It was a common thing for people of old to carry wooden buckets that contained their drinking and washing water. As of the fishing and farming references in the old Bible, Lao Tze spoke to sort of a commonality of the people of his time.
Lao Tze pointed out that everyone wanted a full bucket of water, and yet, they could also lament such, because the full bucket was more difficult to carry than any lesser amount. After mentioning this to the AI, it points out that nature is something like "slow but sure", from the part 27 of the Tao Te Ching. My example was part 8 or 9.
I noted the endless necessity of the chore and thought of Sisyphus from the Camus writing, endlessly trying to push a boulder up a steep hill. That was his life, and so much, be it a few moments or hours, people of old carried their water in buckets, everyday.
The generative AI stated that these chores are "futile" and "absurd", but can, paradoxically, aid us in finding purpose in our lives--to which I point out that the necessity of maintaining at least a basic survival, I suppose, is cause enough.
The output then is something that leads up the hierarchy of needs from basic survival and a trivial sort of joy, all the way to gratitude, of a kind of(what might be) a machine-generated panentheism.
To which the AI asked if I had any thoughts on the subject, which jumpstarted dovetailing from Camus and Lao Tse, through Victor Frankl, and the Frankl is almost a Wikipedia entry in the text of the conversation.
I interject a paraphrase of Marcus Aurelius: "I am merely a spit of flesh."
One has his self-same buck of water, all in all, and to the larger point, whether God is real and loving and merciful, designer and controller of the heavens and the earth, or whether God is an ecumenical fiction among so many people.
The inevitable destination, between myself and the AI, that is was something of the "commonality of the human experience".
I think to myself, too, the one that writes of the Tao can talk about an experience near it, but can't envelope the very vapor of the thing--meanwhile the AI is talking about joy and meaning, to which I point out "awe", a sense of "awe". The response then is something about that sense of awe making one grateful for life(he must have forgot the bucket and the boulder).
Of the smoke, one cant write but an impression of the odor of that smoke, or something of the partially clear appearance of that self-same thing, rather than say, something like stereo instructions or C++ code. To wit, the Tao one can bloviate about on a blog is not the true Tao, or the Tao in the meme is not the true--the true Tao is something of which we have but a residue--a type and shadow, and then merely that, in our sieve of frame of reference, for which we are lucky to have anything in particular at all.
And of the "lower forms", we are in the good book assured that the meek are blessed, the down-hearted are comforted and so on, and the Thoreau mendicant sort of Buddhist proto-Western "mindfulness", dismissed as idle loafing and meaningless word salad, there is something yet of the experience, something yet of the very baseline of life itself, that, quatrapuncted and discombobulated, makes of itself, not struggle or futility or absurdity, but the very fundamental of life, sans adjectives and adverbs.
Conjugates of the Infinite. The Film Flam Man. behold we now through a "Mirror Glass Darkly"(formerly of the "the Abyss Gazes Also", nee Futnuckery with Abaddon1215). Clyde Devlin. Memphis Cawdor. Count it all joy when ye fall into divers tribulation.
Frankl and Camus and Aurelius and Bassmaster Paul: conversation with an AI.
April 13. "You might think I'm lying, but..."
"...we strip the very screw [that] we want to turn..." -Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is The Way.
*MLB's Joe Girardi has in the past attended a NASCAR race at Rockingham, NC at North Carolina Motor Speedway. In fact, his first NASCAR event was at the historic track. The track, known as "the Rock", remains one of the most beloved venues of NASCAR's "small market" heritage.
*According to Google, "spirituality" was among the most searched terms during the April 8 solar eclipse. In addition, on regular days, searches for spirituality peak in the United States around 3 a.m. in the morning, along with searches for "ear" and "dreams".
The generic "bible" search, at its daily peak, still eclipses searches for "spirituality"(in the United States).
*The Federal Income Tax was first partially instituted during the Civil War, but repealed soon thereafter, and later re-enacted, cascading in its adoption on a state-by-state basis.
Also, the IRS has made available a free E-file tool for simple income tax filings.
"He went ahead to prepare a place for you."
In our lives here in the natural, we "prepare a place" in the headspace between our eyes.... the province of reason, contemplation....
"Sometimes a problem needs less of you..." -Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is The Way.
"At some point, you get tired of not being number one." -Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson
"Number Two tries harder." -AVIS Rental Cars.
On nature: paraphrasing Walt Whitman, I Know Why The Biege Walt Sings
Dare we celebrate ourselves?
I bear witness to a spring rain on a middling warm morning, nourishing the foliage and so on, life begetting itself anew in the seance that is the very hope of the spring season. It is gentle, that rain, such that the fresh petals of the season are left un-accosted by the raindrops--it is like a celestial inheritance it is, the very thing of waters from the heavens, and as such, we should make of it what we will, in the bacchanal of our own thoughts.
We would find no particular solace in numbers and measurements and such, but as it were, we are but to tune our little foibles to the frequency of nature--that hymnal that all of God's creation sings as we stand in our existential pulpit of our lives and on the tips of our tongues, our own song, that begotten celebration of self.
Some comfortable velvet strand around our wrists--cordial handcuffs, is our nature, our nature, the being of any and all people--and our nature is only as strong a bond as our belief. At once, the chord restrains, but then, in dreams, we feel it holding us from falling into the loss and misgivings of Sheol itself. We bump-stop nature, but it can be a very comfortable sort of chicken-feather blanketed thing that seems so often, even with various injuries, welcoming.
Dare us to figure--of the balance of our intrigues and dismal amusements--that cordial belief holds us more cordial still, when we see the consequences and cheerfully heap up our burial mounds--monuments singing out to eternity--a spit of earth that might carry on something of our very spirit, even some decades or centuries yet to be spent--why, we figure there is some expedience owed in our very being, and that there are dreams to be unfolded in the real world before our very eyes?
As much as the elapsing of nature, so too the very cost of our dreams, now matter how easily these traipse before our eyes, as we are enveloped in a sense of natural awe; we do have those simple dreams as dismal as dry soil, and the unbuttered eyes of our familiars, which are as dismal also--a sense of indignation or contempt we would be hard pressed to call up inside ourselves, as easily to simply sit and feel the breeze, than to claw and flail against it.
I bear witness to a spring rain on a middling warm morning--accompanied only by the feeling of decay, nature wearing against a sphincter like the weight of a mountain compounding on top of a chicken egg. The follicles of grass look happy, and the flowers are opening their dull eyes; I sort of stutter-stepped myself, a sore leg, and that too was like the unfurling of a season in fits and starts, the way it always does, blanching and chilling, blanching and chilling, and sometimes tempura or steaming.
Dare we celebrate ourselves--when betimes, we sneak a glance at nature, and it seems to celebrate, too?
Individualism: Solomon and Roark Ice Cream Parlor.
King Solomon, paraphrased: "There is an evil I have seen, that a man toils his day and then others eat the fat thereof." (According to, what was then, one of the very wealthiest men in the world. Adoni Zedek, that is to say Rabbi or teacher, half-bird as he was, would have savaged him from above with his monstrous claws...)
Howard Roark tumble-turding out of a prestigious career, fed not by well-earned salary, but by the thin sustenance of his own individualistic principles. His career had lost a prong, as such to be mortified into sickness, as a matter of servicing the integrity of one's own belief(consequences be damned!), had star-fished-off a new appendage, like the evil seven-headed hydra of the Revelation, one as if to die, but then what?
Another talentless hoogah-boo(for there are yet other times, opportunities and places for such intellectual invisibility) and the integrity of Roark that was such that his principles bent slightly, that he didn't put name to his work, but the work was the point, be it alchemizing mud into brick in a claypit, or blue-printing a new kind of building.
And then, for the very wealth of being a "ghost-architect", and not the reputation as a designer, for he had chucked reputation into some dark corner and took it not, still, as a reason de'entre.
Rugged individualism/self-centeredness, then partly comes unraveled. Of this I hold that I wouldn't want to be like a lot of people out there, and by that same thinking, myself a work-in-progress, I wouldn't want, either, too many people to be particularly like me...... for what are we but varities in an existential ice-cream shop?
Self-absorbed non-productive wealthy house-sitter, which thwarts the narrative of the story in my wot:
sauntering along one indolent stupid afternoon, she happens to catch sight of Roark with his shirt off, and according to Ayn Rand, the indolent women almost instantly feel in love with the principles of the man.
A girl,
I say,
in an old Chevrolet,
and she's slowing down
to take a look at me.
All the usefulness of rancid hamburger grease-the trust fund girl-and Roark suitably compartmentalized in his thinking faculty that he never notices that he simply likes her drapes--why if he were more round in his thinking, he would quickly see that her very existence disproved everything he believed about purpose, intellectual property, and life such as it is.
Mentoring by example: the occipital of tension, turmoil and joy.
"be not many among ye masters..."
As we approach the Day of Pentecost, the "special one" that they told you about, and in the afterglow of the Aztec Death Moon on April 9 2024, our "mejor que" is our master and our "menos que" is one to be "pedagogged" and shewed about the insistent and omnipresent firmament.
All else is spirit.
My Uncle showed me how to tie knots. And he was an old hand at the knack, a thing learned as a soldier.
One, how to wake up with a song near the lips. Another, how to balance indulgence and a schedule, how to set aside the time for something good, washing away the nuisance spill of the day.
To be skillfull with one's hands.
To be self-sufficient, as of a break-down, to take it up proper and go to it; that if he flinched or blinked, it did not stampede or impede progress.
That right balance of tension, turmoil and joy that makes a man know when to spring and when to winter-over near the Delaware. "What holds a man together, while also pulling him apart", why urban legend said it was the little sliver of skin between the tessies and the rear stoop.
Teach them wrong in the afternoon, then one has to clean the bad lessons overnight, re-introducing all of the information: such is the way of phoning-in the lessons, with neither unction nor passion, rather than being more--say--round and entire, in one's manner of instruction.
"be the best, my boy. the brightest."
Mysticism: spatial dimensions of the discorporate, and ethereal.
"The divine texts are a map of human consciousness."
Readily apparent, at hand, is the divine nature which abrandons the body and untethers itself from such trivial, droll mundane concerns that assail in the physical. We coalesce as the flatulence of cows, ascending towards that better and more permanent part, the quiddity of the physicality of man encapsulates the lesser sort of things, things which niggle, and bother merely elapses as the floating of our spiritual wings within spatial dimensions, as yet, sensed, but unseen.
As to pull a seem off a pants leg, like a youngling, and rambunctiously compass the great river of time: ethereal, a hoar.
(As of virtue, in the prior installment, arts speaks to the pleasing, the beautiful, as per Emerson.)
Small Screen Legends on Wagon Train.
Did Barbara Stanwyck appear on Wagon Train?
Barbara Stanwick's Wagon Train appurtenances:
Caroline Casteel
Molly Kincaid
Maude Frazer
Karen Crawley
Did Susan Oliver appear on Wagon Train?
Susan Oliver's Wagon Train appurtenances:
Emily Rossiter
Maggie Hamilton
Cathy Eckhart
Lily Legend
(Notably Susan Oliver has a director credit for an episode of MASH. Also, still trying to see her last television appearance on a Simon & Simon.)