Monthly Archives: June 2022

Interesting, the ways we discover things about ourselves reading forums on the Internet.

Things we know already but maybe hadn’t thought about.

I happened to read Excaliber’s post on one of the threads about how he’d lost a lot of his eyesight a decade or so ago and had to quit reading books.  I’m usually not much moved by forum posts, but that one managed to roll over me by surprise.  Shock and deep sadness until I self-examined why.

Purely an identification/selfish reaction.  I was imposing my own value system on Excaliber, whom I think might be the same person as Lantern used to be (which suspicion caused me to feel an empathy for him I mightn’t have if the same had been posted by a total stranger).

But Excaliber went on to remark on various aspects of the affliction.  He’s handling it a lot better than I might.

He mentioned he daydreams a lot, which I do also and call it meditating.  I used to soul travel a lot, as well, but the joy of it was too seductive.  I got so’s I’d rather be there than here, so I backed away from it most of the time.

Anyway, Excaliber’s post got me thinking about physical sensory input and what a blessing it is.  Even if we could remain alive it’s tempting to believe it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.  Until my mind came across a memory of a book I read once by Helen Keller.  Blind and deaf from birth, she grew to be a model of enthusiasm for life for a couple of generations of Americans.  She took the five-high hand she was dealt and made a straight flush of it without any thought of self-pity or complaint entering the game.

Admirable, but it would surely be a tough gig.

Jack

Evening to you:Finished the re-read of Cyrano de Bergerac.  I forget between those readings what a sweet piece of work it is.  It’s it’s good mind-food.  If you prefer, a fine movie was made of it in the ’50s…. might still be available somewhere.  Jose Farrar starred in it as I recall.

Cyrano, a man blessed with the heart of a poet, the courage, pride, physical prowess of a great warrior.  A man the sensitivity and intelligence to recognize the nose too large to qualify as a deformity is just a piece of life, a personal cross to bear without complaint.

A man stares at his nose.

Cyrano:  You may go— or tell me why you are staring at my nose

Meddler.  No.

Cyrano:  Does it astonish you?

Meddler:  Your Grace misunderstands my

Cyrano:  Is it long and soft and dangling like a trunk?

Meddler:  I never said

Cyrano:  Or crooked, like an owl’s beak?  A pimple ornaments the end of it?  Or a fly parading up and down?  What is the portent, this phenomenon?

Meddler:  I have been careful not to look

Cyrano:  And why, if you please?  It disgusts you then?  Does its color appear to you unwholesome?  Or is its form obscene?  Why assume this deprecating manner?  Perhaps you find it just a trifle large?

Meddler:  Not in the least.  Oh, no!  Small, very small, infinitisimol!

Cyrano:  What!  How?  You accuse me of absurdity?  Small-my nose?

Magnificent,, my nose!  You pug, you knob, you button head,

Know that I glory in this nose of mine,

For a great nose indicates a great man.

Genial, courteous, intellectual,

Virile, courageous- as I am- and such

As you, poor wretch, will never dare to be

Even in imagination.  For that face

That blank, inglorious concavity

Which my hand finds now

(He strikes him)

The beautiful Roxanne, whom he loves but never tells, is smitten by the pretty face of young Baron Christian de Neuvillette, a cadet in Cyrano’s regiment of Gasconeers.  Christian’s not a man of words, so during the brief courtship Cyrano writes for him love letters, stands under a balcony whispering to him what to say to Roxanne to win her heart and her hand.

Earlier, by a series of mistaken communications, Cyrano was led to hope it was he Roxanne’s heart chose.  Then, after a resounding shock as she unknowingly confided her love of Christian, she leaves:

His friend, Le Bret, cautions him he’s making too many enemies.

Le Bret:  Alone, yes!  But why stand against the world?  What devil has possessed you now, everywhere making yourself enemies?

Cyrano:  Watching  other people making friends everywhere as a dog makes friends!  I mark the manner of these canine courtesies and think:  “My friends are of a cleaner breed;  Here comes – thank God! – another enemy!”

Le Bret:  But this is madness!

Cyrano:  Method, let us say.  It is my pleasure to displease.  I love hatred.  Imagine how it feels to face the volley of a thousand angry eyes, the bile of envy and the froth of fear spattering little drops about me.  I hold myself erect perforce, wearing the hatred of the common herd.

Le Bret:  (After a silence, draws Cyrano’s arm through his own.)  Yes. Tell this to all the world – and then to me say very softly that . . . She loves you not.

Much later, he’s fatally injured.  Near death:

Cyrano:  I can see him there.  He grins.  He is looking at my nose, that skeleton. (To Death):  What’s that you say?  Hopeless?  Why, very well!  But a man does not fight merely to win!  No, no, better to know one fights in vain!  You there – Who are you?  A hundred against one.  I know them now, my ancient enemies – (He lunges at the empty air.)

Falsehood! There!  There!  Prejudice!  Compromise!  Cowardice!  (Thrusting)

Surrender, you say?  Never!  Never!

Ah, you too, Vanity!  I knew you would overthrow me in the end.

No!  I fight on.  I fight on!  I fight on!.  (He swings the blade in great circles, then pauses gasping.)

Old Edmond Rostand managed to write that thing without ever even knowing me. Felt middling strange reading it, though I imagine when I read it previous times it felt equally strange.

Jack

Mike’s moving blog entry about the threat to online gambling and how removal of the right to do it will touch his life tells a far larger story than his own experience and the threat to his own well-being.

Mike correctly points out, “This online gambling prohibition goes over the top.”

The problem is that the historical, psychological and political processes leading to relieving the citizenry of the choices and responsibilities for freedom aren’t going to stop because they arrived at anyone’s doorstep.

In the 1970s, for instance, the Baptists cheered and gave all manner of support when Governor Dolph Briscoe ordered the closure of the Chicken Ranch, a whorehouse institution that had survived with the tacit approval of politicians and law enforcement officials for 3/4ths of a century.

However, the Baptists felt a lot less enthusiasm when the Texas Rangers, operating under the orders of the same Texas Governor, kicked down the door of a private home and arrested a well-known Baptist evangelist and a number of church elders during a Thursday night poker game.

That went over the top, they believed.

Jealously guarding the freedoms of others we disagree with is a tough pill to swallow.  But it’s the only way we can assure our own will remain intact.

Jack

Question:  Ever thought about the intentions of terrorists?

Answer:  By definition, the purpose of terrorism is to instill terror, panic.

Question:  Ever asked yourself what terrorists hope to accomplish in the target nation?

Answer:  The terrorist assumes the result of his efforts and sacrifices will be in damages far beyond the immediate physical damage to property, injury and death caused by his actions.  He knows he can only kill a millionth or so of the metropolitan population he attacks, at best.  He knows the property damage and injury will be comparatively microscopic.

What the terrorist hopes for is on a far grander scale.  He hopes in their panic the target population will behave rashly.  He hopes they’ll alter their lifestyles, give up their freedoms, and live in terror that he’ll do it again.  Sacrifice what they are and what they have as a result of the fear he caused.

Question:  Ever considered what assumptions the terrorist makes about the population of the country being attacked?

Answer:  The terrorist assumes his target population consists of decadent cowards.  Inherent in his assumptions rests the ordinarily idiotic belief the citizens of the nation he attacks are stupid enough to feel a general threat behind the miniscule damages he causes.

It’s never worked until now.

Even in France, where the gene-pool for physical and moral courage has been systematically culled by the guillotine during the Revolution, by Napoleon I on the steppes of Russia, by Napoleon II supporting the Emperor Max in Mexico, in the trenches during WWI, by the equatorial prisons, so there was nothing left by 1940, except Marshall Petain and general collaboration with the German invaders.

Even in France, I was going to say, terrorism didn’t work.

France and other European nations were under full-scale terrorist attack for almost 40 years and they never abdicated their freedoms, never sold out their convenience to travel, never fortified their national borders.  The Europeans didn’t spend that forty years wringing their hands in despair and fear.

The terrorists sacrificed themselves for nothing.  Their terrorism didn’t work in Europe.

Meanwhile, the US was spared terrorist attacks during all those years.  Presumably, potential terrorists believed the US population, unique among the Western nations, could not be cowed.  Could not be terrorized.  Could not be intimidated into changing what they were by the microscopic threats terrorists could expect to introduce.

Then came Nine-One-One.

What a shock it must have been for them to see their dreams come true.

What a surprise to see the wrong assumptions they’d made all those years about Europeans were all true.

All true with Americans.

Jack

Morning to you.

Jeanne loaned me a few movies to watch, so I viewed one and parts of another last night.

Weird stuff going on out there in the movie world.  One of them was named, Willow, one of those flicks.  I’d call it a sort of kids movie, and adventure/romance/fantasy of sorts.

It qualifies as unusual enough to keep a person watching.  It’s a fairly stock plot moving around in the background with heroes, bad queens, sorcerers, monsters, baby-royalty having to be hidden and those protecting her going through all manner of dangers and whatnot.

But the thing that kept me watching was the characters.  This movie has a main character and a lot of secondary characters who are shorter in physical stature than the average human being.  Secondly, the dogs used for hunting and killing weren’t dogs at all, but appeared to be wart-hogs.

Otherwise, I’d rate it fairly weak, with a strong plus for imaginative in setting.

The other I partly watched was The Big Sleep, with Bogie and Lauren Bacall.  No point in me saying much about it, except watching it completely through’s on my priority list of things to do.  I haven’t seen it in a number of years and I’d forgotten how fine it is.

She also loaned me 12 Oclock High, which I also haven’t seen in a few decades.  I’m generally able to get a lot of enjoyment out of movies involving airplanes only big enough for a couple or four people to get inside, so I think it might be hokey, this one, but still worth a couple of hours watching.

Also been pondering what piece of written work on the bookshelves I’m gonna re-read next.  I’ve about milked The Songlines dry for the time being, though I’m still thinking about various aspects of it and might make another blog entry or two about permutations and thoughts still coming out of it.

Poking and prodding around the bookcases my hand came on The Sibyl, by Par Lagerkvist, as a possibility, My Name is Aram, by William Soroyan, which was the first book that wasn’t mostly pictures that I ever read.  Neither of them demanded I begin an immediate re-reading, so I kept looking after pulling them down from the shelf and stacking them near to hand.

I’m thinking Cyrano de Bergerac, by Rostand. The Confessions, by Rousseau, The Decameron, by Boccaccio, and The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, are going to have to fight it out to see who gets the next re-reading.

They’re all stacked over there close at hand on top of My Name is Aram and The Sibyl.  I think I’m leaning to Cyrano at the moment, but I’ll see how the mood strikes me when I’m feeling I need to think about something besides random numbers.

Jack

More on Bruce Chatwin’s, The Songlines.I’ve completed the general re-reading of the Chatwin book I told you a bit about a few entries ago.  Now I’m doing a bit of a mop-up, studying and pondering segments.Chatwin’s main pursuits were archeology and paleontology.  However, he dovetailed into this a lifelong study of aboriginals and nomadic people.

This combination of circumstance and interest led him to investigate a number of fundamental questions about the human condition, and the human being as a biological creature.  Inevitably, some of these questions borderline on philosophy.

For instance, Chatwin’s detachment from modern man allowed him to see with stark clarity some of the fundamental differences between humans and almost every other species in the animal kingdom.  He was present at the time when discoveries of earliest man were being investigated in Africa.  He participated in the quest to learn everything possible about the lives and lifestyles of those earliest humans

In our early schooling we all discussed, considered, and were instructed on matters of how man is unique from animals.  Interestingly, the most obvious difference between human beings and almost every other species is that man kills his own kind. I don’t recall them dwelling on that trait in school.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens does so deliberately, routinely, and sometimes systematically.  He almost never does so as a source of nourishment.  In this regard, humans are almost unique among animals.  Entirely unique among ‘higher’ animals.

Chatwin wondered precisely when, and why, this singular trait revealed itself in early men.  He even examines it from the Biblical perspective of Cain and Abel.  He explores it as a possible result of the great schism of humanity, the shift by fragments from a nomadic lifestyle to an agricultural, static one.

Interestingly, Chatwin and others in their field don’t know when men began slaughtering other men.  Professor Raymond Dart’s work in the caves of South Africa, suggesting the earliest inter-species killing began with Australopithicus was discredited when more sophisticated forensic techniques were developed.  The remains Dart attributed to homicide and cannibalism were almost entirely the work of a particular large predatory cat species with a preference for human meat.

In the end, no one knows when humans began the routine and often systematic slaughter of other humans.  We only know it was an awfully long time ago.

Chatwin argues it began when men ceased being nomads and the concept of material property and possession emerged.  He makes a good case that the further humans traveled the paths of ownership, ease, wealth and static civilization, the more they wielded the sword, the guillotine, the whip, and the chains.

Jack

How to stay out of trouble in the USAcquainting yourself with behaviors to avoid:

Study the Mormon religion.

• You don’t have to adopt the spiritual tenets of that religion, but if you understand everything the religion forbids and don’t do anything forbidden by it you can depend on staying out of jail and living through your life as a healthier person than you’d have been if you hadn’t done so.
• However, you’d be well advised not to actually become a Mormon. Although it hasn’t happened in recent times, Mormons have a long history of being persecuted, threatened, having their property destroyed and confiscated, being beaten, raped, murdered and generally hated by Christians.
• Getting yourself too closely associated with the Church of the Latter Day Saints is the opposite of ‘prudent’ behavior.  Also, just to be on the safe side, stay away from Jews and blacks, too.

 

So the second avoidance behavior to adopt toward living a healthy, free life:

Do nothing to get crosswise with Christians.

• This will probably require you to adopt some behaviors you mightn’t have chosen for yourself, but it will help assure you remain free within the context of what’s left of freedom once all that other is removed.
• Support the political party that’s currently in power and call it patriotism.
• Wear a red white and blue tee-shirt so other Americans will know you’re one, also.
• Keep track of the daily news. Know who the enemies of your country (the political party in power) are, and be vocal in your hatred of those enemies. Even (especially) if the enemies of the State happen to be citizens of this nation. If you know such people, isolate yourself from them.
• Denounce them to the authorities.  Spy on them and watch for any evidence they might be potential terrorists, drug lords, or online gamblers.

Generally speaking, the behaviors I’ve described worked well in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Post-Shaw Iran, Iraq under the late-dictator, Red China, North Korea, and other countries of like mind.

They ought to serve you well here, no matter how bad things get, so long as the leaders aren’t from Cambodia.

Jack

Morning to you:

The comment by csfb on the Papillon entry pricked my memory when I was wondering what I would read next.  Songlines, by Bruce Chatwick came to hand from the bookshelf.  My copy’s a library discard in middling good shape except for half the front cover being carefully cut off by someone before I got it.

I’ve read the tome several times through the years and each time enjoyed it.  I won’t say each time it’s something new, so much as a reminder of glowing moments of the last read.

Chatwick’s work is anecdotal non-fiction.  It’s the story of network grid of songlines defining Australia before the Europeans arrived, and his attempts to learn what remains of them from the aboriginals who still remembered some as late as the 1960s.

Aboriginal traditions seem a bit unique regarding all this.  The ancients, wandering the land sang every landscape feature into existence, creating a gridwork of maplike, deeply sacred records of the landscape in songpaths.  Features, everything not yet showing themselves, they sang into the underground to lie dormant waiting for someone to sing them to the surface.

Sort of brings to mind a lot of things in my consciousness and thoughts these days involving numbers and time, but it’s also proving to be a source of a lot of sideline thinking about some lost aboriginal thinking within the US.

As for Ultra Edit, I’m five days from expiration of the trial period.  If I don’t renew it will become just so much stored clutter doing nothing on my drive.

That is one fine piece of software.  The person on one of the threads who recommended it declared it was the best software investment he’d ever made, and I believe I’d have to agree.

I’m going to miss it, but unless I break through into being somewhere I’m not yet with the numbers I’ll have to put off purchasing it.

I’ve got the wall broken out in the bathroom shower to expose the plumbing there and a lot of stopgap measures in place to keep water coming to the rest of the house, but I’m going to have to do something soon about a lot of crystalized hardware still inside the adobe wall.

Every move I’ve made thus far, everything I’ve touched in the repair saga has caused some other ancient copper or brass horror to crumble upstream.  I’m lucky to have been able to shut things down enough to keep water to the kitchen, the bathroom sink and the commode.  But it’s complicated the process of bathing….. doing that and my laundry wash in basins on the floor of the tub, which is a blessing to be able to do, but not as happy a blessing as being able to shower.

My old buddy Jerry Sires wrote a song once called, Labor Day Pump Lowering Blues.

“There wasn’t ever any doubt I’s going to lower that pump myself,

And keep that several hundred dollars

Not give it to someone else (Bad newwwwwwws Mike wails in the background)”

So Ultra Edit’s going to have to wait in line behind a lot of other things, including firewood that’s going to be needed, filling up some gas bottles to keep the front of the house warmer in a month or so, plugging some leaks the recent hailstorms knocked in the roof, catfood and groceries and skyrocketing-priced gasoline-gold to get me down off the mountain occasionally.

Unless, of course, the great computer in the sky slips a final piece or two into place and gives me a way to understand precisely the relationship between bonus balls and all those other numbers.

Great day to youse

Jack