June 20 2011

We finally have my father back at his summer house, a home away from home established by his parents in 1915. It is where his heart is. It has been touch and go with pneumonia compounded by his low blood count (which was at a level the hospital people said was "not seen before!").
So he's back to the place he loves. He's already mumbling about motorcycle noise and ugly neighbors: in short, everything is back the way is was. When his blood count finally gets to normal levels and stabilizes, there will be hell to pay.

I am even going to go fishing with him. I have bowed out of his guided fishing expeditions for some years, because I thought the cost was outrageous: a guide and boat for a couple of hours until one catches one's limit, and hand over $600. He had already cancelled all his bookings this year, realizing getting his sea legs back was going to take a long time: walking on land is one thing, on a boat it is quite another.
He had ordered plant material for spring plantings during his long winter, and spring is officially over sometime within a 24 hour period of right now. I managed to get a lot into the ground, only to have the deer herds and rabbits and other cute forest creatures come in during the night and gorge themselves, biting the fairest blooms off every flower...

My older brother and his family came up to the summer place, too.
My family is not dysfunctional: it is insane.
It is rather like a summer's carnival of neurotics come to a small town in August... and there is sort of a constant soundtrack of inappropriate remarks, frightening laughter, and music played out of key. All the rides break down and the cotton candy melts into solid masses.

My grand-nephew asked me to take him canoeing yesterday. Of course, I did agree to do so. I had spent, once again, most of my time gardening. It is a pastime I thought was truly "past". I am not thrilled with the stooping and kneeling aspects of the horticultural arts.

I discovered that a canoe light in the bow, where sat my grand-nephew, was almost impossible to bring about in a stiff breeze; impossible at least by forward motion. I had to back paddle to turn. It is very good to know things like this: more weight in the bow! Of course, Sunday afternoon is a iffy time to canoe at that spot, since there are so many pleasure boats zipping by and throwing waves; it is much better early on a quiet weekday morning.

I thought about two things during the weekend:
(1) water as a metaphor for formation of consciousness, and
(2) whether our imagery used in the 19th century during the Slavery debate reflects the imagery we use in our Afghanistan debates.

(1) Light reflects off the many faces of waves; waves are turbulent and ever-changing; in a good sized body of water, there are millions of reflections impinging on the eye.
I thought of Cellular Automata.
I saw myriads of information, encoded by photons at the retina, but there was no further "coding" into consciousness: the reflections remained chaotic and undulating ceaselessly on the waves. If I had had a coding mechanism already, like a "story" or and "ideology" about the water reflections, I could have created an immense artifact of consciousness:


The many faces of the River turn at me;
the necklaces and diamond pendants that she wears!
all prismatic, all reflecting silver mirrors!
She turns to look at me!


Our consciousness is like a humble scientist at the Nobel awards: they see further because they stand upon the shoulders of past giants.
So does our consciousness ceaselessly build its ideologies upon the shoulders of past beliefs, and its Reality is like modern Rome built upon layers and layers of the past.

(2) I have been reading books from fire-eaters (pro-Southern, pro-slavery, and pro-Confederacy) and abolitionists (anti-slavery).
The imagery and logic seems to be pretty much the same as we use in different fields to argue the goodness or badness of what is being done, such as in Afghanistan: the Taliban is anti-woman, the Taliban is anti-education, the Taliban this and that, all put together in a mish-mosh justification of all of our deeds and mis-deeds. Same thing holds the other way.
Kametz Katuph! (as I have gotten into the habit of saying... striking my forehead and uttering grammatical epithets.)

... the prisoner of ideological reality wears the same chains all through history. Be good! Forget the questions about what is real or not-real! The only Reality is Virtue. (Reflection and meditation upon what is Virtue is not virtuous!)

(thanks to Arsen about virtues.)

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