Just Live for Now, All Over Again

I'd forgotten the sheer weightlessness of Living in the Moment.

It comes naturally to us all at the age of 4, but after that, it seems (for all but a few of us) to be almost totally replaced by Living in the Past or Living for Tomorrow.

The beauty of Nowism is that neither Guilt (Man did I screw that up) nor Anxiety (Ohmygod what if...) can live in the universe of the now. Anyone who can banish those twin white snakes from their gut is bound to feel reborn, with the fearlessness, playfulness, and physical lightness of a child.

I first learned all this from Albert Camus, and I swore I'd never forget it. But I did, or rather I let it get behind a lot of other stuff in my head so I could no longer see it.

Then just a week ago I was reminded of Camus and his crystalline, fog-lifting ideas by a writer named Barbara Ehrenreich in Harpers Magazine, and since then he's popped up again and again. I can't say if he is regarded as a Philosopher's Philosopher--or even if he's regarded as a Philosopher at all--but I can tell you that for me he is a Writer's Writer.

Here are just two sentences from Albert Camus:

"The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind".

"I was absent at the moment I took up the most space".

I hope others who once, like me, felt the unburdening power of Camus and his words will rediscover him, and I hope even more that thousands to whom his name means nothing will check him out. All who do, regardless of age, accomplishment, or ancestry will have a chance to feel the white snakes shriveling up before the power of his simple, clear words, and the more who do, the better off we will all be.

I only wish he were here to speak them himself, on CNN, on MySpace, on the floor of the US Congress.

Luckily, he left much for us to read, as indispensable to surmounting the wintriness of our lives, I think, as the almost audible blue of an early spring sky.

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower". Albert Camus, 1913 - 1960

How could I have forgotten?

I know who I am ( Judy Blue)

I met a girl once, a girl who said she knew nothing, nothing about anything.

She said her name was Judy Blue, that much she knew, and she showed me her long thin left thumb that was tattooed blue.

What do you mean you don't know anything, that's ridiculous.

Maybe so, but it's true. Trust me. (photo: cindy sherman)

So how do you, you know, get by?

You don't need to know much to get by.

But you need to know something.

I know who I am and I know how to ask for help. It's enough.

Is there anything you want to know?

Not really. I don't think it would help.

Help what?

Help me get where I'm going.

Where's that?

That depends on people like you.

She was right.


cindy sherman

Disturbing Birds

Birds (grackles, sparrows and pigeons) fell dead by the dozens in downtown Austin Texas January 8/07.

Birds by the hundreds dropped dead in Western Australia three weeks before, crows, pigeons, wattles and honeyeaters, in the town of Esperance.

Two similar events in very different places far apart.

Now ducks are down in Idaho.

Lots of people are saying "What's goin on?"

Catastrophers say it is clearly the beginning of the end. Harder-headed boys and girls say it is all a part of the rich, if sometimes deadly, pageant of the natural world (shit happens).

Seems to me that the real importance of weird events like these is what they reveal about US. That person who sits beside you at work might have seemed just like you...until the birds fell from the sky (or were pushed) and she said "Oh no, that's how the end of the world begins" whereas you were thinking, " Freaky things are always happening in Australia and I'll bet they find some nasty chemical was released into the air in Texas ".

Dead birds, it seems, tell us something about ourselves that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Some of us have reacted to this pair of incidents with deep and persistent alarm. In this camp are those who saw in this strange happening an evil portent, a supernatural sign that the jig is up, the end is nigh, the show is over.

Others, just as deeply affected by the bird deaths, saw not the supernatural at play, but various scary albeit completely natural forces at work: a reversal of the earth's magnetic field, a deadly virus worse than any bird 'flu they had told us about so far, freaky weather events as a result of global climate change, toxins in the environment from man's continuing disregard for his own home, deliberate poisonings by a person or persons who think birds have no place in the scheme of things, diabolical terrorists, and more.

On the other end of a scale (for which I don't have a name) are those of us who have just smiled at the weirdness of these far-apart, bird droppings. We're sure it isn't the end of us or of the birds, we figure someone would figure it out, and we are pretty sure the explanation will be pretty ordinary, if not nice.

I would love to know the relative numbers of each type of response. Are we primarily deeply disturbed by such things? or are we primarily disposed to dismissing them as just weird?

The only conclusion I've drawn is this: there is a continuum of human response to such things, and not all of our responses are equally useful to our survival.

To come clean, while I try to show some respect for those at the alarmist end of things (well maybe, but...), I invariably come down on the dismissive, somebody-will-figure-out-what-happened-and -fix-it-side. And while I think that I and the other people who tend to respond as I do are an important safeguard or buffer against extreme action, I think in the end it is the people at the other end who provide a more important service to the human race. In short, we need doomsayers, alarmists, worriers, those who are deeply disturbed by events like the inexplicable death of hundreds of birds .


One day, they will be right.

This is not the conclusion I thought I would be writing here. I thought I'd come down in favour of my own rationalist tendencies (which of course are great for getting rid of the worries that plague people at the other end). I will probably go on being a hope-for-the-best kind of guy. I lack the capacity to worry about anything for very long. But I owe a debt to all that do. We all do. Not that all of them will be right, not by a long shot. But odds are they will be, soon enough.

Music in Your Head

I asked some questions, and while expecting somebody slightly less baffled than me to offer up a few answers of the top of their head, it turns out someone very smart in Montreal does have most of the answers having studied a fair number of heads.

In an article entitled Music of the Hemispheres published on the last day of 2006 in the New York Times, Clive Thompson writes about the work of Canadian cognitive scientist Daniel Levitin on the brain science of music. Levitin's book, Your Brain on Music, would seem to have the answer to lots of my questions about music, and I hope to read it soon. Meanwhile I'll keep listening and wondering.

Something I will probably never understand is how to write a piece of music that can do what a suite by JS Bach or a scream by James Brown can do for me.

Play on.