By Wayne Allensworth (Edvard Munch, The Scream) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming This is the third of my articles on Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, and its implications. An overview of his ideas is found in A Hole in the World and Between Two Worlds: Iain...
By Wayne Allensworth In Act 3, Scene 2 of King Henry IV, part II, Shakespeare’s grand comic knave, Falstaff, reminisces about old times with his friend Justice Shallow, particularly a memorable night more than 50 years in the past. They recall a woman, Jane Nightwork, who, like Falstaff and Shallow, has fallen victim to advancing age, as time flows on, and the chimes will eventually toll for the...
By Wayne Allensworth This is the second of my articles on Iain McGilchrist and his hemispheric theory of human cognition, which posits two apparently opposing, actually complementary, modes of being and perception as expressed in the Right and Left brain hemispheres (RH and LH hereafter). In the first article, I raised the issue of relationships and how our personality—and our world—come into...
By Wayne Allensworth Gretchen Peters is another fine musician you may not have heard of. Born in New York City in 1957, Gretchen Peters found her way to Nashville in 1988 after living in Boulder Colorado in the 1970s, where she had played in local clubs. She has written songs that became hits for country stars such as Martina McBride, Trisha Yearwood, Patty Loveless, and George Strait, as...
By Wayne Allensworth Eva Cassidy may be the best singer many of you have never heard of, and she may become the best singer you have ever heard. She died too soon in 1996 at age 33 of melanoma. I was living in the DC area at the time, and Eva frequently performed in clubs around town, but I learned of her too late, after she had passed away. She had just begun to attract attention, and her...
by Wayne Allensworth Christina’s World (Andrew Wyeth) Once upon a time in a world that seems like a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a creative writing piece inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s painting. I was 13 or so, and the paper was for an English class. The teacher liked it and read it aloud to her classes. I can’t remember what I wrote, but that painting made quite an impression on the young me...
By Wayne Allensworth (Factfile.org) The man who was our greatest living writer, a man who wrestled with God along with the ghosts of Faulkner, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Conrad, has passed away at the age of 89. May he rest in peace after having struggled mightily as an artist with the big questions—meaning, purpose, God and Man, life and death, good and evil–he never let go of in his...
By Wayne Allensworth The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford, is a personal favorite of mine and a movie that influenced a whole generation of filmmakers, the generation of Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, and Scorsese. Spielberg has said that he watches The Searchers before beginning each new film project, and the opening doorway sequence (pictured below) has shown up in other films–notably...
By Wayne Allensworth On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read verses 1-10 of the Genesis creation narrative as they orbited the moon: We have lost the sense of wonder, of enchantment with and in our world. So many of us have become enveloped in a technological cocoon that regaining it will be difficult. Man has successfully manipulated his...
By Wayne Allensworth Gordon Lightfoot, Canada’s Minstrel of the Dawn, the travelling troubadour of Don Quixote, who warned Sundown to take care, languished in loneliness In the Early Morning Rain, and who wondered what would be discovered If You Could Read my Mind, has passed on at the age of 84. Sometimes I thought he could read our collective mind, as his songs were at once deeply personal and...
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