drmstream[writing]

I read a book the other day that is very pop­u­lar with peo­ple who are look­ing for answers to uni­ver­sal ques­tions. The writ­ing was con­cise and clear, and the imagery was acces­si­ble, despite strik­ing me as overly sim­ple. Most strik­ing was the style. Every chap­ter was short, every para­graph was short, every sen­tence was short. The […]

She’s get­ting car­ried off to the evil witch, cap­tured by her demon mon­keys who were sent out to col­lect the inno­cent intruder.  Look at the Tin Wood­man doff­ing his cap, Dorothy sit­ting at the edge of her seat like a lit­tle girl at the movies, and the winged mon­keys wide-eyed and intent. Where’s the fear? There’s […]

  An image was stuck in my head. I saw a sin­gle tree in the dis­tance. A dog stood beneath it. The vista was all greys and whites and blacks. The dog and the tree were soli­tary but sep­a­rate. The image evoked some­thing nec­es­sary and almost for­got­ten. I went to Flickr and typed in the […]

“A good pho­to­graph is one that com­mu­ni­cates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed per­son for hav­ing seen it; it is in one word, effec­tive.” Irv­ing Penn Irv­ing Penn reminds us that there’s a com­mon thread in the expe­ri­ence of beauty, whether it’s organic or inert, whether it’s tamed or wild, whether […]

  To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a cri­sis of lit­er­acy would have called for a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the mul­ti­plic­ity of func­tions that lan­guage per­forms, the fore­most of which is the abil­ity to code and transcode expe­ri­ence and to pro­vide cul­tural direc­tions for its inter­pre­ta­tion, han­dling and elaboration, […]

  Recently, I was talk­ing with a math­e­mati­cian. He was ani­mated as he talked about the beauty of math, the thrill of tak­ing an axiomatic sys­tem and using its prin­ci­ples to build a bridge to a solu­tion for what appears to be a wholly unre­lated prob­lem. The excite­ment in his man­ner was infec­tious and deep. He […]

… All these moments in the individual’s life, when the uni­ver­sal laws of human fate break in upon the pur­poses, expec­ta­tions, and opin­ions of the per­sonal con­scious­ness, are sta­tions along the road of the indi­vid­u­a­tion process. This process is, in effect, the spon­ta­neous real­iza­tion of the whole man. The ego con­scious per­son­al­ity is only a […]

The ques­tion you have to answer is whether you hold your­self away or throw your­self in; whether you ignore the con­se­quences of fail­ing and insist that the joy is from try­ing; whether you keep mov­ing when you feel your­self slow­ing down. Here is a para­ble: A woman pushes a gro­cery cart up a steep side­walk. The […]

This is where I am: An old man dying from can­cer, but still vital and bemused by the inten­sity of life, is walk­ing on a dark path that runs behind an old house down the hill to the run­down apart­ment build­ing he lives in. The lit­tle patch of woods is the byprod­uct of a geo­log­i­cal quirk. Millenniums […]

  I was at lunch with an artist today and asked him about his work. “I keep push­ing ahead and it changes,” he said. I asked him to describe a cre­ative phase that was par­tic­u­larly dis­tinc­tive. He became ani­mated as he talked about the chal­lenge of adding a third dimen­sion to his paint­ing. “I painted a very […]