Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows. 1890

Forty Illusions Before Midnight

Birds never fly away
    Fish never swim away
        The sun never sets
 
We are idiots of ego

The only revolutions
That matter are the violent ones
The ones that force us to cast off

Me mine me mine

The only revolutions that matter
    Are those that reveal
        All is relative

All is contingent and evanescent
Like the leaf that falls because

    She says so

The earth is not the center
        Man is not the center
            The self is not the center

Through time
        There is no time

The great prophets
From Buddha to Einstein
Knew this        and

    Tell us to let go

Ego

Those who do not preach this
    Are not great
Those who do not break us

From the habit of me me
Are not shattering

Anything

– by Douglas Pinson

 …

The Moody Blues and the Beatles.

Listen to the Moody Blues’ first hit from 1964, Go Now. It doesn’t set trends. It follows them. It’s well within the parameters of the British Pop Invasion, with its echo of American Pop R&B and Blues. Yes, it has a Mersey beat twist. But it in no way prepares us for what would follow.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Go Now

Just three years later the Moody Blues, with a few changes to their original lineup (losing Denny Laine, picking up Justin Hayward), would embark on a musical Odyssey that only the Beatles had come close to attempting. In 1967, when they made their album, Days of Future Past, the world got a chance to hear what full orchestras could do when they backed up Rock bands suddenly immersed in psychedelia.…

Driving was everything. Driving was our escape and revenge, our home, something we controlled outside the law of adults. Their law wasn’t our law when we drove and partied and listened to Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys — what today some call Classic Rock. It wasn’t classic back then. It was just the music of our generation.

We had seen “American Graffiti” and we cruised the streets looking for our own version of West Coast Car Culture, knowing we’d never find it. Knowing that our towns, bleeding into other towns, operated under different rules, three thousand miles away from the Valley.…

Ishizuri Jakucho. 1770

Have decided to take the plunge. Jump in. No longer just an observer. I will practice. I will breathe zazen. I will contain all opposites and not look back. Will do Mu and find emptiness in all forms and form in all emptiness. Will do what is necessary to eliminate I.

The wheel. The great karmic wheel. How to get off it. Why wait? Why wait a thousand lifetimes? Why not now? Total immediacy, total naturalness, complete such-ness. Now. Within this one lifetime, which is all that there is, the nothing and the everything, the nowhere and the everywhere, the center and the circumference, I will get off the wheel. Why wait? Why postpone it? There is only now. There is only here, now.

It’s not just about one. It’s two and three as well. One and none. One and infinity.…

Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan. Photo by Keith Pomakis

Nothing to learn

Sitting still and awesome like a mountain
No-I thought of nothing
    Half-way home

Master Hsueng asked No-I        
    “Why do you think of nothing
    With great intent?”

And No-I said
“Through concentration on nothing
I am liberated.”

Thwack came the bamboo stick
    Gong gong gong rang the bell
            Birds cawed as they fled into the blue sky
Their sky their home

“Master, why did you strike me!“
No-I asked in great pain
No longer still or awesome like a mountain

And Master Hsueng answered:
    “When you grasp after nothing
    You make it an object
    Outside Mind-Body

    You break the flow between void
    And form
    Form and void
    You categorize nothing!”

Thwack came the bamboo stick
    Back down on No-I’s shoulders

No-I did not Awaken
        For two more years

by Douglas Pinson

 …

Click here to view the embedded video.

Plain Gold Ring

Explosively controlled jazz. Volcanic scat and soul. She bobs and weaves and falls victim to the depths of her emotional possession, as all great artists do. But she rises from those depths and expresses the journey upward and outward, without losing her courage or her conviction.

Aside from her wonderful voice, running parallel with it, she moves in interesting, idiosyncratic ways to her own song. A refreshing change from all too many pop singers who dance in cookie cutter ways, pushed into narrow corporate forms to look like every other pop singer.  Joy Williams of The Civil Wars is similar in her physical originality.

*     *     *     *     *

Kimbra Johnson was born in New Zealand, grew up there, but now makes her home in Australia. She has been compared with singers like Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse and Bjork.…

Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier

 Melancholia is Lars Von Trier’s conflicted ode to German Romanticism, Wagner, Depression and life itself. It starts off with one of the most beautiful openings of any movie I’ve seen in recent times, with Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde merging with stunning, slow motion images. They look like paintings come to life, moving incredibly slowly, awakening to new shocks, new horrors.

The beginning prefigures the end beyond the usual trajectory of Hollywood films. It in fact gives away that ending in the first few minutes. But we don’t care. Because the journey is everything, and we don’t even mind that this is a cliché. Coming full circle seems poetic and right, and circles dominate the night and day skies. We don’t feel cheated, even after an apocalypse.

The movie is told in two parts after the intro, matching planet with planet, sister with sister.…

Georges de La Tour’s Magdelen and the Smoking Flame. 1640

I’ve always been fascinated with high contrast. Baroque painters, building on the legacy left them by Da Vinci, among other Italian Renaissance heroes, experimented with cast light and its effects in a way not yet seen before the 17th century. The best of them was Caravaggio, and he had many followers, among them one Georges de La Tour.

The painting above is a meditation on mortality, on life, on death, on the miracles one witnesses with or without a messiah in the picture. It is one of La Tour’s finest, and shows a tremendous growth from his early, rather clumsy and derivative work. In this painting he demonstrates his mastery of shadow and light, of the human figure and the drama a simple candle can create. He makes us think of opposites, the play of opposites — eternal conflicts and their necessity.…

The Civil Wars — Poison and Wine

Just bumped into this duo on, of all places, Paul Krugman’s blog. They are truly gifted and harmonize together as if they were born to follow each others voices up and down musical scales. To get a stronger sense of that, it’s necessary to hear them sing a wide range of songs, and listen to them more than once. Their richness grows on you. It fills empty spaces with the unsaid, with an echo of tradition, a hint of two or three or twenty worlds.

Joy Williams and John Paul White met in Nashville in 2008, and released their first album in February of this year. She’s from California; he’s from Alabama. Their music is a beautiful conflict of culture and ideas.

 …

Cat Stevens — Where do the Children Play?

One of the beauties of numbers is their endless supply. No worries about “scarcity” when it comes to our numerical friends. So, in an economy based upon the value of labor instead of capital, with numbers being assigned for a day’s work, and those numbers in turn being used to purchase goods and services, there is no danger of running out of money. Money, per se, does not exist in Egalitaria, and it doesn’t need to exist. In its absence, anything is possible. In the presence of endless supplies of numbers, the sky’s the limit. A sky made bluer because capitalism is dead.

If Nietzsche had been from Egalitaria, he would have said, “Money is dead. Everything is permitted.”

With our current economy, a business has a finite payroll.…