This Blog

Since I was old enough to form coherent memories, I've been researching and thinking about a handful of questions that interest me. I can't help it. I'm compelled like a dog needs to sniff the ground.

I have been reluctant to put my thoughts in words, though, because squiggles and lines on a piece of paper are a feeble medium for transmitting the images and concepts that are alive in my head. Hopefully, all the tools of the Internet will provide a better way to convey them.

Writing, is at best, only the evidence of motion of an active mind, just petrified foot-prints. A reader can follow the path, and see the muddled gray version of the sights that the author saw, and obtain some version of the experience that was in the author's brain. For example, when I write about walking through the woods near Cedar Road in Munson Township, the image in my mind is detailed. I recall the pine needles underfoot, and the roots of trees, and the sunlight filtered through branches. I think about one afternoon when I was a teenager, and I walked right up to a fawn that was standing there. While the passage of years has muted my memory of the colors and the movements of myself and the deer, I know that a reader only sees stick-figure versions of that scene in their mind's eye.

In the worst case, writing becomes the inky blood of institutions, and an animated corpse of long dead authors. The desire to dominate is, perhaps, the only emotion that outlasts the men who nurture it. In the worst case, writing enslaves people and pickles the brains of the living and puts them to sleep.

There's an ongoing struggle between the living and the undead and their minions. At times, this struggle manifests in physical form: in wars, or in commerce, but mostly it's a struggle of individuals. It's a struggle to see and understand the world, and to find and accept freedom of thought and action.