A Sunday Should be Well Spent

Lazy Sunday brings with it a vibrant feeling of life when it comes. In a sunlit room with wood floors I make time to read Prince Valiant.

Reading the old fashioned strip is not an obligation but rather a habit. I read Prince Valiant when I was young and thought things like, “Geez this is slow and boring” and “When will this every get to some action”. Now I savor the fact that I only have to read the story once a week and I am current.

By saying I “make time to read Prince Valiant" I mean I have the opportunity, the down moment in which to waste my time in an idle pleasure. Our world we live in is too fast. We have lost any sense that we can ever rest. Culturally we went from to hand to mouth existence to a time of leisure society in less than a century. In less that three decades we are now back at fighting for our day's morsels.

Still I think we need to carve out downtime. Rest beyond sleep is important.

The pictures are from a Sunday afternoon spent wandering about a county park on Vancouver Island. I think the shot of my youngest all those many years ago is a thing of beauty.

It was different back then

I am cleaning up an old computer and this is what I found in the images. Forgive me if I posted it before. Yeah times were different back then. Looking at the typing I think it wouldn't have taken much to turn me into a Unibomber clone.

The Two Stimulants that are Always Visible

The motivation for the posting of the Joni Mitchell song, the Three Great Stimulants was a walk in the alleyway behind my office. As I was departing for a lunch one day I noticed an odd bit of urban art. The piece had clearly been arranged by someone.

My mind saw this as an installation by one or more addicts in a private urban space. I snapped a picture to memorize the effort. The coffee cups were all precisely placed at an angle save one. The empty cigarette pack also seemed to be staged with care so as to complete this work comprised of lost/discarded materials. My mind gave it a title, Stimulants in Iron before Brick.

The only things missing from this shot are intoxicants and sex. Putting a woman in a slit skirt with a mostly empty microbrew bottle in her hand might be the answer to that. It would resolve the lack of completion that I see in this work. Maybe I will try and stage that and post the image.

Anyhow once the stimulants thing got in my head I started humming the Mitchell tune.

Faces

Sometimes you see a face and just accept the emotion being conveyed as being open. Perhaps the person you gaze has caught is smiling. It may come from the twitch of a muscle near the mouth. Perhaps a bone in the cheek flexed.

A face can tell us so much. The arch of the eyebrow, the presence of “laugh” lines, these are the kind of nuances of facial features conveying who a person really is. Well it conveys this information to me and to other people of my ilk, neurotypicals. Clearly and without question my son doesn’t see these things; nor will he ever. His brain has been proven empirically per a series of MRI scans to be formed in a way that is not set up to read these cues. It is what it is.

For me reading a face isn’t about the complexion as much as it is the eyes and the mouth. Oh the complexion can tell you if the person has worked hard and thus has been weathered. Stress or the elements are a couple of causes for the aging of skin. My father’s face worked outside and worked with stressful situations. His face was as worn as an old leather jacket supple and wrinkled. His was an expressive face. The skin told you what he did. However the mischievousness or anger or confusion that is what you had to read in the eyes and the laugh lines. A complexion can also tell you if a person has sought refuge in a bottle or some other intoxicant. But skin tone can’t tell you what somebody is really all about.

For years now I have seen the above face behind the counter at the coffee shop I haunt. The image does not do her justice. It does not show the open joy she exudes in daily conversation. It does not show the love of life and the lust for knowledge she ebulliently exudes. What it does show is another human who can use her face as a canvas to tell us so much more about who and what she is.

The Three Great Stimulants

I don't know if I would call this one of Joni Mitchell's great lost songs. I like it. The sentiment seems true when I think about it. Also how many songs can you name that use the word artifice?



Here are the lyrics in case you want to peruse them.

I picked the morning paper off the floor
It was full of other people's little wars
Wouldn't they like their peace?
Don't we get bored?
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

No tanks have ever rumbled through these streets
And the drone of planes at night has never frightened me
I keep the hours and the company that I please
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh and deep in the night
Our appetites find us
Release us and bind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They'd like to slam free choice behind us

I saw a little lawyer on the tube
He said, "It's so easy now, anyone can sue."
"Let me show you how your petty aggravations can profit you!"
Call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh and deep in the night
Appetites find us
Release us and blind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They're gonna slam free choice behind us

Last night I dreamed I saw the planet flicker
Great forests fell like buffalo
Everything got sicker
And to the bitter end
Big business bickered
And they call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh these times, these times
Oh these changing times
Change in the heart of all mankind
Oh these troubled times

Spinoza

Our apprehension of truth can’t be passive at all, but active, a function of the exercise of reason-the same reason that exists in all humankind. Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza. New York: Schocken Books, 2006, p 208

A walk at lunch on a gray day passes quickly. Time spent this way gives a moment to reflect. Walking down the streets of a small city is a different walk than the one in the mountains I described recently. On the misty evening of the earlier walk I was seeking relief. Today when I walk at lunch I am seeking a moment to think.

Primarily when I have been striding abut today I am thinking about what Baruch Spinoza endured in his search for the truth. Being driven from his community of Amsterdam Jews, that is the entirety of the world he had known until his excommunication, could not have been easy. Today nobody is expelled forever from society except for sex offenders. Now even murderers can be rehabilitated. In our 21st century world you can challenge the existence of God and humankind in most places will not kill you.

Having been ordered to sever his ties with the Jewish community, and they having been demanded by the religious authorities to cut all time with him, Spinoza had to move into a more rural area. It was a place where he was isolated from the day to day world. He was left alone with his ideas. Alone isn’t quite right he had correspondence with persons engaged in similar pursuits, but some of these were clearly designed to trap him in acknowledging one heresy or another. Some seem to have been been sent with the hope he would say something in response with which he could be prosecuted. He entered a world where all of Christendom was suspicious of anyone other than the true believes; it could not have been easy.

I liked the above quote. In some ways it is my mantra. The search for truth must always be foremost in how we carry on in our lives. To probe for truth and challenge assumptions allows us to grow. However with growth comes pain. Spinoza really was an extraordinary being.

A Tree Resolves it All

Sometimes you just need a walk. Putting your feet into motion feels good when your world is too intense and too in your face and when you just need to be anywhere but where you are.

On vacation recently I hit one of those moments. No single thing took me there; no single person brought me to that point. It was the accretion of a number of things that caked together made me want to go.

Let’s consider the situation. Sitting in a garage some 60 miles away was my car. As noble a beast as the Prius it for some reason it had started smoking on the long decline into Cherokee. Social dynamics on the child front were bad. The kids had been at each other in the back of my sister in law’s van for the better part of the day. We had been visiting historic sites and the Gameboys were mandated to be off. Lacking distraction teen fuses were short. Me I was just sweaty and tired.

Arriving back at the condo, I couldn’t find any reading material that would work to divert my mind. The TV did not work well and I really didn’t want to play cards. Lacking any other options I decided to take a walk. On the way out of the condo I noted our camera was sitting on the table. Grabbing it I headed out.

Despite the humidity the walk was exactly what I needed. As I headed down the hill I noticed a cloud rolling over the next hill/mountain. Stopping about halfway down a pretty steep incline I noticed how majestic the mist coming down over the green lush trees was. Looking up I spotted a single tree standing erect and very strong against the fading light. There was no hidden in the tree it was just beautiful to me. I took a couple shots of that pine and my mind cleared.

A walk on a country road took me out to a solitary tree. A solitary tree took me to a space beyond all the hubbub of the day. It grounded me and I was okay. Go take a walk.