Memories, Travel

Visitations

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                             65  bar rises 29.73  2mph WSW dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny

                                                       Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon

The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.  Angkor.   Singapore.  Bangkok.  Ephesus.  Delphi.  Santorini.  Rome.  Pompeii.  Venice.  Florence.  Crete.  Delos.  Istanbul.  Bogota.  Cartagena.  Mexico City.  Merida.  Oaxaca. Vienna.  Salzburg.  Paris.  London.  Hawarden.  Anglesey.  Conwy.  Edinburgh.  Bath.  Cities and towns, states and countrysides in the US and Canada too many to name.

Angkor drapes vines over me, inserts vast tree roots into my memories while the howler monkeys and the cicada scream.  It’s hot and it doesn’t let up, just gets hotter, too hot in the midday.  The stone rises and rises, carved by artists capable of rendering the delicate and ephemeral in stone.  The astronomical, astrological, theological pandemonium of it all causes reverberations deep in my soul, beyond my Self and down into my links with the collective unconscious.  I was there when the stone masons cut the block, shaped Vishnu turning the great turtle in the sea of milk.  My hand carved the apsara and fitted stones into the great western gate of Angkor Wat.

Delphi sends music to me, pan-pipes and Apollo’s lute.  The cedar scented sacred way winds it way up the side of Mt. Parnassus past the Athenian treasury, up to the Temple of Apollo where the Delphic Oracle met questioners and answered their questions with questions deep in its subterranean precincts.  Here, too, is the omphalos stone, the center of the world.  The Castalian spring.  All round Mt. Parnassus are echoes of divinity, cries from the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo’s defeat of the cthonic serpent Python, still resound throughout the rocky hills.  The Delphi Oracle still speaks today and she says, “Beware, Stranger, of forgetting your past for in it lie secrets to your future.  Without your past you will wander the earth always an infant in your understanding.”

Merida and the Casa del Balam, house of the jaguar, bring heat, heat so intense that as the afternoon rains came there was no relief, only a suffocating rise in humidity.  To escape the locals do much of their business in pre-dawn and dawn hours, sitting together in the main park around the confidenitales, small curved benches made so dating couples could sit beside each other, yet not touch.  Here Mayan women sell blood oranges in front of the Cathedral, their roots at Chichen Itza and Tikal, not Jerusalem or Rome. 

Hawarden resonates with my genetic past.  On the trains in North Wales most of the people looked like they could be my cousin short, thin, dark eyes and hair.  The town with its residential library (where I stayed) and its brick and stone streets and buildings had Victorian written in its architecture, public and private.  It also had a bookish quality, an Oxford don would not have felt out of place.  The church graveyard, just behind St. Deniol’s Library, had slate markers covered with moss and huge trees hanging heavy bows over the graves.  Behind it the stone building of St. Deniol’s parish church sat calm and iconic.

There are others, many others, but these places live within me, never absent.  They are the great gift of travel and one I cherish.

Cinema and Television, Our Land and Home, Travel, World History

The Land is Our Vantage Point

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                            62  bar falls 29.66  0mph N dew-point 55  Beltane, night

                                                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Started Gettysburg tonight to get me in the mood for the southern trip.  Even though I’ve canceled my Gettysburg trip for this time, I can’t head into the south without thinking of the Civil War and trying to visit a few battlefields or other historic sites along the way.  Even as I write the word historic, I think back to something I wrote not long ago about how young our country is.

Think of Stonehenge, a temple from the paleolithic, over 5,000 years ago.  There are probably citizens of the United Kingdom whose ancestors were there, helped position the stones.  Imagine Turkey and Iraq, nations where civilization has had a foot-hold for thousands of years.  Egypt.  China and its 6,000 years of history, much of it recorded. 

Here, where most of us are boat people, only a few of the First Nations survive.  They can trace their ancestry on this land back several thousand years, but none of us with roots in Europe or Africa or Asia (at least the most recent immigrations) can see deeper into the past than Plymouth Rock or Roanoke.  Our history here spans no more than 400 years and as a country we are only 240 some years old.

The Hudson River School painters, in particular Thomas Cole, believed that the American equivalent of ruins were the natural wonders. The frontier in his day.  The mountains.  The Great Lakes.  The mighty rivers.  The forests that stretched over millions of square miles.  Now we can add the Grand Canyon, the buttes and mesas of Utah, the homes of the Anasazi.  Yellowstone.  Yosemite.  The Boundary Waters. 

It is still true. Still true that the land itself is our vantage point to consider history and pre-history.  Still true that the sight of the Rocky Mountains or Lake Superior or the Mississippi or the Smoky Mountains or the Everglades can move us to tears and anchor us here, anchor us here as firmly as the Bastille, the Tower of London, the temples of Angkor or the Great Wall of China.

GeekWorld, Travel, Weather +Climate

240,000 Miles and Still Happy

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58  bar falls 29.74  10mph E  dew-point 56  Beltane, cloudy and raining

                         First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Since this has been and will be a traveling month, I’ve been attentive to weather nation-wide.  It’s amazing to sit here looking outside at my garden where the vegetables are slow to mature because of cool weather while the east, south and southwest have had hot hot hot.  The red looked like a child had decided to color the U.S. by starting down the eastern seaboard and then moving along the bottom of the map, went up a state or two, then went on west.  Red all the way.

The automobile is my primary mode of transportation.  Train second.  Air a distant third and then only for speed or an impossible distance.  The former is the reason for air to Texas in July, the latter found me in a plane for Hawai’i. 

When I travel by car, I pay attention to the Weather Channel like a pilot watches the isobars.  It looks like my luck will be good.  The very hot weather system seems ready to break up into more seasonal summer temps.  I’m glad.

Took the little red car into the dealer today for an oil change (they like me, they really really like me) and discovered that the head gasket seep has become a full fledged leak.  That means a head gasket and head grinding when I return plus I have to check the oil every other gas stop.  Even though I repaired my air conditioning after 5 years without it (kept thinking I’d get rid of the Celica, but it kept working.), the heat still makes travel uncomfortable and it does reduce gas mileage. 

I  told Scott at Carlson Toyota I don’t begrudge the Celica few repairs at 240,000 miles.  Still a hell of a lot cheaper than a new car and I get 30-32 mpg on the road.

While we’re on the subject of mechanical devices, my computer now makes a reluctant noise when I boot up, as if it doesn’t want to get up yet.  At first it made me think:  Hard drive!  Bad.  Even though I back-up daily.  Then, on the web I found that it’s probably not the hard drive, but the cooling system.  Time for a little fresh air in the old computer case.  I like this machine.  It’s just right for my needs even though it is now 3 years old.  Like the Celica I feel I may have it a while.

Literature, Writing

Does Google Make Us Stupid?

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70  bar steady  29.81  0mph NNW  dew-point 52  Beltane, cloudy and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“When life gives you lemmings, jump over the cliff.”  A quote from an unusually cynical book I’m reading right now.

Am also reading an article from the Atlantic which asks the question, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?”  The author says that he and other his literary friends now find it difficult to read a whole book, to sustain a long and complex thought process, to do anything more than speed read blogs.  They attach this tendency to the Web and their constant web presence, searching, reading, researching, writing. 

It makes for an arresting article title.  I wanted to read it.  The argument doesn’t track for me, however.  Unless it’s my age (compared to theirs), their experience does not match mine.  I don’t find reading a book a challenge.  I do notice that I have a shorter attention span at times, something I correlate more to the span between commercials on TV programs;  but, when I need the focus for a subtle or complicated book, it is there.

When I write a novel, it comes in daily chunks, not one long, intricate thread.  It must get there, of course, but it happens in discrete, manageable bites.  Reading complex material is the same process for me.  I read it at a pace that makes it accessible to me.  

When I started college, I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Program.  I remember two things.  One, if you want to read fast, take an index card and follow it as you move it down the page, taking in lines whole, from the center, rather than left to right.  Two, no matter how fast you read, the material determines the pace you can read.  Where 1,000 words a minute might be possible for fiction, when reading philosophy 150 words a minute is fast.  This squares with my own experience and factors into the topic, too.     

News of the Strange

Hammer Head

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70  bar falls 29.81 0mph ESE dew-point 52  Beltane, sunny and warm

                  First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Check out the sophisticated medical  technology used in this strange story.

“George Chandler said he feels fine, even though a nailgun fired a 2.5 inch nail into the top of his head on Friday. Chandler and a friend were doing a project in a backyard when the nailgun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail.

Chandler said Monday he told his friend he didn’t know where the nail went, but he felt a sting on the top of his head.

They discovered that the nail was driven deep into Chandler’s head, so they called an ambulance and he was rushed to a hospital.

Chandler said a doctor used a common claw hammer to remove the nail.

He said he feels “very lucky, very, very lucky” to have escaped serious injury.”

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Can We Count on an Escape to the Stars?

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63  bar rises 29.81  0mph ESE dew-point 51   Beltane, cloudy and cool

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

“Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.” from a New York Review of Books article by Freeman Dyson

Here’s a bit from his own webpage: Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Dyson is a smart guy and no follower of the crowd.  His article reviews books which count the cost of global warming.  His real point, though, seems to be that those who would silence the critics of global warming may find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like the Catholic Church and Gallileo, for example. 

Here’s another quote:  “In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.  It may–or may not–be that the present is such a time.” 

He seems to look toward a more nuanced stating of the case along the lines of this quote from Ernesto Zedillo, editor of  Global Warming: Looking Beyond Kyoto.  “Climate change may not be the world’s most pressing problem (as I am convinced it is not), but it could still prove to be the most complex challenge the world has ever faced.”  Dyson has written elsewhere that he believe global poverty, starvation and epidemic treatable diseases like malaria, cholera and typhus are more important than global warming.  These are, he argues, clear and present realities.  We should not let climate change take attention away from them.

This is important stuff for me since I got word last night that I will serve on the Sierra Club’s political committee this year.   I believe in the Great Work Thomas Berry describes in his book by that name, namely, that our generation is the one that will have to change the human presence on the earth to a sustainable one.

Still, I take the point of some conservative critics who wonder if the emphasis on the health of mother earth detracts from our specie’s self interest, i.e., our own survival.  My belief is that the two have become, or, better, we now recognize that they always have been, intimately related.  Only in the most optimistic space opera science fiction sense can we imagine scenarios in which our species escapes earth to colonize the stars.  Short of that we have to dance with the planet we were given.  This one.

Somehow we must make progress to mitigate the affects of climate change and to slow it down.  We must make that progress, though, in a way sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the human inhabitants of earth, our fellow creatures.

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Gotta Take That Wild Last Ride

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61  bar steep rise 29.76  4mph W dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and cool

                First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Decided to cancel the Gettysburg leg of my trip.  Need to be at home.  Another time.  Gettysburg is not going anywhere.

A bit more about radical individualism.  Last night I proposed, as I wrote here yesterday, that civilization, especially through work and love, constrain the unfettered, natural–wild part of us.  There was good criticism of that position, i.e. part of the natural state of humanity is life in family, in relationship.  Another position asserted that deconstructing (I’m not sure about this use of the term, but it is what was used.) ourselves so that wildness could break out denies the process of integration of the mature person. (individuation, perhaps?)  Wildness, in this view, must somehow come together with all of psyche’s zoo or, better, pantheon (my terms) to define a full person.

It is true that the very nature of what it means to be human gains its definition in a social context.  In that sense, yes, to be human is to be in a family, a clan, a community.  It is also true that the integration model of maturity requires a delicate balancing and harmonizing of disparate impulses, desires and drives into a well-functioning individual. 

Even so.  A first reaction over against both of these arguments is this:  we all die alone.  This is the existentialist’s key and, to my eye, keen observation.  It can be pushed back through life itself.  We are all born alone, that is we are the only one to emerge from the womb as that distinct individual.  Even triplets are born into different bodies, at a slightly different time, and have unique life experiences.  In life we inhabit our body and no other.  We may, more or less, empathetically walk in another person’s shoes, but we can never get in there while their foot is in the shoe.  You are unique and, whether you wish it to be the case or not, can have it no other way.

Second, the Jungian model of individuation, which I embrace, calls us to live into our Self, to become, that is, whom we already are.  This may involve harmonization and balancing, but it may also include embracing aspects of our Self heretofore submerged or repressed.  The journey is not to maturity in this view, rather it is toward the clearest and most distinct realization of our uniqueness.

As a note I read moments ago by James Hillman said, the individuation process prepares us to die.  Last night I did not mention my final thought on wildness.  The last wild act of our life is death.  It is that moment most natural, most terrifying, most awesome, least understood and never tamed.  Death is, for each of us, our wildest moment.  Individuation ensures that we come to that last natural divide, that last wild place, as who we are, shorn of cultural convention and psychological repression.  That we come dressed only in the clothes which our psyche had for us to wear from the very beginning.  That we come to the most wild moment in our life, in other words, as the natural, wild Self into which we were born.

This journey, this ancient trail, is the ancient trail.  It is one we walk alone from birth until death.  It is this realization that makes me a radical individualist, proud and happy to live in community, yes, but as a person free and unfettered.

Family, Woolly Mammoths

A Radical Individualist

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58  bar rises 29.69  0mph S  dew-point 51  Beltane, night and cool

                   First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Woolly’s on Wildness.  Some of us thought wildness was wilderness, or being in wilderness.  Others of us thought wildness lay in the the natural, the natural state, unconstrained by civilization.  Yet others believed wildness was one aspect of our psyche that needed integration into the larger, mature person we become over time.

I realized in the middle of the conversation that I am a radical individualist, along with Emerson and the Existentialists.  More on this at another time.

How to make another see the inherent worth they have, the beauty and the glory of their person?  The depth of their soul and the bounty they represent in the world?  I don’t know right now and I wish I did.

Travel, Woolly Mammoths

The Wild Man

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71  bar steady  29.66  1pmh ENE dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny and warm

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

We have had only 3 days above 80 this year.  The weather stays cool, which is fine, but the plants don’t like it.  They grow slowly.

Tonight is the Wild Man meeting of the Woolly Mammoths at Charlie Haislet’s pent-house condo overlooking downtown Minneapolis.  Not exactly the abode of a wild man.  Still, most of us would have trouble with it, too.  

This week feels compressed since I leave on Saturday for Maxwell AFB and Gettysburg.  It means I’m on the kind of work attitude I get into before a trip.  This time it will last a week.

Thankfully this time I head out on Hwy 94 not 35.  I will skirt Chicago by heading down the middle of Illinois, then on south, into the heat.  I can only hope that the hot weather will subside, at least a bit, before I get into Tennessee.

GeekWorld, News of the Strange

Exaflops, Zettaflops, Yottaflops and the Xeraflop

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72  bar steady 29.65 1mph SSW dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and warm

             First Quarter of the Flower Moon

Sometimes the language surprises even those of who try to keep up with technological innovation.

“An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States.

“The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop…”