"When you get older, it is a bit like being an adolescent – every day is different. It is a strange thing. You are proceeding into the unknown, which is different from growing up and proceeding into the known."

Susan Hiller

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/15/susan-hiller-interview-self-doubt-is-always-present

Thinking about the memoir

 After the death of the poet Donald Hall I arranged to borrow several books of his essays from the library. Most essays are memoirs of his early experiences collected from the point of view of a man obviously getting on in years. While I enjoyed his essays on other poets I began to find the memoirs less engaging. It is not surprising that many people find memory alluring as they age. It's what they have in abundance. As the Wendell Berry character stated in the quote below, " I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." But what I am seeing is that too often I remember negative experiences. And even if the memories are good I have realized that I need to focus more on experiencing new things, the positives in life. Which seems simplistic, but many things we take an unconscionable amount of time to learn, in retrospect, are. So I have decided memory in moderation, and instead I will focus more on reading my many books, posting to my websites, working on my hobbies and connecting with family and friends. Which means these posts, which have gotten fairly perfunctory over the years will probably get longer. (Sorry)

The quote below is from a post on my Jagged Orbit  website, regarding the purchase of the magazine pictured above. It also deals with the subject of memory and aging. 

the full blog entry is here:

http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/search/label/Edgar%20Rice%20Burroughs

"I have to admit this purchase was rooted very much in nostalgia or perhaps immaturity if you like. I have lately found the rise of irrationalism worldwide troubling and some days the world seems unrecognizable. As I get older my reading and collecting helps keep me mentally active, engaged and grounded. The process of aging has been beautifully described by Wendell Berry in his novel (a favourite of mine) Jayber Crow.

 "Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.
     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." (24)
I try very hard to avoid wallowing in memories of the past, and make sure that I read new and diverse works and authors, but I, like Edward St Ives, cannot resist the occasional winged T-Rex." 

"Back there at the beginning, as I see it now, my life was all time and almost no memory. Though I knew early of death, it still seemed to be something that happened only to other people, and I stood in an unending river of time that would go on making the same changes and the same returns forever.

     And now, nearing the end, I see that my life is almost entirely memory and very little time." 

from Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

"There is always a gap between how we feel inside 

ourselves and how the world sees us. Sometimes this gap

 is comfortingly narrow and seems bridgeable; at other

 times it yawns horribly, so that the self we experience and 

the one that other people encounter appear almost unconnected.

I think that this bewildering and often frightening 

mismatch between the way we see and know ourselves and

the way the world sees us happens more often and more powerfully

as we get older - because, of course, inside our minds and our hearts

and our heads, we are still young, still just getting going on life's 

journey, still making up our minds who we want to be."
...., 

But the mirror ignores the selves I carry with me and can only, 
mercilessly, show me my 56-year-old self, unmistakably 
bashed about by life and all its ambushes.

By Nicci Gerrard for the Daily Mail

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2813247/The-day-saw-old-crone-mirror-realised-NICCI-GERRARD-awful-chasm-young-feel-world-sees-us.html

" We come into life with nothing and gradually we build 

up the vast, rich world of the self: language and knowledge 

and relationships and belongings and experience and 

memory and love. Above all, memory and love. "

from Words fail us: dementia and the arts

by Nicci Gerrard

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/19/dementia-and-the-arts-fiction-films-drama-poetry-painting

“There was still distance to travel, but I was on the way to drawing level with Mr. Deacon, as a fellow grown-up, himself no longer a figment of memory from childhood, but visible proof that life had existed in much the same way before I had begun to any serious extent to take part; and would, without doubt, continue to prevail long after he and I had ceased to participate.” 

from A Buyer's Market

by Anthony Powell

"Even in a country you know by heart

it's hard to go the same way twice.

The life of the going changes.

The chances change and make a new way.

Any tree or stone or bird

can be the bud of a new direction."

from Traveling at Home

by Wendell Berry

I have not been taking a lot of pictures lately so I decided to

finish off the photos for our trip to visit friends in Oct.

 I guess I have sort of missed winter this year. I find 

preparing to retire a bit more complex and stressful

than I expected. But all change is that way and by the 

end of April it will be time for new adventures and I 

have to say I am ready.

Again I love the rolling hills and the sky.

A prairie town in autumn, it's history, one snapshot 

in the life of the region, commemorated in a 

few iconic building and some lovely murals.

Looking forward to being an old dog in the sun.

" I know what I valued.

Last night I heard a coyote howling off the ridge

and went to the window.

In the darkness behind the glass

I saw myself, and behind my eyes the stars flew

into the pines."

                              from Last Nickle Ranch: Plains, Montana

                                           by David Bottoms

"Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate from the bridge it covers."

from Monet Refuses the Operation

by Lisel Mueller

   We arrived at the cabin a couple of days ago. 
These photos were taken by the trail camera attached
to the post by the porch steps. The bear appears for
several days after we left then nothing.

“ ...If there is to be a poet in these modern times,

he must go out for himself and must gain much

wisdom. He must look deeply into the world,

and far into time, even though he sees both the

world and time from some little microcosm like

Sheep Rock Spring.”

                                                from Sheep Rock

                                                        by  George R. Stewart,

" Sometimes it is inconceivable that I should be the age I am

Almost always it is at a dry point in the afternoon

I cannot remember what

I am waiting for and in my astonishment I

Can hear the blood crawling over the plains

Hurrying on to arrive before dark "

from The Child 

by W.S. Merwin

This quote from Merwin really struck me as appropriate

for those times I encounter a chance mirror or 

contemplate the years since something or to

something. These shots are from last weekend

when we had, hopefully our last blast of winter.

This weekend we bought a Thule for our upcoming

trip to the cabin and I did a bit of yard work.

"Almost a thousand years later

I am asking the same questions

you did the ones you kept finding

yourself returning to as though

nothing had changed except the tone

of their echo growing deeper

and what you knew of the coming

of age before you had grown old

I do not know any more now

than you did then about what you

were asking"

from A Letter to Su Tung-po

by W.S. Merwin

"Am I going on too much? I value these because they happened,
and the sum of them is my lifetime."


From Roger Ebert's Salon.com article My Backup Mom
(discussing his memories of his family and friends)



I have been feeling the passage of time lately something I think
is quite common as one grows older. Certainly I find a lot
of writers discussing the past, memory, history, the passage
of personal time, the passage of institutions, customs. A poet 

I have been reading lately John Koethe excels at memory and 

passage of time in the city landscape.

 

"This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come
It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home
In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly
In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance.

Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life,
There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane.
The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves,
And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade.
The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild,
Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes
Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret.
And then gradually the moments quicken into life,
Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene;
And then the park is empty and the years are still."


from The Park
John Koethe

 

So staying with the theme of time a homage to the seasons.

 

 

 

I have loved science fiction since encountering it in the school
and public libraries I frequented as a child in Windsor. Lately
I have been adding SF anthologies from the 1940’s and
1950’s to my collection. I love the strange stores that appeared
in an pulp magazine were republished in a old anthology and
then disappeared forever. For example a running bathtub that
brings down the skyscrapers of New York? Tonight I opened
the mails and there was Science Fiction Adventure in Dimension
(time) but the first story I picked out was by a favorite author
Ray Bradbury and I encountered this wonderful passage set on Mars

 

 

 

Max registers his approval.

“There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and
turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did
time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you
wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water
running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping
down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further,
what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping
silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an
ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year
balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time
smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved
a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost
taste time.
He drove the truck between hills of time"




                                                         Night Meeting
                                                                            Ray Bradbury