Jimmy Stewart’s Come Hither Look

I tried to resist it—I really did. Yesterday, I saw another sexy planet, this time on CNN’s website, a beautiful purple Neptune-like exoplanet. I don’t even know where in the universe it is, but, wow, what a stunner. However, in my attempts to live a balanced life and not fall under the sway of just any importuning god or goddess that beckons, I resolutely closed that CNN window and looked for something else to post. This morning, though, I was still thinking about that beautiful planet and just knew somehow that I’d find enough purple desserts to make anyone weak in the knees if I spent a few minutes looking. Sure enough, purple is an unforgettably gorgeous and dramatic dessert color. It turns out that there are plenty of purple cakes, purple pies, purple macarons, and purple ice creams . . .  And all of them are lookers. My goodness me—who knew?

I’m not sure I can analyze the reasons purple is so devastating in this regard, and I don’t really want to. It should be used more often in cooking, in my opinion, but maybe it wouldn’t have as much impact if it wasn’t so unexpected. Purple is very close to blue on the color spectrum, and both are surprisingly mouth-watering when used in certain ways with food. My mini-photo essay on the sexy Neptune-like planet and a train of accompanying desserts can be found on Wordplay’s Facebook page. There were many other photos I could have included, but you’ll see that for yourself if you go out looking for them.

Eros is really getting to be a problem here on Wordplay, but I haven’t paid Aphrodite her due in a while, and everyone who knows anything about mythology knows how mad that makes her and the lengths she’ll go to when she feels neglected. She’s getting her revenge on me now. Once you open yourself up to it, you start to notice just how beautiful the world is every day, in many ways, despite the ugliness we all have to deal with. Eros is always thrumming along in and behind things, but if you ignore it, it stops paying court to you. I came across a photo of actor Jimmy Stewart on the Internet a few weeks ago, and while I always liked him, I never thought of him as sexy. But suddenly, after a couple of weeks of these erotic planets and Aphrodite-induced dessert binges, I started realizing just how handsome he is in that picture, and it’s just a subtle thing, really, something in his eyes and his smile.

I’m including the picture here, and you’re welcome to agree with me or to disagree about Mr. Stewart’s charms, but if you can withstand the sight of a bunch of artfully scattered pink and purple macarons with flower petals against a dark background, you’re a better person than I am.

Jimmy Stewart. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty/Getty Images

Deconstructing Banana Pudding

For a topic this week, it would probably be difficult to beat Wordplay’s National Dessert Day tutorial on apples, banana pudding, chocolates, and other topics, posted today on the Wordplay Facebook page, complete with photos. Therefore, I won’t try. I thought I’d said all I needed to on desserts, Aphrodite, etc. last week, but when I found out what day it was today, I just had to seize the opportunity. (And really, can you ever get tired of looking at pictures of desserts? Probably not.)

I guess I was also trying to make a point about the impossibility of putting life experiences into separate silos and the lack of neat boundaries between categories of knowledge, experience, etc. If you’re reading this page for the first time, that may sound pretty far removed from National Dessert Day, but if you think in terms of mythology, depth psychology, and layers of meaning, it’s really not. I’m a librarian, too, and while I semi-enjoyed the cataloging class I took in school—which taught us how to organize and classify areas of knowledge—I saw even then that some subjects just don’t fit into a single slot. Some librarians might argue that they actually do if you’re doing cataloging the right way, but I don’t agree. There’s too much overlap between subjects.

I have a fairly strong teacherly instinct, which I’m sure annoys a lot of people (at least, it seemed to in the past), but I have realized that I take a lot of pains to explain things because I have spent so much of my life feeling misunderstood. I don’t mean to make that sound tragic; it’s just a fact that I often felt my experiences were not like those of other people, and that people really didn’t understand my jokes, my references, or even my real feelings about things. I was not always the forthcoming person I am on this blog, and I really was one of those young people I was talking about a few weeks ago who lacked communication skills. Through much of my life, I had a hard time speaking up for myself in person (though never in writing). Actually, what someone said to me once turned out to be true, and that is that you gain greater confidence in yourself by doing. I’m much better at talking now than I used to be.

So I tend to favor clearness in communication, but it’s also true that no matter how clear you try to be, some people will never understand you because they are seeing you through the filter of their own experiences. I don’t like misunderstandings, but they are unavoidable at times, so sometimes you just have to say your piece and move on. I might say something like, “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” and really mean that just as a literal statement of fact based on the weather report. And yet I often feel that people try to read much more into my words than I intended. On the other hand, I often have to caution people not to be “too literal” when it comes to interpreting stories and mythology. Sometimes there is no “literal truth,” but rather a psychological or artistic truth. I’m really not speaking a secret code that other people are supposed to decipher (I would find that extremely tiresome myself) just because I talk about poetry, myths, art, and other things that have layers of meaning. It’s not true that a person named Daphne literally turned into a tree because someone named Apollo chased her, but it is true that it’s sometimes necessary to put your foot down and make a stand.

Others things I learned from National Dessert Day:

1. There are an awful lot of blogs out there on cooking that almost look like someone just made them up and slapped them on the Internet a week ago. It’s not that they are lacking in quality, it’s just that they don’t quite seem real.
2. Banana pudding is one of the most appealing desserts there is to look at; you hardly ever see a photo of banana pudding that isn’t mouth-watering.
3. It takes a little courage to write about food and Aphrodite, as one feels that one is almost bound to be judged, or misjudged, for the attempt, even though you may only be saying what other people are thinking.
4. Fruits are more “erotic” than vegetables, and it’s probably because of the sugar.
5. Some fruits are more “erotic” than other fruits. Never really thought it through in those terms before, but it’s true.
6. Chocolate truffles, according to one source, were named for the truffles that grow in the ground because of the “earthy” appearance of their centers. That never would have occurred to me, though both kinds of truffles are expensive gourmet items.

That’s about it for this week. Thanks for reading, but remember this: if you take an idea from this page and run with it, only to find yourself at the business end of an international crisis, don’t blame me. Learn to be a little more thoughtful about what you read; take a couple of classes or something.

Wordplay Indulges in Broad Generalizations. You’re Welcome.

With last week’s post, I thought I had gotten Aphrodite and Eros and desserts and all out of my system, but that does not seem to be the case. I know this because I keep finding myself looking up pictures of the most elegant desserts I can find on the Internet. Of course, you cool kids know that when we speak of Aphrodite, we are speaking of more than romantic love. Aphrodite encompasses luxuries and indulgences of all types: fine wines, beauty, fashion, flowers, and, of course, desserts. If you’re not sure how this works, or what the goddess of love has to do with any of this, think of it this way: Aphrodite encompasses romance, and all of the above are considered enhancements or accompaniments to romance. And certainly, it is quite all right—healthy, actually—to fall in love with yourself and to treat yourself with appropriate indulgences as needed.

I know that my readers understand this because reductionism is a kind of sin in depth psychology, and if you follow this blog, that means you have some appreciation for the nuances of the soul. In mythology, too, it’s unusual for simple mathematics to rear its head: rarely does “this” equal “that” in any kind of neatly delineated way. Aphrodite and Eros reign over an entire class of experiences, not just sensual love, and that includes a group of things we might categorize as “the finer things in life.” Most people realize that life is made up of not just one or two but a variety of different types of experiences. “To everything, there is a season,” as Ecclesiastes tells us.

Nevertheless, just as people often have one or two qualities predominating in their makeup, so do places. L.A., for instance, is one of the most Aphrodite places I’ve ever seen, and Lexington, KY, (where I live now) is one of the least. There’s nothing unusual about a place or a person having a dominant cast to it, but it’s also true that whatever is undervalued or outside the comfort zone tends to go into the shadow. Thus many people have the perception that L.A. is an anti-intellectual place and that Kentucky is a very hearth, home, and family type of place. I’ve spent enough time in Kentucky to know that there’s a lot of truth in this perception and also to feel that people here have a suspicion of “Aphrodite.” It’s not that they don’t feel it, it’s that they’re not quite at home with it. It seems like frippery, perhaps, or something that might lead you astray, away from the things that really matter: hearth, home, family, and God. Of course, if it weren’t for Aphrodite, there wouldn’t be children or families, but somehow Aphrodite seems to get divorced from the rest of the process, as if she had nothing to do with it at all, and Demeter rules the roost.

My current preoccupation with Aphrodite springs, I’m certain, from my current experiences. If you ever find yourself living in your car and getting by from paycheck to paycheck, you may discover, as I have, that a healthy person eventually rebels against all that cheapism and tries to seek balance as best it can. You throw a chocolate bar into the grocery cart once in a while or check into a hotel to experience cool sheets, pillows, and air conditioning. A person who lives in his or her intellect much of the time (Athena/Apollo) will, at the best of times, seek out sensory enjoyment just to stay in balance, and if you’re living in very reduced circumstances, it doesn’t become less important but rather more. Certainly, it’s possible to have too much Aphrodite in one’s life, which amounts to overindulgence; it’s also quite possible to have too little, which amounts to poverty.

So it was that, being off work today and still thinking about dessert, no matter how hard I tried to find other “more important” things to read about, I decided to set myself a task: to discover an Internet photo of the most luxurious fall dessert not involving pumpkin that was out there to be found. This was how I made what was, to me, an interesting observation. The majority of fall desserts that don’t involve pumpkin contain apples, and no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find an apple dessert that seemed luxurious in the same way a profiterole or chocolate mousse is. (An exception might be a galette, simply because the French have a deft way of putting Aphrodite into their food that does not seem to come as easily to most Americans.) Vast quantities of cinnamon, sugar, butter, and cream notwithstanding, all the apple desserts I saw, as delicious and appealing as they looked, seemed wholesome rather than gourmet, and I think this has to do with the apple itself. Introduce an apple into a dessert, and you’re suddenly speaking of harvest, Grandma’s kitchen, and the farm rather than of luxury.

So, here’s my contribution to world peace: 1. Aphrodite, so often either overvalued, maligned, or misunderstood, is probably most to be feared when overvalued, maligned, or misunderstood. 2. American culture has a Puritan cast to it that gives Aphrodite sort of a bad name here, but this possibly diminishes the further you get from New England. 3. If you require an indulgent dessert with apples in it, you might have to go as far as France. 4. Kentuckians are great at getting in the harvest but suck at experiencing (or creating) sensory delight. 5. People in L.A. fear being ugly or wearing their pants too loose as much as the rest of us would fear the plague. 6. It often costs more to make things beautiful, but the payoff in psychological well-being is probably vastly underrated.

The Eros of Planet Raphael

On Wordplay’s Facebook page, we have been visited lately by a rather persistent Aphrodite who keeps making her presence known via images of luscious desserts and sexy planets (yes, you read that right). Here at Wordplay, we take responsibility for noticing and commenting on these aphrodisiacal moments that keep appearing in our culture, but did we invent them? No, we did not. Aphrodite is much older than anybody here, including Wordplay, and Wordplay is practically Methusaleh (we remember Beatlemania: think of that). Perhaps we will take credit for letting our imagination run and associating one thing with another in ways that might not have occurred to someone else.

We admit to always having had an eye for beautiful desserts, but sexy planets? As you know from reading our blog, we have an interest in both astronomy and the mythology of the night sky. Many celestial objects are named for gods, goddesses, and other mythical creatures, and it’s not surprising that some of the attributes of these mythic beings cling here and there to their namesakes. We respect scientific objectivity and understand that the methods and objectives of science and mythology do not always coincide, but we suspect that scientists are just as human as anyone else and (at least some of the time) respond to the “romance” of the night sky as well as its “objective reality”: the seductive quality of moonlight, the impulse to wish on a falling star, the allure of celestial visions swimming far out in space and brought into focus only with the aid of high-powered telescopes.

I am sure there are scientific reasons why astronomers and astrophysicists would apply filters that cause images of the planets to become saturated with certain colors, but the eye of imagination responds to the color’s allure, not the technical rationale for using it. When an artist’s rendering of a celestial object lovingly emphasizes its beauty, I assume that the artist is bringing Eros to bear on his or her work. This would explain why I look at an image of the planet Jupiter depicted in swirls of brown and cream by the Mabuchi Design Office/Astrobiology Center of Japan and see a cream puff or tiramisu, and why a rendering of a blue planet with the irresistible name of GJ 3512b seems to beckon like a love god.

In thinking about planet GJ 3512b (which I would probably name “Raphael”), I realized I’d been presented with a challenge. Some of the other planets were photographed or drawn with warm colors more associated with food and appetite, while GJ 3512b was enticingly swathed in bands of blue. Since blue is a “cool” color, more associated with spirit than with carnality, I wondered at the source of the allure. In looking at images of the color blue (and that was how I started my search), I realized almost immediately that while blue is indeed cool, it is somehow hot at the same time. This is perhaps not as strange as it seems if you think about the sensation in your fingers after you’ve been holding an ice cube: the intense cold almost feels like heat, in some contradictory-but-true sense. There’s a yin and yang to heat and cold, and they blend into one another. Robin’s egg blue may seem like an innocent color, one you might use in a child’s room, but there’s also the smoky blue of jazz.

I remember once being inspired to write a poem about the color blue, trying to interpret it through each of the senses (what it sounds like, what it tastes like, etc.), through a sort of applied synesthesia. (I did it on my lunch hour; yes, I suppose you have a lot of pent-up creativity when you’re surrounded by dusty law books all day.) I thought about that when putting together my photo essay on the erotic qualities of the color blue. To me, it’s as if, instead of throwing down an apple, Paris threw down three planets and asked, “Which is the fairest?” In the end, I’m not quite sure blue didn’t win out over some of the warmer colors, the blush pinks and the cafe au lait browns, because I kept finding more and more images of blue, all steeped with an intense allure, many more than I could use.

Here, then, is a supreme paradox in nature: how cool is, in reality, underneath it all, warm. (But props to blush pink and cafe au lait brown, too, for giving blue a run for its money.) It would be interesting to go through all of the colors like this and run a similar experiment. I suspect they all have the potential to be cool or hot; perceptions that assign this or that quality to certain colors are, to some extent, arbitrary. Eros is in the eye of the beholder.

Just No, That’s All

Dear Amtrak,

I read about your plans to create a more modern dining experience for your passengers. (See The Washington Post article, “The End of an American Tradition: The Amtrak Dining Car,” by Luz Lazo.) While I understand your efforts to control costs, I think what you’re actually doing is changing the Amtrak experience in a fundamental way. There are few things as old-fashioned as sitting down to dinner in an honest-to-goodness dining car on a train and few quicker ways to feel yourself almost magically transported to a more elegant era—or maybe what I really mean is what seemed like a more civilized era.

I realize that some people are down on elegance, preferring utilitarianism, but I say they are wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m all for practicality, but—seriously—when you decide to travel long-distance by train, you’re probably already over the let’s-get-there-as-fast-as-we-can-and-hope-the-airline-doesn’t-kill-us mentality that normally takes you to an airport. You’re traveling by train because it offers a different kind of experience, a seeing-things-at-the-ground-level type of journey. I know there are people who also ride trains simply to get from Point A to Point B, but even so—why not do it with a little flair?

In some ways, I sympathize with the Millennials who seem to be the intended recipients of these changes. Especially since life became Cubist, I don’t always feel like sitting down with God-knows-who and having to make conversation, either. Perhaps it’s the times that have turned people more in on themselves, and it really is the current Zeitgeist I’m addressing and not Amtrak. I do, however, remember my first experience in riding Amtrak years ago—my first trip out west—with great fondness, and a lot of the reason for that was the dining car. I was alone on that trip and was frequently seated with older, retired people who were traveling for fun.

As shy as I was then, I still recognized how special it was to get to converse with these (almost invariably) kind strangers and learn a little bit about their lives and reasons for traveling, all while watching the continent roll by outside and enjoying an actual three-course meal. I am NOT in favor of Amtrak doing away with traditional dining, and although I don’t want to sound like someone’s mom, there is a flip side to the dining alone conundrum: it probably wouldn’t hurt for some of the youngsters to put down their cell phones and spend a few minutes practicing their social skills. Lots of room for improvement on that score (for some of their elders, too).

I would guess the attendants have a pretty good eye for making appropriate seating arrangements, so your chances of getting seated with Uriah Heep are small, or at least, they used to be. The Amtrak staff back in the day appeared to have the entire dining service down to a science. I still remember the dining car attendant who, at 50 miles an hour, dropped the glass of iced tea he was preparing to serve me and than caught it again without either missing a beat or spilling a drop. When I goggled at him, he just shrugged. Years of experience, he said. It was one of the best things I’ve ever seen.

I don’t do much traveling these days, but if I’m ever planning another cross-country vacation, I’ll have to reconsider going by rail if there won’t be a dining car. I’m not saying we all have to make like Lord and Lady Grantham and dress for dinner decked out to the nines, but those thrice-daily trips to the dining car add some structure to the little community you become a part of for the duration of a train trip and are a good way to break up the day. As spectacular as the Colorado Rockies and the High Sierras are, one does like to stand up, move around, and have something to look forward to in the form of a nice meal, a big picture window, and professional service. It seems a shame to see the dining car go the way of the dodo, just sayin’.

P.S. While you’re at it, bring back the china, cloth napkins, silverware, fresh flowers, and silver teapot the article speaks of. Maybe people’s behavior would rise to the occasion if you served the dinner with some flourishes. Life is too short for all these cheap experiences we keep having thrown at us. Amtrak, you are by no means the only people doing these types of things, but I had hoped to someday repeat the first experience I had with Amtrak travel, and it sounds as if it might be something quite different if the time ever comes for me to do that. It would be nice to see somebody somewhere hold the line on all of this.

Would You Buy a Ticket to Isla Nublar?

Over the last couple of years, due to more exposure to cable TV, I’ve found myself pondering a particular question: why is there almost always a Jurassic Park movie playing on one channel or another at any given time? It may not sound like a compelling issue, but it’s one of those idle questions that a cultural mythologist might actually be able to answer. We’ll start by assuming that the explanation has to do with the appeal of the movie and not some dull reason like the fact that broadcast costs were set lower for the franchise due to a relationship between the movie studio and the network. Those are the types of mundane but reality-based reasons that make a mockery out of a well-meaning attempt to explain something in terms of zeitgeist or the collective unconscious or some other depth psychological explanation. For all I know, there could be a mundane reason—but let’s assume not.

I find that unless one of my favorite programs is on, I tend to be drawn toward any Jurassic Park movie that may be on, no matter which one it is, and no matter how many times I’ve seen it. I admit to a special fondness for the earlier movies in the franchise, but that’s probably because the new cast of characters simply hasn’t had enough time to grow on me yet. It’s tough to compete with beloved characters like Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcolm, and John Hammond, and I might have preferred park operations manager Claire Dearing to be a little more of a match for ethologist Owen Grady in Jurassic World—but aside from that, I obviously find the movies entertaining enough to watch over and over.

First and foremost, it’s the dinosaurs, of course. Almost every kid catches the dinosaur bug at one time or another (big kids, too), and it has to do with the fact that these fantastic beasts, which would seem the stuff of legend if we didn’t know they were real, roamed the earth in a far-distant epoch of the past. There are probably vestiges of “paradise lost” in the appeal of these creatures, despite their ferocity, simply because of the fact that they’re lost to us and represent a past to which there is no returning. They're also compelling in the way any top predator, or any overwhelming force of nature, usually is—whether it be a grizzly bear, hurricane, volcano, great white shark, or supernova. It’s evidence of how big the universe is and of how small we are.

Jurassic Park puts forth a vision of what it would look like to recover the past. The people in the films (as well as viewers) are always awed by their first view of the dinosaurs, and the park itself is presented as a kind of tropical Eden. Were it not for the predators—the T-rex, the raptors, and the rest—Jurassic Park would still be awe-inspiring, but the films would lose the engine that drives them, the Man vs. Nature conflict that is ever-present but sometimes glossed over in our contemporary world of computers, manufactured goods, high-tech inventions, and modern cities. Jurassic Park makes the power of nature a central, inescapable fact in the lives of the characters. Whether they live or die depends on their ability to adapt and respond when the park’s carefully planned defenses fail and the dinosaurs overrun the limits humans have tried to place on them.

There is always a message in these movies about the dangers of hubris, a warning about placing too much faith in human control and technology—at the same time, there’s a childlike wonder in the fact of achieving so ambitious a goal and of recovering the distant past. There’s always a character warning others about their presumptuousness and overreach, there’s always someone just looking to make a profit and not really seeing the big picture, and there’s always someone who thinks they can put down any dinosaur insurrection whatsoever if you give them enough firepower. Jurassic Park is a little like A Wizard of Earthsea in its depiction of a dangerous force set loose in the world that resists any and all attempts to bring it under control once it’s out. There’s also a heavy dose of those old literary conflicts Man vs. Himself and Man vs. Man.

Should we reign in our natural curiosity and our growing sophistication in the use of technology because there could be unintended consequences if we persist in using what we’ve learned? Is it hubris or simply a commendable wish to explore the world around us that leads us to experiment with nature? How do we resolve differing attitudes toward nature, our place in it, and the best way to pursue and use knowledge? All of these questions are raised in the films, and to their credit, the films do not try to force an answer on you.

For every lecture Owen Grady or Ian Malcolm gives entrepreneur John Hammond or park manager Claire Dearing, there is a reply in the existence of the dinosaurs themselves in all their grandeur. Would it be better if Jurassic Park had never been created at all? No matter how much havoc ensues, the answer is never an unqualified “no.”

Would it have been better if we had never explored space or invented the Internet? Most people would probably say “no,” but would the answer change if we began to experience more negative consequences: some devastating bacteria brought back from a distant world or a global Internet breakdown affecting banking, communications, security, and other sectors? Jurassic Park evokes the wonder and magic of recovering a bit of lost Eden while also asking us to consider the implications of manipulating nature. Like a Greek tragedy, it warns of the dangers of hubris but then moves beyond tragedy to present scientific endeavor as something glorious. In our post-Edenic world, the movies seem to say, what we do is up to us—as long as we are willing to live with the consequences.

Wordplay’s Lost Marble, Explained

Q. Wordplay, you recently had a photo of what looked like a blue marble on your Facebook page and jokes about the “Lost Marble of Wordplay,” or something like that. Could you tell me what that was about? Was it supposed to be funny?

A. Sure, I can answer that. The lost marble of wordplay is a small blue marble about a quarter-inch in diameter that escaped from my “Lost Marbles” jar one night when I was trying to move something in the car.

Q. You mean, it’s an actual marble?

A. Yes. A blue one. It has some friends, too, and they all live in the Lost Marbles jar when they aren’t escaping and rolling inconveniently under seats and into inaccessible corners. I probably said a few bad words the night it happened.

Q. You actually have a “Lost Marbles” jar, or is that a joke, too?

A. Well, it may be a joke, but it’s an actual jar, too.

Q. Can’t you explain it any better than that? I don’t see why you’d waste time and space on something like that. It’s not even really that funny.

A. Well, it may not be that funny, but it was more just a matter of seeing a photo of something very unlike the marble and then just making a joke out of the size disparity.

Q. But why is it funny?

A. Well, think of it this way. Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called “Anecdote of the Jar”: “I placed a jar in Tennessee/And round it was, upon a hill.” It’s an object that’s somewhat out of place, insignificant, and slightly ridiculous in a way, but everything in the landscape seems to rearrange itself around it so that it assumes an outsized importance. It’s sort of like someone just saying, “OK, everybody look at this,” and all of a sudden, that jar is the center of the universe. It’s kind of like that.

Q. Who’s Wallace Stevens?

A. Well, now, did you pay tuition to Wordplay so that we are now responsible for teaching you about modern poetry? The check must have gotten lost in the mail.

Q. Geez, it was a civil question.

A. And a civil answer, considering. Just type “Anecdote of the Jar” into Google.

Q. So it was a literal jar?

A. Probably metaphorical, actually. Unlike my “Lost Marbles” jar.

Q. So, how exactly did you lose the marbles again?

A. A unicorn jumped on the hood of the car, dislodging a sleeping and entirely innocent bison, and in the ensuing fray (which I failed to get a photo of), the jar fell over.

Q. But . . . Were the unicorn and bison in the car with you, or were they on the hood? I thought you said . . .

A. I’ll tell it to you straight: there’s no room in my car for either a unicorn or a bison. But don’t you think the sudden appearance of a unicorn would startle you enough to make you drop something?

Q. There’s no such thing as unicorns; you’re making that up.

A. Well, yes, but they did somehow become the national animal of Scotland.

Q. So you were in Scotland when it happened? How did you get your car over there?

A. It grew the wings of Pegasus and flew over the Atlantic at breakneck speed, landing in a patch of heather.

Q. But what caused it to grow wings? Cars can’t grow wings.

A. Not under normal circumstances.

The Wordplay One-Room Schoolhouse

With school being back in session here and in other places around the country, Wordplay is feeling its teacher-y side coming out. You may be of the opinion that one college degree (or two if you really must) should be enough for anyone. Here on this blog, we realize that not everyone has our propensity for running around studying everything that interests us. If we were going to design a curriculum for a basic understanding of Western Culture that would be accessible to anyone without the time or money to sink into four years on a well-appointed campus, we’d base it on what’s essentially a twelve-course curriculum.

You should realize that, while we’re in general agreement with the basic outlines of a humanities education, Wordplay might lend more weight to certain subjects than others would do. This is based on our own experience of what’s useful, and by the way, we mean practically useful as well as just sort of “good for you in a general sort of way.” It’s practically useful because knowledge in certain areas helps you understand references that pop up over and over again in conversation, the sciences, the arts, and the media. Never again would you have to wonder, for instance, why in the hell someone would name a moon Chiron or what the Oracle of Delphi was if you had had a course in Greek mythology.

When I look back over my education, I realize that even in elementary school, I had some very formative experiences. I’m not even going into the old-fashioned way I learned how to spell through phonics class (and it’s nice to not have to worry about spelling and punctuation: it frees your mind for other things). There was the teacher who often read to us from a world folktales book after lunch, and the geography class that made me realize what an interesting place the world, with all its varied cultures, really is. There was the Shakespeare class in high school. (Everyone needs one. I’m sorry to tell you this if you don’t like Shakespeare, but maybe you’ll thank me for it some day.) There was the World History class that opened a window to the past, and the many English classes that gave me a wide introduction to reading in what is called the “Western Canon.”

I don’t think I regret a single literature class I ever took, but aside from that, here are the courses I would recommend.

1. Greek and Roman mythology. Not surprisingly.
2. Renaissance Art.
3. Introduction to Shakespeare.
4. Music Appreciation. (You can also get a long way just by listening to a lot of music. I once had a crush on a violinist, and you wouldn’t believe how helpful that was in introducing me to a lot of classical music I wouldn’t have heard otherwise.)
5. Middle English. (This means any course in which you study the literature in Middle English, not in translation. The day you start to hear the music that underlies the English language—which is most apparent when you start to separate the rhythms from the meaning—is the day you’ll agree with me about this, and not a minute sooner, I predict.)
6. Introduction to Poetry. You really ought to have a separate class on the English Romantic poets, I think. Understanding why female English majors tend to develop crushes on Keats probably doesn’t hurt the boys that are interested in the female English majors—but make responsible use of your knowledge.
7. Any course that combines literature and depth psychology.
8. Introduction to Philosophy. (And Logic, too, if you can get it.)
9. Introduction to Film.
10. World Religions.
11. A foreign language of your choice. Or more than one, if possible. Then you’ll know just enough to be dangerous, like I am.
12. World History.

Of course, everyone needs to understand science and mathematics, too; they should be part of a good education. I personally disliked Algebra II and Trigonometry and went no further than that in math, and I have trouble wrapping my mind around certain concepts in Physics, but I recommend going as far as you can. My list is more for an understanding of culture than of science—but of course, science is a part of culture, too. I really don’t believe you have to cover everything; sometimes an introduction to a subject is all you need to open up not only that topic but to lead you into connections between various areas of knowledge. That’s when things really start to get fun.

Dragons Above and Other Wonders

There are certain things in life that really can’t be explained. I’m sure you could give a few examples of your own, but here’s one of mine—and I admit that I was reticent, actually reticent, about posting this when it happened because it seemed too fantastic to be believed, and I thought people might think I was making it up. I didn’t get a photo, you see, and thought I might be accused of exaggerating. I was having trouble believing it, and I was there.

However, as you know, Wordplay strives ever to tell the truth, and if we left this out, it would be a dereliction of duty, I think. What happened was this: I’d spent some time one afternoon putting together a photo essay about dragons trending in the culture. As I recall, it was right after that, as I was leaving the coffeehouse, that I walked out into a brewing storm. I drove over to the grocery store, marveling at the big mess of clouds swirling overhead.

While I was on the way over there, I started to notice that one cloud in particular had a shape to it. It was a long, black coil, like a snake, or, actually, a dragon, with a dragon head, a long, long body stretching and twisting across half the sky, and a mouth open as if ready to spew fire. I have never seen a cloud shaped like that and am sure it has something to do with one big air mass meeting another along a fairly uniform line. I know there had to be a scientific reason for that gigantic, rolled-up carpet shape, but it was still jaw-dropping, like other sights in nature you come across once in a great while. I wish I had taken a photograph, but lightning was striking in both the far and middle distance, and for safety’s sake, I stayed in the car until it all passed.

Besides thinking people wouldn’t believe me, I admit that I was so amazed by the appearance and timing of this cloud dragon that I started to wonder if it was some kind of a trick. Now, I know I once posted a blog about wild weather events I’d been caught up in and my speculations about whether someone (AKA the government) might be experimenting with cloud-seeding, etc. Even if someone is working on that, in some obscure bureau or other, I can’t imagine that anyone’s weather experiments have advanced to the level of cloud-sculpting on that scale, even if they know how to make precipitation fall.

I suppose I was trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, but I saw a program on The Weather Channel about “The World’s Wildest Weather Events” in which various phenomena like this were documented and discussed. One of the meteorologists was discussing the very rare phenomenon of straight-edge clouds, something she herself had witnessed, and she said that she had a difficult time believing the evidence of her own eyes even though she could explain the science behind it. It was, truly, an incredible sight, but no more so than what I had seen. I have to thank the meteorologist for sharing her story, which gave me the impetus to think over what I had seen and decide that, no matter how fantastic the event, not sharing it because it seemed unbelievable was precisely the wrong tack. After all, this blog exists as a forum for exploring the presence of mythology in everyday life, and if a cloud dragon appearing over your head is not an irruption of mythology into everyday life, I don’t know what would be.

When something like this happens, I’m tempted, as possibly you are, to try to come up with an explanation. I’m not sure there is one. Of course, Jung called this type of thing synchronicity and believed that it was evidence of a sort of dialogue between the human psyche and nature. Even if this is true, how it all works is still a mystery. I consider myself a capable writer, but I’m not at the level of conjuring up castles and dragons in the air, no matter how in tune my brain waves may be with the atmospheric vibe on a given day. Maybe it’s just a matter of having your eyes open and noticing things. The more active your imagination is, the more there is to see. And then, of course, you have to remember to look up.

Ballad for Summer’s End

Well, it happened again. I heard a song on the Starbucks playlist whose artist I didn’t know. This time, I was fast enough to ask the barista while the song was still playing, but the app wouldn’t open. Another pleasant baritone, another catchy melody, but the names of both elude me, and all due to a computer slowdown. I’m not sure if it’s the same slowdown we’ve been having at work, but it’s really no matter—the point is, if I don’t like a song, it will probably play ad nauseam. If I do like it, and ask someone about it, I’m just a little too late to find out what it is, and they won’t play it again for another three months at least.

You’re probably thinking, “Wordplay, can’t you find anything else to write about?” And the answer is, “Not really.” There’s a real end of the summer feeling here: it’s hot, but very still; students have started to appear here and there, but at the same time, there’s a feeling of absence, as if quite a few people are out of town on vacation. It’s neither here nor there, just that typical August feeling of vacancy. If you’re in a university town and are neither a student nor a professor, you sense the pause in the academic calendar, but since it doesn’t affect you, you have neither anxiety about getting everything done in time nor the anticipation of a brand-new academic year. It’s just a hot, drowsy lull. It still looks like summer, there’s no hint of fall yet (some years the nights have started to cool a bit by now, but not this year), and if you work in retail, you’re probably unpacking things for a Labor Day sale. You’re still thinking ice cream; apple cider hasn’t yet entered your thoughts; and winter is still as a distant dream.

This is not going to be the lyrical “changing of the seasons” post I did a couple of times in the past. Not really feeling that elegiac Wordsworth melancholy right now; it’s more of a heat-induced stupefaction. If I could encapsulate what I am feeling, it would be more along the lines of, “If only I had my own front porch, and my own pitcher of iced tea, so I could sit and sip and listen to the crickets in peace and look up at the stars once in a while.” I’ve never had that in my entire adult life, which seems like a shame, but the next place I live will have at least a balcony, if not a porch, if there’s any justice in the world. I lived in Lexington for many years with barely a glimpse of fireflies and certainly no place to sit outside and enjoy the long summer evenings that are one of the best things about Kentucky, but maybe that will change some time.

With nothing else going on, this seems like a good time to entertain idle questions, in lieu of falling asleep in the heat and ending up down some rabbit hole. So here’s one: if you were in the same predicament as the people in the movie Groundhog Day but actually got to pick the day that keeps repeating, what day would it be? For me, it would probably be a day in early summer, a day of bright blue skies and puffy clouds. I don’t think it would be August—although if I ever get that porch swing and glass of iced tea, I might change my mind about that. Spring is gorgeous here, but it’s not quite summer. Fall is also quite nice much of the time, but it means summer is over with for another year. And although winter has its own beauty, it’s possibly enjoyed best of all in small doses—at least, that’s my opinion.

So this is my end-of-summer post, and we’ll dispense with all the Persephone and Demeter references and Keatsian ode-to-autumn rhapsodies this time around because I’m afraid I was starting to repeat myself a little bit. I will report to you with a hint of disapproval that since I work in retail, I’ve already spotted the presence of “seasonal merchandise” and am dreading the moment, which will probably be next week, when I walk to the front of the store and see Halloween yard decor and animatronic ghouls. Not because I’m scared of those goobers, but because it interferes with my seasonal clock. Werewolves in August? Sheesh, whose idea was that?

Extra Limbs and Other Burning Issues

The other day, I posted an item I’d seen in The Atlantic’s “Photos of the Week” of a little girl in a city crosswalk being followed by a dinosaur from the Australian theater company, Erth. Erth was performing at Underbelly’s Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, when the photo was taken, and until you notice the pair of very human legs underneath the puppet, the illusion is quite enchanting, like something from a children’s picture book.

By coincidence, I was looking at a picture of Drogon, one of the dragons from “Game of Thrones,” the other day, trying to figure out why there seemed to be an extra pair of legs underneath it. We seem to have a minor trend of extra pairs of legs under large reptilian creatures, extinct and/or fantastic; Wordplay is unaware of the origin of this trend, but now that we have seen it in the culture, we feel obliged to point it out. If we don’t address it, someone might become alarmed and wonder, “What can it mean?”, unleashing a tsunami of unintended effects in his or her efforts to find out. Besides, I’ve been casting about for a topic this week, and this will do just as well as anything else.

While my former opinion on mythology in the culture was that everyone should try to be knowing observers, I’ve come to believe that this isn’t a pastime everyone excels at. In fact, some people are downright disasters when it come to “seeing through” and should probably be placed under house arrest for their efforts—but that’s someone else’s department. I’ve got my hands full with dragons and dinosaurs, am an observer only, and hope to be nowhere within a hundred miles of any round-ups that take place. Of course, I make no claim to always being right either, and my observations are strictly my own.

What about these extra pairs of extra-large reptilian legs, though?

It’s kind of weird. In the photo from the Underbelly Fringe program, you can clearly see the legs once you know they’re there. I didn’t notice them at first, probably because my eye was so charmed by the illusion—in other words, I wanted to see a dinosaur in the crosswalk, so my brain edited out the extra pair of legs. I was seeing what I wished to see, falling in with the illusion, which is exactly what you do when you go to the theater. The photo is an example of what happens when theater spills out of the theater house and into everyday life. It’s something unexpected, a little bit of magic in the midst of mundane reality. If you were on your way to work or running an errand and saw that scene, it would probably make your whole day.

Now, the image of Drogon is a bit more problematic. The more I look at it, the less I can figure it out. One of the legs doesn’t even look like a leg, because it doesn’t seem to have a foot: it’s more like an enormous paddle. And are there three legs on the dragon’s right side, including that claw hanging down? What’s become of all the legs on the left side, because all I see are one leg and a wing. Of course, we’re talking about a creature of fantasy here, but it’s a dragon, not an amoeba, so is a symmetrical arrangement of arms and legs too much to ask?

Maybe, after all, it’s just the angle. Wordplay does not wish to manufacture a crisis. Because no other explanation comes to mind, other than the possibility that this camera angle is meant to imply that there’s something freakish about this creature, we will take it that this is simply not Drogon’s best side. Since a dragon is already kind of a freakish thing, we see no reason to double down on this idea . . . But we were not writers or special effects crew for “Game of Thrones” and have no particular insights into their reasons for crafting this scene as they did.

I guess what this really demonstrates is that there isn’t always a clear answer to everything. Where things are unclear, the mind will often try to provide clarity by manufacturing a credible explanation, but it’s often little more than projection. Entertaining perhaps, revealing certainly, but at the end of the day . . . something you made up. If you’re good enough at it, sometimes you get paid for it.

Music as Soul-Stirring and Music as Wallpaper

Speaking of music (as we were last week), Wordplay has had plenty of interesting listening experiences with playlists in public places, including Starbucks. Our official stance on music in public places is that, if it isn’t really, really good, it should at least be unobtrusive. Many places today play whatever they’ve got at such earsplitting volume that whether or not it’s to your taste, it forces itself on your attention. Since people are usually in coffeehouses to read or talk, this doesn’t seem designed for the customer’s comfort, but whatever. Customers only keep Starbucks, Panera, Kroger, and other places in business—no need to worry about what they like and don’t like.

However, it’s not all bad news. Starbucks, in particular, can apparently switch from one playlist to another with ease and occasionally does a good job of mixing it up. It’s been a while since I got really discouraged with one of their playlists, but it did happen recently when they decided to play all Elton John 16 hours a day. It’s not a slam at him to say any playlist does better with variety, and a steady diet of anything can get old quickly. My understanding is that they were commemorating the release of the film biopic of his life, but I would have done this by throwing a few extra songs of his into the mix along with some of those of his contemporaries—just enough to give a flavor of the era.

It’s quite possible, though, for me to hear the same songs many times without really hearing them, because for me, they’re just the background to whatever else I’m doing. Once in a while, I’ll realize that I like a song that I don’t know the name of, or I’ll wonder who the artist is. If you want to identify the song or artist you’re listening to in Starbucks, you can do so with the Starbucks app and Spotify. If you don’t have that, you have to do it the way I do, by typing into Google whatever you can decipher of the lyrics. Most of the time, you’ll find it on the first try, but not always. There is one recent indie pop song by an unknown artist whose plangent melody I really like, but since I only know one partial line, I haven’t been able to track it down. The chorus is either “All I heard was silence” or possibly “All I had were filings,” and the only thing I can come up with is a very different song that isn’t the one I’m looking for.

The other day, I heard a song that’s drifted through Starbucks several times recently, Noel Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” which is, of course, a classic from the Great American Songbook* (actually, the Great British Songbook; see the note below). This version has a particularly powerful and expressive vocalist, and I became curious to know who it was. I was too late to ask the barista, who could have looked it up while it was playing, and the suggestion I got to check the playlists on Spotify didn’t work because there is apparently a new (and entirely different) song by a newer artist that pops up on playlists in its stead. I spent an hour that morning listening to various versions of the song—not a bad way to while away an hour—before coming across Lena Horne’s version. I’m not certain the one I heard is the same as hers, but the vocal is similarly powerful and almost, one might say, life-changing.

Starbucks is hit and miss with its music, but sometimes they strike gold. Although there is a tremendous variety of music on the playlists, it manages to sound corporate about 75 percent of the time, at least to me. There are exceptions that make you sit up and listen, but otherwise, it’s music as decor—which I guess is exactly what they have in mind. If I wanted to hear opera one minute and “The Streets of Laredo” the next, I guess I’d have to move to San Francisco and hang out at Caffe Trieste, if indeed it’s still there. Many things that once were seem to be fading with the times.

*Although Lena Horne was American, Noel Coward was British. Wordplay regrets the error.

Thus Spake George Jones

After last week’s post, a tribute to Greek tragedy as seen by a bot, I started thinking about some of the Greek tragedies that I myself have read. Last week’s brief sampling of a play written by a graduate student’s bot featured so many familiar motifs that I started thinking about the genre’s essential plot elements. I can tell you this: in plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, family strife plays a major role. If it’s not a wife killing a husband, it’s a parent killing a child. There are grand passions, grand betrayals, clashes between affairs of state and private duty, reunions after long separations, acts of revenge, occasional acts of loyalty (which seemingly never go unpunished), matricides, filicides, parricides. In short, Greek tragedies can be gloomy affairs, no matter how great the themes they are exploring.

I’ve concluded that Greek tragedy was the country music of 5th-century Athens. You know it’s true. If there’s any species of high art more calculated to have you crying in your beer by the jukebox at intermission, it’s the works of the ancient tragedians. Some of you Generation X and Yers may be scratching your heads doubtfully, and in a way I don’t blame you, because regardless of your familiarity with the ancients, you may never actually have experienced country music the way I did while growing up. While the plays of Classical Greece may be frozen in time, coming to us across an immense expanse of time and distance, country music has changed since my youth. Back then, in the heyday of Conway Twitty, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Porter Wagoner, and others, many of the songs I heard on country radio were painful to listen to. I don’t mean sad, I mean painful.

Those were the days of what I would call hard country as opposed to the soft country of today. I’m not an expert on country music but did grow up surrounded by it, as it was favored by both my parents. I often wondered why, because it seemed to me that if you were feeling OK to start with, listening to it would depress you, and if you were already depressed when you heard it, you’d soon feel infinitely worse. It was a mirror of things only half-understood that seemed to be happening around me, and why on earth would I want to listen to reality amplified as a form of entertainment? Not for me the ballads of unfaithfulness and Carroll County accidents—I gravitated as a moth toward a flame to the melodious soft rock of The Carpenters, Bread, Don McLean, and other gentle troubadours of the day.

I may have been absorbed in a romantic haze, but given the choice between that and the utterly too literal realities of the “Harper Valley PTA” variety, I feel sure I would make the same choice again. Nothing wrong with a little escapism in the midst of ugly realities, if escapism is your only choice. I think people do this as adults, too.

Nowadays, of course, a lot of country music is indistinguishable from pop music. Several times, while alone in my car on long trips, I have tuned into country music stations in places like Missouri and Ohio and been wrapped in a cocoon of love by various male baritones all singing of faithfulness and understanding in a way that would have made George Jones cringe. (I believe it was Mr. Jones who lamented the change in country music away from the adultery/murder/prison/drunkenness end of the county toward the kinder, gentler side of the district aspired to today. At least, he once did so in an interview.)

I will admit that some of today’s songs can be sappy (as opposed to starkly depressive as in the old days). Nonetheless, if I’m trying to get somewhere on the road, I’d rather by accompanied by a sympathetic chorus of we’ve-had-our-consciousness-raised good old boys, with an occasional renegade thrown in—mostly alluding to the nobler aspects of romance and human nature—than by a Conway Twitty dirge that might force me off the road into a ditch. It would probably take a listen to both sides of the first two Carpenters albums and a goodly dose of The Little River Band to set me right after that (and that still might not be enough).

Without a doubt, there are high culture advocates out there who see no connection at all between Greek tragedy and Johnny Cash and would sooner drink hemlock than admit they might be accessing the same dark strain of human experience. Personally, I wonder if the distinction between “high” and “low” art is a defense mechanism more than a valid division, but in any case, allow me just to say that Clytemnestra murdering both her husband and Cassandra had nothing on Johnny Cash singing “Delia’s Gone.” If you were in the bar at the intermission of Agamemnon and they started playing that song, you’d be out of the theater in a flash, Chardonnay unfinished, slamming your car door, spinning out, and searching desperately on the dial for a latter-day country music lullaby of the blandest variety to soothe your disordered senses. You might even be desperate enough for disco.

You Are Now Cereal

Phi Beta Kappa featured a post on its Facebook page the other day from Mr. Spencer Klavan, a graduate student who trained a bot to write a Greek play by having it watch many hours of tragedies. He stated that the excerpt in the post was only the first page, but to me, everything that needed to be said was right there on that page, rendering the rest entirely superfluous (though it was all excellent, I’m sure).

With a stage direction indicating that the setting is the exterior of a “Cursed Dynastic Palace,” you know you’re in the hands of a straightforward playwright who’s going to let you know exactly where you stand. And the rest of this one-page mini-play is just as carefully observed, with characters such as long-suffering wife Dyspepsia and chief god Stankrocles (in charge of mathematics and ancestral guilt, that double whammy of random but somehow meaningful jurisdictions) and an authentic Chorus that really knows its stuff: “Welcome home, Great King ! Watch out ! Everything is normal !”

The action is crisp and the verbs active. Dyspepsia carries a big knife, Stankrocles eats a sandwich, the Chorus dances, and Dundertron laughs. There are greetings, warnings, forebodings, dancing, and dead lions. And the climax, in which Stankrocles turns everyone into barley, is as satisfying as you could wish. What else is there to be said after that? You are now cereal. Deal with it. If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell it like it is, no holds barred (someone besides Wordplay), your search is at an end with Mr. Klavan’s bot. The sheer audacity of its storytelling and bold willingness to take risks in delivering a Greek tragedy attuned to our gainful (that is, grainful) times will dazzle you, make you laugh, and take your breath away.

As a drama that captures not only the spirit of an earlier age, but the nihilist zeitgeist of ours, this play cannot be beat. And besides . . . What? What are you asking? Catharsis? Well, what do you want that for? Are you feeling bad? All Wordplay can tell you is, if you don’t get catharsis from barley right now, you likely never will. It’s barley or nothing. And that’s some good fiber, too.

Sunrise With Parking Lot

This week’s post was inspired by a photo I took two days ago and posted to the Wordplay Facebook page. Here is the photo:

When I captioned the picture, I explained that I just happened to see the crepuscular rays when I was walking across the parking lot at the grocery store early that morning. I had never tried to photograph crepuscular rays with the sunrise and wasn’t sure I could capture the effect, but the photo turned out pretty well. What I like about it is the depiction of the ordinary in juxtaposition to something verging on extraordinary. When I was little, I thought that God looked like the rays of the sun streaming down (or in this case, up) from behind a cloud. What I see here is a schematic of what the universe may really look like if there is some immanent spiritual reality existing within it.

As I understand transcendentalism, that system posits the existence of God and a spiritual realm “out there” somewhere, beyond the physical world. I’m not sure I know where that might be, since I’m kind of a material girl myself, but we’ll put that aside. I don’t see a division between “spiritual” and “material,” believing that if God is anywhere, he is all around us. I admit that there is a certain beauty in imagining special realms set apart—over the rainbow, in the heavens, in fairyland, or wherever you may imagine it to be. But I look at it this way: It’s possible that spiritual reality co-exists with or intersects everyday reality in countless places but is only glimpsed at certain moments when a slight “separation” occurs, such as the one depicted above. I wasn’t even in a good mood when it happened—I was just there, which proves you don’t necessarily need to get in the right frame of mind to see it.

Now you may say, “But it’s only a sunrise,” and that’s true, of course. It is a sunrise, but I don’t know what’s “only” about it. I do know that now and then something wondrous seems to arise in the midst of an otherwise ordinary moment, something that inspires awe. I’m merely speaking for myself, but I think other people have felt the same thing. In “The Prophet,” Kahlil Gibran said, “Could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; and you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.” Now, it is a very tall order to suppose that one must accept everything just as it is, but I take his point. There is always beauty to be experienced, if you can bring yourself to see it.

I mentioned Hinduism last week, which reminds me that there’s a scene in the Bhagavad Gita (which you were supposed to read LAST YEAR and report back to me on, REMEMBER?) in which Krishna, who is talking to Arjuna about his doubts and fears just before a big battle, opens his mouth to show Arjuna what eternity looks like. Krishna, Arjuna’s friend, is really the god Vishnu in human form, an appearance he takes on in order to keep his divinity from overwhelming the ordinary humans he comes in contact with. It is awe-inspiring and chilling to think of eternity being that close to one, as if at any moment you might tumble into a black hole without even knowing it’s there. Many traditions, though, have stories of people doing just that.

One minute, you’re in Kansas, the next you’re in Oz. You’re on the way to the village to buy some bread, you come across a fairy ring, and you’re whisked away to Fairyland, where you may spend a hundred years before anyone realizes you’re gone. Or you’re a Grail knight and wake up one morning on the ground after spending the night in a castle that is now nowhere to be seen. Or you chase a rabbit down a hole and end up in a rather peculiar place with mad hatters and Cheshire cats.

I take these as metaphors for spiritual realities that, rather than being somewhere else, are really intertwined with everyday reality but can only be accessed via imagination, inspiration, or possibly some precipitating event. Some people are suspicious of the word “spiritual,” so allow me also to say that for me, talking about spirituality is akin to talking about a richness of experience that recognizes interconnections among all things and some kind of underlying order while also recognizing that we may not quite understand everything. I prefer to leave room for a little bit of mystery—which is probably only proper from a scientific point of view. Hubris can be dangerous—as the stories also tell us.

Germane to the Discussion

It’s true: we are living in a synchronistic universe. I wrote about similarities between art and life recently, and I was only using the language of art (Impressionism, Cubism) to describe my own experience. Really, though, it seems that other people may be caught up in the same slipstream (to dip into physics for a moment). How else to explain the phenomena of “doubling”?

It’s one thing for me to take a photo and then remark on how much it reminds me of a certain work of art. It’s another to come across a news service photo of an entire group of people in another country who have somehow managed, in their innocence, to re-create the scene in yet another famous work of art. The similarity of this group of German sunbathers to the people depicted in Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884” also reinforces my point about current reality being definitively Post-Impressionist. Not that I was thinking Pointillism exactly, but, sure, that works. We are out of the garden, but the colors are still there.

If the universe is truly—as the Hindus tell us—a dream issuing as a giant bubble from the mind of the sleeping Vishnu, lounging there on his cosmic ocean, perhaps we are currently living in the Art 101 bubble. Maybe from your wave, it looks Pointillist; from mine, it looks Cubist; and from someone else’s, it looks Surreal, but in any case—it’s all art, so don’t sweat it. We’re all living in a giant museum, and while you may be able to do little more than shuffle from one room to another, there’s always another masterpiece right around the corner. Think what you have to look forward to!

Now, I have heard of planned events in which people deliberately set out to re-create a famous work of art with living and breathing participants. That’s been done with Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in the Netherlands, and in Laguna Beach, California, they have an annual festival of “Living Pictures” in which masterworks are brought to life in a Pageant of the Masters. (By coincidence, and I swear I didn’t know this until two minutes ago, this year’s festival begins today and runs through August 31st. No fooling—here’s the link.)

Now if you don’t happen to live in a trendy place like the left or right coast of the United States, or Amsterdam, you can still get your share of arts and recreation. For example, I happen to know that just north of here, in Columbus, Ohio, there is a park in which “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” has been reproduced using plants—so, no human actors, but the resemblance is still remarkable, as I can tell you myself, having seen it with my own eyes on a long-ago trip. Should your plans take you in that direction, check it out! I have photos that I took myself on my own Sunday morning visit, and while some of the hedges may have needed a bit of trimming, the overall effect was quite impressive.

Wordplay would like to be able to take credit for being prescient in all of this, but all we can truly say is that, given a surf board, we will ride a wave on Vishnu’s ocean as long as the next person. Longer, even.

Meme Able Me

One thing I may have neglected to tell you is that Wordplay now has its own Facebook page, and you can visit us there any time you feel you just can’t make it another day without us. (I’m really not being facetious, or not totally so. These things happen.) I thought about doing this several years ago when I was trying to promote my book and came across some writerly advice about starting a Facebook page. I don’t actually remember the reason I didn’t do it; in any case, the page is more an adjunct to the blog than it is to the book. As you know, Wordplay ranges over many interests since its underlying theme is mythology and everyday life. It has a structure but a very open one due to the subject matter.

Recently someone asked me for input on some labyrinth-building projects here, and while I was glad to give my opinion, I had to explain that my interest in the topic was not from the standpoint of building or using labyrinths but more from a literary stance. I think that the book, while timely, actually has a long shelf life and could be read by anyone with an interest in literary criticism or epistemology, at any time. I also ventured into social criticism with follow-up work that explored some of the social and political reasons why labyrinths may have started trending in the first place. While these topics remain an interest, I felt several years ago that I’d done as much as I wanted to with them and was ready to go in other directions.

It’s challenging to write a blog concerned with cultural mythology. I see a lot of things on the Internet and elsewhere that I don’t feel are worth commenting on or wasting anyone else’s time with. I’ve taken to posting links and images on the Facebook page that catch my eye, and if you’ve seen it, you know that I usually take a light-hearted approach. My voice is the same there as it is here, but the Facebook page is more conducive to sharing links and graphics and creating memes. I sometimes laugh when I’m working on it.

A couple of days ago, I came across a video in my Facebook newsfeed from Mom Versus. The heroine of this Facebook page often posts videos of herself trying out recipes and is in a decidedly humorous vein. After posting a video of her making an American Flag Cake, I was playing around with the idea of “Southern belles” and kept thinking of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, which was, as you may remember, entitled “The Bells.” I ended up branching off from my original idea but still managed to create a meme in which I brought together two very disparate things, Mom Versus and Game of Thrones. (If anyone can find similarities in completely unrelated things, it’s Wordplay. Remember Say Yes to the Dress?)

I plan to continue the Facebook page along with the blog; the page has more than once served as a point of inspiration for that week’s blog post. Sometimes it’s as simple as a photo I took myself and posted; other times, the inspiration comes from something in the culture. I’m often hesitant to “buy into” trends I see or to comment on the news (holds head in hands), but with humor, a lot of things are possible. You can make a serious point without seeming to, or you can just be silly.

Please check us out on Facebook if you feel moved to do so. You’ll recognize that both “feet” and “cups” (two very everyday things) have played a somewhat outsized role in some of our doings so far. I’m not really sure I can explain why this has happened, just that it has.

Wordplay Feels You on Fake News

Today was a nice enough summer day, I guess, but nothing like as simple as some of the lazy summer days I remember from the past. Modern life is constantly throwing complications at you. If reading the news makes you cry, forget the news and just find a good book, right? Sounds good in concept, so you head over to the library and wait for it to open, getting bitten by mosquitoes and sweating in the humidity, because the building opens late on Sundays. Finally, the hour arrives, and you go in with the other patrons, looking forward to getting a new book in your hands, although experience has taught you not to get too excited these days about anything.

You plug in, pull up NoveList, and start browsing titles. You know, because you’ve done this before, that some of them will sound amazing but prove to be disappointing, but still, facts are facts: English majors are ever hopeful about books. After looking for a while, taking the time to check your account to make sure that newfangled “Book History” is still turned off (because, a little too Big-Brotherish, even if seemingly harmless for someone with mild tastes), you home in on a couple of books. One sounds Edwardian and mildly interesting, and the other catches your eye because you saw it at the bookstore’s checkout counter recently and noted that it was a retelling of a Shakespeare play.

You check out both and settle in for a little reading in a refreshingly quiet back section of the library (relatively speaking: all libraries are noisier than they once were, especially this one). You’re a few pages into the first book when that familiar sinking feeling sets in, because, alas, the story is not what you thought it would be at all. You’re not losing yourself in the pages, you’re getting annoyed, whether because the story is not what you were hoping for or because the author’s mannerisms draw attention away from the story, you’re not sure which.

Fine, put that one down and pick up the other one, the one based on Shakespeare. This is an author whom, despite his having lost you completely on his last outing, you have decided to gift with another chance. At one time, he seemed unobjectionable and even distinguished, but now . . . Did you even get off the first page or were you all the way to the second page before you began to quoth, “Nevermore!” and slam that book shut, too.

Many artists seem preoccupied these days with “peacocking.” What else do you call it when a capable and even remarkable writer good enough to write a bestseller and/or literary prize winner starts preening, winking, talking to you from the back of his/her hand, and spouting nonsense. They might as well title the book, The Only Book You Need to Read, and in substitution for other content, drop in the words, “I know everything, I’m so important, and even if I don’t know what I’m talking about, I need your undivided attention.” Someone has gotten hold of these people and ruined them.

In complete fairness, let me say that the day may come when I will have to retract some of my opinions, too. I’ve considered opposite points of view too many times for all of the ideas I’ve expressed to be true—some of them have to be wrong. You do the best you can with what you know, and when people seem determined to spread disinformation, it’s difficult to know where the truth is. In that case, you consider alternate possibilities and try not to get overly attached to a single point of view. Rather than “wishy-washy,” I prefer the Keatsian term “negative capability”—the capacity to move among different points of view without settling too firmly into one entrenched position. Yes, confusion and doubt are the hazards of this type of thinking, but I’ve never been able to understand how some people can be so sure of everything anyway. How do you know that? Don’t you think it might be better to hold off on trumpeting something until you know more about it? I feel on firm ground with very few things besides the Golden Rule as a good (though not perfect) starting point.

When I write non-fiction, I try to be accurate and without malice. When I write fiction, I just try to capture the story out of my head (no small task) and tell it as well as I can. Artistic integrity, to me, is keeping the crafting of the story as your single aim. Name-dropping, scoring points on enemies (yes, I know Dante did it, thanks for bringing that to my attention), and spreading propaganda are artistic sins that we hope most people try to avoid.

If you’re wondering, I did end up leaving the library with a book, a collection of the short novels of John Steinbeck. When I’m in doubt, I go back to the classics. I’m sure Mr. Steinbeck had his faults, too, but at least he can’t alienate me by trying too hard to be in-the-know.

Urania Explains How Life Became Cubist

I’ve only had two art history classes in my life, but they obviously exercised a huge influence on my imagination. I sometimes think in terms of images I’ve seen; maybe another way to say this is that the study of art history primed me to notice moments when art imitates life. Great paintings wouldn’t have the power to enchant us if they didn’t contain archetypal material, and that sometimes creates a feeling of recognition when you least expect it.

I’ve written about this before. I had lived in my last apartment for many years before I realized that the view of the roof lines on the opposite side of the street reminded me very much of René Magritte’s The Dominion of Light, especially at certain times of the day. Peach-colored sunsets have more than once made me think of Maxfield Parrish’s extravagant and billowing clouds. I was looking out my back window one summer day late in the afternoon when the quality of light on the opposite wall reminded me of Winslow Homer. I wasn’t even sure what I had in mind when this happened—possibly the light on the sail in Homer’s Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)—but that wall definitely looked like Homer.

Recently, I was on a downtown street near the courthouse when I was stopped in my tracks by a view of mixed architectural styles and roof lines visible from where I was standing. It instantly brought Thomas Cole’s The Architect’s Dream to mind, and although the elements in the real-life view didn’t match those in the painting point for point, there was enough similarity to make it seem that the painting had, in a manner, sprung to life before my eyes. A long, horizontal, arcade-like building, a pediment, pyramid shapes, a massy square building with rounded arches, a Gothic steeple—all were there in a jumble, just as in the painting.

A similar art-related experience I’ve had more than once is to see a painting that creates a feeling of déjà vu that I can’t explain. Sometimes I feel that I may only have encountered the place in my imagination and not in reality at all. A Pre-Raphaelite painting of a solitary knight pausing in a forest may remind me of reading King Arthur for the first time, just as a moonlit scene of an Italian bridge may bring to mind a place encountered in one of Mary Stewart’s novels.

I once took an online quiz that was supposed to tell me “which famous painting I was.” Whatever the result, was I was flattered by it—I believe it may have been something by one of the Impressionists. But if you asked me a different question—“Which artist could best paint life as you are now living it?”—I would have to say Picasso, and it would be the style of painting in which the same face is depicted from several angles at once. Of course, a Hillmanian would have a perspective like this, but more than that, I think modern life (as I experience it, at least) creates a feeling of time speeding up in some places and slowing down in others that often leaves things a little out of joint. I experience myself much as I always have, but I seem to be caught in a crosswind of dimensional planes that leaves me goggling at the unlikelihood of it all. I’m ahead of myself in some areas and lagging behind in others; my elbow may be in one place, my foot in another, and my shoulder in another plane entirely.

I never particularly identified with Cubism before, but life and art have some surprising corners. I just saw an article that mentioned some sort of a hole on the edge of the Milky Way that’s been identified by a Harvard scientist. It’s far too vast to be caused by a star, she says, and the culprit may possibly be “dark matter.” Don’t you just know it! Dark matter interfering not only with the galaxy but with my nice Impressionist life and skewing the whole thing Cubist! Just wait till I get hold of the sucker . . . There won’t be a wormhole small enough for it to hide in.

Storm to the South

A little while ago I watching a storm cloud move across the sky south of me. I thought I could almost see a funnel cloud in the middle of it and imagined having to hide behind the counter in the cafe if it veered in this direction. The sky got darker, there were rumbles in the distance, and then it rained, but that was all. It’s been a rainy spring here but nothing very far out of the ordinary so far.

I like thunderstorms, but they’re usually milder here than the ones I remember from growing up in Florida. There, the rain assumed a tropical intensity, and lightning seemed to split the sky wide open. Some years ago, I was riding Amtrak through Iowa, and I clearly remember the thunderstorm that blew up as we were sitting down to dinner that night. With the flatness of the land and lack of buildings it was possible to see a long way, and we had an unobstructed view of the storm, which seemed notable for the intensity and frequency of the lightning but was after all probably nothing unusual for the northern plains.

I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen a storm like that since Florida. I don’t know if the spring storms are more intense over Iowa than they are over Kentucky or whether it’s the wide-angle views that make storms seem bigger. It was fun to watch the storm from the safety of the dining car, just as it’s always enjoyable to sit in a dry room, preferably in a cozy chair with a book in hand, and watch rain fall.

Not so fun to be caught out in a storm in a place like Texas or Oklahoma, though. It’s safe to say that a career as a storm chaser is out of the question for me, since my instinct is to go away from a storm, not toward it. A couple of years ago, I was on my way to visit a friend in the Dallas area, and just south of the city, I ran into the blackest, most ominous cloud I’ve ever seen, really downright Dante-esque if you can picture what a storm cloud rolling out of Inferno itself would look like. I was alarmed but noted that no one else was pulling off the road, so, like them, I just kept going until I drove out of it some twenty minutes later. There was no thunder with this storm, but driving into it was like running into a solid wall of water, and it stayed that way until I drove out from under the cloud, back into normal reality, twelve miles from my friend’s house.

Why is this mythic? Well, all natural phenomena are part of the fabric of myths and have their own gods and goddesses (we were just talking about Iris, the Greek goddess of rainbows, last week). In modern life, we talk about weather in scientific terms, and even if you watch The Weather Channel for hours at a time, as I’ve been known to do, you’ll hear hardly a mention of Thor, Aeolus, Zeus, or any other weather god from the old stories, though Old Man Winter may sometimes be mentioned in a whimsical way.

Some people like the idea of reverting to the old nature religions that tend to personify natural events and give them human qualities. My enjoyment of nature isn’t diminished by hearing it spoken of scientifically. The science of weather is complex and fascinating, and the forms and characteristics of the old myths play around the edges of my imagination when I watch weather programs or look at a storm through a window. Is there some reason a scientific approach has to clash with having an imaginative relationship to the world? Not that I can see. I can listen with interest while someone describes the dynamics of a tornado and still find that the archetypal twister in my mind is the one that carried Dorothy to Oz.

The Knight of Cups Has a Message for You

Often I feel that I’m reacting to things I see in the culture, just playing with repetitions and coming up with associations. I rarely see myself as someone who “starts things”—for instance, I didn’t start the phenomena of modern beverage cups and bottles in scenes of medieval settings on famous TV shows—but I did have fun taking pictures of my own coffee and tea cups and putting together little montages with them (see Wordplay’s Facebook page for the photo essay). That’s how I got from a water cup at breakfast to an image of the Knight of Cups from the Tarot, a symbolic progression that may or may not mean anything but was fun to do.

Cups have a symbolism of their own, and I was playing in my montage with the idea of being “offered something.” The tricky thing with symbols is that they often contain more than one meaning, and even opposite meanings. A cup can represent refreshment, potential, receptivity, and a number of other things, but it can equally represent the opposite of any of those—it might contain poison, for instance, instead of refreshment. A closed container could represent “keeping the lid on something” rather than an offering.

Now, I will plead guilty to starting a word association game with the word “iris,” but I was only doing it on my Facebook page for fun, so if you start seeing it everywhere suddenly, don’t blame me. It was the montage of the cups that actually morphed, more or less organically, into the iris montage. I paired an image of my iced tea cup at McDonald’s with a photo of a partial rainbow that I took a couple of weeks ago because they had a similar “arch” (or “arc,” I guess, if we were still talking about Game of Thrones). Naturally, being a myth person, I then started thinking about who was the goddess of rainbows in Greek mythology, and she, of course, was Iris.

So I found a painting of Iris that looked old enough to be in the public domain (and honestly, that was my main criterion): this was Guy Head’s Iris Carrying the Water of the River Styx to Olympus for the Gods to Swear By. Iris happens to be holding a pitcher, which is not a cup, but close enough, and although she appears to be having a major wardrobe malfunction, she seems to know exactly where she’s going and to be heading there with all possible speed. The treatment is suitably dramatic and even includes several repetitions of curved arches in the rainbow itself, the stone, the reflection, the drapery, etc., so the painting is all over the arches theme in just about every way conceivable.

After that, I started thinking about other meanings and associations of the word “iris,” which is, of course, more than a goddess’s name. It’s the part of your eye that surrounds the pupil, and it’s the name of a flower. It was also the name of a show by the Cirque du Soleil that I saw in Los Angeles some years ago, my one and only time of seeing that famous troupe, and quite an experience it was. The theme of cameras, lenses, and “seeing” was evident in the show, which had a Hollywood theme, though I really don’t remember the details, just the overall impression of the spectacle. One of my favorite moments occurred before the curtain went up, when I was idling in my seat, and a performer opened a hidden, circular window at the top of the stage (I was in an upper balcony) and looked out at me momentarily before snapping it smartly shut. I had the impression of having been “winked at.”

So I put together Iris of the rainbow and pitcher with a photo of my own eye and added in a logo from Cirque du Soleil’s Iris (though the one I chose is a stark black and white and hardly does justice to the jumble of color and motion I remember). Lastly, I added an image of Vincent van Gogh’s Irises, which probably needs no introduction to anyone, as famous and beautiful as it is. I have sat or stood in front of that painting at the Getty Museum for many minutes at a time on more than one occasion—seeing it was one of the highlights of the first weekend I ever spent in Los Angeles. Curiously, I had somehow gotten the impression that irises are a symbol of healing but when I did some cursory research to confirm that before posting the image to Facebook, I found plenty of other symbolic meanings for the flower but nothing related to healing. I’m now curious about where the healing idea came from and feel that it may have been from something I saw in the museum, though it was so long ago that I’m not sure.

So we now have a rainbow goddess with trailing drapery, a highly acrobatic circus spectacle, a structure of the eye, and a flower, and if you thought I was going somewhere specific with all that, the answer is “not really.” It was all in play, in keeping with the theme of this blog. But if “the eye is (indeed) the window to the soul”—watch out. It could be yourself you see reflected in that photo essay. Maybe Wordplay itself is all just a gigantic Rorschach test—you never know.