Henri Bergson

In Henri Bergson's book Creativity, time was indivisible, it was fluid. It wasn't the abstract, quantifiable time of math and science, or of clocks. He used the word "duration" to describe the experience of consciousness. "Duration" allowed for a truer appreciation of the real nature of time, as a flux between past, present and future in the process of becoming which could only ever be intuitively grasped. In our compendiums of understanding the error is to mistake intuition for common sense. The latter is practical and cultural. The former perceives the existence of the quantum level, the tiniest of units, but can't demonstrate it. Evolution for Henri, wasn't mechanistic, it was a pure undetermined explosion. It was an easy idea to love.  And indeed the mathematician Penrose would suggest that consciousness itself emerges when the quantum phenomena of superposition occurs in neurons, the energy exchange is corralled by what are called micro-tubules and last long enough to be the source of what Bergson would have considered our experience of time as fluid rather than the mechanistic clock time of bits that are directed by mathematical formulas.

La grandeur de la France

 

During the Second World War Albert Camus was an editor for a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jean-Paul Sartre was captured by the Germans, as a prisoner he read Heidegger, wrote his War Diaries, in 1941 he was released into the public by the Vichy Regime for poor eyesight. Jean Genet, during the second world war, served a number of jail sentences for vagabondage, lewd acts and thieving. I recently subjected Baxter to a crash course on all three writers. Why? He has promised to behave a little longer.

Pollards and Copses

 I do have a slight disagreement with a recent dictionary's understanding of Copse. The coppicing of copses wasn't to make them denser it was irregular harvests of useful hardwoods. Hazel Nut, Chestnut, Ash, Lime, Willow and Alder. This is a picture of Willow.

Ferns have been around for 400 million years

 

Worth recalling Kant as The Philosopher of the Enlightenment. If he had a militaristic subtitle it might have been Dare to Think. In his essay on The Enlightenment he used the phrase Dare to Know. He thought in terms of thinking for oneself as an expression of an individual's maturity. 

Impenetrable Nature of Kant's Critiques

 

He was four inches shorter than Napoleon. His Categorical Imperative was an expensive way of saying Instinct. Polite to think of it as a conclusion arrived at through reason. A curve toward Justice. More like, once Justice is defined instead of dreamed of, it's revealed as lot of hard work and a long way from instinctive, but whether it's a curve or a straight line, the idea that it might be natural instead of struggle cheers a mind up.

A Death in Spring

 

The Vulture survived. The Water Lilies are well up. I have heard the Green Frogs. There's a Washington Hawthorn that grants shade and prickles to the old hot tub. She could have lived 700 years, but she didn't survive the winter. She was planted in hope for future happy Mays and winter berries for Finches. A brave Lady, she was home to many a Chickadee and even a Gnatcatcher or two. She had twenty years before a pox and a hard freeze became too much.

Nesting in the Ornamentals redux

An error. It wasn't a Carolina Wren, it was a Chipping Sparrow. The female of a Chipping Sparrow pair builds nests. The Male assists with advice and the odd opinion.

Nesting in the Ornamentals

 It could be a Carolina Wren. The male of their pair makes all the noise and likes to explore the possibilities, challenge his skills, practice a little. The final location is down to the female.  

Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus

 

His was a philosophy of the absurd. He noted a fundamental need to attribute meaning to life on Earth. The universe's response was an "unreasonable silence." In this absurd situation, Albert saw no justification for suicide, what he saw was a call to revolt. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Hanging Pillow Cases and Basket Lighting

 

That's a freezer, a map of the world, a shelf and a sink

Shu, shoo, shoe and laces

Script size, something resembling teeth and good light are all kind of central to those of us in their waning years. The Big Questions such as why the people of Japan have large feet are best left to the next generation of old people.

Violet Wood Sorel

 

Other cat pays a visit

 

Struggling a little with endings. Worth reminding the callow and insufficient who might require endings of Sartre’s suggestion that libraries were graveyards, books are the graves. 

Tucker’s Roll

 

 

yep, a few years ago it lost its footing and it’s still smiling back

Lateral Thinking

 

To quote a Vortex AI Platform discovering purpose by sifting through collections of words: "Lateral thinking, a problem-solving approach, encourages creative and unconventional solutions by exploring ideas from different perspectives, rather than relying solely on logical, step-by-step reasoning." Easy to say but let's see what happens to Groupthink if and when I have a shower. Will the desire for harmony within the group lead to irrational, dysfunctional, yet oddly comforting decision making outcomes? Who knows!

Congress

"Baxter please! You must know this by now. It's a fact of life, that when boys and girls engage in sexual congress, the conversation is less nuanced for the boy, he reaches his conclusion within seconds sometimes, and is asleep within minutes which can leave a female partner either frustrated, angry and deeply depressed, or thrilled with the easy money. For Delyth Primrose that's when a tin of cold spaghetti in tomato sauce offered a solution."

Frgg’s Day

 

Frigg was a German Goddess, she was married to Oden for all the good it did her, and she was the mother of Baldur. But it wouldn't really be the English Language if it wasn't constantly taking its knickers off for the wretched Romans. Absolutely no reason to bring the relationship between Oden and the Roman planet Venus into the English word for the fifth day of the week. And why the frig don't we follow the Ancient Greek Tradition of spreading a week over ten days instead of stuffing it into seven days so that a month could have four weeks, instead of three? By the way, spell check, Oden is the Swedish form of the name.

Cat Tuesday