Category Archives: ashes
On throwing your cigarette butt out of your car window
On beauty
It’s all been said before, but maybe this term means more or less than you think it does. Philosophers have driven themselves (and their readers) mad in labyrinthine rhetorical treatises on the subject without ever (re)solving anything. One man’s pleasure is another’s pain. Most essays on beauty are fruitless, thornless, roses that neither praise nor defend any particular position, or perhaps not. The rose has been over-utilized as a metaphor for beauty, but dissolving the concept of beauty in an ironic metaphorical rose soup does nothing to define what makes something or someone beautiful. Some roses are ugly, too. A lot of beauty is about what looks good now–a fad, a passing moment, an ephemeral moment in time, a wisp of smoke, a shadow, nothing. People have fought over what is beauty, but in the long term their explanations are hollow, vacuous, superficial, focusing on the physical, which may be beautiful or may be ugly. Who knows? Some would have you think that they know. I would suspect that they are worried about being found out as fakes and phonies. An idea might be beautiful, or it may deserve to be on the hash-heap of history. We fill museums with beautiful things–paintings, sculptures, and the like, and then we charge admission to see them. Are they more beautiful because one must pay to see them? One might acquiesce to the idea that certain aesthetic structures are more pleasing to look at than others, that colors may go together, that this painting is more pleasing to look at than that sculpture, but again, is beauty a learned concept or are some things innately beautiful? As is the case with all human constructions, beauty is a contrivance, a convention based on what the hierarchy says is beautiful. Beauty is constructed, but I often wonder to what end. Nothing, it seems, is more inherently beautiful than anything else. I suppose that it boils down to what we have learned to love, and that is what we find beautiful.
On beauty
On going too fast
We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.
On going too fast
We lead lives of quiet desperation as we chase from one thing to the next, blind to our own panic and our senseless running to and fro in order to make everything work. We speed, break all the traffic laws, destroy our nerves, put ourselves in danger, put others in harm’s way. There is no sense of meditation or self-reflection or self-awareness in our wild chasing between appointments and deadlines. We are totally unaware of the danger into which haste and hurry put us. The modern connectivity of our digital gadgets is driving us all to distraction. We are all over-committed, over-booked, and over-worked because we can’t say no, and we let the tail wag the dog. I actually yearn for the simpler days when phones were on kitchen walls, we were unreachable when out of the house, we could walk to work and school, and we had limited reasonable commitments. We no longer have time for even the most casual moment to relax and smell the roses, have a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, drive reasonably to the next thing–or maybe even not have a next thing? I have written about time poverty in the past and its relationship to digital media and constant on-line connectivity, but I think that American society has hit a moment of critical mass of appointments, meetings, lessons, sporting events, reunions, and events. All of which makes for a very full and interesting life, but it also leads to forgetfulness, missed appointments, frustration, speeding tickets, red lights, and disappointment. One of my resolutions for this year is to just slow down.
On fatigue
(This will be short for obvious reasons) Have you ever felt so bone-crunchingly tired that it didn’t matter anymore if you rested or not? Didn’t matter anymore if you drank six cups of coffee or none at all? I think I’ve arrived, but I can’t tell and I don’t care. There is a winter storm on the horizon and I don’t care. I should go to bed and get some sleep but I don’t care about that either. I get the feeling that the semester was just one week too long, or maybe the Thanksgiving break was a couple of days too short. Today, it seemed like I ran from one thing to another, and this was my quiet day. Tomorrow will be worse with an early meeting and two classes to teach. And it isn’t even a physical fatigue that bothers as much as the mental fatigue that hangs over me like a cold, wet blanket. If I have to write another official whatever, I may just scream, or worse, I won’t say anything at all. Mental fatigue is the real villain in this folktale. I like the Christmas season, but it seems like so many things pile up during these first two weeks of December that I end up hating December anyway. It’s not that I feel out-of-control, but it does feel like I would have to make a huge effort to reach “out-of-control.” And tomorrow is only Thursday–where’s the weekend? On the other hand, what has already happened to my week? I had all sorts of good intentions when Monday started. I’m too tired to figure any of this out, and I imagine, dear reader, that you are too tired to read any further.
On fatigue
(This will be short for obvious reasons) Have you ever felt so bone-crunchingly tired that it didn’t matter anymore if you rested or not? Didn’t matter anymore if you drank six cups of coffee or none at all? I think I’ve arrived, but I can’t tell and I don’t care. There is a winter storm on the horizon and I don’t care. I should go to bed and get some sleep but I don’t care about that either. I get the feeling that the semester was just one week too long, or maybe the Thanksgiving break was a couple of days too short. Today, it seemed like I ran from one thing to another, and this was my quiet day. Tomorrow will be worse with an early meeting and two classes to teach. And it isn’t even a physical fatigue that bothers as much as the mental fatigue that hangs over me like a cold, wet blanket. If I have to write another official whatever, I may just scream, or worse, I won’t say anything at all. Mental fatigue is the real villain in this folktale. I like the Christmas season, but it seems like so many things pile up during these first two weeks of December that I end up hating December anyway. It’s not that I feel out-of-control, but it does feel like I would have to make a huge effort to reach “out-of-control.” And tomorrow is only Thursday–where’s the weekend? On the other hand, what has already happened to my week? I had all sorts of good intentions when Monday started. I’m too tired to figure any of this out, and I imagine, dear reader, that you are too tired to read any further.
On American Pie
You can go read the critical explanations of what Don McLean’s song, “American Pie,” is all about–Buddy Holly, Dylan, the Stones, the sixties, but I don’t think that most people think about those things today when they listen to the song. I imagine that most people think about lost loves, youth, music they loved, ideals, tragedy, religion, and a host of other associations which the broad metaphors and wide-open tropes of the song suggest. The beauty of the song does not lie in the exact meaning of each reference–the jester=Dylan–but in the voice that wants to tell a story about lost innocence and cynical experience. As adults we listen to this song, and some piece of it resonates with the things that have happened to us: a first girl friend, music, a pick-up truck, a glass of whiskey. What matters is that we listen to that voice which tells us that “for ten years, we’ve been on our own,” and we know that we are no longer young, no longer under the protection of our parents, no longer in the possession of our youthful ideals. We feel empty, rage, read too much bad news from our doorstep, seen too many widows on the nightly news. “American Pie” is about what is lost with age. This is the common experience which is shared with everyone who listens to the song. Each person fills in the blanks with the failures and losses in their own life. What makes the song special, however, what makes it stand apart from the pop music fluff of the seventies, is the song’s ability to evoke that period in everyone’s life when everything was lived so intensely, when everything was a drama, when you could still “kick off your shoes and dance,” when you still might wear a pink carnation. There is no remedy for the loss of innocence, and experience has taught us that although those high ideals we might have harbored in our youth were hot and burning, that life is a little easier to live without those preoccupations. Yet the loss of innocence is also a bitter affair when you realize how foolishly you acted, how unrealistic you were about the way the world worked, and how bitter experience can really be–“My hands were clenched in fists of rage.”
On American Pie
You can go read the critical explanations of what Don McLean’s song, “American Pie,” is all about–Buddy Holly, Dylan, the Stones, the sixties, but I don’t think that most people think about those things today when they listen to the song. I imagine that most people think about lost loves, youth, music they loved, ideals, tragedy, religion, and a host of other associations which the broad metaphors and wide-open tropes of the song suggest. The beauty of the song does not lie in the exact meaning of each reference–the jester=Dylan–but in the voice that wants to tell a story about lost innocence and cynical experience. As adults we listen to this song, and some piece of it resonates with the things that have happened to us: a first girl friend, music, a pick-up truck, a glass of whiskey. What matters is that we listen to that voice which tells us that “for ten years, we’ve been on our own,” and we know that we are no longer young, no longer under the protection of our parents, no longer in the possession of our youthful ideals. We feel empty, rage, read too much bad news from our doorstep, seen too many widows on the nightly news. “American Pie” is about what is lost with age. This is the common experience which is shared with everyone who listens to the song. Each person fills in the blanks with the failures and losses in their own life. What makes the song special, however, what makes it stand apart from the pop music fluff of the seventies, is the song’s ability to evoke that period in everyone’s life when everything was lived so intensely, when everything was a drama, when you could still “kick off your shoes and dance,” when you still might wear a pink carnation. There is no remedy for the loss of innocence, and experience has taught us that although those high ideals we might have harbored in our youth were hot and burning, that life is a little easier to live without those preoccupations. Yet the loss of innocence is also a bitter affair when you realize how foolishly you acted, how unrealistic you were about the way the world worked, and how bitter experience can really be–“My hands were clenched in fists of rage.”