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At 67, I'm astonished how little I've changed!

1/31/2017

After nearly seven decades of struggling through a very real world, a world I was never able to change to suit my peculiarities, but rather one in which I was forced to change myself in order to survive--not to mention thrive--I would expect to be a very different person coming out of all that than I was going in.

Rummaging through a box of ancient odds and ends from my early life, I uncovered a little black notebook containing sixteen pages of diary, beginning Oct. 16, 1966. I was sixteen years old then, just a sprout, leafless, totally dependent. And there on page two, after a general description of our farm, our family, and my life as a child, I described myself:

“All this has led up to what I am, which isn’t anything special. Out of the ordinary—yes—but special—no. I am somewhat ambitious and have a craving to learn. My ambition is to be a biologist, although that does not mean I won’t end up being a ditch digger. I have a theory (I am always making theories) as to why I am like this. I may as well put it down here, even though it will not interest anyone but myself, in later years. There are quite a few reasons why I have this ambition and will to learn….” And I go on for FIVE PAGES describing why I loved to learn things. Not the things themselves, but why! Theories! It wasn’t enough that I had to understand why other things existed, and how they worked. No. I suddenly put down my books and ideas and asked myself what was going on in my own head. Why did I want to know all these things? And so then I worked on that problem, as if it were about the deer in the forest, solved it, and then went back to everything else. And I’m still doing that. After sixty-seven years. Constantly. Every day. Every hour of every day. And now that I’ve just written that (“Constantly. Every day. Every hour of every day.”), once again, fifty-one years later, I look at those phrases and automatically wonder why. All over again. Why constantly? Why every hour of every day? So here I am, right now, re-analyzing the theories I wrote in those five pages, and adding ones I hadn’t thought of then. Re-weighing, balancing, re-working the percentages. I can’t help it. That’s just who I am. I haven’t changed a bit.

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Pensive in winter mist.

1/3/2017

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Linda came to a conclusion about something, but couldn't put it into words.

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إبراهيم أشعياء عوض linda can i bet!
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Sheila Deane That's a really pretty blue grey scape.
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There’s a benefit to waking throughout the night: catching all the dreams.

1/3/2017

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I haven't solved my sleeping problem yet; I still wake up every few hours. But at least now it all adds up to a full night's sleep. Last night, for instance, I woke four times, each time after a dream.

One odd thing I’ve noticed is that each dream each night is completely unique. It seems to have no relationship to the others, either in terms of feeling, theme, location, characters or plot. And yet, there is only one person, me, who is dreaming them all, and all in the space of one night of my life, during which I presumably have one main outlook and feeling about myself and the world. This was a very unexpected discovery.

As well, when I thought back on as many dreams from the last few days as I could remember this morning, I noticed that all the people in them had distinct personalities, with distinct looks and characters as well, as if they were plucked right off a real street and popped into my dream whole. Even sometimes while I was dreaming I would be puzzling over one of them just as I would someone I met in real life, thinking what an interesting person. In the past, I've ignored their reality because I just assumed that what some psychologists said about dreams was the truth, that people in them represent different aspects of the dreamer's self. So, not understanding a character simply meant I didn’t understand what aspect of myself was being referred to. Well, that still may be true, just that the representations aren't simple symbols created from whole cloth as if they were chess pieces but instead are plucked straight from my memory base of real people and brought to life.

However, the more I think about that, the more I doubt that they represent parts of my psyche. Instead, they seem more likely to be parts of the drama of a dream, and it’s the whole of the drama which represents my ongoing feeling and outlook at the time.

One part of my general outlook now, and has been since I lost my shyness recently, is a newfound enjoyment of people, of the individuals they all are. I really like people, in all their uniqueness, all of them, the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, I think that interest is being represented in my dreams by making the individual characters in the drama fun to watch and think about. It uses these fascinating people as the building blocks for each dream. It's as if my dream mind were a story writer. Which would make sense too because stories are another thing I'm into consciously. As I have been most of my life.

Or is it the other way around; I'm into it consciously because my unconscious mind just naturally thinks in terms of stories? I don’t know the answer to that one. Although, If I think about it hard enough, maybe I’ll dream it up tonight.

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A sunny dream, with no fear.

1/3/2017

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For the fun of it, I decided to climb out on the cabling of this vast, floating wind harvester, a machine that was part of a long stream of similar metal air ships, all of different colours, shapes and sizes, but all looking to some degree like massive grain combine harvesters. In the blue sky, the sun was cheerfully shining down onto wide fields of green farmland about half a mile below us. I was with a couple other guys, both of whom seemed less knowledgeable about all this than me, but who nevertheless followed me out onto the cables.

At one point I looked backwards into the stream of air harvesters behind us, and just above them a vast, new one in yellow was bearing down on us. It was longer and slimmer and obviously faster than the older, more upright, bulkier machines. It seemed to be coming right at us, but instead blew by just overhead, noiselessly but causing a tremendous wind.

I looked around to the front, in the direction it had disappeared, just as a small, old machine was blown out of the air and crashed, its wide catcher-conveyer section smashing into that of the machine I was on. I said, "Look at that," as it balanced there. Then it toppled over and fell out of sight towards the ground. I was trying to understand what happened and said to the others, "It's the big, flat forward section that makes these machines very vulnerable to a sudden wind."

As I was waking, I was amazed that I had no fear of heights at all way up there. Maybe that was the point of the dream, the exuberance that comes with a lack of fear, the way I'm feeling about people lately! And I thought the machines were like an air version of sperm whales that open their great mouths and sieve out plankton. I couldn't see any animals in the air that these machines were after, like birds, so maybe there were vast numbers of insects up here in this particular air stream on this planet. And where did the idea of the flying harvester come from? When I was a kid on the farm, I used to watch combines mow down wheat fields, lifting the stalks up into their bellies where the grain would be taken from the chaff that was shaken out the back. On large farms, a number of harvesters, one at an angle behind another, would mow down an entire field fairly quickly.

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Little mistakes....

1/3/2017

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I was just reading in James Boswell's The Scots Magazine of 1775 an announcement of the wedding of an ancestor of mine, and then noticed that the next section in the magazine was Deaths. Here's the first one:

"Sept. 30. Near Brentford, Sir William Yorke, late Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. His death was owing to a mistake by his servant. Sir William was grievously afflicted with the stone; and having usually gotten relief by taking a certain number of drops of laudanum, his servant was dispatched to the apothecary at Brentford; who gave the laudanum, but with a special charge not to give Sir William more than twenty-four drops. The servant, forgetting the caution, gave the bottle into his master's hand; who, in his agony, drank up the whole contents, and expired in less than an hour after."

There is no mention made of what became of the servant, or his career.

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David Stones I always exercise caution around my servants, particularly in their delivery of the various potions that serve the dark mysteries of my ailments. "Mistakes can kill," I remind them. "Yes, they can," they say. At once rueful. At once with a quiet but discerning glee.
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Stan Burfield Ha ha. Very funny, David. You definitely have a few good novels in you.
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A word can't refer to the essence of something

1/3/2017

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Here's a little thought my lateral, non-literal friend Donald Brackett sparked in me just now. It has to do with the meaning of things.

Normally a thing may have a meaning for a person, but, upon serious consideration, it's pretty obvious that the meaning is solely a symbol for it, an idea that is attached inside our minds to that real, external something. But the thing itself has no relation, no direct connection, to the symbol in our minds. So it seems that it can't actually BE its meaning, no matter how much it may seem to be when we look at it.

However, if we really drill into reality to the point where we actually get beyond our view of it somehow--if we get down to the essence of something-- then the relationship between it and its meaning appears very different: We can then only see IT, itself, or refer to it with itself as its own symbol. Thus, any use of symbolic language is actually not referring to an essence, but only to an idea, maybe to an idea of the essence, but still just to an idea.

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Donald Brackett very elegantly expressed.
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New Year's Day, 2017.

1/1/2017

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At 67, I'm astonished how little I've changed!

Pensive in winter mist.

There’s a benefit to waking throughout the night: catching all the dreams.

A sunny dream, with no fear.

Little mistakes....

A word can't refer to the essence of something

New Year's Day, 2017.

Stan Burfield's Blog

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