I just deleted about an hour's writing. I was opining about the problems of our times and the apocalypse that seems to be in the offing. The world is experiencing rapid change, and it isn't merely social. The environment is under siege from profiteers, but it is easier to cry about twenty year old deeds and to pursue justice against the dead or dying. "Crimes" of enticing and eliciting people into making bad personal choices take precedent over corporate crimes that are killing us all. Social science is easier than science and politics is easier still. Everything is personalized and is presented as being universal. We use the tar brush profusely and then wonder why people can't agree.
But there I go again. I shouldn't read the papers in the morning before I write. Perhaps I shouldn't read them at all. A population of politicized people is simply fodder for profit and corruption.
God loves a sinner. . . or so they say.
I can't go on.
I was going through some old hard drives looking for lost Lonesomeville photos that have come to my attention. As I've said, my files are a mess. I found a lot of forgotten things in them, of course, and became distracted. This photo was taken with the recently sold Hasselblad Xpan. Makes me wish I hadn't sold it. Selavy. The world will never be like that again, anyway. When we finally come out of our pandemic semi-lockdown, the world will look much different than it did before. It will smell different and taste different and look different. There is no going back. Trying to cling to something is always unproductive. Adapt or die, I guess.
Apparently, that is the case (link).
Now would be a good time to read Edward Gibbon’s THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE:
ReplyDelete“The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”
Gibbon was a product of the Enlightenment and took the rational scientific approach to history.
The empire collapsed before it was invaded by barbarians who finished the job. The empire was overwhelmed by fanatical religious thinking rather than rational stoicism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/opinion/united-states-social-progress.html
But hey, let’s drink, party, and shout in chorus:
“WE’RE NUMBER 28!”
“WE’RE NUMBER 28!”
“WE’RE NUMBER 28!”
“WE’RE NUMBER 28!”
Well, sir. . . Rome wasn't burned in a night.
Deletehttps://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/b4d6675a-a901-4cb4-a210-37f8c48f73da
ReplyDeleteOh. I wrote and wrote last night.
Then had one of those self-conscious panic attacks come upon me. I'm not sure what is going on in my head these days.
It is best to keep to simple things - the gardens, the dogs, sleep, meditation, walks, stretching, work (I guess, for it does spare the mind a bit) - chai, books and art. Tho it could be those last two that cause me problems.
Who would give them up? Not me. Certainly.
And so, I try to do the best I can and live with the strangeness that is me. And when I feel the strangest - read poems - look at art. And suffer more.
T will be gone 2 years very soon. We used to talk endlessly of those things. Or how the garden was doing or the cats. The skunks, etc. Or what I miss most - spooning with him lecturing in my ear about some topic he had been ruminating about all day - until I fell asleep (only to be quizzed the next morning on what I remembered from the instruction).
Libras - dammit - all about them. :)
I was looking through T's America Poems. I decided on this one:
To Dance with Gaia, 2032
who will sing
the rising of the sea
who will mourn the passing of the world?
the children wail piteously,
boom crash of inner Earth,
bass gong,
the long trek,
mostly it was left behind
rotting in the landscape,
mauve weave of heat
behind behind,
Still
down south
you might be able to buy a girl
a soda
and tell her that you love her.
Aye, mother
sweet sin
A series of little dooms
blunders & fools.
It’s all in the preparation
of the tea,
The placement of the leaves,
the trees, taking their revenge.
stale green muck
that lines the new formed shores.
Mother races through the storm
in her nightgown,
her hair wild, mad.
on your knees
on the cold concrete
you cannot call her back.
Now. Photography. I think you like it a little.
Delacroix said this about photography: "photography would be responsible for the return of art to the "highest regions of the mind, art's true domain."
Such contention in those early days of the picture making machine. Such fear of the new unknown.