The Inklings Continued

Art

The countless attempts to expose you and I to the world, to tragedy, starting with a parade of black faces in Macbeth and then to a Touch of Evil, fallen upon deaf ears, transformed, and ultimately crushed, because we must hear, but instead we see, and when we see we see others, but when we hear we might take to heart and transform ourselves.

So many offerings tried on the screen, so many repetitions of theatrical guise, burnings and mortification. And yet, the Joker lives and so do we, holding up our two boats with moral indignation while a thousand other little ships collide and sink in deepest darkest Africa. We have refused to go there, although we are already there. We have refused to go to the deepest darkest heart, although, like our bold hero, we also strive heavenward in Faustian frenzy, struggling in our laboratories to construct wings both strong and light enough to fly away from the darkness we brought back and now feasts upon our children.

That our hearts also would become like wax and melt in the crucible, that our flesh might be transformed, but we cast light upon screens and struggle with color. There was a dance, it was all dance, it was all beautiful, so many smiles, and once and awhile a phallus. So we arose and sent our daughter into the woods where Wotan was waiting. And then because we did not understand what happened, we constructed a shrine. And this shrine was a ward against evil, but the evil was not what we understood. Was it Wotan or the laughing virgin? We did not understand. And so we burn.

And as we burn we live in a world of black and white. We know no color. This is reassuring until we reach the dead of winter, the cold shadow of waiting nuclear holocausts, and we shiver. We need heat. Our carven images do not suffice. And so we fall into the world of menstrual blood, not understanding this delicate process of death and life, of falling and rising, that preceded and will always be with us. We have only red; we no longer understand the meaning of sacrifice.

It might have been better to start with a verdant green, to start in the shade before attempting such a quest — which must always meet winter, but this does not guarantee that we would end up anywhere, except attempting to escape our insanity with other thespians or hoping that a new nihillism can bring liberation through the burning of past temples or collection of scalps.

It might be, it was, in some cases a loud death, a screaming death, although ignored by the mass of men because they no longer cared for or understood the struggle, or it might simply be a thud in the night or the time when are handcuffed and taken away to prevaricate our way to the truth of our existence by the ward’s psychologist.

The poem continues to hide behind myrid masks of deliberate construction.

Joel Dietz, on his Forum, Dunedain.net

Sacred Music

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/10/sacred-music-sacred-time

Augustine here proposes not merely a psychology of music but also an ontology: He seems to think that the “numbers of judgment” with which we evaluate rhythm exist eternally and were given to us by God. A thousand years later, the Renaissance philosopher most influenced by Augustine’s treatise, Nicholas of Cusa, put the matter somewhat differently: “Creative art, which the happy soul will attain, is not of its essence that art which is God, but rather participation and sharing in it.” The great composers never imagined that they were participating in creation, only imitating it. Sacred music is not revelation, just the next best thing.

Expectation and memory, Augustine adds, determine our perception of distant past and future: “It is not then future time that is long, for as yet it is not: But a long future, is ‘a long expectation of the future,’ nor is it time past, which now is not, that is long; but a long past is ‘a long memory of the past.’” This is the insight that allows Augustine to link perception of time to the remembrance of revelation and the expectation of redemption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wesley

After attending a performance in Bristol Cathedral in 1758, Wesley said: “I went to the cathedral to hear Mr Handel’s Messiah. I doubt if that congregation was ever so serious at a sermon as they were during this performance. In many places, especially several of the choruses, it exceeded my expectation.”

Leonard Pitts, Statistics, and Race

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003731134_pitts03.html

“For instance, there’s “Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News,” a 2001 report that concluded: Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in news media as victims of crime and significantly overrepresented as perpetrators, based on crime statistics; newspaper articles about white homicide victims are longer and more frequent than those about black ones; and interracial violent crime is more likely to be reported even though it is just about the rarest kind of violent crime.”

Leonard Pitts is quoting from their executive summary: http://www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/media/exec.html

Unfortunately, the report tells almost next to nothing about interracial crime per se, which as he so strangely fails to perceive, is the only matter of interest in a discussion on a topic like the Knoxville murders. In other words, the issue isn’t whether the couple were more likely (right up to the point it happened) to have been “victimized violently by a member of their own race”, but whether the odds were proportional (which the study claims actually is proportional, by a three to one margin), what type of brutality was involved, and whether such violence ever occurs going the other way. This is notably absent. The study merely claims minorities are more likely to have a long story on them, and more likely to receive a general statistical “over-reporting”, both in length and incidence relative to their percentage of the whole. What it does not do is separate armed robbery from homicide, for example, or stabbing from rape. Furthermore, a minority could receive attention more often for the same type of crimes for legitimate reasons, such as the crime involving a stranger of a different race. Or, perhaps, the manner of violence involved or the level of intensity with which it is deployed might be a neutral factor that leads to “bias”. Beating someone with a baseball bat and holding up a register aren’t at the same interest level. Most crucially, mathematically speaking, a minority could more often receive attention in violent crime, relative to their overall slice of the pie, while still committing a disproportionally greater amount of interracial crime. In otherwords, the report doesn’t address the issue involved at all. Whether Pitts is right, overall, is irrelevant, because his sources he uses to make a vague claim of violent crime equality is irrelevant to the issue at hand. Whites could receive a statistically fair proportion of violent crime from blacks (from a general view from their side), while blacks could still eat up the vast majority of interracial crime. It’s a subject no one wants to discuss.

Even the report fails to explain: “The more unusual the crime or violence, the more likely it is to be covered. Factors that increase the likelihood of a homicide being reported in the news are multiple victims, multiple offenders, an unusual method, a White victim, a child, elderly, or female victim, or occurrence in an affluent neighborhood.”

This gives the impression that a black victim is invisible. But it fails to ask the unspeakable question- are there any examples of this happening the other way? Are there victims of kidnapping/rape who are black, with white perpetrators? This is the interesting subset. If not, then all kinds of conclusions could be drawn or explanations posited.

Red Toryism in Scotland

“The legality of any UK component country attaining de facto independence (in the same manner as the origins of the Irish Republic) or declaring unilateral independence outside the framework of UK constitutional convention is uncertain. Prevailing legal opinion following the precedent set by the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on what steps Quebec would need to take to secede is that Scotland would be unable to unilaterally declare independence under international law if the UK government permitted a referendum on an unambiguous question on secession.^[55][56] It is uncertain how the unilateral 2008 Kosovo declaration of independence and subsequent recognition by the UK and some EU member states has affected this legal position,^[57][58] Successive British Prime Ministers, however, have acknowledged the right of the Scottish people to determine their own future.^{[59]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_independence}

Merlin, by Muir

O Merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam’s finger
Across the memory and the wave?
Or a runner who’ll outrun
Man’s long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
and Time locked in his tower?