Scripture is Jazz
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“A poet’s work…To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking….And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”
― Salman Rushdie
Stabbed ten times at the Chautauqua Institution… he is off the ventilator and conscious. What point art, people ask? Well, if people weren’t so afraid of it they wouldn’t try to strangle it.
— Rhiannon Giddens
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Each line on a Native American’s face is a badge of honor, every line holds sacred knowledge from their experiences in this life….For honor and respect were shown to these elders, and the more lines meant more knowledge to share. For these Elders usually had the last word for the most important decisions for the well being of their Nation….We did not see beauty as young appearance but saw beauty and gave reverence to these lines.
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If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.
— C.S. Lewis
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I do not believe Van Gogh was trying to capture what he objectively saw so much as to share what he subjectively felt. I look at religion the same way. Scripture is more like jazz than an instruction manual.
— Jim Rigby
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We want life to be simple and easily explained by an instruction manual that we can follow with nary a doubt. Our credulity is boundless and the joke’s on us, only it’s more tragic than funny. Happiness and certainty prove difficult to capture within the confines of our precepts and religious commandments. Our gullibility can even make us into killers. Our literal thinking is not thinking at all, it’s a refusal to think. It’s fear of the questions that life puts to us. We’re afraid of not having the final answers.
