monets of my life

Oh, my Dawg!

2008-09-05T20:41:00.002+04:00

When people argue about the question of God or no god they usually do not know what the argument is about. Mostly they just keep repeating the same misunderstandings over and over, not reaching understanding or peace.

The atheist says there is no god.
What God is he referring to?
If it is the current media version of God who looks like Santa Claus on steroids and acts as if he’d need Thorazine as well, he probably is right.

As to the Old testament and Holy Qu’ran versions of God, I’d be very, very surprised of any proof of their existence could ever be presented, either.

Modern man knows so much about history, laws of physics and the dimensions of the universe that he cannot possibly take the campfire stories of the ancient Middle East shepherds seriously.

In fact, man has gained knowledge of so many unrelated details of the world that he has been forced to invent psychotropic drugs, professional sporting events and satellite television to rescue him from anxiety.

In the deluge of these irrelevant facts he has managed to forget the old truth: God is a concept, a feeling that is needed by the human being to feel whole and well.

Let’s take an analogy: Democracy.
Most people do believe in democracy but few know what it is. Nobody knows where it is or what it is made of. Still people crave for it and are ready to suffer, starve and kill in the name of it. They believe, they have felt its effects and seen what life is like without it. They have seen the doings of democracy and believe.

Can democracy exist without the human mind? What about God, can he?

Man is the only species able to have the human feeling of divinity. The entity inducing this feeling can be interpreted totally differently in a hypothetical species lacking the “God-sense” that appears to reside in the prefrontal cortex of the human beings.
Whether animals have religious feelings or not, I really do not know. If I’d make a guess, they live it all the time but how can I tell for sure.

I am made of God and God is made of me. Is there a “me”?

Let me try to explain what God is to me. I have scientific training and I do support the efforts of sceptics all around the world where they go about catching magicians thriving on defenceless suckers. To me, Galileo, Keppler, Newton, Einstein, Bohr Darwin, Pascal and Jung are holy men.

I love the planets.
Looking at the moons of Jupiter gives me the kicks. It takes me thinking about Galileo. How he kept observing the planet and its moons with his telescope: “Whatever the priests might say, they cannot stop the moons orbiting Jupiter and all the planets orbiting the Sun.” The priests refused to look in “the Devil’s tube”.

Keppler, Galilei and after them thousands of astronomers gradually assembled the big picture about how the universe is organized. With the help of the Hubble and digital processing of serially coupled radio antennae our sight reaches ever further. We can observe stars being born. We can see planets vanishing in black holes with nothing but radiation left behind. We can listen to the symphony of the stars for, analyse the spectra of the energy and calculate the age of the universe from the basic hum.

Definitely something more than a whimsical bearded patriarch was needed to bring about all this, n'est pas?

I love life.
The greatest moments in my job are the ones when I see a baby being born. How he just is there, all of a sudden, brought about by physical chemistry, millions of years of evolution and the energy of the Sun.

There were the strands of DNA, some Life Magic and the result is there, screaming his head off to the blinding light and coldness of the world, trying to get hold of his mama with his unseeing eyes.

Yes, I am familiar with some biochemistry and biology and genetics. But the heaviest volume of Obstetrics textbooks cannot take away the feeling of awe and wonder of birth.
To me, new life represents a miracle.

I love energy.

All the life we see on this planet is powered by radiation from the nuclear reactions of the Sun. Green plants and some plankton are equipped with molecules that resonate with the wavelengths of the sunlight and capture its energy in the bonds of their molecules: Sugar, cellulose, starch and fat. Some forms of life use the deep-sea volcanic energy for the same purpose but I was talking about what we see.

Animals feed upon the plants and each other. We see how food chains are organized in the struggle of the energy. Life recombines its structures under the pressure of the struggle of survival. The weakest get eliminated in the game of selection. The blueprint of the genome is varied by mutations and the selection gets more material to choose from.

All of a sudden, there is sex.
Sex provides the living beings with a means of producing new variations of their genome far superior to anything else. The remarkable thing with sex is that it produces offspring determined by the preferences of the parents. This is quite unlike the blind mutations. The effect of sex would be a subject of many more books than already written about it.

I try to fathom how our search for the perfect sexual companion is related to Darwinism. There seems to be a very important role for archetypes there.

Now could the nomadic God of our books or in any other book create the chain of life sketched above?

Or could it ever be reconstructed by man? Could man ever figure out all the laws and their interferences and reverberations in all the possible variations that occur in the universe?

Could man ever in his head have picture of the entity that has produced the universe, microcosm and macrocosm, the laws of conventional and quantum physics and the probabilities that seem to control the occurrences in a way that definitely simulates the doings of a subject with a will.

My impression is that the entity is way too great for us to see. Looking at it, we might see some aspects of it or the boundaries of our understanding, if we are lucky. But definitely not the boundaries of the entity I call God.

I am made of God because me being here is an expression of the laws of physics and probabilities that govern the universe. God is made of me because it is I with my limited understanding, with my archaic animal senses and quite recently developed rational thinking that is trying to define God.

The best I can do is to carve a piece of God my size and show it around.

Of course, I can encourage other people to do the same, if they are lost and lonely in their worlds.

Is there a “me”?
I feel, therefore I am.
Eat that, Descartes!

Reliscience

2008-09-05T20:30:00.001+04:00

Science originated from human curiosity. Gradually, the methods of observation developed to such an extent that their structures were able to provide a view of reality much less related to the personality of the observer than anything else.

It would not be much of an exaggeration that with scientific method man has been able to stand out of himself to observe his own workings in the world.

Science is striving to get information about the material, measurable world as impersonal and impartial as possible.

Art, again, is an expression of the human experience. True, it can be regarded as exploration of the mind and the soul of man. True, it creates objects that can be observed and experienced by other people who might or might not “understand” it or share the experience of the artist.
Then again it might not. Both the creation of the piece of art and the way it is experienced is highly subjective and focuses on depicting the ways our “operating system” uses symbols to convey different states of emotion.

Art is striving to share information and about the phenomenological, subjective world and cause emotional and highly personal experiences in its audience.

Here I must add that the feelings of a scientist making a discovery that allows him to project his inner harmony on measurable reality without a discord can be quite similar to those of an artist finding the perfect blue for the morning sky or the perfect line that pulls “it all” together.

Art and science are both about harmony and aesthetic experience but methods and apparent goals are vastly different.

Religion can be serving the need for harmony as well. A French theologist said that the only way to join religion to science is the love of God. This can be interpreted that religion has been constructed to make up answers where answers cannot be found with art or science.
Our human mind refuses to believe in the “here” or the “now”. Rather, it goes about creating history and making up future with logic that has evolved for thriving in a flock of monkeys in the African plains. If something happens, there is something with a will making it happen. If something is, there has to be somebody that created it. Such an idea that things just might happen because the circumstances allowed it to is alien to our thinking. We need reasons; we need active subjects with a will to make sense of the world.

Our mind is a flock-animal mind though upon and slightly outside of it we have developed a sort of a rational segment capable of introspection.

Flock animals do as they see the next one doing. They follow their congenital subroutines in a blind fashion. With a little thinking one can find hundreds of examples of human primate flock animal behaviour. Unfortunately, we can explain it to ourselves only by assigning it to a causative factor outside of ourselves. Instead of saying: “Hey, it is my animal operating system running wild”, we say we have been addressed by God or possessed by Devil.

So basically what we need religion for is to explain away things we do not understand because of lack of knowledge, honesty or courage. We need it to assign causative factors to the awesome feelings our consciousness weaves together from external sensory material and electrochemical subroutines programmed by eons of evolution into our operating system.

We need religion to bridge the cap we observe between our animal and our rational self.

Which really does not need to exist at all once we accept our own animalism and see ourselves not as a spirit in a body but as a body making the spirit. Not being or existing but happening.

Much like the rainbow.

no go

2008-04-23T13:50:00.003+04:00

If you make a list of four things to do up town you run a chance of getting two of them done. My Nokia N81 8GB broke again. Something with the navibutton, cursor jumping back and forth like crazy. Still under guarantee so...except that today SFR, the local "service provider" (HA!) had closed its Service Aprés-vente. Usually on has to wait at least 45 minutes to get service and now it ceased totally.

There is a packet in mail since two weeks but it does not exist. I called and a friendly guy explained that they have about 6 weeks of waiting in the customs. If you ever have something to send to France, use DHL, UPS, Fedex or whatever but DO NOT USE FRENCH POST!

None of the mechanic shops were open so I could not have my register plates changed.

On the way home I spent half an hour in traffic jam. The road was blocked for no obvious reason "Travails en cours".

This island is a training course of frustration tolerance.
The worst part of it is that it works. You know that there is no such thing as tomorrow, only "not today for sure". You assume the same style little by little. It has been a month since I wore real shoes. My mail is gathering in piles unanswered. Reminders of different colors. Even uncashed checks. Nobody's taking out garbage and it stinks.

This is scary.
How to fight Island Idiocy?
Or should I just go fishing.

holidays coming to an end

2008-04-10T16:03:00.003+04:00

Monday it is workworkwork again. the way of repeating the word three times to emphasize that there is a lot of something there or going on is a local habit. If multiplying verbs and nouns is not enough to cover all the threatening stretches of silence, you can say "bla-bla-bla et comme ça" and "le voilà". People hate silence. The seem to be stuck on oral phase: They have to talk, kiss, smoke, eat or drink incessantly.

They drive me nuts.

As for my HDR experiment, I have now noticed that there are pictures that are correctly exposed and well within the contrast range and they number increases dramatically as one brackets the exposure with ±1.67 stops. Then there are some shots that "justify" the use of HDR but the end result is not necessarily better than the middle orginal.

And then there are shots that improve.

I am not talking about making unnatural "creative" shots just for the heck of it. I am after a natural rendition, something that we subjectively experience with the help of our magnificent image processing grayware. We do color correction, 3-D rendition, histogram flattening etc. at a fraction of a second without even appreciating what is going on. Cameras are not like that at all. Yet.

So I took off after 6 to catch some morning light in the nearby marsh. I was not very impressed, it was quite dull with clear skies. But I shot 1GB CF-card full anyway. Bracketing!

Normally one walks 3 hours and takes (old habit) about 35 shots of which 4 turn out OK.

So I got home, uploaded my catch on my Mac and got three pictures that I liked.

I did HDR transformation on one of the shots but I am not going to tell which one.

All I can say that it took quite a while to mix the three shots together and even after all the effort I am pretty sure that no one could tell the manipulated shot apart from the others.

Not better, not worse, not more or less synthetic than the others.

Playplayplay.

GOOD!

going HDR, thanks to Catalunia

2008-04-09T10:50:00.004+04:00

Got the idea from fellow blogger.
What you need is Photoshop CS2 or higher on your computer and two photos that are similar except for the exposure.

Obviously, things are easier if you take the pictures with HDR conversion in mind in the first place. Your digital SLR knows how to bracket the exposure automatically if you tell him so. One needs the operating instructions, though.

On my first attempt I can see that instead of just taking two photos with different exposures I should have pretreated the other one's rocks and the other one's clouds to get a result.

My photo is just another picture, no drama.
Which is (sort of) how I want it but not quite as bland as this.

Got to keep on trying.

after Nissan X-trail, the deluge

2008-04-08T20:20:00.009+04:00

on rrrroule!
by garbidz

I have to confess, I do not have a bad conscience of driving a 4x4. It is not because I am ignorant; I am not. Our beautiful fragile planet is overheating, drying up, flooding and getting increasingly toxic.

Too many people like me. Too many people commuting, air-conditioning, eating deep frozen delicacies and buying stuff we don't need wrapped in stuff that kills sea mammals. Too many people like me flying jet planes and defecating in water.

I even use diesel-generated electricity. Now is that a no-no or not! I never buy bio stuff because I like to know that what I eat or put on my skin has fulfils ISO norms. I do not mind manipulated genes or stem cell research.

And I like the 4x4. Our bikes and picnic gear goes to the back.
We drive around, park the car, ride a little, eat a little and take a little siesta somewhere on the mountains or the seaside.
Life is beautiful, delicious and good.

Meanwhile elsewhere we have the Chinese starting up 5 coal plants every day. We see the Indians multiplying like drunken rabbits and pretty soon getting a car, each one of the 1.2 billion of them.

We see the americans (5% of the world population) burning about 30% of the world fossile fuel consumption.

Plus, plus, plus.
So we do our little sins here on our little island with not too much soul-searching. While it lasts, it is very nice.
It won't be for long. I would gladly suffer to change it. But I cannot, in this matter I am powerless.

BTW it is true that women are better drivers, doing about half of the kilometers but causing only one sixth of the accidents.
(I also like her smile)

carnivore!

2008-04-06T10:04:00.007+04:00

young fine lion
by garbidz

This is a young lion I met in South Africa about one year ago.

I like his expression, it is as if he was approaching the punch line of a raunchy joke.

What DO lions joke about?

Cocky gnus? Zebra's tempers? Tipsy giraffes?

fears of dying, getting old

2008-04-05T11:23:00.004+04:00

Lava rock is not the easiest surface to walk on. Or it depends. If it is level and dry, OK. But at the beach where the molten stone has boiled and bubbled with sea water, it gets very uneven. And very, very slippery when wet. The thing is, one does not see the difference. All of a sudden you just lose grip and off you go. It is the algae.

This morning, decided to capture the (overly magenta) morning light again I headed to le Gouffre, a lava rock formation about 10 minutes walk from here. With my Loewepro on my back and the tripod in hand as a walking stick I negotiated down the slippery rocks. Shot some photos of which I am not very proud artistically. Technically they are so about there.

Climbing back up I was thinking all kinds of things. FLIP-CRASH! there I was, sitting in a pond of seawater, my knee twisted. Feeling like an idiot I took a deep breath, packed up my gear and -as I was sitting down already- took a pause.

These are the kinds of things you get when you do not appreciate your age.

You get carried away in you daydreams for a split second and you get hit by the forces of gravity.

Some of the pictures turned out OK. But my leg hurts...

Brave shining Jodie

2008-04-04T13:43:00.005+04:00

Jodie Foster has been my leading lady since the Taxi Driver. An intelligent beautiful woman who never seems to slip or fall. In the Brave One she pulls a brilliant performance playing a deeply traumatized woman trying to get back the life that used to be hers. Mugged to coma, boyfriend killed and dog stolen. This kind of stuff sort of gets the romance out of your repertoire.

Sideline: A cerebral trauma causing a long loss of consciousness probably leaves traces in the brain -even though psychomotor functions test normal, there are more subtle changes affecting emotion and values which impair social functions. I am pretty sure that Jodie Foster has done her homework here. Erica Bain had lost the connection to her feeling self with the exception of urge to survive.

What we have here is a psychopath. Her hands do not tremble when she shoots somebody. There is no guilt. there is no excitement. On the positive side of the emotional spectrum we can observe her laying her hand on the hand and the shoulder of the cop. Her neighbour's sympathy is bothersome unless useful in stitching her up after the encounter.

What if the heroine was somebody less sympathetic, less cultivated and not quite as beautiful as Jodie Foster? Now the spectator goes on sympathizing with the vigilante who has taken the law in her own hands. We cannot blame him, really, as even the Law falls in the same trap in the form of detective Mercer.

What is this film a picture of?
Are people getting fed up with mindless people committing mindlessly violent acts and getting away with it?
Are we willing to let our instincts rule as fear is lurking behind every corner?
Is law only for us, the Good Guys whereas bad boys can fool around as they wish?
But personally I do not see the film promoting dangerous ideas, it is just depicting them.

But who can be sure...maybe there is somebody somewhere who thinks: "Jody Foster can shoot people and get away with it, why couldn't I".
Chilly film.

sopranos

2008-04-04T12:40:00.002+04:00

080307gbdz
Originally uploaded by garbidz

I hate photorealism. Actually, it is something I am going to take advantage of in putting my tummy back behind the belt where it belongs.

I hate my tummy.
The hat is nice, though, got it from Sydney.
This picture was taken near Capetown.
Go south, young bird!

morning light at Pointe du Sel

2008-04-04T12:05:00.011+04:00

Learning curve with the wide angle zoom is steep. I just cannot seem to get close enough. Tilt and stop-down and what else. Experience with polafilter not good, the Hoya causes vignetting, colour is dull. Too cheap!

I think I know what I want now and it takes another early morning.

morning light shadow at Pointe du Sel

2008-04-04T12:05:00.009+04:00

This one I uploaded from my Mac instead of blogging from Flickr. Playing around to see how these things unwind.

I got up 5 am to take an espresso after which I hoisted my equipment and took off to capture the morning light. It is elusive. It seems there are a few things to watch. One is the color balance. Canon seems to love rose and the pix turn out like strawberry ice cream. Another one is my thumbs. with the wide zoom they seem to be everywhere.
And third, the polafilter evidently has to be an expensive one.

Well, I got my flowers, and a couple of times the "zen" feeling of getting a lot of things right at the same time.

Still work to be done. Perfection is Out There.

Magenta!

2008-04-04T11:59:00.004+04:00

too many times I missed the morning light...
admittedly there is too much magenta there and the rocks are slightly our of focus but this is what I got up so early for

troubles with the remote release after it got soaked at the Gouffre the other day

100% seems so far far far away

Garbidz_anse_311205

2008-04-03T17:35:00.002+04:00

Garbidz_anse_311205
Originally uploaded by garbidz

discovering the marvels of the walking forest

and the frustrations of the world of Blogging

lazy

2008-04-03T15:37:00.011+04:00

I got a somebody to do my work for me so I can be a nobody for a couple of weeks.

Horizontal is my kinda position.

Read up: Ancestors' Tale by Dawkins. Rich! Not to do on a full stomach, no way to keep eyes open. Just wondering, why do people hate Dawkins so much...is it because he is an aristocrat and not the slightest embarrassed about it. Or is it because he says what he thinks is right.

I like his writing, the man I do not know.

Alex Studies, Irene Pepperberg's story of herself and "her damned bird", the beloved Alex who (due to his anatomical restraints) managed to speak with humans without having neither Broca's or Werdnicke's areas of the cerebral cortex. Actually, no cortex at all but a hypothalamus.

Elkhonon Goldberg's Executive Brain makes one think how a very small difference can make a big difference. Such as being a jew, for instance, in the Soviet Union and managing the big leap out of there. Other than that, I feel he has something very politically incorrect to say and to our delight, he lets us guess what it might be.

Immunologist-Nobelist turned neuroscientist Gerald Edelman gives a very brief presentation about where his study group now is with the machines that simulate human thought processes.

The reading is very heavy. Had I not read his (and Tononi's) A Universe of Consciousness, I would probably not have understood at all what he was about.

Basically, IF we have certain functions hard-wired and soft-wired in a certain fashion, the media becomes irrelevant and the construction can achieve consciousness-like properties.

Which takes a lot of BS out of the consciousness talk of today.

Certainly, no need for philosophers here, as they seem to be focusing on the wrong questions. Our language is not adequate to describe phenomena that are alien to our perception. (makes sense) So any verbal construction will be useless in trying to predict what an unknown entity might behave like. Whereas the Philosophers' Way is to declare things impossible if there are no words to describe them.

As if universe was dependent on our ability to comprehend it.

Anyway, I got very very wet and possibly destroyed my Canon D30 while trying to capture the evening swoosh by the seaside.

Worth it?

What do you think

I keep going back

2005-09-21T22:49:00.000+04:00

it was two years ago that I got out of the hospital quite miserable after the episode

it started while I was doing a weekend in a paris suburb clinic, I got double vision with a splitting headache

I decided to go to a pharmacy to get some medicine but walking to the car I noticed that my legs weren't carrying me

in the car I noticed that I couldn't possibly drive since all things were double and turning around

there were a couple of colleagues there, they did not take me seriously...I called a friend who advised me to go to Pitie-Salpetriere...I took a taxi who was a complete idiot and told me to walk the rest of the way as he was not used to driving in the city...and there was a football game he didn't want to miss on tele

my ex helped me to get another taxi and followed me to the hospital where I just couldn't move any longer

they took me through scanners and stuck quite an amount of needles in various places...they gave me some stuff iv that tasted like stale human flesh...not that I'd ever tasted it but one gets the idea in the operating room

a couple of weeks just nightmare, things pgoing round and this splitting headache

I shaved and showered anyway and grew a deep sympathy to poor devils who are confined to asylums and stuff

I spent one week in intensive Just In CAse I'd develope a respiratory arrest as well...I used to work a lot in the intensive care soo I sort of knew that one possible diagnosis would have been Guillain-Barre that puts you off for two years and after you are a zombie

it wasn't it

at two weeks my legs started to carry me though as if I was drunk, my hands weren't trying to slit my throat when shaving and they sent me home

meanwhile my wife had decided to get an partment with another man which she did
-lost my job as well

mostly, I spent my days watching tele with one eye (opening the other one caused vertigo) and feeling indifferent

it was crazy, I sort of was there but I wasn't because I did not feel myself

I looked at my arms and legs move but they were not sending the right signals -"proprioception" was affected

the renovating that had been going on in the flat was half-finished as the guy had taken off somewhere to Yugoslavia

A friend of mine stopped by every now and then, brought my mail and some Belgian chocolate

I decided if ever I get back on my feet again I get to somewhere where life is nice and sunny...

my scooter was stolen, unused as it had been...all things were just drifting by as in a bad dream, I couldn't care less, I just did not FEEL any significance of anything at all

I started to come back slowly, but still there was the vertigo and something that still is and not easy to explain: I am lost, not really within myself and if I close my eyes i fall down

the name of the disease is Fischer-Miller and it is caused by a bug that is spread by chickens and guys who use same cutting board for vegetables and meat in restaurants...

Campylobacter jejuni is the name in case it rings a bell

that's the story
that's why I am here in the Tropic right now trying to figure out what happened during my nightmares

I wasn't close to dying in the regular sense of dying but in a sense that soul and body are detached...

I hope you got an idea why I am a bit strange at times...as if not really "there"

though I am in a lot of places...
the disease sort of made my borders vanish, I am a bundle of possible realities

I know my intelligence is not as it used to be and my ability to concentrate wanes sharply after about 8 minutes

(and still I am a lot brighter than these frogs!)

questions?

almost caught

2005-07-16T12:38:00.000+04:00

Three worlds by Mauri...

a strange animal

2005-07-11T00:24:00.000+04:00

There are people who take light away and drain your strength. They ask you question with no answers and struggle with problems where no solutions can be found. They are powerless and they find the illusion of power in seeing others equally stunned. I think it is their justification: NOBODY can find a solution.

Though a solution exists: Look elsewhere.

Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of talking to a 15-year old girl who was completely healthy. Her joy of life was contagious, her smile so fresh and laughter like a spray of pearls. It was a party of grownups where I belonged as little as did she.

Grownups are a sad bunch. Vinegar, musty air, wrinkles. The smarter you are, the more you find fault with ...everything.

And there she was, her blue eyes twinkling like morning dew, her smile all open and nothing wrong with her wits. She shone a strange light that seemed to escape the eyes of the grownups. She was happy to be alive, delighted to learn new things, certain to be appreciated and used to be welcomed with smiles.

The three hours spent talking to her took twenty years off my age.
I got a little closer to the ethymology of Angels.
You see them or you don't, they exist or they don't.

I personally know they do.
Thank you, little Elisabeth!

The List

2005-04-03T11:35:00.000+04:00

When I took off to this island having kissed my former life good-bye I made up in my mind a list of things I should get.
Things. Not ideas, positions or persons but material things.

The first one on my list was a red car, preferably a two-seater cabriolet. I was-thinking about a Porsche but...-they cost a lot to acquire and to keep. The spare parts are made of precious metals and the nearest mechanic is fifty miles away. I shopped around for BMW's. They do make magnificent pieces of engineering and that's what hit me in the face. I do not want over engineering. I do not want to buy things that are put there just to make you buy more and more, spend extra because of your status sense. The choice got smaller and smaller. Walking in the Mazda shop, I saw it. The Miata: Nothing extra, small, nimble, and reasonable.
I drive around wearing a hat and a smile.

The second thing was an electric guitar. I've been fooling around since I was 14 and never had a guitar that could be properly tuned. I have bought guitars to my family but somehow always skipped myself. Now was the time. I opted for the Fender Strat though a Les Paul would have been closer to my soul which is a shade of blue. The Strat is fantastic. I found the "flow" with it and it is giving me moments of great pleasure and satisfaction.

The third on the list was a decent digital camera. I've been doing photography some 30 years now and I have had cameras of all sorts. Now one has to go digital because ... everybody's going digital! I had a digital ixus and a waterproof Pentax which were sort of OK for notebook type of stuff but if you try to catch something in motion, you miss. The things happen with such a delay that the subject had vanished by the time the whirring and beeping had ended and there was finally a "click".
I got a Canon D 20. I had an EOS 5 before and some lenses so I figured the learning curve would be steepest with a machine from the same family.
It is a marvellous piece of fine mechanics, informatics and what have you.
I cannot understand how much the technology has advanced since the days of my OM-2 or AE-1. Yes, you can still fail your shots. You can even forget your camera home. But the machine is perfect, anything going wrong is the user's choice.

I got all the things on my list.
Am I happy?

Most of the time, yes.
Though I confess that I was about as happy making the list and anticipating.
I am not going philosophical about material things and happiness, what can be bought and what not.
I just make a note that I once again got what I wanted and now I have to want something else or study Zen.

To study Zen is to study detachment, the state of non-being, not-wanting, not-looking...
I see a dilemma here: How can you motivate yourself to not-wanting?
In the state of not-wanting you don't want to motivate, either...

Maybe I am just lazy.
I'll do some funk now...

spokes

2005-03-20T01:43:00.000+04:00

This morning I woke up in the work. It was six o'clock and a false alarm. The telephone rang again at 7. I had had four hours of sleep. The enteritis I had got of a sandwich in the cafeteria was burning and ballooning my stomach. I was hungry with a headache and zero appetite. Did my job and took off as the next guy showed up. My home is so ugly that it hurts. The furniture consists of four chairs, a table, a sofa and that's about it. But there is big glass door to the garden that lets eyes breathe.

I took to looking at my post. Friends are good to have if they know when to be there and when not. I love my loneliness. Only when I am alone I can get in touch with the Other Guy, the one who knows about beauty. He likes to be a little bit drunk so I've bought him a bottle of Canadian Club. After seeing "Lost in Translation" I'd wanted get Suntori instead, but, alas, not available here.

Alone I meet the music. I do not really know how to play but I like the sound I am making, My guitar is a Strat. I savour the harmonies, I listen and dream of fingers that could do the things ringing in my head. So many fantastic melodies pass through my head and I barely catch a note here another from there. The dogs outside are howling.
Margaritas ante canes.

I do not think, somebody else is doing it for me. This someone else loves oxymorons and great gestures. Today he said: "The opposite of love is fear". Then he shut up.

At noon I took a nap. There was a gentle figure all dressed up in winter clothes (the air con was at full blast) and told me about the things I've done. All the things she said began with: "If not for fear".

I woke up and it took me quite some time to know where I was.

From what I remembered of the dream, I reconstructed parts of my life. And, hell, that was the truth I had been looking for so long. I picture feelings as a cart wheel. In the middle ar the axis there is the state of "not-feeling". There are spokes that shoot in different directions. Your total feeling-state is a vectogram of these feelings. Now I realized that love is not an opposite of hate. It is easy to love and hate somebody at some stage of the relationship.
Love is not an opposite of not-loving, either, Zero has no opposites. (that's why so many people make themselves zeroes even if they could be somebodys).

I picked up the Strat and took on a harmony. Boy, do I love its sound!
I dropped some notes, came back to the original and made some arpeggios.

The music strenghtened my new view.
The opposite of beauty can be ugliness but before accepting this you ask yourself what is beauty.

Then you can ask what is ugliness and what is the good of the the two.

Beauty is something to approach, to have, to relish. I think that beauty is a branch of the tree of love.
Ugliness is something to run away from, to root off. Ugliness is nature's gift to know from the first encounter that this is something not for you. Trouble, stomach ache, worries.

The opposite of ugliness is not "tolerable". That is the state near the axis of the wheel of feelings.
The opposite of fear is not "unfear". That is a state of non-feeling. The opposite of fear is attachment.

In the search of beauty I search for love.
Please, do not confuse the industrial mush with Love,.

Love is not something that can be given or taken or lit up or killed.
It either is or then it is not. The best you can do is find it inside of you and show others that it is.

I say no more.

sunset soundtrack

2005-03-06T20:59:00.001+04:00

The austral autumn nearly did me the trick this evening. Two weeks ago the sun set at 7 pm. I know as one of the highlights of my day is to go down to the seaside and contemplate the sunset. What is the big deal about sunsets, one might ask. A question like that define a person more thoroughly than I ever could. I just say that birds love sunsets, the muslims do their prayer at sunset, people here gather on the cliffs to look at it and as I know, even the monkeys of Upper Nile get together to howl on the riverbanks facing west at dusk.

Sunsets here are a real treat. When the sky is clear, the blue is overwhelming, penetrating, violent. When it is the monsoon season and whimsical winds throw about clouds of various sizes, shapes and textures, the sun's rays and the laws of optics put together a show that beats any home theatre set 6-0 6-0.

But tonight I nearly missed it as we are just about to reach Equinox and days shorten at a remarkable rate. At 6:30 there was hardly any light left.

Going down to the beach I had Pat Metheny's Travels playing in my iPod. Perfect strolling music! The waves were reflecting the still-lit sky in a shade of sheetmetal.
Clouds looked dirty. I sat down on a fence and changed to Remember Shakti 's "Shringar". It is scenery music, not going anywhere special but constantly in movement like the leaves of the trees or the ripples on the lagoon bay. As the flow of the music intensified, the colors went through their sequence. The sun set in the clouds, the light was very gently rose until it faded.
The music ended. I dried my eyes.

I did not miss anything. There was nowhere far away I longed for. All the loves I had were the times they were. All my dreams, my successes and my failures had no meaning whatsoever. I was in the now. The beauty and the harmony emptied everything, all my ambitions, cravings and regrets, of all the emotional significance they might have gathered along the years.
I was in the Now.

"Beauty is only skin deep".
?!

My foot!

three times thanks

2005-02-27T19:40:00.002+04:00

I took the drive to the volcano at dawn. I wanted to avoid the traffic that becomes impossible before nine o'clock. I wanted to see the glow of the remains of the recent eruption. And the morning light, it is something spectacular here. The mountains were blue from their western side and slowly turning to rose from where the sun was going to rise. White tufts of clouds were hanging on to the sides of their tops. Lower down in the valleys colours mixed into a dark green-red shade that contrary to the common belief is not at all brown but -green-red!

As I drove down to the south and curved along the coastline towards east, the colours changed. Each minute added saturation to the reds and the yellows whereas greens lost their reddish tinge and assumed the brilliant tropical shade that goes so well together with everything in nature here.

My heart was light. Pleasure was pouring directly from my eyes to my heart. I thanked God for my eyes. For what is beauty but the feeling of awe induced by a visual stimulus? ( did I say that?)

The sun rose over the Indian Ocean. It was so bright all detail was lost. It was like a gigantic sheet of aluminum foil where the remains of the morning clouds were mirroring themselves. The wind started to wake up bringing the parfum of the flower plantations. The smell from the earth mixed with the flowers and brought an immediate association of church-going old ladies on a Sunday morning. I giggled to myself and thanked God for the head that amused me without asking.

I got to the place where the lava had cut the Route National n°2 in Tremblet. I parked the car and continued on foot. There were a lot of gendarmes, some tourists and locals as well. The hours around dawn are for the bicyclists as the heat gets scorching before noon and the diesel fumes very hard on the lungs.

The "coulée" was, how should I put it...it was there. Now you imagine a dark brown cliff with smoking trees sticking from underneath it you pretty much get the picture. Once the people shut up, I heard it crackling silently and could quite clearly see it still glowing from the inside. All of the sudden I realized: It was moving! One can accept a cliff rattle a little and glow a little but they are definitely supposed to stand still. This one wasn't. With unhurried determination, it was making its way to the ocean.

The gendarmes were very blunt and matter-of-fact. One could easily have thought that they were there to make sure that nobody steals the "coulée" that had made such a nice appearance in TF1 news already. But that was not the case; they were there to keep stupid people from taking a walk on the brittle crust and falling into the 800-plus centigrade molten stone. No matter how clearly the facts are stated there is always someone who cannot resist the temptation. It is the Government's fault if they burn themselves. So there, no smiles, no bonjours.

I turned back and stopped for a coffee and a "pain chocolat" in a roadside café.
One could see the hardened lava stream from the year 2001 all the way from the mountainside to the sea. Two-meter bushes and trees and shrubs were pushing from the ground already. Down on the beach lava stones were rolling back and forth with the waves, slowly turning the cliff to a beach, filling it with black sand grain by grain.

I realized that the creation was still going on, that God was tinkering with this little island and probably liked what he was doing.

I thanked him for letting me watch.

He said:
"Stick by me, I'll be your guiding hand
but don't ask me what I think of you
'cos I might not give the answer that you want me to..."

(oh, well...)

and he signed here:

ty-a-pology

2005-02-27T19:29:00.000+04:00

Some people find it difficult to accept that I use a word in the headline that gets a red line under it in their spellcheck. I sympathize with them and relieve their suffering. Think of the texts as impressions rather than academic exercises of grammar and flow.

hot for teachers

2005-02-20T21:50:00.000+04:00

About a year ago when I had decided to stay in la Réunion, I decided to do so properly. Properly means getting to social circles, to know people where you have to, bien sur, master the language. To master a language -unless you are a genius or a toddler- you need a teacher. On a dinner with my friend Brieuc I presented my problem: I admire the French language, its expressiveness and imagination. Your Mr. Le President is a fantastic speaker, I'd love to learn to speak like him!"

Brieuc looked at me knowingly, his face lighted up and he repeated: "Mr. Le President...wait a second, I think I have just the right guy for you. Have a look and see, no obligations". The rendez-vous was set to saturday morning. At 9:10 there was a knock on the door and a very tall and a very black man entered. He presented himself, and his credentials. He was a professor of the French language at the university. We talked a little over the coffee and obviously, he was screening my needs to plan his policy.

I have a problem understanding French dialects. This man had a very heavy African accent he seemed totally unaware of. So we did grammar, some expressions where in addition I had to do an enormous amount of guessing and excusing to understand what he said. Finally I started getting Brieuc's joke. This man was indeed speaking like Mr. Le President, only that the president was not Mr. Chirac as I'd expected but Mobutu Sese Seko.
A very respectable statesman, no doubt , but not the one I wanted to sound like.

After some time I saw Brieuc and he burst out laughing. "I knew it. But wasn't he tall!"
Undeniably.

So he gave me another phone number. This time it was a woman, an Alsacien, tall and sporty. I had no difficulty communicating with her. She gave me lots of feedback on my mistakes which I gladly took. She also cooked me a nice meal and we went to concert together. Unfortunately, having mostly educated riding horses before, she had very confused ideas about French grammar. I like grammars and I like making questions and tired of her nonsensical attempts to explanations I decided to quit.
She had a depressing aura of sadness about her.
She was quite tall, too.

The third one was again a professor at the University, a lady slightly over my age. She had a problem with her apartment which she wanted me to rent and she also wanted me to buy her furniture. I met her a couple of times but I made no progress. I have to admit, though, that she was a better cook than I am.

So here I am, two years in France and still talking like a spanish cow. But with my bovine accent I've managed quite well: I've rented a flat, bought a car and got it registered and insured, had water, electricity and phone connected. Banking is still a problem but so it to the french also but a few. You are faced with a deep-level incompetence combined with superiority and stupidity that resembles a Monty Python parody. The only way to cut through is to know a Somebody or be one. A recent expat from behind the Moon is not ranked on their lists.

So, being a Modern Man I amazoned a Transparent Language French Interactive CD. I get my pronunciation evaluated with a meter. It goes to green if I do OK, yellow if I flash and hardly moves most of the time. It is quite eerie, repeating the phrases aloud in an echoing room. If I ever had a neighbor doing that, I'd probably call in the Basket Squad.
The most depressing thing: A black labrador barking outside keeps getting better scores than I do.

I wonder how much he'd charge for a lesson... a Franfurter?

flickr

2005-02-18T23:23:00.001+04:00

I am amazed: Flickr really works! All the time I struggled with the wanadoo server and Freeway trying to upload just to get "indisponible" written across the screen.

Amazing people on flicker.com with amazing pictures...three hundred frames of whales' flippers and tails!

I am starting to like this, honestly!