Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Away From Here

 The search for truth - be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power - always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance.

The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 361


It's difficult to look at the world today and not agree with Pessoa's observation that the "grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance." And in America, today more than ever, those random tickets are based on inherited wealth. The oligarchs are stripping America economically - and the religious fanatics are stripping America spiritually - and have somehow convinced tens of millions of Americans that the greatest threat they face are trans folks just trying to live their life as best they can. However, does that really mean that the "subjective truth of belief, [and] the objective truth of reality" don't exist at all? This may be Pessoa simply being Pessoa, I guess, although the "truth" of the American dream clearly doesn't seem to exist anymore. If the collective dream is dead, does that mean that the individual dream is dead as well? That's a tougher one. I've talked quite a bit lately about my desire to turn around from the cruel, callous world that we live in, this Trumpian nightmare where empathy is mocked and heartlessness is celebrated. Instead, I've turned inward, even more than usual, and I'm making a deliberate effort to read even more than usual (and that's saying something). As Pessoa opines, "The value of art is that it takes us away from here." However, in doing that are we letting the barbarians win? This brings us back to the New Monastic Individuals concept, and maybe it's enough to try and preserve the best and the most beautiful, culturally and spiritually and intellectually, and just attempt, as best we can, to pass it along to others. 


Tuesday, April 22, 2025

2025 Readings 37

 This morning I finished a very quick reading of Sarah Kendzior's The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America. Yes, this is the second Kendzior book that I've read in the last week - with two more in the queue.  This is the book - and the essays - that introduced her to America as a brilliant social critic and Casandra-esque ignored prophet of the age of Trump. As with The Last American Road Trip, it's difficult for me to praise her work too highly. If you care about the state of the US right now you should definitely be reading her and following her on social media; she's the real deal. Her essays on race and inequality and education are insightful, thought-provoking, inspiring, and also humbling. In this case, let me quote from her essay "The Fallacy of the Phrase 'the Muslim World.'"

   "It is time to retire the phrase 'the Muslim world' from Western media. Using the phrase in the manner above disregards not only history and politics, but accurate reporting of contemporary events. The protests that took pace around the world ranged in scale and intensity, in the participants' willingness to use violence, and in their rationales. The majority of 'the Muslim world' did not participate in these protests, nor did all of the Muslims who protested the video advocate the bloodshed that took place in Libya.

   By reducing a complex set of causes and conflicts to the rage of an amorphous mass, the Western media reinforce the very stereotype of a united, violent 'Muslim world' that both the makers of the anti-Islam video and the Islamist instigators of the violence perpetuate.

   Essentialist views of Islam and Muslims are nothing new. In Western media, Islam is often presented as a contagion, with Muslims as the afflicted, helpless to their own hostile impulses. What is different about the current crisis is that it comes in the aftermath of the 'Arab Spring' - another series of intricate events depicted as interconnected and inevitable. Democracy would 'spread' from one Muslim country to another, analysts argued, regardless of the unique historical trajectories of individual states. Some analysts wet so far as to suggest it would spread to Central Asia, a region of largely isolationist dictatorships uninfluenced by Middle Eastern politics. The current protests are being portrayed as an 'Arab Winter' - a simplistic reversal of a simplistic perception of success, with Muslims, undifferentiated, receiving the blame.

   There is, of course, cohesion among Muslims, in the sense that there is cohesion among followers of any faith. The notion of the umma is an essential part of Islamic doctrine. But the way the idea of 'the Muslim world' is expressed within Islamic communities is different from the way it is expressed outside them. It is rare to hear the phrase 'the Christian world' used in the English-language media, because doing so would generalize about the motives of over 2 billion people. No such respect applies to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. Googling the phrase 'the Christian world' yields 5.8 million results, while the phrase 'the Muslim world' yields 87 million results, many of them wandering what is 'wrong' with the queried target. When the phrase 'the Muslim world' is invoked, it is usually to reduce, denigrate, or impugn."


Changing

 The weekend before last we headed to the local Grange to attend a Bob Dylan Wannabe Concert to raise money for the Montpelier free clinic - and, of course, knew people on stage - all of which is about the most Vermont thing you could possibly say. It was one of those bittersweet evenings. On the one hand it was a reminder, and one that I guess I didn't need, of what a special community we live in. On the other hand, it was almost painful for everyone to join together at the end for a group singalong of The Times They Are A-Changin'. There were a lot of 70 year old who gave their times and money in support of a noble cause, and championing the spirit of the 1960s in the process, while at the same time the majority of the young men in my class are visiting for Trump. 

At the end all of the performers sang a rousing version of The Times They Are A-Changin', which was both lovely, and as I proposed above, heartbreaking.

We were so happy that G3 and Ali were able to join us for the performance. 

Noli, Ali's sister, a proud possessor of her first driver's license, drove up to the wilderness for the weekend.

My friend Art, who I've known for twenty years through Champlain, was performing, and it was great to see him. It reminded us to get together more often for breakfast.



Saturday, April 19, 2025

2025 Readings 36

 I'm embarrassed to admit that I followed Sarah Kendzior for years on Twitter but had never read one of her books. My great friend, and office-mate, Erik dropped off a copy of The Last American Road Trip the other day, along with one of his masterfully forged autographs (or maybe it was simply nice of Kendzior to write me a personal note). I blew through The Last American Road Trip in a couple days and have gone right into The View from Flyover Country, her first book. The former is her latest book and it reflects upon a series of family trips that she and her husband took their two kids on, while there was still an America to see. From this framework she's able to include a fair bit of criticism of what's happening to America, but what really comes through is her love of the country and her sadness at what is happening to it. Beyond everything else, she's also a very powerful writer. The book, as with all her books, is highly recommended. Let me just include a short section, dealing with her response to hearing that Roe v Wade had been overturned:

   "Missouri is a trigger stage, which means that band on abortion prohibited by Roe's 1973 passage would become law once federal protections were struck down. At some point, I know, I would become a second-class citizen. One morning, I would wake up and legal protections I had known my entire life would be gone. One day, everything would be the same except my husband and son would have more right than me and my daughter, and I would have to explain to my children why. I have never had an abortion and have no intention of getting gone, but that is true of many women who end up getting abortions. The perverse pain of the Roe reversal was how it made me feel like a failure, above all, as a mother: the very identity the state prescribed. I could not protect my daughter from the government. Our bodies were state property now.

   When the day came - June 24, 2022 - I knocked on the door of my husband's makeshift pandemic home office, said 'they overturned Roe,' and left before he could respond. I got in my car and drove to Creve Coeur Lake, an offshoot of the Missouri River where I go kayaking in the summer. Creve Coeur is French for 'broken heart' but I didn't know that because no one knows how to pronounce or interpret Missouri French. 'Creev Core,' we say, we unsophisticated rubes whom the Supreme Court had made cattle - cattle that so many different forces wanted to corral.

   I kayaked until my hands blistered and bled, and while I was out on the water the attorney general of Missouri signed away my bodily autonomy. I don't know the exact moment it happened, whether it was when I saw a duck shielding her ducklings and started to cry, or when I passed an elderly woman drifting under a highway bridge, her face streaked with tears, and she put on sunglasses so they would not show, or when the clouds darkened the lake with the threat of rain and I thought, Bring it. You cannot do anything worse to me today. Show me some action. Give ma a battle I can fight. And then the clouds parted, and in the light of the sun I saw the blood on my palms like a stigma, like stigmata. I knew God did not want this and that state officials did not care about god because they had decided to replace him with themselves."

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Moonie

 I've been pestering my friends today with this odd trivia question: Who are the three individuals who are in the CFL and NFL Halls of Fame? The first answer is an easy one, and not simply because I had already sent around the picture below: Warren Moon. The other two are more of a challenge: Bud Grant and Marv Levy. The fact that Grant and Levy are a combined 0-8 in the Super Bowl probably signifies something important. It's also interesting that two of the three Double Hall of Famers have Vikings connections. Weird. Of course, as I've doubtless mentioned too many times on blog (I mean, come on, you don't close in on 3000 posts without repeating yourself) the fact that led me to the CFL in the first place was that I learned early on that Grant had coached (wildly successfully) in the CFL before he moved on to the NFL (where even his brilliance as coach couldn't overcome the Curse of the Vikings). Anyway, I guess I'm now one step closer to being fully prepared for June's CFL Doubleheader of Excellence. Oh, one final thought: I had to have this Warren Moon jersey made, as you might have figured out since he played for the Edmonton Eskimos and not the Edmonton Elks (same franchise, just a name change a couple years ago). For some reason you couldn't order player jerseys on the Elks webpage (which probably doesn't say much about how good they are at the moment). 

I think it was all worth it for the comped Elks lanyard and decals.



Tuesday, April 15, 2025

2025 Readings 35

 Last night I finished Voices of the Fallen Heroes, a collection of late Yukio Mishima short stories. Over the decades I've read a lot of his work, including Forbidden Colors, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sound of Waves, Death in Midsummer, and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and The Decay of the Angel; these four novels make my all-time favorite list, and I've read the collection multiple times - and it may be time for another read). It was odd to think that he was writing these short stories at the same time as the last couple volumes of the Sea of Fertility collection. 


Vermont Public Philosophy Week 2025

 Here's a nice picture of Janet, dominating at our Vermont Public Philosophy Week Doubleheader a couple Saturdays back. We had fifteen people stop by, which was a solid turnout, especially on a cold and rainy day and during a time that coincided with an anti-Trump rally downtown in Montpelier (we weren't counter-programming, obviously, and would have been down there ourselves, but we scheduled the talks several weeks before the protest). Janet discussed co-ops and community and read from her book, and I blathered away about Fernando Pessoa. Oddly, three people showed up who had read a goodly amount of Pessoa and had seen my talk listed on the Philosophy Week website. Who knew that Pessoa would be a draw? Although, and not surprisingly, Janet drew more folks than I did (which clearly says something good about her - and her community).

The Adamant Community Club is a great spot for a talk, although it's a more beautiful view out the window almost every other month of the year.