scrolling through the personal book collection installed in the mostly unused office I outfitted for my father years ago when the house was quite new. after reading Wolfe, it's hard to look at a sheet of paper: virtual or crinkled. the border of autobiography and fiction is a powerful dialectic to play along. always sure to raise hackles of feral anger in dissociation when the images are built from eyes that see essences. it is the essence that is the only thing valuable enough to comment on, eh? appearances which point to essences are the best.

Those who are motionless on the wandering earth: the voyagers. Those who flee over the motionless earth: the stay-at-homes. But those who flee over the wandering earth, and those who are motionless on the motionless earth: what should they be called? -- J. M-G . LeClezio

Look Homeward, Angel burns a swath through my horizontal days, speaking, drilling truth-of-being in an elemental and fearful way through reading eyes into soul. mmmmm. nice to adsorb this re-presentation that speaks so in dissonant harmony.

O God! O God! We have been in exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go. -- Thomas Wolfe

a classic Arizona evening. air cooling rapidly, sky running a burnished spectrum from burnt orange to blue-white silver, clouds reversing the shades so that at zenith cloud and sky become one, for a moment. full moon rising over Mingus Mountain. dogs barking in the neighborhood, a rabbit comes running on the cool western downwind to sit right in front of me in the twiLight. Venus is the first planetary orb to show, followed by Jupiter, 13 degrees behind on the ecliptic. and while the precise placement of these masses constructs a field of influence on every body external, leaving the internal point of self unaffected, it is not revealed easily to the eye, used to watching fast-containing media flows. astrophysics talks about gravity. and so it is, a pseudo-science of invisible attractions. drawing bodies nearer or into slingshot close approaches which accelerate one in an altered trajectory onwards and leave the other spinning more slowly. while the sun provides life energy to press upwards with body presence, for a time, resisting that sagging force. there is no contradiction between science and spirit -- the contradiction arises only in the naming of things. science believing that its system of naming, so clean and internally consistent, is superior to others, but each system of naming believes this. science is no different. faith in one, truth in the other, reality in a third. just down to words. (and the surprise that Babylon brought to humans -- how could language be corruptible?)

And it was this that awed him -- the wierd combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. -- Thomas Wolfe

Francis Bacon doesn't seem to be so interesting -- highly over-rated. though he did recognize that

Knowledge is power -- Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est

but anyway, he doesn't provide any liberate witticisms on recovery. recovery is a slow process. obviously. to regain a state of order after a chaotic intervention into the body-system assumes a significant input of energy back into the system. seeking order. recovery is seeking order. but the pathway never seems so clear. there are many possible ways. the ingestion of certain substances is necessary, but which ones in which order and what quantity when. rest mandatory, but when does rest and horizontality begin to hinder regaining the activity of life which is primarily vertical? exercise, the operation of the physical meat space is key, though it too can take legion permutations depending on life-philosophy. body-awareness is heightened, to the excriuciating boredom of those folks who have to listen to mumbled ruminations about body processes and deviations that are often, as they say, "more information than I needed to know." the grail of order, bringing perfect form back to the meat-space is always set to fail merely by the intervention of the same time factor that is necessary for recovery to begin with. time brings decay and aging. so, recovery will always be an accession to a lesser goal or state than one would care to accept. diminished capacity. the question becomes, what to let go of and what to fight for...

see Come and See by Elem Klimov -- a movie that pressed certain icons into my awareness a year or so after it was released (1985), at the International Film Series at CU-Boulder. I think I went with Chris to that screening, almost 20 years ago. but the imagery of the film remained present and powerful. long single takes and shots always seduce my eye. like the opening shot in Schindler's List -- impossibly long and powerful. Klimov ends Come and See with an incredible steady-cam movement through a dense forest, following the marching partisans. films should leave images in the psyche. that's what mediation does, finds a means to impress the eye, and so the soul. guard this with care.

no energy. good days are fewer than bad days. bad days come when sleep is not found. a particular kind of diffuse pain or sensation keeps body from sinking into deepening slumber. no fast-racing head thoughts, just sensate disturbance. strings the days out in a fog of lack and pointlessness.

one month out on surgery. some things have improved, many have not. no stamina, little strength, watching muscle mass melt away. going to physical therapy -- it adds some dimensions to movement and increasing strength, but existence is ever limited. memory is poor, desire to communicate limited. thankful for the continuing cool and cloudy monsoon weather. spectacular clouds, occasionally the massive thunder storms intersect the house here, though most often they do not, Chino protected by a dry bubble of upwelling air. sometimes there are storms on all sides yet none will migrate over the area.

I think Nick suggests that moniker, but maybe not. my memory of daily existence is very flat and lacking any cataloged depth or retrieval landmarks. this will persist into the future. with spinal cord damage. the entire neuro-system is off. so is the lap where the laptop resides. some skin surface below the suture line reacts with the definite sensation of burning when there is only a slight pressure contact. confused nerves. distorted signals. while the main body system slowly oscillates, out of equilibrium.

finally, Iceland surfaces with an honest account of the genesis of much of what appears on the island as an exotic landscape. well actually it is a BBC expose by a reporter who happens to be married to an Icelander. severe deforestation, followed by the primary surface vegetation, grass, being totally eaten by sheep, who kill grass when overgrazing by eating the roots. followed by the normal strong winds, and there goes the 3 - 10 meters of rich volcanic topsoil, straight into the Atlantic. you are left with a hard cobble surface with partly eroded stones of varying size. occasionally you can see the process as it is happening -- mesas sitting some meters above the hard pan surface, mesas made of topsoil, capped by thick shaggy green expanses of grass. all the land was once up there, covered with grass and trees. (more images)

reflecting on parallel universes, light musings surround the controversy that today ceased rumbling around CNOOC (Chinese National Offshore Oil Company) and Unocal (Union Oil of California). back when I worked for Unocal in the early 1980's, it is hard to imagine any other response than hearty guffaws to the suggestion that, in 20 years the US oil concern would be up for auction with Chinese buyers out-bidding Chevron. no longer in contact with any of my colleagues from those days, I would be curious to hear their situations, if, indeed, they still are employed by the firm. times change the conditions of the market. Unocal has been an acquisition target since the early 80's when I was there -- when the infamous Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was in hot pursuit of the company, such that the board tried to sink the company into multi-billion debt to make it less attractive. it is a different time indeed when a Chinese company, 70%-owned by the Chinese government, makes an aggressive bid to acquire a legacy US corporation. and on top of that, a company dealing with THE major strategic resource of the developed world of the 21st century. no wonder Washington hawks are screaming! after watching the entire cspan-aired Senate hearings on this precise merger, I was astonished at the lack of intelligence in the expressions of the 'experts' called in by the Senate. so little understanding of the movement and evolution and change of power in a dynamic world. fighting or resisting inevitable power shifts is for the naive who cling to temporal power under highly conventional paradigms. it is clear that China is rising, and the US perhaps falling -- in the broad sense. the empty cup tends to fullness, the full cup tends to emptiness. rather than deal with the realities of socio-political evolution, the Washington power-brokers cling to an out-dated and very static worldview. few seems to get Sun Tzu.

but how is it, these men and women who populate a corporate landscape, how do they live? remembering back to the instance of going on a executive retreat to an exclusive resort in Ojai, north of LA, for a 4-day review of Unocal's status in the oil business. my task was to present at an informal seminar an overview of state-of-the-art technology and applications for gravity and magnetic in petroleum exploration. golf was on the schedule for a majority of the older execs, their bonding exercise. open bar helped with that. I got the feeling that everything simply went along a certain and safe pathway to the intended goal of regular paychecks which were fed into mortgages, car payments, and very short vacation splurges (only 10 days of holiday per year for the first 5 years). like a corral to tame the wild engineering student broncos.

I have always maintained that my departure from the Big Oil scene was in no way an altruistic choice. this despite an early radicalization which included studying "The Communist Manifesto" in 7th grade -- a fact that Russ Werner picked up. he was the funniest kid in the junior high school, and the best cartoonist as well. he left a note in my yearbook addressed to the Pinko Commie Rat. no, that predilection did not factor in, though I can point to Roger Steffens program on KCRW, where I was a volunteer-member, The Reggae Beat brought the vibes of the Rastafarian belief system into high relief with guests the likes of Bob Marley, Alton Ellis, and Peter Tosh. If music can radicalize, it did. Bob Marley speaks as powerfully as any German philosopher! Jah Rastafari Makonnen not to mention programs like "Alma del Barrrio" on KXLU "schizo-radio on the Left."

I also recall, when living off of Lincoln and Ocean, taking a long slow look at a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard, running around $1200 at the time, now I really wonder what would have happened if I had bought that rather than a Nakamichi tape deck, a used 6'2" twin-fin swallowtail surfboard, and a Fiat Spyder.

no, leaping from the Big Oil gravy train was merely the next step. on the eve of departure, the actual handing in a letter of resignation to Dennis Mett, the director of International Exploration, there was the huge Mombasa project that came up. For 6 months after I left, I would get occasional phone calls from Bill Sax, the VP of the International Division, asking if I wanted to continue working for Unocal and go to Africa for 6 weeks to oversee a mag survey from offshore up into the Great Rift Valley. by that time I was on another trajectory completely.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa. -- T. Boone Pickens