The Police reunite tonight!

For those of you who know me, you know I rarely watch, let alone get excited about anything on television (films/movies are a different story). However, I am really stoked about The Police reuniting at tonight's Grammy Award ceremony. The picture accompanying this post is from the very first Police album I ever owned, Regatta de Blanc, which featured such classic songs as Message in a Bottle, Can't Stand Using You, and lesser known classics such as It's Alright for You.

I still know all the words to their songs by heart. I just can't wait to see Sting, Andy, and Stewart playing together again. I have to attribute their Ghost in the Machine album, which was inspired by Arthur Koestler's book of the same title and which included the song Spirits in the Material World, which is a great take on some implications of Rene Descartes' philosophy as articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy, to my desire to study Philosophy academically.

In this age of mP3 and digital music, the concept of an album that explores a theme, like Ghost in the Machine and, later, Synchronicity, gets lost. Hearkening back to my post, As we prepare to observe the Incarnation of the Son of God, Part II, the music of The Police, Rush, REM, along with some more obscure groups, helped form me and my consciousness. It is no exaggeration to write that listening to The Police is the immediate cause of me reading Descartes, Jung, Koestler and, referencing Don't Stand So Close To Me, "that book by Nabakov". I am not and never was a Jungian or a Cartesian, and Koestler, while a very bright polymath, is a poor man's philosopher. However, as a fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year-old these ideas and concepts fascinated me and opened my mind to a larger world and initiated me into the conversation. In fact, the first Latin I learned was from the title track of Synchronicity- "spiritus mundi"- the ancient philosophical concept, not entirely rejected by some Platonically-leaning Fathers of the Church- spirit of the world- not Satan, but a spirit, while not divine, animates the world, something like Gaia, which is a concept with very limited application, from where I stand, to the Christian faith, but not completely without value.

Anyway, it should be cool. Happy birthday to my lovely wife, who turns 29, yet again, today. I love you!