June 25, 2021
This rusted object came alive for us! (Windward Oahu Waimanalo Ditch Trail)
I'm reading another series of books by Octavia Butler the Patternist series. If you can accept her premises that there exists humans with special abilities similar to the Marvel characters such as Inhumans or Avengers then your reading about good and evil without nuance so at times I feel I'm in an alien world of dystopian cruelty and chaos.
I juxtapose this with my reactions to some of the current news that describes how were finding out about the capital riots and insurrection attempts, the great lie of Trump which is endorsed by so many people thinking he had the election stolen from him, The new laws being passed in some of the states to disenfranchise large segments of their population and attempts to stifle free speech by targeting critical race theory as a subversive act which can result in your being fired or even have charges brought against you in Texas and Florida. The house minority leader Graham was confronted today by an injured police officer defending the capital against the insurrectionists who pointed out that Graham had tried to call the president Trump on January 4th to stop the riot and characterized the mob as insurrectionist and now is in the great lie camp allowing congress members allege that the riots were antifa generated. Then of course the world news makes me wonder if I'm living in a fantasy world created by Butler. Belarus diverts a plane and then kidnaps the dictators opponent off the plane and beats him up. Putin allows his opponent to be placed in prison after he was poisoned by Putin's operatives and nearly dies. We have a war in Ethiopia where in Trigray many civilian casualties goes on without any end. Our health is still at risk due to the lack of movement to get vaccinated by so many of our citizens. China continues to oppress and put in concentration camps the Uyghurs. India has a very out of control pandemic with Hindu nationalists and Modi as the head bumbling along and continuing to oppress Muslim minorities i.e. this week an elderly Muslim man was accosted, had his beard shaven, was beat up and made to denounce his religion by some local thugs and their arrest is in doubt.
So I don't have to read Butler just read the news! Now in my last post I suggested that the motivation for people to be so cruel and endorse outlandish fantasy as reality is the profit and power motive. Knowing the motivation does not stop the fake news and distortion of the truth for their gain. So the Florida governor is out to police free speech to prevent the white lie that racism is dead. He wants to prevent the cruise ships to not require people to be vaccinated (a recent ship full of people had two unvaccinated people test positive for Covid), he attempted to fudge the Covid statistics to show what a good job he was doing, etc. Well, the motivation seems to be that he may be interested in running for president in the Republican party.
What happens if you're intent on suicide since your fed up with the human race and want out! Yukio Mashima wrote Life for Sale an interesting survey of our world where various people with different motivations hire the suicider to commit suicide for a fee! His imagination is entertaining but the end result was he the author did commit Sepukku.
Well, on the other hand! Happy anniversary to us. Rebecca and I have had our fourth Wedding Anniversary Celebration yesterday. What a wonderful day to hang out, enjoy each other, and smile at our good fortune. No yelling, shouting, threatening, narcissistic bombast, or lies. We talk frequently, smile, mildly tease each other, tells jokes, and make sure we're O.K. We're different and continue to learn from each other. When stressed we can assist and comfort well. It's a miracle that I've been so fortunate to have such wonderful partners and family.
Tchaikovsky wrote a piece for piano chant sans paroles (song without words). You may be more familiar with Mendelsohn's work of a similar name. I'm impressed with this beautiful piece and I'm struggling to create some semblance of what experts sound like but I need much more time practicing at the piano. Attempting to attain what the artist intended is so satisfying to me even when I'm far off the mark. Last evening at dinner at Baci's in Kailua, Rebecca and I discussed how music, bird songs, and our brains can communicate across to ourselves and others without words. How our brains are constructed to allow us to be aware of music and its power to move us. Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax in a recent radio interview characterized music as allowing us to feel more whatever the feeling. As we talked about this I recalled that we had watched a documentary of an idiot savant who hardly could communicate in words but with a music teacher he could play from memory almost any piece and manipulate the notes in very creative ways. Oliver Sachs wrote a book (Musicophilia) about music and the brain which I recall he found that people with dominant hemisphere strokes could then play and learn music that they could not before the stroke. The non dominant hemisphere was disinhibited. Rebecca recalled how people with severe dementia could sing songs in a group and individual setting though their ability to recognize and remember was lost. Birds call out so that other animals become alert to danger.
Well, our cat Pepper is on the hunt for a rat hiding behind an armour in our dining room. Last evening he had the rat in his mouth but to him it's a toy to play with eventually the mouse is overwhelmed and dies. We are alive and one day our body will stop functioning there will be no more but we'll not know it after it happens. I'm O.K. with that but some of you may want to believe something else will happen to continue our essence afterwards. If you do then Butler's books may come true for you unless you have special powers to influence the keeper of the Good Place to keep the monsters at bay! And we won't know once our physical body and brains are dead and gone.
Leonard
I came across this creature deep in the woods of windward Oahu (Olomana Alo Trail rock garden)
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