Dreaming the World

I’m sitting at my desk where the rain is still striking the north facing windows. It’s chilly, not much warmer than it was last month, and soggy. We have had a months long procession of coastal storms which have repeatedly cut away the marsh road and eaten whole beaches.

The buds on the maple trees are bright maroon tinged red, and seem to grow almost daily, and the flower buds of the magnolia suggest we shall soon have blossoms. Here and there small trees and bushes have burst into leaf and the forsythias are showing color.

I’ve been creating and exploring multiple sound worlds and not really “completing” anything. My deep immersion in this has meant I have not kept up with others’ blogs, or much else for that matter. Time just seems to pass very quickly.

I’ve had Judy Collins playing almost continually on my internal jukebox for the past week. Most of the time the tune has been Who Knows Where the Time Goes? but today it is sharing time with Send In the Clowns. Both seem perfect for the state of being seventy-five in a chaotic world.

My mother-in-law has been trying to make rational sense of our irrational world. She was a civil rights lawyer and is deeply dedicated to the “rule of law”.We share the wish that people could think rationally about things and act speedily to address the issues facing all of us. I’ve been reading Times Echo by Jeremy Eichler, which she gave me, and which makes the point that humans are too often driven by unconscious forces that are both individual and collective, and seem unable to use reason for much more than designing ever more effective means of destroying others. I keep trying to kindly tell my mother-in-law that it is painful and useless to expect people to be rational when they are not but of course I have also to remind myself.

Eichler’s book explores the relationship between genocide and the music of remembrance composed in the Twentieth Century. The parallels between our historical moment and the early decades of that century are hair raising at best. That aside, the book explores the innumerable contradictions between the artist’s desire to describe, and pay homage to, the unfathomable, and the innumerable ways the state twists those efforts into unrecognizable devices of propaganda. It is a tough read and I recommend it.

A writer friend insists that what matters now is that we be kind, build community, and make art. I’m not sure that’s different than it’s ever been. Sometimes she sounds like a shaman.