Boxes

Finished a paperback novel. Its been quite a while since the time I read several novels a week. It felt about the same to read this one, since it was well written. What's different from highschool is my literary education that lets me see the construction and tropes within it. Read enough and you see the similarities between them. It was enjoyable. A world between covers, where I got to experience the emotions and actions of all the people. The experience is made by using compression, shortcuts, description. Its like putting ones consciousness into a box. The closeness makes everything seem more real. The author constructs the box, paints the scenes on the inside, but eventually you have used up the novelty and have to leave. Outside the box the world is not so trim. Looking back on a long term pursuit of fiction, I see the parts of reality I missed. Always climbing into a box, and too often using the methods of box interpretation out in the real world, which has not such walls and continuity. The world has its own boarders, entirely different than squared line-by-line pages. The world was not designed for our amusement and catharsis. My point is not that we should stay out of the narrow box worlds we create. Vacations have their utility. It is I who needs to inhabit a new set of interpretive constructs. The ones for out here. Because, I am coming to understand with my own warped methods, that this world is itself a box. A far more deadly and immersive one than fiction media. The world was created by someone with intentions and populated with characters. Where else would we have gotten the idea for our little boxes? Likewise there will be a conclusion out here. I have faith in the author of the truest of myths. Even my role here has meaning, and there is something within me more than a human who runs through his role and never exists again. There is wisdom encoded on pages. Wisdom that holds true across many a scene and worldly circumstance. Bits of wisdom, like math, are permanent qualities that had to exist outside of our knowing them. And so, even a misguided soul like me can pick up the wisdom I've found and use it on the straighter path. Our father, who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. For thine is the kingdom, the power, the glory forever and ever, amen.

Alternate photo for drive poem

Driving tractor earlier this spring.

a driving poem

I switched to the classical music channel and wrote this on the tractor yesterday. I wouldn't rate this poem very high, but I enjoyed writing it.




     I can drive
until the sun falls from the sky
and boils the ocean dry
and is left,
a hard cold coal of sun
and an albatross carries it back in time -
to start the day again.
      I can drive
until all the aluminum is removed from
all the feldspar everywhere
and the stripes on the roads are
anodized.
      I can drive
until you've learned every song ever wrote on piano.
and all the people
who ever existed have listened to it all,
live in concert.
      until
every tear is cried
every tear, and all weeds are
gone from every field
with friends across every phylum.
until
all weariness is sated
and time is measured
as the space between then and now,
not from within
as we wait until.

rafting

Today I did white water rafting for the first time. It was fun and exciting, enjoyable to propel the boat as a team, and had those nervous bits when it seemed dangerous.
As we floated through smooth and rough water my thoughts where on the experience of being on uneven water, and how that is so often used as a analogy for the function of thoughts themselves. The water is singular in substance, a tangible mass made of a myriad tiny pieces, hard yet splashing to drops, swirling mysterious currents turning this way and that, yet all going downstream. There is power in water, but in most arrangements it is harmless.

After all the reading I do, it was grand to experience the foundation of a metaphor.

camera stick discovery

What good is a monopod with a ball head? Maybe I'll sell it.



But wait!






It's a keeper! I read about doing off-photographer camera and there's all sorts of ways to get unusual angles with a big stick! I can also use it for off-camera flashes once I buy some.