Written and unwritten.

Old Bits of Wood

 How accurate are the means of our understandings. The second question is: what do you mean by means? I'll tell ya! "An action or system by which a result is brought about, a method."

You got math, physics, biology it's a long list that includes Accounting and Creative Accounting. Some way off is the question: has physics cheated us? Max Planck in his 1944 speech in Florence Italy suggested that maybe it had. And why? Because by means of physics the finalizing metaphysical equation hadn't been determined, a conclusion hadn't been reached, something as yet unidentified, was missing. In short the Physics journey was unfinished, the means had a long way to go.

When Planck offered his thoughts on the gaps in physics, many a hard-nosed adult went spiritual and in the meanwhile far away in the bombed out ruins of Frankfurt am Main, Arthur Schopenhauer, a bad tempered Metaphysical Materialist well known for throwing a seamstress down stairs, grunted in his grave. He'd never been big on linear thinking, the compulsion to require an ending was not strong in Arthur. Nor was it a quarrel between circles and straight lines for him, it was closer to what John Walking Stewart called Moral Motion.

And what on this good earth did your hero mean by Moral Motion? 

First of all, with a name that includes "John" and "Stewart" there is no way he can be my hero, if there was a "Chad'' in there I'd spurn him completely.  Second of all: Moral Motion is Stewart's name for the idea that the universe is not made of "objects," but of sentient matter in a constant state of transition. And this is were the argument that Thomas de Quincy attempted to develop over how and where Stewart got his ideas, twinkles anew in our warm, festive hearts as we sup on Kentucky's own Ginger Ale and wish it was Bourbon.

For his part, Walking Stewart claimed that all his ideas had come to him through the physical act of crossing continents on foot. De Quincy knew for sure that Walking Stewart was an "untutored," ill-stabled genius who'd done a bit of walking, and might have stumbled upon and talked to Buddhists and European Materialist as well as a mix of atomist and animist thinkers, and he'd got got himself so muddled up he couldn't order his thinking into a well trained bundle. And it's true Thomas De Quincey's own contribution to the written world was spectacular, all that and he'd discovered a novel way to monetize addiction, he'd invented the genre of Addiction Literature.

The Romantic critique of the Industrial World had dreams of changing it all for the better. A holism that completed the whole man, didn't leave parts of him lost and panting. And your'e right, percentage-wise not many people heard of Schlegel's Lucinde or Hoffmann's Nutcracker, until Dumas and Tchaikovsky did stuff to the Nutcracker and Emmanuelle Arsan did stuff to Lucinde, and Lo as the line was straightened the genre of Romantic literature, and chorus line theater turned sticky from industrial portrayals of lingerie. 

As a result, in the search for a happy ever after, never was Schlegel's contribution to the meanings in Irony mentioned. Schlegel supposed that the role of irony in art was to demonstrate there was no such thing as an ending. Try putting a slightly retarded Bastian on the back of a fluffy dog and flinging him around in a dark void called "The Nothing" and not mention Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer Heidegger or Sartre.

No wonder David Foster Wallace threw a coffee table at his girlfriend, he couldn't get his mind around the possibility that if it ended happily or with hope, it was suspect. And yes as Baxter likes to point out, throwing coffee tables at anyone or anything is a first world problem. 

For de Quincey's interest, as he wonders where Ann went, the thousands of generations of Aboriginal People of Western Australia were well tutored in their understandings of their world. It was place where the land carried the dreaming, were custodians of the verse walked the tracks of songlines, followed the lore, and maintained a frequency. 

Of the two, de Quincey and Stewart. Stewart was closer to understanding a world without the written word. That world would have been a non-linear world. In that non-linear world where, as a transient collection of atoms I am nothing without everything else.

Where have the Butterflies gone.

Bark

 Back when De Quincy was a Romantic young junkie the word resonance wasn't commonly used. It's from Latin for echo or resound and more recently its meaning as a vibration has reached the marketers and propagandists where it's called a virus. Through physics this echo or resound has found a home in the world of electronics, specifically radio waves where it was baptized as frequency and there it slowly pushed aside harmony. 

And whether you like it or not, as we return to Jorge Luis Borges' essay on the Nothingness of Personality you might notice a vibration stirring the spirit, a harmony soothing the soul, a resonance rhyming with balance because I at least am going to argue that the last Golden Age of our species was destroyed by the written word.

Borges was a young man when he wrote The Nothingness of Personality. He claimed Personality was a "mirage maintained by conceit, it was without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He also suggested that a reader absorbed very little of what was written, rarely was the reader ever in a position to challenge or debate what was written, and altogether, in my view, Borges insinuated the relationship between writer and reader was a sterile relationship where the writer, in the interest of his own success, was attempting to impress the reader either with the equivalent of tablets from on high or a ripping yarn which as a best seller could mean a second home in the Cairngorms, or somewhere. 

The meanings in resonance that incline toward balance allows for the concept of what Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, the Master of Balance if you prefer. An imbalance betrays itself as a disharmony, a frequency that produces only static on the wireless as you search for Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station out there on the North Sea that's touched your imagination and into which you want to fall.

Go ahead, ask Socrates, he'll tell you the written word creates the illusion of understanding, fosters a pretense of knowledge, destroys memory. If you don't believe me then tramp homeless, friendless, handheld deviceless and hungry across the land, and there you may ask where the hedgerows have gone, you might wander after Hedgehog, and try to remember when you last saw a Butterfly. Or not.

  

The Sky Emu, Songlines and The Everywhen

Yellow Jacket Nest and Skunk or Possum

 The Sky Emu, is a dark blob in the Milky Way that we linear English Speaking Peoples have totally castrated by giving it the incredibly dull name of The Coalsack Nebula. Sure, the Coalsack Nebula can't be seen by most of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, but South of the Equator it's very much a feature for anyone interested in Emu.

I will tell you why but as with the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was crushed in 2017 by the current resident of the White House because he didn't want to understand it, it's complicated.

The point is, The Sky Emu, depending on where it is in the sky and what shape it is will tell you what the Emu are up to. What kind of mood they're in, whether they're wandering around, nesting, laying eggs. And don't be fooled, the Emu are untrustworthy and they are dangerous. In 1932, the Australian Government authorized the military to take up arms against The Emu.

The other thing to remember, which the Australian Military overlooked as they lost their war against Emu, you don't hunt Emu when the Sky Emu tells you they're nesting. If you do, your sin becomes a ripple in the fabric of time, all the way back into the past, the Everywhen thus threatened, your food sources would be destroyed, songlines would no longer lead you to water. Shame on you, you pathetic creature!

Of course, all over our own northern hemisphere, there was a time when people would look at the sky and do a Sky Emu interpretation on it. For example in Ancient Egypt it was fairly straightforward, when in the course of a year, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, first rose after seventy days of absence just before sunrise, usually a week or two before the end of the summer, it meant the river Nile would soon be flooding. The Greeks called Sirius the Dog Star and they accused her of being the cause of the Dog Days of Summer.

In the North we have rather abused our relationship with the earth and the heavens. We fossilized the Songlines, made chocolate chip fortune cookies out of the Everywhen, stars twinkle and we catch them when they fall for luck......Anyway, thank god the days will lengthen for a while,

 

A permeable Membrane and the fate of the Sodomites.

Dappled

When it comes to Plato, Kant, Hegel and a whole bunch of others, some of them English Speaking disciples of the Enlightenment, those of us who share the quest for a tie wearing Grail of Reason, find ourselves accusing those of the Romantic Vision, along with the Woe is me Existentialists and anyone who claims to be uniquely spiritual and/or creative, of being pit dwelling, hat wearing blobs with very little going for them.

And I say this as someone who owns a deep respect for the world as it might have been during the Paleolithic period, the several million years before the farmers messed with our lifestyle and just twelve thousand years ago turned us Neolithic, a paltry description for twenty-five thousand years of poor nutrition, shorter lives, more diseases, social stratification and conflict over land ownership.

The point is you can't touch the Romantics without submitting to an understanding of all that and the Taoist Way. "Once I was a butterfly, fluttering this way and that, then I woke up and saw that I was a man. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." Good pothead Neolithic stuff, the dreamworld and the first rational question: "What is Real?"

For Taoists the answer came this way: both dream and awake is part of a larger unified flow. Or as Can Bobby would tell you, dream and awake for a Taoist are just "different frequencies of experience." Worth noting that if Can Bobby ever feels anything it'll be a different frequency.

 Go ahead, sneer away as you dream of an event in Bethlehem which has badly messed with calendar for two thousand years. But rest assured if you were in Western Australia thirty five thousand years ago, you'd settle down for the night and while asleep you'd left the shell and traveled to a small, often permanent, body of water you hadn't visited for years, and spotted a tree that had fallen over or a spring that had dried up, then, according to the law, there was a good chance you owned that billabong. And why on earth? Well, dream time was real. 

In the 1960's, as we beatniks were being overwhelmed by hippies, traveling while asleep was called Astral Planing, but trust me in those days justice had been well sterilized and Astral Planing didn't hold up in court even if prior to the English Invasion it had always been a custom and practice, and a god given right of the Welsh Speaking Peoples.

So we got what Can Bobby refers to as a "permeable membrane" between sleeping and waking. The Romantics embraced the permeability of that membrane. Here there's a sentiment that's sort of from Genesis. It goes something like this: 'The Children of Sodom have lost the right to Petition Fate."

They were doomed. Man, woman and child, all of them doomed. I don't know about Jesus or the Holy Spirit but an overly sensitive God the Father felt badly ignored, he had to set an example, and he'd have no mercy on them. Romantics, might have described the Sodomites, and the Gomorrahites, as stuck in the light of the sun. A light that only showed boundaries not connections.

Alcoholics have a cure, they say sorry, admit to their sin and submit to a higher power. It's very romantic and rather ironic way to deal with the higher power of alcohol.