CCXX - misadventure

Samsung transcribes: A Horse with No Name

https://soundcloud.com/ian-ho/horse-with-no-name-1482018 

Who were this were during their attackers her and send the 1st thing the moon scared the asantu 7 the get there 00 hair to do the the What's to to see Beryl vents 7 it there was and the the the the and the the the and the the the the the the the the 1000 go to the the the the alarm

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
Cos' there ain't no one for to give you no pain
(la, la, la la la la la,
la la la, la, la la la la)

CCXIX - Mister Rogers

I've never liked poetry that much. It's so annoying. It has the potential, of course, but so often it's just so annoying. I feel it has an artificial measure and fragmented quality about it. Sentences are supposed to flow from one word to another, one idea to another, one breath to another. Poetry stilts that. And it's ever so cryptic, so much duality, triunality, sometimes it isn't clear that the poet himself has thought clearly of what he is trying to say, nor the words with which to say it. And the imagery is far-flung, melded from the bizarre. Words are employed in unfathomable, painful new ways. Themes of melancholy, loss, bitterness abound. I need to hear a voice speaking, and I don't get that unless I get a hint of the character speaking the poem's lines. I've never liked poetry that much.

But I've never heard a poem by Mister Rogers, and he is a poet to me. I've never been touched by a poet, but Mister Rogers' poem has me.

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?

Oh, it's you I like. (It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood ...)

CCXVIII - growing old is like that i think

There comes a time in every sunset when you decide to turn away, from the phosphorescent, coruscant, illumination. It's hard to imagine a sky so lovely, peach, orange, red hues, blue, purple and forest around the corners. Every tuft and nook in the clouds taking an edge of light, blobbing shadows each to their own measure, glow and burble. Even to the eyes, the most direct of senses, it is marvelous, effulgent, unbelievable. If you close your eyes, the memory is magnificent, towering.

Better to end it early, than suffer an ignoble, fading exit. So you turn away, and your step is heavy, slow, grave. Pebbles crunch lightly as they roil and resettle under your feet, grinding into the gravel. Half shoeprints form, crumble. At the intersection, the bustle of traffic, industrial light directed from polished headlamps, little plaintive squeaks of rubber brakes, once again gain your attention.

But there comes a moment, just before you round the bend, when you yearn to turn and see again the lighted sky, catch another sight. It's still there, isn't it? It's still a physical sliver of the world that exists wherever the sun slips just under the spherical horizon of the earth, cloud, elevation, incline, humidity, foliage, etc. permitting. A paltry few seconds ago, it was all there, and magnificence can't just evaporate. It means something to be great, to comprise art, by some law of the universe that is the self-constituted makings of immortality.

But don't check, it's still better to go on, home. Your impression, reverie, nostalgia does the rest, forever in the visual idea. Keep a geist of the glory in your heart, cherished. Remember old friends, past loves, forlorn stuff in forgotten songs. And step forward with balance in your heart.

CCXVII - moments

When i think of you which happens sometimes in a beautiful moment of serenity and often my music is playing i think of you next to me and I'm breathing in slowly and then I'm breathing out slowly and you're there in some form with me and I'm cherishing the moment being there with you and my eyes are open but I'm not looking at anything except you and i in my mind and kinda it seems then my eyes are really closed but inside my eyes are open as well and i know that it could be the case that you're there but it isn't the case and me being all of me at this exact moment being who i am i don't know if I'm enough and all there but i trust in the monent that I'm all there and it's somehow enough of me now and i trust in that me and i see clearly everything as it was as it should be and as it is as it should be even as it is as it always is well you know they say hope springs eternal but to me it always seems to turn back and i hope in so many words i hope it's you even as it is though it isn't really but that's ok because i like to think about you this way you and me here me and you here somehow just being here and that's it that's the moment.

CCXVI - what is life

It's hard to learn about the universe, the grand physics ordering all these swathes of gas, cosmic oddities, powers and chunks of rock, that immense sphere of prolific fusion energy, our star, our ancient blue planet, out of the immaculate conditions of iterative solar and terrestrial formation, the mysterious, bewildering, brilliant start of biological L I F E, its grubby attempts to endure and survive through all the turmoil and skulduggery its host land musters out of its own nature, its tremendous, single-minded persistence, its collective ancestral will to live and will to power, spanning cycles of generations, life and death, its devastatingly wonderful machinery powering evolution of familiae, genera, species, and the meagre skinflint of that ape, homo sapiens' trampling on this earth, and not be blown away, just blown away by it all.

I've said this before, yet this always takes my mind away: one part in two billion of the sun's energy falls on the earth. Out of that sliver of juice, all of life as we have it is given. I honestly can't deal with that knowledge.

CCXV - snowflake

I was at the National Gallery on Saturday. I actually find the National Museum more ... lovely in its old timey way (they also had an exhibit with impressionist art in 2012). It was my second time to this exhibit with the National Gallery. They brought in paintings from the Musée d'Orsay. The interesting thing about this particular style of painting, the so-called impressionists, is that originally, most of their kind were rejected by a kind of uppity panel of Parisian art jurists, who were more used to the classical style of the great David. So Napoleon III, nephew of that Napoleon, started a Salon des Refusés for these rejected artwork. And you know, by and large, the public became enamored with this slightly surreal new style of painting, more dreamy than the romantics, a little bit less stark than the realists, a kind that went after essences and spirits of things, presented in a little haziness, melding life and mystery, all in a painterly style, giving up slightly the high techniques of the old masters, but only to escape their stuffiness, to present better their ideas of the imprecise interplay of light and shadow, a more fluid interpretation of the elements in a scene. They had the great geniuses on their side, Delacroix (perhaps he wouldn't mind being lumped with this lot!), Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Signac, Monet (I don't personally like Monet, but he is definitely one of this group). I find that I think about the art better when I went this second time. The first time, I kinda was a little driven to making sure I traversed every corner, taking photos of everything I liked. It was like chasing Pokémon. I enjoyed just being a goer-thinker this time. You know, there's a little in every painting that reveals new things to you. Everything is important, everything fits into the composition, makes the ghost in the machine. And so often you realise it's you that kinda wakes up to the magic of the painting, like you can feel yourself growing up as the painting shows you who you are, what you know about life, beauty and art, skill, love and technique. Art, books, music ... you have to take out something deep inside your soul to grasp their deep architecture, rhythms and resonances.

Take this painting (Gustave Caillebotte, Rooftops in the Snow [Snow Effect]), 1878). I didn't think much of it at first, and to be honest, I think you'd forgive me, with all the other artwork that was on (there were what, three Manets and three Cezannes?). But you know, it kinda occurred to me that this was a view of reality for someone out there. People lived in this world, going about their business, occupying these homes, working their little occupations, building their little lives. Once in a while, waking up to cold, dark snowbound days. What if there was a war, yeah they'd have to gather as conscripts, fight to defend their towns and cities, go far, far places to die to a cruel, remorseless bullet, bleed to death on a hill, or in a mud filled gutter. What if you were a snowflake falling on this city, and that snowflake became a man. Could you do it, could you shoot another man in this picture, his blood spilling out onto the snow, forever changing the fabric of this painting, the strings that weave together into this world? I don't know, I don't think I could. Whatever the casus belli.

CCXIV - guesswork

How do you learn a new word? Say a word you've never heard of before. Rubric. Parse. Jargon. Juxtaposition. God, when I read Augusto Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme, he's literally making up new words, part English, Spanish and indigenous Guarani. It's confusing. But he leaves hints as to what they mean. That's the secret. You guess what the words mean by their context, and you think, ok, maybe a similar word or phrase could be substituted there. Framework. Break down into little pieces, like a computer processor. Technical language. Side by side comparison. And so on. And by that process you apply the mental understanding of those concepts to the new word. You apply the mental characterisations, the potential uses and abuses, the possibility for doublespeak, hidden mirth, cryptic humor and subtextual intent. It evokes appropriate measures of memory, fear, anxiety, outrage, annoyance, envy, or perhaps the lighter elements. You understand.

That incidentally is what Steven Pinker warns about when he warns of the power of euphemisms (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011). When you use a euphemism, such as "collateral damage" instead of "civilian casualties", you're not only making it sound more palatable. To some extent, you're avoiding the natural way that people apply their mental, empathetic, contextual faculties. The message misses them by. Of course, add a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance reduction (a healthy tendency to avoid thinking horrible thoughts if possible), and these things just don't register. That's the true danger of doublespeak (shoutout to the great, and truly immortal, Orwell), censorship, re-shaping language, and so on.

I think it was Wittgenstein that reformulated, in his mildly absurd way, that words are equivalent to ideas.

"The move to thought, and thereafter to language, is perpetrated with the use of Wittgenstein’s famous idea that thoughts, and propositions, are pictures—“the picture is a model of reality” (TLP 2.12). Pictures are made up of elements that together constitute the picture. Each element represents an object, and the combination of elements in the picture represents the combination of objects in a state of affairs. The logical structure of the picture, whether in thought or in language, is isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs which it pictures."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#TracLogiPhil)