Eldering

Antony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

.....the stone was the largest raw diamond anyone had ever seen. Thei most gifted stonecutter spent eighty days faceting it, and when it was done, it was a brilliant blue, the blue of tropical seas, but it had a touch of red at it's center, like flames inside a drop of water.... The stone came to be known as the Sea of Flames. Some believed it was a deity, that as long as kept the stoner, he could not be killed..... a priest said he had a dream . . . the Goddesss of the Earth told him she had madethe Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea,and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the Prince plucked it out, the Goddess became enraged, she cursed it the stone and whoever kept it. . . . . The Curse was this: the keeper ofthe stone would live forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on those he loved one after another in unending rain. . . . But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse.

[Random French broadcast]:

"The brain is locked in total darkness. . . it floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims withcolor and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

. . . . . Open your eyes and see what you can see with them before they close forever....."

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea:

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite. ”



 Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

Time is a slippery thing: please hold of it once, and it's draining might sail out of your hands forever.

To shut your eyes is the guest nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and bases and buildings exist a rawer and older world, A place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

Does the brain which lives without a spark of light fill for us a world full of light?

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, Atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. 40 weeks later, 6 trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mothers birth canal and we howl. Then the world start in on us.
....
To men like that,  Time was a surfeit, A barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry around in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

..... And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manee and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flew above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out to the other side, The air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Every hour... Someone for whom the war was in memory falls out of the world.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

On My Birthday I Can Write Anything I Want To

Richard Matt and David Sweat, the two escaped convicts in New York/Vermont can be shot on sight and no one much will care.  Certainly not me. That's why they are considered outlaws. Open season on them, right?

But I have a contrarian shadow that comes from the darker side of my soul. Existentially speaking. There is a fragment of feeling within me that identifies with Matt and Sweat: do they not represent my struggles against the world, or the prospects of our all of our transient, flawed and fragile lives against inevitable death? Fleeting hope vs certain doom? Having a case cancer of cancer promotes this POV

Maybe I like the hunt & chase as a form of authentic competition.

Are not Matt & Sweat Warrior-Brothers? These men, for whom very few people have expressed anything but contempt, and for whom the notion of “family” may have had predominantly negative connotations, may consider themselves blood brothers. I would bet on it.

In this situation, can the causes of Justice & Hope be opposed? Justice requires that these two thugs be shot down like mad dogs before they kill again. Given the chance, I would shoot them down. But Hope aspires that they escape certain capture and death to teach us something about the virtue of perseverance against all odds. Like Matt & Sweat as Bonnie  & Clyde escaping from Alcatraz?

The best possible outcome is that the two never kill again. Whatever else happens.

Anthony Doerr on Memory

Memory

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.

~~Luis Bunel, My Last Sigh

Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here; another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you create new memory.

Memory is a way of defying erasure.
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Nothingness is the permanent thing. Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception.
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Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them?

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What is a seed the purest kind of memory a link to ever generation that has gone before it?

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....there is no good nor bad to it at all. Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be under water. Progress s a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.

vvvvvvvvvvvv

Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles.

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A river never stops. doing, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, forgetting,sleeping, mourning, dying--the rivers are still running.

Every hour ... all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. the World is remade.

....You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Marianne Williamson

Writing about Sports

Bill Ward:

Sports was never really about sports, but about the people who played them. The best thing about the sports is its humanity. Write the humanity.

Bill Plaschke

Judgments

Anne Lamott:

I didn't know how to let go of judging people so quickly, on how they look, or dress, or speak, so I couldn't stop judging myself.

Yes. My daily struggle...