Watching the Tom Foley escapade unravel the Republicans as their stitchwork elsewhere submerges Iraq under bloody waves of civil war is bad enough. Worse, ultimately, as harbingers go, my beloved New Hampshire autumn feels tropical this year. It seems the entire world just can’t cool off. The Dust Bowl of the Tens (remember the Dust Bowl of the Thirties?) is tightening its climatological grip on America’s breadbasket. Global Warming. Relatives of mine just moved to Arizona. I don’t know what to think. If glaciers worldwide are melting, and snow pack is dwindling just about everywhere, the Sierra’s can’t be far behind. The Canadians, who have the largest supply of good fresh water in the world, are already passing laws preventing the US from getting any of it.
So, faced with these sorts of vast gathering storm clouds, what am I doing preparing to web publish my epic poem, The Rowan Canticles? A project in faux oldish English that rhymes, no less? It took fifteen years to compose. 12,000 lines. Finally finished. What’s the point? And what’s the point of creating Fresh Squeezed Music, a personal journal of instrumentals, here at my site either? Artists try to inject beauty into the world, that’s obvious. They labor away in their microscopic individualities, awash in an ocean of burgeoning human numbers, afloat, as I am, on an exponentially increasing ocean of data. I guess it’s normal to wonder what the point is.
It is normal, isn’t it?
