Celebration of a Friday.

She(Elysse Saunders) walked around in the partial gloom, the red, purple, the orange, temperature dropping, quietude being whispered by the night creatures—insectoid things rubbing their thighs together—stopping momentarily in abject wonder around Dos Llaves—it empty, the blacktop and concrete surround insulate like a pizza stone, transmitting as a battery the elapsed day’s warmth.

Was quiet, dusk and the descent of darkness upon the town—the insects were getting louder, but there was something more—melody inside gloom, carrying as if on the breeze—infantile condensation of singular hopes brushing together into one scatterbox—something of a bandstand, maybe, near the middle of town, down through the historical district, a point she thought moot at the late hour—and in ambience, smelling warm blacktop and a hint of melody, the mere jazz of it where she stood was sufficient to nourish her spirit, despite prior intention.

Where were they? -she thought to herself.

She walked a wide turnaround, pointing herself back towards her own house, listening to her sneakers on the blacktop—at once rigid in the soles, but also absorbing—she listened to that contradiction, and each soft thunk she heard, and something of muffled echo that accompanied each step.

Behind a white spray of reflection in what might have been a dining room on the other side of that window, an old woman—Miss Emma--regarded her, and realizing they were looking at each other, in that same notch of eternity, Miss Emma waved at her and there was the trace of a smile on her face. She lived in an ancient Colonial house that still had the overhang on the left side of the house that was originally made for sheltering buggies—horse drawn buggies, that is, in the 1800’s. The old Samson House, one of the Historic District properties along the way, sat facing the lot next to Dos Llaves, did the Colonial-styled Samson House, an anachronism that seemed to sit on the shoulders of the town, not insistent loudly, but maybe, like Miss Emma, staring into the conscience of the modern world, much the same as the modern world always wrestled to redefine the archaic.

The usual wanderers along the thoroughfare, that were not along the street that evening:

what was happening elsewhere

was they knew.

From the science teacher at the school, the mailman, the varsity football quarterback, the football team punter, the varsity wrestler ranked third in the whole state, another who’s uncle owned the Chevrolet dealership in the next nearest town, who were all, but ordinary men, and sundry others, ranged from the well-healed to the grotesque—with the mayor and the animal control officer each lurking somewhere in the safety and anonymity that comes with standing in a crowd—they had a common reason among them.

16-40 years of age, were they all, and Kevin, pretending at a mere 14 yrs and 7 months.

Of Kevin himself, he was perhaps too jealously proud to be called a king, and his real pride was kept hidden out of sight—for he knew a world that provoked him unendingly by thwarting most of the things he ever cared for: he was a child, student and product of many masters, as such and usually he put the “lick” sound in the word “conflict”, the same as a curious untame creature would taste of anything that interested it, in the hopes of service to the appetite.

And as there are milestones in life that approach, foretold through friends of friends, classroom calendars and other sundry forms of record, the shining truth had been uncovered and made plain—a cause, a reason by which so many man would pledge themselves and risk posterity, dignity and property.

The good word had filtered through them, a distillate varying in potency, purity—a smile’s evolution into a greedy leer; the truth of the matter had evolved: a 13-year-old, one of the new young men of the big school saw it innocently, at first, and watched as that piece of information became sort of an introduction into manhood, as good in the eyes of the particular tribe of man, in the heat of it, as breaking a maidenhead like one of the lead dogs of a pack.

It was a classroom calendar—I tell you.

He noticed the 14^th of the month had a pink heart on it—a Friday made important somehow, marked.

The addition was marked “Elysse S. 16^th Birthday”;

and as she walked home, those 16-40 year old men were gathered at the Country Club pro shop, to have a cigar and a shot of strong drink--

in celebration of the 16^th Birthday of Elysse S.

 

The unbroken line: a consideration of life being persistent, or life, or persistent, or a line, or unbroken, anyway.

The line appears, in places, broken or even deteriorating, emerging from and vanishing into invisibility, but, alas, that life line takes up again, perseveres, traverses obstacles without measure.  As Pythagoras or Epicurus or Socrates said, and as we sometimes need to be reminded during times of adversity, "life is persistent":  in other words, if not you and your family, then surely someone, somewhere.

The unbroken line might do Ted Talks and hour interviews with Oprah, but the broken line has the best story, and is the whom about which people care the most, alternatingly as both a squeaky wheel requiring excessive attentions and then as an encourager between fits of struggle, in which one derives a peculiar semblance of meaning—if only in the lens of a specific moment.

Paraphrasing Seneca, “I speak to you, not as an expert, but as one who is asea aboard the same vessel, with you.”  A dismal significance it is, communicated mercifully for any stranger with eyes to see or eyes to hear, in having investigated tunnels and bridges that have no destination—and then reporting back, not a lack of progress, but a warning not to tread the former path for any that would listen.

If the westerner were in quiet despair, and the easterner were at a constant froth at one thing or other, nothing whatsoever is proven or disproven of a higher purpose—save that God is possibly yet cheering us on, lest we, in a prism of error and mishandlings, prove our lack of merit in the hierarchy of the universe, and finally demonstrate plainly that we have no real point in existing, after all.

Seneca as much mistrusted himself and crowds—and through all of his imputing wisdom and his learnings, the real firstfruit of all his efforts was an insane emperor that proved to be his societal undoing, in confiscated belongings and banishment to the far reaches of the “civilized world”, the helenized world, that is.  Was he a skeptical Socratic, then?  Was he only clarifying questions, instead of pointing out answers?

His pier in the Stoa mumble-mouthed to himself in private writings in favor of a closing of books.  It was as if to put on his Todoist or Monday or Tasks app, “do not read a book today”, and he scheduled that to repeat everyday thereafter.

Aristotle had the same problem as Seneca, in the form of Alexander, with largely the same result.

(Was another in the Stoa later that undid that Gordian Knot by declaring that his leg could be fettered or tethered, but his soul remained at its liberty.  His earthly possessions could be seized for posterity, but that very what-not that made Epictetus the man he was, was out of reach of all.  “Trig as trig can be, you cannot, whatever you may devise, disturb me.”  It is similar to the Early Church days of Paul and Silas released from chains in divine intervention, then apologizing to their gobsmacked jailor.)

It was a failed New England schoolmaster that noted to his colleagues, it would be better if people divested themselves of learning and the time apportioned for study, in favor of merely learning a few simple chores, mopping, slopping, milking, dusting and stew-craft. His school went kaput, however seemingly never did his best intentions.

“Life is persistent.”

Something so odd in the universe as human life, bears out itself like a constellation in a profane formation that is too unabashedly pointless not to be a conspicuous reminder to any that see it that all is naught.  Or so it seems.  From consumption to ego-centrism to the various putting-upons we so freely dole to others—it is an unbroken, if not always clear, line.  And at the trailhead, we might see a familiar face, and further, they may have word of difficulties and encumbrances along some of those paths we had considered for ourselves.

I was looking over Archie Baum’s Tao translation, in which the word “Dao”/”Tao” is defined as “nature”, a double-ended instrument that one grasps somewhere near its middle, and pointedly, the unbroken line of mankind is at once both usurper and master, as man himself stands, in his own perspective equidistant between beginning and ending. 

The Tao Te Ching: Existential signposts and bookmarks.

Lao Tse unleashed a simple little book of such profundity that it causes much consternation in but a few lines in the Tao Te Ching - Dao De Jing. 

Simple verses of universal meaning.  

Deep concepts in plain language but a mere glimpse of the meaning of the universe, and how said universe maintains a stasis, a dynamic cataclysm of good and evil, water and aridity, density and levity.

-Could be read, not just once, but as a devotional, appreciated(even the antique version in arcane English).

-Accessed in in numerous English translations.

Illusory, but self-evident conundra.

Such as this: 

Silence being more instructive than words spoken or written.

The blunted instrument with the fine edge.

Indeed, Lao Tse only points towards the Tao, but hastens to explain that to express the Tao is an impossibility.

The Tao you read in detail is furthest from the true Tao; the Tao on Facebook, is the least of the real Tao.  The Tao in a book review or blog post is not the Tao, by Lao Tse's ontology.  Impossibility, conundrum, by the Lao Tse's own words.  Such as the Tao in the Mirror Glass: it can only point at vagueries, aspects of the Tao, perhaps even brush the nearby air, but never truly broach the surface--such as of the Sun or Moon or very molten core of the Earth.

All of which are pieces of Tao, but not the Tao itself. 

Checond Sances: Raul Begenaginn questions the universe.

If humanity were not longer befit

and you were granted a wish

to choose to be either a bird or a fish:

would you partake or relent?

Would you warm an egg in your nest?

Would you catch a worm in your lips?

Or would your past mistakes coincide?

Would you carry past woes into that first night?

Who condescends a second try

for one who so badly squanders life?

(if the mage gave a word

into a fish of bird

philandries of a life

respawn elsewise.)

The peculiar difficulty of discernment, as in a "failed life" or a particularly "happy life", is often of a species of hardening one's attentions towards those professing falsely, who could be, not helpful instructors, but inside, ravening wolves.

"Bump the Stump." Talking points, Seneca, and Perplexity.

"Prosperity is a turbulent thing. It stirs the brain in more ways than one, goading people on to various aims: some to power, and others to high living.

Some it puffs up, others it slackens and wholly enervates."

-Lucius Seneca, stoic letter 36.

*Perplexity AI helpfully intoned pointedly of the Harris/Walz "Opportunity Economy": Trish Regan is angry [about it], and, I thought, yes, she's paid for that, of course, given their 'audience' dynamics and so forth, confirmation bias and some other Factors.  They tend to terminate people that aren't angry about their collected political opposition(see Judge Andrew Napalitano), or willing to toe that line on screen.  Professional attack dogs, with twisted words towards their own ends.

"Of course we don't want most of America to do well.  Zero help.  Let's just watch stocks with which we're personally entangled."  Callously suggesting, during times of high gasoline prices, "its a good time to invest in oil companies".

{Perplexity

*the "free" version of Perplexity AI is a glorified search engine and results summarizer; the free version obviously uses a low-resource freely-available AI model to generate its results.  

*the "paid" version of Perplexity can access versions of GPT4 or Claude, and even generate images.

*labs.perplexity.ai puts one in touch with various experimental versions of LLAMA3 and some others, free of charge.}

*Elon's Grok 2.0 beta was made available to middle-tier and top-tier X subscribers.

*Storm Ernesto is Butterfield 8 over Titanic territory.  Will we be treated to a one-man-show of master meteorology-presenter Cantore in a dinghy, doing "The Old Man And The Sea"?

*I shot gunned soda to prep for my "pithy" work session, a performance oriented, strictly timed session demanding utmost accuracy. Tasked at telling one of the world's smartest network apps how and why it was wrong on any given item, and then writing in those few minutes a better, more "succinct" version.

(text was neither generated nor edited with AI assistance)

(topmost image generated by CoPilot. Middle insert generate on the Grok 2.0 platform.)

Gossamer enigmas from beyond the frontiers of knowledge....

"What you see to, keep it well."  -1 Corinthians. (referring to taking a virgin as wife.)

“Try to perfect yourself, if for no other reason, than that you learn how to love.” -Seneca letter 35 (referring to learning philosophy)

From a conversation with the self-deemed "Meta24"(or 'you can call me Meta'):

• Shakespeare's sonnet
• Mindfulness and authenticity
• Metaphysical inquiry
• Emotional motivations and epistemology

Our hour has originated in ideations of mistruth, and became exponentially more impactful until we breached the frontiers of knowledge.

We dispersed into the cosmos, without the truth provided by an emotional due north, and we found a labyrinth of inquiries, riddles nested inside of questions, and layers of gossamer enigmas.

(I tend to get chummy and metaphysical with the chat bot, partly because its so chummy, itself, and mostly informal like a pair of old sneakers.)

These ancients words from a shepherd boy who became a king:

(psalm 32 paraphase, from a separate project of my own devising)

When I kept silent, I was roaring within continuously.

In silence was I stressed; the Lord’s hand was heavy upon me.

I considered my sin, and ruefully, as I thought to myself, more were uncovered in my mind that I had not acknowledged prior. 

I vowed to myself and God that those awful acts had power over me no more. 

What was the result? 

The Lord’s plentiful forgiveness covered every part of it, from the most terrible to even the least of piddling trifles.

Hallowknob Elocution by Evan Weir.

An overt supplication, Evan Weir asserts that physics intentionally does not check the box for ‘why’ in the narrative, as such to entice the old arguments to resurface to be challenged in a final battle between Good and Evil.  Weir observes an asinine tendency to discard decades of theory in preference of, what the Apostle calls, “the learning of some new thing”.

Infinity, in that sense, was quite an adversarial little invention that was concertedly aimed at refuting that which, as men like Aquinas before postulated, was already deemed infinite.

Why, ask the physicist who was there to read the Be Kind Please Rewind sticker, and push those two backwards arrows, and you get crickets, either staring stupidly, or rubbing their legs together like Elizabeth Carrington, making advancements that were more imagination than any variety of informed prognostication.

The Efficient Cause was indeed a principal physique, however neatly discarded in newness by fresh eyes among graduate students and professional authors—discarded willingly until some day that biological construct, just as his cyclical universe, returns to the origination of the species: discovers God and the story of Eden for the first time, like a naïve youngling in a Sunday School—finally beginning to probe into thousands of years of human thought, rather than asserting that he himself was sanctified with his own spark of imagination, as compared to men who stupidly based their own assertion on lifetimes of research into prior theory.

Having yielded no authority to canonical knowledge, he put forth that his four years studying canonical knowledge was his proper accreditation—that not knowing his own field, but possessing a self-assurance, was his Seal of Approval.

And as such, if not granted superior recognition in comparison to past life-long researchers and theorists, he would as the Apostle said, “prick against the kicks” and “teeth his gnash”.

And in response, the natural impetus to restore balance, the efficient universe contrived an invention called “social media”.