HCA #11

 Holy Church of Art

Sermonette #11

When art is a personal activity, the artist musters all their skill, talent and passion to seek the truth of their vision. Why would an artist lie to themselves?

When art is a social activity, the artist addresses wrongs and inequities of society. Their goal is social transformation. The artist also transforms themself in the process of seeking social transformation.

When art is a cultural activity, the artist sees both backward and forward in search for forms that define and identify the essence of their culture. Their work enters the cultural memory.

When art is a spiritual activity, the artist is seeking a higher plane with a higher motive. This may be found in the beautiful, the sublime, the religious or the highest aspirations of humanity.

Human love

 Human Love

Two random bits of DNA trying to make it work
Passion slowly cooling down
Fate twisted in knots
An unstable mess on a rock solid foundation
Everything the minister warned you about and more
Something to hold onto until your last breath
As mysterious as multiple universes
A strange condition that can last a day or a lifetime
Not always about making love
Making making love into love
Damned hard work
Sticky as a spider’s web
What we live for and die for
A finger tracing the length of the body
What most songs are written about
What Disney films distort for profit
Something even Jesus couldn’t figure out
A rainstorm bringing floods to some and puddles to others
What it took St. Paul a lot of adjectives to describe
What can smack, frighten, dislodge, tickle, explode, contort and blossom
The most important measure of a meaningful life
What transcends class, gender, race, and even species
A dream we try to live in
A costume party at a circus
A personal concoction of giving, taking and self-delusion
Things that happen in most of our beds
Poisoned by Cupid’s arrow and living to tell about it
A fishing line cast into the water, baited with hope
A bitch of an enigma
What makes the world spin off its axis,
And land in the most unexpected places

Penis

He knew even as a pre-teen that he would have a penis of formidable size. Embarrassed, he kept it under wraps as best he could for as long as he could. He never named it, and for a long time resisted the obvious career choices. But hard times forced his hand, and he turned out to be a natural at porn. He made an enviable living and won numerous awards for his acting. Through all his years in the business, his parents never knew. When he died, he chose to be cremated. Nobody was going to make a trophy of his manhood. 

For him

Is there a message in the body that speaks our sexual identity? For him, his preference was never in question and never questioned by his parents. The only real question was how flamboyant. High school was more about fashion than behavior. College was more about behavior than connection. Middle age was more about connection than comfort. Living with, sleeping with another whose gaps he filled with love and flair was enough to last him until that unexpected, insidious and withering death. But, dear, what he wore to his own funeral! 

Moral compass

 Where did you get your moral compass, and how do you use it?

Essential workers

 In truth, professional athletes are not essential in the way that teachers, police officers, nurses, plumbers and many other professionals are. Yet we pour money into the pockets of these athletes while teachers, police officers and nurses are underpaid and leaving their professions in record numbers. The entertainment value of professional sports continues to be more important to people than fair wages and good working conditions for essential workers.

If all professional sports disappeared tomorrow, I’d still need my plumber.

Human

 Being Human

What it means to be human has always been a fluid thing. Few of us have recognized that, and fewer of us have recognized that we have a part in determining it. But now the chaotic, screaming, absurd, demented spectacle of life doesn’t give us much choice. We can either hide and, cower or we can fling ourselves headlong into the struggle—and what the struggle requires--to be fully realized, contemporary human beings.

We used to be able to look in the mirror of the God we had created to understand who we are. But now that mirror is so faceted and shattered that it’s hard find any God there. We used to search for deities and their hideouts in nature. But now a universe of unimaginable expansiveness seems nothing more than matter following elegant, but predictable, laws. We used to find God in our own mysterious and magical creation. But now we begin life in Petri dishes and will soon clone ourselves. We used to admire our own flesh-and-bone beauty. But now we are made of plastic and metal and synthetic chemicals and silicone and computer chips. We used to take great pride in the brains that affirmed our human potential. Now we fry them with drugs, and in a century we may find that they played the greatest trick of all on us.

I believe that in any age few find their way to the awareness and the practice of a deep and full humanity. But I also believe that any person with just a drop of true awe before the world can take on that journey. I believe we are presented with a dizzying number of social, cultural, moral, ethical, physical paths to being fully human. And I believe, traveled at the deepest level, they are all the same and lead us to the only God that can save us, the God within us. But when the stakes are as high as they are now, I wish I could believe that we will all get there together.

Illusion

 

On Joseph Cornell

 On Joseph Cornell

Constellations mapped in star-fish
Spheres explaining
Spirals from the edge of sky
Conclude, obscured
Things in proximity
Edge past the names of things

Obsessive in the coming
The vision won’t speak life, but dreams
Copulating
Then structures (intimate) cohere
And symmetry is replicated

Niches of happened things
Stacked perimeters
Bird, shell, arm of tree
Reflect on where the idea of it lives
Item-icon tooled
In flecks of story not his own

Donald Trump

 

Say love

 When you tell someone you love them, what exactly do you mean?

9th grade

 How about this.

9th grade is a life skills year. Depending on skills they already have and their particular interests, students can build their curriculum with courses on plumbing and electrical, auto repair, culinary, construction, computers-whatever makes sense. All these courses would incorporate skills in relevant mathematics, science, language arts and social sciences. This would make these topics relevant and meaningful to students.
Then grades 10-12 would resume academic studies.

HCA Sermonette #10

 Holy Church of Art

Sermonette #10

Art is mana of the spirit, not mammon of the material. Art defies the shackles of the material world even as it must come from the same material world. If it becomes mammon, it becomes trapped in the material world.
This then is the dilemma of art. It must live in the material world, even be born of it. Yet it must continue to assert its nature as mana.

Breaking sports news

 Breaking sports news

--The next summer Olympics will include pickle ball and kettle bell competitions.
--All NBA playoffs will become 11 out of 20 starting next year.
--MLB will replace pitchers with mechanical ball machines controlled by AI.
--In honor of the popularity of women’s sports, the next swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated will be all men.

Vietnam

 Vietnam

Remembering

Soul, soaked in scream,
I never sang.
I unknew loving.

I killed a yellow man.
(Pounding him with the first, the second,
The thousandth bullet of my duty.)
Part me was in his shroud of dying flesh.

Memory (now)
Is not the calendar of the evening news.
It is the every breathing act.

Healing

My child knows me only as seed.
And what can I share in stories
Soaked in blood, and scattered flesh,
And all the things I came to do?

Who hurts with me?
Holding tight against the rage
From every fragment of cell
And self.

Look at me
Wearing shame and rage
And all the other medals
Of the rituals of that code.

So I hold tight to my pain,
Not dilution, not sacrament,
Reconciled to the always-will-be-ness of it.
Accepting in a solitary, daylight act,
I end-begin.

Tomorrow

 I whispered promises

In Tomorrow’s ear

And heard the laughter
Of Yesterday…
Who overheard

Love

 Love

Tireless emerging grass of life
And ordinary
Full with roots and seeds
And ordinary is not weeds
But green and slender
Bent with hidden sorrow

Florida

Breaking news from Florida:

Ron DeSantis and his family banned from Disney World for life.

13-year-old says the word “gay” at school and immediately turns to stone.

After watching a drag show on TV, 47% of teens say they would like to go to Summer Drag Camp.

Librarian handcuffed and arrested after biographies of Alan Turing and Pete Buttigieg are found in her school library. 

Your body

 

AI

 I’m not interested in AI. I don’t want it to do my work for me. I created my own natural intelligence with hard work, failure and problem solving. AI will put people out of work, help people cheat on themselves and others and create problems we can’t even envisage now. I don’t want a fast and easy way out.

AI is obviously here, in the hands of the good players and the bad players—like every major discovery of science and technology. But I’ll do my own art and my own writing and watch AI invade our lives.

Assholes

A meditation on assholes

Why are so many people assholes so often? I mean criminal assholes, uncivil assholes, arrogant assholes, selfish assholes, power-hungry assholes and any other assholes in our lives. Does the asshole seed get planted in children? Does life experience generate it? Is being an asshole a trait found in all cultures? Is being an asshole addictive? Can assholes be healed or is it a life sentence? 

Strategies

 Political strategists advise a candidate on the best ways to campaign: wardrobe, the right spokesperson, how to lie convincingly, spectacle, what people really want to hear, how to make empty promises. But these are the same strategies used every day in corporate marketing. We get numbed by it, so we never think to demand honesty, integrity and competence from our politicians.

Sexual expression

 Culture, religion and government have set themselves the task of controlling sexual expression. Nature expresses itself in variety, and that is the case in human sexual behavior. Sexual expression should be a personal choice, only limited by any harm it does to others. This requires responsibility on the part of the individual, which is supported by quality sex education. Obviously, our society is not there yet.

Fear, ignorance and control make it difficult for LGBTQ+ individuals to express themselves sexually as they choose. The LGBTQ+ community is small and filled with solid citizens. All LGBTQ+ individuals and all the drag queens have not been as destructive to society as the infidelity of men, the hetero treatment of women in advertising and the macho male.

When

 

Mysterious

When is the last time you thought of life as mysterious?