About Bull Fighting

A matador taunts a bull. © Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Media

… i almost didn’t write about this photo essay on bull fighting… it moved me practically to tears… i have no interest in bullfighting i thought to myself… i’d rather not think about what we (humans) do to animals (and to one another)… but then, i thought, i have been powerfully affected… if this is not paying attention, then what is?… so, i share it… the photographs speak for themselves…

… i participate in killing chickens… we eat… we eat animals… i thought it important that i confront an animal and take its life if i were going to eat animals… it always saddens me, but it doesn’t stop me from doing it, because i eat animals and i should know what that is in all it’s facets…

… bull fighting is torturing animals for sport… this is obscene… like dog or cock fighting… that we should be entertained by the suffering of any creature is abhorrent… but people can be, too often are, abhorrent… we progress through the grace we offer the life we share the planet with and one another… that bullfighting still exists tells us we have a long way to go… the only hope for survival in the long term is offering that grace collectively, everywhere, always…

The Essential Haiku

… i have finished all the pages that are direct translations from works of, or about, the masters… the last piece excerpts from a record of Basho working with his students… even though Basho tells us earlier that we must write down the first lines to come into our minds… it becomes clear in this final piece that poems are revisited, refined… it is as one would expect… also, that poems were sometimes communal efforts…

… i will next read through the notes of the book as the first one illuminated the general acceptance of homosexual love in Basho’s time… i wonder when, if, that changed?…

… in a few days i have a new book coming… Rise Ye Sea Slugs!… what a title… it is a compilation of translations of well known haiku… multiple translations as, generally speaking, it is impossible to give a perfect representation of a haiku in translation…

First Thoughts

… H safely delivered to M… trip home quick, easy… dogs happy to be released, Fiona refusing her food… i will make dog food today…

… Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Civil War today, the moment when the tide of it changed… the brutality of the war… the hatred that must have existed… we are not there yet in the present day… i hope we never get there…

… robotics on my mind… evolution on my mind… we will advance our ability to make machines regardless… i have long speculated that intelligence was moving forward through the machines we make… the problem with machines is the people who make them… they can do tremendous good, or tremendous harm… at present, it all depends on the people who commission and deploy them… i wrote a micro poem about this…

The world of robotics,

is the world of robotics—

and yet…

… in the format of the famous Issa haiku, The world of dew…

… the dogs don’t seem concerned about the absence of H…

… i wonder how the chocolates we brought to M and R were?… they certainly had interesting flavors and were beautiful enough…

** Jörg Colberg, On Art and Neo Liberal Society**

From The Merge by Sara Brincher Galbiati, Peter Helles Eriksen, and Tobias Selnaes Markussen

… watch this video demonstrating the current capabilities of robots created by Boston Dynamics…

https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw

… then read this…

… and if you need more encouragement, this…

_ But when the sum of it all — the (art) community — largely fails to respond to all the various challenges to our societies, democracies, and well being, then I’m left to wonder where it all went wrong._

Maybe it’s simply the fact that the world of art has become too enmeshed with the very people who are responsible for the challenges I just mentioned. Why or how? Simply follow the money.¹

… the article is significant to me less for the book it reviews, which it pans, than for the conversation it starts, which to me is, wtf are we doing?…

Basho On Poetry

… winding down to the end of The Essential Haiku…

The basis of art is change in the universe. What’s still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart. Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.¹

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.²

… Basho promoting Panpsychism?…

Every form of insentient existence—plants, stones, or utensils—has its individual feelings similar to those of men³

… Learn from the Pine has a lot of wisdom… it comforts me because in general, i follow its proscriptions, not perfectly, not even admirably, but i follow them as best i can…

First Thoughts

… a text from J, during the night, they spoke to C who says J is slowing down considerably, not able to make and eat breakfast… they say they are glad that R and i will visit soon…

… exploring SetApp… i try to take a look at one new app a day, i have found two that seem worth my while, NotePlan in particular seems to be the task and planning app i’ve been waiting for all my life… combining note taking, task setting and calendar all together… it, combined with Ulysses should be enough to justify its cost… if i find one or two more that are useful, icing on the cake…

… today i take H over to M and R’s house, from there, they will spring M from rehab and take them back to Block Island… H will stay with M on the island for as long as it takes to be sure they are able to function, with or without help… or the end of the month, when they will have to be back to care for the dogs while i drive to Florida and back…

… Heather Cox Richardson’s post was about how the conservative stance on COVID19 (reinforcing vaccine disinformation, banning mask wearing and downplaying the virus altogether) is boomeranging on them as the Delta variant burns through the unvaccinated who are overwhelmingly the ones catching it, being hospitalized with it and dying from it… with any luck, conservative disenchantment with their leaders and happiness with the economic help the Biden/Harris administration has organized will lead to control of House and Senate remaining in the hands of Democrats… it would likely mean the end of the threat to democracy for the time being…

Guido Guidi

… another article by Brad Feuerhelm for ASX… this one on Guido Guidi’s Cinque Viaggi 1990-1998… another photographer who photographs the evidence of people much more than people themselves… just look at this landscape…

Guido Guidi, from Cinque Viaggi 1990-1998

… mentioned also in this article is Gerry Johansson, another of my photographer heroes… another who focuses much more on the evidence of people than the people themselves… i get my courage to move forward from these photographers… i understand them and it starts to occur to me… a hypothesis if you will… is the depiction of people much more prevalent in photography by women than in photography by men?… i am thinking i need to review more carefully the photography i love, and see what binds it together…

The Evidence of People, Not the People

… all of the photography work i am viewing this morning is of people… extremely heavy emphasis on people… i don’t photograph people and don’t seem to be in the mood to look at photographs of people… i much prefer the absence of people, in life, in the photographs i make… i do photograph the evidence of people, all the time… the evidence is more interesting to me than the people themselves, or at least, the evidence does not protest when i make a picture, does not present itself as a being that will get angry with me for intruding… and then this article on the work of Mark Templeton in ASX, by Brad Feuerhelm… and this image…

Mark Templeton from Ocean Front Property

Mark Templeton has taken notice. Though the refutation of another place is not the aim of this work, what Templeton suggests, by acknowledging the infernal desire to leave as quickly as possible and as far away as possible, is that what we are seeking is not the place itself, but rather the journey away from ourselves, and he is rightly critical of that practice. He has noted that we never seem happy enough with where we are. We have been produced and educated with this in mind. We litter our surfaces with the promise of water, and, without remorse or candor, we embark recklessly towards entropy inasmuch as we refuse to stop expanding our movements. All heat cools. All light fades. And yet it would be a shame, in this broad and beautiful geography, if we could not take time to measure ourselves against what is most precious: the home, the family, and the will to accept that our lives are fleeting no matter where our feet finally place themselves.¹

… the emphasis i have placed on the one sentence above is because it so aligns with my experience of those close to me… what is is never good enough, and lives slip away, beautiful present moment by beautiful present moment, unnoticed because we are continually dreaming of some better, happier life down the road…

Mark Templeton from Ocean Front Property

… i love the above photograph… and would you believe that i prefer the decrepit urban landscape to the hot tub bliss depicted on the billboard?… i know, i’m weird… H will confirm that to you… she understands my preference, but has long wanted a hot tub…

… if my funds were limitless, or even less bounded than they are, i would buy this book… it looks very good and BF’s essay about it is good too…

Who Does That?

… someone is running a loud noisy machine, leaf blower?, at 5:30 AM!… who does that… there are chain saws too… i am wondering if a tree has fallen down and needs to be removed from the road… maybe… that would be the only acceptable explanation…

The Prose of Issa

… excerpts from “A Year of My Life (1819)…

… the interesting part being prose passages after which haiku have been inserted… as if what happened in the prose lead to the poem… or course, it could also be that the poem was written at some time in the past and inserted for it’s relevance to the moment described in the prose… Issa inserted one of his most famous poems after a passage about the death of his daughter…

The world of dew,

is the world of dew,

and yet, and yet—

… the prose in general seems to be a little banal, a little removed emotionally from what it talks about… i wonder if these journal entries seem the same to anyone who reads them?…

First Thoughts

… last night, just before going to bed, i let the dogs out… big commotion, one dog comes when called, the other doesn’t… go to investigate, the other dog is rubbing his face in the dirt, the air smells of skunk… sigh… second dog had to be bathed before going to bed… dog children… love them most of the time, damn annoying on occasion…

… we visited D and J yesterday, friends of H’s from the PBGV world… they wanted to meet Fiona and see what it might be like to have a GBGV… D has prostate cancer and the sense i got was that it wasn’t going well… D seemed depressed… it made me thoughtful…

… news broke about the release of the AG’s report investigating charges of sexual harassment by Andrew Cuomo… calls for his resignation or, if he refuses to, impeachment, began immediately… it has never occurred to me to harass any woman… i don’t understand men who do…

… Heather Cox Richardson talked about the Biden/Harris administration’s efforts to help impoverished people… at the beginning of the administration i thought that they needed to do enough that positively affected ordinary people’s lives that those people could be peeled away from 45… HCR thinks that is part of the plan too…

… i have been thinking that one of my shortcomings in life has been an inability to decide on big and deep efforts, then plan and execute them… i am going to change that… part of my problem is that i get lost in the weeds of the planning, and then fail to execute…

… tomorrow i take H to her brother’s house in CT and then come back without her… she and M will pick up M from rehab and take her out to Block Island… H will stay with her to make sure she is able to care for herself or has the help she needs… we don’t know how long that will take… while she is gone, i plan to get things done… i will rebuild the rear steps, paint the bay window, progress with the installation of trim in the dining room… i will tend the garden, work on my photography, and enjoy being on my own for a bit…

Her Dark Materials

… ran across this excellent exhibition of women artists… the artwork below by Charlotte Colbert most caught my attention, though all of the artwork was worth paying attention to…

Benefit Supervisor Sleeping, Charlotte Colbert

The subject of this portrait is Sue Tilley aka “Big Sue”, the Benefits Supervisor launched into the public realm through a seminal series of paintings by Lucian Freud after the two were introduced by Leigh Bowery in 1990.¹

… artists in the show…

The exhibition features works by Alexi Williams Wynn, Alice Anderson, Carolina Mazzolari, Celeste Rapone, Charlotte Colbert, Emma Talbot, Florence Hutchings, Francisca Sosa Lopez, Galina Munroe, Helen Epega (The Venus Bushfires), Jo Kitchen, Jodie Carey, Kristine Roepstroff, Kate Daudy, Misha Milovanovich, Nancy Cadogan, Nika Neelova, Noemie Goudal, Paulina Mischonowska, Pola Wickham, Rannva Kunoy, Sahara Longe, Seana Gavin, Sophie Vallance, Tiffanie Delune, Trudy Benson and Vinca Petersen.²

The Haiku of Issa

… i’ve read all the Haiku that are in The Essential Haiku… this morning i read exerpts(?) from Journal of My Father’s Last Days… i had to push myself through the pages… Issa was devoted to his father, hated by his stepmother, not sure what his relationship with his half brother was…

… my father is dying… in some ways it was interesting to read about a son caring about and caring for his father… i am not being called upon to do that, though i am pretty sure i would if it came to it, compassion is the proper response to anyone’s end of days…

… i don’t like my father and he doesn’t like me… our relationship has been difficult for most of my adult life… i long ago gave up on any expectations that it could be different… we tolerate each other for my mother’s sake, sometimes, just barely… it would be nice if i had similar devotion to Issa’s but i don’t… my devotion is to my mother… she is my main concern at this time… i am hoping for a few good years with her, without the ever present tension of my father, before she too passes on…

… i don’t know how i will feel when he does die… i only know that i am not very sad or worried about it right now… the sadness i feel right now is for the pain and sadness my mother is experiencing… i know, from the experience of dogs and cats that have passed on, how difficult it is to watch a being you have loved fade and pass away… H’s dad died suddenly, this seems the easier way despite the shock…

… i expect some difficult days ahead… i expect some difficult feelings too… we are in the space of taking it one day at a time and dealing with what wells up as it comes… which, according to my vague understanding fo Buddhism, is all we can ever do…

First Thoughts

… Heather Cox Richardson is about Tucker Carlson, Hungary, Victor Orban, Christian authoritarianism, and how the United States is being pushed in the same direction… it saddens me that at present it is hard to perceive that this push will not succeed… i have no desire to live under Christian authoritarianism, or any other kind of authoritarianism… Democrats have been unwilling to do what is needed to reverse course… or at least a handful of Democrats…

… i once told someone that i have no interest in power, at least the kind of power that is power over… i loath people who have power and use it to shape the world to their personal vision of how things should be… i loath minorities that try to do the same… one size fits all is rarely a good solution… one size does not fit all… multicultural adjustability fits all…

… i started looking into Non-Fungible Token art yesterday… i find myself getting excited about making art in a way i haven’t been for a while… there is a way of making and distributing things i have been making but didn’t know what to do with… the flattened cans project, the video stills project… there are also the image poems, a short sequence of images played in video fashion… it seems to be opening up possibilities for exhibiting and selling… it seems to offer a chance to bypass the gate keepers… of course, there is no reason there will be any more interest in my work than there is now, just because the venue for sharing changes… there are issues with NFTs, especially environmental ones… they require a great deal of computing resources as individual object certificates (and the objects?) get distributed across many servers around the world… the redundancy is what protects the system from fraud…

Holy

By Donna Ferrato, reviewed by Jonathan Blaustein…

… for the most part, i agree with Jonathan Blaustein, that Holy is a powerful book, though my personal reaction to it is that it starts to fall apart a bit in narrative intent at the end, in the “Other” section… i proudly own a copy though… it’s overall, fabulous… i commented on the post, expressing these sentiments…

Come Home to Yourself

By Kaira Jewel Lingo…

You already are what you want to become.¹

… hmmm… i am what i want to become?… i would say i am thunderstruck, but that would be overly dramatic… such an interesting statement… on the one hand, it is telling me that my present self is the sum of all the wants i’ve had time to express, pursue, fulfill… there would seem to be a fatalist trap, if we are today what we have wanted in the past, then can we today, want something different and therefore become something different…

… the message of the article seems to be that we always carry our home within us, that if we could recognize that and come through the door into it, we could be at peace, regardless of what is going on around us…

_ It is especially tempting in times of transition and challenge to abandon our homes, to leave our territory, in search of answers, perhaps by worrying about what will happen in the future. This is precisely the moment when we need to return to the present moment, feel our bodies, and take good care of ourselves now. Because the future is made of this moment. If we take good care of this moment, even if it is very difficult, we are taking good care of the future.²_

… “if we take good care of this moment … we are taking good care of the future.”… what does this moment need of us?… it does not seem possible to me that “this moment” can be taken care of without, at minimum, a slight anticipation of the future and a slight recalling of the past… we may center ourselves in the present moment… but caring for, which is an act, requires intention for where we are going and respect for where we have been… it’s a kind of Möbius strip of iterations of being, continuous, repetitious… we cycle around it while the strip itself moves through time and space…

… so, do i understand something of the Buddhist perspective and have my differences with it?… or, do i not understand it, and/or accept it, so i am filled with questions…

First Thoughts

… i spent time yesterday sorting out the usefulness (or not) of the various apps i have learned about recently… Obsidian, Good-Task (which seems promising), Workflowy (which i have had for some time), Ulysses… the holy grail is to find a set of apps and a workflow that isn’t a barrier to getting good thinking down and deep exploration accomplished…

… i have never found the app and workflow setup that left me satisfied in both ease of use and organization of production… but i wonder, do i get hung up in the method of production as a means to avoid the hard work of production?… i have a number of quests that, in order to feel better about myself, i need to see through to completion, or a depth of knowledge that i am trying to have… as opposed to dabbling in this and that… so, my main rabbit holes of inquiry…

• pansychism
  • the idea that all matter is conscious on some level
• the feminine
  • what it is to be a woman
  • women in photography
    • as subject
    • as photographer
    • as critic
    • as exhibit curator
  • gender fluidity
• non-fungible token art
  • i like making what i call video stills, ten second videos of a scene that capture a moment in which the now connects to the cosmic infinite, similar to the way a haiku does
• haiku/micro-poetry
  • reading and analyzing haiku
  • writing #micro-poetry

… for each of the above, i have now set up research folders in Obsidian…

• photography
  • daily photo walks
  • daily editing of photographs
  • daily sharing of photographs

… this morning, the Heather Cox Richardson Post is about Dr. Robert Moses Parris who learned much and did much… he passed away last week… reading it left me feeling frustrated about my own accomplishments… that they are not greater or more meaningful… i feel i have lots to offer, i just don’t know how to make it available in a way that fits with who and what i am and makes it useful/attractive to others…

… i have quickly come to the conclusion that Obsidian is not for the daily notes-on-attention-paid work… Ulysses works better for that… perhaps it is the thing to use for project specific research… that is what i will try next…

The Sketchbook Project

… talk about starting something interesting… 50K sketchbooks and counting! More about it and their current challenges here.

Get your own sketchbook, fill it up, return it!

From my titled post on my video stills…

Until recently, I have not known what to do with these video stills as an art product. Beyond my mixed feelings about the “art industry,” I truly had no idea how I might sell such a thing to a collector if I wanted to. I placed one of them in a group show once and agonized over how to present it in a way that was salable.

I have, for some time now, been experimenting with, what I call, video stills. These are short (less than twenty seconds) videos that capture a not quite still moment. Here is an example.

I think of them as video zen moments, or, if you will, video stop and smell the roses moments.

One idea haiku poetry has keyed me into is that the simplest of scenes are both exactly what they are in the moment, and pregnant with the possibility of insight. A famous Issa Haiku illustrates this point:

The world of dew

Is the world of dew,

and yet, and yet.¹

Until recently, I have not known what to do with these video stills as an art product. Beyond my mixed feelings about the “art industry,” I truly had no idea how I might sell such a thing to a collector if I wanted to. I placed one of them in a group show once and agonized over how to present it in a way that was salable. How do you supply a digital copy that can’t be replicated? I tried a digital frame which would be solely dedicated to the video, but none of the commercial ones were suitable to how I wanted to present the work. How do you supply a digital copy that can’t be replicated?

Enter Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Art. I am still not entirely clear about the specifics of how it works (I’ve just begun my research), but it seems promising.

The Haiku of Issa

… the last two in the book…

• insects floating down the river on a branch, still singing…
  • literally, one can imagine a branch breaking off and carrying insects with it… that they would be oblivious to the changed circumstances and still be singing…
  • or, they might apprehend that there is little they can do about the change in circumstance, why not keep singing?…
  • or, they might be pleased to be on a new adventure, and sing with joyous expectation…
  • metaphorically, humanity often finds itself oblivious to the peril it is in… carried along by the years, without really understanding what their lives are about…
• the poet’s death poem…
  • the stupidity of (being) bathed at the beginning and end of life…
    • i struggle with this one literally and figuratively, why would bathing the newborn or the dead be stupid?…
    • is the poet complaining that life should find a better way to begin and end?…

… i have a new book on haiku coming… this one offers multiple translations of each haiku as a singular haiku can’t get at all the nuances and cultural references of the original… it’s a thick book apparently… may take me a long time to get through it…

First Thoughts

… feeling a little lost and aimless… trying to make the work, wishing something would come of it… good ideas, good intentions, difficulty following through…

… one cocktail last night (it is the weekend)… i mixed myself a second one, but decided to flush it down the drain… yay me!… kitchen cleaned up and ready to go, i feel this morning as i would feel with no cocktail…

… a good BrainPickings this morning, the idea that intuition, emotional intelligence, is at the foundation of true intelligence… that intellectual intelligence is a kind of petrification of self without an intuitive sense of how things work… this is what reading the haiku every day is an effort to achieve, a kind of emotional intelligence… an intelligence of the moment… of seeing the moment in it’s simplest terms…

… a robin sings in the distance…

… it will be cool this week… how will my tomato plants fare?… my last zucchini plant is dying, has died… sad, will need to give them more space next year…

… Fiona woke me up last night… midnight… she was pacing the room like she does… strange though, the doors were open, she could have gone downstairs on her own if she wanted… she might have done if i had not gotten up…

… i meant to call C this week, but didn’t, feel a little guilty about that…

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, Documentary

… Björn Andrésen, chosen by Luchino Visconti to play Tadzio in his film adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice… at the film’s premier, Visconti declared him “the most beautiful boy in the world”… it looks like a sad an interesting story, read about it here then maybe watch the documentary when it comes out…

Ghost Blog

Photographer unknown, assumed to be a self portrait…

… while looking for information on Japanese culture to help understand haiku, i stumbled across this ghost blog, produced by a young woman in 2013 who seemed to be trying to orient her life around Japanese Buddhist/minimalist principles… the picture above is of her… the blog seems to have been short lived, all the posts are dated within a period of three or four months…

… she doesn’t identify herself anywhere in the blog… it’s been eight years since anything was posted… i wonder where she is now?…

… on closer inspection i realize the blog is a school project, possibly art school… a project about interiors and culture… it seems incomplete…

… looking into the evergreen.edu webpage home, i discover it is Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington where she must have been a student…

The Haiku of Issa

… i am nearing the end of The Essential Haiku… a few more poems, a couple of prose pieces at the end of the book, i am finished… yesterday i gathered together a dozen of my micro poems to read at an event in the evening that was postponed until next week due to the rain… a COVID precaution… i read them to H who did not seem that enthusiastic about them… haiku and micro poems are funny things… i suspect you get them, or you don’t and the difference between a passable one and a great one is hard to pin down… they need to be specific enough to call you to the details of a moment, but then use those details to open a window on the infinite…

… today’s haiku summaries and interpretations…

• a small boat drifts down the tide under an autumn moon…
  • first interpretation is literal, a scene observed
  • second interpretation, the small boat represents the poet in late middle age, early old age, as seasons equate to stages in life…
  • tides are cyclical and related to the moon…
  • the moon is enlightenment, the poet drifts in the light of enlightenment and with the push, pull of the tides…
• I’m here and the snow is falling…
  • first interpretation, literal, the poet standing in the falling snow…
  • second interpretation, old age has overtaken the poet, but he is still there, still alive…
• making very straight holes with piss in the snow…
  • it’s hard to go to far beyond the literal interpretation here… i suppose the straight piss stream would be a good sign for an elderly man… still some virility left…
• missing her grumbling, the moon…
  • pining for a woman under the moon…
  • in Buddhism, the moon is a symbol of enlightenment, Issa was a lay Buddhist priest, so it is likely the Buddhist significance of the moon prevails in his writings…
  • so, perhaps it is longing for a woman under the light of the moon, or perhaps it is longing for feminine wisdom to complete enlightenment…
• the nose of a new foal among the irises…
  • it is hard to go beyond the literal here, though spring and rebirth could be a general theme of the poem…
• a peasant woman planting towards her crying child, crooked row…
  • this is one that could be literal but is perhaps more satisfying to interpret as metaphor…
    • the strength of a mother’s love, the bond between mother and child…
    • the strength of the bond of family…
    • the pull of youth on the not so young…
    • longing for youth…
    • the triumph of heart over mind…