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Everyone likes a mystery. And what is better than a possibly supernatural mystery surrounding a piece of music or artwork?

Like that Pink Floyd album that syncs up with The Wizard of Oz?

What about that Led Zeppelin tune that says Satanic things if you play it backwards?

You know that Shakespeare’s Macbeth is cursed right? Mysterious accidents often happen to actors who dare participate in the production.

The other day, I was listening to an album I hadn’t touched for a couple years: La Luna, by Sarah Brightman. It’s an odd mix of pop covers and classical vocal (and instrumental) pieces re-arranged. One of the tunes is Gloomy Sunday, a cover of an old Billy Holiday jazz song.

It turns out this piece has alleged special powers. When you listen to it, it makes you want to commit suicide! True story.

And we aren’t talking about the “oh my gosh, this music is so awful, it makes me want to kill myself just so I don’t have to listen to it anymore”. No, no. That phenomenon can be frequently observed, for example, when Nickelback comes on the radio.

This song is about a lonely lover whose mate has died. And they want to end it all too and join them. And if you listen to it… you’ll feel an unmistakable urge to slit your own wrists. Just maybe.

It’s kind of like how listening to Rock ‘N’ Roll compels you to be sexually promiscuous, only more specific.

Wikipedia of course provides a nice overview of the mythology surround the piece, including these tidbits

The Japanese movie Densen Uta (2007) was also inspired by this song. In the movie, a high school girl and a magazine editor investigate a series of suicides linked to a mysterious song released 10 years back, including its possible connection to “Gloomy Sunday”.

The song and its surrounding legend play a considerable part in Phil Rickman’s novel The Smile of a Ghost, linked to several apparent suicides.

And you can’t beat this next one:

The song inspired the Spanish movie The Kovak Box (2006). A writer is trapped on the island of Majorca with people who are injected with a microchip that causes them to commit suicide when they hear “Gloomy Sunday”.

Awesome!

Anyway, it’s actually a pretty nice tune. Check it out. Just be careful. If you start to feel depressed, take the antidote: Look on the Bright Side of Life from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.

My friend Mark B. drew a robot for me a few years ago. It has a coffee cup sitting on it’s head. He (the robot), is not entirely sure how it (the coffee) got up there. He would like to figure out how to get it down though. He’s thinking about it right now. Incidently, the drawing itself was made using espresso for ink. Seriously. This is my avatar. I AM the coffee robot. I’m standing very still. So I don’t spill.

My wife recently finished a remarkably difficult and beautiful quilt. All by hand. You see how crooked it is? No wait, that’s if I had tried to put it together! Super nice. Now all we need is for our adoptive daughter to arrive so we can wrap her in it.

Why having lots of children and parenting them really well is the best way to put energy into the system:

There is no other institution which suffers from time so much as religion. At the moment when it is remotely possible that a whole generation might have learned something both of theory and practice, the learners and their learning are removed by death, and the Church is conronted with the necessity of beginning all over again. The whole labour of regenerating mankind has to begin again every thirty years or so.

-Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p.83

Good thing the Holy Spirit does things too.

Higher Education is in trouble. Universities don’t offer near as much value per $$$ as they used to. They are a bubble that needs to pop in this recession. They are propped up enough by other things though, that it’s likely they will just deflate some.

This commentary from Fearsome Pirate: (with my own notes)

I see several replacements already brewing:

1. Not going to college. The fact is that if you’re going to work in the service industry for the rest of your life, you’re better off investing that four years in moving up the ladder instead of running up $40,000 in debt getting a BA in Fitness & Health. More people are going to realize that, especially as the generation that wasted money getting useless degrees grows up and has kids.

More people ARE realizing this for sure.

2. Learning a trade. Did you know we have a shortage of plumbers in America? Fixing pipes pays way better than washing cars or serving coffee.

But not better than DRINKING coffee!

3. For-profit community colleges. These schools save the students lots of money by not having athletics programs, fraternities, or classes that exist solely for a professor to shove his politics down your throat. The one I worked at for a year has already added BA’s in Criminal Justice and a couple medical-related fields. The education is decent and costs a fraction of what you’d pay at a land-grant college.

“For-profit” drives innovation and efficency. Tenure promotes innovation on paper, but in reality it feeds mediocrity.

4. Going on welfare. We’re transforming our economy to model it after European socialism, which has chronically high unemployment, low productivity, and a massive welfare state. It’s much cheaper for the government to hook you up with a crappy apartment and food stamps than it is to put you through college for four years.

This is true. Might as well skip the student loans.

5. Playing Xbox and smoking weed. Turns out you don’t have to go to college to do this.

This is remarkably cheap now too!

OK. So this is one of those “thought provoking” quotes that occasionally shows up on a paper Starbuck’s cup.

Failure’s hard, but success is far more dangerous.

If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and
opportunity can lock you in forever.

– Po Pronson, Author of stories, screenplays, and nonfiction, including What Should I Do with My Life?

This is an interesting quote, but it’s all about perspective.

As a musician, I have failed. As a computer programmer, I have excelled. My career has advanced considerably. It used to be that dropping out of IT work to work harder on music would mean living frugally. Now it would mean a massive pay cut. And I need that money to take care of my family, send my kids to school, pay for the minivan. If I stay where I’m at, I’ll have the opportunity to move up even more. The dream of being a musician, or any kind of artist for that matter, becomes more and more distant every year. It’s now entered the realm of the absurd.

Oh well I guess.

Where did we get the idea that being “locked in” was bad? Being locked in prison is bad. Maybe locked in a dead-end career is bad. But “locked in” to a successful and relatively prosperous career? What a pile of suck! Totally the wrong thing! Really? I’m not convinced. Time to break out the Merton again:

Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a “means of livelihood” while he waits to discover his “true vocation.” The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.7 Sec.5

Who is selling us this lie? This isn’t part of the American Dream. Is this only since 1900? 1960?

Charles Williams points out that English mystic classic The Cloud of Unknowing is “all but impossible to read”. Why? It’s not just that it’s confusing. Or that it’s written in Middle English. It practically begins with a curse, forbidding you from reading it!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

I charge thee and I beseech thee, with as much power and virtue as the bond of charity is sufficient to suffer, whatsoever thou be that this book shalt have in possession, whether by property, or by keeping, or by bearing as a messenger, or else by borrowing, the inasmuch as in thee is by will and advisement, though neither read it, write it, nor speak it, nor yet suffer it to be read, written, or spoken, by any other or to any other, unless it be by such a one or to such a one as hath (in thy supposing) in a true will and by a whole intent purposed him to be a perfect follower of Christ. And that not only in active living, but also in the sovereignest point of contemplative living the which is possible by grace to be come to in this present life by a perfect soul yet abiding in this deadly body.

-The Cloud of Unknowning, Prologue

In fact, it is doubtful whether Christendom has ever quite recovered form the mass-conversion of the fashionable classes inside Rome and of the barbaric races outside Rome. Those conversions prepared the way for the Church of the Middle Ages, but the forcibleness of the conversions also prepared the way for the Church of all the after ages. It is at least arguable that the Christian Church will have to return to a pre-Constantine state before she can properly recover the ground she too quickly won.

Her victories, among other disadvantages, produced in her children a great tendency to be aware of evil rather than of sin, meaning by evil the wickedness done by others, by sin the wickedness done by oneself. The actuality of evil does not altogether excuse the hectic and hysterical attention paid to it; especially to those who appear to be deriving benefit from it; especially to benefits which the Christian spectator strongly disapproves or strongly desires. Even contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.

-Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p.86

Also, I’ve seen this sort of reasoning used as a stick to beat baby-baptisers with, but in fact I think it should probably be reserved for beating fans of conquest-evangelism.

I think he’s right here, though I’d never considered how this has shaped Christianity for the past 1600 years (and continues to shape it today). When the church in a place like China is pursecuted and driven underground, does that return it to this necessary pre-Constantinian state in some sense?

In his book on church history, Williams explores how persecution varied under the different emperors of Rome. It turns out the ones who most had their own lives under control were the nastiest to the people of God. The ones who were bigger sinners were more friendly.

The “good” Emperors had come to regard Christianity as evil, as all tolerant and noble non-Christian minds tend to do. Partly, no doubt, the best Emperors had the highest idea of their duty to the safety of the State. But also they had the highest sense of moral balance and the least senseof the necessity of Redemption. The worse Emporors – Commodus, Heliogabalus – had a more superstitious impulse which was certainly more in accord with the asserted dogmas of the Gospel. Gods, and the nature of the Gods, are likely to be better understood by sinful than by stoical minds.

-Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p.28

This is a good passage on the early church heresy of gnosticism. Lest you think it only hung around in the second century, take a look at how he describes it here. Sound familiar?

By definition, all men were in need of salvation; therefore, of faith and repentance in faith. The Gnostic view left little room for the illuminati to practise love on this earth; “they live as though they were indifferent,” and Irenaeus. The Church anathematized the pseudo-Romantic heresies; there could be no superiority except in morals, in labour, in love.

See, understand, enjoy, said the Gnostic;

repent, believe, love, said the Church, and if you see anything by the way, say so.

In some sense, the Gnostics avoided any “scandal” to the mind and soul. The stones they offered fitted the corners of many temples; only not of the City of Christendom.

-Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p.25

Also the dichotomy of “see, understand, enjoy” versus “repent, believe, love” is very striking to me. The gnostic does his mental gymnastics properly so he can enjoy things in life without having to bother with repenting and the monumental task of loving. He can talk a great deal about love, with the odd side effect of not ever having to love. I see myself on a bad day.