Poetry About Time: The Investigations

The Tick-Tock Tractatus

Speaking About Time: The Poetic Investigations

By Michael P. Garofalo

            

                
        August Offerings, Red Bluff CA, 2010, MPG

 

 

Sections

1. Time: time-space, movement, measurement

2. Past: memories, habits, fixed, specific, tradition

3. Present: now, here-now, day, duration

4. Future: maybe, planned, anticipated, uncertain

5. Passing: change, cycles, aging, growth, death

6. Beginning: renewal, starting, enthusiasm

7. Psychology: learning, experience, knowing

8. Middle: in progress, half-way, steady, living

9. Language: poetry, philosophy, ordinary

10. Silence: inexpressive, nonsense, illogical

11. Mystical: numinous, profound, intense, insightful,

12. Beauty: art, crafts, music, reading/writing

13. Social: ethics, morality, economics, manners, value

14. Philosophy: ethics, history, analysis, arguments, logic

15. History: landmark events, books/printing, memory

16. Eternity: forever, infinite, unimaginable, death

 

Preface

Key to Books Cited

Bundled Up Quintains about Time

Additional Notes

7.   Psychology: experience, learning,
      phenomenology, sense of time, personal

 

7.1
Generalities, Questions, Quips

What you see depends on when you look.
What you hear requires you to listen now.

Time is our 6th Sense.

The Specious Present extends consciousness
to include a pinch of the past,
a pinch of the future,
and the fullness of the now.

Give awareness a 5 second window
for processing perceptions.

Afraid to run out of time.
He had time on his hands, then dropped it.

Your brain works on time schedules.

"The quality of attention determines
the nature of the experience."
Joanne Kyger

BU794, GC§14

The Five Senses

 

7.2
Using vs Knowing

We knew that water was essential,
but did not know it was H2O;
We knew the sun was hot,
but had no concept of nuclear.
It works but we don't know how or why.

BU2930

History of Science

 

7.2.1
Unfolding Time

     Implicate orders of a
Underlying Reality
Unfolding Being... and the
     Explicate orders of
ordinary common things.

BU1149, GC§7

David Bohm

Net of Indra

 

7.3.1
End Game

They ran out of time
The game ended on time
They lost this time.
They all got back to the bus in time.
They will do better next time.

BU2835

 

7.3.1.1
The Game of Death

I'm too old
for any real Destiny
except for Death
creeping up to me, tagging Me:
"Your It!"

BU891, GC§36

 

7.3.1.2
Impermanence of Samsara

Samsara is Nirvana?
10,000 Things are Nothing?
Past and future are gone (Empty?).
The Present is gone in a Flash.
What's left? Samsara won't last.

BU918

 

7.3.1.3
Silent Lips

          The sting of Death,
the sharp pains of unseeing,
the final closing of the eyes,
the silent lips of emptiness...
faces lost forever in future times.

BU1246

 

7.3.2
Better Next Month

That such and such is the case
May piss me off for all the day
Why should it be this damn way?

Next month, such and such will not be the case.
I will be very pleased come that day.

BU3431

Quintain Poetry

Time Explained: Experience, Consciousness and Relativity.
By Alan Bennett, 2026.

Reading Wittgenstein 1975-

 

7.3.2.1
Timely Emotions

Emotions cluster around Immediacy.
Distant futures lack emotional density.
We feel very little about 2222 CE.
Few have any passion for far distant unrealities.
We lust after, say, Hot SEX Today! Fuck the Future!

BU3371

Emotions and Time

 

7.3.3
Take it Slow

Travel light
Even yesterday is a heavy backpack.
Travel slowly
Even tomorrow can wait---
Move on, don't hesitate.

BU2890

Time, Change, Freedom:
An Introduction to Metaphysics
By Nathan Oaklander

 

7.3.4
Differences and Distinctions

Things that look the same
are often really different---
in a web of new respects as to usage
in a web of words wedded meanings
in a different place in space/time.

BU2968

Appearances

 

7.3.5
Time Snuck By

The time sauntered by
invisibly, casually, punctually...
I barely noticed.
so busy with pressing deeds---
time flew by in a gentle breeze.

BU3083

"... time is not a linear flow, as we think it is,
into past, present, and future. Time is an
indivisible whole, a great pool in which all
events are eternally embodied and still have
their meaningful flash of super-normal or
extra-sensory perception, and a glimpse of
something that happened long ago in our
linear time."
- Frank Waters, Mountain Dialogues, 1981

 

7.3.5.1
The Time of Inner Mind

Under the Water
of my mind
an unconscious Sea
of Memories
guide me through time

Keep me on a course line
send me some signs
become conscious at times...
freedom may a fiction be
controlled by unknown destinies.

Bring the Unconscious,
Sub-Conscious, ego, and Id,
Collective Unconscious figured in—
Over the waves of Consciousness
the flotsam of Unknowns are adrift.

BU9

The Gushen Grove Sonnets

The Five Senses

 

Darwin Revisited

While resting quietly, I have been reading books on the history of science, evolutionary biology, and a biography of Charles Darwin (1809-1882).  These books will keep me fascinated and busy for a few weeks.  I have read all or parts of these books before 2017.  

The "Annotated Origin" is an outstanding volume.  I am always amazed at Darwin's use of many interesting and cogent examples to illustrate his key points of theory.  Beings change over generations based on lived circumstances.  We don't need supernatural causes to explain how beings have existed and changed over time.  

"The History of Science" by Stephen F. Mason.  Collier, 1956.

"The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of the Species."  By Charles Darwin.  Annotated by James  T. Costa.  Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2009.  Indices, references, biographies, appendices, 537 pages.  ISBN: 9780674032811.  

"The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins.  

"Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist" by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Norton, 1994, 868 pages.  The Darwin biography was detailed, comprehensive, historically fascinating, and very interesting to me.  Life in London, and Down House, from 1840-1880, is well documented in this book.  

I Love Science

 "I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it."
- Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

"In the end, it's probably impossible to tease out whether the heads or tails of science, the theory or the experiment, has done more to push science ahead." (DS, p36).  


"It is theory that decides what we can observe."
-  Albert Einstein

"Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."
-  Charles Sanders Pierce

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements  By Sam Kean.  Little, Brown and Company, 2010.  400 pages.  ISBN: 978-0316051644.  VSCL.  Subjects: Chemistry, Periodic Table, Science, Elements.  This book is the most interesting, informative, and well written book I have read in the last 60 days. 

The modern sciences of physics and chemistry have discovered or synthesized 118 Elements.  This fascinating subject can be studied through the graphical model of the Periodic Table of Elements first conceived in 1869 by the Russian chemist, Dmitri Medneleev.  Read the "Disappearing Spoon" for the fascinating story of the Table of the Elements. 

   

Religion of the Enlightenment

 Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.  By Matthew Stewart.  W.W. Norton, 2014.  Index, notes, 566 pages.  

Naturalism, Deism, Atheism 

Books on Atheism, Agnosticism, Non-Religious, Freethinkers, Humanists

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. By Susan Jacoby.  Holt, 2004.  448 pages. 

Religion in America: Percentage of People Who Are Independent of Religion

Mike' Garofalo's Experiences and Views on Religion

Pragmatism and American History

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.  By Steven Pinker.  Penguin Books, 2018, 576 pages.  VSCL. 

The Human Body and Religion

I am always keenly interested in our understanding, appreciation, and uses of our human bodies.  Somatics and mind-body arts practices are one focus of my research and writing.  My own opinions about a philosophy of living one's life, and enjoying the use of our bodies are, generally, non-religious, Epicurean, skeptical, and philosophical.  

Religious views of the body-mind are a serious impediment to scientific and pragmatic progress. 


"Two thousand years of Christian discourse—anatomy, medicine, physiology, or course, but also philosophy, theology, and aesthetics—have fashioned the body we inhabit.  And along with that discourse we have inherited Platonic-Christian models that mediate our perception of the body, the symbolic value of the body's organs, and their hierarchically ordered functions.  We accept the nobility of heart and mind, the triviality of viscera and sex (the neurosurgeon versus the proctologist).  We accept the spiritualization and dematerialization of the soul, the interaction of sin-prone matter and of luminous mind, the ontological connotation of these two artificially opposed entities, the disturbing forces of a morally reprehensible libidinal humanity ... All have contributed to Christianity's sculpting of the flesh.

Our image of ourselves, the scrutiny of the doctor or the radiologist, the whole philosophy of sickness and health—none of this could exist in the absence of the above mentioned discourse.  Nor could our conception of suffering, the role we allot to pain and therefore our relationship with pharmacology, substances, and drugs.  Nor could our conception of suffering, the role we allot to pain and therefore our relationship with pharmacology, substances, and drugs.  Nor could the special language of practitioner to patient, the relationship of self to self, reconciliation of one's image of oneself with a ideal of the physiological, anatomical, and psychological self.  So that surgery and pharmacology, homeopathic medicine and palliative treatments, gynecology and thanatology, emergency medicine and oncology, psychiatry and clinical work all obey Judeo-Christian law without any particularly clear understanding of the symptoms of this ontological contamination.

The current hypersensivity on the subject of bioethics proceeds from this invisible influence.  Secular political decisions on this major issue more or less correspond to the positions formulated by the church.  This should be no surprise, for the ethos of bioethics remains fundamentally Judeo-Christian.  Apart from legislation on abortion and artificial contraception, apart fro these two forward steps toward a post-Christian body—what I have elsewhere called a Faustian body—Western medicine sticks very closely to the church's injunctions.

The Health Professionals' Charter elaborated by the Vatican condemns sex-change operations, experiments on the embryo, in vitro fertilization and transfer, surrogate motherhood, medical assistance with reproduction, but also therapeutic cloning, analgesic cocktails that suspend consciousness as life comes to an end, therapeutic use of cannabis, and euthanasia.  On the other hand, the charter praises palliative care and insists on the salutary role of pain.  These are all positions often echoed by ethical committees calling themselves secular and believing themselves independent of religious authority." 

-  Michel Onfray.  Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  Translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt.  New York Arcade Publishing, 2005, 2011.  ISBN: 10161145008X.  Annotated bibliography, 246 pages.  VSCL.  A lucid, strong, well reasoned, insightful, and stylish presentation.  Excellent explication of the French and European writing on atheism, anti-clericalism, irreligion, deconstruction of religions, and anti-fascism.  His detailed knowledge of religious customs and ideas is very impressive.  I agree with Professor Onfray's assessment about the negative influences of the three monotheistic religions surveyed; as I do with the dynamic and robust critiques of religion by Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. The above quote is from p. 47 or Professor Onfray's book.  


When my mother, June, was dying of colorectal cancer, she spent her final days comfortably in a hospice.  When she died my superstitious Catholic father said many times that the hospice killed her, that the hospice practiced euthanasia, that the hospice was sinful and evil.  No matter how much I explained hospice care to him, he would not listen.  It is no wonder my mother did not want to see my father at the end.  I concluded that that he would rather have seen her suffer more, believing that suffering was good for the soul.  He was often a mean and rigid macho man, lacking loving-kindness and compassion. 

When I was 12 years of age, I was told by my priest confessor that masturbation was a mortal sin, evil, unnatural, and inspired by the devil; and, that I would go directly to hell for eternal horrific punishment if I continued to masturbate.  I knew that that masturbation was pleasant, harmless, disease free, legal, and entirely private.  I could not understand how if I should murder somebody I would go to hell, and if I masturbated I would go to hell.  These church rules and penalties regarding masturbation seemed to me arbitrary and absurd.

The longstanding mistreatment of women by religious authorities and religious rules is also completely unsatisfactory to me.  Dr. Ben Carson, for example, a recent secular Republican political candidate, believes our laws should be changed so that any woman who is impregnated by a rapist or through incest should not be allowed to have an abortion even if she chooses to do so.  Reflect also on how women are oppressed and mistreated under the domination by Islamic men.  

I was not surprised to read that the Catholic Church, Islam, and Mormons still all object to vasectomies.  Religions supported and encouraged slavery for centuries.  Religions significantly slowed the progress in anatomy for many centuries by refusing to allow post-mortem autopsies.  Large families are encouraged by religions (more paying believers in the long run I suppose) despite the grueling poverty of overpopulation.  Examples of the pernicious effect of religion on medicine, psychology and public health can, unfortunately, be multiplied with ease.  

The fact that people hold antiquated and false views about bodily functions is not so troublesome as the fact that their religious leaders want to force everybody to accept, obey and follow their nonsensical opinions.  These religions do not favor freedom of thought and action, scientific investigation, and freedom of expression.  Most sensible and modern 'social church goers' simply quietly ignore and disregard most of these outmoded ideas about bodily functions and behaviors pandered by their priests and preachers, if they can do so without being harmed by the local religious police enforcers.  


I have never gone to any church since I was 16, after I left Catholic high school.  What a wise move on my part to abandon the silly rules, anti-scientific opinions, fables, myths, superstitions, and authoritarianism of organized religions.  A good life is much easier to live and enjoy, without the burdens of religious twaddle.  


"The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents its expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error."
-  Baron d'Holbach, The System of Nature

 
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions."
-  Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930 

Earthquakes: Fear and Trembling Unto Death

 

I lived in Los Angeles from 1946 until 1998.  We had many earthquakes of between 4 and 5.3 on the Richter Scale.  The worse was a 6.7 earthquake in Northridge in 1994 that killed 67 people and caused $20 billion in damages.

Yes, I have been very afraid during these earthquake experiences.  In the back of my mind, I always dreaded the BIG San Andreas Fault Earthquake that would destroy our lives.  Fortunately, thus far, we have avoided major disasters like in other places around the world.

Housing in Los Angeles is typically suburban, wood framed, lath and plaster, one story.  Building codes are fairly strict with respect to earthquake standards.  This helps us survive up to a 6.7 Richter.  People in ramshackle houses, with brick or stone walls, or poorly constructed multi-story apartments, face terrible fates in earthquakes above 7.0.

Of course, it also depends on when the earthquake hits. During the early morning Northridge quake, 4:30 am, most were home sleeping.  Of the 22 libraries I managed, 3 had collapsed ceiling tiles, a few fallen book stacks, etc.  We were lucky it did not hit a 4:30 pm and the library was busy with students studying.

History of Earthquakes in Los Angeles County

Turkey-Syria Earthquake on February 6, 2023  Killed 59,000  7.3 R

Haiti Earthquake on January 12, 2010  Killed 125,000  7.0 R

Indian Ocean 2004 Earthquake and Tsumani  Killed 278,000  9.2 R

Now, when I do monthly Yurt camping on the Pacific Coast of Washington and Oregon, I think of the offshore Cascadia Fault.  If it broke loose a 8.5 Richter someday, a person on the Coast would have 5 minutes to get above the oncoming Tsunami Monster.  Death by crushing and drowning for thousands of people and terrible destruction of the small coastal towns and ports in Oregon or Washington.

Science and Spirituality

I highly recommend the very well written books by Chet Raymo.  Outstanding reflections on science, life, spirituality "religious naturalism", and history.  His writing style is engaging, enlightening, and full of scientific insights.  

Like me, he was educated in a Catholic High School.  He attended Notre Dame University to study physics.  His views on "religion" are close to my own, i.e., pantheism, immanence, animism, wonder, mystery, beauty, scientific knowledge, skepticism.  A philosopher's spirituality!

When God is Gone, Everything is Holy: The Making of a Religious Naturalist.  By Chet Raymo. I read this book in 2016 and again this week in 2022. VSCL.

Honey From Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God.  2005, 205 pages. VSCL.

The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe.  2003, 203 pages.  VSCL.

Other fine books by Chet Raymo. 

The Sacred Depths of Nature.  By Ursula Goodenough.  Oxford, 1998, 224 pages.  VSCL.

VSCL = Valley Spirit Center Library.  Purchased for my home library in Vancouver, Washington.  

 

"Chet Raymo (born September 17, 1936 in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is a noted writer, educator and naturalist. He is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Stonehill College, in Easton, Massachusetts. His weekly newspaper column Science Musings appeared in the Boston Globe for twenty years. This is now a daily blog by him. Raymo espouses his Religious Naturalism in When God is Gone Everything is Holy – The Making of a Religious Naturalist and frequently in his blog. As Raymo says – "I attend to this infinitely mysterious world with reverence, awe, thanksgiving, praise. All religious qualities." ^[1] Raymo has been a contributor to The Notre Dame Magazine^[2] and Scientific American.^[3]

His most famous book is the novel entitled The Dork of Cork, which was made into the feature-length film Frankie Starlight. Raymo is also the author of Walking Zero, a scientific and historical account of his wanderings along the Prime Meridian in Great Britain. Raymo was the recipient of the 1998 Lannan Literary Award for his non-fiction work.

Raymo espouses a scientific skepticism for his beliefs:

"For the Religious Naturalist, darkness and silence are not the paradox, they are the resolution. The apophatic tradition ends in effective negation (God is not this, God is not that, God is not). Not only do we fall silent in the face of the Word, the Word itself dissolves into silence. We too walk a fine line; not between skepticism and faith, but between skepticism and cynicism. We try to stay firmly on the side of skepticism, open to whatever winds of wisdom blow our way, and as for knowledge of the world, we cherish the scientific way of knowing -– tentative, partial, evolving".<sup>[4]" 
- Wikipedia</sup> 

Time and Time Again ...

I enjoyed reading The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, 2018.  A fine summary of what physicists and philosophers of the past and present have thought about time, cogent examples, poetic analogies, good explanations of the issues involved, clear and readable.  

"The entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not permanence.  Not of being, but of becoming.
We can think of the world as made up of things.  Of substances.  Of entities.  Of something that is. 
Or we can think of it as made up of events. Of happenings.  Of processes.  Of something that occurs."
-  Order of Time, p. 97  

I now have two other books to read by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist and popular science author.  I borrowed the two books from the Cascade Library Branch of the Vancouver Regional Library District.    

Seven Brief Lesson on Physics, 2016

Reality is Not Wat It Seems: The Journey into Quantum Gravity, 2017.  

One book I am now studying each day is Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, JAVSCRIPT, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, 2018.  I am designing my first CSS page for a cellphone display.  

Process Philosophy: Bibliography, History, Links, Information, Quotes.  By Michael P. Garofalo    

My own recent poetic reflections on Time, from my Slices of Time After Time:

.....  

"The arrow of Time never rests,
moving forward unrelenting
irreversible
from hot towards cold
from organized to disorganized
from past to future
from moving towards stillness
from life towards death.

Or, so it seems,
      to us,
      with our little particulars in view,
      and our social survival habits a must.

The spiderwebs of Time are legion,
multitudes of nows of heres;
Uncountable heres and theres
      unhitched
from any eternal present everywhere."  .....

the surf swallowed

all in its way─

night and day

the sea
smashed on the shore─
drifting thoughts

Living and Thinking

I have been reading books on American Pragmatism, a biography about William James (1840-1910), and five lectures/essays by William James.  

. 
My current reading includes:

The American Pragmatists.  By Cheryl Misak.  Oxford University Press, 2013.  Index, bibliography, 286 pages.  VSCL.  The thorough and informative summary of key pragmatist thinkers in America. 

Maps of the Mind: Charts and Concepts of the Mind and Its Labyrinths.  By Charles Hampden-Turner.  Collier, 1981, index, 224 pages. VSCL.  An excellent overview of modern theories about our minds, consciousness, and its biological foundation. 

Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living.  By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn.  University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, index, bibliography, 432 pages.  VSCL.  Hellenistic thinkers applied to modern concerns.  

Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (1840-1910).  By Linda Simon.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998, index, bibliography, notes, 496 pages.  VSCL. 

Pragmatism, Old And New: Selected Writings  Edited by Susan Haack, with associate editor Robert Lane.  Amherst, New York, Prometheus Books, 2006.  Glossary, index, 741 pages.  Subjects:  Pragmatism, Philosophy, Neopragmatism, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Belief, Usefulness, Action.  VSCL.  Includes five essays/lectures by William James.  

Pragmatism and American Philosophy

Epicureanism

How to Life a Good Life: Advice From Wise Persons

Details Are All There Are

 "Science and psychoanalysis apart, the most profound development in thought since Nietzsche, as far as we are concerned, is the phenomenological approach to the world.  Mallarmé sought "words without wrinkles," Baudelaire cherished his minutes heureuses and Valéry his "small worlds of order," as we have seen: Checkhov concentrated on the "concrete individual" and preferred "small scale and practical answers," Gide though the "systematizing is denaturing, distorting and impoverishing."  For Oliver Wendell Holmes, "all the pleasure of life is in general ideas, but all the use of life is in specific solutions."  Wallace Stevens considered that we are "better satisfied in particulars."  Thomas Nagel put it in this way: "Particulars things can have a noncompetitive completeness which is transparent to all aspects of the self.  This also helps to explain what the experience of great beauty tends to unify the self: the object engages us immediately and totally in a way that makes distinctions among points of view irrelevant."  Or, as Robert Nozick, who counseled us to make ourselves "vehicles" for beauty, said: "this is what poets and artists bring us―the immense and unsuspected reality of a small thing.  Everything has its own patient entityhood."  George Levine call for "a profound attention to the details of this world."  

-  Peter Watson, "The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God," p.536

"The idea of one overbearing truth is exhausted."  
- Thomas Mann, translated by James Wood  

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
-  Albert Einstein

"To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things."
-  Zen Master Dogen

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."
-  Benedict De Spinoza

"God is in the details."
-  Mies Van Der Rohe

"After appreciating and understanding thousands of the details, a common variety God is really superfluous."
-  Mike Garofalo

"Caress the detail, the divine detail." 
-  Vladimir Nabokov

"Details are all there are."
-  Maezumi Roshi

"We think in generalities, but we live in details."
-  W.H. Auden

Gardening and Spirituality

Gardening and Religion

Does Light Make No Sound?

 

Light Makes No Sounds?
By Michael P. Garofalo, 9/30/2020

Mano y Mano, Face to Face, a Fight
The Gunfight, Two Dudes, in Spokane (one dead, one critically injured)[i]
A fistfight in the Bandini barrio de ELA, City of Commerce
Two girls fighting at a Middle School in Corning …
Quick, Exhausting, Brutal, Injurious

Two US Presidential candidates debating on TV in 2020. Refereed. 
Roberto Duran fist to fist against Sugar Ray Leonard
at the Brawl at Montreal in 1980.  Refereed.
Lakers vs Celtics, 1985 or 2010, Los Angeles. Refereed.  

OR
“No mas.”  And/Or  "No quiero pelear con el payaso"
("I do not want to fight with this clown.”); and,

back to the more immediate and important daily realities of people
getting along peacefully with one another, and me.[ii]
Quieter, calmer, restful, safer, friendly, peaceful.

Memories can make bad sounds or not. 
Many dreams, I suppose, are so silent, I can’t remember them. 

Light makes no Sounds?

Too much light can make us cry or scream in pain.
No light is scary and dangerous.
Lights Out, We Are Closing, Day is Over, Closed, Someone Dies.  

Sunset is Silent, aside from the takeoff roar of jets overhead,
heading northwest from Portland’s PDX.

Daybreak is Silent, aside from the chatter of birds in the garden,
or the drone rumble of autos and trucks on Interstate 205 nearby.

The Summit of Baden-Powell is bathed in 1979 light;
I’m warm and tired from the climb,
falling asleep in the silence of the light. 

Things are all wrapped up, interconnected, intertwined, in love.  

But, it maybe true, nevertheless, that light makes no sounds. 

---

[i] Right-wing white supremacist gunman killing 32 at a Fort Worth Texas Mall.
65,000 or more dead US soldiers from Vietnam War, millions of others
60 Million Blasted to Bits in World War II
Possibilities of annihilation in thermo-nuclear war

 

[ii] I now (2020) walk in our 50 year old Vancouver Orchards suburb,
with many beautiful homes and landscaping,
with many big trees in this Evergreen State of WA.
A rich old man, rich in peaceful and beautiful memories,
lucky, unique, with a managerial/administrative talent,
helping hundreds of thousands of readers and viewers,
a book and media distributor,
and, hopefully, an educator as well as a librarian.

 

 

Reading and Resting

I've been struggling a bit with a cold the past few days.  The usual: fatigue, coughing, chest congestion, feeling down ... familiar problems to millions.  

I bundle up, stay warm, rest, drink plenty of warm fluids, take mild medicines, and slowly recuperate. Karen is a wonderful helpmate- understanding, providing remedies, and encouragement.  

While resting quietly, I have been reading books on the history of science, evolutionary biology, and a biography of Charles Darwin (1809-1882).  These books will keep me fascinated and busy for a few months.  

"The History of Science" by Stephen F. Mason.  Collier, 1956.

"The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of the Species."  By Charles Darwin.  Annotated by James  T. Costa.  Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2009.  Indices, references, biographies, appendices, 537 pages.  ISBN: 9780674032811.  

"The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins.  

"Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist" by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Norton, 1994, 868 pages.  The Darwin biography was detailed, comprehensive, historically fascinating, and very interesting to me.  Life in London, and Down House, from 1840-1880, is well documented in this book.  

Rainy Day Reflections on Biology

In Red Bluff, the rainy season is from October to May.  Yesterday, and for the next two days, a Pacific storm has arrived from the West to provide a steady rain, a brisk wind, and cooler temperatures.  Over two inches have fallen already at our home.  

The wild grasses are all green, and most deciduous tress have lost over half their leaves.  A lovely time of the year - even more colorful than spring.  

November - Quotes and Poems

I have been reading the fascinating book "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" (2010) by Richard Dawkins.  Scientific reasoning, fact finding, predictive powers, logic, confirmed theories, the scientific community, documentation, research, analysis, pure and applied science, testing ... are subjects that always attract my keen attention.  I have read a number of books by Professor Dawkins - a first rate thinker and writer.  He is also an influential contemporary atheist, and I share is views on religion.  

The human body is over 60% water. 

The typical adult human body consists of about 60 trillion cells (6x10^13). 

There are about 60 trillion atoms in a human cell.

Inside the nucleus of each cell are the DNA genetic
codes that govern growth, structure, and reproduction.
As these DNA strands are modified or reshuffled
during millions of reproductive cycles then variations occur over time.

The earthly timeline is measured in hundreds of thousands
of millions of years for these variations to occur
and some to survive and multiply.

Fascinating!
Amazing!
Complex!

[Reprinted from my 11/20/2016 Blog Post.]

Correcting the Clocks

"A leap year (also known as an intercalary year or a bissextile year) is a year containing one additional day (or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, a month) added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year.  Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have the same number of days in each year drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track. By inserting (also called intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year that is not a leap year is called a common year.

For example, in the Gregorian calendar, each leap year has 366 days instead of the usual 365, by extending February to 29 days rather than the common 28. Similarly, in the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, Adar Aleph, a 13th lunar month, is added seven times every 19 years to the twelve lunar months in its common years to keep its calendar year from drifting through the seasons.

The name "leap year" comes from the fact that while a fixed date in the Gregorian calendar normally advances one day of the week from one year to the next, the day of the week in a leap year will advance two days (from March onwards) due to the extra day added at the end of February (thus "leaping over" one of the days in the week). For example, Christmas fell on Tuesday in 2001, Wednesday in 2002, and Thursday in 2003 but then "leapt" over Friday to fall on a Saturday in 2004."
Leap Year - Wikipedia  

Our lives are ordered by time in many ways.  We have personal and idiosyncratic experiences and conceptions of duration and time.  Our social and employment lives are strictly governed by clocks and calendars. The flow of the seasons effects our personal well being, access to food, our comforts and discomforts.  Our personal participation in the temporal dimension is limited by our birth and death dates. 

The subject of "time" has been of serious interest to philosophers, thinkers, scientists, poets, and mystics for over 4,000 years.  Here are two good books, written in a fairly accessible style, that I recommend:

Time, the Familiar Stranger   By J. T. Frazier.  University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.  Index, bibliography, notes, 408 pages.  ISBN: 9781558498594. 

Time and the Art of Living  By Robert Grudin.  Mariner Books, 1997.  Index, 250 pages.  ISBN: 978039689814.