either here or in real life.

I also began to work assiduously on my backlog of Middlemarch readings. This is my daily email from dailylit.com, and I fell off my morning readings back at the beginning of July. I don’t remember why, but I just didn’t feel like reading about those people one morning. And then the next morning. And then before I knew it, I had four or five days of reading to catch up on. And then nearly a month.

So yesterday, I dove back in and found that Eliot still delighted me, and that I was just as involved in the working out of her issues and themes as before. I’ve set myself a daily reminder to read three of these emails every day until I’m caught up.

Other than that, just basking and meditating. Tomorrow I return to GHP to catch a couple of performances and to retrieve some personal belongings, and then we are hosting some Chinese youth who are in town with the Hangzhou Welan High School Folk Chinese Youth Orchestra. This is the group who was to come last summer but made the fatal error of agreeing to try to play Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. It was very kind of them, especially considering the effort was futile, given that they are a traditional instrument group and in no way could approach the Western chromaticism of that particular piece, and it unfortunately dragged them into the curse on my music: the tour was canceled due to an H1N1 outbreak in their province.

What I’m saying is that though I’m in good spirits and have no excuse not to get down and work on something, I may not have the time until Monday or later. And then we head up to Abingdon, VA, for the Festival. And then I go back to work. There is not enough time, not enough time.

Summer Countdown: Day 13

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My brain continued in lockdown mode. There was no point in attempting any composition or painting. I had thought I might get by with the color exercises, but it seemed that this simple—ha!—task would require too much thought.

So since the weather was clearing up, I decided to toil in the earth. I went outside to the labyrinth.

[ed. note: you can skip to the next section if you like]

I began clearing the “planting area” of the patio. This patio is an area on the upper level of the back yard that I plan to level and pave over with stones. The side next to the fence will be a raised planting area with flowering plants. I’m not a big fan of flowers; they require a lot of care to look good, and as the Japanese might say, they “hot up the blood.” The labyrinth is all green. But the patio is Ginny’s area, a kind of a sitting/dining area that is not the labyrinth, and she likes flowers, so flowers it is.

Because of one unexpected expense or the other, we can’t afford the patio this summer, but I have plants that need to go into the ground: the cute little bat-faced cuphea plant known as “Tiny Winnie” (in honor of our late pet), and a couple of gardenia bushes given to us by our neighbor in the same vein. So I figure I will do the planting now and the paving later.

To that end, I mowed down the weeds in the area; transplanted a couple of irises that our former neighbor planted on the bank between our yards and which now sprout in the decline under the current neighbor’s fence; weeded the vinca major from the monkey grass; and sprayed Round-Up on the vinca major on the decline. Kill it, kill it all.

At some point I will have to figure out how to build the retaining wall for the planting area, but that’s for another day.

I also moved the remaining bricks from their perch over behind the firepit area over to the paving brick staging area. That counted as today’s exercise. Then I mowed down all the undergrowth in that area. It’s an area for which I have no defined landscaping plan, but now it’s clear at least, clear enough for me to start looking at it. Also, it reminded me that I need to install the bamboo fencing along that last stretch of the chainlink now that the diseased pecan tree has been taken down in the other neighbor’s yard. (Taken down, yes, but not removed. I don’t know what that’s about.)

All in all, a fun afternoon of sweat and toil.

All this is boring, I know, but it was therapeutic. I regained a sense of purpose and what our 19th century friends would call vital energy. It was fortuitous then that the mail brought the painting DVDs I had ordered a couple of weeks ago, and a book: Opening to Inner Light: the transformation of human nature and consciousness, by Ralph Metzner, ©1986.

I decided to stow the DVDs for the time being and plunged into Inner Light. This is a book that was referenced in a monograph I’m reading, and its author’s thesis is that “metaphor, symbols, and analogies are essential to describing [psychological transformation] and that there appear to be about a dozen or so key metaphors—from dream to awakening, from captivity to liberation, from fragmentation to wholeness—and symbols for tranformation that occur over and over in all major cultures and sacred traditions throughout the world.”

You can see the appeal.

Preface, introduction, first chapter/metaphor: “Awakening from the Dream of Reality.” And there was a quote from fourth-century Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa:

All who are seriously concerned with the life of heaven must conquer sleep; they must be constantly awake in spirit, driving off, like a kind of drowsiness, the deceiver of souls and the destroyer of truth. By drowsiness and sleep here I am referring to those dream-like fantasies which are shaped by those submerged in the deceptions of this life: I mean public office, money, influence, external show, the seduction of pleasure, love of reputation and enjoyment, honor, and all the other things which, by some sort of illusion, are sought after vainly by those who live without reflection. For all those things will pass away with the flux of time; their existence is mere seeming; they are not what we think they are.

Well. This is not a new idea to me, of course (vid. Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, et al.), but it was a gift from the universe. It enabled me to rethink my state of funk and almost miraculously shed it. (Sorry to be so opaque about the issues which have been troubling me, but this is a blog, not a diary.) I was able to cook supper and build a fire for the evening and peacefully contemplate my perfect life. A good thing.