Synchronicity is “the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”

This morning I’m mulling on the synchronicity of my reading and the recent election in Britain as viewed through the eyes of Russell Brand.

Russell Brand is a sort of comedian who has recently started a pod/videocast that I have watched. During the past week or two, Brand began to  in to his own idealism and to believe in the possibility of affecting a political outcome in a positive way.

He changed from advocating not voting to advocating voting.

The days after the election in which his admirable positions were soundly trounced, Brand seemed to move back into thinking that public government was broken beyond repair.

I admire this movement of his. The line between idealism and despair is a fine one. I have moved back and forth on it my whole life.

In the end, I try to choose to act when possible. But probably fail at finding ways to do so besides voting and meager financial support of causes I agree with.

I was delighted this morning when at the end of his essay, “Letters to an Innocent Bystander,” Thomas Merton uses the story of the emperor’s news clothes to drive home his point that we can no longer be “innocent bystanders” in the world.

Brand’s new movie which i haven’t seen is called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

One can imagine his reasonable and unfashionable socialist ideas (with which I probably agree).

Merton’s world had some significant differences.

I mull them over as I read his work.

He hints then about where we have ended up in our time. But of course is speaking more about his time than ours.

One of the things I have always liked about Merton’s writing is that he addresses the reader in a clear and honest way, no matter from what context one is reading him. This is so different from most religious (especially Christian) writers I have read. 

The beginning paragraph of this essay is an example of this. In it, Merton hopes that

“we have not yet reached the stage where we are all hermetically sealed, each one in the collective arrogance and despair of his own herd.” Thomas Merton

This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the echo chamber effect of the internet.

Of course that’s not exactly what he meant. But he goes on:

“If I seem to be in a hurry to take advantage of the situation which still exists, it is, frankly, because I sometimes feel it may not continue to exist much longer.” Thomas Merton

Ahem. Again some resonance for the 21st century as it has turned out so far.

“In any case, I believe that we are sufficiently still ‘persons’ to realize we have a common difficulty, and to try to solve it together. I write this, then, in the hope that we can still save ourselves from becoming numbers.” Thomas Merton

Again AHEM. People as numbers. Go tell Facebooger.

Finally, I found myself thinking about the intellectual dishonesty that Greenfield exposes in Chapter 7 of his book, The Myth of Choice.

Since I’m over my 500 word limit and your eyes are glazing over maybe I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Rain again this morning. I got up specifically to sit on the porch with my oil lamps burning and sip coffee and listen to the rain.

Eileen lay in bed most of yesterday binging on the TV show, “The Americans.”

We checked out the DVD. I found the show pretty mundane but she liked enough to use it to keep herself occupied while she feels ill.

I did my Greek listening to the rain and then read some Merton. I’m at a loss to say why I am drawn back into reading Merton. Many of his observations seem very dated. His poetry is almost as bad as mine. Nevertheless I am drawn to him especially when he is talking about the society at the time.

In his essay, “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolph Eichmann,” he points out how sane Eichmann was. He draws a line from Eichmann’s sanity to the sanity of people in his world who would blow it up and “coolly estimate how many millions can be considered expendable in a nuclear war.”

I remember this fear, the one of the war coming to the USA via nuclear explosions. While this danger is not gone, our fear in America has changed. Now we coolly estimate how many civilians are expendable when we target (and buy valium in australia kill) specific terrorists.

It’s the same kind of sanity Merton was talking about.

What Merton leaves out and what we experience now is the anxiety and anger that drives the mad discussion.

Despite his sophistication and cosmopolitan orientation, he also leaves out the increase in the din of what is happening all over our world. I wonder if the very idea that what used to be news, a filtered selection of what was going on, has exploded into an unceasing 24 hour of expanded awareness of events in our world with an emphasis on the tragic.

Have events changed so much as one’s ability to know about them?

Hard to say. But it creates a constant barrage of troubling testimonies and stories of things that are happening to real people all over the world.

No wonder so many retreat behind reactive hardening of opinions and judgments. A retreat that seems to me to be related to Merton’s idea of the sanity of Eichmann.

Writing to Survive

I follow many people on Facebooger including a good number of writers. This link was put up by one of them. I shared it on Facebooger knowing that if certain of my Facebooger friends were to read it they would be angry. But I think it’s well written and is about the truth.

I moved myself out to the porch this morning so that I could hear the rain more clearly.

I was inspired to reread Merton’s essay, “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” But first I wanted to open more windows and insert some portable screens we use.

We have two windows like this on the porch. When I went to the second one I discovered a bird had decided to build its nest in it.

I decided to leave that window closed.

I said yesterday that “The Rhinocerous” was about conformity. But both Merton and Ionesco himself say that while it’s about conformity, it’s also about totalitarianism. Ultimately they see that when everyone else in society is a monster, rebellion is as futile as transformation. Merton quotes Ionesco: “They [the spectators] leave in a void—that was my intention. It is the business of a free man to pull himself out of this void by his own power and not by the power of other people!”

So Merton’s essay uses the gratuitous nature of the rain and the image of a society of rhinoceroses to challenge the illusion of our lives lived together collectively: “Because we live in a womb of collective illusion, freedom remains abortive. Our capacities for joy, peace and truth are  never liberated… we are prisoners of a process, a dialectic of false promises and real deceptions ending in futility.”

You would never guess from reading these quotes from Merton that most of this essay, especially the beginning and ending hinge on the uselessness of rain and is rendered in almost poetic prose.

As I reread it this morning listening to the rain, the word, “collective,” rang around in my head. I realized that I had read a different take on this in our present society. That was in Kent Greenfield’s book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits.

Toward the end of the second section he calls “Limits and Influences” Greenfield makes the point that markets take away societal action and replace it with so many individual choices that the very idea of a social group determining its fate is “elbowed aside.”

He gives the example of when a box store like WalMart moves into a community. Before the box store, many smaller stores owned by locals provided people in the community with commodities. After the box store, people in the community make many individual decisions to purchase cheaper items at the Walmart type store.

The result is that locally owned businesses fail and probably the downtown dries up. At no point was there a collective decision to have this happen. The market elbowed aside any collective decision-making with many, many decisions by individuals to purchase specific items cheaper at the larger store.

Greenwood speculates that the change that results might not be the one the community would choose given a chance to do so.

This makes me ask the question: have we devolved even further into a new totalitarianism, a hollow and almost automatic loss of community replaced by groups of individual consumers and the corporations that sell things to them?

Suddenly, Tehran’s Mayor Becomes a Patron of the Arts – NYTimes.com

Billboards with art on them. Excellent concept.

After Nearly Claiming His Life, Ebola Lurked in a Doctor’s Eye – NYTimes.com

Science at its best.

A Rough Guide to Spotting Bad Science

12 points to consider when reading about science. They apply in other areas as well.

Finished reading the play, The Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco this morning.  I was 8 years old when Ionesco wrote this play. I think it’s a play about conformism. Gradually people are turning into rhinoceroses. Ultimately only one man doesn’t turn into a rhinoceros by the end of the play. The stage directions instruct that the sounds of the rhinoceroses off stage become more and more beautiful. That their heads also become more and more beautiful as the play continues.

The last human being ends up talking to a mirror alternating feeling left out of the transformations of his peers and being defiant.

I can see this reflecting the fifties even in France where it was written. Now I have to go back and see how Merton was using this play which was very fresh when he wrote his essay.

I have been fighting melancholia for several days. I hesitate to say I’m depressed because I still function. It’s more like I go blank. Reading over my journals from past years I see this is something that has been with me most of my adult life.

Rhinoceros (1965) Jan Lenica – YouTube

10 minute animated film treatment of main themes of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

Rhinoceros The Play – YouTub

A 2014 production from Chabot College in California. Not terribly good.

I think this “Modern World” sums it up well:

This Church In Belgium Is Brilliantly Designed – 9GAG

This piece of art is a bit like the ones in the next two links.

Mayor de Blasio Is Irked by a Subway Delay – NYTimes.com

The thing I like about this story is that the mayor appears to have inadvertently sent it to the Times.

This morning after doing some Greek, I turned to Thomas Merton’s little book, Raids on the Unspeakable. It was with satisfaction that I found the first chapter in this book is about rain. Merton talks about the fact that what has no price can still have value.

“Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something ACTUAL is to place it on the market.” Merton in “Rain and the Rhinoceros.”

Merton has withdrawn from the Monastery in Gethsemani and is in cabin far from the others. He has no electricity there. In 1986, 26 years after Merton published this book, I visited Gethsemani with my psalmody class. Looking for my poem on the rain I stumbled across a few journal entries I made while there.

I find it ironic that Merton mentions his lack of electricity, since it was electricity that killed him. He was attending a conference of monks both Christian and non-Christian in Bangkok. He stepped from a shower and touched an electric fan and it killed him.

Solitude and rain are both themes in my life. When very young I wrote a poem about the rain.

Here is the torn day, rain

Here is the torn day rain
Broken like red small leaves
Under my feet

My last lover has to be you
I find you everywhere
And I sleep beside you

Every word or sound I have made
Was really made for you

Mute one silent with sound
You are on my hands

Someone tried to steal you
To make you faithful

You are the only one
I never asked to be faithful

Sticking your sounds
On the leaves, you
Are all around me

It took a little searching to find that poem. I think about it once in a while. I like that I chose rain as a muse.

Reading Merton helps me understand my isolation as solitude.

“Philoxenos in his ninth MEMRA (on poverty) to dwellers in solitude, says that there is no explanation and no justification for the solitary life, since it is without a law. To be a contemplative is therefore to be an outlaw. .” Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros”

I’m not a true solitary, but no one really is. Besides the company of my beautiful wife, I spent my solitude with people like Merton and Chopin. Rising to occasional contemplation, I am content “to be an outlaw.”

But I’m an outlaw who is addicted to the interwebs. This morning when I couldn’t find my copy of Rhinoceros by Ionesco, I found it in an online pdf. Free.

“The problem of Berenger, in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, is the problem of the human person stranded and alone in what threatens to become a society of monsters.” Merton, “Rain and the Rhinoceros.”

Maybe I’ll write here later about how Merton works this play into this essay. First I want to finish reading it.

My schedule is definitely lightening up. The virus I lived through seems to be hanging on in the form of a runny nose. Nice. Today I only have two things scheduled: a meeting with clergy at work and a choir rehearsal this evening. This is considerably less than my Wednesday with ballet classes filling up the morning.

Though I have been spending a lot of time with Chopin at the piano I feel pretty unmotivated.

It doesn’t help that Eileen is basically holed up in bed trying to get better. I have managed to ease back up into 45 minutes a day on the treadmill and my blood pressure has been down ever since classes stopped (a correlation?).

Only three more Sundays of choir and I’m done with that. I enjoy my work but I find it frustrating that people miss so many scheduled events like rehearsals and services thereby causing me to dumb down a bit so that our performances are not disasters.

I ordered copies of Peter Schikele’s “Four Curmudgeonly Canons” so that we could have a fun end of the year thing to sing through. They were only $1.66 a copy so I paid for them out of my pocket since there not really something we could use at church.

They arrived in the mail yesterday. I purchased them without really getting a chance to look at the compositions. (I should have searched on google images which is where I found the above images). They are not all that great. There’s basically one joke: I can’t wait until this season is over. I will probably have to explain the “Pinter” reference to the choir. (“Everything is bleak as early Pinter.”)

The Road to Character

So David Brooks is using the interwebs to gather info for his next book. About character. You can click on the link and contribute your ideas about your own life and its meaning.

Mummy Displayed in Hungary Sets Chinese Villagers in Pursuit of Lost Icon – NYT

I find this interesting because some guy was looking at his phone in a village and recognized the lost god.

Japanese American Museum Acquires Internee Artifacts – NYTimes.com

Art from tragedy.

Contrary to goals, ER visits rise under Obamacare

Rep Huizenga (MY rep in the house) tweeted this link as evidence of the continuing failure of Obamacare.

He or his tweeting intern apparently did not read the dang article since part of the rise is the increase in need of doctors for newly insured people.

I tweeted this to him (or his intern) but as of this morning he has not responded. Sooprise.

The first time I was accepted by a college music school was around 1972. I had lost a few years since high school. I attended Flint U of M for a few semesters but was pretty disenchanted with college. However, I got good grades. These classes later transferred and helped with my degree.

Driving back and forth between Flint and Columbus Ohio I noticed the grand old buildings of Ohio Wesleyan University which can be seen from the highway.

For some reason I got it into my head to study composition there. I moved my first wife and my son to Delaware Ohio where OWU is located and with the help of my parents bought a house and began studying piano with Richard Strasburg in order to make the entrance exam requirements.

I can remember my goal as a pianist and composer was to be able to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, both volumes.

About two years later this study ended when I left my first wife and hitch hiked to Northern Michigan to play in rock and roll bands and meet the woman who became my second wife (thank God!).

Strasburg was a good teacher. I learned a ton from him but was never to study with a piano teacher again.

After quitting my Roman Catholic church job around 2001, I began to practice piano and organ with a renewed intensity. All this is to say 14 years later, I think I am improving as a pianist.

When I was younger so many people seemed to over estimate my abilities as a musician. Now that I am 63 I feel very few people see my abilities clearly at all. In fact living in Holland at this time I feel pretty invisible.

You know. The old don’t matter in our society.

And I’m getting old.

Nevertheless I know my pianistic skills are on a tremendous upswing. I ascribe a lot of this to my improving rehearsal techniques which seem to exponentially help me. The more I learn, the better I am. The better I am, the more easily I learn.

I bring this up because yesterday I returned to one of my favorite piano composers, Chopin. I never studied him with Strasburg. I love his music and have learned and performed a bit of it. My Dad used to play him on the piano and I still have some of his scores.

It has been a while since I have practiced Chopin. I’m not always 100 per cent sure how to execute some of his ambiguously notated notes.

But yesterday things went well. I have stumbled on practicing slow enough to get all of the notes but not so slow that I do not derive any musical pleasure from it.

I also read through Liszt’s transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica. Again it went pretty well.

How bout that?

Contrary to my expectation yesterday, two parishioners commented on the prelude I played on the organ. The piece was “Processional” by William Mathias which is a piece I think is attractive to the listener. I had not put the title of the piece in the program due to my illness and dithering with the choir piece for the day.

Immediately after I played it one of my tenors asked me what it was was and said that he liked it. Then after service walking in the parking lot, a parishioner asked me what it was that I had played for the prelude. When I told him, he reacted as though he recognized the title and said he liked it.

I guess more people are listening than I sometimes think.

Also, I had a good moment with a bass who often resists singing in his upper range. In between the pregame and the service, I had a chance to ask him if the exercises to extend range I have been doing with the choir for the last few weeks were helping him at all. He said he thought that they were. Woo hoo!

He also said how much he enjoys singing the Psalms in Anglican chant. Wow.

I’m looking forward to two days off. Eileen is starting to feel a bit better. I am hoping to shed a bit of burn out and exhaustion.  My cold or whatever it was is still with me, but I am feeling a bit better.

How Not to Drown in Numbers – NYTimes.com

Big data is not enough. It needs the “special sauce” of polls and human understanding and judgment.

The Medical Bill Mystery – NYTimes.com

If you’ve been paying attention this is not a revelatory article. However, it is troubling.

What Black Moms Know – NYTimes.com

This author’s approaching to raising kids is one I recognize more than the one I see around me.

Eileen is still ill. She spent most of yesterday in bed. As I mentioned yesterday I went to the string quartet rehearsal. I found it sort of frustrating. The music went fine. Then the bride arrived with her fiancee and had us play it through in its entirety for her three times. All of this was done from the nominal fee of $10 per person. It felt highly indulgent. I’m sure the bride had no idea how unreasonable it was to convene the group just to indulge her without substantial extra pay.

I couldn’t tell how sincere the string quartet was in its fussing over the young bride. I’ll think twice before accepting a gig with this group again.

I’m still recovering from my illness.

I’m hoping that my lighter schedule will help me with exhaustion and burnout. So far I’m pretty much in survival mode. Yesterday at church after finishing preparing for today’s service, I wanted badly to practice more. I read a bit in Widor and then realized I was not fit to practice and came home. After a rest, I  did manage to put in 30 minutes on the treadmill.

A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered – NYTimes.com

Michael G. Vickers is one of those people who has been influential in many US actions without too high a profile. This article is well written and frightening in its realpolitik.

Ben E. King, Soulful Singer of ‘Stand by Me,’ Dies at 76 – NYTimes.com

Instantly put some of his songs on my treadmill playlist yesterday.

Speaking of playlists, I have recently been listening to Black, Brown and Beige by Duke Ellington.

Brian Eno’s Before and After Science

Vaughan Williams Phantasy Quintet and String Quartets

Alabama Shakes’ Sound and Color.

I do like this group.

I finally had enough stamina to spend some time choosing organ music for this weekend. I am playing compositions instead of improvising. Since improvising is easy for me, it felt a bit like a cop out to improvise organ music two weeks in a row since I improvised last week’s postlude.

On the other hand, I have had to deal with last minute changes to the choral anthem and  the fact that I’m not high functioning due to my lingering illness. After doing some playing yesterday, I decided to resurrect a couple of pieces I like: Processional by William Mathias and Fanfare by Tony Hewitt-Jones. They reflect my own upbeat mood which is a reaction to both feeling better and the nice  spring weather we are having here in Holland Michigan.

I arrived at church yesterday to see this weekend’s bulletins printed and stacked ready to hand out. So these titles will not be in the bulletin. No harm done. Only a few people even seem to notice the prelude and postlude and probably most of them don’t check the titles.

I also did fifteen minutes on the treadmill yesterday so I am gradually returning to normal.

This morning I feel great. I have noticed however that my energy doesn’t last the whole day in this recovery period. I have to attend a rehearsal with a string quartet for an upcoming wedding. This is the one where the bride insisted on hearing us before hand. We are playing a kind of dopey piece, “Until the Last Moment” by Yanni. It’s on YouTube if you’re interested. It feels to me like a wandering George Winston sort of non-piece. But the piano has a prominent role in it and that’s why the quartet hired me.

Today is the first day of Tulip Time. There are activities all around the home where we will be rehearsing. I’m hoping I can drive most of the way over to it this afternoon in order to reserve my energy. Normally I think I would walk over. It’s not far. But we’ll see.

Banksy Finds a Canvas and a New Fan Base in Gaza’s Ruins – NYTimes.com

I actually think this is pretty cool. The artist Banksy sneaked into Gaza and did three murals.

Freddie Gray’s death ruled a homicide

Once again I was able to access this entire press conference. Although I am skeptical, this looks like a different approach to the death of someone at the hands of the police that other cities have taken. Certainly, the prosecutor is impressive.

Last Fuckable Day Sketch

I haven’t been able to get into the wildly popular Amy Schumer. This video however had me laughing. I mentioned it yesterday to my organ student who said that hitting sixty is difficult for her.

Update

I was at this point in my blog when Eileen got up (still very ill) and asked when my rehearsal was today. I checked and it was in 20 minutes. Yikes. Got dressed, went to it and came home.

Ambassadors of Harmony-2009 International Barbershop Chorus Champions – 

Somebody put this video up on Facebooger. It’s a bunch of insane barbershoppers singing and dancing 76 trombones!

Frustrating. Chrome has decided to upgrade its bookmarking system making it more visual and less  hierarchical.

I wanted to bookmark a blog I found this morning and put it under my sub folder of blogs in my music folder.

ArtsJournal: Daily arts news | Terry Teachout on the arts in New York Cit

I was unable to do so. Nice. I know that I am an eccentric user of tech, but I still find it defeating when changes are made that I can’t easily use.

I think part of the problem is that I have folders inside of folders.

Oh well. I’ll figure it out when I have more patience. Or more likely completely change the way I bookmark stuff to suit the overlords at Google.

Thursdays seem to be the day for me to discover just how I exhausted I am even with a bit lighter schedule.  I finished rehearsing with my cellist (my violinist canceled) and found that I was weak with exhaustion. I went home.

I ended up in bed watching and listening to YouTube videos. I do like Alabama  Shakes.

I began reading a bit in Terry Teachout’s bio of Duke Ellington this morning.

The introduction describes Ellington’s Carnegie Hall appearance for which he had decided to write a new lengthy work (Black, Tan and Beige).

I tend to think of Ellington as a great composer. But reading and thinking about him this morning I realized that i do so on my own terms. Ellington got mixed reviews for the premiere of his length work including reviews by academic composers which were very critical of his work.

In 2015, the classical musicians reviewing Ellington seem to be unaware of their own irrelevance. Popular music drowns out historical music in our time. But still the music in our ears somehow helps us be more human.

As I lay in bed yesterday listening to bands on YouTube I realized that I am drawn much more to music like Alabama Shakes than most music I listen to, study and perform that is being written today under the guise of “classical music.”

This includes silly songs like FourFIveSeconds:

Maybe it’s that all the training and the skill one can obtain won’t beat your own aesthetic out of you. Composers are encouraged to “find their voice,” performers to make the music their own and play with conviction.

Maybe my voice and conviction is that of a naive 17 year old listening to Zappa, Miles Davis and the Beatles in his bedroom in 1968.

In the meantime there’s always the Alabama Shakes.