Snowy foothills to the east / Language of the heart

"If I create from the heart, almost everything works; if from the head, nearly nothing."

-- Marc Chagall

Generous listening

Dad and me in 1949:






















My father died in the morning on St. Patrick's Day in 2003 at age 89. Hard to believe that 9 years have passed. Today I was looking at the autobiography that he completed in 2001 and wrote for his only grandchild, my nephew Lee. I am grateful that my first and last communications with my father were positive. All that remains of my father is love.















A friend forwarded this via email:


































(photo by am, taken late in the day yesterday, looking to the southeast from my porch)

Clouds to the east after rain mixed with snow

(Click on image for fuller experience)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

Thanks to Whiskey River for this quote for my post today.

Thanks to Wikipedia for this:

"There are no heroes in Dick's books," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

The every-other-day-on-the-internet experiment is working out well. The effect so far is that I am spending half as much time on the internet and savoring the time off as well as the time on.

Mid-March morning / Snow and a more than half moon / Fennerio

For fuller experience, click to enlarge photo.

Listen

Addendum:

We, the Web Kids, found at wood s lot on February 28, 2012.

A most puzzling spectacle

Beginning the day at 5 a.m.:






















kick (kik), ... 28. Slang. a. a thrill; pleasurable excitement.
(from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, The Unabridged Addition, 1981)

Lyrics from Cole Porter, 1934:



If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

It winds from chicago to la,
More than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

Now you go through saint looey
Joplin, missouri,
And oklahoma city is mighty pretty.
You see amarillo,
Gallup, new mexico,
Flagstaff, arizona.
Don't forget winona,
Kingman, barstow, san bernandino.
(from "(Get your Kicks on) Route 66", Bobby Troupe, 1946)



Kix, Food for Action, 1950s (starts at 3:36:)



"For free?"



"... You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you ..."
(from "Like a Rolling Stone," Bob Dylan, 1965)



Well, there's nothin' that you ain't tried
To fill the emptiness inside
But when you come back down, girl
Still ain't feelin' right

Chorus: (And don't it seem like)
Kicks just keep gettin' harder to find
And all your kicks ain't bringin' you peace of mind
(from "Kicks," written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil)

A most puzzling spectacle:



("Bull Playing Soccer," pen and ink by am, 1974)

A curious balancing time

Listen.

Thanks to http://lassieandtimmy.blogspot.com.

Something new. Only opening my laptop every other day. Going to see what happens. Curious.

9BVNJHTXVA5W

As I walk in good company

"A sense of Mystery can take us beyond disappointment and judgment to a place of expectancy. It opens in us an attitude of listening and respect. If everyone has in them the dimension of the unknown, possibility is present at all times. . . Knowing this enables us to listen to life from the place in us that is Mystery also. Mystery requires that we relinquish an endless search for answers and become willing to not understand. . . Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years, I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

~ from MY GRANDFATHER'S BLESSINGS, by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

That's the kind of medical doctor I will listen to.

("Beloved," gouache and watercolor by am from the late 1980s or early 1990s, my late 30s or early 40s. The words in the painting are a poem I wrote when I was 17 years old, in December of 1966)

Walking Through the Fertile Land of Memory and Forgiveness

"There are some good things to be said about walking. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."
- Edward Abbey

Thanks to Whiskey River

Walking toward Bellingham Bay in Marine Park in Bellingham, Washington:






















("Walking Through the Fertile Land of Memory and Forgiveness," gouache and watercolor, by am, from the 1990s)

Written for Nina Simone

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood was written for Nina Simone.

Until just now, I thought Eric Burdon wrote it, and that Bob Dylan was thinking of Eric Burdon singing that song and was being both playful and ornery with his remark. What do I know?

"We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what WE KNOW may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth ..."

(Quote from Always Coming Home, by Ursula Le Guin, but the capitalization is my mother's. She typed that out for me on a little piece of notepaper with a drawing of Rattlesnake Grass from California's North Coast and enclosed it in a letter she wrote to me during the 1980s)

"A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding."
(Bob Dylan)

Talking Fertile Land with Ocean

(Gouache and watercolor, 18" x 24", from the 1980s, by am)



What's so bad about being misunderstood?
(Bob Dylan)

Walking down to Bellingham Bay / Thinking about Luis Bunuel and Dalton Trumbo

Johnny Got His Gun and Dalton Trumbo are still on my mind. After re-reading Johnny Got His Gun, for the first time since Richard recommended it while he was in Vietnam in 1970, I've been checking out related DVDs from the public library. A few days ago, I watched "Trumbo"(2007) and was reminded that Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplays for "Exodus" and "Spartacus." Yesterday I watched "Johnny Got His Gun" on DVD. Although it was first released in 1971, this DVD with additional features was released in 2009. I don't remember seeing "Johnny Got His Gun" when it was released on September 22, 1971, but I am guessing that Richard did see it.

Richard's last weeks of life in a VA hospital in spring of 2008 appeared to be much like those of Joe Bonham in Dalton Trumbo's 1971 film, "Johnny Got His Gun."

In 1971, when Dalton Trumbo directed "Johnny Got His Gun," he added to and changed the story from what he had written in his book in 1939. Scenes with Joe Bonham's contemplations on Jesus were written by Luis Bunuel.

Of all the changes and additions that strengthened an already powerful testament against war, what stood out for me was the scene near the end of the film where the military hospital doctors and staff were standing at Joe Bonham's bedside after Joe had finally been able to communicate with them by banging his head on his pillow in Morse code, "S.O.S. Help me." The commanding officer had asked Joe what he wanted, and Joe had replied, and the commanding officer had denied Joe's requests. At that point, Joe began to bang his head against his pillow, saying "Kill me" over and over again in Morse code.

The commanding officer then turned to the chaplain and said, "Don't you have some message for him, Padre?"

The priest shook his head.

The officer said, "You could at least tell him to put his faith in God, couldn't you?"

The priest said, "I will pray for him for the rest of my days, but I will not risk testing his faith against your stupidity."

The officer said, "Well, you're a hell of a priest, aren't you?"

The priest said, "He is a product of your profession, not mine," and walked out of the hospital room.

Now that is a mysterious statement. The koan here is, "What is the product of the priest's profession?" Certainly Dalton Trumbo had given some thought to that when he wrote that scene and asked Luis Bunuel to write words for Jesus to say earlier in the film.

The two following paragraphs are from a Wikipedia article about Luis Bunuel:

In a 1960 interview with Michele Manceaux in L'Express, Buñuel famously declared: "Thank God I'm an atheist."

However, he repudiated this statement in a 1977 article in The New Yorker. "I'm not a Christian, but I'm not an atheist, either," he said. "I'm weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine, 'I'm an atheist, thank God.' It's outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called "Mexican Bus Ride," about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It's guilt we must escape from, not God."

I'm feeling Richard's serene presence today. It is nearly four years since he died. We are not suffering from guilt. We are too poor to support a church and a priest. We do not walk alone anymore. I think that the word God is a koan.

Old Tree in Late Winter

Three Trees / Alive Alive-O/ First Love

Listen to this mystical song:



“No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”
(Albert Einstein)

Out on a long walk on a late winter morning