Fear, Futility and Fatigue

These are my modern muses.  

They dance a circular step-dance, with their hands above their heads, around an invisible focal point deep in the Irish forest, a focal point that is known only to the Fairies of ancient myth.  Myth bleeds into reality now, and reality into myth.

 

26 July 2023

This day -- yesterday -- will be remembered as the day it no longer became possible to deny the presence among us of other intelligences.

Now, after this new understanding is absorbed, it will fall to every man and woman to adjust his/her worldview to accommodate the new knowledge and to think through its implications for everything up to and including what happens to us when we die.  If this question is of no interest to you, if you choose rather to be a monkey with his hands over his eyes, I don't know what to say.

 

Epitaph for a Dilettante

Things that I have learned to do, to varying degrees of proficiency:

• Speak and read Russian.
• Pilot a sailboat of 6000 lbs displacement; tack a 110-ft schooner.
• "Have the airplane," under the supervision of an instructor, in a Schweitzer 2-33 training glider, a Grob performance glider, a Yak-52 Soviet military trainer, and a North American SNJ US Navy trainer.
• Practice the Chinese art of meditation and martial art known as tai chi.
• Play rudimental percussion and Latin percussion, as well as the Irish bodhran drum.
• Play a couple of simple tunes on the vibraphone.
• Understand the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Soren Kierkegaard.
• Penetrate the Internal Revenue Code and the entire body of Massachusetts tax law, as well as the US constitutional principles implicated by it.
• Drive a sports car on a race track.

Things that I have not learned to do, to any degree of proficiency:

• Swim.
• Play golf.
• Play baseball, football, basketball or soccer.
• Dance.
• Paint.
• Sew.
• Ride a horse.
• Clean a fish.
• Shoot a gun.
• Do magic tricks.
• Juggle.

 

(Or So It Is Written in the Krazy Kozmologie of Marshall Vian Summers)

"The Wise are hidden."

 

Retrospective

In his early youth Ingmar Bergman was a puppeteer who played with light and with darkness.  The footlights threatened fire.

When Bergman was nearing his end, he was able to look back on a trail of broken and bitter relations, of wounds not healed, of suppurations only masked by colorful and carefully-crafted bandages.

In his work, which was entwined more than most with the fabric of his life, it remained a constant -- he was a master puppeteer who played with light and with darkness.

 

Meaningless Pulses in 3/4 Time, cont'd

Orlando Cepeda was checking his swing

When a tiny red music box

Owned by his daughter

Just stopped in "mid-air"

With an unscheduled brrrrinnnng!