11. F. Spent time reading some old and new chat logs tonight. There is a limit to how many logs one can read in an hours or two. Looking forward to sleeping on all this tonight. Help me to see what I am not seeing. Hmmm. that is a “prayer” implying that I need to keep going. I wonder if that is the case. I am feeling calm on the surface with a slight touch of uneasiness down deep or is it the other way around?
10. F. And then there is heaven time, eternity, gazing on God
9. F. pause. My mind seems to be calming down a bit again. “Self” is content for now. Since hearing Corvuscorva jokingly tell Quilty “Not to worry your pretty head about it”, that phrase keeps popping up as the answer to any conundrum.
8. Gr. and a pause
7. F. TIME to go to a meeting now. Deep breath
6. F. pause. The office is another place where time creates a framework. What has to be done in the time frame? Do I have time for that? Can I go home now?
5. F. pause. It is interesting how threatened we feel when our assumptions are questioned. It seems it sometimes take a good bit of distress to force one off those assumptions. Wouldn’t life be easier if that wasn’t necessary?
4. BrM. taking TIME to pause
3. F. Thinking about art history (poking it with a stick) and time this morning testing the hypothesis that there is a fourth time. For convenience we build linear narratives that show progression of styles. This is done as a first step to learning about a period of art. The linear narratives are useful as an introduction but once we look further we find that these narratives are themselves an illusion. Artists look to what has been done already and it influences what they do in many different ways. Those artists who fit the narrative are kept, and those who do not, are forgotten. To fudge the obvious distortions, we sometimes build parallel narratives. Not all 19c French painters are “Impressionists” so we have an academic narrative so fewer artists are left out. The methodology itself becomes deeply ingrained in us and we apply it to all those periods in which we have less knowledge. But it is illusion. Instead of realizing these are assumptions which may help us get to see some of the ideas behind the art, we make the assumptions themselves the reality. This then reinforces our idea of linear time. But these artists lived years, and hundreds of years and even thousands of years ago so there is a past. But we can make assumptions about art that tie artists together.
2. Gr. I check everything and it is still good and add to the list what I have learned from being in PaB this past summer.
1, TGT. I am alive again for another day to observe mushrooms or go to a meeting necessitated by my weaknesses in the last one
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As far as presentation of appearance goes, mushrooms are among the most spectacular and mysterious. This morning I was treated to a unusually display surrounding a tree stump on the front lawn. Where there had just been grass and dirt the last time I looked, there were layers and layers of brownish, white mushrooms, one on top of the other, all reaching our into the air. We don’t usually expect mushrooms; they are not part of what we see every day. Suddenly conditions are right and they are all over the place, and then they are just as quickly gone a few days later. Then the scene returns to the accustomed one and we are left with faded memories, that particular appearance never to happen again. The next one will be very different, in a different place.
What are the implications for time? For that particular mushroom there are the conditions, the seed (?), the nutrients, and then the proper dampness, which lead to the birth, the life, and the quick death. The tree was of a different time frame and the lawn itself even another, which includes the seasons. My relationship with the lawn is another time frame. Back to mushrooms, they have been coming and going for thousands of years as have trees, the grasses, flowers and humans and other beings, including those who may feast on the mushrooms. Beyond that time is earth time and cosmic time. But what is different is the scale, isn’t it? From our view, no individual mushroom usually warrants our attention.
Mushrooms are just a part of the landscape on those days when we are paying attention. So we do not deal in mushroom time; they are just a part of the landscape, eternity in our eyes (when we are not bulldozing and paving them over). We don’t take note of the coming and going of the mushrooms as affecting us in any way, unless we are among the few raising them or collecting them.
So there seem to be different time frames. In cosmic time, we are blips on the screen with less of an appearance than a mushroom to us. Yet at this moment we are.
