After the Sunday organ recital at the great outdoor pipe organ in Balboa Park, my mind was thrown into a state of confusion.  The organist, someone I know, was not announced at the beginning or at the end of the performance, and the audience was told to speak of him as "anonymous."  Everyone who attended the concert was asked to agree not to talk about the concert by saying who played the organ even if we knew his name. The audience was asked not to take photographs or videos of the concert. The reasons given had to do with fairness relating to the hiring of a new city organist.

A group of friends and I are reading and discussing The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong.  Before going to the concert, Margaret and I attended the hour-long discussion about a short section of Armstrong's book.  Karen Armstrong, a former nun and a scholar, has caught my attention with her ideas about how religions that exist in the world today got their start. The section of the book we read before today's discussion was about the history and particularly about the "world view" of the people who lived and thought and wrote in Greece 2500 years ago.  Included in Armstrong's book and therefore in our discussion were the ideas that were explored in the plays of Sophocles, particularly in the tragedy Antigone... so I reread the play and reviewed the history of the period in Greek history when the play was written.  Before I go on with "a discussion" and an explanation in the Blog of the muddle in my thinking about how Sophocles plays are appropriate to the political situation in my country today, I have some more thinking to do.

The last time I spent time thinking about Sophocles and his plays, I was preparing to talk with high school seniors about Antigone.  I am thinking again about those days and Sophocles' notions about human conflict, particularly political conflict, and I may try to devote a few days of Blog writing to the subject.  We'll see...