Another Batch of Seeds for Your Mind Farm

Seems like a good time to sow another handful of seeds for your mind farm. Nurture them with warmth, moisture and care. 

“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”
— Seneca the Younger

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
—C.S. Lewis

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” 

—Desmond Tutu

"Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.” 
–-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Don't blame the mirror for what it reflects."

—e. 1983 Journal Note

"Nobody likes the man who brings bad news."

—Sophocles

"It is man's peculiar duty to love even those who wrong him."
—Marcus Aurelius

"The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being."

—Thomas Carlyle

"Wonder is the basis of worship."
—Thomas Carlyle

"The simple step of the courageous individual is to not take part in the lie."

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The one thing about art I like, and I still do: you’re in charge.”

— Jonathan Winters

"The best way to forget is to find something you want to remember."
—Marlene Dietrich

"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
— Socrates

“No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau

“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.”
 – Leo Tolstoy

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."
—George Orwell

“One of the most beautiful gifts in the world is the gift of encouragement.”

—John O’Donohue

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.” 
–-John Lubbock

"When Kierkegaard wrote about the sickness unto death, he was not remarking on a bronchial infection."

—David Berlinski

“Never be ashamed of trying. Effortlessness is a myth.”

—Taylor Swift

“Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please.”
— Pythagoras

"When facts become hate speech, then truth is an arrestible offense."

—Katie Hopkins

"In a world overflowing with noise, sometimes all it takes is a whisper to stir the soul."

—Nahar Trina

Looking for America: Paul Simon's Quiet Masterpiece of Longing

Inside the World Trade Center

Last week I listened to Paul Simon's "America" for the first time in a while. How interesting to hear it in conjunction with our nation's 250th anniversary. The song's deceptively simple narrative unfolds into profound reflection on the human condition.

In the 1960s Simon & Garfunkel recorded numerous songs that captured the angst of "my generation." Haunting songs like "Sounds of Silence" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" connected with young people living through that period of disruptions that included assassinations, race riots, burning cities, the Cold War and Vietnam. 

The song is essentially a short story. It begins with the playful, "Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together / I've got some real estate here in my bag." The "real estate" is nothing more than what's in his suitcase or sleeping bag. They're young, broke, and full of possibility. After purchasing a pack of smokes and Mrs. Wagner pies they simply "walk off to look for America." Optimistic Sixties youth. 

In the second stanza we learn that the narrator's girl friend is Kathy as they board a Greyhound in Pittsburgh, something I myself have done twice in my life, both being personal turning points. Perhaps that's one reason this song has stayed with me. Certain songs attach themselves to the intersections of our lives and are never heard the same way again.

"Kathy", I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Their banter on the bus is lighthearted. Who hasn't had these moments with someone you enjoyed being with, playing games with the faces.

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said "Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Like children cloud-gazing, they entertain themselves by transforming ordinary life into adventure. After a while, though, the mood begins to change. I can imagine it as a movie soundtrack in which the first notes of a gloomier tune can be heard. 

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"

"We smoked the last one an hour ago"

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

 

I've been in all these scenes before, night settling in, moving through time looking at scenery and retreating into the thoughts in my head, and she retreating into her magazine. This line says so much with such brevity: "So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine..." No external drama here as the song shifts to a darker place.  

"Kathy, I'm lost", I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

It's a heartbreaking confession. "Kathy, I'm lost. I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."

And perhaps the saddest part is how this kind of awareness, when it goes unshared, isolates us. We can sit beside someone we love, traveling the same road, and still find ourselves alone inside our own thoughts.

Simon avoids giving an answer as to why the narrator feels this way. Beneath the surface, he feels something he doesn't fully understand, an angst that is existential, not circumstantial. And the kicker, which is repeated at the end, is that this is something pervasive. While counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike he imagines that they are all in the same soup, lost but looking, yearning for something.

Thus, America is not a geographical destination but something much larger, an idea—a symbol of fulfillment, belonging, identity, perhaps even purpose itself. We're all searchers, seekers of a place where we belong, people striving to understand why we are here and what it means to be human.

Here we are, nearly sixty years later, with more technology, more entertainment, and more information than Simon's two travelers could have imagined. Yet the longing he captured has not disappeared.

Perhaps that's why America has endured. It's not really a song about highways or Greyhound buses or even the United States. It's about that quiet ache almost everyone experiences sooner or later—the feeling that there must be something more. Simon never tells us whether Kathy and her companion found what they were looking for. He simply reminds us that we are all fellow travelers, counting the cars on our own New Jersey Turnpikes, looking for a place to call home.

The Boy in the Bubble: Our Perilous Postmodern Predicament (Revisited)

Each of us, whether conscious of it or not, lives inside a meta-narrative — a story that gives shape and meaning to our experience. These frameworks help us interpret suffering, progress, history, morality, identity, and hope itself. The songs we listen to, the books we read, the films we absorb, and the headlines that bombard us daily all reinforce or undermine these narratives.

The New World Encyclopedia defines a meta-narrative as: “A theory that tries to give a totalizing, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social or cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.”

For centuries, the dominant Judeo-Christian meta-narrative placed God at the center of human history. Life had meaning because history itself had meaning — a beginning, a moral structure, and an end toward which humanity was moving.

Modernism gradually displaced this framework. The new narrative suggested that humanity no longer needed transcendence. Progress itself became the faith. Science, technology, education, democracy, medicine, and human ingenuity would build a brighter tomorrow. The future became our secular heaven.

But as the twentieth century, these Utopian visions encountered the reality of world wars, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, gulags, terrorism and alienation. The collapse of trust and the realization that technological advancement does not necessarily produce moral advancement became self-evident.

From these ruins Postmodernism emerged. It questioned whether progress was ever truly progress at all. It distrusted grand narratives entirely and hope itself became suspect.

It is in this sense that "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon feels so prophetic.

Listening to the song again recently, I was struck by its architecture. The verses arrive like fragments from a newsfeed: terrorism, drought, celebrity spectacle, scientific breakthroughs, violence, medicine, wealth, and technological marvels. The modern world flashes before us in disconnected images.

-- A bomb in a baby carriage.
-- A baby with a baboon heart.
-- Lasers in the jungle.
-- These are the days of miracle and wonder.

And after each unsettling verse comes the refrain: “Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.”

But the reassurance feels hollow, which is the genius of the song. The Boy in the Bubble captures the emotional contradiction of late modernity — astonishing technological achievement paired with spiritual exhaustion and civilizational anxiety. The narrator seems convinced that technological wonder should somehow compensate for spiritual dislocation. Look at all we can do, he insists. Look at the miracles. Look at the progress.

Yet beneath the surface lies exhaustion and dread. The one being comforted appears to understand something the narrator cannot: human beings can surround themselves with spectacle and still feel abandoned. We can cure diseases, transplant organs, photograph distant galaxies, and instantaneously transmit information across the planet — yet remain spiritually adrift. The modern world increasingly resembles a giant illuminated carnival trembling atop a void. 

One thing that makes the song enduring is how it captures the emotional texture of postmodern life long before social media intensified it. Today we scroll endlessly through catastrophe, innovation, entertainment, outrage, tragedy, and distraction in one continuous stream. We are flooded with information yet starving for coherence.

Even the most amazing reels soon leave us bored. Nothing satisfies.

And what makes the song so incredibly pointed is that while the narrator doesn't see it, the one he's trying to comfort sees it perfectly. She's not only crying because of the brokenness of the world but because the one who seeks to comfort her is so oblivious to it. It's like Graham Greene's The End of the Affair in which the narrator tells the whole story, yet can't see that which is plain to everyone who hears his tale. Listen to this song several times and hear the painfulness in his appeal at the end of each verse. 

We reassure one another with the language of progress while quietly sensing that something essential has gone missing. Perhaps that is why the song still haunts listeners nearly forty years later. It understands that our crisis is not merely political or technological. It is metaphysical.

The Boy In The Bubble

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shopwindows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turnaround jump shot
It’s everybody jumpstart
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
a loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires, and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long-distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry

© 1986 Words and Music by Paul Simon and Forere Mothoeloa

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture:

After philosophy, much of my college study (1970-74) was dedicated to the fine arts. I immersed myself in painting and drawing, as well as continuous rummaging of the art books housed in the school library, which was almost the nearest building to  my dorm. Though captivated by much of what I saw, and at times sought to emulate, there was plenty that I wasn't really attracted to. I did, however, have a great love for the process of laying paint on canvas. I found the process of creation magical.

During that time I had a friend who periodically told me, "The artist is the vanguard of the revolution." His meaning was clear. Art was to be subservient to political ends. My friend Walter Urban created powerful works of this nature, a life-sized soldier on a cross (protesting Viet Nam), a family in the future taking a walk in the park wearing gas masks.

I myself saw many ends that art could serve. After the death of a best friend in high school art served a therapeutic function for me. There were dark things in my heart that words seemed inadequate to express. Beyond the grief there were other emotions and art was a means of working it out.

As one stepped back and surveyed the previous 100 years, one could see that art also served as a mirror of the culture. This is the theme tackled by Dutch author, professor and Christian scholar Hans Rookmaaker.

 

Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of a Culture (1970) explores how the development of modern art reflects the spiritual and philosophical collapse of Western civilization. Writing as both an art historian and a Christian thinker, Rookmaaker argued that art is never created in a vacuum—it mirrors the worldview of its time. As Western society drifted from its biblical foundations, art, he says, became a visual record of man’s alienation, fragmentation, and loss of  meaning, themes taken up by mid-century existentialists like Camus and Sartre.

Rookmaaker traces the story from the harmony of classical and Renaissance art, where beauty and order reflected divine creation, through the Enlightenment’s turn toward human reason, and finally into the modern era, where faith in transcendence eroded. Artists like Van Gogh, Picasso, and Pollock emerge as prophets of a disintegrating world: their work cries out with spiritual yearning but lacks the hope once rooted in a Christian understanding of reality.

For Rookmaaker, the “death” of culture meant more than a shift in artistic style; it pointed to a deeper moral and spiritual drift. When God is no longer at the center, both art and life begin to lose their unity and meaning. Yet he did not fault the artists themselves. In their confusion and despair, he saw an honest reflection of the human condition. His response was not condemnation, but invitation—a call to recover beauty and, through it, a renewed sense of order and purpose.

[This seems to be a good place to insert a couple of comments by my eight-year-old grandson who visited New York's Museum of Modern Art this week. My daughter said, "He was so funny at the art museum with his sort of pithy, harsh reviews of the art: 'So, um ... How did this get so famous anyway?' and (no doubt responding to Pollock)  'Huh. It kinda looks like they just splattered paint on the paper.'"]

Ultimately, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture is not an argument against modernism but a plea for spiritual reawakening. The book invites readers to see that the renewal of art depends on the renewal of belief—that culture can be reborn only when it again recognizes its source in the Creator.

                                         "Red Star"  

Now that we are more than fifty years removed from Rookmaaker’s diagnosis, the story of art has not reversed itself so much as it has unfolded along the very trajectory he observed.

The boundaries are gone. The gatekeepers have loosened their grip. What once required training, patronage, or institutional approval is now open to anyone with a vision—and sometimes even to those without one. From installations and performance pieces to digital art and street murals, expression has multiplied in every direction. In this sense, there has indeed been a kind of liberation.

And yet, with that freedom has come a curious diffusion. Without a shared center—without a commonly held sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful—art often speaks in a thousand private languages. Some works are deeply personal, even therapeutic. Others are expressions of love. And then there is art that is simply functional, enriching us more than endless halls of empty walls.. And we still have the overtly political, echoing my friend’s conviction that the artist stands at the vanguard of revolution. Still others seem to revel in irony, fragmentation, or shock, as though meaning itself were suspect, though what shocks some seems to miss the mark because many of of oldsters have seen it all before and, yawn...

But beneath the variety, one thread persists: art continues to tell the truth about us. It reveals our longings, our confusions, our search for identity and transcendence. If the last century showed us the fracture, the past fifty years have shown us what it is to live within it.

Which leaves us, perhaps, where Rookmaaker left us—not with a neat conclusion, but an invitation.

If art is a mirror, then what we choose to create—and what we choose to behold—matters. The question is not only what art has become, but what it is for. And whether, in the midst of all this freedom, we might yet rediscover not only expression, but meaning… and perhaps even beauty in its myriad forms once again.

Related Links

The Painted Absurd

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2009/05/painted-absurd.html

A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-century-of-rebellion-exploring-20th.html

Ethics, Science and Meaning: Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

Last night, as I lay awake thinking about a few issues in contemporary culture where it appears that science is becoming ethically unmoored, my thoughts drifted to Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting novel Never Let Me Go.

What makes Ishiguro’s storytelling so gripping? Is it the patient unfolding of his narrative, each layer revealing vivid, achingly human characters? Or the elusive gravity that pulls you deeper, a force you sense but can’t name? Perhaps it’s the way his narrator, Kath, weaves interconnected stories, grasping for truths she's only half-understood as they unfolded, leaving us to piece together the shadows alongside her.

Ishiguro’s craft recalls John Gardner’s exercise in On Becoming a Novelist in which the writer is asked to describe a pond. There is a dead body hidden from view, so it is a serious scene, but the writer has to create the feeling of dread through describing only what is seen.

Ishiguro clearly has become masterful at conveying this kind of undertone without ever explicitly stating it. "Show, don't tell" is one of the first dictum's fiction writers hear at writer's conferences, and this author does it ever so well.

His stories stir painful self-revelations, unearthing moments from my own past—times I spoke too soon, stayed silent too long, or watched relationships pivot on choices I didn’t know were pivotal. Through Kath’s reflections, Never Let Me Go explores friendship, loss, memory, and meaning, inviting us to confront the fragile threads of our own lives.

 

Perhaps its the manner in which these situations that he creates unearth painful revelations within ourselves is another aspect of his writing that makes it so potent. I think that is a big part of it. Or at least for me. As our narrator Kath tells the story, which consists of strings of interconnected narratives about various people, it seems as if she is striving to resolve what was really going on, things she'd not fully grasped as she experienced them.

SPOILER ALERT

There's something special about the students living at Hailsham, a boarding school in England. At first we don't know what's so special about this school, and neither do the children who grow up there. Eventually a little light streams in and we learn that these children are here for a purpose.

The three main characters in Never Let Me Go are Kath, Tommy and Ruth. These characters are drawn with such detail that you can almost hear them breathing and recognize their fingerprints. Ruth's manipulations are ever so annoying, and Tommy's struggles create such empathy that you lose yourself in Kathy's meandering reflections on the key moments they have shared both at Hailsham and afterwards.

Any number of thoughts come to mind here, one of them being the manner in which a family secret comes to light after it has been suppressed for many years. I'm thinking of a child born of incest, who never realizes why he has no father but eventually senses, then learns, that it's his grandfather.

In this story, the children of Hailsham were part of a program to clone humans who would grow up to become organ donors. As young adults they give until they do not survive. It can be two, three or four, but eventually you give your body parts till you are "complete," which is a euphemism for death.

It's no wonder that a pall hangs over everyone's tale of self-discovery. How the characters respond to these revelations, often nothing more than rumors because the teachers of Hailsham are limited in what they can openly disclose, is the heart of this story.

Eventually the students leave Hailsham and move to the Cottages. From here they become Carers, and then Donors. Some lucky ones will have a chance to get deferrals for a couple years before entering that Donor stage. This is another undercurrent in the story of this threesome.

* * * *

The title of the novel, "Never Let Me Go," is taken from a late 1950's song by Judy Bridgewater, recorded on her album Songs After Dark. Judy Bridgewater and this song recur several times as events unfold involving Tommy, Ruth and Kath.

I love Ishiguro's writing. There's a beauty in the way he digs into the nuances of relationships. Here's a sentence that illustrates this. Kath is reflecting on an incident which seemed insignificant at the time, but was not.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

Hailsham seem's like an interesting choice for the name of the school. The student clones are shams, not real humans in a sense. This particular school, though, is an elite version of this system of cloning humans to become organ donors, so it is "hailed" by clones who went to other schools. Some time after Kathy, Ruth and Tommy have graduated, however, the school gets closed, no doubt for a sea change in public opinion about the ethics of this business.

Lots of food for thought throughout, and an engaging read as well. 5 stars out of 5.

* * * *

Related Links
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled Is an Achievement of the First Order
In Awe of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant
Throwback Thursday: Ishiguro On Dylan
  For what it's worth, here's a link to the Judy Bridgewater song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UX6tzE7P44

Life Is Not A Spectator Sport: A Weekend Reflection

It's Jay Gatsby Month. 100 years ago, April 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was published by Charles Scribner's and Sons, so you may see his story pop up a few times in the next couple weeks.

[Spoiler Alert: All of these Gatsby references assume you already know the story.]

They say that cats have nine lives; we only have one. This singular chance at existence demands that we be more than passive observers. We can choose to sit and watch from the audience, or choose deliberate engagement with the world. The theme “Life is not a spectator sport”--a theme I've reiterated many times over the course of a lifetime--captures this urgency to step beyond the sidelines and shape our own stories through action and courage. 

Whether we're chasing dreams like Jay Gatsby, or standing against injustice as history’s rebels did, the essence of living lies in participation, not detachment. In one sense, this call to action is a plea for purpose, reminding us that life--fleeting and finite--gains meaning only when we dare to act, risk, and truly live.

This idea resonates deeply in literature and life, emphasizing courage, agency, and the pursuit of meaning through action.

In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is an embodiment of this theme. He's refused to remain a bystander in his own story. Born into poverty, he rejects the sidelines, reinventing himself as a wealthy man to win Daisy’s love. His relentless pursuit shows a life lived boldly, even if flawed. By way of contrast, Nick Carraway, the novel’s narrator, is the lingering spectator, observing Gatsby’s world with detachment. His passivity contrasts with Gatsby’s drive, suggesting that true vitality lies in taking risks, not just witnessing others’ dreams.

The story is more nuanced than that though. The picture Fitzgerald paints is more grim. The American Dream isn't all that it's cracked up to be. There's a power hierarchy in life. The lower classes believe in upward mobility. This is America, where anything is possible. What many don't see is that when you rise above your place,  you become a target. You're a clay pigeon thrust skyward and the uber-rich delight in taking potshots at you, shattering your illusions, putting you back in your place.

Even so, we're not advocating that you abandon your dreams. Quite the contrary. This is an appeal to take action, despite a possibility of frustration, futility and failure. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift, time and chance happen to them all.

In his song "Father and Son" Cat Stevens wrote this terribly sad line: "You may still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not." When we've abandoned our dreams, what is left? 

For all sad words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are these, 'It might have been.'

--John Greenleaf Whittier