I Can Hardly Believe it Has Been A Year: Remembering David S. Tabor

David and his brother Nathan standing with me in Vienna in front of Freud’s house at Bergasse 19. The marker on the street shows where a Jewish family once lived. They are all over Vienna.

I can hardly believe it has been a year. There is nothing I could say that would improve on what I wrote last year, a week after David’s death. I am posting it again here as I want alll of you to know what an extraordiary person he was and especially to enjoy his extraordinary art. Please click on the link:

 
My sister Betty just shared with me the last message she got from David, it was just a few days before he died, when he invited her to come be with us in Houston where he went for treatment. This message shows David’s sweet and innocent spirit:
 
“Hi Betty! Sure thing!.,we’d all much enjoy you visiting with us at that Houston house! Btw; I plan also to film us all there; talking in the living room. Think it’d be a very great film anyway. Priceless. We could share copies of that film,.I know Nate would really enjoy watching that film, in Spain. So definitely join us there. Should be a great visit!”

More Bits and Bites During the Summer of Covid

More from some of recent books and films…or heard on the street…

 I want death to find me planting my cabbages. Careless of death and still more my unfinished garden. Montaigne

Conventional wisdom is a disease again which a small percentage of humanity has been inoculated.

To be a fundamentalist, you have to have a book. And you have to forget the book has a history.

Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense–that’s scholarship!                        Gershom Scholem

And you are too slow. A good quality for a lover but a bad quality for a Horseman.     Queen Elizabeth 

On all the flesh that says yes; on the forehead of all of my friends; on every hand held out I write your name.

God Talk

We are all wayfaring ones, our birth, our circumstances, whether order or chaos, privilege or plague; very little is controllable in the grander scheme of things, at least from the vantage point of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. We carve out our tiny space, feel the “I” of it, but  it all blends together into centuries and millennia. We call it “history.” Such a strange concept. Microbe, elephant, flea, or sequoia, seem to somehow “harmonize” with wars and cruelty, chance and necessity. And then there is that amazing grace, not the song, but the “thing” of it–the Dasein.

The Universe/God began to “talk” to me in synchronicities: coincidences meaningful only to me and individually dismissible (to a skeptical outsider) as mere hokum, but too numerous and often too striking for me to dismiss.

Brenda Denzler

Nature and the Human

Nature notices neither the unspeakable sorrows and sufferings humans inflict on one another, nor the destruction and pain resulting from natural processes of cause and effect. “Chance and necessity, chance and necessity” chants Jacque Monod, with a cadence like the slow drumbeat of a cosmic mantra. “Atoms and the void, atoms, and the void,” echoes Lucretius from two millennia ago.  The flowers outside the gates of  Auschwitz burst forth a panoply of colors and the grass grows green and thick with the spring rains as rabbits and mice come forth to welcome the sun. And that nature itself, “red in tooth and claw” drums slowly on in ever unfolding evolutionary patterns, each entity oblivious to the whole, but ever acting within it. The same is true after an earthquake or volcanic disruption or astroid impact or a pandemic. We who have the gift of self-awareness and wonder and analytical observation bear the burden, shed the tears, cry out to the cosmos, and wonder as we move through life how and where our sense of “meaning” and “purpose” fits…or Not. Are we anomalies and flukes in a process otherwise dead to and unaware of anything that goes on—or is that very capacity we have to ask, somehow reflective of something we have yet to understand? Yes, Mr. Zimmerman, we are going down the Valley one-by-one, as only your 70 year-old voice can sing it. But is there a choice? I put myself deep into this painting done by my departed son David, I can actually stare at it and merge into it–a strange feeling. I want to open my eyes and look around and see that is beyond the archway ahead.

Walk through the Unknown by David S. Tabor