Kings and Presidents should bow down before them all.
MacCruiskeen » Sat Nov 09, 2013 7:49 pm wrote:kelley » Tue Jun 11, 2013 4:20 pm wrote:last month i went to italy, just to look at the frescoes, and to visit the giotto chapel in padua specifically. it's one of the most charged places i've ever visited. there wasn't a negative ion in the room, and even after six hundred or so years the message these pictures communicated was clear. it was one of belief, not in god per se, but in the divinity of humanity, which after all was the fundamental message of christianity, and was an absolutely startling thing to encounter at this particular moment when things seem to be speeding towards points beyond reason. this didn't seem a transcendental idea proposed by the artist and his cohort, but rather that of the transmission of spiritual experience as deeply woven into the fabric of daily life, with the intimation of the divine grasped as material fact. i suspect this recognition will help immensely in what i understand to be, if i'm lucky, the last third of my life.
Is the poster called kelley even still alive any more? I don't know. But he or she did a good thing there.
"Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world." - John Keats, who had 26 years on this planet to make his soul (and did), in a letter to his brother.
So, in the spirit of all the unfamous refugee mothers and children, and kelley and The Consul and Giotto and Shakespeare and Gerrard Winstanley and Bach and Mozart and John Keats and William Blake and Emily Bronte and Rosa Luxemburg and Patrice Lumumba and Martin Luther King and Salvador Allende and Jesus and Karl Marx and "all the lost poets of World War One" (Peter Barnes) and Peter Barnes and George Carlin and Skip James and Nina Simone and Liam Óg O'Flynn and the sweatshop workers of Haiti and the homeless guy I spoke to yesterday -
Here's to everyone who knows that souls are made in blood & sweat and fear & trembling & honest struggle, if at all, and not by pretending that all things and all words are equal, or of equal value to the making of a soul (and a shared world)
Positive ions to everyone present or departed, without exception.