Category Archives: Memories

Memories, Music

Yeah

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Then again, there’s jazz.  Not sure how it made its way into my soul.  Sometime in my teens.  Might have been that see-it tour I took with the Methodist Church to New York and Washington, D.C.  Gene Krupa at the Metropole stands out as a memory, though just what I would have been doing there I have no idea.

Jazz, like the Coltrane piece I’m listening to right now, Body and Soul, comes along with big east coast city memories, including the wood paneled corridors of Washington, D.C.  It feels like night time and carpeted hallways with people doing significant things, well past working hours.  Smoke filled rooms, half-empty glasses with lipstick stains and cigarette butts smoking in ceramic ashtrays.

There’s also the stadium in Cincinnati where Coltrane shared the stage with Monk and Herbie Mann.  Where the jazz went on and on and then we returned to the place we were crashing, somewhere on Mount Adams, maybe on Celestial Avenue or Paradise or Monastery Street.  It had these kind of street names.

The combination of marijuana, the jazz festival, the late 60’s and Mount Adams makes for a peculiar set of memories, as if for a while I floated along on Celestial Avenue listening to tenor sax riffs, that wonderful complexity of Monk’s piano, the flute, the horn all marking a variation on the theme of heaven.  Might have been.

(Cincinnati landmark Immaculata Church on Mt. Adams in the background)

 

 

Holidays, Memories, Myth and Story

Heart Shaped Cakes

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Imbolc                                                                  Valentine Moon

Back in the far away long ago my mother used to bake heart shaped cakes, devil’s food, for my birthday.  This Valentine holiday birthday has always been one of the semi-secret joys of my life.  I get to celebrate my annual pilgrimage, my odometer turns over, on a day now celebrated for love; special enough to remember, not so special that it overpowers my birthday, like I always imagine Christmas would or July 4th.

It did make those elementary school rituals, often laden with important messages not quite understood, hoped for, but more often missed than received, even more fraught.

Now that I know it’s the mid-day of the ides of February, 13-15th, and that Lupercalia followed it in Roman times, it makes this whole approaching time more special.  February was the Roman December, the last month of the year and the ides, those mid-month days sacred to Jupiter, usually had festivals and celebrations.  On this last month of the Roman year the Romans took care to purify themselves and offer sacrifices to absolve themselves of whatever needed to be left behind in the old year.

We could approach Valentine’s Day as a day for clearing up any uncertainties or unpleasantnesses built up over the previous year.  Seek a way to resolve them, then go out for a meal to seal them off, leave them behind.

Family, Memories, Politics, Travel, US History

DANK

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Winter                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

Dank.  That’s the name of the place.  The medical dispensary that now has a retail recreational marijuana cash register, too.

This hidden store is in a setting of low warehouse and light manufacturing type buildings.  The brick exterior has no sign and the only evidence of its existence is a black and white piece of 8.5 by 11 taped to the window that says: Dank.  Keeping it kind.

Once inside the entry way there is a long hallway with office suites off to both sides.  Only at the far end of the hall, maybe 100 feet away is any human being evident..  Sure enough, DANK is the last office suite on the left.

A colorful sign advertising various forms of marijuana:  loose, baked, oil and kief (a product unfamiliar to me).

A guy in the required knit hat, ear buds and baggy sweater, a couple of days of growth says, “I have to check your I.D.”

As you might imagine, I gave him a look.  The gray-hair and wrinkles?  “Sorry, man.  The state requires it.  I know you’re more than 21.  But I have to check the expiration date.”  General laughter in the room.

Off to the right is a glass vitrine with three shelves holding hand blown pipes and bowls and bongs, artistic.  A roped walkway, ala security lines, held a dozen or so people, mostly young men in their twenties, but there was another older man like me and one woman.

At the end of the line were two cash registers flanking a glass display case with white chocolate with marijuana baked in, chocolate chip cookies, lighters, including a bic lighter, green and with DANK written over a marijuana leaf.  The cashiers served as marijuana sommeliers, answering questions about various strains like indica and sativa, prices per ounce.

To an old 60’s guy this was a scene resonant with memories of bags scored from furtive dealers, parties with just a hint of paranoia.  And here, in this state where my grandchildren live, and in a store not a mile from their home, people bought and sold grass.  Legally.

It was, as we might have said, a trip.

 

Latin, Memories, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Focused

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Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Made a concerted push and finished Climate Change, Week 2, today.   Always surprised at how concentrated mental effort exhausts me.

A bit of Latin today.  It was interesting, so I’ll post it here. Ovid describes the state of the countryside in Lycaon’s kingdom after the flood:

This occupies the high ground, a hooked ship sits

294  And draws its oars here, where not long ago a farmer plowed,

295  Above the fields or sails over the top of buried villas,

296  This ship on the surface catches fish in elm-trees.

 

This apres deluge piece from the Metamorphoses reminded me of a story I followed with fascination as a high school student.  The Army Corps of Engineers put a dam on the Salamonie River and submerged Monument City (pic) and two other towns.  The Corps bought the towns in 1965 and moved everyone out, including, which intrigued me at the time, all the cemeteries.

In this case you can literally catch fish in the elm-trees.  There was a dark glamour to the whole project. These towns flooded regularly and the dam sought to end the problem of rising waters in the area by covering them with water so that hooked ships might draw their oars there.

Kate’s sister Anne has been here the last couple of days sewing.  She’s got a couple of days off from the jail in Shakopee.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories

Selfies

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Samhain                                                                         Winter Moon

Great warmup yesterday, eh?  I think we saw 33 here for an hour.  Take that nosnowbirds.

Off to downtown Minneapolis again today.  Third time this week.  I often go a month IMAG1188without getting there.  My first physical with Cornelia Massie, M.D.  No real concerns, just another benchmark on the road to the big check-up.  That’s the one when check-ups are no longer necessary.

(who’s in there?)

Listening to a lecture by Alan Watts yesterday had me wondering about the self.  As you may know, I’ve been an advocate of the Self, the unique bundle of experiences, gifts, body/mind and personal history that is you.  In my way of thinking, Self=Soul.

But.  I think I may have to balance that with the Eastern view of no-self.  Watts described each of us as the universe being conscious of itself, a game the universe plays.  We float along on the flesh bag that contains us, taking in sensation as it comes, changing, always, with it.

In addition to the high Western individualist Self I can see the Eastern argument, too. When I consider the young boy who ran up the concrete slope of a neighbor’s fence to walk higher than his mom for the length of their lot, I wonder how we can share memories.  We do, I know that.  But his reality, his experience of the world is so different from mine today that it makes him as alien to me as a stranger.  Or, an intimate for that matter.

And, if the child, then what about the adolescent?  Well, there, too.  That guy with the runny nose, a wet handkerchief in his pocket, going from class to class, working hard to keep up his status as the brain.  How about that 60’s radical with a placard in one hand, a joint in the other?  Geez, who was that guy?

And so it would go in a chain up until, well, when?  What about the man who sat with his brothers at the Nicollet Island Inn on Monday?  His time has come and gone, replaced with the one who types now.

Yet, I’m also dragging this ever changing body to the doctor because I feel a duty to it, to make it last as long as possible.  Why?  Well, I’m interested in seeing what the Self becomes.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Absence

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Samhain                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

Driving home from the grocery store today I went past the street down which Dick Mestrich used to live.  Used to live in the sense that he died a couple of years ago.  It felt like there was a hole there at the end of the street, a place where my knowing went and came back with a false report, an absence.

It led me to think what it would be like if I still lived in my hometown of Alexandria, a town of around 5,000.  I knew people on most streets, classmates, friends of classmates, friends of my parents, business owners, people from church.  By now, at age 66, I can drive past many homes where my knowing would report an absence.  Jim Ragsdale out on Harrison Street.  Pancreatic Cancer.  Richard Lawson and Richard Porter out south on Harrison, Alexandria’s main street.  Richard Lawson from injuries sustained in Vietnam, Richard Porter from a fast-moving disease.  Sherry Basset.  Dennis Sizelove, diedClass of 1965 Float (2) in Vietnam.  Even Karl Kyle the owner of the funeral home that sat diagonally from our house and where my mom’s funeral was held.  Mom and Dad, of course.

As we get older the list gets longer, places where our knowing no longer functions, a hole in our social fabric.

Regina Schmidt, too.  Here.  Moon.  I’m aware that this is how it has been and how it will be.  Death changes life even for the living.  Why this came up for me today, I don’t know. But it did.

One more thing.  It feels ok.  Death taught me its deeply personal lesson long, long ago when my mother died.  I’ve known since then that life is a precious gift, one that can be lost with no forewarning.  This life, this unexplainable awareness and mobility and love, is ours on loan.  The universe wants its elements back, has another use for them.

This holiday I’m thankful for their organization in myself and the people I know, and in the people I’ve known.  A deeply weird opportunity, life.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Memories, Music

Holiseason Begins to Put the Pedal Down

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

We’re in that pre-holiday time when the air begins to take on a certain quality.  It’s part hope for a Thanksgiving (this time) that we both recall and imagine, a desire for an ideal time with family, with busyness, with good food and good memories made.

There are those other times, the times before, when the magazines had turkeys in their ads and the Whitehouse spared a turkey.  This year it will be a Minnesota turkey.  The times when we all had to put on our Sunday clothes even though it was Thursday and drive to an Aunt’s or to Grandma’s or to a friends.  Football and stuffing, a browned turkey and mashed potatoes.  Too many people around a too small table.  That drowsy, sleepy feeling, a tryptophan haze.  The turkey drug.

Those times mesh with hope, give it a flavor, a scent, a sound, a cast.  Those are, for me at least, good memories.  They give the time, this time, a pleasant before hand buzz, a family inflected smile.

This is holiseason.  It has these moments one after the other.  Times when others and the world of commerce and the world of religion and the world of small children all begin to bang into each other, making the world merry.  Yes, it’s chaotic and capitalistic. No doubt of that.  But it’s also fun, filled with good songs and lights.  Gifts and cold weather.  At least here.  Not so much in Singapore and Muyhail.

To all of you headed over the hills and through the woods.  Have fun.  Eat too much.  Laugh a lot.  Drive safely.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

The Unreliable Narrator–You

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Samhain                                                           Thanksgiving Moon

Beginning to play with the post-modern idea of the unreliable narrator, a staple of certain literary fictions and now understandable to me.  The most unreliable narrator of all may be our Self, or, rather, the work done by our mind to create a self.  As we attempt to weave a coherent notion of our story–how this, what, let’s use Heidegger’s idea of dasein–this dasein came to be here now, we impose on our memories a logic, a sequence, a string of cause and effects that explain, as best the dasein can, how it came to be in this moment.

There are many problems here, but the one I want to focus on is the fungibility of our memory and what Kant called the a prioris of thinking:  space and time.  Our memory changes as we access it, as we put it into new contexts, as our understanding grows and that changes happens to a quanta that was shaped by the context in which we first had the experience, the understandings we had then and by the fog created by our senses, which, by design and necessity, edit our lived experience so we can utilize it.

On top of this string of memory altering inevitables are the a priori categories of space and time, mental constructs which our reason uses to make what William James called “the blooming, buzzing confusion” worthwhile to us.  We see objects in four dimensions, in a space time matrix that changes as we perceive an object, event, feeling, moment, idea.

(Henry and William James)

What this means to us is that our Self has the demanding and ultimately futile task of seeing the plot in our life, its why and its meaning.  Why futile?  Because we change as we touch it, not Heisenberg, no, more than that we change more than the spin or the location of memory when we touch it, we change its content and thereby change our narrative, which, as a result changes our Self.  This is always happening, every moment of every day of our lives.   Modernist literature like Ulysses and Remembrance of Times Past was an attempt to give to us in written form this mutability at the heart of the internal project that is us.

As I said a few posts back, this is descriptive, not proscriptive and certainly not prescriptive, and it does contain one kernel of great importance. Since we actively construct our own narrative from the experiences we can recall, we can enter into that stream and actively construct our future.  In fact, unless we enter that stream with purpose, Heraclitus’s famous river, it will carry us along without our intention.

So, buckle up, strap on that orange life-preserver and take your seat in the raft that is your Self navigating the flood of your life.  It’s a thrilling ride no matter where it takes you.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, Third Phase

Destabilizing. And That’s OK.

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

A further extrapolation on the narrative fallacy and the self.  (see post below)  This notion, destabilizing as it is, makes sense to me. Which is ironic if you get the gist here.

It helps explain the existential panic I sometimes feel when my mood darkens, sometimes with a known trigger, sometimes not.  Yesterday was such a time for me.  When I have conversations about my work, Missing in this case, the potential for a seismic tremor heightens.  Of course, these tremors, unlike earth bound temblors, can produce good shakes and bad shakes.

Stefan’s careful analysis of what he felt worked and what didn’t, which I appreciated, especially in the detail and clarity which he offered so freely, unsettled me.  Geez, if this much still needs to happen and this is the 4th draft, what’s wrong with me?  WRONG.  OH.  I’VE FELT WRONG BEFORE. AND AHA THIS PROVES THIS OTHER TIMES RIGHT.  WHAT WERE THE OTHER TIMES?  UHH.  CAN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY, BUT THE FEELING, THE FEELING’S THE SAME.  ISN’T IT?

This went on as I drove away from his house.  I would remember the tell yourself this is a good workout, that you’re not tired article I read in the New York Times yesterday so I would tell myself that this was temporary, not anchored, that it was good to get feedback, that I was having a good day.  I had a friend who cared enough to be straight with me.  oops.  felt bad.  I’m having a good day, driving in the city.  There’s Knox Presbyterian, “living the obedient life”, yep, still conservative.  Need some tea, Verdant’s all the way over in Seward, but, hey.  The Teashop is just ahead on Lyndale.  Oh, good, I’ve never followed through on my writing, never got published, never tried hard.  Never. Never.  Never.  Never.  Here I am 66 and I’ve bounced from this to that.  Bad.  Wrong. Not followed through.  Old now and not ever going to follow through.  Always bad, wrong.  Wait.  There’s the Teashop.  I’ll buy tea here, not drive all the way over to Seward then have to loop back to Kramarczuk’s.  After the teashop.  Bought a half an ounce of tea for $25.  Stupid.  Hey, I can just loop around, no cars in the lane going the other way on Lyndale.  Oh.  Didn’t look behind me in my own lane, guy lets me go.  Maybe I’m too old to drive.  How will I know?  Bad.  Wrong.  

Finally, I talked myself into the moment.  Cut the loop.  The wind drove the golden leaves, the maple leaves, they are golden.  They swirl up in the air, blown high, come down.  Fall.  This is fall and it’s happening right before my eyes, as I eat this Italian sausage, which is not so hot, still I’m right in the middle of this wonderful seasonal transition.  I’m in this moment now, neither bad nor good, just here.  Part of another fall.  It’s come again, as it has come before and will come again.  And I will be in it, part of it.  Neither bad nor good.  Right nor wrong.  I calmed down, my center returned and the jaggedy feelings left my body, those tensed muscles relaxing.  

The feeling tone remained, like a bad taste, and tried to reassert itself, grind itself into the wormhole that is a certain narrative arc about my self. Finally, the arc I prefer, the one that lets me move forward, not get stuck, took hold.  I had woven my narrative around this temporary dis-ease and let it be.  Part of my life, yes, but not all of it.  Whew.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.