Home


Extracts2

The second set of extracts from correspondence.  The period is from 11/3/03 to 6/30/03.  As compared to other writings, these extracts are on many themes, and in many moods.  The continuity is from the same source as the continuity each of us provides for our lives.


11/3/02
Snow always lends an air of artful magic to what are usually ordinary scenes.
***

11/9/02
I can't seem to get enough of ducks.  I am very fortunate that one of the most beautiful of all birds is the common mallard and that they think people are acceptable, even if mentally unbalanced.  They "fit" into an amazing array of scenes and times and moods.  They are, in fact, miraculous in their ability to fly, sit on water, swim under water, walk about on land.  They, like plants and other animals, are "out there" 24/7 in all seasons, adapting moment by moment to whatever happenstance fate tosses their way.  Their own moods and evocations of mood are endless, yet in some sense more profound than ours.  They are always against the backdrop of annihilation.
***

We've had a bit of snow, but I always hope for the real thing as it is instant magic, not to mention being photogenic.  We will no doubt move further north eventually to get some real weather.
***

Thinking about retirement, we senior citizen types can see the end of vocation and the expansion of avocation.  In my case, avocation has always been much more important than vocation. 
***

In a sense, for most people high school never ends -- it just changes its name to university to job to career, but when the bell rings ya gotta be there or get bad marks and some terrifying somebody will frown.  Frankly it all is a kind of trap -- they rope people in with medical, dental, retirement plans, the occasional praise, the small pay increases that add up.  If we lived hundreds of years, it would seem mild, but these things take the best part of all our lives.  None of this applies to the lucky souls who are paid to do what they would do for nothing, or who know they are actually doing a lot of measurable good that would not be done without them.  What percentage they -- 5%?

…so, yeah, let's everybody retire and do what one should do with life -- have fun and play hard at what one loves.  Let the machines do the work.  I would be willing to consider allowing my surrogate machine to work a full 8-hour day (with breaks, of course).  Checks may be sent to my Bahamas address.
***

Good to hear details of your investigations into Jonathon Alder.  I imagine all good historians form personal links to past persons to short-circuit time and make the past live again...
***

11/10/02
Funny, I think, the basic rules of life -- eat well, regular habits, healthy exercise, a good night's rest -- don't seem hard, but how often they are broken.  Then the Ten Commandments...  (Haven't coveted my neighbor's ass lately, wouldn't do any good, he traded it in for an SUV.)
***

The four of us had an old-fashioned gab-fest.  Anyway, there was talk of child development and does new modes of communication re-wire the brain and how will kids be different from past generations.  Sister is amazed at the rapid learning of kids re computers and the Internet.  Is the imagination exercised these days?  Will the kids be stunted in some way, but facile in others?  Is there an external nervous system developing around the planet?  Global village?  Nations of human termites?  Or of demi-gods?  For myself, I can almost feel the last stages of the passing of the old world of humans and animals and plants; of earth, sky, and water.  Not that it will disappear, but that it will be seen as superceded as we are nourished by machines while we dream inside a largely shoddy cultural landscape.  Such is the apprehension, at least.  If we are externalizing ourselves, as McLuhan, among others, say, then we will presumably live inside our enlarged selves -- what?  -- as cells in the larger organism?  Interesting stuff to conjure with...
***

Thinking about the ongoing culture out there.  I am not much in touch with it myself, but enjoy hearing about it.  I do get a jolt of blues or folk sometimes on NPR, but not much.  My general take on it all is I really don't have the time (or is it energy, after all) to focus much on the output of others as it is my own that takes my interest.  The programming and photography and reading take what I have left to spend beyond the demands of work or the general "housekeeping" of life.

In earlier years it was so important to be inside the coolest wedge of culture, to be a part of it, a member of the invisible club of ace persons privy to the best insights and perceptions.  Further, I (and many, many others) had some vague idea that art could only be produced within that world and in relation to it.  Trouble was, for me at least, the effort to stay current tends to drain one of the impetus of actual production.  I guess the art/music/politics-culture is a sort of industry, like the legal or health community.  It chugs along churning out short- and longer-term gurus, critics, clowns, choruses...
***

11/11/02
Your ISP simply must increase its bandwidth and cease irritating its users.  Blocking normal web pages to an adult user who is trying to get some project done – this is unacceptable, period.  If they are using some lame web-page blocking program, they should dump it until they get one that is reliable.  The porn question is a hard one, but fear of porn should never be an excuse to block legitimate content.  This is flat-out Big-Brotherism.  The only way to handle this in the end is by client-based blocking supplemented by what might be called "most-vile list" server-based web page blocking.  This would be only for the ghastliest and most pernicious sites, and it would have to be based on a human-maintained list of sites or pages. 
***
11/12/03
Glad your cat knows art when she sees it.  I always did think cats are very perceptive. 

As I associate illness and other negative conditions with doctors and am generally unhappy with them for many reasons, I stay away from them, though I have health coverage.  I am not crazy though, and would go to them for a broken bone or some debilitating condition.  I know the passing years will re-introduce me to them and I expect a bit of hostage syndrome to occur, but I am in no hurry for this and will avoid them until I must go.  It is kind of amazing to me how many young people I work with are constantly running off to doctors and, in fact, complaints of illness are common with them.  I take no flu shots.  I would take any reasonable vaccine to avoid some disease.  None of these comments are in relation to you or your situation, just my take on the vast health industry with its inflationary pricing and its endless demands on the entire economy.  Some of it has to do with the desire for endless youth and vigor -- the "I am just as I was at seventeen" culture.  Some of it is guilt about kids when both parents work (He sneezed, let's get an anti-bacterial shot for this probable virus condition.  Doctor agrees.  Makes money.  Super-bacteria develop?  Tough beans, let future generations handle that problem.  Etc.) And like that. 
***

11/13/02
Well, if we tried to solve every anomaly in computerdom, we would be forever occupied... 
***

11/16/03
Here is the latest set.  I finally got around to playing with long exposures, so some of these shots feature that.  And it is most appropriate I learn this as I usually go to the park in the late afternoon.  There is a period of light, bright or dim, then twilight comes fast as I am shooting.  I am adapting to the light situation, rather than, shudder, change my habits.
***

11/24/02
You have snow, I'm jealous! Gulls are strangies, so beautiful, so naked in their expressions of need.  They can chill you like a cold wind even while admiring them.  Their environment is so demanding and their numbers make for such constant competition.  Would like to know one better.  I remember a surprisingly tall brown gull "baby" wanting to be fed at SeaWorld in San Diego.  As we were wandering about the paths there, this baby approached us and wanted some fish or bread or whatever to fill its empty belly.  It had no fear of people and could not believe that no one would stuff it full on demand.  Often I have remembered that lusty, and probably doomed, baby -- so potent an exemplar of raw life amid a gussied-up commercial context.  I have had my mind twisted by such things so often, I wonder that I can think straight at all.
***
A thought: take a small sketch pad with you and make drawings of no more than 5 minutes duration.  Forget about art and skill and talent considerations -- they are not relevant to my suggestion.  The point is to make memories and to give even more excuse to observe than you naturally have.  Think of the drawings as visual notes for later letters.
***
I took some pictures as usual -- all night shots -- but have not done much work on them.  I am looking forward to incorporating time more into the images.  This should be frustratingly difficult to do well, and I am masochistically looking forward to it.  The ducks, by the way, have even more occasion than normal to doubt the sanity of people what with one of them walking around in the darkness pointing bizarre instruments at them.  Their tolerance is much appreciated.
***

The blind lady facilitator is interesting to think about.  Reminds me of a British officer during WW II who had lost a leg in combat, and who went about the hospitals to cheer up amputees.  He joked about the advantages of an artificial leg and routinely asked to be kicked in the leg to show an example.  One day he made his invitation, was kicked, and laughed as usual at the result, then walked stoutly from the room to collapse in pain away from view.  He had been kicked hard in his good leg! Then, being him, he made a joke of that too.  I thank the powers that be that I have not been tested in certain ways.  Life seems hard enough without excess frosting of pain.  I am willing to accept the handicap of less suffering, no matter how ennobling more suffering would be.
***

 And, relating to blindness, a group of us at work were given disability sensitivity training and a blind lady was present.  She works at Big Kahoona University.  A quiz-style sheet was handed out to have us respond to statements, true or false, regarding people with disabilities that included this statement: The remaining senses of blind people become more acute in compensation for blindness.  I thought about it and said True.  Answer was supposedly False.  This was stressed by the commentators.  I expressed disagreement (irrepressible moi).  The blind lady said she had learned to pay close attention to her other senses, especially hearing, and relied on them a lot.  Someone else gave a tortured re-phrasing of all this.  My final comment was the re-phrasing was legalistic.  To pay closer attention to other senses, to learn to listen and touch with the intense focus of the blind, is to indeed increase the other senses.  Further, who can say that these other senses are not physically, chemically, electrically, hormonally augmented by this increased attention and use! Political correctness is too close to being group-think not to be on guard against it.  It may mean well, but the truth is what is important.
***

…one feels impelled to have mashed potatoes, then restore cosmic harmony with a nice salad dotted with bleu cheese -- gad, I'm getting hungry just writing this.  Oh, and we are calling upon the good offices of that kindly old lady Mrs.  Smith, who works in her magic kitchen all day, her cheeks red from the heat of the oven, her sleeves rolled up, arms covered in flour, her eyes dancing with good thoughts.  Some cynics say she is a snorting factory somewhere making frozen pies by the semi-load, but I know better.  Frankly, when it comes to deep-dish apple pie, I have rarely had home-made pie any better than sweet old Mrs.  Smith makes and cooks on her pretty old wood stove out in the country somewhere amid the trees, fields, and clouds.
 ***

I worked on her computer -- it is another HP Pavilion, and I've come to dislike them.  They are a sort of pretend computer, dumbed-down by HP to artificially lower the price and increase sales.  Someone should sue them for littering.
***

You asked in one letter was I split on more snow vs.  Bahamas -- well, I've always thought if a person is going to dream, why fool around?  I have many temporary homes in my imaginary real estate portfolio.  "Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam..." -- it always comes out of me as "Oh, give me nine homes, with the taxes all paid...".  So the Bahamas (or Bermuda) are there to stay long enough to write a poem to lobsters and hyacinth, then head back to icy climes with the stark beauty of life in the north.  Brain works better in cold weather too.
***

12/1/02
You wrote of gull feeding.  I watch ducks being fed a lot, though I rarely feed them myself.  I sort of aim to fit into the duck scene as it were, be a duck, or at least a harmless wandering anthropoid, rather than a food source which would get me a reputation among the ducks and mess up a lot of pictures -- all of them would be of close ducks looking expectantly at the camera.  Fu.  There is a 25-cent duck food machine on the bridge, so some use that to get a handful of dry food to toss into the water.  The big trout and bigger gold fish (a foot long!) vie endlessly with the ducks for the food.  Sometimes it looks like the ducks are padding about with their orange feet on the fish! And some people eschew fooling around -- they bring large bags of popcorn or bread and feed ducks by the pound, despite the pathetic sign ordering people not to feed the ducks.  Some signs are there to be ignored, just as some laws are looked on with disdain by both cops and citizens.
***

…the handiness of town amenities.  We don't know how it will be, but if we have the opportunity, we will repair to a more natural setting eventually.
***

Your description of study hall and the jays outside and wanting to be out with them is like my feelings in those interminable years of school.  While I always liked learning and mental exercise and all that, I felt best outside.  Inside was being socialized, being trained to be tractable, to drone away the hours at arbitrary tasks.  How different would our lives have been if we had time each week with kindly and knowledgeable people who taught in the book of nature! Warehousing of students is more the reality, keeping them from parents' hair and out of the job market for years and years.  Some teachers did try to make a difference, but many others did not.  The latter had given up, burned-out, or never had any love of knowledge.  So much of what I know, I've learned on my own.
***

Your virtual cat friends are, I think, an early example of a social phenomenon that will grow hugely in the future.  As we become more and more isolated in our electro-cultural urban worlds, we will take friendship where we can get it, including virtual friends and experiences and personal electronic assistants and robots.  it is in our nature to engage in give-and-take with something like ourselves -- to have friendly interchange on a daily basis.  Yet we, as a society, have given away relatives, friends, communal tasks, and have come to live in the great machines that are cities. 

The desire for a friend, to put this broad need into a simple phrase, will have many extrapolations and variations.  I've heard there are some companies that have allowed pets to accompany workers (I've never seen this myself).  Some people will flatly say, if you want me, the [cat, dog, monkey, parrot] comes along. 

Others will turn to personal electronic assistants, which could also be simple robots.  These will help people remember things ("Don't buy that-- you've got six in the pantry already" or "It's Aunt Madge's birthday next Tuesday -- are you going to call her?  ") or will engage in the specific conversations that the person cares about ("I found a great quilt pattern on the web for you.  It's a variant of the one you said you were going to try.") and will eventually be able to follow a rambling conversation about ordinary life with observations of its own ("They say you should know history to avoid the doom of repetition, but I don't see much sign of it, if you ask me."). 

Needless to say, like pets, the assistants will grow inside of the personal space of the owner and be "comfy".  In time, these will come to be better friends to a person than many people can be, but one assumes they will never be as good as the best of the real thing.  Time will tell.  Meanwhile, you have your cats AND the virtual cats to enjoy.  A joke about cats and dogs: the master comes home and the dog says, "Master, please love me." and the cat says "I'll get back to you."
***

"Don't get old." Pee in the chair.  96 – not a bad age to get to.  He can pee in a chair if he wants to, far as I'm concerned.  The alternative to not growing old is an unknown state for which we have simple words and many euphemisms.  What's after I don't know, but I doubt if it is as interesting as the before.  I would have to live 36 more years to match her dad -- I doubt if I'll make it, but I'm willing to be wrong on this, assuming I would have a reasonably intact mind -- otherwise I'll pass.
***

Thanks for the follow-through with the blind woman on the question of increased other senses.  Her answer is one more possibility in the mix.  If one has no sight, hence no visual distraction, then more attention is paid to hearing and the other senses.  They provide more input than they would for a sighted person.  The brain surely compensates for this by increased activity, and more auditory and other sense information is recorded in memory.  This enriches further sensory processing.  It seems impossible that the brain's incredible adaptations would not make for greater ability in these vital areas.
***

However, there does seem a lot of illness in the general population, as I have said before.  So many people have cancer, or diabetes, or severe allergy, or heart problems.  Yet we are living longer, they tell us.  I assume something negative is happening in our society that is unknown or too "big" to reveal, regarding health.  The imagination wanders over the possibilities: crowding, contamination of the environment (long list here), long-term nuclear effects, quiet little diseases we have but don't recognize, genetic defects augmented somehow.  Maybe the electronics are slowly cooking us.  (Maybe going to doctors is statistically bad for people.) I don't know what is going on, but my intuition says something is wrong.
***

12/2/02
I looked back over my email and found its tone to be a bit negative.  Yet, that's OK, I think.  We are not machines, we are dynamic entities in a changing environment -- and that environment is colored with the hues of our current state.  While it seems the newer model folks filling up the world are dedicated to a superficial gloss of upbeatness, no matter what is happening, it does not prevent them from all the sins the flesh is heir to, and, as she has pointed out, these "people-people" often don't actually care much for others, though they give a show of doing so.  They often lack old fashioned empathy. 

Anyway, mature individuals are aware of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that is part of life, and can span across temporary differences of perception, feeling, and speculative statement.  It is not agreement on this or that point that is important in the long run -- it is honesty, and fidelity to the truths of one's life.  We who care are all members of the church of simple being and our devotions are our responses to the daily miracles of existence.  I remember once, many years ago, she and I were driving on a journey, and we saw a delivery truck in a parallel lane.  It had been converted by some hip individual to a mobile home, and, beautifully painted on the side of the truck was the phrase "Church of the Visible Surface".  It delighted me then, and it delights me now in memory, and I've never tried to analyze exactly why. 
***

As to after-life, well, I have no knowledge of it and no strong opinion about it.  If it is so, its existence is not more astounding than the existence we have now.  It would be one more miracle.  I WOULD like to go on afterwards to a greater understanding and appreciation for consciousness and existence and the wonders of the universe.  However, I proceed as if the time I have is all the time there is, as he did.  He counted out his life in days.  Using the biblical three score and ten, we have, according to my cheap calculator, 25,550 days of life.  That many days, 613,200 hours, 2,207,520,000 seconds...  He had fewer days than average, but he used them well -- so many don't use them, they throw them on the ash-heap of time like trash.  I rarely use them as well as I aspire to. 

…about the spiritualist church -- as you guessed, I have no negative reaction to this, it is part of the mysterious mix of life.  I have opinions about this and that, but I don't take them too seriously -- if they are wrong, I toss them out with no regrets.  Truth remains the important thing always.  Let me know if anything interesting to you comes of this. 
***

…I read once of a person who had epileptic tendencies, but not so much he was refused entry into the army during WWII.  He was an officer and, one day, was being driven through the French countryside late in the day.  For a long run, the vehicle passed alder and birch trees through which the sun shone, such that there was a pronounced rhythmic alternation of light and shadow.  He went into a seizure due to this flickering light.  The brain must maintain a delicate balance of rhythmic patterns such that no rhythm goes into "feedback" and endlessly reinforces the pattern.  The screeching of audio equipment is, as you no doubt know, a form of feedback.  Perhaps you fall into the category of "pre-epileptic" and, again perhaps, the dizziness is due to a low-grade and temporary feedback -- a kind of stuttering of the senses.  The exercises that bring on the condition should allow your doctors to verify this by brain-scan while doing the exercises.  People who have a tendency to migraine and epilepsy have a kind of compensation for the misery of their afflictions -- they have experiences associated with creativity and insight. 
***

And let's hear it for outdoor education! The Peripatetic Philosophers walked around while they conversed and speculated on all things.  Our current forms of education waste the energies of youth on mere sports -- that energy could be used in the service of the mind!
***

12/8/02
She informed me I'm "funny" in going to the park at the same time in winter as in summer, though it gets dark much earlier.  Well, I guess so, but it does get me into dusk and night shooting -- it is certainly easier when shooting conditions are ideal, but I am attracted to those other times.  After all, the plants and animals are "out there" in all conditions, so I'm out there too, to see what's going on.  The ducks mutter about large animals stumbling about in the darkness, but if they realize it is another gonzo human, they decide it is just one more bit of human lunacy and politely let it pass.
***

12/9/02
The night images are a new world for shooting -- colors are strange, pixels emerge as unwanted subjects, time is askew, or smeared on the image.  Stumbling through the dark park, ducks wonder what the heck, convinced by these shots to finally drag out a tripod I bought years ago for not much, shots later than these benefited from that, will send when the universe allows...
***

12/9/02
Brief comments: you asked if I knew about the creative aspect of migraine and/or epilepsy from personal experience.  Generally, I know about this because I have read something about lots of things, including these conditions.  Also, I've been attracted to writings about creativity, I notice them.  Do I have these conditions?  Well, I may be early pre-migrainoid, I do see the blinking fortification patterns sometimes, but no headache.  No epilepsy, per se.  Yet I have tried to pay attention to my body's various states.  Some of these have a disorienting quality.  My lifelong interest has been consciousness itself -- I've been down a few byways in pursuit of understanding it -- how it works, its role.  Some of those byways took me to strange worlds of possibility. 
***

Stability and fidelity to the real world are prime directives of the mind, yet creativity is in other directions.  I have done less and less "forcing" of the issue and more giving the mind a milieu to create in.  Art can do it.  Nature can do it.  Metaphysical studies can do it (though belief is not part of it for me [pre-judgement]).  The computer can be a tool here, I'm sure.  Some use programs to develop needlepoint or knitting patterns.  I took a shot not long ago of two crows flying past a background of fall foliage.  I "pixilated" the image to reduce it to abstract forms and was pleased with the result -- would make a nice pattern for a throw.  Anyway, you might as well enjoy the creative benefits, you are certainly paying the price. 
***

Depression: well, I'm half Welsh, so I've always said I have a license to be melancholy any time I wish.  As I am prone to depressed thoughts and feelings, I have developed mental habits to protect myself.  There are roads I refuse to walk down.  It has saved me some rough times through the years.  However it is never completely gone and has given my mental life a darker shading permanently, a thing that has somewhat isolated me from the doilies and pastels of most folks.  I never have come to easy terms with this really -- for me the dark is the background of the light, tears are the sponsors of laughter, hard times are the floor on which the comfy rocker rests.  I can't separate these things.  Others reject the things they don't like, I cannot reject half of life.  I took a picture once of a duckling that had beaked his way through the eggshell, tried his best and, when I saw him, he just died of exhaustion and drowning.  His feathers were perfect, each one distinct.  A fly landed as I looked.  It is hard to look, to see such things, but it is real, it is part of the character of Mother Nature.  It is out there when the choir sings so beautifully on a Sunday morning.  It is what the lonely candle burns within. 

Maybe all this is why I don't react well to inspirational messages: beauty, kindness, love, wisdom, compassion need no advertisement -- they glow brightly against the Otherwise.  Is it our obliviousness to the obvious that is being addressed?  Are we accusing ourselves of delusion?  Does not delusion remain intact if we blank out half the world?  Ah... 
***

12/14/02
I too have been a bit down these last few days, and a couple of events haven't helped.  …and, while the town is pretty and the German Christmas displays and booths were enjoyable, the freezing rain turned to beautiful gently falling snow, my camera developed (and still has) problems due to getting wet as I was trying to shoot images while manipulating an umbrella.  I am seriously bummed, as the kids say -- my camera is a too important to lose now or anytime.  I may face unexpected expense and delay -- we'll see.  It may dry out and be OK, but maybe not.  I have been too depressed to work with the few images yet (yes, I was able to upload them to my computer). 
***

A characteristic of an emotional state is that one can't usually think of a good reason why the emotion won't go on a long time, or forever.  It overlays the entire world with its impression and one suspects one is having a true look into things.  However well one may understand better, that impression is strong.  We both know cat fur draws away tensions when gently stroked, so you having 3 cats is a good move.  I pet cockatiels morning and evening and that helps too…
***

Most people who never learn how to use the computer are mentally "flat-footed", they say "I don't know how" and never try.  They are unwilling to make mistakes and think they must do everything by rote.  But rote does not cut it with computers.  By the time rote has wheezed to a goal, they've changed the rules!
***

The word "pixilate" -- I have to confess I mangle-created it in my email to you.  Not that I'm not sort of proud of it in a way.  The real word "pixilate" (the way I spelled it and shouldn't have heh heh) refers to being touched by pixies, to be bemused or put into an alternate, maybe semi-magic, state, to be a little crazy.  The word "pixelate", which has not existed (as far a I know), I now pronounce to be a real word that means to manipulate and emphasize the pixel nature of digital images for some creative end.  I hereby give you license to apply your own meaning to either word, and you can do the same for me. 
***

As to the "prime directive" of the brain, reality, creativity, and spirituality, I naturally have a lot to say, but I think I better spread it out a bit, to avoid writing a tome.  Nothing to disagree with in your observations.  My take at this moment on it is we have different perceptions at different times and moods about these vital matters.  I do remember once being in a heightened mental state, with a head full of abstractions and insights and kindly fellow-feeling with all things, but scampering out onto a tiny rock several hundred feet above the shore rocks of the blue Pacific.  When I came out of my revery, I was a few inches from death.  My, how that concentrated the mind on the issue at hand which was how to avoid dying in the next minute or so! I think if my body could speak without a side-trip through the mind, it would have said "Brother, those are beautiful thoughts we've been having, but if you don't mind, un-freeze yourself and let's negotiate a careful retreat, what say?" 

So, the mind-brain, or vice-versa, has a strong bias to negotiating this baffling and complex world successfully -- it "wants" to be capable of deciphering the relevancies from the blizzard of inputs and of sending out through the body the most useful actions.  It is beyond praise in its ability to do this.  And in the larger sense, it is this same tool we use to discover non-immediate truths, and to develop the spiritual life.  You are right in questioning what is real -- the more we know, the more shaky becomes the very idea of reality.  However, our bodies and this world DO have a history, an ancient inter-relationship that, by consistency and result, show that at least a part of some hypothetical All-Truth is being played out here.  The stone may be full of space, but it is also full of electro-magnetic binding of particles, as are we.  We kick the stone and all the philosophy in the world would not save our toes from complaining.  I think Samuel Johnson hurt himself demonstrating this point :^D 
***

So, some of your friends would be, shall we say, surprised that two mature persons of opposite sexes, can have anything to say to each other that wouldn't be quite exciting to them?  God must love fools, he made so many.  But, then, he made a lot of beetles too.
***

Here is a long bit of  quoted material to make you smile:
======================================
From the book "Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students," which is compiled from student exams and papers by history professor Anders Henriksson of Shepherd College, W.Va.  The first set of examples is from a recent AP story by Vicki Smith.]

Subject: history: a tale told by an idiot

During the Dark Ages, it was mostly dark.

Hitler's instrumentality of terror was the Gespacho.

Christianity was just another mystery cult until Jesus was born.

The mother of Jesus was Mary, who was different from other women because of her immaculate contraption.

History, a record of things left behind by past generations, started in 1815.  Thus, we should try to view historical times as the behind of the present.  This gives incite into the anals of the past.

History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.

From the secondary sources we are given hindsight into the future.  Hindsight after all is caused by a lack of foresight.

Bible legend states that the trouble started after Eve ate the Golden Apple of Discord.

This was the forbidding fruit.  An angry God sent his wraith.  Man fell from the space of grace.  It was mostly downhill skiing from there.

Social division of labor began when a tribe would split into hunters and togetherers.

Crow Magnum man had a special infinity for this.  Advances were most common during the intergalactic periods.

Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago.  The Nile was a river that had some water in it.  Every year it would flood and irritate the land.  This tended to make the people nervous.

There was Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.  Lower Egypt was actually father up that Upper Egypt, which was, of course, lower down than the upper part.  This is why we learn geography as a factor in history.

Rulers were entitled Faroes.  A famed one was King Toot.  It was a special custom among them not to marry their wives.

Zorroastrogolism was founded by Zorro.  This was a duelist religion.  The three gods were Good, Bad and Indifferent.  These beliefs later resurfaced among the Manitees.

Judyism was the first monolithic religion.  It had one big God named Yahoo.  Old Testament profits include Moses, Amy and Confucius, who believed in Fidel Piety.  (One of the only reasons Confucius was born was because of a Chinese tradition.)

Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships with her face.  The Trojan Was raged between the Greeks and the Tories.  The Greeks finally won because they had wooden horses, while the Trojans were only able to fight with their feet.

Greek semen ruled the Agean.  We know about this thanks to Homer's story about Ulysses Grant and Iliad, the painful wife he left behind.  Another myth with a message was Jason's hunt for the Golden Fleas.

Religion was polyphonic.  Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.  Persepolis was god of vegetables.  Souls were believed to spend the 'here, there and after' in Ethiopia.

Plato invented reality.  He was teacher to Harris Tottle, author of "The Republicans."

Lust was a must for the Epicureans.  Others were the Vegetarians and the Synthetics, who said, "If you can't play with it, why bother?"

U.  Clid proved that there is more than one side to every plain.  Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle.  Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.

Finally, Europe caught the Black Death.  The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras.  It was spread from port to port by inflected rates.  It was then passed around by midgets.

Victims of black death grew boobs on their necks.  Death rates exceed 100 percent in some towns.

[Other examples, from a column by Chris Watson, in the Santa Cruz Sentinel:]

"Prehistoricle" people spent all day banging rocks together so that they could find something to eat.  This was called the Stoned Age. 

The Sumerian culture, which was the oldest, began about 3,500 years before Christmas.

Hammurabi was a lawyer who lived from 1600 B.C.  to 1200 B.C.

The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac and their 12 children.

When they finally got to Italy, the Australian Goths were tired of "plungering" and needed to rest.  Italy was ruled by the Visible Goths, while France and Spain were ruled by the Invisible Goths.

Nuns were generally women.  In the early part of the Middle Ages female nuns were free to commit random acts of contrition and redemption.  Later they were forcibly enclustered in harems.

The Wholely Roman Empire amazed many when it was found in Germany.  The Hundred Years War (1320-1600) was fought over English holidays in France.

John Calvin Klein translated the Bible into American so the people of Geneva could read it.

Charles III of Spain swooned for years on the bridge of extinction.  The War of the Spanish Succession ended in a "drawl." Peace was inforced by the Treaty of Uterus, which prevented the King of France from sitting personally on the Spanish thorn.  The War of the Austrian suspicion broke out soon after this.  It had become very inevitable when Mother Theresa inherited the throne.

It was the 18th century Enlightenment that contributed most to the 17th century.  The Enlightenment was a reasonable time that seeped slowly into one of Europe's ears and then creeped out the other.

Deism was the belief that God made the world and then stepped on it.  In Deism God has no direct influence on daily life, but just watches like a movie, eating his candy and munching his popcorn.

The airplane was invented and first flown by the Marx brothers.  Marie Curie won the "Noel" Prize for inventing the radiator.  In 1911 an English feminist attracted attention by plunging under the King's ascot.

Bakunin was a flaming "anachronist." Anarchism is a system of government headed by an Anarch.  Canada, for example, became an anarchy in 1867. 

Teddy ("J.R.") Roseaveld spoke softly, threatened with his big stick, and built the Panema Canal through Mexico.  From this events moved to an ensurpation by Poncho Vidalia.

Japan boomed Pearl Harbor, the main U.S.  base in southern California.  Few were surprised when the National League failed to prevent another world war.  Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman were known as the "Big Three."
======================================

1/21/02
One point I remember wanting to reply to was your comments about "English-speakers" and anecdotes.  This is not a political correctness thing, it is a cultural thing (not that I care anything for political correctness).  An anecdote has nothing to do with myths or fables -- it is a short, interesting, purportedly true account of a specific incident, often but not always, biographical.  I think of it as a "telling" tale, one that reveals the person, the time, the particular society or milieu.  Some people, such as Abe Lincoln, seem to be magnets for the anecdote, and he told them too.  There are zillions of them in the English-speaking world, and I thought it interesting that an author, who wanted to collect anecdotes from all over the world, was surprised to find they are scarce in other countries and cultures.  If his observation is true, it would be interesting to figure out why it is true. 
***

The holiday period, looking back, caused a certain de-focusing of previous intents and goals -- perhaps that is usually true, I don't know.  At any rate I have yet to re-establish the wa of before.  I remember you said something about your wa being impervious to the slings and arrows of life.  If true, you are to be congratulated, I have never been that way for more than short periods of time.  But perhaps we are not talking about the same thing, or perhaps I don't really know what should be meant by the term.  My theory of dealing directly and physically with other people is that the loss to oneself usually is greater than the gain, one's chosen mate always excepted.  The thought is that there is a mental effort in communicating.  One must not only draw together the threads of meaning from within oneself to construct coherent sentences, but must, to a degree, invent the other person within oneself, to adopt their point of view sufficiently to imagine the integrity of the other person.  In short, one opens the gate.  Few are those who, while occupying space in one's mind, give as much as they take.  So many are basically selling something, and after the sale is made or refused, they go their way. 

Re-reading that, I realize it seems cynical, and I don't mean it that way.  Certainly there is joy, and shared laughter and ideas and experiences that augments one's life ("en-biggens" one, as Lisa Simpson would say).  And if more is got, than given, then one can only regret that the balance was not perfect.  My point is simply there is a cost in most interactions with most people because "forgive them, they no not what they do" is the condition of man. 
***

1/25/02
Days blending along...  some written snapshots of the time:

25 days record of precipitation (though light flurries are counted)...

New computer is nice for speed and most of the programs I need are installed and working...

Thoughts in the morning as I come awake: AI, philosophy, man vs.  the natural world, war clouds, Windows and Linux operating systems (tomes-worth to theoretically learn)...

Always the soaring pigeons to lighten the heart.  News story of seals racing about their pool for hours due to the introduction of two new seals -- is this cultural transfer?  Did the pigeons learn their soaring or is it just a pigeon thing to do?...

Rich weather changes...

Chilblained right hand from the last camera shoot...

Re-focusing on the important things an ongoing effort...

New randomized pains of age cycling through the possibilities, still truckin'...

Many days of spectacular light and the restrained colors of winter...

Refuse to use loyalty cards at the grocery, costs a bunch in "fines" to not let the so-and-sos have personal info ($10/week?)...

Finally succumbed to the clumsy coat of winter, prefer jacket and layering for mobility...

The jobless clients are sadder and tireder and touchier as the unemployment situation establishes itself in a long period of recession...

Stock market jumping about like a nervous parrot in a small cage...

Will US and Europe split over time as interests diverge?...

Where are the little house sparrows, has the winter got them, did they head south?  Starlings MIA too...

Hawk has established a territory that includes Talleyrand.  I hear him calling.  He flew low overhead as I worked, so downtown doesn't scare him...

People, like living things in general, are infinitely strange -- news story of a mallard drake trapped in ice and firemen risking much to crawl out and pour warm water on the ice to free the drake, contrasting this with our normal cold indifference to our effects on our brother beings...

Women and kids, women commonly the introducers of kids to human life, so constitutionally need to be more positive?...

T-shirt motto: "When I snap, you'll be the first to go."  Charming...

Current joke: Noted cardiac surgeon dies, funeral features a huge heart done in satin and velvet.  Funeral oration ending, heart opens and draws the casket within and closes quietly.  Minister says it appropriate the master of the heart should be enfolded forever within it.  An attendee smiles to himself, he is a gynecologist.  Another faints and hits the floor, he is a proctologist...

.All is swirls of impressions and impingements.  Inside history and outside too.  Glad I have a narrow channel to my culture, it has ADS, hyperactivity and all those other ailments seemingly increasing in kids...

Hard not to be a Romantic -- it is a personal armament.  Yet one suspects the backdrop is just canvas and paint...

Sky and water, color and freer form, am drawn to them too.  Living things concentrated patternification, part of the world like protons and electrons.  Latest National Geographic has stunning images of the earlier Universe on the way to our 100 billion galaxies each with a similar number of stars (10^22 stars, 10 sextillion stars, God, or whatever, not stingy with stars)...

I calculated one time if we place the sizes of things on a base 10 log scale, each of us can be said to house 1/3 of the entire universe.  This seemed (and seems) to me to be a more accurate scale to assess what is going on.  A recent story: paleontologists in China discover fossils of four-winged dinosaur-birds.  I checked with Angelica, my little girl cockatiel.  She said she couldn't remember ever having had four wings.  I send that on for what it is worth :^D
***

2/1/02
I once had a thought about farmers and mud -- that mud made everything so hard to do, and, in the doing, was little grace or satisfaction.  Old time colonial farmer-settlers would do much of their heavy work in the winter when masses could by put on sleds and easily dragged around.  Mud squared the amount of effort to do anything, even walk.  I've seen illustrations of old building layouts where there were covered passages from house to barn to workshop to storage.  Must have saved a world of hassle. 
***

…one of the features of humanity is the inconsistency of the quality of design.  Some things are done brilliantly, then put in a poor box, or with inadequate controls, or lacking documentation, or with cheap, quick-fail parts.  Sometimes we quickly establish a protocol and the manufacturing world can crank out X, knowing anyone can use it.  Another time, years and years go by with some clumsy mish-mash of uselessly differing rules, or connectors or secondary supports, etc. 
***

The Open Source movement is an interesting one: check it out in your favorite search engine.  It is based on openly published specifications and code, with no one able to make it secret for the temporary purposes of exploitation.  The idea came out of the programming world, especially the work of a man named Stallman.  But the idea has taken fire and has been embraced by really big companies like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.  Further, it is beginning to transcend the techy world and is beginning to affect thinking beyond those bounds.  It draws the user into the process and capitalizes on the vast pool of creativity in the general population.  It has proven that first-class work can be done outside of the hierarchical, closed paradigm that has been dominant for long years. 
***

Yes, I like pigeons, and just about any living thing (not so sure about mosquitoes, hagfish, leeches, ticks, etc.).  The birds are so much paid attention to because they are fairly large and right out there in the world for all to see.  The moles, rabbits, foxes are slippy-sliding around the fringes as they think being seen is not good for their health.  The soaring pigeons are a delight, and I wonder about them, why they do it, is it learned, instinctive, what?  Is it part of their social life, who is cool and who isn't?  Who's genes in the eggs of spring and summer?  Are they big on fitness?  Is it just plain fun?  Reminds me of (I may have written of this before) the "Bird Brain of Britain".  This was an odd thing -- a particular youth organization in Britain during a particular time set out elaborate mechanical contrivances that were puzzles for birds.  The birds had to work out a sequence of acts to get food.  (The Great Tit won, by the way.) All this was in a documentary she and I watched years ago.  A scene stuck in my mind -- a pigeon solved a complex color code to get the food.  Impressive enough, but the striking thing was, there was the same food right next to the pigeon that could be eaten directly with no effort! The only conclusion seemed to be that the pigeon was working out the problem for the pleasure of it. 
***

Sometimes it is nice to cut to the chase and go directly to people who share an interest, rather than waste energy trying to raise the consciousness of friends about the issue.  That, alas, rarely works, I have found.  The pattern is: while I have enjoyed learning the skills and knowledge of friends, they don't reciprocate much.  Most folks are buried in their perceptions and feelings to such a degree, they have difficulty in focusing on anything else.  Also, a surprising number of people refuse to think outside their sub-set of fascinations due to an unexpressed sense they have no right to do it.  I have always leapt in with both feet, and known as I did so, that there were then many chances to seem foolish -- but so what?  Better to be an occasional fool than a lifetime prisoner. 

Notions of the nonce…
***

2/8/02
This is quite interesting to me as I have been through nearly exactly the same experiences and thoughts in trying to describe and understand the situation of the conscious mind "looking out" at existence.  His analogy of an observation platform is one I have used myself.  While the activities and impressions of daily life stream by in coruscations of colored effects, there is sometimes the experience of being a quiet observer that is apart from both the outside jumble and the inner ferment.  This observer has the, as it were, luxury of watching, but not having to engage in, the fury of stormy life. 

Putting aside the question of how to be enlightened permanently, and looking at this philosophically, the circumstances of the observer seem to lead to its retreat.  That is, if we set aside, for the purposes of inquiry, what I understand to be the great religious urge of mankind to find how to be an accepted and honorable part of the Universe (or God), then the mind is in this strange position: it wants to understand, enjoy, and even control the very mechanism that has evolved to mediate between self and other.  In other words, the maker of the world that is the astonishing function of the physical nervous system wishes to increase its conscious involvement with itself. 

About this, I especially do not want to leap to conclusions -- it is far too important a matter.  If mankind dies out, it is more likely to be due to mishandling this, than in blowing itself to smithereens. 

When one thinks of it, the conscious mind seems often to be superfluous, or sometimes a bumbling witness, to the swirl of life.  Babies are born and so quickly they put on the grownup's clothes and roar away from childhood all ready to play the star on life's stage.  Most people have no idea what to do with the unlikely fact of their own existence and that of a world in a galaxy of 100 billion stars in a broader space of 100 billion galaxies.  Some say God, some say luck, some say illusion, some say big bang and lots and lots of evolution. 

Meanwhile the observer on its platform, has the luxury of leisure to think of tinkering with the machinery.  This bears thinking about -- what is the purpose of this leisure, this disconnect of a part of the mind from the busy processes that sustain the world, inner and outer together?  My tentative conclusion is that it is really a necessary feature of consciousness.  This implies that for all the Herculean effort the physical body engages in to establish an overall integrity for the 100 trillion cells of that human body and the manifold world, it was not enough.  More was needed than a simple fuse between the representations of self and world.  It may be that because time is needed to create the best representation, a special area of the mind was set aside to allow trial representations to be previewed and compared. 

To continue this idea, it seems this area would have to be walled off from the regular turmoil, a cork-lined room, so to speak.  Special broadband cables would have to be laid down to supply massive memory input to this creative processing.  As I play with this idea, I imagine a techie's paradise: many high-resolution screens, surround-sound digital audio, the best of every kind input device.  And who the beneficiary?  I have trouble imagining it being other than the everyday mind -- but it is a very specialized part of the mind, one that has been stripped of an awareness of its tremendous creativity and power.  In fact it seems to know very little.  Knowing more would probably interfere with its function. 

My best guess is that, while this specialized function of the brain has been so successful as to routinely dream of star travel and boundless hydrogen energy and shopping malls on Pluto, the establishment of this technique has an Achilles heel -- it provides a means for the mind to substitute fantasy and fantasy's rewards for the original self-other interplay.  In other words, it has the means of nullifying its own purpose. 
***

2/16/02
You wrote of pigeons... 

...which reminded me of a pigeon in (I think) San Diego that liked the warmth of a traffic light and would tuck in the cylindrical recess of the stop light and stay cozy in the intense redness.  What it thought about the light going off every couple of minutes, I don't know.  And pigeons like signs, especially ones with 3-D letters with nice O's and P's that seem made to nest in.  I saw a nearly unbelievable sight Friday, but could get no picture of it (probably not possible anyway).  I'll try to describe it.  I was watching particularly active group going their energetic soaring around my end of Bellefonte -- circles , ovals, high, low, figure-eights.  As I watched they pulled a particularly sharp bank over a low building that sits over the water.  This building has always had pigeons roosting beneath it (the under-beams are maybe five feet above the water).  So picture the pigeons cutting a sharp bank, each bird's wings at 90 degrees to the horizon, moving very fast, arranged in a narrow line from 50 to 200 feet above the building.  Abruptly about 12 birds fell out of the lower part of the formation, tumbled a little, then flew quickly down and under the building, between the square concrete pillars, and up into to the darkness to land on the home beams.  All this in four seconds or so.  This is close to supernatural flying, I would think.  Another time, we saw either bats or chimney swifts flow out of a tall brick stack like smoke and then change their minds and flow back down in.  It had an odd effect on my mind, like watching a movie backward.  The mundane has its magic, if one can perceive it.
***

And I remember hiding under a school desk, but the memory is dim and uncertain.  I definitely remember being talked to in school about the possibility of nuclear attack.  I think I suppressed the details of how ducking under a desk, or anything else, was supposed to fend of the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb.  I know it hung over the heads of adults as a real possibility in the most frozen days of the Cold War, but I was not much affected -- I was more interested in cowboys and space wars and comic books.  When I was seven, 1950, I and Mom were hurt in a bad car wreck.  She never recuperated from it, and I was in bed forever with a cast, am there still maybe in some dimension of my mind.  Other things to distract than bombs...
***

My take on things is primarily philosophical, rather than spiritual or ecstatic, though I recognize the importance of the spiritual life.  His approach seems more toward the spiritual side, as does yours.  That's fine, I have no argument with that, we no doubt need more of it.  And I have been fortunate enough to have experiences in that direction.  Sometimes philosophy segues into an exalted sense of the grandeur of the universe and the high-vaulted spaces of the mind seem to encompass that which gave it birth.  Even so, I come back to philosophy, to trying to understand and articulate my speculations in service of the truth.  The goal of the spiritually-focused person is a perfect and incorruptible state of being, an experienced joining of the self with the way of the universe.  That isn't my goal, though I wouldn't turn it down if it were offered :-) Yet perhaps, in a way it is.  It is impossible to stray too far from what is important, if one pays attention at all.

I would say rather that, knowing I am part of the universe and in no way distinct from it, I am already one with it, am already enlightened, illusion and all.  I cannot say I have given up on enlightenment, but I no longer expect it nor do I seek it.  If I had it, I would use it to further my understanding of the condition of being a conscious being in the world.  I have come to lessen my use of the language of the ecstatic, because while it maybe perfectly sincere and a valid cry of delight, yet it does not increase my understanding, and may divert energies from the task. 

Personal salvation, or inner peace, or boundless joy is, however worthwhile, not that to which I aspire, yet if they come to my door, they'll be welcome.  It is the truth that draws me, truth my mind can recognize and incorporate.  My mind, forged by my body, the body forged of star-dust, the way of the universe is my way, and surely there is no real estrangement of truth and the mind.  As for illusion, are we not sunk in it?  There is a great irony here, I think.  Illusion has proved a useful interface between the twin realities of body and universe -- it is our working method! Its necessary existence is a bafflement and challenge to both the ecstatic and the philosopher.  More on this at another time...
***

I know people with phobias about birds.   My life would have been much poorer without birds, including those I pet and talk to every day.  If I could, I would be in the company of more birds than people.  Birds, dinosaurs some say, with finely split and rearranged scales, warm-blooded, baby-rearing, brave pilots of the skyways, far-ranging, deep-knowing, out there in all seasons, may they live forever, amen.
***

3/15/02
Astronomical spring is only a few days away, and I think the snow is gone for a while.  The weather has changed its mood and is going into its dithery phase where it is not sure quite what it wants to do.  Times change in a short time sometimes -- I got her some cut flowers for St.  Valentine's Day and we both fussed and doted on them and I took a bunch of shots too.  The weather was winter then and the flowers spoke to us.  Yet unlike virtually everyone we work with, we do not complain incessantly about cold and snowy weather.  We usually think, and sometimes say to these carpers, they should move to Florida or Arizona or some warm where.  Like hey, its a latitude thing you know, this is Winter's home and it has a right to be here.  I don't bother telling them the joys of Spring are a gift of Winter.  One lady had a brilliant non-blonde moment when she realized she was cold because she insisted on wearing light clothing! When she bought a down coat, the problem went away.  More such epiphanies to her!
***

The web site is slowly coming along -- I add a bit to it each week.
***

The buds you spoke of vary so much in size and obviousness from plant to plant.  There are trees and bushes that make no secret of their readiness for Spring, and others that seem quite dead until the last minute, then they color and fuzz-up quickly, ready to leaf.  I used to be OK at plant identification, but have lost most of it from disuse.  With time perhaps the knowledge will return, and perhaps I'll renew my studies.  Meanwhile I look more closely than I did when I was younger, and see more, appreciate more. 
***

I have always eaten lunch outside when the weather allowed, and smiled to think of my co-workers sitting on metal chairs in the stark break room.  For them, eating outside would seem, if thinkable at all, eccentric. 
***

Being a teacher, working with the public presents one with each disease-of-the-month and staying healthy is a challenge.  Someday, I guess, I'll have to see a doctor, but won't if I can help it.  They seem almost as bad as the disease, in most cases.  It is now 22 years since I've been in a doctor's office and here's to 22 more! (Where's some wood to knock on?)
***

Cats on your john – they must marvel at one volunteering to stand in a shower stream -- they probably think we are kindly but unbalanced of mind.  Our birds come out, usually twice a day for an hour or two or three.  They have a gentle lunacy about them, and they love to be petted.  At times I have all three birds demanding to be petted at the same time.  And they can tell when you aren't concentrating on the task, as when you are petting two at the same time.  Their standards are high and miffage results from being shortchanged.  Sometimes they stare off into the distance, cocking their heads, who knows where their minds are?  The males may decide to sing their strange repetitive song and, when they do, they are gone from this world, sort of a fugue state, I guess. 
***

Mom must have thought these image-memories were very important.  For years, she pasted them on the traditional black pages and wrote legends in white ink.  Her idea that the days of her life were worth capturing, were significant, I also believe.  Let each of us be our own historian, we are as interesting as anyone featured in a leather-bound book.
***

 Oh the days gone by.  The barn of long summer days up in the haymow.  The unused smokehouse and workshops.  Old farm equipment moldering in the sun-lit dust filtering down.  The woods (The Woods!) where I wandered every trip to the farm.  Somehow I remember the farm better than most of the rest of my life, perhaps because it was not always there, trips were special.  Huge book of Ripley's Believe It or Not I read and re-read for years.  National Geographics in the outhouse.  Ghosts of the past all about, the horses, sheep, barn cats, and chickens, my mother still there as a playful young girl, She and her sister up to some devilment.  The older sister, serious, in a corner reading.  The boy lying in bed at 15, thinking of planes and motorcycles.  Black skies and glittering stars.  Cold upper bedroom and freezing under blankets until one shivered out enough heat to warm the bed, then toasty warm and safe while the wind moaned in the eaves.  Cold, cold stairs in winter, the stairs one descended on Christmas morning for presents, vaunted in the mind to fabulous dimensions.  Time and mortality and decline.  The whole thing gone now, no corners left for the haven of memories.  Unbelievable. 

I thought, when very young, that everyone had grandparents who had a farm.  Surely no one would be deprived of that experience?  If I ever write a book of history, it will be about farms and what they meant, and how they have passed away, and what we have lost. 
***

4/22/03
Glad your computer is (probably temporarily) acting properly.  These things wait till one's guard is down, then come up with some new headache.  Like life-in-a-box… Fortunately, the learning is fun and the advances give pleasure. 
***

As to youth and age, really the patterns of dreaming must be endlessly varied.  It is certainly true that sheer energy and vitality have a big effect on the scope of dreams.  The loss of that is hard to distinguish from melancholy or mild depression.  Also there are the many facets of betrayal of hopes and dreams, and other people often contribute to this.  We social animals pay a price for our society, sometimes a very high one.  Still, I trust we retain reserves of vitality that the world cannot completely take away, and, in returning to ourselves -- to all of the selves we are, including all we have been -- we can be recharged.  The children we were live in us and they are as innocent as they were before.  The human heart is so convoluted that we may see sorrow as a betrayal of joy, or another time, see joy as a betrayal of sorrow.  Over and over I marvel that the mind and heart travel their own paths.  Try as we might, there is no guarantee of synchronization of the two.  Whether I do it well or not, I do try to act forward without waiting for the inner orchestra to finish tuning up and begin the music. 
***

5/3/02
Am slowly burning out with people, as I suspect you are too a bit.  Human communication, or more properly, mis-communication, being what it is, the effort to do just about anything is like the pioneers trying to move stones and logs around in the mud.  With that as a base, add in misalignment of expectations, ego-defense reflexes, self-aggrandizing and lazy management, and a soupcon of Murphy's Law -- you have a big ongoing mess that is not worth the worry we put into it. 
***

Here is the situation as I understand it: the economy needs lots of buying to keep going.  The flow of money is the green blood that flows in the economic veins.  The actual amount of work that really needs to be done is smaller than the economy needs, so much work is disguised busy-work.  Many of us are doing trivial work.  We tell ourselves it is important, because we need to feel we are not wasting our time, but I think we secretly know, or at least suspect, the work is useless.  We are well into the Age of Robotics, but, in a large cultural sense, we ignore that fact, and pretend it does not have the potential to do most of the truly necessary labor.  We are encouraged by the popular culture to have, as our primary mode of being, a consumer function.  The economy again.  While this works, it is ultimately futile, and deep-down, we know it. 

If machines can do most of what needs to be done, where does that leave us?  People are not able to just wander about aimlessly.  We need some structure of goals and values, some accord with the larger supportive human world, some satisfying relationship with the great Universe around us.  Here I am introducing Big Questions that have no easy answer.  Every person a philosopher king? 
***

I chalk the teaching problem up mostly to the near universal inability to concentrate for any length of time.  Nervous systems have been damaged by popular culture, and possibly also by the electronic tools. 
***

The computer and the Internet gives the ordinary person information and tools that in the past belonged only to experts. 
***

Each skill we learn thoroughly gives us a more professional result and moves the bar up.  It is both satisfying and oddly frustrating because our standards demand more and more of us.  (I told a fellow worker one time I did not give a damn about teamwork.  It had not done much for me.  My best efforts come from personal pride, not teamwork.  Teamwork is a way for management to avoid decision and displace responsibility.  That's why they babble about it all the time and put up cloying posters.)
***

Cats have an inborn interest in things coming out of holes, so maybe the paper inching and waving out of the printer has a fascination.  My little girl cockatiel has an opposite reaction to my ties that she sees me put on in the morning (part of my disguise).  She cannot understand why anyone would hang a road-killed snake around his neck.  She flies off to safer territory. 
***

For many people, ordinary life and job sucks away the best part of themselves and leaves a dry husk by retirement, as if an invisible vampire had been steadily visiting.  For whatever degree that is not true of me, it is due to a lifelong knowledge that what I do among others is not as important as what I do of myself, by myself, and for myself.  This has nothing to do with ego, it has to do with art.  Youth dreams mighty dreams, as does Spring.  Like life that endures the extremes of Summer, and bears fruit in Fall, sleeps in Winter, and is re-born in Spring, we have that renewal as artists and dreamers.  If we are not all Leonardos or Beethovens, that is not the important thing -- one begins where one is and creates onward… How much better are you two than those who drool away their evenings with the TV, or who populate their minds with the commercial ghosts of popular culture and leave no room for a thought or genuine feeling of their own.  Adventure is just a thought away. 
***

As a teacher, you probably thought many times that whenever you could teach information in the framework of a project, the information "took" so much better than usual.  Yet, unfortunately, it isn't easy to do that in the normal educational environment. 
***

5/12/03
I liked your blue, blue being by favorite color, at least so I reported when I was a kid.  Perhaps still true, though I have gotten to know and like many colors pursuing image-making over the years.  I still especially like sky-blue, Delft blue, Windsor blue, cerulean, robins-egg...  Sea green is another favorite.
***

Today I completed my second painting using the computer, rather than traditional methods.  Much flawed, but shows it can be done:
***

Somehow I thought you might "wuss", it is not easy to tell someone they no longer fit in your life
***

Now that you have found a real and personal reason to use the computer, your learning will no doubt accelerate many-fold.  As much of a pain as computers are, they are magical machines in that every time you run a new program, it is a different machine.
***

That was the largest major proofing job I've done, and it did not make me want to run out and become a professional proofreader.
***

All instructional books are helpful, but maybe set up some projects for yourself, little challenges, to speed up the learning.
***

While a good, functioning team is possible and useful, most are just a way for the manager types to be out of office, mentally or physically.
***

That is the pattern here… The house may be a dump, but they drive a $40K SUV.
***

I try hard to remember that it is important to do what is in the heart, despite the shifts of condition or moods.  The doing will take a person forward.  When I am afflicted with some species of dissolution , I take the opportunity to organize my stuff.  I figure if I am miserable about something, I might as well be productively miserable.
***

I have had that same thought about eating.  It is usually a pleasure, but it is expensive and time-consuming, and fraught with health issues, and, finally, sometimes the same old thing seems worse than tedious.
***

5/19/03
And something in your last couple of sentences reminded me of something I just read in "The Starship And The Canoe".  George Dyson commented that kids are easier to raise when the parents are involved with something bigger than themselves.  This "larger than oneself" business is important, I think.  Or maybe it is just "other than oneself".  One can rattle around in one's own life endlessly, but having a goal forces a person into new territory and new learning.  And, as far as the child is concerned, there is not only the titanic task of learning a zillion things, but learning also that there is a point of focus for all the zillion things.  Children probably learn the best stuff by watching adults successfully manipulating the world.
***
I am working on a flying drake now, and it is slower-going.  I'm deciding whether to finish it, or just stop and call it a learning experience.  If I go on, I'll need to put a very thin layer over the Sculpey I have done, then model and texture that, "fire" it, and paint it with acrylics.  I am rather an undisciplined artist, but recognize it is good to reduce the number of steps to the logical minimum to avoid fussiness.
***
…this is someone with whom I find it hard to empathize.  I guess she would have to discover a little girl in herself that wants to learn.
***
Animals do amaze one frequently.  And this reminds me of the large number of dead animals my family and I saw along Route 66 in 1950 in the West.  Never since have I seen anything like as many killed on the road.  I suppose they had not yet learned that dot in the distance was moving at 65 MPH and didn't have the agility to jump around or over an innocent party on the highway.
***

You would probably enjoy a book Hillerman edited called "The Best Of The West".  It is a collection of writings on the West that spans several centuries.
***

Glad you found a solution to dealing with slides: make prints & scan 'em, simple and effective!
***

Ah, I sense curmudgeon-ness (cumudgeonity?) happening here regarding the vaunted medical profession -- now you are in MY territory :-)
***

On Saturday I added some things to the Larch site, including a bit of humor, some button items, some curios, and a page of photos.  I am starting to play around in my mind with other ways of presenting images, and this time, I tried giving a sense of a sequence of time.
***

I finished "The Starship And The Canoe" that I referred to earlier -- I have been gnawing on that bathroom book for a year and a half! I replaced it with a new read: "The Watchers At The Pond"… I finished the two excellent books written for younger readers by Holling C.  Holling that I mentioned to you.  (I once mentioned to a colleague that I had just finished "Wind In The Willows", and she said, "But isn't that a children's book!" What a fool.  I replied that if something is good, then it's good at any age.  She smiled condescendingly.) Also, I have begun "The John McPhee Reader".  He is an exceptional writer of non-fiction.
***

5/26/03
I have always felt that a friend was one who is interested in whatever the other person is interested in, and vice versa.  And there must be communication on a regular basis to maintain friendships because it is the expansion of ordinary communication to the point that the spiritual landscapes of the two people (or three perhaps) can touch and partially merge.  The spiritual landscape is an idea of mine dating back to my early twenties.  I realized that what one cares about over time comes to establish permanent mental objects -- like statues, buildings, park-like landscaping in a real landscape.  A person works a lifetime on this spiritual landscape, and only real friends can enter it (or perceptive readers of one's writings), and overlap their own landscapes with one's own.  Many, perhaps most, persons have a poorish personal landscape, and they do not recognize the value of the spiritual landscapes of others, so they can be "special purpose" friends only -- chess, or quilting, or fishing, or whatever.  It takes time and patience to work all this out -- something in short supply these days... 
***

"The Best of the West", being a compilation, has a multi-faceted nature built-in that in a work of fiction is trumpeted as being "inter-dimensional" or "relativistic", but is just old fashioned differing perspectives. 
***

I read an account of a woman who was advanced in years who decided to walk across the country, from East coast to West coast.  She had a theme of some sort, and a connection to a ladies' group that helped her in many towns, but the interesting thing was the doing of the thing.  She ended the journey in much better physical shape than when she started, and several of her maladies disappeared. 
***

Their Version:

To ope their trunks
The trees are never seen.
How then do they
Put on their robes of green?
They leave them out.

My Version

If trunks of trees are tightly shut
As firmly as a hickory nut,
How dress trees in their robes of green? 
They leave them out for sake of Spring. 
***

I like the whole sequence of changing vegetable life, but I can't help regret the way birds and animals disappear into the thick greenery, and birds ventriloquize from their leafy curtains. 
***

It is true that the so-called conversations of many people is similar to the furious chittering of house sparrows, except the house sparrows are probably making more sense. 
***

I doubt if I am making my quota of potato chips, but I like them sometimes with a sandwich.  I think they exist primarily to give cardiac exercise to exercised health faddists. 
***

One of the paradoxes of the examined life ("The unexamined life is not worth living") is that of concentration.  In theory, concentration should be simply not paying attention to other things than the topic desired, but it is very difficult in practice to do that, especially in matters where one's own judgment and taste are required.  Some unconfident part of us always wants to drag others into the process.  While a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is not in itself a bad thing, the attempt to refer to others as some kind of a touchstone is doomed to fail.  The touchstone is always within.
***

By a coincidence, on the same day, which was dark and rainy, I had a similar experience, except the villain was a large black dog.  I failed to get a shot of the dog, but here is a family of geese arrayed in battle order facing a threat, and it is interesting they did not hurry away, but stayed to express contempt and displeasure:
***

Sounds good, you both have something enjoyable to look forward to.  For my own outings, I finally bought a plastic tarp and cut it into sections for something waterproof to sit on, and even lean back on for park benches.  Each of my coats has one of these sections, and for good measure, the camera case has one too.  Some of the best shots come from just sitting quietly and waiting, and ya might as well be dry and clean. 
***

Here are quotes from "The Best of the West" where the Navaho, who had gone on the warpath for very good reason, and were captured, forced on the "Long Walk", and imprisoned in Bosque Redondo, were offered by General Sherman either land in Cherokee country or to return home: Barboncito: "Our Grand-Fathers had no idea of living in any other country except our own...  When the Navajos were first created four mountains and four rivers were pointed out to us, inside of which we should live...  I think that our coming here has been the cause of so much death among us and our animals...  Outside my own country we cannot raise a crop, but in it we can raise a crop almost anywhere...  I am just like a woman, sorry like a woman in trouble.  I want to go back and see my own country.  If we are taken back to our own country, we will call you our father and mother, if you should only tie a goat there we would all live off of it, all of the same opinion...  I am speaking to you now as if I was speaking to a spirit and I wish you to tell me when you are going to take us to our own country...  I am well pleased with what you have said, and if we go back to our own country, we are willing to abide by whatever orders are issued to us, we do not want to go right or left, but straight back to our own country."

And, back they went finally, and the evil of former times, usually caused by greedy white people, passed away.  The love of the Navajo for their land is profound, and it would be a cold heart that could have listened to the Navajo spokesman Barboncito without being moved.  He said even the rattlesnakes were worse in the land of imprisonment, they did not warn before striking... 
***

6/2/03
I am slowly working my way forward in my reading of American history.  The problem is that I keep wanting to go backwards to find out the precursor history.  I am reading in The Frontiersmen, The Oxford History of the American People, and a wonderful atlas of American history to build up a better understanding of colonial times, and the relations between the colonists and the natives.  I am currently escaped from the War of Jenkins’ Ear and am about to plunge into Queen Anne's War.  My current fascination is with the frontier, how the attitudes regarding Indians was formed to a great extent during a few years prior to the Revolution, the explosive expansion, the can-do-anything feeling of the times.  Looking back, so much was compressed in a short time, say 1790-1890, but the era 1740-1790 was also amazing for great changes.
***

Years ago, I thought I read in The Chain of Life that dandelions, for all their bright flowers, reproduce asexually, but I have not been able just now to verify that on the Internet.
***

Geese do have this seemingly haughty and noble bearing, though I have seen them bathing and showing off and the nobility slipped a bit, lese majeste.
***

All your images are nice expansions of your communications -- fun isn't it?
***

I was very lucky last Friday.  I was able to sit in a grassy field at the park and closely observe three pairs of Canada Geese who had their goslings out grazing in the grass.  The littlest goslings will flop down flat to eat as they don't have the long goose neck yet, bet in a couple of weeks they will.  Little and big, the geese tear the grass with an upward swing of the head, like cattle.  The goslings inevitably evoke a smile at times, they are so egg-shaped and half-coordinated, they flutter their absurdly small wings when they get excited.  They develop so fast at this age, you can almost see the bright fuzzy yellow down growing grayer, and the wing feathers sprout.
***

I have volunteered rarely in my life, and the few times I did, I can't say I enjoyed it much.  Volunteers ought to be treated like royalty, given the good they do, but I sure wasn't...
***

There is a permanent and irksome fact about human existence -- that knowing the reasons for a psychological state does not protect one from mis-apprehending or mis-responding.  Perhaps it is this simple: the senses say what is happening and the feelings and emotions say what it means to us.  The latter is embedded in the experience so completely, that it is a laborious effort to deconstruct the composite and reconstruct it on rational grounds.  It can hardly be done "on-the-fly" very well.  On the other hand, having to routinely compensate for unpredictable errors must give a much deeper self-awareness than is the norm.
***

I remember a Ray Bradbury story that had the protagonist going back to his hometown to murder a childhood friend and betrayer.  The story built the suspense and the tale as the journey continued.  Finally he knocked on the door, the betrayer answered, the protagonist extended his index finger at the bewildered man at the door, and said "Bang! You're dead", then turned and left, leaving the other stuttering and calling after him.  The story certainly called out to a little fellow somewhere in me...
***

Well, I can still sit on the ground cross-legged, though the getting up isn't all that graceful.  Maybe when I get rid of a few pounds, I'll pop up like a gopher.  A lot of my good shots come from just being quiet somewhere and letting life flow around me.
***

I like the leaf and flower scans, some real possibilities there.  If you put together a web site sometime, tree information and comment would be a great section.
***

GRAND PRIZE WINNER: “When a cat is dropped, it ALWAYS lands on its feet; and when toast is dropped, it ALWAYS lands with the buttered side facing down.  Therefore, I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat.  When dropped, the two will hover, spinning inches above the ground, probably into eternity.  A ‘buttered-cat array’ could replace pneumatic tires on cars and trucks, and "giant buttered-cat arrays" could easily allow a high-speed monorail linking New York with Chicago.”

I thought this was the best, by far, but think the government should give me a fat grant to optimize the cat/toast ratios.  I think the research would have to be done in the marshes of Minnesota and the beaches at Cancun.
***

When I retire, I know the $ situation will get much more constrictive.  Bummer.  Where are those MacArthur genius grants when one needs them?  As for a higher plane and death, I plan to be a big crybaby about the whole thing.  I intend to practice by periodically crying out "Why Me?".  I'll try "I'm too young!" even at age 98.  Maybe Death will get to laughing so hard, I can slip away, after taking his picture, of course.  I can see the headline: "Death Loses It!"
***

My birds, all three of them, sometimes sit with me (on me) at the computer.  They seem not to be impressed with anything invented after 8,000,000 B.C.  Still, the mouse does have that chewable cord... 
***

The stroking of a cat is good for the soul, so cats aver, and who are we to argue?
***

You ought to cut that horoscope out that told you to stay in bed today and make it permanent, put a little note on it, "Good for the current day".
***

Of that shot of me, I said we don't see ourselves as others see us, but if I were someone else, I'd think the image OK.
***

[Of the person who didn’t like to eat outdoors, but did, then was decorated by a passing bird]  And so he was enlightened in a flash, began to giggle at the cosmic absurdity of it all, retired to the mountains, wore a monk's robe, and played a flute so beautifully, the deer would come and gaze at him for hours.
***

This sort of thing, and lots of others, has been referred to as the "People Problem".  While I commend you for your desire to give succor to others, it doesn't surprise me that group-think has done its tedious business again.  I feel that the best one can sometimes do, is do your own thing well, and let whatever the resulting benefits affect others to the degree they are capable of benefiting.  Life is too short (especially for us mature types) to waste trying to reconstruct the nervous systems of others.
***

I have no idea [what your dream means].  But one can always interpret dreams, maybe it signifies "freedom means nothing left to lose", to quote Kris Kristofferson. 
***

 [On observing life processes without interference]  That is nice  when it happens.  Awareness without interference.  Generally the mind reacts to its own attention by assuming there is a question that needs answering.  Its method is to dynamically rearrange the components into hypotheses.  Yet to see the overall flow, one needs to simply observe over a period of time.  The mind is a bit of a workaholic, for survival reasons, but sometimes it can stare into a flowing stream and see itself there among the intersecting ripples, like a metaphysical mirror.
***

6/8/03
Your interest in images for the diaries piqued my interest in public domain images, so I did a search on that and found the link below, among many others.  I may use images by others on the Larch site eventually or use them in some other way.  And you may find an image here or there that suit your purposes for some of your projects.  I am enclosing an Ansel Adams print to give an example of the quality one can sometimes find: Link to list of public domain images: http://mciunix.mciu.k12.pa.us/~spjvweb/cfimages.html
***

Thanks for the images of the family -- they are always very welcome and appreciated.  In thinking about the loss of family history and images generally in America, I found myself wondering what sorts of creative things are being done out there as people not only do genealogy, but try to preserve a record of their family and friendships.  Most media we could choose are dependent on a particular technology, but material on paper is fairly long-lasting.  My Epson ink-jet printer uses an ink they claim will be good for 70 years.  A photocopied text should be legible until the end of time as far as the carbon ink is concerned, though paper of course decays, especially if it has acid in it.

As an aside, I read once about a major government museum or archive bureau that had a considerable collection of old technology that they needed to read various stored data.  I suppose they don't have the time or money to convert the data to some standardized storage format.
***

I dream in color, though my impression is that often the colors are muted.  I rarely remember my dreams on waking, but there are exceptions.  My favorite experiences come from a dream-state between waking and sleeping.  This does not often happen, but it is usually very creative when it does happen.  Over the years I have dreamed a nearly complete musical comedy, part of a novel, a ballet where the dancers were notes of the musical scale, strange scenarios, answers to Zen koans (a whole stream of them!), and other oddities.
***

Your experience is more common than the other way.  Many people don't know much, but they do pay close attention to their irritations and satisfactions.  When there is little real communication and empathy with other family members, people simply see them as aids or obstructions to what they want.  While close relatives are important from birth to death in a psychological way, they are not so important in their existence as real people.  I guess you could say family members are frozen in the psyche as symbols due to the diminishment of psychical growth as people grow older.  Unlike others, I have always felt the main reason to get together is to communicate in some way, and I am usually frustrated about the inertia I find in the minds of most others.  I have never really understood how people can live and have so little reaction to living.  Philosophically, it is the difference between the becomers and the be-ers, and I have long since put my emphasis on being.
***

This is interesting: it is as if you were allergic to your own adrenaline, or to something that the adrenaline affects.  Operating on intuition, rather than vast government studies, I sense we have in the general population more and more allergies as time goes on.  I suspect that "hyper-responsiveness" to this or that is close to the root of many modern ailments.  If I were a medical researcher, I would work with the hypothesis that something in the modern environment is impinging on the process by which the body deals with emergency conditions whether caused by viral or bacterial invasion, or by some internal condition that must be corrected or compensated for.  This impingement is causing a mis-identification of the threatening agent such that the body reacts with inappropriate severity to otherwise harmless phenomena.  The analogy would be the Pavlovian reaction: salivating at the ringing of a bell because of an association between the bell and food.  The body associates a concurrent harmless state with that to which the body needs to react.  In sum: something is increasing the mis-identifications of the immune system.  We really need to find out what that something is.
***

A lot in this paragraph [of yours].  Probably your ability to use writing to express yourself has helped you quite a bit.  Those who cannot write, cannot pause long enough to reflect on their lives.  Oddly, to them, what they have done is of no importance, only what they are going to do.  An image comes to mind of someone harried and whipped by the Furies down the twisting trail of their lives until they drop off a hidden cliff.  There is a popular saying: "Don't look back, something might be gaining".

For myself, I try to accept as much as I can of mangled pasts and malformed reactions, sigh past opportunities lost because of whatever personal inadequacy is being featured at the moment, and simply pursue the best thing of the current time.  Somehow, magically, there must be a balance among the competing darks and lights of life, where truth is honored, but nothing is allowed to become parasitical on the life force.  The whole point of all this is to live.
***

I am fortunate so far, though some innate pessimism figures I will pay eventually, I mean beyond dropping neatly dead at 108 with camera, or brush, in hand.  However, my health standards are lower than the people I deal with, say, at work.  I accept less than 100% as not really abnormal -- sometimes you're up and sometimes down.  Most folks hie off to the doctor at a cough or bout of lethargy.  I guess they are all stars in some inner "Chariots Of Fire".  I am satisfied with "Wheelbarrows of Trundle" ;-)
***

Haunted by ghosts of the past -- so are we all, I suspect.  I remember a line that moved me once, though I am not religious, I'll paraphrase: "Give your ancient regrets and chronic woes to God as a gift, He will know what to do with them." I found this psychologically liberating because we do cleave to our bitternesses, are even jealous of them, these things which eat at our hearts.  To think we could give them away...as a gift...perhaps the greatest gift we have ever given.  Ah, well, I'm no guru, just a survivor who likes the idea of creating room for joy and new discovery.
***

Yes, saying thanks is a declining practice, I've noticed.  The phrase "people-people" makes me smile.  Most of those who are thus self-described have little consideration for people other than themselves. 
***
6/16/03
Yes, I have a medium desire to do something on family history, at least get the basics down.  Perhaps I will do something on that eventually.  It does seem odd that our family members don't have a simple list of the direct-line people with birth dates, and if appropriate, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.  So many of us moderns are informal to the vanishing point about such basics.
***
Nice shot.  As you say, "the spirit of the horse".  It is a satisfying thing when the moment is so captured that it becomes immortal, containing within itself the now of the time.
***

Good you heal quickly, I guess I am about average.  And yes, lots of pollution in our lives.  I think it kills many people every year, most of it from our "chemical dependency" material culture.  How many times have I heard "oh, we didn't know then what we do now", as a way of excusing the insertion of dangerous radioactive molecules and various disease-causing chemicals into our environment.  Money, jobs, economy, national security -- how many lives is it worth to maintain these at the desired level?  How we agonize over one unnecessarily taken life sometimes, but wholesale illness and death -- it seems we actually accept a tradeoff at so many lives per billions in dollars.  Psychologically, mortalities that are sufficiently obscure as to causality, are not taken very seriously, and some who should act more morally, look away from the truth when it is not convenient.
***

Of course this is so much easier to say than to do.  I find when I am stressed and tired, my defenses get weaker.  I may grow angry about things that normally I would pass over, or I may begin to dwell on past wrongs.  So there is an analogy between physical illness and psychological illness.  Our psychological immune systems can fail to protect us and we may fall prey to acute "psychological illness" comparable to a cold or flu.  Hard as it is to maintain, we want a resilient immune system that eventually overwhelms the intrusive ailment, and prevents it from becoming a chronic one that is debilitating.  We hear about "wellness", but it is not uncommon to fluctuate over time because we are in a dynamic relationship with the physical and psychological worlds, both changing.
***

I agree.  It is not always easy to tell where one mind leaves off and another begins.  Song writers sometimes innocently reproduce melodies and phrases and think they are original, but came from the huge public echo-canyon of expression.
***

Probably so [to holding on to life].  "Fifty springs are little room/ To see the cherry hung with bloom", as Housman wrote.  If years are like hills, I want to see the view from the top of the next one.  And the next one...  If the afterlife were a land of discovery, I would be all for it.  Let those good times roll on forever.  And if this life is the only one we get, then let us enjoy it while it lasts.  In the natural world of volvoxes, rotifers and midges, life and death come and go in stroboscopic flashes, the dead world leaping back into life and life passing into death in a continuous oscillation.  It is our true nature to wonder the why of it all, but usually the best expression we can do is mount to a lectern like a locust whirring on the altar of Chartres cathedral.
***

This seems right to me too [Tony Hillerman’s writing technique], though there are no doubt many ways of writing.  Some re-write extensively, others write "bleedingly", slowly, and re-write little.  I seem to write best in response to what another has said.  If I were to write fiction, maybe I would try working from broken notes, reacting to them, then rearranging.  Re-writing is OK for corrections, but not good for creativity, for me.  The great writer, I've thought, can tap into the creative pre-conscious mind, it seems, on a continuous basis.  I have been good at dialog, and that is a back-and-forth reactive thing, to which my creative side seems attracted.
***

I have read the book, but forgotten these details [of poor science].  Yes, it is interesting stuff.  The history of science is full of puffed-up types intent on proving a theory, instead of laboring in the service of truth.  You could make a map of sciences, with mathematics at the center, then the hard physical sciences, and so on outward from there with each succeeding layer jealous of the proven hypotheses of layers inward.  Out on the rim, barely holding on, are the psychological and ethological scientists.  How the scientist lusts after the establishment of laws! I'm surprised Heisenberg was not slain on the spot, when he proved unprovability.  And it is kind of amusing to see thinkers tinker longingly with quantum dynamics even though it is the joker in the deck.
***

It is the IDEA [of giving away persistent negative thoughts] of this that appeals, not the associated theological beliefs.  Your comments give me a better idea of where you are in a religious sense, by the way, than has come through before.  These long-held negative psychically-damaging "entities" that we contain are like the self-regenerating patterns in nature, like a hurricane or a fire.  Somehow they tap into the energy of our lives and continuously regenerate.  They don't appear to be solvable or quenchable because they turn everything to their own purposes.  Whether they can be pre-empted, so to speak, by giving them away, I don't know for sure, but I like the idea of just setting them down and walking away.
***

This seems right [that the spirit renews itself].  What choice do we have, who wish to live?  We must all phoenix-spring from the ashes of yesterday.  To wait for perfect peace of mind and totally tidy psyches, we would wait forever.  When our business crashed that we had put years into, and I was threatened by ruefulness, I finally was forced to defy it.  I said let the damned regrets take a number and get in the queue, I don't have time for them now.  And I was able to cope with the hard times as they came.  Never since have I allowed regrets to sap my energy for living.  Not that they don't try.
***

6/23/03
As his journal showed, we talked about, among other things, the role of the will in conscious life.  That was a big topic in my mind in those days.  I thought about both the exciting possibilities and the danger of taking a more active role for consciousness. 

Much of the direction of meditation seems to be in the other direction, that of overcoming the interference of consciousness with the other mind processes, nullifying it as it were.  Yet, such is the nature of this type of speculation, that one comes in a circle back to the same thing -- bringing what is hidden into the light of consciousness. 

Practically speaking, it behooves the spiritual traveler to be very sensitive to why there are matters hidden from the conscious mind, there are doubtless good reasons for the mind to be layered that way.  Not that one accepts this as a permanent state, but one needs to learn to go humbly among the byways of the mind.  An analogy might be a child wandering among the dynamos and circuitry of a great hydroelectric dam -- so fascinating, so dangerous.

As for the will, it seems to an expression of the integrity of the system that is the self.  It is a powerful psychic state, and yet it is far from being in charge of all processes in the self.  It has little subtlety.  Its sway is in the now and it guides in a crude way, it chooses paths that of course can make all the difference, as Frost said.

Well, I rein myself in on that topic.  Like him, or anyone who thinks about this stuff, I could fill books of speculation.
***

This is good to hear [that my images will be published].  I used to occasionally write the lyrics to songs, and got great satisfaction from hearing others sing them.  Artists so exclusive they put their work in a trunk, are missing the completion of the process.  The work should live out in the world, in the minds of others.  This is very much like having children, preparing them as best one can, then letting go, so they can enjoy the experience of living too.
***

This is an interesting exchange, and the idea of the mind fighting for balance and health appeals to me.  Further, if this idea has any validity, it suggests much about the problem of mind -- it attempts not only to show the world, but the meaning of it, and the mind also "rewards" itself for good behavior and punishes itself for bad.  It is a blend of objectivity, subjectivity, and auto-control.  Because it produces the only world we know, the possibilities of error are stupendous because if truth is set aside as too painful, then fantasy can take its place.  And that fantasy can be life-enhancing, or darkly debilitating, and still be satisfying in some way.
***

It is strange, now that I think of it, that we accept the germ theory and immune system dysfunctionality for the physical body, but have failed to consider that the world may provide thoughts and experiences that can harm us, or that mangled perceptions and interpretations might fester.
***

I realize there is a connection [between physical  illness and psychological illness] also, probably in both directions.  But I wanted to clarify the analogy.  And go ahead and get rid of frustrations -- writing is probably the best way to do it because writing implies turning something to the uses of expression, it is a kind of art.  Art heals.
***

I don't know about [their] seeing spirits one way or the other, but cats, dogs, birds have senses far beyond ours, and so live in a different world, though overlapping with ours.  It is one of the reasons they are so valuable to us, that they are not us, and nudge us to the awareness of other things...
***

Much truth here [in your comments].  The logical and sensory mind has its useful plodding steps, while the intuition soars and swoops overhead.  Together they lick the platter clean, so I prefer to think.  Both are mind in different guises.  Perhaps intuition is less bound by the dimensions of time and space.
***

Well, in a disturbingly few years, I'll have occasion to observe the situation [of the afterlife] at first hand, or not, as the case may be.  My opinion will matter little in the face of the reality.  I have come to enjoy having opinions, knowing how little they really mean.  I figure the universe can just about always trump any opinion with some amazing reality.  Also, your TV comment gave me a chilling vision of hell where souls are trapped in the electrostatic field of some giant screen endlessly showing game shows or soap operas, probably while awaiting rebirth as mushrooms.
***

Aside from the rare burst of pure creativity, one can see that writing is like some sport where one practices until the basic skills are there, then one just "does" it, that is, one gets into the process.  Letter writing as a dialog, as we are doing here, is not the hard labor that nearly everyone seems to assume it is.  Yes, it takes some patience, some ability to stop quivering like an aspen leaf, but given that, it isn't like breaking rocks.

It worries me to see so many of my friends and family members unable to stop their mindless activity for a while.  i am reminded of a book I read years ago called Snapping.  It was about techniques used by cults to indoctrinate new members -- the key was to render the other person's mind unable to think its own thoughts.  For example, they urged the ceaseless chanting of mantras to fill up the minds of neophytes, so they could not have any troubling doubts or purposes of their own. 

Maybe this commercial culture is doing a similar thing through popular culture -- some young people cannot be without music or a cell phone in their ear at all times.  Otherwise (shudder) they might have an idea or two of their own.
***

[Asking about the Uncertainty Principle]  Here is a long quote about it from the Internet, probably more than you want to know:
==Begin quote
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

An odd aspect of Quantum Mechanics is contained in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (HUP).  The HUP can be stated in different ways, let me first talk in terms of momentum and position. 

If there is a particle, such as an electron, moving through space, I can characterize its motion by telling you where it is (its position) and what its velocity is (more precisely, its momentum).  Now, let me say something strange about what happens when I try to measure its position and momentum. 

 Classically, i.e., in our macroscopic world, I can measure these two quantities to infinite precision (more or less).  There is really no question where something is and what its momentum is. 
 In the Quantum Mechanical world, the idea that we can measure things exactly breaks down.  Let me state this notion more precisely.  Suppose a particle has momentum p and a position x.  In a Quantum Mechanical world, I would not be able to measure p and x precisely.  There is an uncertainty associated with each measurement, e.g., there is some dp and dx, which I can never get rid of even in a perfect experiment!!!.  This is due to the fact that whenever I make a measurement, I must disturb the system.  (In order for me to know something is there, I must bump into it.) The size of the uncertainties are not independent, they are related by
dp x dx > h / (2 x pi) = Planck's constant / ( 2 x pi )

The preceding is a statement of The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  So, for example, if I measure x exactly, the uncertainty in p, dp, must be infinite in order to keep the product constant. 

This uncertainty leads to many strange things.  For example, in a Quantum Mechanical world, I cannot predict where a particle will be with 100 % certainty.  I can only speak in terms of probabilities.  For example, I can say that an atom will be at some location with a 99 % probability, but there will be a 1 % probability it will be somewhere else (in fact, there will be a small but finite probability that it will be found across the Universe).  This is strange. 

We do not know if this indeterminism is actually the way the Universe works because the theory of Quantum Mechanics is probably incomplete.  That is, we do not know if the Universe actually behaves in a probabilistic manner (there are many possible paths a particle can follow and the observed path is chosen probabilistically) or if the Universe is deterministic in the sense that I can predict the path a particle will follow with 100 % certainty. 

A consequence of the Quantum Mechanical nature of the world, is that particles can appear in places where they have no right to be (from an ordinary, common sense [classical] point of view)!

This notion has interesting consequences for nuclear fusion in stars. 
==End quote
***

Interesting [that you absorb meaning better if you physically type it].  Einstein said his creative imagery was physical in nature, rather than visual or auditory.  Also, the factor of time may be involved -- it takes time for the mind to react in a complete way to something like the meaning in writing.  We moderns skim a lot, due to the sheer quantity of information, and vision is inherently less emotional than the other senses.  But when we slow down, we give ourselves time to react.  To the degree what is being said is less factual and more experiential, to that degree we must react to it, otherwise it has no purpose.
***

This is true [that the negative feelings you thought you left behind are sometimes still on your trail].  We carry the entire past into the future -- all of the selves we have been.  To put it humorously, we should often have good experiences and be interesting people as we evolve, so we will be in good company later.
***

Yes, it [the business crash] was pretty messy.  I did at least find that I did not die, and that compared with that experience, other not-so-good times are better.  Whether my current mood may be up or down, I try to keep rollin' along with something that interests me.  My mood eventually rises to the situation -- it is hard to be down while being involved in something interesting.
***

Maybe the pixel seems illusive because it is just one dot of a specific color, but newspaper or monitor colored images are three dots that blend in the eye, "impressionistically".
***

There is nothing like a project to accelerate learning -- the project provides the coherence, the context for the otherwise discrete skills.
***

Like a hawk [seeing everything at the same time], and I have had that desire often to bring it all together and fuse it in me permanently.  However, until that happens, a better analogy for me is one I've returned to often over the years -- a blind bloodhound.  Often unknowing of the great mysteries that surround, the blind bloodhound is the master of the trail who can follow it whatever the twists and tricks it contains.  As an aside, I'll mention a fact about the sense of smell -- it is the only one that can perceive into the past.
***

6/25/03
Your newsletter [that they send you] in orange on blue sounds unhealthy -- lots of people have more technical knowledge than good taste.  I have seen magazines, like ZooNooz from the San Diego Zoo, that suffered from an excess of graphic tricks, where they superimpose text on images of exotic animals or plants, for example.  It is supposed to be jazzy, cool, hip, young, and "with it", but it is often merely foolish -- text is meant to be read, and readable. 
***

Parting observation: in doing the web pages, I have realized how well text and images go together, assuming the viewer has the basic patience to read the commentary.  An image really needs to be looked at for several seconds, at least, to register emotionally.  This is several seconds more than most modern eyeballs can handle.  This is a problem that the image presenter has to deal with, assuming a desire to communicate through images.  Vision is relatively unemotional by its nature.  The other senses have emotional reaction more built-in, especially smell, but even hearing is more emotionally "resonating" than vision.  Words can "frame" the image, slow the viewer down, give emotion time to happen.  Probably more on this in time... 
***

The reason I find email to be the very best way to communicate is:
-- it is writing, so it has the advantage of thoughtfulness, "permanence", and, to whatever degree, art
-- also, as writing, it carries the "flavor" of the person and time, and gives a focus to the reply
-- it can be created at any chosen time, so is very convenient for the writer
-- it can be read at the convenience of the reader
-- there are a lot of formatting possibilities if html rather than text is used, for variety
-- images can be inserted easily, for the pleasure of images, and to illustrate text
-- stamps, envelopes and physical address books are not needed
***

The take of any Times of any coast on our culture amuses me, but wearies too. What they consider art and what I do, are quite different.  These are ingrown, urban sophisticates brittling their way through the minds of people like themselves.  It is "cosa nostra", our thing, and they can have it. These are "arts council" folks, precious and irrelevant.  Read The Painted Word sometime. I have ignored them, more or less, these thirty years, and I find when I return, they are just the same -- intelligently, articulately vapid and stupid.  Such as these trundle out their theories, heavily larded with politics, and a few of them actually create something -- usually ugly, but wreathed around with intimidating abstractions.  Like "a brave syncretism of hope in a morassic slough of death-loving ethos" or some such twaddle.  Any American that stands up and has a real thought or feeling of his own wipes away in a single gesture all this orgy of egos and mutual-aggrandizement.  This stuff is culture as industry. Bah!
***

Your letter arrived yesterday.  It sounds like the good folks of Gotham are evolving their political destiny apace.  And as you say, the lack of a precedent allows for creativity.  However precedent will be there soon enough, what will they do then? Qui bono?, qui bono?...  Always that question, like a sound of a truck endlessly backing up in the alley.  Perhaps everyone should be given new jobs every six months to avoid entrenchment.  Or, better yet, have managers in all departments that really manage, who take both responsibility for, and control of, the process, who stay on top of projects and bring them in on time -- what a revelation!  How ironic that productivity is "mere", and meetings are seen as the proper environs of the managers. "  Let's see, how can we spread this responsibility around so nobody comes back on me?"

In sum, coherence and integrity are not generated in meetings, as a rule. They are characteristics of individual minds. you probably already know all this, but must work through the messy psycho-political process anyway. Somehow the players must grow to feel they have more to gain cooperating with the process, than by subverting it...
***

6/30/03
A shop a few steps away from the bottom of the 24 steps to our floor have two huge cats who laze creatively about the place.  It is a sort of junk store by folks who used to have a hardware store, so there are many lazing places for cats.  The cats think all people are just fine, and even better when they know how to pet cats.  I have a certain popularity among them, as I iz an expert cat-petter.  Sometimes a cloud of loose hairs envelops the cat after a good pet, and how could one not like the owners who think cat-hair on the merchandise is a normal and reasonable thing.  Boxes of magazines are favored sleeping sites.
***

Yes, that was a bit painful [deleting some photo pages from the web site], but necessary.  I have a lot of images, and they keep coming, so I have to make room for them.  The web site is like a bucket -- it only holds so much, so older pages will be retired.  One image, In Reflection, I so regretted losing, that I am thinking of starting a page just for the shots I cannot bear to permanently delete from the site.
***

For some reason, this reminded me of my "discipline" technique with our cats when we were in Canada.  When they misbehaved, I would become overly friendly, petting them assertively, holding them upside down, cooing maniacally, etc.  But never so goofy the cats were completely offended -- they just believed that certain behavior on their part led to a brief mental aberration on my part.  It was surprising how well the technique worked.  I'm sure they felt it incumbent upon themselves to do their bit for mental health by not doing what triggered the weird actions by me.  Cats are rather conservative and reserved by nature, and tend to approve of reliable local conditions conducive to the good life.
***

This suggested to me the value of an inner map of soul-satisfying spots in any city -- places to repair to wherever you are, whether a park or a coffee shop, a tucked-away little alcove with a bench, perhaps a church with a cool pew on a summer afternoon...
***

I find myself interested in this idea of featuring trees -- not sure how I might myself go with it.  I like the idea of showing seasons by means of particular scenes or of particular plants or animals.  And liking the "over time" approach to commentary and photography.  I have been taking repeated shots of scenes and a nesting pair of pigeons, knowing there was something along those lines I wanted to do.  Here is the wing exercising of a young pigeon the nest and occupants of which I have shot many times (notice the lack of a white cere in the two young birds):
***

You are welcome to the images, and if images are imagined to have feelings, they are no doubt happier out there in the big universe.
***

Well, discussions of real life cannot always be upbeat if they are also to be honest.  And if one cannot be honest without violating a hidden stricture to be always positive, then what is the stricture worth?  Honesty about life and experience is part of the foundation of communication, and of art itself.  We simians have odd notions of what others think of us -- we actually seem to prefer an upbeat illusory view of us, than to be truthfully seen and known, warts and all, as we really are.  The person who is known as always cheerful, always inspiring, may not have any depth, or be self-deluded, or be masked to us, or be so enlightened as not any longer to live in the same world we do.  Whatever the truth, we probably cannot enjoy knowing that person, cannot learn from them, cannot communicate.

Related to this, is the manyness of ourselves.  While I don't have doubts about my own integrity as a single being, I also see I am all the selves I have ever been, some "good", some not so good, some coarse, some fine, some reaching out to the greater world around, and some tucked smugly into self-validating prejudices.  Further, as Edward Hall says, we have our formal or "right vs.  wrong" selves, our informal selves that are more inclusive, and our technical selves, who manipulate the tools of thought and manufacture.
 **

I am glad you reacted to this, so I can react to your reaction to clarify.  The point I was making was not that a person can't have a strong emotional reaction to the meaning of an image, but that vision itself is the least emotional of the senses.  It perceives at a distance, and is separated from emotional reaction in the same way the observer is separated from the thing perceived -- the view is "objective".  Compare it to touch, or smell -- they are "personal", they are within one's personal space, and a judgment about the experience is built-in to the experience itself.  However, about 70% of our entire set of sensory cells are in the retinas of our eyes.  We are highly visual creatures.  Our emotions certainly do come into play as we interpret what we see, as we remember former similar sights, or weave the image among the threads of our meanings.  An image can become the focal point, the attractant, of the floating thoughts and impressions of our lives and become charged with them, become the icon of a complex of reactions.  An image of a lamplight attracting moths out of the darkness comes to my mind... 

Again, it takes time to react to an image, or any work of art, and the artist cannot help but regret the hurried response most observers have to the offered image -- if too fast, then the seer sees, but does not know, is cognitively blind.
***

Interesting.  Lots here to respond to.  First, by all means disagree as you please.  Conversation evolves in two ways: either by counter-argument, or by agreeing and extending the ideas expressed.  Both are fine, though in rapid give-and-take of spoken conversation, the second way is often more enjoyable.  Few people, I have sadly found, really enjoy creative, or speculative, conversation.  To put it more bluntly, they are not capable of it, they lack the playfulness of mind.  Each of us has a unique point of view from within our overcoat selves, and we have that to offer, even if we foolishly imagine ourselves to be uninteresting.  To that, add our dreams, reveries, personal metaphors, theories, jokes, plain silliness, ideas, grievings, triumphs, regrets, hopes, insights -- all the panoply of mind, and just about anyone has plenty to say, if not mentally flat-footed, as so many are.

So, when you stand up for your own perceptions, which may come into a sharper focus because I or someone else has said what seems contrary to them, and you express them back, it cannot but help both parties.  You benefit because you articulate what you have not expressed explicitly before, and the other person has then a similar advantage -- a contrasting foil to which to react.  This is win-win.

That said, I have to say I agree with all your statements about memory triggered by remembered sensory impressions.  These memories come suddenly and poignantly to mind on a sight, or sound, or smell.  And I see what you mean about "perceiving into the past" by that means.  And I also follow your idea about present sensory input calling on memory to provide meaning and context.  In short, bare perception would avail us little without the past-perceiving of memory. 

However, I think my intended statement still holds true when I said smell is the only sense that perceives into the past because I was speaking more objectively than the meaning you took.

To clarify, imagine a dog at a crossing of paths.  He may see a rabbit hop by, or hear a redwing blackbird in a nearby marsh, or taste the tips of new grass.  These are perceptions of things present now.  But he smells a dog that went by yesterday, it was a young female, it was somewhat ill.  Underneath her smell is the smell of a raccoon, a male, his scent is older by half a day, or so.  Over there a water snake went by, a cottonmouth probably, it slithered by just this morning.  There is a faint deer smell, a doe certainly, from concealed droppings, days old.  And so on.  To a bloodhound, such a scene must be an astounding multiple overlay of beings and events now gone.  This is what I meant by perceiving into the past.
***

Thanks for all the images you sent in your messages, they do extend the meaning, don't they?
***

I can imagine a "post-partum" depression with the publication of a book.  Slow start, getting in to it, total focus, high activity level toward the end, suddenly done, then...  what?  Well, onward eventually, but the mind will be spinning for a while till it gets its bearings again.
***

Dissociating -- your going nowhere is sad, escaping into no experience as better than the experience offered by your young life.  For myself, I had a childhood habit, also carried into adulthood (and not gone) that was, I suppose, dissociating, though I have never thought of it with that term: I would also "be gone", an observer would see me staring into space, but inside I was in the world of ideas and dream-like reveries.  There would be, and are, voices of my own mind (not heard as if from outside) that would pose possibilities, or argue this or that point.  I cannot see this as a negative thing -- if others do not help one evolve, then one does it by oneself.  I have done it before, and I am prepared to do it again.  The psychologist might well tsk-tsk about this, because the psychologist's criterion is how the person thrives while fully participating in the life of the family and community.  My focus has always been on myself, and secondly on others (you might say I have returned the favor of others :-) The point is not the auto-aggrandizing ego, but to live fully the life that has miraculously been given me.
***

Here is the answer [to what keeps the spirit inside the body] -- oops, just kidding, no idea.  Actually, I have a mess of ideas.  I read when I was first learning about all this from a philosophical view, that ancients distinguished between spirit and soul.  Spirit, as the etymology suggests, is the breath of life.  The soul is, I guess, most commonly understood to be the mote of God that is within each person. 

In reading years ago The Chain of Being, the author talked of the spherical microscopic plant called volvox -- while it is made up of cells indistinguishable from free-living single celled beings, it lived AND DIED as a unit.  Somehow volvox is an entity of entities, and integrity of integrities, with the larger integrity taking precedence over the smaller ones.  Our body has some 100 trillion cells, and all of them developed from one single original fertilized egg cell.  They do not all "die" the moment our heart stops, but they might as well, they are on borrowed time, and the time is short -- for brain cells, their death comes in a few minutes.

No, I don't think in terms of soul, though I am a good agnostic and do not insist on anything.  But I do speculate on the integrity of the system each of us is -- what can it be compared to?  how is it maintained?  how sharply focused is it?  how does it relate to mind?  is the will simply the naked expression of the integrity of the self?

Always related to such ponderings, is our relation to the larger universe.  The Universe exists, it is creative, it is evolutionary, it has its ways.  We are part of it, a large part in fact, and we too have our ways, we are creative, we evidence integrity, we evolve.  In us the great Universe is sharply focused, and I would not be surprised to find we are the direct gesture of its movement toward integrity, will, and yes, expression.
***