Better Living Through Beowulf – June 2017

Be Afraid of Trump’s Fear of Being Mocked

We all know the feeling of being laughed at but we don’t always feel the need to take action to stop it.  Getting back at someone who doesn’t care about the relationship only sets you back with the people who observe the abuse. Trump left the Paris Accord not because it hurt Americans but because its members hurt his feelings by laughing at him. When mockery of a cruel person occurs, the unimaginable insecurity becomes animated. A man’s obsessions bear out in his behavior before they act out in his vengeance. Obsessions build reputations which must be upheld. What is the horrifying story that applies to Trump’s obsession over mockery? Someone refused him and he was permanently embarrassed. He was put on the spot by someone and returned with nothing. Since the time of the laugh, he has determined to stop the laughter no matter what. Stopping a President is a kind of death wish.

Bob Dylan, Gifted Storyteller

Blowin’ In the Wind

A literary education gives principles, sensibilities and an informed view of the world. You can recognize when crazy men are taking over the world and the rest of us are on their doomed voyage.  In the end you can see yourself at sea, floating on a coffin, all quiet, and you are reluctant to that honor.  Literature influenced song writing by listening to early folk singers.  Listening to early folk picks up vernacular and folk lingo became the only vocabulary.  Once you loved the world, now you witness all the suffering of mankind.  Nature doesn’t notice but you are changed forever.  Death is blowin’ in the wind and to honor the dead shades the horror of it.  It is preferable to live a life of struggle than stay eternal in death’s place.  Better to tell many long stories of simple struggle, and sing the wisdom of a shunned pacifist.

Genesis: Story Truth, Not Happening Truth June 11, 2017

 Reducing religion to science reduces its understanding…

I recoil when someone begins dissecting Genesis with a scientists’ scalpel or a fundamentalist fillet, this article helped me uncoil. Poetry allows wonder to be expressed. Scientific analysis of religion diminishes wonder. Fundamentalists of both religion and science attack wonder with a deaf ear to its poetry. Story truth repeatedly reveals itself to a true thinker, while scientists seek only a single revelation. Scientism’s faith excludes wonder and therefore wisdom escapes it. The most important truths never translate into facts, expressing religion and poetry in inexpressible symbols … emblematic of wonder. Poetry rings insufficiently literal to fundamentalists of both religion and scientism, but brings pleasure to those sensitive to its insufficiencies.