Saw numbers as symbol manipulators
orchestrate the departure of indifference.
Saw flowers, news, phone calls, books.
Saints are resting
under the elms and next to yard signs.
Is this what
indeterminacy looks like?
Afterward,
pelagic thoughts.
Ought to write them down, but don't.
Mind overwhelmed by
"wash hands"
and
"vote".
1
Roots
have been
killed -
fill,
patch,
caulk.
After,
walk
in
water,
wearing
new
shoes.
2
She
(sometimes)
bridges
interstices.
3
Copper
culture
altered
water.
4
Nemotodes?
Neem and toads?
Nemophila?
Nem szabad!
All the while,
a
dog begs.
5
K2
you
lie
underneath
two
mountains
a dry valley
and Huron's
ice age
ledges.
6
wrote
"vote"
got a manual
labored
through it
wrote
note
"return
library books"
had coffee with...
then worked on...
Debated with myself -
" What will you do if ...."
" To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is."
Lopez, Horizon, p.400
A rosary
of wallabies - in Walpiri a rufous hare-wallaby (Lagorchestes hirsutus) is a mala.
Lopez, Horizon, 403
Malas and songlines
"...in interviews with Western field biologists over the years, I've found that the issue of local extinction is, for many of them, not entirely clear. There are to many cases of animals being declared locally extinct only to have them turn up again. "singing" an animal back into existence is a metaphorical expression for some as-yet-umplumbed biological process of restoration, quaint only in the minds of those who believe they already know, or can discover, precisely how the world is hinged."
Lopez, Horizon, p.406
"The modern urge to turn a landscape into "what it once was", to make it "better" by eliminating "pests", to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn't co-evolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease - biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to "restore" any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has "destroyed" a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren't able to reverse the direction of evolution, to darn a landscape back together like a sweater that has unraveled. Restoration privileges some animals and plants over others, and therefore presents ethical problems identical to those one faces in examining any project of social engineering or any country's policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, it is not possible to restore the soil chemistry of lands turned nearly lifeless by decades of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and overgrazing.
Lopez, Horizon, pp396-397
"In every corner of the world there was such resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous."
Barry Lopez, Horizon, p.263
Remember Lopez' habit of using a navigational map to chart notes, memories of site
experiences.
Perspective:
Light as solar, otherworldly, light as underwater, submerged, limninal.
My country under construction.
Early sounds of hammering, hollow as a bell, or striking thick like a log.
The sounds accompany troubled dreams.
I wonder as I wake up,
what we've become.
The hammering, as in bells, fists, clubs, clasping
hands.
The hammering bands round
the heart, round as beads, rosary recitations.
Empathic or fanatic?
We control the breath, the praying sounds.
And then, slowly, the hands, arms, our bodies smacking
to the ground around us.
The knees. The pleas.
My chest constricts.
The hammering, as in the voices of interruption,
the threats, the scenes of confusion, the violent memes.
What lies are within us?
What lies are before us?
t
Eternal inflation predicts that time will end
Raphael Bousso a;b;c, Ben Freivogeld, Stefan Leichenauera; b and Vladimir
Rosenhaus a;b
a Center for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-7300, U.S.A.
b Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720-8162, U.S.A.
c Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe University of Tokyo, 5-1-5 Kashiwa-no-Ha, Kashiwa City, Chiba 277-8568, Japan
d Center for Theoretical Physics and Laboratory for Nuclear Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.
Abstract:
Present treatments of eternal inflation regulate infinities
by imposing a geometric cutoff .
We point out that some matter systems
reach the cutoff in finite time.
This implies
a nonzero probability
for a novel type of catastrophe.
According to the most successful measure proposals,
our galaxy
is likely to encounter the cuto ff
within the next 5 billion years.