Apologies to all my wonderful readers (and you ARE all wonderful) for the lengthy pause in posting. I’m at a crossroads, it seems. As a musician, there is always another song to write, a score to compose, music to arrange or learn. It comes naturally to me after decades of working in music. Prose is a different beast altogether. I began this “stack” in a fairly eclectic manner but then focused more narrowly on Covid, like so many other writers on Substack and elsewhere. I think it’s clear that unless you live in China (and to a lesser degree Canada and a few European countries), the epidemic has run out of energy. Every time I try to force myself to sit through a medical video - even by people I admire and have watched and listened to repeatedly - I hit the “stop” button less than five minutes in. I just don’t care about any of it anymore - medically, that is. I still care very much about the near destruction of our way of life, about the bald-faced ethics reversal (“It’s YOUR duty to make sure I don’t get sick”) and the overall economic and moral collapse we are witnessing.
Nevertheless, I find that I either don’t have much to say about it all…or that I am too depressed to write about it. I know with certainty that the cloud of depression would lift if I saw Fauci making a heartfelt apology on national TV, though a person without a heart cannot be expected to make a heartfelt anything, I suppose. Just a plain old simple “sorry, we messed up” would do. But now, as we drag through these months of post-pandemic ennui, where everything has been turned upside down, nothing resolved and yet we are somehow expected to pretend all is normal…I don’t have enough creative oxygen to write about it all.
I have mused a bit about the Ukraine situation but that, too, is no longer a topic I can add much to. Except perhaps to quote Winston Churchill’s famous “Better jaw jaw than war war” (incidentally, Churchill never said it this way. He said something like “Better to sit jaw to jaw than to conduct a war campaign” It was later adopted and modified by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who DID indeed utter that now famous “jaw jaw/war war” quip)
I think that I shall return to my original idea of eclecticism and will write about music, psychology/psychotherapy, history and the Prague of Franz Kafka and of my childhood. So please stick with VERUM ET GLADIUS (which is how Google translated my title “TRUTH AND BATTLE” into Latin…I would have thought it was VERITAS ET GLADIUS but what do I know)
Verba volant, scripta manent