Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Dead eyes


Do you know what is one thing that is scary to me? A dead person’s eyes...especially when they are open...and moving around and blinking and seem like they should be alive...but they aren’t. That gives me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach and, sometimes, I have to turn away. The worst is when the person doesn’t know that they are dead. They don’t know any better and so they walk around pretending like they are alive. Maybe, it’s all a grand scheme to make sure people don’t bury them.
Perhaps "dead" isn’t quite the right word. Maybe it is more like "undead." I’m sure that calls to mind zombies and such, but these are real. I see them walking around every day.
Maybe, if they knew they were dead they would go find their rest and find the life that is waiting for them there. But they don’t and no one has the courage to tell them that they aren’t alive.
“But I go to church...I have a life...I have my friends...I tweet nine times a day. A dead person can’t do that.”
But can’t they?
Can’t even a robot with no life in it at all tweet nine times a day and sit in a building and keep a log of what is happening around it? It still has no life in it. A robot can’t have passions, joys, pain, love. A robot can’t have moral integrity. It can have a program that tells it to accept and reject certain things based on a list of criteria, but then it can just be programmed to do whatever whoever is skilled enough to program it wants it to. It has no choice.
Some of these undead people seem to do just that. If something is viral on social media, it must be worth attention. If five people they know like something, it must be good. If it lines up with the thoughts they were taught in school, then surely it is right. Their foundation is only as solid as those external parameters that they have been taught. Those are not lasting - and even if it were, if that undead person’s external circumstances change, that person’s identity changes, their principles change.
Sometimes, despite my squeamishness at dead eyes, I want to get in one of their faces and yell, just to see if it elicits any response other than an eye roll and filing me away in their brain as an odd creature. Perhaps I am one, but at least I am alive.

Sunday, December 11, 2016

A Different Music

It's been an odd season for music.  Odd related thoughts.

"He who sings, prays twice."  I think Augustine remarked.

Is it possible that music is our highest mode of expression?   Even now we have fragments of this in our hymns, gregorian chant, musicals, concerts in which the experience is shared.

All of these have more meaning than just the written or spoken words that they carry.

***

This was brought to mind when I came across first "Lachto Drom" or "Happy Journey".  It is a telling of the experience of the Romani.  Please, even if you don't understand the words, listen, watch with compassion.  Learn about this people from their voices.

***
Second and related is also Rom related:  the Barcelona Gypsy Klezmer Orchestra.  This is an amazing group that I had never heard before.  It seems a sad that they are no longer playing with their extraordinary original clarinetist,  Robindro Nikolic.  May they none the less continue the fine musical adventure. 

Let me know what you think.