Man's Fantasy

Maybe you feel that somehow we are all spiritually connected. Perhaps there is a spirit-world out there somewhere; it could be up there in the clouds, in the great beyond.

You’re not the only one. People on earth have felt this for a very long time. The story of Man reaches deep, far back into our history, and it is full of evidence that humans have always related to spirits, maybe the souls of dead men and women, maybe aliens from somewhere else, nature spirits or gods, or the One God, or maybe all these notions are just the ghostly products of our overactive imaginations.

If there were, in reality, no spirit world out there, I think we would make one up. We would, if we haven’t already, imagine a pantheon of gods or spirits that sort of hover around and make stranger things happen that we can’t explain.

Our ancient cultures have throughout history brought forth plenary evidence that something freaky is going on out  there, whether it is in our minds, or otherwise.

The myths of ancient Greece presented a scenario of multiple gods who were, in some ways, very much like us. The movers and shakers among them strove to gain attention and favor from the potentates who seemed to be in charge, like Zeus and Hera, or Poseidon and Athena. Although they were thought to be somehow supernatural, those deity wannabees were generally chomping at the bit to outdo each other.

Just like, you know, us schizoid homo sapiens.

Age after age, we love to get off by summoning them up from the pit of our imagination or the abyss of wishful thinking.

Now our long postmodern 3.0 world-narrative has generally relegated these old fogies of the spirit world to the back pages of your garden-variety goggle search.

On the other hand, our historicsl narrative presents testimony from multiple fronts that the spirit world is actually created and headed up by One God. Yet we argue about what the correct name is. Is it allah or jehovah of krishna or lady godiva or whatnot, and who is the true prophet and so forth and so on.

Our postmodern  pervasive intrusive web-babel of electronic media has now given us humans a host of bandwith opportunities to bandy this thing around and make a big deal out of it. Our overactive imagination can now have a field day of competing gods and goddesses, a plenary plethora of super-heroes and heroines, to whom we give our attention and in some cases even our devotion and veneration.

But hey, you won’t catch me fortifying any fan-fixation with the Ba’al or Dagon; I won’t be doing hocus-pokus with the Wicked Witch, nor will you find me hobnobbin’ with Darth Vader or joking with the Joker. Nosiree. I’ve got too much going on to waste time on those misfits. Let Superman and Obie-wan and Wonder Woman and Spiderman handle them. They can waste all the time they want chasing those villains all around the solar system.

Let ‘em play their game of thrones ’til the cows come home. I don’t care if you drag all the dungeons and dragons this side of Hades out to array themselves in full battle paraphenalia to take down whosoever’s in charge at the moment. They can pokemon forever for all I care. They’re probably a bunch of gropers and pedophiles chasing fairy tails in hell anyway.

All this fantasy fluidity is about as useful as a freakin’ fentenyl freeze-pop on a free ferry to fairy land. Something’s rotten in fandom. The likes don’t tell the whole story, y’all. We gotta find a way outta here.

I really think all these dreamed-up deities have been, just like us, screwing things up all along. They don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. When God finally did show up to get us straightened out, they nailed him up on a cross.

I believe somehow we’ve got to rise above all this fantasy.

 I recommend an alternative: faith in Christ resurrection, which would be a better use of our time, and it would solve a deadly problem for you and me.

Glass Chimera

The Bookends of Experience

As far as East is from the West,

and near to worst as to the best,

I have wandered lonely as a cloud

as we travel from some swaddle to the shroud.

Once we drove a stake in the ground and called it home;

now this morning wakes me here as sun is shone.

Situated now on continental sunrise heights

while recalling vivid island sunset sights,

and noticing here our stark and spindly leaves, these trees,

I recollect the wide and warm of ocean breeze.

Experience goes as far as mountains are from sand,

then circles back around to water, air and land.

Sometimes life is hard, you know;

at other times it's soft as autumn leaves make show.

As days turn dark,

so light doth continually toss out some spark

of hope or happiness or flexibility

that is yet assailed by despair or dearth or rigidity.

Experience comes as vividly as rising sun;

then memory renders it precious when day is done.

Doors of perception

open into windows of reflection

as present slips into the past

and future finds a fleeting foothold fast.

We amble here and there and everywhere;

we ramble now and then without care.

When reality and reflection mingle in the sands of time

imagination splurges into rhythm, sometimes in rhyme

when myself is beached upon the rock of time,

and our family finds itself with God and universe in line.

Glass half-Full

The Nutcracker is not correct!

During all six+ decades of my time here I've been appreciating Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker ballet suite. Every now and then, woven throughout this life I'd hear snippets of the musical adventure--dance of the mirlitons, the sugar plum fairy, snow queen, the Nutcracker Prince . . . whether spinning across the airwaves from WDAV, or sacheting through some mall soundtrack, or whirling around in my childhood recollections, maybe gliding through a Christmas scenario from some ancient yuletide celebration in days of old. Whether it be a shimmering tinsel of exotic melody that hangs upon my personal memory, or some almost-seen glimmering remnant from a collective archive of European culture, I haven't a clue.

Then last night we saw the actual ballet performed at Charlotte.

http://charlotteballet.org/tickets/nutcracker/

Whoa! What an experience.

As the dancers initiated their rite of midwinter reverie, my first thought was about the stage setting in their background. How much the world has changed! since Petr Ilyich first cast this musical extravaganza into the world's imagination. The immensity of the Christmas tree, the lavish grandiosity of what is obviously a mansion setting, and the quaintly sumptuous finery of the characters' costumes--these elements of the story are quaintly outmoded, and did not portend a ballet that would reflect sensitivity to contemporary political correctness.

The family depicted in the story do not seem to represent regular folks--certainly not Democrats, anyway.

I mean, they look like old-fashioned rich people, like we used to see in old British movies, all dressed in frills and formality. Maybe they're actually . . . the dreaded 1%! Or maybe even (Tchaikovsky being a Russian) they are those heartless Russian nobility types whose vast domains were enriched by the toil and sweat of peasants.

I thought: This is going to be a ballet about upper crust Ruskies whose prosperity was directly dependent on the Czar's authoritarian feudalism, before the Bolsheviks began redistributing the Old World's old money into new Leninist revolutionary paths of proletarian appropriation. This stageplay is not going to be an egalitarian holiday presentation. No Little Match Girl or Dickensian Tiny Tim tearjerker here.

I wasn't really thinking that. I'm a Republican after all.

But the ballet is, as it turns out, one colorful yuletide episode in a little rich girl's life. How politically incorrect is that? And if that wasn't bourgeois enough, the setting then morphs into the little rich girl's dream-- the whole second half of the show is a little rich girl's fantasy! Don't tell anyone.

Now I can understand the palace-like marbled grandiosity of the Bank of America Center interiors, which I was forced to walk through while ambling from the parking garage to the theatre. (Even though Wells Fargo sponsored the Event. Go figure.) This ballet is part of a vast capitalist plot to make every middle and lower class family just like the well-endowed family whose holiday fantasy is dramatized in the Nutcracker!

I can't believe the Democrats met here, right outside those doors in downtown Charlotte, only two years ago!

Is it a Russian plot?

That dancing Prince looks pretty nutty if you ask me. I wonder if he's somehow connected to Putin's power-grabbing aspirations!

Nevertheless, in spite of all that hog-wild rumination trying to drag my sugar plum appreciations into politically correct judgements, we had a great musical experience with the Charlotte Ballet, accompanied by Charlotte Symphony! I was thoroughly enthralled as the dancers whirled around Petr Ilyich's construct of an Old World 1%er child's fantasy, while the stage-setters did their magic under the influence of Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux's imaginative dancing mastery.

Somewhere between the pageantry of high-hatted toy soldiers and the mysteriously dissonant celesta, which accompanies Sugar Plum Fairy's confectionary grace, I found myself amazed at the "diversity" represented in Tchaikovsky's 19th-century rendering of an old Hoffman tale.

My amazement started in the first scene, with the post-modernly mechanical movements of the the Toy Doll and the Nutcracker Doll. These motions were incredibly like mime, or even hiphop. I didn't know if I was flashing on Charlie Chaplin, Marcel Marceau, or Michael Jackson.

To further complicate my prior expectations about ballet, I had to ask: Who would have thought an outlier Russian symphonist would include Spanish chocolate, Arabian coffee, and Chinese tea in his fantastic array of pirouetting spices? And then he blends them into a Czarist celebration of one family's opulent holiday festivities?

But old Petr managed to do it. Quite an amazing guy, that Russian.

From listening to his music over the years, I've gotten the impression that the composer spent his whole symphonic life trying, time after time, to perfect the delicate art of orchestral crescendo. The Nutcracker represents, it seems to me, an exotic side-trip in that lifelong dynamic project. While 1812 Overture and the Swan Lake were brilliant expressions of that quest for the perfectly constructed crescendo, The Nutcracker is a different character entirely--a wildly musical collection of divers cultural adventures, 19th-century style. Maybe that's why its seasonal popularity has launched Petr Ilyich's masterpiece of sweetness of into one of the world's most enduring classics.

Glass Chimera