Flip The Blanket

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.

M. C. Escher
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Hello Ernie
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This is the 1,841st edition of Vagabond Journeys. I've been writing and posting one almost every day since 2006. To the world at large it would be known as an exercise in futility. Yesterday I had only 15 known readers when I should have hundreds, thousands. So why do I do it?

Love is one answer. I love to feel my imagination wake up and start working. I love to feel that swirl of ideas around my head. I love it when the natural flow of inspiration brings up a concept better than the one I thought of on my own.

Those are selfish things. Need is another one. I need to share my thoughts, ideas, enthusiasm for living and my life experience with other people. Of what use is a senior citizen if he doesn't open up the trunk, go through everything, throw out the old shoes, wasted love notes and foolish dreams, then bundle together the true values of decades of a life lived.

Hope is another reason why I don't give up. As an actor I have played for an audience of one and an audience of five thousand. The performance was always the same as at other times, the same commitment, the same joy. Why does the violinist return to the same concertos he has played before? Why does the golfer take his clubs out to the course even in the cold weather? Because every swing is a finger poked into the magic world of perfection. The golf swing, the music, my writing aren't perfect, but there is always the possibility that one day it will be.

Despair is another reason why to keep writing. An artist is one who must create, who must let imagination loose from any attempt to cage it, who must feel the blessing of inspiration and recognize it when it comes. For me, who lives in a cultural vacuum, I must create the only atmosphere in which I can survive.

The urge and search for perfection may seem like an absurdity to the rational mind. Yet the greatest achievers of the human race were those who did the impossible. I may get the readers I deserve some day, I may not. I may get close to perfection some day, I may not. But I will grab one side of the blanket with the other artists who are willing to try the absurd and flip truth and beauty into the sky and see haw high we can make it fly.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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Careful Chiseling

Man cannot remake himself without suffering,
for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Alexis Carrel
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Hello Aland, have a warm and sunny day.
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"And a little child shall lead them."

It is said of Michelangelo that he claimed to see the statue within the block of marble and just chiseled away everything else until he revealed the pure work of art inside. I think it may be the other way around for the real human being.

It is heartbreaking to see a child's hopes broken and it's expectations closed up. Why? Because the child is still at the point of innocence about the world. People will say "Well, that's all part of growing up. That's life. C'est la vie."

But who really knows what la vie is? There are more books than you and all your friends and neighbors can read in a lifetime trying to explain it. Biologists with their diastole and systole can only go so far and simple phrases like Life is God don't hold one's interest for very long.

Life seems to be a conglomeration of things that keep getting added on from the moment we are conscious of our first hope being dashed, until we are surrounded and made up of all the ills, fears, angers, hatreds, failures and regrets as well as the thrills, successes and realizations of our days. But what did we lose along the way in this process of "growing up"? How many of us remember the joy of our first cupcake or our first balloon?

If there is a paradise to be found it may be that it can only be gained by remaking ourselves in the image of the pure, innocent being we were made to be, with hammer and chisel in hand to chip away, in sorrow and hard effort, all the accumulated dross that makes us think we are wise and adult, until we finally reach the pure, innocent self inside.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
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SPRING QUESTION

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

2 answers so far

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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