Extracts

Dilation on topics du jour, many from email to a particular person. From habit, I'll try to put in dates. The date range for this page is 5/19/02 - 10/26/02.

5/19/02	A friend who is overly impressed with professional experts, recently attempted to resist my getting him to express a thought of his own. I told him I delight in speculation for its own sake. It is a real pleasure to pass one's precious time in trying to figure something out without much regard for the experts. Let the experts go suck on their prejudices in silence for a change. I figure an ordinary person free in his or her mind is close to the best when it comes to speculation, general knowledge, pleasure in the workings of the brain, intuition, and general whatnot that only a churl would care to try to distinguish him or her from the best. The main use of the experts, mavens, gurus is to provide us with grist for our own churning mills. They are not our leaders, but our attendants. The same applies to the Group and all its mechanisms of government. All should serve the individual mind in its dance with destiny (dubious word, but I like it anyway :^D ).

6/2/02	Your comment, "stretched my mind and once it is stretched it won't go back again", I like. Once one's mind is convinced it has its own center, its own gyroscope, it detaches from the cacophony of one's immediate culture. By "culture" here I mean not the high culture of, say, Plato and Mozart, but the constant chant of "this is who you are" by those around us. In doing this, one's mind begins to create a personal touchstone of truth. The culture is arbitrary, selfish, relative. Each of us is an integrity taught to suppress its nature for perhaps understandable reasons of socialization and survival, but there comes a time when that integrity can be honored and allowed to express itself. /.../ Quote from you, "He was trying to fly high enough to see everything at once." I think the mind needs understanding the way the stomach needs food. If one stares at something, it is a message from the mind to itself to fuse knowledge and perception, then store the successful result in memory. The philosopher applies this, what is basically a survival technique, to the mind's own abstractions. The result may be many things -- confusion, reverberation, new coherence, joy in simply being there hosting the profound cascade of sheer thought. Whether the universe is itself unified, has much integrity, I don't claim to know. But in us, the universe is caught in the act of being an integrity-generating process that has no bounds.

6/25/02	Saying more about the inner and outer worlds, I had a sense one time, that has stuck in my mind, that for many people the world is in direct contact with their periphery -- (how can one know, of course, what is the world view of others?) But it seems that retinas, skin, the membranes of smell and taste are pasted directly to the world, as it were. I have had a view, as long as I can remember, that I was observing two worlds, the inner and outer at once. It comes and goes, fainter now and stronger another time, but always there to a degree. The periphery is well down inside the brain surrounded by a swirl of ideas and sensations and thoughts, the first layer. The second layer is the rest of the universe, I suppose. As a matter of observation, rather than philosophy, I'd say there is a sort of objectivity about the inner layer as well as the outer one. Just being, is stupefying. This double-layer mind adds even more to the amazement of it all. Not only is the world there and me there to perceive, but I see with some detachment the inner processes of dealing with the rest of the universe. Really, it must be the same universe happening on both levels. The universe is trying to understand itself in us and we, without question, are part of the universe. We ask ourselves questions: what is it?, what does it mean?, what is my place in the whole?, even, how does it work? This process, though, does not depend on our personally finding answers to the great questions, yet we will try. The process goes on of its own impetus. It is far more profound than our thoughts flitting birdlike from limb to limb. Some Zen types have asserted we are already enlightened and I suspect it is true. Too bad we can't (I at least can't) relax into that enlightenment at will, even if I can't be in that state at all times as some of them say they do. I can only sometimes be in that stone-like center of whatever all this is at the core of the two layers. When the universe fell in love with change, it gave a marriage gift of a small stone that did not change and the stone conferred upon change eternal youth. And to this day, each of us has a small stone given to us at birth. Without it we would be blind to change and to the possibilities of life. There, that is my myth du jour. If there were not something beyond the perfect bliss of the eternal moment, why does life burn like torches in the dark vastness?

7/6/02	"Integrity taught to repress its nature." The needs of the group have great potency. That has always seemed both mundane and odd at the same time to me. The group has no brain itself, its mind is weak, it has no body proper, but its id is powerful and its blows are hard. Many individuals have had reputations ruined or been crushed by it over the ages. The individual has far more integrity than the group, yet the group is "immortal" (or at least long-lived). The group is rather stupid, the individual has the creativity, the emotional subtlety, the delicacy of expression. The group has a kind of wisdom, often hypocritically put into effect. The group is a rough beast that can smell a lack of "groupness" on a person and it has an instinct to attack, if that is the case. In unity is strength: the group's deeds are sometimes mighty, yet virtually all that we hold to be valuable in human life is created and sustained by the individual -- art, literature, music, scientific discovery, curiosity, adventure, love, and all the other emotions and high aspirations. And, for a final indignity, when the group has led some poor mind into sullen stupefaction, it is then "individualism" that is blamed for bad behavior. To compare the group to the individual is to compare a pile of rocks to a cathedral. As to integration, it is a tendency of the universe in all its forms. To unify that of which something is made, is the natural bias. We and other higher life forms exhibit this feature in abundance and we carry the tendency on. While the philosophical end result of this line of thought would be a unity of the universe as a whole, that would seem to be well down the road. (Or perhaps not, I don't know, and figure no one else knows either.) My guess is the tendency to unity comes first, later we ask what the purpose is of that. We see that a unified entity has a greater efficiency, a greater continuity, in dealing with the rest of the universe. We see that a smoothly-running internal system is healthier, more robust, than one at war with itself. Fine, I agree with that, yet I try to remember the bias was no doubt there first; it was born before purpose. A tendency to unity just is; it needs no reason. Reason is one of its many children.

8/3/02	And porches indeed. We had a nice creaky red swing on ours when I was a kid -- a great place to enjoy a bit of summer afternoon or evening. Just think of free associating on the great times of youth, before TV, before the pervasive fear of a thousand things that doesn't allow kids to play anywhere they wish anymore: Kool-Aid in metal glasses sweaty with condensation, hide-and-go-seek in the gathering gloom, black ants on red peonies, big cars with a big enough area under the back window, you could crawl up there and watch the stars, drive-in movies with double features and cartoons and hitting the snack bar between shows, the countdown to the next show projected on the screen, lightning bugs making the darkness into a great 3-dimensional space (later I liked the name fireflies better), screen doors slapping behind you, running feet (kids ran a lot), heavy bikes you couldn't damage, buttery popcorn treat, cool movie theaters, radio mysteries going out to well-developed imaginations, the worst thing anyone imagined then would be as nothing today... See the USA, a little dab'l do ya, Burma-Shave ("Saw a train, Tried to duck it, Kicked first the gas, And then the bucket!), Better buy Birdseye! You'll wonder where the yellow went... A fiery horse with the speed of light... I'm Buster Brown, I live in a shoe...

8/18/02	Yes, you have one person in agreement with you about the vapid stuff sent to us by our busy friends as if having included us in a list of email addresses two years ago constituted staying in touch. Perhaps their attention spans will shrink to a sort of stuttering amnesia and they will dither themselves into a heap, twitching and dreaming vaguely they are being productive.

9/7/02	I figure if they know computers are often a problem, it will help them get over their fears. Having a foam mallet with which to smite the monitor or box might be a good idea. So-o-o... welcome again to the wonderful world of information technology. We are in the horse-and-buggy part of the Information Age. (Emphasis on buggy) Some day these things might be pals, whispering in your inner ear that you shouldn't buy that catsup as you already have the jumbo size in reserve in your pantry, but if you do want it, it'll print out a coupon for 50 cents off, but on the other hand watch it because you are showing signs of becoming allergic to red food-like substances :^D

9/14/02	...and the subject of praying mantises came up. I talked of finding one of these formidable giant insect dragons in my backyard as a kid and taking it in the house in a jar. I was very impressed with its awareness of its surroundings and its fearlessness and its turning its head to watch the fool that imprisoned it. Its attitude seemed to be that the proper order of the universe was being violated by some clueless bozo and if things were as they should be, the bozo would be an inch long and lunch. I remember nearly jumping in surprise on coming into the room where it was after sundown and switching on the light -- its green eyes were coal black! OK, so with that so recent conversation in the swirl of mental flotsam, as I was carrying groceries up our stairs (24 stairs) at about 7 in the evening last Thursday, I was very surprised to see the PM slowly attempting to navigate the top stair. In moments I had invited the PM to visit us and he/she with usual PM grace, accepted. I finished putting the groceries away and turned to my guest. We adjourned to the kitchen. The PM, at one point, flew slowly to the curtain. This being acts mostly with stately measured movements, but strikes with speed when it needs to do so. The camera came out and the PM and I interacted as best we could. Hence the images. Then I carried the PM to the somewhat isolated yard of a nearby church, and placed The Right Honorable PM on broad flat dense hedge, to make progress there hopefully toward a good meal and whatever pleasant fate the universe allowed. As to the coincidence, it has been years since I last saw a large praying mantis in the wild, not that I have been particularly looking. I am the opposite of observant by nature, being intro-, rather than extro-, spective, as I have said. When I do look, I look as deeply as I can and can not count the times I've been surprised by joy...

9/29/02	From an email of the other of us: [Eric] Sloane’s comments (in the video interview) on his painting were fascinating. He talked about painting fast and taking advantage of “happy accidents,” of letting them lead from one thing to another. He said something like this: An unintentional splash of orange on the canvas might remind him of just how the light was on the corner of a barn in a late afternoon many years ago, and he’d paint that barn instead of what he had started out to paint. Then a man walking down a street in New York City, pondering a dozen problems and with art the furthest thing from his mind, might see the painting in a gallery window, and it would remind him of just how the light was once in a late afternoon many years ago. And he’d buy that painting because what he wanted, and what he needed, was not a picture of a barn or a picture by a famous artist but a memory of a moment in his own life when everything seemed right and beautiful.

10/2/02	Ah, were we ever in our twenties, young goofs strong of sinew and opinion? Yes, I believe so. And I remember once, in my twenties, lying on a hilltop and feeling so good in the sun with soft ocean wind in my hair that I decided to leave one of my selves there forever half-drowsing with ideas and images slipping in and through my so-called mind in never-ending stream. Part of me is there yet. I have always liked reading history, though I haven't been much taken with politics and warlords and the endless perfidies, etc. Over the years, lots about ordinary people in different times and cultures, lots of overview -- the twenty-odd civilizations, most long gone, lots about the Greeks and Roman civilizations with their many inventions and arts. This history interest, like many interests, wax and wane and wax again. I still have a Histomap of History which is a four-foot long chart of expanding and contracting cultures and key moments and leaders noted in the appropriate time section -- I knew it well at one time and used it to place people and events into some kind of context. My goal was to have a "sense of history", that I thought a person should have to have some grasp of his own time. I always felt I wanted to be more than someone who just "woke up" and discovered himself to arbitrarily be a 20th century American complete with the full set of notions and prejudices. Now that I am a 21st Century American, well, I feel the same way, I guess. The difference is in the energy level one has, maybe, as one grows older. I have forgotten much, I am wiser mainly in expecting less of myself and others than I did. The ideals remain, yet the inner pressure is less against the tremendous pressure of time and cold reality. Or maybe the id-driven ego of youth is mitigated and the inner pressure is more now sustained by a humbler love of truth and beauty which seems less grand than the blazing force of young life. Like you, I must faithfully follow the roller-coaster of physical health and energy where it leads -- sometimes to a weariness, sometimes to a better moment than a younger me would have been able to perceive. One anonymous radio essayist described a time of near defeat after a long effort to establish a competitive dog team. He and the dogs, while on a training run, broke into a stunning paradise of drifting snow and sunlight that transported his soul. He and the dogs ran freely for miles in transcendent mountain beauty. He said, and I agreed with him as he said it, that this is what we hunt for, what we are really doing -- searching out great moments to remember in all the lesser times good and bad.

10/5/02	I used to write poetry some, but now mostly do doggerel for fun, like this old one of mine: Maybe it's all just atoms stacked By a lonely god who felt he lacked An audience for moral talks -- The universe as artifact.

10/13/02	It IS time-consuming, like anything that results in something beyond the ordinary, but is, like all art, rewarding in ways few other things can give. The key is the world of the self, not the selfish self (a variant of common delusion), but the self that wanders from birth to death in a larger something not the self in search of unity or peace or perhaps equality with the rest of the universe. Having life and sentience, it is an insufficient response to be merely a passive consumer of the world's offerings. Simply put, there is a need for some authentic doing that comes from the core of oneself. The creative spirit of the world then meets its twin in us. So I think anyway... Eric Sloane carved into all his many mantelpieces this: "The providence of God is my inheritance". Am pleased you liked my little poem and passed it on. If there is any feedback from that author, let me know. There is a fine little satisfaction that comes from knowing a mental child is doing OK in the world. I have written few poems of that type in later years: it is a form I made up when we lived in the backwoods of British Columbia in the 1970's. It is a modified rubai (from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam). There are two fewer syllables per line and was invented to allow a haiku-like brevity in a more Western form. I remember another from those years: On Regretting The Passing of Summer The hillside flowers died today, And autumn mushrooms heap the tray -- If I could turn the Sun-Road 'round, And make Old Winter lose his way... As a note on the poem, I had been studying astronomy and astrology at that time, and was very aware of the movement of the sun through the constellations and the grandeur of time's passage in the heavens. How much I have forgotten about the stars and planets... As for astrology, my reading had frequently wandered into discussions of symbolism and I decided to choose an area of study where symbolism was coherent -- a system, rather than an arbitrary bit here and there. I looked into the Tarot, had a deck of Tarot cards that were to be colored by hand (the colors all have symbolic meaning), and finished maybe a dozen or so cards before our life changed and that was lost. (It was great, though, the slow painstaking hand-coloring really fixed the symbolism in mind.) But I did study astrology to the point I could do charts and give a rudimentary "reading" of a person's chart. I never was interested in the superstitious aspect of astrology, nor did I "believe" in it. But that was never the point of my study -- I thought all symbolic systems are expressions of the human psyche and, as such, provide a more open door to that psyche than the scientific systems that focus on the mind. Some things just ain't scientific! (No self-respecting astrologer would come up with so gross a description as 'anal-retentive'! :^D ) ... The images are from a rainy overcast day, hence are humbler, more muted. Still, each place is a different place at different times, the plants and animals are beings of all seasons, things persist through drama high and low, who am I to insist on intensity? As an example, in walking with a friend and chatting away, I almost missed noticing the unusual behavior of four ducks. The young female was swimming rapidly around three young drakes who were staying together in a small, ever-changing circle and displaying in a subtle way to her. This went on for maybe four minutes. I had never seen this before and wondered what it meant; after all it IS the fall of the year. More always going on around us than we know of. As I have aged, the scales of significance tip more and more away from the babble coming from our electronic culture and, frankly, the conversations of most people. The sound of crow or cicada or distant thunder register more and the yada less.

10/19/02	Perhaps this is a different set of geese on their way south, I don't know. I read these geese are staying further south more and more. Alas for golf courses, geese really like them and, as big animals, they fertilize these giant lawns liberally. People are muttering about doing them harm. Personally, while I would hunt them if I would otherwise be hungry, I hope they can be left in peace. More animals and less people would be just fine with me. I figure inflation of human population leads to devaluation of human worth just as oversupply does with money (not to mention the environmental destruction).

10/20/02	Fires, traffic snarls, toxins, germs, communication blackouts, power outages, nuclear contamination, disruption of shipping, persistent sniper attacks, deliberate and artful rumor. And, with very good reason, thoughtful people do not really completely trust government itself due to bad laws, bad information, manipulation, and such realities as government dumping of disease germs on various cities without warning or permission of humanity below, not to mention feeding people psychotropic agents just to see what happens. We are a bit too herdlike in relation to authority, particularly compared to the image Americans have of themselves as independent citizens from whom authority flows. This may lead some to sense they are between two dangerous entities and act accordingly... Hmm, such digressions are probably salutary, if done in moderation. Any of this sort of thing could become obsessive, if one allowed it. I remember the old curse: "May you live in interesting times" and I find myself wanting to re-dedicate myself to the inner life.

10/26/02	"The clear skies, and beating hot sun, with only the breeze from the ferry to cool us. The ever present sea gulls following the ferry..." -- yes, that is a good example of the special moments that come upon us by surprise in the midst of living. Living is mostly moving from A to B to C in a vague anxiety as if time were a grim authority figure to be pleased, but by a species of grace, we are given a span outside the hasty journey that is a time of times, or outside of time. It is to be savored if one is aware of it, and remembered either way -- a little epoch of pure being. Such moments, I have come to feel, are high in the list of reasons to be for they continue to lend their inherent grace to us as long as we have memory. Ohio history -- I know much less that I would like to. How the fond looks of those natural entrepreneurs that were the ex-colonialists turned to the Northwest Territory and the Ohio country. I read somewhere there was the Society of Cincinnatus made of American officer veterans of the Revolutionary War that chaffed to move west to Ohio and, especially, the Ohio River that promised to be the main artery of trade for the new developing region. I've read that much of central and northern Ohio were swampy, so vast drainage ditches had to be cut. The Erie Canal was a bold stroke later to develop a supply line for enthusiastic new inhabitants of the new fruitful lands. What a release of human energy! The Indians lost all their opportunities at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, more than they could have seen at the time probably. What a stunning period, that of 1790-1890, where no one knew or cared about limits on human dynamism. Roads, canals, then railroads were banged into place so rapidly. Everyone was in a hurry after centuries of restraint by endless authorities. Suddenly the lid had been removed and humanity boiled over and across the rich land and into every nook and niche poked the roads and railroads. All the expressions, good and bad, of the human spirit were made explicit and anyone or anything in the way was destroyed or pushed aside. Farms, ranches, roads, railroads, and towns were established on the flimsiest of excuses. Then, it is as if we woke up in 1890 and realized the amazing thing was done, the frontier was gone. What was left was to adjust to the consequences of our acts, to regularize, repair, codify, settle down to the long haul. Many are the ghost roads, ghost railroads, ghost farms, ghost towns scattered everywhere; their bones joined the bones of the bear, mountain lion, and buffalo across the great land. It is as if we had mighty and heroic ancestors who ran out of magic, who had tried a great deed one too many times, who sighed out in exhaustion and in doing, shrank in size to the size of ordinary people, turned and put on office casual clothes and proceeded to number-crunching tasks, and bought SUV's in a unconscious and pathetic tribute to what they once were. I very much appreciate your historical efforts. As the I Ching so amusingly points out: "It furthers to have a goal." Blake said energy is eternal delight and, for all I know, he's right. I remember a conversation I had with a friend back in my Muir Beach days. We had little pot-bellied stoves that was the source of heat in the little cabins. I took the argument that the fire was like a little demi-god or elemental. Like a primitive god, it would do well by you if you fed it and honored it with its own little temple, but if you treated it with disrespect, it would destroy you, and all you had, without a backward look. Though my friend was not in a mood to agree with me at that moment, later, he said, as he was carefully building a little structure of kindling in the stove and muttering prayer-like words to encourage the fire to abide with him, he decided I was on to something. Whether energy may destroy us or, more commonly, dissipate, it needs to be guided into a productive path so we may gain temporal, if not eternal delight. We may know this truth, but we simians are so constituted that we are easily distracted from anything, including what we know is our personal best path. Maybe we are still back there in the grasslands of Africa, hunted daily by lion and threatened by snake while we look a thousand times a day for that next root or berry or nearly invisible rabbit. If so, perhaps we are not doing so badly, considering that lion waiting by the bus stop ;-} Geese on the golf courses. I like the use of sensible dogs to defend the courses and possibly public parks. I do like having the geese here, though. Like so many situations, what is needed is fine tuning and restraint -- a balance. What you usually get is extremes -- humanity (simianity?) is not good at fine tuning and subtlety. I remember in Springfield as a kid feeling sad and disturbed when the powers that were decided to shotgun the pigeons -- yes, there were hunters blowing the birds out of the sky in downtown Springfield! I think the aforementioned powers thought better of their decision later and discontinued it. Others must have felt as I did. Some cities have done well with hawks and, to do that,they had to get good at making another life form feel at home in cities. More power to this trend.