there are things on heaven and earth that move me

what are these things that move me,
trace bundy
kevin O,

they are new or in the general scope of humanity very small ..

have a look, things of beauty, moments in time, more so than before they suddenly move me. It must be the golden syrup of nostalgia and memories seeping into my ever existence. I realize my life has become fragmented through the motions of my thoughts, slowly slicing and dicing and placing memories and future dreams and current events, binding them like a broken mosaic.

Strange when we look back and across we somehow see different things and the pieces somehow don't really line up.  I look back in time, well not really i stare at fleeting images in my mind, I get starkly reminded by images I see around me; printed ones, electronic ones. Something inside me wells up, something unbeknownst to me. I see images of a past that is vaguely reminiscent of my own life, I see images of a life I do not recognize, I see faces and places filled with memories, some mine, some others and some belonging to a social consciousness that I am only a small part of, all these fragments are floating slowly together and others are drifting into the haze. The purple glazes our existence, our consciousness taking shorter or longer dips into the un-reality of this state.

I wonder if the path we choose is it the yellow brick road? Sometimes our mind wants us to believe we have taken the wrong route, other times we know we have, sometimes we know ti is the right path, but most times we wonder around in abject confusion, into the grey mists of our human existence we go, slowly unraveling the past and origins. I apologize, but I do have to return to a previous point where we do have to consider what is it that builds the fabric of our existence? Can this be likened to the nature or nurture debate in evolution? I suspect for some of us the threads used to weave our existence and grubby with the lives of people who are long gone, at other times the tapestry of our lives is woven with new threads.

And the internal welling of emotion never  ceases to amaze me, is this something that was locked deeply inside behind a stone wall. How i have slowly chipped away at that mortar, only to find tightly wound packages, each day, each week, each month
I open a new piece of my life, why did I lock this off, or did life lock me within the confines of these walls.
I stare at photographs, strange memories come welling back. I know full well we are the object of our own actions, but sometimes we feel bound by the cords of life, these long sinewy threads that run through our lives. At times they are broken at other times they stop us failing, yet on the same hand they confine us and give us that most fancifully stated  inertia. How is it that we can start living once again? Do we live in tranches of year bundles. Is it wise to move in 10 year bundles to make changes in our existence. Is it time for a new career if possible, somehow we stand on a knife edge of responsibility and adventure in life, I suppose we have to start with the small steps towards the door, without that inertia we will never leave the room let alone the house.

On something more material, why does brown flour bread really struggle so much? I suppose it is obvious, but it just gets me every time I bake the damned brown bread ;-) So where does the adventure take us next, firstly within the mind, the recesses of the mind, the ants go marching one by one huraa..  don't stop, don't fall, It could be that we have to live within fragments of the life we have created and called our own. How do we achieve these small and fantastical things without embarking on the voyage of our lives, what si it that binds some of us to the material, the ethical, emotional and does not free us from the chains we have bound ourselves with. Yea though i wonder down the road of uncertainty give me the strength to take the next step, to not be scared of the dark corners and ghouls, their chains rattle in the corners of our minds. I walk towards the end of the road, not knowing or seeing the path nor the destination.
I just have to remember the words of marshal m^3 .. I'm not afraid to take a stand, its been a ride I guess i had to go that place to get this place .. yes it is cliched, but I would at least want to keep a common thread throughout this journey of my life.

In general the fantastic still amazes me, the unreal, the existence of an alternative reality that does not really exist other than in our minds.  But all we know is onwards and upwards.

We stand once again at a cusp of decisions, now not later, more not less, live not cower in the shadows we fear so much, hold onto the the light.

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
--- Frank Herbert, Dune - Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear



"Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is."
---- German Proverb

We get drawn down the rabbit hole of fear, at times we revolt, other times we cower and hide, paralyzed like a dear in headlights.  It is difficult to determine why we are bound to this primal and debilitating emotion. I will walk along this path I fear and go forth into the unknown world.

and of all of them Banksy always moves me most :-)

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step

So it does,

to paraphrase, this has taken more than one sitting so it will be disjunct and confusing, more so than normal ;-), sorry i should say post-pre-phrase

I walk, I cycle the kilometers

Every morning as I open the garage door, the characteristic crunching of my battered steel cleats on the cement floor makes me cringe in anticipation for the cold and crisp air that hits my face. Some days the multitude of small splashes hitting my face as I exit the driveway into the road, wondering why I have not sorted out the shower cap for my helmet yet? This morning not unlike any other, the air was crisper, hardly a breath of wind in the air, no rain. Yesterday a howling southerly met me outside the door, lashing me with pelting rain drops. All I know is that every day will be different, that is something I can be sure of. I digress, I fear from what I had set out to discuss on this day that is so different. The day started simply like every other, except it was different.

and then i stopped writing ... for days and days, and now the words come back.

But like always the words are milling around, less so the words, but more so the concepts the thoughts, concerns and questions.

I keep coming back to one starting point, finding it difficult to make a departure on something that has been plaguing me for days,  or should I rather say weeks and months. Something that will just not go to rest. Due to my self created exile I expend a more than normal time alone, or at least in the company of my own thoughts. What, I, (yes) and most probably a million others around the world, have been pondering relates the reality of human constructs, however weird that sounds. I sometimes sit and wonder if something like the Harley riders, the weekend warriors, is more or less authentic than any other phenomena. You may ask what the Crap Am I talking about? But in reality why would an artificially created reality that is subscribed to by a large number of people be any different from any other realities. Is it real? I know we often look and laugh at the instant nature of this sub culture and many other similar cultures. But the question that still stands, is whether or not it holds any validity or not. Yes it exists, and has little or no erudite or even philosophical basis, well there is debate around some of it? It is real, it exists even though it is as made up as Foucault pendulum by umberto eco. The additional realities then get created on this dubious starting point and the eventual interactions and manifestations are subsequently then real. Does this invalidate or validate the existence and reality of something. Where is the truth? What is  the truth in this situation, it is a self referencing and fulfilling construct. How much of what we experience and exist within is made up of the same fabric? Where the reality and artificial nature of our existence collide, we are thrown into a large grey mess.

At this point I doubt there is a lot of clarity where the truth starts or stops with regards most things in our daily lives.

So where does this leave us? Do we rely on classical representations or even historical truths or manifestations or can we live within the reality we create for ourselves? Which is better or worse.


Well that is enough of that for now,  following on this path is bound to lead your thoughts astray.
ashtrays, buckets and the sound of tinkling Zamaleck bottles.

the relativity of sound, they things sound now and then and how we remembered them and how they sound when we feel different and the same.  If this sounds like gobildeegoop. Yes it is, i was thinking about something i had thought about to many times before but always disregard as nothing?  Have you ever noticed how different music can sound on different music systems and locations, yes this is obvious we know there are differences, we can be sure of that, but somehow our preconception and bias tends to, in my case, alter the sound and experience tremendously of the sounds i experience. Thsi could change something from beign amazing to poor to brilliant and bakc and forwards again.

I saw something yesterday, it made me sad, it related to friendships.

I stand here in a quagmire of thoughts, ruminating and running through my brain and veins at the speed of a radioactive isotope.  I sit here a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by the endless unknown, I saw this in a book the other day, someone standing peering into the unknown. Yes it was visually portrayed.  To continue, I listen to Gogol Bordello transcontinental, it fills me with happiness and sadness and a longing to a past that is not mine and is only the past and drives me forward into an unknown future.   A few days hither I was watching LOR, the third movie and it was so absolutely amazing, but it saddened me a lot, when i looked at the wonder and awe that had been created by the media and the story, but it only pointed to me how we have taken away the splendour awe and mystery out of our lives. The Western society has removed the underlying mystery that surrounds our humanity. In no way do i suggest we should all abandon rationality and immerse ourselves into a form of romantic non-reality or a dream realm, what I do however lament is that the mystery of our existence has been removed, we no longer dream of dragons, i cannot dream fo the long line of green ants marching along the ridge of the red sand dunes, the Lion roars in Africa has become literal, the chameleon is no longer a spiritual animal, nor is the praying mantis.  I am not saying we have to depart from the rational and san, what i lament is the loss we have. Our reality is created on top of countless memes that contain these half truths and images bound to the human race. These memes are surgically been removed from us before we have had time to replace them with reasonable facsimiles or new incarnations thereof. We have replaced the mystery of symbols and hedgerows with WWW , you have to question how we can let that happen, we have replaced bread the source of our origin with Big Mac. We cannot go back, time is fleeting it passes on, but I can lament the loss of this reality.  In a way I am not taking a step backwards tempting the salt pillar, rather taking a breath a long the journey of life, search new yesterdays in the unending sea of possibilities. Sometimes the weight of the self imposed yolk bears me down, the added weight of the past soemtimes slows our ability to plough the lands to plant the new crop. Without the Yolk we would be nothing, without the memes which have become plaited into my veins it would not be me, those plaits sometimes strangle, sometimes allow new pathways for the blood to flow through my veins. These are things in my past that are not of me, but are as a result of things I had no part in and that happened on another continent that I have never seen, slowly the sands of time mingle with the sands of my past creating solid ground at times creating a sinkhole a quicksand trap i set for myself. Other times, I run across the hot sand, through the pine forests past the Amanita through the dark glades search for the line of lost green ants. The paua shell giving me the illusion of a silver lining on the long white and grey clouds, I search for Ganesha, the tarrot cards lay open on the plaid tablecloth laid open int he glade, splinters of sunlight highlighting the cards that have been drawn for me. I know not what they mean, but I do know that eventhough I chose a new deck a number of the old cards are still represented.

Just remember we need to break the daily bread, drink life and imbibe the suns rays when they shine on us, appreciate the moisture and rain. We remember the jade coloured light that is thrown over everything here carries a tinge of darkness with it eternally. The sun shinning from without, sometimes strongly from within, but the cloak of darkness hangs like a shadow across the view. Lucky we are that the winds of change blow strongly removing the boughs causing the shade, yet at times when the wind fails to blow and the sun hides behind it blanket of greyness to create dark recesses we have to slowly search for those inner lights. Somethings we are prepared for, others not.

To conclude the discussion, read this like the wrapper of a bright yellow chappie, sometimes silly, nostalgic. hard on the outside, slowly softening with a taste that lingers.

the things you never thought you would miss and other strange beasts int he night

Damn that was a long title, but it needed to be said. I may be re-iterating something I have said in the past, go shoot me.. allow me a senior moment.

oh the first word of the day is Tableau..

Where to start?

Somehow our lives are judged, or should I say we judge our lives and or any combination thereof.  The things we miss, the things we do, the things we wished we had done, the places we want to go, the places we have been. These are all choices, fleeting through our lives. I was going to metaphor-ze that statement, but in flight realized that would be overkill. I read a book recently. I think I may even have mentioned this, BUT interestingly i read a blog of a random person yesterday and they were discussing the same book. Oh yes the book. It is outliers by Malcom Gladwell. I found it terribly illuminating for a number of reasons, but one of the interesting points was the 10000 hour scenario where it is implied that to master anything we need to practice or do or action something for more than 10000 hours. Without this magical number of repetitions or skills development it appears that no one can excel at anything. It is a strange thing.. but the book appears to be well researched, or at least it gives that impression. Albeit that it is rather soft-science-ish and all social science and the n! efficient strategies to do x and y the best. I enjoyed it. But my point being? The blog i read actually pointed to this article and related this to the "art" or process of writing and most specifically blogging. It is sad, the blog is nice and natural, the author could actually have carried on, but has not for the last few years. You may ask or even intimate, what the FRIG is my point. Eventually this blog may actually become readable. I suspect there are only about 100 hours into this blog so we are a couple of orders off the mark. So be patient, is all i ask. One day this may or may not actually sprout some value and wisdom. I may also fall into the category of the room full of monkeys and typewriters. Apparently this anecdote is actually called the infinite monkey theorem . 

Given enough time, a hypothetical monkey typing at random would, as part of its output, almost surely produce all of Shakespeare's plays. In this image a chimpanzee is giving it a try. (from wikipedia)

 

 

The last note on the monkey is that through this I have learnt a fantastic new word, namely dactylographic. But I do see that the person who tabled the infinite monkey theorem was a definite strong anti-creationist.

Oh yes and here is the other monkey:

To get back to the original train of thought, or rather the actual human condition that I wanted to raise. This point being the process of being through the expression of our existence through travel, discovery, production, art and general social condition.
We measure ourselves via the external representation or even internalization of these factors and the consequent diatribe and verbosity or lack thereof that we exhibit. Have mind will travel, have fears we are held back. We have a physical manifestation, we have a physical form and space we inhabit, whereas our minds travel backwards and forwards in time and across space, physical space.

What is it that inhibits our travel in all these manifestations; physically, emotionally, temporal-y and intercontinental? Is it the amount of gadjo within in me that attempts to find roots like a strangling fig? Sometimes the roots break loose, I fall into a dream state, I watch the line of green ants. The wind blows from whence I cannot say, it is not a foul wind, it is a wind driving us forward into the unknown. Is this what I dreamt of in my youth. I hope not, but if it is then it is.

 one of the many sights I saw today on my short traveling through the streets of wellington. Is it a UFO, not sure but it was pretty Wired

 some more sights in an around wellington, and for all those doubters .. look the sky is Blue ;-)

  My favorite urban decay, well actually not really this is a building site, where an old building has been pulled down to make space for something new.












So where does that take us or leave us? There is no absolute or even grey answer to this. But I do still pose the question around how our ability to move and travel reflects on us as beings on this planet. I look and ponder when I view the various photos of people I know and don't know on the interWeb. How much are we constrained by our inability to let ourselves go and experience the flows of life through the interactions of others and our physical location and in contradiction how little others are bound by their inability to be constrained to one thought or the other. In the eventual stream of global consciousness are we better or worse than those who do or don't?  Is it the vague reference to me having eastern european blood or even vaguely germanic with  blue eyes could point to some Viking or even possibly Gypsy blood, but not enough to put me a wandering, I wonder a lot about wandering though! But i suppose being an immigrant makes me part of the global mixing of society, is this our last ditch internalized effort to maximize our survival on this planet?

Have we as humans reached the eventual end of the rope?

Yes things are falling apart faster and quicker than we would ever imagine. But where does that leave us? In a state of anarchy, or does it require something else? at this stage I am without thoughts on this.

todays words

In no particular order other than they appeared to me in conscious thought

Kapow,Steve from iSys ,RAP and CEP,That darn Cat 1965, Tron Evolution 2010,Arthur - 2010, Source Code,Christopher Brookmyre

There were no fossils in New Zealand till a while back. That is there were no Vertebrate Fossils. But they found them. They found arrow heads in North America, that changes everything. Japan has to little Electricity and have been plunged into a dark age.


It is still shaking here, but not so often near us, but Charl did say it shakes to much in CC .

No not in this pic, but this is a picture of me running nowhere in particular.

this is in its rawest form CZ 3, there will be more, particularly this was untouched by my hands, baring the piece of pua shell that I flipped to show the sheen. It is amazing, that the Maori made Lures out of these shells hundred of years ago and caught a wide variety of carnivorous and bight-y fish. They even trawled behind their canoe's.


and here is Ronnie... just because I  miss my chikins..

FYI relative sunshine hours from wikipedia
Wellington            2065 hours
London               1461 hours
Basel                   1599 hours
Johannesburg       3130 hours
Edinburgh            1405 hours
Cape town           2993 hours
Sydney                2480 hours


enough randomness for now.. more tomorrow

Random things

I was browsing flickr (me on flickr )the other day.. well yesterday and the day before and many others, I always look at the new and "explored" pictures and came accross this picture (this link):

No not one of mine.. but it got me to think about a book I had read a long time ago, something I think i remember, but will have to go and re-read again. The book is called count zero written by William Gibson, I am not sure if this technically still fits in the cyber-punk Genre or not, as this was after the inital neuromancer and other books that brought this into common cutlure. But I do digress, the aspect of the novel which fascinated me was nto the hacking and all the other intricate dealings in a virtual reality, but rather a couple of scenes in the book where there is an "installation" of objects that is in space, in a random orbiting collection. My memory is most probably clouded.. but I still would like to re-read the book just for this piece. My reasoning, strange, as it may be, is an internal fascination with collages. More than collages though, Collages tend to be one dimensional and at best 3 dimensional when the artist attempts some dimensionality. Here is a postcard from an exhibition i went to recently in Wellington.

 It was at best disappointing, why you may ask? It jsut was, it showed little dimensionality, it had some temporal distortion, some lapses in generation and mixed media and days, but it was childish and he was trying to sell it as ART. But that is neither here nor there.

I think it relates more to these random collections of objects that we as humans gather over time and place on our desks and mantlepieces and all over our existence. Yes this does sound a lot like the social Cairns concept, which i see has now been superseded and destroyed with Geocaching. but there are elements of insane originality and amazing conceptual art. For example the drop boxes, the USB devices that are mounted in places all over the world.

Ok so after a quick reccie over the googleweb if find this artbasedoncountzero 1 2 , not what i had expected. notquite  ... alotcloser  

Gets me a thinking about the media that would best represent the images inside my head, most probably at the end of the day the written word is all that can represent the thoughts in our minds, the more we try to abstract them into physical or visual representations the more we fail, or do we? Can we ever do any justice to what we envisage, or is that part of the challenge to cement our multidimensional thoughts into a single digit dimensional representation, be it an electronic image a 2 dimensional canvas, a sculptural representation of an aspect of something we visualize.

I look i see, I think I am lucky because I have not seen this before, I can see everything with young eyes, it is simple because I am not of this land.

Slowly the sun sets on the past, the silhouette of a life past fades into the dusty red sunset....

a new dawn, a crisp dawn I keep expecting my beard to ice up on the way to work, somehow unlikely but it is starting to feel that way. Every day  heralds a crisp dawn.

well enough of that for now..

time to go and enjoy the weekend

vunerability

So where to restart again,
(and once again this is fictional and not relevant to anything in particular,
for email recipients you need to actually look at the website)

things return to a semblance of normality, the Christians are back at the station. The sun rises the sun sets, the earth shakes a lot, the sun rises it shakes some more, the waves pummel, the tears flow down our cheeks.

I wonder do we have an internal compass guiding us back to a past known or unbeknown to ourselves?  Is there a part inside us which holds a direction to true home? When we are separated from our home, albeit if generations pass. Is there still an internal song line inside us caucasians taking us back to the route of our origins? Is there a song drawn across the globe calling me back to my roots, is the route back to my home? Does my spirit have a home or will it drift endlessly in this mortal existence that i call my life?

I find my self being pulled and pushed and drawn all over my surrounds searching for a glimpse of a  petrosomatoglyph, could it be that this which i had seen as social cairns could not maybe be the afore mentioned?
The only consistency is the change and time fleeting like wind blowing through my hair, I stand atop a large hill viewing the landscape of my existence.  I listen closely but the songs are confusing, pulling me back to a home (s) that I do not recognize and a home(s) that is not the one that my physical form has ever visited. My dreams and spirits flows through time and space being pulled towards a land on another continent.
Would it be a path it should follow, a journey along the path of my forefathers, to see what?

I stand with the brisk wind howling through my short hair, wind so cold and strong it brings tears to my eyes . The waves of wind creating visual poetry in motion as the boughs of the grasses sway and weave intricate patterns apon the side of the hill. I walk slowly through the forest and with little more than a sense of fascination and awe of the splendour, but I cannot yet call this my home, it happens to be the location that my physical form enhabits. Strangely at peace I walk faster and faster looking to get to the top of the hill, to break out of the forest and seek the air and the space and see the sea in the distance.

what will tomorrow hold for me and you?
I do not think we need to worry, the world continues with or without us,

I stand with my eyes affixed to the north staring to a location at this point unbeknownst to me. All i know is that this is where the roots of my current seedling made roots.  For the time being this is where is call home. More like a bough visciously ripped during a storm, only to be washed a shor ein an unknown land, sprouting and trooting to give a new home to its vicariously transported thoughts and tenants. All I know is that there is an internal song calling me to the origins of it all. Time will tell where the song takes me, what beacons of home I shall find on my journey forwards. There is no knowing what language that song is sung in, all I have to hope is that the internal rhythms guide me along the path that the dreaming totemic animals call me on my path forwards.

To say this is anything but true, is to say anything else is not. Irrespective of the truthfulness or validity of  this outlook.

So where does this take us, through a winding route through the dreams and thoughts of my mind on roads paved with good intentions and loaves of bread. I stand hoping to leave a trail behind for someone to follow as i seek the path or route back to my origins.

The words fall through the spaces in my thoughts rapidly falling swirling and mixing to create strings of meaning about the past future and present. What is the truth of the dreams we dream? even if they are not our own dreams  or words, does that make them any less fantastical. In this day and age of rationality and absolute truth is there any space left for the dreaming of our lives within the confines of our minds, knowing full well that the stark reality of life lies outside, the soft and melodic story that is woven inside my mind, in certain cases I could say my soul. My soul is transported to a land of memories, mingling with words of others, mixing with the tears flowing from the corner of my eyes, running down my angled and aging cheeks into the corners of my mouth illiciting a salty reality which momentarily returns me back to the present. 

where does this fictional story start? Does it start in the dust or the forests under an Acacia tree, an Albizzia an Artocarpus or whichever one and in a really absurd notion that the future is before the past it could even be a Podocarpus totara. There is no knowing where the dream of the lion and multitudes of beetles will take me.  As I walk down the wondrous pathway with Alan on my side, the call of the Tui rings shrill in my ears, carefully i make sure not to break the line of  green ants dreaming of red rocks and beetle fruit and jack fruit and my mind slowly but surely enters the dream plane. Slowly the rhythms combine to push me forwards on this journey we call dream time traveling. Long lines of green ants are silhouetted against the dusty red sky.

For the answer to this you will have to wait and dream the dream with me.

Yes in retro and even introspect the cheese slowly cakes against the side of my mouth, but it is not a reality, neither the words I write nor the experience illicited by them. The life as beautiful as a a tretchikoff stands before us ;-)

On mortality and living

How our mortal coil unwinds
like a tightly coiled clock spring it sits and unwinds slowly
sometimes jumping of its carefully mounted ridges, exploding
we run, we think we can hide
another day presents itself
from one peril we run into another
all we know is that this is finite

suffering is not relative, but it is seen that way
media sees and sensationalizes
flooding, quakes and global climate change

the plight of the 3rd world
carrying the burden of the 1st world on its fragile shoulders
no one sheds a tear unless it is you
standing a moment we gaze forward into nothingness
tomorrow is here
we stand
we look
we know not what now holds

into the darkness

"exit light,
enter night
take my hand
we are off to never never land"

"Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

I shall not tread lightly as i enter into the darkness of life, i shall enter into the dark spaces with a spectrum of bright colours blindingly i move forward, nay i say shall fear no dark space, nay i shall not fear injustice, nay i shall not fear the unknown.

Go forth he said, search for the flicker of light in the darkness that abounds, find the truth, find the happiness, find the colour, even it it means a 30 second exposure.  


Something had changed, he stood there staring at the wall, it was different today, the same yellow sandstone wall covered by lichens and moss. It just seemed so different, he felt the inner connection he wondered about it, how come the patterns looked that way. He had to come back and take a picture, a picture of the pattern, no one would believe him. The butterfly had flapped its wings in Malaysia, more specifically KL. Everything would be different tomorrow, the weather, the patterns the sunshine everything would change. All for a little Carbon Dioxide he imagined, the weather was changing, it made him think about the Bob Dylan song that he had heard and loved and hated and all of the above at the same time. 


Slowly he took another step up the worn pathway, glimpsing thought he fine rain drops gathering on the hood of his raincoat sending large globules of rain down his cheek. would it ever be the same again, he kepot pondering over and over, there had to be something he could do, almost instinctively he dodged the lady with the pink hair, he was wearing an emerald green dress today. The water slowly started seeping through the seams of his shoes, he felt the ever present squelch, first on his left foot then on his right. He had always been limping, he could never understand why. There was no reason for him to limp, but he did, waiting for the traffic light, he knelt to tie his shoe lace, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the on coming traffic, how he had wished he had bought a car instead of spending his money on that book, or he should rather have thought books. Slowly, yet deliberately he stood up and sidled closer to the traffic lights insidious beeping, he knew it was for the blind people, but it irritated him so. from a distance he got his first aroma of the coffee filtering through the wet blanket covering them all. something to look forward to he thought, life is full of small joys he kept telling himself. Suddenly his dream state was shaken by the loud buzzing of the traffic lights, the frentic bustle of people around him, rushing to cross to the other side, it flet like he was standing at the Styx, crossing this, imbibing the city it would change everything, unlike the Styx it would not last for years, or would it. He paused a moment longer, irritating a rather large lady behind him, buslting through she mumbled angrily under her breath. Without waiting he jumped forward as if he had been awoken from his dream state, something inside, a song a dream was pulling him forward towards his fate for the day, or was it just the flapping of a very small grey butterfly with lightly coloured blue flecks on a remote hill called the heads that pushed him forwards? Unto this day he will never know, i doubt he will ever know why he walked that way, on that morning, why he stopped to buy coffee, why he lingered a minute longer than before, but he did and that is what formed his life going forwards.


And the train trips become more familiar, the faces are becoming more and more familiar. I recognize the lady with the pink hair and thee green dress, the members of parliament, the political analysts. the computer programmers, the testers (yes!.) and all the others. Yes there is a comfort int he familiarity of it all. At times there is comfort in new things, at others there is despair. Oh we are an enigmatic and chrono-dis-synchronous anachronistic beings. Or maybe some are and others are not. But there are things that make us happy at times and not at others, frigin weird. Maybe when I come back as the supreme ruler and master of the universe i will re-engineer humans into something a little more predictable or at least less predictable.. but this mix and match is wholly confusing.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel and yes that is the train and somedays it is the sunlight streaming through.

Life is like a stained glass window, multi coloured , multifaceted and surrounded by heavy lead boundaries.. :-)

next maybe something on the sensory experience of food... either that or a potjiekos recipe ... maybe if we record these blogs and play them backwards we might just get soemthing LOL

meaning

lost faith, an imaginary tale base don the fact that i no longer see my station Christians..
(totally fictional :-))
this is what happens if you read a happy death on the way on the train ;-)

He was a lonely man, his faith was his strength, his strength was his faith.

Every day he stood their eyes closed beneath the bush shelter on the southern side of the station in the shade. He stood there with a purpose eyes wide shut praying to a God that gave his life meaning. Other days he just sat there reading the Book, over and over the words flowing in him creating meaning in a life that made no sense. What was this elusive thing he called happiness, come rain come shine this was his spot, every day he stood steadfast like a soldier imbibing the spirit. That was real he experienced it, he did not falter, he did not fall, he stood tall, he was one of God's soldiers. Nothing could shake his faith, this was his life, his life had meaning, this was the meaning, this was his life, it was great.  Everything was grey, people had a grayness and darkness around him, yet his inner light shone through all of this without faltering. He had purpose in this dark and godless city, he was in praise of the glory that was and is and always will be.

He had forgotten about the flowers along the way, they had always been an inspiration, a mirror of the glory that radiated around him. Things seemed different to him today, he could not really figure it out. These feelings came and went, the glory ebbed and flowed like the tides on onehunga bay. How he wished he was standing next to the radio masts, immense in size and structure. The wind whistling through the cables, the crazy fractal patterns that were created by the wind creating wave apon wave of movement, neigh standing waves. This was good, but he could not go there, it was with sadness his mind went back to that day.

IT is not he who questions who wins the race, it is not he who wonders, it is he who races who wins. He stodo there standing looking at this piece of text etched in the marble base of the statue, its weathered and lichen pocked surface was a mere smidgen of its past glory, but somehow the new natural patina created by the elements did something to enhance and change his view of this sculpture. Every day he walked past he was captivated by the beauty of it, but inside he could not reconcile the idolatry, the thoughts it brought up inside him. This was wrong, these were Pagan idols, demi Gods. Why he questioned, why did he have to walk this way every day, be faced with this thing of beauty, this thing that tested him. He would be strong, he would not falter, his faith would be strong or would it?  How could it be that he found such solace staring at this heretical beast, he then slowly and deliberately started repeating the mantra that helped him through these moments, it had always explained and given meaning to situations like these .... "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that, poof. He's gone." and he wondered was this real, he knew he had heard this somewhere and there it was gone again. He stood their staring lovingly, not knowing why the vision of Pan, neigh the evil looking abomination spoke to something inside of him. He knew not what this was? The vision of the water nymphs, the hedgerows.. What he had never seen a water nymph let alone a hedgerow. What si this thing he called reality, something had happened.

He cleared his mind of these heretical thoughts, comforting himself as he grasped for the book on the inside of  his jacket, the hardness of its outer cover and backing comforted him in his time of need. As he turned the corner he knew he would see the cross peaking through the trees from the small anglican church, No a truck was blocking his view, slowly it moved, he craned his neck and all was back to normal again. He could continue along with his walk to the depths of a life he could not understand nor believe in, but was forced into. Inside he knew he had the strength to continue this day, and the next and the next.

the life of a bread

This is the life of bread in our kitchen

from humble foam beginnings

we get yeast captured from the "Wild"

a symbiotic combination of yeasts and Lactobacili, in combination the digest the flour turning this into Carbon dioxide and Alchohol. You can see the asymmetrical pockets of yeast, quite different from the homogeneous commercial yeast which creates a very uniform froth.

an extended rising period to allow the development of the flavours and the  asymmetrical bubbles and the rubbery texture

the final outcome

some details of the fractal surface

some more details of the fractal surface 

a detail of the based of the baked bread with its fern like patterns

the eventual texture of the bread

when you have a choice?

What is it you do when you have a choice?

Do we all have choices, or are we bound inextricably to the existence and future destined to us by our pseudo Calvinistic mindset.

How much can we leave to chance, how much freedom do we have in shaping our own destiny? Is there an inertia akin to the phylogenetic inertia that binds us to this fragile phenotype we call Homo sapiens?  What is the distinction or difference between the phenotypic plasticity displayed this race we call humanity. Why call it a race, simply plunging head forward into the abyss of the unknown known future we are creating for ourselves as a race or meme. Why is it we cannot make good decisions as a collective. As individuals we stand tall, speak out and rage, but as a collective we are weakened by the indifference and ambivalence of the race we call humanity, should I rather say called. As we move headlong into this the new millennium, who holds the torch high guiding us into the night, silently into the night I shall go, I fear not for I have my  belief and inertia, it will carry me on through the days and nights of endless doubt and into the new day. My spirit is my guiding light, i know not which guide stands before me? It could be a slight flight of my imagination, it could be a dark and harrowing view on the reality  of our existence as humanity. I stand tall, i creep through the boughs of reality. The stark, grey sleek view that humanity is tabletizing on us.

et tu my human companions you sell me down the river
as i stand before the abyss of the river of life which spans that which is lying before us
will i ever know the pink dolphin, will i see the fluorescent glow of the bio luminescence of the beaches of my life
the waves crash harshly onto the rocks of stability
my continent burns
We stand back and watch it burn to the ground, like a candle burning from both ends, no one to blame
a collective uncertainty
a collective insanity
is there a path forwards?

hey for those who worry, this is not me .. this is just societies unhappiness not mine ...
i cannot stand and not see, but i cannot stop what is inevitable and not see what is unfolding in front of us

look forward

how fragile we are ..

us humans
we stand we fall

we get up we stand
we fall
we lay die down and die ..
what makes us stand up every time what makes us stay down
what gives us belief in tomorrow, when there is nothing
is there something,
for some there is....
for others there isnt

Don't be afraid stand tall......

add two tablespoons of flour to two tablespoons of fruit juice stir and let stand keep adding and stirring for 3-4 days till it foams.

Life starts from nothing, bread has meaning, light, the sound of a cicada, the blue sky, the sound of the wind whistling through the line on my fishing rod, the crashing of waves sending spray onto my shades, invigorating sea spray.

It begs the question is despair a first or third world emotion? Where does it fit on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

But stepping aside from that where do we stand?

A good coffee, some decent bread, some fresh sea food what more do we want.

maybe some time next to the sea ..
where do we draw the lines between what is essential and what is a luxury


oh back to the bread thing.. once it has been standing for 3-4 days you should have bubbles and froth ..it should have a pleasent smell not a vile smell :-)
.. this is sourdough after all

alternativily we have tried taking two or three apples, blending them and adding them to flour and water  .. this gave a fantastic rise to the bread as well.. The standard approach is to take flour water and hope that you get a culture going... or is that have culture? LOL
Does sourdough give you culture or is the belief that the culture gives you culture?
 
Oh and about the slashing of the bread ... interesting.. that is to allow the bread to rise .. often the yeast does not have enough strength to lift the mass of dough above it ... Thus we slash it to release the pressure.


here is a nice resource http://sourdough.com/links 

another very important term: Bannetons
http://donssourdough.blogspot.com/


But there is so much more .. and that si enough of that for now.



maybe a collection of bread photos next?

True insight methodology and the loaf of bread

How dissimilar to the watch the favor and the very large fish, my life has moved from something along the lines of ..... to something more in the lines of the sour dough loaf and the strangely small little fishes I try to catch.

But we need to find the truth of the matter.

How the world is changing, a cloud is no longer just a cloud a cellphone is no longer a cellphone or a mobile phone is is a mobile device, the sea is empty of fishes and we have to pay someone for a piece of sour dough starter? A maori man stood up and told a whole lot of people that he had a vision, no one cares, they stare and ridicule. It is not that he was/is wrong or right, but that they dismiss his words without respect and with contempt. What has happened to the day that people that people listened and revered the prophets of old. No not the prophets of da city.. that is a kettle of a different fish.

But back to the epic tale of the Sourdough starter, 3 weeks and at least one bag of flour later it appears, wait and about 5 attempts. We seem to have a moderately active and fairly pleasant smelling yeasty bacterial symbiosis. It is an interesting thing this, the development of a sourdough culture. I would equate this to something similar to make roti, in principal it is so simple, but try as you may it just does not work as advertised.  The general principal is to take flour water, or flour and fruit juice or potato water and flour or something similar. Leave it for a few days and hope that a "natural" bacteria and a lacto-bacili lands in the muck and flourishes and grows.  The list of suggestions is endless regarding the ways to promote the bacteria (lactobacillus) and Saccharomyces or Brettanomyces. According to wikipedia (when wheat flour contacts water, naturally occurring amylase enzymes break down the starch into disaccharides (sucrose and maltose); maltase converts these sugars into glucose and fructose that yeast can metabolize. The lactobacteria feed mostly on the metabolism products from the yeast.^[5] The mixture develops a balanced, symbiotic culture after repeated feedings.) .. Bla bla something like that for those of you are not really all that interested in the chemical reaction albeit that it is very interesting and worthy of the number of books that have been written on the topic.

So why all this harping on sourdough you may ask, well it highlights a conundrum or pivotal point in the development of humans, or should I rather say ambivalence. We live in a culture that has, or should i say species,  diametrically opposing value measures. On the one hand we have the need and drive to be technologically centred or advanced, yet on the other hand we have the notion of slow food and living which in many ways are contradictory and they of course we should not forget cultural biases and most importantly the impact of the breadline on this perception.  Where does that leave us as a human race?
We seem to have a multitude of memes around our approach to food as a species. I suppose that is what makes us rather unique in that we don's have a consistent set of foraging and feeding behavior within a contiguous range?  There are numerous other species which display cross range memes in terms of foraging, the most colloquial being the milk/cream  stealing tits in England;-) I do digress, let me return to the notion of slow food and living. This is something I find very appealing, but that is for my subcultural meme. From an evolutionary perspective I doubt this has much in the way of selective advantage or disadvantage in the short term, most profoundly due to the rapid mixing of memes and behavioral patterns.

To get back to the whole sourdough starter issue, what did we try? We tried the flour and water left outside in the elements, I tried chopped up fruit, raisins, potato water and and and.. After leaving each of these Bio-experiments standing and fermenting on our kitchen counter for a good few weeks, much longer than intimated by the authors of various articles books and colloquial comments. The kitchen was filled with the aroma of fermenting flour, but nothing substantial. We then started getting fruit flies and fungus .. But it does appear that we have developed a moderately active culture, with the foam and all. This is after Anita had taken a sub sample of the last  few attempts. So where does this lead me? Phase n! of sourdough bread making.  So what we did before? We made sourdough, but decided that we needed a new culture because there was a fear that we had contamination with commercial yeast. One imagines we should have left best alone, but now we have started culture, which i will give away.. dont worry we wont sell it :-)

what else have learnt, wonderous things about the "science" of breadmaking, bla bla this would all be repetition of easily available resources on the Web. But one or two things i did discover was something to do with the percentage water/flour ratio and what impacts this has on bread making and the magic 60/30 rule. The thing i did however discover was something more amazing.. how the frig they do this ...

And the other thing is why bread is scored or cut like this?

 that is quite interesting, we have also discovered more about flours and types of flours and the misnomer that it means a tremendous amount..



It is all a learning experience, not altogether different from growing veggies in pots on our porch, learning to fish with bait in the sea...  Part of my life as an ex pat. No I did not say my name was pat or that I was a Patsy.. ;-)


So what next, more photos, more things to do and see.

oh here is a nice pic of mine that is in a gallery on the web .. no nothing that fancy, just a collection of images about the interislander ferry in Kiwiland :-)

it is here if you wanna see the bigger version HERE


oh well enough of all things exiting and random for today. You may ask, why the sourdough bread? Why the slow food, just randomness and limited meaning to another day on the slow hamster wheel in kiwiland.



 

back to the beginning again

In many ways we return to the beginning again...

It is a new year, it is a new country, it is a new life, we started baking bread again, we getting better at that, the others.. well that it is still to be seen. As a paraphrase i believe so, at least i am enjoying it more.

The diaspora our lives have become entangled in is rather strange, we really hoped and believed we would be able to meet and find some real Kiwi's to interact with, yet we have become no different to the normal garden variety immigrant Cafe owner/small convenience store owner or any other nationality, i suppose in a Global sense, korean, indian and any other race that has gone forth to conquer the new world in search of a "*****" life. At this stage it is difficult to say? Yes it is a better life, but now I understand why people all say, and I would. do it as soon as you can... Do it as young as you can.. I am not sure If I should say why, It would not really make sense..

But other than that, we return near full cycle to the loaf of bread. A new year, many new loaves of bread, many new days await us beneath the long Cloudy sky, speckled with sunshine between the howling wind, fields of green pierced by fluffy white sheep.I imagine William Orbit got it wrong when he spoke of little fluffy white clouds in Arizona, he would have gone insane standing outside of my back window. How easy it would be to confuse the multiple layers of clouds above the rolling green hills interspersed with small fluffy sheep.

It is really a diaspora from Africa, yet we do not share a  national and/or ethnic identity, but rather a common origin. We can sit as a group of ex-pats and reminisce about different things. I see once again the question of being an African raises it's head  (Now does this require Capitalization?).  What makes you a citizen or naturalized in a country or continent? In Africa it appears that only your skin colour can make you African or is that african? 
As context to this read the following 2 links:


http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sentletsediakanyo/2010/12/28/we-are-not-all-africans-black-people-are


http://necrofiles.blogspot.com/2010/12/defining-race-and-ethnicity-in-south.html

Well I wonder, are we still african in either contexts or if we are afrikan or African or Afrikaans, if we leave the continent either way. But there is little we can add or say regarding this. It is not something that can be simply resolved by us or by intellectual debate as this goes deeper and closer to a grain that spirals in every direction, not allowing us any context or point of view.

But to return to the loaves to feed the many or the many loaves to feed the few, as we dawdle along the pathway of  bread appreciation, and not the facebook liking or page or anything similar.. But in general the appreciation of something so simple yet so complex. something I have gotten to realize is that  like all other noble pursuits bread making is an ever continuing process. Each loaf I make holds surprises for me, yes I know I should attempt for some consistency in the process and possibly an element of repeatability.. But no nothing like that.. in an attempt to learn, each attempt is doomed to possible failure or flop.. a couple have been.. but on the whole they have been successful.One of the most interesting details I have discovered about bread making and most probably more essentially artisan style breads or sourdoughs is the fervor and vigor that the followers exhibit. The lengths that people go to to create the ultimate loaf of bread is just insane, albeit ranging from the sourdough extremists to the perfectionists to the others .. such fun...

But to return to a much earlier post, it is fascinating to follow the web that bread has woven through our lives and our predecessors. something so simple that we take for granted that has a complex and mostly not understood technically by laymen or even those who's lives depend on it. And it is at this point that we have to question the notion of advancement and how it impacts on the survival of the human race as a whole. How important are these meme's in the survival of the race we call humans. I suppose it could most aptly be called a race as we are moving at the speed of a meteor towards eventual cataclysm.
But we are what we are.. we as the human race have been there a couple of times, depending on the book there are a number of different stories, atlantis, ages in chaos, the bible (the pillar of salt story)..

BTW they way i am now seriously in doubt about ever using the pillar of salt metaphor any more after I read the entire text and the in depth discussions around where it leads to .. freaky stuff..
But then again it is from the book that implies i should smite my Canadian neighbours ... ROTFL

But on a lightly more serious note, this does not mean to undermine that which gives meaning and importance to others. We are all a construct of our own devices, minds and cultural biases. How strange we are as humans, we could almost imagine that we are all different. Are we not all searching for the same enlightenment in different places. Some find it in the Bible, some in the Koran some in the Bhakgavat ghita and some in the street art of Banksy, some find it in the patterns on a well formed loaf of bread.

Banksy in afrika

It is a strange thing this perspective or hindsight that we have on our first world pedestal. We throw stones at those poor soles whose lives are within the millieu of their 3rd world existence. throwing stones at those who leave, consoling themselves with their conscience with oxfam dontations  and other similar justifications and conscience beating interludes. But is there anything we can actually do to improve the plight of others in far away 3rd world countries? Does it make it better or worse, where do we draw the line between assistance, intervention or interference? I must apologize I am not casting a stone whilst having a log in my eye, this is merely an observation.  But is there a way that the world can be rescued from humans? There are fragments where humanity has managed to bootstrap itself out its mire, but only here and there, and only to be thrown over by natural events or humans again.

So where does this leave us,

Clive and George's perspective on this would not be any different or would they? More on that another day, it is the essence of what life is for us, you and them. In some ways Karl had it right, in others he didn't, it is not the whole nor the individual, but rather the creative masses and all of the individuals and whole molded together in one writhing complex inexplicably complex mixing pot. Momentarily flashes of light and brilliance emanate from the washing machine of human lives. 

What responsibility do we have as individuals within a larger super organism or entity play, within a story about a story within a moment in time.


to quote the inimitable :


Yeah, It's been a ride...
I guess I had to go to that place to get to this one
Now some of you might still be in that place
If you're trying to get out, just follow me
I'll get you there....
....
....
There's a game called circle and I don't know how
I'm way too up to back down
But I think I'm still tryna figure this crap out
Thought I had it mapped out but I guess I didn't
This fucking black cloud still follow's me around
But it's time to exercise these demons
These motherfuckers are doing jumping jacks now

It is so strange to stand on the outside and wondering what it would like to be on the inside.  So we stand on the outside looking in, based on what we have seen before. how much of that is a reflection of others. How many are great, how many of the greats are reflections of society which were great at the time. How much lurks in the shadows of their minds. Where does greatness start, can it be defined as something which is new or a new look at something old. MM3 looks at himself with laughter, Albert stares absurdly, Freddie looks on stating there is no God, Other Albert said God is in the numbers, frank says Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories. .... We all look back, mouths sealed, eyes so wide the white pierces everything. Does it matter that we stand here doing nothing, does it matter that we stand back, does it matter than we run like dog with our tails between our legs and don't make stand like a dead Lion. The Lion, Zion stands tall, we creep away like the small puppy we are.  I was afraid, the ruins still stand, the phoenix rises, each time more spectacularly than before with no relevance to what it burns in each incarnation. 

But to quote Frank 

"The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."

enough for now .. more later

 

on Another day a different dollar yet the same day

Strangers in strange lands we wonder through this periodicity we call day and night wandering, wondering and  experiencing

How do we respond to the ramblings of a fellow train traveler, noticing the tired lines that days, weeks
 and years have etched into their weather beaten skins. The actual question being how to respond as a rebuttal to another's rambling on life. Our lives are interwoven with others, listening as I am to some old queen. Listening to best friend and other songs,emotions welling up inside I sit in front of an old table worn by others, worn by me as a child. I sit staring into space, caught in my own melancholy of the situation.
But it is life i have chosen above melancholy, not that i do not suffer from serious bouts.  But there is so much to explore in the new lives we have created for ourselves and the old ones we live in. We had a choice to change our lives and our conditions and our general existence. We have to choose to see, to experience, to eat, cook, to walk with the wind blowing through my long beard, how strange it is that at a point the wind would have been blowing through my willowy hair, now all that remains are mere bristles
of the past. But in actual fact it is through the roots that we are biased and model our views and our experience of that which we see and and imbibe around us.
we have a choice, we have taken the choice and it is our responsibility to exercise it to the utmost.

The question of nihilism invokes more questions than it answers, is it an answer to a question that doesn't exist? What is the driving force behind the alternative? Is it a single alternative or is it a plethora of multidimensional options. How do we justify a choice other than Nihilism if we do not have a fundamental or philosophical directive. In those cases there must be more to the decision or the anti-decision. If Nihilism is nothing then the opposite is everything? On immortality I have little to say other than that would be a very long time ;-)


Interestingly one thing i did notice was that there was an inherent similarity in the way things digress, the blog it seems to bring out the worst digressions in all of us, we tend to loose the plot and point and ramble on as if in a discussion with someone ont he train while they are not listening. I must admit that I truly enjoyed the imagery of the dude in the white bath robe, but sorry I could not get past the scary mental image of Riet Willemse in his of white bath robe standing deep in the suburbs of Cape town.. on his early morning waddle to the front gate to pick his cape Argus. While the wind howls viciously around him,. dark green stokies muddied by the inability to see a puddle due to the previous nights vineyard fever. How a simple couple of words can drive us   into a rabbit hole of thoughts.

I digress greatly on the topic at hand, but before i forget i have a couple of rather disturbing yet real and otherwise life titbits. Back to the Pink lady on the train, my weekly intervals of her pressence ont he train are mostly entertaining. She has taken to wearing christmas decorations on her earrings .. This is so cool on Monday she was wearing small (well not all that small) golden teddy bear earrings. Oh how fragile we are in our preconceptions and social adherence. Why is it we are bound to the social standards, why can we not all be wearing strange decorations:-) Well in some senses in between all they gray, yes we had summer it lasted for a couple of weeks, we are now back into the greyness .. it is a strange thing, I think Smilla spoke of her sense of snow, Maybe it shoudl be mark's sense of the gray and white, I am at a loss to describe or capture the colours, or lack of the colours on an electronic media. The grayness perpetuates everything inbetween the greens and browns and yellows. It is truely mystical at times. The weather is everythign and more here, i experienced last weekend to my amazement, that for once my forsight of extra clothes is an acceptable practice:-) I went rambling, such a nice word, to a valley about 40 km away from my house, I left int he morning and the weather was awesome, hot Sic!.. well hot for here .. warm and sunny and hardly a cloud int he sky, I then progressed over they heywoods, through the hut valley and past Petone.. where i could see the white blanket reminiscent of the table cloth runnign off the mountains into the see int he Wellington bay. Crossing over the hill into the next valley, where the closer I rode to the Cook straights the more incliment the weather became.. only to arrive at my desitnation to experience, cold, windy and mysty surrounds.. insane insane insane..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34377062@N00/5207880435/

 
but back to the rabbit hole in reality and the expression of self and many other things. Today I saw my second Hedgehog here in NZ, btw they are a pest.. so no glamour... but that is not the current point at hand, and the first one was splatted on the road like a flat possum.. of which there are many .. but that is another story for later.  But back to this one..

"picture this ...

I was cycling to work this morning.. it was rather cloudy and cold. and mystical as it is at that time of the morning,  This in its own sense is rather mystical and eerie at best, to be alone on your bicycle this early int he morning in the  Cold and the mist.. something that I have always loved, yet have found creepy and mystical. Must be something akin to a fear of the dark. But to get back to the Hedgehog, it was just sitting there on the side of the raod, and strangely it was much larger in real life than I had ever expected. but mroe than that the setting just scratched to clearly at a memory within me that was not my own. Lets not call it deja vu.. lets call it a feeling similar to somethig i would experience from a Lewis carrol story. and then it struck me.. it had nothing to do with going down the rabbit hole, albeit there is something down those lines..  But it is a story I read my daughters when they were much younger, I said small in my first incarnation of the sentence .. that would be far to lewis carrolish ..

The story is very sweet, and strangely the anthropomorphism of animals is in no way out of place, even in the story of Mrs Tiggy-winkle. But to get back to the story the dreamlike quality of this story is just amazing and would best capture my experience of seeing this quaint little weta killer. It draws us deep into a world which is literally down  the rabbit hole. Somehow walking through the hills and dales and mountains around new zealand it feels like i am immersed in a book that was written,a ctually co-authored by lewis carrol, beatrix potter and Tolkien .. it is so weird. I have seen benjamen bunny, I saw Mr jeremy fisher, I saw the "sticklebacks, I saw the Trout" .. I could have been there in the pages of this book.

At times i could have been hiding from Orks and sauroman.. it is a truly weird place.

To return to rhetort :-) on the Filosophy , we are just mammals, here in New Zealand. It is such a diaspora of nations and individuals. But some of the strangest things i  am experiencing are the impacts of people who have gone before, by experience of the history of my life, my country of origin, my parents country of origin and the way the original colonizers of this place have changed and tamed this environment. It makes me think so much about things I cannot comprehend nor understand that I stand in shame of my race the humans.  IT relates me to the xkcd cartoon of the day.

in general i stare at the beauty and splendour here, knowing full well that 90% of it is created or should i say broken in like a wild horse by my species. so much of what we see here is just so un-natural, so much so that the natural bush looks out of place.. 


But more on me seeing that this is my Blog, how do i feel, I feel angry I feel angry at all those that preceded me and many of the choice they made and the eventual route it has sent me and more importantly the whole of the human race on. You got to question  it all

steriotypically i would like to end this exiting episode in the recesses of my mind with some piece of pink floyd lyrics that in some ways reflect some of things I have been  thinking about recently

"So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here. 
 
Nobody knows where you are,
How near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers
And I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow
Of yesterday's triumph,
And sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child,
You winner and loser,
Come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine! 

"

a full circle

so the circle turns like a large Ferris wheel .. and we return to the sour dough, the glue that holds society together again, like the dust, the egg and the flour and whatever holds us together.

Like before the notion of self is indicated as the reflection off others or as the reflection of others, this must be why we have a fascination with shinny objects. albeit that we say they are objet d'art (fantastic!!! look at the one liner that came back from Google:

"The term "Objets d′art" can be a synonym, a popularized version for interior design commerce, or a vulgarism of pretension"

 all perspective, when is art ART. is food ART, is photography of Food Art? Is eating food art, movies about food can be art? 


Is the Loaf of bread ART? or is it an Art or is it artistry to make a loaf of bread? 


But I must be honest I digress, wildly from the my starting point, Quo Vardis.


we have to return to the tao of bread, but rather than returning to the starting point we will use the starting point as a reference. We cannot return to that point simply. Even on the Interweb, something so stable as DNS entry can stalk off and move away and virtualize, and never be the same, the molecules, the electrons are all different, yet they are the same?




it appears, albeit possibly unreliably that Art is defined by wikipedia as : "
A work of art in the visual arts is a physical two or three dimensional object that is professionally determined or popularly considered to fulfill a primarily independent aesthetic function. A singular art object is often seen in the context of a larger Art movement or artistic era, such as: a genre, aesthetic convention, culture, or regional-national distinction"


Bringing me to a divergent point in the bifurcation of the universal truths, or should it have been truth? When did printed matter stop or start being relevant or truthful? In the Past (sic!) we could trust the printed word, the book was truth. Maybe this is why people believe the bible to be unequivocally true. It is a Book, Books if not fiction are truthful therefore the bible is true. It cannot be otherwise. The newspapers don't lie, the politicians speak the truth of the red danger, When did the Truth dissipate and dilute? what was the cause of the dilution of Truth? I wonder Maybe Riet Willemse would know? 


You may ask who Riet Willemse is? is he real or is he a cosntruct. 


But to get back to the truth of the bread. The bread is truth, it IS. 


And the wheat fell from the growth on the green grass and it was real, even that may not be true any more. Even the most fundamental truth's are being eroded. GM foodstuffs now take away the truth of the essence or do they, are they merely a reflection of societies changes and the speed at which information and change pervades our lives. When wheat is no longer wheat, tomatoes are fishes and Goldfishes glow in the dark. 

We swim slowly in the goldfish bowl of earth, wishing, wishing .... enough sentimentality. 


Back to the truth of Bread as Art or as an artForm.  It brings us back to the essence of bread and its artistry. Is it a Cultural Artifact? Is it the Magnum opus of food? Who knows? Riet may know? Or Slats? Oh yes Slats NaaIr is also a social Construct. They are both in ways similar to Max Headroom, yet in physical embodiment of a cultural imperative or cultural artifact. I suspect we have to start somewhere and the determination of value is of utmost importance. what value does bread have in monetary terms, as a meme or even as an Artifact. To the Slow food pundits, it would possibly be the pinnacle or possibly base of a principal. Somewhere to start, something to complete and in many cases a Damn good example. But bread in Art? It exists all over.  What is the distinction between art and artistic?


But I digress once to many, as I labour on my long distance epic into my new existence as the strange bread maker in the strange land. I suspect the bread, the lowly bread is a good place to start to rebuild to restart. 


I suspect the starter culture is fairly depleted, but as in all things this can be regenerated. With great difficulty we start again, a fresh. We start a new meme. Or do we continue with a pre-existing meme? Can we develop anew? 


Oh something i was thinking of whilst standing on the train this morning:


I wonder about the stories within the stories within the photographs I take and view,
how many of them are seen and appreciated?
Of things I miss and the things I miss that I hated and hated missing and loved and of course the dream of the very big fish. The kiss of the Spiderwoman and Arizona dreaming in the time of Gypsies. The tale woven with richness of food and tastes that is my life. When counting the coins of our existence, we may often stare at apparently empty hands, without even a copper to show. But it is not the coins that remain but rather the coins that have passed through our hands. We cannot be complacent and look back at an existence without a route forward.
Even though I walk through the glades of green grass, for i shall not fear a serpent
the loneliness walks beside me
Harping beside me, pulling me slowly backwards into a pool of memories and wishes and dreams of a time gone past, these are better viewed like a mirror.
I stand aimlessly staring into the ripples formed by the wind over the crystal water hoping to see an image of my past, knowing well that it is only the future that stands in front of me and the past is behind me.
Not saying that what followed me had no value, but that what stands before me is the challenge
minute by minute, hour by hour i edge forward up the path of reconciliation with my inner self
memories lay strewn around me like a broken mirror, glimpses and fleeting images passing me by.


But Back to the bread,
More practically we definitely have moved to the land of milk and something? To be blessed (note i use that lightly) but we are to experience new tastes and views and smells and experiences.
Yesterday we had Crab, paddle crab in safron and cream sauce. And it was good
The trains stopped in wellington
The train to Johnsonville was running, that was good
The cycle to Whitby was long, the wind was wild.. that was good

So the question that remains? We have to return to needing the kneeding.

So we will try again and create a starter culture.

whilst seeking for a culture of our own.If not finding one we will create anew

enough for now more later.