thinking of death but dressing it in the raiment lyric, metaphor
Most of the people I like, or love, or can barely stand are between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five, give or take a year or two at either end, and only about three of them are capable any longer of achieving what was once casually called, and is now wistfully called, a good night’s rest.
For ours is the age of the four “A”s: anxiety, apprehension, agonizing, and aspirin.
People are smoking more and enjoying it less, drinking more and feeling it more, and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the mushroom-shaped ceiling, listening for the approaching drone of enemy bombers, and thinking of death but dressing it in the raiment of lyric or metaphor: the gate in the garden wall, the putting out to sea, the mother of beauty, the fog in the throat, the ruffian on the stair, the man in the white coat, the sleep that rounds our little lives.
From The Watchers of the Night in Lanterns & Lances by James Thurber.
For ours is the age of the four “A”s:
Anxiety,
Apprehension,
Agonizing,
and Aspirin.
Change Aspirin to Advil and change mushroom-shaped ceiling to and waking around three in the morning to lie there gloomily staring at the ceiling fan and counting the blades as they go around and you got me, nearly 70 years after Thurber wrote these lines.
I agonize about my apprehension over my anxiety so I take an Advil.
Then though, reading this, I seem to be right on schedule.
when Carl Sandburg sings I know a lover of all the living sings then
In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes writes about his time a Cleveland Central High School:
Ethel Weimer discovered Carl Sandburg for me. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before—in an article, I think, in the Kansas City Star about how bad free verse was—I didn’t really know him until Miss Weimer in second-year English brought him, as well as Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, to us. Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg.
Little Negro dialect poems like Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s and poems without rhyme like Sandburg’s were the first real poems I tried to write. I wrote about love, about the steel mills where my step-father worked, the slums where we lived, and the brown girls from the South, prancing up and down Central Avenue on a spring day.
… about Carl Sandburg, my guiding star, I wrote:
Carl Sandburg’s poems Fall on the white pages of his books Like blood-clots of song From the wounds of humanity. I know a lover of life sings When Carl Sandburg sings. I know a lover of all the living Sings then
but cannot in good conscience support candidate unworthy unfit
I shall continue to affiliate with the Republican Party, but I cannot in good conscience support for President a candidate who was not the real choice of his party and whom I regard as unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive of this nation by the tests of ability, public policies, official record and independence of character.”
103 years ago, political parties were pushing candidates unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive.
Mr. Ickes was talking about Warren Gamaliel Harding, who had just been nominated by the Republican party for their candidate for President of the United States at the 1920 convention.
Mr. Ickes would later go one to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior for nearly 13 years from 1933 to 1946 under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
The 1920 Republican convention was the one that made the term ‘smoke filled rooms’ famous.
The convention took 10 ballots to nominate Mr. Harding, who according to legend, was called into a meeting with the Party Bosses, in a smoke filled room and the Party Bosses asked Mr. Harding if there was anything … ANYTHING … in his background that might cause problems if he was nominated.
Mr. Harding, according to that legend, asked for 1 hour to think about it and came back and said nope, nothing in my background.
About Mr. Harding’s acceptance speech, Mr. Ickes said, “He proclaims himself a reactionary. He would turn back the hands of the clock and satisfy the aspirations of men’s souls by talking of a full stomach. No more uninspired and uninspiring utterance from a public man is on record in American political history.”
You remember Mr. Harding?
Even he himself felt the he was in over his head as President.
President Harding once said, “Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind.
But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it!
There must be a man in the country somewhere who could weigh both sides and know the truth. Probably he is in some college or other.
But I don’t know where to find him. I don’t know who he is, and I don’t know how to get him.
My God, this is a hell of a place for a man like me to be!”
According to Wikipedia, “In 1923, Harding died of a heart attack in San Francisco while on a western tour, and was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge.
Harding died as one of the most popular presidents in history, but the subsequent exposure of scandals eroded his popular regard, as did revelations of extramarital affairs. Harding’s interior secretary, Albert B. Fall, and his attorney general, Harry Daugherty, were each later tried for corruption in office. Fall was convicted though Daugherty was not. These trials greatly damaged Harding’s posthumous reputation. In historical rankings of the U.S. presidents during the decades after his term in office, Harding was often rated among the worst.
We, as a country, are once again in a cycle where the election mantra might be I cannot in good conscience support for President a candidate whom I regard as unworthy and unfit to be the Chief Executive.
Seems like folks who should be saying this, are not saying this.
For us and this country, my God, this is a hell of a place for us to be!
it looks so easy have to remind self that they make it look easy
I betcha that readers think I am going to tell some sort of sports based story along the lines of one Sunday afternoon in a park in Ann Arbor back when I was in college, I was playing in a pick up football game with my buddies and with the sun setting behind us as we ran a play, I looked back to the quarterback only to lose everything in the sun EXCEPT for the football, which he threw to me in a straight line with the Sun so that all I saw was a bright orange backdrop with black dot of the ball perfectly eclipsing the Sun coming right at me and I held out my arms and the ball literally slid into my hands as I was running at top speed and I turned and ran all in the same motion and scored a touchdown.
It was the best pass-catch play of my life.
It was so good, that everyone on the field had to stop and watch and then applaud.
I was pretty proud of it myself.
I made it look easy.
Walking home we cut across the athletic campus and out on one of the practice fields was a couple of Michigan football players.
We were tossing our ball around and it got away and rolled out on the field and I raised my arm and called out, l’il help??
One those players nodded, picked up our ball and with a flick of his wrist, tossed it back to me.
I mean, that’s what it looked like but somehow it was like he fired a bullet at me.
The ball came at in a blur and I held out my hands, not to catch it, but to fend it off.
It smacked my hand and it felt like it took my arm off at the shoulder.
Ouch, Ouch, OUCH! I thought but at loud I yelled “THANKS” as best I could.
Any thought of my great play faded in the light of this one little toss.
This one little toss at the major college sports level.
They make it look so easy.
But I am not going to tell you that story.
What reminded me of how folks can make things look so easy was an odd video clip I found online.
I was searching for a piece of music by Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach and very much by accident clicked on this other link.
Before I go any further we have to enter the world of suspended disbelief.
Now safely within those confines, this video is kind of the old MTV music videos that tells a story around the playing of a piece of rock and roll music.
In this case though, the piece of music is the the aria Kommt, ihr angefocht’nen Sünder from Mr. Bach’s Cantata No.30 “Freue dich, erlöste Schar.
The story told by the video, there is no dialogue, is that Mr. Back planned for the aria to be song by his 11 year old son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.
Wilhelm discovers that the Bach family maid has an incredible voice and he knows that women are not allowed to sing in Church at time.
Young Willie fakes a sore throat and talks the maid into singing behind him in the choir while he lip syncs knowing full well that his Dad (Mr. Bach) will see through the charade and find out who is singing.
Got it?
Remember we are in the world of suspended disbelief.
And I watched this unfold with a mixture of disbelief and unadulterated pleasure.
First off the movie making itself of this little bit of movie, the camera work, the lighting, the pacing is all really really good.
I mean really really good.
Then the piece of music selected, the aria, which I have never heard of, the music itself, is so effortlessly effortless as are the musicians.
Then there is the voice of the soloist.
Turns out she is a mezzo-soprano named Magdalena Kožená.
Never heard of her.
Wish I had.
Remember we are in the world of suspended disbelief.
The video of her of her singing in character as the maid, again so effortlessly effortless is charming.
In the magic of the world we are in, she just lets the music out as if she wasn’t singing, but as if these sounds were captured inside her.
All in all, this little clip gives a 5 minute escape from the real world to the world of suspended disbelief.
There are days when I would call this gift priceless.
Taken together, the whole package, the music, the performance, the video, all in 5 minutes, all looks so easy, as if any one could have produced it.
They made it all look so easy.
And here is my mystery?
Where did it come from?
Is a clip from another, longer movie?
Is this the entire piece?
I began searching the World Wide Web.
The clip itself is on YouTube in at least three versions.
It is in the Youtube comments that I have been able to get any information.
One comment from 2016 said, “Skvělý režijní nápad Ondřeje Havelky propojil Bachovu kantátu s uvěřitelným příběhem o tom, jak ženy pronikly na kostelní kůry. Výborný představitel J.S. Bacha, životní role 🙂 A samozřejmě úžasná Magdalena – a to má ten klip už skoro dvacet let …”
Thank goodness the GOOGLE TRANSLATE now comes with Language Detection and the Google detected Czech and translated this as:
Ondřej Havelka’s brilliant directorial idea connected Bach’s cantata with a believable story about how women infiltrated church choirs. The excellent representative of J.S. Wow, the role of a lifetime 🙂 And of course the wonderful Magdalena – and that clip has been around for almost twenty years…
So this clip was made maybe back in 1996?
It was in another comment that I came across this information.
If anyone wants to own this video on a DVD, or if you wonder if this is a part of a larger video or movie, it seems that this is simply a short ‘music video’ that is available (officially) only as an ‘Easter egg’ on the 2-CD set titled, “Magdelena Kozena – Enchantment”, Deutsche Grammophon #00289 477 6153. It is a hidden MPEG video file on the first of the two CDs, and in order to access it, you must use your computer (not a regular CD or DVD player).
No kidding.
So …
All that work.
All that effortlessly effortless effort to create, produce and record this little video was all … just for … fun.
It all looks so easy.
What was going through folks head when at a production meeting, someone raised their hand and said, You know what would be neat? If we …
I am not so stupid as to think that this video was not created with a purpose in mind but in the end …
Still …
If you bought this CD, then put the CD in your computer to play and instead of playing the cd, but looked at the files in Windows File Manager and you saw this video file and you clicked on it, all by chance, you got to see this video.
The article quotes tech entrepreneur Nikhil Abraham as saying, “AI will always be playing catch-up with human creativity, and the humans who are at the edge of creativity will always outsmart AI and have experiences that are more valuable.”
I don’t worry so much about AI so long as I can unplug my computer.
I hold that at least once a week you should unplug you computer and wave the end of the cord in front of your monitor.
To enlarge the scale on this theme, I bring up the story of the small town in North Carolina that lost power for several days when some nut put a bullet through some piece of equipment at a substation.
I hope AI remembers this story.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it does and someday it will design its own computer housing to be indestructible.
There is this story from back in the ’60s when some University Professors toured the at-that-time leader in computers for public use, Texas Instruments.
The Professors were looking for computers for their schools and they were shown the latest developments in machines that most likely had about 5000 bytes (5k) of memory and were cutting edge for their time.
According to the story, one of the Professors noticed this giant stainless steal box in a corner and asked what that was for?
The company tour guide said that was the computer housing they were developing for the Navy.
It had to be able to survive a missile attack the tour guide pointed out.
The Professors looked at the steel box then said, “That’s what we want!”
The tour guide looked at them and asked if they were expecting a missile attack?
“No”, said the Professors, “… grad students!”
And so was born the idea that any computer housing had to have at least 17 screws in it until Apple came along with their twist-and-pull to open box around 2005.
The point here is the human competent.
Those darn grad students wanted to get in there to see how the darn thing worked.
Those darn humans who, at the edge of creativity, will always outsmart AI and have experiences that are more valuable.
And cooking is where AI will lose.
As the article says:
“… robots and software can’t replicate what a chef does, even if you can codify a recipe. Like, an eggplant is smaller or larger than before, the fire is a smidge hotter than the last time I cooked.” When chefs create and execute a dish, they’re using all their senses, plus intuition. And as of now, AI doesn’t have senses of its own.“
I guess I could be worried about that … as of now … but, as of now, I am not.
The article ends with this line.
AI cannot taste in the way a chef can.
Even if you’re repeatedly using the same ingredient, let’s say a piece of fruit, AI cannot account for ripeness, sweetness, texture.“
Thinking of the human competent and the role of the chef in the statement AI cannot taste in the way a chef can, I though to that wonderful George Orwell book, Down and Out in Paris and London.
Mr. Orwell, needing employment, worked in the kitchens of Hotel X though tradition has it that he worked at Maxim’s, a landmark restaurant to THIS DAY in Paris..
Back in 1933, Mr. Orwell wrote this about Chefs and dining in a restaurant.
It is not a figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup — that is, if he is not going to drink it himself.
He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness.
To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork.
He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks it again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning.
When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter.
And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy — his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for ever running through his brilliantined hair.
Whenever one pays more than, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may be certain that it has been fingered in this manner.
In very cheap restaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not taken over the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung onto a plate, without handling.
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Maybe this AI in the kitchen deserves a second look.
Post Script: Pictured above is Chef Paul Bocuse, named tje best chef of the Century in the 1900s, renowned for recipes like Poularde de Bresse au riz sauce supréme or Rable de liévre a la créme and Oeufs durs aux oignons dits a la tripe. I ran across an interview with him on YouTube where he was asked when was the best time to be a chef?
“1946 – 1947!” he answered, “Right after the war …. People ate everything!“
No Haiku For You 