Hilton Head Island: Bach and the Golden Record; terrible times; three poems

I am sipping cava and listening to Bach.  I could post a photo of yet another spectacular sunset from this evening but I have pity on you and don’t. 

If you have subscribed to Mark McQuire’s Because Wonder emails, and I do— https://www.becausewonder.com/—you will have recently read of The Golden Record which was placed on Voyager 1 when it was launched in 1977.  Actually there are two ‘records’, gold plated copper discs intended to last billions of years and to carry far into the universe twenty-seven tracks of music in an attempt to convey to any other intelligent life—I am inclined to put ‘intelligent’ in quotes because our species often isn’t—some essence of human life.  While I know that the universe is far beyond my imagination—the universe is itself the most extreme example of wretched excess in the universe—what I can imagine causes me to believe that we are not the only so called intelligent life forms extant. 

You can listen to the Golden Discs from a number of sources.  Spotify.  Apple Music.  YouTube.  I am listening to it on YouTube.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

I note that three of the tracks are Bach.  Beethoven has two.  No one else has more than one.  That seems right.

Of Bach, James sent me a link to a performance of Bach’s CHRISTMAS ORATORIO, for which I thank him.  I noted the comment as shown below.

I read further and found many other than myself listen to Bach everyday. 

Of the terrible times, this is historical myopia.  

I have just watched the ten episodes of a very well done Netflix series:  The Greatest Events of WW2 in Color.  I know the history, but I have learned and seen a good deal that was new to me.  The episodes on the bombing of Dresden and the Allies reaching Buchenwald were particularly revelatory.  Those were terrible times.  Our pandemic is nothing by comparison.

Of the series, my only criticism is that it is too slanted toward us and does not give enough time to the Eastern front in Europe.  The Soviet Union suffered more than twenty million deaths in the war.  The US 500,000.  There is an episode on Stalingrad.  There should have been ones on Moscow, Leningrad, and Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history after which German defeat was inevitable even without D-Day.

On another music video that I admire, Brandi Carlile’s ‘The Joke’, I saw this comment which I find very sad.  Many responses told her she was not old at forty-four, with which of course I quite agree, but I feel her loneliness and isolation.  I am not latino, an immigrant, or gay.  I am old and I need mostly to be alone, but that is not the usual human condition.  As I have written before, we are herd animals who know deep inside that we are all alone.

I noted that after finishing an anthology of Chinese poetry I downloaded one of Japanese.  

The first Japanese poems in the anthology were by or about emperors and princes and not worth being preserved.  However as the anthology progressed beyond nobility, it became interesting. Dates and background of the poets are not provided,  but I admire these two by Tajihi, whoever he was and whenever he lived.  His loss reaches across time.

I also read each afternoon some Western poetry, presently from the BEING HUMAN anthology in which I came across the following.  I could have written it myself.