Ed Hensley Writing of the Day 2012

Now What?

2012-03-02T17:38:00.000-08:00

Something different, something not about hardships and dangers and tragedy. But what?

I'm still trying to absorb that so many more people looked at my writing blog. I'm trying to get over that it had nothing to do with me, much less my writing.

I'm trying to move on, but where do I go after the far-off people and distant experience that I found myself a tangential part of? It was so big and important, and the information that was being communicated was critical, helpful, though sad.

What can I say that's on that level?

Our cat was sick for a day or two. Once, I would have dwelt on that, fretted over it. But she's fine.

The Big Storm? Can't pull that off. It's sunny and warm, so there's hardly any snow left. You know you're not hurting from the weather if you go out and take photos of the ice crystals on your car in the driveway.

I always have something to say about photography and poetry and language. Don't I?

There are times that the sharpness of the focus of an image isn't important, at least not for analysis. But poetry, language?

Yes, Tomas Tranströmer:

***
Often I have to say nothing. Voluntarily!
Because the "last word" can be spoken again and again.
Because hello and goodbye . . .
Because this day that has at last come today . . .

Because the margins eventually will rebel
overflow their banks
and flood the texts.

. . .

It is so seldom
that one of us truly SEES the other:

for a fraction of a second as in a photograph
a man appears but sharper
and behind him
something that is bigger than his shadow.
***

I recommend it all but especially the last stanza in "The Gallery" in _Truth Barriers_.

Hardship

2012-03-01T16:48:00.001-08:00

Hardships: I can't sell my home in Sacramento yet, so I have to rent it. Those are two hardships for me, even though pretty upscale hardships.

This week, being not only the end of a month, but the end of one renter and leading immediately to another (since I can't afford to let it sit idle), I did what felt like two marathon days of travel (60 mi each way) there and back for a day of construction, repair, maintenance and a day of moving out furnishings, cleaning, and some upgrading (new stove, locks, etc.).

When I wasn't down there, I was making arrangements go down there. It was a helter-skelter choreography of purchases, timings, more purchases, more timings, paperwork and emails and phone calls for the new lease, and craig's list postings to try to whittle down the load.

Just in time for the last day of the month, my biggest marathon day in which I would move an entire house of furnishings, the big winter storm of a very dry and warm season was scheduled to hit. The truck rental place is on a steep hill and up an even steeper driveway.

I got the truck the night before, fortunately: the first sticking snow of the year happened that night. At least a figurative sun was shining on me so I could get the truck out of town relatively easily on roads that were just slushy.

I had prepared myself logistically and mentally to load in a downpour and high winds down in the valley. The cold sprinkles during the initial loading gave way to literal sunshine and warmth for the rest of the day.

I still had a list of fears to keep me edgy with adrenaline. Mid-day my wife reported by phone that there was 4 inches of snow filling our street and driveway and it was still coming down. The cleaning service I used hadn't returned my call, so I arranged the night before with a friend of a friend who did "some housecleaning." I had no one to help with the heavy furniture. I knew I would not have time to get to the store to buy the dead bolt I was supposed to install. I had a garage much fuller of debris than I thought. I had a captain's bed that I had no room for in my foothill home.

There's always something to heap onto the worry pile once it gets going.

During the day, I got a Craig's List call and someone came over and bought the bed. My friend's friend turned out to be a monster at cleaning stuff. She turned on her "on" switch and didn't take a break for 8 hours. The friend who recommended her decided to buy the futon that I also didn't have room for and sent over some muscle to pick it up. Mr. Muscle turned out to be someone who was available for the additional work of helping me load heavy things. He also agreed to dispose of all the debris in the garage on a dump run.

My contractor friend happened to be in town and brought a spare dead bolt and his tools and installed it. The stove installers arrived right on time to take away the old stove and install the new one.

My wife arranged for a friend's son to help with the unloading. The roads were completely cleared when I got back home. And the truck rental place was so snowed in that they weren't going to enforce the deadline for returning the truck.

By the end of it all, I was exhausted and achy and felt as though I'd just finished one of my 12-day Grand Canyon backcountry trips.

I had been so absorbed by my own logistics for a few days that I heard of the deadly and destructive storms in the midwest only today. I saw the images of flattened and ripped-apart homes, people on stretchers, windows blown out of entire hotels.

With another storm hitting today and more on the way, I had already felt I was extremely lucky with my tiny set of challenges that had seemed so huge. Everything went about as perfectly as it could for me. And I was so tired, I wanted to take a month off in a hot tub. But I don't have a month, and I don't have a hot tub.

So we were back at work today trying to fix a leak in a roof gutter that's getting down into the basement. But I still feel lucky just from looking around.

In Arizona, a man is grieving for his young wife, one whose promise included lifelong passion for everything, especially him. The Midwest is ripped and grieving. Syria is little more than a wound on the world. Afghanistan has proven itself yet again to be Afghanistan. Explosions everywhere.

Every hardship I've ever had is ice cream compared to those.

Reason

2012-02-28T22:14:00.000-08:00

Another school shooting. Another set of families destroyed.

Another set of speeches offering condolence and coverup. An official in the town says that the latest shooting town is like everywhere else and that "it could happen anywhere."

His rhetoric was tight and his logic convincing, but I still wonder.

Those who search for reasons—and, worse, those who know there are reasons—search for themselves in the wrong place.

Existentialists exist because we exist. Everything else is pure religion, which is to say distraction from distraction by distraction (thanks, T. S.).

The reason behind the ultimate stupidity of the death of 3 teens in Ohio was no more exotic than the death of an earlier set of students in Ohio at Kent State.

Someone without sufficient individual brain power followed orders. Without sufficient humanity to see or at least resist a less-than-animal reaction, someone ultimately nameless pulled triggers.

Stupid officers engendered and hid behind stupid soldiers as they always have. Why do you think soldiers were recruited mainly from juvenile courts and now are grabbed by slick Super Bowl commercials? If you have a choice, you choose something other than mindless obedience to chaos or random violence. Sometimes we are isolated enough to become our own officers and our own soldiers.

The kid who shot kids this time was not like other kids. People do not usually shoot people who are like them. So he did not see them as like beings. It's simple: if he had, he would not have shot them. Why didn't he see them as "human"?

Nature or nurture? How about both. Nature = the U.S.A. and environs. Nurture = his family and environs. If the kid were a single aberration, we wouldn't be talking about it.

Don't point a finger at me and tell me that I'm like your kid who shot other kids and that he's like the kids who were shot and like the grieving and fearing parents of all of your kids and expect me to sit back and say, "yeah, sure: it's all our fault; it's the fault of all of us; it's nobody's fault."

No. It is someone's fault.

A 24-year-old woman adventurer died after falling from a ledge in Grand Canyon on the same day. Don't tell me that's the same thing. Her entire life was a reaching beyond herself. That simpleton at your school had no reach at all. That's why he stole a gun.

Falling

2012-02-27T21:15:00.002-08:00

I belong to a Grand Canyon discussion group. Each time there's a fall in the Canyon, the group discusses it thoroughly. Sometimes more thoroughly than necessary. Always from a distance with lots of speculation. In the most recent one, one theme was that deaths from falls are rare and typically involve tourists on the rim. But today the initial report of another woman killed in a fall. Then the sketchy news report. Any of us who've hiked off-trail in the backcountry know something of the dangers, and most have been close to some kind of dangerous fall. Then this from one of the frequent contributors to the group, and it's all changed:

Most canyon fanatics bump into each other at some point. We're usually a middle aged bunch to have accumulated enough Grand Canyon experience to appreciate the bold and subtle beauty found in this enormous place. It takes a while for the canyon to take its hold. Ioana was that rare shooting star. At 24 she was fully hooked by the canyon's call. She had done many difficult off trail routes, including many that I have not done. She nearly finished traversing the entire length of Grand Canyon. She walked from Lee's Ferry to Diamond Creek on the south side with the exception of one missing piece: the 15 miles around the tip of Great Thumb Mesa from Fossil to 140 Mile. She died with only 6 miles to go.

Andy, Ioana and Matthias were leaving Diamond Creek on March 18 to finish the entire south side to Pearce Ferry. A friend of mine is on the river placing a cache for them now. She would have been the 16th person, and the youngest woman, to ever walk the length of Grand Canyon. But Ioana had even bigger canyon goals. Ioana, Andy, Dan Ransom and I had been planning a north side thru-hike in the Fall of 2013 - a 70 day project. They stopped by to talk last Wednesday and I loaned her my sat phone for the Fossil to 140 hike. She was hiking with Matthias `Matt' Kawski, her ASU math professor and frequent hiking partner. She had that big ever-present smile as she passionately described her Great Thumb route and talked about the upcoming thru-hike. I was always amazed by her canyon experience. Andy and I wished work schedules would have allowed us to go too.

Andy called me at 7:30 Saturday night. Ioana missed her check in call. She checked in Friday night and had made it just past Specter slightly ahead of schedule. We both thought she just left the phone on and drained the battery. Andy was worried though and he wanted to leave for Great Thumb immediately so we could help them at first light if there was a problem. Andy was already in Flagstaff. Not knowing the road conditions, I loaded up my Polaris Ranger, grabbed a few backpacks and gear, and headed out. Andy and I got to the tip of Great Thumb at 3:15am Sunday morning and grabbed some sleep. At dawn we were glassing Tahuta terrace to see if we could find them rounding the point. After a few hours we were really worried because we couldn't find them. Knowing that 135 mile bay was the crux of the hike, we took the Polaris to the end of the road then hiked to the rim overlooking 135 Mile Bay on top of Owl Eyes. We saw a red flat spot on the Supai with a few prints but we couldn't be sure, so we headed back to the 140 Mile exit slide. When we got back we saw Matt coming up the slide. He shouted that Ioana fell in 135 Mile bay at 12:45pm Saturday. I went down to help Matt out the snowy route and Andy went to a hill a few miles away where he thought he might get Verizon coverage. I had an experimental two-way satellite text message unit with me since Ioana had my sat phone. I grabbed Matt's GPS and headed back to the rim to send a satellite text message to Dale with the coordinates of where Ioana fell. Dale called SAR and forwarded the GPS data. About that time Andy managed to get through on his Verizon phone too.

The Grand Canyon SAR folks did a tremendous job. By the time we got off Great Thumb to the S. Rim fire station two hours later they had already located Ioana by helicopter. The fall was about 300'. After finding her the helicopter returned so they could create a rescue plan. About 4pm SAR rapped down and radioed back that Ioana was dead. They brought her body back to the Fire Station by helicopter at 5pm and the SAR rangers were able to show us some photos of the fall line. Ioana hit a shelf on the way down and likely died instantly, then she fell the rest of the way down the cliff band and came to rest on a steep talas slope about 300' down. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

Matt and Ioana stopped for lunch at noon on Sat at the exact place Andy and I saw from the rim above 135 Mile bay. After lunch Matt went high and Ioana decided to go low. Matt didn't see the fall. He heard a few rocks fall, like a big horn walking, heard a brief sound, then a thud. He tried a few vantage points to see if he could see her below but he couldn't. Nor did he get a reply to his calls. But he was certain she took a fall. His only choice was to push on to get out. I can't imagine having to cover that terrain for nearly 24 hours solo knowing that she was somewhere down in 135 Mile bay.

It's human nature to speculate about `how' and `why' these things happen. Hopefully theses facts nip any speculation. Ioana had hiked more difficult routes than the 135 Mile bay traverse. We'll probably never know exactly why she fell. Andy, Matt and I left the S. Rim about 7pm last night. My extended family is really upset about the accident. Most of them met Andy and Ioana when Todd and I gave a talk at MCC. She had such a deep passion for Grand Canyon. Fluent in four languages, she was math wizard graduating with a BS in Math and Biology. It's tragic when a young person dies, but I'm in complete disbelief that it was her. She was so accomplished at everything she set her mind to. The World lost a wonderful person. We lost a canyon friend. I'll always remember her big smile, her passion for Grand Canyon, and her remarkable accomplishments at such a young age. Grand Canyon history will remember her too.

Rest in peace Ioana. My deepest condolences go out to Andy, Matt, and their extended families.

Rich
***********
Also see Math Lover's story and additional links: http://mathlovergrowsup.teachforus.org/2012/03/01/in-the-hopes-that-ioanas-spirt-might-live-on/

Disappearado

2012-02-26T18:35:00.001-08:00

Dont' read this. Read this instead. Or maybe this.

My blogs disappeared today. In a way, especially for the writing blog, there was a component of relief. "Yeah, I have an excuse for not posting tonight."

But my main reaction was fear and disappointment. I was afraid of losing the work I've put into the blog. And disappointed not to be able to follow through and especially to see how hard it is to find out from Google what's going on.

I have most of my writing in the original files. I have all of the images. But what's missing from that form of backup is the configuration and the public presence.

In other words, I've grown dependent on Google. Let's hope the "do no evil" company lives up to its motto.

I suspect they will and that something large went wrong since Blogger's own blog is down in exactly the same way mine is.

Nothing

2012-02-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith's song "Wing" starts with nothing.

Sometimes nothing is something, despite what King Lear says: "Nothing will come of nothing." Of course, Shakespeare knew that. The "nothing" that arose from that "nothing" forms one of the great tragedies in literature, not to mention some of the most beautiful use of language, creation of character, and depiction of scenes.

First is the silence of song-start, which is not silent if you are waiting for sound. Once upon a time, there was the click of needle set-down and the hiss of vinyl. That's what musical nothing was before CDs. CDs created their own digital silence, which only on the best audio systems was truly silent.

The best systems are silent.

After that first non-sound, is a quiet, almost drawled count: "1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4." Then a tickle and swipe of brushes on snare, the hiss of which leads head-on into a single acoustic guitar chord, which becomes strumming over the slap-and-whisper beat of the brushes.

Then Smith's quiet hummed "ahh-ahh-ahh-ing." It's nothing. It might even be a mistake. Maybe she assumed it would be edited out of her voice track. Maybe not. It's Patti Smith, after all. What she does with music is the equivalent of a photographer finding black & white beauty in a world of color. Seeing light and dark and capturing the arrangement of dark and light that won't let you eye pass by without seeing. Her light and dark are words and tones and silence.

Seeing light and dark as a plastic medium is difficult. Life gets in the way. The same is true of language and musical tones. Convention, culture, experience, time all conspire to shape them into what we are told "mean" something.

We depend on the artists to decipher our own codes. We learn the coding so well that we forget it's code.

About 3 minutes into the song, her voice is prominent now and becomes a gravelly tonality that is part roar and part groan. The only way to create that "voice" is to do what she's doing. Guitar notes, brushes on drums, even the bass she's duetting with at the time can't do that. Only letting the body's expressive apparatus take over and do that thing with no name and that means beyond meaning.

Again with the "meta."

It's a valuable exercise to tune into the infinite versions of nothing that shape our music, our language, our culture, our lives. Us.

Apple

2012-02-24T23:45:00.003-08:00

Apple is the largest company in the world, primarily from great design. I used to work for a state agency. The director there, in his wisdom and keen insight, decided that Apple was about to fail. As a result, he decided to scrap the network of Macintosh computers in favor of the state (and everywhere else) standard PCs.

Doing Windows was safer. No doubt that it was a safe choice, since it was the choice of the huge majority.

Something other than Apple is still the choice of the majority in cell phones. But that's not a fair statement. Apple holds a huge lead in the minds of consumers in smart phone market. Cell phones are for those who just need a phone or who can't afford "smart."

Google has feasted on the interstices. What the Blackberry and Nokia couldn't do with their own software, Google did with Android: create something that offers at least some degree of competition to Apple's iPhone.

Because Microsoft couldn't make it work, Google did. That behemoth that offers us everything and generally does it well created the next generation PC to go head to head with the next generation Mac in the famous commercials.

Those commercials ("Hi, I'm a Mac. Hi, I'm a PC.") were so well done enough to become true, no matter what. And they did. Microsoft responded to them well, but so what. It was a response. Bam. Done.

Whatever happened to the Psychedelic Furs? Susan's Strange should be what everyone's listening to at this very instant.

In the NY Times today, a story basically said that Apple is saving the country and maybe the Earth. It may disprove the rule that a company gets big and then deflates. The other examples were oil companies, energy companies, and companies the equivalent of the old widows-and-orphans utilities, such as IBM.

Yes, the same Big Brother that Apple symbolically slew in 1984. And now Apple is on top of the heap of companies that IBM is just another member of.

IBM, Xerox, Microsoft made conscious choices not to rock boats, not to try to create new paths, not to change paradigms. They were, after all, the major benefactors of the paradigms.

Apple changed them. As I've said before, I didn't get any of it, so I have the advantage of innocence. I was as surprised and impressed as anyone else with the iPod and the iPhone. I had not idea at all. But Apple did.

In the miasma of economic gloom and a Sierra Nevada with no snow, I find the Apple example encouraging. A few people sticking to something they consider important and sticking to the goal of the highest quality possible can change things.

Perhaps the greatest proof is the silly Chinese fakes of all things Apple, the hottest things on the fake market right now. Search YouTube for the fake iPhone video to see how just the appearance of an Apple device entices people.

Thyme

2012-02-23T23:13:00.002-08:00

Once a pot of thyme piloted a bay window in a big kitchen, steering the window east. Greeting the sun each morning, alone, no one else around in a house where the humans chose to use the kitchen only in full light.

Fresh thyme does not smell itself. It cannot define pungent. When you are something, you cannot know it other than in some meta way. Knowing something in that way requires a mind. Thyme does not seem to have one.

It has aroma, savor, being, not to mention chlorophyl and roots and leaves. Maybe that's why the humans refuse to witness this point of the day, the prow of pure aroma driving forward, splitting the thick gray air, creating room for the sun and all light.

They're jealous.

Roots: of course they're jealous of those. That's obvious. Just watch the old-bone-driven caskets they steer on the asphalt. Just see the crooked necks and hunched shoulders over "smart" things that lead them along sidewalks.

Leaves: graceful un-adornment. Versus being adorned in the fourth-hand leavings of plants and the 20th-hand imitations of plant-like structures. Sad. Something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike reality.

Chlorophyl: we are chemistry. We know it. We are alive and live directly because of it. We do not have minds whose primary purpose seems to be separation: to separate self from knowledge of self.

Thyme.

Da.

It stays within itself.

Da.

It gives itself.

Da.

It leaves room for others.

That's what the thunder said somewhere to the earth tonight, leaving us with a gentle evening and welcome guests and warmth and comfort.

Bridge

2012-02-22T20:07:00.004-08:00

A friend, on leaving, announced being off to a "bridge group." Immediately, my brain is awash with sights and sounds. What's the source of the images I see and sounds I hear?

I hear older people, mostly women. I hear the muffled clink of ice in liquid in chilled glass.

Yes, I can hear the chill.

Since Bridge is a foreign language to me, it sometimes merges with Mahjong. So I hear "Spades." Then I hear "Bam." And "No trump." Then "Mahjong!"

In the interstices, I hear soft gossip and recipes being exchanged. Maybe a disaster story concerning a wet newspaper or a missed garbage pickup. Nothing as catastrophic as a broken pipe or loneliness.

Then our friend snaps me back into my own locale. Where did I think I was, Manhattan, Vero Beach?

We're not just in a little town in the foothills. We're in the energy vortex that is western Nevada County.

A "bridge" group here, silly me, actually bridges things. Like lives. What do I know? But somehow I still hear . . . "No trump." "Bam."

Van Gogh

2012-02-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

The catalog for the Van Gogh exhibit in Philadelphia arrived today. It took long enough that it was a surprise.

It was a surprise in more than one way. I envisioned a soft-cover, relatively inexpensive brochure-style publication. Instead, it's a no-expense-spared large hard-bound book printed in Florence. It shows the care of all those involved in conceiving and choosing this show, which takes a very close look at Van Gogh. Looking closely at paintings and quite a bit of writing about the details of his works and his process.

It's easy to go big with Van Gogh. He's big. He's colorful. It's easy to see he's an artist. His name is synonymous with Art in this country. Van Gogh is to art as Einstein is to science.

So to look at the brush strokes, drawings, sketches, living spaces, and choose and write a large book and say lasting meaningful things about him and his work, about Art, is an impressive undertaking.

The book is impressive already. Its introduction is clear and well written. It's well documented. Its images are stunning. Most big books draw me to the pictures first, then captions, then maybe to nearby text. Few draw me into their narrative scheme as the thread that draws the images to me. This one does.

I'm a little scared. I feel connected with Van Gogh in some very tangential ways. One is the way most people are: by being impressed by the well-known paintings. When I picked up painting years ago, I did one full (small) painting. It was an imitation of a Van Gogh. When I think of what I want to do with photography in terms of someone other than a photographer, I usually think of Van Gogh.

When Louise and I were in Paris, I missed my bike so much that I bought one there and went on a bike ride with a local bike group north of Paris. We rode through Auvers. One of the guys who could speak only French otherwise shouted over to me, "Van Gogh. Blue Church," as we entered the town. Later, I also saw the painting he was referring to at the D'Orsay.

It was nothing. It was a bike ride through the country. But somehow it makes me feel more connected with Van Gogh, just having seen the house and the church that he painted, maybe even all the better for just rolling by, like a brush stroke.

Looking Back

2012-02-20T21:59:00.000-08:00

What can we learn from our past? One way to look back and find out is to watch a 2-year-old.

Every 2-year-old is our past to some extent. But a grandchild is even more so, probably.

In that sense, we did some historical research this past weekend. We were visiting our granddaughter and the parents she drags along with her.

She was in full display, not held back at all by the illnesses she'd endured in the past week or two. Full disclosure: she's almost two and a half. That six months is like six years at this age.

Her language, her coordination, her perceptions are all on a different plane from the last time we saw her, which was just Christmas time.

She's also fully fledged in the test-of-will stage. Her parents cope . . . like . . . parents. They're patient, tolerant, but a bit worn and sometimes even frustrated. (Little do they know that this is only the first stage of such testing, and by far the cutest, most innocuous, least capsizing of our adult assumptions, stratagems, insights, beliefs, understandings, perceptions, and knowledge).

We were constantly engaged, for one thing, by her language. It was a full immersion program in Sky-talk. And she talks. Much of the time, her parents translate, but we found the far reaches of conversation to be sound brambles where she was our only leader. Our guides shrugged and were also lost. We just had to follow and go along with things, assuming that we were learning even if we weren't aware of anything other than time and sounds passing us by.

A few things, we understood with an immediacy that was heart-warming. "I Wuhve it. I wuhve it. I wuhve it." We might pedantically translate it into "I love it," but when she said it, it carried a different linguistic aura, reaching well beyond language. Of course, when we realized that she was talking about the airbed we were sleeping on, we had to shift gears, but that's part of following such a lead.

Further into the unknown, we found that moods are more malleable than we ever allow them to be. In fact, they can bend 180 degrees in a second. Who knew?

And something as simple as a pair of little arms reaching upward to someone can be a miracle of conjunction and acceptance, all in one little, seemingly practical and mundane, gesture to be lifted out of the crib.

Knowing

2012-02-20T14:52:00.002-08:00

How do we balance knowing and not knowing? Knowing something, we're told, can be dangerous. It has at least two dangers. The "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" danger. That usually means knowing just enough to fool yourself into thinking you know enough. Such as, "I know something about dynamite."

The other danger seems at once the opposite end of a spectrum from that and the inverse or flip-side of it. It's the danger of knowing enough to stop you from searching for more. Such as, the "I know, I know, I know" that stops conversations, which means it stops information exchange, which means it stops knowledge.

Knowing just enough to get yourself in trouble can be very educational in addition to painful. It can be anything from the enlightenment potential of "beginner's mind" to the silly danger of a treed kitten.

Knowing just enough to fool yourself into thinking you know it all—or at least all you need to know—stops everything. It's probably safer most of the time, especially in a cushy society such as ours, but ultimately its EKG is indistinguishable from a fruitcake's.

It's always something.

Full Circle

2012-02-19T09:31:00.001-08:00

Speaking of full circles.

Since I was very young, I was interested in astronomy and space travel. Once it took on a hint of reality, I wanted to travel in space. In fact, I still have my ticket. I think I got it for joining a science fiction book club. It's a ticket on the first commercial travel service to the moon. I'm still waiting.

In the early 1970s I found myself, instead, being a garbage man in rural Placer County, California. It was a necessity then. It was the only work I could find. The only qualifying was to be able to read. No, that's not true. Danny, one of my fellow drivers, couldn't read. The start-stop slips the rest of us were given each morning so we knew who had paid and not paid for service had to be explained to Danny, sometimes with tiny maps on the back. The main qualification, then, was the you be desperate enough to work hard for 6 days a week for slightly less than minimum wage.

I was alternately in college and a garbage route. I had to work to make enough money for the next year of school.

Now in the NY Times, an article about space junk. It's near a point of making low-Earth orbit unusable. It's just like one of the garbage strikes in New York City when we see the photos of sidewalks clogged with garbage. But the resolution always seems to come before the streets become unusable.

Imagine that there is no strike because there is no garbage service. It wouldn't take long for there to be a traffic-free NYC. That's what's happening in space, especially the part of space nearest earth.

Earth is like Pigpen from Peanuts. It has a debris field of generic filthiness as its aura.

That gray haze might be my silver lining. With my previous experience in the debris field, so to speak, and my desire for space travel, wouldn't I be one of the top candidates for space garbagemen?

Visiting

2012-02-18T14:30:00.000-08:00

We are in Marin to visit and help "the kids." Always eager to visit our granddaughter (and her parents, of course), who is two and a half, we were also a little worried since everyone has been sick. From what we'd heard, their illnesses covered it all. We could pick from sinus infections, mysterious intestinal gremlins, indescribable bowel issues, and that's not to mention the aches and pains and sleeplessness and rodents and loud neighbors.

Whoopee. Let us at it. However, when we got here, it was almost eerily normal. Smiles, excited greetings, dinner, playtime. We had a relaxed catch-up talk, a nice visit and meal. Afterward, fun reconnecting with grand-toddler Sky. She's fun to listen to, interact with.

It's a treat to pick up again on her "flow." It's a fast flow, but usually not dangerous. Stories change. Attention shifts. Feet run, dance, stomp, kick, flail, and end up in the air. Sentences entice with their cuteness, their innocence, their mystery. For most of our first day, we need a translator nearby. Auburn and Eric are so used to it, they function on automatic like those United Nations translators, but without the booths and the big earphones and microphones. We listen to dual running commentaries. One in a form of squeally Arabic-ish gush in which a possibly recognizable English word is suggestively inserted about every 10th word-like structure.

Eventually, in our own language immersion program, we begin to swim with the dolphins and pick up on the squeaks and flow of life here.

It's good for everyone to have the variety. Parents get a break from a very energetic runaway vehicle of a child. Sky gets a new set of interactions, games, words, questions, strategies, assumptions, and appreciations. We get the same, a break from the patterns of home, getting to see family, but especially to be able to have our own interaction now with Sky and to be of genuine help.

It's a powerful combo: connection, comfort, completion.

Zeno's Koans

2012-02-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

If someone tells you something. And it's true. Will you blame that person. For not telling you sooner?

If someone tells you something. Something important. Something that can reshape your view of everything. But you don't understand. Soon enough. Do you resent that person's lack of clarity?

"You have to hurry if you want to see something ... everything disappears ... " (Cezanne by way of German photographer Silvia Marks)

Slow

2012-02-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

Who's Nicholas Carr and how does he presume to know stuff about my life and world? Even worse, how dare he be right? Worst of all, how dare he be concise and articulate?

I just subscribed to his blog. I just ordered his book. I'll uncover the holes in his thinking and writing soon enough. Don't worry.

But for now, I have to go along with Pico Iyer, who quotes from _The Shallows_:

[E]mpathy, as well as deep thought, depends . . . on neural processes that are 'inherently slow.' The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

Shut up! I want to have said that. It's one of those expressions that is true no matter how true it is.

In time (yes, in time), I'll write my essay on slowness, or what I've learned from the Big Dummy.

For now, though, let me just dangle a tease and an appreciation. I've long admired Pico Iyer's writing and thinking. If he quotes an author as "eye-opening," I pay attention. I'm glad I did. Nicholas Carr may soon be up there on The List with Iyer and Gladwell and others. Those who both see and can write what they see. They may not be the ones who last. They may not be the Shakespeares of our time.

But they certainly are its chroniclers and may hold that position for years to come. In the case of both Iyer's books and Gladwell's essays and insights, they already are. Anyone looking back at us will learn from them.

How many of us can say that?

My helter-skelter riding of a cargo bike in a bike-unfriendly, helter-skelter California community is nothing. But maybe be I can eventually add my grain to the sands that collect behind us.

Heart

2012-02-14T23:53:00.000-08:00

Valentine, schmalentine. I thought it a Hallmark day. But it's not exactly.

Established in AD496, Feb 14 was the saints day for Valentinus, but since there are more than a dozen saints of that name, no one knows for sure which one. The Catholic church deleted it from the church calendar in the 1960s, something to do with the Summer of Love.

It became associated with love in the Middle Ages, Chaucer's time. His tales, even though we can't understand his earlier version of our language, contain many forms of love. Courtly love is the one that led directly to a day celebrating it with gifts of flowers and candy, more than 500 years ago.

Handwritten gave way to mass-produced. The individual is subsumed. Heart replaced by a cartoon. Words crafted by contractors. The fierce angels of love replaced by babies dressed as butterflies.

What's an existentialist to do? Find meaning.

The shadows of things are things. The shadows of things may be the realest of things. I think Plato said that. It's Valentine's Day, so i don't have time to sort that out.

I have to go get some garbanzos. I hope to start a new tradition. Make something in a traditional shape, but in a non-traditional material, preferably edible. If that thing is a huge cracker in the shape of a heart, then you better have hummus handy when it's unveiled.

I received a beautiful card with beautiful words accompanied by beautiful truffles. When conventions are held with such grace and esthetic, they exert conviction all the more.

It's not that unusual for my wife to smile, greet me warmly, offer me gifts and expressions of love. One of the many areas in which her skills exceed mine. But I'll keep trying to find ways to say and show that she is the molten, anchoring, gravity-creating center of all my affection and appreciation, not just the core object of them.

But now, I have to make some hummus.

Quiet

2012-02-13T18:38:00.001-08:00

Reading Pico Iyer's article "The Joy of Quiet" reminded me of several times, places, and strategies that I wish I didn't have to be reminded of. I want not to have to be reminded by Pico Iyer (one of my favorite writers) or lean so heavily on his concision and articulation.

His article is almost too tightly written. For one thing, he can jump from one aphoristic sentence to the next without giving us the "quiet" of a sentence of pure transition, one that does not threaten us with insight or awareness. No, we have to scramble up one thought-hold only to find that the next one is a class higher, one that might be beyond our grip strength or our shoes' friction.

I've written like that at times. I was trying to impress. I was trying to be like Emily Dickinson, but in prose. I didn't want to waste words. I wanted to chip away all excess. Or I didn't know any better. No matter, it only lasted a few sentences at a time, so not a threat.

My mentor through my final college years, Donald, called my writing "lapidary." I had to look it up, even though I knew the Latin root. Of course, I initially took it as a compliment since he was a good judge of clear and effective writing. After some reflection, I never was sure, though.

A cemetery is a good place to see a lot of lapidary language. But so are monuments, such as the one to Lincoln in D.C. That's the kind of writing Iyer's is. It's on the Gettysburg level.

One of the quiet joys his article brought to mind was one that many might not think about, but it had all the elements. It was the Saturday bicycle rides with a small group of friends and compatible riders in the Sierra foothills of Amador County.

Our short, basic, off-season ride, the one we called the "coffee ride," was 50 miles and included several thousand feet of climbing. More typically, our rides were 60-100 miles.

Those times were a magic mixture that all of us have found impossible to reproduce. The key elements were:

Time
Space
Energy
Camaraderie

Time. It was rare that we had anything scheduled that day but ourselves and our ride. No one tapped a foot at the start. No one had to get back. With rare exceptions, we didn't want anything but what we had. And those exceptions were all external: flat tires, bad weather, unexpected road repair. Almost every one of those exceptions became a good story and a stronger glue holding us together.

Space. We had room to ride. Amador has the rare combination of rural setting and paved roads. One monster ride was 120 miles, all on low-traffic, well-paved roads without duplication. Our rides would typically start at just above sea level and frequently climb to the 5000-foot point in the hills. Long stretches of uphill, long stretches of down, long stretches of rollers, long stretches, period.

Energy. We were in shape. Not necessarily evenly, but we were compatible and capable enough to adapt our riding to fit the group. Strong ones pulled through the wind; less strong recovered in the draft. Michael was the most recent to join. He wanted to fit in fully so much that he worked for a year developing his riding technique. It was almost an audible Click that day when he was fully part of the group.

Camaraderie. We were in sync not just physically on the bikes. We were about as different as people can get and still communicate with each other. Some very religious, some not. Some conservative, some enlightened (guess which was which). Some were white and some were not. An engineer, a cop, and a poet--that about sums it up from the outside, but not from the inside. We were an extended family. In a team sport, the team and one's position hold the group together. I've been on bad teams and good teams, but there was always good team-ness. The best was when it all worked together: we lived and played as brothers. That's how it was cycling, except without the assigned positions and external structure. We became our own structure and our own glue.

Of all the fond memories, irreplaceable memories, was the sense of timelessness. If I had pending work, looming deadlines, personal issues, I went through a transition period after getting on the bike. It would take me a while to warm up physically and otherwise. I usually gave myself an hour. Maybe I'd be second-guessing taking the time to ride or my energy or attentiveness levels to be a good participant. The other guys inevitably urged me forward. And they were right. No matter what my initial reluctance or distraction, once I passed a certain point, clocks stopped. On most days, I lost track of time completely, including any limitations on my energy. If we'd turned left toward China, I'd have just said, "Fine, I just need a bit more water."

Blogging

2012-02-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

Louise asked what I've learned from two daily blogs so far this year. I didn't have a ready answer. In fact, after we discussed it for a while, I still didn't have an answer. And I realized that's part of the answer.

If I were an official blogger with some externally stated and clear purpose, I'd better know. But I'm "official" only to myself so far. I wasn't entirely clear about the specifics when I conceived these projects.

The two blogs also have different purposes. The writing blog is a rust remover, an experiment, a test, but primarily a scaffolding for me. I put no more requirements on it. I write. Period.

It's turned out to be uneven, but entirely successful. Perhaps because my goal was simple, my sight set low, I'm content. I found a few good writing licks. Even more important, I found myself writing out some things that are important to me and therefore about me. I have a granddaughter who may one day want to know gumpa better. I've wished I knew things like the ones I'm writing about people in my life, some gone, some out of reach. A resource like this blog would give me a path.

Many others are writing too, blogs and otherwise. The huge bulk of them are unknown to be, much less read. Many I've known and care about have written and I haven't been able to keep up and lost that thread.

I find myself trying to put more attention and energy behind the search to read and hear better.

On the photography side, first of all, that blog is very easy. I find myself with an abundance of images that clamor for my attention. Many of them are in my image files, some are still wagging fingers at one of my lenses.

I see that blog as a chance to do whatever I want without having to make the choice of whether the image belongs in my portfolio or could be in a gallery or is part of a series. I aspire to all those things, but in this environment, I free myself from those hopes and desires.

I want these images to be good. I want them to be enjoyed or admired. But I don't hold myself to a 365-image gallery standard. Things happen and sometimes I document them, rarely straight. Sometimes I get an idea and pursue it. Sometimes those ideas pan out and I like the results. Sometimes I'm not sure.

The blog is giving me the combination of commitment and distance. I commit an image and then daily, I get to experience the coming back. Sometimes to cringing, sometimes to a smile, sometimes to something I hadn't seen before.

I have other ideas for the coming months. It's a long time. I can't imagine, really. But if the end of the year finds me doing and saying the same thing, I don't think I'll mind, but I kind of doubt that's how it will turn out.

And now I have only ten minutes to finish and get this online.

Jim and George

2012-02-11T20:50:00.001-08:00

Speaking of mentors and small guiding lights, we rode the Jim Rogers memorial ride today. We didn't know Jim Rogers, but we certainly care as much as strangers can. We are cyclists in this part of Nevada County. We are members of the same club. We ride the same roads.

Today's ride was marginally organized. It was a Nevada City ride. Just do it. Announce it and do it. That's the way up here. That's the attitude and atmosphere that draws people here. That and pure ruralness in which rednecks can hide or hippies, entrepreneurs, or drug lords can grow dope.

All those constituencies seemed to be out today. The rednecks in pickups and SUVs. The young wanna-be drunks in hopped up, thumping cars. The locals who want to escape all encounters with other humans except the cashier at the supermarket.

Oh, yeah, and the cyclists. But the cyclists who showed up showed the same range. The arrogant racers who own the road and do not have to think about the cars they are blocking. The young mtb-ers who must stay in their packs no matter whom they might endanger. The squirrelly weekend riders who rider more often than that but still haven't taken any responsibility for using their bikes better. And the rest.

The roads were wonderful for a while. Observant, caring people, some on bikes, some on foot or in cars. All respectful. But once we were out of town, the typical chaos happened. The riders were oblivious to the drivers. The drivers were mostly more tolerant than they should have been, and some were angry. Some had good reason. The man showing off by pushing the woman up the hill because she couldn't ride it that fast herself, oblivious that he was blocking the road for others and completely unconscious of the possibility of slowing down to her pace. The race mentality (mostly non-racers) of having to go as fast as possible and getting ahead of as many people as possible.

I'll want to ride the ride again to support all the right things. I'll try to change somethings, like maybe getting it actually organized. Right now, it's between a ride among friends and a cycling event. It turned out to be neither, with the bad characteristics of both.

I used to ride in Amador County, the best county anywhere near this part of northern California to ride a bike. Because of its contiguous and lightly trafficked back raods, it draws two organized bike rides, Party Pardee and the Sierra Century. The organizers say and do all the right things about observing the laws, riding single file, etc. It does not good. Cyclists are too arrogant and too ignorant as a whole. They block roads, run stop signs, and generally demonstrate beyond doubt or argument why the county should not allow bicycling events and why bicyclists should not be allowed to use roadways.

Because my group was a local cycling group, we bore the brunt of those events for months after they were held.

Any regular local cyclist will do the same after today's event. The intentions were right and just. The actuality was exactly the opposite.

There were a few bright points. Louise and I did it, riding from our house, instead of driving. And then there was George, the only other Big Dummy rider I know up here. In fact, he's both a constant accusation and incentive. He has no car. All that most of us invest in petroleum-driven motor vehicle, he's invested in his Big Dummy bicycle.

He was there. Since he lives out of town and commutes and shops using only a bicycle, he's strong. I didn't get to do more than say hello to him at the start. I couldn't keep up with him on the road.

He stopped by our house on his way back home. He'd done the ride. He'd then gone to the radio station where he works. Then he'd done his shopping. All on his bicycle. He locked it in our driveway while he stopped for tea and conversation to warm him for another hour of riding home, over steep hills, in the dark and cold.

George is cycling and hope for the world.

Mentors #2

2012-02-10T19:27:00.001-08:00

We think of mentors as the ones who shine brightest in memory. The ones whose contributions sum large, which usually means easiest to see and realize.

I've crossed the inner desert (the Tonto, as it's called) in the Grand Canyon at night a few times. I can remember a time I was traveling by my headlamp and then turned it off to realize the strength of the moon's light, even though not full.

It turned out to be a memorable traverse by moonlight and starlight. They all contributed to my ambient light. In fact, from a small circle of light in front of me, surrounded by darkness, the world opened and became huge by that accumulation of little lights.

As I look back, I can see that I owe my progress and ability to see to an accumulation of lights of all sizes.

The one-time light, the casual light, the tiny light, the focused light, the huge beacon, the one that showed me a way through rough terrain, the one what showed me myself.

I can see mentors everywhere I look back. It's harder to see them around me, but I'm better at it than I was.

Mentors

2012-02-09T21:40:00.001-08:00

I'm listening to "Biko" by Peter Gabriel. Stephen Biko died in police custody in racist South Africa in 1977 and was one of the ones who helped destroy institutionalized racism there. He was 30 when he was killed by police.

I didn't know him. I had no idea that was going on other than some general words and news stories about apartheid. I probably knew more than most since I listened to KPFA and subscribed to Mother Jones. But that's all I knew, and it wasn't much.

Not long before that, though, I knew Ray Nelson. He, unlike Stephen Biko, does not appear in Wikipedia.

He was a teacher of mine at Sierra College. After I was nearly thrown out of UC Berkeley and went back onto active duty with the navy as an electrician, I returned to school at Sierra College. It was a tiny rural campus then. It as more woods than buildings.

I had originally been a Japanese major at Berkeley. I'm amazed in retrospect at my insight (such as it was) in those post-Berkeley days. Rather than do what I could to return and find myself back in that world of massive stimulation and oriental language, I realized that I was a "Japanese major" for two reasons primarily: (1) to attach myself to a culture other than my own, in which I was uncomfortable; and (2) to have a better chance with Japanese girls.

I went to high school in a town in the L.A. area that was half Japanese American. The Japanese girls were far more attractive than their pale counterparts. It was more likely their otherness than their beauty, of course, but I wouldn't have understood that then.

And so I ended up in the navy. Because my parents left home when I was 16 and moved to northern California, I was alone in L.A. to finish high school. Thus, the navy was my best chance for college. Despite the chances, I was sent to Berkeley by the navy. There I became a conscientious objector. I no longer wanted to devote the additional four years to the military, so I dropped out of the officer program and Berkeley.

I eventually went to Japan (my dream) and other parts of the Far East on a navy ship. When I returned, my parents lived in the Sierra College district, so that's where I applied first. It's also where I met my life shapers.

Ray Nelson taught the introduction to the short story. He was a reader. He arrived at his office at school at dawn as if to a refuse, a blind to a duck hunter, where he hunted elusive literature. He read when he didn't have to grade papers or meet with students. His love was the literature of early America, especially the Pilgrim era. He often said that his ideal course would be to teach the popular fiction of that era.

Ray Nelson was a great person, one of my favorites. But he was not one of my favorite teachers, I'm sorry to say. I knew everyone in the English department after a while.

All the other key teachers of English connected with me as academics and direct mentors. Ray Nelson was gentle, friendly, supportive, helpful, a friend. I housesat for him while he and his family were on long vacations.

But, as a teacher, I didn't hold him in the esteem I held others.

An instructive event happened one day on my way to school. I lived in the Auburn area and had no transportation of my own. Often, I hitchhiked to school.

One morning, I was picked up by a guy headed all the way to Rocklin, where the school is. As we started talking, it turned out he had attended Sierra. Further, he had taken English classes, one of which had been pivotal to him as a student and person. He hadn't named a course or a teacher. He described the effect that teacher had on him. He described the teacher's attitude and attributes.

On my side of the front seat of his car, I was guessing whom he meant by running through the powerful instructors I had had there. Bill Hotchkiss, of course: the big powerful man with the immense knowledge and caring. Ray Oliva, the Italian elf with wit, humor, and equally immense caring and information to impart. Elmo Daley, the teacher of all teachers, aloof but accessible, huge but frail, a giant of intellect in a geeky package. Which one could it be. Those were obviously the power core of the English department.

The guy picked me up in Auburn and drove me to Rocklin on I-80. It's about 20 miles. I can still picture passing Newcastle and Penryn in conversation, still building the image of the English instructor who had so influenced the driver, who had not gone on to be an English major or even an academic at all, but had found his life shaped just by having known this man as a teacher.

It was about Loomis, the town before Rocklin and the school, before our conversation wound its way to this special man's name. After all my speculations and assumptions, the man finally named "Ray Nelson" as the special one, the one of them all who stood out and had affected his life.

I've never forgotten the lesson of the nameless man I knew for about 20 minutes on I-80 between Auburn and Rocklin in the 1960s.

All that was well before Stephen Biko.

Dark

2012-02-08T21:27:00.000-08:00

From readings in the last 2 days.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
…
—T. S. Eliot

Let Evening Come, Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

—Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall, poet and teacher of poetry and poets, was on Fresh Air today talking about aging. His wife, Jane Kenyon, died of cancer at 47. I didn't know her poems so i looked them up.

I reread that part of Four Quartets because it was near the part I quoted yesterday (or the day before?).

I couldn't resist setting them down next to each other.

I'm reminded of something. Let's see if I can state it and then find a link.

In the latter part of elementary school, I was an astronomy geek. I remember reading any book I could get on it. Most that I could follow were larger-format, short on words, big illustrations, lots of color.

I knew the star Betelgeuse. Orion was my favorite constellation. It was out around my birthday, and it was easy to find. Betelgeuse marks the right shoulder of Orion as he looks down on us. It's a red star and looks reddish from here.

I knew that much already. I also knew that it's nickname or funny name or mispronounced name was "beetle juice." I don't know whether I learned or made up the pronunciation I used for years: "BEH-tul-GEH-seh." The appropriate pronunciation now is apparently more like "BEH-tel-jews." Now that "Beetle-Juice" is so commonly known, I just call it that. It's sure easier to say.

I think this was sixth grade.

I was all attention when I came to a whole big-book page about Betelgeuse. It struck me so clearly and strongly that I remember it and can even still see the illustration. It as simple:

A big circle with flames coming out the circumference represented Betelgeuse hollowed out. In the book, it was about the size of a softball. At its center was a marble-sized yellow circle labeled "our Sun." Four other marbles sat at points along concentric circles around the sun, spaced out the the edge of the inner core of Betelgeuse. They were labeled:

Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars

Not much explanatory text was necessary. Betelgeuse is a Red Giant (as I recall). Our Sun is a small-to-medium-sized star.

The difference between large and small in the Universe is astronomical, so to speak.

There would be room in a hollowed-out Betelgeuse (that small reddish dot in Orion) for the first four planets in our solar system to orbit around our Sun in their normal orbits.

We are 93 million miles from the Sun. Double that and add Mars. That would all fit inside that little dot.

Many evenings I'd lie out in the dark, quiet, and just think about that. With enough quiet and enough dark, that kind of concentration can become meditation. Guided meditation that took me light years out to feel the full impact of the size of Betelgeuse and what it signifies. It's a dot on a dot on a dot on something.

I'm not even a dot on it. The dark closed around me and sucked right into me as if I were a black hole. That sweeping out and sweeping in was my first meditative experience, my first "meta" experience, although I didn't have meta terms or understanding for it.

I just felt its impact. I remember being at first overwhelmed and depressed into insignificance, into meaninglessness. For all I knew Betelgeuse might not even be there anymore. It may have blown up or died into a dead core with huge gravity. The light I was seeing left it millions of years ago.

And then I realized that I understood all that. I could hold all that information and significance in my brain. I could hold it up, look at it, feel it, turn it around, appreciate it, absorb it.

It was years later that I read Dickinson's "The Brain is wider than the Sky" and all her other examples of epigrams about thinking and consciousness. but I recognized what she was saying because of that big astronomy book.

Letting go to dark, the unknown or unknowable, but especially speaking or understanding or embracing the them and then letting go—and even more writing it out in lines that will stay in the minds of others and instruct and guide them. Lovely.

Did I tie anything with anything? I don't know for sure, but I'll accept that unknown, that eclipse, that darkness.

Distraction

2012-02-07T22:29:00.001-08:00

What is distraction? It's everything, potentially. For some, it's anything. I'm not talking about anything at the level of disorder. But I'm more and more convinced that every mental disorder is a spectrum. We're all in there somewhere.

We've that autism is not a thing; it's a range or spectrum of conditions, from severe to savant. I've heard anecdotal speculation about the same applying to ADHD. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that I'm on those spectrums--somewhere. But how do you say that without diagnosis? It's rude. We all need the label to be comfortable.

But my position on the spectrum not stable. It's like a teeter-tooter pole that's been greased. I'm not always in one location on any one spectrum. So one day I'll be far left on one scale and far right on another. The next day, the reverse. That's normal. Right?

If I'm normal, then I'm representative of nearly everybody. That means we all have those tugs and slumps and anchors and holes to navigate every hour of every day.

How can there be any hope for schools?

I'm in class now, realizing what a wise man this teacher is. He responds to questions but he does not police. He doesn't regularly plunge the dipstick of a quiz into this dark and roiling and murmuring tank. He moves forward with assurance, a strong degree of attachment to the subject rather than to results.

"work without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing" [to paraphrase Eliot]

He teaches, often demonstrating the same thing time and again, repeating, creating humorous games for himself in the repeating. His balance of yin and yang. Unlike most, he is balancing them.

If we're all at best not perfect, why do we do anything? Now that I look around the room, everybody's doing something. Most are actually following along and concentrating. I'm one of the ones who is not. No, I'm doing something.

"Distracted from distraction by distraction" One of my favorite Eliot lines.

How do we go on? How do we perceive ourselves? Most, like me, not clearly. We're partly saved by self-blindness and self-ignorance and partly by the forward-looking part that hopes, expects, assumes we're going somewhere and doing something significant or at least necessary.

Melville wrote, "We're all dreadfully cracked about the head and sadly need mending."

Two ways to read that: we're all a mess and why go on or we're all the same; isn't it grand. Then again, a spectrum--like autism. That's probably true, but it needn't be. I think we can just choose.

Brain

2012-02-06T21:22:00.001-08:00

It's everywhere. Dualism. Pigeonholing. Labeling.

I don't mean the categorizing that is a basic function of living and thinking. That's what establishes our simple daily priorities, such as what to do first: wake up, get dressed, eat, make coffee, or call a therapist.

That's what takes care of a lot of the "stuff" in our lives. Do you fold your shoelaces right over left of left over right? That not even "stuff." It's an example of the kind of thing that becomes non-"stuff" via habit. Somewhere back there, it was a choice, maybe even a decision, but it's not now.

If it is, you got bigger issues and probably aren't reading this.

What I mean is exemplified by the latest version of right brain/left brain simplification that I've come across.

It is a bifurcated illustration. In the center is a stylized drawing of a brain, top-down. The space between the two hemispheres is the exact center of the page.

The left half is a simplified b&w line drawing. It is superimposed over blurred lines of what appears to be code. The visible parts are code that would produce the web page I found this on.

The right half is the same line drawing, as far as we can tell. It is covered with stylized and textured color flows and swirls. It also had abstract lines, heavily stylized lines that could be music staff or other drawing. It also has a stick-figure bicycle, not stylized at all.

Each side is labeled in case we didn't get it from the visual. "Left brain" is centered and in san serif font. "Right brain" is asymmetrical. "Right" is in a calligraphic font; "brain" is in a serif font.

But that's not enough. There's an accompanying "explication." The left runs from "I am a scientist" to "I am order. I am logic." The right runs from "I am creativity" to "I am boundless imagination. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel."

Maybe the creator of this design was having fun. Maybe did it for a paid job. I have no direct objections to it. In some ways, it's a convenient metaphor, the old right-left brain thing. "My Stroke of Insight" gives some useful examples, especially for an adult who is forced to live through the right-to-left shift of fundamental knowledge again and therefore develops a rare awareness and appreciation that we rarely attain as adults.

I not only don't think we need a stroke and a good rehab program to tune into that awareness, much as those may make the process clear and unavoidable. I don't even thing that we need meditation or psychedelic drugs, even though I believe they are powerful tools for that same purpose.

We are all caught by a scene or something as simple as a freshly noticed color or shape of light in the trees as we drive. That the process at work. Those nothings that seem full of meaning, often so full of meaning that we do one of three things:

1. forget them fast since they really don't mean anything
2. attribute them to gods since that's where all meaning comes from
3. make art

I contend that we all make art more than we think and maybe more than we know.

"We were all poets then.
We're all poets, I'm sayin'." [old whaling ballad]

We are all fine tuning our attention each day. I have noticed several different colors in my wife's eyes over time; not to mention, the infinite looks and depth. Each calls for me to change. Understanding changes. Simple vision changes. Seeing changes.

Left brain is mathematical and right brain is art? Whole brain is the best poetry, as with Emily Dickinson. Whole brain is the best mathematics, as with Kurt Gödel.

Dickinson and Gödel created languages to describe the world around them. Each created a meta-language, one that glides above its parent language, both expanding it and commenting on it. By pointing out the limitations of that original language, they made it complete. Whole.

Teachers #2

2012-02-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

Going Through the Motions

Teaching is called a noble profession. It's also a human profession.

That means that it's populated by and promulgated by people. The should be expected to have the same inherent structure as other people, such as you and me.

Doctors are held to what seems like a higher standard, but no abstract standard, no matter how long or excruciating the inculcation, changes DNA or stands in loco parentis. Nature and nurture rule us. For most the M.D. is ruled out.

For others, it can be a life-long cause or at least a life-long job that they want to do well in. The ones who will not rise to the status of Hypocrites, Livingston, Salk, Oz, Sacks, or Gawande take jobs or choose specialties that keep them safe and anonymous in their work. Just like most of us.

Teachers are often held in a degree of respect not too far short of a doctor's. We've all had bad teachers and good teachers. A few of us have been lucky enough to have not just good teachers but transcendent ones, people who changed our lives. People who shaped our lives.

But, unlike doctors, teachers past grade school do not have to go through extensive practice and evaluation. At the community college level in California, experience counts as much as academic accomplishment, especially outside the core academic subjects.

That means that photographers teach photography. Artists teach art.

That fact is at once the beauty mark and the wart on the system.

At its best, it exposes students to visionary expertise, to people from whom each word or story or gesture reveals a world of knowing.

Rilke says of art "there is no part that does not know you. You must change your life."

That's what happens with those teachers. They are the art of teaching. They know you through knowing their subject and how to teach.

I don't want to dwell on the counterpart of those special few. I think that most people with an expertise in a field can inspire someone. Unfortunately, it's often not universal. Sometimes, non-existent.

Some go through the motions. The best advertise themselves and pass along what they can. The worst torture both a subject and their students.

". . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." [Yeats]

Good people who know a subject can do all a service by staying out of the way of learning, but few who are given titles and pay and classrooms and subjects who must listen to them can do that.

I've known more than my share of good teachers, I think. Bill Hotchkiss at Sierra College was one of my favorites and long-time mentors. He knew his subject and was serious about teaching, but I knew him well, so I may be slanted. Elmo Daley, Ray Oliva, Don Sturtevant are the others who gave more of themselves than class time and knowledge.

But one teacher stands out even above that pantheon. Marc Bertonasco was as distorted and deformed as a human can be. He as no one's idea of a hero: except in the classroom. There, he was a god. And he certainly liked to put on a commensurate show. He'd slam the lectern, he'd spin around from the blackboard and shout or stand silent staring the room to silence. It was all show. He was actually a mouse.

I didn't know that at first. At first, I was as scared as any other student. But, unlike the 50 percent who dropped after the first session, I somehow got my backbone up and was determined to show him what I could do.

That attitude perhaps foreshadowed my ultra-endurance racing or my solo backcountry trips--taking on an extreme challenge to prove myself worthy.

Marc once told us that he'd not missed a class in 20 (or 30?) years of teaching and he expected us to meet the same standard. However, the school was more lenient than that and required him to offer make-up work. In our Shakespeare class, he defied Shakespeare to pass his make-up work.

That was mostly scare tactic, but it was also standard setting. He also once said that he put in at least the equivalent of a 20-page essay for each class lecture. Therefore, he expected us to get notes from other students and present him with a 20-page essay for any class we missed.

Over the years, I took every course he offered. I had to miss one day in those years. When I offered to write the essay, he laughed and told me to forget it. Of course, I'd already had a few years of A's to my credit by then, but I'm not sure he'd have enforced that with anyone.

All those statements would be pure posing in most people I've encountered who were being paid to stand and talk in front of rooms of students. In Marc's case, there was definitely some posing. But not the teaching part.

What I found was that, if anything, he understated his scholarship and his work on every lecture he ever delivered. Most lecturers are endured and the students take it as their responsibility to survive with enough energy, notes, and information to follow through on the subject and pass the tests.

With Marc Bertonasco, I took few notes. The few I took I rarely looked back on. I didn't need to. Marc mostly lectured. We were not given in-class projects or shown movies. In a few classes, student gave presentations for a small part of the class.

For example, our Shakespeare course began with his forbidding our reading of Shakespeare. He didn't suggest; he told us that we'd screw it up; we'd read Shakespeare wrong without sufficient historical and cultural background. He spent five weeks and gave us what was probably the most concise and clear summary of Western civilization leading up to Shakespeare that has ever been delivered.

Across the years of lectures I sat through, I don't once remember being bored. But he didn't jump on tables or speak to us in funny voices or dress in costumes or bring in clowns. He spoke clearly based on his research and a supremely plotted organization of material.

I was not bored. I was the opposite end of that spectrum. I was taught. The information he was speaking was so well organized and clearly stated that it made sense, it fit with all previous information, and it was not forgettable.

Sitting in a simple student's desk, near the back of the room, in a drab classroom, overlooking the irrelevantly bustling quad, I lived and breathed in a crystalline atmosphere of knowing.

Chossing #3

2012-02-04T21:06:00.000-08:00

I took the shot of the Del Oro tower last fall on a walk that Louise and I did through town. It was one of the walks on which I not only took my camera, but intended to shoot. They are not Louise's favorites because I stop so often. From her point of view, we'll be walking on a sidewalk like normal people and suddenly I'll not be there and she'll have to turn around to find me. Not only to find me, but probably cringing to see what I'm doing. I might be lying in the street or, worse, I might be setting up the tripod in front of a wet fire hydrant. Then she knows that she has some time to kill. But she's good at it; she's self-reliant and flexible--and lovely, to boot. (Think that will buy more some more long walks with patience for photography? Whatever--it's all true.)

The Del Oro is iconic in town, more visible from afar than the Holbrooke Hotel and other historic buildings. We can see it from our front window. It's how we point visitors to town. It's the view we treat them to.

It also has a new fool-the-eye mural on its back wall. Lots of reasons to try to get a good photo of it. I've tried. Most turn out to be just a snapshot of a theater, cluttered with town scraps, distracted by marquee notices, Nothing iconic about it.

On this one walk, I had taken some shots from the corner diagonally across from the theater. I'd taken only one prime lens, so I could not get close enough for some things and not far away enough for others. But that's why I took a prime lens. So I did what I could. A few of the shots were ok-ish.

Up on Church St., a block above, looking down slightly on the theater, I set up the tripod on the sidewalk and worked to get as clean a shot of the tower as I could. There was something there from that POV, something not quite perfect, but maybe revealing. The shot in the camera looked exposed ok, but that's about all I could say about it. It didn't look exciting.

But sometimes, the unexciting on the back of the camera turn out to be some of the best. Most of the time, they don't. Sometimes the most exciting looking ones on the back of the camera are not just disappointing in full size, but embarrassing. The main embarrassment is my lack of judgment and vision, especially being fooled by the LCD screen on the back of a camera. That happens, but less and less as I learn better to translate the Greek of LCD into the English of a monitor full of RAW image.

I always look through images when I transfer them from the memory card. I delete those beyond all salvation. I flag the ones that are best or seem to have potential. Sometimes I don't get back to them for quite a while. That's what happened with the Del Oro shots from that day.

I had passed over the farther-away down-hill shot of the tower and plain and uninteresting. But in my review, something caught my eye and made me open the file. I liked the exposure and the colors and how they worked against the background of near-silhouetted trees and sky. I wish I could say that I saw exactly what was good and exactly how to get there holistically, but I didn't.

I guess some part of my eye-mind saw something that kept me taking next steps in processing it. The two things that I eventually realized were the key factors were the cropping out of unnecessary elements. The frame in the camera held too much roofline and it had machinery on it that disrupted the Art-Deco line.

The other element I just felt as a need to try rather than perceived as a plan. I felt uncomfortable with the very slightly unhorizontal roofline, even though it was close since that's how I was trying to shoot it. But also "uncomfortable" about the slightly-out-of-vertical tower, caused by the angle at which I'd shot.

So I tried straightening those two things in Photoshop. The difference is not noticeable at all unless you see the two versions one after the other on screen. But that was it for me. And then I began to understand the draw of such a simple image with not much going on.

I may be prejudiced because of its iconic status here and the significance of the "Golden" meaning of the words. But the image itself, I think, appeals to me now for a few fairly simple and clear reasons.

The lines: there is on true horizon line, the trees that are strong, certain, nearly black, unbroken, jagged. The line of the roof echoes the horizon but stylizes it with its soft tones, its lightness, its regularity. Its faux tower elements mimic and stylize the pine trees in back.

The contrasts: besides the contrast in the lines, the colors contrast everywhere. The theater's colors are old-fashioned and artificial, as are its lines. All the other colors and shapes, in the trees and the sky's clouds and colors, are organic, natural.

The sweep: the sky has a sweep and swirl of cloud to it. It even seems to be moving toward the right side of the frame. The tower's strict vertical as well as its Art-Deco coloration is a strong contrast to the complete opposite of soft, fluid sky.

The significances: The theater roof and tower are foreground and prominent, the strongest elements in the image, but we know that the trees and the sky will outlast them.

The tower is a human finger stuck up, wet, for a second to test a few molecules of an infinite wind.

Choosing #2

2012-02-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

I set up a "Pick One" section in the photo blog. I may change that name to be one that's more clearly explanatory, but it's the area where I pick a suggested post for a new viewer to look at. If I go to a blog for the first time, I usually don't stick around unless I can get oriented quickly. Thus, my title, my "About" page.

In the "Pick One," I give my current recommendation for an image that would reward a closer look.

That's yet another kind of choosing or evaluating. My own looking back at my images is a process much like finding them in the first place, only they're static now. They just wait for me to return.

I've found the "Pick One" area to be at least as instructive for me as I meant it to be for a viewer.

The truth is that I started it because I was happier with a photo that was down the list of posts than I was with more current ones at one point. I also found my eye lingering each time I went through the list on the one image that became my first "pick": the one called "Brush" from Jan 13.

"Brush" surprised me with that level of attraction. I tried two croppings of my original shot. The one I posted definitely stood out. The point of any cropping is to be what needs to be there for the desired image, but only what needs to be there. I have not analyzed it. I like the curve of glass jar on the left. I like how the light reflections (I tried several strobe positions to get this) are placed and play a role in the image. I like how the foreground brush is placed, in focus, and colorful without being gaudy. I like the hint of jar neck and it's curve, just intersecting the curve of the jar edge just out of frame. That kind of thing engages the viewer's eye and mind to "finish" the joined lines. I like the suggestion of all the other brushes without being distinct enough to clutter my attention. I like the fact that was is not jar and brushes is black. There's no distraction or interference at all from background. I also even like the slight hint of brush handle in the lower right, even though it's the part I'm most unsure about. In fact, I think if there were a way for me not to have that in there, I would do it to simplify the image even more. But I think the reason I've ended up liking it is that it's the most foreground object and therefore serves go give depth to the rest without having a presence of its own. I also like the lighting. Full white and full black with good gradation between. Add to that the overall reddish-brown tone highlighted by the central figure of the reddish bristles, . . . ummm-hmmm.

I guess I just analyzed that one, didn't I? I meant to look more closely at the "Del Oro" in that way. But I think I'll save that for later, maybe tomorrow.

Choosing

2012-02-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

The photos I post on my photo blog fall into two categories: grabbers and what-if-ers.

Either a scene or slant of light grabs my attention and I grab the camera. Or my mind meanders across an idea or see a thing (like a dead cyclamen blossom or a transparent thumb tack) and wonders how I could light it to show off its nature.

Today, Louise and I were sitting in the living room. She had Wedgie the adolescent cat-kitten in her lap. We were relaxing and talking over life (i.e., cleaning the kitchen). She took off her Denise Wey necklace to dangle it for Wedgie, but when I looked up, I saw tableau: hand holding necklace, face in background examining. Afternoon light came in from the big window, doing two things: (1) causing the glass beads in the necklace to sparkle with color and (2) washing out the color in the rest of the scene.

Something there made me rush to the tripod and the camera. Shooting into silhouette means a dark subject, which means tripod. As I brought the camera, I started to set exposure, but got it wrong. To get a fast reading and to see what the scene looked like to the camera alone, I switched to full auto and shot. That's not what I wanted since it lighted the scene perfectly. I wanted very white and very dark and only the necklace in focus. I read the exposure that the camera picked to get a starting point and set up what I wanted in manual mode.

From there, it was up to Louise's patience with my positioning. The light had already changed, so I had time for only a few shots while there was still that balance of light and dark and colors that I saw and wanted to capture.

The key element was the small flares of light and color from the necklace. The figure in the background put it in perspective, gave it dimension and definition, especially with the fingers just in frame holding it before the face. All that just needed to be suggested, at least for the image I saw.

Lots of other possibilities are possible. If I'd had more light and time, I'd have moved the camera closer to see what reflection or refractions I'd get and still preserve the "story" of person and necklace. But I didn't. What I did get, I was pretty sure, was the image I originally saw and wanted to grab.

There are lots of choices in any aesthetic endeavor. Infinite choices. One choice, then, starts a chain of other choices.

I chose to frame the image as I did, partly because I had limited time and partly because I knew it had the elements I wanted, even if it had some extra and would need to be cropped.

Then I chose to crop it. I wanted the necklace, enough of the light source, enough of the face and enough of the hand to create the scene I thought was the story of the image. But it's an image story, not a journalistic essay. It has a progression of light and color, a journey, an arc, for the eye and mind.

I chose to take the color out of the background. It was washed out or underexposed so that it was almost grayscale, but I wanted no color at all. But the grayscale needed something else, I thought. I wanted a feel that I thought a tint might give. I decided on a light slate blue-gray.

I think that gives a darker mood behind the sparkle of the necklace and a cooler backdrop as contrast to the warm colors in the beads.

Almost none of the things I just listed were deliberate, conscious manipulations, as my statements make them sound. They were as casual and blood-and-finger-and-eye-driven as my choice to grab the camera and shoot when I did.

The Necklace

. . .

Blues

2012-02-01T20:03:00.001-08:00

My art class should have started with The Blues. Put on Van Morrison singing "All Right" or maybe the Delta and some version of a Robert Johnson song or maybe one of the Chicago transplants or maybe an extended Dead jam in which Garcia's guitar writes a dissertation on every shading of blues.

No words at all. Students walk in to the blues playing and a big sign that says go to the table in the center of the room, get a brush, some paint and a piece of paper and paint.

Why is the style of music called "the blues"? Of course, we all know, but what words would come out of our mouths if we were forced to articulate that knowing? To know is not necessarily to be able to say.

With something like "red hot" and others that are transferred into the metaphoric from the literal, we can "see" it and understand it by the process of attribution or transference that is an inherent part of language and thinking. In fact, that is one of the junction points at which language and thinking are the same thing.

But what about "green with envy," "in a brown study," or "has the blues"? There is no literal transference as from a heated piece of metal to a quality. These are simply the assigning of a color to a quality or a quality to a color. It's chicken and egg when you look back far enough.

If the class had started that way, plunging us into a new world where color is the government. Immersing us into our own senses, turning us inside-out to find out what color we really are. If anything like that had happened, I probably would not have dropped it today.

Instead we were given a set of paints that we then had to place in front of us on our work tables like soldiers guarding Color, like tombstones for the Possible, while we listened to talk that had no leash. Like a loose dog, it followed its nose from fire plug to grass shoot to truck tire until it got tired two and a half hours later.

We could take our colors home then, like little strangers, like orphans. Awkward, not being properly introduced, uncomfortable, I wanted to invite them to dinner, but ended arraying them on my kitchen counter until I found a better home for them.

If I were a painter, like Louise, I would have known what to do, but to me being given Color in little bottles was not just new but miraculous. So miraculous, I didn't realize it for quite a while. I was excited and distant; eager and trepidatious. My extremes were so far apart, I could not impute a spectrum to fill the gap between them.

This thought stream and writing started because I was practicing bass guitar tonight and have finally come to be able to play a song I've been working at for a while. I'm playing it along with an app on my iPod Touch. The app shows tabs as the song plays. It has tabs for each part, including all guitars, bass, drums, etc. I pull up the bass tab and start it and play along.

It's a blues song done in heavy rock style, an old Led Zeppelin version. The very nice part for me is that the app will play it at half speed. Though at first, it seemed a distant goal, I can now play it (at least hit the notes).

However, I'm playing the song at half speed, and half the blues is not the blues. It's not even half of the blues. It's nothing. In fact, it might be less than nothing. I might be so stuck at half speed that this half-speed musical troll has become its own thing. It has become the song. I have played it so much that it's how I hear the song now.

The few times I've played the song at full speed, I can't even SEE the notes that fast, much less imagine playing them, far less actually finger them.

Somebody can probably just see or hear that song for the first time at full speed and play it. That's how I am with some things, like computer things and some photographic things. That's no help. I'm thinking that we all have areas in life that we wish had a half-speed switch, but most don't.

Look how lucky I am.

Camera

2012-01-31T22:26:00.001-08:00

"Camera."

Did your mind automatically produce an image? What was it? I think anyone reading this would be contemporary enough to "see" what we would recognize now as an instrument to take photographs.

Since most of us have cameras, it's probably the image of our own camera. I think of my main camera first.

Tonight in class, we were given a camera to use to take a portrait of a partner. It was a relative of my camera, but not one I was familiar with.

Back in the day (1970s), I used a Canon FTB film camera so much that it became like an extension of my hand. My fingers had a near-blood connection to the dials and buttons. Most important, I could "feel" how what image would be captured on the film I'd loaded just by looking at the settings and the needle of the internal light meter.

I'd put in enough of the 10,000 hours to become proficient and comfortable and confident. Along with that, I had enough experience and training to be comfortable in the darkroom and was pretty sure I could get the image I wanted from seeing it to black & what print.

I moved on from photography to other pursuits and photography fell away to hobby status and finally to disuse.

When I returned, I decided to go with digital. By then I was comfortable with the computer and very rusty with film. This was back when film was still strong and digital was still arriving. I think I made the right choice--at least for me.

Now, several years later and a few cameras in, I'm finally back to a point at which I mostly feel as comfortable as I used to with my old camera. I'm not all the way there, partly from lack of time and experience and partly because I'm doing a wider range of things in photography now.

I also have a few more lenses and working mostly with prime lenses (no zoom). Each lens makes the camera a different instrument and requires a different eye and different mechanics to some extent from me.

Tonight, the camera felt like a foreign object--almost. I knew its basic function and roughly where they should be placed, so I could navigate well enough, mostly because we shot in auto mode, in which we don't have to do anything other than point and shoot.

Yet I was confident in holding and using a strange camera. If I'd been handed a view camera or Hasselblad, I'd have been lost.

All that variation is nothing compared with what we'd encounter looking back in time for the word camera.

Since I'm old enough to remember Instamatics and Brownies and others, I'd have to go back further than a young person to encounter something unrecognizable.

Far enough back, what's called a camera would be unrecognizable and very quickly (moving backward in time) it wouldn't mean a photographic device at all.

"Camera" comes from the word for "room" in Latin. Why room? Because the first instances of what we call "cameras" was a room. The room had a hole in one wall and a blank wall opposite. It was a large pinhole camera, called the "camera oscura," dark room.

It was used as a tool for artists. The could see a representation of the landscape outside the hole and trace it. Smaller little "rooms" with holes were sold as artists' assistants. The original point and shoot were ornate boxes that the rich, whose basic eduction included drawing, carried with them to use as helps in drawing landscapes or other scenes. They could see the image projected against glass, place paper on it, and trace. That's how they captured the images of their European vacations, for example.

The process is the same as we'd do now, but the mechanics are very different. It's worth thinking about what was lost and what was gained. The equations vary by individual. I wish I could draw, but I can sure do a lot more with my digital camera. And besides, I'd probably not have been able to afford the education or the camera in those days.

[disclaimer: I'm making up some of the supposedly historical facts, but the metaphoric truth is there, I think.]

Maturity

2012-01-30T20:36:00.001-08:00

Long ago and far away (well, about 50 miles away at Sac State), I had another writing assignment. It was for an advanced composition class with one of the toughest teachers I've ever had, but also probably the best.

I don't know why I did what I did for the first assignment. We were to write two short essays.

I was a 9-year junior in college. I was an English major. I can vividly remember the first day of that class. After taking roll, the professor asked for a show of hands of English majors. Several of us proudly and prominently threw our hands in the air. I don't know what the others were thinking, but I was feeling the brotherhood of English majors, which bound that professor and me into cosmic, psychic, intellectual family.

Then he asked whether there were any engineering majors in the class. A few raised timid hands about head-high, hoping no one would notice.

"Good, then at least there will be someone who can write," was the professor's summation.

And thus with the magic carpet yanked from under me, I was out to prove something to this guy.

However, much as tonight, I found myself with just hours left to write those two pieces. They were to be "persuasive."

What I wrote and turned in was one essay. The subject of the essay was why I couldn't write the other essay.

So I'm going to try the same thing now. Here's why I can't write anything tonight:

I have a headache.

The weather turned, but didn't turn far enough into rain, so it sprained a weather muscle, and everyone knows how much THAT hurts.

Our cats are out of synch. One is out and one is in. Then they trade places. Who can operate under such conditions?

My wife just started an aerobics class. She jumped rope. she did crunches, she did basketball passing for her obliques, she did step exercises. All this after going for a strenuous training hike this morning. I'm exhausted. I mean: I better go take care of her.

My daughter just wrote to tell me why she hasn't written. Every illness, assumed illness, possible illness, or irritating or disgusting symptom you can think of was in her email. And then the obnoxious neighbors came home and blasted their home theater system. I'm exhausted. I mean: I'm deep in thought about how I can help them.

I had to be at a meeting at 10 this morning, and I didn't have an easy time getting there and feigning attentiveness. And now I remember that I have a class in the morning at 8:30. How can anyone be expected to cope under such pressures?

The test photo shoot I did tonight made me realize how much I forgot about how to do a shoot that combines ambient light capturing motion and strobe light freezing action. And I don't even know where to look it up.

My wife is humming now that she's had a bath and has no idea how much I have to do and what kind of issues and pressures I'm facing and all the things I'm expected to have done TONIGHT. She seems to have no idea how much her humming is an implied accusation and condemnation.

I have to go prepare a photo for my photo blog.

Just

2012-01-29T22:29:00.000-08:00

In my two blogs, I post photos and writing. The writing is often done late and fast. What goes online at first may have some rough edges. In fact, it's often a rough draft.

Showing rough drafts may someday be museum-worthy. Not in the foreseeable future for my blog, but perhaps, someday. I visited the Crocker Museum and was thrilled to see Wayne Thebaud's sketch books--his rough drafts. Some of my favorite music is the behind-the-scenes stuff that didn't make it onto albums. The rough drafts. The rougher the better. Bob Dylan's original Basement Tapes. Stephen Stills' Just Roll Tape. Some live recordings are all rough draft, some are like a raku firing: experienced artists who know what they're doing flinging themselves into the unknown.

My photo blog is similar. None are truly rough drafts so far, but to some eyes, they might seem to be. Many are experiments. Some are attempts at something new. Some are new attempts at something older.

All of them are ones I like somehow--the subject, the photographic process, the composition, the idea, the colors, the "feel." Not many of them are ones that I would choose for a gallery show, perhaps. Therefore, in some sense they are mostly rough drafts.

A few of the photographs I've produced I've considered finished as they are. But in the case of photography, it's always as finished as I can get them given current conditions. In the case of digital, my monitor calibration, the lighting in the room, the quality of my printer, the quality of the paper, how it's prepared for presentation, the lighting where it's viewed.

In some ways, it feels like rough draft until time or energy run out and it's done. But that's never good enough. Time and energy become secondary to putting all those pieces together into the best representation of what my camera saw and what I know is there.

Writing and photography are similar and opposites. "Writing with light" seems as though there should be some direct
connection, but what is "writing" writing with? Words? Thoughts? Images? All those plus something else, some glue, some life, some ability to make all those things as plastic as clay and shape them. OK, maybe they're not so different.

So far, I haven't changed a photo once I put it online. That may change. But I've changed words. Most often fixing errors or infelicities. In many cases, I can see what's left out or overlooked. But I'm not going back to fix that kind of thing. Yet, anyway.

I've also learned or relearned some editing skills and techniques. One of the most basic is to "murder your darlings" as several writers and other artists recommend, most recently Ethan Canin at a workshop in our town. I don't follow that advice usually. This is my chance to indulge my darlings.

However, I am trying to pay attention to craft. Another fundamental is to eliminate empty or hollow words. I don't typically use what I call "hollow intensifiers," such as almost every use of the word "so" that is not followed immediately by the word "that." Try it: when you hear a sentence with such a use, repeat the sentence in your head without "so." Typically, no meaning at all is lost, but some of the intensity or personality will be missing. Also typically, what seems missing is really contained in the inflection of the speaker. The word "so" is just a vehicle. I'd call it semantic tofu, taking on the flavoring of additives, but tofu has nutritional value.

Often, I congratulate myself on writing without using such things that work in speaking but not in writing. Of course, it's when I'm in my most self-congratulatory form that I discover something like this:

"The same cyclamen as #2, just dried for two weeks. It's just been sitting out in the kitchen. I just decided to put it on the light table and see what the camera could see."

That's the description I write for the photo called "Cyclamen #3." It has three sentences. Each one of them has the word "just" in a key, usually early, position. In each case, the word is not necessary. Not that it's meaningless. It does have some little bit of meaning, but very little.

Most of what we hear as "meaning" is not really meaning. It's more of an attitude demonstration. It's more of a rhetorical backing down, a softening of the statement that makes it seem as though the speaker (me) is leaving some social wiggle room. It's a fairly subtle version of something we all do a lot in conversation, the socially lubricating self-deprecation. I don't mean that the speaker is deprecating himself or herself, but that the sentence is deprecating itself.

Internal deprecation, as in the very common expression "it was very kind-of . . ." followed by some kind of evaluative statement that the speaker wants to say but doesn't want to take full responsibility for.

"I decided" is very different from "I [little ol' me] just [without putting a lot of thought into it in case you disagree] decided [maybe]." Each one of them is slightly different, but they're all gone now.

Science

2012-01-28T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm a month or so behind. But in this age of everything mobile, including time, I was able to hear last month's Science Friday program that summarized the year 2011 in science and technology.

I wasn't surprised to hear the story about the particle traveling faster than light--supposedly. And other discoveries or experiments at that level. I was surprised to hear, in a list given as a prompt to invite callers to contribute, mention of the death of Steve Jobs.

My first reaction was that it was a crumb of respect for an iconic person who had died. I assumed that there would be no one and no reason to go any further in discussing his death as a top science story.

One of the invited panelists did bring up Jobs and mention his paradigm-changing offerings.

I was there for it all. I saw that first Super Bowl ad in 1984--yes, while watching the actual real-life Super Bowl; not on YouTube. I remember the impact. "I want one."

I had to wait for a couple of years before I could afford my first Mac, but I did lobby to get to use Macs in an agency that had standardized on PCs. We got Mac Pluses with half a meg of RAM and no hard drive. The operating system and all applications were on 400K disks. We used version 1.0 of Pagemaker (later bought by Adobe and turned into InDesign) to produce the first-ever desktop published annual report out of our agency. The 250-page report with a heavy mixture of graphics and text had previously been done over months by dozens of people on typewriters and other dozens with scissors and paste and X-acto knives. We did it with a core team of three people in a fraction of the time.

I was on the Apple train from the start. I promised myself, more as a trick to justify the extravagance than a plan, that I'd use the computer to make money to help pay for it. That was in the mid to late 80s. I actually did it.

Making my living has been involved with Macs since then. I was a freelance support and training person. I started a side business of desktop publishing. My main job back then was with the state as a Mac support person as well as a writer and editor--on Macs.

I'm writing this on my old MacBook, part of the time while watching a movie on my desktop iMac. Each morning, which Louise reads the local paper--on paper--I read the New York Times and CyclingNews, including photo essays and video, on my iPod Touch. When I make calls, I use Skype on my iPod Touch. I call it my phone that's not a phone.

When I'm writing or need to concentrate and block out distractions, I put on my headphones and listen special playlists I've set up in iTunes.

Yep, I was around through the entire Steve Jobs sequence, but that doesn't mean I was sitting comfortably on board with each innovation. In fact, I rarely was.

In the case If the huge leaps, I was consistently left behind wondering what just happened and why. And I followed technology. I read MacRumors and other reports on innovation in the field.

I watched the keynotes at MacWorld each year, where many of the top new technologies used to be released. I had heard the rumors and watched as the iPod was announced.

I didn't get it at all. What's MP3? How can something like that replace my precious and solid CDs? Looking back, I think I had reached some kind of saturation point with CDs. I was there and loved them. Much handier than tapes and LPs. I thought it was either a big mistake (Apple had released several other innovative items that failed) or would be some tiny accessory for a few people.

I did get the iTunes store right away. Getting music quickly and not having to buy an entire CD for one song and not having to wait for Tower Records to order the CD did seem magical.

The rumors about Apple releasing a phone made no sense to me. Who wants a phone that plays songs. I just want a phone that's a phone. It took me a long time even to understand its appeal. Even after I got my first iPod Touch (the iPhone without the phone), it took me nearly a year to use it fully and to get it.

The App Store. Didn't get it. I still don't get Apple TV, which is rumored to be the next big thing.

I read all the rumors about the iPad, many of which turned out to be true. But I still wasn't ready. I really get the iPad now, but it needed to get to version 2 before I really understood.

I was an early "think different" enthusiast for Apple. I like its style. I liked its style. I could write that several more times to let its significance reveal itself to me again layer by layer. It was the relationship of a young enthusiasm that never grows old despite the body it's trapped in. It was infatuation that led me to love for the wrong reasons and spend more money than I had for things I really shouldn't have at times. But overall, it's been fun and enriching and intelligent and rewarding. The typical dance pattern called for me to want something even before I understood or new how I'd use it. I never understood the full vision at any of the stages. At the start of all the recent major innovations, I didn't get it at all. But I got it now.

Now, I'll drop this text file into my Dropbox app's folder so that it will be automatically transferred to the cloud and then pushed to my iMac, from which I can upload it to my blog.

OK, now I get why Steve Jobs was mentioned on that program and lots of other places recently. As I said, I can be a little behind at times.

Fire and Water

2012-01-27T22:53:00.001-08:00

"We have fire." "We have water."

I heard them out of the corner of my ear. They were behind me, just voices. I was setting up. They were bustling to get ready.

I expected either to hear a metaphor run into the ground or knowing chuckles. Since were were in Nevada City, maybe a treatise on the nature of humans on earth through time leading to this very moment and all the star dust we share.

Simultaneously, my perception took in their tone and demeanor. It was matter-of-fact, which added to the mysteriousness. My mind had begun to paint a near-reverent calling upon the elements of nature or our most elemental beings.

Instead, my full-hearing brain realized, it was more of a checklist. And then the elastic of mind and time snapped be fully into myself and the situation.

I was at a raku firing. The women behind me were literally checking off their preparedness to pull the ceramics from the kiln. For raku, you need fire and water to interact with the clay. First out in the air to crackle the glaze and then into the nest of paper or sawdust to catch fire and then have the air cut off to smother the glaze and force a chemical change by combining smoke and lack of oxygen.

These were experienced craftspeople at their craft. I was an outsider, there to document the process in photos. I had the advantage of hearing fully what they were saying in addition to What They Were Saying.

The gift of the outsider or the poet.

However, raku, by its nature is the craft and art of adventurers. These are all normal, attractive women, until you look at their hands. They're wet and dirty and scarred. Each time I asked about the process and its results, the answers formed a pattern.

They can describe in the detail of the chemist or the engineer or the artisan all the elements, combinations, mechanics, nuances, reasons and expectations of the process that lead to the firing. From globs of clay through the surgeries that remove the scars and tumors of the mundane and give life to art. The manipulation of the very weather that their creations live in. Then the alchemy of murky fluids that form or dance on the shapes.

Dull, colorless, faded fluids dabbed, brushed, dipped, or dropped into place translate themselves predictably into vibrance and gloss and texture in high firing.

Not in raku. Raku is a climactic curveball of the elements. By its nature, the artists actually add too many variables, inviting chaos, creating spontaneity.

I heard uuuhhhs and aaaahhs and oopses and oh-nos. We these experienced artists, the results were almost entirely transcendent. I did not expect such delicate colors or gradations or lines or textures to come out of the mess that was the backyard where they were working.

The kiln itself looks like someone found a thick bridge deck grate from about 100 years ago and welded it together after one welding class, lined it with insulation that looks like cotton (it's kaolin wool), stuck some surplus gas lines and valves under it, and topped it with bricks and a coffee can open at both ends.

The pieces emerged to be put on either firebricks to be sprayed with old Windex bottles of water or dumped into burnt and beaten metal garbage cans full of shredded newspaper or bedding material for hamsters. The smaller ones are put into paper nests in old roasting pans. The paper catches fire. More paper is dropped on top and the lid put on.

After about 15 minutes, the still-very-hot ceramic piece is fished out of the shreds and ashes with tongs and immersed in water. Since almost all the implements are meant for the kitchen, it looks like girls who've been playing kitchen for several decades and never got called in for dinner.

Those shaping, painting, carving, glazing, stacking, tonging, fire-conducting hands reach into the large bowls of water and pull out beauty like midwives.

But like the nurse in the birthing room, they check for cracks and scrub the newborn clean, and admire and exclaim over the others' works and shun praise for theirs.

The hands that will be holding wine glasses when these works are presented to the world are swirling ash and grit and burnt sawdust, scrubbing off the torture they've put these elements through. The women at the other ends of those hands allow themselves to be pleased and surprised by their work, as parents must allow themselves the joy of their children. They also remind themselves at the fiery and watery end of this earthy process why they do it.

Minimalism

2012-01-26T21:36:00.000-08:00

A decorator in NYC sublet his minimalist, nearly furniture-less flat to a designer, who painted everything (everything) white, including the microwave and the espresso machine, and added a white sofa.

Now back, the owner takes the change as an extension of his own minimalist approach, but plans to get rid of the sofa. It's the only thing in the room except, say, a window and maybe an empty white shelf. Too much clutter.

He was fine with the painted (read: ruined) appliances. He didn't use them anyway.

Another photo in this NY Times photo essay of minimalist home decor showed a perfectly arranged galley kitchen. The caption pointed out that the couple who live there never use it; they eat out.

The photo set ends with a photo of a young Steve Jobs sitting, yoga-style, in a living room without furniture other than a floor lamp, by which he's reading.

Where's the line between pose and practicality? Between gesture and genuine? Between self-expression and self-inundation? Between enough and Enough!?

Don't ask me. We don't know. We have discussions. We have family meetings. I think we even had an inquiry, though I'm still not quite sure I'm using the term right.

We have lists and plans, but eventually, they become part of the clutter. Tonight, we cleared out a closet that is now refreshingly and reassuringly nearly bare. What's left is known and needed.

Ahh, the known and the needed. That's what we want. We should have bought a smaller home. External forces seem to be the only true motivators for us. Family visiting? Great. At least the house will be clean and tidy. "THIS time, let's don't just hide things where we won't find them again for a year."

Airbnb had been a great help. We haven't earned enough money for a maid yet, but the visiting strangers who are also paying money to stay here create an extra incentive to clear nooks and wipe crannies.

As much as I now I have to move the cracker box on my desk back to the kitchen as soon as I finish this (yeah, I'll put away the plate and the cup too and I'll even throw away some of the Post-It notes), I'm not sure I'd trade with that guy with the shades-of-gray-only apartment or the one with the all-white apartment, posed in his studied casual open shirt and slacks. Louise and I are generally on the same part of the wave-form on the clutter-spectrum. When we aren't, we generally accept and appreciate the one who can't stand it anymore and is working on it and tolerate the one who still doesn't care or doesn't see it.

Such balance is a form of poetry--not haiku for sure, not even a sonnet, but, perhaps, free verse.

Time

2012-01-25T21:55:00.000-08:00

Time just changed. There it goes again. Dot. Dot. Dot. Com.

Wednesdays were vegetable pickup and bring in the garbage can; otherwise, whatever I want. Last term I took just a 4-week class, so I'm out of the rhythm of attending class regularly. This term, I'm taking one that starts at 8:30. It might as well start at 4AM as far as my body clock is concerned. At least 4AM would be an adventure of sorts. 8:30 is just early, but it's finger-wagging early. I know that lots of people are at work or soon will be. But I'm usually reading the news and sipping my first tea.

That's changed. And now, it's sloshing up against the other days of the week. Tonight, I realized two major things: (1) I had homework to do for class tomorrow; and (2) that I had to get up early.

I'm trying to take it as just another aspect of the educational process. I'm learning that stuff happens before 9, for example. I have noticed that the light is very nice just before and after dawn, but so far I've been too groggy or busy to do anything about it.

Tonight I posted the third image of cyclamen on my photo blog. It's actually the same flower I shot two weeks ago. I was slow in disposing of it. I felt attached to it. I have a portrait of it. How can I throw it in the compost bucket with coffee grounds and orange peels?

After a few days, I was curious what it would do. Shrivel, turn brown, turn into itself so far that it would disappear? Attract bugs and mold? Cause a divorce?

It did none of the above. It showed little change day by day. Its hues were intact. Its tone became paler. It's started losing one of its dimensions, its 3rd D.

By the end of the first week, I was determined to let it have its run. As long as it was as attractive as it still was, I'd let it live in our kitchen.

Or . . . die in our kitchen. Fade in our kitchen? After seeing what the camera saw, it seems to have had a reblossoming. The light table and strobe lights, its new suns?

After posting the shot, I looked at the three in sequence: 2 Jan, 11 Jan, 25 Jan.

It's a very slow time-lapse. It's a pictorial history of this year so far. It's a pictorial history of life.

Teachers

2012-01-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

Today was the first day of school. I have two classes, both in the Art Department.

My teachers today were new to me, but not new teachers. Even more, they are not new to their crafts and their art. They both have great local reputations and lots of experience in their fields.

This was a day for taking roll and reciting the syllabus. But it was also a day for taking stock. Do I have time for this? Will it be worth it? I can afford to be pickier than the real students.

I don't know these teachers. I have no idea how a term with them would go. I'm sure I would learn things, maybe even what the course catalog promises.

I can't tell whether I'm just the curmudgeonly older person returning to community college and either expecting too much or being too impatient—or both. Or maybe it's the atmosphere that is necessarily created in a California community college by its need for numbers of students to pay the bills. Sierra College still has a solid core curriculum as well as an orientation to both please and offer students marketable skills. It must also draw from the community, which means that many classes, at least the more specialized ones, have to suffer the attendance of the likes of me.

I had seen the "older student" in "my" college when I was one of the "real" students. The returning adult. I tried to find not only a degree of tolerance for them, but understanding and appreciation. After all, they were swimming upstream. They had experience that I lacked. They were there to learn.

Yeah, right. The ones that stand out (obviously) are the ones who did no such thing. They were there for one of two reasons: they had to be for some work-related reason or they were trying to make up for earlier failures.

The ones I remember most are the K-12 teachers who were forced by California to return to school en masse because the state had adopted the English equivalent of New Math. Since the Roberts approach to grammar was my graduate specialty as well as the state's newly adopted teaching method, I knew something about it and I was in classes with those grumbling and grouchy teachers.

They were almost universally lost. They were not English majors, but tossed into an advanced course that most English majors avoided as difficult and esoteric. Typically, they were generalists whose knowledge of what they considered English grammar had to be renewed each year the night before it came up in their classrooms. It consisted entirely of do-and-don't rules. It had nothing to do with our language. They new grammar was based on a new approach to language, one that simply describes what native speakers of the language do without making judgments. That was not just a new concept. It was an alien planet to those K-12 teachers.

Tossing a sixth grade teacher into that course was the equivalent of dropping her in the middle of the Sahara with two sticks and a piece of gum.

Teachers teaching teachers. It's a worst case scenario. But that's another entire blog.

The older students I've seen in school since I retired and became one fall into two categories: The Wise and The Wounded. (Are there others?)

The Wise are the "I've lived a long life and let me tell you a thing or two…" people. The Wounded are the "You just don't know what I've been through, so let me tell you…" people.

If I have to choose, I guess I'll take the former category to slip into. However, since I have a near-phobia aversion to any glimmer of even seeming slightly to be anything like that type, I found myself being the inverse of the type: the Aloof One who knows but doesn't tell.

Not always. Actually, mostly, I've found myself in courses in which I really craved the knowledge of the instructor and was passionate about picking up as much of it as I could. I was lucky to find those instructors. Two stand out as having shaped my mind significantly in the last year or two.

But I'm still the older student who doesn't quite know how to relate to the others. I'm not one of the college aged, so I don't want to pander. I am one of the far-older, but like most of us, I can't quite believe it and haven't figured out where I fit.

Actually (again), I have learned quite a bit from just being in that environment. I've come to admire and respect some at-first-seemingly-flaky guys who were very creative and doing exactly what they should be doing at 18 or so. I've also come to know some of those old farts and found that they do have quite a bit of knowledge and that, despite appearance, they have a youthfulness and a sincerity that draws them here to find a means of expression as well as a means of learning.

Have I talked myself into continuing with either course this semester? Maybe. I'll have to learn how to deal with some things about my "fellow" older students, such as the de-facto student body president of The Wounded in his motorized scooter that beeps like a dump truck when he arrives late and backs into his parking spot in the middle of the room. Certainly, as one of superior age and experience, he then makes up for his interruption by his silence and full attention, right? No, he pulls out his to-go bag and rattles it to get out his soup so that the instructor has to stop and wait. My view of him sipping his cup of soup includes the sign behind him saying that no food is allowed in the room.

My other class has a developmentally disabled student whose mother has to be there with him. There's a story there. Probably a moving and telling and human one. Probably a nobel one at some level. But I'm hard-put to remember that when he's sitting next to me and drawing while the instructor talks and brushing his eraser crumbs in my lap.

It's life in microcosm, I hear you saying. OK. I can accept that and move forward. Or at least move to a different seat. But the instructors are another matter to consider.

Which to choose?

The one who arrived 30 minutes late after the students had contacted the administration and passed around a safety roll sheet to make sure they documented that they were there on the first day of school. The instructor gave no reason for being late and not much of an apology: "sorry 'bout that." Then he went on to read that he expects us to be on time for class. He seemed to see no irony at all.

The one who pin-balled from topic to topic, tasked us with fixing her dyslexia, had to read her own syllabus to remember what she was supposed to do, talked so long that the video that she promised couldn't be shown, and told us at least 20 times in the course of 2 hours that we would have to buy our own black paint. It was like Ground Hog Day with that black paint thing, except that it happened every 5 minutes.

School days. So many opportunities to learn and grow.

Radio

2012-01-23T21:36:00.000-08:00

Radio. Heard of it? I listen everyday. Usually NPR. Since I left Sacramento for the foothills, where the broadcast signal is good only for KVMR, I've been in the habit of streaming KXJZ and KXPR from Sacramento.

At first via the website or iTunes. More recently via an app on my iPod Touch. Since streaming became reliable, I've relied on it.

On Saturday, I installed the latest operating system, the first to be offered as an "app" download. Once again, a testament to the reliability and universality of streaming. The download and installation took an hour or so.

Soon after that process, my web connection was slow. Then dead. I started the troubleshooting sequence. The logical, usual suspects: restart the router, restart the modem, restart Airport, check other computers. The usual didn't perform as usual. Nothing worked.

The DSL modem's lights all turned green except the internet light, which just kept up a marathon step-dance with the activity light. I got your blink.

I tried to call repair service, then several other numbers. The phone wasn't working. We were in the midst of the biggest storm in a while. Water in our phone lines? Poles down or shorted? Squirrels' gnawing letting in rain?

OK, OK, it's time to fall back on that cell phone that I got only for emergencies. I couldn't believe what I was reading until after two restarts: no cell service.

OK, that's big. It's bigger than water in our lines and squirrels. I decided to look up the issue. Knee-jerk: Google. Oh, yeah, no Google. Next-jerk: Yuba-net. Oh, yeah, same deal. Next: radio. Oops, my computer can't get it. Oops, my iPod Touch can't get it.

I literally started and stopped and started and stopped, like a robot with a program that kept leading to a wall. I finally just had to stop, wipe the brain slate clean and think. "Radio. Radio. Radio."

It was like one of those conversations with a friend you haven't seen for, say, 30 years, but someone with whom you shared pivotal times. "Do you remember when? . . ." Little by little, memory crumbs accrete into the semblance of a whole loaf.

Yeah, the boombox, that thing with the antenna. For a few seconds, it felt partly like pulling out an old wind-up Victrola with 78rpm records and partly like trying to operate a space ship.

I found KVMR. It was odd to look out on the town, cars driving as usual up and down the street and to feel as though I'd just walked out of a long stint in wilderness where I'd survived with my hands and my wits.

KVMR wouldn't walk through the house with me like my untethered and tiny iPod Touch and keep playing me Bob Dylan until a news break, so I missed the first part of what was happening. What I heard was that solar flares had caused a major outage, but there was also something about an accident 5 or 10 miles down Hwy 49 at Lime Kiln Road. Later, the news jelled into a car crash having knocked down a pole and that rescuers had to cut a main fiber optic line to save the driver. (Was the driver blinded by a solar flare?)

At least I knew then that I was not alone. In fact, all the police agencies were with me. All 911 service was down. Most businesses were there with me: most ATM and credit card services were down. A friend told me that she was at the theater in Nevada City and was told that those without cash would just have to leave an IOU and pay for the play when they got back into town. Another person was shocked to be brought one of those credit card charge slips at a local restaurant.

I did what I could. Even though I had power and plenty of things to do and entertainment, including books and movies stored on disk and iPods, something felt wrong and empty about the entire afternoon and evening.

Even Franny, one of our cats must have felt it. She didn't come back home until midnight, not even rushing in for her usual treats and play time. I forgave her since the whole world seemed out of kilter without the internet.

On Monday from the local paper, we found out that solar flares, a car crash, a desperation rescue, space aliens, and terrorists had nothing to do with the outage. A pole fell from rain and wind. It contained our fiber optic umbilical to the rest of world.

Risk

2012-01-22T23:20:00.000-08:00

Risk

We have the privilege to know well two sets of parents with 2-year-olds. Both are slightly older than the average parents of a child that age. That maturity is one of the sources of the energies they invest in parenthood.

Today, Louise is just back from a whirlwind visit to one of those families. She went to help with the final preparations and to see and support her good friend. Her drive over the Sierra summit to do that coincided with the first big storm in over a month as well as the grand opening of the yoga/Pilates studio of the mother of the couple.

Louise's trip was a risk, of sorts. The main thing she risked was being turned back by snow and ice. Being prepared for worse is good, but it's rare these days to be stranded dangerously on a major highway.

Though I was concerned about her trip, I wasn't worried about her. If I had been, I probably would have tried to prevent the trip. After I heard more about her stay and was reminded of all that led up to this big day, the culmination of months of effort we've only heard about or seen tangentially, I'm aware of a very different kind of risk.

Louise got a 2-day glimpse into the last-minute hectic behind the scenes. The baby hasn't been sleeping through the night. The mom can't get a full night's sleep. The dad had to work till 3am on final prep for the new business's building. The mom worked all day making food for the opening. She took away time from all that to make a local TV appearance. She also taught an aerial yoga class. Then more cooking and dinner and trying and failing to sleep. All in over half a foot of new snow. That was the lead-up to the big event.

I know some of the pieces of what that opening represented, but nothing of the real effort and only a vague sense of the risk behind it. With all they've had to balance, figure out, investigate, prepare, and endure, I can't even imagine continuing. They had every excuse--no, every reason--to stop and do something more normal, something a lot less risky than starting taking on a lease that needed a lot of work and all that a new business venture means while trying to keep some income flowing and a baby fed and thriving.

The mom's brilliant at her work, which can be said to be the dynamic sculpting of the human anatomy. Names like Pilates and yoga don't do her work justice.

The dad is as creative in his field, which is videography. He dynamically sculpts light and shapes.

But there are lots of people with lots of talents. Most hope and hide. Only a few even dream of hanging a shingle proclaiming their value to the world. Fewer than that attempt it. Even fewer do it.

It's official, as of today, they did it. The opening was from all reports a success despite the storm.

Both of them are clever and patient and exhausted parents. Both are trying to craft careers. At times, they've seemed to be rolling snowballs up a local mountain to make snowmen. But they have persisted and grown and succeeded.

Today's opening is the end of a sequence of light and clocks and squeals in the night and a long string of one-more-thing-to-do. Today is the beginning of a sequence of light and clocks, but light that's just arrived on earth and is eager to be absorbed and clocks that just started today.

What makes people put that much of everything they have into something that will just cause them even more work? This is not an In-n-Out franchise. Offering your skill to the world is risky. Trying to live by those skills and your ability to demonstrate and articulate them is scary . . . and inspiring . . . and scary.

In one sense they don't know what they are doing. To them, they are just doing what they have to do.

Up close, it's been a tumble through briars. From just outside, it's a dance. Even though the dancers sometimes are dancing among sabers and minding their feet, we see only grace.

I don't think they know the full scope of it--that scope that outsiders can see and marvel at easily. They will see it too, eventually. Maybe ten years from now. Most important of all, their son is absorbing that light. No matter what stumbles or failures, modeling such goals and such effort is the reward they have already passed along.

Soft Focus

2012-01-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

Rolf Kahn, flamenco guitarist, Volkswagen manual editor, karate teacher, was my neighbor in a happy slum complex in Auburn, CA. "Slum" because it was uninsulated from heat, cold, and mice. "Happy" because we didn't care. We were happy to find cheap digs in those days. We didn't mind sharing with the mice, and at least the weather was coming into our homes, instead of vice-versa.

Sidebar: The mice in those days were different. They were considerate, well-behaved, unobtrusive for the most part. I rarely saw them except nearly daily in my dog's water bowl. They would climb in for a drink and not be able to get out. I would have changed for a bowl with a mouse ladder, but I couldn't afford another bowl. One of my most compatible housemates over a lifetime was a mouse in those days. For some reason (despite the standards of the complex and the era), I decided to clean the kitchen stove thoroughly. It was one of those that's not much bigger than a toy stove. It was gas, the kind with one pilot light constantly lit in the center of the top. All 4 burners would get their light from it via tubes radiating from that central star.

The sides were open from the top. They were stuffed with what was probably asbestos fiber insulation. When I took up the top of the stove, I found a perfect nest, perfectly round, perfectly shaped, perfectly cupped to hold a curled mouse. It was directly under the suspended pilot light. I started to remove it, but I couldn't. It was tidy, no droppings nearby. I left it there. At least that mouse had a comfy home for another several months. :End Sidebar

Rolf offered to teach me karate. Even though I had no inherent interest, I found his offer irresistible, and knowing martial arts in those days carried a Zen-ish caché. We all wanted to be equal parts Zen master and Yojimbo.

I know exactly nothing of karate. We never go there. But I love the sweet just-out-of-reach chocolate mystery that karate became after Rolf. That was part of what he taught me. The main part, though, was out in a nearby orchard.

He told me that before he could start teaching me karate, he'd have to show me "the dance." Before we started "the dance," however, he gave me the quickest lesson in concentration that I've ever had, and maybe one of the most profound.

"Before we begin," he said, "we have to focus." We were just two guys standing in an orchard. This was not Transcendental Meditation (which I also still practice). It was transcendental, but without capital letters.

To get the right focus and mindset (I don't remember his exact words, but he avoided buzz terms and clicés), he told me to find a leaf in the middle distance and "focus on it until you see everything but the leaf."

One of my most vivid memories in the flow of fuzzy colors that is most of my memory is that moment when I did what he said, trusting. And it worked. It was the simplest of things, taking advantage of what all eyes do. When they stare at something hard and long enough, the thing itself becomes fuzzy and the mind drops the hard focus and lets soft focus enter, making everything but the object of focus fill vision.

I can remember the snap of vision. I never lost the ability, primarily because Rolf made it so simple and fundamental. Sure enough, I was seeing literally everything in a 180-degree fisheye view in the direction I was looking—except that one leaf I had picked.

Seeing everything in one thing is also what Emily Dickinson mastered. In the same way that Rolf lead me (or tricked me) into seeing more widely, Dickinson does the same with the devices she developed, including word choice, syntax choices, omission, and punctuation.

At the end of "I felt a Funeral in my Brain," by making the syntax not unclear, but clearly ambiguous (it can be two and only two things), she forces us not to focus on one. She pries open vision through language, as Rolf did through a trick of the eye.

Years later, when I took a class and I realized that what the teacher was teaching us was what Rolf called "the dance": Tai Chi.

Funeral #2

2012-01-20T20:48:00.000-08:00

This is what you'll find online--for free--for Dickinson's poem that starts "I felt a Funeral in my Brain":

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead,
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

Notice that the capitalization and punctuation are standardized. That's your second clue that it's not fully what Dickinson wrote. The first was that it was free (see yesterday's entry).

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down--
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing--then--

Yesterday, I found myself saying (yes, I'd never said or even thought it before in that way and those words) "read the writing, not the words," or something like that.

One thing that readers often fail Emily Dickinson is to read her silently. Whoever edited the 4 stanzas above and left them to stand alone in that first publication in the 1890s did not read aloud. They didn't so much "think too much" as they interpreted too much.

The chief error I've seen in response to poetry is over-interpretation. It's not OVER-anything; it's interpretation. Period.

READ FIRST.

On the internet, when I searched to find a quick copy of the poem so I wouldn't have to type it, I found the one above put online by an English teacher. I don't know the level or the location. After all, to cite the old cartoon, "Nobody knows you're a dog on the internet."

That teacher's notes cited the metaphor of the funeral, but seems not to have been well versed in the nature of metaphor by taking it too literally as a "dying" brain and someone descending to madness.

That's a prose reading of poetry. Reading what's there reveals another world. A world of super-consciousness, meta-consciousness. The ability to step outside and look back. A miracle of functionality in any human and any circumstance. A salvation in every situation.

It's the core reason that Emily Dickinson is a master poet. In fact, America's master poet.

She's said to have been a recluse, to have hidden from society and from publishing/sharing her work. She was not a recluse. She was a pivotal and active figure in her family and community, though not in the most public of ways, perhaps. She won baking contests in the local fair. She was a noted gardener. She was one of the keenest observers who has ever lived. She was perhaps the most fluid craftsperson of our language who ever penned. And she shared a great deal of those pennings.

Her main two ways of such "publishing" were to send letters to friends and family. I can't imagine, but I'd live to have been honored with one of her "letters." Read just a few of them and you'll see. The early ones that are kind of "normal" in the sense of catching up her correspondent on the happenings around her home are miracles of concision, perhaps too crystalline to be easily apprehensible. Her later letters often were a poem with the recipient's name on top and "Emily" at the bottom. Wow.

This poem was written in 1862, when she was 32 years old. It was during her most prolific period, the few years when she averaged a poem a day. Each day writing some of the greatest writing our language has known. And she didn't publish, didn't lecture, didn't teach, didn't explain herself.

I say to read the poem aloud because the rhythm is controlled by two things: the order of the words and the punctuation. The punctuation you see her is mostly changed from what Dickinson wrote. The words are mostly the same, though there are some variants. The most significant thing missing is the word "again" after line 11 ("With those same boots of lead").

What Dickinson wrote was this:

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

The English teacher who transcribed it on the web copied the old, edited version, but also "fixed" the last stanza that he/she added because he/she was using a cheap textbook that copied the free older versions. But in adding back the last stanza, he/she didn't explain the editing and even regularized the capitalization of that final stanza. In it, as in most of Dickinson, nouns are capitalized, such as "a Plank in Reason" in the first line.

I can't argue that the capitalization is part of the poetry, but it's what she wrote. If we are to respect her as one of our chief poets, one of our entire nation's spokespersons, then let's respect what she wrote.

The teacher has a good sense that the last stanza completes the poem, but doesn't seem to know why entirely. It's explained more as the completion of a story. A poem is not a story. It's a poem.

One way to read this poem is as a meditation. Perhaps even as a description fo the process of meditation. Remember that Dickinson was heavily enticed by and influenced by the 17th century British poets, the metaphysicals, such as George Herbert. The chief device of the metaphysicals was metaphor extended to the point of allegory in addition to fitting into a meditative form. I'm simplifying just a little to fit that century into a convenient sentence (or two).

In that sense, her poem is not a descent into madness or a dying brain being described. She was more modern than we are now in this maudlin self-revelatory age.

Look at the body of her work. It is observational--of herself as much as of the rest of the world. She describes the operations of her consciousness, her thinking, and she describes what happens in her garden. They are not the same, and they are the same.

Poetry cleaves the mind and mends it into better cloth.

One of Dickinson's most effective ways of cleaving a mind is with syntactic ambiguity. It's a powerful and rare trick of language to say two things at once. The only way to achieve it to native speakers is to trick them. The way she does it in this poem is to craft her word order and to avoid standard punctuation.

After the first line of the last stanza, none of the punctuation is standard. In fact, I'm sure you noticed that the punctuation in the first line is standard, but "wrong." One of the modern rules of punctuation calls for never separating a subject from its verb with a single comma. She does that.

Subject: Plank. Verb: broke. The final comma of the line is "correct" in that it's separating two independent clauses. From there on, we're in free-fall.

Isn't that appropriate?

The other comma in the stanza is maybe ok, but maybe not n terms of English 1A. We can't tell because of the rest of the punctuation, culminating in "--then--"

That's it. Definitely no final period. After "reason broke . . . down," she found new worlds and "finished knowing."

Two ways to read that, i.e., the speaker: (1) had done with trying to KNOW or (2) understood in the end.

They mean the opposite. "I gave up trying to know" versus "in the end, I understood it all." Coleridge called the poet someone who "balances and reconciles opposite and discordant qualities."

Coleridge and Wordsworth started what we call Romanticism. Emily Dickinson ended it. What they had in common was being poets, though I suspect Dickinson is the superior, even by Coleridge's definition."

It took a "meta" approach to language to achieve what Coleridge could not. Dickinson broke out of her time and all its strictures. She was the Einstein and Godel and Heisenberg of American literature.

Funeral

2012-01-19T22:42:00.000-08:00

Ray Oliva will be buried tomorrow. He was one of my literature professors. So funerals are on my mind. It seems a general trajectory this time of life. Also on my mind, for completely unrelated reasons, is poetry and what makes poetry and makes it different from other writing. One example that comes to mind with the first rush of such speculation is one by Emily Dickinson: the one that starts "I felt a Funeral in my Brain."

The last stanza of that poem is one of the purest examples of what I think makes Dickinson a great poet, almost certainly the best poet the U.S. has produced, and the beginning of modern American literature. Of course, her entire body of work is her testament, and this poem, despite being well known, is probably not at the top of the Dickinson list of just under 2000 poems.

Yet it is a touchstone, if read appropriately.

The poem was read inappropriately by her family and friends who functioned as editors just over a century ago. They saved a national treasure with their work. They also did readers of the time--and, they assumed, Dickinson--the favor of cleaning up her poems. They applied standard capitalization and punctuation of the day. (Dickinson capitalized most nouns and rarely used standard punctuation.) They fixed questionable spellings. (Dickinson wasn't perfect.) They also clarified some of her poems by changing words or even leaving off parts. Dickinson's manuscripts sometimes still had her notes for alternative words. She also used words in unusual ways, as is more common now, especially using a word that was just slightly askew from the expected or using a word that is one part of speech in the position of another part of speech.

The latter is so common a literary technique, it has a name from ancient Greek. However, Dickinson did not use the technique in the classical sense. Very often, she used, for example, an adjective as a noun. Such use leaves a sense of incompleteness, lack of resolution since our ears expect a noun to follow an adjective. It's a double grabber to offer an adjective and have it BE the noun. It hovers there.

An example: she uses this phrase in at least one poem: "...the Hectic." And that's it. "The Hectic" is the thing. It makes sense in the poem, but even more it carves its own sense into our brain channels because of the syntactic surprise and incompleteness.

An example of a word change by the editors is from the poem that begins "There's a certain Slant of Light." She writes of the "heft of Cathedral tunes." The editors changed "heft" to "weight." The subject of the poem is an intangible feeling caused partly by winter light. The word "heft" in that sense carries the hovering sensibility right into the reader's mind by forcing at least some engagement, perhaps a bit of translation from the more expected "weight." But that's the sense that Dickinson wanted to convey, partly by the fact of reading her writing, not just her words.

That may be the key to poetry: learning to read writing instead of words.

I found the complete poem on the Internet. I'll leave you to find it too since it's still under copyright to Harvard. The teacher who put it online gives an interpretation that includes a weak justification for adding the last stanza, which the original editors left off.

That's why Emily Dickinson is the only poet of her age whose work is still under copyright: Nothing appeared in print as she had originally written it until the 1960s. A new complete edition came out in the 1990s, so that might have extended the copyright. That makes for an interesting story, but few people realize that the inexpensive books of Dickinson poems are the now-public-domain edited versions. All were changed by editors. You gotta pay for the real thing.

I'll continue with Dickinson tomorrow...

Pink

2012-01-18T22:34:00.000-08:00

At Grass Valley Glass. They can get me a case of glass for photo framing for less than half the price of the other glass place in town. I had ordered a case, and got the message it was in.

I bellied up to the counter to do the payment and paperwork. While Mrs. Glass looked up orders and tapped on keyboards, I noticed the big bucket of advertising pens. They were obviously there for the taking (after signing the credit card slip). They were in many colors.

I fingered through them. I had no agenda, really. At least, I don't think so. It's always enticing to get something for free. Especially, something that works. But we have pens. I don't recall searching for anything in particular, necessarily, but I may be wrong.

When my fingers found the pink one, though, they grabbed it and picked it up.

That simple gesture accordioned time so that I experienced a squeeze of the sense and sensibility of years in an instant.

I don't know when it started, but I like pink. For those who do not know, I'm male. And heterosexual.

I don't know that it was natural or perversity. I could very well have starting "liking" pink out of contrariness. But I was contrary because I thought someone should be contrary, not just because I wanted to be contrary.

Society spawns artists and philosophers and bloggers (these days) to warn us of box canyons, dead ends we're headed for; alternative routes for our brains, paths for knowing.

Knowing is always new. If it's old, it's not knowing; it's assuming.

For most males in the U.S., pink as an accessory choice is art, philosophy, knowing. It's new.

OK, I didn't have such a high degree of understanding or awareness. Certainly, not that degree of über-ness. I might, actually, have had nothing but pink. And maybe the the appeal of a color. A color.

My first custom bike was built by an old friend, a wonderful person and frame-builder, Steve Rex. His chief mechanic and only assistant was Floyd Diebel, also one of my reluctant heros. Not reluctant on my part; but reluctant because he's a generation younger and several generations cooler. He was one of those people you want to connect with, meaning you want them to know you exist, to see your appreciation of them, who crave their appreciation, if not more. He as as minimalist in his life encounters (or maybe just with me) as he was in his work. He took an artist's approach to bicycle mechanics. On the side, he was an artist, designer, techie, musician, entrepreneur. He was consistent across those disciplines. He carried Floyd-ness into the darkest crevice of all his endeavors.

Steve was equal in craft, but different in sensibility. Steve as an artistic engineer; Floyd was a technician artist. However, any words limit them, despite describing them.

My first custom bike by Steve Rex took the typical months to complete, despite his "rushing" it a bit to meet my deadline related to an article I was to appear in for Bicycling magazine. Finally, it was time to pick the paint job.

If I can find enough internal information to figure it out, I'll write more about the background of my decision. I wanted only two simple things. First, blue. Blue has since sentience been my "favorite color." Why do we have such things? Why do they stay with us? Why do they define us so? I don't know. There it is. Blue. Preferably, a dark blue, maybe midnight or slate.

The other thing I wanted was pink flames.

OK, you got me. I really have no explanation. I don't think it was entirely a political statement or a call to change our awareness of gender-related phenomena. I think it was mostly that it sounded good to me. But I'm also sure that it was not only that. How could it be?

What I remember is the reaction. Floyd laughed and said it was "too gay." Those were the days when "gay" was slang for something like weird. Steve Rex said, "I won't allow it to be painted with pink flames."

We all had a good laugh at my expense. Eventually, partly because I insisted AND was paying for it, I got pink flames on a blue bike.

My instructions were general, loose to the painter. The bike arrived as a surprise, a present for my senses. I loved it from the start. The bike that I know and all my friends now as "Pink Flames" is still with me. It's my wind trainer bike now, mostly.

It's still a strong, sure, beautiful bike. I can't imagine ever selling it. And I never tire of looking down at the top tube with its pink flames.

George

2012-01-17T21:34:00.001-08:00

George dropped by today. I met him over a year ago. He's my Big Dummy buddy.

Hold onto what you're thinking for a minute or two.

Since I retired, I looked for a way to increase my use of a bicycle as a means of transportation. In (flat) Sacramento, I used my single-speed bike to commute to work. Sacramento is perfect for single speeds and my route to work was even more perfect—mostly on the American River Bike Trail, which has to be one of the best in the country. Man, do I miss it now.

Grass Valley and Nevada City are not well set up for bicycles. Riding anywhere up here on narrow roads heavily populated with SUVs and pickups can be a challenge. Despite its distance and appearance, this area is not rural at all. Just below the surface, it's as suburban as Carmichael, Fair Oaks, or Elk Grove. The big difference between those areas and this for self-sufficient transportation is that those areas have bike lanes and some bike trails. We have none.

Some politicians, none of whom seem to be bike riders, would argue. Quite a bit of extra transportation money goes to support striping of bike lanes and other such nominal accommodations to "alternative transportation."

However, of the very few roads with white stripes near the edge and a white bike logo in them, none of them is maintained. The "bike lane" up Ridge Road is completely obscured with debris most of the way. Often it is blocked by hedges and trees or garbage cans. The bike trail on Idaho-Maryland Rd, for example, is only one one side. It includes such features as a storm grate that completely fills the lane and such worn-out paint that I think few drivers know it exists.

Most cyclists up here are the colorful lycra-clad kind. They rarely ride in the city limits, and then only to get out of town. They go on "bike rides." Most often, they drive to and from those rides.

I wanted to be able to do more with a bike. I have lycra-worthy bikes, custom-built racing machines, lightweight, efficient. I have a 20-year-old mountain bike. I wanted an XtraCycle.

This past weekend we met Ross, one of the founders of XtraCycle, which started right up here above Nevada City. It started as a well-designed but inexpensive way to convert an old bike into a useful bike, one that could run errands and haul cargo. He told us that the constant refrain he's heard since he's been in business with the design and its offshoots is that people wonder what took them so long. They think and dream and plan for quite a while. That's what I did. I read about and researched the XtraCycle design for years.

By the time I was really ready, Surly, the fringe bike manufacturers had released the Big Dummy, a "longtail" frame that would take all the XtraCycle gear. It's first incarnation met the underlying XtraCycle standard of DIY. Surly sold only a frame. You had to build a bike out of it. By 2010, when I was really really really in the market, having retired and moved to Grass Valley, Surly was offering the Big Dummy as a complete bike, including all the basic XtraCycle gear. At first it was too expensive. Then I found that a bike shop in Reno had the BD for considerably less, so I ordered one.

The BD is big. It would not fit in my car, so I modified my car roof rack and took extra strapping to transport it over the Sierra in a wind storm. I made it. I pulled into my driveway, feeling great to have the tension of having my new bike hanging out there in the wind and just having it home so I could ride it. As I got out of the car, just about to loosen the straps and unload my new bike, a guy rode by my driveway—ON A BIG DUMMY. Yes, just 1 yard away just one minute after I pulled in, George rode by on his Big Dummy.

We both did double takes. He rode past the driveway, disappearing behind our hedge, and then rolled backward, with wide eyes staring at the top of my car.

We've been Big Dummy buddies since then. In fact, he was riding my today and stopped by for a few minutes. He works at the local radio station. He has no car. He invested in the Big Dummy instead and all the extras that would make it truly and fully his "car."

We've talked accessories and traffic and parking and security and shopping and longer-distance travel. To get to the SF Bay Area, he has to ride his bike the 80 miles to Sacramento and roll it onto Amtrak.

He's a role model, a goal. We see George riding in the heavy rain, on slushy roads, in the dark. Very little of which I do, other than for the adventure of it—not because I have not choice.

OK, I gotta go do something physical. If George isn't incentive or inspiration enough, the waddle-and-lean people are. I see them mostly at the supermarket. They waddle rather than walk.

Their stride cannot be called "stride" anymore. In fact, it almost seems to be fighting against itself. Their very form of self-propulsion seems an internal contradiction.

Forward-no-sideways-no-forward-no-sideways. Stop. Lean. Forward-no-sideways-no-forward-no-sideways. Stop. Lean.

They are the ones who claim a shopping cart as fully their own. They lean on the push bar and seem almost to refuse to leave that position. Only reluctantly, if no clerk is nearby, will they, with deliberation and care, un-lean themselves just enough to reach for the mayo. It's a beautiful efficiency of motion. Just the barest needed. It's the new athleticism. Perhaps, in the not distant future, it will be an olympic event. Embodied by the truly expert, it's as graceful as rhythmic gymnastics, for example, which is there just as a tribute to the purest of human movement and energy and grace. But it, unlike the Mayo-Reach, had no practical purpose.

Rust

2012-01-16T23:22:00.000-08:00

Rust rides the edge of our consciousness. Sometimes we fall one way; sometimes the other.

It's where art meets junk.

One artist's passion is rusted remnants of others' lives. He kidnaps them and tortures them into the present. Or. He rescues them and counsels them into the beauty they thought they lost. He sweats and bleeds to change rust back.

All art is alchemy. But rust occupies a special place.

It's a metaphor, a symbol of the most profound kind since it touches us all everywhere and everyday.

Don't step on the rusty nail. But you may hang its photo in a gallery. If your car rusts, you are changed. If your tools are rusty, you have lost control.

Rust has its own life, but all but a few care at all, and then only in two ways: for science or money.

Rust, as it turns out, is a protective destruction, as maggots turned out to be inside wounds in wars before penicillin.

Rust is like the scab on your elbow: a boon and a burden.

Rust is conversion, the sun and the oceans emerging from between molecules and spinning them backward in the process. Rust is the pensive sun shining within things and crusting itself into a kind of meditation.

Rust is light scabbing and fire turned metallic and water caught tight. It's everything trying to return to star dust.

Festival

2012-01-15T21:53:00.000-08:00

Volunteering at the film festival and being a spectator at the same festival lead to a form of schizophrenia.

[insert here substantial and inclusive disclaimers about the actual neuro-medical condition of schizophrenia]

Thinking back over my experience this weekend, some notes. First, what we did:

We volunteered to work at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. This is its 10th year. It was started by SYRCL (South Yuba River Citizen's League) to raise money and spread information about the conservation of the South Yuba River (otherwise known here simply as The River) and by extension about conservation of wild lands in general. It has become something of a Sundance for environmentally oriented films. I imagine it hits town much the way Sundance hits Park City--or is it Jackson Hole? It fills all vacancies. Nevada City is a not a sleepy town on weekends as it is, but for this festival, it's on double Red Bulls.

It's a THING for locals, typically artistic or environmentally conscious, to volunteer. In exchange, besides the satisfaction of helping an effective local organization and an important local event, you get to see a day of movies.

We volunteered to work today, Sunday, the festival's last day. Both and I worked this morning. It was our first time as volunteers. Louise worked in the main kitchen, in the Foundry, primarily making and serving food for the VIP lounge. I worked as a pass checker at the Nevada Theater.

Because we worked the last day, our passes were for yesterday, Saturday. We saw a full morning and a full afternoon of movies at one of the 10 venues.

We, therefore, had the unique experience, at least among our friends, of being first-time festival goers and first-time volunteers. It was as though we were pure outsiders since we hadn't really attended before, at least not in the "festival" sense of preparing and planning our whole day around a series of movies.

We packed lunches and coffee and water and our programs and set off to find parking, which turned out to be relatively easy since we were early-ish. We adored films, endured the comings and goings of the audience, admired films, endured folding chairs, were inspired by films, and endured the need for bowel movements without the ability to leave. Then we ate lunch and did it again--for another 4 hours.

After the movies, we walked the town, found many people we knew, including several artists who were showing work related to the art walk associated with the festival. Our friend Denise grabbed Louise on the street to tell her about a breakthrough painting hanging in a wine-tasting room, serving as one of the art venues. She also had a piece at festival headquarters. One the way there, we meandered through the yogurt shop that has been a bar in town for decades and the wine tasting room that was a record store not long ago. Another friend we saw on the street was showing her work at the room. Then we found the XtraCycle booth being overseen by non other than Ross, one of the founders. We talked quite a bit and Louise test-rode a cargo bike for the first time--a Radish. She love it. Now she's beginning to understand why I like riding the Big Dummy.

Movies, folding chairs, movies, more movies, a dozen sidewalk encounters with friends, questions, booth encounters, Clif bars at festival HQ, Lefty's Bar and Grill, where Terra's art is hanging. Too crowded. Maxed. Home and hungry.

Today, we saw behind the scenes. The festival inside out. The people on headphones and radios. The hectic. Where's the MC? Did the pass checker show up? Who are you? Where's David? Miriam? Miriam? Will you switch to channel 6? The restroom's overflowing. The restroom's still overflowing! David is on his way. Thank goodness for the Briar Patch's free coffee for volunteers. Timing issues. Seating issues. Too cold. Too hot. May I see you pass? Oops, I left it at my friend's house, but I'm Flo.

Flo is the person in a fish costume who roams the festival and is its symbol. She actually showed up at our door and had forgotten to bring her pass. We had to send her to HQ to get a replacement. "You're doing a good job," she said. She actually meant it. Rick who teaches kids survival skills. Ragnar who installs energy efficient windows and is from Sweden. David Wong, local wildlife photographer. Some of my fellow volunteers.

Patrick, Katherine, Laurie, Susan, Steve, Melissa, some of those I knew coming through the door. And then I got to watch the last movie of the morning: Journey of the Universe.

That film, the last of my festival, perhaps not as memorable as With My Own Two Wheels or Life Ascending or even Stoked and Broke, it was nevertheless summarizing. It was about worlds within worlds. The seamless world that we inhabit and create and are--all at once. We know with our ability for symbols and symbolic representation. Yet we are participants, each of us a breath taken by the universe. Each of us a molecule, spinning and bumping against others like us and unlike us. The same. Unique. The scientist studying the brain of a fish is using the brain that the fish brain created to look back into herself.

Bicycles

2012-01-14T20:37:00.000-08:00

We spent the day at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. This is the first year we volunteered to help there. In exchange for volunteering, we get a pass for one day of the festival. Today was the day of our pass. We watched movies all day. The festival started last night (Fri). Today and tomorrow are the heart of it. There are morning, afternoon, and evening "sessions." Each session is at one of 10 venues around Nevada City. Each session sticks roughly to some kind of theme. Our first choice was the session devoted to bicycles. The other one we were drawn to was related to adventure and cold. Conveniently, they were both in the same venue, the Foundry.

We ate lunch outside on a day that would have been a quintessential spring day but for being January. The town was full of people everywhere. All of them interesting looking, many of them we knew, and all of them friendly and curious and either politically astute or artistic or both.

This was the quintessential Nevada City experience. It was a day for quintessence. Here's a summary list:

Discussion of life and cycling with one of the founders of XtraCycle.
Meeting with Steve and Susan Solinsky.
Meeting Denise Wey 20 times in her excitement over breakthrough painting.
Seeing Margie Miller on the street and being invited to her show.
Talking with Jerry about movies and photography.
Seeing the new photo gallery in town.
Seeing Denise's paintings and lots of other art.
Seeing Terra and others but not having time to talk.
Sharing festival experiences with Laurie and Sally from OR.
Seeing Patrick with his headset, being important.
Missing the Ginger Ninjas play by bike power, but seeing the setup.
The new Commercial St park-like strip. Very nice.

The afternoon highlights were "A Life Ascending" and "Stoked and Broke" for almost exactly opposite reasons.

But the morning session was my favorite. It was about bicycles and reminded me or renewed my enthusiasm for bikes. A key statement was Kipchoge's about riding his bike for peace. It was a tossed off statement that so universalized and abstracted the riding of a bike that it was probably lost on most.

However, I know that one person riding a bike to do errands in an environment that assumes cars and finds bikes almost invisible can be scary but important. I can be one of those people who does something dangerous and igniting, something that is never fully fledged in my lifetime, but changes the world for others--just by riding my Big Dummy to do errands.

It's simple. It's hard. But the overriding effect of the festival experience is to make me want to commit to doing such things.

As a fall-back position, we want to help support all the bicycle-related projects profiled in the movie "With My Own Two Wheels," which was the most inspirational and beautifully filmed of all we saw.

Wild and Worthy

2012-01-13T23:38:00.000-08:00

The following should be read aloud, especially on this start day of the Wild and Scenic Film Festival with its associated excitement and energy for natural things. It could be argued that the festival and the sensibility behind it are a direct result of Wordsworth, especially his writing about nature and its forms. Here writing about a forest he used to live near as a youth:

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

-- from "Tinern Abbey"

Some associated prose:

[A]ll good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a [person], who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.

The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; . . . Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge. . . .

--William Wordsworth, from preface to _Lyrical Ballads_, 1802

Is-ness

2012-01-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

There's an expression that my mind catches on, like a loose shirt on barbed wire, when I hear someone say it in conversation.

After the barbed phrase, I typically lose track of what was being communicated. You know the drill: the snap-to realization that you missed the last 10 seconds of what was said to you, so you try to do that TIVO thing of being attentive to what's being said now but at the same time rewind reality to hear from your aural memory buffer at least the gist of the immediate past.

We probably all have these kind of phrases. We all probably say ones that will hang someone else's mind, and we all have some that we catch on if someone says them to us.

I've known people to be stopped cold by pronunciations or perceived grammar errors. In fact, I've stopped the brains of people I thought I was talking to by simply saying the word "nuisance" in front of them. It's not the word; it's my pronunciation. I pronounce both parts of the diphthong "ui." In stead of what I've come to learn is the more expected "NYU-sance," I say, "NEW-eh-sance." For some people, it's a conversation buster.

If you find that you say this thing that I'm about to point out, don't be offended. I'm not saying it's wrong or even infelicitous. Necessarily. I was, after all, trained in the newer grammar systems, the ones based on descriptive linguistics. One way of stating the fundamental premise of descriptive linguistics is that a native speaker of a language cannot make mistakes.

The utterance of every native English speaker IS English. The history of every language is that of the historians, linguists, and school marms catching up with their rules and formulations what folk on the street know approximately a century before.

However, that said, native speakers are also, almost certainly, human. (I leave a little fudge room for Watson and Siri.) Humans crave patterns, familiarity, belonging. We, therefore, form habits that form the greased rails we can depend on day to day. We know where they go; we know what the ride feels like.

Habits form in language. Language is a shared medium. It's as if someone started a lump of clay around a room and each person contributed a degree of shaping or substance to it before it arrived at the kiln. We learned it initially from the purest form of imitation. We continue to learn from copying, mirroring, mimicking.

That's partly how this expression became as common as it is, I assume. But there's more. It's also the product of a certain slant of mind or personality. I may not be able to define that part, but I think the expression itself gives hints, as all our utterance choices do.

Now that I've written as much as I have and realized that I have no profound insight into causality or psychology, I'm out of time for this topic.

So I'll just give an example of the "Is Is" structure that I'm referring to. The sentences always begin with a form of this expletive-like phraseology (note: here "expletive" is the grammar sense, such as "there is…" or "it is…" lead-in structures): "What it is…"

The speaker is usually explaining something, such as "What the problem [solution, reason] is…" That lead-in phrase is followed by another "is" in the phrasing that hangs me up. For example, "What it is is a failure of the fuel injectors." I think the "what it is" stands in the speaker's mind as a unified, placeholding, noun-like structure. The place it's holding is the subject position in the sentence; therefore, as every native speaker knows, it must be followed by a verb. Thus, the second "is."

When the expression rolls off the tongue, it's as clear as any other English statement. It's structure can be said to conform to the standard patterns of our syntax. It is even linguistically creative in the sense of assembling a multiword structure into a phrase to function as a single part of speech. That's also a standard English characteristic.

I think what hangs me up is just wanting to say, "You just said 'is is." Did you hear it?" Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Words

2012-01-11T20:11:00.000-08:00

When we see words in our native language—if we speak a language that has a written form—what do we see?

If we are under the age of, say, 2, we see little that is distinguishable from other lines and colors and shapes around us. Starting somewhere around 2, we start to be aware of a world of communication that seems to stitch together that other world of random sounds, color patches, shapes. sensations.

After that awareness begins, we can more clearly see an individual human forming. Our granddaughter, Skylar, has turned that corner. She is in the fluid stage of right-brain language learning. She has already lost at least most of her ability to hear French as a native would or Navaho or Aleut. The sounds necessary have been flushed from her brain cells, which have been redirected to more important functions, such as learning English so she can finally understand what her parents have been saying.

As language develops, the area of the brain that manages our language ability shifts from right to left brain. That process is often simplified into right = creative and left = rigid; right = poetry and left = mathematics. It's not true. But there is an element of fact way back in there somewhere, but it's more a matter of how information is collected, processed, and stored than it is about the value of the product or the capabilities of the person.

All new information--whether language or math or quantum physics--arrives in a cloud that we just have to accept for a while before we feel we have some control over it. Control means we have a means to recall key elements and to communication about them. That simply means that our brains have filed information about that area in an organized way.

Why do we all speak English perfectly, no matter what rules our specific utterances heed, but not all of us can communicate effectively in mathematics with the same completely unconscious fluency? It's simple: we're immersed in language from birth. Most of us are not immersed in math. Mathematics may be a universal language, but not nearly as universal as English--or Ume Sami or Quechua.

Only a few cases exist, but a few humans have survived into adulthood without being immersed or significantly exposed to language at the critical period. They are stunted in language just as someone exposed to little math is stunted and stumbling in even basic math operations. Unfortunately, language is so fundamental that such people are not even complete human beings, though scientist still argue why that is. The critical point is that language defines humanness as we understand it in a way that mathematics does not.

After fully acquiring language ability, say by age 7, language is in the left brain, meaning a matured ability, one that we no longer have to manage consciously, like driving or bike riding or tying shoes.

So by adulthood, we see words as significances. We no longer see them as squiggles to be deciphered. We don't see them as physical at all. We've made them into abstractions.

Abstracting significance from something that inherently lacks significance is also fundamentally human. Perhaps it's indistinguishable from language, a meta view of language.

Examples: religion, political boundaries, flags, words.

Last night we played the game called Mad Gab. In it, a player reads a string of English words that sound like a common name or phrase. The player must guess the common phrase. For example, don't look below the following line, but say it aloud quickly:

Tan Cue Fort Aching Mike Hall

Did you peek? No answer here yet. Keep trying. Did you get it? Did you hear yourself saying, thank you for taking my call?

Some can do it more quickly than others, but most of us get stuck in the original words, especially because the game designer capitalizes each one, making it even more separate from an already non-English, disconnected string.

Until you learn to break yourself away from all you've learned from birth and you not only don't see "Tan" as a color, but don't even hear it as a single contiguous sound sequence, you have trouble blending it with the first part of "Cue" (tan + k) and then hear only the vowel sound of that word separately ("you").

The result in the game can be hilarious. Everyone else HEARS "thank you for taking my call" but in some halting, oddly accented dialect, and the speaker can't hear it at all, still stuck reading those capitalized words on the card.

One way of defining or identifying superior literature from other writing is that the author finds ways to give language a new fluidity. Sigurd Burkhardt said that great writers turn language into a plastic medium, as clay, paint, marble.

In the math world, a similar process happened with Einstein, Godel, Heisenberg, and others. The best example that I know enough about to explain in a rudimentary way is an idea incorporated in Godel's incompleteness theorems. The idea is that no system, say arithmetic, can analyze itself fully. There will always be some characteristic of the system that the system itself can't predict or prove. The mind-blower for me was the fact that he created a meta-mathematics, another system, another arithmetic, whose only purpose was to analyze mathematics. Godel's proof stands as one of the milestones of 20th century math.

Godel turned math into a plastic medium and remolded it. A few generations of the top mathematicians in the world, e.g., Bertrand Russell, tried to prove the completeness and consistency of mathematics and fell short. Godel showed why: they were wrong. They were blinded by their own language, mathematics.

Hmmm. I didn't get to where I thought I was going, but hey, I'm here.

Seeing

2012-01-10T23:32:00.001-08:00

Seeing is not seeing. Sometimes seeing is the opposite of seeing. Sometimes seeing is blindness.

You see the black profiles facing each other on the printed sheet of paper. Seeing those profiles, that vision, is exactly what prevents you from seeing the white candlestick between them.

Our eyes select positive space and "see." It's a choice, a choosing. That selecting creates negative space of what's left. If that degree of blindness can be produced by seeing--a 50% blindness--in a simple black-and-white field, how much more blindness is possible in a vast, complex landscape? And even more in the social landscape, into which we all stroll arrayed in our own suits of mirrored armor?

During 30 days canoeing and camping in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to photograph and see, at seemingly regular intervals, seeing something previously unseen would surprise me. No, not exactly surprise, though there was a soft shock each time. It was gentle. The shock was entirely interior, entirely silent.

Here's the process. Always I would not be looking for something. I would be either looking in general--or, more often, NOT looking. Not-looking was an infrequent occurrence since I was there to "see" and capture photographic images. But quite a bit of my days were spent tending to chores. Pumping water, prepping, cooking, putting away, washing dishes, washing clothes, washing myself took my eyes away from the task of seeing and many times simply brought sights to me. Vision would shift directions; instead of an act that required my action; it was an acceptance that required my inaction.

There's something in that simple realization that changes the shape of one's mind.

It is not spiritual. Seeing did not become vision. For it to be as real as it was and as grounding, it had to be "unimportant" or "insignificant," the unmagestic and unmonumental.

It was much more duh! than ah-ha!

There's a way in which you have to stop even trying to be the expert and become pure innocence, pure slate, and let yourself be written to. A new journal, opened the first time to the first page, about to make its first reveal of words.

There may be time for a hundred visions and revisions during toast and tea.

I would try to rewire the connection of meditative and conscious processes that produce seeing, simply for the sake of seeing differently. If what showed itself was something big, like light, a mountain peak, an entire section of horizon, I'd try to rewire my seeing larger, more inclusive, more whole. If the revelation was something smaller--like the nearly ubiquitous and therefore nearly invisible elkhorn lichen, or the varicolored bear-berry leaves, or the yellowing single blades of grass that grow only in the muskeg--then I'd go on a campaign to see smaller. Several large chunks of days, I spent walking around near camp, sometimes without camera, just practicing seeing small things.

Shapes of dried mud. Leaf-and-stone collages. Tiny etchings on a pebble. Sun crystals held inside dew on fireweed seeds.

Sometimes I'd walk with just my small camera or my macro lens to shape a new dialog between eye and camera.

The process of seeing eliminates; it doesn't have to be seen as deficiency, but as education. I would not have it another way. It's the haiku we live in.

Refuse to be expert or novice. Refuse to be other. That's the curriculum, the course, the test, and the grade.

If wilderness served no other purpose, that alone would be sufficient for shifting our entire economies away from making next year obsolete, away from anything that entices by transitory tastes, and toward planting gardens of seeing.

This is our planet--the unseen things and the process of learning to see. That's the reason we spin and how we earn sunlight.

The Zone

2012-01-09T21:23:00.000-08:00

I rode the Big Dummy (my cargo bike) to my volunteer work session this morning. Our weather has been mercilessly perfect, leaving no excuses for not doing outdoors things. We've also committed to riding several long organized (and some unorganized) rides this year.

We were inspired by watching the Ride the Sky movies. I don't think Louise ever had fantasies of racing with Lance or Levi, so I'm the one who's had to let those go over the years, downgrading ("not that there's anything wrong with that") through several levels and kinds of bike racing.

I enjoyed most of them. Time trialing was definitely the hardest and the one I was least good at, even though I had a coach for a year, working specifically on the TT. I did win the race that was my goal that year, but it was a team triathlon. If it had been a pure TT, I would have been, once again, a mid-packer.

My strongest event, at least the one I invested most time in was ultramarathon racing--i.e., races of over 200 miles. I was trying to qualify for the Race Across America. I didn't make it, but I did put in a lot of miles and learn a quite a bit that every once in a while I realize has permeated my life and transferred to non-athletic things--if there are such things.

Very directly, I've used some of the training and experience in my Grand Canyon trips, which call for long days of hiking alone and long nights of living with myself in the dark.

When I was part of it, the Ultramarathon Cycling Association rules were based in aloneness, individual effort. It was against those rules, for example, to have extended conversations with the support crew in the follow van or to ride with another cyclist. Drafting was forbidden. The qualifying races start at just over 500 miles. For those who want to qualify, there is no time for resting. It's a race, from start gun to finish line. The ones I did started in 105-degree Tucson, traveled to 7,000-foot-&-freezing Flagstaff and then back to Tucson. My first one took me 48 hours.

My crew and I let down with only 50 miles to go. That distance for me then was, literally, a warm-up ride. However, after riding 500 miles, my body was more than warmed up already. It needed its constant injections of energy. I drank a food replacement that gave me 500-1000 calories an hour.

My crew drove ahead quite a way, cavalier about our leap-frogging routine since we were almost to the finish line. I was riding through my second night. We were headed south on dead flat desert between Phoenix and Tucson. I could feel my energy draining, but I was used to that. The drain, however, got worse since I had not been as diligent as usual in watching out for myself. Eventually, I was undergoing a complete "bonk," as it's called in cycling. This one evolved quickly into an energy-depletion and dehydration near-coma. I was barely pedaling the bike. I could see my van's lights way up the road. There were no other cars. No cell phones or radio. I just had to ride. I forced all my attention onto the white line on the right edge of the road. It took all my effort to turn a pedal stroke at a time and to keep the bike aligned with that white line.

Then, as I stared straight down into my headlight's circle, the line began to float above the asphalt. I can still remember my reaction: perfectly evenly split between wonder and anxiety. It was a beautiful white-on-black 3-D image with my bike tires floating above it. But another part of my brain knew that it should not be 3D.

To get some perspective and shake the stare out of my eyes, I looked over into the desert. Flat. Nothing but cactus. Barrels down low and saguaros up high, arms outstretched. And then the cactuses started moving. They surged toward me, threateningly, it seemed to me. I turned back to the hovering white line and mentally struggled to flatten it.

After what seemed an hour, I limped into where my support crew as in celebratory mood. As soon as they saw my face, they stopped. I'm sure I looked as if I belonged in a world of floating pavement and demon cactuses. A land of cycling ghosts. A half hour later, I was back on my bike and finished just after dawn.

My long-time training partner in that era was John. He and I got to know each other so well as riders that we could literally see and feel when we did what we called dropping into the zone. We both knew what it meant in our experiences: that point when you become unified, seamless with your effort. When you stop struggling, trying, thinking, resisting and settle into the effort. This is what I'm doing. This is what I'm here for. Da.

We could sense it in each other when sharing pulls out on long rides. When we sensed it in the other while he was in the front, we knew not to come around and take the lead. We both knew that magic feeling of bottomless legs and energy. We needed no help. We could ride forever. We wanted to pull whoever was behind us to the horizon and beyond.

Many times I rode behind John after we'd traded pulls for hours, perhaps, but then something would happen. Subtle. But I could both see a slight change in his body and I could certainly sense the change of something else. Some energy aura or something. We never named it. But I would just know, he'd dropped and I not only would not come around to pull, I would not speak.

Many times, he would come around after I'd been in front for so long that I had lost track of time completely. It may have been nearly an hour, but felt like a minute. He would say that he had sensed I was in the zone, and he was always right.

John and I also had this one other thing, come to think of it. We never seemed to get tired at the same time. One of us always had energy. We both had lots of times when we were depleted and needed the other one to pull us home.

Riding up Pine St this morning, I was pushing on the Big Dummy pedals, not entirely certain that I'd make it, feeling the last 2 days of riding, the start of our training for this year. I was fighting the image of myself getting off the bike and pushing it. I resisted. I avoided. I hoped. I worked on my technique. Smoother circles, back in the saddle, slower cadence, loose back, pelvic pump, letting the bones pedal--all the techniques I'd learned over the years.

I was on the steepest pitch when it happened. I felt a slight slump in my body, like an old buddy coming around a corner. I relaxed. I had just dropped into that zone of acceptance of effort. It's not at all like the old days. Nothing about my effort or energy was bottomless, but some part of that experience was still there. The combination of physical and mental ability to accept the effort the moment requires and just ride.

Meta #1

2012-01-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

Meta, part 1

Once upon a time, I was a closet math geek. I wasn't in the closet so much because I wanted to hide anything. It was more a matter of no one noticing.

I'm sure I bought and read comic books, but the book that stands out most from that junior-high era is one on Analytical Geometry. It stands out as a kind of secret-pleasure book. Again, secret only because no one else knew or cared to know.

As I recall, my most lingering encounter in that book was with polar graphing. I remember somehow getting enough money to buy a sheath of polar graph paper. I remember lots of hours of graphing things on that polar graph paper.

I have not even a glimmer of an idea of what analytical geometry is now. Well, maybe a glimmer, but that's it.

As for polar graphing, I hold an image of that blue-on-white graph paper with its polar point and concentric lines and radiating axes. But what to do with it, I'd have no idea. But again, a glimmer--the aura of understanding.

I have a circumferential feel of an understanding for such things now.

Such a slippery, vague, unsubstantiated, disconnected, and non-responsible "understanding" can be dangerous. It can be like "understanding" Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in the way that people with political agendas, such as the New Age one, can appropriate and expound with a dead certainty when only the misshapen nugget of the earlier profundity exists deep inside their layers of accreted nacre of their polemic.

Mine may be no different, but there is one difference. Though I hold it as an important touchstone, a truth meter of sorts, a perspective generator--I do not propound it to others as any degree of absolute. I know it's purely private to me in function and importance.

I guess that's hard to do for some. Hold and uphold elements and understandings that are both profoundly and fundamentally life-shaping, but are not shared by anyone else in the world.

We crave confirmation and company, especially at those levels. Witness: religions, political parties, all of Joseph Campbell's work.

That's not where I meant to go here. Something veered and circled. Something that started purely X-Y became polar. Thus this is part one of some, probably, transcendental number of parts, in one of which, the idea of meta will be addressed directly.

Perhaps.

Pacman

2012-01-07T21:23:00.000-08:00

She put a hesitant quarter in the Pacman game table in the restaurant waiting room. Her salt-and-pepper hair was thick and high, pulled back into an inexact accumulation--not a ponytail, not clasped, not braided, not smooth. Her hair was her crown, perhaps, once, her glory. Though pulled back, it was thick enough to crowd around her face, shielding it from easy access or direct scrutiny. What showed of her face suggested a reason. Her eyes darted the furtiveness of the very shy, the uncomfortably insecure. Her skin was a darkish color that was not swarthy, nor olive, nor tanned. It seemed more to be simply cloudy somehow, as if light itself pulled away from the abundance of deep pock marks.

She was not tall. Her growth had been just barely successful at establishing her this side of dwarfism. Her weight, held almost exclusively in her hips added to the overall effect. Gravity was not her friend. Some people stand beyond their actual size. She seemed to hover just below herself.

I was sorry that we'd sat down across from her, the other side of the Pacman machine. I'm sure she had just moved over there, drawn by a game she'd once been good at, not just killing time, but reliving, recovering something--youth, competence, glory?

Most of this I am projecting. Much of these observations are almost certainly wrong and almost certainly about myself. My curiosity is not in journalistic verite, but in conjunctions, borders. Where is the dividing line between me and her? I don't know. This is my poking at the invisible wall.

I want to give her the privacy of her unwatched game. Pacman might be her dance. I can remember the letting go, the dance of the eye and hand. At one point I could play Pacman and never lose. I could live inside the pattern of that dance.

But my eyes look just as she loses a round--the withering sound effects accompanying the dissolving character that is her in stage-one defeat. I want to leave or say something bonding and supportive. But I don't. I can't. I wouldn't know what to say. I was afraid of interfering.

Soon she loses, announcing her loss of skills, by mentioning her former possession of skills, as she returned to sit with her friends.

I saw her at the lunch stop on the bike ride the next day. She's a cyclist. Not a likely one. Not one someone would pick as athletic from a crowd. She was doing what only a tiny percent of humans do, choosing to propel herself over car-like mileage and roadways by her own power. Braving rain, traffic, hills, wind, she was there. My only sight of her was as she walked through my view from food table to friends. Once again, in and out of my life--probably forever. A thousand others passed more prominently, more colorfully, for longer duration through my eyes that day. Why don't I remember them?

She scolds me by her being for my good fortune and my too-frequent lack of appreciation. My dwelling on the superficial. My height. My maleness. My athleticism (such as it is--or was). My tall, aggressive pride in myself and my accomplishments.

I'm doing things that are easy for me. I'm not sticking my neck out other than in ways I choose. I choose how and when and define why. I don't have to wake up each day with thorny wishes and lie empty each night. I don't have to look in a mirror and see something other than a face. The distorted clothes I have to shop for are at the other end of distortion, but closing the gap. I have usually not had to dread wearing lycra, but we may be indistinguishable next year.

I want to get inside her in a way so I can understand something that I can't even conceive of now. But I can't fit. I'd probably not like it anyway. I'm not strong enough. I'd probably find out that I am the issue, that she is happy, married, appreciated, respected, content, accomplished socially, intellectually, and physically.

But whatever she--the actual woman--is, she left me behind with an image and skeleton of a story that I will continue to read and mull until I enfold it completely and it disappears inside me, perhaps brought out again by the next encounter. Or until, in primary colors and withering brightness, it dissolves forever.

Investing

2012-01-06T22:47:00.001-08:00

Investing

Older writing revisited. As Louise and I were in the final stages of buying the house where we live now, I was alone on a weekend in Sacramento, cleaning the house down there when I wrote this note.

Football is ridiculous. Basketball is absurd. Soccer--why bother? (I'll not mention baseball; I like baseball.)

It's Saturday. I was going to take a break and see what's on TV. I rarely am home on a Saturday morning. I'm usually riding my bike. I first thought football--pro. Then I realized that colleges own Saturday on TV, so I'll try to watch some college football. Then I realized the season's over. All but the bowl games.

For most college teams and their followers, the climax is past--mostly long past. For a few it has yet to come--those few invited to bowls.

For a while, a wave of indifference enveloped me, underpinned by a riptide of meaninglessness.

For those outside like me, the college football season is a waste of airtime, money, beer, or human bodies and minds. But for many--not just those who achieve Heismans, TV time, and championships--the college season is its own literature. Each season a volume in a combination dictionary and history that can be referred to and referenced--even in silence--for a lifetime. Sometimes, many lifetimes.

Why? It's a human characteristic--maybe as fundamental as language: investing.

Stocks, college, art, ourselves, our next meal, the future of the planet. We are all day traders in some commodity.

Abe and Emily

2012-01-05T19:28:00.000-08:00

More on Gettysburg. NPR has an eyewitness account of the address.

Sometimes, looking closely at something done well can be instructive. For anyone wanting to write or read better, a few sentences from Abe's short talk are among the best guideposts.

The first sentence: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Why mess around with that long way of saying 87 years? That first phrase can be argued to be unnecessarily round-about or even unnecessary. However, it's a lesson in itself. The lesson is context versus right and wrong. There are times to say 87 years, and I'm sure Abe said it that way, especially in conversation. This line was not uttered in a conversation. It was said to thousands at a formal, even somber, event.

That circumstance calls for 2 things. (BTW, I'm sure I'm not clear-headed enough to have thought of this, other than with a couple hundred years' retrospect.) First, some slow introductory words that will not cause the audience to be lost if they are missed and serve the purpose of letting the audience know that you are talking. Even a president has to deal with the general inability to pay attention. Second, a formal occasion craves words that do not even smell like ordinary words.

Lincoln knew what he was doing. After 2 HOURS of oration ahead of him, he also probably recognized the "out and back" syndrome, the "less is more" syndrome, or maybe he was just tired. However, the speech was written. He cannot be accused, though he seems to have improvised a bit, of not knowing his audience or his circumstances.

Everything he did (writing and speaking) and said (THE Speech) proclaims everything else. His contemporary Emily Dickinson never published in her lifetime. She sent poems out as letters to friends. The appearance of the exact same poem decades apart in separate letters is a key to establishing her as America's premiere poet. She knew when things were finished.

Gettysburg

2012-01-04T19:07:00.000-08:00

Waiting for acupuncture today, I reread the Gettysburg Address (it's free on iBooks). No wonder it's studied. It's structure is crystalline. It's a written jewel. Add to the pure writing, the power and emotions of the occasion and situation, and then toss in the tiny ironic pin-prick of the "The world will little note, nor long remember" passage (I suspect more know the Address than know about the battle or the cemetery), and the Address is a treasure worth studying, reading aloud, savoring. One of my favorite writing exercises in school involved rewriting famous quotes in other words—typically bureaucratese, gobbledy-gook, or maybe just simple modern English. So I pulled out a couple of sentences and did some language stretches

Lincoln:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Updated:

87 years ago this country was created. It was dedicated to liberty and equality.

Bloated:

It has been the equivalent of four and a half generations that have arrived, thrived, and settled into age since the forefathers of all of us here wrested this land from wilderness, survived savages, endured hardships that are today unimaginable, and crafted the processes and created the structures that became this country.

Lincoln:

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Updated:

People in the future will probably not remember, much less pay heed to what I'm saying, but they can not forget what the soldiers did.

Bloated:

Not a single solitary soul among us all will long pay obeisance to these words I utter before you at this hallowed and humbling ceremony today, if, indeed, they remember a single word among any of these, but each and every one of those who come after us must never forget the glorious actions and sacrifices that our brave men and women of the armed forces made on this battleground. [I added the more modern cliché for citing the military.]

Music

2012-01-03T21:02:00.001-08:00

Music

By "music," I mean music, of course, but perhaps leaning toward the bass.

I've now lent out my copy of the Beatles Anthology a couple of times to friends who were facing long-term recuperation. In each case, they loved it. They raved. They thrived on it. I think it was critical that they were both from the Beatles era. But it does seem as though others would be enticed by the combination of story, personality, and music. Especially, now that I've been watching it again.

My view of it is different from when I couldn't stop watching it about 10 years ago when it came out. Two things are different: (1) I care more about the details of their development and (2) I literally can't get enough of watching Paul play bass.

The reasons: (1) I'm older and (2) I'm trying to play bass.

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell uses the Beatles' early career as an example of the chance occurrences that allow us to get enough experience to become masters in a craft.

I'm nearly constantly thinking of the 10,000 hours he holds up as a benchmark. That's the boundary between dilettante and master.

I know I don't have the hours on bass and probably won't get them until I approach 100. I have quite a few more in photography, but it seems as though I just started this year at something like professional level. That's owing mainly to two local teachers — David Arnold and Jim Beckett — from whom I learned to use the digital darkroom (Photoshop and my printer) and to use light.

I've reconciled myself to the fact that I'll do what I do and grow as far as I can. I also have to realize that my eye is what it is. I'm studying more photographers and their work. Many of them nudge my eye, my technique, my thinking. All of them add to my experience. My thinking flutters between just photographing what I want and berating myself for not knowing more sooner.

In photography, I can at least, in most cases, imagine taking the photos I see. I understand them in technique or aesthetic to some extent.

In bass playing, I can't do any of that. Trying to learn something about playing bass by watching Paul McCartney is like trying to learn wisdom by watching a drawing of the Buddha. Nothing happens. Paul's bass playing is so effortless that I can't tell a thing.

The same happened when I took lessons from Mike Palmer, bassist for Mumbo Gumbo. I've known Mike since he was a bike mechanic 25 years ago. Each time he'd demonstrate a pattern, it was as if I were trying to converse with someone whose language I wanted to understand, someone I liked, but someone whom I couldn't understand at all. Until I was more confident, I just smiled and nodded. Then I realized that his movements were so subtle that I couldn't see them.

Imagine this: someone says, "Watch this" and then freezes. After a few seconds of nothing, you're asked, "Get it?" That's what my lessons felt like at first.

I eventually was figuring out that that very lack of movement was one of the main things I had to learn. That fact was articulated most directly by Nina Gerber right at the time I needed to (and was ready to) hear it. She was at our house for just a few minutes following a session with Louise. She's one of those people I have no idea what to say to. She's a legend to many people, especially those of us raised in music on the 60s and 70s era of KPFA, the era when Kate Wolf reigned as queen of northern California folk music. Nina Gerber was everywhere, playing with everybody. Northern California and KPFA were her Hamburg, I guess.

When I took a cross-country skiing class, our instructor said one thing that has stayed with me for 40 years. After our initial training in basic techniques, he sent us out on the trek that would end the lesson--an out-and-back ski of just a few miles. He sent us off by saying, "You'll all be much better on the way back. By then, your bodies will be tired and they'll naturally find the most efficient way of skiing." It was true.

I practice bass for, say, 15 minutes, and I can feel the ache in my wrist and the strings on my fingers. I can't imagine even playing one full song with all the movement — AND the singing — that Paul does. I can't imagine playing a full set, much less doing what the Beatles did in Hamburg.

But I'm right on the cusp of beginning to understand the concept of movements so efficient they can't be seen. I also understand that I can't really "work" on them. I just have to play myself out and let my fingers find the way back as efficiently as they can.

Out and back. Out and back...

Focus

2012-01-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

Focus

Sinus congestion dulls my focus today. Why can't that be the good kind of soft focus, like in photographs, the ones that make movie stars mysterious and alluring?

Three photographs in front of me have areas that are out of focus. The subjects are a spider, a rose, and cheap beads. They form a mini-study in focus.

The spider is shot so that there is only a narrow band of sharp focus. The focus drops off quickly in front and behind. A black widow takes up most of the left third. Its head is just inside the area of sharp focus. The rest--forward legs, rearward legs, thorax, and huge black abdomen--are blurred. Part of the blur is movement. The spider is walking. Part of it is the effect of the lens. Both have the effect of giving the spider dimension and movement, even though it's just a piece of paper. The other aspect that helps the spider image is the fabric the spider is crawling on. It's a loose weave of bright, primary colors. The fall-off of focus gives the fabric, and therefore the photograph, depth. Because the fabric is uneven, with the spider in a kind of low spot, the fabric fills the background and is completely out of focus. That eliminates any distractions, simplifying the image to near icon status. It also adds depth by being in such strong contrast to the area of focus.

Because the band of focus is at a slight diagonal and not purely horizontal across the image, the eye is led in by the nearer focus on the lower left toward the farther focus on the middle right side. Led right into the spider. That "motion" of the eye adds both a drama and to the sense of depth.

The photo of a rose has no hard focus. It was taken with a LensBaby, an inexpensive, inherently soft-focusing lens. But the rose is shown straight on, looking into the bloom. It's iconic. It's a known. It's a cliche, even. The photo, however, avoids cliche by letting the iconic shape speak for itself. The color says rose; the shape says rose. The photographer and all the camera equipment seem just to get out of the way of roseness. However, the effect is actually a result of that equipment, especially the lens. The composition is simple. The rose sits about one-third in from the right. Classic. The image does not have the apparent depth of the spider image. It does not need it; in fact, it's better served without exaggerated depth. The background is nearly uniform in un-focus. It's just big color patches. They are about the same tonal value as the rose, which is not specially lighted. It therefore seems just barely to emerge from the darker values around it, pulled out as a gentle surprise, not a poke in the face. It's organic and iconic at once. That combo along with the iconic image make this photo work--along with the glamorous soft-focus on the rose.

The beads photo has some depth and some movement, but, again, very different from the other two. It has a strongly vertical string of beads in sharp focus. They are in about a third from the left and fill the frame top to bottom. That could create an undesirable separation in the image. What keeps that from happening? Several things: the fact that only partial beads are shown top and bottom, giving the feeling of continuation instead of finality; the shadowing of a similar shape and color of out-of-focus string next to it with some movement in it; the lighting on the beads, giving side to side depth and dimension; and the fact that they are just slightly off true vertical. The image is also balanced by the other moving beads, clearly more brightly colored, brightly lighted, and moving. Their position balances the elements in the image so that it does not seem to lean to one side or the other though it's not symmetrical. The photo has a kind of depth created by the mix of elements. The eye goes to an area of sharp focus. In this case, the darker-colored and dramatically side-lighted violet beads. They get the first attention, but the eye also goes to lightness and bright colors. The light and brightness area ll in the out-of-focus areas. That contrast creates just enough (pleasant) tension that the eye enjoys the juxtaposition and balance. The fact that the background is pure black simplifies the shapes and colors and allows those opposite and potentially discordant qualities to balance and reconcile themselves (to paraphrase Coleridge's definition of poetry).

Sinus-schminus.

A Hmong

2012-01-01T21:07:00.000-08:00

An enticing article in the NYT about Hmong writers. So I wondered, as you might be, what's the big deal? Despite the downfall of the book, everybody seem to be a writer these days.

The hooking idea is that the Hmong in the U.S. of fully sentient age (20-30ish) are the first generation with a written language. There isn't a written version of Hmong. What's it like to be a fluent speaker in a language that can't be written? What's it like to be a fluent writer in a completely different language from the one your parents speak?

It would be yet another well-done article with good photos except for the mirrors-in-mirrors reflections it stirs.

I'm sure there are exemptions among the Hmong. Some parents can read English and make their previous lives current for their children. Some can probably understand completely the poems their children write. But I suspect they're as human as we are.

No generation speaks the same language as the parents. But the differences are not as worthy of a NYT story. I think we can all be instructed by the Hmong story. It is a potential pebble in the pond of thought.

How aware are we of our communication with any others in our lives? How present in any conversation? It does not take separate languages or even separate generations. Having access to a written language is a beautiful tool. It's not the only tool and not the only beauty--except when used well.

I hope that the ripples from that story continue here and elsewhere throughout this year. And more.