July 7 – Post hoc propter hoc

Post hoc, propter hoc
Heard on MSNBC!
wonders never cease

Ears perked up when I heard someone on the morning news say Post hoc, propter hoc.

Latin on a Sunday Morning News round table?

I was pleased and at the same time perplexed.

Had I heard right?

The comment was ignored and no one on the round table took notice,

No one stopped the discussion to say, ‘what?’

None of the other members of the round table group was going to admit they didn’t know what it meant.

They held to the concept of, ‘si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.’

That was all the evidence that I needed that I had heard right.

Someone on cable news used a Latin phrase!

That, for me, was bigger than any news topic they were discussing.

The discussion moved forward and the comment was ignored and plowed back underground to ferment for another couple of years.

As we all know, it means because this happened after that, that was caused by this.

In reply, I say, Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, or, everything changes, but nothing goes away.

June 2 – sequence of torsions

sequence of torsions,
gracefully twisting, turning
takes eye round and round

Adapted from this passage: One sheet shows a woman’s head and shoulders in a revolving sequence of torsions, gracefully twisting and turning, from every angle, even the rear, in exquisite metal point on pinkish-buff paper. Leonardo’s line takes the eye round and round, in and out, and through the movements in an extraordinary perpetual mobile. It is the graphic equivalent of an entire ballet danced by a solo performer. And there, among all these variations, is the actual pose he used for the serpentine figure of Cecilia Gallerani in that surpassingly strange portrait Lady With an Ermine.

(I love the use of words and language. I think there could be a months worth of Haiku’s from this passage)

In the review of Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing review – lines of beauty by Laura Cumming at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London – This superb show of Leonardo’s drawings reveals the craftsman alongside the visionary – and the sheer range of his curiosity

Another short quote – ‘Just to see the botanical drawings alone is to witness Leonardo’s mind in action.

I can’t get to London. I can barely get downtown.

But I can see these images online through the magic of the internet.

The accessibility of art, music and literature is at a level imagined.

If only we make use of it.

5.2.2019 – isms

race and sex isms
confront inevitable
tough to be a Mom

When I ran out of the house and off to the school at the top of the hill, I don’t know how much my Mom thought about the problems of racism, sexism or any number of other isms that confront today’s Moms.

Maybe I just wasn’t aware.

Today, to me, it seems there is so much outside the door of your home that HAS to be dealt with.

That confrontation for a Mom with racism, sexism and other isms is inevitable.

With that in mind, our children have no greater champion than my wife Leslie.

She was BORN with the idea that injustice anywhere is injustice anywhere.

She might have issues with our kids over any number of sins BUT if any one of them was ever held back or limited in anyway by their race, by their sex by their beliefs, by our family structure, then confrontation with Leslie was inevitable.

And I pity the fool on the other side of this confrontation because they never knew what hit them.

Leslie always did her best to raise our kids but when came to being their CHAMPION, there was no one better to be on their side.

May 7 – Hum of the Highway

Hum of the Highway
Sound of America singing
Not Walt Whitman’s song

All day long, like white noise (by itself a terrible nuance of this age) or the low drone of of a far off bagpipe, I hear the hum of thousand’s of engines. The low whoosh of cars and trucks forcing their way through air.

It’s background music for this techno era of auto tuned electronics.

Not the same music Walt Whitman wrote about.

I Hear America Singing

BY WALT WHITMAN

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

April 17 – Words of the World

Words of the world
They are the life of the world
Building blocks of thought

Loosely based on this excerpt:

and I perceived then and there and once and for all what my Hartford neighbor, Wallace Stevens, was soon to be setting down as the truth that all writers should live by, to wit: “Words of the world are the life of the world.”

Brendan Gill in A New York Life, Poseidon Press, 1990