SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine in your winter wood stove, they might think maybe it's easy just because it's free (at least mostly free, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house, wood from various periods of time in the past couple years, some of it stoveready, some not, but you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will dry by the time you need it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully or nearly ready wood, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks, ponder the weather and your wood supply, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with various other aspects of the universe while wandering his theoretical woodlot.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a couple of nearly ready pieces of embodied light, i.e., photons+alpha = wood, into one taller stack, thereby clearing a place for the new incoming atomic structures. Then when winter comes, in the heart of your stove you unleash the energy of those atoms in the welcome form of heat while freeing up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, but right now you have to match the mix of new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all this data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of each stack, but unfortunately as the universe would have it the newest wood always seeks the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom, by for example turning the whole stack over, which is cosmically impractical (Albert, working in complete abstraction, had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about here, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is still used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays, plasma tvs and game consoles, among other things.

This is a universe, after all.

MUSHROOMS AND RELATIVITY

I'd given up on the hiratake mushrooms in the many years since I'd inoculated the logs-- those fussy mushrooms would never emerge, they're so neurotic, as I observed on a tv program where the tyroshroomers sterilized the log sections with steam, inoculated them, wrapped them, buried them in the ground, covered them with leaves and left them alone for who knows how long, did all sorts of terminal care stuff and after all that got only 4 logs out of a dozen successfully inoculated, it was all true 'cause I saw it on tv, so this was really just a bit of mad whimsy I was engaging in here, with my simply principled approach of "just inoculate the mothers, put them under a tree somewhere, cover them with something if you want and forget 'em." So I did. Inoculated them, stacked them on rice straw under some cedars, covered them in rice chaff, more straw, burlap, and left them. But I didn't forget them.

For a good while, I'd peek under the burlap whenever I went by those cedars, but there was never a fungal sign on the logs, other than slow relentless peripheral invasion by small shelf fungi - the turtles of the mushroom world - the logs looked less and less promising. After a time I concluded that the spore had been pre-empted by shelf fungi; the logs were beginning to look forlorn in their ragged, dirty burlap carelessly tossed over woody shoulders, in comparison to the sleek but as yet unproductive shiitake logs leaning nearby in their natural tuxedos, looking ready for the Oscar red carpet, they were so trim, sharp and stylish, clearly prepared for the big time. The formerly alleged hiratake objects, in contrast, were more like under the bridge in a burlap shawl with a bottle in a bag.

Though I hadn't forgotten them, I didn't have much hope for those ancient H-logs anymore, thinking that at least they'll rot down in a few years and make some good compost, in which spirit I was raking leaves and cedar sprigs thereabouts the other day when something graceful and unfamiliar caught the eye of that little mindscout that's always watching through hope's tiny windows even when we daydream, that never lets go of possibility, which is really why we humans are successful as a species: it never lets us give up, is always on the lookout for a revelation... mindscouters DaVinci, Franklin, Einstein are a few good examples - not that I myself am in such company, but the list is - where was I... Oh yeah, those wonderful and elegant, Oscar-winning Hiratake Logs... Boy, were they beauties; I've never seen Hiratake that size; they're never that big when you see them in stores... and turns out that, unlike the lazy shiitake logs, the Hiratake were inoculated only 1 year ago, when in my head it used to be three or more years ago! Time is slowing down for a change! It's like when I was 10 years old! Today was a week long! Tomorrow, yay!

Not forgetting makes time longer than forgetting does. Or it could be all these mushrooms I'm eating...

Photo

SPACE, TIME AND FIREWOOD

Folks who don't heat with firewood can't really appreciate all that goes into that bit of sunshine set loose in your woodstove, you think maybe its easy just because it's free (at least, the way I do it), but there are other burdens that come with the generally erratic supply of gleaned firewood such as I use. There's really no need to mention here the sectioning and hauling and splitting and hauling and stacking and hauling and burning and hauling and hauling and hauling, but I already did so it's too late.

Take 2: Say you've got four or five cords of firewood crowding out there in various locations around your house (as I do at the moment), wood from various periods of time in the past few years, some of it stoveready and some not, but in any case you've run out of stacking space and have just been given access to a whole new multicord bunch of bigwood to be split and stacked so it will be dry by the time you need to use it two or three winters from now, so you've got to put it somewhere on your land but you can't stack new green wood on top of fully ready or nearly ready wood are you crazy, so you've got to walk around, analyze your stacks and ponder your wood supply and various durations, juggling disparate concepts sort of like Einstein used to do with arrangements of numbers and symbols while wandering his theoretical woodlot, the space-time continuum at Princeton.

With these sylvan symbols as well, like Albert you've got to somehow bend time and space by combining a number (x) of similarly nearly ready pieces of embodied energy (E), i.e., photons+alpha as wood (W), into one or more taller stacks (S), thereby clearing a place for the new mass (m) of incoming atomic structures; then when winter comes, you unleash the power of those atoms inside your stove in the form of radiating heat (H) and so free up some space outside, thereby establishing a direct link between time, space and firewood, not to mention the speed of light (c), which can be squared if you want, but right now you have to match the mix of wood new and old.

Fortunately, last year you began to denote all the relevant data in numerical symbols on the end face of one piece of wood at the top of a stack, but unfortunately the newest wood is always on the top of the stack, so to get at the older wood you have to go to the bottom by for example turning the whole stack over, which is not practical (working in complete abstraction, Albert had it easier in this regard), and practicality is what we're talking about, so this approach needs work. Al's work led to atomic fissioning and nuclear power, which here in Japan has a bigly negative historic reputation but is now used in winter to power electric heaters, blu-rays and videogame consoles, among vast quantities of other things.

This is a universe, after all.

PUMPKINS IN THE AIR

Some people get up in the morning and say a prayer or do their stretchy exercises or just go and have breakfast; these days I look out the window to see if the pumpkin is still there.

Not that it's an obsession or anything, get away, its just that I've never grown a pumpkin this far before without a passing simian biting through the stem and loping off, arms full of the apish equivalent of the Hope diamond.

This year though, I planted a couple of pumpkin plants inside my new fence, just to give pumpkinity another try, because when it comes to vegetables I'm willing to perform an identical action a number of times and expect a different result, as per Einstein's definition of insanity, like Albert himself no doubt would have done if he'd had a garden up here, but by the same manic means he at last arrived at his own relativity theory, which, like pumpkins in my garden, was insane for its time.

Unlike Albert, I planted my pumpkins rather late, though still in season, since I'm not that insane, partly thinking: well, hell, some pumpkins might at least distract monkey attention from my onions, which seems to have worked so far. An opportunistic pumpkin that had sprouted from the compost pile grew to quite a size before it was snatched by the beasts well in advance of ripeness. Monkeys are not known for gourmetish discernment.

It being so late in the summer when I planted two baby pumpkin plants I didn't expect much, pumpkinwise. Between them they produced one smallish pumpkin, which even the monkeys haven't bothered, but at some point one of the pumpkin tendrils found the net of the fence, when the whole plant began to climb, and once it had those many square meters of airiness all to itself it soared like a bird, put out big fat round leaves and sunny blossoms, and before too long there was a healthy, happy plumpy pumpkin, dangling way up in the air.

I've never seen an airborne pumpkin before, except briefly when we used throw them at each other when I was a garden-raiding kid, much like the monkeys that are imposing my karmic justice on me now, albeit more severely than I deserve. I have more than repaid my debt to pumpkin society. Full karmic interest should suffice, don't you think, Siva? But to get back to the pumpkin at hand, it seems happy up there, wingless though it is.

And by virtue of altitude it might just get past the monkeys, who, like their habituated human counterparts, do not look for pumpkins in the air.

THE WILDERNESS OF MY ROOM

Like any space, every room begins as a wilderness-- and if the right kind of person has lived in it for a year or two, it becomes even moreso. Take for example my room: a special preserve, I call it, and I like to keep it that way, it's a matter of psychoecology, which is very important to me.

All my life I've done the best I could in that regard, working hard to preserve at least one remnant of wilderness in my daily life despite mothers, aunts, teachers and latterly, master sergeants and wives. As a result of those early and ongoing struggles I more than ever consider it my primal duty, on behalf of humankind, to foster the natural state of things. I therefore try to keep my room as close to that condition (natural plus ultra) as possible so I don't lapse into the illusory danger of thinking that I have my room under control and that even more could be under my control (today my room; tomorrow etc.). Hitler and Mussolini, a couple of obsessively punctilious guys, were like that: they had very neat rooms that led inevitably to spiffy uniforms and the illusion of neat countries, neat neighboring countries, neat populations etc.

The neat room is a dangerous illusion, as history is de facto continuously pointing out to society at large via various financial, political, religious and activist groups of righteous room cleaners and organizers of the human race in general, but we in the developed world never seem to learn, because we insist on trying to get all our kids to clean all their rooms, thereby instilling in them the erroneous belief (as with most beliefs) not only that it should be done, but that it can be done. "A place for everything and everything in its place" is the most inimical and least natural thing I've ever heard, it is the seed of tyranny. Il Duce had that embroidered on his underwear. This is where it gets insidious, or is it invidious... My dictionary is around here somewhere... In this corner I think, at the bottom of that stack under the lantern... Used to be with my thesaurus, which because of this pile of hats I just moved to-- hey this is interesting, I don't think I've ever read this, didn't know I had it, it's in the neopile-- discovery is a wonderful thing.

Shelves, for example, and drawers and their desks or whatever, impart the chronic and tragic misapprehension that our own thoughts, hence our creativity, are organized in such a way, when creativity clearly indicates otherwise (as evidenced by its loss through pigeonhole education). This has led for example to all the terrible poetry etc. we've had to endure down the ages, in amounts far exceeding the sublime bits that survive less and less each year, that came straight out of one wild room or another, created by the diminishing defenders of domestic wilderness.

Neatness interferes, whereas wilderness prevents senility, ever honing the mind to new sharpness. You think Einstein had a neat mind? DaVinci's was a mess; Beethoven, forget it. Creativity is anarchic, unpredictable and cannot be summoned, as can the devil of neatness. No discovery in the room, no discovery in the resident. That's a paraphrase of a Frost quote I've got in a book right about there, under the beeswax candles in one of those boxes in the corner, under the sweaters. Being one with the wilderness, like Tarzan or Geronimo, I know where all the vines, hideouts and escape routes are (there's a river in that direction, there's a butte over there, a canyon beyond etc.), which is quite enough to be getting on with. One only needs so much knowledge of where key things are; the rest is clutter.

My room has been purposely kept wild because at least some places on earth should be kept free of human interference, maintained as reverential venues where the primordial can still be experienced (such places are disappearing by the day). What greater insight can be gained in this modern world than by daily reminders of our primal origins, leading to fundamental understanding of what is truly possible? A room in its essence is our one clear chance at letting the world run free, insofar as this can be done in an enclosed space for which you're paying rent, mortgage, maintenance, depreciation or whatever, paid for via time spent in a painfully neat office, so why waste what may be one's only opportunity to experience the primordial on a regular basis?

In any case, its folly to argue with entropy; look at what it does to dictators.

You'll find none of that in my room.

A HANDFUL OF BROADWAYS

While I was going through the routine of making tea early this morning I noticed a couple of leaves falling from the cherry tree in the garden as a bird rummaged one of the branches, and I thought: it isn’t even September yet, and already the leaves are getting ready to fall...

...An indefinite time later I abruptly returned from an unforgettable autumn day in the Bois de Boulogne some time back in the 20th century, and thought: uh-oh…what did I just do... did I dump the tea down the drain or - no - I was on morning autopilot, so that's ok...

Amid the lingering ambience of the Bois, this bit of gentle confusion brought to mind something I hear a lot from and about folks my age after they wind up doing just this sort of thing: that their memory is slipping-- "absent-minded" is the old-fashioned term for it, idiomatically associated with a professor, which used to give it an intellectual cachet it doesn't have anymore.

My feeling, though, is that this isn't absence of mind at all. The fact is, that in this portion of a well-lived life the mind is by now so rich, so diverse in rewarding avenues of thought, the very Champs-Elysees of consciousness, indeed several Champs-Elysees, plus you can throw in some Ginzas and Ramblas and Unter den Lindens, a handful of Broadways and Route 66s for starters (and whatever else pertains in your particular case) while you're at it, and don’t get me going on the neighborhoods (let alone the wilds or the wildlife, rivers, mountains, forests) I carry in me and that render me subject to enthrallment by a priceless recollection or perception at any moment's turn in the everyday, it should be no surprise that now and then, like a little kid at a carnival I stop and gaze, meditating in natural delight until my return. If this is absent-mindedness, then Einstein was an idiot.

It's the opposite of when I was younger and my filling mind was always busy absorbing all the new things there were, sauntering the new avenues of thought and life I was mapping and experiencing - when focus was the essential point - in the midst of each new and newly fascinating experience I really had no lifeplace of my own yet for my mind to wander far off to, the way it does now. To give Gertrude Stein a friendly tweak, as yet there was no there there.

So if you've been enjoying a well-lived life, by the time you reach my age you have a lot of there there. With so many lives in you to live, re-live and be mentally active in, it should be no surprise if you're often in more than one life at a time (especially when in one of them what you're doing has become routine...). So you might as well admit it: you're not absent-minded, you're extra-minded.

If you don't believe me, just visit your Louvre.