Writer, Musician, Poet, Academic
02 Jan 2017 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: alone, community, developing countries, things, tribe
I eat my Denny’s spaghetti
And try to warm up
Alone
I can always go home
To a warm apartment
Alone
I think of my new Christmas clothes
My new guitar
New electric piano
New fine art print
Collection of ancient coins
They make me happy
Alone
I think of developing countries
Where many do not have such things
In their village
With their families, neighbours, relatives
Community, tribe
I think about these things
Alone
27 Dec 2016 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: blogs, Emerson, follows, Frost, Grammy, Juno, likes, Platinum record, Thoreau, views, visits
This Christmas, we had a very good turnout at church. By our standards. Which is to say that it looked like a full church. I was happy with the turnout. But all this is relative. It is a small church. Even if it were packed, attendance would have been few by standards of mainline churches. But compared to other Christmases, and compared to regular Sunday attendance, it was a good turnout.
This kind of thinking can be translated to other areas. I think of the music business. I know of a band in Canada which I like very much. They fill smaller concert halls, and play festivals, but not stadiums. They even have a Juno award, which is Canada’s equivalent to the US Grammy. They could play to packed bars every night if they wanted to, an opportunity which many good bands would envy. I don’t think they have a gold record. Most likely not a platinum record. If you are a musician, how would you measure success. How much is enough? Stadiums? Platinum records? Airplay? Filling concert halls? Playing to packed bars. Playing enough venues to pay the bills? Then there is the issue of how long your popularity would last. Some immensely popular rappers, with platinum records, are gone in a year or two. There is a new guitar player in town who is having a hard time breaking into the music scene. But he plays better than anyone else in town. It’s just that he’s new.
Then there are likes, follows, visits, and views for bloggers. How many are enough? 25? 50? 150? 1,000? 4,500? Do you write with an eye to posts that will attract views, visits, likes, and follows?
These issues arise in still more areas–money, possessions, status, friends, prestige, education, popularity. How much is enough?
I think that the only way to maintain sanity, is to do what Emerson, Thoreau, and Frost, among others, have advocated for. Follow your own music, march to the beat of your own drummer. The new guitar player in town plays incredibly well to nearly empty bars. I know of a preacher who conducted a service for one person, and of some synagogues that can’t open the Torah, because they don’t have a quorum present. This does not indicate the quality of the performance, message, or belief system. We write, preach, or play best when we do our best, and not worry too much about how much or many fans, congregants, or follows we have.
18 Nov 2016 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Aristotle, culture, logic, persuasion, philosophy, psychology, religion, Rorty, The Girl on the Train
Philosophy and Religion used to provide guidance to us. Now, psychology has taken over the role of guide for human behaviour. It is a role that psychology is ill equipped to perform.
Plato taught us to examine the soul. Aristotle taught us how logically to present an argument. What is left of contemporary philosophy is only rhetoric, persuasion, and language analysis. In the 20th century, philosophy turned logic into arithmetic and called it symbolic logic. Then they said that logic is a closed system and does not relate to the world of experience. That means philosophy can’t argue for the truth anymore, because you can’t argue at all. Then philosophy said that there is no truth, only what I want. So we are left not with arguments in search of the truth, we are left with persuading people to do what we want, what we want them to do.
Richard Rorty, one of our past great post-modern philosophers wouldn’t take an endowed chair in the philosophy department of the University of Virginia because he thought that philosophy had reasoned itself out of existence. He had them design some sort of cultural analysis department that he taught in.
So we are left with expressing our feelings, accepting ourselves good or bad, and affirming ourselves, worthy or not. Those are principles of psychology. And as a consequence, we get “The Girl on the Train.” A very long, uninteresting movie about the feelings of a girl, and her life–a life I didn’t much care about.
But I do care about people, and religion taught me to love others. However, I have also been taught to love the good in people, to nurture it, and to bond with it. Aristotle said that only virtuous people have the kind of temperament that can sustain friendship. They are virtuous themselves and their psyche is not at odds with itself. But philosophy has reasoned itself out of existence. And religion’s influence is fading, has faded in society. And we are left with The Girl on the Train.
31 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Andrew Wyeth, art, spirituality, Spring Fed, symphonies
Good art affects me like symphonies. Art moves my spirit and evokes states of mind in like manner as good music stimulates my feelings. Colours laid together to create an effect, shapes, background, objects. When I gaze on good art, I am lifted into a transcendental world and sacred space of the mind, heart, and soul. Art is made of sensual materials–paper, visual shapes, and colors–and yet its effect is inner, intangible, spiritual.
I finally brought the fine art print I spent a lot of my liquid monthly income on (more than twice my monthly rent) into my home. It’s a massive limited-edition print that covers almost half the wall from the ground to the ceiling. I came home from church today, and when I looked at the print, I realized that the service wasn’t over for the day. This work, “Spring Fed” by Andrew Wyeth, is both a realistic painting and not realistic at all. It’s not really a painting of anything. It is a painting of a square cistern in the foreground with a square window behind it. You can see the square cistern in the foreground and look at the square window behind it, and the square window panes of the window, then look through the window at some cattle and a hill with patches of snow. Is it a painting of a cistern? Of a window? Of cattle and a hill? I don’t know how to consider the painting as a whole. It is a magical complexity that is not an image of anything. Then there are the colors. The painting is almost a monochromatic. The cistern is dark brown, the hill is brownish green, the cattle are brown, the walls are grey-green-off-white. The complexity of the multiple layers of imagery and the color combinations create a wonderful effect that no photograph could.
Artists know that their work will end up on a wall, and that people will look at it day-in-and-day-out. And yet the monochromatic color choices render the painting something that is even room decoration, too, and can be looked at again and again without tiring the eye and mind. I say this with no deprecation of the greatness of it’s artistry. Unlike a piece of music, which one can’t listen to over and over again without getting sick of it.
I have always enjoyed visiting museums and viewing art. I’ve never owned a consummate work of this quality–even though it is a limited-edition print and not the original. I don’t know of a purchase I have been happier with. The cost is of no consequence. My living room is transformed by this work of art, as I am, and will continue to be.
06 Oct 2016 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: 9th Symphony, B-minor Mass, Bach, Beethoven, Gudwara, Handel, Messiahecstasy, reason, Sikh, Ukrainian Orthodox Church
I have had few instances when music has really affected me in a worshipful way, and taken over my consciousness. I don’t mean the times when I listen to Beethoven’s 9th, and I am moved to tears. Or when I respectfully listen to Bach’s B-minor Mass, and am moved. No. Recently I have experienced Handel’s Messiah and choked back the tears through the whole concert, when I wasn’t smiling with happiness. And just a few nights ago, I attended part of a worship service at a Sikh Gudwara and found the experience overwhelming.
By virtue of my membership in an interfaith organization, I am able to travel to different places of worship and learn about their religion and experience, sometimes, their rituals (and eat their food). Upon entering the worship space of the Gudwara, we went to the front and did obeisance. That meant I knelt down and bowed my forehead to the ground. The power of that gesture was astounding. I got right back up, but afterward felt I wanted to have remained bowed down longer. Then I sat down on the floor, and listened to the trio playing Indian ragas. We were invited to pray to whatever God we worshipped. I started off with my customary thinking, but very shortly was overwhelmed by a feeling of forgiveness and religious ecstasy. I drank in the repeated musical motifs of the ragas as if I were chanting. And my mind emptied as my soul allowed the worshipful experience to happen in it. I even had an inner vision of Christ on the cross, although my tradition celebrates the risen Christ.
My own faith is about as rationalistic as faith can get. But my experience of the Gudwara and also other places like a Ukrainian Orthodox Church have suggested to me that rationalism can only go so far. The power of good ritual can last even after the ritual is over. I can still mentally go back to the Gudwara experience as its sublime remains in my consciousness, soul, and heart. And I can remember my startled feelings when I stepped out of the Ukrainian Church, with all its icons, into the ordinary world. How drab and lifeless everything looked. My Protestant faith taught me that religion resides in the mind; and it taught me to be suspicious of external rituals. But I don’t think it got it all right in that. There is immense power in ritual. And there are limits to reason.
27 Jan 2016 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: addictions, dopamine, God-image, serenity, truth, wholeness
When a person’s centre of interest is jarred and he or she is no longer pointed in the direction they have known, a person is vulnerable to addictions. This is especially the case when a person’s God-image is lost. The infinite power of the Deity steadies the soul. When the God-image is lost, there is an insatiable drive to fill the emptiness. A person seizes any temporal good at hand. However, everything that is not God will never fill the emptiness left by a displaced God-image. So the distraction seized becomes insatiable. One craves it as a God. But it is not God. So a person cannot get enough of it. This is the origin of addictions.
There are biological factors that figure into addictions. Alcoholics have an allergy to alcohol. Other addictions are said to turn on the neuro-transmitter called dopamine. Addictions give a person a shot of dopamine. But this shot of dopamine cannot compare to the ongoing peace and serenity of God. When a person has a God-image in his or her heart, one does not crave the transient pleasure of a dopamine rush. The Prince of Peace brings lasting contentment and a person feels whole.
This is particularly the case when a person loses a job, or moves to a new location. Then there are also shocks to a person’s psyche when a new truth is dawning. All these things shake a person’s soul. They may lead to a new God-image. But in the transition period, a person can be vulnerable to addictive behaviour.
06 Jan 2016 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: hippies, Key West, memories, Nature, Wallace Stavens
I was a young man
Visiting Key West
When first I looked into
Stevens’ “THE IDEA OF ORDER IN KEY WEST.”
I didn’t understand a word of it.
But I was a young intellectual
Being an intellectual
In a place with a literary history
In Key West then, there were many young
Old hippies, tradesmen, college students
Partying
I came back an holding man
I re-read “THE IDEA OF ORDER IN KEY WEST”
Now I understand much
Most of it
And I am an holding man with
Intellectual inclinations
Coming back to Key West
Old memories barely triggered
But after a couple days
I remembered much
But in Key West now, there are families
A resort town
Tawdry tourist shops or high end
No local hand-crafts
I don’t see so much partying
But I am holding now,, and don’t party.
Though Stevens didn’t think much of Nature
In Key West now
There is the same lush vegetation
Palms, mangroves, tropical brush
And the blue-green sea is the same
The same
10 Aug 2015 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: '60's, Buddha, David Byrne, drugs, Emerson, Guru Rimpoche, individualism, Jethro Tull, music, rock and roll, Thoreau, Yuppies
It wasn’t just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was more importantly do your own thing, peace, and love. We read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau who taught us to be our own person regardless of status, style, or what other people said we should be or do. We weren’t concerned much with making money. Jethro Tull, “I didn’t care if they groomed me for success, or if they said that I was just a fool.” So with a love for music, with an ethic of doing your own thing, and little concern for money, the late ’60’s and early ’70’s generated a bewildering diversity of music. Who ever heard the kind of music that Led Zeppelin came up with. Their music is now engraved on our brains by repetition, but when it came out it was original. “Stairway to Heaven” struck a nerve with everyone which is why we make jokes about it now–everyone was enthralled with it when it first came out. Who would have thought that a man standing on one foot playing rock and roll flute would fill stadiums, as did Jethro Tull?
I still do my own thing. For my birthday I had an artist make me an earring with a lapis Lazuli stone and a feather dangling on short chains. People always comment on it–for good or ill. I have Tibetan pants that I wear with a Nepalese shirt on the streets of the city. At home I have statuettes of the Buddha, Guru Rimpoche, a Mayan god, Saint Francis, and Egyptian falcon deity, and Eastern Orthodox icons. I self-identify as Christian. I majored in Religion and Literature because I like poetry and religion. It wasn’t a wise career choice if I was after money.
In the late ’60’s, early ’70’s, we bought good stereo systems because we wanted to hear our music clearly. Then people started bragging about their systems. What started out as technology for good quality music reproduction became a status symbol. Then people started bragging about which concerts they had been to. What started out as a live version of music we loved to listen to became status symbols. We used drugs to give us alternative states of mind and raise consciousness. Drugs degenerated into amusement alone, and bragging about using drugs became a status symbol. Witness Cheech and Chong’s “Up in Smoke.”
The final blow came in the ’80’s. Then, earning a 6-digit income became people’s ideal. The Yuppies were born. People made excuses for Nixon, saying that he only did what everyone else was doing–he just got caught. Cocaine became the drug of choice, and something to brag about. David Byrne said that being a musician was, “A good job.” The dream of the late ’60’s early ’70’s was successfully, and I think deliberately, ruined.
David Fekete 