In the beginning...

"By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid, art, makes mighty things from small beginnings."
(John Dryden, British poet, dramatist, and literary critic, 1631-1700)

I suppose I must be off my proverbial rocker to attempt blogging, as: (1) I am over 30, and therefore not tech savvy; (2) I have enough work to do for which I do not get paid to bother undertaking another fiscally fruitless endeavor; and (3) I flatter myself to imagine that anyone would be interested in what I think or have to say unless part of a captive audience, as are my college students. (Of course, one of my brother-in-laws has said that he would even pay to hear me lecture about wallpaper, but having friends and relatives compliment you sort of leads to the woefully clueless incidents on "American Idol," in which the contestants' families apparently had encouraged the auditioning parties to make public asses out of themselves in front of millions of people by coddling egos and building up levels of confidence to a degree so absurd that it defies sanity.)

I am reminded of Jesus of Nazareth's parable which advises, "Consider the mustard seed," a lesson which teaches, amongst other things, that great feats can be accomplished from minuscule amounts of faith. (A parable is a type of allegorical narrative, an extended metaphor, in which everything or person in the parable represents something or someone in the real world.) But as I am in a Dryden kinda mood, and I love his maxims, I'm going to continue to quote him herein:

"Ill habits gather by unseen degrees;

As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas." 

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

"Think nought a trifle, though small it appear;

 Small sands the mountains, moments make the year,
And trifles, life." (Edward Young)

If I am to be "bounded in a nutshell" in defining what this blog intends to accomplish (if anything), I offer simply a brutally honest...I dunno. I can, however, attest to what it intends to address, that being my ongoing fascination with language, literature, art, and Judeo-Christian studies; it will consist of random, miscellaneous musings about matters both academic and pedestrian, whether secular or ecclesiastical in bent. I don't have grand plans to post on a regular basis, and I don't fancy I will have regular, devoted viewers (thus I am not really in a position to disappoint very many people, which is a plus, I suppose).

I chose the Dryden quote to launch the site because I think it quite apropos for the content I'll eventually get around to posting somedays, in that it conveys the idea that nature is superior to art, the latter of which is principally mimetic of what the Architect of the Universe created for His enjoyment, which He has been gracious enough to share with us. The amazing beauty, variety, and complexity of nature surely is a testament to the unfathomable powers and wisdom of God (a lesson not lost on Job, whom God had chided for his initial failure to realize as much, see, e.g., especially Job 38-42), and art is our mortal attempt to follow in our Father's footsteps, even knowing we can never fill His sandals. I am speaking, though, of art which held sway for centuries, until we get to the nonsense of what is deemed conceptual, abstract, non-representational, or Postmodern art, most of which is a hot, chaotic mess produced by people with little-to-no talent possessed of grossly self-inflated, gargantuan egos, the most of whom are modern-day flimflam artists--blecch! 

I don't care what line of bullcrap they are peddling, I'm not buying it. Even if Picasso had not confessed that artists of the 20th Century (and beyond, by extension) are confidence men, who sucker you in and then swindle you, I am "onto him," and have ever been cognizant of the shift from beautiful, meaningful, inspirational, motivational, informative, expressive art to that which is hideous, senseless, discouraging, maddening, irrational, self-indulgent crap which passes for art, albeit it is little more than "mental masturbation," i.e., no one but the artist is really gratified by viewing it. As far as I am concerned, much of contemporary art can be symbolized by the story "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which critics are afraid to admit that there is nothing of value existent in what they view, for fear of being considered stupid or naive.

True enough, one time when my nephew was still quite young--nine years old, tops--my mother took him to the Art Institute of Chicago; he was delighted, and raced from gallery to gallery, but stopped dead in his tracks as he turned the corner into the one which had featured multiple works by the man considered by a preponderance of art critics to be the most important artist of the 20th Century, Pablo Picasso, and, much to the amusement and horror of the fellow patrons, he absorbed the paintings for a moment, and then turned to his grandma and blurted out, "Sooooo, what's with all this crap?" Ahh, out of the mouths of babes, wisdom comes!

"Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly impostors. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit.  We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things." (Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist, 1881-1973)

From humble beginnings this site traverses into the public sphere; I can't be certain that things won't run horribly afoul as time progresses, but it matters little if I triumph or fail:

"God is in his Heaven,

 All's right with the world!"

(Robert Browning, English poet & playwright, 1812-1889, Pippa Passes)