The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Musings on Being and Becoming Human

Issue 16

Welcome to The Grapevine! This issue's Presentations include poems on subjects as widely variant as horse racing Lakota style in words and pictures contributed by Anne Fields; making love to music, poems by Anne Lovett; highwire walking over a canyon in Nik Wallenda's breathtaking adventure, recounted by Barbara Knott, who in Reflections offers the script of another poem in which she takes you back to the beginning and promise of Egypt's cultural revolution.

Inside Views and Reviews is a selection of pieces referring to experiences of the past year that contain ongoing conversational potential. There is a review by Nancy Law of a local "wine and art event" sponsored by the literary journal Minerva Rising. In a theater review, we look at Brenda Bynum's avowed intent, in her impressive one-person theater piece, to stir up a small renascence of interest in the life and work of Georgia novelist and activist Lillian Smith. A review of the Actor's Express production of Equus explores the thematic loss of worship given provocative treatment in actor Chris Kayser's portrayal of a psychiatrist attending a boy who, caught between one parent's atheism and the other's religious fanaticism, finds his own distorted form of worship inside a fantasy of horses.

Jonathan Knott, in his Tracking History column, talks about how the blood spilled in war makes sacred soil (subject of an Atlanta History Center exhibition), and Charles Knott introduces James Hillman's unusual treatment of war in his book A Terrible Love of War (2004). Our Museum (place of the muses) pays homage to Ravi Shankar, Doris Lessing, and Seamus Heaney, all of whom died in 2013. In World Voices, Ravi Kumar introduces the Hindu notion of indwelling divinity, as signified by the gesture and word "Namaste," translated as "I greet the god in you." Inside External Links, you will find pointers to additional recommended websites.

Two new categories appear in Issue 16. Entertaining Ideas is a place to introduce new ideas and to revisit and refresh old ideas. One piece considers a possible meeting place for science and soul. Another explores the relationship of enchantment to attention, reverence, psychic sensuality, and praise. In our second new feature called Why We Love Atlanta, we launch what will be a long look at The Grapevine's location in the actual world. Even though we are dedicated to cultivating a broad audience from many places, most of us who contribute to The Grapevine live in the Atlanta area, a particular landscape where we go about our work and love and recreation, engage in thought and art, write and make images, and publish some of them in our journal. That chamber contains postings about Atlanta area people, places, things and events that compel our attention and elicit our praise. We begin with our love and the city's love of theater.

We also want to draw your attention to some interesting findings from other places. As you move around in the salon, you will come across windows that show you, for instance, what it looks like inside the human womb where a fetus grows, and from a much larger perspective, what our planet looks like from outer space, views that may well change our paradigms for thinking about the world and our place in it.

In his book The Gift Lewis Hyde says, The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We wish you that refreshment as you visit us here at The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon. The entrance below will acquaint you with some of our thinking as we named the salon.

Reference: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage Books, 2007, p. 25.

The SALON presents a variety of writers and image makers, from promising beginners to seasoned artists. Anyone who wishes to submit a piece for our consideration can send it as a rich text format document (rtf file) through e-mail to editor Jonathan Knott: jknott@grapevineartandsoulsalon.com.

The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon welcomes comments from visitors. General inquiries can be sent to webmaster@grapevineartandsoulsalon.com. All our regular contributing writers can be e-mailed directly (click on Contributing Writers and open specific pages for e-mail addresses).

Opinions expressed on this site are the opinions of the authors themselves, not necessarily of The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon. Each page on the website should be read in conjunction with this disclaimer.