Bathroom renovation. Dust everywhere. Bookshelves covered with plastic. Rug rolled up, workmen noise. All of which provokes me to see things a little differently.

Tucked away in a closet, a small box of Miele vacuum cleaner bags. There seems a care for the design in the box, even. Something that speaks of a culture that has reverently pursued the spiritual side of life since 'they' sprang from the woods, and before. (The same brave aesthetic that brought us Martin Luther, the Guttenberg Bible...?) I think of cave paintings as I look at the box with the diagrams of bags and instructions in seven different languages. I mean, obviously this is industrial design. It's not the same thing as Giotto's inspiration to take holy figures, previously flat, remote, not of the real actual world of light and shadow, gravity, dimension and individual personality, and breath real life into them, but... Maybe that is just the creatures own innate response to something designed well. We have a deep meaning moment. The simple joy of something made well, with great care and considerations, in its own utilitarian way, a work of art, maybe great art (as if 'when all is said and done.')

Covered with dust I retreat to straightening out my email inbox and iTunes. I listen to the first movement of Mahler's 9th. I listen to Beethoven's piano concerto no. 3. I hear in Beethoven for maybe a moment or two--this is just me--all the women he would have made love to, silly as that sounds, I know. But there is a passion there. There is a reverence. There is something we could call spirituality. There is something in play which makes us better human beings, less likely to be inconsiderate of another's effort to live, kinder, anticipating decency in what we come across.

Does one sense, say, in Kerouac, a kind of inspiration of a deeply religious man, serious about his art, one in keeping with the Catholic background, practicing or not, a sensibility... Well, yes, I think so. And we can see it in his transcription of the life of Buddha, Wake Up. A reverence toward the human species' attempt to understand why we are all here and that sort of things.

That's what goes into good books, just as in good music, painting and little boxes for the proper kind of vacuum cleaner bag. A personal sense of preserving the spiritual of things.



Ah, yes, but we all know, it can hurt to be reverential, hurt to care about something and place deeper meanings within. And in your own passion for making that which is religious into something deeply personal, you run the risk of being taken as a bit mad (as was Van Gogh.) No? Or maybe that speaks about the nature of heresy. "No, you got to do it our way." No one has exclusive ownership over the right to make art, nor the right to prevent its creation, arguments over obscenity and inflammatory statements, racism, Hitlerism, harmful stuff, violence, put aside for the moment, of course.