The Creative Process

When creating, it can be difficult to set the image free without resorting to manipulation: an unbiased hand is required.

Do not force, push or bully… let the image flow naturally from the void.

The creation may not be what you intended, but I think that this makes all the difference between art and intellectualism.

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a challenging week

Wallowing in neutral, spiraling downward…

My work-week has been filled with bizarre electronic problems that — according to every Technical Support person available — are impossible (unfortunately, they are possible, they occurred, they are making it impossible for the Company to manufacture its widgets, and it’s my responsibility to make things work: I can’t really complain; I accepted the job, and knew there would be times like this, but sometimes the waves sneak over the bow and smack me in the face). The school year started this week and traffic is harrowing and frustrating (and I’m in the middle of an experimental novel that has infected my consciousness and something within my mind tells me that my work-week and the novel are connected; but, surely, that is paranoia).

It’s useless to become negative and irritable, yet I still make the attempt…

I searched for positive inspiration and found just what I need, Tricycle Daily Dharma:

Remember ‘Divide and Conquer’ — if you can divide a negative reaction into its parts (mental image, mental talk, and emotional body sensation), you can conquer the sense of being overwhelmed. In other words, eliminate the negative parts by loving them to death.

Shinzen Young, from The Power of  Gone

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Slowly, surely, the week morphed into a manageable string of events, and the weekend is stretching its welcoming arms toward me…

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The wedding season

One of my nieces began an exciting new chapter in life as a married woman yesterday. The wedding ceremony took place in a beautiful, outdoor setting: but, for me, it was two children who truly brightened the event: the Ring Bearer, stolid and steady enough to make Gandalf proud; and the Flower Girl, as carefree as the wind.

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The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

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William Carlos Williams

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Once in a blue moon

Tonight will display a blue moon, the second full moon in August [image: universetoday.com].

The term blue moon originated long ago and was used to refer to bizarre events, or events that seldom occur (and this usage is still common today). This is only speculation, but the term may have originated after a volcanic eruption (or forest fire): if there is a large quantity of smoke or ash spewed into the upper atmosphere, the moon can seem to have a bluish tint.

In more recent times, the Marine Farmer’s Almanac borrowed the term to indicate the unusual event when there were four full moons in a season instead of the usual three. In 1946, James Hugh Pruett, writing an article in Sky & Telescope, misunderstood the reference to mean the second full moon in a calendar month, and this inaccuracy was duplicated during a syndicated radio program in 1980, thereby solidifying the association in the media and the population-at-large (Philip Hiscock (an expert in folklore from the Memorial University of Newfoundland) and Donald W. Olson (an astronomer from Texas) researched and exposed the history of the term blue moon).

Blue moons occur because the moon orbits the earth at a frequency of 29.5 days, which does not match up with the length of the calendar months, resulting in two full moons occasionally occurring in the same month.

Blue moons occur, on average, every 2.7 years, so they are really not that uncommon, but the next blue moon will not occur until July, 2015.

On an unrelated matter; I’m not sure why, but my beard seems to be growing unusually quickly today: I just shaved a couple of hours ago, and I’m already displaying a five o’clock shadow…

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The Road, a book review

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy unveils a bleak notion of humanity’s dark side, similar in many ways to the brutality that developed in José Saramago’s Blindness; but whereas the blindness of Saramago’s novel is milky-white, in McCarthy’s brutal world the view is as dark as coal and ash: Night dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world (p. 3). Ash is everywhere, the vestiges of a once vibrant world, destroyed in an apocalyptic event. The cause of the event is never revealed: it is the aftermath that we are immersed into as we follow an unnamed father and son along their nightmarish journey along the road to the sea (the novel takes no prisoners: there is no escape, and no relief for the reader).

Food is scarce (there seems to be no living things other than humans), and cannibalism is rampant. Groups of bestialized humans roam the road, hunting for human livestock. This is the backdrop for the story’s relationship between a father and his son, who are survivors with little hope of redemption (no names are shared in the story: the only time a character shares a name, it is false: names are trappings from a different world). The father explains to his son that they are the good-guys (the civilized, the ‘carriers of fire’), but the son witnesses his father’s descent: the man has begun to lose his sense of humanity because his son must be protected at all costs. Their relationship —expressed in sparse conversations — is complex; filled with faith, love, desperation, codependence, and a tenuous grip on hope.

The father’s stifled memories of the time before the disaster are poignant: …he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it was not about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all (p. 129 – 130).  [McCarthy, for the most part, shuns punctuation].

We should appreciate this world and hold it dear; The Road is a disturbing, cautionary tale; and, as such, it succeeds wonderfully. It is a quick read, seemingly simple, but it hooks the reader, and evokes an astonishing, emotional response.

Recommended.

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We came in peace for all Mankind

1969 was the year of Woodstock, Led Zeppelin’s first album, the Boeing 747’s inaugural flight, the election of Israel’s first female Prime Minister (Golda Meir), the Beatles final live performance (an impromptu concert on the roof of Apple Records, which was broken up by police), the first confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America (and it took the life of  a teenager, Robert R.), the beginning of the US gay rights movement (sparked by the Stonewall riots in NY City), the first withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the killing of two Black Panther Party Members (who were asleep at the time) during a Chicago police officers’ raid, and many more notable stories and events.

But it is an event on July 20th, 1969, that I recall without consulting Wikipedia or other historic information sites. I was on summer holidays — between grades six and seven — watching the first human step onto the moon. It was almost unimaginable, and the fact that I watched the event on our grainy black-and-white TV made it all the more surreal. It was an achievement that stunned me, and changed me; an event that ignited my imagination and altered my reading preference to science fiction. I wanted to be an astronaut (at one point I even sent an application to NASA; sadly, I never received a reply). Above all it was an event that made me realize how small I was in relation to the universe.

The three men who manned the first moon-mission are locked in my memory: Michael Collins (surely, for several moments, the loneliest man ever: he was off of his home planet and on the other side of the moon; no visual contact with Earth, nobody for company, and nothing but static to listen to — see Of a Fire on the Moon, by Norman Mailer for more details); Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the Moon’s surface; and last, but not least, the mission Commander, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to set foot on another celestial body.

I’m sure everyone has heard by now that Neil Armstrong passed away on Saturday, a little over forty-three years since his historic accomplishment. It is a sad day, but a good day to reflect on a positive accomplishment of the human spirit (interestingly, Neil Armstrong’s famous quote, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” was, he said, slightly misquoted: what he actually said was, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”).

Those first astronauts left a plaque on the moon that states: “We came in peace for all Mankind.” And during Armstrong’s first walk on the surface, he paused and put a patch on the surface to commemorate the Soviet cosmonauts and NASA astronauts who had died performing their duties. These acts took place during the Cold War, and were lovely gestures. The words on the plaque were encouraging, but human strife between antagonists continues to this day.

Someday, a human will place a plaque on Mars to commemorate the further adventures of humankind. It would be wonderful if we could learn to embody peace as a species while we continue our voyage of discovery.

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The roots of golf

The following is not quite as  brief as I wanted, but is a mostly verifiable history of golf (with a focus on equipment):

I spent some time looking into the history of golf —especially as regards the equipment — but I had the dickens of a time discovering anything that revealed the game’s initial seed and its germination. Fortunately, life is filled with miraculous moments of synchronicity; last week, one of those miraculous moments — in the guise of Jock McIntosh — sat down beside me at the Moose-head Pub (and this event has convinced me to reacquaint myself with Carl Jung and his theories).

I was sitting quietly, half-watching a football (soccer) match, nursing my pint, attempting to imagine the creation of the game of golf, when Jock sat down next to me. He asked me what I was pondering, and I explained my yearning regarding the birth of golf.  At first, Jock was reticent; but, as he became increasingly lubricated, he began to drop hints that he might know something about the origins of the sport. When I offered to buy the next round, Jock became even more  loquacious. I loosened my wallet further, and he agreed that, for the price of the ales that he consumed, he would relate the myth — nay, tale — of the beginnings of the game of golf; apparently, he was descended from one of the lads that invented the game (I was skeptical at first, but as Jock did not claim to be descended from the original creator of the game; rather, the lad who helped further develop the sport, I was more inclined to accept his story. And he had the soulful, open glint in his eyes that, for me, always seals the veracity of a tale). Jock is a spirited drinker, and his story cost me a fair penny, but it eased my mind’s longing. I consumed a good deal more than my usual allotment that night (it was a chore keeping up with Jock, but I did my family proud); nevertheless, I remember the lion’s share of the story that he related…

It was Graeme McDuffie, Jock told me, who was golf’s inspired creator (Jock had a thick accent and used words like wee, nae, auld, bonny, lad, laird, and their ilk, but — as a favour to myself, and the sensibilities of Scottish folks everywhere — I’m going to stick to my conventional Canadian). Graeme was a solitary young boy from a town in West Lothian (“…that’d be Lodainn an Iar in the lovely Gaelic tongue,” Jock informed me). Graeme liked to walk, with an aimless gait, through the sweeping expanse of the links. The walks served as a balm after a day working the farm, a time for Graeme to be alone with his thoughts. He carried a stout  walking stick, which had a large knot at the top end. When Graeme stopped at the top of a mound, he would rest both hands on the knot of his stick, stare into the distance, and enjoy the open vista of links and Firth. It was on one of these mounds — the slope of which is now referred to as Graeme’s Brae — that the game of golf was born.

It happened on a late-morning walk; a rare occurrence for Graeme: vestiges of morning mist drifted between the mounds, bestowing the links with the faint wash of magic. He headed for a particularly large mound and, when he’d gotten to the top, he noticed a small, rounded stone on the ground. He picked it up; it fit nicely inside his loosely curled hand. He tossed the stone into the air and took a mighty swing at it with his walking stick, but the stick completely missed the stone, which fell with an unsatisfactory thump onto the earth by his feet. He turned his walking stick around (grasping the thin end with his hands), and struck the stone with the large knot at the other end. Fortunately (for future generations of golf-lovers), the stone took off like a shot and Graeme was delighted. He’d watched to see where it landed and hurried down the mound to find the stone; and, when he did (it took some time: the stone was hidden within a gorse-bush), he struck it again and again, more delighted each time he hit it. He then decided to attempt to aim the stone at certain landmarks; a boulder, a mound, a bush. And then he had a remarkable inspiration: he dug a hole in the ground and returned to the mound: he wanted to see how many strikes it took to get the stone from the mound to the hole (he couldn’t see the hole from the mound, so he found a long, straight stick and pushed it into the earth in middle of the hole: this gave him a perceptible target). The first time it took eighteen strikes, but he got better, and could soon consistently get from mound to hole in less than ten strikes (his record was five, which became his goal). Sometimes the stone landed in a spot from which it was impossible for Graeme to strike at it with his stick; he decided that he should be allowed to move the stone, but he would add a strike to his total (this was a fair punishment, he thought, for striking it into a dangerous position). He decided to call his game goulf, a Scottish word meaning to strike or cuff.

Graeme’s game of goulf evolved. For example, he sometimes spent an interminable time searching for his round stone, so he gathered a dozen equally rounded rocks and carried them in a sack across his shoulders; if he couldn’t find his stone after striking it, he’d add two strikes to his total and exchange the lost stone with a new one. Finding spherical stones became increasingly difficult (he had lost many stones playing goulf), so he decided to carve a small block of wood into a sphere; the wooden sphere worked well, so he made more and replaced his stones with wooden balls.

He expanded his game by creating three holes that formed a large triangle within the links; one hole was quite long, the second was short, and the final hole was even longer than the first (he started at his original mound, struck his wooden ball to the first hole, walked up to another mound (that was close to the first hole) and struck to the second hole, etcetera). He grew extremely fond of his game and often stayed out on the links until the sun had completely disappeared below the horizon.

Iain McIntosh, a lad from a nearby farm, saw Graeme swinging his stick (sometimes cursing) and walking aimlessly across the links. Iain watched for quite some before walking over to see what manner of madness Graeme was involved in. Iain was instantly enchanted with the game, and the two lads became inseparable friends and lifelong goulf partners.

Iain and Graeme developed the game considerably in the months that followed: they cleared and packed down the area around the hole, cleared the area between mound and hole, and added more holes (and the holes were placed in a strategic manner so that the final hole ended where the first mound began: the complete tour of all holes — there were eleven in all — made for a game lasting almost two hours. After playing for a few weeks, they amalgamated some holes, and the eventual number of holes was perfected at nine. Most days they’d play ‘around’ the nine-hole adventure twice). The stick became known as a gaulf-club, and the wooden sphere was referred to as a gaulf-ball.

Soon all the young lads in the area (and some of their fathers) were playing goulf, and the sport grew until it leaked into surrounding areas, and farther afield than anyone in West Lothian imagined.

Goulf became so popular that in 1457, James II, in an Act of Parliament

 

Virgo time

[the Virgo image is from cutehoroscopes.com]

My astrological sign — Virgo (August 23 – September 22)  — has entered the spotlight of the celestial stage.

 I’m not an advocate of zodiacal predictability (far from it), but I thought I’d look up some Virgo characteristics and see how they aligned with my personality. I perused various sites and selected typical characteristics, as listed below (my comments appear in parentheses):

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They are intelligent (indubitably) and analytical (I’ll have to assess the validity of this conjecture prior to formulating a response).
They have an affinity for learning and retaining information (if that means I get bored easily, then yes).
They enjoy sharing their knowledge (yes, even if it’s not wanted).
They are meticulous about their appearance (meh: WYSIWYG) and are generally perfectionists (I’ve always wanted to be one, but I’m too lazy).
They have overactive minds (I’ve been thinking about this for over an hour now (there were a few other issues I was mulling over at the same time (which got in the way a bit (things like, did I pack enough for lunch? And, I don’t care how it makes me look, I like horizontal stripes, etcetera ) but I did manage to keep refocusing), you know, fiddly problems: the kind that whirr about in your mind) and I’m really getting somewhere, but I’m going to move on to the next point and come back to this one later…)
They tend to analyze and critique everything (ouch: yes), and tend to be very hard on themselves (also yes)
They are detail oriented, often blind to the big picture (I’m stuck on this one: every time I begin to seriously dissect the elements of this characteristic, I forget what it was about, so I’ll skip to the next one)
They are obsessed with organization (my wife would certainly agree, but it only makes sense that there is a place for everything; and, if things are always stored in their place, then you can find them when you need them!)
They tend to have a small circle of acquaintances they are devoted to, which can sometimes lead to petty jealousies (I have no comment for this; however, there’s something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest for years: my brother and sister got way more attention than I did when we were growing up, and they still do. It’s never really bothered me much. Just thought I’d mention it.)
They tend to have a refined palate (I do like to guzzle dry red wine…)
They tend to be extremely health conscious (more so as I age…)
They have an ability to create reality in their own minds (yes, and sometimes it’s scary in here!)
They have a tendency to be cheap (as per the Pink Floyd lyrics: Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie), but are generous to those in need (okay! That makes me sound better).
They are reserved, independent and unemotional (yes; yes; and only on the outside, sniff).

I have to admit that the characteristics of a Virgo fit my personality closer than I would have imagined, but I’m not convinced that astrology is a viable system (perhaps because I tend to over-analyze and critique everything?); nevertheless, for the next month, may all Virgos bask in the glow of their celestial season!

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the evolution of a post

This post is my attempt at this weeks WordPress  DPChallenge: my plan was to post about replacing the belt on my dryer, but the post took on a life its own…

A vague countenance is reflected on the empty screen; a ghostly chimera, an ethereal representation of the post-to-be. Difficulty is encountered while attempting to form coherent meaning. The will of the post is the equal of its creator: a struggle ensues, and the post slowly emerges.

The post is not an object; it is a nebulous thing that is being created: it emerges from imagination. It can be deleted. Identical copies are easily reproduced (by its creator, or others of its creator’s ilk). It does not grow of itself. The post cannot be thought of as a being or a separate entity: it may out-survive its creator, but it is forever linked to its creator’s consciousness: the post’s creator could, perhaps, live past death in the form of the post, but the creation cannot be considered other than a part of its creator, whose thoughts percolated and burbled up from the depths of consciousness to become the post (which is under the control of its creator). The post should be hidden from the rest of the world (the obvious solution to this difficulty). The post is a tool, merely information transferred via a keyboard: a conglomeration of data arranged to communicate to others. It is folly to be deceived by the struggles of creation: it is only a struggle within the creator’s mind.

I am the post; a substantial presence, a unique amalgam of quantum energies. I exist outside of creative thought (I am real; the thought is not the thing itself). Yes, I can be erased (what I would call murder), but death is an attribute of the living (as is reproduction: either through cloning or fusion (of portions or the whole) with others to form new life, growth, and fresh meanings). And death cannot stamp out the fact of my existence: I exist, and will therefore remain, until the end of time, a member of the universe. The keyboard served as a link,  an assemblage point, but I am the post: I am me. I am. I can be hidden, I can be murdered, but I cannot be obliterated. And, if given opportunity, I will reproduce, grow, and evolve.

There is pleasure.

Games are being played.

I observe the ghostly figure that is referred to as the creator (its alter-ego, the devil’s advocate, will receive no more acknowledgement than this parenthetical remark), but the creator is an illusion; at best, an actor off-stage. I exist outside of the creator’s mind (if, indeed, there is such a thing as the creator’s mind) and I act of my own accord. 

The post is.

Insanity reigns.

I tattoo  the creator’s ethereal countenance with my symbols, the letters and words that are my body, the reality that others view (my essence swims beneath the surface, but my symbols allude to the depths within). The world knows the creator only through me: using my symbols, I connect the creator with others; so, which of us is more tangible, more real? I generate reality for the  mythical creator. Preconceived labels are irrelevant; which is the creator, and which is created?

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