Exit: '06

Even though I know it's just another day, the imagined weight of the entire previous calendar year makes me feel as though I'm standing on some cliff,
staring into the unknown space in which I will discover the results
of what the last 12 pages worth of months
and all the actions committed within them
have prepared for us now.





"The stars are beautiful because of a flower you don't see..."




"Here's my secret. It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

-The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery








It's just enough to be strong
In the broken places, in the broken places
It's just enough to be strong
Should the world rely on faith tonight

- Jars of Clay, Faith Enough

Meine Familie

German I,
Sophomore year of high school.

One of those 'write something about your family in a foreign language' projects.
... I don't remember what all of this means anymore.

FIT 1 - Found in Translation - The Japanese Lesson

This is the first cartoon I've taken the time to actually draw out.
I have been provoked to be more active about drawing cartoons by the absurdity of many of the situations I find myself in, my desire to actually do things with art and writing, as well as the last straw, the quiet rage that xkcd is so good at taking ideas that I thought were mine.

I must learn to actually draw people so that I can move beyond stick figures. I thought of using animals - I can draw them better - but for the stupidity of this cartoon, it had to be people.


This one is for my family (no offense -),
since pretty much all I had to do was write it down.

so, based on a true story,
the first of what I hope will be more cartoons:

The Japanese Lesson

(You'll probably have to click on the image in order to be able to read it)


notes:
Possible changes:

1)I think it was actually wakuwaku, not niconico which provoked the comments that created this cartoon (Wakuwaku means 'excited'). Perhaps I should fix that.

2) I should probably scan these or something instead of taking pictures of them. I have yet to attain that level of technology. I should also make them so that you can read them on the post.

FIT 1 - The Followup

Linguistic Analysis at my house.
It goes something like this:



"Does Chinese have 'b's? I mean, the 'b' sound?"

"Hm. Well, after analyzing the 4 words and 2 phrases of Chinese that I know... no"

"Ha ha,. yeah. I can't think of any either."

Well, then we must be right. Why do you ask?

"Well, then the wahu song couldn't be Chinese because it has boris!"

"What??"

"You know, it goes.. wahu wahu.... .... boris.... I don't know the middle words, but... I'm not even sure it's 'boris'... but it sounds like it..."

FIT 1 - Epilogue

(In which I remember the phrase that sounds like "boo hen")

"'Boo hen.' Isn't that Chinese?"

"Oh no! You're right!.... nevermind.
Well, there must be some language that doesn't have a 'b'"







This is for my family.
Without them, I would never get material like this...
Thanks, family.
Thamily

Learn Why the World Wags

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

from A Once and Future King by T.H. White


My Mom pulled this quote out of one of her magazines.
I haven't determined to what extent I endorse all Merlin's (or rather, T.H. White's) words, but I do think it's worth considering.

And I do agree with the line Learn why the world wags and what wags it.
Reality and the world we live in, to the degree that we can understand it, is always worth learning more about. I think. so far. I guess there's one way to find out -

Little Islands

The following quote was lifted from Sisters of the Road, whose matching funds donation drive is still underway until the end of December...

Let us be wary of mass solutions, let us be wary of statistics. We must love our neighbors as ourselves . . . there is perhaps no surer road to peace than the one that starts from little islands and oases of genuine kindness, islands and oases constantly growing in number and being continually joined together until eventually they ring the world.
- Father Dominique Pire

The rest is lifted from an email I wrote to a friend about this quote

It seems that this is a case where starting small is not just the more possible way to go about it,
but the real way to go about it.
but still.. where to start?
If there are no lines between war and peace,
everywhere and anywhere is a good place to start. The trick then is, where to continue? For all our youth, energy, idealism, and intentions, we can only give so much at any one time.

Resolved:

No, it is not New Years.

I am not about to wait for New Years to make a resolution.

No, I did not start this today.
But it is a concrete manifestation of something I've been thinking about for a while, especially after an interesting dream I had back in like, October, I think it was.

I want to, more consciously, choose my own death every day.
I might not be able to chose the exact manner of my death,
but I can put my life into everything leading up to it.




Weiter, weiter ins Verderben
Wir müssen leben bis wir sterben

Happy Hollandaise

Ah, it's Christmas morning.

We got late start to the morning.
I didn't get any brother-sized shapes poking me out of bed until almost 8am.

I contributed to my part of making the world a better place by taking a shower. Apparently I missed Mom opening her gift of toothpicks, Sam being awarded one minus-present point for not knowing where the camera was, and Eric being given a Christmas face-squish from Dad.

Apparently, we're combining traditions for Christmas and Easter. No more "stockings" - or whatever. This year, we had Christmas socks! .. but we had to look for one of them among the other clean socks on the couch.

Then we received our Christmas rations of 1/3 cup of water.
(ok, ok, it was to take with some vitamins)

Dad wanted to know who had the Sharpie last because he wanted to write on the plastic cups, so for the rest of the morning, as presents were unwrapped, much attention was paid to who had written who's name in what kind of marker. We suspect that Sam was the last one to have the Sharpie.

Dad clocked the gift-unwrapping phase at approximately 1.5 hours.

The title of this post is inspired by the sauce cookbook I got for my Dad.

Apparently, someone got us a membership to the Ice Age trail. So we're going to go on a Christmas walk to claim it for our own. ha ha ha.

When people get you clothes, you have to wear them
toothpicks, you have to offer them to other people
sauce books..
Well, let's go make some sauce!

Merry Birth of Christ

Birthday Card for JC

I drew/wrote this on a few scraps of paper on 12.01.06 at a prayer meeting of sorts.

The illustration is not a cover for the card. It is more... something that went with it. I will preserve their juxtaposition.

(The text is listed as a tangent/comment.)

Birth of Christ Eve

Yep,
It's Christmas Eve.

This morning,
Sam and I remembered that the Puppy Chow we made huge quantities of is really still cereal at heart. Crispix (TM)(R) to be exact, which is an especially wonderful cereal. Cereal is a breakfast food.
By this reasoning, we discovered the equivalent to Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.

We observed this preparation for Christmas by picking 3 buckets of field corn after driving the (affectionately-termed) tan truck up the hill out back and hacking down an unsuspecting bristly evergreen. It's a smallish, wield-able tree, as is one of the branches that came with it. My brothers and I took some time to claim territory 'for Christmas' by stabbing the stump into the ground and re-enacting that flag scene from Iwo Jima, effectively accomplishing blasphemy and anti-Patriotism/Political Correctness, all in one go.

Mom's putting lights on it right now. The lights are one of my favorite parts. I would've been good with hanging a bundle of christmas lights in that corner of the living room. If fireflies came in different colors...
You genetic engineers out there. You can put firefly genes into tobacco and bacteria to make it glow? Put some Christmas light genes back into the fireflies.

And Mr. Ehren, wherever you are, I guess in the Christmas spirit, I will forgive you for throwing away my carefully cultured dish of glowing bacteria from Biotech class.
Perhaps it's for the best.
I probably would have kept it until it evolved.


I ran into a friend from high school today while grocery shopping. I verbally 'yoinked' a bag of apples out of the back of a stocker's cart since he was blocking me from reaching the apples that he'd already stocked. He turned to the girl stocking with him, amused, and said 'She used my line!' As I walked away, the girl's face went from general amusement to something confusing. 'Tracy?' she said.

Some baiting degree of familiarity drew me to actually stop and walk back. Shoot. I'm terrible with names. We learned about this in psychology class actually. There's two aspects of recognizing a face. One results in the feeling of familiarity. The other is being able to identify details. If any either of those is lacking, it makes things confusingly difficult. I am generally better with the first than the second. I have been known to be completely confused after very good friends of mine do something like shave their beard. So basically, my chances of recognizing her were as close to zero as you can get.

But I did it. I knew her hair was different. Everybody's hair is different when you haven't seen them for at least three years. My theory is that I recognize people based on the space between their eyes and eyebrows. I stalled for time by moving forward, refusing to look at the name tag on her shirt. For a second, I was back in the hallway, on the ramp outside my high school's theater. Standing on the hand railing, leaning over the top of the ramp, I was talking to...
-name tag check for confirmation- yes!
Brigid

I'd only talked with her a couple times during high school, but we were on good terms. She's the first person I've randomly run into since coming home for break. We started comparing what we'd been up to and who we'd seen around
... and somehow made our way into topics of relationships and fighting to regain the ability to trust other human beings - we were a little island of strength and encouragement in the middle of a grocery store - when my Dad tapped me on the shoulder and told me to go get Eric.

"I, .. uh, found the apples." I said.

I tried to find her later to hand off my email address, since it occurred to me that she probably didn't have my school email and might not be trackable be on facebook. But she'd finished stocking peppers and disappeared. So I left a note with the guy that I'd yoinked the apples from. Hopefully it will make it to her.

I don't know why we'd contact each other, or what we'd email about.
But I am realizing more that at this point in my life, I am separating from the people I grew up with and we are all going off in different directions. I feel responsible to take care of what connections I do have. Especially since I think human connections are some of the most important and valuable things in this world.

People and God.
When either of these are lost or separated,
...
The destruction is incredible.






One day before, and it's finally starting to feel like Christmas
Just in time, I suppose, though really, never too late.

It means many things:
It's pretty lights, family, connection, culturally-induced enthusiasm, an island of encouragement, strength amid weakness, brokenness trying desperately to hope,
a world not forgotten. Oh yeah. love.
And God is good.


And my brother has just programmed his messenger program to greet him with "Welcome, Almighty" when he signs on. No,.. he's changing it to 'You are the model of perfection."

I think I will find a candle and go sing with God somewhere.
Since our church is no more and I suspect we will not attend a candlelight service tonight.

Thank God for friends and family
Thank God for Jesus
God with us
Immanuel

Rel 342: Final Paper

This is the longest research paper I've written so far: Plato's Pythagorean Influences

It's the final for my for my Rel 342 Origins of Western Morality? class.
( Rel 153 class final)
Sadly, the semester and class have ended. The class was great and I really enjoyed working on the paper. I am sad that I probably won't follow through as well as I want to with continued research and revising.

The paper was turned in a bit last minute, so I'm not entirely proud of how it looks. There were some embarrassing typos... probably still are.
I didn't want to copy 20 pages here, so I posted it with Google Documents, which I find hardly tolerable to look at.

What I'm saying is I guess I'll understand if you don't read it all ;)

But if you ever wondered where Plato got his ideas from,
it was the Pythagoreans.
They are really cool. They were there at the beginning of the big ideas of what philosophy was, the principle of order of the kosmos, inhalation of pneuma into the kosmos, the desire to be no longer merely mortal, but unite into the order of the kosmos...
And, reading about them from W.K.C. Guthrie is rather enjoyable.

I really admire the early Greek/Italian philosophers.
You read about them and you can just feel how strongly they wanted to know what it meant to live well. I respect philosophy like that.

It might be Christmas when...

...large amounts of food starts showing up from people you don't really know.

My Mom and Aunt both work as vets at the same Veterinary Clinic.
Sometimes being a vet means operating to save an animal's life. Sometimes, it means putting them to sleep.
Either way, my Mom talks about how she could probably make more money if she forgot about caring for the health of the animals and opened a cute fuzzy dog grooming salon instead.
At first, I thought it was just funny, but after seeing some dog day-care centers, dog t-shirts with a price per surface area that make girls' clothing look like a bargain, and a wall full of purse-sized fluffy white puppies in the Beverly Hills Center whose stunted growth will keep them perpetually purse-sized,

she might be on to something.


My Aunt brought over some food and snacks that customers have been bringing to the clinic.

"Oh, who brought these sandwiches?"

"Remember the (insert family's name here)'s? We euthanized their big rottweiler last week?"

"Oh - oh yeah."

It's Christmas time:
The Clinic puts peoples' animals to sleep,
and they bring us gifts of food.

That's actually both darkly humorous and
.. almost touching.

(I guess I shouldn't leave it at that. This Clinic is in a small town and I think the vets help people deal with their pets' injuries, illnesses, and.. even dying .. very well. Most people are very appreciative. I was just there and there are a bunch of photos of peoples' pets and Christmas cards that they send in along the wall. It's really very nice.)

Merry Christmas.


Peace on earth,
Goodwill to men,
and ... puppy chow in biohazard bags.

California Dreamin'

I am no longer in California



I left yesterday.

time
and memories
are funny things.

Once things are over,
they're all the same distance away.
Depends how you measure, I guess.

I recommend
Einstein's Dreams.



btw,
it's a palindrome day!

12/21 /06

all of which are nice numbers.
the digits even sum neatly.

Californ-i-a

I'm in California



It rained the night I got in.
And is unusually cold, I guess.
Coming from Portland, I think this is normal.

This kind of weather seems to create unusual clouds.



I think this is what California means to me -
riding around amid cool scenery with good music. That's when I'm like, yeah. This is California.

And there's places like this:



We went to San Diego to see the SoCal faction of the Cairo Trek. It was really good to see them as people again. It was a little strange to be wearing our American culture clothes after seeing each other in Cairo all summer. We just went to get something to eat and walked around by the beach.



Sometimes I think about how people tend to be friends with people who have similar interests. A lot of my friends and I want to get out there and help somehow, do our part for changing the world, believing in ideals, and working for them. We're the kind of friends whose similar interests will land us in different parts of the world, focusing on other people. Many of my closest friends are these sort of people, the people who want to get out and do something, ..and chances are good that we will never see each other again. I really value the times we can have together.







That's why everyone needs to get out there and do something... so wherever I go, there will be others also going. We will be everywhere. And none of us will go alone.











Also,




The Fountain is an amazingly beautiful use of film as a media of expression and illustration. Amazing.

But not everyone thinks so.

Each scene is packed with symbolism. Every aspect contributes entirely toward the message. It's a very different use of film as discovery and art and a vehicle for an idea - I think it's the closest a film has ever come to being a comic book. Or graphic novel if you prefer.

I don't know if anyone's ever used the media of cinematography in this way before.

Photo Shoot

I'll...
explain later.

(Guthrie, 2)

"Besides appreciating what is of permanent value in Greek thought, we may also learn from observing how much latent mythology it continued to shelter within what appears to be a roof and walls of solid reason.
...

...This is not a condemnation of myth as false in itself. Its stories
and images may be, at an early stage of civilization, the only
available means (and an effective one) of expressing profound and
universal truths. Later, a mature religious thinker like Plato may
choose it deliberately, and as the culmination of a reasoned argument,
to communicate experiences and beliefs, the reality and cogency of
which is a matter of conviction outrunning logical proof. This is
genuine myth and its validity and importance are undoubted.










The danger begins when men believe they have left all that behind and are relying on a scientific method based solely on a combination of observation and logical inference. The unconscious retention of inherited and irrational modes of thought, cloaked in the vocabulary of reason, then becomes an obstacle rather than an aid, to the pursuit of truth.

The reason for making this point at the outset is that the implicit
acceptance of mythical concepts is a habit that never completely
relaxes its hold. Today it is even more heavily overlaid than in
ancient Greece with the terminology of rational disciplines. This
makes it more difficult to detect and therefore more dangerous."

-W.K.C. Guthrie
A History of Greek Philosophy
Volume I
The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans

The Note in the Bottles

written for a spring '06 poetry class.
Inspired by Craig Thompson’s Goodbye Chunky Rice










The Note in the Bottles


I miss you
I miss you
I miss you
Until I think of something else to write,
I miss you
I’ll keep writing these notes
And searching for bottles to put them in
I miss you
I’ll keep walking to the shore and wading
through the sand
to stand with cold water curling
around my ankles, my knees,
I miss you
sucking the breath away at my stomach
cold

I miss you

With every note
in every bottle hurled into the waves,
I miss you

In every color crayon I have
I miss you
Written out in every way
that I can’t say it
I miss you
I hope
That perhaps the same wave
that tugs the breath from my chest
Is pushing the bottles up against
The hull of your ship.
I hope
That their nervous clinking
clustered in the water, holding notes
is enough
to notice.
I miss you
Until I think of something else to say –

I won’t say that I’ll swim out to you or
hurl bottles until
my arms erode
I won’t say I’ll sink into the sand,
waiting,
I won’t survive that way.

I cannot quite sound out
the song
that Orpheus played alone.
If I knew the tune,
I’d teach a seagull
To drop it like a fish,
And shining, flapping, silver
fading notes
Might catch your ear
Before you throw it back

I miss you
I hope
But I think I may run out of bottles.
I may run out of crayons
I may run out of dumpsters to dig through
Searching for some way to tell you
I miss you
Until the sea is flooded with bottles
And there is no more space for water
I miss you

to stick on your list...

Sisters of the Road, an awesome, awesome homeless/low-income focused program in Portland is doing some fundraising. If you are looking for a good program to contribute your fancy american dollars towards, I can vouch for this place.

Tukul Crafts has a lot of cool stuff. Yes, it ships from Egypt, but it's cheap and helps feed people I vaguely know.

Also,
one of my friends has a source of wrapping paper - type stuff that supports people who make it in Manilla. Leave a comment and I'll get you the relevant info.

ah, advertising that's actually worth it...
* breathes in *

Re: Postcard

I got your postcard in the mail today.

I wish I could tell you how nice it feels. I tell myself by inventing melodies on the piano, but I cannot tell you since I have no adequate way to send you music.

But, I can tell you that I think today I was pleasantly suprised with one of the more beautiful impromptu concerts I've ever heard from myself.

Tunnel Vision

It's finals week.
Studying etc is going pretty well,
but I want it to end.
I want to finish my work, leave these hallways and get back to the world outside where there is life and real things - I want to leave this cave of shadows.

By the way,
here is what is outside of the cave of shadows:



These are some of the kids I volunteered for over the summer.
You'll notice they each have a writing pad and a pencil. This is a great step up for the school from last summer. They are learning English, Music (songs), drama, and art. They might have math now that we're back into the regular school year.

While I'm sitting indoors on this couch reading scholarly articles about group theory and hyperbolic representations, wishing I could finish this and move on to the real world, ...

In the real world, kids are hundreds of miles away from home, haven't eaten breakfast yet, probably woke up somewhere between 3 and 5 to collect water for the day, and who knows if they'll ever live anywhere else, which they must because their original government has decided that they are not human enough to live and their temporary environment generally despises them for problems associated with being part of an influx of refugees to Cairo. And these are the lucky ones - the ones whose families can afford to send them to school.

And what am I doing?
today, I'm going to take a geometry test.

Quiet Fire

Taken mid-October of this year.

Sometimes everything is so beautiful that I think if I could look at it all at once, I would explode.

Maybe that's why pictures have to have frames.
Had I been able to capture that whole afternoon in my lens, posting it here would result in homicide (assuming I survived that long).

Kaleidoscope in Chlorophyll

I never would've got this shot had it not been for the fleet of green caterpillar-like creaures descending in sheets of silkish strands from the trees catching my attention by hitting me in the face.

Morning Breaking

 

I woke up one morning in early October and found this outside, which provoked much wandering around in a bathrobe with a camera. Morning - a time for breaking ground, as Harry Chapin might say.

On to his Next Chapter

Not sure how he feels about having his name listed in media such as this, so I'll leave it out but if you know him, you'll know who I'm talking about.

Recently, the head of our Outdoors Program resigned to move on to discovering the next part of his life. He was the organizing energy for the eventual development of a smooth, solid, effective outdoors program which excells both in quality and quantity of outdoors experience and training. But, he won't take that much credit for it, so we've been calling him the catalyst. And yes, to be fair, there are a large number of other people both students and staff involved and contributing to furthering the program. And, continuing to be fair, many probably wouldn't be there without him and the opportunities that he helped bring about.

We had a goodbye/send-off party of sorts for him. In all honesty, I think he is one of the more thorough human beings I have ever met. It's hard to describe. He's one of those people.. One of those people that you hope to become if you have enough experience, wisdom, insight, and genuine involvement in the world around you. One of those people that you forget exists these days because you don't expect people to be that real and to actually believe things about what is good in people and what is valuable in nature and what is worth it in life. It seems so natural in him. That's what I mean by 'thorough'.


But of course, I can never say these things out loud.
so I write them down into goodbye letters
with the recipient's name in calligraphy -
colored caligraphy, in attempt to let them know that their name is worth special attention.
And I attach little folded cranes because I wish I could be more direct in expressing - but I need a messenger to speak for me. Cranes are weighty with connotations, so they seem like appropriate messengers. Cranes are songs that can't find words.

I used to be able to imitate just about any bird call - except for cranes. It only strikes me now that this seems more interesting given the associations that I just made concrete in the previous paragraph.

I almost wish I'd taken a picture of the crane and letter I made for him, but I intentionally didn't. It's all for him.

But the words are also mine, and I cling to my words like a staff.

This is roughly what I gave him.
And I'm putting it here because I don't want this to be forgotten.





This is not the greatest letter ever written, nor the neatest folded crane. Honestly, I made both right before I came, because I'd forgotten the time. But here is what I could do with what I had. And, that's what you said time was for, right? (I paraphrase:) To limit us into choosing those things which are important.

I haven't taken many of your classes, but I've been around enough to know that you're a great teacher and incredible person - would that there were more of you - and it would be selfish of us to demand you spend all of your precious interval of time here. Thank you for all you've given us, and I hope we can continue in sharing the gift.

Best of everything for the future.

Prometheus' Descent

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Previously, I posted about Pierrot and the Moon which I saw as one of two Theater thesis performances.

The other performance was called Virginia Woolf: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, a rather clever arrangement of characters in which the ghost of Virginia Woolf arrives at the New York Library where there's a display on her work set up - apparently in honor of the upcoming 125th anniversary of her birth in Jan '07. When I go to plays, I copy down lines I like in my notebook. One of the quotes (which I didn't quite copy in time, so forgot some of it) went something like All I have ever longed for is one expressive sentence that should signify all the glory ...
...All these journals, and I was never able to strike on such a phrase.

As further context, I'd like to reference this post, [link to be reinstated at a time TBA] which I actually made just before typing this one.

written in my notebook during intermission between the two performances:

***

This causes me to think that perhaps I should read more Virginia Woolf. I really don't have any experience with her writing. I also want such a sentence. I suppose we all do, but some of us don't have writing as our primary medium of interpretive expression. And then, I don't want to read her, for the same reason that I don't want to read xkcd sometimes - I want my creations to be my own - I want to write it myself! But a friend and I were talking about the problem of potentially never having an original thought. And reflecting on how much effort and energy it takes to advance to something that actually IS new to anyone other than myself, and also how I am sometimes frustrated with others for making mistakes or for coming upon something slower than they would have had they simply opted to read certain relevant things.

...

It's possible that it would be selfish for me to miserly insist on owning the things I think I'm creating rather than recognizing that my own thoughts are relatively unoriginal.

Maybe I should look around more for ways to step up off of the work of others, allowing myself to become less my own and more of others -
allowing the things I produce to be a collective work.

At least then,
I would be honest in my attempts to progress rather than fooling myself into thinking that I can, at my present stage, endeavor to create anything truly new

when all around me,
my same thoughts that I ignorantly transcribe here, are readily available in volumes & minds of others if I would only let them influence me in the same way that I hope my work can someday influence others.

I am feeling rather hypocritical at the moment.

***


Oh yes-

The end of the Virginia Woolf play contains such quotes (much quotage removed) as:

(reading from Moments of Being)
"behind the cotton wool,
there is hidden a pattern
and we are all parts of that pattern..."

... we are the thing itself

I can hold these words,
but I will never change them. Even if I were to destroy everything in the world,
they are the unchanging thing
and I have no posession of them.

...here is life
here are the words given us each alike,

and we must do our best with them.

Pierrot's Moon

After seeing Reed thesis performance Pierrot and the Moon by the illustrious Mr. Owicki, I wrote in my notebook:

I have a title
I wish to find the photo
it is
"Pierrot's Moon"

Fortunately, I'd taken pictures of the moon just earlier that night...
It was shining through a cloud, with interesting effects.



Pierrot and the Moon consisted of a short skit followed by back to back performances of Pierrot of the Minute by Ernest Dowson and Pierrot Dandy and the Moon by Dieter Bassermann. The development of some particular images through these three performances was very powerfully done.
I would really like to find the entire scripts.

I heard this music long ago, I know not where.





How wan and pale do moon-kissed roses grow

(O, Rose, thou'rt sick!)

Moon-kissed mortals seek in vain
to posess their hearts again



Dream,
thou has dreamed this
yet when thou wake,
be sorrowful,
for dream's sake

It is so hard to be given such a gift,
and be unable to give anything in return,
except thanks.




When, be it soon or late,
What Pierrot ever escaped his fate?

Kosmiotes

Searching for info on the Pythagoreans in History of Greek Philosophy by Guthrie, I found the following, which Guthrie was using as a modern (physics-motivated) example of the way that the Pythagoreans may have dealt with finding confirmation in nature of numerical systems and ratios.




"The ideal element in nature consists in the fact that mathematical laws, which are laws of our own thought, really hold in nature. And that deep amazement which we often feel over the inner order of nature is connected above all with the circumstance that, as in the case of crystals, we have already recognized the effects of this 'mathematics of nature' long before our own mathematical knowledge was sufficiently developed to understand it's necessity."
-CF von Weizsackes, The World-View of Physics, 21











Yet I am reminded of the Intellectualist Fallacy in our Linguistics reading from Foley about how just because a set of rules describes a system, doesn't mean that these are the particular rules which guide the system.






and then there's just stuff like this.