Sunday Spectacle: The Big Here and the Long Now (19Feb2017)

BE big HERE long NOW: The onslaught is meant to induce exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to capitulation. Lift your eyes. Get outside. Put the screen away. Cultivate your garden. The title of this week’s Sunday Spectacle comes from a Brian Eno essay. In this essay Eno muses on different cultural attitudes about neighborhood. Those constrained to just their apartment or condo or house live in the ‘small here.’ Those who walk around their neighborhood and use its parks and walk or bike to the local pub or grocery store, live in a larger here. Similarly, the short now is today, tomorrow, this week. The long now is this century, this millennium. Don’t forget to step away from the small here and short now and into the big here and long now occasionally. You might even want to set a timer to remind yourself. What do you know about where you are? Take this quiz to find out.

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PRETTY PICTURES: I love my screen saver. Every time I see an image I like I copy it into a folder and those images rotate randomly as my screen saver. I’m going to be pulling a lot off the Metropolitan Museum of Art since they just dropped 375,000 of their public domain works onto the internet. You can search their collection with this link.

Figure in Hammock, Florida by John Singer Sargent

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STORY: My story is moving along. I haven’t fallen behind yet, but I also haven’t been editing as much as I need to. I don’t know if learning how to tell stories the Pixar way will influence what I’m working on right now, but it won’t hurt to hear what they have to say. I’ll at least look through the storytelling segment.

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MOON: I’ve been pretty good in my ongoing effort to be more in tune with the moon. I grab images of the moon when I’m out and it’s visible. But, nothing I can do compares to these playful images by Laurent Laveder.

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A POEM: That’s it for this week. Not much, and nothing in my head that prompts an editorial, so I’ll close with this from Matthew Arnold.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.