Essays by Larry Barnett
“We can’t return, we can only look behind.”
– Joni Mitchell
Despite the persistence and power of memory, the seduction of the past and 20/20 hindsight, the arrow of time appears to go in one direction only: forward. It might be more accurate to say “outward,” insofar as forward inclines one to think… Read the rest
Human society today rests far less upon nature than upon the results of human imagination. Futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller called it our “metaphysical” world, author Neil Postman calls it “technopoly,” and I call it our “cooked-up reality.” It was not always this way.
For all but the… Read the rest
Be it ritual figures made for spiritual practices, decorations placed on everyday objects, hieroglyphs applied to rock faces, images created using colored sand, applied body paint, feathers or jewelry, so-called “folk art” is the natural and often… Read the rest
We live in an age of specialists and experts who identify themselves as at the top of their craft, experts like the financial wizards at JP Morgan Chase, who recently lost their company over $3 billion dollars. “Ooops,” they said. “We feel terribly stupid.” These are the same specialists who tanked the… Read the rest