QOTD: WHAT ASPECT OF NATURE DO YOU APPRECIATE/ENJOY THE MOST?

Avalon has taken some outstanding pictures of oceanside sunrises.

Water to me, in all it’s good forms. Soothing ocean waves on a clear moonlit night when it’s warm…
A clean, flowing, narrow brook or stream, over rocks and around fallen pine trees…
A small inland lake, so calm on summer morning it looks like a sheet of glass…
Mild periodic rain, to make the flora grow and restore the green in Spring.

On the other edge of water’s sword are flood waters, and Nor’easters that would put the fear of Mother Nature’s wrath in anyone caught up in them.

We can live without food for many days.
Water? Vital to life.
Curse the man or corporation that pollutes what little fresh water is available.
We shouldn’t waste it, nor take it for granted.

“He leadeth me beside still waters, and restoreth Peace to my soul”

Psalm 23

The balance.

The way everything works in perfect harmony within a closed system is beyond my ability to fully fathom, so whenever I regard it I find myself in awe.

It’s hard to be awestruck when you’re my age, but it never fails.

Mountains & our beautiful National Parks.

The exhilarating nature of, well…nature. Knowing full well it could crush every bone in your body, or stop your heart, or maul you…yet you survive for another day. Being caught above tree line at the wrong time of day during a lightning storm, but it wasn’t your time to be struck. Encountering bears while hiking and enjoying their beauty in their natural habitat, but it wasn’t your time to be mauled. Hiking rocky terrain along a steep precipice, but it wasn’t your time to fall to your death. Exhilarating.

As well as calming, peaceful, quiet, contemplative…all necessary to hear God and immensely enjoy His majestic beauty.

Touching my favorite trees…Sequoias, and marveling at their height, girth, soft bark, and their length of time on earth.

Smelling the scents of nature…pine, cedar, flowers…and fire.

Hearing water rushing over a waterfall or trickling over smooth rocks in a brook. The sound of branches breaking, birds chirping, leaves crunching under your feet.

Women

If you can find it, the lack of HUMAN noise. At first I was thinking the quiet, but nature isn’t quiet. The sounds of nature are wonderful, from birds, the sound of wind through the trees, the sound of running water or even a waterfall, the sound of rain or thunder, the sounds of mammals walking or scurrying through the leaves or brush….all wonderful things to listen to without the sounds of humans or their technology.

The Call of the Wild has no domesticated notes in it. That’s what I like about it.

But London wrote about the domesticall, too (I put this in here once upon a time before the time now upon):

And part of what London saw when he was “Pinched” (couldn’t find it online, went back to when I did, ’19, & this trove was stuck to it):

Saw this, about Jack London, in a recent LRC piece:

“Jailed, London the future socialist stood by as his gang disciplined a naïf, “I remember a handsome young mulatto of about twenty who got the insane idea into his head that he should stand for his rights. And he did have the right of it, too; but that didn’t help him any. He lived on the topmost gallery. Eight hall-men took the conceit out of him in just about a minute and a half—for that was the length of time required to travel along his gallery to the end and down five flights of steel stairs. He travelled the whole distance on every portion of his anatomy except his feet, and the eight hall-men were not idle. The mulatto struck the pavement where I was standing watching it all. He regained his feet and stood upright for a moment. In that moment he threw his arms wide apart and emitted an awful scream of terror and pain and heartbreak. At the same instant, as in a transformation scene, the shreds of his stout prison clothes fell from him, leaving him wholly naked and streaming blood from every portion of the surface of his body. Then he collapsed in a heap, unconscious. He had learned his lesson, and every convict within those walls who heard him scream had learned a lesson. So had I learned mine. It is not a nice thing to see a man’s heart broken in a minute and a half.”

But the writer then goes on to justify “reframing” (denying) the denial that roots the cause of all the downstream symptomology:

“London insisted a worldwide class revolution was the answer. A century and several gory nightmares later, there are those who still cling to this faith, but only in the West. In the East, even the most ignorant know the survival of his identity and dignity is conterminous with his nation’s. Orwell understood this well. It is the biggest crime to wreck anyone’s heritage in a flash.”

But before all that writer characterizes, either contra all the heritage blather, or inadvertently spills beans on true humanimal “heritage” (albeit whilst incorrectly broadstroking ego):
“London quickly worked his way up the clink’s hierarchy, to become one of 13 enforcers for the guards. This experience alone should have taught him that in all situations, not just dire ones, each man will prioritize his own interest and survival, and that there’s no solidarity among the “downtrodden” or whatever. Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parable about this. Since man is an egoist, power lust lurks everywhere.”

Yeah, writer’s asian contagion may be showing. But it ain’t just Asians got the infection. Nair takes the hair off, narrative – incl “heritage” – glues it back on. Stay thirstily & hairily beastly, my most interesting friends in the whirl’d…that bier commercial.

And then writer concludes with this:

“In the US, at least, this shouldn’t be too complicated, for their crimes are mostly out in the open, and their enforcers appear nightly in your living room, not unlike 1984. As you watch, they cheerfully lie, silence witnesses, mass murder, squander your last cent and dismantle, brick by brick, the house your forefathers built and died defending. Even if all they saw was its basement, it was still their everything.”

More of the ancestor hairy narrative hari-kari (seppuku) . But what caught my eye connects to a snip of dialog from the Peaky Blinders Irish gangster series (Helen McCrory’s in scene, just gone by cancer…but we got helicopters on mars):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZZQVVQUg08

Every enabling\codependent cogdis accommodation, adaption to & embracing of pharaoh – including those renamed\reframed phounding phathers, as well as all their lesser wannabe emulators who build, or join, “their own” gangs – is exactly “like taking bricks out of the wall of your fucking house.” The song is Just Another Brick In The Wall. But the dismantling of individual boundaries – barrier walls – is really a much clearer pic of the process, &\or of humanimal design.

Other people are not, can never be bricks in your house. But, all too many, have never yet stopped pretending to be just such bricks & pretending others were just such bricks. That’s the illusion that sells & humanimal herds will buy all you got. Even this London writer says it without seeming to notice he did. Or maybe he just goes with the rad egal effluent that all unique individuals are merely carbon copies to be writ up & in at pharoah’s discretion.

Gonzo (was a freaking optimist…at least when he wrote part of this): “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

Caveat always: manymanymany are already @conception preconfig’d boundaryless, or mostly so…& then the long pavlovian gauntlet, of “hall-men,” to drive it all home(less…no bricks for you! barks the masonry nazi) starts. Cuz ever’body knows the big bad wolves can’t huff&puff down brick…(oh, I gotta’ story ‘bout a pig I chased into a brickyard once upon a time…)

Finally, at the very start of the London piece: “Trapped in intensely mediated lives, we all think we know more as we experience less and less.”

Just so. And the most intense “mediation” of all is, & always has been, “we.” It is dissociation…via association. And the ocean’s just a desert with the perfect disguise above. Hedged Oxbow Incidents forever. ∞

Mamet: “Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues & the Jacobins: the first is happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies.

On ascession to power, the first become apparatchiks, thrilled with their ability to control events. This brief phase culminates in their murder by their former partners.

The ideologues, in their brief illusion of authority, are happy to invent new names for themselves (Citizen, Comrade) & for every other thing under the sun (his-her-we-they-them); they are let free to run through the big-box store of culture effacing & changing the labels, that is, controlling speech.

The penalty for opposition, as we see, appears almost on the instant. First the expression of opinion is characterized as dissent, then is calumniated, & dissent (now called aggression) is reidentified as lack of active assent.

Those seeking to avoid, first, discord, then censure & the loss of income, quickly find they have nowhere to hide & must choose active endorsement of ideas repulsive to them or blacklisting.

After the inevitable Night of the Long Knives, the threat of blacklisting is upgraded to the certainty of imprisonment or death.

These are the lessons of history, which is to say they are the record of one of the functions of human nature: to guide the individual to power. The urge is checked by the benefits of religion (& so morality) & by those of a constitutional state: the freedom to strive, guaranteed by law & the reasonable fear of punishment for its transgression.

Absent the individual’s subscription to these, we have that anarchy which, we see even now, leads to the normalization of crime. What is more delightful to the weak human soul than the prospect of criminal indulgence not only allowed but *endorsed?* Here the human sex trafficking of Epstein Island & the destruction of the cities are the same as Hitler’s stunned joy at the taking of France: nobody’s going to stop me.

We human beings are a bad lot. Unchecked, we divide into predators & food.

We know the restraints of honor, of morality, of family loyalty, & of the fear of shame & punishment. Civilizations are kept in order (for good or ill) by the carrot & the stick. The Declaration of Independence lists the rewards of life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.

But what of the death wish? What of our envy of those better off? What of the urge to amalgamate in search of companionship or camouflage, in fear of the night?

In associations’ benign form, we have the sewing circle & the bowling league; progressed into anarchy, we find occupy, Black Lives Matter, antifa; & then the carmagnole & the guillotine.

Each knows himself to be weak – to have done evil, or to have evil thoughts & perhaps plans. Mob mentality deals with our self-loathing by blaming it on others: racists, Israelis, “haters.” Religion treats unwelcome self-knowledge by offering confession, consolation, & prayer.

Healthy culture addresses the condition with art. Great paintings & music can inspire, suggest, soothe, thrill, *but they cannot teach.* Neither can literature. The arts exist, as does religion, to touch those portions of the human soul *beyond* the corruption of consciousness.

We all know our consciousness is corrupt, & a long life, examined, brings the burden of regret, shame, & indeed a horror at our own actions that, at times, becomes scarcely bearable.

The theater, & tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession & conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

The tragedy is like the story around the campfire &, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into anoter world. “Once upon a time,” just like “there were these two guys,” not only reassures but *instantly bypasses* our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, & self-image.

In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story *is not going to be about ourselves.* Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, an advertisement), the spell is broken, & we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.

Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection & we realize we were hearing an ad.

When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.

The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night & his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to *face it* & to deal with it through *reason* (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, & his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.

To address his fears by saying, “So remember, never be changed into a wolf,” is to make the same error as putting on plays with a “message.” These are a terrible misuse of the theatrical moment. As are the “talk-backs,” transforming an evening at the theater into an English class.

As free speech disappears like Jimmy Hoffa, producers & theatergoers are left with fear. Not only has a mechanism for relief been suppressed; the art form has been pressed *into service of the repressive mechanism.* ~ Recessional: The Death of Free Speech & the Cost of a Free Lunch, David Mamet

I’ll only point out that Mamet misuses “anarchy” & conflates “power” with corruption, among other “does not equals.” And that he is the 2nd Jewish writer I know of whose penchant for “order” is on display. But otherwise, much to like.

Bah! You’ll have good luck and get competent pilots.
& Florida will treat you well. Except if you go to Miami, and start
babbling too much about the juice, Adolph, or The Six Million Holler Scam.

Your better bet is to just make sure, that if Mike Tyson is on either of your flights,
don’t badger him. Compliment him on his facial tattoo, and then read a book in flight.

Better yet. Put on a set of Bose noise cancelling earphones, plug in to some good tunes,
and toe-tap to the beat during the entire flight.
Don’t break for peanuts, beverages, or a piss.
Keep on rockin’ in the fee world.
~Have a great time, & bring back a story or three for the gallery.

As a high schooler, I enjoyed natural foods like psilocybin mushrooms.

Now I like being in a forest watching nature while waiting on a hog to come out of the bushes to get the corn and shoot it.

Rain

Nature is great because nobody is around to see you bury the bodies.