Sylvan Reverie

I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass;
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
I will get me away to the waters that glass
The clouds as they pass.
I will get me away to the woods.
- Richard Hovey

I’ve been away from my blog, yet again, for a small spell of time. This time, however, it was not a matter of choice (at least not a practical choice) – my computer’s mainboard gave up the ghost. It was three years old, and survived one failed UPS and four failed power supplies before finally being overcome by the fifth. The computer is now attached to a different power outlet, a move I hope will work, and wish I’d considered sooner. Along with this came a re-installation of the operating system and restoration from partial backups.

Normally, I try to take advantage of computer downtime by actually getting out more and feeling the wind on my face; but other events, along with my somewhat obsessive approach to restoring the computer to where it was before having to re-install the operating system, have kept me indoors. Despite it all, I have had time to allow my mind to wander and – although I will certainly make time to answer the need described in the above poem – I should be starting a small philosophical series within the next few days.

The most peaceable way for you if you do take a thief,
is to let him show himself what he is and steal out of your company.
- William Shakespeare

While browsing through a number of blogs tonight, I couldn’t help but notice the incidence of people leaving a comment for the sole purpose of advertising their own blog. One even went so far as to request in comment that s/he be added to the blogroll. Personally, I consider the practice revolting. I know in some cases, blogging hosts make it impossible not to include a link to your profile or homepage in the name section of a comment – I consider this quite far removed, however, from going out of one’s way to craft a separate link or advertise a URL within the body of the comment itself. When I can get away with it, I don’t include a link back to this blog when I comment elsewhere – I’ve told myself that, should anyone want to know where my home on the Internet is located, they can ask me. Granted, I sit here with a blog that’s half a year old, has had two visits and no comments – but I’ll continue to stand behind my principles and, in my defense, I only enabled comments in here today. Perhaps, as the title of the above quotation’s original source suggests, I’m simply making much ado about nothing – it still gets under my skin, though.

Moving on to something completely unrelated, and likely much more interesting, my wife related an experience she’s had with her dreams lately, and it inspired me to wander along another path of thought. Often enough, our dreams don’t make much sense to our waking minds – yet there is every reason to believe that our dreaming minds have little problem when it comes to our waking experiences, in fact, some propose that dreams are a way of processing waking thoughts and experiences. I’m also reminded that some of our most talented and creative people are often called ‘dreamers’, and that it is possession of a wakeful channel into the dream world that we regard as the inspiration that defines these people. All of that taken into consideration, would it not make sense to just simply stay in the dream world?

Totally related, but completely off the deep end: what if the dream world is an actual realm or dimension that we all actually do access when we sleep, and death is no more than a one-way ticket to it?

I remember, I remember
- Winthrop Mackworth Praed

The house on Manitoba -

Sitting in my high chair is my earliest, dimmest memory, but not so dim that I can’t remember the direction I faced or draw a reasonable floor plan of the room I was in and its adjoining room. I remember lying in my crib and, through the bars, seeing my babysitter step into the shower. I remember rolling on the floor towards the television and then back away, my father smiling as he told me “no” every time I approached – I thought it was quite the game, until I actually touched the television and saw my father’s face transform. I remember the smell of my first inflatable punching bag, and I remember my fascination at how Weebles wobbled but didn’t fall down. I remember the Sun on my face as I stepped outside – I don’t remember what day it was, only that it was late morning and I was wearing coveralls, and that it was the first memory I have where I was happy to feel the Sun on my skin. I remember exploring what seemed giants for trees at the time, and talking to them, and finding out that they were my best friends. I can still remember the smell of their bark, and the feel of their energy. I remember having a nightmare involving my father’s shadow, and daymares involving his substance. I remember my first snow, and that I had to look at it from inside because I was quite ill – my mother made a snowman for me, then brought some snow inside so I could investigate. That was the first year I remember watching the Frosty and Rudolf Christmas specials. I remember hating eggs, and the terror I felt when I saw my grandmother put eggs in what would be my birthday cake – she told me they were magic eggs, that they would disappear in the cake, to trust her – I’ve liked cake ever since, and eventually learned to like eggs. I remember the horror of daycare, and I remember the feeling of pride when I saw the daycare lady’s face as I introduced her to some of my father’s favorite vocabulary. My father was a drill instructor at the time, his language was both toxic and contagious – I very quickly had the other ten kids chanting along with me … I never went back to that daycare. (more…)

A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
- Thomas Carlyle

As I stepped in front of a car at an intersection the other day, I mused over just how trusting we tend to be of the intangible things that make our world run. A traffic signal only directs traffic because people allow it to do so. The light itself doesn’t stop people. One couldn’t really even intelligently argue that the light tells people to stop – it’s a light, it comes on, goes off, it doesn’t speak or tell anyone anything. People see a red light and tell themselves to stop, a decision based on the common acceptance of a light bulb’s dominion over a traffic intersection. Once I made it across the intersection, I continued to ponder this idea, and was surprised with the vast number of areas in which our society is governed by the unsubstantial. The two most obvious things I could think of were space and time: two things that rule our society in different ways, yet are invisible, intangible, and exist only because we have agreed that they must exist. Laws, although they are written down and enforced, do not themselves have any real body of their own. Laws are, like time and space, universally agreed upon by people – even so-called ‘lawbreakers’ understand that they are violating the laws they seem not to respect. Numbers, words – especially the virtual words that are reflecting my current thoughts – they don’t physically exist on their own.

As I walked on, marveling to myself at how our great societies are truly grounded on even greater, asomatous concepts, what nearly pushed me to a pounding headache was when I started reflecting on how life would be if we accepted only the concrete, and rejected the intangible.