From Up On Frederick's Stone

Another brief thought on politics and a thought on how psychosomatic drugs alter one’s perception of reality.

Two totally different topics: how a long work day is leading me to change my relationship to time; El Niño/storm vs sea myth.

The prospect of working eleven hours daily at a decent job is causing me to naturally want to “structure my time more intentionally/efficiently.” The vast majority of advice on time management is but the masturbatory hypocricy of charlatans. I don’t know what words to use for my instinct to rearrange how I act in time when busy, except those that are bastardized by the “success gurus.” It’s not that I’m against “wasting time” or being idle. That has been the dominant position for a long time, even if there are cultures and people who aren’t so callous about their time, who value leisure, the “dominant” cultures/people are heavy on the side of structuring time.

Attempted first line:
For there to be causation between any two objects, there must first be causal affinty between those objects. Objects must be able to interact before they interact. This capacity for physical interaction, this causal affinity can be called interrelativity.

Minds are mountains, mountains are minds—what is common between them? What is enlightenment in the transcendent complex? What shall I call it?
Some great timeless questions:
– How long is the shore of Lake Powell?
– If a raindrop falls exactly on the continental divide, what determines which ocean it will end up in? Are there alpine lakes with two outlet drainages?

A brief thought on the concept of “Eber” before I go into work. It’s a topic that keeps resurging into my mind. It’s the root word for Hebrew and the root concept of Nietzsche’s übermensch. It is perhaps the clearest movement toward pure abstraction the human species has ever made.

One day, to my disgruntlement, I got into an argument with a friend about politics. I think it’s a good idea for me to jot my perspective down, mostly because I’m still upset that he didn’t actually listen to me, partly because it illustrates how mass media affects our ability as citizens to function as part of the US government by/of/for the people, partly because I think that a clear nondualistic political perspective is both uncommon and powerful.

When I felt closeness with the central coast in those later years of grad school and weird phase in-between Cal Poly and Big Sur, my imagination drifted to the bigger mythological/philosophical aspects of the work in my thesis.

In 2022, there is one main thing that I think I discovered, but I don’t know how to describe it—at least it is hard to put into words.

At the turning of the New Age, after WWII and before the hippie era, Joseph Campbell authored The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a book chronicling many of the world’s mythic heroes and illustrating parallel truths between them. Myths, he asserted, often share a fundamental structure, that of “the hero’s journey.” For instance, a young knight might go out to fight a monster to protect a virgin princess and save the town. Or little hobbits, with the help of brave allies and mentors, might have to travel far and wide to fight the evil armies of Mordor and destroy the ring of power for the sake of all Middle Earth. Although I have not myself yet read through the book, I’ve listened to a fair number of Campbell’s recorded lectures, especially when they were free on Spotify—he is a delightfully eloquent and jovial speaker, by the way—and this is the gist of it. There is a sort of archetypal hero lurking in the shadows of most powerful stories, and it grips our attention, even if we’ve heard different versions of the same narrative structure over and over. It’s as if there is one big story that humans have been telling each other for all time.

It has been three years since I last wrote about the spring wildflowers. My lips have been sealed in a loud silence. I have been tumbling through the dreams of California. Words have been far away, changing quickly, they slip past my lips before I speak them. There were dreams then I wished to utter, and I still desire to pronounce them. But I struggle in this golden darkness. The seasons lift me up and humble me. A great riptide keeps me in its powerful gyre, and I do not find the will to escape. I envy the exultant jubilance of green-gold on the jetstreaming sky. Why, and what words form in me here?