What would remain?

what would remain?

Imagine being a modern person, even a well-educated person, and the world-as we-know-it ends .It doesn't really matter how, but this person, Cory, is now the remnant of the advanced civilization we know as ours, finds himself or herself in a remote village deep within the mountains of asia which has somehow managed to escape the wholesale disintegration of the outside world.

Maybe Cory doesn't even realize what has happened to friends, family and culture. Not yet, anyway.

Time passes.

Through some process, Cory discovers that a disaster has occurred and that some major failure has occurred and that what she /he knows may be all the entire world knows of civilization.

Hope gives way to resignation and Cory decides to make a life in the village and to pass on to the villagers what he/she knows and feels to be important, that which needs to be saved.

Years pass.

Cory is long dead.

A thousand years later, what might be the message that endured through the centuries and how might have it changed?

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Restaurants

After driving to Seattle for a crafts fair in the university district and after checking into my hotel, and before finding any of my friends, I decide to get serving to eat. I notice that across the street is a restaurant and I figure, why not? I approach the front door of what can only be called a concrete cube.
I probably wouldn't be attracted to a place like that now, but now was then. I opened the door and pushed aside heavy red drapes and stepped into an anteroom coated with gilded mirrors.
Incongruity rooted me to the spot. Outside, the highway churned with truck traffic and people headed home to a warm, comprehensible dinner.
I was not so sanguine.
But before I could reconsider , I was escorted to a table.
To my delight the table snuggled up near a piano where a pianeuse, a black woman in a gorgeous gown, played and sang.
I watched and clapped and appreciated.
I said so, and she thanked me.
Then she asked what a nice boy like me was doing in a place like this.
This?
I admit that my crap detector is set on "Low", usually, but I now looked around and saw lots of mirrors and suits, gilding and women of the broad sort.
She played wonderfully.
I told her that I was a woodworker and that I was going to be selling at the craft show on the morrow.
Here she was, in brocade and singing jazzy songs on a grand piano in what I was now suspecting to be a hangout of some sort, and she tells me that she is a woodworker too!
She loves it and we talk tools and wood species, between songs, for the rest of the night.

I went back a few years later and there was no building there.



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Nothing is forever

Except Forever.


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Surprise

Surprises.

First time in Paris, being a committed Democrat and having just read "Tale of Two Cities", I go in search of the Bastille, refusing to ask directions because, after all, how difficult might it be to find such a famous monument?
Tres difficile, as it turns out.
Not until a few hours of puzzled searching later do I discover that those fellow Democrats tore it down.
Not unlike back when I visited Barcelona, and Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and found no church there, just the facade!
There remain subtle reasons to travel, and some that just smack me alongside the head.


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Spain

Spain

Hitchhiking.
Picked up by two Iranians.
They offer to share their lunch.
We stop by a small stream.
They climb onto the roof of their old Peugeot, cut up raw onion and french bread and we eat. Afterwards, they slice the peel of oranges longitudinally, making it very easy to peel and eat the fruit.
I haven't seen that done before.

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Piazza Navona

Sitting in the Piazza Navona, eating outside and watching all the artists convincing the tourists that they were the next Giotto, the cammeriere puts the glass of wine on the table and it wobbles as he doe so. He reaches into his apron a pulls out a matchbook, leans down and squeezes it under one of the legs and and asks me if that works. He taps the corner of the table. "E pur si muove", I say.
He laughs uproariously.
"Chi la detto?"
I hate to say it, though I should have expected it, I am not thinking that he would recognize the phrase , and when he asks me who said it, I freeze for a moment. But fortunately, like a starry messenger out of the night sky, it flashes: "Galileo".
He laughs again and says, with a clap on the back,
"quando hai finito, ti compro un cafe".
A thoroughly delightful meal, out of very little.



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Eternal Truth

Winter morning;
The rain falls from the sky
As it always has.


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"Liking" and "ising"

I am liking what's ising.


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Is like

Nothing "is".
"Like" best describes it.


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Myth

Myths as a metaphorical way to present reality:

The most content with the least detritus.


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Mr. Y

Is mystery a good thing or a bad thing?
Would we rather a world full of mystery, or none at all?

Mystery is like an inexhaustible battery, powering all questions.

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If...

If,
After reading a poem,
One asks "what did that mean?"
Then the poem failed.


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Winter with Einstein

Winter morning;
Nothing moves.
It's everything else that moves.


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