Disjoints and connections
Disjoints and connections
Some links
It has been a while since I shared some links, but as I try to ease myself back into tending to this substack properly, I think it is a good habit to pick up again. These are all articles that have made me think, smile, or both. Maybe they’ll do the same for you.
My last post was about time being out of joint. On a related theme, LM Sacasas at the Convival Society explores ‘this sense that language has gotten somehow out of joint’.
In the first of two parts, Ted Gioia examines the archetypical blues legend and the ways in which music historians falsify his history:
“They close their eyes to the fact that these complex and sometimes troubled individuals operated in a surrounding culture and community permeated with a larger mythos of transcendence, salvation, and spiritual questing. They want to secularize life stories that simply can’t be secularized.”
A succinct argument against an entrenched technocratic ‘solution’: the suggested ‘professionalisation’ of the UK social care workforce.
The findings of a paper in Nature suggest ‘a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology’: the massive post-war investment in research and the universities appears to have created large bodies of ossified expertise without increasing the rate of ‘discovery and invention’ at all. This does not bode well for those that hope a technological fix to our compounding crises is just around the corner.
Dorset Daoist Caroline Ross shares a letter she wrote to a freind after losing many of her possesions in a fire. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, but a ‘sour old man in a flat cap’ isn’t a terrible description of your present author either:
“…last night I dreamed a sour old man in a flat cap said to me, ‘Only God is the way, everything else is false and from the Devil,‘ gesturing at my hands full of sticks and stones in the process of becoming. I replied, ‘Nothing of the Earth is evil,’ and woke knowing this to be utterly true.”
It seems to me that both the sour old man and Caroline herself may be right at the same time.
Finally, and in a lovely suprise, torthúil shares some artwork influenced by my last article. Thank you!
Image: pule hill cloud by Jim Grady (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Thanks for the links; I look forward to exploring them. And thanks for including me at the end: what a nice surprise! Always enjoy your writing.
Hey there, I can assure you that my sour flat-capped man was not you! He pops up in dreams sometimes, as he did here in 2021, and is really a 'Part' of me (I like Internal Family Systems' use of this word). One of my grandfathers was a dour, authoritarian, fundamentalist Protestant preacher, absolutely sure of what was right and wrong. Hmm, couldn't possibly have any of that trait in me, could I? So you are indeed correct to say that we could both be right about the nature of God and of evil, and that would be my view nowadays. But in the spirit of not revising or adding insight I did not have into a letter from a time in the ashes, I am happy to leave it to readers to tease out the insights for themselves. (As though there are really any such separate selves... What rebellious threads we are! Refusing to be woven into the table cloth for the greatest feast ever thrown.)
Greetings, friend, as I procrastinate paid work.