He’s an all-time favorite, the best of pianists, and an all-around honorable fellow. He predicted his own death at 50 years of age, saying he would die then and of a stroke. In later years he became obsessed with checking his blood pressure. The question then becomes, did he indeed know it in advance, or did he direct it by obsessing over it? Truth is such a tricky thing at times.
Photo at top is from the Boston Globe and the one on the bottom from the NY Times.
When you watch a video you can clearly see how he uses his left hand to direct his right hand, especially when playing Bach.
When I think of H.G. Wells I always picture Orson Wells. I’m not sure if that’s due to the same last names, or if the actor played the part of the author in some long-forgotten film that lingers in the recesses of the mind. Or maybe even a character in a film that originated with H.G. Wells. Who knows. Maybe even word association. As I recall someone’s name at the swimming pool: Spring, for Spring Byington. This is pretty funny as the swimming pool Spring is Chinese, hardly a stand-in for the movie star. But whatever works, I say.
So much is happening right now that too many things of worth, of note, get lost in the noise. It seems only a little corner sometimes, a little light gets to the deepest darkness. I read where sterilizations have taken place and continue to in the camps run by ICE. The camps that have yet to be disbanded, where children have yet to be reunited with their parents, where women are subjected to the horrors of Nazi German. In America. In America today.
Sometimes I shake my head in despair. I don’t know what to do.
BREAKING: Pauline Binam, a Cameroonian mother who says she was involuntarily sterilized while held at the privately-owned Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, has been granted humanitarian release. Binam’s attorney says Binam’s fallopian tube was removed without her knowledge by the same doctor who’s accused of performing forced hysterectomies on a number of other prisoners, and who is reportedly not a board-certified OB-GYN. Last week, Binam’s deportation was halted at the last minute after pressure from immigration rights advocates and members of Congress.
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Still, we go on. We endure in our small apartments with our timely haircuts and our pedicures. We walk our dogs. We play with our kittens and search out new sheet music for the piano. To be played with martini on the board above. We sing. And we cry.
“Being with him when he died was something I will never forget. His bravery. His happiness. His acceptance. It was a colossal experience for me. Changed my life completely in a way that I had not expected. I expected to feel sad and lost. But I felt the opposite. Just, like, ‘Boy, this is it. This is all we have. Right here. So you’d better pay attention.’”
Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed
Posted by Ravenous Butterflies
This certainly set off a firestorm of controversy. Not the photo but the words by Anderson. Predictable things: How can she say that?! Of course there’s more than now…Heavenly, etc., Still miss my wife and I loved her for many more years than…Who is she kidding? No grief and loss? Angry rhetoric that somehow people thought was appropriate rather than trying to understand. I find those sorts of things amazing. It’s never a matter of seeking what she came to experience, but rather a diatribe about a belief system—one’s own. Oi!
Of course there were also many who believed they understood what she had to say, with or without a Heaven to come. All of a measure of one’s own life, and death.
So, she wrote of how they came to be, how their minds entangled and how they could imagine no others than each other.
How when it came time for him to die to this earth he was in ecstatic conversation with The Other, communicating in Tai Chi symbols, his hands dashing madly about in front of him, a Light that grew and emanated, and a smiling countenance that made his face seem on fire.
This gave me chills of light, of joy. A death to Celebrate, as some are.
Schopenhauer left us on this date in 1860. (February 22, 1788–September 21, 1860) His major work The World as Will and Representation gave us an understanding of the differences and relationship between Art and Science. Schopenhauer uses mutability as the criterion of distinction — science, he argues, is concerned with change, whereas art contemplates the eternal. Mutability as the tendency to change while the Eternal is the Always. The 1818 masterwork also gave us Schopenhauer on the relationship between genius and madness, and the crucial difference between genius and talent.
Writers Ink—Writing and Stuff 