I’ve been thinking for a while based on my own use of the service that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.
Miscellaneous
Trees: Phototropic Simplexities
[ Cross-posted from Zenpundit — this one’s a prose poem: it begins with a statement so tight it needs to be unwound, & unwinds it ]
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I wrote this urgently starting when it “woke” me at 4am one morning in the late 1990s or 2000, and as soon as it was out, I found myself writing another piece in the series, a game design. Together, the pair of them represent a stage in my games and education thinking intermediate between Myst-like Universities of 1996 and my vision today of games in education. In this posting, I have added the words “figuratively speaking” for absolute clarity: otherwise, the piece remains as written all those years ago.
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A copse. Photo credit: Ian Britton via FreePhoto.com under CC license. Note how the wind sweeps the trees into a group shape.
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Trees: Phototropic Simplexities
Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.
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Meaning:
Trees we know: I as writer can refer you, reader, safely to them, “trees”, in trust that the word I use will signal to you too — triggering for you, also — pretty much the assortment of branching organic thingies about which I’m hoping to communicate that they are complex entities whose complexity comes from a simplicity of rule — branching — repeated with variations, said variants doing their branching in thirst of light, each trunk rising, limb outpushing, branch diverging, twig evading other twig much as one who seeks in a crowd a clear view of a distant celebrity shifts and cranes and peers — branching, thus, by the finding of light in avoidance of nearby shadow and moving into it, into light as position, that light, that position, growing, and thus in the overall “unified yet various”, we, seekers of the various and unified love them, to see them in greens themselves various in their simplexity is to say “tree” with a quiet warmth; while they themselves also, by the necessity of their branching seeking, if clumped together seek in an avoidance of each other’s seeking, growing, thus space-sharing in ways which as the wind sweeps and conforms them to its own simplex flows, shapes them to a common curve we call aerodynamic, highlit against the sky huddled together as “copse” — this, in the mind’s eyes and in your wanderings, see…
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Meaning:
Trees we can talk about. Simplexity is a useful term for forms — like trees — which are neither simple only nor complex only, but as varied as complexity suggests with a manner of variation as simple as simplicity implies.
Trees? Their simplexity is conveyed in principle by the word “branching”. Its necessity lies in the need of each “reaching end” of the organism to ascertain from its own position and within the bounds of its possible growing movement, some “available” light — this light-seeking having the name “phototropism”.
Simplexities — and thus by way of example, trees — we like, we call them beautiful.
Clustered together, too, and shaped by the winds’ patterns of flow, these individual simplexities combine on an English hilltop (or where you will) to form yet other beauties.
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Thus:
Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.
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Meaning:
I love trees. Want to talk about simplexities, beauty.
I wish to talk about beauty because it is beauty that I love, if I love it, that is beauty: love is kalotropic, a beauty-seeking. I am erotropic, love seeking — you can find in this my own simplexity, my own varieties of seeking, of the growths that are my growth, and clumping me with others under the winds, the pressures that form and conform us, you can find also the mutual shapes that we adopt, beautiful.
Simplexity, then, is a key to beauty, variety, self, character, cohabitation… Tropism, seeking, is the key to simplexity. Love is my tropism. Ours, I propose.
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Meaning:
Beauty is one simplexity perceived by another: the eye of the beholder, with optic nerve, “brain”, branching neuron paths that other simplexity, “consciousness” the perceiving.
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Meaning also:
That all is jostle, striving — a strife for life, in which the outcome overall is for each a “place in the sun” but not without skirmishes, shadows. The overall picture, therefore, beautiful — but this overall beauty hard to perceive when the specific shadow falls in the specific sought place of the moment, the “available” is not available, and the strife of the moment is paramount.
Branching being the order behind simplexity, differentiation…
Differentiation for maximal tropism at all levels — life seeking always the light, honey, beauty, is always and everywhere in conflict also with itself, competitive: and competition the necessary act of the avoidance of shadow, and the shadow creating act.
And beauty — the light, thing sought, implacably necessary food and drink, the honey — thus the drive that would make us kill for life.
I could kill for beauty.
I could kill for honey.
Figuratively speaking.
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Implying:
Paradise and Fall, simultaneous, everywhere.
It is at this juncture, at this branching, that we are “expelled from the garden” — can no longer see the beauty that is and remains overall, that can allow us to say also, “we are never outside the garden” — for the dappling of light on and among the leaves has become to us, too closely jostled, shadow.
And shadow for shadow we jostle, and life is strife.
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Thus:
The dappling of light on leaves, beautiful, is for each shadowed leaf, shadow, death-dealing, is for each lit leaf, light, life-giving: a chiaroscuro, beautiful, see.
Roots, too, have their mirror branchings.
Such a Disagreeable Man
I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be;
You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,
I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer.
To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,
Yet ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why!
From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida
I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I encounter those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.
Sunset Sky With Balloons
At the balloon festival in Abilene, Texas – 2010
Slides
I love the English language. Yes, I understand I have a lot to learn, and it isn’t as romantic as French, but neither is it as barbaric sounding as some of the Slavic languages (not saying these people are barbarians, just the sound to me grates a bit).
English, to me, seems for some reason (I am obviously no linguistic expert) to be one of the easiest languages to twist and turn for modern usage. I have a vendor that manufactures their products in Germany. The manuals come in several languages, and you can see heavy English usage in the foreign languages, mostly for technical terms. I asked my wife about this – she is fluent in German. Her response is typically that “there isn’t a word for that in German”.
Does anyone remember slide projectors? Of course we do. Such a hit they were in the sixties and seventies and eighties. You could actually put a slide in a slide projector and project an image on a screen of the Pyramids, or a product, or a photo of good old Aunt Sally from that vacation you took at Niagra Falls.
Today, we have Power Point to replace the pictures and modern ways to project images on a screen. But we still call the separate pages of the presentation “slides” and the unit is still a “projector”. I have some young admin assistants that on occasion help me to create Power Point presentations and I have asked them before if they have ever seen an actual “slide” or a slide projector. Most of the time the answer is no.