Life of Birds, random thoughts.

Gyokei Mochizuki




Birds fly.
Who has not dreamed this or wondered? What is shared in us that marvels at this potentiality we divested ourselves of so many millions of years ago. There were birds and there were mammals, and we have mostly gone our separate ways. We on the mundane ground, rational and plodding. They, in the heavens, climbing, soaring, diving, gliding.
The birds have an entire other force of nature to deal with, one that affects us only mundanely or in extremes. The cost to them is high. The must have hollow bones and feathers, must always maintain the flight systems - pruning, and most importantly must somehow strike balance between the energy needed to lose the earth and the weigh limits of doing so.
They do pay that cost and they are successful.

We live on a razor's edge of cost and benefit. I have always considered that 'the dismal science' was a suitable epithet for economics. Economists were pecuniary men struggling to understand and measure the ghost in the machine of our own making. Then there are economic philosophers reducing our experience to supply and demand, labor and production. Perhaps their limitation, or more likely my limitation, is assuming economics is a human driven affair.

There is much science lately on the connections between low caloric intake and longevity. Low calorie diet seems to blocks the enzymes that enhance cell death during metabolic stress. Cells, like engines, acquire energy by oxidizing fuels. It follows, somewhat, that a higher rate of consumption, through a complex system over time, will wear more quickly than a lower rate.

There is much debate over clean fuels and green energy. The reality is, if we wish to move fast and far, to fly and drive around, to lay wires and roads, then we will consume - burn and exhaust, like any engine. No amount of efficiency will eliminate that truth.

I am not saying we should not seek life and health, nor should we run rampant over the earth with our magnificent machines. I am only saying that we should know that everything, every movement, comes with cost. Then we will be able to measure the costs. We can be rapacious adventuring economists, we can be technologically wise economists. We can be glorious flying economists, we can be gentle restrained economists.





We will pass
birds will fly
the sun will burn












Anther opinion: I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.


Jack London

"Today"

There's a bare spot in my yard
Where the weeds used to be
If you'd ask then I'd tell you
It looks pretty dead to me

Over Coffee today I looked out on my plot
Some things, they say, need to be pulled
I put in a long hard day, broke a sweat
and a couple of shovels along the way

At least it was a place of pure live things
They fought their fights and served their gods
Striving in chaos bent and sharp
I must admit I miss the green

In the raw soil chickens scratch around
Well now those hens have a place to feed
Though they take more care than those old weeds
I do love fresh eggs - warm and brown

Things no one ever says when they are dying

It is typical for a person's thirties to be a period of labor and careerism. A period where the curse of Adam is experienced in full before mellowing into the more comfortable or less hope-full decade that follows. I am not atypical in that regard. What I have done differently is to try to live on the wisdom of my elders - not as advised but as collated and perceived.I have, over the years, internalized the aphorism: No one ever says, on their deathbed, "I wish I had spent more time at the office." Rather they say, "I wish I had spent more time with my family." Aside from the occasional exception, who can argue with that?

I have tried to take this deathbed wisdom and live my life accordingly. As in so many other things, it turns out I am a bit naive. Life is showing me that yes, I must prioritize labor and earning and collecting, as this serves my family who need the security and stability that I personally do not value so much.

So what gives with all those dying utterances? I don't doubt their veracity.

What has me pondering is the idea that you cannot learn a lesson early or without experience (my own idea or if not copyright, then independently arrived at). I have had this idea gnawing at me in the other direction as I have mourned the carefree young adulthood I did not experience as I set about early in family-making. That I know the vapid pleasures of the immediate, of the passion, of the appetite and of flesh will prove empty in their unsustainability and narcissism. That the short goals of the young and independent pale to the long goals of the more experienced who have wrapped their lives in the comfortable difficulties of a family. That art is the dull and impotent imitation of the recreation of self in a living lambent lineage (please don't attempt to convince otherwise - a lot of personal scaffolding rests on those assumptions). Though I know these things, it is knowledge without experience driving it, form without substance. Feels like paper knowledge.

So this wisdom from the future. Can I not live on this wisdom without the experience that drives it?



Well I spooled this thought out and wound it back in and then suddenly a new gold thread. Though the conditions of this statement are universal, the statement itself is not. Yes, folks do have to work more than they would like and spend time they would rather spend with their loved ones at tasks often mundane and in dull unnecessary competition. Yes economics is the dismal science, the study of the mud in the menial system we were born into. The people who speak of it are as dull as brick layers to me, but it is the system we are born into and good luck extricating yourself.
So work, labor, the indenture to capital is really just a vulgar tool for the actual job at hand, which is the taking care of and nurturing human life. Everyone must use this tool and with a family the more so. The lesson is already lived and therefore the pill not be taken less the bitterness proceed it. The bitterness and then the lesson are reserved for the people who follow certain worldly cues and supplant the motivation with undue ambition. The phrase is not for the person who must work when they would rather mete that time to the people they love. The phrase is for the people who confuse the tool with the task.
This is an aphorism I would have to experience to learn, because i have not yet created a need for the lesson, and hopefully never will.





note: I am not averse to working or careers, but the maintenance of certain comforts above what I require for the sake of normalcy, and also I resist systems I have no choice but to be a subject of (except physics).


Finally some quotes on work and money:

"Eating can be wonderful, but you also must digest and you must shit. There is nothing glamorous about shitting but good luck eating without it" - Me


"To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men." -G. K. Chesterton

"I am losing the precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men." John Muir

Sometimes you really have to get out

I was watching the documentary on the National Parks which I highly recommend - primarily the first one. It really made a national hero of John Muir, in the way Whitman and Melville might be. It also made me tear up a whole unmentionable bunch. These are sensitive times.

It fed as a tributary into my larger flow of thought - examining my history in a random schema - collective the higher moments of my life, the moments laced with the sublime and fissured with the dazzling paralysis of the immediate.
Nature a recurrent theme in these times of me. I thought I might put a few of these places together and hopefully soon, the other moments - less about place perhaps and then more evanescent.
For now these:


Bahia de Conception, Baja de Sur, Mexico

When I was younger and May parents still together, we spent a few summers roadtripping down the Baja peninsula. There was no black ribbon of a highway then, and no spring break. Cabo San Lucas was a fishing town that drew only sports-fisherman and my uncle, who expatriated after the death of my Aunt and Cousin in a boating accident. My family, five of us at that time, would drive down in the VW camper and leisurely drive and camp down through the campesinos, deserts, checkpoints and oasis, spend some time at Land's End and speed back up in a straight twenty hours in time for some urgency of life. I could include any of countless places, but this was always a special place for my dad - and a bit of a secret for a while. The island would become an isthmus at low tide. The bay was warm and walkable for half a mile and filled with crabs and stingray and evening luminescence. Around the island was on a small reef where we snorkeled with sharks, angelfish and manta-rays.


Joshua Tree National Park, CA
I grew up in deserts and vacationed in deserts. I lived in the Sonora in my very youth (know for the Saguaro cactus)and then the Mojave (known for the Joshua Tree). We spent a lot of time at Joshua Tree National Park doing inexplicably dangerous things on the rocks out there. I was never a climber as such but we did pursue what we called boldering. It had two incarnations. The first is the traditional understanding of the term: making short technical ascents on the small faces of boulders - climbing where a fall doesn't kill you. The second was our own term for running at reckless speeds across the tops of boulder fields sightlessly finding the next step like hopped up mountain goats. I don't know how may parents allowed this. Nothing compares to a sunrise at Joshua Tree.



Havasupai Falls Indian Reservation, AZ
This is a trip I did with my Church Group that I think was ostensibly a father-son event, though not strictly. My father was not present at the time so my mom came on my first backpacking trip. We had an amazing time of it. Down into the red stoned ravine, a close relative of the Grand Canyon then a forced march to base camp along the gathering streams and pass the Indian Reservation Center. Following day a hike to the falls. There is, under the falls an underwater cavern that holds air called the Blue Room. It is not, however, under the falls pictured, but under some smaller ones further downriver. We made the same mistake and spent an hour trying to spelunk under that water in a human chain. The march out was a challenge and some of us went back and assisted the slower and older with their packs like hopped up mountain goats. It was a small coming of age for me.






Mendocino Woodlands State Park, CA
Family Camp! My wife took me here when we started dating and we have not stopped going each year and now My boys have grown up here and the joy of joys is how they just vanish in the woodline as kids are intended, emerging grubby and hungry and maybe see them, but probably not. Fierce in their independence.
Redwoods, creek swims, dorky songs, cold nights. warm days.
Most people who go are like a second extended family and I wish the people I love who have not gone would come.




Big Sur, CA
I convinced my wife to get married here, at the Henry Miller library. Our wedding was actually enjoyable and filled with meanings of our choosing. The after-party was legendary. This has that memory and an earlier one. Some rare unburdened time in my life as I road tripped as I moved to the Bay from the desert without constraint of time or other. I took my VW bug all highways and turned the drive from seven hours to fourteen. It was as a drive that spanned time and gave me California through a chalice of memories - Bakersfield oil derricks, abandoned PCH mansions, and my then literary hero's final abode.
Listen To Beach Boys' Holland.


National Elk Refuge & the Grand Tetons
This photo is pretty much (but not as nice as) the view from out campsite. On our honeymoon we drove through Jackson during the annual chili cook-off and the antler festival. We went through the elk-refuse and camped out on a bluff in National Forest land. There was still snow on the ground. The view is it.


Yellowstone National Park, WY
Can you believe this is the picture I used? Go find your own awesome picture of Yellowstone. There are too many to choose. This is Gardener River Bridge. Under this side of the bridge on the far side of the river are two locks locked together and to the bridge. I put them there and if you see them you might recognize the initials.
Yellowstone was mind-altering. No photo does it justice. The colors are just more intense. The greens are different than greens should be. The animals have a contentment of living in a geothermal basin. We went hunting for wolves before dawn. We grew bored with bison and elk and then amazed and fascinated again. I am aquiver in reminiscence.


Tressel Bridge, Henry Cowell State Park, CA
This coming weekend, My eldest son an I are going on his first backpacking trip. Looking for good photos, I found this one and realized I had been there before on a Church trip that included SF and Alcatraz, Hearst Castle and the Santa Cruz Boardwalk!
The train was not running but we climbed this bridge. I am sure I will be able to include our coming trip to this list







It is also worth noting that military bases act as kinds of reserves. They are generally far flung and the regulations regarding their treatment are pretty severe. The following are places my enlistment has had me see:


Fort Jackson, South Carolina
Basic Training in a Southern August. At least I've seen a carolina Pine forest!+








Mubarak Military City, Egypt
Operation Brightstar 2008 held literally in BFE. See the pyramids. I did, in Cairo - a cosmopolitan city for four thousand years.









Puget Sound as seen from Fort Lewis WA
At NCO school this was the sight I got to see during my Land Navigation test. It actually surprised me to almost fall in it through some brush. I passed the test.









Fort Bliss TX (at New Mexico and Mexico Border), Near Franklin Mountain State Park
Sky for miles, blue on red. And thunderstorms like they should be. We were conducting pipeline training with Jet Fuel so the storm put the kibosh on that.









Spangdahlem Air Base Germany - Black forest
Brief layover returning from Egypt. Got some chance to wander about like a fairy tale creature. Do you know the route from Europe to the US goes over Greenland? We did it in the unpressurized cargo section of a C130. cold man.

Zeno's second paradox or my $60 cup of coffee

"anything but the bottom step of the ladder, it keeps getting higher and higher. Dawn comes soon enough for the working class, it keeps getting sooner or later. This is the game that moves as you play. How does it feel, how does it feel?" - X




I got a traffic ticket a while back. Nothing important, failure to yield and registration. Scheduled a date to appear - show proof. Correction cuts the fine in half. Well that appointment got lost in the shuffle, which apparently upsets the court to the tune of three hundred. I thought I might go on down and plea for lenience since no one was interested in hearing me through the phone. Of course they are only available through business hours, but I am fortunate to have a malleable schedule. The fellow in front of me has a similar problem, yet more exaggerated - a $25 dollar ticket has somehow managed to inflate to $1200. We both figure we can make an honest presentation to the court and pay more reasonable fees. Turns out, the court will not see you until you pay the fee in its entirety...got that. Then what are they going to do? Give it back?
I'm making installments.

Previous to this bucolic bureaucratic experience, I had though to splurge on a cup of coffee (get that - splurge). So I get through my first cup and figure its about time to feed the meter, but first the bathroom and when I return, lo and amazement - a parking ticket. 58 dollars.

Thats all prologue, because as much as all this inconveniences me and my family in our effort to climb out of our socioeconomic status, to surmount that lip of stability that comes from our particular circumstance, ability and life-choices - as much as it helps us maintain the current uncomfortable state of our finances - how is this system engaging those less fortunate. Or even those less able to make the wise life choices which I am so capable?
Consider someone making minimum wage, not to mention those making a more reasonable wage (say $15 an hour, working regular business hours full time as some of my former college educated coworkers did) What can this type of situation do to them?
What if you cannot get off work. What if you can and you lose that pay? What if you cant afford to pay and lose your privilege to drive? What if that's how you earn your income, or now you have to take public transit which adds an hour to your commute both ways? What if you have children in childcare and now have no practical way to pick them up and what does it matter because those extra two hours a day just pushed the cost benefit of childcare/work below water? et.al.

Zeno's second paradox is a situation where Hercules, starting after the tortoise, will never be able to catch it, as he must always travel 1/2 the distance before he can travel the whole, and each half will have its own half unto infinity.
The working person at the bottom, looking up, will find the incline forever and increasingly precipitous as they approach that point of stabilty.

Bible - the return

Job.
About two thirds of the way through the old testament, which could use some judicious editing, for content and redundancy.
According to my New American Bible: Catholic Mission Edition, Job is the first of the "wisdom books: which will also include Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach. (the last two are excluded in protestant bibles so I have not read them, same as the two Maccabees)

It is interesting that I randomly pick it up again after a bit of a hiatus - the Maccabees were like an overly violent film with unlikeable protagonists. I had to take a break.

Interesting because of the following day's Melvillian tone. Moby Dick concludes with Ishmael quoting of the book of Job to describe himself.

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"

Sunday with Melville

My wife left this morning. The baby and I roused ourselves early and went to get the children from my ex. Her partner was outside loading their car. He is a big guy. He knows this and uses it. I am directed inside. Its not my weekend. It’s the wrong day. I am not supposed to be there - a healthy interaction. I drove away directionless. Empty plan-less home. I drive us to church.
She left on a retreat, nothing official, just her and a friend. She planned this trip and then I was informed. Of course I don’t have a problem with it. It is a healthy idea. We have been having our problems. That happens, right? Normal. I didn’t think having a partner would be this difficult. Maybe partner is the wrong word. I should think of a different word, one that works.
My ex has been friendlier than I am accustomed. I get two days a week with the boys. Or they get two days a week with me. It is about their experience rather than mine. Except, they do not spend the first weekend of the month with me. It was decided they required a full weekend with their mom. I would rather they spend more time with us. I have to pay her support for the discrepancy.
We get to church and I take the baby to Sunday school. I walk into a lecture underway on Moby Dick. Captain Ahab represents totalitarianism. Is totalitarianism immortal or not? The preacher in the book sermonizes on spiritual subjectivism. He is played by Orson Wells in the film. He takes questions. Is subjectivism of myth antagonistic to the objectivism of subjective history as agreed upon? Is Melville a Jungian profit of modern geopolitical upheaval? I am disoriented and cannot find the thread of the conversation. I read Moby Dick last year. We leave quickly.

We went on a bike ride with the baby in the trailer. Bring the dog. Pick up some groceries and beer. The full moon rises over the peak. The sun sets over the bridge. We are going to dinner tonight. We are representing our family.

Winter's dying days

Two of my friends have parents dying - one of cancer, one of AIDs. One friend survived a suicide attempt and is coping with alcoholism. Two other friends are mourning a friend who died in a motorcycle crash. I am sure there is more.

We went to the San Bernadino Mountains for Christmas this year; my whole extended family was present. At least twenty people of varying relation at any given time. My grandparents, who are now great great grandparents, are in their late eighties. My grandfather has had a bypass this last year and my grandmother had open heart surgery leading to a coma and stroke. He used to build houses - built the majestic and spacious house we occupied over the holiday, build churches. She was a talent at anything she touched: knitting, quilting, painting, gardening, stained glass…

They are in good health all in all but we can see the end in clear sight - them and I and whomever else would care to. My grandmother, already deaf, is experiencing a progressive dementia. She has replaced a busy creative hand with a wandering compulsive tidiness. You can see it is hard on her. She is sharp even still. You can see its hard on my grandfather - no longer the faultless patriarch, for good and for bad. You can see the loss of self sufficiency challenging him, but the responsibility somehow remain. Somehow he still takes care of my grandmother.

They are like two refugees huddling together out on a cold and damp overhang - only each others’ complaining bodies for comfort, but somehow warm though not warm

My grandmother lays full on my grandfather in his easy chair - something i have never seen, and neither have I seen such contentment in him than at these times.

The life is in them - they are not haggard and pathetic. My grandfather cracks jokes and dons my grandmother’s bra when she has misplaced it. She proudly gives tours of the house to anyone fortunate enough o take the time. She used to show me what she was working on, now she shows what she had done.

Its hard on everyone, this life. They have a lot of faith and I envy them that.




This was the hill over my grandparents’ house. It was recently devastated by wood beetles








Old toad survives the snows

Everyone's suddenly a linguist

I there is the odd coincidence of the mind and consciousness that is causing me a potential sea change of perception. I have been thumbing through this book, Maps of the Mind, which in itself is pretty interesting. "Maps of the Mind is an excellent review volume that integrates and condenses many different perspectives concerning the nature of the human mind. Using the metaphor of a map, the author organizes the work of several prestigious authors and theorists into nine different levels, from the mechanistic and physiological to the paradigmatic and mythological." The pages are laid out in what could be an interpretation of conflict, but in fact each perspective is presented as building on the next.
Well, I was on a job and my friend was reading Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes. I inquires about it and skimmed it a bit because it looked interesting. Later that evening I came to the page in my book on the theories of Jaynes. What is more is that another friend at the same time, came to a reference to Jaynes in a book he was reading. Weird.
If not familiar with his theory, reduced to the point of near meaninglessness is that human consciousness is a recent development (appx 3000 years old), and before that, the two hemispheres of the brain did not communicate so well so that one side (left)could be said to be developing man's thoughts and the other side (right) was interpreted as audio hallucination, i.e. god, spirit, daemon etc. and was a thing that, though it did in fact have individual agency within a person, was to that person, a different voice.
Now, here's where I am amazed. immediately after the above experience, I was listening to a radiolab podcast on words. There was a segment on the fact that thought follows language that holds some water but I didn't entirely buy, and then there was this segment. A woman, a neurologist no less, has a stroke that shuts down half her brain. Her resulting experience is oneness, lack of self - she is having a stroke and does not act, because of the whole immersion. Yet she is not mindless, she is there in the experience and can recall it. Only the coming back in momentarily of her other hemisphere prompts her to act and saves her, yet she says that given a choice - she would return to that state.
I also just read an interesting article on the philosophy of David Foster Wallace, as he riffs throughout his career - mostly on Wittgenstein, but there are others. I opened many tabs to examine things mentioned (fitting, given DFW's footnotes upon footnotes). He was primarily a philosopher.
And of course a primary function of Wittgenstein - and much modern linguistical philosophy - is that there cannot be thought without language. two things strike me as odd about this, aside from experience:
Wittgenstein goes on to say that language is a social construct, which seems obvious. Thought, however, is a more solipsistic process. How can that be reconciled?
The other things, and I don't know the name for this specific logical fallacy, is that we can easily identify thoughts had that are not lingual. I have seen the argument that we could not identify those non lingual thoughts without language, but that is an opaque discussion, much the same as Wittgenstein's claim that all metaphysical (and emotional) language is nonsense.
Feel free to correct me, I am less than even a layman and tend to avoid straight philosophy.

Trees

I have been experiencing some notable synchronicity involving trees. I am reading Ovid's Metamorphosis which contains a few tree stories so far:
Myrrha is transformed to a myrrh tree after her incestuous relationship with her father.
Cyparissus who loved a deer and would walk with it in the woods. Hunting, he accidentally killed it and felt intense guilt and sorrow; he begged Apollo to let him mourn his dearest friend. Apollo granted his wish and turned into a cypress tree - today a sign of mourning and also one of my favorite trees.
Pyramus and Thisbe planned to meet under the mulberry tree, and that is where they died. Their blood stained the white berries burgundy. This story is the inspiration for Romeo & Juliet.
There is another that I cannot recall, but that really moved me. Anyway, I am enjoying Ovid.
I have encountered the story of the man who kills the oldest tree in the world, apotentially the oldest living being in the world - a 5000 year old bristlecone pine. He is an geologist studying climate change and he ends up studying salt basins (because of his deed?). It is amazing to think of accidentally destroying something that has witnessed time since known civilization.
So, this led to other research and baobab trees, as featured in the little prince and the African savanna, are potentially a thousand years older.
More amazing are clonal trees, which clone from pre-existing root systems. These are not so impressive on a mythical scale because they are not individual, but some aspen (as featured in John Denver songs) 'colonies' are estimated at at least 80,000 (& possibly as much as 1 million) years old. What is the consciousness of a tree? What is the consciousness of a tree colony?

I have also happened upon a few poems and songs, but for some reason, failed to annotate them so they are lost somewhere in my mind.
..and from Moby Dick there was something...

So this is an old (rather unfinished) poem from when I wrote poems. It needs a LOT of work, but here it is.

Night –
Night’s single talon wraps low around reaching tree branches-
A stretching Adam across black ceiling: forearm torn, knotted stiff.

Night’s thousand eyes strain to glimpse earth, penned angles -
clambering and falling wingless to ash and dust.

Night’s hemorrhage labors and conceives light –
Supersonic afterbirth of the sun:
Savant offspring, mayfly lifespan.

Night’s death falls staining the sky:
Neck coiled back in rigor mortis,
Red excrement left in the west


The Sun
He is born an orphan – inheritor to murder He
Burns with guilt and indiscretion

The Sun speeds unseen toward one thing,
Pursuing the western star – His own aborted brother

The sun sheds uncounted skins each day
Living off self, possessed by ends

The Sun shows His age in His eyes –
And like a feral dog, climbs
Mountains alone to Death

Trees –
Trees go naked in mourning – pulling hair in agony.

Trees gather bouquets for the dead, but stand
unmoved, unbowed. Only sighing new breath silently

Trees think always slowly
Deliberate and full
Of many questions

Tree reaches to the sky in agony of straight locked arms
Just one longer day and night?



So you've read it. (warning: poem spoiler) It is pretty much a consideration of what the mythology of trees might be, experiencing the rush of days and nights upon each other and the worship of the sun. For some reason, overlaid with analogies from Judeo/Christian mythologies. Don't ask me why. Well you can ask if you want




*****

Finally, there is a smog song, Rock Bottom Riser. At the time, Bill Callahan was dating Joanna Newsom, who lives/ed in Nevada City.I think perhaps that he is singing of or at least metaphorically referring to swimming in the Yuba River. When I see him, I will ask him.

I saw a gold ring
At the bottom of the river
Glinting at my foolish heart
So my foolish heart
Had to go diving
Diving, diving, diving
Into the murk

And from the bottom of the river
I looked up for the sun
Which had shattered in the water
And pieces were rained down
Like gold rings
That passed through my hands
As I thrashed and I grabbed
I started rising, rising, rising

I am a rock bottom riser...