The Seventh Seal

Pic is a pen and inc watercolor I did when first arrived...a control burned meadow. I make postcards out of some paintings, with the thought someday to market postcards, but I doubt if I'll ever get to it...one of the "sometime" things.




CNN is on with the Jena story...


I'm still mulling yesterdays start at a post...I want to get at the 19th Century authors tone...from Muir to Melville, Poe to Emerson, Whitman to Longfellow, and a lot of others I'm not that familiar with...Mark Twain too. I think all of them were over come by America's natural beauty and landscape, and the discoveries of Darwin and the geologists, something of what goes on with the Hudsen Valley painters...this might take a bit of thinking!


One pioneer posed the question, Was the discovery of Yosemite the opening of the Seventh Seal?...when I find that quote's source I'll add it...



I found an account of Whitney's journey through the valley and surroundings, which I want to work with too, and his quarrel about the Glaciers with Muir.

quote from early newspaper account of Huthchings' visit...
San Francisco Daily California Chronicle, August 18, 1855

From Mr. Hunt’s store, we kept an east-of-north course, up the divide between the Fresno and Chowchillah valleys; thence descending towards the South Fork of the Merced river, and winding around a very rocky point, we climbed nearly to the ridge of the Middle or main fork of the Merced, and descending towards the Yo-Semity valley, we came upon a high point, clear of trees, from whence we had our first view of this singular and romantic valley; and, as the scene opened in full view before us, we were almost speechless with wondering admiration at its wild and sublime grandeur. “What!” exclaimed one at length, “have we come to the end of all things?” “Can this be the opening of the Seventh Seal?” cries another.

end quote

Sublime, that's the word, the 19th century pursued the Sublime in Nature...

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
September 21, 2007

Tomb Earth

I remembered the following quote from wikipedia's site on William Cullen Bryant and his early poem Thanatopsis ...pic from wiki...

quote

Due to the unusual quality of the verse and Bryant's age when first published in 1817 by the North American Review, Richard Henry Dana, then associate editor at the Review, initially doubted its authenticity, saying to another editor, "No one, on this side of the Atlantic, is capable of writing such verses."

unquote

(and snagged it tonight from another blogger doing a bit on Bryant..)

Hawthorne's Haunted Mind is still in the mulling...and this poem I'm trying to tie into it...the poem sees the earth as a tomb...

And I've been thinking about graveyards as common haunted ground...and is there a "common haunted ground"?..is where I'm headed...but it needs some work up...

Getting up early tomorrow, so I need to make it short tonight...

quote from poem..

The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, pour'd round all,
Old Ocean's grey and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

unquote

watched cnn all nite after work...the Jena story tells about the use of digital cameras and blogs...I may have mispoke about the web dampening things down!

One of interviewed dodges a question...did he think the nooses were a hate crime...and I saw note that Bush is dodging a question...and the two stories are related!

quote

By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent 1 hour, 3 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday refused to criticize a U.S. security company in Iraq accused in a shooting that left 11 civilians dead, saying investigators need to determine if the guards violated rules governing their operations.

unquote

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
September 20, 2007

Jason and Golden Fleece

Yesterday morning an old Hercules movie was on...one of those Italian ones dubbed with English. It had the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece (I came in during the Amazons...)

And it was funny when Jason tries to get the Fleece away from the protecting Dragon. The Dragon bellows with Godzilla's roar, and the "music" is from The Forbidden Planet soundtrack, famous for being all electronic music...a first in a movie.

Animal Planet on...I dont know what to watch anymore. First the ocean show, now the animal police.

Noting the Hercules movie soundtrack is from my new found sensitivity to how the movies are made, the sound, and how the cameras take in things. This because of the little videos I'm making of the Creek critters.

Even the worst of movies is a lot of work, and the effort goes unheralded, even in the best and frequently watched movies.

Robert Graves was working on a historical novel, Hercules My Shipmate, when he got sidetracked and started writing the White Goddess.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
September 19, 2007

Charcoal Half Dome

I'm one of those who feels I must go somewhere, or do something, or I'll feel bad because I haven't done anything or gone anywhere!

I'm likely to skip meals, housecleaning, doctor appointments, just generally everything, in the pursuit of this.

And if I'm trapped by work, I feel worse, and go into a funk, which makes things twice as worse as I'm likely to just turn the TV on and zone out, totally frustrated.

I should be doing charcoal drawings...this one I did today one of few I've done here...and writing my poems...as that's what I can do.

But I like to do the photography, it's poplular, and I spent most of tonight editing video, and shortly try to get it all on dvd.

I have no idea what to do with newsprint charcoals once I've drawn them..the paper turns dry and crumbles quickly...I've tossed hundreds of class drawings...I could use Mi Tientes paper, or some other, but it hasn't the same feel.

Two of my channels have gone mute on TV...dont know if it's my pushing wrong buttons on remote, or the TV...Letterman and Ferguson and PBS...

CNN has gone totally silly.

I was going to post about the meteor, Tamanana or something(Tomanowa), sacred to the Indians up North...someone selling a chunk...last night...and now tonight one has fallen in Peru making people sick.

The Indians held the meteor sacred, a gift from the Sky People...and it is thought that the old Egyptians with their BenBen stone did the same. Or is it BenBen bird, and another name for the sacred stone...then there's the Kaaba cube with the meteor in it's corner...that's the square monument Muslims circle in Mecca.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
September 18, 2007

Happy Ending

A hiker, near my age!, somehow got lost between Glacier Point and Taft Point. This pic from yesterday when I thought this helicopter was looking for a lost hiker. They found him okay, just a little thirsty. That's the west side of Sentinel.

PBS has story of Japanese American airman, turret gunner. Flew missions in Europe and over Japan too.

I was going to do a bit on morbid movies, and morbid 19th century authors (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Whittier..I've been gathering them..) but it was such a nice day that the whole thing evaporated. For another time...

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

September 16, 2007

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Movie "Blade" was on before I went to work, and now repeated...and it's nuts...oh but Dirty Jobs was going nowhere...

I thought to look up Nathaniel Hawthorne and give that Haunted Mind piece another reading...brb

Oh, I quoted Hawthorne in the Dragon's Teeth post...he told the tale of Cadmus.

Well, I thought about dreams today...they defy those parameters for the scientific principle...they are not separate from the viewer, and two or more people can't view them, or see the same thing.

So how can they be reported? I dont know!

Now, last night, this morning actually, (Hawthorne does quite a job in describing sleep!), I had a dream which seemed connected to those Alaska scenes last night, and mixed in with the Creek....I have my tripod and camera, and climbing gravel slopes and come upon an open view of a river in a deep ravine...and it's a good photo I think, and start to set the camera up...and I hear, or see, machinery, a bulldozer?, working in the woods, and I think they wont be bothered by me, and I go back to the camera, but now I'm looking at the forested river bank...no open view..and I try to climb the gravel slopes to find it again, and climbing the slopes should make me tired, I think, but my strides are strong.

Did I remote view someplace? I dont know. It seems a mundane enough dream, but what interests me is the pervasive anxieties in my dreams...in this one, will I bother the machinery operators?, will I tire climbing the gravel slopes? and the allusiveness of taking the view photograph.

The 19th century American poets and novelist seem to seek insights, and to pass them on...I suppose because of two things, it was still the age of exploration, and like the scientists they wanted to make discoveries.

Maybe tomorrow I'll find some examples of this...Winslow Homer comes to mind too, as his paintings are often meditations of one thing or another...

Well, I have to watch Blade...I think that's Jessica Biel... oh, there's a whole series of these...

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
September 15, 2007

Haunted House

Time was, a long time ago, I dont know how long!, people believed in ghosts and the supernatural. Since the advances of science, all that's changed.

But if our heads, our minds, can be considered a "house", where we truly live, we're still haunted.

National Geographic has the story of two different bear attacks about the same time in the Kodiak archipelago...it's a bit drawn out!

We intuit that our 'house" is haunted, and that's why, I think, so much of our entertainments have supernatural things, scary things.

Ferguson had a fellow on his show the other night that articulated very well how the news shows play on our fears...because fear more than anything gets our attention, and that's what advertisers seek, an audience that stays tuned to see what new catastrophe, from anywhere in the world nowadays, may be threatening. And, he explained, watching these shows leads to stress and other ailments.

Well, my new illusive friend from Tuolumne just explained to me that books dont have advertisements, and you can leave a story and come back to the same spot in the story..."You cant do that with TV..." We both love books.

More Kodiak bears...they're brown bears, distant, and much much bigger, cousins of the brown bears hereabouts.

"People who love books, always have a friend." I read that, or something like that, in a WW2 history book, or something, by a retired military officer.

Pic is a book about the Magic Kingdom's Haunted Mansion...been there many times delivering bogies.

Link to Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Haunted Mind

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/haw3610.txt

DavidDavid

Tree in the Door

September 15, 2007