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After tonight I will be gone for the better part of a week (at least). See you when I get back.

Mary

-- the void and the art of not-seeing

The light is just coming. Civil twilight, the sound of train wheels on steel track from the open door, my white long-haired cat, Peyote, a glimmer against the grey sidewalk. I can see through the foot high gap between the bottom of my closed blinds and the bottom of the window pane. I am typing, drinking broth, listening for the bird calls to begin rising from the wood and wire. Underneath it all, under the rumble of a truck across the bridge ...

I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the planet because it is our “energy currency”) winds its way through my dreams like a three-stranded woven cord, sometimes just itself on a dark background of a nearly empty dream and sometimes it comes across the stage of a dream in progress, taking the shape of something else. Last time it was a large black cat, a panther I suppose, from its size and ...

Humans have tried a number of strategies to modify our behavior. Two of the key ones have been religions and secular ethical codes that come with punishments built in. History shows that neither has much of a track record with modifying human behavior toward compassion, tolerance or just getting along: holy wars and secular wars; prisons and cults. And yet we (meaning human beings) don’t have as many public hangings as we used to. Slavery, while currently on the increase, has decreased significantly ...

This is a long one. Sorry.

The apparent question, with respect to my first memory, is what actually happened? But is this question the real question? If the experience is assessed within the cognitive framework that supports “what actually happened”, it constrains the reality of the experience. The rules by which meaning is captured in the net of a sentence and the rules by which meaning is caught by soma are different. Assessing the meaning of Il fait beau in the right context ...