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Forgiveness: Truth & Reconciliation
Today’s Reading – about images taken in Rwanda. Portraits of Reconciliation in the New York Times Magazine. KARORERO, SURVIVOR: “Sometimes justice does not give someone a satisfactory answer — cases...
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Doing and Nothing
An exploration of Song Dong’s Doing Nothing Garden and the possibility of renewing ourselves and our environment through not doing By Vanessa Badagliacca Click here for PDF Version. I grew up...
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The beginner sees the whole ox
A nice story from the ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, which will also allow me to call attention to an aspect of know-how and of awareness that interests me particularly. We might call this...
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Storytelling
This morning I came across an Indiewire post with a video where “Darren Aronofsky and a Neuroscientist Discuss How Movies Mess With Your Brain.” The title is a little disingenuous because it’s really...
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What Is Permitted—To People and Bonobos
The Sources of Morality By Walter Cummins Review of The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal (W. W. Norton, 2013) Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to...
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Joining the Dead
Memorial Day in the States is a long weekend when many of us go to the beach or a park or have a special picnic with friends and family. I ended up at Portland Head Light where the memorials consisted...
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Israel and Switzerland: What is a Country? Can it disappear?
Sometimes philosophical queries peep out of the news, just beneath straightforward reporting. I began reading in Haaratz (an Israeli newspaper) expecting only news and the usual political rancor. But...
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Images, Beauty, and Terror
Images have impact! In my previous post, Zeteo 10/04, I considered Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where the poet conjures the image of a broken statue of Apollo as he views it in a museum....
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Illusory First and Last Words
A colleague has written a nice review of The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West. The book pursues the thesis that the role of fatherhood is a central trope in...
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Voting in Maine
Is atmosphere important? — Can I control breeze? I usually leave political observation to one side, but today was my first voting experience in my newly adopted state, Maine, and it was distinctive and...
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Nietzsche and Wittgenstein: Suicides, Folds, Tones, and Surfaces
Thinking sometimes seems like conversing and borrowing and remembering. Something a colleague or friend says starts one off on a path that is half conversational response and half remembering,...
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Truth, Madeline, and the Trill of Doom
In “Madeline, Imperfection, Love, and Loss” (Zeteo, 11.25.2015), Joy Yeager reminds us of that priceless book for children and adults called, simply, Madeline. It’s the story, as she reminds us, “of...
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Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity
Note: a rough draft of this essay was posted in error mid-week The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the...
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Dancing with Woolf, Treading with Eliot
♦ What would happen if God leaned down and gave you a full, wet kiss? — Daniel Ladinsky Some words, like people, move us before we’re really aware of what’s happening. We return the glance...
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Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude
Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the...
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Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves
The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self....
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Listening, Stillness, Inaction
I have a friend who has published an award-winning book of poems titled “Having Listened.” He writes in the shadow of Boston, near the Arnold Arboretum, designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted. We walked...
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Big Science, Big Art
I was startled to read in yesterday’s Boston Globe that a scholarly paper on “the God particle” (the Higgs boson) had 5,154 authors. I wondered if they hired a stadium for the signing and celebration....
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Bach, God, Fervor, the Devil
I returned last night from a concert that featured, among other things, two movements from Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. By pure luck, I had been reading an essay by Edward Said on Bach’s life...
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Affect, Irony, Idiom
Decide: Does Post-secular spirituality feature 1) posthuman ethics; 2) posthuman subjects; or 3) totalistic re-positioning I’ll read anything — almost. Once a month it’s my habit to browse...
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