Heroes/Heroines & Metanarratives

The other day in my wanderings I happened to finally walk inside the Boston Public Library to which I was amazed at the amount of art in there. Really, if you have not been there you should go. From the staircase adorned with lion statues dedicated to Civil War veterans while along the walls is painted grand murals done by Puvis de Chavannes of Virgil, and Homeric characters that are absolutely staggering. There are many more rooms to explore and as you ascend higher you find on the second floor a room with a mediaeval hero narrative adorning the walls, "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It's a narrative told without words, only in pictures where the viewer can piece together the story in their own way, or by knowing the Arthurian narrative. Either way the telling of it in the zoetrope broken down into several thoughtfully illustrated scenes. Where this narrative and the entrance staircase narrative collides is on the third floor where there is the Judeo-Christian mural by John Singer Sargent where you are faced with what the other art pieces evoke, a crisis of western religious faith. In each there is a presence of some supernatural being, some phenomenon of death and life, where we are led to believe that our lives are worth living, that we lend ourselves to some greater narrative and are in part, separate pieces of a collective soul. That we can do so much with our lives if we dare to notice the world and it's problems and set ourselves to the task of bringing it into a larger context.

This idea matched with the kind of religious crisis in America, where people are either too fundamental or too apathetic we lose the sense of collectiveness that has existed for thousands of years throughout human history. We lose touch with a basic human trait, that we are a community and that we are all interesting in our own ways.

As I continued wandering around thinking about how beautiful the art was and how the story was engaging I came across a quote on written on the wall but unfortunately I do not remember who said it or it exactly, but it went along the lines of coming to the library to find the heroes and heroines of our collective consciousness, and I thought that it was a marvelous way to describe what a library is and what it's function is in a society which has grown to be come more individualistic and segregated. What we have maintained as a species, as an American race is our consensus of what a hero is from fictional characters like Huck Finn or John Henry to real life heroes of Amelia Earhart and Abe Lincoln. Their stories can be found in the library, collected for the good of culture, so that we might be inspired to do something worthwhile with our lives, which perhaps is the function of religion.

I found myself enthralled with an interview in The Atlantic with author Robert Bellah about his new book Religion in Human Evolution which seemed to raise an interesting perspective on the idea of how religion has evolved and how it continues to evolve. It reminded me of a conversation I once had back in 2004 and I was talking in a dorm room with a girl about 2008 and the election and how I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting to see a woman or an African-American run for president?" and then to see Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama in the race along with the media's favorite Alaskan. The talk was around the same time that the new Pope had been elected and how he was, supposedly going to be the last Pope in line with some prophecy. We are too consumed with prophecy and not enough on what we can do to help our fellow man. However, as time has passed since 2004 there's been a kind of new leniency with the Catholic Church, as though the were progressing with the world in a way that was in tune with the blinding fast speed of broadband internet, while other groups are working to revive some pre-Civil Rights America, some idea that going back is better than going forward.

We are not a lost generation. We can maintain some sense of what is morally right and morally wrong as a collective and perhaps if we believe that there is still some mystery left in the world, something undiscovered, some frontier that we can believe in something bigger than ourselves, which is what religion has always been, even if it is not overwhelmingly focused on an afterlife, which in no way does that even start to help us solve the problems in our world, like famine and war. Nothing is solved if all we ever thought about was where we'd go when we died. Because chances are our bodies will all end up lying somewhere without the ability to get up and dance or with eyes that cannot see the wonder of a sunrise.

As for what I took away from yesterday's lunch it was that I should be doing something good with my time and if it is by looking at some Winslow Homer illustrations that shows life in Boston at the turn of the century and how life is so similar to then as it is today if you look and notice it. That we are inhabiting this same space, working to preserve it and to innovate it with new ideas and then looking at a diorama of George Bellow's "Stag at Sharkey's" which is so primal and invigorating with pure brut and grit that it has inspired me to want to go to Cleveland, of all places, to stand near it. God, what world! And here I thought Boston was dead and it is just being born. Where Does Religion Come From? - The Atlantic

In Case of Sunburn Apply Watermelon

OK, so it’s mid-August and it’s that feeling of summer winding down.  Crank up your stereos to some Frank Sinatra because that Summer wind is blowin’ out again.  And my friends, if you come away with nothing gained from this summer let me drop some knowledge on you that befell me one fateful weekend on Milton 3 Ponds this summer.  In case of sunburn apply watermelon.  It works, especially when you’re suffering and purple and when shirts are your enemy and hugs are unbearable and aloe is nowhere in sight.  Although once I got home and regained my bearings on civilization and aloe came back into the picture, watermelon quickly went back to being just food.  And I’m okay with that.

The night is coming on again and it’s hot again.  My God, this has been a hot summer.  Unbearably buggy and unbearable humid, consistently.  If you don’t believe that the world is changing, that the oceans are warming up then you need look no further than the Russian side of the Sea of Japan where three people have lost limbs to great whites.  What’s so crazy about that?  Well, they don’t get much bigger than dogfish off the Russian coast in the Sea of Japan and the water is somehow warmer than is should be.  Wake up, kids, the sun’s a little brighter today.

To kind of play on the side of the skeptic I will say this, perhaps it is not a great white, after all they are not indigenous to that part of the world.  But I doubt a dogfish is ripping the arms and legs off of swimmers, if anything this is the work of the legendary chupacabra or Godzilla or dare I say, King Kong!  But isn’t it just the way of every generation to wish that they would come across something as strange and wildly exciting as a Godzilla or King Kong like the dragons of the Dark Ages.  Kurt Vonnegut once said that we are still living in the Dark Ages.  I can see that.  Not everyone is an Einstein, yet.

I don’t recall a summer where I’ve met so many interesting and joyful people.  Seriously, I’ve spent weekends with some wild brothafuckers and they are all legit in my book.  Things like meeting wildly inspiring and different people should come around more often.  All I can say is, “where were you guys 4 months ago?”  It is inevitable that we will have to walk through hard doors and meet hard times in our lives.  I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes and I’ve learned a lot about my compulsive and weird self.  I’ve learned about other people as well, that people walk different, think different, want different things.  People can be phony and flaky and people can be true to their cores and as genuine as apple trees.  It’s knowing the difference that helps.

Anyway the summer isn’t over yet despite the hype of an early fall.  I’ve got some plans left and some traveling to do and some friends to see.  Life parades on in it’s weird way like the funeral parade in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (youtube it).

Also, explore you’re world, your town, your bedroom.  There is much to see and do.  I’ve been going for these runs around town and it’s reminded me that there is much to do and be and that this town is full of such interesting corners that you can be shown the light if you look at it right.  Also, Audioslave makes for a prime running companion.

Cheers. 

Traveling Extensively in Scituate

I took one of those strange runs around town where the geography of the place becomes, somehow, more apparent.  There were hills and ditches and patches of trees and patches without trees that I’d almost forgotten about because I hadn’t been by in so long.  It’s hard to think that I’d actually left this place for years on end because that life feels so far away now.  It feels like another me.

Thoreau once said, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.”  I’d like to think that I’ve explored this little burg a bit myself, that I’ve been acquainted with its past as well as it’s present.  I saw someone putting up a new house from scratch on Tilden Rd today and thought to myself that it’s hard to believe that anything isn’t prefabricated today.  That things are still built from a mold that is used once and only once.

Kerouac said one of the keys to writing is to, “be in love with yr own life” I think that should transcend the writing game and should apply to everyone.  Sometimes I’ll look back at days gone by and me and want to go back and slap my younger self in the face or put up a road block but as metaphysical as it may sound God did not grant us erasers of past, although I suppose if we were more forgetful beasts I’m sure we’d all forget everything in time.  But I am of a poor disposition that tends to remember far too much of the minutiae of life and therefore when I take a walk a run a jaunt around this merry little burg then I am apt to find myself remembering strange remembrances which apply to this town.  My hometown.

Cue Mr Springsteen:  http://youtu.be/D6XH9R7kMwQ

Yes and this was not my first home nor will it be my last but it is home nonetheless.  I’ve had many places I’ve called home or felt home, either in the company of good people or in the presence of a good place.  I have felt in dreams the kind of solemnity which comes with a feeling of being home.  The smell of it and the taste of it’s cooking are undeniably familiar yet inevitably fabrications of reality, manipulations of some strangeness in the brain that signals the coming on of comfort.  Like even now as I remember a younger me cutting through the path behind the bleachers that leads from Cedarwood to the football field at the high school to play a pickup game of baseball in the quad when I was about 13 which in a funny way reminds me of the walks on the snowmobile trail in Keene to go to the “beach” and going past the A-Fields and now walking through the Public Gardens down Charles St to Cambridge St. to Staniford to the Boston Garden.  It all adds up.

The geography of a place settles on you.  When you are walking you notice the contours of the road, the smell of the neighborhoods and individual driveways.  You notice the sounds of birds and the sight of a woodpecker climbing a tree leading with its beak as you go by or the sounds of people mowing their lawns or talking to friends on front porches.  The conversations of strangers always seems so much more interesting and urgent than anything else in the world.

To go back to the whole Kerouacian point of loving yer own life to segue into another Kerouac quote, “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge.”  Kids, this is the voice of experience.  You always know more than you think you know and you all talk so pretty some times it shatters me to my very core.  If I had a dime for every terrible decision, every impulsive action, every cuss and curr and clash and attack then I would not be the person I am today, the one trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday.  Without a corruptor there is no story.