June 30, 2009 - The Caribou - Homewood Illinois

Back at the Caribou – I expected you to be in southern Missouri by now – nope – got ill and spent the week at the lake – now I’ll wait until after the Fourth – hate to be out on the road during a holiday – know what you mean – probably something you got from the kids – whatever is going around you get it hanging around them – know what it was – some infection I suppose – one good thing, I lost a few more pounds – creating the new me – Oh, Shylock, that pound of flesh is what I owed you!
-

He didn’t want to meet any Communists. They didn’t have any money. He felt that it was all right for a man to go to jail for robbery, but to go to jail for fooling around with Reds was bunk – Richard Wright

First to disappear
         Was the spreading chestnut
         Under which the village
                  Blacksmith toiled
Then it was time for the elms to go

And now it’s the ash’s turn

          It’s already causing havoc

          So many broken bats

What will be next

          There’s talk of the

          Western pines

                 Another insect perhaps
When will it be our turn
                Monoculture and blight
                Seem to go hand in hand
What a lovely couple
They make

Little by little each one is not so young. One is still then young, little by little one is not so young – Gertrude Stein

Head and ears
Head or tails
Head over heels
Heart in hand
Hand on heart
With a heavy heart
Such a bleeding
     Heart
Lend me an ear
Keep an eye out
With a nose for a tale
What a whale of a tale

One can account for just so much of life, and then no more. At least not yet – Richard Wright
-

Red clover, white clover

          Roll over
Where the buffalo roam
          Is home

Among millions of people the deepest convictions of live are never discussed openly: they are felt, implied, hinted at tacitly and obliquely in their hopes and fears – Richard Wright

The GPS said
The GPS told him
To go there
He pulled in
And it said
‘Recalculating Route’

Ancient travelers guessed; modern travelers measure – Samuel Johnson And now days there no need for any of that – just look it up on the Internet

Its pathetic that the dog
Is man’s best friend
When the cow is so
Dear to his soul
Shepard, goat boy, cowhand
Swine header – rancher
Herdsman, stockman
And the dog is just there
To lick the pan and the
Hand of the man

Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds – Richard Wright

Coffee makes everything
      Right with the world
Beer and wine makes everything
      In the world right

That of all the ways of beginning a book which are now in practice though out the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best – I’m sure it is the most religious – for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second – Laurence Sterne

Can you really be an artist
And also be anti-art
Goddamnit you surely can
So long as authority gets
Your symbolic middle finger
That is art’s inclination
        Anyhow
To flaunt the rules is oh so
Artsy fartsy
       Anyway
I did this; I did that
And so you must unless
Playing at a parlor game

In our blindness we have so contrived and ordered the lives of men that the moths in their hearts flutter toward ghoulish and incomprehensible flames! – Richard Wright
-

I’ve been to Chaco

I’ve seen the future
I’m unhappy and so
         Very very sad

There’s a time for reciting poems and a time for fists – Roberto Bolaño

June 24, 2009 - Round Lake - Sister Lakes Michigan

The weather is starting to get hot – for two days in a roll now- it’s got up  into the nineties – now I’m at the Lake – I once cautioned someone about calling it ‘The Lake’ (but that was a different lake) – It’s a form of arrogance – telling others that you have a cabin and are intimate with the lake enough to call it “It”(and probably they are not) – it is ok for The City which everyone (everyone who is anyone and that is all that matters) knows is San Francisco (unless of course your are talking about the financial district in London) – I called up to The Lake  earlier to make sure I made it for the pirate party and I did – the kids are swimming now – the pirate party will be later after it cools off but before it gets dark – arh arh, shiver me timbers matey!

It is more difficult to maintain a tradition of good cuisine than a tradition of great literature, as England teaches us – Octavia Paz

I found a watch at
The second highest point
In Iowa. The CCC had
Built an observation tower
The local college boys
Have a graduation rite
Get drunk and heave
A TV off of the tower
They had to hike lugging
It up a long trail but
Who gives a damn when
     You are smashed
And in the middle of
The night Kaboom ha ha ha
And during the toss his
Watch flew off his wrist
He was too blasted to notice
And today I have that watch
       Ha ha ha

What began as a liberation has turned into a business. The same thing has happened in sexuality as in gastronomy: the erotic industry is the younger sister of the food industry – Octavia Paz

An idea or form is born without any doctrine
In an act of spontaneous generation
As these flies spring fort form shit
Then it acquires baggage and
Needs places of storage
It is acquisitive of stuff
A revolution every twenty years
Said Thomas Jefferson
God redeem this stuff!
And a man of the people cries
And does much violence
And then he dies
And we are so much better
For it but begun again
To accumulate

By its nature what we see on the screen is the art of happening; we are given the gesture itself, not an account of it – Alain Robbe-Grillet


A lucky few are of
A natural archetype
There is no difference
Between them and the
Role they are playing
Who they play is who they are
There is much assurity of self
        In this
Others have to learn a personality
And wear it like a cloak
And there is always something
Doubtful about who they
       Are – they are never so sure

If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body; - and if it is true that people can walk about and do their business without brains – then certes the soul does not inhabit there [in the brain]. QED – Laurence Sterne

The pirate party ended with a treasure hunt. Dalton whose birthday it was in honor of will be seven on Friday – he is older than his sister Lilly and older than Maria who always comes with them, had a difficult time sticking to the directions on his pirate map – always wanting to wander over to the little boat that had taken Sarah and Mark across the lake – it did sort of look like what a pirate might row ashore from his ship - but eventually, with a little guidance from Katie they found treasure at each of the seven spots marked on the maps that she had drawn. All the adults had tattoos and pirate hats – some wore eye patches – some put their earring in their noses – and started using the paste on jewels as bling – one on a front tooth, one on the side of the nose – silly adults. The kids put their treasure in their treasure bags that they had decorated with stick ons (cross bones and skull, x marks the spot, jolly roger flag and paste jewels) and once back inside started checking out their booty (the pirate kind – what they had accumulated during the hunt – don’t count your jewels until you’ve fended off your enemies) and figuring out what they had acquired. This morning fist thing they got out their stuff (pirate booty) – they still have their tattoos on and Lillie is wearing three strings of pearls – Maria said that she slept with her other cheek on the pillow so that the tattoo would not come off – If you want to keep it forever (and she said she did) then you mustn’t go swimming today or ever again – Will not forever then but for as long as I can. All the adults are still sleeping except for Dave who got up early to go to work – he had gone to bed early too.

I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean, I mean that not anyone is saying what they are meaning, I meant that I am feeling something, and I mean that not anyone is thinking, is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean I am not certain of that thing. I am not saying, thinking, feeling, being certain of this thing, I mean, I mean, I know what I mean – Gertrude Stein

You deserted him for me
You’ll desert me too
All women do
Don’t get their way
Desert if they get a chance
But now for one last chance
Hold out a little hope
If redemption should be evident
But by then it’s too late
It’s a false hope
Emotion has torn the anchor loose
You are adrift in the storm
All the jewels to be stolen
By jolly pirates

The media are not the message; the media are the society – Paz

A Receipt –

Fairway Stores Inc

Employee #6: Name – Ashley

Total purchase: $16.80

Total debit sale: the same

Item count: 12

2.46 lbs bananas

1.03 lbs tomatoes on vine

One red pepper @ $1.29

June 6, 2009 – 12:01 PM

Thank you for shopping

Fairway

We appreciate your

Business

Two leprosies and one degradation: submission to ideological dogmas, and prostitution to the market – Octavia Paz

Then we went out and sat on the barge – Dalton pretended that he was the pirate captain – This lake is getting bigger – no this is the sea for pirates to not sail around on lakes but on the sea and the sea is certainly big – Oh, Dalton replied and retuned to his tiller. Dalton had come and asked – can we go outside – sure, I replied, so long as everyone wants too – Wrigley and Kolby I already knew did, but Kolby was only allowed outside on her leash – she a runner and she is a jumper – oh what a wild one she is. The girls did – can we go on the boat, Dalton asked – why not and we all did – then they wanted to do the ‘snappers’ from their treasure chests – Carla has said last night, wait for tomorrow to do those – don’t run with them and don’t put them in your mouth – the package said use only under close adult supervision - go up there on the patio and throw them down on the concrete – eventually even Lilly whose a scartycat warmed up to the concept and was popping away and giggling – don’t use them all now or you won’t have any for later. Eventually Carla and Dan got up – they were looking the coffee – I had made a pot earlier but it was mostly gone – I had knocked my cup against a chair when preparing to go outside with the kids and spelt half a cup on the carpet – what’s this Carla asked in her bare feet, it’s wet – oh, I did that, I admitted. The coffee is stored in a canister that is kept in the refrigerator – I got it out for them and some zucchini tumbled out when I did – the refrigerator is stuffed to overflowing.

Losing our name is like losing our shadow: to be noting more than our name is to be reduced to a shadow. The absence of relation between things and their names is doubly intolerable: either meaning evaporates or things vanish. A word of pure meaning – is as impossible as a world of things without meaning – without names. Language makes the world habitable – Octavia Paz

Dec 22, 2003 – The Royal Ground – Fillmore and California – San Francisco, California

Breakfast at Kate’s Kitchen – The Framer’s breakfast - scrambled egg, English muffin - fruit or potatoes? – potatoes, please - bacon or sausage - no - no meat? - no – thanks - I find myself watching umbrellas, watching myself watch umbrellas. Wondering if this mean something – everything means something but is it really worth the time spent pondering it – we don’t know until we do.

In order to return one must venture forth; in order not to disappear in the void, he who sallies forth must return to where he started – Octavia Paz

June 23, 2009 - The Caribou - Homewood Illinois

Sitting here at the Bou for the last time in a while. When you coming back? What are your plans? Don’t know. Try not to have any. I’m headed to Michigan – to a pirate party – birthday party – a seven year old. Will you still be here at ten? Don’t know gotta go in time to get there for the pirate party. I helped my sister shop – we found all kinds of pirate stuff at Michaels. It’s ok once in a while but I’d not like to shop everyday. And after that? Thought I’d head south into southern Illinois and then Missouri – looking for a home – just a place to winter over in. Got engough books for several months - I'm happy, fat and bald - Summer have all of me.

The transition… to the museum was a magico-religious transmutation: object turned into icon. This idolatry began in the Renaissance and from the eighteenth century on, has been one of the real religions of the west (the other being politics) – Octavio Paz

In the mid-west
Where the summer
Is hot and humid
And insects
Fly up your nose

The religion of arts, like the religion of politics, was born out of the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things… Politics or more precisely, Revolution – co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society – Octavio Paz

On the plains
The rain comes
Not from Spain
But from the ruins
Hungry hooves
Thunder

The demands language provokes are more categorical then the replies that onecan furnish with it – Albert Camus

Is it time to go
Is it time to be
Somewhere else
Without any appointment
And nothing scheduled
And no reservation made

What difference does it
Make
But its in the blood
It’s what a nomad does
Can’t sit still
Can’t wait and
Watch the grass grow
Can’t wait for any bedsores
To appear


Can’t wait for what awaits!
And it all lies beyond the horizon

All men and all women ever having been, being in living are certainly feeling something in them about going on living. Each one of them certainly some times is going on being in living doing something and then is going on being in living doing some other thing – Gertrude Stein

What does it take to become your
Spokesperson
Certainly it doesn’t require any
Expertise
As it shall be decided what is
To be said


A self-appointed spokesperson
Is one of many spokespeople
When there is no authority
To appoint just one


And yet regardless of how
Many there are
There is always a unity
To the message
Deviance is self-destructive


Sometimes all it takes
Is a lot of arrogance
And a disregard for the
Possibility of truth

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would not venture to talk all – so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all; the truest respect you can pay to the reader is understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself – Laurence Sterne

There is a relationship between ‘dial-a-porn’ and Taco Bell, but I don’t wish to go into it here.

We are all Marxists in one way or another, just as sometimes, unwittingly; we are Neoplatonists, Stoics, Kantians, Darwinists – Octavia Paz

American being has come
To be a being living in old age
Near the end of its being living
Bitter of its failings
Blind to its obsessions
And nostalgic for imagined
Past glories

The French poem is wrong: to travel is not “to die a little,” but to practice the art of saying good-bye so that, our burden, that much lighter, we man leanr to receive. Detachments are apprenticeships – Paz

Post-modernism is modernism’s self-critique
If one can still believe in dialectics

Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism – Octavia Paz

Blue State philosophy applies – states should be run like businesses. No one proposes that business be run like state agencies – its not a two-way street – all government agencies are expected to pay their own way – it part of the ideology – through usage fees (we shall overlook for the moment what we can not see) – and who can pay the most gets the best of government’s services. And it’s scary because government is capable of creating scarcity and necessity which private enterprise only dreams about – but that is ok because it’s not an integral part of the ideology. The powerful like it. Big business likes it. It’s very Puritanical – God rewards his stewards with material wealth – It’s only natural, its very carnal – the good should be rewarded and the bad punished – a part of the grand plan – it’s only God’s meritocracy in action – or maybe it is only self-justification – of why some should have and others be denied. Power does not need self-justification but it has a preference not to be seen as evil as a rule, unless that becomes a necessity – and lets hope that it doesn’t come to that. But if a tyrant should arise and presume to make the same choices of who is good and who is not, everyone would scream – but they do now – the government is trying to take our guns! I like Jefferson’s solution better – a revolution every twenty years (if only we could keep the intellectuals out of it).

Happiness was a faith that we proclaimed, insolently. We needed, quite the opposite, to be delivered a bit from our greed, to be torn, in fact, from our happy barbarity – Camus

By naming what he felt and thought, the poet does not transmit his our her original ideas and sensations, but presents form and figures that are rhythmic combinations in which sound is inseparable from sense. These forms and figures, these poems, are artificial objects, cubes or spheres of echoes, and resonances, that produce sensation and ideas – sensations similar but not identical to hose of the original experience. The poem is the metaphor of what the poet felt and though – Paz

First Nick than Ranger Rick
Who was sent to benefit from Des Moines
Just returned after two days training
He seemed relieved to be back
Return to the routine of regular rounds

I would like to take a weed-wacker
Said Nick, to this place but they
Yell at me if I work on my time off


That Nick says Ranger Rick
Sure is a hard worker
And he marked my site placard
With his big felt tip pen
Nick had stopped to pick up
The trash scattered by the raccoons
It was his day off – busman’s holiday
I exclaimed – the term was new to him

To some it is an astonishing thing that anyone can be doing anything so that someone can be paying them something for that thing. To some it is not at all an astonishing thing that some one is knowing how to be doing something that someone is paying that one something for doing that thing – Gertrude Stein

They buzz in your ears
They get caught under
Your eyelids
They fly up your nose
And if you open your
Mouth down they go
But it’s a relief that
They don’t bite
And Then I am reminded
That they breed
In horseshit

With these poems made up of mere sounds, we totally rejected the language corrupted and rendered unusable by journalism – Hugo Ball

Like dorm roommates get
Their cycles in synch
Women talk to get their
Lives in social synch
With each other, whereas
Men maintain their silence
In order to hone their
Competitive advantage

Two obstacles stand in the way of elaboration of a new idea of society. The first is the identification of social progress with industrial development…. The other danger… lies in conceiving of the new society as a geometric construction: utopia – Paz

I hear cows – Moo - Stupid cow

The gods on the other hand… voice stars, rivers, mountains, horses, insects, dragons. For them to speak is to create; their speech is productive… When the gods speak they produce; when humans speak, they relate – Paz

Into and out of
The present
With a blur
Of soft focus
It’s anathema
Of the cinema

It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilate everything to itself, as proper nourishment; and from the first moment of your begetting of it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use – Laurence Sterne

June 22, 2009 - Caribou Coffee - Homewood Illinois

Still didn’t get my mail – but had a nice visit – caught the 8:30 METRA University Park train back – made it by 10 minutes – I always worry about making a deadline – would have had to wait for two hours – surely you can find something to do for that time – this is downtown Chicago – yeah but it’s Sunday night – still! Will I could have sat and read which is what I do a lot of anyway. I ran out of books and found five at the Homewood Library Friends used book sale – only one of which I really wanted to read – the biography of Marcel Proust – off to visit Borders this morning – gotta have some poetry.

As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is at fault, will terminate in friendship – Odiem praeclarum! – then nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in telling – Lawrence Sterne


The appeal of thunder
        Is a rumble

Blood flowing in the street
Torrents of violence
Demanding surrender


The aftermath of thunder
        Is nostalgia
A longing for a return
To the womb


        Distant thunder
Receding and proceeding
Horizon to horizon
Reverberations of waters
Headed towards the sea


Then it is over
And it’s the return
        To the mother
Only the accounting remains
What is gone and what
        Still remains

I am much less interested in their being good ones or bad ones, clean ones or dirty ones, rich ones or poor ones, well-mannered ones or badly mannered ones, sick ones or well ones. I want to know about each one the being in them in them to make of them ones succeeding, ones failing – Gertrude Stein

A great novelist could just as well
Have been a grand entrepreneur

It takes the same single mindedness

And determination for simple ideas

The former creates the future and the later

        Confirms history

But whether a grand entrepreneur would
Make a great novelist is doubtful
Although he might be splendid
As a hack writer or advertising
         Sloganist

So then I will go on writing, and not for myself and not for any other one but because it is a thing I certainly can be earnestly doing with sometimes excited feeling and sometimes happy feeling and sometimes longing feeling and sometimes almost indifferent feeling and always with a little dubious feeling. I could though be so wise and I am so wise and it would be so nice for me to be certain what from me some other one could be a wise one a little less wiser than I am – Stein

The poem does not exist prior to its being written

History overflows and floods whole continents and peoples then the waters recede and the survivors count up what is missing and what remains –Albert  Camus

Travelers seek wealth
As they appropriate
As they create
As the despoil
As they enchant
The one is the tourist
The other is a poet

Man not only thinks of the world by means of his language… his vision of the world is predetermined by his language – Ernst Cassirer

How can the pendulum

Mark out time when

It does not march,

       Travels no line

Swinging into the future
And then back into
       The past and
It passes through the
Present as fast as
        It can

I certainly will later be telling something that I will be telling about her later. I certainly will be telling more about her later – Gertrude Stein

Prairie thunderstorms, more threat than actual violence, most of the time. Something crashed in the woods early this morning and I awoke. A dead tree perhaps. The State is a little negligent about its maintenance here. A druggist turn apiarist said he was trying to get the city to take it back. He reached behind him in his truck and retrieved a honey bear which he held out to me. I have it still. Why did the state take in on then, I ask. Greedy, he replied. I agreed with him as I had gotten a hint of his political leanings. And it was the WPA who had built the lake and the park and that led to Obama’s taking on government employees (when the private sector was reducing its workforce) and the evils of deficit spending and I didn’t want to go there – where private enterprise is always right and the government is always wrong – a world of imaginary absolutes (and all of them are). I successfully steered the conversation away from politics and back to bee keeping and colony collapse. He was not very knowledgeable about it said something about a infestation of mites which led me to believe he was an investor more that a practioner. He was out here cruising the park on a Sunday afternoon killing time in his pick-up truck.
-

Reference is the lesser part of meaning, part of meaning, patternment the greater – Benjamin Lee Whoof
-

Everything in the world … by dear brother Toby, has two handles… At least, replied by father, every one has two hands, - which comes to the same thing – Laurence Sterne

June 21, 2009 - Millienum Park - Chicago Illinois

Back in Chicago – well almost - headed into Chicago this afternoon – to visit with my niece – her father, my brother is in town and I haven’t gotten my mail in four months. I returned from the Lake and shaved my head. When I looked at my head on my 61st birthday (two months ago) I could see my scalp – hair getting thin – better none that spotty – so I’ve been growing a beard – and now it’s looking good – so I shaved my head an hour ago and it feels strange – gee I look like my father. I'll take the META downtown from Homewood – runs every other hour on Sunday. Due to get in at Millennium Station (Below Millennium Park) at about 3 this afternoon.

The final and most revolting injustice is consummated when poverty is wed to the life without hope – Albert Camus
-

Getting over the blahs again
I awoke in slow time
In homogeneous time
Time without division
     Or addition

Exponnetial time
It was all one – that 59
      Ford Galaxy and the 47
      Chevy pick-up
Could as well have

       Been the Astrovan
Just a jar of jellybeans
Such a grab bag of time
Any flavor will do
Just don’t make me decide

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things – Albert Camus

So how much did the Slum Dog Millionaire win in US dollars – one million rubees is about $20,000

Lifting dumbbells is not a hobby. It is a confession of subservience, not an assertion of freedom – Aldo Leopold

The greater the urge
The more it needs

    Resisting
Sit still
And when urged
To remain calm
    Get up
    And run
One needs be
A contrarian
To achieve
     Anything
At all

Powers do not have to show it. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it; you know it – Ralph Elllison


Words lie intermediate – forming a relationship, between the specific and the general

Remember you don’t have to be a complete fool, in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself… Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least. Play the game. But rise the ante, my boy – learn how it operates, learn how you operate – Ralph Ellison

What ever it is that we wreck
Nature shall correct
Its just that once we have done it
It shall not return in our lifetime


Things that you make
You can unmake
But what you didn’t
You can’t resurrect

Perhaps only the unreliable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie – Ralph Ellison


Half a dozen different
Wildflower in bloom
Including the claret cup
But Abbey’s cliff roses
Are the most prominent
Filling the night with
Their perfume


The lizards
Scamper about

Catching bugs
The only thing about
In the heat of the day
Darting from shadow
To shadow
Stopping only to
Palpitate the air
For edible scents

Pioneers usually scoff at any effort to perpetuate pioneering – Aldo Leopold

Chiggers hadn’t bothered me in a long time. As a kid we got them inside the band of our socks. My buddy Gerald got them so bad that his doctor ordered that he not wear cloths for a week. I though that was funny – having to be naked (I didn’t know then that adults did it for fun – got naked in pairs). And in May I got the worst case of chigger bites that I have ever experienced. That and the onset of Memorial Day and the onslaught of tourists (RVs prowling the byways) – well it all just soured the camping experience. It was that as much as anything that turned me back. And what is a chigger anyway?

A chigger is the larval stage of a mite – kin to the tick – and it doesn’t bit but injects the host with an enzyme and feed on tiny parts of the inner skin. This causes severe itching accompanied by a red-pimple like bump that usually appears only after the larvae have detached themselves.

For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat – Albert Camus

Last year RV purchases were down 32.9% from the previous year: 237,000 vs. 363,400 units. 90% of the RV market is composed of motorhomes, travel trailers and fifth wheel trailers. Folding towed and truch campers compose the remainer.

It is better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others – Ralph Ellison

For like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hardwork and progress and action, but now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the time. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities – Ralph Ellison

Going counterclockwise is
The left-handed way
The spiral is the most common

Symbol of rock art
And if counterclockwise is right
And there was no
Statistical preference for
Left-handed men then
It would have indicated they were
True artist and not just priests

While the actual working cowboy disappears, along with the genuine non-working Indian, the make believe cowboys flourish and multiple like flies on a pecan pie – Edward Abbey

Is not mathematics the
Universal language
That offended the gods
And the just cause that
Brought the towers down
Imagination and reach
Without limitation are
The precursors of tragedy
According to the Greeks

While the Greeks used reason to restrain the will, we have ended by placing the impulse of the will at the heart of reason, and reason has therefore become murderous – Albert Camus

In a curious paradox, humanity has refashioned a hostile destiny with the very weapons it used to reject fatality – Albert Camus

There is something profoundly sad
In the promise of a long life

We do what is quickest, which is to report what we have done and what we have seen – Albert Camus


The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually thing of, but the sort that attempts to led dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die – Camus

LOWEST COMMON DEMONINATOR

Conceived by bureaucrats
Designed by a committee
Executed by lowest bidder
Administered by professionals
Upon the advice of the experts

The criticism of language cannot get around the fact that our words commit us and that we shall remain faithful to them. Naming an object inaccurately means adding to the unhappiness of the world – Camus

June 18, 2009 - Sister Lakes Michigan

‘Tis not my intention to persuade
That’s what advertising is for
I plan my attach on the walls
Of your metaphors
I start by circumvaliation
Your reality

Circumvaliation – the initial process of surrounding a besieged fortification with trenches from which trenches are extended towards the points of attack

Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy – Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold is the father of wildlife management in the US and promoter of the establishment of wilderness areas – the first being the Gila Wilderness area in New Mexico. An adjoining wilderness area to the east of the Gila was established in 1980 and named for him. He earned a degree in forestry from Yale and served 18 years in the forest service mainly in New Mexico and Arizona. He taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until his death in 1948

What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory – Aldo Leopold

A collection of Aldo Leopold’s nature writings was published as “A Sand County Almanac” in 1949. It is considered a landmark publication of the American conservation movement.

The most ugly of Americans

Flies his colors the highest

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers – Aldo Leopold

And along comes man
Tackle box and fishing pole
    In hand
Intent upon his gain
The birds scatter
Waiting for the remains


Patience is a poor substitute
    For necessity
And lacks any pretence
Of festivity

Out ability to perceive qualities in nature begins as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language – Aldo Leopold

The question should not be

How to make the world safe

For more people, but

How to make the world safe

From more people


There is something inherently
Insane about this notion that
Infinite density will provide
Infinite benefit


This concept of infinite growth
Is fundamental to civilization
The problem is that there is
Not enough growth


And the application of reason
To insane ideas
Is a how we display intelligence


This is the mystery
That has become our
Religion

I know nothing whatever about true underling reality, having never met any. They are many people who say they have. I know, but they’ve been luckier than I… for on my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces – Edward Abbey

As Aldo Leopold was the founding father, Edward Abbey was the bad-boy of American conservation having little faith in modernism and the efficacy of accommodation regarding wilderness protection – going so far as advocating sabotage of development project – coining the term “to Monkywrench” (see his novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and its later sequel “Hayduke Lives” ) Although proclaimed a ‘nature writer’ he did not like such categorization – perhaps ‘desert anarchist’ would be more apt but then again it is just another label. Larry McMurty called him the “Thoreau of the American West”. The quotes here come from his collection of essays “Desert Solitaire: a season in the wilderness”

[Objects and monuments of the vanquished had become] safe to play with in recombinations emptied of previous vital meanings, as in tourist souvenirs, antiquarian reconstructions, or archaizing revivals – William Weber

Stupidity is not remedial

It flourishes on barren soils
It has no wants
Its lack of success
Is its only encouragement

I am glad I hall never by young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms with a blank spot on the map? – Aldo Leopold

If you would only listen you just might hear the sounds of the rhythms that have cycles beyond the ear – the day, the year, the centuries and perhaps even the millennium. There are such sounds in the universe.

Parks are made to bring the music to the many, but by the time many are attuned to hear it there is little left but noise – Aldo Leopold

The truth is that there is no surplus
Reliance on it, other than temporarily
Is foolhardiness and all civilizations
     Do it
And their success is directly related
To the rapidity of their decline


A surplus is the same as a loan
Try as we might it must be repaid
To comprehend this is to have
     No vision


What you take you must
Give back
That and a little more

All are restrained by an ironclad taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.- Aldo Leopold

Nature is that which lies out there
Just beyond the picture window
It’s imperative that they be mobile
For our unlimited viewing pleasure


Surveys rank this second highest
Outdoor recreational activity

I cannot explain why a red rivulet is not a brook. Neither can I, by logical deduction, prove that a thicket without the potential of a quail covey in only a thorny place – Aldo Leopold

They don’t recycle paper here!
They should have a solar shower here
    Yeah, I know
Constant but ecofirendly
Consumers ever seeking
     Improvement
Eco-conscious modernism
Still believing in the
Enlighment project
Wanting to see it
Carried to its fruition
The progressives
   On the greens

We need more predators. The sheep man complains, it is true, that the coyotes eat some of their lambs. This is true but do they eat enough? I mean enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. That is my concern… The lambs, accustomed by tradition to their roles, do not complain; and the sheep men, who run their hooved locusts on the public land and are heavily subsidized, most of them as hog-rich as they are pig-headed, can easily afford these trifling losses – Edward Abbey

To life off the fat
Of the land
As if one is living


On the fat of the lamb


To build up storehouses
Of fat
Off someone’s else
Land is both


Our ewe and their cry

We strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness… but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run – Aldo Leopold

Poor land may be rich country, and vice versa. Only economists mistake physical opulence for riches – Aldo Leopold

A sportsman is one who gives his quarry a chance to escape with its life. This is know as fair play, or sportsmanship. Animals have no sense of sportsmanship. Some like the mountain lion are vicious – if attacked they defend themselves. Others like the rabbit, run away, which is cowardly – Edward Abbey

One in twelve vehicle owers also own a recreational vehicle - 8 million households have an RV. The recreational vehicle industry has sales of $15 billion a year. The averave vehicle is driven 4,500 miles and is used a total of 28-35 days a year.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building recreation into the still unlovely human mind – Aldo Leopold

There are 13,000 private RV parks in the US and 1.600 state and national government campgrounds. But how many developed  sites are available for camping  and what porportion of the have utillities is not clear. Tent sites without utilities at state and other govenment sites range from six dollars to sixteen dollars a day. Utility access is an additional four to ten dollars. Day usage fees frequently apply which add an additional four to six dollars a day. Average cost of tent camping in developed campgrounds is $6-$20/day.

Most devloped campgrounds have utilities. If a site has utilities you pay for it wheter you use it or not. Increasingly 'primitive' sites (those without utilities) are being developed (utilities included). The number of availabe of tent sites is drastically shrinking - many parks have no undeveloped sites.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another – Aldo Leopold