A Moments Rest

Today I spent the afternoon in warm post-summer sun. I walked about the Tinker Nature Center grounds, across the rolling field, where young trees lie here and there with ceremonial plaques at their feet, and toward the Dimeo Labyrinth, one of my favorite haunts in this oddly spectacular tiny city. I stopped by a young poplar. Sat facing the sun and ate my spinach, tomato, and cheese sandwich.

I pictured the clouds passing overhead and momentarily blocking the sun’s rays. When I checked to confirm, they were always smaller than I imagined. Must be a) my sense of awe at the passing shadow of a cloud, or b) the clouds are already getting low, a surefire sign that the winds are coming across the great lake in the north and that winter truly looms.

At the labyrinth, upon entering I always have a sharp sense of my presence and location. But by the fourth turn, I am lost. This despite the fact that I have walked this labyrinth a minimum of eight times. That means it is working. The labyrinth is fulfilling it’s purpose. Furthermore, when reaching the center, I swear I have not set foot into the immediate tracks and curves surrounding me. Efforts to trace the path with my eye fail. As if the labyrinth, or my appreciation of it, forbids its unraveling.

Later, I laid in the full sun on a bench made of plastic made to look like wood in a nature park at the entry to a labyrinth. I read from Ergo by Jakov Lind, which I am enjoying quite a bit. My thumb marks the coincidence of my location in the book and my location on the earth. It reads, “The city is a labyrinth.” The cover of this book is blue, but not as blue as the sky in this picture.

The real world starts in a week, if you believe the hype.

Self-Immolation

A day or two before completing Quim Monzo’s two-part novel Gasoline I told my friend how much I was enjoying it, how familiar it was to me, which she was surprised to hear because normally familiarity makes me feel unoriginal and depressed, but this was somehow different. I tried to explain that there was a frailty and honesty in the characters that was a welcome change from other instances of shared brain syndrome.

But then, upon reading the last few sentences where a character is describing what might be his first bout with insomnia, a strange thing happened within my brain. A tingle developed near my brain stem, followed by a sudden wave that surged through my brain and which I rode to the completion of the book. It felt like the reawakening and release of a stored train of thought, perhaps from my own first bout with insomnia. And the description was so on target and familiar that I wanted to throw the book across the street of the cafe I sat at and curse at it. I could feel the corners of my lips furl, my eyes narrow, and my eyebrow scowl as an unexpected rage surfaced from my mind. The feeling of familiarity was too much and it sparked an unexpected reaction from within.

After the smoke cleared, so to speak, I was sitting there quietly thinking to myself, how did Monzo do that? It is as if he was soaking me in gasoline and those last few sentences ignited me.

There was a young man on the television, he was on the verge of tears, saying that this was the most important thing in his life. You could clearly see and hear the passion he must have felt, I thought he was going to light himself on fire in protest. He was upset that basketball player Lebron James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. The song, “We are the World”, was produced to raise funds for and awareness of the famine in Africa^wikipedia, Cleveland Cavalier fans sung a parody of this song in an effort to keep Lebron James in Cleveland. The late Manute Bol, another basketball player, spent all the money he earned from his 10 years in the NBA, and many say his life, trying to improve the conditions in Sudan.

I am just saying… and I’m not doing enough, or anything for that matter. I listen to songs on repeat for hours on end, but to what end? Familiarity with a sentiment at the cost of strangeness to the spectrum? Or to a severe crush on Julie Doiron, all you need is unattainable love, to paraphrase a pop group from the past.

Meandering Through Austin

San Antonio, TX — I spent the better part of today in the capital city revisiting some old haunts are exploring some new ones. Driving through the sluggish city streets and congested highways is becoming unbearable. I blame the small-city-living of Rochester, NY where even on the worst days traffic seldom slows to a trickle. However, I still love this city and share the sentiment from Olmstead’s A Journey Through Texas:

AUSTIN.

Austin has a fine situation upon the left bank of the Colorado. Had it not been the capital of the state, and a sort of bourne to which we had looked forward for a temporary rest, it would still have struck us as the pleasantest place we had seen in Texas. It reminds one somewhat of Washington; Washington, en petit, seen through a reversed glass.

Olmstead makes the note that “[t]here is a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops, but not one book-store.” which is out of date… or is it? I think of Austin’s infamous nightly college-drunkfest on 6th Street, of which I have the unfortunate honor of once being a patron to, and I conclude there are a remarkable number of drinking shops. But the proliferation of bookstores is definitely different since those days, probably largely due to the University of Texas (my alma mater) being built directly behind the capitol building. A balance, perhaps?

I took plenty advantage of the bookstores. Scored me an Evergreen Black Cat book from Grove Press (circa 1965) of two novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet (perhaps better known as the scriptwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, to which you might exclaim, “Scriptwriter! That film had a scriptwriter!?” and I reply, “Oh yeah!” while busting through the wall a la Kool-Aid man with a handful of matchsticks).

I quote from Olmstead, again and at length:

LITERATURE.

In the whole journey through Eastern Texas, we did not see one of the inhabitants look into a newspaper or a book, although we spent days in houses where men were lounging about the fire without occupation. One evening I took up a paper which had been lying unopened upon the table of the inn where we were staying, and smiled to see how painfully news items dribbled into the Texas country papers, the loss of the tug-boat “Ajax,” which occurred before we left New York, being here just given as the loss of the “splended steamer Ocax.”

A man who sat near said—

“Reckon you’ve read a good deal, hain’t you!”

“Oh, yes; why?”

“Reckoned you had.”

“Why?”

“You look as though you liked to read. Well, it’s a good thing. S’pose you take a pleasure in reading, don’t you?”

“That depends, of course, on what I have to read. I suppose everybody likes to read when they find anything interesting to them, don’t they?”

“No; it’s damn tiresome to some folks, I reckon, any how, ‘less you’ve got the habit of it. Well, it’s a good thing; you can pass away your time so.”

A journey through Texas: or, A saddle-trip on the southwestern frontier; with a statistical appendix.

San Antonio, TX — In the mid-1800s, one Frederick Law Olmstead, a northerner credited with designing/creating some of my most cherished public places (Central Park in NYC and Highland Park in Rochester, NY), took a fact-finding expedition with a companion to the great state of Texas, which had just been admitted to the union after the brutal Texas Revolution against the Mexican army (remember the Alamo, yo).

Olmstead traveled across the state on horseback, visiting many of the budding communities that still exist today with uncanny similarities. He published his findings in 1857, you can find his book on GoogleBooks, it is a page turner–er, I mean page scroller. He reveals many bizarre traits of historic Texas and himself. Never have I learned so much about my state than from this treatise.

And I now find myself traveling about Texas with a fresh perspective…

Texas is still a wild frontier.

In the coming days, I will attempt to document this.

Zeeman Effect in Stellar Spectra

Adapted from H. W. Babcock’s 1947 article (Astrophysical Journal, vol. 105, p.105, 1947) on the Zeeman effect in stellar spectra.