Off-Roading

Polite notice for the sole reader of this blog:

I'm relocating to my new self-written website here: https://dormiensvigila.github.io/home.html
All the hitching stories from the blog  are there and it's where new things will end up too.

Le Mans

 

Somewhere near Le Mans in 2015 I think.
At a petrol station there is a young man, French, who is hitch-hiking.
Tall, thin and pale where he isn’t sunburnt. Dark brown hair cut short with clippers, bushy eyebrows, black eyes like a snowman would have. Thin stubble everywhere. He reminded me of Where’s Wally somehow, I don’t know why exactly. He was very animated.
I walked up to him and we shook hands in greeting. We laughed when we realised that we couldn’t communicate verbally. He gestured at a baguette in the side pocket of his backpack and pointed to me. I smiled and refused as I wasn’t hungry. I pointed at the cardboard strapped onto my backpack  and pulled out a marker. He nodded. I dropped my backpack to the floor and knelt down to pull out a piece of cardboard for him, then handed over the pen and waited while he wrote his sign. This accomplished I stood up and shouldered my pack again.
We hugged in parting and said ‘bon voyage.’

Some minutes later I am waiting by the motorway on ramp as the sun goes down.
These are the most sacred moments of my short existence.
The evening pours out of the world like honey leaving a main artery.
I am filled with a mix of joy and curiosity about where I will sleep. There is no knowing.
A car beeps as it passes me. I see this young man waving furiously from the back.

Nothing can solve existential pain but there’s something about briefly having a brother.

Lu'ay Samir Sami

 

Who Sees You

Entropic Villanelle

Tom Disch

Things break down in different ways.
The odds say croupiers will win.
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.


I have had heartburn several days,
And it’s ten years since I’ve been thin.
Things break down in different ways.


Green is the lea and smooth as baize
Where witless sheep crop Jessamine
(We can’t, for that, omit their praise)


And meanwhile melanomas graze
Upon the meadows of the skin
(Things break down in different ways).


Though apples spoil, and meat decays,
And teeth erode like aspirin,
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.


The odds still favor croupiers,
But give the wheel another spin.
Things break down in different ways:
We can’t, for that, omit their praise.

The Ghost Walks

Inside Skinner's Box

 "The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man."

"It is a mistake to suppose that the whole issue is how to free man. The issue is to improve the way in which he is controlled. "

"A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment."

  "We admire people to the extent that we cannot explain what they do, and the word "admire" then means "marvel at."

"I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings. "

  "I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is."



Random bits from BF Skinner.

Bivouacs

 

Bivouacs

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The nightingales sang all night,
The stars were tangled in the trees
And marvellous intricacies
Of leaf and branch and song and light
Made magic stir in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We slithered in a foot of mire,
The moisture squelching in our boots;
We stumbled over tangled roots,
And ruts and stakes and hidden wire,
Till marvellous intricacies
Of human speech, in divers keys,
Made ebb and flow thro’ Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
We bivouacked and slept the night,
The nightingales sang the same
As they had sung before we came.
‘Mid leaf and branch and song and light
And falling dew and watching star.
And all the million things which are
About us and above us took
No more regard of us than
We take in some small midge’s span
Of life, albeit our gunfire shook
The very air in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
I rose while all the others slept,
I seized a star-beam and I crept
Along it and more far along
Till I arrived where throbbing song
Of star and bird and wind and rain
Were one – then I came back again –
But gathered ere I came the dust
Of many stars, and if you must
Know what I wanted with it, hear,
I keep it as a souvenir,
Of that same night in Somecourt Wood.

In Somecourt Wood, in Somecourt Wood,
The cuckoo wakened me at dawn.
The man beside me muttered, “Hell!”
But half a dozen larks as well
Sang in the blue – the curtain drawn
Across where all the stars had been
Was interlaced with tender green,
The birds sang, and I said that if
One didn’t wake so cold and stiff
It would be grand in Somecourt Wood.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And then the man beside me spoke,
But what he said about it broke
The magic spell in Somecourt Wood.

                        --Gilbert Waterhouse