Photos of Lakes and Hills

 

Travalon and I continue to watch The Office, and there was an episode where the main character, who works for a midsize paper company, went to a small, family-owned paper company posing as a lawyer looking for a paper company for his law firm. The kind people running the small company gave him a list of their clients so he could call them for recommendations, but of course he was going to call them to steal them away. Then in an episode we watched last night, the main character called the small business and got a message where the proprietor sounded like he was holding back tears as he said that after forty years in business, they had shut down. I know it's a fictional show, but I'm still not over it. It's probably mostly my overactive imagination, making me think how I'd feel to have a lifetime of work go down the drain like that, but it doesn't help that such things happen all the time in real life. Greed is awful.

Tonight at Night Prayer I mentioned how a couple of R&B songs from the 90's, "He Wasn't Man Enough" by Toni Braxton and "Be Happy" by Mary J. Blige, are sampled in current hip hop songs. Nothing wrong with that on the surface, but both original songs are about women realizing they don't have to be treated disrespectfully by a man, and then the new ones are men rapping about treating women disrespectfully. I said why can't they sample a song other than one where they're going against the entire message of the original song, and the Dairyman's Daughter said the devil can't do anything original. Rich agreed that it's diabolical, and he gave some examples of TV shows where the original was wholesome and then a remake was not at all. I think they may have a point.

Here are some photos that Travalon took yesterday. First is the bird party on Indian Lake.

This is the hill at Indian Lake that has a chapel on the top.

This is a view of Lake Marion in Mazomanie.

And this is the train - with two engines - going alongside the lake.

This is the hill on the other side of the lake.

And here is the train again. It was quite long.

But there was an end to it. Note the lotus patch in the lake.

This is Black Earth Creek, which we also walked alongside.

Cousin Itt??? Is that you???

Here you can see the railroad tracks running toward the hill beside Lake Marion.

The other direction, they go over a small bridge.

This is the hill at Pheasant Branch. 

And here is the crane party, which had moved from the marshy area to across the road in a cornfield.

I took this photo of the sunset tonight with my phone, from our chair's office.

Despite the dirty window, you can see how stunning it was. Remember how beautiful our world is if you are discouraged by the results of tomorrow's election. No matter who wins, there will still be lakes and hills and sunsets.

Famous Hat

The Eye of the Beholder

Right now I am listening to "Laudate Pueri, Dominum" by Couperin and it is so incredibly beautiful, there are no words to describe it. On the cover of Magnificat this month is a painting of a Gothic cathedral, and it strikes me how those things created by the hand of man reflect the beholder. So many of us are deeply moved by the beauty of a majestic Medieval church or the intricacies of a sacred piece by Josquin de Prez, and this is perhaps not surprising when you realize that the primary beholder is God. Yes, they are meant to be seen or heard by humans and direct our thoughts heavenward, but in some sense they were created for God. Nonbelievers grasp this as well and react accordingly; I know one athiest who listens to Bach's "Mass in B Minor" over and over, saying how much it moves him. Once he wondered why music like that isn't written anymore, and he had no reply when I pointed out that Bach was writing for God but most music nowadays is written to appeal to the lowest common denominator. An even more extreme example is an acquaintance who actually said Gothic cathedrals made him uneasy because they made God seem so... "big!" "I like to think of God being my size!" he said. I found this an incredibly mind-boggling statement - how could God be 5'10"? - but at least he didn't miss the message that sacred space was built to convey.

The second level of art would be that aimed at human beholders. Most people find the portraits painted by the old Renaissance Dutch and Venetian masters very beautiful, and so they are, because they were created with the patron in mind. Music up until the time of Beethoven was very much this way as well. I would say Beethoven was the first composer who seemed more concerned with his own creative ideas than with the listeners' perceptions. This has become extreme in modern art and music, to the point that the upheld ideal is not something which is easy to relate to but something "challenging," meaning most people do not care for it. Personally, I would think art, like any other commodity, should be subject to market forces. When painters and composers had to please kings and dukes, look what beauty they created! When they get grants from the NEA, look what downright subversive and smutty things they create using our tax money! And then we, the people who paid for this trash, are at best browbeaten for our populist tastes and failure to embrace ugliness, and at worst are accused of censorship for protesting having to pay for things that offend our religious beliefs, not to mention our sense of beauty! Sorry, censorship means you are not allowed to create this garbage. Nobody is stopping you from doing so; we are merely protesting having to foot the bill.

This brings me to the third level. Who is the "beholder" of so much modern art? It would seem that it is the artist alone, but perhaps it is someone more sinister than that. If God is beauty, then what would ugliness be? And who would be trying to pass ugly off as the new beautiful if not that ancient deceiver, Satan? After all, when an artist creates something not to please God or even other people but only himself, is he not in some sense making the same choice Satan did, to recognize himself above God as the ultimate judge of good and evil? And would Satan not want us to reject the truly beautiful in favor of the pornographic and sacriligious? When a crucifix suspended in urine or a play depicting Jesus as homosexual is held up as great art while an artist like Thomas Kinkade who creates beautiful landscapes is derided for being both "too Christian" and "too accessible," you can easily figure out whose side the critics are on.

Famous Hat