Shelley’s classic sonnet first spoke to me in grade 12/1967; I imagined that our school would be gone one day (And this, ironically, happened for real 5 decades later when it was closed/abandoned, and then burned to the ground by vandals.). It just seemed like the perfect poem about the folly of egotism and political corruption.

A year or so ago, it seemed like it had become more relevant with the defeat of Trump at the polls. Since then, he has been in retreat with many of his businesses failing–as they always have. In the above picture, a sign with ‘Trump’ on it would have about the same effect as Shelley’s poem. No, there eventually won’t be anything left of the global empire Trump foisted on the world while glorifying himself.

From 1990ish. Many poets just write about themselves, but social commentary is a larger view and understanding of the world we live in.

Many are the dead men and women of history, especially those unjustly killed by dictators, wars, and impersonal technology. Often mainly for the selfish/egoic whims and desires of corrupt, evil rulers.

Despite the above harsh, corrupt reality, many people do not live beyond their daily worlds of Tims, lattes, and relatively small/insignificant personal problems.

Joyce’s quote lives on with recent events in America, the Ukraine, etc. Our world remains an ambiguous, crazy mish-mash of what Northrop Frye called “wish fulfillment” underpinned by a surfeit of “anxiety dream”.

Two very young sibling squirrels on the backyard tray:

A model of sharing for human siblings.

Another year, another pandemic poem….

Jimmy Seals (left) of Seals and Crofts, the popular 1960s-70s folk duo with hits including “Summer Breeze”, “Diamond Girl”, “King of Nothing”, and “We May Never Pass This Way Again”.

They first came to my attention in 1970 after their memorable, poetic Down Home album (lyrics below).

“The world we know is living                                                                                                              In a hand me down shoe, hand me down shoe                                                                           And don’t you know that the shoe don’t fit                                                                                Maybe there’s a hole in it.”

One of The Guess Who’s hits, “Hand Me Down World” was likely inspired by this song.

Another pandemic poem written in spring. Nature carries on, oblivious to the human plague that has destroyed so many human lives and dreams. The Frost epigraph is a good question he often pondered. What can we make of a world that is less than what we once knew and believed? What is still humanly possible after myriad setbacks and crises? We must needs take instruction from the past and the great people of the past: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”–Emily Dickinson.

Each process is composed of numerous moments. It is the moment which typically gets frozen in camera pictures and individual memory. It is priceless to stop Time. Technology has long allowed us to do that.

Not to say that the process or the ‘films/videos’ aren’t memorable’; it’s just that, in them, the details/the ‘basic facts’ tend to get lost and the eye is distracted by many more elements.

For centuries, permanence has been a recurring human desire and obsession. What stands still? What can catch the reality of the moment and ‘fix it’ so the eye can see it and the mind can fathom and appreciate it quite apart from the ongoing, never-ending flow of life and Time.

It is also in the frozen moment or work of art that one can linger with and savour the always-present factor of context. Everyone, everything, every action, decision, or choice is ultimately contextualized/within a context. I believe we can see, understand, and appreciate contexts better in that which the subject is still, frozen, isolated, and recorded as such. (In that sense, more truth.)

And perhaps, there may also be some truth to the idea that it is always much harder to ‘hit–i.e. fathom–a moving target’.

There is nothing quite like going from fuzzy, declining vision and distorted letters of print to looking into the equivalent of direct sunlight–the brightest light I’ve ever experienced– in a surgery theatre! I was briefly (and fortunately) in the skillful hands of a woman surgeon twice and–perhaps in each operation–staring into the ‘Eye of God’ subsuming all.

72 Years: A Self-Portrait (1949-2022)

A tough Monday morning for Peanut (with one of her toys).