Let there be light

it had to come

Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world. --Archimedes

For a dreamer night's the only time of day

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. Ralph Waldo Emerson

What do you do when there's not anything to say anymore? When this floating, this limbo like state has permeated the inside and taken over. I don't feel full but empty. I can still think, still write, but I can only seem to respond to questions posed by others. Those questions don't enter my head like they used to. It's been months now, months of floating and there's still no explanation. First I thought it was that I was burned out, but I had made it to the end so it wasn't a major difficulty. But no healing seems to have occurred and so I'm again left without an explanation of this emptiness. It's just existing, it's just waiting, for what I just don't know. These are the thoughts, when they come, these are the struggles and the musings, when they still deem fit to come upon me. Or maybe its when I can open myself up to them, when I stop and listen, stop at all. Maybe I am living in a bubble, living in my head. I can't get out and I can't feel alive. It's only waiting and wanting and not even knowing what. I do the work and I can see I'm learning, but does it matter if its like this? Its not like last year, its manageable this time, it's not even unpleasant usually, but it still seems incorrect or lacking. It's not stimulating or invigorating or alive. It's information, absorption and processing. I can take it all in and I can use it and I can feel myself get smarter. But I'm still looking for the why. Knowledge for its own sake. I agree and I do want that. But I need something else as well. I need to breathe, to see, to feel. I need to stop, to reflect. I'm having a hard time finding the point of this arrangement we call life. Not in a depressed way, no worries of that because in the modern world that seems to be the immediate thought. It's not depression. It's more like boredom, which is fascinating because I'm interested in what I'm doing. It must be, again, the process. The mechanism that has taken over society and now dictates the way ones life proceeds and the proper way for one to acquire knowledge. Even when inside this very system, when I can see myself benefitting, even often enjoying it, I grow weary. But it doesn't even seem that I am growing that way anymore, it just seems to be a constant state, and so sometimes I just drift inside of it without realizing or worrying.

I want to break free

Or does it?

Shadows of the Past

It has been one year since this blog began, one year since we began this experiment in interaction. Since then things have changed. We are different people, shaped by the irrevocable flow of time. That difference has seeped through into our blogs, our topics, our voice, our presence has changed. My goals now for this endeavor are humbler--while this will always be a way for the three of us separated by time and space and life to keep in touch, to keep the bigger questions which do not always fit into the too infrequent catch-up phone calls in focus, no longer do I see it as a forum where what we shout to each other will affect the intervening distances. Sometime I do not even think that I am having a conversation with you let alone a dialogue with the world beyond. This experiment has been proof that the interweb is too impersonal, too big, too cold, too technological for a real debate. That is not why people turn to the on-line world--it is largely for escapism, for voyeurism, for socially acceptable stalking, for a chance to scream their opinions into the void, and often for a dose of schadenfreude. A genuine dialogue, developing in the void between strangers for no other purpose than to share each others thoughts has eluded us, and may be impossible in this medium.

While this experiment has failed I am not now tempted to take down this blog as I once was. For I have found a new purpose in it--a repository. It is a place where I can fix my thoughts, both in a effort to sort them out and as a record for me as to what issues I was concerned with and what I thought in the past, a diary or letter opened to our little public. It is a place for me to put poems, pictures and mostly quotes that inspire and amuse me. And through this sharing a new dialogue might occur, one less structured and less deliberate than the previous goal, but one occurring through the creation of a shared consciousness. By creating such a trove we at least create a common store of idea, of language and reference from which the dialogue can stem.

So two our 2 readers and anyone else out there who stumbles upon us, I have a favor to ask for our one year anniversary. Please, talk, think, point out something else that relates to what we are saying--respond in someway so we are not just shouting into the void.

The full text with no horror tunnel

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamer of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; ' World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

In My Craft and Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Fables and Folklore

“ Gratitude is the sign of noble souls."-- Aesop

To Be