My First Tentative Steps

My word become a thousand words for the day: Mercury. Word for both a planet (wanderer) and a god . Closest planet to the sun. Roman name for the messenger god, Hermes. Once considered by the ancient Greeks to be one of two planets which traced the same orbits about the sun. Hermes was the name for the elder evening manifestation and Apollo the name of the morning star. I wonder who chose to consolidate the names into Hermes (Mercury) rather than Apollo. Was the process gradual? A group effort which triumphed in the due course of time? Is there something essentially Mercurial than Apollonian about this planet? I suppose the manifestation at two parts of the day lends strength to the argument for Mercury (Hermes). After all, why would the god of light, clarity, order, harmony want to associate or habit a world which flirts with deep darkness? Perhaps because that world moves so perilously close to the source of all light and heat, Helios, the sun. Apollo's own light is Platonic tertiary real, bathing in the greater light of a sun itself the son of another sun...and so on. Is not the taste of pure light, sweetest bliss, worth the risk of flame? Maybe not. Where are you now, Apollo? Seeking wisdom from the usurped Pythian oracle?

Hermes (Mercury) is indeed light, swift, sure of foot, trickster God, slipping even out of his own name into another (Mercury). Neither intrinsically Roman nor Greek, probably not wholly the property of Egypt. He switches allegiance as the time dictates, and must have probably switched his name in the process. Where are you, Mercury (Hermes), today?

Surrealistic imagery unfolds: pine cones containing whole evenings within them, replete with constellations, space probes, and soft breezes...A brief trip out on to the web has not yielded me my prize: a picture that would transport the reader into my reverie. What artist would help me build my image? I haven't found the ideal helper, but I'm close to something. I envisioned a mountainous terrain populated by hardy trees, between the whorls of the hanging cones stars shining. I don't care to explore the symbolism, I will leave that to the Freudians out there. Rather, I would meditate on this profound idea of macro or large scale structures inhabiting the smaller spaces, smaller than the space of your cupped hands. Meditate, dwell, inhabit. I like these latter words...

Well, I think it's about time to go to bed. Good night!

I begin this post with a small memorial for my chidhoold friend who passed away. I shall provide you with his name: Kevin Farrell. I have this post used the word "friend", though I repeat that we were not very close-, we sometimes played together as children. Some invisible connection exists among people who have grown up with one another. I suppose this bond develops out of geographical proximity. The objects and experiences of a neighborhood embed themselves in the structures of our memories and perceptions and the imaginative projections of the future-past and future are then negotiated in the vortex of the present.

On the scale of the real, I am recalling wiffle balls, Charlie's crab apple tree, Mike's farm, his dog, Skippy, sunflowers growing on the corner plot, yellow buses visiting a corner with a stop sign, the lacework of branches running up and down the block. Within the matrix of associations, another child would occasionally enter, Kevin. I suppose our matrices overlapped. I certainly felt the loss the other night when I had first heard he passed away: 37 years old and dead of a heart attack. Not much more information, perhaps cholesterol was the culprit. Perhaps. There has been, there will be no official wake, no funeral. Kevin passes without ceremony into another existence; but he does not pass without my quiet and mournful reminiscences; he does not pass without my prayers for his safe keeping; he does not pass without my hope that he finds a greater and better existence. Certainly, John Donne writes profoundly when he compares loss to a permanent diminishing or lessening. Something has forever vanished from my life. Something it is which persists and continues...

For a reason not completely clear to me, imagery from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe appeared to me in relation to Kevin's passage. I do not wish to interpret the symbolism; rather I would convey my hopes, dreams, and desires about safe passage to a realm where animals speak and God presents himself in visceral, recognizable (though not expected) form. I often searched for portals to Narnia when a child. Before I even read the series, I wrote some stories with surprise passages to other places-, there where lay adventure, confidence, good friends, and noble causes, the possibility of defeat, the near inner certainty that all would be well, somehow work out in the end. I continue to search for those portals...

Meditations based on phrases (can one word be a phrase? perhaps if we consider invisible connotations and associations, then we travel further into organized texts...) and new ones for the day: form and content, a priori, death of a childhood companion, sulky clouds and sulkier jazz music). Well, I am wrestling with html coding techniques while simultaneously experiencing server issues. Frustrating to say the least. Before I walk away from the terminal with that feeling of defeat, I will sow a few more ideas. After all, I journey the blog to write or to unfold the words which percolate within and seek the light of day.

Syntax difficulties aside, I am struck by the contrast between what we end-users and programmers consider the difference between form and content. Check out the source code for this (or any other page). Now try to locate the precious metal we call textual content. There, ensconced between mighty pillars of code, strung out like a single sentence is the core of your thought. Dwarfed really by the complex apparatus which brings it to life. Retaining less of the visual form of the paragraph in which it is conceived and later represented. To the computer, infinitely precise and conditioned and cold, these words, your thoughts, are just so many more characters, data. They do not stir emotions or reveries, do not inspire the circuitry within the machine. Or do they? How shall we ever know? How do we even know any other human being hosts the same kind of consciousness?

Well, I will not speak for the pineal gland of the computer, nor for its soul for that matter. More later, including the sudden death of someone I haven't seen in years. He has disappeared. Though we were not ever really close, we had been acquainted since childhood. The loss is somehow still profound, think John Donne's famous quote. I seek to honor him with my time and my own words. I am not sure how I go about this. I shall reflect further...

My meditation begins with a concactenation of certain names, ideas, sensations. They are Don Byrd, Philip Glass, Manuel De Landa, Karl Popper, Immanuel Kant, common knowledge, recursion, minimalism, pscyophysics, poetry holes, the vault of the heavens, the stars beyond the vast, blue bubble, the anticipation of a chord change.

Wow! What a mouthful. Opaque, I imagine, to most passersby. That list above builds. The longer my string becomes, the greater the concactenation, the smaller the possibility of a verb, of flight or transport. I am weighted down by nouns and proper names, references and allusions (maybe some illusions) which few understand or care for. Not as ends in themselves, though, but means toward richer experience, some delicate but profound concactenation of the inner and outer worlds.

Let me try to light some of these words from within. Don Byrd is a poet and philosopher who works out of Albany, NY. He has had a profound influence on my vision of life, though I suspect he considers me a Romantic, not a good word in his lexicon. See a review of his great theoretical essay, The Poetics of the Common Knowledge to get a flavor of his critical concerns as well as constructive enterprise. Don foresaw the communal potential of the Internet over (10) years ago, long before AOL had become a household name. Typing away at our terminals connected to a small network, we students, friends, and admirers of the Bard would exchange more than thoughts and feelings in the virtual reality of hypertext. We shared this space, separate and united at once, an energy of immediacy and intimacy. We humans with our "poetry holes" which just do not want to be sealed were part of a great project to restore Being to our existences.

I have lost connection with most of those participants, including Don himself, in interactive poesis, proto web-page design. There was a quality of academic life which did not abide well in me at the time. I sought experience and self-study outside the hallowed walls. I was particularly interested in a knowledge of people and the material and spiritual underpinnings of our society. Some ten years after my departure, my ambitions are not so grand, nor my propensity to generalize. Reality is complex, so complex that I hesitate to express much confidence in even the simple observation of a cardinal hopping about the branches of tree. Though my recurrent interests in ideas has now led me back toward full-fledged intellectual pursuits, I return chastened and humbled. Less global are my concerns, more local.

The philosopher Manuel De Landa speaks of "psychophysics", and a "...quasi-causal operator... this is the entity that builds the plane of consistency out of multiplicities." In plainer English I think he is affirming something like a Self or Soul which has at least some power and even responsibility to shape and influence its reality. Are these, too, not quasi-metaphysical entities (more bad words) which forever haunt our thoughts and intrude into our writing. Which leads me to Kant. The starry skies above and moral laws within were somehow profoundly resonant to this grand philosopher. They are with me, as well. But more later. I am having some technical difficulties and should address those first.

A brand new glorious day. Grammarians out there, please tell me whether I need a comma in my first sentence. Then I shall reflect upon your wisdom and guidance. My instinct was to exclude the comma, rather uniting the adjectives "brand", "new", and "glorious" (there I go inserting a comma) into one harmonious whole day (there I go again excluding the comma). It seems that I opt for comma when I seek to explicate, rationalize, analyze and then omit the comma when I want to build, grow, layer (what does that say about this sentence).

Oh, Bertrand, you and your set of sets have confounded me again-, sentences folding in on themselves, spreading wings, expanding to encompass themselves. I am getting dizzy in this logarithmic spiraling of my thoughts, looking for a place to perch. Still point you still elude me, I chase and chase "Round the corner. Through the first gate,/Into our first world". Dandelion seeds, the song of the thrush, sunshine, starfish, and blue skies dwell there, hanging like ripe melons from some Tree of Life.

Well, reverie, you have had your flight. Rest your sated, weary self upon this small site.

Prayer Walking. Interesting phrase that I delved into a few hours ago. I think of the title of an Emerson Essay, "Pray Without Ceasing". What substance or thing does the supplicant seek? Inspiration? Joy? Meaning? Answers to Questions? Communion with an Intelligence without yet somehow within? I have my rapturous moments walking under the moonlight, by the ocean, through the woods after a fresh rain. More often than not, though, I am swept away by words, torrents of words, whirlwinds. Conversations, exchanges with phantom beings remove me from the world of sense. Control, I suppose, lies within the impulse to bounce these words roundabout my mind. Is not control also a part of the impulse to pray? This leap of faith to God, leap we must for the bridge never seems to materialize, moves us into the arms of plenty, a psychic fullness. I will not include myself, though, in the company of the "we". Not for me a simple faith in the unseen, the non-evidentary, though I draw great sustenance from the coherence which resides in ideas stretching across the deeps of time.

I am fatigued, having little slept the past few days. But within me beat words awaiting their day in the sun, or blogosphere, if you will. I let them have their way, permitted them play in this sandbox, this curved cyberspace. And as spherical geometry tells us, these words will again come back to me.

Night asks me to slip between her silken covers, slumber deep there. The dream tunnel beckons.

Good night.