The world has always been an ugly place, but the ugly sure seems pervasive today. At every turn, every click of the computer as one survey’s the internet, all we experience is disappointment and decline.
The FBI has become a criminal enterprise, Washington, DC is a crime syndicate, Israel not only commits a genocide but attacks a neighboring sovereign nation and demands that the US get involved. My disgust with world events is now complete.
Writing is a way for me to release the inner demons, and share the observations as I view our world. But one simply cannot beat the negative drum daily, that is not a healthy pursuit. Cynicism can become a spiral downward, into a self-created misery.
No reader wants to follow an author down into the abyss of mental torture over a cruel, cruel world.
One must attempt at times to seek out the better angels of our nature, to not see the clouds but the breaks in the clouds, see through to the blue skies above.
Making some attempt to disrupt the daily poisonous pen exposing the filth and degradation, I began to wonder.
I wondered, can beauty be found anywhere in this world?
And scrolling through “Youtube” I found this
That my friends is not only beautiful, but pure perfection captured forever.
Hearing Smokey Robinson sing elevates the soul. I’m not sure music can inspire and lift any more than listening to that two-and-a-half minutes. Somewhere in there are angels, attempting to whisper to us all.
Perhaps only in a world of autotune, greed, avarice, and filth that is the music industry today, can one look back and hear Smokey Robinson sing and really appreciate the brilliance.
There was a time and place that such beauty surrounded us all, and yet I’m not sure we appreciated it to the degree warranted
There was a time and place where the actual business of printing and pressing records for sale yielded to the art, understood that the product mattered, and that the music had to take center stage, and that profits would follow perfection.
I’m asking you, look around, where do you see this beauty replicated in our own world today?
Certainly we are much more technically advanced than when these recordings were made, and we all feel as if our lives have been elevated to a higher place than back when both of these recordings were made, but I look around and I cannot see where the beauty is allowed to shine through the greed and avarice.
Material pursuit has become a complete obsession, and though our youth have at their beck and call programs that can allow them to showcase similar talents to what I’ve shown here, to reveal them to the world, instead we get poseurs and cat videos, Only Fans and The Kardashians, Real Housewives and Howard Stern, pure unadulterated filth fed into the minds of our impressionable children, whose aspirations are no longer to achieve something substantial and worthwhile, but to become a “star” on Instagram, or Tik Tok.
There was a time, and place, that Detroit attempted to create automobiles that stirred the soul. Made from materials that endured. The bumpers alone from a late 1950’s auto were indestructible, a piece of chrome plated steel that had gravitas. Today’s egg shaped cars are indistinguishable except by name plate.
Pontiac claimed they didn’t build cars, they built “excitement”, but Pontiac is long dead. The fruits of their labor seen only in old “Rockford Files” shows on some obscure cable channel.
We live in a completely disposable society, and unfortunately the most disposable item of all appears to be real talent. When “dreck” produces a ridiculous stream of cash with ease, why bother to waste time seeking real talent.
Maybe the real issue is that by removing God from our lives almost completely all that is left is the material and superficial.
I don’t know much but I do know that in both of the recordings I’ve linked to here, there is an element of the spiritual shining through. Perhaps back then, when we still had some connection to God in our daily lives, there was a real effort to allow him to shine through our talents.
And now, with God completely absent our lives, there are no vessels, no servants, no one willing to serve the divine and allow their gifts to elevate his presence.
For if you listen to both of those recordings and aren’t moved spiritually, then perhaps you’ve become too far removed from God yourself. I don’t pretend to choose your God, but I do believe that whatever higher power you espouse can be found somewhere in the music I’ve attached.
Tesla said that it is all in the vibrations, the patterns, the mathematics, the frequencies. As frequencies change so do the patterns, and there are sounds associated with calming the mind, and reaching the soul. Somewhere in Tesla’s formula is the divine.
And in this music as well.
I needed a break from the daily drum beat of negativity and awful news from world events. I needed a break from the disappointments of the current administration, and the lack of arrests and justice served.
I needed a banana split, or at least a hot fudge sundae, but recent health issues preclude the treat that can sooth the mind and body. I could take no pleasure from such instant gratifications, doctors orders.
A little Smokey Robinson, a little Beach Boys will have to suffice.
Two videos, less than five minutes time, and my soul has been fed.
I am once again ready to read the news.