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First off, at the end of this post, I want to republish some of the recent amazing comments contributed by my new friend, Mesmacat, in Australia. Regular visitors know I very rarely do this, because what the webheads like to call the "real estate" herein is mainly devoted to my memoir-in-progress.

But, every now and again, a new person shows up with such remarkable insights, firing off of what I have posted that he or she elevates what I am trying to do here to another level.

That is how it is with Mesmacet. His reflections add much more heft and literary sensibility to my posts, so my other readers deserve to see his writings. If you click back through recent posts, you will see many such comments, each as wonderful as its predecessor.

I wish I could figure out how to juxtapose my posts with his comments, as a sort of dialogue that reveals new layers of meaning beyond what I could ever accomplish on my own.

I am truly grateful to Mesmacet, for participating in this way. And I will anew encourage anyone else who feels like it to join the conversation here. Forget the memoir; I would be thrilled if this blog turned into a community of people discussing themes of mutual interest.

In other words, in '60s lingo, "let's do this altogether."



To inspire your inner artist, here is "an old Lamborghini" by Dylan. I think he was nine when he drew this.



I've been caring for my housemate's plants while she frolics on the beaches of Mexico, celebrating her 40th birthday. This one seems to enjoy my care.



Here we are, back to Dylan's car series. What I love about this van is its relationship with the stoplight.

A new haiku:

For every car
A stop light

By David-San, 2007



Here in the region with the richest agricultural bounty on earth, all kinds of good things are flowing into our markets.



Ever think you can't write? Have nothing to say?

I've taught writing in various venues since I was 22. I still have not met the person with nothing to say, no story to tell. But I have met many who lack confidence in their ability to write.

Much of this, I fear, is the natural result of a society that alternatively ignores and over-values its writers. Sure, some have more pure writing "talent" than others. But, everybody can write, whether they realize it or not.

I can't wait to locate, scan and publish my grandmother's partial memoir here; and perhaps parts of my father's hand-written, unfinished novel. Neither would have ever considered themselves "writers," yet both were capable of weaving a story with words that were uniquely their own.

We all have our "voice." In fact, we have at least two voices. Our speaking voice, which can grow weak with age. Our writing voice, which transcends age.

Those who know sign language, or are able to convey stories with their bodies, through dance and other forms, have the gift of a physical voice, not reliant on words.

Actually, there are many other voices residing within us. The various media forms -- drawing, painting, photography, film-making, jewelry-making, sculpture, performance pieces, standup comedy, and (to my mind) the most powerful of all -- music -- all convey separate channels for releasing the individual voice.

(At this point, I have to explain the above photo was a mistake, the result of my finger pressing the shoot button when I meant to press the off button. Something about the result is strangely compelling, to me. My point is that we all can create some form of "art" almost by accident, or even entirely by accident, if we just recognize it when it happens.)

The other night, on YouTube, I was indulging one of my favorite passions -- gathering clips of live performances from musicians I adore. On this occasion, I was seeking great renditions of Amazing Grace, the ultimate gospel composed, ironically, by a man who participated in the slave trade until he saw the light, and grasped the power of a force that could "save a wretch like me."

I am not so unreligious that I do not appreciate the power of this message. At my father's burial, at Rolling Hills in summer, 1999, I held my daughter Sarah, a beautiful singer, as we all sang the song of loss, faith, salvation, and redemption in honor of my father's life.

I found one version, by Mahalia Jackson, but failed to locate another, by Marion Brown, that is my all-time favorite.



It occurred to me last night that I have been looking at this ceiling fan for nearly four years now, but never captured it on film.

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Mesmacat has left a new comment on your post "The Hearts of Men":

David, I was looking at another post, where you mentioned the idea of a generation able to see its own demise. I wrote a little off line, in response to that, at first, but the thoughts have not yet found their mark. They may not, these are big questions and I do not expect necessarily always to find some satisfying responses to them, as I grapple with the ideas they inspire.

Nevertheless, I am glad for the opportunity to engage with these notions. It is something I enjoy about the time I spend here; I encounter an idea or feeling you have opened out in your own way, through your own curiosity, and I can build on that. It is in my own way of course, but by and large with some sense of shared sentiment or hopefully shared respect for the core of the issue.

It creates the potential that an online body of writing, joined with the commentary of others, can merge into a form of interactive creativity very different from simply writing in your own space for yourself. It also certainly helps that you cover so much ground, with so many poignant sensibilities therein, planted and cultivated with care.

Unlike my own journal, which is a vast collection of drafts and sometimes half finished thoughts – a writer’s journal, complete with ink spots and ramblings - this is a space where I feel better for only posting what I am ready to post, with a sense of the best refined thoughts of a time. They may not be complete, but they are not tumbled on to the page for the sake of releasing a writer’s creative tensions. Your posts are are polished, self-realized and elegant to a point I would like to respond to in kind, rather than according to the dictates of my own blog project.

Somehow, writing in response to this post, it was easier to make a proper beginning on a path to examining what I feel about questions of that generation that sees its own end.

The following is what this post made me feel, while still considering my response to the other post:


I battle with this too. I suspect many thinking, sensitive people do, and I hope at least to be one of those, or at least scrape in somewhere among them, after my many fits and starts of action and reaction, grand visions and humbled discoveries. And boy, have there been a few of those. And probably many more to come, no matter how often I think I have found the answer, and can coast on rosy wheels, only to falter on the bumps and pot holes I little see along the road, in my eagerness for enjoying a path that is great for my latest brand of skates to roll on.

David, I guess you have worn more skates, in more styles, and learnt from more knocks that I have. But I have had a good few in my time.

The question sometimes seems to me to be: how do we get to love, if we think too much, want too much or fear not little enough? How do we grow towards love? Some just feel it; some are there already. Children are in some ways, but they have not yet discovered how to find it when it is not given to them without question or perseverance, or indeed, only lies after a journey through a landscape of disappointment.

Yes, there are grown ups who love as innocently and fully sometimes as children. But they are but some among many that make up the world; not all are as evolved in their sensitivity or the scope of their hearts from the starting line or not a long way past it.

A great number of us have to find love, and find it through struggle, difficulty and encounters with the limitations of our less than admirable greeds and misguided passions.

The dog eat dog world of literal survival, the egg breaking, the lessons learned from dangerous over confidence or too much self doubt, the hurt, pain, depression and mania. They are part of the world, no doubt. They are dynamics of creativity and discovery in a growing consciousness, perhaps more for young men, than young women, but probably in parallel ways, are equivalent maturity processes within different modes of feeling and perception. No one wants them at the time, but working through them certainly makes love mean something, makes love real, not imagined or too closely associated with wants, not needs - with covetousness, not generosity.

Taking advantage of the good fortune we are sometimes showered with before we recognize it – the young in our society seldom seem to do this unless they are lucky, or precociously gifted or spectacularly well trained by the wise, and receptive to\o them. Can we expect from our collective adult selves, so young really in the scope of what it means to be a global society, with so many new toys, and so much new power, to do any better?

If we are to survive, we are going to have to succeed, however, in finding a way to maturity, to moving on from our egoistical fascinations. We have to grow up as a civilization. Our survival depends on it, as does in many ways the survival of a young person depend on finding maturity after the experiments of youth.

It is a bit more complicated with a global society with vast and intricate forces and temptations, than with a single individual, no doubt. Especially given that society is young in many ways, but also quite old in others. We blind ourselves to the consequences of our actions as well, as we blind ourselves to the lessons of history.

As a civilization we are both old and young at once. We can err in both directions. As a civilization we do not ever confront death and the gradual change of our body leading to it, at least not yet. We keep on moving on, learning some things, but also in a kind of eternal youth of the optimism of our own grand plans for a future we have not yet had to come to terms with.

It is this question of forward motion without true apprehension of the consequences, coupled with a constant effort to erase the troubling lesions of history that leads me on to further thoughts about the generation that can see its own demise. Hopefully they will settle into place.

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Mesmacat has left a new comment on your post "Attachments\":

I think the coin is safe in your hands. The person who might tell you a story worth you parting with it, I suspect might also be a person who has no desire or need for it.

Greed seems a poor inspiration for true tales that move us. I certainly like the look of it too much to make an attempt :)

I guess it might be a story about finding treasure, and a coin seen in the light of its journey is something more than its face value. Stories as treasures, and treasures as stories, what a web you have woven there, David LOL.

When I read your post I was reminded of a story I read a long time ago, I can hardly remember what or by who, about a coin that was one of those used to pay Judas to betray Christ. It caused unsettling fortunes for those whose hands it passed into. I guess that Pirates of the Caribbean films probably play on a similar idea.

I can quite relate to your pondering on how many hands it’s passed through. But I also wonder how long before coins themselves vanish from the lives of some nations.

I guess coins derived originally from the value of certain units of precious metals. And even when coins no longer reflected their value in material, it still makes sense to hold something that is equivalent in value to another thing.

How many things so vital to survival are moving towards being so abstract.

On another note, a memory from my own life. Coins as a child were obviously a means to desired things. But also they were objects of fun.

I can recall playing at the seaside on a game that paid you more coins if you rolled your first down a shoot in such a way that the coin fell exactly between the edges of a stripped surface.

Another machine was an ever-moving contraption of shifting ledges, a waterfall awaiting the signal to flow, that showered coppers and sometimes silvers if you dropped it in the right spot.

Some of these machines still exist. They are among the best indications of dicey, risk-laden investment I can think of. But the potential thrill of clatter of won coins is difficult to ignore.

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Mesmacat has left a new comment on your post "Traveler's Tales":

Beautiful artifacts. I am sorry to hear about the loss of your own collection from your travels.

I have always been entranced by the way that the artifacts a civilization produces, resonate with its character:
Style like a wavelength of experience, like a pattern you can almost taste. I had an experience once that suggested to me almost as though the elements of language, style and shaping of the land express some kind of hidden coefficient. How it would I have no idea, but there is something so compelling about the way that so many aspects of a time and place fit together.

The artifacts can be quite different, they can have many different functions, but they belong together. In a sense they are also dots you can join together with your imagination to apprehend something of people either a long way away, or far back in time.

I don't know if you know the Borges story Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius - about a secret society that invent a civilization, and create the impression of its former existence through creating an encyclopedia to describe its cultural facets and history, and also fashioning false artifacts.

I guess if you found a group of artifacts that express a particular era and sense of design you might well conclude that a community once used them, that they lived their lives using them.

It is that sense of things that were handled and were a focus for human energy that makes a former culture so much more real than just stories about them, to my mind at least. Certainly how different would the myth of Atlantis be, if we had objects that were, or could have been Atlantean?

I can identify with the knife fascination. I was given an Indian ceremonial knife with a wooden sheath at a young age by a relative. I poured over it, frustrated by the fact I could only do so when closely watched by adults.

Something sharp that hides in darkness, and gleams when drawn. Well, that was going to appeal to a young boy I guess.

However, I don't think it was the destructive potential of it, it was that the knife was somehow so complete in itself, so impossible to hedge your bets around, so real. A bit like the edge of a cliff, you know it is supposed to be dangerous, but it marks a boundary between things you just get used to and things you can never afford to let out of your attention.

***

Thank you.

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