SubscribeNovember 8th, 2011
just because / attending to the small things
You know I’ve never heard Feynman saying anything silly. What a wondrous thing a mind like this is.
Post post addition:
I wondered more about the idea of Feynman saying something silly, and so I went looking for it. It wasn’t hard to find.
So what happened to the old theory that I fell in love with as a youth? Well, I would say it’s become an old lady, that has very little attractive left in her and the young today will not have their hearts pound anymore when they look at her. But, we can say the best we can for any old woman, that she has been a very good mother and she has given birth to some very good children. And, I thank the Swedish Academy of Sciences for complimenting one of them. Thank you.
Has this silliness changed my mind about Feynman’s fine mind? Not at all. Would I have wanted to know him? Depends on what he would have done when I called him an idiot for using such a mean-spirited metaphor. Everything depends on what he did with the new data that an old woman has something of value that has nothing to do with what his dick responds to. Anyone know if he was ever called on it?
April 5th, 2011
beauty
Have you ever seen the rich brown cinnamon of arbutus bark?
I saw a man today with skin that glowed like the falling brown skin of an arbutus. He was so beautiful in that skin that I could feel the green life pushing up from his bones. Such a pleasure that he exists.
July 23rd, 2010
ephemeral, yes, but art
I am always unseated by the beauty of this kind of art.
via Wimp
March 15th, 2010
Some little bit of beauty
Here’s another thing I’m having a hard time getting out of my head. These two pictures represent a single bag. The first is a pattern created by weaving the inner leaves of corn husks. The colors are probably yarn wrapped along the threads. The second image is the reverse side of the bag and is made of beads.
The bag is for sale for $2100.00 which I find both amusing and deeply distressing. According to the sale site the bag is from the late 1800s. It’s Nez Perce. I cannot but help think of the hands that made it, that killed the deer, that tanned the hide, that traded for the beads, the needles, the thread, that sat for months wrapping and weaving the corn husks. And it is so very beautiful. I wonder if the person who buys it will go to a dance, will carry it on the floor and use it to bring themselves and their family good fortune, or if it will go in a locked collection somewhere. And I wonder what family created it – which one of the families still in Nez Perce country are the descendants of the hands that made this possible.
The thing that is amusing is that there was a point when this stuff was considered worthless, at best a token of a vanishing race. Anyway, enough gloom. What really catches me is its beauty. That’s the thing that really sticks.
March 5th, 2010
I remember now
why life is worth living. This is the thing I miss the most by living in a city as big as Vancouver.