PLAY IT BY EAR

THEME FOR 2023

“THE BODY IS THE SOUL”

I have harbored profound questions about identity, consciousness, behaviors, emotions, memories, pleasures, pains, choices, good and evil, free will, and what it means to have a “life story” for longer than I can remember—certainly, for much longer than I’ve had the capacity to label and organize such items with words. What I’m saying is, I was a born philosopher, deeply and obsessively curious, wide-eyed, emotionally exacting, with a tendency toward imaginative abstraction even before I was verbal—as are so many of us little ones, before the world forces its concretizing rigors upon us. I state all this as an unprovable origin myth that will fuel my mission here.

Then again: I have always liked what passes for the concrete, too, so I’m also happy to obsess about plenty of matter-ful matters in science, history, economics, politics, and of course the weather (in its existentially loaded current meaning.

The bottom line is: I HAVE QUESTIONS.

You are, I hope, someone who’ll gain something by riding alongside my attempts to pose them and (maybe) answer them (or not). Welcome, all late-night neurotics and cocktail-party polemicists: let’s gambol and gambit.