Queenjulia's Blog & Photos

Friday.24.November.04

A neighbor talked to me a few days ago, chiding me for the fact that David has said that he likes displacement boats, yet uses one in his business that planes. "People can go places too fast," said the neighbor.

As with most people, my first response to criticism is defensiveness. First of all, I do my best to separate what's mine from what's David's. It's not my business to monitor his statements about his boat. Second of all, I happen to know that he's perfectly without hypocrisy in this matter. He spent a year trying to convince everyone that displacement was better, but when he gave up and switched to a faster boat, his business finally began to pay for itself. Third of all, doing things quickly in and of itself is not a bad thing. You choose how you'll spend your time, and if you're ethical, you include environmental and quality of life factors in your decision. If you don't have an attitude, you'll pick speed some days and deliberation others. And fourth of all, for the most part, I think you have to trust your neighbors. It's hard enough being mindful of your own life. There's no moral benefit in monitoring how other people spend their time.

Defensiveness aside, I sympathize with my neighbor's concern. It does seem to me that speeding the pace of life up has immediate positive feedback, but in the long term might not be very sensible. Many things that we "have" to do turn out to be missable. It might be harder to do without something or to fake it, but spending the time and energy to go to the store to get it might turn out to be harder in the long run.

Living here, where the pace is indeed slower, I have no problems with boredom even though I have a short attention span. Life expands to fill the gaps. When I hear how my mainland friends spend their days, I'm often concerned that they can't possibly do justice to their schedule or to their possessions. As my dad used to say, "you need to schedule time to smell the roses."

Friday.19.November.04 Skipjack.

I spent much of daylight outside, cleaning out under the house. Moved batts of insulation to the woodshed, and found a delicate little cat skull.

The Carpenter asked us if we wanted to spend the extra money for ecologically friendly insulation, and we both said, "yes" without hesitation. But here's the question. Is it e.f. to throw out the evil insulation and buy the good stuff? Or does using the old stuff that's already bought have less impact? In our case, we'll solve the problem by giving the old stuff to another carpenter who has made an art form out of using scrounged material.

But the general question remains. Another example would be, should you keep your old 15mpg Buick or should you buy a new fuel-efficient smog-free car? You'd have to consider the day-to-day benefits as well as the long-term benefits. You'd have to take into account the effect your decision would make on other people, since we humans are generally copy-cats, but in a fashion-conscious way. And you'd have to consider whether it was even ethical to sell the old car, or should you just junk it? Also, the money you'd pay for the new car would have to be earned. If you bought the new car, you would be diverting that amount from some other, possibly more socially worthy purchase. And if you didn't, maybe you would not have to work as much, thus, possibly, increasing the quality of your life.

Some of our friends solve this by not having a car in the first place, or by sharing the use of a car. For sociable people without children, this seems ideal. For me, it seems as though it takes an incredible amount of arranging time, time that I personally would regard as a horrible waste.

Wouldn't it be cool to live in a culture where the most convenient thing to do would also be the most ethical thing to do?

Wednesday.17.November.04 Wool drying on the elderberries.

Mail comes three days a week, which seems to make it more urgent to get the mail out on those days. It's not casual. So we spent a tense morning folding, taping, addressing, and stamping the school newsletter. We skimmed in to the Post Office with 111 of them, which made the bill $66.60, the number of Pure Evil. So, are we supposed to make something of that? Is our newsletter the harbinger of the End Times?

Omens and anthrpomorphisms are part of every culture. Even the science mavens I know tend to name their computers and beat-up trucks. I do it. My last computer was named Mrs. Cake, from Terry Pratchett's formidable but mostly virtual boarding house keeper. She certainly lived up to her name. I have little parenthenses in my mind, though, which assure me that the anthropomorphism is a loose metaphor, humorous partly because it so obviously doesn't apply very well.

Of course, that's part of the relentlessly scientific story with which I describe the world. Because I'm trained in mathematical thinking, I tend to analyze structure and content separately. To me, content is somewhat arbitrary, subject to the whims of experience. The hair on your head, for example, could be any length between zero and one meter and I wouldn't be alarmed. And structure is elusive, with ramifications that we seem to miss when we decide we understand how things work; Einstein's elaboration of Newton's laws are an example. Coincidences and false inferences are just that.

The Number of the Beast is fraught with the glory and the terror of God's last wrap-up. People seek out emotional peaks and valleys from whatever source, it seems. Revelations,, whatever else it is, is not crystalline in meaning. You surf along on the emotions invoked and arrive, willy-nilly, at some sandy surf-bashed meaning for 666.

On the other hand, and here is where I think I differ with Bk, I think that meaning most certainly does reside in the synchronicities of daily life. Those meanings are personal but, in my view, everything is personal.

Okay, okay. I'm not a solipsist. I don't think that the universe begins and ends with me. But I experience it that way. As far as I can tell, all but the most exalted interactions I have with other people are projections of my own psyche onto their screen, interacting with some more or less dimly experienced "other." And the same goes for everyone else I've watched. As far as I experience, while I trust that the Universe really does have an objective existence "out there," the way it interacts with me is purely for me. When something that seems significant pops up, it behooves me to pay attention.

My body/mind/spirit has, on the whole, become more and more aware of itself since I was a zygote. This isn't just because of intentional stuff like yoga and education and meditation, but also because of the upheavals and shifts that occur in the unconscious as the weight of experience gathers. I believe (and this is definitely a belief, not a deduction) that the soul is emergent behavior. You start with your basic human wetware: cells, electrical impulses and gunky stuff. You can tell if it's dead. You can even tell if it's brainwashed or drunk; the soul part of it doesn't work correctly. If all of it works right, though, you can tell that there's more to it than just functioning machinery.

Bk and I have been bickering about God for some years. He finds my understanding of God to be ridiculous (for many reasons, only some of which I think I answer below). Recently, I found this delicious passage in Richard Tarnas' The Passion of the Western Mind. He is talking about Plato's understanding of the Greek gods:

Depending on a specific dialogues� context, Zeus, Apollo, Hera, Ares, Aphrodite, and the rest could signify actual deities, allegorical figures, character types, psychological attitudes, modes of experience, philosophic principles, transcendent essences, sources of poetic inspiration or divine communications, objects of conventional piety, unknowable entities, imperishable artifacts of the supreme creator, heavenly bodies, foundations of the universal order, or rulers and teachers of mankind.

Man, that Plato! That's just what I was trying to tell Bk. It sounds confused because it is confused. It's confused because I think that the divine is generated by the same emergent behavior that generates soul. To experience god, you turn around and look into your own depths, which act is at the same time looking out at your metaphors for the universe. It's entangled with what makes you you, and its complexity arises combinatorily from the complexity of your neuron patterns.

In Zen, you're supposed to contemplate things as they are before you give them a name; it's an effort to get past the world of stories and to actuality. But I think that's just another story; the Zen story that things are more real if they aren't drawn into categories. In my story, the definition of human includes that our existence is metaphor-ing; that's how we find the universe. Metaphors and stories include the laws of physics (which I believe could have been formed from different aspects of the natural world and still be true) and human evolution, as well as our ideas about what love means, about who to vote for, about whether it's okay to take a toddler to a restaurant. Those are pretty clearly stories. The rest of the time, when you're washing dishes or waking up or something, that's also suffused with stories.

We dream all the time. We don't notice because daily life usually drowns them out. I spent a few years trying to capture my dreams every morning and learned a fairly effective method. I usually awaken with a particular emotional flavor in my head. If I hang on to it delicately but insistently, often all of a sudden I realize that the memory of the dream was always there, but I mistook it for background dailiness. Big chunks of plot fall into place. With practice and a purposeful light-footedness of mind, that technique can be used any time. Dreamlike metaphors and snatches of stories stitch together my whole life at the foundation level. And there's where God lives; the generator of metaphor; the mechanism by which metaphor intersects reality.

No wonder God is divine; all meaning comes from that process. Here's Tarnas' Plato fragment revisited:

Actual deities: If God is what generates meaning, people are likely to project that process onto anything deeply meaningful. People used to find God in sex or pillars of fire or gardens. Now there are people who find him in fear of change, or in fear of homosexuals, or in love of babies. allegorical figures: Not so much an allegorical figure, as the source of allegorical figures. character types: My dreams are peopled by character types who act out the stories about who I am and where I'm going. psychological attidudes, modes of experience, philosophic principles: All life metaphors. sources of poetic inspiration or divine communications: I think that all the really interesting things in life are only accessible through metaphor. Find a good one and you get that shiver that lets you know the divine has breathed on you. objects of conventional piety: There's a lot to be said for conventional religious ritual. Nobody is always in the mood for awareness but you should be reminded regularly that it is available. unknowable entities: Take the Universe. Okay, it's pretty big, isn't it? Well, now consider all the ways you could relate to it. That's infinitely bigger. That's God; infinite and intentional. imperishable artifacts of the supreme creator: I think of God as pretty big. Each religion has its own God, each person has their own, but they're all avatars of the same thing. The "imperishable" part works for me if I think of each moment as imperishable. No matter what happens tomorrow, today has eternal existence as today. heavenly bodies: projection. foundations of the universal order, or rulers and teachers of mankind: Both spot-on.

Now that I have explained God to you, you will be interested to know that I met him in a dream. His avatar was Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, a fat guy with a relentless attitude who knows and explains all.

Oh yeah, I was going to talk about synchronicity. Later.

Thursday.11.November.04 Wall.

Mom's frail but courageous. Her arms are covered with bruises that come from her blood-thinning medicine. She holds on to furniture as she walks. She almost invariably wins at cards. Sometimes she is lost in a fog and sometimes incisively insightful.

Some years ago, my therapist asked me what I did after I woke up. "I lie in bed and plan my day," I answered.

"And how do you do that?"

"I've got a running list of things that have to happen, and usually some of it's like teaching or cooking that doesn't have a cut and dried content. So when I know how long things have to take, then I'll run through scenes until there's one that plays. Like, if I'm going to be running a meeting I go over the agenda, and if there's people I have to talk to beforehand I play through where I want the conversations to go, and think about whether I personally have a goal for the meeting, and then I think about the aspects that I have problems with and if there's a better way than what I have been trying."

"No wonder you get so much done," she said kindly. "What if you were to just take the day as it comes and not plan it?"

"Then it would all fall to pieces," I said. Then, "I'll try it." That night, I dreamed that the prison doors had been opened and I was running out of the stone building into a vast sunny area with tree-shaded open air cafes, pursued by jailors.

Learning that my therapist's suggestion was a good one still doesn't sit easy with me some years later. Finding the balance between my instinct to over-organize, and my committment to live somewhat more chaotically isn't a one-time thing.

Today was an example. We planned three days for Portland, for various reasons that I went over carefully but don't plan to re-examine, now that the plan's been made (how different from David, who is always ready to change as new input comes). We had a fairly long shopping list, both for things for the ordinary running of the household, and for snow gear and house gifts for Norway. Also, we wanted to spend time with my sons and my sisters and mom. Due to razor-sharp planning and some luck at Goodwill, we finished the shopping by two o'clock today, leaving a blank day and a half. That's the tightass Ms. Perfect part.

You can't read it, but I can. It says iBook G4.

Now, here's the clueless part. Okay, look at the picture on the right. You can see exactly what my circle of vision takes in here at Mom's table: my laptop, the cold tea, and the origami book (Tomoko Fuse's Unit Origami, a must-read for geeky types). I've seen a variation of this view for at least half an hour every day as I blog. Sometimes the tea has lemon juice in it instead of cream, of course.

You will notice that smack in the middle of the scenery it says iBookG4. That's a crucial part of this story. So, there I was in the Mac Store, and I wanted to buy an Airport Card so I could do e-mails in Norway and upload the blog. The very nice salesman asked, "And what kind of laptop do you have?"

And I said, "A G3."

Of course, that could be due to plain old dumbness. But, I like to think that it isn't. Attention can't be allocated to too many places at once. When I live in such a way that details matter, which I have done, then I can list the contents of every drawer in the house, I know what the unit price and yield is on everything in our IRAs, I know when all the warranties expire and all the clothes are either mended, ironed, and hanging up, or they are in color-sorted laundry bins. This leaves little mental space for serendipity, the sudden whoosh of wings through the attic.

Mom's struggles with daily living, then, I think are what leave her room to be herself. She's undergone overwhelming changes in her life, including famine, war, death, love, art, music, suburban living, and advanced old age. To give herself time to savor what life has brought, she needs to drop extraneous stuff, like cleaning out the refrigerator or listening closely to the multilayered chatter that we sisters and our children generate.

Tuesday.9.November.04

Yesterday the neighbors came over to help eat leftovers. We played fiddle for hours. Music is harder for me to grasp than the visual arts, because it's auditory and ephemeral; two of my weakest perception faculties are hearing and memory. When Ruby talks to me about how the chord structure wants to move from here to there, I only dimly hear what she means. Repetition makes it more clear, but boredom happens before understanding. Or, not boredom, but the kind of gridlock you get when you've heard the same phrase so often it devolves into gibberish. Melodic movement makes a little more sense to me. When those rippling washes of sound slosh around as we cycle through a hornpipe or slip jig, I'm soothed and delighted.

On the ferry today, the Ex UN Advisor said that research in the San Juans shows that our salmon aren't eating lots of "forage fish," as they do elsewhere. Scientists have developed teensy fish-stomach pumps. Trained (but strange) technicians inspect fish barf to find larval octopus beaks, juvenile crabs, and the amphipods and copopds that we call "sand fleas." The official word until this guy catalyzed this research, was that the San Juans don't even have resident salmon because we don't have rivers or reasonable habitat. But, it turns out that we do. Salmon spawn in our teeny tiny creeks. The Noodle Bowl. Fry from rivers all over the greater Puget Sound congregate along our beaches (I've kayaked over schools of them), chowing down on crunchy things. Even with such an economically important fish, we are just beginning to notice what they are actually like and what they do with their time.

We stopped at Seattle University to meet with Bk, who was looking fresh-faced and perky. Took him to The Noodle Bowl in the International District, where we agreed that the fried chive pancakes were exquisite. Had a pleasant conversation about democrating schools and about intelligent machines. "He's a good man," I said to The Spink as we drove out of Seattle. "He's a very good man."

"You already said that," said The Spink.

Monday.8.November.04 Back in sunnier days, the cat chameleoned herself to selected surfaces.

The Spink and I will be in Portland for the rest of the week if all goes well. Looking forward to seeing family.

One of the main points brought up by the UN guy last night was that institutions carry with them their own dynamic. Real people are distanced, even if the institution is run by well intentioned people like aid workers. Concentrating power like that means that people, who have an instinct to follow and exploit power, often loose sight of their own ethics.

In a world where cultures have learned to centralize things like government, money supply, and even labor and religion, the interests of normal people are often set aside in favor of the interests of the system itself. (This is not to claim that people's interests are well served in indigenous societies, either, of course.) What is needed is to realize that we need to hold our own against bureaucracies, in whatever form.

I'm trying to think of an example that isn't horribly loaded, but of course, they all are, because we in Western Civilication have always struggled with institution vs. individual. Here's an example that's losing the urgency that it once had: If I were Catholic (I'm not, but I'm familiar with many Catholic issues), then I might find that the larger interests of the Catholic Church might usually coincide with mine. I might even go along with some aspects that don't really serve me because my energy and mind is tied up with the institution. But at some point, I'd have a crisis of faith. As a woman, I might if I got pregnant when I couldn't deal with a child. For my father, it was when the Catholic Church in Czecheslovakia did not protect him, a Catholic with Jewish blood, at the beginning of the Nazi years. For one of my mother's friends, it was when they visited The Vatican together and she realized that the magnificent treasures gilding the walls had been wrung from the blood of countless indigenous "converts."

Although it can be done in shadow as well.

Okay, so now you've had your crisis of faith and you understand that you and the institution are separate; that the institution is making decisions that not only would you not make, but that nobody you have ever met would make unless they had some institution to back their unworthy decision up. Who do you know who would sit there and insist that somebody they knew and loved have a baby that she can't cope with? Who do you know who would send my father to a death camp? Who do you know who would pour gold down somebody's throat in order to find more gold? I can imagine such things being done, but only if the person doing it steps aside, metaphorically speaking, and lets some concept of what everybody else is doing or believing take over their own mind.

And who do you know who would divert aid money from starving people into their own pockets? Nobody sane. The insanity, I suspect, comes from that stepping aside. It comes from not insisting on holding on to your self. From allowing some concept of what "the Church" or "America" or "The United Nations" would do take over your decisions.

Remember when you were a kid and you playacted different roles? What I noticed fairly early on, was that you had to pretend to have a blind spot. You, as the wooden block figure, had no clue about the noisy avalanche that was coming at you. You, as the prissy lady, had zero tolerance for smiles. You, as Guy of Gisborne, wanted to kill Robin Hood so badly that you had no room for sipping a cup of tea or having a conversation with somebody that didn't know Mr. Hood.

I think that happens with adults, too. When we take on roles that aren't our true selves, it's part of the game to install a blind spot. The most creative part of living with others is compassion and respect. If we're playing a role, we'll probably end up screwing up in the compassion department. If we've got a lot of power, that will kill people.

Sunday.7.November.04 About halfway through the table-setting process.

Had an elaborate dinner party, with the DeRuta plates David's parents gave us over the past decade, and starched tablecloth and napkins, and four courses with several choices in each course with appropriate wines and everything. We started fussing at seven in the morning and finished shortly after the guests arrived eleven hours later.

Talk, in that rarified atmosphere, drifted to dumpster diving. The Carpenter said he'd been working at the coop cafe in Michigan, and when neighboring restaurants started featuring fine wines and produce from local farms, they decided to feature a "dumpster dive special" every day, to extremely mixed reviews. In another story, an island surgeon was doing his daily dumpster diving in the South, when he came across several cases of lobsters and sirloin steaks. Wow! He arranged everything carefully, backing his car up to the dumpster with the trunk latch already open, and sprang into efficient action. Just as he finished, a bunch of the restaurant employees exploded out of the back door, cursing and yelling. They'd been stealing from the kitchen and now the doctor was going to drive away with their loot. He did drive away, loosing a bit of tire rubber and one of the lobster cases.

In a seamless segue, we ended up in the Central African Republic. A UN official who was in charge of arranging secret interviews with torture victims had assembled dossiers on eight prospects. She gave the list to her superior, and the next day all eight of them were shot. It turned out he was a double agent in the pay of the CAR government. The next time the Ex-UN-Advisor heard from her, it was through a phone call from Sarajevo, punctuated with static and gunfire. She'd become an infantryman with the UN forces in Bosnia, and said it was much more relaxing there. The Ex-UN-Advisor (let's call him Bob) said a similar thing had happened to him. He'd been sent to Phillipines to investigate misappropriations of aid funds there. The guy through whom the funds were funnelling sent him and his team to a place that turned out to be a war zone. Bob came back and accused him of trying to kill him and his team, but he just laughed it off. He's still in charge there. Bob said that the villages he visited which were supposed to have benefitted from UN aid had never heard of the UN and obviously were not receiving aid.

In another story, Bob was investigating charges that the Botswana Army was relocating the San people of the Kalahari Desert, despite having been asked to stop by the European Union and the UN. He and his San team, a couple of oldsters and an interpreter, visited a number of villages, then came to a kraal, or palisaded village, that was empty. So, they did what one does in Africa, made tea, sat down, drank the tea, and waited. Some hours later, people started coming back. They said that the Botswanan Army had been through a few days before, but they'd been warned in time and took everyone and all the livestock into the bush to wait them out. Eventually, Bob and his team left.

They were captured by the Botswanan Army on their way back to the capital. They were lined up against a shed and an officer paced back and forth in front of them, slapping his riding crop against his thigh and questioning them. "He was just like John Cleese, except he wasn't funny," said Bob. The first old man told this very complicated story about visiting his aunt in the next village, because of some peculiar family necessity. During the story, the officer slapped his riding crop and said, "Right," in a sarcastic tone of voice.

The next old man told an equally complicated, equally false story about having to get some medicine from a medicine man and being sent to another place for complicated reasons. "Right."

The interpreter had a third complex, false story. Finally, it was Bob's turn. "And what the fuck is his story?" asked the officer.

View from the bleachers at the soccer game last month.

"Oh," said one of the old men, "He is our nephew." (Bob is visibly not an African Bushman). "Right." And they were freed and went on their way. But on the way, they got a flat tire and had to dig the Land Rover out of sand and lost a couple of days.

At the airport, Bob was delighted to be leaving. He had his report, he had his polaroids, and life was good. The official at the airport was a very beautiful woman who said sternly, "But your visa expired two days ago. You are not allowed to leave the country with an expired visa. Sir, what have you been doing in Botswana?" "Oh," answered Bob, "I've been investigating human rights abuses by your government in the Kalahari." "Okay then," said the woman, stamped his passport, and waved him onto the plane.

Bob says that when he was there, there were still about 18,000 San in the Botswanan Kalahari. Now there are maybe 2,000. We asked him why the evictions? Well, the official story is that the San are hunters and they poach on the Kalahari Reserve lands. "But I was there. I saw it," said Bob. The tribal lands teemed with game and the government lands had almost none. Why? Because the Cabinet members were cattle farmers and gave each other permission to graze on reserve land. Because native ecologists had worked out what the land needed for maximum biomass and the government ecologists didn't have that knowledge. Another factor was that the diamond mining company, De Beers, had contracted to mine in the south, and, for liability reasons, wanted the land there cleared of people, which the Army obliged them with.

We continued on with cheesecake flambee, brownies with whipped cream, assorted fruits, and a pleasant dessert wine.

Saturday.6.November.04 View from the bleachers at the soccer game last month.

Gloomy day. Nothing electrical's been on all day, and the batteries are still at 97%, which is where we left them last night at bedtime. No solar gain.

On days like this my biology overwhelms my spirit. I shuffle around, waiting for daylight to start so that I can, too. I've got a sunlamp for just such occasions, but it's too much work to turn it on.

Scooped up two cubic feet of The Economists and Foreign Affairs to recycle. At the Post Office exchange, picked up an equal volume of low-grade books and took them home to run through the wood stove. I guess it's my German heritage, book burning, although I have the decency to disapprove and deplore it when other people do it. But I justify it by noting that the two computer books were copyrighted 1989, and that I haven't heard of any of the books condensed in the Readers' Digest editions, and the rat-chewed book about four jolly children on a houseboat was already missing the last chapter.

It's kind of like those idiotic exhortations to "READ!" or "JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS!" It depends on context. Reading, in general, is probably better than shooting stray cats with BB guns. In general.

The most shocking collection of books I ever came across (and yes, I've led a sheltered life in some ways) was in jail. Well, it wasn't a real jail. There were about 300 women in a gym, fresh from a very large demonstration at Lawrence Livermore Labs; I think that was in 1981. Too many of us to fit into their regular jail system. For the most part, they were very nice to us. We got baloney sandwiches and candy bars to eat, and mats on the floor with blankets, and we just ignored them when they told us to stop talking after lights-out. On the second day, they brought in cardboard boxes of book donations, which was very welcome since a good number of us weren't used to the steady invasive energy of three hundred keyed-up people in the same room with us. Some people had been meditating, most people were chatting, and then the boxes of books came in.

They were really seamy. Violent sex and sexy violence, and not consensual, either. Some sensitive soul collected the books in the bathrooms and set fire to them, and everyone cheered, except the guards, one of whom delivered a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lecture later on.

Occasionally I wonder what the heck was going on. Why would an institution give such books to criminals? Nothing good could have come of them. And, who besides the penal system buys them? So anyway, it's not enough to read. You should, at least on some level, decide whether the world will be a better place once you've read the book.

And as for just saying no to drugs, I saw a D.A.R.E. poster in a drugstore window in Portland. What's meant, is, "Just say no to illegal drugs, unless they're for medical purposes and you're pretty sure they're helping you and you got them in some country where they have different standards than the FDA. Also, say no to legal drugs such as alcohol and somebody else's prescriptions, or your own if you're abusing it. And don't use legal substances in ways that give you a high, like don't sniff glue or paint." Somehow, that's not as catchy.

Tuesday.2.November.04 Really cold water.

"What are you going to do if Bush wins?" asked my neighbor.

"I hate political activism, but that seems to be the next step," I said. "The consensus on the Nazis seems to be that things could have been deflected or stopped, but only until a certain point. After that, you were toast. The signs seem to be creeping in that direction now.

"There's the linking of a religious agenda with the political one. That's against the Founding Father's brilliant idea of separating Church and State."

"And," said my neighbor, "if you read Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong? about the decline of the Muslim world, one big reason that they're stagnant and we're not is that the West early on learned to make that separation."

"The implication is that if you don't support Bush, then you're a traitor. I can't reconcile that with the multicultural ideals I was brought up with and accept."

"Hegel's dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," said m.n. "To get to good solutions, you need to seriously consider several points of view."

"And the Patriot Act," I said. "Someday it's going to be declared unconstitutional. Of course, if you're presumed innocent until proven guilty, some guilty people will go free. But I'd rather that than have innocent people be condemned."

"Don't forget Guantanamo Bay, which is still going on," said my neighbor. "Quite aside from the ethical evils of holding people on suspicion, without accusation, trial, or lawyers, there's the question of what our enemies will do to us once they see that we don't respect the Geneva Conventions."

"Okay, we've said this before," I interrupted. "But what, exactly, would effective political action consist of? I know how to write letters to congresspeople, and I know how to hold a placard at a demonstration. But surely there are more effective ways to address political evils. You want your solution to somehow match the world you want to create. I want to live in a world where maybe people bicker a lot in the quest to figure stuff out, or better, do a lot of observing and science, but they don't do power trips or threaten each other. In a way, placard waving is part of the problem."

"We Baby Boomers have done it once. We're old now, and expendable. We need to learn from the mistakes we made the first time around and do it again, but do it right," said m.n. "Most people will do the right thing if they are reminded of the ethical principles that they hold."

"And indeed, there's often a disconnect between the morals people claim and what they do. So, if there was an effective way to wake people up to their own ethics, I'd do it."

"Yep."

Monday.1.November.04 around 1 in the morning Miles and miles of wrack.

David was driving The Spink and me to the dock so that we could collect seaweed while he went sloshing off in the chop to meet a couple of passengers on the other side. She had her book and I had a recorder (blockflote, not tape) and music paper. CBC was playing something orchestral and pleasant. The theme was a seven note motif, repeated in various keys and with various instruments.

"I'm enjoying it, but have no patience composing like that," I said. "What I aim for is a good solid melody. Texture is too subtle for me, so far."

"Seems like you can approach music from many different angles," said David.

"Yeah. Ruby thinks in terms of chord progressions. And a rock piece is usually about the beat. I suppose a piece is great music when it's all been addressed"

In the orange sunset light as I spread sea lettuce wrack around the broccoli and onions, I thought about form vs. content. Some people, like me, want to know what the parameters are. If we get lost, we're likely to spend more time on the table setting than on cooking, more time on the grammar than on the poetry. Other people are more interested in the content. Unmoored, they're like Da Vinci, whose art was magnificent but the paint ran, or the mold cracked, or the project, while breathtaking, never actually got finished.

That afternoon, sprawling amidst sand fleas and rotting eelgrass, I'd noodled around formlessly on the recorder while The Spink rowed around in the bay. I already knew the final form: it would be a fiddle tune, restricted to two octaves which is the range of most folk dance instruments, and in a key suitable for the recorder. Wrote down a couple of riffs that went nowhere. Leafed through the notebook and found a two-bar riff that reflected the merganser pair bobbing around in the glare in front of me, buried in some junky tune that I wrote last spring (the riff was buried, not the mergansers. The ducks were doing fine).

It was in 6/8 time, composed when I was fiddling so it was in "A." That's an awkward key for the recorder so I changed it to "C." (Each key has its own personality, or so I'm told. I can't really tell so I just use the key that seems easiest to play in.) Your basic old-time fiddle tune in 6/8 is a jig, with two or three sections of eight bars apiece. I know from experience that I enjoy self-referential tunes, where each four-bar section has a kissing acquaintance with each of the others. And I also know from experience that dance tunes shouldn't be too interesting. You want them to be fun and catchy, not intellectual. So, with two bars and a form, the rest of it basically wrote itself.

Where was I? In the garden spreading seaweed, musing about form vs. content. In any new situation, I want to know what the rules are. It's not because I'm particularly timid or law-abiding, but because it seems to me that rules arise organically from situations. They tell you enormous amounts about what's going on. You already know a lot about a culture if you hear "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," or "Students who wear inappropriate attire shall be sent home," don't you? Those rules outline the edges; where people struggle and where things begin to fall apart.

Musical rules too. Contra dances teeter on the edge of chaos; people are twirling around and weaving in and out and sweating and laughing, and there's always a sense, for me at least, that the relationship between the music and the dance could cease its cordiality at any moment; from kissing to sulking or worse. Contra dances arose from folk dancing, which, like most folk arts, is far more oriented towards properness in form than the more academically informed arts are. I wonder if that rigidity of form is a hint that things are barely being held back.