My Blog

Thursday and The Green Philodendron

Jason Leary — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:10:44 GMT

Today, in late afternoon , Grandpa and I went out to a clearing between buildings in Lakeland and we saw a somewhat large, green philodendron . The plant we saw was not the philodendron that we took from Clearview and keep in a hanging white plastic plant hanger (though that one is also beautiful ; a great creation --which I've also shown to Grandfather few days ago ) The philodendron which Grandpa and I encountered today was , instead , of the split-leaf variety . The plant had waxy , velevety green leaves (which were an avocado shade on some and a somewhat deep yet a shade lighter tint on others) . Grandpa mentioned that he smelled the leaves of the plant as we drew near to it in the clearing of the garden area . I mentioned that it might be chlorophyll that he smelled . It was good for us to be there . The day was partly cloudy ---one of those central Florida late afternoons , with hints of sunlight . The swaths of sky had a sort of smoky , diaphanous colour that one might find in , say, a painting by the Hudson River painters , or a painting by one of the Dutch painters of the 1600's ---or some painting . Granpa marvelled at a rather large oak . I guessed it might have been a species of oak here in the Southeastern United States called : A Live Oak . It has a rather large girth to its trunk . Though I've seen larger live oaks , nonetheless, it was a large trunk of considerable girth . The branches were festooned with dangling clumps of Spanish moss that is salty grey in colour . The tree had the characteristic ridges , crackied small fissures in the bark that live oaks in Florida are known for . Grandpa marvelled at it at its girth and its height , and righly so . Such a tree is after all a beautiful creation . Grandfather wondered about how old it is ...and wondered, thus , how many rings the years had inscribed inside its trunk .? I marvelled also at the light green lichen that was spatterered here and there on the trunk like the leavetakings of peeling paint . I rememmber about early last year-- in 2007---telling my neighbor friend Kirk (in Bartow) about how, (apparently) in some resturaunts in Japan some forms of lichen are served as food . It was very good to be out in the green clearing looking at philodendrons. I've kept the potted philodendron ---a plant of the same group but a different species . from the house on Clearview . I told Grandma that I would water it and tend it . It dates back to the early 1990's . I'm inclined to think that we had it at least as early as 1993 ... There were two of the potted variety that hung from a bar by the craftsman window in the kitchen of the stucco house . There is much water in philodendrons . They thrive on soil and water .

The Ownership Fallacy

Jason Leary — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:46:00 GMT

THE OWNERSHIP FALLACY (The revised and extended text) The Ownership Fallacy is the ever so bizarre notion that presumes that a belief is part of a person who supports that belief, and from that false premise which claims that a belief is somehow part of a person.. then falsely presumes, therefore, if some person is single-minded in supporting a belief, that one can then (falsely) conclude that such a resolute, single minded person is somehow then allegedly supporting themself, or being selfish.. Alternately, one might also rightly describe the Fallacy as...The Ownership Fallacy : an ever so weird and pathetic notion..a notion which claims that if some person wants everyone else to believe what that person believes, that such a person who wants everyone to believe what they believe... is somehow allegedly selfish for desiring that others believe what they believe. Such a ridiculous and mind-boggling pathetic notion, which presumes thusly, is derived from a bizarre , fast and loose pattern of thinking called: lateral thinking . The Ownership Fallacy *wrongly presumes* that the beliefs that a person supports are part of a person's self , and concludes from such a *false* presumption, that if a person is seeking to single-minded serve some beliefs that they support that, in doing so, they are, therefore, supposedly serving themself . Such a fallacy is based on lateral thinking, inasmuch as it presumes that if any item (such as a belief) has a relationship to a person's self --that somehow allegedly means that the item is then somehow part of the person's self---which is a ridiculous conclusion to derive . Just because some item has a relationship with a person's self, does * NOT* mean that such an item is in any way a part of a person's self . A belief can have a relationship with the self of a person who supports that belief--but the relationship is often an instrumental relationship where the person acts as a *mere instrument* for that belief . A person can, in acting as an instrument for a belief they support, maintain that the belief they support is totally superior to other contrary beliefs, and , yet , think of their personal self as NOT in any way superior at all, and be totally humble, understanding their personal self as merely having the role of a mere instrument for serving the belief , in expressing that belief and/or acting to serve it . Believing the belief one supports is superior to contrary beliefs is NOT in any way the same as believing one's personal self is superior to other people . There is NOTHING at all arrogant about believing that a belief one supports is superior to beliefs that are contrary to it--despite the bizarre propaganda that has become prevalent in recent decades that claims otherwise ! The Ownership Fallacy is aided and abbetted by the tendency of people in casual conversation to use figurative ownership terms like: "your", "my", "their", "our", "his", or "her"- and act as if they applied to intangibles like beliefs, concepts, principles, ideals and so on . If people realize that such ownership terms as 'your' as in expressions like "your beliefs", or 'their' as in expressions "their beliefs", are NOT to be taken literally they can help to avoid the ownership fallacy . The problem is apparently that many people take such expressions literally AS IF such intangibles were really part of the person that expresses and/or supports them , when they are NOT part of them . The Ownership Fallacy is also aided and abbetted by the tendency of people (who are influenced by lateral thinking) to equivocate the word 'want' --mixing two separate and very different usages of the word ' want' and talking *as if* such two very different usages of the word 'want ' were somehow the same --when they are NOT ! It is important as a clarification to present what is known as a *precising definition* as to what a belief is in terms of its categorical identity. A belief is: a network of representations or (in the case of false beliefs: mis-representations) which can reflect (in varying degrees) the affirmation or negations of propostions (propostions which are themselves, in turn, networks of concepts or metaconcepts) . Neither the beliefs nor the propositions that make up those beliefs, nor the concepts or meta-concepts that make up those propositions none of these items ...none of those... are in any way part of the person which expresses them ! As mentioned before, the ownership fallacy is a pattern of thought that equivocates between two separate uses of the word 'want' . One is the use of the word 'want' that refers a context of desiring something that involves self-aggrandizement (such as physical excitement of a hedonistic sort, or gaining some acclaim for oneself ) . The other use is a use of the word refers to a completely separate context of desiring that does NOT involve self-aggrandizement at all, and is often quite opposed to self-aggrandizing. But since both completely different sorts of contexts are referenced in the English language by the same word (the word 'want') , it is easy for the person who supports the bizarre pattern of thought called the Ownership fallacy to try and mix those COMPLETELY SEPARATE contexts for the use of the word 'want', and make goofy, ridiculous claims, like saying "Even the altruistic person who wants to help others without wanting anything in return , is selfish because they are doing what they want too if they want to be altruistic". <---That sort of goofy claim --popular as it is with the lateral thinking / postmodernist crowd , disregards that the specific type of wanting that the person who desires to help others only out of the desire to serve the principle to do so (and NOT for any acclaim; and NOT to feel good about themselves) is a *qualitatively different* kind of wanting then the person who wants that which is self-aggrandizing ! Thus we can see that the ownership fallacy is based on lazy equivocations which weirdly attempt to blur the distinction separating intangibles such as beliefs ect and the conscious agents which attempt to serve them or express them .

A Hummingbird, A Dragonfly, and other Miscellany

Jason Leary — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:26:53 GMT

Today on May 30 , 2008 , when I was walking my dog : Willow back through the back yard from a walk around the pond , (called Lake Hack) I saw a green small hummingbird drinking from a meagre flowering hedge out back . An old merchant marine who shared the hospital room that my Grandfather stayed in , in October of 2006 (the year before last) told me that hummingbirds make their nests from spider webs ! The hummingbird was a metallic shade of green , what some might call a shade of green called magnetic green . Yesterday, what looked like a dragonfly only thinner and almost transparent , flew right up against me as if to announce itself and then about just as quickly flew up to the spring green leaf of a nearby sycamore tree that flanks the perimeter of the pond where I often walk . About 4 weeks ago now , I had a dream about a young lady named Laura Raintree I once knew back in the early 1990's . I met her in Mt Dora ( near Orlando) though she lived in St.Petersburg . In the dream, I dreamt I met her father and saw him working as a blacksmith hammerring at an anvil ! She liked rainbow colours in the wakeaday realm and working as a raft instructor on the rivers in North Carolina . I know very little about her life or personal history , yet what I know of her leads me to think she was a fascinating and remarkable young woman . In the wakeaday realm she wore a rainbow coloured beret and a an ankle bracelet that looked as if it were made of hemp . I don't know if her father actually is a blacksmith or not in the waking life . Maybe unbeknownst to me he is a blacksmith . I'd like to have my own forge and try my hand as a blacksmith one day hammerring metal until it shines and fits into the right shapes .

The Diamond Guitar : By Truman Capote

Jason Leary — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:47:53 GMT

Read a good story out loud to Grandpa . Lately, Grandpa has been wanting to have short stories read to him aloud to him . Another relative who was headed to the local library , picked up a copy of some short stories by the author Truman Capote . So over this past week and into the present week , I've been reading him stories out of the book . The other day I found a truly good story titled the 'Diamond Guitar' by Truman Capote . It was a far better story than most of the ones I 've read out of the selection so far. Unlike many of the stories of his I read, the 'Diamond Guitar' was NOT lurid or morbid . It was, indeed, a fascinating story of a more dreamy, contemplative sort then most of the fare Truman Capote goes for . The story is set in a prison farm located in a pine forest, where the prisoners work in the forest tapping turpentine from the tree trunks-- which is later distributed somewhere . The storyline concerns primarily the friendship between an older man, who had been in the prison farm quite awhile ,and a young man of 18 years (who is newly arrived) . The young man brings a guitar with him : a guitar with what looks like diamonds set in the wood of the guitar . The young man sings and plays the guitar . The young man and the old man attempts an escape ....but I don't want to ruin the story for those who might want to read it someday .

Seeing the tree

Jason Leary — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:44:47 GMT

Just this past weekend-- sometime around Saturday, or Sunday: March 29, or March 30, 2008 at night, I was walking by the medium sized pond or "lake" here in Bartow , Florida tired after a long and somewhat complicated day of laboring ...either at the small dreary house where I presently reside or over at my neighbor-friend's house and yard ...when I saw the tree : the sycamore tree over on the perimeter of drab St.Augustine grass and dull soil that surrounds the pond across the short street from the front yards of the houses . It was night and there was a wan yellow light about the tint of yellow from a flashlight beam or a car headlight, only more steady and still on the canopy of the tree . The leaves of the sycamore were a light yellow-green (what is often called a spring-green ) . There was a light cooling breeze blowing or billowing back and forth with only the slightest hint of moisture that was making the thin stalk-like branches of the midsection and upper areas of the tree buoy back and forth in slow billowing motions . There was the simmerring , fricative , shimmerring, teeming sound of the crickets somewhere in the distance that had the hint of an oceanic quality. I had been thiinking about what Annie Dillard wrote about 'the tree with the lights in it' , and though I didn't exactly see the tree with the lights in it the way Annie Dillard described it, I saw that tree . The usual sense of familiarity felll away as I stared at it from about 2 or 3 feet from its trunk and for a moment the words ...the chatter of words inside the mind fell away and I saw it as if seeing it for the first time . I wish all that read the present blog entry could see the tree the way it was that night. If I attempt to describe it invariably I'll want to kick myself mentally for not conveying a precise enough picture for the reader . Alas , I think only a moving camera photograph from a 16 millimeter or super 8 camera could convey what it looked like with the breezes billowing some, yet not all of the branches and the nearby streetlights and/or porchlights from the nearby houses falling on it. The night was fairly clear that night not murky and cloudy as it often is . The pond and the nearby surroundings are on the whole rather banal . People throw litter at the edge of the pond . It certainly isn't the most majestic of ponds in central Florida . Yet sometimes when the rains a previous day have put fresh water in it and the sun (or at night: the moon) shines on it right and the skies are clearer , there is *some* beauty there . Much of the time the weather is murky ..with stagnant warm humid air that hardly circulates that is too dreary and banal for words . Yet thanks to the Creator I was able to see the sycamore tree ...and really see it with vividness ...with crickets humming in the distance and mild breeezes blowing . I thought of the narrative of the garden of Eden and considered that experiences of the sort I had may be vestiges of some lost realm of space and time that is sometimes glimpsed in dreams, reveries, and experiences of the sort I had that night .. a lost realm called Eden .... I also thought how (as far as I know) sycamores are not native to central Florida and was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges in one of his stories musing on a palm tree that itself was not native to a particular place and writing the line , 'And you too O palm are foreign to this soil' . Gazing at the tree: its billowing canopy and its secret silent trunk, had the feel of looking at a someone .....

Not bats in the belfry

Jason Leary — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:58:38 GMT

' The squirrels in the bell tower have had more squirrels. ' So reads a line in a story by Jean Kerr titled , ' How I Got to Be Perfect .' Why does that line seem so cosmic in a minor key ? It seems epigram-like , or like a field report of some sort . And it seems a pithy disclosing of some wry secret from some book of days . Annie Dillard found perhaps a similar quiet miracle when she read from some manual on tents and camping , how some people feel it is difficult to sleep in a white tent during a full moon .

Another seabird

Jason Leary — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:06:51 GMT

Yesterday , late in the afternoon towards even , I saw a beautiful solitary seabird soaring-- at a somewhat high altitude--- in the sky above the nearby pond here in benighted drab Bartow , Florida . It was seagull like , but I don't think it was the species of seagull that one usually sees frequenting the Florida coastline . I wonder if it may have been someother seabird ---such as tern or a shearwater or soem other gull like bird . It had the thin , splayed , streamlined wings like a seabird . Bartow, Florida is inland --some 55 or 60 or 70 miles from the Guld of Mexico on the West and some 80 or 100 miles from the Atlantic space coast on the East . It made an arc of slow returns in the pellucid light of early evening/late afternnon in Central Florida and then dissappeared / flew off beyond the line of oaks and meagre houses and yardscapes on the east of the small road that circles the pond . My father told me, over the telephone, a number of years ago that he saved the life of a seagull which had almost strangled itself - many years before--- by having a plastic array of beer can rings around it. He removed the plastic rings from its avian frame . Heroism does make the earth a better place .

It's A Dog's Life

Jason Leary — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:44:19 GMT

Last week, I finally took the opportunity to take my half-basset hound / half-German Shepherd dog : Willow , out while the hour was still 2 sometime p.m. It is around 2 o'clock p.m. when the sunlight here in Polk County, central Florida is usually best . The afternoon is in it's prime --it does NOT have the often cloying sense of early evening . So we finally did it : Willow and I . We walked while the clock ---whatever minute hand it was on ---had the hour of 2 p.m. She and I walked together by the pond that is called a lake here in Bartow , Florida ---on the west side of the pond--walking through the dull strip of St.Augustine grass--at the perimeter of the pond that is thankfully intermittently peppered with some passable sycamore trees ---here and there with spaces between them . The sky was a shade of blue somewhere between a cerulean and a denim blue . The light was rather good ---there was a hint of the sort of milder warmth of what passes almost for autumn in central , Florida . There were some white cumulous clouds . As I crouched ---and at times laid on the ground-- to hug and kiss Willow and gaze at the landscape and skyscape over Willow' s head and ear in diaganol profile (she has ears like a pit bull) I noticed that a swath of sun rays were starting to make some of the sharp edges of a cummulous cloud silvery-white , with that platinum tint that reminds one of those cloudscapes shown in posters (from decades ago) that would show similar clouds and patches of sky in sillhouette, along with silver-white sunbursts and verses printed across them from the Psalms ---and homiletic books with the similar sort of photographic fare . Yet if I try to describe the landscape and skyscape with its almost cyan colored sunlight (that wasn't the most spectacular I've seen , yet which brought a quiet joy), I'd no doubt be angry at myself for not conveying the most accurate of images. Like so many days, you'd have to see it---a moving picture of the sunlight , skyscape, (and at best) passable landscape . If they're is one of the few cliches that holds much verity , it is that a picture is worth a thousand words . Make that a million ---if not more in some cases. Wishing has got me to say that I wish I had the wherewithal to upload a photo of my dog . She is a rust (or auburn) colored brown --a little less bright colored than a red fox . Her conical snout is a black, yet fringed with an off white the color of aged salt . A British couple who lived further down on Clearview Avenue last year (2006)-- or the year prior-- when Grandfather , Aunt Amanda, and Willow and I lived there told me she looked like a Welsh Corgi . On that day , in the grass by the pond and next to the half paved side road with fenced houses and a mossy magnolia that juts out of Lamar's side yard on the other side , I hugged Willow , kissed her , rubbed her ears , and smelled the warm scent of her fur in the sun . She grinned-- whether from panting or sheer good spirits I cannot presently tell . It was good to share the slightly dry, warm air in the sun with Willow . To share the solitude in the warm sun and look at the sky with her ears as a kind of backdrop . I wish I could convey what it is like to nurture a particular precious creature like her . I'm reminded again of how in one of the gospels : Matthew (if memory serves rightly ) Jesus exhorts the disciples to 'preach the gospel to every creature under heaven . ' Every creature .? One ought to marvel ---if one is given to marvelling at theological matters --or if even if one is a "non-religious" person with any penchant for curiousity ---at the phrase 'every creature under heaven' . I'm reminded of St.Francis-- of the middle ages--- presenting the addentum , 'Preach the gospel to every creature under heaven . If necessary use words . ' What is it that my dog's eyes say ? Walt Whitman, in observing the eyes of cattle, once wrote that what he saw in the expression of the cows ' eyes seemed more than all the print he had read in his life . I remember other dogs . Sam : my aunt's black and white Shih-Tzu-- who looked like a little seal when he lost most of his hair. I remember my late Grandmother Mary-Ellen telling me-- sometime around 1993 or perhaps early 1994 --to put a blanket around Sam-- that he looked cold ---when he shivered . I remember my female Pit Bull: Amber , that lived in the backyard of the house in Lake Wales , Florida from the autumn of 1982 to the late spring of 1983 . She was a good dog also . I still remember ---and hopefully will--a precious little Daschund in a pet store of a mini mall in South Lakeland--that I stopped into in 1989 , during one of the tedious shopping-for-new- clothes-or -shoes expeditions that my mother used to take me along to . Often I humored her in such expeditions . His face was almost like something out of a cartoonist's drawing, with big sad eyes that , when I touched him in his open cage , pleaded with me to take him ---to take him home . The sight of him looking at me, like an orphan looking for someone to give him a nice home, the sight of him jumping into my hands and looking up at me then with an almost immobile fixity ---has etched itself into memory . I must never forget that dog. If only I had the money at the time to have taken him home ! How very unusual it is that that day in 1989 has become 17 or 18 years ago now . What happened to that precious little, forgotten dog . I hope he found a home with kind people . 'You have recovered in sleep the transparent quarter where you were born with its lanes paved by a rainbow with its square of bitter crystal . ' -----Edmond Jabes

Greater Than

Jason Leary — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:11:25 GMT

The insights that I know are infinitely greater than me . I'm glad I know them --for they indeed are greater than me . The more I *analytically* know about them the more i stand in awe of how they are infinitely * far greater than* me . It is the insights that are great---NOT me .

Soveneirs from far away

Jason Leary — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 09:33:29 GMT

SOUVENEIRS FROM A FAR AWAY LAND (a story) Copyright 2007: by Jason Leary I. A half-dream of an egg shaped building: a pavillion flanked by a silhouette of autumn leaves. There is an opening. It is barely larger in vertical extention to the height of the tall lady , who stands there in silhouette by the open portal. A door .She is dressed rather like a medieval nun . Her hair completely covered in a cloke which extends to her ankles .Her face, shown in side relief, is an oval whose perfect forehead, nose and other features are bathed in the same golden, pear-colored light that colors the egg shaped building . The building has the waxen look of a scene from one of the Dutch Reniassance painters .The air about it as ripe as a bursting almond . It is beheld with a slow, sleepy curiousity. There is a gold that neither glows, nor glitters , but beckons like the blue of distance . The man awakens to the slow muffled roar of early afternoon . The digital clock reads 1:30 . The buses arrive on the hour. He'll catch the next one . a thirty minute scramble to eat cold salad, brush teeth, and dress for work . The bus stop awaits... II . Some twenty-five odd years ago there was a musty library the air heavy with the scent of starched paper, where he read of elephants and looked at the pictures. Big, tall elephants with flapping ears and ivory tusks. Twenty years ago there was a circus in the small central Florida town. He remembers the big tent and its circus smells, a flat field of whithering grass, an old off-duty clown of the hobo sort who watched across the field to fetch something from a nearby camper- van . The white clown makeup on his face was only slightly beginning to smear on one cheek as he walked through the humid muggy air of a central Florida afternoon in mid September . The clown's face was tired , jaded . The man also remebered how how the trees: a line of bland Florida oaks, lingered with their powdery green at the horizon's edge (in the far distance to the south of the field, the circus tent, and just west of the nearby highway) . Yet most of all the man remembered the elephant . It was a rather small elephant: not so young to be rightly called a baby, but not yet an adult. It's height and girth seemed just a few feet more tall and wide than average beef cow. The handler was holding a rope attached to a harness around its neck . It was there to give rides to children and others . He would not ride on the elephant . He was content to watch it, to observe its beautiful lead-colored skin, to smell its alien musk, and to hear its occasional huffs and puffs (for it did not sound the horn of its trunk unless it came in sight of other animals of the four- legged kind). Later the boy looked on as the handler called out an "intermission" to the small crowd of children and adults eager for rides, and led away the elephant to a basin of almost cool , clear water to quench its vast Rhodesian thirst . Soon autumn would be coming and the circus would be travelling on to other towns . Today the man was quite bored and he remembered how he (on one tiresome seemingly endless week, during a windy March of his tenth year ) he tried to visualize elephants of a purple hue . Now he remembered that excercise in imagination (a dry and overused word for it) as he plugged his headphones into the computer phone . The familiar odors of newly upholstered vinyl, of particle board, of stale, greasy French fries, that a supervisor from the early afternoon shift had consumed at a nearby desk, again greeted his nostrils . He sat down and stared at the flaccid colors of the cubicle .He hoped that the call volume would be low, it often was on Thursday .. He often hoped that the irate customers would fine something better to do then scream about how the dental care kit had not arrived in their mailbox yet . Of course that was the same hope he had every day of the week . Mercifully, for the first half of the shift he had few calls . There was time to ruminate. He thought back to that windy March, of his tenth year when he spent many a boring afternoon visualizing purple elephants . He tried to remember their tints . Some were a deep royal purple that would glint from time to time with a velvet sheen .The funny part was that with that shade it had been most difficult to visualize the ears .Elephant ears have a crisp bounding line...they are some of the most geometric ears found in nature. The deep pour of dark blue-purple was hard to couple with a crisp outline of flapping ears . With a neutral base of tan or grey the ears were easy to picture . Not so with dark purple .There were others with a light purple-grey (perhaps it would be more accurate to describe them as purple with a hint of grey). Those were much easier to envison in great detail. The problem was though he could visualize their outline in great, crisp detail, the images did not linger as long as the deep purple counterparts . They were much more fleeting . There were also the occasional lavender colored elephants. They too were fleeting, even more than the greyish ones, and had crisp ears with the utmost symmetry . The tusks were hardest of all to visualize . They still were .... III . Back at home hours later, he remembers the elaborate burial rituals of elephants....and how some elephants will reportedly extend tree branches and wave them before a fallen comrade . He sits down before a makeshift table that serves as a study. There are books, magazines, scatterred here and there. His trusty inkpen is there and a half-opened box of cognac-flavored Honduran cigars that he bought from tobacco shop in Winter Garden . He had decided to splurge for a small box of them last summer while sightseeing around the town ("you only live once" , he said to himself out loud and inwardly added, "if at all") . The table was there with its books and the occasional magazine: the titles unto transcripts of whispers overheard and sought out : Ethan Fromme, The Occurance At Owl Creek Bridge, Tristam Shandy , Discourse On The Method and First Meditation , The Cantos, and various and sundry magazines containing words , and images of note . He remembered again the dream he had dreamt in the wee small hours of the morning . It was a pear-colored light that bathed the scene and tinged the woman's nunnish garb . Where was that place ? IV : Later .... He sat down , fetched pen and paper, and tried to write a story , not quite related to the dream. After much grappling, he wrote a story about a group (or tribe) of people that make themselves makeshift living quarters in an abandoned "ghost town" (pardon the redundancy) in a desert of The North American West . Those people in some far off future century have come to live in the abandoned houses, hotels, saloons, graineries, and silver mines (as well as the town's lone tin mine) . Those second wave pioneers have dug deep wells and found sizable wells of clean water . They grew yucca and agave ---hardy desert plants...for food . They also hunt what little amount of game the desert affords . The people who inhabit the once abandoned town have a main form of communal cultural life which centers around group singing . Over the many decades they have perfected a very sonorous form of throat singing in blended choruses of both men and women (and some children) which is long and varied and usually consists of strings of syllables (mostly vowel sounds) fringed and bufftted with consonants and glottal stops .The consonant sounds are often subject to minor variations in pronunciation from one "line" to another . The songs are like wordless hymns .The singers report that while singing the sounds induce an array of various tastes in the mouth . The syllables are taken from various names that the 19th century inhabitants of the town left, that the first ancestors of the second wave of settlers read and used as ballast for songs . The songs are sung in gratitude for the original founders and inhabitants of the ghost town for leaving behind the buildings that the second wave now uses. Of course the founders of the town never intended for their mining village in the desert to become the settlement of the unlikely wayfarers . Nonethless, the people of Lone Quarry (many of them that is) want to show gratitude for the ones who left them a place of solace; a refuge; a hideaway . The townsfolk of Lone Quarry practice a kind of Christianity, though not of any denominational sort. They read the King James Bible, and meet together to sing hymns . The one that gives thanks to the ancient pioneers that founded Lone Quarry is but one example of them . THE STORY INSIDE The sparse rains that have come every spring have ended in the town of Lone Quarry .They will return again next Spring . The townsfolk are greatful there is yucca and agave in great store again, and the game has been a plenty for more than any spring in the past . Matthew hears the wind whistle past the eaves and the splintered beams on the north side of the old hotel . It is a bluish-grey faded frame and wil be home to both Sarah and he now that she is heavy with child. His child....What shall they name him ? She wants to name him Eli ...a good name, a name from the Bible . The scent of the vast wind seems to hold some great secret (or several) . Matthew's cousin : Jared is a curious lad. His mind is fascinated by origins: origins of things and events. Jared longs to find the place where the winds begin . Jared spends hours off by himself just thinking . Today he joined in the val-song at sunrise. He had been joining the town singers for awhile now . Now his voice was improving. His throat resonated with a passable semblance of the right notes . Furthermore, it didn't sound forced . Jared pondered the taste of the song. Jared had tasted 17 of the song flavors . There were 7 tastes which Jared identified as being the strongest; the most discernable . One was called ' vega ' which had the tangy flavor of the freshly cooked meat of the desert rabbits. The other flavor was called : 'alta;---a flavor that had little correlation to actual foods and beverages. It was a strange, pleasantly sour taste with a subtle hint of the salty, which had many other nuances of flavor that were varied and difficult to describe . Then there was the sharp flavor of the desert pinyon nuts called 'livia' . It was followed by the wheatlike flavor of 'zinta' : a type of lichen that grew on desert rocks and was scraped off and used as a kind of appetizer . 'Zinta'', in turn, was followed by 'kaarlstad' ---a flavor of tin well known to anyone who spent any great length of time in the former ghost town's one abandoned tin mind . A taste that inspired Jared deeply and was one of the most strong flavors was 'sar' : a flavor that had the mineral tang of fresh rainwater . Lastly, there was 'Delia' : the taste of the brandy made from the green apples that outsiders from the far lands to the northeast ( the travelling ones) traded with the townsfolk in exchange for silver nuggets and hand woven quilts . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Not a bad beginning ", he whispered aloud to himself. The middle and the end of the story would come later . So he hoped . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- V. Grains of wood... The mind in the smallish house finds shapes, likenesses. Here a strange angular wood boat, there a bird or a moth with fanning wings . One could stare for hours Outside : The trees have tales to tell almost .In the sugared leaves of trees carbon, methane, and sunbeams collide.The passer- by unaware of the age-long waltz of green.Below the soil limestone drips and cascades slowly into the porous dark . Chandler was looking for the right voice. What's further he was looking for what to say with the right voice. He must say what was right; quite right . He had to find the right words to say.There were many right statements to state, perhaps an infinte number and all of them must be consistent. Say true ..... The right words either shouted, whispered , or sung must be found . Speak them clearly write them on paper or chisel them in stone . Chandler had no time for trite platitudes. He would give no quarter at all to the pragmatic , the plebian . There were soundings, depth charges.... a long fishing expedition (or several) in the waters of the mind . The habits of mind of the everyday sort where small blurrings of focus were accepted by some..... well he would have none of that . To finish what he started without dropping the thread, and to start well that was the Task . It was sometimes on the threshold of cooling sleep that the most profound discoveries made and the most lucid exercises conducted . Looking out at the long sweep of history, Chandler saw that the study of history (when done in a paltry way) alternately concealed and revealed much . VI . Sunny courtyard playing Mahjong amidst stucco and shade . It is a place he has never been , but seen far off . There were tables ; glad tidings, mourning doves amidst the alcove . A place in time; the promise of innocence . Innocence focusing . The prospect of breezes and sunny days under banyon and camphor . Glimpses of a wallpapered room; sound of rain. The air inside prepared for echoes, nettles on the papered walls, jars of millet, canned peaches, and somehwere in a distant room a riverboat piano playing . VII . Ecstasies of Innocence . The writer tounge-tied pen in hand. (Attemps to speak , stammerrings, jagged utterings, warblings, chirpings ) . As an aspiring writer he rejected the oft repeated notion that a story or a novel must have a conflict or some villanry . Concurrently, he rejected the notion that a world with no evil would be boring ....The *further* ecstasies of innocence yet to be discovered . ....that was a lost fronteir its waters scarcely charted . The farther Eden itself was like unto a garden with so many paths left untrod . The haste of errant Man; the roads not taken . VIII . He awoke, remembering nothing of the long dreams that came later save for the vague passage of elephants . He could not remember the color of the water they frolicked in .He remembered a procession of them single-file as seen at a glimpse ; as if seen in the rearview mirror of a takicab . The rumble of graceful bulk . Fuseli painted a phantom horse. If Chandler ever set a brush to canvas he would paint elephants with flapping ears and slender trunks . Yet those images of elephants were no nightmare . They were no symbol either . Their gracious visibility and what it disclosed was enough . X. TABLEAUX OF ANOTHER DREAM Bald albino children in tunics wind ornaments that turn silken threads . Haystacks, barns, silos of grain, millet, spelt, barley in that far away land .. Somewhere else: bells, sunbursts, poplar- shaped leaves . The air heavy with wet medicinal leaves . Dragonflies with minstrel wings, dart in the smoky blue dusk like quicksilver tracings . Scenes flutter by .... There is a brief picture of a woman in a bare attic or cellar playing a harp . Her hair pulled back in a Grecian clasp . Her harp a silhouette amidst barely lit walls of oak. She is seated. Her dress long and brown as a potato sack . Then a longer glimpse : an aqueduct, the blue of distance, and the lonely whistle of a desert wind . The scene soon followed by a child in a caftan and headdress kissing what looked like some strange hybrid of gyrofalcon and hen and then casting it with both of her hands to fly out an open window . The same child seen again after an unknown span making a notch on the floor with what looked like chalk . Ah, but what to write of those lost , remembered elephants ? The writer of elephants did not see those fleeting pictures of albino children in tunics . He did not see the sunburst through poplar shaped leaves, nor the firey blue dusk of quicksilver dragonflies, nor the harpist in the emptied room, nor did he hear the whistling wind from the aqueduct, nor glimpse the child kiss the strange bird that took flight when cast through an open window . Had he heard or seen such dreamt of scenes, they would have provided much ballast for great ruminations..... large cogitations . He still had his elephants they teemed and beckoned with raw visibility vibrant and strange . story : 3a: a fictional narrative shorter than a novel . So read a Websters Dictionary definition of the word 'story' . But the phrase : 'shorter than a novel' was very telling. It involved the tacit recognition of the narrative coming to an end .Chandler understood with a narrative coming to an end....the sense of such a finale : a stopping-off (as in Hamlet where 'the rest is silence' ) loomed large ....and , foreshadowed itself, already gave the paragraphs of the narrative a sense of something fading....a tacit disclosure of how finite a span such events had . Chandler wanted to write a different sort of narrative . He wanted to write narratives that did not stop, but merely came to a rest, and could resume again . Moreover, he sought to write works of literature that were portable; absent of any external drama, yet aglow with a keen internal intensity ....narratives that could be rightly likened to a furniture for the life of the mind . A furniture moreover, which encouraged study ....comfortable, yet not any place to slouch . He wanted to put a graceful vigor into into the life of the mind : The Central Task . XI ERSTWHILE Somewhere by a tent an elephant groaned and shuddered in animal tides.... the weight , the straining meat & spirit straining under tedium , pulls and pushes, heaviness the physical tides of stimulus and response. The sky not blue enough for its steady gaze for even elephants have grand dreams . There is a hymn lost amidst groans and squeals . The elephant bears a secret name unutterred , almost half-forgotten . Stength of living spark itself groans . The long days are still too short for the Harvest longed for and whispered about by ancestors and kin . The savannahs and waterways where some sparks were courted deep in cranial wells , amidst the sinews and bones, the calcium traps spent sunbeams, the marrow distills in the long , dark nights of fitful sleep . A generational longing . Some desire by those animals perhaps to cut and carve....the herd desired and lingered in hoping . To build , yes that is the verb .. A desire held by they who had no hands only tusks, trunks, and sturdy feet . They were not as the horse to carry packs . Not as the dogs were they: the guardians and protectors of men . No . The giants longed to build to leave something permanent more than branches and bones . Chandler groped in the dust of sight and dream. To puzzle out such foreign faces, to read those unfamiliar eyes . They remained of an inner codicil ; a breviary: amidst the nameless, forgotten, and not yet born . Identities were sphinxes that disclosed their secrets when the time was spent and more questions asked . The rumbling of elephants glimpses under the slow tides of heaven .

Damn Interesting

Jason Leary — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:26:06 GMT

The painting revealed by clicking on the following hyperlink is damn interesting : http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l47/sanquentin_2007/about_9.jpg

Herbert Draper Painting

Jason Leary — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:33:18 GMT

At http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=9150 is a damn interesting painting. The sense of high altitude captured in the painting is fascinating .

Fascinating essay on the Logos

Jason Leary — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 00:51:21 GMT

Here below is a fascinating essay on the Logos by Christian apologist J.P. Holding --as it relates to Christology in Judaism and the early followers of the Way . Jesus: God's Wisdom -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- James Patrick Holding -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In order to support the traditional Christian view of the relationship of Jesus to the Father, we must understand the background for certain claims about the nature and identity of Jesus in the New Testament. Our general argument may be outlined as follows: Jesus, as God's Word and Wisdom, was and is eternally an attribute of God the Father. Just as our own words and thoughts come from us and cannot be separated from us, so it is that Jesus cannot be completely separate from the Father. But there is more to this explanation, related to the distinction between functional subordination and ontological equality. We speak of Christ as the "Word" of God, God's "speech" in living form. In Hebrew and Ancient Near Eastern thought, words were not merely sounds, or letters on a page; words were things that "had an independent existence and which actually did things." Throughout the Old Testament and in the Jewish intertestamental Wisdom literature, the power of God's spoken word is emphasized (Ps. 33:6, 107:20; Is. 55:11; Jer. 23:29; 2 Esd. 6:38; Wisdom 9:1). "Judaism understood God's Word to have almost autonomous powers and substance once spoken; to be, in fact, 'a concrete reality, a veritable cause.'" (Richard N. Longenecker, The Christology of Early Jewish Christianity , 145.) But a word did not need to be uttered or written to be alive. A word was defined as "an articulate unit of thought, capable of intelligible utterance." (C. H. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 263. It cannot therefore be argued that Christ attained existence as the Word only "after" he was "uttered" by God. Some of the second-century church apologists followed a similar line of thinking, supposing that Christ the Word was unrealized potential within the mind of the Father prior to Creation.) This agrees with Christ's identity as God's living Word, and points to Christ's functional subordination (just as our words and speech are subordinate to ourselves) and his ontological equality (just as our words represent our authority and our essential nature) with the Father. A subordination in roles is within acceptable Biblical and creedal parameters, but a subordination in position or essence (the "ontological" aspect) is a heretical view called subordinationism. Background: The background with Wisdom Christology is found in the concept of hypostasis. What is a hypostasis? Broadly defined, it is a quasi-personification of attributes proper to a deity, occupying an intermediate position between personalities and abstract beings. In the ANE here are some examples: Hu and Sia, in Egyptian tradition the creative word and understanding of Re-Atum Ma'at, also Egyptian, a personification of right order in nature and society, a creation of Re Mesaru and Kettu, or Righteousness and Right, Akkadian hypostases conceived of as qualities of the sun-god, or as gifts granted by him, or sometimes as personal beings or independent deities the divine word, which proceeds via the character of breath and wind, in Sumerian and Akkadian literature Wisdom in Proverbs 8, and Wisdom in Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon, and Philo's logos, all fit hand in glove with these. Now let's look at some cites, starting with Prov. 8. Proverbs 8:22-30 The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: When he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth: Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him... This passage is one of several in the Old Testament (see Ps. 58:10, 107:42; Job 11:14) in which abstract qualities are personified, following an Ancient Near Eastern tradition of personification. (Derek Kidner, The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, 44.) Here, and in other parts of Proverbs, Wisdom "makes claims for herself which are elsewhere made only by, or for, God." The verb used by Wisdom to call attention to its messages is the same used by the prophets to call for returning to God in repentance. (R. N. Whybray, Proverbs, 44) The speech made by Wisdom in this chapter is "a lengthy self-recommendation in which (Wisdom) boasts of her power and authority and of the gifts she is able to bestow," following a known Ancient Near Eastern literary genre in which a divinity praises itself. "Wisdom is intended to be understood as an attribute or heavenly servant of the sole God Yahweh to whom he has delegated certain powers with regard to his relations with mankind." Finally, to complete the picture, Proverbs 2:6 tells us, "For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding." God is the source of Wisdom; Wisdom is one of God's characteristics and attributes. (Bruce Vawter, "Proverbs 8:22: Wisdom and Creation," Journal of Biblical Literature 99/2 (1980): 205-216, argues that Proverbs 8 depicts Wisdom as a separate deity that Yahweh "acquired." I follow Hurtado in replying that "this language of personification [used in Judaism as a whole] does not necessarily reflect a view of these divine attributes as independent entities alongside God." Such personifications "must be understood within the context of the ancient Jewish concern for the uniqueness of God, the most controlling religious idea of ancient Judaism." Thus he regards claims like that of Vawter's, that Wisdom here is depicted as an "independent deity," as something that is "simply unwarranted and imports into such passages connotations never intended by the writers." Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 46-7. For more on this verb, see here.) We will now examine Jewish speculations that accorded "the Wisdom of God" a quasi-personal status. We will then be able to see a continuity between the intertestamental literature and the New Testament that defines the nature of the relationship between God the Father and Jesus Christ. Dunn puts it succinctly: "What pre-Christian Judaism said of Wisdom and Philo also of the Logos, Paul and the others say of Jesus. The role that Proverbs, ben Sira, etc. ascribe to Wisdom, these earliest Christians ascribe to Jesus." James D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making , 167. This conception of Wisdom parallels a less significant, general Jewish explanation of how a transcendent God could participate in a temporal creation. The Aramaic Targums resolved this problem by equating God with His Word: thus in the Targums, Exodus 19:17, rather than saying the people went out to meet God, says that the people went out to meet the word of God, or Memra. This term became a periphrasis for God; whether it could have been reckoned as a separate person, as in Christian Trinitarianism, is a matter of debate. The risk involved with making Wisdom/Word an independent deity was too great for the rabbis to speculate further, but Christians found in the Wisdom tradition an ideal categorical conception within which to place the person of Jesus. N.T. Wright observes in Who Was Jesus? [48-9] that Jewish monotheism "was never, in the Jewish literature of the crucial period, an analysis of the inner being of God, a kind of numerical statement about, so to speak, what God was like on the inside." Rather, it was "always a polemical statement directed outwards against the pagan nations." Rabbis of Jesus' time had no difficulty in personifying separate aspects of God's personality - His Wisdom, His Law (Torah), His Presence (Shekinah), and His Word (Memra), for example. This division had the philosophical purpose of "get(ting) around the problem of how to speak appropriately of the one true God who is both beyond the created world and active within it." Similarly, Brad Young writes: Within Judaism, the 'hypostatization' of Wisdom or Torah did not seem to undermine monotheism, since ultimately it was a kind of periphrasis used to circumvent the implication of direct contact between the transcendent God and the creation. This concept, Young continues, did not challenge God's "ultimate originality and sovereignty" at all. Hence, the idea of Christianity identifying an actual person in such a way is not problematic for monotheism in any sense. Nor is a trinitarian concept entirely foreign to Judaism. O'Neill [JCO.WD, 94] records the words of the Jewish historian Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, who laid out this exposition upon the three men who came to visit Abraham in Genesis 18:2, and were presumed to be divine figures: ...the one in the middle is the Father of the Universe, who in the sacred scriptures is called by his proper name, I am that I am; and the beings on each side are those most ancient powers which are always close to the living God, one of which is called his creative power, and the other his royal power. No one would question that Philo was a Jewish monotheist; yet here we have an exposition perfectly compatible with the Trinity: the Father, The Creative Power (the Son, or the Word), and the Royal Power (the Holy Spirit). Similarly, in the apocryphal Baruch 4:22, we read: For I have set hope for your salvation on the Eternal One; and joy has come to me from the Holy One, at the mercy which will soon be present for you from your Eternal Saviour. Now we move to passages concerned directly with Wisdom. Ecclesiasticus 1:1-4 All wisdom cometh from the Lord, and is with him for ever. The sand of the sea, and the drops of the rain, And the days of eternity who shall number? The height of the heaven and the breadth of the earth And the deep and wisdom, who shall search them out? Wisdom hath been created before all things, And the understanding of prudence from everlasting. The book of Ecclesiasticus was written by Jesus the son of Sirach in about 100 B.C. It describes Wisdom as having been "created before all things," as being "from everlasting" and as comparable to "the days of eternity." In this we are in harmony with the Trinitarian view of Jesus as created or generated by the Father eternally, that is, finding his source in the Father and having no existence apart from Him, yet also having existed eternally as God does. Sirach writes further: I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, And covered the earth as a mist. I dwelt in high places, And my throne is in the pillar of the cloud. Alone I compassed the circuit of the heaven, And walked in the depth of the abyss. (Ecclesiasticus 24:3-5) He created me from the beginning of the world, And to the end I shall not fail. (Ecclesiasticus 24:4) This is another speech of self-praise of the sort found in Proverbs, only this time, the speech takes place in the heavenly court -- a place where only God would offer self-praise. Wisdom says of herself: "I came forth from the mouth of the Most High" (the "Word" of God) and "my throne was in the pillar of the cloud" -- an allusion to the Old Testament sign of the divine presence. Wisdom also says that it has "encircled the vault of heaven, and walked in the depths of the abyss...ruled over the waves of the sea and over all the earth, and over every people and nation." In the book of Job (12, 28), these things are what God asks whether Job can do, with the implication that only God can do them. Finally, Sirach says, "(God) searches out both the deep and the heart, and he perceives all their cunning devices. For the Most High knows all, and he sees the signs of the age. He declares changes that occur, and reveals the searching out of hidden things. He does not lack insight, and nothing escapes him. The might of his wisdom he measures out, He is the same from eternity. Nothing is added and nothing is withdrawn, and there is no need for anyone to instruct him." (42:18-21) Wisdom is an attribute of God, and is co-eternal with Him -- otherwise, Wisdom is a thing "added" to Him, or someone has "instructed" Him. Bauckham makes a similar observation concerning a much later passage: "2 Enoch 33:4, in an echo of Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 40:13), says that God had no advisor in his work of creation, but that his Wisdom was his advisor. The meaning is clearly that God had no one to advise him. His Wisdom, who is not someone else but intrinsic to his own identity, advised him." Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament , 21. The Wisdom of Solomon: In this intertestamental work written under the persona of Solomon, Wisdom is described as the artificer of all things (7:22), "the breath of the power of God and a pure effluence flowing from the Almighty" (7:25), and is spoken of as the "image" (eikon -- for the significance of this term, see Chapter 1 of my book, The Mormon Defenders) of the goodness of God (7:26), able to do all things and make all things new. "Wisdom" was also envisioned as sharing God's throne, having been present with God from all eternity, and was thought of as proceeding from God. God's Wisdom and Word are equated in verse 9:2 -- "O God of my fathers, the Lord of mercy, who hast made all things with thy word, and ordained men through thy wisdom." Wisdom is also credited with performing miracles, like the parting of the Red Sea (Wisdom of Solomon 10:18-19). Philo. The Jewish philosopher Philo was a contemporary of Jesus and the author of several philosophical and historical works. Philo calls Wisdom (which he also refers to as the logos) the "image (eikon) of God," refers to the Wisdom of God as the one through whom the universe came into being, and describes Wisdom as God's "firstborn son," as neither unbegotten like God or begotten like men, as Light and as "the very shadow of God." He regarded the logos as one of several attributes of God which he referred to collectively as "powers," with the logos as the chief power in the hierarchy. Now that we have concluded our brief survey of Jewish intertestamental literature, some observations are in order before proceeding to the New Testament evidence. As we will show, what these writers said of Wisdom, the authors of the New Testament also said about Christ. But we are not necessarily arguing for direct dependence by Paul or John or any New Testament writer on Philo or any particular writer. Rather, we are establishing that there existed in Judaism certain set motifs about Wisdom with which the writers of the New Testament worked, and that, as Hurtado (44, 46) puts it, "ancient Judaism provided the first Christians with a crucial conceptual category" that was applied to the risen and exalted Jesus. We will now show that Jesus identified himself with Wisdom, and thereby identified himself with its qualities, including co-eternality, functional subordination, and ontological equality with God. Matthew 8:20//Luke 9:58 Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. Witherington notes that the image of this saying "had been used earlier of Wisdom having no place to dwell until God assigned her such a place (cf. Sir. 24:6-7 to 1 Enoch 42:2), with Enoch speaking of the rejection of Wisdom ('but she found no dwelling place')." Witherington also notes the parallel to Sirach 36:31, "So who can trust a man that has no nest, but lodges wherever night overtakes him?" The use of these allusions "suggests that Jesus envisions and articulates his experience in light of sapiential traditions..." (Jesus Quest, 188) Matthew 11:16-19//Luke 7:31-2 To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other: "'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not cry.'"For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon. 'The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners."' But wisdom is proved right by all her children." Proverbs 1:24-28 Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the gateways of the city she makes her speech: "How long will you simple ones love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? If you had responded to my rebuke, I would have poured out my heart to you and made my thoughts known to you. But since you rejected me when I called and no one gave heed when I stretched out my hand, since you ignored all my advice and would not accept my rebuke, I in turn will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when calamity overtakes you-- when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you. "Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me. This passage provides some important clues once we have the social data in hand, and add in the factor of Jesus' communal meals with the dregs of society. Witherington notes passages like Proverbs 9:1-6, "which speaks of a feast set by Wisdom herself where she invites very unlikely guests to the table" for the sake of helping them acquire wisdom. Witherington therefore argues that Jesus dined with sinners and tax collectors because he was "acting out the part of Wisdom." (187-8) Matthew 11:29-30 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Sirach 6:19-31 Come to (Wisdom) like one who plows and sows. Put your neck into her collar. Bind your shoulders and carry her...Come unto her with all your soul, and keep her ways with all your might...For at last you will find the rest she gives...Then her fetters will become for you a strong defense, and her collar a glorious robe. Her yoke is a golden ornament, and her bonds a purple cord. Sirach 51:26 Put your neck under the yoke, and let your soul receive instruction: she is hard at hand to find . Jesus is clearly alluding to the passages in the very popular work of Sirach. His listeners would have recognized that he was associating himself with Wisdom. Matthew 12:42//Luke 11:31 The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the men of this generation and condemn them; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here. Noting the association of Solomon with the Wisdom literature, Witherington writes (186, 192): If it is true that Jesus made a claim that something greater than Solomon was present in and through his ministry, one must ask what it could be...Surely the most straightforward answer would be that Wisdom had come in person. Matthew 23:34//Luke 11:49 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city... Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute... In Matthew's version, Jesus says, "I will send them prophets..." Luke specifically identified Jesus with Wisdom. The Gospel of John identifies Jesus with Wisdom in a number of ways. Jesus speaks in long discourses characteristic of Wisdom (Prov. 8, Sir. 24, Wisdom of Solomon 1-11). John's emphasis on "signs" mirrors that of the Wisdom of Solomon, and John uses the same Greek word for them (semeion). Finally, John's overwhelming use of the term "Father" (115 times) matches the emphasis on that title in the late Wisdom literature. John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. The prologue to John's gospel makes a precise identification of Christ with Wisdom, describing the Logos' Christological role (1:3), its role as the ground of human knowledge (1:9) and as the mediator of special revelation (1:14) -- the three roles of the pre-existent Logos/Wisdom. In calling Jesus God's Logos, John was affirming Jesus' eternality and ontological oneness with the Father by connecting him with the Wisdom tradition. Now consider these parallels with John's prologue and the Wisdom literature: John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Wisdom of Solomon 9:9 With you (God) is Wisdom, who knows your works and was present when you made the world. John 1:4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. Proverbs 8:35 For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the LORD. John 1:11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not. (1:11) 1 Enoch 42:2 Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, and found no dwelling place. John 1:14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. Sirach 24:8 The one who created me assigned a place for my tent. And he said: 'Make your dwelling in Jerusalem.' John 6:27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. Wisdom of Solomon 16:26 On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval. So that your children, whom you loved, O Lord, might learn that it is not the production of crops that feeds humankind but that your word sustains those who trust in you. John 14:15 If you love me, you will obey what I command. Wisdom of Solomon 16:18 And love of Wisdom is the keeping of her laws, and giving heed to her laws is assurance of immortality. The Word was in the beginning (John 1:1) Wisdom was in the beginning (Prov. 8:22-23, Sir. 1:4, Wis. 9:9) The Word was with God (John 1:1) Wisdom was with God (Prov. 8:30, Sir. 1:1, Wis. 9:4) The Word was cocreator (John 1:1-3) Wisdom was cocreator (Prov. 3:19, 8:25; Is. 7:21, 9:1-2) The Word provides light (John 1:4, 9) Wisdom provides light (Prov. 8:22, Wis. 7:26, 8:13; Sir. 4:12) Word as light in contrast to darkness (John 1:5) Wisdom as light in contrast to darkness (Wis. 7:29-30) The Word was in the world (John 1:10) Wisdom was in the world (Wis. 8:1, Sir. 24:6) The Word was rejected by its own (John 1:11) Wisdom was rejected by its own (Sir. 15:7) The Word was received by the faithful (John 1:12) Wisdom was received by the faithful (Wis. 7:27) Christ is the bread of life (John 6:35) Wisdom is the bread or substance of life (Prov. 9:5, Sir. 15:3, 24:21, 29:21; Wis. 11:4) Christ is the light of the world (John 8:12) Wisdom is light (Wis. 7:26-30, 18:3-4) Christ is the door of the sheep and the good shepherd (John 10:7, 11, 14) Wisdom is the door and the good shepherd (Prov. 8:34-5, Wis. 7:25-7, 8:2-16; Sir. 24:19-22) Christ is life (John 11:25) Wisdom brings life (Prov. 3:16, 8:35, 9:11; Wis. 8:13) Christ is the way to truth (John 14:6) Wisdom is the way (Prov. 3:17, 8:32-34; Sir. 6:26) The letters of Paul continue the identification of Jesus with God's Wisdom. 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30 is the most clear: Christ is explicitly identified as "the power of God and the wisdom of God." Elsewhere in 1 Cor. of relevance: Wisdom 1:4: Wisdom existed before all things.... 1 Corinthians 2:7: ...wisdom that God predestined before the ages.... Wisdom 1:6: To whom has the root of wisdom been revealed? 1 Corinthians 2:10: God revealed these things to us.... Wisdom 1:10: ...he has given [wisdom] to those who love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9: ...which God has prepared for those who love him. Wisdom 1:15: [Wisdom] has built an eternal foundation among men.... 1 Corinthians 3:10: ...as a wise architect I laid down a foundation.... Wisdom 2:5: Gold is tested in the fire.... 1 Corinthians 3:12-13: And if any man builds upon the foundation with gold or silver or precious stones..., it is to be revealed in fire. Colossians 1:15-18 Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence. This passage is full of allusions to the Wisdom literature. Note the following parallels: Colossians 1:15a He is the image of the invisible God... Wisdom of Solomon 7:26 (Wisdom is) a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. Colossians 1:15b ...the firstborn over all creation. Philo's reference to Wisdom as the "firstborn son" and offspring of God. For more on this matter see here. Colossians 1:16a ...by him all things were created.. Wisdom of Solomon 1:14 "for he created all things that they might exist" Sirach 1:4 and Philo refer to Wisdom as the "master workman" of creation. Colossians 1:17b He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Wisdom of Solomon 1:7 ...that which holds all things together knows what is said... The book of Hebrews, while never identifying Jesus directly as Wisdom, does indicate an equivalence. In verse 3 the rare Greek term apaygasma is used to describe Jesus as the "brightness of God's glory," just as the word is used in Wisdom of Solomon (7:25-26) to describe Wisdom's radiance. Hebrews ascribes to Jesus the same functions that the Philonic/Alexandrian Wisdom literature assigned to Wisdom: mediator of divine revelation, agent and sustainer of creation, and reconciler of God and man (Wisdom of Solomon 7:21-8:1). For more on this word see here. Hebrews also says of Jesus what Philo says of the Logos. Philo referred to Wisdom as the "charakter of the eternal Word" just as Hebrews uses this term of Jesus. Hebrews also "asserts the superiority of Jesus over a group of individuals and classes that served mediatorial functions in Alexandrian thought," including angels, Moses, Melchizidek, and the high priest. Finally, in Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, though universal in scope, by God's decree rests in Jerusalem, and is regarded as having the role of the priesthood: "In the holy tabernacle I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion." (24:10) Compare this proclamation with what is found in the Book of Hebrews chapters 3-10 describing Christ as our "high priest" ministering at a heavenly tabernacle.

Strange Beauty: From the Land of Denmark

Jason Leary — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:00:33 GMT

At the following hyperlink are images of strange beauty from the land of Denmark go and see : http://kunstonline.dk/indhold/la_ring.php4

Martha and Mary

Jason Leary — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 04:45:43 GMT

Please go see at the following hyperlink :http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=18616

Madam Hessel and Her Dog

Jason Leary — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 05:26:35 GMT

If the following hyperlink takes rightly one can find an interior landscape that seems charged : http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ArtGalleryServlet/index.html?XSL=list&Filename=k2832&action=Retrieve%20by%20period&PeriodId=8

Solitary Seagull

Jason Leary — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 08:32:01 GMT

Earlier this present week, I saw a solitary seagull flying high in the sky, while I stood walking my dog , by the meagre pond , here in benighted Bartow, Florida . Will (hopefully) have more to tell about that seagull sighting later . ADDENTUM : . Bartow, Florida is some 50 or so miles inland from the gulf coast on the west, and some 80 or further miles from the ocean on the East coast . Lakeland ,Florida where I had been living (prior to late July of this past year) has more seagulls even though it is about the same distance inland from the coasts . So here was that seagull flying overhead . It was a majestic sight to see . I wonder what he or she was doing so far in land, flying over a benighted town like Bartow ? I was reminded of the dove that Noah sent forth from the ark, which returned with a good tiding of an olive branch . Mind you, the seagull I saw had no olive branch , but it seemed to be a sign of good tidings , notwithstanding . Or at least the hope of good tidings .

Art of Domnic Koval

Jason Leary — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:43:20 GMT

There is a painting by Vermont painter Dominic Koval that is especially visually amazing in terms of its use of silhoutte, line , and almost indescribable color . If the following hyperlink takes rightly it can be seen at the following link address : http://www.wellofstars.com/Painting/Painting%20-%20Solo%20Pages/2007/In_deep_shade_she_remembers....html

DAYS OF CLEARVIEW (Moments I)

Jason Leary — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 09:05:37 GMT

DAYS ON CLEARVIEW : MOMENTS I (Text recopied and edited from an earlier message board entry) . PREFACE : To say that I miss the stucco house on Clearview Avenue and its surroundings in Lakeland , Florida --is a cosmic understatement . I wish that Granfather and I had found an alternative to selling it that could have handled the mortgage problem ...The funny deal of it is that for years I had intermittently complaiined about it . Notably --I said it was too small though it was not quite as small and stark looking as this present residence on Kissingen Avenue, in a rather nowhere- like town called Bartow, Florida . Granted the house on Clearview Avenue would have seemed somewhat more roomy without a relative's collection of stuffed animal collection --which, mercifully, was largely donated away during the weeks before the sale . During the last three years on Clearview before the move which took place arond July 20 , 2006 --the house and the neighborhood started to look strangely better . There were more breezy afternoons there ---where the light and the breezes often looked more dreamlike ...where there were more afternoons that in the words of the Argentine storyteller : Jorge Luis Borges , were, ' intimate, infinite ' . There were more shafts of dreamy spring and summer light on the walls that would stream through the windows . Sometimes they would stream through the cut glass windows in the living room and fall on the stucco walls of the dining room and corridor --sometimes with fragments of rainbow spectra . To attempt to describe those shafts of light --some of which were small elements of rainbow spectra---others were shafts and swaths of pale melon colored light---with words on a computer screen or on paper --would fall so short of the immediacy and vividiness of the experience as to be threadbare ...so the prospect of doing so tires me at the very start---knowing that I would not go nearly far enough with such a description . Before leaving the one story house on Clearview, I managed to take some photos with my aunt's instant camera . Aside from how the snapshots were (though they were not as total a disappointment as I feared) both: (1). Not as many as should have been and (2). not always having quite the exact illumination that would have been best to capture the image and (3) . not always as the angle as would have been best . There is not the sense of the flow of the rooms and the greater sense of extended space in the snapshots as one might have with, say, a 16 millimeter or other moving camera . The hope is that one day , I will have someone who has much more computer saavy than a borderline computer illiterate like myself will be able to ---what's the word ? " upload" the photos I have taken onto the internet in order to give observers a little more than an inkling of what the house, yard and surrounding vistas seen from the front and sides or back of the house on Clearview , looked like . I hope and pray that the couple that the house on Clearview was sold to , do NOT change it to much. I'm saddened to see that the azalea hedge at the side of the house --where, in the spring of 2004, I read the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes ,as well as art magazines , wrote the story of Caswell and part of another novel , and talked with the little Spanish speaking boy : Joseph son of Jose and Gloria ..who was quite fascinated with the flowers, and the twigs that were on the yard----is now cut down . (I hope that there will be some roots or rhizomes to help it come back one day. I will always miss that azalea bush with its enormous, fat , shimmering bumblebees that droned amid the riot of hot purple petals and the lattice like leaves of yellow-green ) . It was there that I looked at a photo in one of my grandparents art and antique magazines of a painting titled ' Feeding The Sheep' by the 19th century painter S.S . Carr, and in another similar magazine a painting of a girl with short hair feeding a bird titled 'the Macaw' by McGregor Paxton --who looked just like my long lost girlfriend from September and October 2001 : Amy-- who was from near Asheville, North Carolina. . The skyscapes during the past 3 years on Clearview seemed different in the past 3 years . The clouds the sky seemed often to take on the dreamy lights and tints you mind find in Igmar Bergman films .... It is all too easy to say, "Oh yeah, well it usually happens like that the place looks better when you are about to leave it , or after .." and be lazy- fast to chock it up to some sort of nostalgia, or just some everday sense of a place looking better before one leaves it-- of a NON-specific sort , and thus gloss over how very specific the look and the feel of the place was in the past 3 years was...the presentation of sights, sounds, and smells that had not been like that in quite the same form before . Recently this month of May just past (May 2006) --there seemed to be such a generous pour of afternoons with a sort of sunlight that was creamy pale gold (that description too doesn't quite do it as well as it could be described) which tended to light up the front porch of the house on Clearview, with its jalousie windows and the yard with its swath of sky between the houses and trees, on the opposite side of the red brick residential street . There was an afternoon of course with its dragonfly with its arc of long returns that I wrote of earlier in another post in this present message board . And there was the morning that was some 2 to 4 weeks or so beyond that day in May, when I saw that dragonfly , that I saw and smelled some rather exotic, almost unearthly experience of the landscape, that would be what William Blake might have called 'cleansing the doors of perception ' . That morning had been one where for some time now i had been listening to a rather extraodinary musical tape by a musician in St.Petersburg, Florida, who was named Andrew Delaney . That tape had been given to me as a free gift by his wife Melissa, (who had, the same afternoon I had seen the dragonfly, come by with her toddler son :a bright eyed inquisitive young lad, after hearing that the house might be for sale and came inside and had a look around) , was quite unusual . (We later sold the house to a different couple who had called about the house sometime earlier , but it was good to make the acquaintance of Melissa and her son, and ,later, her husband Andrew ) . I have been wondering for sometime whether or not the music and lyrics of the tape-- by musician Andrew Delaney --which had been recorded quite a number of years prior might have induced the experience of the landscape that I had on that morning in mid to late May--a morning I wished I had dated on a calender. The music produced by Andrew Delaney on the tape titled 'Dreamscape' was quite dreamy, oceanic, breezy , echoing...one might even say orphic (I think of Orpheus the musican from Greek folklore with his musical harp) and the lyrics with their inflexions quite amazing . (The music and lyrics call to mind a phrase by writer Thomas Wolfe (as I seem to recollect of a bell heard through ocean water ) . One of the songs on the musical tape was titled 'Concave Blue' ! I had been listening to that musical tape by Andrew Delaney for some time, during those weeks in May and also into June , weeks when I had gone out that one May morning near the exterior front door of the porch, of the stucco house on 1030 Clearview Avenue, and stood right near the white plaster urns on their thin side platforms and the mailbox unter the lintel of the doorspace --. (The front porch was set out a bit in a rectangular space with its jalousie windows ) . I may have gone out to walk my medium sized dog :Willow . If I remember rightly, that's why I had gone out that early . Then again, I may have gone out to move the garbage cans either out of, or to, the front yard . There was a generous steady breeze blowing in a generous, flowing pour of wind --like a stream of wind pouring from the west . It was more like a continuous breeze---it was not what you would call a flapping wind . There seemed to be a washed sort of chalky white color in the cast of the light coming in from the western swath of sky over the houses and trees on the opposite side of the brick street and yet there was a strangely pellucid blue to the sky from the light ---although the sky did have a hint of a pale orange -yellow that just tinged the blue in such a way that reminds me of the sort of cast of sky in Superman cartoons, or in Maxfield Parrish posters , and or the tint of sky one might see in a painting by Scheeler and the Precisionist school of painters ---in those paintings that show long thin skyscrapers of some cityscape bathed in some soft dreamy light . Before I return to describing the visual experience of the landscape , it is worthwhile to note the interesting smell that the landscape took on . There was in the breeze I noticed a strange scent that smelled (unlikely enough) like the ocean . Lakeland, Florida is some 60 to 70 miles inland from the ocean in terms of the Gulf Of Mexico on its west coast and some 80 or more miles removed from the ocean on the Atlantic coast on its east ...and yet there was a chalky, calcite smell like unto small seashells encased in chalky rock, which made me think of the smell of the ocean . I could hardly hazard a guess as to what exotic atmospheric factor could possibly enable smells from the gulf coast to be transmitted by the wind so far inland , though it is even from a inductive standpoint remotely possible , I rather doubt that these were smells being sent by the wind from the ocean . I do not know what materials in the nearby surroundings of my street or the surrounding streets and yards would have occasioned that smell ...the experience was quite anomalous . The visual experience seemed to go with the scent inasmuch as the images of the swath of sky over the houses, and yards, and its horizon behind them/ over them, took on some visual quality that made one almost visually intuit an *apperceptive image* the sort of alternate possible landscape and/or skyscape as one might imagine in some other epoch of time . Earlier, I had mentioned the dreamy , fantastical posters of the late 19th early 20th century artist Maxfield Parrish . Well that is somewhat like the sort of look the landscape on that morning seemed to approach . The horizon seemed more prominent as a sharp line of an arcing sort of panorama of space in the west as seen in the skyscape just barely above the line of trees and rooftops on the western side of my street . There was a bird :that looked like it could have been an osprey or a hawk- like bird that was a glaucous , or creamy off-white (which had if I remember rightly some small speckles on its torso and/or wings) that kept sounding a large echoing squawk that made one think of the sound a large seabird might make . The bird ,which resembled some other birds I had been seeing for some months prior which had been making nests further down the street, kept flying out close to the horizon line and arcing around and returning in midair . The bird too looked unusual in that unusual light of the western sky . First of all, it looked somewhat a little bit oversised in terms of the length of its frame---oversized even for a bird of prey of its type . Mind you , it was not a giant bird of Pterodactyl or Roc bird type proportions , but it seemed a little bit too big for usual birds of prey ---and that little bit seemed to give it a just on the verge of being preternatural look . Furthermore, the birds wings at times *almost* (I'm not going to take poetic license and exaggerate here so I'll use the word 'almost' ) resembled in minature the sort of flippers one might see in illustrations of those long ago ocean dinosaurs like the Pleiosaur ! At times I looked at the bird as it made its arc in the sky with the sort of curiosity, as if I were looking at what I wondered might be some exotic unknown species of bird ! The area around the horizon, which had come to resemble the rim of some panoramic semi-circle , seemed to be somewhat elongated by a few degrees beyond the sense of length or girth that that patch of sky usually has . The cast of light, the breeze, the scent like of the ocean , the squawking slighly oversized bird that had wings that looked the flippers on an ocean dinosaur , the seemingly elongated horizon and area of sky just immediately above it, all called to mind the hint in the mind of an imaginal landscape like one found in some of those fantasy art genre posters and illustrations from the 1970's and early 1980's which would often depict an arcing panorama of oceanscape or beachscape depicting some imagery like from the epoch of the dinosaurs (when much of what is now Florida was under the ocean) or from some alternate earth that features some similar features . The experience did seem miraculous in a quiet non-dramatic way . There was a sense of strange awe ---a sense of finding what some might call 'a postcard from the Infinite .' During many of the nights in May, and possibly early June, around the week in which that morning took place, there was another somewhat exotic experience of many nights where I went out late walking on my street and there were a lot of exotic smells of flowing plants that I do not recall having smelled before or since . During one night when I walked out and smelled those plants I smelled also a telephone pole on my street Clearview and the scent of the wood and/or perhaps the resin or varnish they put on the wood of that telephone pole seemed magnified ---far more vivid . Of course, such sights, sounds, and smells as on those particular May afternoons and nights are not an affair that happens everyday . Go there on the wrong day, and you may not find them at all (though if you wait around long enough and look through enough umbrella trees and walk around looking you may find something quite memorable given enough time ). Go to Clearview Avenue on an overcast day and it might very look quite dull and prosaic ---as afternoons in years past on the street could often be . (Though even an overcast day on Clearview Avenue is still like the outskirts of the Garden of Eden compared to an overcast day on the even far more dreary and banal Kissingen Avenue in Bartow, Florida !) For years, it is worth mentioning for the sake of accuracy , that Clearview Avenue did not always look good and for years I complained about the way it looked . And please , Dear Reader, do NOT come away from reading this present memoir essay with some trite, mendacious, glib notion like "be thankful for where you are" or "it's not so bad where you are after all" or any mendacious baloney platitude like that---for that is certainly NOT what I wish to convey at all ! Yet Clearview Avenue had those rare window moments of time ---those afternnons and evenings where the landscape took on new glints ...where the landscape both within the house and out became like a wine that took on new nuances over time---days in which the sky opened up . I wish I could freeze all those moments of time in their exactness ---exact down to the last details out of a love ; a cherishment that is exact, precise and will NEVER settle for fuzzy generalities--- and share those moments of time and landscape with everyone here . The interlude in the Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald comes back to mind where Gatsby tells his friend on Long Island how the summer is going by too fast and how he wishes he could reach out his hand and hold it back ---make it stay . There is indeed a beatitude in clinging to the right moments from the past. There is a beauty and virtue in the very act of clinging itself ---provided one wishes to share what one clings to with someone else---even if that someone is the Universe itself which you hope is "listening" somehow . Clinging is a form of savoring . Such savoring can be amost like unto the mood you find in a Psalm . I'm also reminded of the apparent quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, where the writer makes reference to places that were not loved enough in the fleeting hour and how Rilke apparently wrote , 'How I long to make good from afar , the forgotten gesture, the additional act ' (Rilke apparently longed to continue those moments in time that were not savored *as much* though they were savored some even then) as they should have been and apparently longs to savor them in all their specificity in the same place they originally happened . So do I !) Much of the time I spent on Clearview Avenue , I was often pining in turn for other places I had lived in before I moved there . To some extent I longed for an earlier residence on Honeytree Lane--which I remember had fireflies that my Grandma and I watched from the front poorch on nights in late 1984 or early 1985 . Honeytree Lane was the house in which my pet bird: the yellow cockatiel Vincent, was able to fly about outside his cage and walk about, before we moved to Clearview walong with Vincent in the summer of 1985 . Even more often than that, I longed for the landscape that surrounded my former house not far from Lake Walk-In-Water several miles to the southeast of Lake Wales , Florida . The beauty of the surrounding sand hills with their scrub forest , the beauty of the ponds with their lilly pads and wild weeds , the beauty of that enormous breezy lake Walk In Water is ineffable . ( I 've revisted that neighborhood by Lake Walk in Water several times while my residence was on Clearview ) . Yet now I find that i'm longing and rightly so for Clearview Avenue ---a place where the sky seemed to open up ---a place which had glints of beauty that you longed all the more to grab and hold and tie to the wall --because they were often so flittering . Thank the Creator I did begin to cherish those moments and attempted to some degree to savor them--but not quite with the degree of ardor which should have been even more. I am thankful to the Creator and Jesus in particular, as well as to Zack , and Grandpa ,and Grandma , and aunt Amanda, and Joanie , Melissa and her husband Andrew Delaney: the musician , Yahoo , Garrett & Siri, and others ---that I was able to savor it during those last 3 years. In the last couple of weeks before the sale of the house, the author of this present memoir was running around like an earwig moth (which Clearview Avenue had lots of , incidentally) trying to get more glances and savor it with doubled intensity ! The place at times had those various and sundry features that detracted from its beauty, such as stuffed teddy bears that one of my relatives collected , a tube of cat hairball removing cream, and here and there little plastic McDonalds resturaunt minature figurines that stood on the bookshelf next to books like the 'Timaeus' by Plato, and 'Labryinths' by Jorge Luis Borges ...Such kitch as the relative's McDonalds figurines somewhat detracted from the secret blessings of a stucco house that had a craftsman window, with a trailing thin philodendren, in the kitchen, a stucco made curved breakfast alcove , also in the kitchen , art nouveau electric lamps with interesting lampshades, an interesting wood cabinet in the dining room, an old "highboy" wood cabinet on the front poorch, and other curiosities . The house was one which we shared with two consecutive dogs : Sam: the long lost black and white Shih-Tzu who we unfortunely lost around January of 1995 , and Willow : my half bassett hound, half German Shepherd-- who now lives in some dreary backyard kennel, due to the fact that the cats in the house, in which Grandfather have now moved, are wary of dogs . It was the house in which my Grandmother and I discussed UFO's at length and the amazing sorts of civilizations that might be on other planets . It was the house in which I played the music of the English folk band 'Pentangle' from the autumn of 2004, and intermittently again until early in this present year of 2006 --which I played on my stereo in the dining room on Clearview (with one speaker working ,notwithstanding) for Grandfather , along with the beautiful song 'Morning Glory' as sung by the Canadian musical band 'Blood, Sweat, and Tears ' --a song earlier sung by singer/ songwriter: Tim Buckley . (Though the music did inspire curiosity and a ponderous look on my Grandfather's face, I think he still prefers Cole Porter to some extent) . Clearview Avenue was a house where my father and I had fascinating discussions via telephone on whether there might be unknown colors , synesthesia, photons and what light might be, art, alien life , where I discussed with him of the majesty of Shaker farmhouses and Shaker art in general , plants and exotic animals, the deserts of the American Southwest ect . Clearview Avenue was where I found via telephone information service my long lost friend Travis ( fellow tree hugger and anti-nuclear protester ) who I had known in the very early 1990's and who had since moved back to the Titusville , Florida area . It was at 1030 Clearview Avenue that Grandpa and I had the Barn: a barn- shaped toolshed where Grandpa kept his saws , hammers, nails , washers ...much of which I put in boxes that are now in the garage at this present residence in Bartow . (I have but one photo of the toolshed, and I 'm hoping that computer photo imagery enhancing technology can make a larger image of the barn exactly as it was in its best light --because if I attempt to describe it I fear that it will not reveal to the reader even a passable glimpse of what it was like to be in that toolshed . The toolshed had two somewhat small thin windows that let in some sunlight . i'm hoping that the new couple will preserve that toolshed as it was . How I long to be there hammering nails into wood with a hammer again while my Grandfather stands with his own hammer in hand ) . There are so many moments --so many gems of time--so many afternoons filled with promise and insight, so many particular breezes with particular shafts of light on particular walls , so many postcards from the Infinite-- that took place at and around the house on Clearview Avenue , that I fear I will leave out . If I get a chance to include more in other memoirs and posts , I fear there will still be other anecdotes that i will leave out--- that I will remember after i have written or posted of other moments --where I will remember after the fact and I will say (or think ) ' I should have included that!', 'I should have mentioned that one !' On Clearview was the poor, fortune- blighted travelling magazine subscription salesman (his name might have been 'Andre' but I am not sure of that) who if I recall rightly was wanting to help his infant son (or so he said) who (if I recall righly) his wife or girlfriend had custody of , who I invited onto my front poorch and entreated to listen to seashells, which I kept on a glass table on that front poorch, one evening, a little after dusk Decembe,r of last year (2005) . This man who was about in his thirties put several of the seashells to his ear and smiled with apparently earnest joy and awe when he heard the "sound of the ocean" in these seashells . For that moment he apparently had the earnest curiousity and awe and innocence a young boy might have. It was a blessing to share such joy with a travelling stranger . I fear that I will one night or day have a dream and will see myself back on Clearview with Grandpa and it will seem that I had never left / or that I had certainly returned and then I will wake to find it was only a dream, and tears will run down my face till I am soaked . I hope (and will always hope) that those afternoons on Clearview can be recaptured exactly as they were experienced--the better afternoons and evenings that is --and will be able to savor more fully, and extend them in some epoch or realm of time to come . With God all good, consistent things are possible .... Then (or perhaps before then by some exotic means) I hope to share those moments in their vividness exactly the way they looked , and sound, and smelled with others ... . I also hope that others all with their special houses and the amazing moments of the past will be able to do the same .

Greetings again long lost comrades &intellectual barbarians

Jason Leary — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 00:49:13 GMT

Hello brethren intellectual barbarians . Long time.... I didn't expect to find the present sight ---I stumbled on it after losing access to the 2003- 2004 message board . What happened to all the posts from 2003 and 2004 ? (I must confess I miss the essay on the scent of nutmeg I posted in 2004 !)