| in america volume 26 part 2 - 2012-2013 | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27 December 2013 Luke did the right thing for Christmas Day, made dinner for Sara who was alone. Goose with chestnut and liver pate stuffing, mince tarts with whipped cream, port by the fire with two cats and Bach. Quiet Christmas Day on the street outside. And was there welcoming me home this morning. Said he's felt better since there was a shift Oct 23. What was I doing - photos in the mist. The room is still cold. I woke at 5:30 and had to go get the red quilt to pile on top of already thick covers. Last night heading down the ramp from 6th Ave to the 163 in the dark, blasted at heart and aware I'd have to pay good attention driving. New battery, new tires, my strong beast powering a shocked soul home. Thus one can also say: a definite stability of the world sub specie aeternitatis can only occur through the connection of each individual system with the whole rest of the world. There exists only one universal being which comprises all of reality in an undivided unity. Brahman through Maya projects the appearances of the world. > Is it a clunky way of saying space clotted and reclotted through time forms and erases bodies that perceive as the sorts of bodies they are? Ie are about in limited ways. > The Vedic claim that a clot of space can tune itself to alter how it is about. > Interpreted through Western dualism. unity and continuity in Vedanta reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics Schrödinger and Heisenberg a universe based on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes Er hat eine Ecke des grossen Schleiers gelüftet (said Einstein of de Broglie) union of waves and particles in a concrete fashion, a particle being a little localized object incorporated in the structure of a propagating wave the Broglie-Einstein wave theory of the moving particle, according to which the latter is nothing more than a kind of whitecap on the wave radiation that forms the basis of the world Particles are mere epiphenomena. De Broglie based on traveling waves, Schrodinger on standing waves. It is scarcely necessary to emphasize how much more appealing than the conception of jumping electrons would be the conception that in quantum transitions the energy passes from one vibration pattern to anther. The change in vibration pattern can take place continuously in space and time, and can readily persist as long as the emission process does. The image point (or 'particle') of the mechanical system must then be represented by a wave group with small dimensions in every direction. that point where a certain continuum of wave forms coalesces with the same phase. No special meaning is to be attached to the electron path itself and still less to the position of the electron in its path .... The wave group not only fills the whole path domain all at once, but also extends far beyond in all directions .... Insistence that the electron is a wave ... the belief soon discarded by other physicists From 1926 his conviction of wave motion as the source of physical reality "began to waver". Pauli: Quantum phenomena naturally display aspects that cannot be expressed by the concepts of continuum physics (field physics). If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves. By choosing to be a conservative in physics after the revolution of 1926, S joined the radical minority who dared to dissent from an orthodoxy known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. S was a visualiser. 5th Solvay 1927 - Einstein, de Broglie and S, not Born, Heisenberg, Bohr. "A battle over the epistemological foundations of physics and over the way in which scientists should understand their world." The greatest delight in the university was the weekly colloquium, which met on Wednesday afternoon to discuss new discoveries and theories. Einstein took a leading role, as with careful questioning and explanations he sought to reach the heart of every problem presented. The Berlin Physics Colloquium At issue whether nature is acausal. The most remarkable thing was that both the opposed directions of thinking finally coincided in a formally mathematical way. Consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. S
There is no known instance in which a professor of physics or chemistry without any Jewish family ever made an open protest against Nazi activities. Scientists all over the world anxiously watched these events in Germany but only one of them resolved immediately to do something. "Jewish intellectualism is dead. The German national soul can again express itself." Goebbels at the book burning ceremony "held in most of the university towns in Germany". May 10 1933. S sold out after the Anschluss, "would on the whole like to make his peace with the regime". Uncertainty originally restricted to the atomic domain has become transformed to a macroscopic uncertainty. - [Tom arrives on the Thursday afternoon bus.]
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This morning so extremely stressed by Tom's presence, solar quaking, chest tight, and still tight when I think of it. I couldn't touch him, didn't want to look at him. Is that called traumatized? I had driven through the dark that way, listening to Grimaud and Sol Gabetta over and over. By Ramona I felt it had eased. But then the moment he got into the jeep on the Dudley's parking lot yesterday it was back. This morning I knew I'd get better after I dropped him off. I didn't until I'd been sitting in the sun in the new [Ramona] Starbucks reading the Times for a while. It's a physical injury, like a bruise created invisibly by an explosion of bad rays. - I'm not doing what I usually do, making it worse by saying I will go away forever - though I feel a little pull that way. I feel stymied instead, like standing staring at a dead end. 29 A bird on the sandstone cut bank that looked bluer than a bluebird, an indigo bunting? It says rare. It wasn't far from the spot where earlier I saw a kitten on the center line with a bloody mouth. It was alive. I thought maybe there's a veterinarian in Julian, put it into a box on my green jacket. Ended leaving it at the cat woman's house. Vee Lumpkin. Quite trashed-feeling still so I brought home six novels and a pint of Haagen Daas and slept. Woke to beads of water on the outside bedframe and now fog up to the chair's oak. Went to Julian for pellets this morning expecting rain or snow later. I don't remember it being this cold last year. 30 Was lying awake thinking I haven't taken account of what's been happening. I wanted yesterday to be an eraser but today I still need to say the worst, the two things, Tom's violent hatred and the dying kitten. I had carried the kitten into a shallow box lined with my jacket and could hear its claws on the cardboard as I drove. In Julian I saw it had dragged itself to the back of the jeep and wedged itself between another box and the side wall. It had smeared blood. It was lying on its back with its neck bent inward and its bloody mouth open. It was like the kitten I'd carried in the jeep before, a long-haired grey, but maybe a month older. The vet was closed Saturdays. The feed store man said god had sent it for a purpose. The woman with a pet grooming business mentioned Vee Lumpkin, the woman at the pellet store looked up her address and told me how to get there. No one was home. I could see through a smeared sliding door to breakfast left on the table. A dozen plates on the porch with partly eaten cat food. I lifted the kitten back into the box and covered it with a bit of the jacket and left it on the porch to die. Should I have stayed with it? And why was it on that stretch of road far from houses? Did someone throw it out of a car? It was a desperate thing to see, and what is a crushed kitten as an image. Vulnerable girlness. The young woman in India raped by six men in a bus, who died yesterday. November grass, her vision of animals born and dying, appalled clear vision. Judy van der Veer 1940 November grass Tom's burst of violent hatred and its deep effect, on him too. He phoned yesterday and said he'd been in hell. The suddenness. The way it happened in the dark. The way I sat there in the jeep stunned not knowing what to do. And now I'm back in this room cold and alone, feeling alone, the little heedless comfort of being a bit back with Tom wrecked so my solar is tight and I'm not at liberty. I don't understand the hatred. It's like Roy. Something I am is unbearable to them. It's not something I shouldn't be, I'm certain of that. It's a clamped structure, my being something I should be and it being unbearable to them. 31st Yesterday afternoon I glanced out the north window and saw it was beautifully snowing, large slow steady flakes. Tim says put your most heartfelt wish on a folded piece of paper under your mattress. What's my most heartfelt wish. Sun today and forecast for more days. Why are there four plastic chairs lined up in the pasture down near the road. Dream images. I step out of a door or elevator and find myself next to the lip of a high waterfall, smooth curve of blue water. I'm in a long underground corridor walking with my little boy away from a museum. I step through what I think is an elevator door and am staring at an east-European man and woman about to make love in what I assume is a cubicle for rent. A bed with frilly print bedspread and pillow shams is descending from the ceiling. - Something about dead ends, was thinking I should list all the little efforts I make that come to nothing. Just list them to take fuller account of them. And then : absolutely fuckin' gorgeous says Sean-Xavier of Here. - Linda stopped by and said there'll be fireworks later, and a fire, Feigels' grandkids I suppose. "Usually they have it up on Angel Mountain but the road is too bad." She was telling me so I wouldn't be alarmed, "so you wouldn't think it was wild Indians or something". "Or worse" I say, meaning let's not be racist. - New Years Eve. Fireworks. Carnations. The last of Angelo's port. Louie phoned. Beethoven's 131. Absent friends, the dead and the still living. 1st January 2013 So then I phoned my mom, who brightened when I said I remembered her knowing Orion. The extraordinary 1920s - To the lighthouse the same year as the 5th Solvay, Oberland, Pound mid-cantos, Wittgenstein building a house - all in 1927. An era of such collective engagement, so much dispute and reformulation, with the whole of metaphysics at stake, furious popular resistance because it mattered. 2nd
Here's my wish, to work truly and deeply in something cutting-edge and significant for the rest of my life. To drop what's irrelevant and still have the resources to do that. To succeed and have a community in that work. To be good to my mammal self in support of it. To keep focus in it - to take proper care to keep focus in it. It's something to do with granularity. It's scientific and mythic. I write in support of it.
1. cosmology 2. bodies/aboutness 3
At 75 degrees latitude one's time zone changes every 269 miles. white bears whose great paws have widened over time so the bears can walk on ice that would seem too thin to support their weight 5 Drove to Ramona yesterday after a morning with cosmic images. On 76 the mild sun and new grass felt like early spring, new loft in the day. On the way home I thought to chance Black Canyon Road, which I hadn't dared since the rain. It was euphoria, Black Mountain mauve over orange, the road recently graded so it seemed a carved shelf, plants at their year's minimum, a clear bare sense, and all in the sweet quiet warmth of sun halfway down in the west. Simple joy all the way. And then carrying in tangelos, green pippins, goat cheese, a Tuscan loaf, pastrami, thick Greek yogourt, organic carrots, a budded hyacinth. Unloading pellets into the garage glad I still can. Many new calves with their mothers alongside the lane. It seems Feigel breeds for the new grass in January. O'dark thirty, midnight to 5. 6 "That we will presently see," quoth Robin, "and meanwhile stand thou where thou art, or else, by the bright brow of Saint Aelfrida, I will show thee right good Nottingham play with a clothyard shaft between thy ribs." 1. Saint Alfreda d.795 Saintsday August 2, daughter of King Offa of Mercia, virgin and hermit, "retired to the marshes of Crowland". A sister Aelfrida. 2. Aelfrida of Wessex, Princess of England, 877-920 daughter of Alfred the Great, sister of King Edward the Elder, married abt 888 to Baudouin the Bold of Flanders. 3. Queen Aelfrida, 945-1000, at Corfe Castle in Dorsetshire, second wife of Edgar the Peaceable, father Earl of Devon, mother of Aethelred the Unready. 8 Elfreda Epp's in the US census. A lot of black Elfreda's, including an African Elfreda Blue. Post-Tolkien fantasy elves tend to be more beautiful and wiser than humans, with sharper senses and perceptions. They are said to be gifted in magic, mentally sharp and lovers of nature, art and song. They are often skilled archers. - Rowen has been reading the first 6 months of his life in my journal and likes it, he says. "Delightfully mad." He had been reading bits to Michael. He was light and sweet, as he is, but his charm still always surprises me. It's snowing in the dark, wet snow sticking to leaves, as I saw when I turned on an outside light. Row said he was being 20 again, meaning having come to Vancouver again and this time not so chaotically. I said I'm happy he's living with Michael. He said being a security guard is working. Mike said joyfully that he's making drawings - on good paper - from a French version of Pinocchio [Winschluss]. He said good paper twice. 8 9 I feel clearly seen by Ellie and I think this clear-sighted quality is a noteworthy aspect of her. That and her kindness, integrity, honesty, vision, and essential coherency. I admire and look up to Ellie and I also feel treated as an equal. Her strengths are many and tempered by the hard and honorable work she has clearly put in to know herself and bring her whole self and focus to her work. [Sonja] -
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- Dust & soul. I begin with the gigantic blooms of space. They are blooms made of dust. Rapturous. I will show the forces shaping hem, eddies, explosions, gravitational suck, vortical travel. 10 An icy wind began late this afternoon. Cumulous masses with bright edges strode forward from the west. Tom phoned to say the news has been all excited about a storm system slipping down from Alaska.
[Elton John Can you feel the love tonight] 12 Propagation effects, which can seriously degrade the reliability and performance of a communication link, strongly influence the choice of suitable satellite system parameters. Rain is the primary factor affecting satellite links. At the 20 and 30 GHz frequencies of the ACTS system, rain attenuation is a more serious problem than at the lower band frequencies. 13 Sunday 9 in the morning. Very cold. Fire pushed many notches up the dial. Orange trees have been in danger. A freeze in Borrego Springs. Crops down in Brawley halted in the ground. There's ice in the hot water pipes, which are letting through only a thin stream. I'm bemused by Dorris Heffron, last and first named in the intro to RF. Greg mentioned her in his comments on RF6-3 and I looked her up. Living in a $900,000 house with valances and flowered sofas near Georgian Bay, married to the retired chief actuary of Sunlife having ditched the philosopher some time ago, busily active as chair of the Writers' Union of Canada. Book tours. Local villagers nodding to the writer and her dog. Dorris was a bland girl in the front row of [Isaac] Newell's American Literature class. I vividly remember the moment, sitting over on the left side of the room with Olivia, when Newell read out a paragraph from a student's paper and it turned out not to be mine. That smooth lump of a girl in her sweater and pleated skirt a better writer? She was in my year. The hunger to look successful that's still showing on her website says she was coming from poverty too but we went forward on very different paths. The evidence is that she's been strategic in ways I've scorned. She's more second rate. She hasn't engaged life at the same level. And yet what - and yet she has been valiant, persistent, and focused. What is my real question. It's whether the scrappy, lively girl I was at Queen's was second rate in her own way, that led her into vagabondage rather than recognizable accomplishment, whether the ambition I've had for a wider life has led me wrong.
In one of the many dreams this morning I was on a fenced platform above a cliff. The cliff gave way. I could feel it start to slip and knew I'd fall. The platform seemed to be falling slowly above a copse of trees. I could see the treetops approaching, thought they would break our fall. There was a soft landing.
Haven't mentioned the camera arrived and I'm lagging on testing it. Jody: Less than half an inch long, that shell was paper thin, so fragile it crunched when I tried to pick it up (which made me cry some more, out of disappointment for the loss); but when I let the fragments drift away one of them settled right next to another empty shell. Then I saw another, and then a full one, with its occupant snail oozing along a sunken twig. I fell into a new world that day, a world of Planaria and caddisflies, crayfish and hellgrammites, water pennies and water snakes, a world which I had no idea other people even cared about until in high school my 10th grade biology teacher loaned me a book on benthic organisms. I think what changed, when I finally stopped to let the change happen, was my perception of how I work. Ellie Epp's advising style, advising sessions, and embodiment lectures profoundly changed how I perceive my own workings: time and again she has shown me what I'm doing, in a way that makes me finally understand why ballet dancers practice in front of mirrors. Ellie gave me words to understand myself and my situation. She gave me myself, in words - words I wrote, words she wrote, words that by some magic of literary echolocation pinned me within my place yet simultaneously offered me a removed perspective of myself. This perspective shift is why, in 2012, I can see myself pacing within my troubles like a caged beast, whereas in 2008 I was only the beast, and all I could see were my troubles. 14 8 at night of a day mostly wasted, meaning I was mooning with Greg's replies to my replies abt RF6-3. A craving I didn't like but fed. For what, exactly. For being carried without effort, something like that. Like watching TV but my own history the show. Not good. I explain things to Greg. Is that bridging? Is RF the time to bridge to?
"I decided several weeks ago, suddenly, in the periodicals library, that I am going to become a film-maker." "I've vowed! I've decided something in one swift moment." 15 It was being distressed in what we were talking about. Why didn't I realize that? I'm still talking about it today but I'm not hanging by a thread. Here's this other question about being a filmmaker. I did that, but should I say not really? It says no.
- Shot my first clip. There it is. Figured out a USB cord. FCP transcoded. Began a stack of flashcards. Happy!
16 Essential oils - penetrate human tissues more quickly than other substances - penetrate cell membranes and influence metabolism. Barbara says she asked an old-timer - ie someone here even longer than she has been - whether he remembered another winter as cold as this one. He said no. "Usually it's cold for a week and then that's it." I said I remembered it being 80 degrees one afternoon last January. "It was the first autumn I was here. I thought it might be just normal." "No, that wasn't normal either." - Can I describe her old voice on the phone. It reminds me of the shadows I've been photographing. It's slow, grey, broad, clumpy, and has soft edges. I walked east along the road and sat for a while on the roadbank with my back against the boulder I'd been trying to photograph. I was facing out across the valley. There was a large oak overhead, that had dry leaves among the green on some of its lower branches to either side of me. I had the sort of moment I often have when I think of settling down somewhere outside. It's almost fear, felt as an impulse to go back inside. This time I defied it, laid my head back against the rock and closed my eyes. There was more wind than usual, but an inconstant wind I began to picture as coming across the valley in fat strands tapered on both ends. With my eyes closed I began to hear it. There'd be a dark surf in one of the big-canopied oaks below but no sound above me. Then sometimes an intensifying surf towering overhead. Usually at the same time there'd be a dry delicate rattling nearby, to left and right - little scraping marks in close-up against the dense texture of the whole canopy's ... I'm looking for a word. ... it's a gigantic sustained strong exhaling sound that I saw as that, air pushed hard through many stuff surfaces. Sometimes mysteriously there'd be a little squeak as of metal turning on metal. 17 What to do abt the way no one wants to read the writing on Here.
Dust & soul.
Soul - do a focusing exercise on it - sensation.
"This calm, free and sensitive space"
18 I had moved into a hotel room in an area like Water Street, the industrial area next to the tracks, where there's a long view toward the harbour. Second or third floor - some ways up. It was shabby and dirty and overlooked an alley where there'd be noisy drunks but I thought when the mist cleared I'd be able to see the mountains and ocean. I went out for a moment and when I came back I could see other people's things in the room. I'd paid the rent ahead of time but maybe I didn't register? Sound of the door opening. Two Indian women come in, low-life Indians, red lipstick. We go out to look for a manager. Then a long sequence of following the manager through rooms full of broken-down criminal-looking men. Brakhage DVD last night. What I liked was the interviews, his face and his coherent steady talk. A formed human speaking from his formation, Pound and the generation of painters like Pollock, all those New York artists of the '60s and '70s, more cogent than he was when I met him. "Birth, death and the search for God." What does he mean, God? It's that guy thing isn't it, other men won't admire you enough unless you look like a master of vastness. Whereas darling Wittgenstein wanted to let the fly out of the fly bottle, demonstrate a modest, central correction to anyone's thinking. "New movements in thought." the oils' inherent complexity energizing vs relaxing 'biological signaling action'
19 Posted one photo yesterday, grey lace, and then a lot of little bits of writing: Angelo's story about meeting his wife between one minute after sunset and Coulter pine November 16 (Orion is after that), today's two photos after bleak chair; over December; participate; waves not particles after the red sky; talking about weather all over the county after east wall; seeing with my ears after grey lace. Tom has bought a tripod for me from José in a double-wide in El Cajon. Found Mike Hoolboom's new site with dharma talks and other encouraging abundance. 20 Haven't seen any rabbits for months. It's back up to 75 afternoons. Someone at the Santa Ysabel nature center giving a talk about stars, galaxies and nebulae we can see up here. The room was full of people I thought ugly until it occurred to me that if I knew them they'd be like people in a community garden meeting - my people, in their drab shabby misshapen worth. - When I don't know what to do going to check through N6. 21 Last night reading the pages from when I was writing in Jam's little backroom, dictionary pieces and play of the weather, I dilated. Can't say it. Was elated in myself as I was. Kept feeling I like this so much, could anyone read it, do I know more about what to make of it, the magic in the story with Jam, that was so pin-point we couldn't sustain it. There's no [outside] record of what we [women] were in that time. The photo of Jam under her willow. Black and white grain. Something, something. And then the pitch of worked-for attention was snagged by Robert MacLean and a time was over. I spilled love into void for the next four years.
- Inauguration today - 800,000 to a million people they are saying on NPR - our beautiful young man. "A more forthright case for progressivism" says David Brooks. "This is a happy warrior." "In his personal demeanor he's very traditional." "A certain resoluteness he's shown since the election." "A story about the expansion of rights." 22 I'm milling today. Among projects. The grain work, I said, and began in more than one way. Nebula learning, which seized me, and beginning with the camera, and N6, and yesterday starting to lay out In English, and the Dust & soul workshops, for which I've been collecting this and that throughout the journals. 23 The Obamas are so preposterously good-looking, so put-together, that you watch them come out of a morning church service and you notice the President of the United States last. 25 Designing In English, learning more Indesign. It's half past midnight. Getting into the bath, in the dark, just now, I was thinking about how I handle being with people I don't know, now - the couple from Salmon Arm I found in a yellow VW van on the Don's parking lot yesterday and brought home [because it was raining]. I am acting like an old woman, not thinking about whether my hair is messy or the hall corners are dirty, and speaking without much reserve or forethought, but mentioning skills and accomplishments freely. Das ist mein Schmuck und Ehrenkleid - it has to be accomplishment now because I have to give up on my looks and on presence too. I brought strangers home and was attentive to make them comfortable, and I think they were, but I sat and worked at the big screen and left them to poke at their computers on the couch through the afternoon. She had an open honest face and is a forester but did what women do, waste my time talking about their relatives - her sons, her parents, her cousins, her sisters, the rudimentary Canadian gormlessness that believes telling your present preoccupations is conversation. I noticed though that she would speak to me with an arm across her belly and thought maybe women talk to me about their relatives when they are scared of me, to surround themselves with people to whom they are important. He was more complicated, a tall fair-haired man in his mid-fifties who had a nice shape and will have been a shy fair-haired pretty young man. New Zealand accent. He left social duties to her and had maybe a melancholy edge, manly interests, things about engines and computers, boats. I would speak to him differently I noticed, sometimes a free little catspaw of play. I guess that was a quite bracketed sort of liking. At the door this morning he put out his arms and gave me a hug. It's raining. Sound of water on the stone, chuckling sweetly. 27 Fifteen year cycle that will emphasize/promote your ideas, needs and goals as never before. This demands thought and choice. 28 It's cold again, and I don't have any tea - Tia said The golden west is appalling. I said say more. She said, "Fuck - did she and does she still feel all that and how does that feel to hang onto all that and isn't the writing of it giving it life and isn't she afraid to be with all THAT?" "Thinking of the time and the pain and the building of a monument to that pain." What should I think of that. I've never thought of it as a monument to pain. Pain comes and goes. Gradually I learn what to do with it, gradually I've learned what it is. - There I had gone at random to GW5-2, which begins with Joyce telling me to love unconditionally. It's not a monument to pain, it's valiant study. It makes me feel what soul is, which has been my dim suspended question for Dust & soul. Soul is what I was then, a kind of doubleness, a relation to myself - and to events too, isn't it. It's not simply experience, it's a relation to experience. It's first experience allowed in its intensity and it's second an alert relation to experience that guides, in a way. Is soul a dyad? It says yes. A double capacity. A relation of adult and child. Which is why it aligns with religion. I was soul in relation to the sky because I felt and realized.
- Mary's 89th birthday. Worst she's been I think. She couldn't hear well, or maybe couldn't understand. She didn't remember Luke's name, called him Roy, and then asked about him twice in three minutes in the same words. "Ellie doesn't call often." I was holding my breath, what would she say next, but then she said as if in afterthought, "... That's you isn't it." - Origins: fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, part 4 Back to the beginning, PBS Nova first aired in 2004. Microwave background, beyond infrared before radio waves - radioastronomy Big bang - that flash of light remains as microwave background vast webs of structure Slightly denser bright spots in, hotter direct observational link with the early universe Over billions of years gravity does its work. This is what the universe looked like 380,000 years after the big bang. 13.7 billion years ago. Inflation stops, leaving behind a much smaller, dense, hot, violent universe. space filled with precursor <particles> All the light within the cosmos is trapped bouncing off these <particles>. As the universe continues to expand it cools until 380,000 years after the big bang temperatures fall to the point at which stable <atoms> can form. At that instant light from the big bang flashes free. I think we're now close to the right story. Supercomputer simulations show the infant universe filled with vast billowing clouds of hydrogen. Almost immediately the clouds begin to connect, pulled together by their own gravity. As hydrogen piles on, a central region becomes more dense. These first stars are hydrogen giants ... all the atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium are forged inside stars. Star first burns hydrogen to make helium. When it runs out of hydrogen it contracts and gets hotter. Helium three at a time to make carbon, one more to make oxygen. Sulfur, argon, chlorine, potassium, calcium. Back in the middle silicon is starting to burn, from which chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel and iron. A star that has relied on fusion has come to the point where it has nothing more to spend. There's radiation going out from the outside but deep in the inside the iron can't burn. The core collapses. It bounces. That sends a very sharp wave back out through the stars. The whole thing is blowing up. Such outrageous energies overcome the iron barrier. Atoms into all the other elements. Every last atom was formed in a star. The universe concentrated them. Each generation of stars enriches the broth out of which the next generation is formed. The Eagle Nebula, the Pillars of Creation. What the image revealed were places in our own Milky Way galaxy where new stars are forming - these little nodules embedded young stars. 29 It's warming some, has cleared. When I drove down to the mailbox there were the slopes dun and pale on all sides in weak light. Small hoofprints at the gate. My yellow-centered narcissus are out, I've brought some in for the scent. Poked three stems into the black little bottle I threw in London when I was 25. Its endurance - locked little pattern that has stayed locked while I haven't. Someone on PBS saying nuns whose sentences had more concept-clumps in them didn't go into Alzheimers in old age. A man who studies word-occurrence numbers. I have had a sense that long sentences show a superior nervous system. - and get as near to the heart of the world as I can Scottish accent. earthbound companions and fellow mortals [Meaning animals] The enemies of wildness are invincible, and they are everywhere, but the fight must go on. - Who was that playing John Muir. Lee Stetson. Ken Burns The national parks, PBS. 30 Pine oil osteoporosis, loggers in Sweden, metabolic turnover Vitus agnus castus menopause Emergent properties of the plant's whole suite of secondary metabolites Molecules that affect function of other organisms - toxins, attractants, notably enzymes and receptors Water soluble take effect when eaten, non-water-soluble volatile Where they have a specific effect, structurally similar to mammal hormones and neurotransmitters. Metabolism in plants and mammals similar. Mixtures of secondary metabolites as they occur in plants trigger the expression of several hundred genes, which are relevant in different pathways. Cell membrane - most water-soluble molecules can't penetrate. Essential oil molecules modify electrical activity of the membrane proteins that change membrane permeability or for instance alter ion channels. These are nonspecific - interact at many sites. Inflammation, arteriosclerosis, heart disease and aging Effects on nerve conduction - coffee, tea, valerian, St John's wort Stresses of the environment are reflected in the spectrum of fragrant molecules .... Essential oils from wild plants do not necessarily have a stronger fragrance, but they show increased complexity and, subjectively, more elegance. For metabolic and degenerative disease, where many different components of the essential oil interact simultaneously with multiple systems in the body, success appears to hinge entirely on the authenticity of the chosen oils. Simplest components, monoterpenes, stimulant, antibacterial, antiviral - almost all oils have them, eg herpes a drop of oil. Inula graveolens mucolytic, candida in bronchii, drop on pillow. Mastic lymph decongestant. Wild thyme - 'population thyme' - where they grow - response to bluer wavelengths of light at higher altitudes - lighter and softer oils than from cloned plants. The specific conditions a population faces determine which subset of the whole chemical array of metabolites available to them is in fact activated. When the human body encounters an essential oil it encounters a mix of substances it has known for evolutionary periods of time. 3 drops of sage oil potentially serious toxicity, best distilled from young leaves. Citrus and tea tree may skin-irritate. Test with a fraction of a drop inside the elbow. Bitter orange - neroli, oil of petals - peel sedative - petitgrain is leaves and miniscule undeveloped fruits, stress. Essential oils alter sense function too. Put it in a base oil and apply where we want its effect. Base oils apricot kernel, sweet almond, safflower, sesame, jojoba, light olive. Keep in dark glass. Immune flares - pathogen kept from inner organs, periodic effects to expel - muscles, joints, mucous membranes - steroids increase tolerance to pathogens. Better approach to strengthen the body to succeed. Body needs to be sufficiently hydrated, check lips, eyes, nose. Sage antifungal, antimicrobial, antibacterial, antioxidant, activates estrogen. Kurt Schnaubelt 2011 The healing intelligence of essential oils Balsam poplar oil - rheumatism and arthritis. Balm of Gilead. 31st Alice Sheldon going for a PhD in psychology at 43 started to write good sci fi when she was working on her diss. James Tiptree came into existence when she was 51. PhD 1967. Ursula said "I love sf and writing sf but sometimes I feel horribly lonely - morally lonely, psychically lonely." 1973. And now I'm crying because of the way Ursula replied: Oh strange, most strange, most wonderful, beautiful, improbable - so immense, so funny, so effective and fantastic and ETHICAL a put-on. Her brilliance and sweetness and quickness and courage burns like fire, it leaves a sense of suffering. She lied to us but she never betrayed us, never once. L.G. after she'd died.
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