Creative Minds

The Metaphysics of Food: Kitchen Scenes With Spinoza, Brillat-Savarin And Def Leppard.

A four-mile walk from Nacka to Kungsträdgården, brings me face to face with Joachim Beuckelaer’s Kitchen Scene With Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1565) in the Nationalmuseum. Words are exchanged between us and a conversation about the metaphysics of food ensues. Examining the fundamental nature of reality, the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute centers any…

Cosmic Horror, Jim Crow, And “The Thing In The White House” Just Won’t Go: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom.”

I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to now it. (5)

So writes James…

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Lovecraft’s America: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom” And “The Thing In The White House” Is A Shoggoth. Episode 1.

With HBO’s Lovecraft Country based on Matt Ruff’snovel of the same name offering a new episode each week, and Black Americans and protestors being shot and villainized as speakers at the Republican National Convention and pundits at Fox News call for more “law and order” (i.e. targeting Black Americans and the #BlackLivesMatter movement), it’s time to consider another recent novel that has…

The Supernatural Terror Of Simone Weil As Fiona Apple Fetches The Bolt Cutters.

Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.  Instants where everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void.  It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.  (11)

As I read through Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, first published in 1947 and consisting of passages culled from her…

Branches And Sky Unbecoming Or A Few Thoughts On Chaos.

I will tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.  I tell you: you still have chaos in you.  (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 46)

χάος in Greek means “infinite space, the expanse” and the “nether abyss, infinite darkness,” also “unformed matter.”  In Hesiod‘s Theogony, we begin the begin with chaos, which gives birth to Erebos (“a pace of nether darkness…

The World Is Weird.

The world is weird.  The sun spills light as though it has all the colors to burn what is dead and empty into luminous greens and yellows, while a pool of water adds its aesthetic by reflecting and shimmering the madness of light and color.  And all of this is made because the Netflix inside my head is always in pre-production, production and post-production.  The shudder I feel at this presence…

I shiver with rapture; I soar on the wings of sudden joy!  O Pan, O Pan, appear to us, sea-rover, from the stony ridge of snow-beaten Cyllene.  King, dancemaker for the gods, come, so that joining with us you may set on the Nysian and the Cnosian steps, your self-taught dances. Now I want to dance.  Certain qualities of light at a particular time cast a suggestion of Pan.

So sings the chorus in…

Thinking About The Rona While Cooking Viltkött Bourguignonne And Talking To Hannibal Lecter, Agent Smith And Luis P. Villarreal Who Are All Listening To Nina Simone Sing “Black Swan.”

Nymphs and Satyr as painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau and dated 1873.  My eyes were reeling with such images lost in my forest, but having found my way out of branches and roots and the winding, gyring paths of Dr. Seuss and Quantum Mechanics, I’m back home to cut a filet of elk into stew pieces on a course charted by Juliet Child in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As is the case with…

Look close at a tree.  I mean, really close.  A tree is really, when you look close a bit alien, a bit other than you, if you’re human, and then again there’s something familiar looking back out at you.  Other and you.  Rooted to place and branching above, its skin is alive and revealing of its age.  An inner bark of living tissue and an inner bark of dead tissue.  Like human skin.  A world of…

An Island In The Middle Of A Lake, And Yes, I’m Thinking About Rousseau And Bachelard And Jung, While Contemplating Roasted Salmon And W.G. Sebald’s “A Place In The Country” As Pan Appears With James Hillman And A Nymph And Everything Stops.

In Rousseau’s Fifth Walk, he writes about time spent on a small island in the middle of Lake Bienne in Switzerland.

On the island there is only a single house, but a large, pleasant and comfortable one which, like the island, belongs to Bern Hospital and in which a tax collector lives with his family and servants.  He maintains a large farmyard, a pigeon house, and fishponds.  Despite its…

How does a journey begin?  Well, with a walk.  A church and a cemetery affords the beginning.  Bare branches on the edge of spring with stubs of brown-green grass and a path of graded small stones.  An avenue of trees really, as we look down the path past grave markers and towards the dwellings of the living.  All very ordered with wrinkled trunks, chiseled and polished memorials, and an overcast…

What Does The Great Stag See From The Forest At The Turn of A New Year? Björkar, Björk And Calf Liver Served With Fried Egg and Potatoes, While Contemplating The Good Resonance Of All Things.

It’s good to think of Hannibal as we leave the Winter Solstice behind.  Well, at least remember the Great Stag who witnesses Björkar.  Birches.  Member of the Betulaceaefamily.  Deciduous hardwood.  Dropping what is no longer needed.  The falling away of what no longer fits.  Dark horizontal lines on white, paper-thin plates.  You can peel a birch like peeling an onion.  Turn of the year–time to…

My Favorite Swedish Boulders, Seeing Faeries, Mycorrhizal Networks, Forests Thinking, And Roasting Pork Belly With Mark Rothko’s Color Fields While Dancing Tango And Listening To Astor Piazolla.

Boulders are everywhere on Nacka.  Granite boulders left by retreating glaciers or shaped out of bedrock by wind and rain.  Formed out of volcanic activity and millions of years of pressure turning stone into a metamorphic tale out of Ovid.

Walking the forest back in August, I come upon them and they come upon me.  I have in mind Ramsey Dukes’ book How To See Fairiesand the initial exercises…

“Ay, There’s The Rub” Or Hamlet Dreams Of Pork Belly, Marinade, Northern Forests And Charles Mingus.

Boulders and lakes and forests, oh my.  Långsjön calls me each morning to circle its depth of sky and water and trees.  A walk of ritual and greeting with the light ever pouring out green and blue into the air.  And in the middle, slowly turns a white platform from which you may dive into the lake or dive into the sky.  But, to the rub.

“To sleep, perchance to dream . . .” of pork belly.  Hamlet…

Days Of Summer 2018. Days Of Sunlight And Pork Belly With Caviar, Laphroaig and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Light is everywhere.  Already the sun lights the sky at four in the morning and will not set until well close to ten at night–that is, four and twenty two.  Summer in Sweden brightens any sun-worshipper into a cult-member calling for the reigns to be handed to them so they can burn the sky and plunge on and on into more light.  Ah, Phaethon.  Amidst this Dionysian-revelry in all things solar, my…

Laphroaig Càirdeas 15 With The Right Amount Of Ritual And Discipline.

“Through the performance process itself, what is normally sealed up, inaccessible to everyday observation and reasoning, in the depth of sociocultural life, is drawn forth” as Victor Turner writes in From Ritual To Theater.  Purchased this particular LaphroaigCàirdeas at the distillery and I’ve been looking forward to opening canister and bottle and exploring its taste through the performance of…

Laphroaig Aged In Ex-Manzanilla Casks With Some Indiscipline.

It looks at me.  I look at it.  I tasted it on Islay in a warehouse at the Laphroaig Distillery.  I drew this precious water of life out of a ex-Manzanilla cask.  I brought it back with me to Nacka.  Now it’s time to have a taste once again.

Look at it.  I do think it’s good. A dark-auburn resin glistening in glass.  Aged in an ex-bourbon cask for ten years and then eight years in an…