Happy Birthday Mr. Chandler

Raymond Chandler
July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room." (from Farewell, My Lovely)

Magic Squiggles

The Tentacles of Consciousness

"Tentacles" by Steve Ball

"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members."  ~Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory

Ah Wilderness!

Following 4-hour flight from LA, 16 hour drive north from Chicago, flew into Latreille Lake from Red Lake, Ontario for a week of fishing. Some pix (click to enlarge):

The puddle-jumper -  built in 1946.

My Native American guide - no sense of humor. And nasty habit of chewing tobacco and spitting it out--constantly.

The Lodge -- hell on earth.

Glad I had the guide.

Two of these Americans claimed to be doctors, another a dentist, the fourth a lawyer. Yeah, and I'm Ernest Hemingway. No doubt they're all on the dole.

The guide's evil children tormenting a desperate moose.

Guide snags a big Northern--would've been lost without his expert net man.

Fishing in Canada: Hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer sublimity--

What Happens

"Lament for Icarus"  Herbert James Draper (1898)
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

"A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly."  ~Roger Scruton

The Mystical Experience

I am always amazed by those rare writers who manage to describe what in truth is indescribable.

 "In that moment of remote immediacy to things--of intimate strangeness--there may be some element of unreflective innocence, even something childlike [...] That sudden instant of existential surprise is [...] one of wakefulness of attentiveness to reality as such, rather than to the impulses of the ego or of desire or of ambition; and it opens up upon the limitless beauty of being, which is to say, upon the beauty of being seen as a gift that comes from beyond all possible beings. This wakefulness can, moreover, become habitual, a kind of sustained awareness of the surfeit of being over the beings it sustains, though this may be truly possible only for saints. For anyone who experiences only fleeting intimations of that kind of vision, however, those shining instants are reminders that the encounter with the mystery of being as such occurs within every encounter with the things of the world; one knows the extraordinary within the ordinary, the supernatural within the natural. The highest vocation of reason and of the will is to seek to know the ultimate source of that mystery.  Above all, one should wish to know whether our consciousness of that mystery directs us toward a reality that is, in its turn, conscious of us."

~from THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD:  Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart. Professor Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher who draws much of his inspiration from the classical theology of non-Christian religious traditions, including Sufism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The subtitle of his book, in fact, is derived from the Sanskrit description of Brahman in Vedantic philosophy: Sat-Chit-Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss). 

Sacrifice at Ft. Hood

Sgt. First Class Danny Ferguson died keeping Lopez out of a room full of fellow soldiers — holding doors closed that wouldn’t lock, says fiancée Kristen Haley.














"The tragic hero is both self-sacrificed and a sacrificial victim; and the awe that we feel at his death is in some way redemptive, a proof that his life was worthwhile. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice [...] Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art."  ~Roger Scruton, Beauty