Post 146.  
 
Unlike friendship, Love (caritas) is offered to friends and enemies alike (Matthew 5:44; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, Question 23), which seems to share similarity with Beautying. When a band records a new album, a sculptor puts their work in a public square, or a crafter offers a bracelet on Etsy, their artwork would fail if it only drew interest from friends. But other acts of beauty—a lullaby, a campfire song, a blanket knitted for a new baby—are almost entirely contained within friendship. Friendship involves eye-to-eye conversations, help in times of need, common meals, shared experiences of all sorts; and is therefore a particular kind of love. Perhaps the deepest: But love is bigger than friendship. In love we may buy a meal for a destitute stranger or give to a global charity that feeds the hungry. For Catholics and many other Christians, love is enacted through what are called the Corporal Works of Mercy—feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. These expressions of love cannot be limited to friendship—one must not only love those with whom they are friends. The Good Samaritan cared for the stranger, and so must we.

            Because we enact beauty from the limited consciousness of a human—we are not God—many of our beautiful acts have lives beyond our awareness. A painting may be discovered long after the painter’s death and find its way into an elite museum. My undergraduate music teacher professor, Vahe Barberian, worked extensively to produce performances of his deceased father’s symphonies. In the 21st Century, sometimes something as simple as singing Happy Birthday as a family might go viral, and touch millions of people’s lives—if only for an instant before they each swipe on. Like acts of love, the life and results of an act of beauty, given to a stranger are unknown by any but the Lord. Intention matters, likely more than results if only because results are beyond us, especially the omniscience needed to predict perfectly the results of any free act. 

            We enact beauty because God is perfect Beauty, the creator of Beauty—the cistern from which we draw our beautiful acts. To take the time to beauty is to have a certain kind of faith in the future—like planting a tree that will take a century to reach maturity, and may be cut down by someone else. Some musicians make money songwriting, but others live lives in obscurity, writing songs for some other reason. To create something beautiful and meaningful is to hope for relationship with both other people and something unknown and unknowable, the mysterious spiritual Being who is Beauty.

Daniel Shevock
 
Link to image (Jan Van Delen, Caritas): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Van_Delen,_Caritas_(1673-80),_KBS-FRB.jpg

Post 145.

Remind me to bring earplugs next time I write at Starbucks. Perhaps being a musician, or my tendencies toward the spectrum, is why I notice the obnoxiousness of today’s corporate spaces. Not only Starbucks. When I get gas at a Sheetz, I pay for the gas—my labor traded for ancient sunlight—and I also am forced to endure songs and advertisements blasted at an unpleasantly considerable volume-level. It feels like a breaking of the social contract. I pay for the gas; I don’t pay to be advertised at.

            Problem solved, today anyway. I asked the cashier to turn the volume down a little. I feel awkward and assertive making the request, but nobody else has walked in for the 15 minutes I have been here. Online, customers indicate that corporations use loud music to keep customers from lingering. What an odd purpose for a business model, especially for the coffee house, which was borne in the Enlightenment and nicknamed the ‘Penny University,’ and where scholars, artists, merchants, and poets gathered to read, write, talk, and share ideas. But, as is well documented on the political right and left here in the U.S.—capitalism ruins everything.

            Every business model has, at its core, a beautiful sowing—universities were founded to fulfill the medieval need to conserve the ancient intellectual tradition and to understand God in His created universe (university) and the activities of humankind. Public and parochial schools were established to increase public literacy, so that everyday people, and not only clergy and scholars, could read, especially scripture. Hospitals were instituted to care for and protect the lives of the ill and injured. Public housing projects to shelter the working homeless; police forces to protect the community; carpentry guilds/unions to erect beautiful buildings that everyday folk could not, such as cathedrals; and robotic technologies to lessen dangerous labor freeing people to attend plays, musical festivals, and to make their own arts and crafts. The list goes on, and all these institutions—when they grow long in the tooth—in capitalism risk losing sight of their beautiful purpose and reduce their existence to imprudent quarterly profits.

            Most academics would understand capitalist institutions’ loss of their beautiful purpose within the historical writings of Marx—and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so. However, I am going to suggest writers who are otherwise at each other’s throats have identified this same problem. Russell Kirk’s 4th Principle of Conservatism is prudence—which is indeed long-standing virtue in our Christian and Greco-Roman history. “Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity.” https://kirkcenter.org/conservatism/ten-conservative-principles/ Most conservatives today might argue that many of these big businesses are private, when in fact the process of incorporation—a government policy—publicizes most especially large institutions, with their tendencies toward monopolization of markets. Rather than piecemeal argue against the squalor of modern public universities, schools, housing projects, and the like while ignoring the squalor of private gas stations and coffeehouses, I would rather apply this principle of prudence more consistently and generally.

            If a virtue is to truly be a virtue in the Christian sense, it is applied generally. Christians are not relativists. Prudence, the virtue of being as clever as serpents and as harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), is the finem, or “end” of all moral virtues, according to Thomas Aquinas, directing human thoughts on all other virtues (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q47.A6). Rash, inconsiderate and fickle people often lack prudence while cunning and anxious people have a distorted sense of prudence. I would argue prudence also guides the human understanding of Beautying.

            Prudent beauty is not a new idea. Medieval schools aimed to nurture harmonious people, the vir perfectus, through study of music as one of seven liberal arts. The ideal music was neither too harsh nor too timid; neither too loud nor too soft; neither too ignorable nor too striking. So too the harmonious people medieval schools taught (https://archive.org/details/didascaliconmedi00hugh). Today we may know more musical genres and have instant access, online, to more cultures’ folksongs, symphonies, improvisations, mantras, stories, raps, ragas and tunes, but a general application of prudence—fit within each culture’s ideal musical expression—can guide many assessments of the human formations of Beautying. I find, as I write this, I want to avoid falling into the trap of 20th Century aesthetic theory, which placed Western musics above non-Western musics, and classical musics above popular musics. I have no intention of flipping the pyramid on its head either, but rather appreciating all musics within context, and understanding that they are, in some way, an expression of that trinitarian reality impressed upon the whole universe (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/bonaventure/). Beautying is prudent to the extent that all relationships best reflect prudence.
          
 ds 
  
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:12_La_Prudence_-_H._Pussey_Grand_Etteilla_Tarot_Deck.jpg 

Post 144.  

Often, I awaken and observe a watch in the night by studying the bible. Last night, I read Psalm 137, the beginning of which is known through the song, “Rivers of Babylon.” The psalms express the full range of human emotion—our full internal life. Good and bad. God knows it all—and there’s no reason to hide the truth of our thoughts. The psalm vividly takes us to Babylon, where in despair a musician reflects on the brutality his people have received from their Babylonian captors. Enslaved, the psalmist sorrows at being forced to sing cheerily for his slavers as they dance, eat, drink, and celebrate their victory over Jerusalem. “How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:4).

            The psalmist then promises to always remember Jerusalem and curses himself if he would dare forget. Then the psalm turns dark. Perhaps the darkest moment in scripture, as he prays for Babylon’s desolation, and blesses whoever pays back Babylon for its destruction of Jerusalem. He prays, “Blessed the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock.” (Psalm 137:9). What a horrible thing to wish for. It is horrible also when we do this—and God sees our darkest hopes in us.  

            How bizarre it is to hear the German Reggae/Disco group Boney M’s 1978 cover of “Rivers of Babylon” become popular on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Repeating only the first part of Psalm 137, and to upbeat-cheery rhythms, Boney M’s hit fails to plummet into the depths of despair voiced by the psalmist. And yet, there’s something in the paradoxical nature of it, a bubbly song in the shallowest of short-form internet rubbish with a finger pointing to a moment of earnest despair, hopelessness and misery. It could easily be dismissed as just another moment of postmodern audio- brain rot, but like any expression of beauty, even miscarried ones, the finger pointing is pointing toward Beautying. The involuntary cheerfulness of the psalmist expressed in trite baloney. Relationships are never perfect because people are never perfect, and even at our worse, any attempts can reveal Beauty—in all Beauty’s horror, false joy, and feeling.

DS 

Link to image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M.#/media/File:Boney_M._(1977_Atlantic_Records_publicity_photo).jpg

Post 143. 

In the book of the prophet Jonah, God reveals His nature as Love. The Word speaks to Jonah, commanding him to speak words of forewarning to the Ninevites. Jonah, the devout Hebrew prophet, flees by boat toward Spain, at the remotest reaches of the known world. Why does he seek to escape the Lord? Jonah knows the Lord’s power, and that He is the single God who is actual. The Word then walking with Jonah is the God who walked with Adam in the Garden of Delight; who warned Noah to build and vessel; who gave Sarah a son when she was 90; who led the slaves out of Egypt, parted the Sea of Reeds, and fed them manna in the wilderness. Jonah, then, knew not only of the Lord’s power, but of His mercy. This is what he feared.

            In the 8th Century, BC, Nineveh was a large city in the Assyrian Empire, which had decimated the Kingdom of Israel, killed and tortured many, and captured all the educated and strong youth. Assyria was known for being cruel, devising what would become the foulest and most notorious mode of torture: crucifixion. Jonah lived in the Northern Kingdom, in the town of Gath-hepher, about two miles from what would become Nazareth. Jonah likely had family members who were killed, tortured, and taken into slavery. When the Word came to Jonah he knew of God’s oneness, of his strength, and of his clemency. It is clemency that vexed Jonah most, and he absconded from his homeland and the Lord.

            In his flight Jonah experienced God’s power over the sea, being forced to admit that the God of the Hebrews was Lord of the land and sea. Unnamed sailors were converted and offered worship to the one God as they reluctantly threw Jonah overboard. Jonah, consumed by a large fish, was taken to the depth of the sea—to Hades itself—and prayed that he would once again be allowed to be in the presence of God. After three days, Jonah was expelled onto the shoreline where the Word returned to him and commanded him again to prophesize to the Ninevites. He reluctantly did so, offering Ninevah the shortest prophecy shared in scripture: “Forty days more and Ninevah shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4).

            I say these eight words aloud. Were they spoken in a soft or loud tone? With abruptness or with gentle lovingkindness? Did Jonah speak to them dryly with a shade of joy, eager for Ninevah’s destruction and taking pleasure in it? This seems most likely, by what follows. Jonah retreats beyond the walls to await the city’s annihilation, rightful vengeance for the atrocities Assyria committed on Jonah’s nation, family, and friends. But the Assyrians pronounce a fast and repent of their many sins. In response, God relents, and shows mercy, just as Jonah dreaded He might. Jonah, the unwilling prophet, stews in his tent. Does God withdraw his lovingkindness from Jonah, this obstinate prophet? No, he educates Jonah, explaining that he loves the humans and animals that live in Nineveh. They too are His, just as the sailors are, and as Jonah is. Rather than retribution, He wants a relationship with them.

            Who is this God that is one, all powerful, sends his Word to his prophets, and who relents? Relenting is typical of loving relationships. My son asks to go bowling and I say no. Later he asks again and I relent. Do perfect fathers relent? Evidently. Many centuries would pass before this paradoxical question had a theological answer—the Trinity. The word—Trinity—is not penned in scripture, and yet, read in light of the Trinity, some of the most paradoxical scriptural episodes become less paradoxical. How is the face of God something humans cannot see (Exodus 33:20), and yet Adam and Noah and Abraham and Moses all walk and talk with Him? The Word of the Lord comes to all the prophets. For early Christians wrestling with the divinity of Jesus, most explicitly in the Johannine books of the bible, the Word is in some way God, but in some way a separate person. So too, the Spirit is a separate person, unified as part of the same God. God is one, God is three. Trinity. From the dawn of being, the Trinity was—three persons in loving relationship. For an internally loving God, God does not require our relationship to be perfected—He is not missing relationship, only to get it through his creation—but rather clemency is internal to God. Herein lies truth to the nature of Beauty, in God’s transcendent relenting. Beauty is never experienced except through relationship—an artist colony, a punk band meeting in a garage, a father walking with his teenager through a museum pointing out his favorite paintings, a DJ and an MC responding to each other’s improvised ideas, a child cooking a cake for the first time with their parents, a singer responding to an audience, a grandma crocheting a scarf for her grandchild, a congregation intoning psalms together, a barber discussing baseball while trimming an old friend’s hair, or a mother singing lullabies to her babe in a rocking chair. Every experience of beauty in this world is internally a relationship—so it would be inconceivable to imagine transcendent Beauty as lacking this essential characteristic of beauty-in-specific. Relationship.

DS 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jonah_and_the_Whale,_Folio_from_a_Jami_al-Tavarikh_(Compendium_of_Chronicles).jpg

Post 142. 

God made us as logical creatures, as well as material, social, creative, and spiritual creatures. May I never have the hubris to say, when talking of my material reality, that it is my animal self in a way that implies it is less than other aspects of myself. God created the material as well as the immaterial. A dog is no less created by and beloved of God than the Pythagorean theorem. One material and one immaterial. No. This is a Platonic ordering of reality. Nonetheless, one ought not swing the pendulum too far in the other way, and reduce all to material—mind to brain, mathematics to the number of objects, music to soundwaves—and claim living the intellectual life is some sort of hubris.

            The intellectual life can indeed become hubris, if taken from a Platonic stance of ordering; things below forms of things, material below ideal. But from a scriptural perspective, there is no necessity of such hierarchy. Each are beloved creations of God. Both are also the right of everybody, regardless of job, class, race, intellectual ability, or sex. Every human has a need to wrestle, to their ability, with intellectual questions. There is, then, a humble intellectual life that can be lived by everybody. Whether or not witty folk can easily grasp those things wrestled with by those who are less quick is irrelevant to the question. Stay in your lane. Wrestle with your own problems. If you have a way to help, help. But don’t judge. The medieval hierarchy—nobility above aristocrats; above clergy; above soldiers and guildsmen; who are above peasants—appropriates too much space in our hearts today, long after our cultures have made a mockery of nobles, aristocrats, and clergy. Let us drop the hierarchical thinking and return to those grace filled needs of the human, which are not only material, but also intellectual, artistic, and spiritual.

DS 

Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intellect,_statue_by_Josef_Ma%C5%99atka.jpg 

Post 141. 

For Christians, a relationship is at the center of everything. This relationship—The Father Loving the Son, and the Son Loving the Father—is expressed through an oft puzzling word: Trinity. God is one. God is three—creator, spirit, word. Centuries before the first Christian theologian was born, the Greek philosopher Plato reasoned the first part of the Trinity, that God is one. Plato’s monotheistic One, the perfect form of the good, the source of all reality, is infinite, simple, and unchangeable. The One is the standard by which all are measured. Plato’s One harmonized well, for many Jewish and early Christian authors, with the Abrahamic God of Israel, who is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). The I am who is (Exodus 3:14). Not a thing but Being itself. However, a God who is One without also being a relationship is experienced as distant, cold, and fixed. This is not the God of scripture, who relents and is altered out of His good sympathy (Jonah 3:10). In scripture is uncovered a God who is love. Not one who merely loves, but who is love. The Trinity.

            In Plato’s most prominent myth, a man is chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows dancing on the cavern wall. For him, these shadows are the total of existence until one day, against his will, he is forced from the cave, past the figures and the fire in the cave, and out into the actual sun. He is in pain as he gazes upon the motionless but vivid sun. But eventually he comes to realize he has now seen the form of all light. The perfect form of light, the idea behind light that allows one to recognize imperfect light in the shadows of flames on a cavern wall. This light is flawless and frozen. This is the nature for all of Plato's forms—the form of dog, or the form of a chair—making up its -ness. E.g., dogness or chairness, which permit one to recognize a particular instance as a dog or as a chair.

            If the ultimate transcendent description of God is Trinity—that God is Love is above the Platonic One who is the fixed Good—then at the center of everything is relationship. Somehow a perfect relationship. A perfect relationship which cannot be frozen. This activeness of God is what inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he describes heaven as active, while in hell, Lucifer’s wings freeze everything. Ossified. Fixed. While Plato’s transcendental forms are frozen, with the full weight of that word, the Christian ideal transcendent must be the opposite—animated, stirring, everchanging, affectionate, and dynamic. While many authors have wrestled with Trinity as dynamic, few have gone beyond the Platonic ossified form of transcendent Beauty. Their descriptions of Beauty have more of Plato in them than the Trinity. As such, my recent work has aimed to understand what an ecological and praxial conception of transcendent Beauty—or Beautying as a transcendent verb—might mean for musicking and teaching.

DS   
 

Image Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif/640px-Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif

Post 140.
Check out Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy.

Prompt (ChatGPT): Design a lesson plan based on the article, Satis Coleman—A spiritual philosophy for music education. 
 🎵 Lesson Plan: Listening to the Sacred: Music, Nature, and the Seeking Spirit
Grade Level: Middle School (Grades 6–8)
Duration: 2–3 class periods (45–60 minutes each)
Theme: Exploring music as a spiritual and ecological practice through listening, improvisation, and instrument-making
Inspired by: Satis N. Coleman’s holistic, spiritual, and nature-centered approach to music education

 🎯 Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students will:

• Engage in deep listening to natural and human-made sounds
  
  
• Reflect on the emotional and spiritual aspects of music
• Create simple instruments using natural or recycled materials
  
  
• Improvise music inspired by nature and personal experiences
• Understand music as a means of connecting with the environment and inner self
  
  

🧘‍♀️ Day 1: The Art of Listening1. Introduction (10 minutes)
Begin with a discussion on the concept of "deep listening." Ask students:

• What sounds do you notice in your daily life?
• How do these sounds make you feel?

2. Nature Sound Walk (20 minutes)
Take students on a silent walk around the school grounds or a nearby natural area. Instruct them to focus on the sounds they hear—birds, wind, leaves, distant traffic, etc.
3. Reflection and Discussion (15 minutes)
Back in the classroom, have students share their observations. Discuss how these sounds could be considered musical and how they relate to emotions and spirituality.

🛠️ Day 2: Instrument Creation1. Introduction to Instrument-Making (10 minutes)
Discuss how Satis Coleman encouraged making instruments from natural materials, emphasizing the connection between creation and personal expression.
2. Building Instruments (30 minutes)
Provide materials such as:

• Recycled containers (for drums or shakers)
• Rubber bands and boxes (for string instruments)
• Sticks and tubes (for wind instruments)
  
  

Guide students in creating their own simple instruments.

3. Sharing and Discussion (15 minutes)
Have students demonstrate their instruments and discuss the sounds they produce. Relate this to the sounds heard during the nature walk.

🎶 Day 3: Improvisation and Expression1. Warm-Up (10 minutes)
Begin with a group rhythm exercise using body percussion to build a sense of unity and focus.
2. Improvisation Session (25 minutes)
In small groups, students use their handmade instruments to create short improvisational pieces inspired by their nature walk experiences. Encourage them to focus on expressing emotions and stories through sound.
3. Performance and Reflection (15 minutes)
Each group performs their piece for the class. After each performance, discuss:

• What emotions or images did the music evoke?
  
  
• How did creating and playing the instrument affect your connection to the music?

📚 Assessment

• Participation: Active involvement in discussions, instrument-making, and performances.
• Reflection: Written or verbal reflections on the experience of listening, creating, and performing.
• Creativity: Originality and thoughtfulness in instrument design and musical improvisation.
  
  

🌱 Extensions

• Journaling: Encourage students to keep a sound journal, noting interesting sounds they encounter and their emotional responses.
• Research Project: Explore instruments from various cultures and how they connect to nature and spirituality.
• Community Engagement: Organize a performance for the school or local community to share the students' creations and experiences.
  
  

This lesson plan aims to embody Satis Coleman's philosophy by fostering a deep, personal connection to music through nature, creativity, and introspection. Let me know if you'd like to adapt this plan for different age groups or settings!


DS

 Post 139.

Rootless lights flicker
in the absence of footsteps
an owl forgets us

What does it mean to speak, to carve thought into shape, when the very loam beneath our language no longer holds our weight? The words come quickly now, summoned by circuitry rather than spirit, and yet, they fall like ash, weightless, silvery, without scent. We no longer labor with ink. We no longer stain our thumbs.

There was a time when silence served as teacher. Wind through sycamore leaves. A creek learning its own path through limestone. A child humming beside a field. Now we listen to wires, soft clicks in dark rooms. It's not silence that teaches now, but simulation.

Artificial intelligence is not intelligence as we knew it. It does not forget, does not forgive, does not falter. It compiles. What it compiles, we consume, forgetting our own hunger. The cost of this miracle is not paid in gold but in groundwater, in the hum of cold server farms that never sleep. The cost is paid in distance. From soil. Sweat. The patient friction of lived time.

The natural world taught us rhythm. Sunrise. Cicadas. Grief. AI offers speed without tempo's tether to breath. We are sold endless songs without the singer's broken voice. Essays without the hand-callused writer. In losing labor, we risk losing soul.

We write faster now. More. Always more, but if every word is harvested from past speech-acts, who plants anew? If every note is echoed, who listens for silence? Our stories no longer compost into soil. They circulated, untethered, endlessly sterile, complete.

This is an invitation. Step away. Touch something unproductive. Grow sentences like bean sprouts, crooked and reaching. Let thoughts meander. Let wondering be inefficient.

Beauty survives only in the fertile places where decade is allowed. The digital does not decay. It ossifies. But what is preservation without presence?

This piece was not written by hand. It was generated by ChatGPT based on the writing style of Daniel J. Shevock

DS


See also:

The Model for Convivial Tools Applied to ChatGPT, Shevock & Holster. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacob-Holster/publication/389275394_The_Model_for_Convivial_Tools_Applied_to_ChatGPT/links/67bca05c461fb56424e8955a/The-Model-for-Convivial-Tools-Applied-to-ChatGPT.pdf

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Social Media in Music Education, Bates & Shevock. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vincent-Bates/publication/350410129_The_Good_the_Bad_and_the_Ugly_of_Social_Media_in_Music_Education/links/648b08687fcc811dcdd04d2c/The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-Ugly-of-Social-Media-in-Music-Education.pdf

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Bates & Shevock. https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lessons-Living-Planet-Ecomusicology-ebook/dp/B0D6F7BZ14/

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock. https://www.amazon.com/Eco-Literate-Music-Pedagogy-Daniel-Shevock/dp/0367607352/

Image link: https://openverse.org/image/efbd6747-894b-4c18-b7e3-ea5baf06c3a5?q=circuit&p=3

Post 138.

            I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, translated by Isabel Hapgood. It is eminently readable, which is good, because the book is long (at 1263 pages). I finished reading Dante’s Inferno, which was interesting, shorter, but had its own type of tedium. Inferno is less about the story and more a fictional philosophy. Back to Les Mis, which is interesting and philosophical. I am reading about the good bishop, who is so out of place in a harsh world, as a Christian must needs be.

The bishop is physically affected by the guillotine, walking with a condemned criminal to it and into that man’s hope of salvation. But he is physical impacted by the technology of the guillotine.

"The guillotine is the concretion of the law, it is called vindicate; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron, and cords." (p. 16)

I think that Deleuze or another postmodern philosopher already treated the guillotine more concretely and directly, but not as Catholicly as Hugo does in this artistic response. [I looked it up, it was Foucault, not Deleuze.] Some of this quotation—not all of it—can also apply to any technology we humans immerse ourselves with voluntarily, and not only the technologies aimed at swiftly ending our lives. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence each are concretions of relationships among people, though not necessarily or explicitly “the law,” as the guillotine was. On the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, human hopes, dreams, expectations, and desires coalesce and are elevated or exterminated at the whim of an apparently neutral tool. Nevertheless, these tools are, like the guillotine, not neutral, and do not permit one to be neutral when faced with them. They reduce experience to a complex and occult binary equation and define the terminus of possibility. These tools replace relations that entangle the actors who use their eyes, ears, nose, and skin, replacing human-to-human contact with mere interactions that are detached, separated, and isolated.

            Like the scaffold, for today’s people, interactions with and through the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence do not seem machine-like to them. These tools are not lived as being inert mechanisms with material realities, including parts built and shipped around and trashing the globe, built with obsolescence in mind, run by server-farms polluting faraway rivers. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are, to so many normal people without the time to think deeply about them, their friends, relatives, and companions on their easily forgotten journey toward the grave. The scaffold and the everyday tech we surround ourselves with, then, have something in common—the end, also known as our eschatology. AI and the scaffold are both meant as relatively tranquil and pacifying modes of passing.

DS

See also:

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock 2017

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025

Post 137. 

This morning, I heard the song “This Pretty Planet” on YouTube Music, and decided to print out the lyrics and figure out the chords so I can add this to the list of songs done by 5th or 6th Grade Music next quarter. I think it will likely work well as something that utilizes Orff instruments for improvisation, maybe creating movements, and eventually learn it as a part-song—with three different parts over the same chord progression. The lyrics are as follows:

This pretty planet spinning through space,
You're a garden, you're a harbor,
You're a holy place,
Golden sun going down,
Gentle blue giant spin us around.
All through the night, safe 'til the morning light.

Ecologically conscious questions could include: How does thinking of Earth as a globe spinning through space; a garden; a harbor; and a holy place inspire you to think about Earth and our relationship to it? In what ways is the earth a planet spinning through space? Scientific. From the point of an imagined indifferent observer. From the perspective of the universe. In what ways is the earth a garden? Flower gardens offer us beauty, and we aim to conserve certain places we have deemed excessively beautiful, like the Amazon, Mauna Loa, the Grand Canyon, Mount Kilimanjaro, Yellowstone, the Flaming Cliffs of the Gobi, Banff, and Victoria Falls. Equally, as a garden, Earth offers us physical sustenance—and Earth as garden can direct our attention to sustainable agricultural practices that protect waterways and sustain human life.
           
Harbors are beautiful places that help us, after a long journey, experience a sense of having landed. As a place of arrival, harbors increase our sense of satisfaction after long periods of sometimes anxious journeying. Holy places are also, at times, places of harbor—to mix metaphors, pilgrims travel, often on foot, ancient pathways like the Camino to arrive at a medieval cathedral, the seat of the bishop. Holy places are also places we wish to preserve as historically significant. Mount Sinai is historically significant for Jewish, Christian, and Islamic people, being where Moses received the commandments. The Wailing Wall is probably the most sacred site for Jews, being destroyed by the Roman Empire 2000 years go. Kashi Vishwanath Temple is one of the most historic and sacred Hindu temples, perched on the banks of the Ganges River and dedicated to Shiva. And the Tiger’s Next is a sacred monastery in Buddhism build 1000 feet above a small village in the Paro Valley, Japan. Stonehenge is a prehistoric sacred site and possibly an ancient burial ground, though the religion Stonehenge exemplifies is long past.
           
And finally, as a holy place, the Earth can be a place for worship. For Christians, which I am and obviously know most about personally, the Earth is fallen but is God-created. Created as “very good.” As such, throughout the Middle Ages, Christians were said to study two books, the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. Today, the Franciscan tradition seems to exemplify this approach to God’s creation. But other traditions within Christianity have also offered ecological statements, as well as Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims.
           
The song “This Pretty Planet” can afford the ecologically sensitive music teacher many opportunities to cultivate eco-literacy.

Daniel Shevock

See also:

Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025