Ed Mooney | ZETEO

Leviathans, Apocalypse, Woolf, Melville

January 24, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I’m not sure what led me to open Moby Dick again. It’s become a book to browse rather than “get through.” And when a passage pops up, one can’t be in a rush. Going slowly I can unravel serpentine sentences that so often deliver gold. Why just now? Perhaps because I’ve moved to the seacoast where even square-riggers come into port come summer, and I have time for reverie. By coincidence, passages from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse were lingering […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, love, Thoreau, writing

Listening, Stillness, Inaction

January 17, 2016 by Ed Mooney

I have a friend who has published an award-winning book of poems titled “Having Listened.” He writes in the shadow of Boston, near the Arnold Arboretum, designed by Fredrick Law Olmsted. We walked there recently, a patrician park overseen by Harvard University. It has no end of whispering trees and rolling paths. It’s quiet; it’s easy to listen. My friend listens there as we walk, taking a break from non-stop Christmas festivities. But his listening didn’t begin in […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiLL • Tags: love, philosophy, poetry, writing

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Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves

January 10, 2016 by Ed Mooney

The Self is Disposable, Isn’t It? Not for most of us for most of the time. But its reality can be brought into question. There are exotic cases of apparent persons who seem to lack a self. Bureaucracies and the structures capitalism seem to deflate any rich sense of self. And the splendor of brain science swallows our better judgment about the reality of selves. My previous Zeteo post, 01.03.2016, followed the incredible story of a girl of many disguises, […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, literature, love, philosophy, reading, science, theater

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Narrative, Performance, Selves & Solitude

January 3, 2016 by Ed Mooney

Nothing is more fascinating — and frustrating to others — than our capacity to manipulate the image or story we present to others. In an acute way this capacity to pretend or impersonate raises the question of who we are beneath public appearances. The clash between public appearance and underlying reality plays into the hands of those who deceive, sometimes in criminal activities, sometimes just as part of a harmless game of charades or a sober theatrical performance. Some persons […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: ethics, philosophy, politics, social justice

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Dancing with Woolf, Treading with Eliot

December 27, 2015 by Ed Mooney

♦ What would happen if God leaned down and gave you a full, wet kiss? — Daniel Ladinsky Some words, like people, move us before we’re really aware of what’s happening. We return the glance from across the room instantaneously, spontaneously. Sometimes words are like that, a contagious spark. We dance in the space of words and things worded. A quickness of phrase or movement will quicken an alert return. The glance and spark not just of looks […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: death, philosophy, poetry, women, writing

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Whales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors

December 20, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Herman Melville was mesmerized by a mysterious white whale. A new movie in town, In the Heart of the Sea, recounts the more or less true story of a whale ramming a ship in 1820. The Essex from Nantucket was stove in, in the South Pacific. Moby Dick is a distant relative of that event. It turns out that Melville was fascinated by a white whale and also by an ominous white meteor streaming through the sky — not […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: books, death, film, literature, Meteors, movies, reading, Thoreau, whales

Dogs, Memory, Home, Devastation

December 13, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Jason Wirth’s Commiserating with Devastated Things is a wonderful book tracing themes in the novels of Milan Kundera—not to mention the resonances of these themes with Virgil, Cervantes, and Hermann Broch (among others). I’ve learned about St. Francis joyously embracing a leper, about Holy Fools in Russian Orthodoxy and in Dostoevsky (in the person of Prince Myshkin). And I’ve learned about the systematic slaughter of dogs by the Soviets as they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to install civil terror. Kundera […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: cruelty, Czechoslovakia, dogs, fiction, Milan Kundera, Russia

Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity

December 6, 2015 by Ed Mooney

The massacres in Paris or Beirut, the stabbings and instant “justice-by-cop” in Israel, unabated slaughter in Syria or Yemen, or the crystal clear framing here in Zeteo of centuries of suffering attributable to brutal class warfare — if faced unblinkingly, all this can induce paralysis. Then we learn, within days, that three are murdered in Colorado Springs, and fourteen in San Bernadino. Slow-burning or explosive, the catastrophes seem to go on and on. Sad to say, if there’s a tropism […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, crime, Marx, massacres, philosophy, solidarity

Truth, Madeline, and the Trill of Doom

November 29, 2015 by Ed Mooney

In “Madeline, Imperfection, Love, and Loss” (Zeteo, 11.25.2015), Joy Yeager reminds us of that priceless book for children and adults called, simply, Madeline. It’s the story, as she reminds us, “of a little girl, an orphan, who lives in an old house in Paris, with eleven other girls.” A nun, Miss Clavel, is in charge. For many, the book is unforgettable, full of enchanting illustrations and about many essentials: love and loss, wandering in Paris, a little community of […]

Categories: Ed Mooney • Tags: death, literature, love, music, philosophy

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ZETEO

Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

Category Archives: Ed Mooney

Leviathans, Apocalypse, Woolf, Melville

Listening, Stillness, Inaction

Brains, Literature, Disposable Selves

Dancing with Woolf, Treading with Eliot

Whales, Meteors, Terrorists, Saviors

Dogs, Memory, Home, Devastation

Massacres, Slow Violence, Solidarity

Truth, Madeline, and the Trill of Doom