I have been having difficulty loading images into my blog.  At the moment, my life seems to be about coming to terms with the passage of time.  So maybe it is appropriate to paste in images of the January and February calendars.  They represent a take on the first one sixth of the year 2013.

Catacombae

Today I was looking at the January Smithsonian and was interested in their special edition with a number of articles about time, all written by very smart people.  So I made a collage for my journal.  I inserted the image of the journal page but it didn't really turn out the way I wanted it.  So I have much to learn about the art of blogging.  Maybe I'll go to the library tomorrow where there's a faster internet signal.

  
February 2, 2013

 I wanted to use some of the Mussorgsky work to go with the idea of trying to get a handle on time.  I could not load them into the blog page though I had no trouble loading in the icicles picture.

Catacombae   “The creative spirit of the dead Hartmann leads me to the skulls, calls me close to them, and the skulls glow softly from within.”  Mussorgsky

As if...

 

February 2, 2013

I can hardly believe that one twelfth of the year has gone--forever…! In a way we can see it as a joke, but there is something about the passage of time that is totally incomprehensible.  EveryTHING (more or less) is related to ‘place’ but time escapes from any place.  Our perceptions are fixated on the solidity of things in space.  Don’t we have any receptors for time? 

Our languages must be related to this in some way, with our fixation on naming things.  We even name actions in an effort to fix them in space.  Time doesn’t figure.  So do you think that we are physically limited in such a way that however it was that language was invented, humans simply didn’t have the physical capability to acknowledge time when inventing grammar and vocabulary?  This reminds me of the ‘quiff’ thingy and Schroediger’s cat.  Time has been named, measured and talked about, but we still can’t understand what nor why.

 

January 30, 2013

I am looking at my painting of icicles.  It was painted for Shakespeare’s poem from Love’s Labours Lost:

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail

When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul

When nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit,

      Tu-who, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot

When all aloud the wind doth blow

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow

And Marian’s nose is red and raw

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl

When nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit

      Tu-who, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The image I painted is of the weeping side of a cliff, which in winter almost always has some ice on it.  That winter there was more than usual.  The ice extended right across the highway.  This area is on the road to Harrison River--somewhere west of the turn off to the Sasquatch Inn.  The Sasquatch Inn used to be a very characterful pub.  At the time it was different from any other pub in the province that I knew of, because there were no separate entrances or drinking areas for Gentlemen and Ladies with Escorts.  Everyone came in the same door and sat in the same room while enjoying some draft beer.  Nobody ever asked what you’d like because there was only one beer on tap.  The waiter came over with a tray of small glasses filled with beer and asked how many you wanted.  There were no pints.  The Sasquatch has become updated today.  This probably has a lot to do with the ski area that opened on Hemlock Mountain.  The Sasquatch is at the turn off.  When you come down exhaused from a day of skiing, you have the option of getting pye-eyed before you get back on the icy road.  Ah-h-h, winter.  This is why I am in Apache Junction right now.  I can get pie-eyed a lot cheaper right here at home.  And while doing that, I relax in my hammock.

I'll probably need some little nudges from somewhere before I can actually start this blog.  But one of my New Year's resolutions was that I would start a blog.  It has taken my broadband stick forever to bring the page up in the first place, so the scatterings of 'As if...' may be a bit sparse for a while.  I haven't decided what to put in this blog but  calling it 'As if...' does have some relationship to what I might want to write about and post photos about. 

From the time I started to think about things and remember them, 'as if' more or less describes my experience.  I see things as if I am the centre of the universe.  I just thought of it now but since I've chosen this title, it will likely have a bearing on whatever gets into this blog.  After I have a day to think about what has happened here, maybe tomorrow I can actually start this blog.