To thine own self be true

depicting animals cuddling across various kinds and species are a reminder how basic empathy and sympathy are as feeling-forces in Nature. Would that our own species had more and similar natural empathy and sympathy and less trolling, hating, warring, and abuse across genders and races.

That pure, instrumental music is the most direct, influential, and powerful music communicating immediately and deeply affecting the feelings of people round the world. Without the need for spoken language. Without the need for any advance specialized introduction or training.

I should add that these affects are equally evoked by electronic music and instrumental music of other cultures, as in the Indian sitar-playing of Ravi Shankar. Again, pure music/music at its purest. The best of pure music transcends Time and place.

it is vitally important for parents and spouses to have alone time, private time, quiet time, and relaxation time. Time to decompress, reflect, refocus, and plan. In this–sanity, perspective, renewal, personal growth, peace, balance, and personal survival.

In the last two days: recording many of my poems and dubbing my old cassettes of poetry readings and band performances onto computer files and CDs. As well as receiving an e-mail video of different kinds of animals responding to different kinds of music.
The power of the human voice: something that is instantly missed by others, for example, when someone dies. Not only is the human voice the sound signature of a given individual, but it is something that communicates and pleasures depending on the various qualities of voice.

As a poet and teacher, I have seen and experienced others profoundly affected by readings, talks, and discussions. I have communicated thoughts and feelings via the spoken word and human voice that others have responded, too; an affect I have long observed in my own experience as a listener when I have listened to the likes of Richard Burton, Martin Luther King, Ingrid Bergman, and many others. Suffice to say, certain voices have a very persuasive, pleasurable, even seductive air about them.

I have, likewise, played music for thousands (recalling how crowds sang along, moved, or danced in response) and remember well how music first affected me as much as (if not moreso) than the spoken voice. My mother used to plunk me down by a cathedral radio in the 1950s as an aural babysitter. Later I, like millions of other Western teenagers would raptly and rapturously listen to top 40 AM radio for the hits of the day through the ’60s and ’70s.

Later, I would attend several hundred concerts by professional musicians, listening to a range of genres from Indian to jazz to folk to rock to classical; the unmistakable power and influence of multi-genres of music. Certain songs or pieces made/make me feel a certain way and stimulate inner spirit, as well as mental imagery. Both spoken word voice and music (including sung lyrics) affect and influence people of all races; music, though, is a universal language per se, transcending nations and geographical or cultural separation.

Am I surprised that animals (as in the aforementioned video) would respond in automatic, sensitive ways to music (much as dogs or horses respond to spoken word commands)? No. Animals and birds often demonstrate or exhibit similar features to humans. Why should their aural senses not respond to music? The insects landing on Paul McCartney singing in the video were obviously also drawn to the light, but who knows? Sensate creatures or beings are sensate in mysterious ways. Re. the landmark 1970s book on plants, The Secret Life of Plants–when I read it long ago, I was not too skeptical about the research that plants also responded to music such as rock and classical.

Music is a major powerful force, and it can be felt deeply as all humans know. That it does affect other life on the planet should not be any great surprise. An untapped resource and potentially useful application, unquestionably.

1987’s The Lonesome Jubilee by John Cougar Mellancamp. Terrific sound, bare-bones rock with accordion and fiddle accompaniment, a powerful black female backup singer, and poignant social-commentary lyrics about working class and poor people’s lives.

“I want to live the real life
I want to live my life close to the bone
Just because I’m middle-aged that don’t mean
I want to sit around my house and watch t.v.
I want the real life I want to live the real life”

Mellancamp’s best-ever work. “Check it out”…

Ingmar Bergman’s last film epitomizes much of what this director was all about: feelings, communication, relationships (male-female, father-son, father-daughter, mother-child), and responses to human flaws, failures, and death.

It reunites the couple from his acclaimed, intense, exhaustive analysis of male-female relationships: 1973’s Scenes from a Marriage. Johan and Marianne have entered old age and, though long separated, she has embarked on a trip to revisit Johan to experience whatever still can be experienced by the still-connected duo. Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson movingly revive their roles and take them to an ultimate, unexpected reconciliation.

But their story is truly a backdrop to another couple and family storyline Bergman initiates of Johan’s alienated adult-son and talented 19-year-old daughter, the latter about to leave home to pursue her future and bliss as a talented celloist. There are many conflicts between the two, with the musician-father controlling her cello education, but being unnaturally close to her partly because of an unresolved obsession with his dead wife. He has not truly separated from his wife and has invested his remaining life in the daughter’s forced fealty–she who will suddenly be gone for two years following a plan different from her father’s. Borje Ahstedt and Julia Dufvenius are excellent as father and daughter.

And there is the long-standing bitter feud between father and son–Johan and Henri–to complicate matters. The two share an equal support of the daughter and her aspirations, but only one of their two plans for her will win out. Marianne listens in to both father and daughter and responds to them in ways that only enhance viewers’ appreciations of the depths of her humanity, first seen in Scenes from a Marriage. She, too, has unfinished business with Johan after that and, surprisingly, with her daughter from their previous marriage–an unexpected touch reminiscent of Bergman’s Autumn Sonata between mother and adult child.

Johann’s relationship with his granddaughter is also ‘fleshed in’ with classical music playing a role in both the scenes between Karin and both her father and grandfather. Bergman also performs some magic with absolute minimal cello-playing by father and daughter, an unseen Bach organ solo played by Henrik, and a well-known classical piece on CD listened to by Johan in his interesting, atmospheric study.

And so, Bergman surprises the viewers, returning from Scenes of a Marriage, with these many unanticipated layers of themes, conflicts, and characters, saving one of the latter for a surprise ending. Mention should also be made of Bergman’s use of framing with Marianne surrounded by photographs on a table at the beginning and end of the film, and her theatrically setting-up the return visit before viewers become quickly absorbed in the movie per se of Saraband.

Saraband is thoroughly entertaining, rich, and intense like the best of Bergman’s classics. It is also his last words on human relationships, death (the pitiable, tragic Henrik presents Bergman’s view of it in the middle of the film), and film-making. Only a genius could have crafted Saraband so lovably, powerfully, and memorably. As highly recommended as any of Bergman’s classic works.

the things to most remember, treasure, and hang onto are following your bliss, and matters of both soul and spirit–those things that make each of us who and what we essentially are as individuals. Those things which underlie the course of busy, conflicted days trying to adapt, to stay alive, trying to get things done, and trying to move forward, and not lose hope.

ought to become another American national observance of the day they nearly lost their democracy, constitution, law and order and were bravely defended by Capitol police, epitomized by Brian Sicknick and others who put their lives and bodies on the line to save their country. A day of infamy, heroism, and the survival of all that is still good, noble, and admirable about the United States–a country whose name Trump’s lawyers can’t even spell correctly.

The great American stage actor Hal Holbrook. Best-known for his many one-man shows as Mark Twain, his performance as Deep Throat in the movie All the President’s Men, his Oscar-nominated performance in Into the Wild, and for the best-ever performance of the Stage Manager character in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

who may be feeling incomplete, out of touch with other men, conflicted with themselves and women, or in need of fathering.
The informative and supportive 1990 video online, “A Gathering of Men”, a 1 1/2 hr. vid with Robert Bly and Bill Moyers. Topics include The Warrior, the male need to express grief and mourning, the search for father figures, fathering one’s son, and many other topics, too, referring to women as well: women as Warriors, women and their fathers.

It was inspired by Bly’s classic book Iron John, which covers the same topics. Both are worth checking out for men with ‘missing pieces’ and seeking more purpose and resolution in their lives. Probably timelier than ever with the separations and isolations wrought by the pandemic. And there is definitely something in both works for women as well if they’re trying to understand men and spouses better.