Twas brillig

William R. Foust, formerly of Palatine, died Friday, March 31, 2000, in Memphis, Tenn., following an extended illness. Mr. Foust was born in Jackson, Tenn.

I hope that you are able to enjoy the snow.
Today the sun is shining…I looked out the window and saw something that was amazing.

In the large space formed underneath the branch of a large tree, I saw sparkling that danced in the air. I don’t know what caused it. Maybe it is droplets of water or snow flakes falling off the branches above. When the sunlight shines on it (whatever it is) the space was filled with dancing sparkles. Absolutely beautiful.

The snow is white and crisp and stays there. Our neighbour uses his snow machine. I marvel at this. Who would have thought about a machine that shoveled snow. I like the smell of it. [The snow, not the machine!] The sound of the crunch under foot when you walk. So much for trying to walk soundlessly. At least you can see the animal tracks. Now I easily see where they’re living. And it is a good thing we’re not dependent on trap-lines.

Stories, if they are well thought out, can often teach us useful things about all of us and our lives together. I’m a great fan of Douglas Adams because he wrote very compassionately.

One of my many favourite passages of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is as follows.

This is from Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy at the last of Chapters 30 and the beginning of Chapter 31, ” …..

“Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.

Come, said Slartibartfast, “you are to meet the mice. Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbably event in the history of the Universe.”

“What were the first two?”
“Oh, probably just coincidences, “ said Slartibartfast carelessly. He opened the door and stood waiting for Arthur to follow.
“I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” he muttered to himself.
“I beg your pardon?” said the old man mildly.
Oh nothing, “ said Arthur, “only joking.”

(CHAPTER 31)

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl’hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galazy-now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across-which happened to be the Earth- where due to a terrible miscalculation of the scale of the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

“It is just life,” they say…..”

I am very interested in following the progress of the L. A. writers’ strike.

What might be the outcomes? Better pay and working conditions?

Is any hope for better quality and more complex narrative scripts; and fewer or breaks for advertisements in those narratives? I’ve very nearly given up watching TV. And I’m picky about the cinema offerings as well.

Will it change the way the media industry works? Will it have any long term effects on other writers’ lives? We can wait and watch.

Today I revisited the interesting website of Theodore Zeldin, who I met while living in Oxford. His present project is founded on the idea that by revising the way we look at history as well as the ways in which we live our lives, we will be able to find the common elements of human beings that can live in a world that is compassionate and connected. Sounds good to me.

Have a look at The Oxford Muse Project at http://www.oxfordmuse.com/

Wm R. Foust, was my art teacher in High School. He is a unusual person. Hanging out in his dept. and being in his classes kept me from ‘drowning’. He helped me realize my abilities, not just to draw and to paint. He encouraged all of us to talk about our ideas and the books that we’d read. Sometimes he would suggest a book. The one day I discovered I had the courage to take the risk. I could begin trying to make my dreams into realities. I’ve dedicated an earlier project to him although I doubt if he knows about it. The trouble is, I don’t know where he is anymore, as he retired sometime ago.

I know, (I really wish), that you’re out there somewhere, so, I thank you Bill.

I’ve been listening to Brazilian music today while I also tried to get some work done. I heard some of the music that I first heard there. When I reheard it today it moved me greatly. This music ‘caught me’ unawares when we lived there and it still does. It entered and took possession of much of my mental world and it is still there.

I think that I connect the effort of learning Portuguese with the strong feelings, visualities, the people, in fact with everything that happened to me (to us) at the time. At the beginning of our stay, I spent eight months in verbal (and social) isolation before I managed to create a conversation with another human being, except for my children. They spoke English to me but they soon gave up that habit up. I only discovered recently (because they never told me) that they they had understood very little of my nightly readings of Charlotte’s Web that I faithfully read to them in English. They learned to speak Portuguese far sooner than I. I think that we were all changed by that experience.

The ‘community of people that we lived amongst was, in comparison to other places, a very close and often a warm mental space. I was expected to rely on a ‘library’ of intuitive impulses that in a sense I’d never learned in childhood. So frequently I found myself unsure of what to do or say. My lasting experience is a sort of sweet sorrow or saudade.

This belongs to yesterday’s view.

Well, I can’t seem to work out what the day is, whether it is the 5th today, or the the 6th… by the time I finish this entry it will definitely be the 7th,  which is what I had thought it was in the first place.  Hum… I really am in another place that is far away from yesterday and yesterday’s space. The weather is definitely distantly outside and I am living in a sealed capsule. I keep wanting to either open the windows or go outside just to breathe fresh air.

The areas around houses look very controlled and constructed spaces. Any wildness that might here is lost. It has all been manicured. Trees and flowers appear repressed. In some places the ground has lost all its natural cover and just looks dead. (It hasn’t kept the snow.)

I was trying to imagine what the larger area that we now think of as South & North Dakota, Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc., looked like, before defined borders existed the way they do today. How did that world look in the last century? Fewer people, more trees, gardens, and smaller farms, more animals. Humans followed the animal paths and tracks when they traded and visited. Tracks were widened by humans into roads as they moved across the land. What are these stories ?

November 4th, 2007 - Still moving. Still breathing.

The phase in my life as a “semi-migrant” is a few months shy of 3 years - I’ve been moving a lot since 2004 but I’m working on the “stopping” part. It has meant new adventures for me some of which were really enjoyable, others not. Since 2004, I’ve met some ‘new’ cousins and made new friends. And, in reflection of the experience, I have thought a great deal about other people’s migrations and re-settlement. I wondered how people in the 18th and 19th centuries coped with facing the necessity of moving in order to survive, or not, the world over. In my teens, I read Ole Edvart Rölvaag’s ‘Giants of the Earth’ , a book that recalled the aniexty of leaving somewhere behind. At the time I found it painful to read but I didn’t really understand it. Even though he wrote about the 1890’s South Dakota, I now know from experience that he had captured the essence of such changes in peoples’ lives.

I woke up this morning to see snow flurries outside my window. I’ve been watching the changes of the forest. We recently moved from southern England which is very different. No snow to speak of. When it does snow people react with anxiety at the smallest quantity. The countryside is beautiful. I drove west today toward Winnipeg. So nice to see the subtle contrasts between the browns and greys of the grasses, the white poplars and the deep green evergreens. So beautiful. I wish that I’d had my camera. Anyway, I think that I like the snow - at least the best snows of my childhood, where we were snuggled in a warm log house. I would sit by the window and draw. On the other hand, having enough firewood nearby to fuel the cook-stove for when the temperature drops is sufficient to cause some concern. How many times did my dad say to me that he was ‘carving’ stove wood instead of ‘carving birds’?